American Thumb-prints

Wait around

To hurry Mortals home

Every village has its tragedy, alas! and that recounted in this following inscription is at least one faithful record of terrifying disaster. Again it seems at variance with the moral order of the world that these quiet fields should witness the terror this tiny memorial hints at. The stone is quite out of plumb and moss-covered, but underneath the lichen it reads:

“Phebe, wife of Ezekiel Markham Died Jyly 14,

1806 Ae 49

Also their 3 Sons Bela, Ciba, and Brainad was

burnt to Death in Oct 1793”

“In the midst of life we are dead”

The mother lived nearly thirteen years after. There is no neighboring record of the father. Perhaps the two migrated after the fearful holocaust, and he only returned to place his wife’s body beside the disfigured remains of her little ungrown men. Bela, Ciba, and Brainard rested lonesomely doubtless those thirteen waiting years, and many a night must their little ghosts have sat among the windflowers and hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst the drifted needles of the pines in the clear moonlight of summer, athirst for the mother’s soul of comfort and courage.

Again in this intaglio “spelt by th’ unlettered Muse” rises the question of the stone-cutter’s knowledge of his mother tongue. The church of the dead villagers still abides. But nowhere are seen the remains of a school-house. Descendants of the cutter of Master Kelsey’s headstone haply had many orders.

The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel all the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the oozing spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of days ago. Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a strange sense of waiting. And above is the silence of the sky.

With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of the early village—undisturbed as they were by any world call, and gifted with a fervid and patient faith—must daily have grown in consciousness of a homely Presence ever reaching under their mortality the Everlasting Arm.

This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these graves—that some good, some divine is impendent—that the soul of the world is outstretching a kindred hand.

In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to human vision—the good that is mighty and never grows gray,—μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει.

The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests of these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal—their graves in the church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life beyond—that their output of lives and years of struggle bore no more lasting local fruit, however their seed may now be scattered to the upbuilding of our South and West, the conversion of China, and our ordering of the Philippines.

And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they—such men and women as they—still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in all institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality, surely! If such men and women had been less severe, less honest, less gifted for conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with an enthusiasm for justice, less clear in their vision of the eternal moralities, less simple and direct, less worthy inheritors of the great idea of liberty which inflamed generations of their ancestors, it is not possible that we should be here to-day doing our work to keep what they won and carry their winnings further. Their unswerving independence in thought and action and their conviction that the finger of God pointed their way—their theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading—made possible the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay spent.

So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills—what with the decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence of the spiritual—there is a resting-place of the Blessed—an Island of the Blessed as the old Greeks used to say—an abode of heroes fallen after strong fighting and enjoying rest forever.

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

He is the half part of a blessed man
Left to be finished by such a she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.

    Shakespeare

If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities demanded in a plaything or handmaid—if he recognise in her the existence of an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his own, he must, by plainest logic, admit that life to express itself in all its spontaneous forms of activity.

    George Eliot

Hard the task: your prison-chamber
Widens not for lifted latch
Till the giant thews and sinews
Meet their Godlike overmatch.

    George Meredith

UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

“I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation of the Florilegium of Stobæus. The sentiment was not new with Euripides—unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod with his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos, who in outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the degradation of the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely sang “two days on which a woman gives a man most pleasure—the day he marries her and the day he buries her.”

And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant laughter-lover, the titanic juggler with the heavens above and earth and men below—Aristophanes who flouted the women of Athens in his “Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.” Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole great narrative, and had avoided the mention of women and their part in the history he relates.

“Woman is a curse!” cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before, when they told the story of Eve—

“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”

Down through many centuries our forebears cast to and fro the same sentiment—in spite of the introduction into life and literature of the love of men for women and women for men; in spite of the growth of romantic love. You find misogynous expression among the Latins. In early “Church Fathers,” such as St. John Chrysostom, you come upon it in grossest form. Woman is “a necessary ill,” cried the Golden Mouthed, “a natural temptation, a wished-for calamity, a household danger, a deadly fascination, a bepainted evil.”

You see the sentiment in the laws of church and of kingdom. You sight its miasm in the gloaming and murk of the Middle Ages, amid the excesses which in shame for it chivalry affected and exalted. You read it by the light of the awful fires that burnt women accessory to the husband’s crime—for which their husbands were merely hanged. You see it in Martin Luther’s injunction to Catherine von Bora that it ill became his wife to fasten her waist in front—because independence in women is unseemly, their dress should need an assistant for its donning. You chance upon it in old prayers written by men, and once publicly said by men for English queens to a God “which for the offence of the first woman hast threatened unto all women a common, sharp, and inevitable malediction.”

You find the sentiment in Boileau’s satire and in Pope’s “Characters.” You open the pages of the Wizard of the North, who did for his own generations what Heliodorus and his chaste Chariclea accomplished for the fourth century, and you come upon Walter Scott singing in one of his exquisite songs—

“Woman’s faith, and woman’s trust,
Write the characters in dust.”

All such sad evidences, it should be borne in mind, are but the reverse of the fair picture with which men have regarded women. But because there is a reverse side, and its view has entered and still enters largely into human life, human estimates, and human fate, it should be spoken about openly. Women and men inexperienced in the outer world of affairs do not realize its still potent force.

As for the subject of these gibes, for ages they were silent. During many generations, in the privacy of their apartments, the women must have made mute protests to one another. “These things are false,” their souls cried. But they took the readiest defence of physical weakness, and they loved harmony. It was better to be silent than to rise in bold proof of an untruth and meet rude force.

Iteration and dogmatic statement of women’s moral inferiority, coupled as it often was with quoted text and priestly authority, had their inevitable effect upon more sensitive and introspective characters; it humiliated and unquestionably deprived many a woman of self-respect. Still, all along there must have been a less sensitive, sturdier, womanhood possessed of the perversive faith of Mrs. Poyser, that “heaven made ’em to match the men,” that—

“Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free,”

– men and women rise or sink; that, in fact, the interests of the two are inseparable and wholly identical. To broad vision misogynous expression seems to set in antagonism forces united by all the mighty powers of human evolution throughout millions of years, and the whole plan of God back of that soul-unfolding.

The misogynous song and story of our forebears with momentous fall descended and became the coarse newspaper quip which a generation ago whetted its sting upon women—“Susan B. Anthonys”—outspoken and seeking more freedom than social prejudices of their day allowed. An annoying gnat, it has in these days been almost exterminated by diffusion of the oil of fairness and better knowledge.

But even yet periodicals at times give mouth to the old misogyny. Such an expression, nay, two, are published in otherwise admirable pages, and with these we have to do. They are from the pen of a man of temperament, energy, vigorous learning, and an “esurient Genie” for books—professor of Latin in one of our great universities, where misogynous sentiment has found expression in lectures in course and also in more public delivery.

The first reverse phrase is of “the neurotic caterwauling of an hysterical woman.” Cicero’s invective and pathos are said to be perilously near that perturbance.

Now specialists in nervous difficulties have not yet determined there is marked variation between neurotic caterwauling of hysterical women and neurotic caterwauling of hysterical men. Cicero’s shrieks—for Cicero was what is to-day called “virile,” “manly,” “strenuous,” “vital”—Cicero’s would naturally approximate the men’s.

To normally tuned ears caterwaulings are as unagreeable as misogynous whoops—waulings of men as cacophonous as waulings of women. Take an instance in times foregone. In what is the megalomaniac whine of Marie Bashkirtseff’s “Journal” more unagreeable than the egotistical vanity of Lord Byron’s wails? Each of these pen people may be viewed from another point. More generously any record—even an academic misogyny—is of interest and value because expressing the idiosyncratic development or human feeling of the world.

But, exactly and scientifically speaking, neurotic and hysteric are contradictory terms. Neurotic men and women are described by physicians as self-forgetting sensitives—zealous, executive; while the hysterics of both sexes are supreme egotists, selfish, vain, and vague, uncomfortable both in personal and literary contact—just like wit at their expense. “If we knew all,” said George Eliot, who was never hysterical, “we would not judge.” And Paul of Tarsus wrote wisely to those of Rome, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest.”

Science nowadays declares that the man who wears a shirt-collar cannot be well, and equally the same analytic spirit may some day make evident that neurosis and hysteria are legacies of a foredone generation, who found the world out of joint and preyed upon its strength and calmness of nerve to set things right. Humaneness and fair estimate are remedies to-day’s dwellers upon the earth can offer, whether the neurosis and hysteria be Latin or Saxon, men’s or indeed women’s.