Julia Ward Howe Part 11

Again, her life had been singularly free from responsibility. First her Aunt Francis, then her sister Louisa, had "kept house" in Bond Street; Julia had been a flower of the field, taking no thought for food or raiment; her sisters chose and bought her clothes, had her dresses made, and put them on her. Her studies, her music, her dreams, her compositions--and, it must be added, her suitors--made the world in which she lived. Now, life in its most concrete forms pressed upon her.

The baby must be fed at regular intervals, and she must feed it; there must be three meals a day, and she must provide them; servants must be engaged, trained, directed, and all this she must do. Her thoughts soared heavenward; but now there was a string attached to them, and they must be pulled down to attend to the leg of mutton and the baby's cloak.

This is one side of the picture; the other is different, indeed.

Her girlhood had been shut in by locks and bars of Calvinistic piety; her friends and family were ready to laugh, to weep, to pray with her; they were not ready to think with her. It is true that surrounding this intimate circle was a wider one, where her mind found stimulus in certain directions. She studied German with Dr. Cogswell; she read Dante with Felice Foresti, the Italian patriot; French, Latin, music, she had them all. Her mind expanded, but her spiritual growth dates from her early visits to Boston.

These visits had not been given wholly to gayety, even in the days when she wrote, after a ball: "I have been through the burning, fiery furnace, and it is Sad-rake, Me-sick, and Abed-no-go!" The friends she made, both men and women, were people alive and awake, seeking new light, and finding it on every hand. Moreover, at her side was now one of the torch-bearers of humanity, a spirit burning with a clear flame of fervor and resolve, lighting the dark places of the earth. Her mind, under the stimulus of these influences, opened like a flower; she too became one of the seekers for light, and in her turn one of the light-bringers.

Among the poems of her early married life, none is more illuminating than the portrait of Dr. Howe, which heads this chapter. The concluding stanza gives a hint of the depression which accompanied her first realization of the driving power of his life, of the white-hot metal of his nature. She was caught up as it were in the wake of a comet, and whirled into new and strange orbits: what wonder that for a time she was bewildered? She had no thought, when writing "The Rough Sketch," that a later day was to find her soul indeed matched with his, "in high resolve and hardihood": that through her lips, as well as his, G.o.d was to sound forth a trumpet that should never call retreat.

In her normal health she was a person of abounding vitality, with a const.i.tution of iron: as is common with such temperaments, she felt a physical distaste to the abnormal and defective. It required in those days all the strength of her will to overcome her natural shrinking from the blind and the other defectives with whom she was often thrown. There is no clearer evidence of the development of her nature than the contrast between this mental att.i.tude and the deep tenderness which she felt in her later years for the blind. After the Doctor's death, they became her cherished friends; she could never do enough for them; with every year her desire to visit the Perkins Inst.i.tution, to talk with the pupils, to give them all she had to give, grew stronger and more lively.

Of the friends of this time, none had so deep and lasting an influence over her as Theodore Parker, who had long been a close friend of the Doctor's. She had first heard of him in her girlhood, as an impious and sacrilegious person, to be shunned by all good Christians.

In 1843 she met him in Rome, and found him "one of the most sympathetic and delightful of men"; an intimacy sprang up between the two families which ended only with Parker's life. He baptized the baby Julia; on returning to this country, she and the Doctor went regularly to hear him preach. This she always considered as among the great opportunities of her life.

"I cannot remember," she says, "that the interest of his sermons ever varied for me. It was all one intense delight.... It was hard to go out from his presence, all aglow with the enthusiasm which he felt and inspired, and to hear him spoken of as a teacher of irreligion, a pest to the community."

These were the days when it was possible for a minister of a Christian church, hearing of Parker's dangerous illness, to pray that G.o.d might remove him from the earth. To her, it seemed that "truly, he talked with G.o.d, and took us with him into the divine presence."

Parker could play as well as preach; she loved to "make fun" with him.

Witness her "Philosoph-Master and Poet-Aster" in "Pa.s.sion Flowers."

Parker's own powers of merrymaking appear in his Latin epitaph on "the Doctor" (who survived him by many years), which is printed in the "Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe."

She used in later years to shake her head as she recalled a naughty _mot_ of hers apropos of Parker's preaching: "I would rather," she said, "hear Theodore Parker preach than go to the theatre; I would rather go to the theatre than go to a party; I would rather go to a party than stay at home!"

A letter to her sister Annie shows the trend of her religious thought in these days.

Sunday evening, December 8, 1844.

DEAR ANNIE,--

Do not let the Bishop or Uncle or any one frighten you into any concessions--tell them, and all others that, even if you agree with them in doctrine, you think their notion of a religious life narrow, false, superficial. You owe it to truth, to them, to yourself, to say so. I think perfect and fearless frankness one of our highest duties to _man_ as well as to G.o.d. Only see how one half the world pragmatically sets its foot down, and says to the other half, "Be converted, my opinion is truth! I must be right and you must be wrong,"--while the other half timidly falters a reluctant acquiescence, or scarce audible expression of doubt, and continues troubled and afraid and discontented with itself and others. Let me never think of you as in this ignominious position, dear Annie. Do not think that I misapprehend you. I know you do not agree in doctrine with me, but I know too that you do not feel that you can abandon your life and conscience to the charge and guidance of such a man as Eastburn, or as Uncle Ben. Do not, therefore, be afraid of them, but let their censure be a very secondary thing with you--while your life is the true expression of your faith, whom can you fear? You are accountable to man for the performance of the duties which affect his welfare and well-being--for those which concern your own soul, you are accountable to G.o.d alone. A man, though with twenty surplices on his back and twenty prayer books in his hand, can no more condemn than he can save you.... There may be a h.e.l.l and a heaven, and it may be good for most people, for you and me, too, if you choose to think that it is so. But there is a virtue which rises above such considerations--there are motives higher than personal fear or hope--the love of good because it is good, because it is G.o.d's and nature's law, because it is the secret of the beautiful order of things, because they are blessed by your virtuous deeds and pure thoughts--because every holy, every n.o.ble deed, word, or thought helps to build up the ruins of the world, and to elevate our degraded humanity. Those who propose to you h.e.l.l and heaven as the great incentives to right, appeal merely to your natural love of personal advantage--those who hold up to you a G.o.d now frowning and indignant, now gracious and benignant, appeal simply to your natural cowardice, to your natural love of approbation. Does one love G.o.d for one's own advantage? One loves Him for His perfection, and if one loves Him, one keeps His commandments. Abandon, I pray you, the exploded formula of selfishness!... I think one should be capable of loving virtue, were one sure even that h.e.l.l and not heaven would be its reward.

The benedictions of the Sermon on the Mount are very simple--no raptures, no ecstasies are promised. Blessed are all that seek the good of others and the knowledge of truth--blessed, simply that in so doing they obey the law of G.o.d, imitate His character, and coming nearer and nearer to Him shall find Him more and more in their hearts. One word about Unitarians. It is very wrong to say that they reject the Bible, simply because they interpret it in a different manner from the (so-called) orthodox, or that they reject Christ, because they understand him in one way, and you in another--while they emulate his wonderful life, while they acknowledge his divine mission, and the divine power of his words, why should they be said to despise him?...

During the years between 1843 and 1859, her life was from time to time shadowed by the approach of a great joy. Before the birth of each successive child she was oppressed by a deep and persistent melancholy.

Present and future alike seemed dark to her; she wept for herself, but still more for the hapless infant which must come to birth in so sorrowful a world. With the birth of the child the cloud lifted and vanished. Sunshine and joy--and the baby--filled the world; the mother sang, laughed, and made merry.

In her letters to her sisters, and later in her journals, both these moods are abundantly evident. At first, these letters are full of the bustle of arrival and of settling in the Inst.i.tution.

"I received the silver.... The soup-ladle is my delight, and I could almost take the dear old coffee-pot to bed with me.... But here is the most important thing.

"MY TRAGEDY IS LEFT BEHIND!... My house ... in great confusion, carpets not down, curtains not up, the devil to pay, and not a sofa to ask him to sit down upon...."

She now felt sadly the need of training in matters which her girlhood had despised. (She could describe every room in her father's house save one--the kitchen!) The Doctor liked to give weekly dinners to his intimates, "The Five of Clubs," and others. These dinners were something of a nightmare to Julia, even with the aid of Miss Catherine Beecher's cookbook. She spent weeks in studying this volume and trying her hand on its recipes. This was not what her hand was made for; yet she learned to make puddings, and was proud of her preserves.

Speaking of the dinner parties, she tells of one for which she had taken special pains, and of which ice-cream, not then the food of every day, was to form the climax. The ice-cream did not come, and her pleasure was spoiled; she found it next morning in a s...o...b..nk outside the back door, where the messenger had "dumped" it without word or comment. "I should laugh at it now," she says, "but then I almost wept over it."

Everything in the new life interested her, even the most prosaic details. She writes to her sister Louisa:

"Our house has been enlivened of late by two delightful visits. The first was from the soap-fat merchant, who gave me thirty-four pounds of good soap for my grease. I was quite beside myself with joy, capered about in the most enthusiastic manner, and was going to hug in turn the soap, the grease, and the man, had I not remembered my future amba.s.sadress-ship, and reflected that it would not sound well in history. This morning came the rag-man, who takes rags and gives nice tin vessels in exchange.... Both of these were clever transactions. Oh, if you had seen me stand by the soap-fat man, and scrutinize minutely his weights and measures, telling him again and again that it was beautiful grease, and he must allow me a good price for it--truly, I am a mother in Israel."

Much as the Doctor loved the Perkins Inst.i.tution, he longed for a home of his own, and in the spring of 1845 he found a place entirely to his mind.

A few steps from the Inst.i.tution was a plot of land, facing the sun, sheltered from the north wind by the last remaining bit of "Washington Heights," the eminence on which Washington planted the batteries which drove the British out of Boston. Some six acres of fertile ground, an old house with low, broad, sunny rooms, two towering Balm of Gilead trees, and some ancient fruit trees: this was all in the beginning; but the Doctor saw at a glance the possibilities of the place. He bought it, added one or two rooms to the old house, planted fruit trees, laid out flower gardens, and in the summer of 1845 moved his little family thither.

The move was made on a lovely summer day. As our mother drove into the green bower, half shade, half sunshine, silent save for the birds, she cried out, "Oh! this is green peace!" The name fitted and clung: "_Green Peace_" was known and loved as such so long as it existed.

This was the princ.i.p.al home of her married life, but it was not precisely an abiding one. The summers were spent elsewhere; moreover, the "Doctor's Wing" in the Inst.i.tution was always ready for habitation, and it often happened that for one reason or another the family were taken back there for weeks or months. Two of the six children, Florence and Maud, were born at the Inst.i.tution; the former just before the move to Green Peace. She was named Florence in honor of Miss Nightingale. The Doctor had ardently desired a son; finding the baby a girl, "I will forgive you," he cried, "if you will name her for Florence Nightingale!"

Miss Nightingale became the child's G.o.dmother, sent a golden cup (now a precious heirloom), and wrote as follows:--

EMBLEY, December 26.

I cannot pretend to express, my dear kind friends, how touched and pleased I was by such a remembrance of me as that of your child's name.... If I could live to justify your opinion of me, it would have been enough to have lived for, and such thoughts, as that of your goodness, are great thoughts, "strong to consume small troubles" which should bear us up on the wings of the Eagle, like Guido's Ganymede, up to the feet of the G.o.d, there to take what work he has for us to do for him. I shall hope to see my little Florence before long in this world, but if not, I trust there is a tie formed between us, which shall continue in Eternity--if she is like you, I shall know her again there, without her body on, perhaps the better for not having known her here with it.

Letters to her sisters give glimpses of the life at Green Peace during the years 1845-50.

_To her sister Louisa_

... I a.s.sure you it is a delightful but a terrible thing to be a mother.

The constant care, anxiety and thought of some possible evil that may come to the little creature, too precious to be so frail, whose life and well-being the mother feels G.o.d has almost placed in her hands! If I did not think that angels watched over my baby, I should be crazy about it.

_To the same_

My trouble has been Chev's illness.... He was taken ill the night of his return, and established himself next morning on the sofa, to be coddled with Cologne, and dieted with peaches and grapes, when lo, in an hour more, no coddling save that of (Dr.) Fisher, no _diet_ save ipecac and werry thin gruel--chills, nausea, and blue devils. Bradford to watch by night, Rosy and I by day; Fisher and I sympathizing deeply in holding the head of a perfectabilian philanthropist. I making myself active in a variety of ways, bathing Chev's eyes with cologne water by mistake instead of his brow, laying the pillow the wrong way, and being banished at last in disgrace, to make room for Rosa.

Am I not the most unfortunate of human beings? Devil a bit! I enjoy all that I can--have I not milk for the baby, and the baby for milk? Cannot Julia make arrowroot pudding and cold custard? Can I not refresh myself by looking into Romana's sapphire eyes, with their deep dark fringe? Is there no balm in Gilead, is there no physician there? Yea, thou, oh Bradford, art the balm, thou, oh Fisher, art the physician! Food also is there for cachinnation, that chief duty of man--Quoth Chev this morning, lifting up his feeble voice and shaking his dizzy head: "Oh, oh, if I had fallen sick in New York, and old Francis had bled me, you would not have seen me again...."

Florence's name is Florence Marion--pretty, _n'est-ce pas?_...

Farewell, my own darling. Your JULES.

Well, life _am_ strange! I am again cookless. I imprudently turned old Smith off and took a young girl, who left me in four days. Why? Her lover would not allow her to stay in a family where she did not sit at table with the lady. I had read of such things in Mrs. Trollope, and thought them quite impossible. In the place from which I took her, she had done all the cooking, washing and chamber work of the house--was, in fine the only servant, for the compensation of six dollars a month. But then, she sat at table!!! oh, ho!

_To the same_

SOUTH BOSTON, April 21, 1845.

... The weather here is so gloomy, that one really deserves credit for not hanging oneself!... I pa.s.sed last evening with ----. Chev was going to a "'versary," left me there at about seven, and did not come for me until after ten. Consequence was, I got heartily tired of the whole family, and concluded that bright people without hearts were in the long run less agreeable than good gentle people without wits--glory on my soul, likewise also on my baby's soul, which I am!