The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 61, November, 1862

Chesuncook, according to its quality of lake, had no aid to give us with current. Paddling all a hot August mid-day over slothful water would be tame, day-laborer's work. But there was a breeze. Good! Come, kind Zephyr, fill our red blanket-sail! Cancut's blanket in the bow became a substitute for Cancut's paddle in the stern. We swept along before the wind, unsteadily, over Lake Chesuncook, at sea in a bowl,—"rolled to starboard, rolled to larboard," in our keelless craft. Zephyr only followed us, mild as he was strong, and strong as he was mild. Had he been puffy, it would have been all over with us. But the breeze only sang about our way, and shook the water out of sunny calm. Katahdin to the North, a fair blue pyramid, lifted higher and stooped forward more imminent, yet still so many leagues away that his features were undefined, and the gray of his scalp undistinguishable from the green of his beard of forest. Every mile, however, as we slid drowsily over the hot lake, proved more and more that we were not befooled,—Iglesias by memory, and I by anticipation. Katahdin lost nothing by approach, as some of the grandees do: as it grew bigger, it grew better.

Twenty miles, or so, of Chesuncook, of sun-cooked Chesuncook, we traversed by the aid of our blanket-sail, pleasantly wafted by the unboisterous breeze. Undrowned, unducked, as safe from the perils of the broad lake as we had come out of the defiles of the rapids, we landed at the carry below the dam at the lake's outlet.

The skin of many a slaughtered varmint was nailed on its shingle, and the landing-place was carpeted with the fur. Doughnuts, ex-barkeepers, and civilization at one end of the lake, and here were muskrat-skins, trappers, and the primeval. Two hunters of moose, in default of their fern-horned, blubber-lipped game, had condescended to muskrat, and were making the lower end of Chesuncook fragrant with muskiness.

It is surprising how hospitable and comrade a creature is man. The trappers of muskrats were charmingly brotherly. They guided us across the carry; they would not hear of our being porters. "Pluck the superabundant huckleberry," said they, "while we, suspending your firkin and your traps upon the setting-pole, tote them, as the spies of Joshua toted the grape-clusters of the Promised Land."

Cancut, for his share, carried the canoe. He wore it upon his head and shoulders. Tough work he found it, toiling through the underwood, and poking his way like an elongated and mobile mushroom through the thick shrubbery. Ever and anon, as Iglesias and I paused, we would be aware of the canoe thrusting itself above our heads in the covert, and a voice would come from an unseen head under its shell,—"It's soul-breaking, carrying is!"

The portage was short. We emerged from the birchen grove upon the river, below a brilliant cascading rapid. The water came flashing gloriously forward, a far other element than the tame, flat stuff we had drifted slowly over all the dullish hours. Water on the go is nobler than water on the stand; recklessness may be as fatal as stagnation, but it is more heroic.

Presently, over the edge, where the foam and spray were springing up into sunshine, our canoe suddenly appeared, and had hardly appeared, when, as if by one leap, it had passed the rapid, and was gliding in the stiller current at our feet. One of the muskrateers had relieved Cancut of his head-piece, and shot the lower rush of water. We again embarked, and, guided by the trappers in their own canoe, paddled out upon Lake Pepogenus.

LOUIS LEBEAU'S CONVERSION

Yesterday, while I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva,Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands,And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance,Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer,Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December,—While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,Breathing air that was full of Old-World sadness and beauty,Into my thought came this story of free, wild life in Ohio,When the land was new, and yet by the Beautiful RiverDwelt the pioneers and Indian hunters and boatmen.Pealed from the campanile, responding from island to island,Bells of that ancient faith whose incense and solemn devotionsRise from a hundred shrines in the broken heart of the city;But in my reverie heard I only the passionate voicesOf the people that sang in the virgin heart of the forest.Autumn was in the land, and the trees were golden and crimson,And from the luminous boughs of the over-elms and the maplesTender and beautiful fell the light in the worshippers' faces,Softer than lights that stream through the saints on the windows ofchurches,While the balsamy breath of the hemlocks and pines by the riverStole on the winds through the woodland aisles like the breath of acenser.Loud the people sang old camp-meeting anthems that quaverQuaintly yet from lips forgetful of lips that have kissed them:Loud they sang the songs of the Sacrifice and Atonement,And of the end of the world, and the infinite terrors of Judgment;Songs of ineffable sorrow, and wailing compassionate warningFor the generations that hardened their hearts to their Saviour;Songs of exultant rapture for them that confessed Him and followed,Bearing His burden and yoke, enduring and entering with HimInto the rest of His saints, and the endless reward of the blessed.Loud the people sang: but through the sound of their singingBrake inarticulate cries and moans and sobs from the mourners,As the glory of God, that smote the apostle of Tarsus,Smote them and strewed them to earth like leaves in the breath of thewhirlwind.Hushed at last was the sound of the lamentation and singing;But from the distant hill the throbbing drum of the pheasantShook with its heavy pulses the depths of the listening silence,When from his place arose a white-haired exhorter and faltered:"Brethren and sisters in Jesus! the Lord hath heard our petitions,And the hearts of His servants are awed and melted within them,—Even the hearts of the wicked are touched by His infinite mercy.All my days in this vale of tears the Lord hath been with me,He hath been good to me, He hath granted me trials and patience;But this hour hath crowned my knowledge of Him and His goodness.Truly, but that it is well this day for me to be with you,Now might I say to the Lord,—'I know Thee, my God, in all fulness;Now let Thy servant depart in peace to the rest Thou hast promised!'"Faltered and ceased. And now the wild and jubilant musicOf the singing burst from the solemn profound of the silence,Surged in triumph and fell, and ebbed again into silence.Then from the group of the preachers arose the greatest among them,—He whose days were given in youth to the praise of the Saviour,—He whose lips seemed touched like the prophet's of old from the altar,So that his words were flame, and burned to the hearts of his hearers,Quickening the dead among them, reviving the cold and the doubting.There he charged them pray, and rest not from prayer while a sinnerIn the sound of their voices denied the Friend of the sinner:"Pray till the night shall fall,—till the stars are faint in themorning,—Yea, till the sun himself be faint in that glory and brightness,In that light which shall dawn in mercy for penitent sinners."Kneeling, he led them in prayer, and the quick and sobbing responsesSpake how their souls were moved with the might and the grace of theSpirit.Then while the converts recounted how God had chastened and savedthem,—Children whose golden locks yet shone with the lingering effulgenceOf the touches of Him who blessed little children forever,—Old men whose yearning eyes were dimmed with the far-streamingbrightnessSeen through the opening gates in the heart of the heavenly city,—Stealthily through the harking woods the lengthening shadowsChased the wild things to their nests, and the twilight died intodarkness.Now the four great pyres that were placed there to light the encampment,High on platforms raised above the people, were kindled.Flaming aloof, as if from the pillar by night in the Desert,Fell their crimson light on the lifted orbs of the preachers,On the withered brows of the old men, and Israel's mothers,On the bloom of youth, and the earnest devotion of manhood,On the anguish and hope in the tearful eyes of the mourners.Flaming aloof, it stirred the sleep of the luminous maplesWith warm summer-dreams, and faint, luxurious languor.Near the four great pyres the people closed in a circle,In their midst the mourners, and, praying with them, the exhorters,And on the skirts of the circle the unrepentant and scorners,—Ever fewer and sadder, and drawn to the place of the mourners,One after one, by the prayers and tears of the brethren and sisters,And by the Spirit of God, that was mightily striving within them,Till at the last alone stood Louis Lebeau, unconverted.Louis Lebeau, the boatman, the trapper, the hunter, the fighter,From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended,Heir to Old-World want and New-World love of adventure.Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumorsWherethrough he loomed on the people, the hero of mythical hearsay,—Quick of hand and of heart, insouciant, generous, Western,—Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy.Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast,Reprobate, roving, ungodly, infidel, worse than a Papist,With his whispered fame of lawless exploits at St. Louis,Wild affrays and loves with the half-breeds out on the Osage,Brawls at New-Orleans, and all the towns on the rivers,All the godless towns of the many-ruffianed rivers.Only she that loved him the best of all, in her loving,Knew him the best of all, and other than that of the rumors.Daily she prayed for him, with conscious and tender effusion,That the Lord would convert him. But when her father forbade himUnto her thought, she denied him, and likewise held him for outcast,Turned her eyes when they met, and would not speak, though her heartbroke.Bitter and brief his logic that reasoned from wrong unto error:"This is their praying and singing," he said, "that makes you rejectme,—You that were kind to me once. But I think my fathers' religion,With a light heart in the breast, and a friendly priest to absolve one,Better than all these conversions that only bewilder and vex me,And that have made man so hard and woman fickle and cruel.Well, then, pray for my soul, since you would not have spoken to saveme,—Yes,—for I go from these saints to my brethren and sisters, thesinners."Spake and went, while her faint lips fashioned unuttered entreaties,—Went, and came again in a year at the time of the meeting,Haggard and wan of face, and wasted with passion and sorrow.Dead in his eyes was the careless smile of old, and its phantomHaunted his lips in a sneer of restless incredulous mocking.Day by day he came to the outer skirts of the circle,Dwelling on her, where she knelt by the white-haired exhorter, herfather,With his hollow looks, and never moved from his silence.Now, where he stood alone, the last of impenitent sinners,Weeping, old friends and comrades came to him out of the circle,And with their tears besought him to hear what the Lord had done forthem.Ever he shook them off, not roughly, nor smiled at their transports.Then the preachers spake and painted the terrors of Judgment,And of the bottomless pit, and the flames of hell everlasting.Still and dark he stood, and neither listened nor heeded:But when the fervent voice of the while-haired exhorter was lifted,Fell his brows in a scowl of fierce and scornful rejection."Lord, let this soul be saved!" cried the fervent voice of the old man;"For that the shepherd rejoiceth more truly for one that hath wandered,And hath been found again, than for all the others that strayed not."Out of the midst of the people, a woman old and decrepit,Tremulous through the light, and tremulous into the shadow,Wavered toward him with slow, uncertain paces of palsy,Laid her quivering hand on his arm and brokenly prayed him:"Louis Lebeau, I closed in death the eyes of your mother.On my breast she died, in prayer for her fatherless children,That they might know the Lord, and follow Him always, and serve Him.Oh, I conjure you, my son, by the name of your mother in glory,Scorn not the grace of the Lord!" As when a summer-noon's tempestBreaks in one swift gush of rain, then ceases and gathersDarker and gloomier yet on the lowering front of the heavens,So brake his mood in tears, as he soothed her, and stilled herentreaties,And so he turned again with his clouded looks to the people.Vibrated then from the hush the accents of mournfullest pity,—His who was gifted in speech, and the glow of the fires illuminedAll his pallid aspect with sudden and marvellous splendor:"Louis Lebeau," he spake, "I have known you and loved you fromchildhood;Still, when the others blamed you, I took your part, for I knew you.Louis Lebeau, my brother, I thought to meet you in heaven,Hand in hand with her who is gone to heaven before us,Brothers through her dear love! I trusted to greet you and lead youUp from the brink of the River unto the gates of the City.Lo! my years shall be few on the earth. Oh, my brother,If I should die before you had known the mercy of Jesus,Yea, I think it would sadden the hope of glory within me!"Neither yet had the will of the sinner yielded an answer;But from his lips there broke a cry of unspeakable anguish,Wild and fierce and shrill, as if some demon within himRent his soul with the ultimate pangs of fiendish possession,And with the outstretched arms of bewildered imploring toward them,Death-white unto the people he turned his face from the darkness.Out of the sedge by the creek a flight of clamorous killdeesRose from their timorous sleep with piercing and iterant challenge,Wheeled in the starlight and fled away into distance and silence.White on the other hand lay the tents, and beyond them glided the river,Where the broadhorn1 drifted slow at the will of the current,And where the boatman listened, and knew not how, as he listened,Something touched through the years the old lost hopes of hischildhood,—Only his sense was filled with low monotonous murmurs,As of a faint-heard prayer, that was chorused with deeper responses.Not with the rest was lifted her voice in the fervent responses,But in her soul she prayed to Him that heareth in secret,Asking for light and for strength to learn His will and to do it:"Oh, make me clear to know, if the hope that rises within meBe not part of a love unmeet for me here, and forbidden!So, if it be not that, make me strong for the evil entreatyOf the days that shall bring me question of self and reproaches,When the unrighteous shall mock, and my brethren and sisters shalldoubt me!Make me worthy to know Thy will, my Saviour, and do it!"In her pain she prayed, and at last, through her mute adoration,Rapt from all mortal presence, and in her rapture uplifted,Glorified she rose, and stood in the midst of the people,Looking on all with the still, unseeing eyes of devotion,Vague, and tender, and sweet, as the eyes of the dead, when we dreamthemLiving and looking on us, but they cannot speak, and we cannot:Knowing only the peril that threatened his soul's unrepentance,Knowing only the fear and error and wrong that withheld him,Thinking, "In doubt of me, his soul had perished forever!"Touched with no feeble shame, but trusting her power to save him,Through the circle she passed, and straight to the side of her lover,—Took his hand in her own, and mutely implored him an instant,Answering, giving, forgiving, confessing, beseeching him all things,—Drew him then with her, and passed once more through the circleUnto her place, and knelt with him there by the side of her father,Trembling as women tremble who greatly venture and triumph,—But in her innocent breast was the saint's sublime exultation.So was Louis converted; and though the lips of the scornerSpared not in after-years the subtle taunt and derision,(What time, meeker grown, his heart held his hand from its answer,)Not the less lofty and pure her love and her faith that had saved him,Not the less now discerned was her inspiration from heavenBy the people, that rose, and embracing, and weeping together,Poured forth their jubilant songs of victory and of thanksgiving,Till from the embers leaped the dying flame to behold them,And the hills of the river were filled with reverberant echoes,—Echoes that out of the years and the distance stole to me hither,While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,—Echoes that mingled and fainted and fell with the fluttering murmursIn the hearts of the hushing bells, as from island to islandSwooned the sound on the wide lagoons into palpitant silence.* * * * *

THE DEVELOPMENT AND OVERTHROW OF THE RUSSIAN SERF-SYSTEM

Close upon the end of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite ideas of Right were subjected to the strong mind of Ivan the Great, and compressed into a code.

Therein were embodied the best processes known to his land and time: for discovering crime, torture and trial by battle; for punishing crime, the knout and death.

But hidden in this tough mass was one law of greater import than all others. Thereby were all peasants forbidden to leave the lands they were then tilling, except during the eight days before and after Saint George's day. This provision sprang from Ivan's highest views of justice and broadest views of political economy; the nobles received it with plaudits, which have found echoes even in these days;2 the peasants received it with no murmurs which History has found any trouble in drowning.

Just one hundred years later, there sat upon the Muscovite throne, as nominal Tzar, the weakling Feodor I.; but behind the throne stood, as real Tzar, hard, strong Boris Godounoff.

Looking forward to Feodor's death, Boris makes ready to mount the throne; and he sees—what all other "Mayors of the Palace," climbing into the places of fainéant kings, have seen—that he must link to his fortunes the fortunes of some strong body in the nation; he breaks, however, from the general rule among usurpers,—bribing the Church,—and determines to bribe the nobility.

The greatest grief of the Muscovite nobles seemed to be that the peasants could escape from their oppression by the emigration allowed at Saint George's day.

Boris saw his opportunity: he cut off the privilege of Saint George's day; the peasant was fixed to the soil forever. No Russian law ever directly enslaved the peasantry,3] but, through this decree of Boris, the lord who owned the soil came to own the peasants upon it, just as he owned its immovable boulders and ledges.

To this the peasants submitted, but over this wrong History has not been able to drown their sighs; their proverbs and ballads make Saint George's day representative of all ill-luck and disappointment.

A few years later, Boris made another bid for oligarchic favor. He issued a rigorous fugitive-serf law, and even wrenched liberty from certain free peasants who had entered service for wages before his edicts. This completed the work, and Russia, which never had the benefits of feudalism, had now fastened upon her feudalism's worst curse,—a serf-caste bound to the glebe.

The great waves of wrong which bore serfage into Russia seem to have moved with a kind of tidal regularity, and the distance between their crests in those earlier times appears to have been just a hundred years,—for, again, at the end of the next century, surge over the nation the ideas of Peter the Great.

The great good things done by Peter the world knows by heart. The world knows well how he tore his way out of the fetichism of his time,—how, despite ignorance and unreason, he dragged his nation after him,—how he dowered the nation with things and thoughts which transformed it from a petty Asiatic horde to a great European power.

And the praise due to this work can never be diminished. Time shall but increase it; for the world has yet to learn most of the wonderful details of his activity. We were present a few years since, when one of those lesser triumphs of his genius was first unfolded.

It was in that room at the Hermitage—adjoining the Winter Palace—set apart for the relics of Peter. Our companions were two men noted as leaders in American industry,—one famed as an inventor, the other famed as a champion of inventors' rights.

Suddenly from the inventor,4 pulling over some old dust-covered machines in a corner, came loud cries of surprise. The cries were natural indeed. In that heap of rubbish he had found a lathe for turning irregular forms, and a screw-cutting engine once used by Peter himself: specimens of his unfinished work were still in them. They had lain there unheeded a hundred and fifty years; their principle had died with Peter and his workmen; and not many years since, they were reinvented in America, and gave their inventors fame and fortune. At the late Paris Universal Exposition crowds flocked about an American lathe for copying statuary; and that lathe was, in principle, identical with this old, forgotten machine of Peter's.

Yet, though Peter fought so well, and thought so well, he made some mistakes which hang to this day over his country as bitter curses. For in all his plan and work to advance the mass of men was one supreme lack,—lack of any account of the worth and right of the individual man.

Lesser examples of this are seen in his grim jest at Westminster Hall,—"What use of so many lawyers? I have but two lawyers in Russia, and one of those I mean to hang as soon as I return;"—or when, at Berlin, having been shown a new gibbet, he ordered one of his servants to be hanged in order to test it;—or, in his reviews and parade-fights, when he ordered his men to use ball, and to take the buttons off their bayonets.

Greater examples are seen in his Battle of Narva, when he threw away an army to learn his opponent's game,—in his building of St. Petersburg, where, in draining marshes, he sacrificed a hundred thousand men the first year.

But the greatest proof of this great lack was shown in his dealings with the serf-system.

Serfage was already recognized in Peter's time as an evil. Peter himself once stormed forth in protestations and invectives against what he stigmatized as "selling men like beasts,—separating parents from children, husbands from wives,—which takes place nowhere else in the world, and which causes many tears to flow." He declared that a law should be made against it. Yet it was by his misguided hand that serfage was compacted into its final black mass of foulness.

For Peter saw other nations spinning and weaving, and he determined that Russia should at once spin and weave; he saw other nations forging iron, and he determined that Russia should at once forge iron. He never stopped to consider that what might cost little in other lands, as a natural growth, might cost far too much in Russia, as a forced growth.

In lack, then, of quick brain and sturdy spine and strong arm of paid workmen, he forced into his manufactories the flaccid muscle of serfs. These, thus lifted from the earth, lost even the little force in the State they before had; great bodies of serfs thus became slaves; worse than that, the idea of a serf developed toward the idea of a slave.5

And Peter, misguided, dealt one blow more. Cold-blooded officials were set at taking the census. These adopted easy classifications; free peasants, serfs, and slaves were often huddled into the lists under a single denomination. So serfage became still more difficult to be distinguished from slavery.6

As this base of hideous wrong was thus widened and deepened, the nobles built higher and stronger their superstructure of arrogance and pretension. Not many years after Peter's death, they so over-awed the Empress Anne that she thrust into the codes of the Empire statutes which allowed the nobles to sell serfs apart from the soil. So did serfage bloom fully into slavery.

But in the latter half of the eighteenth century Russia gained a ruler from whom the world came to expect much.

To mount the throne, Catharine II. had murdered her husband; to keep the throne, she had murdered two claimants whose title was better than her own. She then became, with her agents in these horrors, a second Messalina.

To set herself right in the eyes of Europe, she paid eager court to that hierarchy of skepticism which in that age made or marred European reputations. She flattered the fierce Deists by owning fealty to "Le Roi Voltaire;" she flattered the mild Deists by calling in La Harpe as the tutor of her grandson; she flattered the Atheists by calling in Diderot as a tutor for herself.