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Title: The eleventh hour in the life of Julia Ward Howe
Author: Maud Howe Elliott
Release Date: March 30, 2018 [EBook #56877]
Language: English
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THE ELEVENTH HOUR
JULIA WARD HOWE
From a Drawing by John Elliott
The Eleventh Hour
in the Life of
Julia Ward Howe
BY
MAUD HOWE
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1911
Copyright, 1911,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.
All rights reserved
Published, October, 1911
Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S.
AD MATREM
The acorns are again ripe on your oaks, the leaves of your nut tree
begin to turn gold, the fruit trees you planted a lustre since, droop
with their weight of crimson fruit, the little grey squirrels leap
nimbly from bough to bough busily preparing for winter’s siege. The
air is fragrant with the perfume of wild grape, joyous with the voices
of children passing to the white school house on the hill. The earth
laughs with the joy of the harvest. What thank offering can I bring for
this year that has not yet taught me how to live without you? Only this
sheaf of gleanings from your fields!
OAK GLEN, September, 1911.
FOREWORD
This slight and hasty account of some of my mother’s later activities
was written to read to a small group of friends with whom I wished
to share the lesson of the Eleventh Hour of a life filled to the end
with the joy of toil. More than one of my hearers asked me to print
what I had read them, in the belief that it would be of value to that
larger circle of her friends, the public. Such a request could not be
refused.
THE ELEVENTH HOUR
IN THE LIFE OF
JULIA WARD HOWE
My mother’s diary for 1906, her eighty-seventh year, opens with this
entry:
“I pray for many things this year. For myself, I ask continued
health of mind and body, work, useful, honorable and as remunerative
as it shall please God to send. For my dear family, work of the
same description with comfortable wages, faith in God, and love to
each other. For my country, that she may keep her high promise to
mankind, for Christendom, that it may become more Christlike, for the
struggling nationalities, that they may attain to justice and peace.”
Not vain the prayer! Health of mind and body was granted, work, useful,
honorable, if not very remunerative, was hers that year and nearly five
years more, for she lived to be ninety-one and a half years old. When
Death came and took her, he found her still at work. Hers the fate of
the happy warrior who falls in thick of battle, his harness on his back.
How did she do it?
Hardly a day passes that I am not asked the question!
Shortly before her death, she spoke of the time when she would no
longer be with us--an almost unheard-of thing for her to do. We turned
the subject, begged her not to dwell on it.
“Yes!” she laughed with the old flash that has kindled a thousand
audiences, “it’s not my business to think about dying, it’s my business
to think about living!”
This thinking about living, this tremendous vitality had much to do
with her long service, for the important thing of course was not
that she lived ninety-one years, but that she worked for more than
ninety-one years, never became a cumberer of the earth, paid her scot
till the last. She never knew the pathos of doing old-age work, such
as is provided in every class for those inveterate workers to whom
labor is as necessary as bread or breath. The old ploughman sits by the
wayside breaking stones to mend the road others shall travel over;
the old prima donna listens to her pupils’ triumphs; the old statesman
gives after-dinner speeches, or makes himself a nuisance by speaking or
writing, _ex cathedra_, on any question that needs airing, whether it
is his subject or not; she did good, vigorous work till the end, in her
own chosen callings of poet and orator. What she produced in her last
year was as good in quality as any other year’s output. The artist in
her never stopped growing; indeed, her latest work has a lucidity, a
robust simplicity, that some of the earlier writings lack.
In the summer of 1909 she was asked to write a poem on Fulton for the
Fulton-Hudson celebration. Ever better than her word, she not only
wrote the poem, but recited it in the New York Metropolitan Opera House
on the evening of September 9th. Those who saw her, the only woman amid
that great gathering of representative men from all over the world,
will not forget the breathless silence of that vast audience as she
came forward, leaning on her son’s arm, and read the opening lines:
A river flashing like a gem,
Crowned with a mountain diadem,--
or the thunders of applause that followed the last lines:
While pledge of Love’s assured control,
The Flag of Freedom crowns the pole.
The poem had given her a good deal of trouble, the last couplet in
especial. The morning of the celebration, when I went into Mrs. Seth
Low’s spare bedroom to wake her, she cried out:
“I have got my last verse!”
She was much distressed that the poem appeared in Collier’s without
the amended closing lines. The fault was mine; I had arranged with the
editor Mr. Hapgood for its publication. She had done so much “free
gratis” work all her life that it seemed fitting this poem should at
least earn her, her travelling expenses.
“Let this be a lesson,” she said, “never print a poem or a speech till
it has been delivered; always give the eleventh hour its chance!”
It may be interesting here to recall that the Atlantic Monthly paid her
five dollars for the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the only money she
ever received for it.
Her power of keeping abreast of the times is felt in the Fulton poem,
where she rounds out her eulogy of Fulton’s invention of the steamboat
with a tribute to Peary. Only a few days before the news of our latest
arctic triumph had flashed round the world, her world, whose business
was her business as long as she lived in it; so into the fabric of the
poem in honor of Fulton, she weaves an allusion to this new victory.
On her ninety-first birthday a reporter from a Boston paper asked her
for a motto for the women of America. She was sitting on the little
balcony outside her town house, reading her Greek Testament, when the
young man was announced. She closed her book, thought for a moment,
then gave the motto that so well expressed herself:
“Up to date!”
Was there ever anything more characteristic?
In December, 1909, the last December she was to see, she wrote a poem
called “The Capitol,” for the first meeting of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters at Washington. The poem, published in the Century
Magazine for March, 1910, is as good as any she ever wrote, with one
exception--the Battle Hymn; and that, as she has told us, “wrote
itself.” She had arranged to go to Washington to read her poem before
the Association. Though we feared the winter journey for her, she was
so bent on going that I very reluctantly agreed to accompany her. A
telegram, signed by William Dean Howells, Robert Underwood Johnson, and
Thomas Nelson Page, all officers of the Association, urging her not to
take the risk of so long a journey in winter, induced her to give up
the trip. She was rather nettled by the kindly hint and flashed out:
“Hah! they think that I am too old, but there’s a little ginger left in
the old blue jar!”
She never thought of herself as old, therefore she never was really
old in the essentials. Her iron will, her indomitable spirit, held her
frail body to its duty till the very end.
“Life is like a cup of tea, the sugar is all at the bottom!” she cried
one day. This was the very truth; she knew no “winter of discontent.”
Her autumn was all Indian summer, glorious with crimson leaves, purple
and gold sunsets.
In April, 1910, she wrote the third and last of her poems to her
beloved friend and “Minister” James Freeman Clarke. She read this poem
twice, at the centenary celebration of Mr. Clarke’s birth held at the
Church of the Disciples, April 3rd, and the day after at the Arlington
St. Church. Compared with the verses written for Mr. Clarke’s fiftieth
birthday and with those celebrating his seventieth birthday, this
latest poem is to me the best. The opening lines bite right into the
heart of the matter; as she read them standing in the pulpit a thrill
passed through the congregation of her fellow disciples gathered
together in memory of their founder.
Richer gift can no man give
Than he doth from God receive.
We in greatness would have pleasure,
But we must accept our measure.
Let us question, then, the grave,
Querying what the Master gave,
Whom, in his immortal state,
Grateful love would celebrate.
Only human life was his,
With its thin-worn mysteries.
* * * * *
Lifting from the Past its veil,
What of his does now avail?
Just a mirror in his breast
That revealed a heavenly guest,
And the love that made us free
Of the same high company.
The poem on Abraham Lincoln written for the Lincoln Centenary and read
by her at the meeting in Symphony Hall, Boston, February 12th, 1909,
is perhaps the best of the innumerable memorial poems she composed. As
one by one the centenaries of this and that member of the band of great
men and women who made our country illustrious in the 19th Century were
celebrated, it came to be considered as a matter of course that she,
almost the last survivor of that noble company, should write a poem for
the occasion. So difficult a critic as Professor Barrett Wendell said
to me that he considered some of the stanzas of the Lincoln poem as
good as the Battle Hymn. I remember he particularly liked the last two
verses,
A treacherous shot, a sob of rest,
A martyr’s palm upon his breast,
A welcome from the glorious seat
Where blameless souls of heroes meet;
And, thrilling through unmeasured days,
A song of gratitude and praise;
A cry that all the earth shall heed,
To God, who gave him for our need.
During her last summer she was in correspondence with her friend Mr.
Garrison about the publication of a volume that should gather up into
one sheaf these scattered occasional poems. She had this much on her
mind and made every endeavor to collect the poems together: some of
them had never been printed, and of others she possessed no copy. She
stopped in Boston on her way to Smith College in the last days of last
September, and spent an afternoon in her Beacon St. house looking for
some of those lost poems. Her wish was fulfilled, and the posthumous
volume, to which we gave the title “At Sunset,” lies beside me.
Look down the page of contents and note how various are the names
that figure in the list of personal poems, and what a wide range of
character they show; beginning with Lincoln, Doctor Holmes, Washington
Allston, Robert E. Lee, Whittier, Lucy Stone, Phillips Brooks, Robert
Browning, Archbishop Williams, and ending with Michael Anagnos--this is
a wide swath to cut, wide as her own sympathy.
One poem of hers that has soothed many a wounded heart should be better
known than I believe it to be. Though it has no dedication, it might
well be dedicated to the men and women who have tried, and who to the
world seem to have tried in vain.
ENDEAVOR
“What hast thou for thy scattered seed,
O Sower of the plain?
Where are the many gathered sheaves
Thy hope should bring again?”
“The only record of my work
Lies in the buried grain.”
“0 Conqueror of a thousand fields!
In dinted armor dight,
What growths of purple amaranth
Shall crown thy brow of might?”
“Only the blossom of my life
Flung widely in the fight.”
“What is the harvest of thy saints,
O God! who dost abide?
Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs
In blood and sorrow dyed?
What have thy servants for their pains?”
“This only,--to have tried.”
On the 26th of July, 1908, she wrote: “The thought came to me that if
God only looked upon me, I should become radiant like a star.” This
thought is embodied in the following quatrain.
Wouldst thou on me but turn thy wondrous sight,
My breast would be so flooded by thy light,
The light whose language is immortal song,
That I to all the ages should belong.
Two lines of hers have always seemed to me to express above all others
her life’s philosophy:
In the house of labor best
Can I build the house of rest!
Of all her labors, heavy and varied as those of Hercules, her poetry
was what she loved best. But she lived in an age when there are few
who can take their spiritual meat in verse. The age of steel is an age
of prose, and so she labored in season and out to give her message
in prose as well as in poetry, with the spoken word as well as the
written. She was the most willing of troubadours; she hastened gladly
wherever she was called, whether it was to some stately banquet of the
muses like the Bryant Centenary, or to a humble company of illiterate
negroes, in the poor little chapel at Santo Domingo, where she preached
all one season. Whether some rich and powerful association like the
Woman’s Club at Chicago summoned her or some modest group of working
women on Cape Cod, she was always ready. She asked no fee, but accepted
what was given her. She spoke and wrote oftenest for love, and next
often for an honorarium of five dollars. The first need of her being
was to give. So much had been given to her that she was forever trying
to pay the debt by giving of her store to others. I find in her own
handwriting the best expression of this need of giving, that was
perhaps the prime necessity of her life.
“I, for one, feel that my indebtedness grows with my years. And it
occurred to me the other day that when I should depart from this
earthly scene, “God’s poor Debtor” might be the fittest inscription for
my gravestone, if I should have one. So much have I received from the
great Giver, so little have I been able to return.”
One day a rash scatter-brained fellow who was always getting himself
and others into hot water asked her this question:
“Is it not always our duty to sacrifice ourselves for others?”
She knew very well that he was contemplating a perfectly reckless step
and was trying to hoodwink her--and himself--into thinking the action
noble, because it would be so disadvantageous to himself. The boy I
fear forgot her answer; here it is for you to remember and lay to heart.
“We must always remember that we come into the world alone, that we go
out of the world alone, that there is nothing to us but ourselves.”
Certain things, she held, we must sacrifice, selfish personal ends,
comfort, pleasure, ease, but if we are to fight the good fight we must
not make the fancied sacrifice of letting our arms rust while we lay
them down to fight another’s battle--nine times out of ten an easier
thing to do than to fight our own. She had met with so much opposition
all her life through serving the unpopular causes of Abolition, Woman’s
Suffrage, Religious Freedom, she had fought so grimly for what, when
she entered the ranks, always seemed a Forlorn Hope, that she knew the
real joy lies in the battle, not in the victory.
Her last public appearance in Boston was at a hearing in the State
House, where she came to plead for the cause of pure milk. This was
on the 23rd of May, 1910, four days before her ninety-first birthday.
There had been a great deal about the Pure Milk Crusade in the
newspapers, the Boston Journal had made a special question of it and
one of the reporters had already interviewed her on the subject. The
Chairman of the Massachusetts Milk Consumer’s Association had asked
her to give her name as honorary president of the league. This she
was glad to do, but this was not enough, she wanted to do more. I was
called up once or twice on the ’phone and asked if I thought Mrs.
Howe was able to speak before the legislative committee at one of the
hearings. I thought that with the birthday festivities so near and the
fatigue of moving down to Newport before her, this would be a little
too much, and consequently “begged off.” In these days there was a
meeting in Cambridge in memory of Margaret Fuller. She was invited to
be present, and was determined to go.
“They have not asked me to speak,” she said more than once.
“Of course they will ask you when they see you,” I assured her.
“I have my poem on Margaret written for her Centenary,” she said.
“Take it with you,” I advised. “Of course you will be asked to say
something, and then you will have your poem in your pocket and be all
prepared.”
I was unable to go with her to the meeting, a young lady who came
to read aloud to her going in my place. They came back late in the
afternoon; the meeting had been long and I saw immediately that she was
very tired. The cause of this soon appeared.
“They did not ask me to speak,” she said, “and I was the only person
present who had known Margaret and remembered her.”
I was deeply troubled about this. I saw that she had been hurt, and I
knew that if I had gone to the meeting I could have managed to let it
be known that she had brought her poem to read. For a very little time
she was a good deal depressed by the incident--felt she was out of the
race, no longer entered on the card for the running.
Very soon after this they telephoned me that there would be another
hearing on the milk question at half past ten, and that it would
probably go on all the morning. She had been very bright when she came
down to breakfast and made a capital meal. When I went into her room, I
found her at her desk all ready for the day’s campaign, though I knew
that the Margaret Fuller incident still rankled.
“There’s to be a hearing at the State House on the milk question; they
want you dreadfully to speak.”
She was all alert and full of interest in a moment.
“What do you say, shall we go?”
“Give me half an hour!”
I left her for that half hour. When I returned she had sketched out her
speech and dressed herself in her best flowered silk cloak and her new
lilac satin and lace hood--a birthday gift from a poor seamstress. We
drove to the State House together, and after some difficulty in finding
the right lift finally reached the room where the hearing was going on.
She had made these notes for her speech, but had not brought them with
her; we found them afterward in her desk.
“It seems to me that the theme of this hearing is one which should
commend itself to all good citizens. I think that even our patient
American public is tired of the delay, for although we are in many ways
a happy people, I do think that our public is a long suffering one. I
should think that we might hope for a speedy settlement. For we are not
discussing points of taste and pleasure, but matters of life and death.
There are various parties concerned in the desired settlement, but to
my mind the party most nearly concerned is the infant who comes into
this world relying upon a promise which we are bound to fulfil, the
promise that he shall at least enjoy the conditions of life. I learn
from men of science that no possible substitute exists for good milk
in the rearing of infants. How can we then delay the action which shall
secure it?”
She listened to the long speeches with interest, little realizing that
this was to be her last public appearance in Boston. When the time came
for her to speak, it was noticed that while all the others took the
oath upon the Bible to speak the truth, the whole truth and nothing but
the truth, the ceremony was omitted with her. As her name was called
she rose and stepped forward leaning on my arm.
“You may remain seated, Mrs. Howe,” said the Chairman.
“I prefer to stand,” was the answer. So, standing in the place
where, year after year, she had stood to ask for the full rights
of citizenship, for the right to vote, she made her last thrilling
appeal for justice. Her keen wit, her power of hitting the nail on the
head, were never used to better purpose. The hearing had been long
and tedious. There had been many speeches, the farmers who produce
the milk, the dealers who sell it, worthy citizens who were trying to
improve the quality of the milk supply, experts whose testimony showed
the far from ideal conditions under which the milk of the great city
is brought to its consumers. Everything had been proper, commonplace,
prosaic, deadly dull. Her speech was short and to the point, giving
in a few words the whole crux of the matter. Her presence, the
presence of the old Sybil, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother was
extraordinarily romantic, it lifted the whole occasion out of the realm
of the commonplace into that of the poetic. Her speech followed in
substance the notes she had prepared, but it was enhanced with touches
of eloquence such as this:
“We have heard a great deal about the farmers’ and the dealers’ side
of this case. We want the matter settled on the ground of justice and
mercy; it ought not to take long to settle what is just to all parties:
justice to all! Let us stand on that. There is one deeply interested
party however, of whom we have heard nothing. He cannot speak for
himself, I am here to speak for him, the infant!”
The impression made was overwhelming. This ancient Norn, grave and
beautiful as the elder Fate, claiming Justice for the infant in the
cradle! The effect upon the audience was electrical. The roughest
“hayseed” in the chamber “sat up;” the meanest dealer was moved, the
sleepiest legislator awoke. The silence in that place of creaking
chairs, and coughing citizens, was amazing. All listened as to a
prophetess as, step by step, she unfolded the case of the infant as
against farmer and dealer. When Mr. Arthur Dehon Hill, the Counsel for
the Association, led her from the room he said:
“Mrs. Howe, you have scored our first point.”
The friend, who had called in her help, was one of the strongest
“Anti-Suffragists.” This was a very characteristic happening. Whenever
any great question of public interest, not connected with Woman
Suffrage, came up, the “antis” were continually coming to ask her help.
If the cause was a good one she always gave it. She was no respecter of
persons; the cause was the thing. Over and over again she was appealed
to by those who were moving heaven and earth to oppose her in Suffrage,
to help some of their lesser ends. She was always ready; always hitched
her rope to their mired wagon and helped pull with a will. Her wagon
was hitched to a star, the force celestial in her tow rope was at the
service of all who asked for it in a good cause.
A few days after the State-house hearing, she fell in her own room and
broke a rib. She recovered from the effects of this and in the last
days of June moved down to her place at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where
she passed nearly four happy months with children, grandchildren and
great-grandchildren about her. Three weeks before her death she wrote
to the Reverend Ada Bowles:
“I have it in mind to write some open letters about Religion and to
publish them in the Woman’s Journal.”
She was at work upon the first of these, a definition of true Religion,
when the end came. Her last Tuesday on earth, she presided at the
Papeterie, a social club of Newport ladies, in whose meetings she
delighted. She was in splendid vein; that gay company of clever women
gathered around her as pretty butterflies hover about a queen rose,
still fascinated, still entranced by this belle of ninety years. She
wore over her pretty white dress the hood she had received from Brown
University, the year before, when she was given the degree of Doctor
of Literature. She was as usual the central figure at the meeting, and
gave the Club a vivid account of her visit to Smith College, whither
she had gone the week before to receive another degree. The next
morning she worked at her “Definition of True Religion;” five days
later, the summons came. Leaving the task unfinished, as she would have
said, “the iron to cool upon the anvil,” she passed on to the larger
task that now absorbs her ardent spirit.
During her last years she received many letters, even printed
documents, with minute inquiries touching her method of life. A society
of Nonogenarians sent a set of questions about her habits of body, and
mind, with a postscript asking especially to what she attributed her
unusually prolonged activity. Though I am sure she must have answered,
for she was faithful beyond belief in such matters, we have found no
record of her answer. Now she has left us, her children are often asked
the same sort of question about her:
“How did she do it?”
“What was her secret?”
“Why did she die ninety-one years young, instead of ninety-one years
old?”
If she herself had tried to tell you her secret, to account for her
rare powers preserved so late in life, spent so prodigally at an
age when the lean and slippered pantaloon hoards his scant store of
strength as a miser hoards his gold, she would have said something like
this:
“You must remember I had a splendid Irish wet-nurse!”
Perhaps she laid too much stress on that excellent woman’s share in
making her all she was (no foster-mother was ever more faithfully
remembered by nursling); she owed something, surely, to her forebears.
She came of good old fighting stock; in her veins thrilled the blood
of Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox of Virginia, of General Greene, both
heroes of the Revolution, of that staunch old rebel, Roger Williams,
of the Wards, for two generations colonial Governors of Rhode Island.
All this fighting blood, together with her red hair, gave a certain
militant touch to her character; she was a good fighter for every
just cause, especially the cause of Peace. Though she spoke oftener
of the Irish wet-nurse than of her ancestors, she did not altogether
forget them as an anecdote told by my sister, Mrs. Richards, proves.
They were at some meeting, a religious gathering I think, where one
speaker--rather an effete pessimist--closed a speech in the key of the
“Everlasting No,” with the doleful words:
“I feel myself weighed down by a sense of the sins of my ancestors.”
My mother, who was the next speaker, sprang to her feet with the retort:
“And I feel myself lifted up on the virtues of mine!”
There rang out the key-note of her life, the “Everlasting Yea,” the
trumpet-tone to which all high souls rally.
Many people have had fine wet-nurses; a legion have the same legacy of
power in their blood, who do not accomplish much with it.
_Poeta nascitur, non fit!_ She was of course born an uncommon person,
but I believe the manner and habits of her life, quite as much as her
native power, made for her vigorous old age. As I look back on the
intimate compan companionship of a lifetime, I realize that these
excellent life habits, habits that any one of us can cultivate, had
even more to do with her long continued usefulness than the great Irish
wet-nurse herself.
First, and last, and all the time, she worked, and worked, and worked,
steadily as nature works, without rest, without haste. She was never
idle, she was never in a hurry. Though she played too, earnestly,
enthusiastically, it was never idle play; there was always a dash of
poetry in her pastime, whether it was making a charade for the Brain
Club, or composing a nursery rhyme for her grandchildren. The capacity
for work like everything else grows by cultivation. She started life
with a rarely active mind and temperament. So do many people. It was
the habit of study, of concentration, of work, carefully cultivated
from the first, held on to in spite of difficulties--she had plenty of
them--that wrought what seemed to some of her contemporaries a miracle.
She could say like Adam in Shakespeare’s play “As You Like It:”
“My age is as a lusty winter;
Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you;
I’ll do the service of a younger man
In all your business and necessities.”
“Let me go with you!” This is what Age is forever saying to Youth. “Do
not leave me behind--I can still serve!” So long as Age makes good the
claim, heydey, headlong, good-natured Youth lets the veteran march
in its glorious ranks. Youth does not crowd him out, as the veteran
too often thinks, he drops out because he “cannot keep the pace!” The
reason she did not drop out was because she made good her claim. The
children and grandchildren of those with whom she first enlisted, were
content to have her march with them, still in the van.
Her training, from her very start in life, made her a cosmopolitan; one
of the factors of this world citizenship was her very early study of
foreign languages. French, Italian and Latin she knew almost from the
time she could speak, so that she gathered into her spirit the essence
of the race genius of the Latins. Later came the Teutonic baptism, for
she only learned German at fourteen, when her adored brother, Sam
Ward, came home from Heidelberg, brimming over with the songs, the
poetry, the philosophy of Germany. She studied Schiller and Goethe
with ardor--among her treasures, we have found a long autograph letter
from Goethe to her tutor, Dr. Cogswell. In her youth there were still
cultivated French people living in New York, who had taken refuge there
during the reign of terror. She remembered one of these gentlemen in
exile who gave her French lessons, another who came to the house when
there was a dinner party to mix the salad, a third who came to dress
her hair for a ball. Then there were a group of Italian political
exiles who were made welcome at her father’s house, and the Greek boy
(a fugitive from the unspeakable Turk), Christy Evangelides, adopted
by him, who till the day of his death spoke of her as his sister
Julia. All these early influences tended to make a cosmopolitan of the
little lady while she was still in the nursery. The general culture
of the “little old New York” of that time was far broader than that
of Boston; the narrow swaddling bands of Puritan provincialism never
bound her free and vaulting spirit. From world citizenship to universal
citizenship, to other world citizenship is a far cry. There are men
and women with a truly cosmopolitan spirit who never attain that wider
universal citizenship. She often quoted Margaret Fuller’s “I accept
the universe.” Though keenly aware of the manner in which Margaret
had laid herself open to ridicule by this high-sounding phrase,
without herself formulating it (her sense of humor could never have
allowed that), she practically did “accept the universe,” was always
conscious of a sort of universal citizenship that made the affairs of
every oppressed people her affairs. No hand, however dirty, was ever
stretched out to her that she did not take it in her own and in taking
it recognize the God in the man. She carried a touchstone in her bosom
by which she found gold in natures that to others seemed trivial and
base. She had few intimate friends, none in the usual sense of the
term, for with all her bonhommie that made her the “friend of all the
world,” the Universal Friend was her only real intimate. Her reserve
of soul was impenetrable; only her poems, and occasionally a page in
her diary, give us any insight into her spiritual nature--glimpses of a
certain high companionship with the stars and the planets.
We hear much of the dual nature of man. The term misleads. Man, or at
least woman has a triple nature, is made up of flesh, mind and spirit.
How did she use these three different natures--the physical, the
intellectual, the spiritual?
In her youth the views of health were very different from what they are
now. As a child, she lived the greater part of the year in New York,
where she was never encouraged to take much outdoor air or exercise.
Every afternoon at three o’clock the big yellow and blue family coach,
drawn by two fat horses, came to the door to take the children out for
a drive. Even when they went to the country for a change of air, the
children’s complexions were more considered than their health. Miss
Danforth, an old friend of the family, told my mother in later years of
having met the Wards at the seaside, where Julia, who had a delicate
ivory complexion, wore a thick green worsted veil when she went down to
the beach.
“Little Julia has another freckle today,” the visitor was told. “It was
not her fault, the nurse forgot her veil.”
She was from the first a natural student, loving her books better than
anything else; but she was a perfectly normal child too and her good
spirits and her social gifts often tempted her from her work. Her
sister Louisa remembered that she used to make her maid tie her into
her chair, so that she should not be able to leave her study should the
temptation assail her. In spite of a too sedentary youth, she started
life with an uncommonly good body. After her marriage to my father she
received many new and valuable ideas on matters hygienic, and while
never a great pedestrian she always walked twice a day till the very
end of her life. Still it must be confessed that her muscles were the
least developed part of her. For the last twenty years she was rather
lame, the result of a fall, when her knee was badly injured. She was
always persistent in walking as much as she was able however, in spite
of the effort it cost her. During the summer and autumn, she passed
a large part of the day, studying and reading, on the piazza of her
country house at Oak Glen in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Though for many years she left the housekeeping to the daughter or
granddaughter who was living with her, she always kept her own bank
account and never allowed any one to take charge of her finances. She
often lamented that her hands were so useless for household tasks,
envying her granddaughters’ dexterity with scissors and needle. I must
not forget to mention her practising. She had a beautiful voice which
had been carefully trained in the old Italian method. She practised
her scales regularly all her life; I have often heard her say she
believed the exercise of singing was very valuable in preparing her
for public speaking. She was faithful too in practising on the piano,
and always played her scales so that her fingers never lost their
flexibility or the power to do the things she really wanted them to
do--to hold the pen (she almost never dictated, but wrote everything
with her own hand), to play the piano, to accompany her speaking with
appropriate gestures. To the last her hands retained their exquisite
shape; the cast made from them after death shows their unimpaired
beauty. My father was very strict about diet; all “fried abominations”
were taboo with him, pastry, high seasoning, ham, cocoanut cakes--all
rich food--were anathema maranatha. From first to last she was frankly
a rebel in this matter. It was said, in the family, that she had
the digestion of an ostrich. In spite of all opposition she calmly
continued to eat whatever she fancied to the end of her life. During
her last summer she wrote to her physician asking permission to eat
ham and pastry, dishes that to her daughters seemed a little heavy for
summer weather. At her last luncheon party she was advised not to eat
pâté de foies gras or to drink champagne; she put aside the advice with
the familiar remark we all knew so well:
“I have taken these things all my life and they have never hurt me.”
The fact of the matter was, she had a perfect digestion which she used
carefully and never abused. She ate moderately and slowly, with an
entire disregard to what is usually considered good for old people.
She rose at seven; in her youth and middle age she took a cold bath,
in later years the bath was tepid--well or ill, it was never omitted.
During the last twenty years, that great fourth score so rich in
happiness to herself and her family, and that greater family of hers,
the Public, she took a little light wine with her dinner, “for her
stomach’s sake,” as she would say, quoting St. Paul. This, with a
cup of tea for breakfast, was the only stimulant she needed, for her
spirits were so buoyant, her temperament so overflowing with the _joie
de vivre_, that we called her the “family champagne.” Breakfast with us
was a social meal; there was always conversation and much laughter for
she came down in the morning with her spirits at their highest level.
She slept about eight hours. Until her seventieth year I never knew her
to lie down in the daytime, unless she was suffering with headache.
The first part of that seventieth year was not a good time for her.
More hearty healthy people are killed every year by the sentence:
“The days of our years are threescore years and ten,” than by any
four diseases you like to name. Even her radiant health, her buoyant
temperament felt its depressing influence; as the weeks and months went
by and she found herself quite as vigorous in her seventieth year
as she had been in her sixty-ninth, she forgot all about her age and
resumed her activities, retaining under protest the daily nap. She lay
down with the clock on the bed beside her; twenty minutes was quite
time enough to “waste in napping!” During the last five or six years,
always grudgingly, she gave a little more time to resting, taking a
half-hour’s siesta before luncheon, another before dinner, “to rest her
back.” She always sat in a straight backed chair, never in her long
life having learned how to “lounge” in an easy chair. She was by nature
a night owl and never wanted to go to bed if there was any other night
owl to keep her company. So much for her use of that faithful servant,
the body. If the development of her muscles was not quite up to the
modern standard, her intellectual training far surpassed it. From first
to last she kept her mind in the same state of high training that the
athlete keeps his body, strove for that perfect balance of power in all
the different functions of the brain that an all-round athlete aims for
in his physique. I never remember a time when she relaxed the mental
gymnastics that kept her mind strong, supple, active.
Once, at a crucial moment, when beset by perplexities, I asked for
advice, her answer, stamped on my memory as long as it shall hold
together, was given in three Latin words:
“_Posce fortem animum._” Ask for a strong mind! The motto of her
English friend, Edward Twistleton, known and loved by her generation of
Bostonians.
Ask for a strong mind; ask earnestly enough and you will get it,
will learn to laugh at that old-fashioned bogey, the fear of being
considered “strong-minded.”
Long ago, when a silly acquaintance demanded if it was true she was a
strong-minded woman, she parried with the counter thrust:
“Is it not better to be strong-minded than to be weak-minded?”
If you want a strong mind or a strong body there is only one way to get
it, by faithful exercise. There is no royal road, no easy short cut to
either goal. The wise friend, the good physician can point out the
way, you yourself must tread it!
She always read her letters and the newspapers (history in the making)
immediately after breakfast. Then came the morning walk, a bout of
calisthenics, or a game of ball; after this she settled to the real
serious business of the day; ten o’clock saw her at her desk. She began
the morning with study, took up the hardest reading she had on hand. In
her youth she read Goethe; in her middle life, when she was deep in the
study of German philosophy, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. For years Kant was
the most intimate companion of her thought. In the early sixties, when
she was in the forties, her diary was filled with Kant’s philosophy.
Sometimes she differs with his conclusions, sometimes amplifies them,
oftenest endorses them.
“One chosen lover, one chosen philosopher!” was her motto. While she
owed much to Spinoza and records in her journal that Kant does not
do him justice, her philosopher par excellence was Immanuel Kant. On
her seventieth birthday the Saturday Morning Club of Boston gave her
a beautiful jewel with seven moonstones and one topaz. At a dinner
soon after she wore this jewel to pin a lace scarf. The conversation
at table turned on Kantian philosophy and she was asked some question
concerning it.
“Do you think I wear the Categorical Imperative on my left shoulder?”
she cried.
“Is this the Categorical Imperative?” asked Mrs. Whitman, pointing to
the jewel that held the lace. After that the club’s jewel went by the
name of one of the toughest nuts in Kant’s philosophy.
When she was fifty years old she learned Greek; from the time she could
read it fluently, the Greek philosophers, historians, and dramatists
shared with the Germans those precious hours of morning study. In the
end the Hellenes routed the Teutons, and remained her most cherished
intimates. At luncheon she would tell us what she had been studying,
an excellent way to teach children history. I shall never forget the
day when she had read in Xenophon’s Anabasis the account of the retreat
of the Greeks, who formed part of the expedition of Cyrus. She came
dancing into the dining room, where the children were waiting for their
soup, waving her beautiful hands and crying:
“Thalatta! Thalatta!” the cry of the wearied Greeks on first catching
sight of the sea, after wandering for years in the interior of the
Persian empire.
No event in history is quite so real to me as Hannibal’s crossing the
Alps. Day by day she took us with that valiant Carthaginian general
on his long journey across Hispania, over the Pyrenees, through Gaul,
along the Rhone, and over the Graian Alps. The day Hannibal finally got
his elephants over the Little Saint Bernard Pass, and down into Italy,
was one of positive rejoicing for us little ones. Her imagination was
so keen that when she repeated to us what she had been studying, it
always seemed as if she had seen these things with her own eyes, not
merely read about them. The effort of studying Greek whetted her mind
to its keenest edge. Aristotle and Plato, with her Greek Testament,
she read to the last. She talked with us less about the philosophers
than the dramatists and historians. I remember how much we heard about
the Birds of Aristophanes, one of her favorite classics. Reading Greek
was, I think, the greatest pleasure of her later life. One afternoon
last summer, when a pretty girl of a studious turn came to see her, I
chanced to hear her parting words, said with a fervor and solemnity
that impressed the young visitor:
“Study Greek, my dear, it’s better than a diamond necklace!”
After the morning plunge into Greek or German philosophy “to tone up
her mind,” she took up whatever literary task she was at work upon,
“put the iron on the anvil,” as her phrase was, “and hammered” at
it till luncheon. She was a most careful and conscientious writer,
writing, rewriting, and “polishing” her work with inexhaustible
patience. Occasionally she got a poem all whole, in one piece, like The
Battle Hymn. This was rare though; as a rule she toiled and moiled over
her manuscripts. In the afternoon she was at her desk again, unless
there was some outside engagement--answering letters, reading books in
a lighter vein, Italian poetry, a Spanish play, a book of travels or,
best of all, a good French novel.
Each day opened with the stern drill of the Greek or German philosophy,
by which her mind was exercised and at the same time stored with the
thoughts of the wise, the labors of the good, the prayers of the
devout. That was the first process, the taking in, receiving the wisdom
of the ages. Then came the second or creative process, when she gave
out even as she had received. This regular mental exercise was like a
series of gymnastics, by widen the receptive and creative functions
of the brain were kept in perfect working order. If you are to _pour
out_, you must first _pour in_. If your lamp is to serve as a beacon
light, it must be well trimmed and filled with oil every day.
She never in my memory took up any work after dark. Unless she was
called abroad by some festivity or meeting, the evening was our play
time. She invariably dressed for dinner, which was followed by talk,
whist, music, and reading aloud. She rarely used the precious daylight
for reading English novels, so at night she was ready to listen to some
“rattling good story” recommended by one of the grandchildren. She
delighted in Stevenson, Crawford, Cable, Barrie, Stanley Weyman, Conan
Doyle, Meredith, Tolstoi and Sienkiewicz. How she loved the friends
of bookland, the friends who never hurt or bore! The new ones were
welcome, but she was faithful to the old and liked nothing better than
to reread those masterpieces of her youth, the novels of Scott, Dickens
and Thackeray. We read Pickwick every year or two; she never wearied
of the greatest English novelist’s greatest masterpiece. A good ghost
story made her flesh creep; she was often kept awake by the troubles of
the “people in the book,” who were so real to her that, when they were
having a very bad time of it, she would spread her hands before her
face and cry out:
“Stop! Stop! I cannot endure it!”
Money troubles of hero or heroine especially afflicted her; this was
odd, for she bore the loss of the greater part of her own fortune
with courage and equanimity. Though she knew the value of money,
and practised the most touching little economies so that she might
have more to give away, she cared very little about money and was
always too busy with more important matters to think much of it. The
stories of arctic adventure, Jack London’s especially, “gave her the
shivers;” she ached with the cold and hunger of his dogs and heroes.
The younger people among the listeners often envied her enthusiasm. Her
imagination was so keen, her power of making believe the story was real
so tantalizing, infectious too, that it carried us through many a book
that would have been dull without it.
One of the last books she enjoyed was Dr. Morton Prince’s Dissociation
of a Personality. She was deeply interested in this last word on
psychology and every day at luncheon gave us an account of Sally’s last
prank.
In her later years, though she wrote much poetry, she did not read
as much English verse as in her youth. I do not know at what period
she studied Shakespeare, but she was so familiar with the plays that
at the theatre I have often heard her murmur a correction of a line
falsely given by some player. Her memory was prodigious; it was
like a vast collection of pigeon-holes, where there was a place for
everything, and everything was in its place. She seemed to have a sort
of mental card-catalogue of all the knowledge that was stored away in
her capacious brain. It was as if the subjects were all classified,
and when she wished to speak, write or think on any given one, she
consulted the catalogue, then went straight to the alcove in that well
stored library and brought forth volume after volume dealing with the
subject under consideration. It will hardly be believed that she wrote
her volume of Reminiscences entirely from memory, never so much as
consulting her own diary. It has been said of her that she remembered
all she ever knew, whereas most of us forget a large part of what we
have known. She certainly had an unusual command of her own knowledge.
On one of my long absences in Europe, I had taken with me by mistake
her large Worcester’s dictionary, thinking it was mine. On my return
after an absence of more than two years, I exclaimed:
“How dreadful it was of me to take your dictionary--what have you
done--did you buy a new one?”
“I did not know you had taken it,” she said.
“But--how did you get along without a dictionary?”
She was surprised at the question.
“I never use a word whose meaning I do not know.”
“But the spelling?”
She gave a funny little French gesture of the shoulders, inherited with
so much else from her Huguenot ancestors, of whom she knew little and
thought much. It meant, I suppose:
“When you have learned Latin, Greek, French, German, Spanish and
Italian, you will have learned how to spell English--perhaps!”
At sunset, sitting upon her piazza at Oak Glen, her eyes fixed on the
flaming sky beyond her pines, if she chanced to be alone, she would
repeat an ode of Horace. She was learning one, line by line, when the
summons came. I remember her saying that this made the thirtieth ode
she had committed to memory. _Nous revenons á nos premiers amours_.
Horace, the delight of her youth, consoled what might have been some
lonely hours in her last days.
So much for the regular intellectual drill, by which she kept her mind
delicately keen, as the soldier keeps his weapons for the fight, as
the craftsman keeps the tools for his work. Admirable as this was, it
was only the secondary source of her power. What was it fed the inner
flame of her life so that it shone through her face, as fire shines
through an alabaster vase?
She tapped the great life current that flows round the world; to those
who know the trick, ’tis the simplest, most natural thing in the world
to do, as easy as for the babe to draw the milk from its mother’s
breast. You have merely to put yourself “on the circuit,” let the
force universal flow through you, and you can move mountains or bridge
oceans. She knew the trick; she was forever trying to teach it to
others, to women in especial, to working women above all others.
Her first waking act was prayer, aspiration; her last, thanksgiving,
praise! Just as some persons’ first action is to open the window and
fill the lungs with fresh air, or to drink a glass of cold water, hers
was to open wide the door of her soul and let the breath of the Spirit
blow through it. She was a mystic, a seer. The Battle Hymn was not
the only poem “given” her in the gray dawn of day when the birds were
singing their matins; many of her best poems, her best thoughts came to
her during the first moments of consciousness, when the Marthas of this
world are wondering what they shall get for breakfast, or what clothes
they shall put on. Poor Martha, dear Martha! Try for the uplift and the
grace--they will come to you, even if yours is not the art to make a
poem out of them. That is a special gift! Live your poem, and its music
will turn the lives of those with whom you live from prose to poetry,
change life’s water into wine.
She very rarely talked with her children on religious matters. Both
she and my father had a dread of giving us the very narrow religious
training they themselves had received. Conscious of the mistakes of
such a bringing up, she shunned them and, though we all knew how devout
a person she was, it was chiefly through her writings and her poems
that we received a sense of the religious side of her nature. Her faith
in a divine Providence was the deep well-spring in which the roots of
her being were fixed. She lived in daily communion with the divine
life. Her diary is full of dreams that are like the ecstatic visions of
the old saints. In the note already referred to written on the margin
of a poem in her posthumous volume, At Sunset, she says:
“The thought came to me that if God only looked upon me I should become
radiant like a star.”
Beatrice, her favorite of Shakespeare’s heroines, says:
“There was a star danced and under that I was born!”
In October, the month she left us, a wonderful star appears in the
heavens, and at this season of the year shines with an extraordinary
brilliancy. She always watched for it and often pointed it out to
others.
“What is the name of that star?” I have heard her ask more than one man
of science. “It changes color like a flash light in a light house,
flashes from white to green and then to red.” At last she asked the
question of a man who could answer it and learned that her star’s name
was Aldebaran and that is one of the stars of the constellation of
Taurus. Her horoscope was never cast, but I believe that she was born
under the influence of that wonderful star that flashes first the color
of the diamond, then the ruby, and last the emerald, and that when she
was born, Aldebaran danced!
Though she so rarely spoke of such matters, we who lived with her were
fed at second hand by that deep limpid stream, the river of immortal
life, in which she grew rooted deep. One of the many manifestations of
this was the joyousness with which she took up each day and its little
cares. She always came into the room in the morning like a child who
has some good news to share with the family. Those wonderful spirits,
that overflowed in every sort of wit, jest and antic, took the sting
from the bitterest nature; in her company the satirist grew kind,
the cynic humane. A deep spiritual joy seemed to enwrap her like a
sort of enveloping climate. Where she was, the sun shone, the sky was
blue, birds sang, brooks babbled, for so tremendous was her spiritual
force that it always conquered. It sometimes seemed to me as if I
was conscious of a sort of war of temperaments between her and some
pessimistic or cynical nature. It was like one of those days when, as
we say, “the sun is trying to come out.” The sun of her presence never
failed to come out, to banish the gray fog of the blues, the sufferings
of the irritable or the disheartened. When people came to talk to her
of their troubles, as they often did, the troubles seemed to shrink
like the clouds on a dark day, leaving first a little peep of blue
visible, and finally the whole sky, clear and fervid.
One word more, take it as a legacy, a keepsake from her. I asked her
for a statement of the ideal aim of life. She paused a moment, then
summed up the mighty matter in one sentence, clear and cosmic as a
single rain-drop, a very epitome of her own life:
“To Learn, To Teach, To Serve, And To Enjoy!”
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Ward Howe, by Maud Howe Elliott
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