Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

“Everything went on finely, and we extended our domain over to the neighboring port of Cenchraea, where we had cultivated ground and a harbor. This was perhaps the happiest part of my life. I was alone among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help them, and they let me have my own way. I had one civilized companion for awhile, David Urquhart, the eccentric Englishman, afterward M. P. and pamphleteer. I had to journey much to and from Corinth, Napoli, etc., always on horseback, or in boat, and often by night. It was a time and place where law was not; and sometimes we had to defend ourselves against armed and desperate stragglers from the bands of soldiers now breaking up. We had many ‘scrimmages,’ and I had several narrow escapes with life.

“In one affair Urquhart showed extraordinary pluck and courage, actually disarming and taking prisoner two robbers, and marching them before him into the village. I labored here day and night, in season and out, and was governor, clerk, constable, and everything but patriarch; for, though I was young, I took to no maiden, nor ever thought about womankind but once. The government (or rather, Capo d’Istria, the president) treated the matter liberally—for a Greek—and did what he could to help me.”...

In 1844, about seventeen years after the planting of this Corinthian colony Howe returned to the Isthmus in the course of his wedding journey. “As he rode through the principal street of the village,” says Mrs. Howe, “the elder people began to take note of him and to say to one another ‘This man looks like Howe.’ At length they cried, ‘It must be Howe himself’! His horse was surrounded and his progress stayed. A feast was immediately prepared for him in the principal house of the place, and a throng of friends, old and new, gathered round him, eager to express their joy in seeing him.”

So let us leave him for one moment, surrounded by the children of his adoption, submitting to their gratitude as Hercules might have submitted, if humanity had recognized him on his return to the scene of an earthly exploit,—let us leave him, I say, thus posed for the monument that should express his whole life’s work, while we consider what manner of man he was.

At whatever point you examine him, you find a man of remarkable energy and benevolence, of a practical turn of mind, devoid of mysticism or philosophic curiosity, a man to whom the word is a very plain proposition, whose eyes see what they see with the power of microscopes, and are blind to all else. Dr. Howe’s work in Greece gives a specimen, a prophetic summary, of his whole life-work, that is to say, it was practical aid to those laboring under disability. The devastation of Greece at that time was incredible. The peasants were living in caves and hiding their food under ground from the guerillas. Dr. Howe goes with his hands full of supplies and distributes them, turning the starving wretches into human beings again, through his methods, and through his power of organization. One is reminded by turns of Benjamin Franklin and of Prometheus, in reading of the astute shifts of this benevolent despot, who deals with men as if they were children, coercing them into thrift and decency. Of course the circumstances were extraordinary, or Howe’s peculiar genius could not have showed itself so early. A man of genius he was, but the limitations of this remarkable man’s mind are as clear cut as his features, which had the accuracy of bronze.

Within the field of his peculiar activity he is a great genius. Outside of that field he was not a genius at all—as will appear by his political course in 1859. His mission was to deal with persons laboring under a disability, with criminals, paupers, young people—blind or deaf people, idiots, the maimed in spirit, the defective—the people who have no chance, no future, no hope. These were the persons to whom his life was to be devoted: the Greek sufferers were merely the earliest in the series of persons whom Howe pitied.

He has left behind voluminous papers and reports, and in them lives his creed. He can hardly open his mouth without saying something of universal application to all defective persons in all ages. From the statement of abstract principles to the details of ward management—whether he is writing advice to an anxious mother or addressing the legislature—there is no side of the subject on which he is not great. His attitude toward defectives and his point of view about them form a splinter of absolute truth; religion, morality, practical wisdom, and the divinest longings of the spirit are all satisfied by it. The sight of any of these persons aroused in him such a passion of benevolence, such a whirlwind of pity, that he could do whatever was necessary. He lifted them in his arms and flew away with them like an angel. It made no difference that the cause was hopeless. He would labor a year to improve the articulation of an adult idiot, and rejoice as much over a gain of two vowels as if he had given a new art to mankind.

As has been seen, Howe was originally attracted to the Greek cause through its romantic and historic appeal; but the poetry and the patriotism of the Greek Revolution were, for him, soon merged in philanthropy. His work in the Greek cause and the books and papers and speeches he had written had brought him into the world’s eye. He returned to America a famous man. He was still under thirty years of age, an unambitious man, unaware that he was in any way remarkable. He did not take up the cause of the blind because he felt within him a deep desire, a God-given calling to help the blind, but because the cause of the blind was brought to his notice by Dr. John D. Fisher, and other gentlemen in Boston, who had been studying the methods of the Abbé Haüy in Paris, and who contemplated founding a school for the blind in Boston. It was a happy hour in which they met Howe; for he was a man whose response to any call for help was automatic.

He was one of those singular men in whom we can trace no course of development. Such as they are in early manhood, so they remain. It is interesting to bring together two passages, one from the beginning and the other from the latter half of his life, to show the identity of their intellectual content.

The following is from Howe’s First Report of the Blind Asylum: “Blindness has been in all ages one of those instruments by which a mysterious Providence has chosen to afflict man; or rather it has not seen fit to extend the blessing of sight to every member of the human family. In every country there exists a large number of human beings, who are prevented by want of sight from engaging with advantage in the pursuits of life, and who are thrown upon the charity of their more favored fellows.”...