 | CHAPTER XXXVI.
AFTER THE REVIVAL. Oldtown folks |  |
36. CHAPTER XXXVI.
AFTER THE REVIVAL.
BUT the revival could not always last. The briefness of these
periods, and the inevitable gravitation of everybody back
to the things of earth, has sometimes been mentioned with a
sneer.
“Where 's your revival now?”
The deacon whose face was so radiant as he talked of the love
of Christ now sits with the same face drawn into knots and
puckers over his account-book; and he thinks the money for the
mortgage is due, and the avails for the little country store are
small; and somehow a great family of boys and girls eat up and
wear out; and the love of Christ seems a great way off, and the
trouble about the mortgage very close at hand; and so the deacon
is cross, and the world has its ready sneer for the poor man.
“He can talk about the love of Christ, but he 's a terrible screw
at a bargain,” they say. Ah, brother, have mercy! the world
screws us, and then we are tempted to screw the world. The
soil is hard, the climate cold, labor incessant, little to come of
it, and can you sneer that a poor soul has, for a brief season,
forgotten all this and risen out of his body and above his cares,
and been for a little while a glorified deacon instead of a poor,
haggling, country store-keeper?
Plato says that we all once had wings, and that they still tend to
grow out in us, and that our burnings and aspirations for higher
things are like the teething pangs of children. We are trying
to cut our wings. Let us not despise these teething seasons.
Though the wings do not become apparent, they may be starting
under many a rough coat, and on many a clumsy pair of shoulders.
But in our little town of Cloudland, after the heavenly breeze
had blown over, there were to be found here and there immortal
many a dwelling.
Poor old drunken Culver, who lived under the hill, and was
said to beat his wife, had become a changed man, and used
to come out to weekly prayer-meetings. Some tough old family
quarrels, such as follow the settlement of wills in a poor country,
had at last been brought to an end, and brother had shaken hands
with brother: the long root of bitterness had been pulled up and
burned on the altar of love. It is true that nobody had become
an angel. Poor sharp-tongued Miss Krissy Pike still went on
reporting the wasteful excesses she had seen in the minister's
swill-barrel. And some that were crabbed and cross-grained
before were so still, and some, perhaps, were a little more snarly
than usual, on account of the late over-excitement.
A revival of religion merely makes manifest for a time what
religion there is in a community, but it does not exalt men above
their nature or above their times. It is neither revelation nor
inspiration; it is impulse. It gives no new faculties, and it goes
at last into that general average of influences which go to make
up the progress of a generation.
One terrestrial result of the revival in our academy was that
about half a dozen of the boys fell desperately in love with Tina.
I have always fancied Tina to be one of that species of womankind
that used to be sought out for priestesses to the Delphic
oracle. She had a flame-like, impulsive, ethereal temperament,
a capacity for sudden inspirations, in which she was carried out
of herself, and spoke winged words that made one wonder whence
they came. Her religious zeal had impelled her to be the adviser
of every one who came near her, and her sayings were
quoted, and some of our shaggy, rough-coated mountain boys
thought that they had never had an idea of the beauty of holiness
before. Poor boys! they were so sacredly simple about it. And
Tina came to me with wide brown eyes that sparkled like a
cairngorm-stone, and told me that she believed she had found
what her peculiar calling was: it was to influence young men in
religion! She cited, with enthusiasm, the wonderful results she
had been able to produce, the sceptical doubts she had removed,
into their souls.
The divine priestess and I had a grand quarrel one day, because
I insisted upon it that these religious ministrations on the
part of a beautiful young girl to those of the opposite sex would
assuredly end in declarations of love and hopes of marriage.
Girls like Tina are often censured as flirts, — most unjustly so,
too. Their unawakened nature gives them no power of perceiving
what must be the full extent of their influence over the opposite
sex. Tina was warmly social; she was enthusiastic and self-confident,
and had precisely that spirit which should fit a
woman to be priestess or prophetess, to inspire and to lead.
She had a magnetic fervor of nature, an attractive force that
warmed in her cheeks and sparkled in her eyes, and seemed to
make summer around her. She excited the higher faculties,
— poetry, ideality, blissful dreams seemed to be her atmosphere,
— and she had a power of quick sympathy, of genuine,
spontaneous outburst, that gave to her looks and words almost
the value of a caress, so that she was an unconscious deceiver,
and seemed always to say more for the individual than
she really meant. All men are lovers of sunshine and spring
gales, but they are no one's in particular; and he who seeks
to hold them to one heart finds his mistake. Like all others
who have a given faculty, Tina loved its exercise, — she loved
to influence, loved to feel her power, alike, over man and woman.
But who does not know that the power of the sibyl is doubled
by the opposition of sex? That which is only acquiescence in a
woman friend becomes devotion in a man. That which is admiration
from a woman becomes adoration in a man. And of all
kinds of power which can be possessed by man or woman, there is
none which I think so absolutely intoxicating as this of personal
fascination. You may as well blame a bird for wanting to
soar and sing as blame such women for the instinctive pleasure
they feel in their peculiar kind of empire. Yet, in simple good
faith, Tina did not want her friends of the other sex to become
lovers. She was willing enough that they should devote themselves,
under all sorts of illusive names of brother and friend and
was an instant revulsion, as when some person has unguardedly
touched a strong electric circle. The first breath of passion repelled
her; the friend that had been so agreeable the hour before
was unendurable. Over and over again have I seen her go the
same illusive round, always sure that in this instance it was
understood that it was to be friendship, and only friendship,
or brotherly or Christian love, till the hour came for the electric
revulsion, and the friend was lost.
Tina had not learned the modern way of girls, who count their
lovers and offers as an Indian does his scalps, and parade the number
of their victims before their acquaintances. Every incident
of this kind struck her as a catastrophe; and, as Esther, Harry,
and I were always warning her, she would come to us like a
guilty child, and seek to extenuate her offence. I think the girl
was sincere in the wish she often uttered, that she could be a boy,
and be loved as a comrade and friend only. “Why must, why
would, they always persist in falling into this tiresome result?”
“O Horace!” she would say to me, “if I were only Tom Percival,
I should be perfectly happy! but it is so stupid to be a girl!”
In my own secret soul I had no kind of wish that she should be
Tom Percival, but I did not tell her so. No, I was too wise for that.
I knew that my only chance of keeping my position as father-confessor
to this elastic young penitent consisted in a judicious
suppression of all peculiar claims or hopes on my part, and I was
often praised and encouraged for this exemplary conduct, and
the question pathetically put to me, “Why could n't the others do
as I did?” O Tina, Tina! did your brown eyes see, and your
quick senses divine, that there was something in me which you
dreaded to awaken, and feared to meet?
There are some men who have a faculty of making themselves
the confidants of women. Perhaps because they have a certain
amount of the feminine element in their own composition. They
seem to be able to sympathize with them on their feminine side,
and are capable of running far in a friendship without running
fatally into love.
I think I had this power, and on it I founded my hopes in this
little circle for advising and guiding my friends of the other sex
as Tina did, and I took care to have on hand such a list of intimates
as would prevent my name from being coupled with hers
in the school gossip.
In these modern times, when man's fair sister is asking admission
at the doors of classic halls, where man has hitherto reigned
in monastic solitude, the query is often raised by our modern
sociologists, Can man and woman, with propriety, pursue their
studies together? Does the great mystery of sex, with its wide
laws of attraction, and its strange, blinding, dazzling influences,
furnish a sufficient reason why the two halves of creation, made
for each other, should be kept during the whole course of education
rigorously apart? This question, like a great many others,
was solved without discussion by the good sense of our Puritan
ancestors, in throwing the country academies, where young men
were fitted for college, open alike to both sexes, and in making
the work of education of such dignity in the eyes of the community,
that first-rate men were willing to adopt it for life. The
consequences were, that, in some lonely mountain town, under
some brilliant schoolmaster, young men and women actually were
studying together the branches usually pursued in college.
“But,” says the modern objector, “bring young men and
young women together in these relations, and there will be flirtations
and love affairs.”
Even so, my friend, there will be. But flirtations and love
affairs among a nice set of girls and boys, in a pure and simple
state of community, where love is never thought of, except as
leading to lawful marriage, are certainly not the worst things
that can be thought of, — not half so bad as the grossness and
coarseness and roughness and rudeness of those wholly male
schools in which boys fight their way on alone, with no humanizing
influences from the other sex.
There was, to be sure, a great crop of love affairs, always green
and vigorous, in our academy, and vows of eternal constancy interchanged
between boys and girls who afterwards forgot and outgrew
them, without breaking their hearts on either side; but,
much better than the fisting and cuffing and fagging of English
schools, or than many another thing to which poor, blindly fermenting
boyhood runs when separated from home, mother, and
sister, and confined to an atmosphere and surroundings sharply
and purely male. It is certain that the companionship of the
girl improves the boy, but more doubt has been expressed
whether the delicacy of womanhood is not impaired by an early
experience of the flatteries and gallantries of the other sex.
But, after all, it is no worse for a girl to coquette and flirt in
her Latin and mathematical class than to do it in the German or
the polka. The studies and drill of the school have a certain
repressive influence, wholly wanting in the ball-room and under
the gas-light of fashionable parties. In a good school, the standard
of attraction is, to some extent, intellectual. The girl is valued
for something besides her person; her disposition and character
are thoroughly tested, the powers of her mind go for something,
and, what is more, she is known in her every-day clothes. On the
whole, I do not think a better way can be found to bring the two
sexes together, without that false glamour which obscures their
knowledge of each other, than to put them side by side in the
daily drill of a good literary institution.
Certainly, of all the days that I look back upon, this
academy life in Cloudland was the most perfectly happy. It
was happier than college life, because of the constant intertwining
and companionship with woman, which gave a domestic and
family charm to it. It was happy because we were in the first
flush of belief in ourselves, and in life.
O that first belief! those incredible first visions! when all
things look possible, and one believes in the pot of gold at the end
of the rainbow, and sees enchanted palaces in the sunset clouds!
What faith we had in one another, and how wonderful we were
in one another's eyes! Our little clique of four was a sort of holy
of holies in our view. We believed that we had secrets of happiness
and progress known only to ourselves. We had full faith
in one another's destiny; we were all remarkable people, and
destined to do great things.
At the close of the revival, we four, with many others, joined
Mr. Avery's church, — a step which in New England, at this time,
meant a conviction of some spiritual experience gained, of some
familiar communion with the Great Invisible. Had I found it
then? Had I laid hold of that invisible hand, and felt its warmth
and reality? Had I heard the beatings of a warm heart under
the cold exterior of the regular laws of nature, and found a living
God? I thought so. That hand and heart were the hand
and heart of Jesus, — the brother, the friend, and the interpreting
God for poor, blind, and helpless man.
As we stood together before the pulpit, with about fifty others,
on that Sunday most joyful to Mr. Avery's heart, we made our religious
profession with ardent sincerity. The dear man found in
that day the reward of all his sorrows, and the fruit of all his
labors. He rejoiced in us as first fruits of the millennium, which,
having already dawned in his good honest heart, he thought could
not be far off from the earth.
Ah! those days of young religion were vaguely and ignorantly
beautiful, like all the rest of our outlook on life. We were
sincere, and meant to be very good and true and pure, and we
knew so little of the world we were living in! The village of
Cloudland, without a pauper, with scarcely an ignorant person in
it, with no temptation, no dissipation, no vice, — what could we
know there of the appalling questions of real life? We were hid
there together, as in the hollow of God's hand; and a very sweet
and lovely hiding-place it was.
Harry had already chosen his profession; he was to be a clergyman,
and study with Mr. Avery when his college course was
finished. In those days the young aspirants for the pulpit were
not gathered into seminaries, but distributed through the country,
studying, writing, and learning the pastoral work by sharing
the labors of older pastors. Life looked, therefore, very bright
to Harry, for life was, at that age, to live with Esther. Worldly
care there was none. Mr. Avery was rich on two hundred and
fifty dollars, and there were other places in the mountains where
birds sung and flowers grew, where Esther could manage another
parsonage, as now her father's. She lived in the world of taste
the cheap delights of nature, and there was no onerous burden of
care in looking forward to marriage, such as now besets a young
man when he meditates taking to himself some costly piece of
modern luxury, — some exotic bird, who must be fed on incense
and odors, and for whom any number of gilded cages and costly
surroundings may be necessary. Marriage, in the days of which
I speak, was a very simple and natural affair, and Harry and
Esther enjoyed the full pleasure of talking over and arranging
what their future home should be; and Tina, quite as interested
as they, drew wonderful pictures of it, and tinted them with
every hue of the rainbow.
Mr. Avery talked with me many times to induce me to choose
the same profession. He was an enthusiast for it; it was to him
a calling that eclipsed all others, and he could wish the man he
loved no greater blessedness than to make him a minister.
But I felt within myself a shrinking doubt of my own ability
to be the moral guide of others, and my life-long habit of half-sceptical
contemplation made it so impossible to believe the New
England theology with the perfect, undoubting faith that Mr.
Avery had, that I dared not undertake. I did not disbelieve.
I would not for the world controvert; but I could not believe with
his undoubting enthusiasm. His sword and spear, so effective in
his hands, would tremble in mine. I knew that Harry would do
something. He had a natural call, a divine impulse, that led him
from childhood to sacred ministries; and though he did not more
than I accept the system of new-school theology as complete
truth, yet I could see that it would furnish to his own devotional
nature a stock from which vigorous grafts would shoot forth.
Shall I say, also, that my future was swayed unconsciously by
a sort of instinctive perception of what yet might be desired by
Tina? Something a little more of this world I seemed to want
to lay at her feet. I felt, somehow, that there was in her an
aptitude for the perfume and brightness and gayeties of this lower
world. And as there must be, not only clergymen, but lawyers,
and as men will pay more for getting their own will than for
saving their souls, I dreamed of myself, in the future, as a lawyer,
the bar, and win them by honorable means. I would do it; and
Tina should be mistress of a fine, antique house in Boston, like
the Kitterys', with fair, large gardens and pleasant prospects, and
she should glitter and burn and twinkle like a gem, in the very
front ranks of society. Yes, I was ambitious, but it was for her.
One thing troubled me: every once in a while, in the letters
from Miss Mehitable, came one from Ellery Davenport, written
in a free, gay, dashing, cavalier style, and addressing Tina with a
kind of patronizing freedom that made me ineffably angry. I
wanted to shoot him. Such are the risings of the ancient Adam
in us, even after we have joined the Church. Tina always
laughed at me because I scolded and frowned at these letters, and,
I thought, seemed to take rather a perverse pleasure in them. I
have often speculated on that trait wherein lovely woman slightly
resembles a cat; she cannot, for the life of her, resist the temptation
to play with her mouse a little, and rouse it with gentle pats
of her velvet paw, just to see what it will do.
I was, of course, understood to be under solemn bond and promise
to love Tina only as a brother; but was it not a brother's duty
to watch over his sister? With what satisfaction did I remember
all Miss Debby Kittery's philippics against Ellery Davenport!
Did I not believe every word of them heartily? I hated
the French language with all my soul, and Ellery Davenport's
proficiency in it; and Tina could not make me more angry than
by speaking with admiration of his graceful fluency in French, and
expressing rather wilful determinations that, when she got away
from Mr. Rossiter's dictation, she would study it. Mr. Davenport
had said that, when he came back to America, he would give her
French lessons. He was always kind and polite, and she did n't
doubt that he 'd give me lessons, too, if I 'd take them. “French
is the language of modern civilization,” said Tina, with the decision
of a professor. But she made me promise that I would n't
say a word to her about it before Mr. Rossiter.
“Now, Horace dear, you know,” she said, “that French to him
is just like a red rag to a bull; he 'd begin to roar and lash his sides
the minute you said the words, and Mr. Rossiter and I are capital
He takes such an interest in the development of my mind. He
writes me a letter or note almost every week about it, and I take
his advice, you know, and I would n't want to hurt his feelings
about French, or anything else. What do you suppose he hates the
French so for? I should think he was a genuine Englishman,
that had been kept awake nights during all the French wars.”
“Well, Tina,” I said, “you know there is a great deal of corrupt
and dangerous literature in the French language.”
“What nonsense, Horace! just as if there was n't in the English
language, too, and I none the worse for it. And I 'm sure
there are no ends of bad things in the classical dictionary, and in
the mythology. He 'd better talk about the French language!
No, you may depend upon it, Horace, I shall learn French as
soon as I leave school.”
It will be inferred from this that my young lady had a considerable
share of that quality which Milton represents to have been
the ruin of our first mother; namely, a determination to go her
own way and see for herself, and have little confidential interviews
with the serpent, notwithstanding all that could be urged
to the contrary by sober old Adam.
“Of course, Adam,” said Eve, “I can take care of myself,
and don't want you always lumbering after me with your advice.
You think the serpent will injure me, do you? That just shows
how little you know about me. The serpent, Adam, is a very
agreeable fellow, and helps one to pass away one's time; but he
don't take me in. O no! there 's no danger of his ever getting
around me! So, my dear Adam, go your own way in the garden,
and let me manage for myself.”
Whether in the celestial regions there will be saints and
angels who develop this particular form of self-will, I know not;
but in this world of what Mr. Avery called “imperfect sanctification,”
religion does n't prevent the fair angels of the other
sex from developing this quality in pretty energetic forms.
In fact, I found that, if I was going to guide my Ariadne at
all, I must let out my line fast, and let her feel free and unwatched.
| CHAPTER XXXVI.
AFTER THE REVIVAL. Oldtown folks | |