Books: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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Elbert Hubbard >> Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9
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It will be seen that this is the pure Emersonian faith which has not
only been applied to life in general, but to the arts. Anne Hutchinson
was the mother of New England Transcendentalism. Self-consciousness is
fatal to the art of expression; he who fixes his thought on the
movements of his hands and feet is sure to get tangled up in them;
good digestion does not require the attention of the party most
interested; and he who devotes all of the time to his spiritual estate
will soon have the whole property in chancery. Man is not a finality--
he is not the thing--the play's the thing: life is the play and the
play is life. Man is only one of the properties. Look out, not in; up,
not down, and lend a hand. And these things form the modern
application of the philosophy of Anne Hutchinson.
The ministers got together in secret session and decided that Anne
Hutchinson must be subdued. She was a usurper upon their preserve, a
trespasser and an interloper. Fear was the rock upon which they split.
And I am not sure but that fear is the only rock in life's channel.
Mrs. Hutchinson had told them that sermons, prayers and hymns were
mere "works," and that a person could do all that they demanded and
still be a thief and a rogue at heart, and that this close attention
to conduct meant eventual hypocrisy. On the other hand, if your mental
attitude was right, your conduct would be right.
"Even though it is wrong?" asked the Reverend Mr. Wilson.
And Anne Hutchinson replied, "Aye, verily."
"Then you say that you can commit no sin?"
"If my heart is right, I can not sin."
"Is your heart right?"
"I am trying to make it so."
"Then you can commit any act you wish?"
"Whatever I wish to do will be right, if my heart is right."
"But suppose, now--" and here these clergymen asked questions which no
gentleman ever asks a lady.
These men had a fine faculty for misunderstanding, misinterpreting,
and misrepresenting other people's thoughts.
John Cotton tried to pour oil on the troubled waters by explaining
that the idea of a Covenant of Grace was general, and to make it
specific was unjust and unreasonable. Then they turned on Cotton and
said, "So, you are one of them?"
Anne Hutchinson was ordered not to speak in public.
She still held meetings at her own house, and claimed she had the
right to ask her friends to her home and there to talk to them.
She it was who instituted the Boston Thursday Lecture, which was taken
up by John Cotton and carried by an apostolic succession to the
crowning days of its success, when Adirondack Murray reigned supreme.
Mrs. Hutchinson spoke to all the women the house would hold. The
Colony was divided into two parts: those who believed in a Covenant of
Grace and those who held to a Covenant of Works.
John Cotton seemed to be the only clergyman of the eight who realized
that both sides were right. Anne Hutchinson quoted him, told what he
had said in England, as well as here--and then John Cotton had to
defend himself. He did it by criticizing her, and then by accusing her
of taking his words too literally. He feared the mob.
The breach widened--he denounced her. Winthrop was against her, and
Cotton saw defeat for himself if he longer stood by her. She was a
good woman, but she must be suppressed for the good of the Colony.
With the consent of Cotton, and Wilson, his colleague, these two men,
being joint ministers to the Boston church, made formal charges of
heresy against her.
Sir Henry Vane, a youth of twenty-four, noble both by birth and by
nature, was elected Governor of the Colony. He sided with Mrs.
Hutchinson, and sought to bring commonsense to bear and stem the tide
of fanaticism. They turned on him, and his downfall was identical with
hers, although he was to return to England and make his own way to
success: to love Peg Woffington and elbow his way to place and power,
and also to London Tower, and lay his head upon the block in the
interests of human rights.
Mrs. Hutchinson was tried by an ecclesiastic court and found guilty.
In the trial, which covered several months, Mrs. Hutchinson defended
herself at great length and with much skill; but what the clergymen
demanded was an absolute retraction, and a promise that she would no
longer usurp their special function of giving public instruction.
All this time the Colony was rent by schism. Up at Salem was a Baptist
preacher by the name of Roger Williams, who was much in sympathy with
Mrs. Hutchinson, personally, although not adopting all of her ideas.
He thought that in view of the great usefulness of Mrs. Hutchinson as
a nurse and neighbor, she should be allowed to speak when she chose
and say what she wished, "because if it be a lie, it will die; and if
it be truth, we ought to know it." Roger Williams would have done well
to have kept a civil tongue in his head. There was a rod in pickle for
him, too, and his words were duly noted and recorded by witnesses.
Then there was Mary Dyer, wife of William Dyer, who came to Boston in
Sixteen Hundred Thirty-five, when the Hutchinson trouble was beginning
to brew. Mary Dyer is described by John Winthrop as "a comely person
of ready tongue, somewhat given to frivolity." But the years were to
subdue her. She became much attached to Mrs. Hutchinson, and whenever
Mrs. Hutchinson spoke in public Mrs. Dyer was always near at hand to
lend her support. In the journal of Winthrop there are various
references to Mrs. Dyer. The man was interested in her, but one of
these references reflects most seriously on the mental processes of
this excellent man. When the charges of heresy were brought against
Mrs. Hutchinson, Mrs. Dyer stood by her boldly, and was threatened by
the clergymen with similar proceedings. Winthrop says Mrs. Dyer was so
wrought upon by the excitement that she was taken with premature
childbirth. She was attended by Mrs. Hutchinson, and the child, "being
not human," was despatched. This horrible story was related throughout
the Colony, and both women were regarded as being in league with the
devil. School-children used to run and hide when they saw Mrs. Dyer
coming. A little later the Reverend Cotton Mather was to cite the case
of Mary Dyer as precedent for his pet belief in witchcraft.
Mrs. Hutchinson was found guilty and expelled from the church. She was
then again tried by the General Court, wherein all of her judges in
the Ecclesiastic Court also sat. After a long, laborious and insulting
trial, with no one but herself to raise a voice in her defense, pitted
against the eight clergymen, she ably defended her cause and actually
put them all to rout--an unforgivable thing, and an error in judgment
on her part.
There is much literature surrounding the case, and one of the
ministers, Thomas Welde, wrote a pamphlet explaining his part in it,
quite forgetful of the fact that explanations never explain. The more
one reads of Welde, the greater is his admiration for Mrs. Hutchinson.
Governor Hutchinson of Massachusetts, the great-grandson of Anne
Hutchinson, edited the journal of Winthrop, and gives a remarkably
unprejudiced account of the sufferings of his great maternal ancestor.
Being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Mrs. Hutchinson
found refuge in Rhode Island, where she was welcomed by Roger
Williams, the first person, I believe, who lifted up his voice for
free speech in America. Mrs. Hutchinson was followed by her own family
and eighteen persons from Boston who sympathized with her. Included in
the party was Mary Dyer.
At Providence, Mrs. Hutchinson drew around her a goodly number of
people, including Quakers and Baptists, who listened to her discourses
with interest.
The ministers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony evidently felt that they
had made a mistake, for they got together and delegated three of their
number to go down to Providence and acquaint the renegades with the
news that if they would recant all belief in a Covenant of Grace, they
could return. Mrs. Hutchinson met the delegates with dignity and
kindness. The conference lasted for two days, and the committee
returned reporting the matter hopeless.
There were several desertions from Boston by those who sympathized
with Mrs. Hutchinson, and some of those people Mrs. Hutchinson
prevailed upon to go back. There were threats that the Massachusetts
people were coming down to capture them all by force. This so preyed
upon the Hutchinsons, who had suffered severely, that they packed
their now scanty goods upon a raft, and with improvised sails headed
for the Dutch settlement of Manhattan.
They were kindly received and given title to a tract of land on Long
Island, near Hell Gate. There, in a little clearing, on the water's
edge, they began to build a house. Ere the roof was on they were
attacked by Indians, who evidently mistook them for Dutch, and all
were massacred.
So died Anne Hutchinson.
* * * * *
Anne Hutchinson was mourned by Mary Dyer as a sister, and she preached
a funeral sermon at Providence in eulogy of her. Mrs. Dyer also went
back to Boston and made an address in praise of Anne Hutchinson on
Boston Common, to the great scandal of the community. Mrs. Dyer had
now become a Quaker, principally because Quakers had no paid
priesthood and allowed women who heard the Voice to preach.
Mary Dyer heard the Voice and preached. Her attention was called to
the law, which in Boston provided that Quakers and Jews should have
their ears cut off and their tongues bored.
She continued to preach, and was banished.
She came back, and was found standing in front of the jail talking
through the bars to two Quakers, Robinson and Stevenson, who were
confined there awaiting sentence. She had brought them food, and was
exhorting them to be of good-cheer. She was locked up, and asked to
recant. She acknowledged she was a Quaker, and not in sympathy with
magistracy.
She was sentenced by Governor Endicott, on her own confession, with
having a contempt for authority, and ordered to be hanged. The day
came and she was led forth, walking hand in hand with her two guilty
Quaker brothers.
The scaffold was on Boston Common, on the little hill about where the
band-stand is at the present day.
Mrs. Dyer stood and watched them hang her friends, one at a time. As
they were swung off into space she called to them to hold fast to the
truth, "for Christ is with us!" Whenever she spoke or sang, the drums
that were standing in front and back of her were ordered to beat, so
as to drown her voice.
After the bodies of her friends had dangled half an hour they were cut
down.
It was then her turn. She ascended the scaffold, refusing the help of
the Reverend Mr. Wilson. He followed her and bound his handkerchief
over her eyes, a guard in the meantime tying her hands and feet with
rawhide.
"Do you renounce the Quakers?"
"Never, praise God, His son Jesus Christ, and Anne Hutchinson, His
handmaiden--we live by truth!".
"A reprieve! a reprieve!!" some one shouted. And it was so--Governor
Endicott had ordered that this woman be banished, not hanged, unless
she again came back to Boston. It was all an arranged trick to
frighten the woman thoroughly.
Wilson removed the handkerchief from her eyes. They unbound her feet,
and the thongs that held her hands were loosed. She looked down below
at the bodies of Robinson and Stevenson lying dead on the grass. She
asked that the sentence upon her be carried out. But not so: she was
led by guards fifteen miles out into the forest and there liberated.
In a few months she was back in Boston, to see her two grown-up sons,
and also to bear witness to the "Inner Light."
Being brought before Governor Endicott, she was asked, "Are you the
same Mary Dyer that was here before?"
"I am the same Mary Dyer."
"Do you know you are under sentence of death?"
"I do, and I came back to remind you of the unrighteousness of your
laws, and to warn you to repent!"
"Are you still a Quaker?"
"I am still reproachfully so called."
"Tomorrow at nine o'clock I order that you shall be hanged."
"This sounds like something you said before!"
"Lead her away--away, I say!"
At nine the next morning a vast crowd covered the Common, the shops
and stores being closed, by order, for a holiday.
Mr. Wilson again attended the culprit. "Mary Dyer, Mary Dyer!" he
called in a loud voice as they stood together on the scaffold. "Mary
Dyer, repent, oh, repent, and renounce your heresies!"
And Mary Dyer answered, "Nay, man; I am not now to repent, knowing
nothing to repent of!"
"Shall I have the men of God pray for you?"
She looked about curiously, half-smiled, and said, "I see none here."
"Will you have the people pray for you?"
"Yes; I want all the people to pray for me!"
Again the light was shut out from her eyes, this time forever. Her
hands were bound behind her with thongs that cut into her wrists, her
feet were tied. She reeled, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson kindly
supported her. The noose was adjusted.
"Let us all pray!" said the Reverend Mr. Wilson. So they hanged Mary
Dyer in the morning.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
When the service of the public ceases to be the principal concern of
the citizens, and they would rather discharge it by their purses
than their persons, the State is already far on the way to ruin.
When they should march to fight, they pay troops to fight for them
and stay at home; when they should go to council, they send deputies
and remain away; thus, in consequence of their indolence and wealth,
they in the end employ soldiers to enslave their country, and
representatives to sell it. So soon as a citizen says, What are
State Affairs to me? the State may be given up for lost.
--_Rousseau_
[Illustration]
Who is the great man?
Listen, and I will tell you: He is great who feeds other minds. He is
great who inspires others to think for themselves. He is great who
tells you the things you already know, but which you did not know you
knew until he told you. He is great who shocks you, irritates you,
affronts you, so that you are jostled out of your wonted ways, pulled
out of your mental ruts, lifted out of the mire of the commonplace.
That writer is great whom you alternately love and hate. That writer
is great whom you can not forget.
Certainly, yes, the man in his private life may be proud, irritable,
rude, crude, coarse, faulty, absurd, ignorant, immoral--grant it all,
and yes be great. He is not great on account of these things, but in
spite of them. The seeming inconsistencies and inequalities of his
nature may contribute to his strength, as the mountains and valleys,
the rocks and woods, make up the picturesqueness of the landscape.
He is great to whom writers, poets, painters, philosophers, preachers,
and scientists go, each to fill his own little tin cup, dipper,
calabash, vase, stein, pitcher, amphora, bucket, tub, barrel or cask.
These men may hate him, refute him, despise him, reject him, insult
him, as they probably will if they are much indebted to him; yet if he
stirs the molecules in their minds to a point where they create
caloric, he has benefited them and therefore he is a great man.
Jean Jacques Rousseau was a great man. We are still reading him--still
talking about him--still trying to clap label upon him--still hunting
for a pigeonhole in which to place him.
If a man were wholly crude, rude, ignorant and coarse, and if he did
nothing but shock and irritate us, we would quickly cast him aside.
But in addition to shocking us the great man fascinates us by his
insight, his subtlety, his imagination, his sympathy, his tenderness,
his love. Behind the act he sees the cause, and so he excuses and
forgives. Knowing the present he is able to forecast the future, for
he, of all men, knows that effect follows cause. He does what we dare
not and says what we would like to if we had the mind. So in one sense
the man is our vicarious self--"I am that man." His very faultiness
brings him near. His blunders make him to us akin.
* * * * *
To answer the arguments of Jean Jacques by references to his private
life were easy and obvious. He did not apologize for his life, and
perhaps we would do well to follow his example.
The fact that with his own hands he carried five of his offspring to
foundling asylums as they came into the world does not alter or change
the fact that he was also the author of "Emile," in which book, let it
be remembered, the idea of substituting natural for pedantic methods
in the training and developing of the physical, mental and moral
faculties of the growing child first found expression.
The book furnished Froebel with the fund of ideas for his experiments
with children which resulted in the Kindergarten, an institution that
has profoundly influenced the educational methods of every
enlightened country in the world.
Without a doubt this man who abandoned his own children became one of
the great instructors of the age.
But a fair understanding of the situation demands that we should
realize that things for which we blame him most occured before he was
thirty-eight years old. And the writings of his that really
influenced humanity were not written until after he was thirty-eight.
To confound the reasoning of the mature man, by pointing to what he
did at twenty-two, is, I submit, irrelevant, immaterial, inconsequent,
unrelated and uncalled for. When a critic has nothing to say of a
man's work, but calls attention to the errors of the author's youth,
he is running short of material.
That Rousseau revised his mode of living and reformed his reasoning in
his later years, viewing his early life with bitter regret, should be
put forward to his credit and not be used for his condemnation. The
facts, however, are all that his harshest critics state. But fact and
truth are often totally different things. Untruth enters when we
reason wrongly from our facts.
We have been told by both the friends and the enemies of Rousseau that
to him the French Revolution traces a direct lineage. For this his
friends give him credit, and his enemies blame. The truth is, that
revolutions are things that require long time and many factors to
evolve. A revolution is the culmination of a long train of evils.
Rousseau saw the evils and called attention to them, but he did not
exactly cause them--bless me! His little love-affairs with elderly
ladies, and grateful, should not be confused with the atrocious
cruelties and inhumanities that existed in France and had existed for
a hundred years and more.
A wise man of the East was once eating his dinner of dried figs, and
at the same time explaining to an admiring group the beauty and
healthfulness of a purely vegetable diet.
"Look at your figs through this," said a scientist present, handing
the man a microscope. The pundit looked and saw his precious figs were
covered with crawling microbes.
He handed the microscope back and said, "Friend, keep your glass--the
bugs no longer exist."
Jean Jacques handed the peasantry of France a reading-glass; Voltaire
did as much for the nobility.
* * * * *
Jean Jacques Rousseau was born in Switzerland, which land, as all
folks know, has produced her full quota and more of reformers. The
father of Jean Jacques, quite naturally, was a watchmaker, with
mainspring ill-adjusted and dial askew, according to the report of the
son, who claimed to be full-jeweled, but was not perfectly adjusted to
position and temperature. Jean Jacques tells us that his first
misfortune was his birth, and this cost his mother her life. He was
adopted by Time and Chance and fed by Fate. When the lad was ten the
father fled from Geneva to escape the penalty of a foolish brawl, and
never again saw the son who was to rescue the family-name from
oblivion.
Kinsmen of the mother gave the boy into the hands of a retired
clergyman who levied polite blackmail on his former constituents by
asking them to place children, their own and others, in his hands that
they might be taught the way of life--and that the clergyman might
live, which, according to Whistlerian philosophy, was unnecessary.
That the boy was clever, shrewd, quick to learn, secretive as castaway
children ever are, can well be understood. He became a secretary, an
engineer, a valet, a waiter, working life's gamut backward, thus
proving that in human service there is no high nor low degree, only
this: he, at this time, knew nothing about human service--he was
fighting for existence.
Knowledge comes through desire, but where desire comes from no man can
say. It surely is not a matter of will.
Jean Jacques had a hunger for knowledge, and this, some wise men say,
is the precious legacy of mother to son. He wanted to know!
And it was this desire that shaped his career.
He asked questions of priests all day long, because he was filled with
the fallacy that priests knew the secrets of the unknowable and were
on friendly terms with God.
To escape importunity a priest sent him to Madame De Warens. Now
Madame was a widow, rich and volatile, filled with a holy religious
zeal. Where religion begins and sex ends no man can say--the books are
silent and revelation is dumb. Indeed, there be those who are so bold
as to say that art, love and religion are one.
Leaving this to the specialists, let us simply say that the love of
learning landed Jean Jacques, aged seventeen, poetic and philosophic
vagabond, into the precious care of Madame De Warens, who kept a
religious retreat for novitiates intent on the ideal life.
The religion of Mohammed made converts in numbers like unto the sands
of the desert, because they were promised a Paradise peopled by dark-
eyed houris. Orthodoxy got its hold by a promise of rest, idleness and
freedom from responsibility. The heaven into which Jean Jacques
slipped was a combination of all that Allah, Gabriel and the seductive
dreams of Moody, Sankey and such could provide. Science founded on
truth can never be popular until mankind further evolves, since it
offers nothing better than toil and difficulty, and after each
achievement increased work as a reward for work. This condition stands
no show when compared with a heaven that gives harps that never
require tuning, robes that need not be laundered, and mansions that
demand no plumbing.
Jean Jacques lived an ideal existence; he was the guest, pupil,
servant and lover of the Religious Lady who kept the Religious
Retreat. Also, he was immune from responsibility. But Paradise has one
serious objection--the serpent. This time the serpent was jealousy.
Whenever the Religious Lady had guests of quality, the snake sank its
fangs deep into the quivering flesh of her valet-lover. Thus does the
Law of Compensation never rest.
"What is your favorite book?" asked Ralph Waldo Emerson of George
Eliot.
And the answer was, "Rousseau's 'Confessions.'"
And Emerson's counter-confession was, "So is it mine."
Elizabeth Barrett Browning nibbled at the same cheese. But the belief
now is that Rousseau's "Confessions" is largely constructive truth, as
differentiated from fact, and constructive truth is the thing which
might have happened, but did not. Rousseau's "Confessions" is a
psychological study of hopes, desires, aspirations and hesitations,
flavored with regrets. All literature is confession--vicarious
confession. The gentle reader has the joy of doing the thing, and
escaping the penalty.
* * * * *
Rousseu's first literary effort to attract attention was written in
his thirty-ninth year. It was merely an exercise penned with intent
to show that so-called civilization had really polluted mankind and
done more harm than good.
The essay was a subtle indictment of the times, with the French
Government in mind, all from the standpoint of a Swiss. And it
convinced at least one man--the author--of the truth of its
allegations.
At this time there were in France more than a hundred offenses
punishable with death. In the coronation oath of the King was a clause
promising that he would exterminate all heretics. Just how this was to
be done, the King left to experts. The "lettre de cachet," or secret
arrest, was in full swing and very popular among princes and church
officials high in authority. Any suspected man could be removed from
family and friends as though the earth had swallowed him. He went out
to drive, or to walk, or to work, and was seen no more. Search was
vain and inquiry useless--aye, worse, it might involve the inquirer.
The writ of habeas corpus was as yet a barren hypothesis.
Common people had no rights: they were merely granted privileges, one
of which was the privilege to live until the order went out that the
man should die.
Confessions were wrung from men and women by the use of the rack,
twistings, blows, indignities, an exact description of which could not
be printed. These details were left to priests, sanctimonious men who
did their work with pious zeal and therefore were not accountable.
Church and State were wedded. To doubt Scripture was to be in league
against the State. Heresy and treason were one. To laugh at a priest
might be death. To fail to attend mass and pay was to run a risk.
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