American Thumb-prints

This one instance will possibly give a shadow of impression of the power base politics—reversions to conditions our race is evolving from—have had in Hesperus University life. The power was obtained in the beginning chiefly because of the University’s sources of financial support—appropriations by biennial Legislatures in which every item, the salary of each individual professor, was scanned, and talked over, and cut down to the lowest bread-and-water figure, first by the committee in charge of the budget and afterwards by the Legislature in full session. One instance alone illustrates. In the early spring of 1897, when the University estimate was before the Legislature for discussion and the dominating Populists were endeavoring to reduce its figure, a legislator sturdily insisted: “They’re too stingy down there at the University. They’re getting good salaries, and could spare a sum to some one who would undertake to put the appropriations through.” One thousand dollars was said to be “about the size of the job.” A cut of twenty per cent., generally speaking, upon already meagre salaries resulted to a faculty too blear-eyed politically and unbusiness-like to see its financial advantage. After two or three years the stipends were restored to their former humility, the Legislature possibly having become ashamed.

And in the make-up of the senatus academicus, or board of regents, thereby hangs, or there used to hang, much of doubt and many a political trick and quibble. It was a variation of the dream of the Texas delegate to the nominating convention—“The offices! That’s what we’re here for.” For if a Democratic governor were elected, he appointed from his party men to whom he was beholden in small favors. The members of the board were Democrats, that is, and were expected to guard the interests of their party. Or if the voters of Hesperus chose a Republican executive, he in turn had his abettors whom he wanted to dignify with an academic course for which there were no entrance examinations beyond faithfulness to party lines and party whips. It thus happened that the fitness of the man has not always been a prime consideration in his appointment. More often because he was somebody’s henchman, or somebody’s friend, the executive delighted to honor him.

These political features in the board of regents materially affected the faculty. For instance, if there were among the professors one who illustrated his lectures or class-room work by examples of the justice and reasonableness of free trade, he acted advisedly for his tenure if he lapsed into silence when the Republicans were in power. But if, on the other hand, he advocated protection instead of free trade, while the Democrats held State offices—which happened only by unusual fate—it was prudent for the professor to hold his tongue.

Upon every question of the day, and even in presenting conditions of life in ancient days, as, for instance, in Greece, the faculty were restrained, or at least threats were rendered. The petty politics of an agricultural democracy acted upon academic life in precisely the same way that autocracy and clericalism in Germany have affected its university faculties. In Hesperus professors have been dismissed without any excuse, apparent reason, or apology, because of a change of administration at the State capital and a hungry party’s coming into power. In various callings, or lines of life, the individual may be, nay, often is, wantonly sacrificed, but surely one of the saddest results of political shystering is the cheapening of the professor’s chair, and rendering that insecure for the permanence of which active life and its plums have been yielded.

Hinging immediately upon the political machine are the rights of and recognition of women in university government and pedagogic work. The fact that two or three women were the strenuous initiators of the institution has been forgotten, and no longer is there faith that

“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together.”

With all its coeducation, Hesperus has not yet evolved—as have New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Wisconsin—to women regents or trustees. The people have not yet awakened to the justice of demanding that, in a State institution open to young women as well as to young men, women as well as men shall be in its government and direction.

And within the brown walls of the institution a woman may not carry her learning to the supreme pedagogic end. “People ridicule learned women,” said clear-eyed Goethe, speaking for his world, the confines of which at times extend to and overlap our own, “and dislike even women who are well informed, probably because it is considered impolite to put so many ignorant men to shame.” Such a man—an ignorant man, one of the party appointees just now spoken of—when a woman was dismissed from the Greek chair some years ago, declared, “The place of women is naturally subordinate; we shall have no more women professors.” It was a pitiful aping of dead and gone academic prejudices. To this day, however, but one act—that rather an enforced one—has gainsaid his dictum. A woman has been appointed to the chair of French. It remains to be seen whether her salary is the same as that of the men doing work of equal grade and weight with her own.

“We cross the prairie as of oldThe pilgrims crossed the sea,To make the West, as they the East,The homestead of the free”—

sang the men and women of the fifties as their train pulled out of Eastern stations and their steamboats paddled up the waters of the Big Muddy. But how often it happens that what one generation will die for, the next will hold of little value, or even in derision!

Not wholly independent of politics, not without the uses and abuses of politics, is a great corporation which one of necessity mentions because it has played no small part in Hesperus University life. In those portions of our country where the units of the Methodist church are segregate few know the gigantic secular power it possesses in the South and in the West. The perfection of its organization is like that of the Roman Catholic Church where it is longest at home, or like the unity of the Latter Day Saints in their centre, Utah. The Methodists in Hesperus far outnumber in membership and money any other denomination. They are tenacious of their power, as religious denominations have ever been, and aggressive in upbuilding schools of their own voice and foundation. The question, “What shall we do to keep on the good side of the Methodists?” was, therefore, not infrequently asked in Hesperus University politics. The answer was practical: “Make us Methodists. Bring Methodism to us to stop the antagonism of a powerful body.” Such a solving of the problem—for these reasons—was not high-minded; it was not moral courage. But it was thought politic—and it was done.

Some of the best elements of our day have been profoundly at work among the Methodists. Many of the denomination have been in the vanguard of the march to better things. But it is fair to the course of Hesperus University, which has sometimes halted, to say that sagacious vigor and a knowledge of the best—τὰ Βέλτιστα—were not in every case the claim to distinction of its Methodist head. “Aus Nichts,” says Fichte, “wird nimmer Etwas.” But mediocrity—or worse—did not always prevail. Under absolutely pure and true conditions a man would be chosen for his fitness to fill the office of Chancellor, no matter what his religious bias, unless, indeed, that bias marred his scholarship and access to men, and thus really became an element in his unfitness.

In a perspective of the University of Hesperus it is necessary to consider these various controlling forces as well as the spiritual light of its students. And yet to those who have faith in its growth in righteousness there is an ever-present fear. The greatness of the institution will be in inverse proportion to the reign of politics, materialism, and denominationalism in its councils, and the fear is that the people may not think straight and see clear in regard to this great fact. Upon spiritual lines alone can its spirit grow, and if an institution of the spirit is not great in the spirit, it is great in nothing.

Its vigor and vitality are of truth in its young men and women. One boy or one girl may differ from another in glory, but each comes trailing clouds of light, and of their loyalty and stout-heartedness and courage for taking life in hand too many pæans cannot be chanted, or too many triumphant ἰώ raised. They have been the reason for the existence of the institution now more than a generation. Their spiritual content is its strength, and is to be more clearly its strength when guidance of its affairs shall have come to their hands.

Their spiritual content, we say—it should reflect that life of theirs when heaven seems dropping from above to their earth underfoot—in addition to the labors and loves of men and women, a procession of joys from the February morning the cardinal first whistles “what cheer.”

While dog-tooth violets swing their bells in winds of early March bluebirds are singing. The red-bud blossoms, and robins carol from its branches. Then the mandrake, long honored in enchantment, opens its sour-sweet petals of wax. Crimson-capped woodpeckers test tree-trunks and chisel their round house with skilful carpentry. The meadow-lark whistles in mating joy. Purple violets carpet the open woods. Trees chlorophyl their leaves in the warm sun. The wild crab bursts in sea-shell pink, and sober orchards shake out ambrosial perfume. Soft, slumberous airs puff clouds across the sky, and daylight lingers long upon the western horizon. Summer is come in.

The cuckoo cries. The hermit thrush pipes from his dusky covert. Doves, whose aching cadences melt the human heart, house under leaves of grapevine and hatch twin eggs. Vast fields of clover bloom in red and white, and butterflies and bees intoxicate with honey swarm and flit in all-day ravaging. Vapors of earth rise in soft whirls and stand to sweeten reddening wheat and lancet leaves of growing corn.

Arcadia could hold nothing fairer, and the god Pan himself, less satyr and more soul than of old, may be waiting to meet you where some fallen cottonwood bridges a ravine and the red squirrel hunts his buried shagbarks.

There “life is sweet, brother. There’s day and night, brother, both sweet things; sun and moon and stars, brother, all sweet things. There’s likewise a wind on the heath.”

They have most brilliant suns. They breathe sparkling, lambent ether. They look daily upon elm and osage orange, oaks and locusts in summer so weighted with leaves that no light plays within the recess of branches. All the night winds sough through these dusky trees, while slender voices, countless as the little peoples of the earth, murmur in antiphonal chorus.

And above are the patient stars and Milky Way dropping vast fleeces of light upon our earth awhirl in the dear God’s Arms.

The West is large. That which would be true of a university in one part of its broad expanse might not be true of another institution of like foundation some distance away. And what might be said of a college or university independent of politics, would in nowise be averable of one pretty well controlled by that perplexing monitor.

Again, a fact which might be asserted of a college built up by some religious denomination might be radically false if claimed for one supported by the taxpayers of a great commonwealth, and hedged by sentiment and statute from the predominance of any ecclesiasticism.

You speak of the general characteristics of the University of Michigan, but these characteristics are not true of the little college down in Missouri, or Kentucky, or Ohio. Neither would the facts of life in some institutions in Chicago be at one with those of a thriving school where conditions are markedly kleinstädtisch.

In speaking of the West we must realize its vast territory and the varying characteristics of its people. Of what is here set down I am positive of its entire truth only so far as one institution is concerned, namely, the titulary—that is, the University of Hesperus—which recalleth the city bespoken in the Gospel according to Matthew—that it is set upon a hill and cannot be hid.

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

There was never in any age more money stirring, nor never more stir to get money.

The Great Frost of January, 1608”

Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings: a round of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.

Mary WollstonecraftYou have too much respect upon the world:They lose it that do buy it with much care.Shakespeare

TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS

The Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping in warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed the flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma sine pulvere has been the song of its waters—no green will grow here without my mould.

It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas. Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a knowing, sentient thing—a thinking, feeling thing—it has been expanding and contracting, doubling up and straightening out its tawny body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its uncounted mouths farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles.

In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams jetted limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the light of day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far away—as far as you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a gray, and you stand wondering where the bar of heaven begins and where the restless waters below.

Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or Babylon, were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands, and that they brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a commonwealth. The two raised hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fields and knotted them with fruit trees, and blanketed them with growing wheat, and embossed them in days of ripeness with haystacks such as the race of giants long since foregone might have built. In their rich cornfields they set up shocks which leaned wearily with their weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and troubled by cattle nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven saw and to-day sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and sparkling in its inverted cup through every moment of sunshine.

Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and sweeping. They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves and other ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their snows in the angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks of ravines, and whistle for warmth through the key-holes and under the shrunken doors of farm-houses.

But winds and snows disappear, and again life leaps into pasture-land. A yellow light glowing between branches foreruns the green on brown stalk and tree. The meadow-lark lifts his buoyant note in the air, and the farmer clears his field and manures his furrow with sleepy bonfires and the ashes of dead stalks. Earth springs to vital show in slender grasses and rose-red verbena, and the pale canary of the bastard indigo.

In this great folkland of the Big Muddy, which is beyond praise in the ordinary phrase of men, there live alongside many other types, a peculiar man and woman. They are—to repeat, for clearness’ sake—only two of many types there indwelling, for it is true of these parts as was said of England in 1755: “You see more people in the roads than in all Europe, and more uneasy countenances than are to be found in the world besides.”

The man is seen in all our longitudes; the woman is rarely in any other milieu. She is a product of her city and town. The women of the country have ever before them queryings of the facts of life, the great lessons and slow processes of nature, the depth and feeling of country dwelling. But this city-woman suffers from shallowness and warp through her unknowledge of nature and the unsympathy with fellow humans that protection in bourgeois comfort engenders. She is inexperienced in the instructive adventure of the rich and the instructive suffering of the poor. The basis of her life is conventional.

The dollar to her eyes is apt to measure every value. Let us not forget that in the history of the world this is no new estimate. It was the ancient Sabine poet who advised “make money—honestly if we can, if not, dishonestly—only, make money.” “This is the money-got mechanic age,” cried Ben Jonson in Elizabeth’s day. And the poet of the “Elegy written in a Country Church-Yard” more than one hundred and fifty years ago wrote to his friend Wharton: “It is a foolish Thing that one can’t only not live as one pleases, but where and with whom one pleases, without Money.... Money is Liberty, and I fear money is Friendship too and Society, and almost every external Blessing.”

Lacking simplicity this woman is submerged in artificiality and false conceptions of life values. Her hair, often blondined and curled in fluffy ringlets, is filleted with gold-mounted combs above a countenance fine-featured and a trifle hardened. Her well-formed hands, even in daily comings and goings, are flashing with rings. She loves to turn the precious stones and watch them divide the light. These jewels are her first expression of accumulating wealth—these and the pelts of animals difficult to capture, and therefore costly. After obtaining these insignia of opulence she begins to long for a third—the gentle, inept riot and solitary Phorcides’s eye for seeing life which she calls “society.”

The voice is an unconscious index of one’s spiritual tone; hers is metallic. At times it is deep, with a masculine note and force. The gift of flexible English speech, belonging to her by the right of inheritance of every American—she is at times of the old American stock, but more often of foreign-born parents,—she is apt to wrap in stereotyped phrases or newspaper slang. In her bustling life, formed, stamped, and endowed in spirit by an iron-grooved, commercial world, she gives little consideration to use of the greatest of all instruments and the mightiest of all arts. She has not the instinct of attention to her mother tongue which marks women of fine breeding.

The best thing made by man—good books—she has little love for. The newspaper and to-day’s flimsy novel of adventure stand in their stead. There were times when her reading had the illuminating calm of Milton’s “Penseroso” and the buoyant freshness of Shakespeare’s comedies. But that was when the rosy morning of her life stood on the mountain-top of school-girl idealism and looked not at things near by, but afar—a period not long when compared to the jaded vacuity of later years.

To this shapely woman a writer is presented as “the highest paid lady-writer in the world.” The highest paid! Where, then, is literature, O Milton, with thy ten pounds for “Paradise Lost,” and eight more from Printer Simmons to thy widow! Where, O immortal writer of the simplicities of Wakefield, apprenticed in thy poverty to Publisher Newberry! Where, then, singer and gauger Robert Burns! “Learning,” says Thomas Fuller, in his “Holy States,” “learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.”

This woman is fair and seemly. When you look upon her you think how full of strength and well-knit is her body. You foresee her the mother of strong and supple children. She is graceful as she moves—a result of her freedom and a sign of her strength—and she is mistress of the occasion always. In this domination (the right of the domina) she has, even when unmarried and as early as in her teens, the poise and solidity of the matron. She scorns your supposition that she is not informed in every worldly line, and that the wavering hesitancy of the one who does not know could be hers. She rarely blushes, and is therefore a negative witness to Swift’s hard-cut apophthegm—

“A virtue but at second-hand;They blush because they understand.”

Although conventional, she is often uninstructed in petty distinctions and laws which of late more and more growingly have manacled the hands, fettered the feet, and dwarfed the folk of our democracy; and which threaten that plasticity which, it is claimed, is the great characteristic of life. “It is quite possible,” says Clifford in his “Conditions of Mental Development,” “for conventional rules of action and conventional habits of thought to get such power that progress is impossible.... In the face of such danger it is not right to be proper.”

Secretly our St. Louis neighbor, like most women, subjects herself to

“the chill dread sneerConventional, the abject fearOf form-transgressing freedom.”

Openly she often passes it by and remarks, rocking her chair a trifle uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply—to the superiority of their women.”

Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex. Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband she analyzes to their friends—herein is a fertile source of divorce. Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the peccant humors of her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of women—to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant, witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that marriages are many.

A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce, which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.

“Has she applied, do you know?”

“Oh! they’ve separated.”

“On what grounds is she going to get it?”

“If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.”

These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public places.

Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility. In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience, tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.

She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her power—that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In her midst Fra Angelico would find few sitters. Her religion, commonly that which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning spirit to frozen formalism, is the crystallized precept of theologue and priest, the fundamental ecstasy and informing soul having long since departed. If she had a real religion she could not be what she is.

Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanence and serious thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like that of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as surpassingly shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer their little task with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the supine inertness and inanity of their cabin.