LIGHT OF HUMAN LIVES—PHOTOGRAPHS AND BIOGRAPHS—THE LATE JONAS WEBB, HIS LIFE, LABORS, AND MEMORY.
The next morning I resumed my walk and visited a locality bearing a name and association of world-wide celebrity and interest. It is the name of a small rural hamlet, hardly large enough to be called a village, and marked by no trait of nature or art to give it distinction.
There are conditions and characteristics both in the natural and moral world which can hardly be described fully in Saxon, Latin, or Greek terminology, even with the largest license of construction. There are attributes or qualities attaching to certain locations, of the simplest natural features, which cannot even be hinted at or suggested by the terms, geography, topography, or biography. Put the three together and condense or collocate their several meanings in one compound qualification which you can write and another spell, and you do not compass the signification you want to convey. The soul of man has its immortality, and the feeblest-minded peasant believes he shall wear it through the ages of the great hereafter. The literature of human thoughts claims a life that shall endure as long as the future existence of humanity. The memory of many human actions and lives puts in a plea and promise of a duration that shall distance the sun’s, and overlap upon the bright centuries of eternity. The human body, even, is promised its resurrection by the divinest authority and illustration, and waits hopefully, under all its pains and weaknesses, for the glory to be revealed in it when the earth on which it dwells shall have become “a forgotten circumstance.” Human loves, remembrances, faiths, and fellowships lift up all their meek hands to the Father of Spirits, praying to be lifted up into His great immortality, and to be permitted to take with them unbroken the associations that sweetened this earthly life. Many humble souls that have passed through the furnace of affliction, poverty, and trial seven times heated, and heated daily here, have believed that He who went up through the same suffering to His great White Throne, would let them sing beside the crystal waters the same good old psalm tunes and songs of Sion which they sang under the willows of this lower world of tears and tribulation. How all the sparks of the undying life in man fly upward to the zenith of this immortality! You may call the steep flights of this faith pleasant and poetical diversions of a fervid imagination, but they are winged with the pinions that angels lift when they soar; pinions less ethereal than theirs, but formed and plumed to beat upward on the Milky Way to their Source, instead of swimming in the thinly-starred cerulean, in which spirits, never touched with the down or dust of human attributes, descend and ascend on their missions to the earth. Who can have the heart to handle harshly these beautiful faiths? To say, this hope may go up, but this must go down to the darkness of annihilation! Was it irreverent in the pious singing-master of a New England village, when he said, that often, while returning home late on bright winter nights, he had dropped the reins upon his horse’s neck, and sung Old Hundred from the stars, set as notes to that holy tune, when they first sang together in the morning of the creation? What spiritual good or Christian end would be gained, to break up the charm and cheer of this his belief? Or to dispel that other confidence, which so helped him to bear earth’s trials, that one day he should join all the spirits of the just made perfect, and all the high angels in heaven, and, on the plane of that golden gamut, they should sing together their hymns of joy and praise, in that same, good, old tune, from those same star-notes, which a thousand centuries should not deflect nor transpose from their first order within those everlasting staves and bars!
If the spirit’s faith be allowed such wide confidences as these; if it may carry up into the invisible and infinite so many precious relics from the wreck of time, so many human circumstances and associations, why may it not take with it, to hang up in its heaven, photographs of those earthly localities rendered immortal here by the lives of good and great men? Such a life is a sun, and it casts a disk of light upon the very earth on which it shines; not that flashy circle which the lens of the microscope casts upon the opposite wall, to show how scarcely visible mites may be magnified; but a soft and steady illumination that does not dim under the beating storms and bleaching dews of centuries, but grows brighter and brighter, as if the seed-rays that made it first multiplied themselves from year to year. The earth becomes more and more thickly dotted with these permanent disks of light, and each is visited by pilgrims, who go and stand with reverence and admiration within the cheering circle. Shakespeare’s thought-life threw out a brilliant illumination, of wide circumference, at Stratford-upon-Avon, and no locality in England bears a biograph more venerated than the birth-place of the great poet. His thought-life was a sun that will never set as long as this above us shines. It is rising every year to new generations that never saw its rays before. When he laid down his pen, at the end of his last drama, the whole English-speaking race in both hemispheres did not number twice the present population of London. Now, seventy-five millions, peopling mighty continents, speak the tongue he raised to the grandest of all earth’s speeches; and those who people the antipodes claim to offer the best homage to his genius. Thus it will go on to the end of time. As the language he clothed with such power and might shall spread itself over the earth, and be spoken, too, by races born to another tongue, his life-rays will permeate the minds of countless myriads, and the more widely they diverge and the farther they reach, the brighter and warmer will be the glow and the flow of that disk of light that embosoms and illumines his birth-place in England.
What is true of Stratford-upon-Avon is equally true of Abbotsford, of the birth-place of Milton, Burns, Bunyan, Baxter, and other great minds, which have shone each like a sun or star in its sphere. Now, what one word, recognised as legitimate in scientific terminology, would describe fully one of these disks of light cast by a human life upon a certain space of earth, not as a fugitive flash, but as a permanent illumination? Photograph would not do it, because its meaning is fixed and rigidly technical, as simple light-writing, or sun-writing. The term is completely pre-occupied by this signification, and you cannot inject the human life element into it. Biography is universally limited to an operation in which the life is the subject, not the agent. It is simply the writing out of a life’s history by some one with a common goose-quill or steel pen. Still, the word biograph would be the best, of the same length, that we could form to describe one of these disks of light, if it were made the same verb active as photograph; or to mean that the life is the agent, as well as the subject,—that it writes itself in light upon a certain locality, just as the sun graves a human face upon glass. Let us then call the bright and quenchless planispheres, which such lives describe and fill around them, biographs, assuming that the script is in rays of light. As differ the stars above in glory, so these differ in the qualities of their illumination. The brightest of them, to mere human seeming, are those which shine with the sheer brilliancy of intellect and genius. These chiefly halo the homes of “the grand old masters” of poetry, painting, eloquence, and martial glory. These attract to their disks pilgrims the most numerous and enthusiastic. But, as the nearest stars are brightest, not largest, so these biographs are brightest on their earth-side. There are thousands of less sharp and spangling lustre to the eyes of the multitude, which shine with tenfold more brilliancy from their eternity-face. These are they that halo the homes of good men, whose great hearts drank in the life of God’s love in perpetual streams, and distilled it like a luminous dew around them; men whose thoughts were not mere scintillations of genius, but living labors of beneficence, bearing the proof as well as promise of that immortality guaranteed to the deeds of earth’s saints. If the soul, after such long isolation, is to take again to its embrace so much of the old human corporeity it wore here below, does it transcend the prerogative of hope in the great resurrection to believe that these biographs of God’s loving children on earth shall be taken up whole into the same immortality as the bodies in which they worked His will among men? Is the faith too fanciful or irreverent that believes, that the corridors and inner temples of Heaven’s Glory will be hung with these biographs of His servants surrounding, like stars, the light-flood of His love that radiated from His cross on earth? Is it too presumptuous to think and say, that such pictures will be as precious in His sight as any graven by the lives of angels on their outward or homeward flights of duty and delight? These are they, therefore, that shall give to the earth all the immortality to which it shall attain. These are they that shall take up into the brilliant existence of the hereafter, ten thousand sections of its corporeity; portions of its surface, perhaps, as substantial as the human form that the souls of men shall wear in another world. These are they that shall shine as the stars, when those beaming so brilliantly in our eyes around the shrines of mere intellect and genius, shall have “paled their ineffectual fires” before the efflux of diviner light. Let him, then, of thoughtful and attentive faculties think on these great and holy possibilities, when he treads within the pale of a good man’s life, whose labors for human happiness “follow him” according to divine promise; not out of the world, not down into the grave with his resting body, but out among living generations, breathing upon them and through them a blessed and everlasting influence. Let him tread that disk of light reverentially, for it is the holiest place on the earth’s surface outside the immediate circumference of Cavalry.
This is Babraham; and here lived Jonas Webb; a good man and true, whose influence and usefulness had a broader circumference than the widest empire in the world. A Frenchman has written the fullest history of both, and an American here offers reverentially a tribute to his worth. The light of his life was a soft and gentle illumination on its earth-side; the lustre of the other was revealed only by partial glimpses to those who leaned closest to him in the testing-moments of his higher nature. He was one of the great benefactors, whose lives and labors become the common inheritance of mankind, and whose names go down through long generations with a pleasant memory. To a certain extent, he was to the great primeval industry of the world, what Arkwright, Watts, Stephenson, Fulton and Morse were each to the mechanical and scientific activities of the age. He did as much, perhaps, as any man that ever preceded him, to honor that industry, and lift it up to the level of the first occupations of modern times, which had claimed higher qualities of intelligence, genius and enterprize. He was a farmer, and his ancestors had been farmers from time immemorial. He did not bound into the occupation as an enthusiastic amateur, who had acquired a large fortune by manufacturing or commercial enterprize, which he was eager to lavish upon bold and uncertain experiments. He attained his highest eminence by the careful gradations of a continuous experience, reaching back far into the labors of his ancestors. The science, skill and judgment he brought to bear upon his operations, came from his reading, thinking, observations and experiments as a practical and hereditary farmer. The capital he employed in expanding these operations to their culminating magnitude, he acquired by farming. The mental culture, the generous dispositions, the refined manners, the graceful and manly bearing which made him one of the first gentlemen of the age, he acquired as a farmer. The mansion which welcomed to its easy and large-hearted hospitalities guests of such distinction from his own and other countries, was a farmer’s home, and few ever opened their doors to more urbanity and cordial cheer. This is an aspect of his character which all those who follow the profession he honored should admire with a laudable esprit de corps.
As a back-ground is an important element in the portraiture of human forms or natural scenery, so the ground on which the life and labors of Jonas Webb should be sketched, merits a few preliminary lines. Of all the occupations that employ and sustain the toiling myriads of our race, agriculture leans closest to the bosom of Divine Providence. It is an industry bound to the great and beautiful economics of the creation by more visible and sensible ties than any other worked by human hands. We will not here diverge to dwell upon these high and interesting affiliations. In their place we will give them a little extended thought. There is one feature of agricultural enterprize, however, that should not be overlooked in this connection. All its operations are above-board and open to the wide world, just like the fields to which they are applied. Nothing here is under lock and key. Nothing bears the grim warning over the bolted door, “No admittance here except on business!”—meaning by business, exclusively and sharply, the buying of certain wares of the establishment at a good round profit to the manufacturer, without carrying away a single scintillation or suggestion of his skill. If he has invented or adopted machinery or a process of labor which enables him to turn out cheap muslin at three farthings’ less cost per yard than his neighbors can make it, he seals up the secret from them with the keenest vigilance. Not so in the great and heaven-honored industry of agriculture. Its experiments and improvements upon the earth’s face are all put into the common stock of human knowledge and happiness. They can no more be placed under lock and key, as selfish secrets, than the stars themselves that look down upon them with all their golden eyes. No new implement of husbandry, no new mechanical force or chemical principle, no new process of labor or line of economy is withheld from the great commonwealth of mankind. As the broad skies above, as the sun and moon, and stars, as the winds, the rains, the dews, the birds and bees of heaven over-ride and ignore, in their missions, the boundaries of jealous nations, so all the great activities of agriculture prove their lineage by following the same generous rule. They are bounded by no nationalities. They are shut up in no narrow enclosure of self, but are put out as new vesicles of light to brighten the general illumination of the world.
The department in which Jonas Webb attained to his position and capacity of usefulness was peculiarly marked by this characteristic. In a certain sense, it occupied a higher range of interest than that section of agriculture which is connected solely with the growing of grain, grass, and other crops. His great and distinguishing husbandry was the cultivation of animal life. To make two spires of grass grow where only one grew before has been pronounced as a great benefaction; and greater still are the merit and the gain of making one grow where nothing grew before. To go into the midst of Dartmoor, and turn an acre of its cold, stony, water-soaked waste into a fruitful field of golden grain, is going into co-partnership with Providence in the work of creation to a very large and honored degree. But to put the skilful hand of science upon creatures of flesh and blood, to re-form their physical structures and shapes, to add new inches to their stature, straighten their backs, expand their reins, amplify their chests, reduce all the lines and curves of their forms to an unborn symmetry, and then to give silky softness and texture to their aboriginal clothing—this seems to be mounting one step higher in the attainment and dignity of creative faculties. And this pre-eminently was the department in which Jonas Webb acquired a distinction perhaps unparalleled to the present time. This has made his name familiar all over Christendom, and honored among the world’s benefactors. Never, before him, did a farm-stead become such a centre and have such a wide-sweeping radius as his. None ever possessed such centripetal attractions, or exerted such centrifugal influences for the material well-being of different and distant countries. Indeed, those most remote are most specially indebted to his large and generous operations. America and Australia will ever owe his memory an everlasting homage.
His operations filled and crowned two great departments of improvement seldom, if ever, carried on simultaneously and evenly to a great success by one man. His first distinguishing speciality was sheep-culture. When he had brought this to the highest standard of perfection ever attained, he devoted the surplus capital of skill, experience and pecuniary means he had acquired from the process to the breeding of cattle; and he became nearly as eminent in this field of improvement as in the other. A few facts may serve as an outline of his progress in both to the American reader who is familiar with the general result of his efforts.
Jonas Webb was born at Great Thurlow, Suffolk, on the 10th of November, 1796. His father, who died at the age of ninety-three, was a veteran in agriculture, and had attained to honorable distinction by his efforts to improve the old Norfolk breed of sheep, and by his experiments with other races. The results obtained from these operations convinced his son that more mutton and better wool could be made per acre from the Southdown than from any other breed, upon nine-tenths of the arable land of England, where the sheep are regularly folded, especially where the land is poor. In 1822, he commenced that agricultural career which won for him such a world-wide celebrity, by taking the Babraham Farm, occupying about 1,000 acres, some twelve miles south of Cambridge. In a very interesting letter, addressed to the Farmers’ Magazine, about twenty years since, he gives a valuable resume of his experience up to that time. In this he states several facts that may be especially useful to American agriculturists. Having decided in his own mind that the Southdowns were preferable to every other breed, for the two properties mentioned, he went into Sussex, their native county, and purchased the best rams and ewes that could be obtained of the principal breeders, regardless of expense, and never made a cross from any other breed afterwards. Nor was this all; he never introduced new blood into his stock from flocks of the same breed, but, by a virtually in-and-in process, he was able to produce qualities till then unknown to the race, and to make them permanent and distinctive properties. Now this achievement in itself has an interest beyond its utilitarian value to the agricultural world. To