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<h3> CHAPTER II MASSACHUSETTS PURITANISM—THE YALE CLASS OF 1853 </h3> Massachusetts was in those days, that is, in the middle of the last century, in the bonds of that inherited and unrelaxing Puritanism which was her strength and her weakness. Darwin had not spoken. The effort to reconcile science and theology—not religion—had only begun. Agassiz's was still the voice most trusted, and he, with all his scientific genius and knowledge, was on the side of the angels. The demand for evidence had not yet overcome the assertion of ecclesiastical authority in matters of belief. The spiritual ascendancy of the New England minister was little, if at all, impaired, and his political ascendancy had still to be reckoned with. There were, I suppose, no two places in the world so much under the dominion of one form or another of priestly rule as the six New England States and Scotland; and therefore no two between which spiritual and political resemblances were so close. There were, however, influences which while less visible were sometimes more potent. The pastor was the figurehead of a Congregational Church; or, to use Phillips's simile, he was the {12} walking-beam which the observer might think the propelling force of the steamboat. "But," said Phillips, "there's always a fanatic down in the hold, feeding the fires." The fanatics were the deacons. They often had in them the spirit of persecution. They encroached upon, and sometimes usurped, the rightful authority of the true head of the Church, the pastor, in matters of faith and matters of conduct alike. They constituted themselves the guardians of the morals of the flock, the pastor and his family included. My father was a man whose mind ran strongly toward Liberalism. He had nothing of the inquisitor about him. But his deacons were possessed with a school-mastering demon. They had the vigilance of the detective policeman and a deep sense of responsibility to their Creator for the behaviour of their fellow-men. Good and conscientious citizens all of them, but indisposed to believe that men who held other opinions than theirs might also be good. Their individual consciences were to be the guide of life to the rest of the world. If they had not the ferocity of Mucklewraith they had his intolerance. They would have made absence from divine service a statutory offence, as the earlier Puritans did. Two services each Sunday, a Sunday-school in between, and prayer-meetings on Wednesdays—all these must be punctually attended by us children, and were. When a decision had to be taken about my going to college, I wished to be sent to Harvard, {13} as every Massachusetts boy naturally would. But Harvard was a Unitarian college, and the deacons persuaded my father that the welfare of my immortal soul would be imperilled if I was taught Greek and Latin by professors who did not believe in a Trinitarian God. This spirit of theological partisanship prevailed and I was sent to Yale. At that admirable seat of learning there was no danger of laxity or heresy. The strictest Presbyterianism was taught relentlessly and the strictest discipline enforced. Chapel morning and evening, three or perhaps four services on Sunday—in all let us say some eighteen separate compulsory attendances on religious exercises each week. Would it be wonderful if a boy who had undergone all this for four years should consider that he had earned the right to relaxation in after days? None the less willingly do I acknowledge my debt to Yale, a debt which would have been heavier had I been more industrious. The President of the University in our time was the Reverend Dr. Wolseley—learned, austere, kindly, but remote. We boys saw little of him except on a pedestal or in the pulpit. When he bade the class farewell, he made us a friendly little speech and proposed a toast: "The Class of 1853. I drink their healths in water. May their names not be writ in water." Nor were they. Perhaps no class contained so many members who have filled larger spaces for a longer time in the public eye and the public press. {14} There was Stedman, the poet and poet critic. He left poems which will live forever, but no such body of poetical achievement as he might have produced had not circumstances obliged him to devote to business and to editorial work abilities superior to either. He is not remembered pre-eminently as a poet of patriotism, but the only poem of Stedman's included in Emerson's Parnassus is his "John Brown of Osawatomie," written—was it not for The Tribune?—in November, 1859, while Brown lay in his Virginian jail waiting to be hanged. Stedman, his genius flowering in a prophetic insight, warned them; but his "Virginians, don't do it" rang unavailingly through the land; and his             ...Old Brown,             Osawatomie Brown, May trouble you more than ever when you've nailed                     his coffin down never reached the Virginian mind till Northern regiments sang their way through Southern States to the tune of "John Brown's Body." Stedman's range was wide. He set perhaps most value on his Lyrics and Idylls. That was the title he gave to the volume of poems published in London in 1879; selected by himself for his English readers. His American friends will like to be reminded that the first third of the volume is given to "American Lyrics and Idylls," including "Old Brown," and that tender monody on Horace {15} Greeley which no Tribune reader can have forgotten. There was Charlton Lewis, an Admirable Crichton in his versatility,—if the serious meaning of that name has survived Mr. Barrie's travesty of it on the stage. We knew him at Yale as a mathematician who played with the toughest problems proposed to us by mathematical tutors and professors; whose very names I forget. We knew him afterward as lawyer, insurance expert, Latin lexicographer, journalist, financier, and editor of Harper's Book of Facts, the best of all books of facts; but now, or when I last inquired, out of print and not easily procurable. He understood cards also. Playing whist, which I think was forbidden in college, he dealt to his partner and two adversaries the usual miscellaneous hand; and to himself, by way of jest, all thirteen trumps. When the enemy remonstrated Lewis answered: "If you will specify any other order in which it is mathematically more probable that the hands would be distributed, I will admit that this is not the product of chance." An answer to which there was no answer. He delighted in puzzling minds less acute and less scientific than his own. Few men have had a more serviceable brain than his, or known better how to use it; and his power of work knew no limit. There was Mr. Justice Shiras of the United States Supreme Court. There was Fred Davies, a dignitary of the Church—in whom professional decorum never extinguished a natural sense of {16} fun and good-fellowship. There was, and happily still is, Andrew White, historian, writer of books, President of Cornell University, Ambassador, and, in a forgetful moment, one of President Cleveland's commission to determine the boundary line between a British colony and a foreign state; neither of whom had asked him to draw it. There was Isaac Bromley, one of the world's jesters who make life amusing to everybody but themselves; whom all his colleagues on The Tribune valued for qualities which were his own and not ours. Not the least of the many eulogies which death brought him was the testimony of those who knew him best, that his humour was good-humoured. The most casual reader must have noticed how various are the talents and characters among the hundred and six graduates of 1853. There are many more. There is Wayne MacVeagh, the most delightful of companions, counsel in great causes all his life, Attorney-General of the United States, Ambassador to Rome, one of the men who paid least respect to social conventionalities, yet in Washington a central figure in society. But neither law nor society gave full scope for the restless energy of his mind. During all the later years I have known MacVeagh he has been a thinker, serious, daring, too often unsound. His reading has been largely among books dealing with those new social problems which vex the minds of men, often needlessly, and disturb clear brains. Novelties interested him; and the drift of his thoughts was toward radical reconstruction {17} and toward one form or another of socialism. He espoused new opinions with vehemence; and sometimes reverted with vehemence to the old. We met again in London some five and twenty years ago. MacVeagh delivered to a little company at lunch a brief but reasoned and rather passionate discourse against our diplomatic service in Europe. When I suggested that we had none, he retorted: "But we have Ministers and Legations and though some of our Ministers are good and able men, they are wasted. No Minister is needed. All the business of the United States in Europe could be done and ought to be done by Consuls, and all the Legations ought to be abolished, and the Ministers recalled." I forget just how long it was after this outburst that MacVeagh was appointed Minister to Constantinople; and accepted and served; with credit and distinction, and afterward more efficiently still as Ambassador to Rome. He had a pretty wit in conversation, and a power of repartee before which many an antagonist went down. A celebrated American causeur once attacked him as a Democrat. "Yes," answered MacVeagh, "I am a Democrat and know it. You are a Democrat and don't know it. You have just been made President of a great railroad corporation. The stock sells to-day at a hundred and twenty; but before you have been President three years, you will have brought it within reach of the humblest citizen." {18} An unfulfilled prophecy, but that is what makes prophecy so useful as an instrument of debate. Only time can prove it false. These men and many more gave distinction to the class. Randall Gibson, of Louisiana, afterward Confederate General and United States Senator, cannot be omitted from the briefest catalogue. He was one of a small band of Southerners at Yale. When you came to know him you understood what the South means by the word gentleman; and by its application of the title to the best of its own people, or to the ruling class in the South as a whole. Already, of course, and even in this younger brood, the clash of interests and sentiments, the "prologue to the omen coming on," the strained relations between South and North, were visible, and vexatious enough in social intercourse. Randall Gibson was saturated with Southern ideas, and perhaps had the prejudices of his race, but he kept them to himself or did not impart them to us of the North. He lived in the upper air, yet he looked down on nobody. There was no more popular man, yet no man who held himself so completely aloof from the familiarities common enough as between classmates. In after life, from the havoc of war and other causes, he suffered much and bore disaster with courage. He was a man with reference to whom it is possible, and was always possible, to use the much-abused word chivalrous, with the certainty it could not be misunderstood. When he died {19} there passed away a beautiful example of a type common in literature, rare in life, rarest of all in this generation, the grand seigneur. There was lately an Englishman, Earl Spencer, whom Randall Gibson resembled: slightly in appearance, closely in those essential traits which go to the making of character. The same urbanity; the same considerateness to others; the same loyalty of nature; the same shining courage; the same unfailing effort to conform to high ideals. Both men had the pride of race and of descent. In both it turned to fine effects. I have known Lord Spencer to submit—I may be forgiven this distant allusion—to what can only be called an extortion rather than engage in a legal controversy he thought undignified, yet out of which he would have come victorious. I have known Randall Gibson to accept the verdict of fate, the award of undeserved adversity, rather than defend himself when his success might have exposed his comrades to censure. The world may call it in both of them quixotic, but the world would be a much better place to live in if quixotry of this sort were commoner than it is. Neither of these two men railed against the world, or complained of its ethical standard. All they did was to have each a standard of his own and to govern their own lives accordingly. {20} <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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