Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

One word must be added as to the effect of casuistry upon the intellect of those enthusiasts who backed Brown while begging him to be gentle. Dr. Howe writes to Theodore Parker: “And I sent him a draft of fifty dollars as an earnest of my confidence in him and faith of his adhesion to what he so often assured me was his purpose—to avoid bloodshed and servile insurrection.” Now Brown’s previous history and avowed intentions made bloodshed an integral part of his scheme; and no one knew this better than the secret committee. But destiny endows each man with so much blindness as enables him to fulfil his part in the drama of history. It was necessary for Dr. Howe to support John Brown. His nature required it of him. In order to do so, it was necessary for Howe to undergo a slight mental obfuscation; and lo, how easily it was accomplished! He gives Brown a pistol and begs him not to use it; he seriously remonstrates with Brown as to the stealing of horses, even when done in aiding slaves to escape. This is not humbug but hallucination.

It should no more be counted against Howe that he could not express himself through the medium of politics than it is counted against Goethe that he could not paint. To have mastered one vehicle is enough for one man in this world. To have seen life from a point of view which unifies contradictions, merges thought with feeling, identifies religion and common sense, is enough to give a man a niche in the temple of humanity—yes, even though this power of vision is accorded to him only at moments, or when he is dealing with a particular subject, or when he has a violin or a paint-brush in his hand.

It is the man that makes this unity—this stained-glass window through which truth shines. The artists have had a monopoly of logic, and are the only people who get the credit of being expressive. Yet now and then a philosopher like Kant draws together a lot of old junk, and thinks over it, and arranges it till it becomes—to anyone who can follow the reasoning—a sort of cathedral of logic. Or again, a man who is the very antipodes of Kant—a man of action who arranges nothing, but whose thought and conduct are arranged for him by nature—becomes so polarized and at one with himself that he sheds a sort of glow about him; but whether this glow comes out of his words or from his conduct and words taken together we hardly know. The vehicle is nothing; the man is all. Such unitary natures are rare enough; and Howe, within his own limitations, and while standing over his own tripod with his own peculiar lyre in his hand, is one of them.

The outbreak of the war put an end to all those conditions which had been turning human nature inside out during the fifties. It was no longer necessary for idealism to seek its outlet in crime, nor for half-good men to be turned into devils because they had not in them the stuff that makes martyrs. When the war came, the average man found the sacrifice prepared for him in a form which he could understand. He gave himself freely. He gave all he had. There followed such an outpouring of virtue and heroism that the crimes of all humanity might seem to have been wiped out by it; and at the end of the war the United States resumed her place among modern nations, and took up the conventional problems of modern life.

During the war Dr. Howe was a member of the Sanitary Commission; and during the remainder of his life he continued to be the greatest authority on everything that concerned organized charity, and probably the most active individual who had ever taken part in such things in the United States.

In this sketch there has not been time to touch upon the international side of Howe’s life; his relation to the liberals and philanthropists of Europe, from Lafayette to Kossuth. I omit the picturesque episodes which that relation gave rise to, as, for instance, Howe’s imprisonment in Prussia in 1832, and his being chosen, at a later date, as the depository for the stolen crown jewels of Hungary. “When the jewels were recovered,” writes Mr. W. J. Stillman in his autobiography, “they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S. G. Howe, the well-known Philhellene.” The jewels were recovered by the Austrian Government before they could be transferred to America, and this was, no doubt, a fortunate outcome for all concerned. Dr. Howe’s liberalism remained at the same temperature throughout his life. It led him in 1867 to revisit Greece for the last time, as a distributor of supplies to the insurgent Cretans. It led him in 1871 to favor the Annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States.

Howe died in 1876. The rapid cycle of social revolutions in the United States which followed the Civil War, heightened the contrast between the veteran and the new age, and strengthened the romance that had always hung about him. To have taken part in the Greek Revolution seemed, in 1870, almost the same thing as to have been present at the siege of Troy. The mantle of Byron and the Isles of Greece never quite fell from his shoulders.

Dr. Howe seems to have been one of those nimble, playful, light-footed natures who are as strong as steel and can be as stern as steel upon occasion. His physical endurance was so great that it led to his habitually overtaxing himself. His excitability made him a hard man to live with; and he was occasionally hasty, harsh, and exacting. This irritability of Dr. Howe’s is deeply related to his whole mind and being. He was constitutionally deficient in the power to rest. The blind headaches which clouded the last third of his life were probably the convulsions through which outraged nature resumed her functions. He supposed them to be the residuum of Grecian malaria; but anyone reading of Howe’s daily life would look for breakdown somewhere. There is a gleaming elfin precocity about him which the human machine cannot support forever. He was ever in action: as he so wonderfully says of himself, “he prayed with his hands and feet.”

Dr. Howe had that kind of modesty which seems to be confined to the heroes of romantic adventure: rough soldiers have it, and people whose courage has been put to the proof a thousand times.

“I do assure you, my dear Sumner,” he writes in 1846, “the sort of vulgar notoriety which follows any movement of this kind is a very great drawback to the pleasure of making it. To the voice of praise I am sensible, too sensible I know; but I do detest this newspaper puffing, and I have been put to the blush very often by it.”