Along the friendly way

Front matter

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Contents

I. Some Preliminaries . 15

Birth — What is it ?

Ancestral Ingredients.

II Earliest Recollections

Memory or Imagination?

IN my long backward look I find that the mind lingers most fondly over the events of early childhood. These recollections are also the most vivid. It may be that persons who have had extraordinary careers, who have heaved big events or been crushed by heavy sacrifices, recall those things most prominently. But one like myself, in whose life-stream there have been no Niagaras, will be apt to think most naturally of the springs in the distant hills, the early confluents where the waters of companionship first mingled, the stretches of still-water mirrored with the cloud-land of childish fancies, the overarching forests out of which leaped upon him his first terrors, and the little valleys which gave direction to his after career.

Perhaps there is a psychological explanation of our clearer remembrance of early events. To fasten things in recollection we must look at them long enough to fix our attention. The mnemonic acid must cut in. The attention of children is forced by the novelty of what passes. How the first track of the skate on virgin ice stands out ! I can see it now after seventy summers have melted it away. The first clap of thunder startles us, while the thousand subsequent strokes of Thor's hammer lose their distinctness in the prolonged roar of the storm.

The impressions of childhood are apt to repeat themselves in the impressions of after life. They become, as it were, fundamental draught-lines which we unconsciously follow in later thinking. Ruskin noted that Turner's great Alpine peaks showed in their contour and color a suggestion of the Yorkshire Hills amid whose minor beauties he learned to paint. A biographer of Tennyson, explaining the unabated freshness of the poet's sentiments and imagery, attributes them to his early experiences as an observer of nature and a connoisseur of men and things, — the shapes of his impressions having been so simple and decided that they never changed. " First emotions are life emotions ; however the current flows, the source is the same."

There may also be a physical explanation of the vividness with which we retain the impression of our first things. A difficulty which beset the inventor of the phonographic disk was to find a substance which would most readily record the tiny sound-waves, and, at the same time, most securely retain the almost infinitesimal indentations they made. The inventor of the human brain had a similar problem. Everything we notice records itself, shall we say by a scratch, an indentation, producing some molecular change in the cellular tissue. The child's brain is marvellously quick to

EAELIEST EECOLLECTIONS 39 take, and as marvellously endowed to retain, the impress of whatever touches it.

On the other hand, in old age the brain seems to have become too hard to receive the impression of ordinary things. Hence the commonly noticed failure of the aged to recall recent occurrences, though they are apt to be full of reminiscence of earlier happenings. My father, when he passed into his nineties, became unreliable in respect to current engagements. He could read for the third time a story without finding anything to remind him that he had travelled over the same pages before. But start him to repeat the thread of an old-time romance, to argufy the politics of Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay, to describe the costumes prevailing in the transition period between kneebuckles and blue swallow-tails with brass buttons, it was like reading from the age-yellowed pages of a newspaper of those days.

There is a dispute among writers as to the earliest age when the brain is sufficiently hardened to make passing impressions into permanent recollections. John Stuart Mill declared that he couldn't remember when he couldn't read Greek. He was not " an ordinary man," but one of those prodigies that do not concern any philosophy we may indulge in in this memoir. After questioning many lads and lasses, and also cross-examining some of my venerable friends in their at least twice-told tales, I incline to Jean Paul Kichter's opinion, — " There are in men, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two blank bookbinders' leaves — childhood and old age."

We do not ordinarily recall things that occurred before our third year. Yet we sometimes think we do. An experience of my own perplexes me.

On my brain film is a very vivid picture of a scene enacted when I was still a creeper. My playroom was on the second floor. How vividly I can see it now: the big rocker, the tiny crib, the green Venetian window blind ! My nurse had put me on the window seat which reached to within a few inches of the sill. Over this sill I leaned until I lost my balance, rolled down the sloping roof of the piazza, and lodged in the broad trough of the gutter. Looking over the edge of this I saw the bright flowers of a rose-bush some ten feet below. With the perversity that has followed me through life, I tried to tumble down to them. The nurse's screams delighted me. Knowing that I was beyond her reach, I experienced my first thrill of personal liberty, which thrill was lessened neither by the narrow limitation of the gutter, nor by any fear of the unknown depth below me. I was not unlike certain anarchists who are so enamored of their independence that they are willing to roll into social perdition. I can to this day see the broad face of my Irish nurse, its prevailing red turned white with fright. I can recall her exact pose as she thrust her broad hips through the window opening. I have seen her a thousand times as she tried to crawl down to me, and rejoiced as often

EAELIEST KECOLLECTIONS 41 with the recollection of how the slanting roof pitched her upon her nose, lessening by at least a skin's thickness the size of that member, which nature had already sufficiently curtailed to meet the most approved type of Hibernian beauty. She persisted in elongating herself until her fingers gripped my clothes. There she lay panting out her exhausted energy, until my father opportunely appeared upon the scene, grasped her by the feet, and drew us both to safety.

Now all this I could swear that I distinctly remember, were it not for a psychological difficulty. At that early age I could not have had a sufficiently developed sense of the ludicrous to appreciate the scene ; yet the ludicrous element is its chief feature in my recollection. I must honestly account for my seeming precocity by the fact that I have often heard my father and others tell that story of my first misadventure. My imagination, excited by the picturesque adornments of the tale, became reality ; just as in process engraving shadow pictures are cut into the plate.

I will not apologize for my childish illusion, since some of my most veracious friends, who have long since reached years of discretion, occasionally relate as their personal adventures things that my grandfather would claim to belong to his diary, recorded, alas! before the days of copyright. We all of us at times confound our memories with our imaginations, just as stereopticon lecturers mix their plates.

The late Lawrence Hutton told of a dinner he attended in London, at which James Bus sell Lowell made a speech whose very words Hutton could repeat. " Yet," adds Hutton, " I am assured that it never happened at all. I can find no one who ever heard of such a dinner." Carl Schurz frequently told of the immense impression made upon him at a Cabinet meeting by Mr. Lincoln's vivid description of the Monitors fight in Hampton Roads. But he afterwards wrote, — "A careful scrutiny of the circumstances convinced me at last that I was not at the White House that day. This is one of the cases which have made me very anxious to verify my memory by all attainable outside evidence."

I wonder — to compare little things with great — if errors similar to my early " recollections " may not have occurred in connection with some of the ancient traditions of the race. Even Herodotus, reverenced as the Father of History, runs the risk of being called the Father of Lies in narrating as his j>ersonal observation many things that certainly belonged to earlier legends, which legends themselves are now known to have been fables. Possibly some of the " eye-witnesses " of more sacred events have, all unconsciously, colored their actual visions with the popular beliefs or current interpretations of the facts, and have thus given us upon their saintly authority that which would not now pass the test of real historical verity.

Over the human mind there has always rested a

"EARLIEST EECOLLECTIOKS 43 mirage-making atmosphere that brings remote things near, and is apt to transform arrant fancies into visnal realities. The Crusaders, while still on the far distant Rhine hills, declared that they saw Jerusalem, even its walls and temple. English soldiers have sworn that in a recent battle in Belgium Saint George appeared in shining armor to encourage them. Indeed, the legend of Saint George's adventure seems to have been a mere revival of the olden Scandinavian story of Siegfried slaying a similar monster.

It has generally happened with the visions of the saints, especially of Mary and Christ, that they were reproductions of the pictures in the churches with which the ignorant visionaries were familiar. We may thus account for the many Descents into Hell recorded by our ancestors in such books as those of Eoger of Hovenden and Matthew of Paris. Though Benvenuto Cellini was a most artistic liar in some respects, we need not think of him as deliberately prevaricating in his account of the apparition of Jesus in his cell in San Angelo. Such sights were undoubtedly real experiences in the souls of the observers; but so also the clouds and tree-tops seen in pools make actual pictures on the retina though they are not really down there in the water. The sources of the experience can be questioned without disparaging the honesty of the narrators. Sincerity is not a test of truth.

44 ALONG THE FftlENDLY WAY

Children's Lies.

A noted preacher once said that all children are born liars. This is a Calvinistic slander, unless by a lie is meant everything that does not agree with outward fact, however innocent the utterer may be of any intention to deceive. With that unscientific and immoral definition, I must confess to have been a liar from infancy to at least adult years; for I have told stories, and stuck to them in spite of discipline, which astound me in the recollection.

A child, unless he is a dullard, is a natural romancer. This is due to the fact that his mind is more active than his senses, so that his outward knowledge fails to supply with actual facts his inner inventiveness. In after life there is a nearer balance between mental and sense perception. Indeed, in many cases the man becomes so engrossed in merely outward things that his imaginative faculty is partly atrophied from disuse. But in childhood it is the reverse. Limited actual observation of the world fails to satisfy the inner craving for excitement. The grain of fact runs out, so that the child pours into his mental hopper the grist of mere fancy.

In my short-clothes days we had not many picture books in the nursery, so we made our own pictures as we could. They were of such things as were never seen on earth nor in the waters under the earth. There was then little scientific " milk for babes," in the form of revelations of the wonders of the physical creation. The dinosaurians had not

EARLIEST RECOLLECTIONS 45 yet crept up from their geological habitats and sprawled themselves over the pages of school-books. But we invented their rivals.

One night, after too much raisin cake for supper, I peopled the darkness with all sorts of fantastic shapes, which, as I now recall them, were quite Dantesque. One creature had the body of an enormous serpent, the claws of a cat and the bill of a bird. This latter function was armed with a row of teeth that would have been the envy of any bully of the primeval jungle. Of course, I made myself slay the monster. But the tussle was tremendous and agonizing. No doubt the pillows and coverlets would have shown how I wriggled away from the crunch of the monster ; how I caught and held from me his great claws; how I fastened his jaws wide open with my dagger just at the moment they were about to snap me into two. I have never had a more realistic experience. As I tell the story I feel again the fright that almost paralyzed me as I grappled with the fearsome object, the chill and heat that alternately coursed up and down my spinal column during the conflict, and the enthusiasm of the victory.

The next day I told the story to my brothers. A governess overhearing it was doubtless horrified with the conviction that she had in training a child of the devil who had spent the night with infernal playmates. She reported the matter to my father, to whom I insisted that I was telling only the truth. Upon which, he being more orthodox than psychologic, advised me to paint on my imagination a place of fire and brimstone as something likely to be real in my future experience.

But what is reality? Simply what one realizes. A thought that sways me, a fantasy that carries me away, a mere dream, if you will, is more real to me than a cyclone through which I have slept soundly. The material part of a sunset is only dust and mist particles, but the glory of it is an immensely greater fact, for all that it is assayed only in my sentiment. Surely beauty, grandeur, sublimity, are as real as the mountains or the sea on which they are painted with the brush of my aesthetic feeling. Science is a reality ; yet it is not an outstanding series of facts ; only our conception of an order in the universe that may have no more truth back of it than the ancient cosmogonies that have floated away like other mists of the early morn. Thales was not the less a philosopher and less worthy of his title of Father of Science because his four elements, earth, air, fire and water, were not elements at all. Let us be just to those who encircled the world with the river Oceanus as a watery horizon ; who saw through the phosphorescent waves the gleaming trident of Neptune commanding the seas ; who turned their prows in fright from the cave where iEolus kept the tempests ; who read the entrails of beasts as the hieroglyphic prophecies of future events, and followed the wandering of Ulysses among the isles of Calypso and Circe, and over the pasture lands of the sun, as credulously as we follow Stanley among the pigmy

EAELIEST KECOLLECTIONS 47 tribes of Africa or Nansen among the floating islands that girt the North Pole. Homer, Hesiod and Ovid, the authors of the Babylonian and Hebrew stories of creation, Virgil, Milton and Dante, and the singers of the Sagas of the Northland were only the dreamers of the race during its childhood or adolescence, yet what they told became the determinative forces of much of human history.

We are now critically examining the old Bible records with the purpose to reject whatever cannot demonstrate its literal exactness. Criticism should be careful lest in its iconoclastic zeal it destroy genuine and important history, namely, that of the convictions — dreams, if you will — of the men who once lived under the spell of ancient oracles. We shall thus lose more of value than we shall gain if we succeed in melting the seals off all apocryphal scripture. Our very superstitions belong to the history of truth ; they are essential to the biography of humanity and cannot be omitted without detriment to the fidelity of the record.

A Young Anarchist.

That I did not grow up to become an anarchist was not due to my first school-teacher. She was a lovely woman, soft-eyed, soft-cheeked, soft-handed, soft-spoken, all because she was a soft-hearted creature. She was a rigid disciplinarian, according to her code, but not in administration. She was perpetually inflicting punishments that didn't punish. When she scolded, which she thought she was doing vehemently, she was like Bottom as the lion, who would " roar you as gently as any sucking dove."

I had done something wrong, and was made to hold out my hand for the due reward of my deeds. A tiny whip of the size of a broomwisp and the weight of a shoe-string fell thrice upon my flesh. I was disappointed. I thought a whipping was of more consequence than that. I felt that my teacher hadn't credited me with pluck. She ought at least to have made me wince, stiffen my lips, and grind my heel on the floor. I was underrated, insulted, and that in the presence of another little fellow who thought he had licked me the day before.

I watched my chance to merit a heavier punishment, something one could feel, and be willing to talk about afterward if only he didn't cry. I perpetrated some awful, horrible, atrocious bit of naughtiness — the adjectives describe my purpose, not the deed, although I have forgotten what it was. Reformation through corporal punishment having so signally failed in my case, the mistress endeavored to shame me out of my wickedness. She threatened to make me sit in the next room with the girls. Through the open door I caught a loving glance from one of the little misses who happened to live next door to me, and of whom I was very fond. That glance was, as in more classic instances, my undoing. I at once repeated my crime, and had a delightful half -hour holding the hand of my inamorata under the fold of her frock.

I was at that time laying the foundation for my

EAKLIEST KECOLLECTIONS 49 ideas of government. The " powers that be," such as Kings, Policemen, Generals and Schoolma'ams, it seemed to me were ordained only to break the monotony of other people's lives by providing them with new sensations — the first plank in the platform of my political economy.

I was encouraged by my experience to pursue further the investigation of this great problem. I committed another offense. Now I was to be visited with the utmost severity, put through the final degree, until my soul should be racked into submission.

I was shut up in the dark closet! Had I ever heard of the saying I should have expected to read over that dungeon portal, " Abandon hope ye that enter here." I anticipated the solitude of ear-splitting silence ; but the cheerful voice of a darkey mammy singing in the adjacent kitchen prevented that catastrophe. I set out to explore with my hands my unknown environs. What awful recesses, deep caverns, ghostly bats and unimaginable things ought to be in the dark closet ! Suddenly my fingers slipped into something soft. I smelt the stuff. Goody! Pumpkin-pie! I was incarcerated in the pantry ! Never was a mouse happier. I did not ask to see. Touch, smell, taste, were all the senses I needed. I only feared that the mistress would relent of her cruelty to me before I had scraped the bottom crust.

I served my time in the pantry cell, and was led out into liberty. My sleeve, with which I had wiped my mouth, presented the annals of a solitary confinement with which the story of Silvio Pellico in the Spielburg and that of Picciola and his flower do not compare. But the eyes of my teacher were so full of tears over my sufferings that she didn't notice the sleeve.

This method of imparting to a youngster proper ideas of Law and Order, due respect for Authority, and a wholesome realization that " the way of the transgressor is hard," might do for the training of rabbits, but not for young hyenas and foxes, to which ancestral races most of us humans seem to belong. That school might have been preparatory to an after course in the university of BlackwelFs Island.

In spite of modern theories, and judging from my own case, a better discipline would have been a series of sound spankings laid on by a masculine hand ; thus imparting intelligence and discipline by what the scientists would call the Process of Induction, or which the metaphysicians would, perhaps, regard as a practical application of the a posteriori method.

First Physical Pain.

John Morley quotes approvingly the words of George Meredith, "We lose a proper sense of the richness of life, if we do not look back on the scenes of our youth with imaginative warmth." One of my recollections does not lack the sensation of warmth. I was scarcely able to run when that exploit

EAELIEST KECOLLECTKXNS 51 brought me to my first experience of bodily suffering. Since then I have felt most of the screws on the rack of torture, from toothache to gout ; but the terror of such agonies has been somewhat mitigated by the memory of primitive discipline.

It was before the general introduction of butlers' pantry sinks piped for hot water ; at least such an Etnean supply had not yet been put into our house. The kitchen goddess was accustomed to bring into the dining-room an immense caldron of boiling water in which the dishes were washed before being ornamentally disposed on the shelf. Unfortunately I encountered the maid as she was bearing this portable lavatory through a narrow passage, with the result that several gallons of the steaming fluid deluged me. A great scar on my neck is a fragmentary memorial of the accident ; but I do not have to look at that to revive the remembrance of the agony of forty days. It helps me to a degree of equanimity in keeping a promise I recently made to an Italian priest that I would read a little book he had given me as a warning against my heretical tendencies. It was Saint Alfonso Maria de Liguori's Meditations, one chapter of which is entitled Delia Fine, and describes purgatorial " fire in the eyes, fire in the mouth, fire everywhere." During my lifetime I have had a delight in the smell of castor oil and lime-water, the mixture that solaced my pains during those dreary weeks when I lay like a snake in his den literally casting my old skin and taking on a new one. That early experience has undoubtedly made me more heroic as I have often been metaphorically in hot water since.

First Contact With Greatness.

The residence of General Winfield Scott was not far from our home. I had never as yet looked upon the renowned warrior, but my faculty of appreciation was stunned by the reports of his deeds. He had taken "with his arms" the city of Mexico. What tremendous arms he must have! When my father read at morning prayers how a king of Babylon had " carried away all Jerusalem," I wondered if he or Scott were the bigger. I knew about Gulliver and also about the giant that J ack killed, and was prepared to expect some tremendous vision when the General should arrive home from the war. I was disappointed when I saw him. To be sure he was a big man, made broader by the epaulettes that parapeted his shoulders, and taller by his cocked hat and feathers ; and the fanfare of trumpets and drums that played " Lo, the Conquering Hero Comes " seemed to blow him up to greater dimensions. But he was really no bigger than the giant I had seen at Barnum's.

I imagined that there must be some terrible power condensed somewhere in his body. Maybe he would explode at times as gunpowder does. So while the General was passing in the procession I kept behind my slightly bigger brother for safety. As there was no explosion beyond the outcries of the crowd I felt that greatness was a cheat,

EAELIEST EECOLLECTIONS 53

A few days later my brother and I were chasing our ball in front of the General's house. By chance the ball rolled through the hedge into the demesne of the terrible man. What should we do? My brother was as daring as I was impudent, so he yielded to my urging, summoned all his courage into his spine, and crawled through the hedge. Horror of horrors ! The colossus himself was sitting in a garden chair close to the hedge. He seized my brother by the waistband of his breeches, and lifted him over the hedge to the sidewalk. "My lad," said he, " you shouldn't bombard a man in his own castle. Suppose your ball had been a cannon-ball and had struck me ! "

While I breathed more freely since no terrible thing had happened, I felt a sort of contempt for Great Scott. If the mighty man had only crushed a bone or two in my brother's body, or flung the intruder over the top of the house, it would have been in keeping with my ideal of greatness. But, think of it! He had only broken the waistband of his breeches ! My awe was punctured. Some day I would pepper the General with my bean-thrower.

My brother had his revenge. A day or two after the General stopped us little tots on the street.

" See here, my lad ! Aren't you the boy that invaded my lawn? "

How my muscles stiffened ! The General laughed heartily, and patting my brother on the head, said kindly, " You must be more cautious next time, and not have so many pins stuck in your belly band."

What is greatness? The question thus started in my mind has never yet been satisfactorily answered, and few biographies help toward the solution.

First Lesson in Patriotism.

I was perhaps six years old when I received the first impression that I was living in a world of antagonisms. Everything external had heretofore gone smoothly. Everybody chucked me under the chin. I hadn't yet read about Blue Beard, and wouldn't have believed in the existence of such a monster if I had known the story. But suddenly I was made to realize that society is divided into factions ; that nations are like diverse species of wild beasts, snarling and snapping at one another for possession of the bones of self-interest. As in a spasm, my puny soul muscles suddenly became knotted for conflict.

The change came about in this way. My old grandmother had come to visit us. She had a wonderful face, full of kindness, eloquent with wrinkles, framed in a big white cap that, like a nimbus of light, covered her head to the chin. She was a splendid story-teller. Nearing her own second childhood she had that leisurely garrulous style that so pleases first childhood. While she was in our house fairies seemed to look into the windows at night, and the chimney swallows twittered like baby angels back of the fire-board. She talked about birds and bunnies, about good children and loving mammas, until one would imagine the whole world

EAKLIEST RECOLLECTIONS 55 a harmless Paradise where there was not even a garter-snake or a wart-toad to harm us.

But one afternoon she took me to the top of the house, and helped me climb a tall chair. She bade me look far away to a white gleam of water.

" That's it," said she.

For a long time she gazed. I thought she had forgotten me.

" What is it you see, grandma? "

" Why, that is the Sound off yonder. I wanted to see it once more before I died. When I was a wee little girl, about as big as you are now, I one day walked with my father from way back in the country to the shore to get a sight of the old British prison ship Jersey. My uncle was confined and tortured on that horrible vessel for months during the Revolutionary War."

I can never forget that hour, as I stood on the high chair, grinding my elbows against the window-sill, with my eyes strained toward a spot in the direful distance, and listened to what she told me of the trying days of her girlhood; of her father's property ruined, her relatives killed ; of how

John got his wooden leg, and Peter

lost his eyes in battle and went all the rest of his life totally blind. When 1 went to bed that night I could not sleep, but rehearsed all the pictures she had painted, deepening in my imagination the blood-red colors, and twisting into worse contortions the writhing horrors of the battle-field. I have since seen thousands of the wounded, and, as I write there lie before me the morning journals with casualty statistics from the bloodiest war-field of all history ; but my grandmother's story cut deeper into my heart, because it was my first impression of the age-long story of " man's inhumanity to man." I can now, after all these years, when I am as old as she was then, still feel the touch of the old lady's hand on my head, and hear her voice as she bade me never forget what it cost to make our country. Hundreds of times since I have seen that prison ship floating in the lagoons of light on the horizon, and have watched the clouds sailing in like the navies of invaders. Some of the iron of that grand Eevolutionary soul must have gotten into my blood, and, rusting there, produced a sort of chronic patriotic irritability. That day I became a citizen, rather than fifteen years later when I passed my majority and cast my first vote.