The Biglow Papers Part 3

There young Devotion learned to climb with ease The gnarly limbs of Scripture family-trees, And he was most commended and admired Who soonest to the topmost twig perspired; Each name was called as many various ways As pleased the reader's ear on different days, So that the weather, or the ferule's stings, Colds in the head, or fifty other things, Transformed the helpless Hebrew thrice a week To guttural Pequot or resounding Greek, The vibrant accent skipping here and there, Just as it pleased invention or despair; No controversial Hebraist was the Dame; With or without the points pleased her the same; If any tyro found a name too tough, And looked at her, pride furnished skill enough; She nerved her larynx for the desperate thing, And cleared the five-barred syllables at a spring.

Ah, dear old times! there once it was my hap, Perched on a stool, to wear the long-eared cap; From books degraded, there I sat at ease, A drone, the envy of compulsory bees."

I add only one further extract, which will possess a melancholy interest to all such as have endeavoured to glean the materials of Revolutionary history from the lips of aged persons, who took a part in the actual making of it, and, finding the manufacture profitable, continued the supply in an adequate proportion to the demand.

"Old Joe is gone, who saw hot Percy goad His slow artillery up the Concord road, A tale which grew in wonder, year by year, As, every time he told it, Joe drew near To the main fight, till, faded and grown gray, The original scene to bolder tints gave way; Then Joe had heard the foe's scared double-quick Beat on stove drum with one uncaptured stick, And, ere death came the lengthening tale to lop, Himself had fired, and seen a red-coat drop; Had Joe lived long enough, that scrambling fight Had squared more nearly to his sense of right, And vanquished Percy, to complete the tale, Had hammered stone for life in Concord jail."

I do not know that the foregoing extracts ought not to be called my own rather than Mr. Biglow's, as, indeed, he maintained stoutly that my file had left nothing of his in them. I should not, perhaps, have felt ent.i.tled to take so great liberties with them, had I not more than suspected an hereditary vein of poetry in myself, a very near ancestor having written a Latin poem in the Harvard _Gratulatio_ on the accession of George the Third. Suffice it to say, that, whether not satisfied with such limited approbation as I could conscientiously bestow, or from a sense of natural inapt.i.tude, I know not, certain it is that my young friend could never be induced to any further essays in this kind. He affirmed that it was to him like writing in a foreign tongue,--that Mr.

Pope's versification was like the regular ticking of one of Willard's clocks, in which one could fancy, after long listening, a certain kind of rhythm or tune, but which yet was only a poverty-stricken _tick, tick_ after all,--and that he had never seen a sweet-water on a trellis growing so fairly, or in forms so pleasing to his eye, as a fox-grape over a scrub-oak in a swamp. He added I know not what, to the effect that the sweet-water would only be the more disfigured by having its leaves starched and ironed out, and that Pegasus (so he called him) hardly looked right with his mane and tail in curl-papers. These and other such opinions I did not long strive to eradicate, attributing them rather to a defective education and senses untuned by too long familiarity with purely natural objects, than to a perverted moral sense. I was the more inclined to this leniency since sufficient evidence was not to seek, that his verses, as wanting as they certainly were in cla.s.sic polish and point, had somehow taken hold of the public ear in a surprising manner. So, only setting him right as to the quant.i.ty of the proper name Pegasus, I left him to follow the bent of his natural genius.

There are two things upon which it would seem fitting to dilate somewhat more largely in this place,--the Yankee character and the Yankee dialect. And, first, of the Yankee character, which has wanted neither open maligners, nor even more dangerous enemies in the persons of those unskilful painters who have given to it that hardness, angularity, and want of proper perspective, which, in truth, belonged, not to their subject, but to their own n.i.g.g.ard and unskilful pencil.

New England was not so much the colony of a mother country, as a Hagar driven forth into the wilderness. The little self-exiled band which came hither in 1620 came, not to seek gold, but to found a democracy. They came that they might have the privilege to work and pray, to sit upon hard benches and listen to painful preachers as long as they would, yea, even unto thirty-seventhly, if the spirit so willed it. And surely, if the Greek might boast his Thermopylae, where three hundred men fell in resisting the Persian, we may well be proud of our Plymouth Rock, where a handful of men, women, and children not merely faced, but vanquished, winter, famine, the wilderness, and the yet more invincible _storge_ that drew them back to the green island far away. These found no lotus growing upon the surly sh.o.r.e, the taste of which could make them forget their little native Ithaca; nor were they so wanting to themselves in faith as to burn their s.h.i.+p, but could see the fair west wind belly the homeward sail, and then turn unrepining to grapple with the terrible Unknown.

As Want was the prime foe these hardy exodists had to fortress themselves against, so it is little wonder if that traditional feud is long in wearing out of the stock. The wounds of the old warfare were long ahealing, and an east wind of hard times puts a new ache in every one of them. Thrift was the first lesson in their horn-book, pointed out, letter after letter, by the lean finger of the hard schoolmaster, Necessity. Neither were those plump, rosy-gilled Englishmen that came hither, but a hard-faced, atrabilious, earnest-eyed race, stiff from long wrestling with the Lord in prayer, and who had taught Satan to dread the new Puritan hug. Add two hundred years' influence of soil, climate, and exposure, with its necessary result of idiosyncrasies, and we have the present Yankee, full of expedients, half-master of all trades, inventive in all but the beautiful, full of s.h.i.+fts, not yet capable of comfort, armed at all points against the old enemy Hunger, longanimous, good at patching, not so careful for what is best as for what will _do_, with a clasp to his purse and a b.u.t.ton to his pocket, not skilled to build against Time, as in old countries, but against sore-pressing Need, accustomed to move the world with no p?? st? but his own two feet, and no lever but his own long forecast. A strange hybrid, indeed, did circ.u.mstance beget, here in the New World, upon the old Puritan stock, and the earth never before saw such mystic-practicalism, such n.i.g.g.ard-geniality, such calculating-fanaticism, such cast-iron-enthusiasm, such unwilling humour, such close-fisted-generosity. This new _Graeculus esuriens_ will make a living out of any thing. He will invent new trades as well as tools. His brain is his capital, and he will get education at all risks. Put him on Juan Fernandez, and he would make a spelling-book first, and a salt-pan afterwards. _In clum, jusseris, ibit_,--or the other way either,--it is all one, so any thing is to be got by it. Yet, after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains. He feels more at home with Fulke Greville, Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George Herbert, and Browne, than with his modern English cousins. He is nearer than John, by at least a hundred years, to Naseby, Marston Moor, Worcester, and the time when, if ever, there were true Englishmen. John Bull has suffered the idea of the Invisible to be very much flattened out of him. Jonathan is conscious still that he lives in the world of the Unseen as well as of the Seen.

To move John, you must make your fulcrum of solid beef and pudding; an abstract idea will do for Jonathan.

*** TO THE INDULGENT READER.

My friend, the Rev. Mr. Wilbur, having been seized with a dangerous fit of illness, before this Introduction had pa.s.sed through the press, and being incapacitated for all literary exertion, sent to me his notes, memoranda, &c., and requested me to fas.h.i.+on them into some shape more fitting for the general eye. This, owing to the fragmentary and disjointed state of his ma.n.u.scripts, I have felt wholly unable to do; yet, being unwilling that the reader should be deprived of such parts of his lucubrations as seemed more finished, and not well discerning how to segregate these from the rest, I have concluded to send them all to the press precisely as they are.

COLUMBUS NYE, _Pastor of a Church in Bungtown Corner_.

It remains to speak of the Yankee dialect. And, first, it may be premised, in a general way, that any one much read in the writings of the early colonists need not be told that the far greater share of the words and phrases now esteemed peculiar to New England, and local there, were brought from the mother-country. A person familiar with the dialect of certain portions of Ma.s.sachusetts will not fail to recognize, in ordinary discourse, many words now noted in English vocabularies as archaic, the greater part of which were in common use about the time of the King James translation of the Bible. Shakspeare stands less in need of a glossary to most New Englanders than to many a native of the Old Country. The peculiarities of our speech, however, are rapidly wearing out. As there is no country where reading is so universal and newspapers are so mult.i.tudinous, so no phrase remains long local, but is transplanted in the mail-bags to every remotest corner of the land.

Consequently our dialect approaches nearer to uniformity than that of any other nation.

The English have complained of us for coining new words. Many of those so stigmatized were old ones by them forgotten, and all make now an unquestioned part of the currency, wherever English is spoken.

Undoubtedly, we have a right to make new words, as they are needed by the fresh aspects under which life presents itself here in the New World; and, indeed, wherever a language is alive, it grows. It might be questioned whether we could not establish a stronger t.i.tle to the owners.h.i.+p of the English tongue than the mother-islanders themselves.

Here, past all question, is to be its great home and centre. And not only is it already spoken here by greater numbers, but with a far higher popular average of correctness, than in Britain. The great writers of it, too, we might claim as ours, were owners.h.i.+p to be settled by the number of readers and lovers.

As regards the provincialisms to be met with in this volume, I may say that the reader will not find one which is not (as I believe) either native or imported with the early settlers, nor one which I have not, with my own ears, heard in familiar use. In the metrical portion of the book, I have endeavoured to adapt the spelling as nearly as possible to the ordinary mode of p.r.o.nunciation. Let the reader who deems me overparticular remember this caution of Martial:--

"_Quem recitas, meus est, O Fidentine, libellus; Sed male c.u.m recitas, incipit esse tuus._"

A few further explanatory remarks will not be impertinent.

I shall barely lay down a few general rules for the reader's guidance.

1. The genuine Yankee never gives the rough sound to the _r_ when he can help it, and often displays considerable ingenuity in avoiding it even before a vowel.

2. He seldom sounds the final _g_, a piece of self-denial, if we consider his partiality for nasals. The same of the final _d_, as _han'_ and _stan'_ for _hand_ and _stand_.

3. The _h_ in such words as _while_, _when_, _where_, he omits altogether.

4. In regard to _a_, he shows some inconsistency, sometimes giving a close and obscure sound, as _hev_ for _have_, _hendy_ for _handy_, _ez_ for _as_, _thet_ for _that_, and again giving it the broad sound it has in _father_, as _hansome_ for _handsome_.

5. To the sound _ou_ he prefixes an _e_ (hard to exemplify otherwise than orally).

The following pa.s.sage in Shakspeare he would recite thus:--

"Neow is the winta uv eour discontent Med glorious summa by this sun o' Yock, An' all the cleouds thet leowered upun eour heouse In the deep buzzum o' the os.h.i.+n buried; Neow air eour breows beound 'ith victorious wreaths; Eour breused arms hung up fer monimunce; Eour starn alarums changed to merry meetins, Eour dreffle marches to delightful measures.

Grim-visaged war heth smeuthed his wrinkled front, An' neow, instid o' mountin' barebid steeds To fright the souls o' ferfle edverseries, He capers nimly in a lady's chamber, To the lascivious pleasin' uv a loot."

6. _Au_, in such words as _daughter_ and _slaughter_, he p.r.o.nounces _ah_.

7. To the dish thus seasoned add a drawl _ad libitum_.

[Mr. Wilbur's notes here become entirely fragmentary.--C. N.]

a. Unable to procure a likeness of Mr. Biglow, I thought the curious reader might be gratified with a sight of the editorial effigies. And here a choice between two was offered,--the one a profile (entirely black) cut by Doyle, the other a portrait painted by a native artist of much promise. The first of these seemed wanting in expression, and in the second a slight obliquity of the visual organs has been heightened (perhaps from an over-desire of force on the part of the artist) into too close an approach to actual _strabismus_. This slight divergence in my optical apparatus from the ordinary model--however I may have been taught to regard it in the light of a mercy rather than a cross, since it enabled me to give as much of directness and personal application to my discourses as met the wants of my congregation, without risk of offending any by being supposed to have him or her in my eye (as the saying is)--seemed yet to Mrs. Wilbur a sufficient objection to the engraving of the aforesaid painting. We read of many who either absolutely refused to allow the copying of their features, as especially did Plotinus and Agesilaus among the ancients, not to mention the more modern instances of Scioppius Palaeottus, Pinellus, Velserus, Gataker, and others, or were indifferent thereto, as Cromwell.

. Yet was Caesar desirous of concealing his baldness. _Per contra_, my Lord Protector's carefulness in the matter of his wart might be cited.

Men generally more desirous of being _improved_ in their portraits than characters. Shall probably find very unflattered likenesses of ourselves in Recording Angel's gallery.

?. Whether any of our national peculiarities may be traced to our use of stoves, as a certain closeness of the lips in p.r.o.nunciation, and a smothered smoulderingness of disposition, seldom roused to open flame?

An unrestrained intercourse with fire probably conducive to generosity and hospitality of soul. Ancient Mexicans used stoves, as the friar Augustin Ruiz reports, Hakluyt, III., 468,--but Popish priests not always reliable authority.

To-day picked my Isabella grapes. Crop injured by attacks of rose-bug in the spring. Whether Noah was justifiable in preserving this cla.s.s of insects?

d. Concerning Mr. Biglow's pedigree. Tolerably certain that there was never a poet among his ancestors. An ordination hymn attributed to a maternal uncle, but perhaps a sort of production not demanding the creative faculty.

His grandfather a painter of the grandiose or Michael Angelo school.

Seldom painted objects smaller than houses or barns, and these with uncommon expression.

e. Of the Wilburs no complete pedigree. The crest said to be a _wild boar_, whence, perhaps, the name. (?) A connection with the Earls of Wilbraham (_quasi_ wild boar ham) might be made out. This suggestion worth following up. In 1677, John W. m. Expect ----, had issue, 1. John, 2. Haggai, 3. Expect, 4. Ruhamah, 5. Desire.

"Hear lyes y^e bodye of Mrs Expect Wilber, Y^e crewell salvages they kil'd her Together w^th other Christian soles eleaven, October y^e ix daye, 1707.

Y^e stream of Jordan sh' as crost ore And now expeacts me on y^e other sh.o.r.e: I live in hope her soon to join; Her earthlye yeeres were forty and nine."

_From Gravestone in Pekussett, North Parish._

This is unquestionably the same John who afterward (1711) married Tabitha Hagg or Rag.

But if this were the case, she seems to have died early; for only three years after, namely, 1714, we have evidence that he married Winifred, daughter of Lieutenant Tipping.

He seems to have been a man of substance, for we find him in 1696 conveying "one undivided eightieth part of a salt-meadow" in Yabbok, and he commanded a sloop in 1702.

Those who doubt the importance of genealogical studies _fuste potius quam argumento erudiendi_.

I trace him as far as 1723, and there lose him. In that year he was chosen selectman.