Oldport Days
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson >> Oldport Days
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As I looked, a film of shade kept appearing and disappearing with
rhythmic regularity in a corner of the window, as if some one
might be sitting in a low rocking-chair close by. Presently the
motion ceased, and suddenly across the curtain came the shadow of
a woman. She raised in her arms the shadow of a baby, and kissed
it; then both disappeared, and I walked on.
What are Raphael's Madonnas but the shadow of a mother's love, so
traced as to endure forever? In this picture of mine, the group
actually moved upon the canvas. The curtains that hid it revealed
it. The ecstasy of human love passed in brief, intangible
panorama before me. It was something seen, yet unseen; airy, yet
solid; a type, yet a reality; fugitive, yet destined to last in
my memory while I live. It said more to me than would any Madonna
of Raphael's, for his mother never kisses her child. I believe I
have never passed over that road since then, never seen the
house, never heard the names of its occupants. Their character,
their history, their fate, are all unknown. But these two will
always stand for me as disembodied types of humanity,--the Mother
and the Child; they seem nearer to me than my immediate
neighbors, yet they are as ideal and impersonal as the goddesses
of Greece or as Plato's archetypal man.
I know not the parentage of that child, whether black or white,
native or foreign, rich or poor. It makes no difference. The
presence of a baby equalizes all social conditions. On the floor
of some Southern hut, scarcely so comfortable as a dog-kennel, I
have seen a dusky woman look down upon her infant with such an
expression of delight as painter never drew. No social culture
can make a mother's face more than a mother's, as no wealth can
make a nursery more than a place where children dwell. Lavish
thousands of dollars on your baby-clothes, and after all the
child is prettiest when every garment is laid aside. That
becoming nakedness, at least, may adorn the chubby darling of the
poorest home.
I know not what triumph or despair may have come and gone through
that wayside house since then, what jubilant guests may have
entered, what lifeless form passed out. What anguish or what sin
may have come between that woman and that child; through what
worlds they now wander, and whether separate or in each other's
arms,--this is all unknown. Fancy can picture other joys to which
the first happiness was but the prelude, and, on the other hand,
how easy to imagine some special heritage of human woe and call
it theirs!
"I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,
Lord of thy house and hospitality;
And Grief, uneasy lover, might not rest
Save when he sat within the touch of thee."
Nay, the foretaste of that changed fortune may have been present,
even in the kiss. Who knows what absorbing emotion, besides
love's immediate impulse, may have been uttered in that shadowy
embrace? There may have been some contrition for ill-temper or
neglect, or some triumph over ruinous temptation, or some pledge
of immortal patience, or some heart-breaking prophecy of
bereavement. It may have been simply an act of habitual
tenderness, or it may have been the wild reaction toward a
neglected duty; the renewed self-consecration of the saint, or
the joy of the sinner that repenteth. No matter. She kissed the
baby. The feeling of its soft flesh, the busy struggle of its
little arms between her hands, the impatient pressure of its
little feet against her knees,--these were the same, whatever the
mood or circumstance beside. They did something to equalize joy
and sorrow, honor and shame. Maternal love is love, whether a
woman be a wife or only a mother. Only a mother!
The happiness beneath that roof may, perhaps, have never reached
so high a point as at that precise moment of my passing. In the
coarsest household, the mother of a young child is placed on a
sort of pedestal of care and tenderness, at least for a time. She
resumes something of the sacredness and dignity of the maiden.
Coleridge ranks as the purest of human emotions that of a husband
towards a wife who has a baby at her breast,--"a feeling how free
from sensual desire, yet how different from friendship!" And to
the true mother however cultivated, or however ignorant, this
period of early parentage is happier than all else, in spite of
its exhausting cares. In that delightful book, the "Letters" of
Mrs. Richard Trench (mother of the well-known English writer),
the most agreeable passage is perhaps that in which, after
looking back upon a life spent in the most brilliant society of
Europe, she gives the palm of happiness to the time when she was
a young mother. She writes to her god-daughter: "I believe it is
the happiest time of any woman's life, who has affectionate
feelings, and is blessed with healthy and well-disposed children.
I know at least that neither the gayeties and boundless hopes of
early life, nor the more grave pursuits and deeper affections of
later years, are by any means comparable in my recollection with
the serene, yet lively pleasure of seeing my children playing on
the grass, enjoying their little temperate supper, or repeating
'with holy look' their simple prayers, and undressing for bed,
growing prettier for every part of their dress they took off, and
at last lying down, all freshness and love, in complete
happiness, and an amiable contest for mamma's last kiss."
That kiss welcomed the child into a world where joy predominates.
The vast multitude of human beings enjoy existence and wish to
live. They all have their earthly life under their own control.
Some religions sanction suicide; the Christian Scriptures nowhere
explicitly forbid it; and yet it is a rare thing. Many persons
sigh for death when it seems far off, but the desire vanishes
when the boat upsets, or the locomotive runs off the track, or
the measles set in. A wise physician once said to me: "I observe
that every one wishes to go to heaven, but I observe that most
people are willing to take a great deal of very disagreeable
medicine first. "The lives that one least envies--as of the
Digger Indian or the outcast boy in the city--are yet sweet to
the living. "They have only a pleasure like that of the brutes,"
we say with scorn. But what a racy and substantial pleasure is
that! The flashing speed of the swallow in the air, the cool play
of the minnow in the water, the dance of twin butterflies round a
thistle-blossom, the thundering gallop of the buffalo across the
prairie, nay, the clumsy walk of the grizzly bear; it were
doubtless enough to reward existence, could we have joy like such
as these, and ask no more. This is the hearty physical basis of
animated life, and as step by step the savage creeps up to the
possession of intellectual manhood, each advance brings with it
new sorrow and new joy, with the joy always in excess.
There are many who will utterly disavow this creed that life is
desirable in itself. A fair woman in a ball-room, exquisitely
dressed, and possessed of all that wealth could give, once
declared to me her belief--and I think honestly--that no person
over thirty was consciously happy, or would wish to live, but for
the fear of death. There could not even be pleasure in
contemplating one's children, she asserted, since they were
living in such a world of sorrow. Asking the opinion, within half
an hour, of another woman as fair and as favored by fortune, I
found directly the opposite verdict. "For my part I can truly
say," she answered, "that I enjoy every moment I live." The
varieties of temperament and of physical condition will always
afford us these extremes; but the truth lies between them, and
most persons will endure many sorrows and still find life sweet.
And the mother's kiss welcomes the child into a world where good
predominates as well as joy. What recreants must we be, in an age
that has abolished slavery in America and popularized the
governments of all Europe, if we doubt that the tendency of man
is upward! How much that the world calls selfishness is only
generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to
maintain a wife in luxury or make one's children rich! In an
audience of rough people a generous sentiment always brings down
the house. In the tumult of war both sides applaud an heroic
deed. A courageous woman, who had traversed alone, on benevolent
errands, the worst parts of New York told me that she never felt
afraid except in the solitudes of the country; wherever there was
a crowd, she found a protector.
A policeman of great experience once spoke to me with admiration
of the fidelity of professional thieves to each other, and the
risks they would run for the women whom they loved; when "Bristol
Bill" was arrested, he said, there was found upon the burglar a
set of false keys, not quite finished, by which he would
certainly, within twenty-four hours, have had his mistress out of
jail. Parent-Duchatelet found always the remains of modesty among
the fallen women of Paris hospitals; and Mayhew, amid the London
outcasts, says that he thinks better of human nature every day.
Even among politicians, whom it is our American fashion to revile
as the chief of sinners, there is less of evil than of good.
In Wilberforce's "Memoirs" there is an account of his having once
asked Mr. Pitt whether his long experience as Prime Minister had
made him think well or ill of his fellow-men. Mr. Pitt answered,
"Well"; and his successor, Lord Melbourne, being asked the same
question, answered, after a little reflection, "My opinion is the
same as that of Mr. Pitt."
Let us have faith. It was a part of the vigor of the old Hebrew
tradition to rejoice when a man-child was born into the world;
and the maturer strength of nobler ages should rejoice over a
woman-child as well. Nothing human is wholly sad, until it is
effete and dying out. Where there is life there is promise.
"Vitality is always hopeful," was the verdict of the most refined
and clear-sighted woman who has yet explored the rough mining
villages of the Rocky Mountains. There is apt to be a certain
coarse virtue in rude health; as the Germanic races were purest
when least civilized, and our American Indians did not unlearn
chastity till they began to decay. But even where vigor and vice
are found together, they still may hold a promise for the next
generation. Out of the strong cometh forth sweetness. Parisian
wickedness is not so discouraging merely because it is wicked, as
from a suspicion that it is draining the life-blood of the
nation. A mob of miners or of New York bullies may be
uncomfortable neighbors, and may make a man of refinement
hesitate whether to stop his ears or to feel for his revolver;
but they hold more promise for the coming generations than the
line which ends in Madame Bovary or the Vicomte de Camors.
But behind that cottage curtain, at any rate, a new and prophetic
life had begun. I cannot foretell that child's future, but I know
something of its past. The boy may grow up into a criminal, the
woman into an outcast, yet the baby was beloved. It came "not in
utter nakedness." It found itself heir of the two prime
essentials of existence,--life and love. Its first possession was
a woman's kiss; and in that heritage the most important need of
its career was guaranteed. "An ounce of mother," says the Spanish
proverb, "is worth a pound of clergy." Jean Paul says that in
life every successive influence affects us less and less, so that
the circumnavigator of the globe is less influenced by all the
nations he has seen than by his nurse. Well may the child imbibe
that reverence for motherhood which is the first need of man.
Where woman is most a slave, she is at least sacred to her son.
The Turkish Sultan must prostrate himself at the door of his
mother's apartments, and were he known to have insulted her, it
would make his throne tremble. Among the savage African
Touaricks, if two parents disagree, it is to the mother that the
child's obedience belongs. Over the greater part of the earth's
surface, the foremost figures in all temples are the Mother and
Child. Christian and Buddhist nations, numbering together two
thirds of the world's population, unite in this worship. Into the
secrets of the ritual that baby in the window had already
received initiation.
And how much spiritual influence may in turn have gone forth from
that little one! The coarsest father gains a new impulse to labor
from the moment of his baby's birth; he scarcely sees it when
awake, and yet it is with him all the time. Every stroke he
strikes is for his child. New social aims, new moral motives,
come vaguely up to him. The London costermonger told Mayhew that
he thought every man would like his son or daughter to have a
better start in the world than his own. After all, there is no
tonic like the affections. Philosophers express wonder that the
divine laws should give to some young girl, almost a child, the
custody of an immortal soul. But what instruction the baby brings
to the mother! She learns patience, self-control, endurance; her
very arm grows strong, so that she can hold the dear burden
longer than the father can. She learns to understand character,
too, by dealing with it. "In training my first children," said a
wise mother to me, "I thought that all were born just the same,
and that I was wholly responsible for what they should become. I
learned by degrees that each had a temperament of its own, which
I must study before I could teach it." And thus, as the little
ones grow older, their dawning instincts guide those of the
parents; their questions suggest new answers, and to have loved
them is a liberal education.
For the height of heights is love. The philosopher dries into a
skeleton like that he investigates, unless love teaches him. He
is blind among his microscopes, unless he sees in the humblest
human soul a revelation that dwarfs all the world beside. While
he grows gray in ignorance among his crucibles, every girlish
mother is being illuminated by every kiss of her child. That
house is so far sacred, which holds within its walls this
new-born heir of eternity. But to dwell on these high mysteries
would take us into depths beyond the present needs of mother or
of infant, and it is better that the greater part of the
baby-life should be that of an animated toy.
Perhaps it is well for all of us that we should live mostly on
the surfaces of things and should play with life, to avoid taking
it too hard. In a nursery the youngest child is a little more
than a doll, and the doll is a little less than a child. What
spell does fancy weave on earth like that which the one of these
small beings performs for the other? This battered and tattered
doll, this shapeless, featureless, possibly legless creature,
whose mission it is to be dragged by one arm, or stood upon its
head in the bathing-tub, until it finally reverts to the rag-bag
whence it came,--what an affluence of breathing life is thrown
around it by one touch of dawning imagination! Its little
mistress will find all joy unavailing without its sympathetic
presence, will confide every emotion to its pen-and-ink ears, and
will weep passionate tears if its extremely soiled person is
pricked when its clothes are mended. What psychologist, what
student of the human heart, has ever applied his subtile analysis
to the emotions of a child toward her doll?
I read lately the charming autobiography of a little girl of
eight years, written literally from her own dictation. Since "Pet
Marjorie" I have seen no such actual self-revelation on the part
of a child. In the course of her narration she describes, with
great precision and correctness, the travels of the family
through Europe in the preceding year, assigning usually the place
of importance to her doll, who appears simply as "My Baby."
Nothing can be more grave, more accurate, more serious than the
whole history, but nothing in it seems quite so real and alive as
the doll. "When we got to Nice, I was sick. The next morning the
doctor came, and he said I had something that was very much like
scarlet fever. Then I had Annie take care of baby, and keep her
away, for I was afraid she would get the fever. She used to cry
to come to me, but I knew it wouldn't be good for her."
What firm judgment is here, what tenderness without weakness,
what discreet motherhood! When Christmas came, it appears that
baby hung up her stocking with the rest. Her devoted parent had
bought for her a slate with a real pencil. Others provided
thimble and scissors and bodkin and a spool of thread, and a
travelling-shawl with a strap, and a cap with tarletan ruffles.
"I found baby with the cap on, early in the morning, and she was
so pleased she almost jumped out of my arms." Thus in the midst
of visits to the Coliseum and St. Peter's, the drama of early
affection goes always on. "I used to take her to hear the band,
in the carriage, and she went everywhere I did." But the love of
all dolls, as of other pets, must end with a tragedy, and here it
comes. "The next place we went to was Lucerne. There was a lovely
lake there, but I had a very sad time. One day I thought I'd take
baby down to breakfast, and, as I was going up stairs, my foot
slipped and baby broke her head. And O, I felt so bad! and I
cried out, and I ran up stairs to Annie, and mamma came, and O,
we were all so sorry! And mamma said she thought I could get
another head, but I said, 'It won't be the same baby.' And mamma
said, maybe we could make it seem so."
At this crisis the elder brother and sister departed for Mount
Righi. "They were going to stay all night, and mamma and I stayed
at home to take care of each other. I felt very bad about baby
and about their going, too. After they went, mamma and I thought
we would go to the little town and see what we could find." After
many difficulties, a waxen head was discovered. "Mamma bought it,
and we took it home and put it on baby; but I said it wasn't like
my real baby, only it was better than having no child at all!"
This crushing bereavement, this reluctant acceptance of a child
by adoption, to fill the vacant heart,--how real and formidable
is all this rehearsal of the tragedies of maturer years! I knew
an instance in which the last impulse of ebbing life was such a
gush of imaginary motherhood.
A dear friend of mine, whose sweet charities prolong into a third
generation the unbounded benevolence of old Isaac Hopper, used to
go at Christmas-time with dolls and other gifts to the poor
children on Randall's Island. Passing the bed of a little girl
whom the physician pronounced to be unconscious and dying, the
kind visitor insisted on putting a doll into her arms. Instantly
the eyes of the little invalid opened, and she pressed the gift
eagerly to her heart, murmuring over it and caressing it. The
matron afterwards wrote that the child died within two hours,
wearing a happy face, and still clinging to her new-found
treasure.
And beginning with this transfer of all human associations to a
doll, the child's life interfuses itself readily among all the
affairs of the elders. In its presence, formality vanishes, the
most oppressive ceremonial is a little relieved when children
enter. Their influence is pervasive and irresistible, like that
of water, which adapts itself to any landscape,--always takes its
place, welcome or unwelcome,--keeps its own level and seems
always to have its natural and proper margin.
Out of doors how children mingle with nature, and seem to begin
just where birds and butterflies leave off! Leigh Hunt, with his
delicate perceptions, paints this well: "The voices of children
seem as natural to the early morning as the voice of the birds.
The suddenness, the lightness, the loudness, the sweet confusion,
the sparkling gayety, seem alike in both. The sudden little
jangle is now here and now there; and now a single voice calls to
another, and the boy is off like the bird." So Heine, with deeper
thoughtfulness, noticed the "intimacy with the trees" of the
little wood-gatherer in the Hartz Mountains; soon the child
whistled like a linnet, and the other birds all answered him;
then he disappeared in the thicket with his bare feet and his
bundle of brushwood.
"Children," thought Heine, "are younger than we, and can still
remember the time when they were trees or birds, and can
therefore understand and speak their language; but we are grown
old, and have too many cares, and too much jurisprudence and bad
poetry in our heads."
But why go to literature for a recognition of what one may see by
opening one's eyes? Before my window there is a pool, two rods
square, that is haunted all winter by children,--clearing away
the snow of many a storm, if need be, and mining downward till
they strike the ice. I look this morning from the window, and the
pond is bare. In a moment I happen to look again, and it is
covered with a swarm of boys; a great migrating flock has settled
upon it, as if swooping down from parts unknown to scream and
sport themselves here. The air is full of their voices; they have
all tugged on their skates instantaneously, as it were by magic.
Now they are in a confused cluster, now they sweep round and
round in a circle, now it is broken into fragments and as quickly
formed again; games are improvised and abandoned; there seems to
be no plan or leader, but all do as they please, and yet somehow
act in concert, and all chatter all the time. Now they have
alighted, every one, upon the bank of snow that edges the pond,
each scraping a little hollow in which to perch. Now every perch
is vacant again, for they are all in motion; each moment
increases the jangle of shrill voices,--since a boy's outdoor
whisper to his nearest crony is as if he was hailing a ship in
the offing,--and what they are all saying can no more be made out
than if they were a flock of gulls or blackbirds. I look away
from the window once more, and when I glance out again there is
not a boy in sight. They have whirled away like snowbirds, and
the little pool sleeps motionless beneath the cheerful wintry
sun. Who but must see how gradually the joyous life of the animal
rises through childhood into man,--since the soaring gnats, the
glancing fishes, the sliding seals are all represented in this
mob of half-grown boyhood just released from school.
If I were to choose among all gifts and qualities that which, on
the whole, makes life pleasantest, I should select the love of
children. No circumstance can render this world wholly a solitude
to one who has that possession. It is a freemasonry. Wherever one
goes, there are the little brethren and sisters of the mystic
tie. No diversity of race or tongue makes much difference. A
smile speaks the universal language. "If I value myself on
anything," said the lonely Hawthorne, "it is on having a smile
that children love." They are such prompt little beings; they
require so little prelude; hearts are won in two minutes, at that
frank period, and so long as you are true to them they will be
true to you. They need no argument, no bribery. They have a
hearty appetite for gifts, no doubt, but it is not for these that
they love the giver. Take the wealth of the world and lavish it
with counterfeited affection: I will win all the children's
hearts away from you by empty-handed love. The gorgeous toys will
dazzle them for an hour; then their instincts will revert to
their natural friends. In visiting a house where there are
children I do not like to take them presents: it is better to
forego the pleasure of the giving than to divide the welcome
between yourself and the gift. Let that follow after you are
gone.
It is an exaggerated compliment to women when we ascribe to them
alone this natural sympathy with childhood. It is an individual,
not a sexual trait, and is stronger in many men than in many
women. It is nowhere better exhibited in literature than where
the happy Wilhelm Meister takes his boy by the hand, to lead him
"into the free and lordly world." Such love is not universal
among the other sex, though men, in that humility which so adorns
their natures, keep up the pleasing fiction that it is. As a
general rule any little girl feels some glimmerings of emotion
towards anything that can pass for a doll, but it does not follow
that, when grown older, she will feel as ready an instinct toward
every child. Try it. Point out to a woman some bundle of
blue-and-white or white-and-scarlet in some one's arms at the
next street corner. Ask her, "Do you love that baby?" Not one
woman in three will say promptly, "Yes." The others will
hesitate, will bid you wait till they are nearer, till they can
personally inspect the little thing and take an inventory of its
traits; it may be dirty, too; it may be diseased. Ah! but this is
not to love children, and you might as well be a man. To love
children is to love childhood, instinctively, at whatever
distance, the first impulse being one of attraction, though it
may be checked by later discoveries. Unless your heart commands
at least as long a range as your eye, it is not worth much. The
dearest saint in my calendar never entered a railway car that she
did not look round for a baby, which, when discovered, must
always be won at once into her arms. If it was dirty, she would
have been glad to bathe it; if ill, to heal it. It would not have
seemed to her anything worthy the name of love, to seek only
those who were wholesome and clean. Like the young girl in
Holmes's most touching poem, she would have claimed as her own
the outcast child whom nurses and physicians had abandoned.
"'Take her, dread Angel! Break in love
This bruised reed and make it thine!'
No voice descended from above,
But Avis answered, 'She is mine!'"
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