Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 - Various
"No offence, I hope, Ma'am; none meant, certainly. Wish you
good-afternoon, Ma'am. Call and see you again some day, and hope to
find you better."
_Would_ he find her better? While the mystery remained, while the
ruin of her hopes impended, what could restore to her the
cheerfulness, the courage, the self-command she had lost?
[To be continued.]
"BRINGING OUR SHEAVES WITH US."
The time for toil is past, and night has come,--
The last and saddest of the harvest-eves;
Worn out with labor long and wearisome,
Drooping and faint, the reapers hasten home,
Each laden with his sheaves.
Last of the laborers thy feet I gain,
Lord of the harvest! and my spirit grieves
That I am burdened not so much with grain
As with a heaviness of heart and brain;--
Master, behold my sheaves!
Few, light, and worthless,--yet their trifling weight
Through all my frame a weary aching leaves;
For long I struggled with my hapless fate,
And staid and toiled till it was dark and late,--
Yet these are all my sheaves.
Full well I know I have more tares than wheat,--
Brambles and flowers, dry stalks, and withered leaves
Wherefore I blush and weep, as at thy feet
I kneel down reverently, and repeat,
"Master, behold my sheaves!"
I know these blossoms, clustering heavily
With evening dew upon their folded leaves,
Can claim no value nor utility,--
Therefore shall fragrancy and beauty be
The glory of my sheaves.
So do I gather strength and hope anew;
For well I know thy patient love perceives
Not what I did, but what I strove to do,--
And though the full, ripe ears be sadly few,
Thou wilt accept my sheaves.
FARMING LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND.
New England does not produce the bread she eats, nor the raw materials
of the fabrics she wears. A multitude of her purely agricultural towns
are undergoing, more or less rapidly, a process of depopulation. Yet
these facts exist by the side of positive advances in agricultural
science and decided improvements in the means and modes of farming.
The plough is perfected, and the theory of ploughing is
understood. The advantages of thorough draining are universally
recognized, and tiles are for sale everywhere. Mowing and reaping
machines have ceased to be a novelty upon our plains and meadows. The
natural fertilizers have been analyzed, and artificial nutrients of
the soil have been contrived. The pick and pride of foreign herds
have regenerated our neat stock, and the Morgan and the Black-Hawk eat
their oats in our stalls. The sheepfold and the sty abound with choice
blood. Sterling agricultural journals are on every farmer's table, and
Saxton's hand-books upon agricultural specialties are scattered
everywhere. Public shows and fairs bring on an annual exacerbation of
the agricultural fever, which is constantly breaking out in new
places, beyond the power of the daily press to chronicle. Yet it is
too evident that the results are not at all commensurate with the
means under tribute and at command. What is the reason?
In looking at the life of the New England farmer, the first fact that
strikes us is, that it is actually a very different thing from what it
might be and ought to be. There dwells in every mind, through all
callings and all professions, the idea that the farmer's life is, or
may be, is, or should be, the truest and sweetest life that man can
live. The merchant may win all the prizes of trade, the professional
man may achieve triumphs beyond his hopes, the author may find his
name upon every lip, and his works accounted among the nation's
treasures, and all may move amid the whirl and din of the most
inspiring life, yet there will come to every one, in quiet
evening-hours, the vision of the old homestead, long since forsaken;
or the imagination will weave a picture of its own,--a picture of
rural life, so homely, yet so beautiful, that the heart will breathe a
sigh upon it, the eye will drop a tear upon it, and the voice will
say, "It were better so!"
In a city like Boston there are farms enough imagined every year to
make another New England. Could the fairest fancies of that congeries
of minds be embodied and exhibited, we should see green meadows
sparkling with morning dew,--silver-slippered rivulets skipping into
musical abysses,--quiet pasture-lands shimmering so sleepily in the
sun that the lazy flocks and herds forget to graze, and lie winking
and ruminating under the trees,--and yellow fields of grain, along the
hill-sides, billowy in the breeze, and bending before the shadows of
the clouds that sail above them. And mingling and harmonizing with
these visions, we should hear the lowing of kine, and the tinkle of
the bell that leads the flock, and the shout of the boy behind the
creeping plough, and the echoes of the axe, and the fall of the tree
in the distant forest, and the rhythmical clangor, softened into a
metallic whisper by the distance, of the mowers whetting their
scythes. With these visions and these sounds there would come to the
minds which give them birth convictions that rural life is the best
life, and resolutions that, by-and-by, in some golden hour, when the
sun of life begins to lengthen the eastward shadows, that life shall
be enjoyed, and that the soul shall pass at last from the quiet scenes
of Nature into those higher scenes which they symbolize. There is a
thought in all this that the farm is nearer heaven than the street,--a
reminiscence of the first estate, when man was lord of Eden; and this
thought, old as art and artificial life, cannot be rooted out of the
mind. It has a life of its own, independent of reason, above instinct,
among the quickest intuitions of the soul.
Now this idea, so universal, so identical in millions of minds,
springing with such spontaneity in the midst of infinitely varied
circumstances, abiding with such tenacity in every soul, can have its
basis nowhere save in a Divine intention and a human possibility. The
cultivation of the farm is the natural employment of man. It is upon
the farm that virtue should thrive the best, that the body and the
mind should be developed the most healthfully, that temptations should
be the weakest, that social intercourse should be the simplest and
sweetest, that beauty should thrill the soul with the finest raptures,
and that life should be tranquillest in its flow, longest in its
period, and happiest in its passage and its issues. This is the
general and the first ideal of the farmer's life, based upon the
nature of the farmer's calling and a universally recognized human
want. Why does the actual differ so widely from the ideal? It is not
because the farmer's labor is hard and constant, alone. There is no
fact better established than that it is through the habitual use both
of the physical and mental powers that the soul achieves, or receives,
its most healthful enjoyment, and acquires that tone which responds
most musically to the touch of the opportunities of leisure. Why,
then, we repeat, does the actual differ so widely from the ideal?
A general answer to this question is, that that is made an end of life
which should be but an incident or a means. Life is confounded with
labor, and thrift with progress; and material success is the aim to
which all other aims are made subordinate. There is no fact in
physiology better established than that hard labor, followed from day
to day and year to year, absorbing every thought and every physical
energy, has the direct tendency to depress the intellect, blunt the
sensibilities, and animalize the man. In such a life, all the
energies of the brain and nervous system are directed to the support
of nutrition and the stimulation of the muscular system. Man thus
becomes a beast of burden,--the creature of his calling; and though he
may add barn to barn and acre to acre, he does not lead a life which
rises in dignity above that of the beasts which drag his plough. He
eats, he works, he sleeps. Surely, there is no dignity in a life like
this; there is nothing attractive and beautiful and good in it. It is
a mean and contemptible life; and all its maxims, economies,
associations, and objects are repulsive to a mind which apprehends
life's true enjoyments and ends. We say that it is a pestilent
perversion. We say that it is the sale of the soul to the body; it is
turning the back upon life, upon growth, upon God, and descending into
animalism.
The true ideal of the farmer's life--of any life--contemplates
something outside of, and above, the calling which is its instrument.
The farmer's life is no better than the life of a street-sweeper, if
it rise no higher than the farmer's work. If the farmer, standing
under the broad sky, breathing the pure air, listening to the song of
birds, watching the progress of
"The great miracle that still goes on,"
to work the transformation of the brown seeds which he drops into the
soil into fields of green and gold, and gazing upon landscapes
shifting with the seasons and flushed with new tints through every
sunlit and moonlit hour, does not apprehend that his farm has higher
uses for him than those of feeding his person and his purse, he might
as well dwell in a coal-mine.
Our soil is sterile, our modes of farming have been rude until within
a few years; and under the circumstances,--with the Yankee notion that
the getting of money is the chief end of man,--exclusive devotion to
labor has been deemed indispensable to success. The maxims of Franklin
have been literally received and adopted as divine truth. We have
believed that to labor is to be thrifty, that to be thrifty is to be
respectable, that to be respectable is to afford facilities for being
still more thrifty; and our experience is, that with increased thrift
comes increased labor. This is the circle of our ambitions and
rewards. All begins and ends in labor. The natural and inevitable
result of this is both physical and mental deterioration.
It is doubtful whether the world furnishes a finer type of man,
physically and intellectually, than the Irish gentleman. He is
handsome, large, courageous,--a man of fine instincts, brilliant
imagination, courtly manners, and full, vital force. By the side of
the Irish gentleman, there has grown for centuries the Irish
peasant. He is ugly, of stunted stature, and pugnacious; and he
produces children like himself. The two classes started from a common
blood; they now present the broadest contrast. We do not say that
freedom from severe labor on one side, and confinement to it on the
other, are entirely responsible for this contrast; difference of food
and other obvious causes have had something to do with it; but we say
that hard labor has, directly and indirectly, degraded from a true
style of manhood the great mass of the Irish peasantry. They are a
marked class, and carry in their forms and faces the infallible
insignia of mental and physical degeneration.
We would by no means compare New England farmers with the Irish
peasantry. We only present the contrast between these two classes of
the Irish population as the result of unremitting toil on one side,
and a more rational kind of life on the other. If we enter a New
England church, containing a strictly rural assembly, and then visit
another containing a class whose labor is lighter, and whose style of
life is based upon different ideas, we shall see a contrast less
marked, perhaps, but presenting similar features. The farming
population of New England is not a handsome population, generally.
The forms of both men and women are angular; their features are not
particularly intellectual; their movements are not graceful; and their
calling is evident by indubitable signs. The fact that the city
assemblage is composed of a finer and higher grade of men, women, and
children is of particular moment to our argument, because it is
composed of people who are only one, two, or three removes from a
rural origin. The city comes from the country; the street is
replenished by the farm; but the city children, going back to the
farm, show that a new element has been introduced into their
blood. The angles are rounded; the face is brighter; the movements are
more graceful; there is in every way a finer development.
There is probably no better exponent of the farmer's life than the
farmer's home. We propose to present the portrait of such a home, and,
while we offer it as a just outline of the farmer's home generally, in
districts removed from large social centres, we gladly acknowledge the
existence of a great multitude of happy exceptions. But the sketch:--A
square, brown house; a chimney coming out of the middle of a roof; not
a tree nearer than the orchard, and not a flower at the door. At one
end projects a kitchen; from the kitchen projects a wood-shed and
wagon-cover, occupied at night by hens; beyond the wood-shed, a
hog-pen, fragrant and musical. Proceeding no farther in this
direction, we look directly across the road, to where the barn stands,
like the hull of a great black ship-of-the-line, with its port-holes
opened threateningly upon the fort opposite, out of one of which a
horse has thrust his head for the possible purpose of examining the
strength of the works. An old ox-sled is turned up against the wall
close by, where it will have the privilege of rotting. This whole
establishment was contrived with a single eye to utility. The barn
was built in such a manner that its deposits might be convenient to
the road which divides the farm, while the sty was made an attachment
of the house for convenience in feeding its occupants.
We enter the house at the back door, and find the family at dinner in
the kitchen. A kettle of soap-grease is stewing upon the stove, and
the fumes of this, mingled with those that were generated by boiling
the cabbage which we see upon the table, and by perspiring men in
shirt-sleeves, and by boots that have forgotten or do not care where
they have been, make the air anything but agreeable to those who are
not accustomed to it. This is the place where the family live. They
cook everything here for themselves and their hogs. They eat every
meal here. They sit here every evening, and here they receive their
friends. The women in this kitchen toil incessantly, from the time
they rise in the morning until they go to bed at night. Here man and
woman, sons and daughters, live, in the belief that work is the great
thing, that efficiency in work is the crowning excellence of manhood
and womanhood, and willingly go so far into essential self-debasement,
sometimes, as to contemn beauty and those who love it, and to glory
above all things in brute strength and brute endurance.
Here we are ready to state the point and the lesson of our
discussion:--The real reason for the deterioration of agriculture in
New England is to be found in the fact, that the farmer's life and the
farmer's home, generally, are unloved and unlovable things, and in the
multitude of causes which have tended to make them so. Let the son of
such a home as we have pictured get a taste of a better life than
this, or, through sensibilities which he did not inherit, apprehend a
worthier style of existence, and what inducements, save those which
necessity imposes, can retain him there? He hates the farm, and will
flee from it at the first opportunity. If the New England farmer's
life were a loved and lovable thing, the New England boys could hardly
be driven from the New England hills. They would not only find a way
to live here, but they would make farming profitable. They would honor
the employment to which they are bred, and would leave it, save in
exceptional instances, for no other. It is not strange that the
country grows thin and the city plethoric. It is not strange that
mercantile and mechanical employments are thronged by young men,
running all risks for success, when the alternative is a life in which
they find no meaning, and no inspiring and ennobling influence.
The popular ideal of the farmer's life and home, to which we have
alluded, we believe to be what God intended. That life contemplates
the institution and maintenance of personal and social habits, and the
cultivation of tastes and faculties, separate from, and above, labor.
Every farm-house should be a residence of men and women, boys and
girls, who, appreciating something of the meaning and end of life,
rise from every period of labor into an atmosphere of intellectual and
social activity, or into some form of refined family enjoyment. It is
impossible to do this while surrounded with all the associations of
labor. If there is a room in every farmer's house where the work of
the family is done, there should be a room in every farmer's house
where the family should live,--where beauty should appeal to the eye,
where genuine comfort of appointments should invite to repose, where
books should be gathered, where neatness and propriety of dress should
be observed, and where labor may be forgotten. The life led here
should be labor's exceeding great reward. A family living like
this--and there are families that live thus--will ennoble and beautify
all their surroundings. There will be trees at their door, and
flowers in their garden, and pleasant and graceful architectural ideas
in their dwelling. Human life will stand in the foreground of such a
home,--human life, crowned with its dignities and graces,--while
animal life will be removed among the shadows, and the gross material
utilities, tastefully disguised, will be made to retire into an
unoffending and harmonious perspective.
But we have alluded to other causes than labor as in some measure
responsible for the unattractiveness of the farmer's life, and
affecting adversely the farming interest. These touch the matter at
various points, and are charged with greater or less importance. We
know of no one cause more responsible for whatever there may be of
physical degeneracy among the farming population than the treatment of
its child-bearing women; and this, after all, is but a result of
entire devotion to the tyrannical idea of labor. If there be one
office or character higher than all others, it is the office or
character of mother. Surely, the bringing into existence of so
marvellous a thing as a human being, and the training of that being
until it assumes a recognized relation to God and human society, is a
sacred office, and one which does not yield in dignity and importance
to any other under heaven. For a woman who faithfully fulfils this
office, who submits without murmuring to all its pains, who patiently
performs its duties, and who exhausts her life in a ceaseless overflow
of love upon those whom God has given her, no words can express a true
man's veneration. She claims the homage of our hearts, the service of
our hands, the devotion of our lives.
Yet what is the position of the mother in the New England farmer's
home? The farmer is careful of every animal he possesses. The
farm-yard and the stall are replenished with young, by creatures for
months dismissed from labor, or handled with intelligent care while
carrying their burden; because the farmer knows that only in this way
can he secure improvement, and sound, symmetrical development, to the
stock of his farm. In this he is a true, practical philosopher. But
what is his treatment of her who bears his children? The same
physiological laws apply to her that apply to the brute. Their strict
observance is greatly more imperative, because of her finer
organization; yet they are not thought of; and if the farm-yard fail
to shame the nursery, if the mother bear beautiful and well-organized
children, Heaven be thanked for a merciful interference with the
operation of its own laws! Is the mother in a farm-house ever regarded
as a sacred being? Look at her hands! Look at her face! Look at her
bent and clumsy form! Is it more important to raise fine colts than
fine men and women? Is human life to be made secondary and subordinate
to animal life? Is not she who should receive the tenderest and most
considerate ministries of the farmer's home, in all its appointments
and in all its service, made the ceaseless minister and servant of the
home and all within it, with utter disregard of her office? To expect
a population to improve greatly under this method is simply to expect
miracles; and to expect a farmer's life and a farmer's home to be
attractive, where the mother is a drudge, and secures less
consideration than the pets of the stall, is to expect impossibilities.
Another cause which has tended to the deterioration of the farmer's
life is its solitariness. The towns in New England which were settled
when the Indians were in possession of the country, and which, for
purposes of defence, were settled in villages, have enjoyed great
blessings; but a large portion of agricultural New England was
differently settled. It is difficult to determine why isolation
should produce the effect it does upon the family development. The
Western pioneer, who, leaving a New England community, plants himself
and his young wife in the forest, will generally become a coarse man,
and will be the father of coarse children. The lack of the social
element in the farmer's life is doubtless a cause of some of its most
repulsive characteristics. Men are constituted in such a manner, that
constant social contact is necessary to the healthfulness of their
sympathies, the quickness of their intellects, and the symmetrical
development of their powers. It matters little whether a family be
placed in the depths of a Western forest, or upon the top of a New
England hill; the result of solitude will be the same in kind, if not
in degree.
Now the farmer, partly from isolation and partly from absorption in
labor, is the most unsocial man in New England. The farmers are
comparatively few who go into society at all, who ever dine with their
neighbors, or who take any genuine satisfaction in the company of the
women whom their wives invite to tea. They may possibly be
farmers among farmers, but they are not men among men and
women. Intellectually, they are very apt to leave life where they
begin it. Socially, they become dead for years before they die. The
inhabitants of a city can have but a poor apprehension of the amount
of enjoyment and development that comes to them through social
stimulus. Like gold, humanity becomes bright by friction, and grows
dim for lack of it. So, we say, the farmer's life and home can never
be what they should be,--can never be attractive by the side of other
life containing a true social element,--until they have become more
social. The individual life must not only occupy a place above that of
a beast of burden, but that life must be associated with all congenial
life within its reach. The tree that springs in the open field, though
it be fed by the juices of a rood, through absorbents that penetrate
where they will, will present a hard and stunted growth; while the
little sapling of the forest, seeking for life among a million roots,
or growing in the crevice of a rock, will lift to the light its cap of
leaves upon a graceful stem, and whisper, even-headed, with the
stateliest of its neighbors. Men, like trees, were made to grow
together, and both history and philosophy declare that this Divine
intention cannot be ignored or frustrated with impunity.
Traditional routine has also operated powerfully to diminish the
attractiveness of agricultural employments. This cause, very happily,
grows less powerful from year to year. The purse is seen to have an
intimate sympathy with intelligent farming. Were we to say that God
had so constituted the human mind that routine will tire and disgust
it, we should say in effect that he never intended the farmer's life
to be one of routine. Nature has done all she can to break up routine.
While the earth swings round its orbit once a year, and turns on its
axis once in twenty-four hours,--while the tide ebbs and flows twice
daily, and the seasons come and go in rotation, every atom changes its
relations to every other atom every moment. Influences are tossed into
these skeleton cycles of motion and event which start a myriad of
diverse currents, and break up the whole surface of life and being
into a healthful confusion. There are never two days alike. The
motherly sky never gives birth to twin clouds. The weather shakes its
bundle of mysteries in our faces, and banters us with, "Don't you wish
you knew?" We prophesy rain upon the morrow, and wake with a bar of
golden sunlight on the coverlet. We foretell a hard winter, and,
before it is half gone, become nervous lest we should miss our supply
of ice. The fly, the murrain, the potato-rot, and the grasshoppers,
all have a divine office in tipping over our calculations. The
phantom host of the great North come out for parade without
announcement, and shoot their arrows toward the zenith, and flout the
stars with their rosy flags, and retire, leaving us looking into
heaven and wondering. Long weeks of drought parch the earth, and then
comes the sweet rain, and sets the flowers and the foliage
dancing. All the seasons are either very late or very early, or, for
some reason, "the most remarkable within the memory of man."