VANISHING TYPES.
By Rev. EDWARD P. SPRAGUE.
Abundant evidence is afforded in nature that, beside the familiar forms of life of the present, there have been earlier forms, such as are now no longer seen. Each great epoch of the earth’s history, as, to a less degree, each great continent on the earth’s surface, has had certain prevalent and characteristic types; of which some still endure; some have wholly disappeared, and some are just now passing out of sight. And among all these extinct, persistent, vanishing and recent types, there are perhaps none more full of interest, or more worthy of our careful study than the ones that are just now passing away.
Something similar to this is to be recognized also in the varying phases of human life. There are styles of men, habits of life, peculiarities of character, customs, occupations, and conditions which belong almost wholly to the present; others which are common to the present and the past; and still others which are as strictly part of the long ago, as are the megatherium and the plesiosaurus. There are no corresponding forms now, and probably never again will be. There can never more be the old feudal baron, the chivalrous knight errant, or the trouveres and troubadours of mediæval Europe, any more than there can be again the ancient worshipers of Jupiter or devotees of Bacchus. Old forms of government, old ideas of the divine right of kings, old faith in auguries, the old search for the philosopher’s stone and for the elixir of life have passed away, never to return.
More recent, however, than these, and more closely related to the present, are certain types of life with which our fathers were daily conversant, but which promise to seem to our children very strange and remote. Not merely does the regular succession of the generations bring us at length to the last Revolutionary soldier, and to the last survivor of the seemingly exhaustless supply of Washington’s body servants; but at the same time the changes which transpire in local and social life do serve to make rare, and then wholly to remove, the types of men that were only lately distinctively common and prominent. We do well therefore to stop in the midst of our hurrying, driving, self-glorifying age, and study some of these Vanishing Types of life, character, occupation, with varied accompaniments and experiences, which to-day have become or are fast becoming things of the past.
A recent writer in one of our great metropolitan dailies comments in a pleasant strain on the survival in only humorous papers and poor plays of the typical Englishman and typical Yankee, as so long and commonly represented. What has become of the John Bull and the Brother Jonathan of a few years ago? Were they not true characters at all? If not, who will explain the hold they took on the popular fancy, a hold so strong that they are not quite abandoned to-day? They must have been fairly faithful representatives of certain actual types. Are Englishmen and Americans growing different, then, from what they were, or growing like each other, that now these two illustrious characterizations have largely disappeared?
As the writer remarks: Punch still has John Bull as a national type; but shows a great reserve in the use of him, and continually resorts to Britannia as a substitute. Our old friend John, the bluff, stout, honest, red-faced, irascible, rural person, has really been supplanted by a more modern, thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. He is, or was a very rude person, and always seemed to take great delight in asserting himself in such a way as to produce as much general annoyance and discomfort as possible. But he is gone, or is going, and the time is coming when we shall regard him as only a survival, a tradition of the past.
And so for English use the Yankee type of Uncle Sam may still serve to represent America, although he belongs to the past as much as slavery does, or the stage coach. He would be a bold man who would attempt to say what our national type is now; but it is safe to say that it is not a long, thin, cute Yankee, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with brass buttons, whittling a stick, and interlarding his conversation with “I swan,” and “I calc’late.” In fact, if Mr. Lowell were to write “Biglow Papers” now, Uncle Sam would hardly serve his purpose as he did during the war.
Not only are differences between national types rapidly vanishing into the past, so that Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen and Americans no longer seem strikingly unlike; but along with these international, the more domestic and home types are disappearing also. The distinctive kinds of men, and the distinctions which attached themselves inseparably to various classes and occupations are passing away.
Take the men to-day of any one town, village or farming district, and I fully believe you will find fewer odd and strange characters among them than was the case among their predecessors or fathers of a generation ago.
Just this was the complaint of an old farmer who used to delight to drop into my study in northern New York, and have, as he called it, “a talk with the parson.” He was himself a relic of a past generation, a man of marked face and peculiar manner. He had been a school teacher in his earlier days, and quite a man of letters among his associates of that time, and was very fond of describing in a quaint way that was not without discrimination, the life of his youth. While fully admitting the greater advantages and easier times of the present, he would always add: “But everybody is getting to be just like everybody else now-a-days. Why, when I came into this valley every man on all these farms had something peculiar about him, some way of standing, or talking, or dressing, by which I could have described him so that you would have known him the first time you met him. I don’t know,” he would add, “but you may think it an improvement, but the men are all alike now, and I miss the differences.” And looking at the old man, and feeling that he served as a connecting link, a survival of the past into the present, I was ready to believe that what he said was true; the older men had more marked peculiarities than those of to-day.
Let us look now more particularly at some of the types which were distinctive features of the life of a half century ago, but whose successors have lost much of that prominence to-day by means of that gradual tendency toward uniformity which has since then been working.
First among these and foremost, as distinctive and distinguished, stands the “Country Parson” of fifty or more years ago.
No such men are seen to-day; for although the ministry continue, and are always to continue, constituting a distinct class in the community, they are now in no such ways singular and distinctive as then. Dressed always in his clerical black, and in earlier times in the clerical bands also, he was known on the street and saluted with reverence as a man by himself, set apart from the rest of the community, higher and holier than they. His position was unequaled, unapproached even by any other person. He was looked up to by all, honored by all, and feared, if not by all, by all the children at least. His opinions on matters local and civil, personal, social, philosophical and religious had almost the weight of absolute and supreme wisdom, which no one might gainsay.
See him enter the plain white “meeting-house” and ascend the lofty pulpit, and you recognize the height of his exaltation. In many places all the congregation were wont to rise when he came in, and remain standing till he had taken his seat; and still more commonly, not one of the congregation ever moved from place till he and his family had passed out of the church.
Listen to one of his long sermons, as the hour-glass at his side is turned possibly for the second time, and in the way the congregation give attention, you see evidence of his authority and of his hold upon them. He discourses on high themes, abstruse doctrines, and obscure points of faith. He discusses his text and subject in a logical and philosophical way; defines the doctrine, first by what it is not, and then by what it is; divides and sub-divides, and divides again, illustrates with analysis and analogies, intersperses with other passages from the Bible, and perhaps with occasional Greek or Latin quotations, draws to the “conclusion,” adds the “improvement,” goes on as though taking a fresh start to his “finally,” and then ends with his “and now last of all.” For a full hour, or perhaps two, the congregation have listened, counting it a precious privilege so to do; and that which he has advanced will be remembered, repeated, talked over, and discussed among them all the week.
Those early clergymen are not by any means to be spoken of slightingly. Some of us may know more of science, and be better informed in matters of natural history and of the contemporaneous condition of other lands; but few of us know as much Hebrew and Greek, few of us are as deeply versed in metaphysics, few of us are more vigorous in argument, and none of us certainly have such influence in our communities, or could hold our congregations for so long services. Those country parsons were men of mark; deep theologians; strong in the doctrines; prone, men may think to-day, to a narrow and iron-clad theology; but they were veritable giants also, and in fast, thanksgiving, and election day sermons did not hesitate to handle national themes, point out very specifically and with square condemnation, popular sins, and to discuss, and if necessary, pass open judgment on the courses and actions of public men.
It is often remarked that the fathers builded first the church and then, next and near by, the school-house; and so next to the minister a marked man in those older days was the “Village Schoolmaster.”
Occasionally the schoolmaster and the minister were one. Sometimes he was a minister who, from the too prevalent affliction of throat disease—a judgment, possibly, on account of the long sermons—had exchanged preaching for teaching. Oftenest he was a man by himself; and no teacher in any public school of to-day quite perpetuates his likeness.
I can not do better in attempting to describe him than to quote from Prof. McMaster, in his admirable “History of the People of the United States:”
“The master was expected to live with the parents of his pupils, regulating the length of his stay by the number of the boys in the family attending his school. Thus it happened that in the course of his teaching he became an inmate of all the houses of the district, and was not seldom forced to walk five miles, in the worst of weather over the worst of roads, to his school.
“Yet, mendicant though he was, it would be a great mistake to suppose that he was not always a welcome guest. He slept in the best room, sat in the warmest nook by the fire, and had the best food set before him at the table. In the long winter evenings he helped the boys with their lessons, held yarn for the daughters, or escorted them to spinning matches and quiltings. In return for his miserable pittance and his board, the young student taught what would now be considered as the rudiments of an education. His daily labors were confined to teaching his scholars to read with a moderate degree of fluency, to write legibly, to spell with some regard for the rules of orthography, and to know as much of arithmetic as would enable them to calculate the interest on a debt, to keep the family accounts, and to make change in a shop.
“Nor was this making change a simple matter. Fifty years ago the silver pieces which passed from hand to hand, under the name of small change, were largely made up of foreign coins. They had been in circulation long before the war for independence, had seen much service, and were none the better for the wear and tear they had sustained.
“One of these pieces was known as the four-pence, but passed for six and a quarter cents if, as the result of long hoarding, the inscription was legible, and the stamp easy to make out; but when worn smooth—and the four-pence pieces generally were worn smooth and crossed—no one would take them for more than five cents. A larger coin was the nine-pence, which passed for twelve and a half cents. The pistareen was worth twenty cents. The picayune, a term rarely used north of Mason and Dixon’s line, went for six and a quarter cents. But the confusion was yet more increased by the language which merchants used to express the price of their goods.
“The value of the gold pieces expressed in dollars was pretty much the same the country over. But the dollar, and the silver pieces regarded as fractions of a dollar, had no less than five different values. In New England and Virginia a merchant who spoke of a dollar was understood to mean six shillings, or one hundred and eight coppers; but the same merchant would, the moment he set foot in North Carolina or New York, be content with demanding ninety-six coppers, or eight shillings, as the equivalent of a dollar. Sixpence in Massachusetts meant eight and a third cents; a shilling meant sixteen and two-third cents; two-and-three pence was thirty-seven and a half cents; three shillings was fifty cents; four-and-six was seventy five cents; nine shillings was a dollar and a half.”
About all these to us strange coins and values the schoolmaster was expected to know, and to be able also to instruct his scholars. He filled, therefore, a very important place in the life of the village, as well as in the experience of the boys under his instruction. Nowhere to-day can you find in village schoolmaster, district or town school teacher, superintendent of instruction, or learned professor, a figure that fills out and continues just the portrait of the typical pedagogue of a generation or more ago.
Next after the village schoolmaster, and perhaps outranking him in prominence and in distinctive traits, and so deserving to have been mentioned sooner, was the “Country Doctor” of the past generation.
Wherever men live, meet with accidents, suffer sickness, grow old and die, there in civilized lands the physician is a necessity, and is always to be found. Favored as we are in the present by all the progress in medical and sanitary science, and attended by the skilled physicians of to-day, we can hardly realize the life of the doctor and of the patient in the time many of the remedies which are now used to relieve pain were unknown, when there were no drug stores except in the larger towns, when only a few simple medicines could be easily obtained at the village store, along with the tea, sugar, calico, twine and garden seeds that made up the stock on the shelves. Then the physician compounded his own drugs, rolled out his own pills, made his own tinctures, weighed or measured out his own prescriptions, and carried with him on his round of calls, and perhaps in his saddle-bags, a most varied and astonishing assortment of medicines, a list of which would be remarkable to-day, alike for the presence of many that are abandoned, and for the absence of still more that are now in common and constant use.
The physician of to-day excels him perhaps in general knowledge, in ability to deal with difficult diseases, and to perform delicate and successful surgery. He is the man of wider reading and more scientific views; he is possibly the better practitioner; but he is by no means the distinct character in his way that the country doctor of fifty years ago was.
“His genial face, his engaging manners, his hearty laugh, the twinkle in his eye, the sincerity with which he asked after the health of the carpenter’s daughter, the interest he took in the family of the poorest laborer, the good nature with which he stopped to chat with the farm hands about the prospect of the corn crops and the turnip crops, made him the favorite for miles around. When he rode out he knew the names and personal history of the occupants of every house he passed. The farmers’ lads pulled off their hats, and the girls dropped courtesies to him. Sunshine and rain, daylight and darkness were alike to him. He would ride ten miles on the darkest night, over the worst roads, in a pelting storm, to administer a dose of calomel to an old woman, or to attend a child in a fit. He was present at every birth; he attended every burial; he sat with the minister at every death-bed, and put his name with the lawyer to every will.”
From the consideration of these vanishing or vanished types, a single illustration of which alone was usually to be found in any ordinary village, we turn now to a class that then, as their successors do now, made up the predominant element in every section—the “Country Farmer”—and I mean the country farmer of fifty years ago.
The farmer of to-day is a man who lives in a comfortable, perhaps handsome house, whose parlor is carpeted and is graced with a piano, whose acres are mowed or reaped by the horse-power machine, and grain threshed by steam, who drives in a good carriage, and his son has a top buggy of his own; whose wife wears silk, and his daughters spend their winters in the city. He wears handsome clothes, takes one or two agricultural papers, keeps fancy stock, Jerseys and Hollands, and occasionally furnishes articles to the press on “Creameries” and “Ensilage.”
Not such was the typical farmer of a generation or two ago—a man whose comforts were fewer and helps much less, and also a man of stronger traits of character, more decided convictions, harder working, and probably in proportion fully as successful in accumulating the profits of careful industry.
One such I have in mind, an example of the best of his class. He was a large man, well built, tall and muscular. He had been educated at the common district school of the vicinity, had succeeded his father in ownership of the farm, had married early, and became in time the head of a large family. No chance visitor ever spent the night at the house without being taken out into the kitchen and shown the long line of boots, seven pairs arranged in a regularly diminishing row, and all ready for the morning.
He was not what would be called an educated man to-day, but he had studied the national and the state constitutions; knew all about the politics of the country; looked after the interest of the district school near his home; attended regular in all seasons and weathers the village church, four miles away, and in which also he served as a trustee. He was a firm believer in the stanch Calvinism of his fathers; taught his children the Westminster Catechism on Sunday afternoons; always voted his party ticket straight, and believed with all his heart in his minister and in his favorite political leader.
He toiled hard, rising early and going to bed early also. His food was simple, beef, pork, salt fish, dried apples, beans, and farm vegetables, with milk, butter and eggs in abundance, and bread, if not the whitest, yet always sweet, made from the wheat of his own growing, ground into flour at his neighbor’s grist mill. His work did not present any great variety. In spring there was the regular round of repairing the fences, cleaning out the barnyard, ploughing and sowing; followed in due time by the long and laborious hoeing the corn and potatoes, and then by the mowing the grass with scythes, reaping the grain with sickle or cradle, and afterward the threshing on the barn floor by the well-swung flail, whose sturdy blows filled all the valley with answering echoes.
In winter there was the cutting, hauling, sawing, splitting and piling in the shed the abundant supply of wood that was to keep up the next year’s fires in the great fireplace, the huge brick oven, and the kitchen and “living room” stoves.
Pleasures and recreations were few; the huskings in the fall, the squirrel and rabbit hunts, the evening chats with a neighbor along with the apples and mug of cider, the game of checkers by the kitchen fire on a stormy day, the occasional larger gathering for an early supper, the spelling match, and the singing school. Books were not numerous, the weight making up for the lack of variety. There were the Bible, Watts’s Psalms and Hymns, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” Fox’s “Book of Martyrs,” Rollins’s “Ancient History,” Watts’s “Improvement of the Mind,” Baxter’s “Saint’s Rest,” Young’s “Night Thoughts,” and a stray volume of The Spectator.
Trained by such books, by lessons of hard experience, by intercourse with neighbors, and by the sermons of his minister, such a farmer became, not the polished man, or versatile, or widely informed, but the man of strong character, rugged worth, decided convictions unflinchingly adhered to, true, honest, upright, kindly, careful, close perhaps, but generous also and helpful. To men of to-day he might seem narrow-minded and opinionated. We may smile at some of his ideas and apprehensions, and tell humorous stories illustrating his acknowledged inquisitiveness; but none the less at heart we must do him honor and admit that more men like him were a blessing in the community to-day. Rigid necessity compelled him to be carefully economical and exact in his dealings to a degree even that verged on parsimony, but he was just in it all, and demanded only what was rightfully his own. For the sake of securing that however he would, if necessary, be at the trouble once taken, as it is told, by a certain New England farmer. A United States surveying party had taken a single chestnut rail from his fence, and using it as a signal pole, had neglected either to return it to its place or to compensate him therefor. Discovering this trespass he started after them, walked ten miles in the hot sun, interviewed the chief, informed him that people’s property was to be respected, and that he was not a man to be imposed upon or frightened. Pleasantly and respectfully met, and asked to state the damage, he replied: “Well, seein’ as no cattle got in, there warn’t no damage; chestnut rails ain’t of much account anyway, and that one I calc’late wasn’t worth more’n ten cents;” and receiving that amount duly paid in legal coin of the country, he returned home amply satisfied.
Sketches of vanishing types, such as these, might be almost indefinitely continued, but we must be content with simply indicating some of the fit subjects.
There was in every village the “Country Shoemaker,” whose shop, close by the tavern and the blacksmith’s, was the favorite rainy day resort for both boys and men. There the latest news was rehearsed, party slates were made or broken, and matters of local interest, or of state and national politics received impassioned discussion.
There were also the village “Tailor” and “Cooper,” persons as indispensable as the village pump. The gossiping dressmaker went her yearly round among the circle of households; and the old-fashioned peddler brought silks and city goods to the farmer’s wife, and was always welcomed by the farmer himself for the news he brought from other places, supplying surprisingly well the place of the modern newspaper.
In almost every New England village situated at all near the sea coast a prominent character was the retired Whale Captain, a man of very positive character, accustomed to authority, and not always a comfortable neighbor or amiable citizen.
Very different also from the farmer of the north was the Southern Planter, who was with us only a little while ago, but now as a distinctive type is fast vanishing from sight. The product and the pride of the southern land, prominent in society and politics, ruling as lord over his swarm of dependents, and holding his social, religious, and political opinions by a sort of entail with his estate, he forms a most interesting subject of study, and will perhaps figure largely as a favorite character in the American novel of the future.
Any sketch of olden times ought to make special mention also of the “Old Stage Coach and Driver.” The days are not very long passed when a journey from here to New York or Philadelphia was a matter of graver consideration than is now given to a trip to London and return. Not without very serious preparation, fortifying himself for the hardships, considering the possible dangers, and perhaps taking a very formal farewell of his family, did a traveler set out on his journey; and then his progress was painfully slow, and his discomforts painfully many.
The stages, great lumbering vehicles, made perhaps forty miles a day in the summer, and not much more than half as many in the winter. In summer one was choked by the dust, and in cold weather he froze. “If no accident occurred the traveler was put down at the inn about ten o’clock at night. Cramped and weary, he ate a frugal supper, and betook himself to bed with a notice from the landlord that he would be called at three the next morning. Then, whether it rained or snowed, he was forced to rise and make ready by the light of a tallow candle, for another ride of eighteen hours. After a series of mishaps and accidents, such as would suffice for an emigrant train crossing the plains, the stage rolled into New York at the end of the sixth day after leaving Boston.” This is not exceptional. It was considered something remarkable when the trip from New York to Philadelphia was first made in less than two full days.
The mails of that time were carried in these same stages, except in the special cases where post-riders hastened through on horseback. So small, however, was the mail service at the beginning of this century, that Prof. McMaster affirms: “More mails are now each day sent out and received in New York, than in Washington’s time went from the same city to all parts of the country in the course of half a year. More letters are delivered in that city every twenty-four hours than, when Franklin had office, were distributed in the thirteen states in a whole year.”
Along with the varied types of character and of occupation that have vanished, or are vanishing away, there are many articles of use and of ornament, that were once common, but are now hardly to be found.
A pair of old brass andirons that belonged to one’s grandmother are to-day an almost priceless heirloom in any family. Old spinning wheels, in daily use fifty or more years ago, but for a generation consigned to the garret or remote store room, are now brought down and, freshly polished and decked with ribbons, made to adorn the parlor or the hall. A genuine old sickle is to-day hard to find; the hand fanning-mills are becoming rare, and a real flail is almost never heard. How many of the young ladies of to-day have ever seen one of the foot-stoves their grandmothers used to carry to church, or one of the warming-pans always put to use for the benefit of the friend that in winter time occupied “the best chamber?” How long is it since the side of every kitchen opened into the cavernous depth of the old “brick oven,” the heating of whose great dome was such a labor for the adults, but such a delight for the children? What too have become of the old tin “Dutch ovens” that were used before the open fireplace, and of the iron “bake kettles,” with cover for the burning coals, which were sometimes called by this same name? While for an old tinder box and flint one will search almost in vain unless in some cabinet of carefully guarded relics and antiques.
A very wide question is sometimes raised as to how far the absence of such marked types as those of the past indicates an improved age in the present, and whether indeed the opposite of this may not be the case. It may be argued, and not quite without some show of reason, that the tendency to reduce all characters, stations, and kinds of life to a largely universal correspondence, and the merging of markedly distinctive traits into a general resemblance, is an indication of weakness rather than of strength, and that thereby society suffers a loss instead of securing a gain. One may well hesitate before refusing to admit that there may be some truth in such a view. However, without attempting to argue this question, or to draw any inferences from the whole, it is enough for the present purpose to show that many of the strong traits of the past, like strong features seen in old family portraits, are to be recognized only in reduced and softened characteristics to-day, so that we do well in the midst of the uniformity of the life of the present to pause and recall and honor these vanishing types of the past.
