Harrington: A Story of True Love

by William Douglas O'Connor

It ceased; there was a pause, and the world’s hopes and struggles surged in upon his kindled spirit, as the organ rolled forth in golden sweetness the martial and mournful andante of the Marseillaise. The French hymn of liberty, whose sombre and fiery tonal morning burst once on the birth-throes of Democracy, like the light of God upon the chaos of the globe! He never heard it without emotion, and now it rushed into his soul, dilating and expanding into vast orchestral harmonics. His eye gleamed and bright color lit his face as he listened to the triumphal terror and glory of the thrilling strain. On and on it swept in cadences of tears and fire; down and down it darkened in weird and burning melody, fraught with the passion of all human wrongs; and rising into the pealing cry of the battle-summons, and flowing into the proud, heroic tones of mournful rapture which seem to exult for the dead who die for man, it melted away.

Harrington sat, flushed and throbbing, in the fragrant silence of the room. The organ had ceased and gone, and he was alone. Gradually the tumult of his spirit sank into golden calm, and with the charm of the music still lingering in his mind, he put the faded herbs into the drawer, and prepared to begin his tasks.

His unfinished article was the first thing to be attended to, and he got it out and set to work upon it. The article, as Muriel had said, he was writing for money, for Harrington’s means sometimes ran low. His mother dying six years before, when he was nineteen, had left him her little property, including this house. The house he rented to Captain Fisher, and this rent, added to the interest of the money his mother had left him, gave him a yearly income of about six hundred dollars. An economical and selfish man might have got on well enough on these receipts; but Harrington, though economical enough, was anything but selfish, and between his own expenses and his pecuniary outlay for others, he sometimes found himself in want of money. On these occasions he was wont to interrupt his studies to write for certain periodicals till he wrote himself into funds again. What he wrote sold well, and his pen was in demand; but philosophy, Hegel said, has nothing to do with dollars, and Harrington evidently thought scholarship had not either, for when he had once filled the gap in his finances, back he went to his studies, and the magazine editor did not live who could tempt him from them into another contribution.

For he was a scholar born, and in this room he kept alive the traditions which have made the name of Harrington dear to scholarship and man. It is a shining name in literature and history, and bears the recorded honors due to names linked with the memory of human pleasure or the cause of human service. There was one Harrington in the days of the Eighth Henry—a polished poet, who surpassed the verse of his time. There was another, his child, the darling of Queen Elizabeth, a sprightly wit and poet, who sunned his muse in the brightness of the bright Britannic days, wrought well for belle-lettres and history, and gave his country her first English version of the fan and fire of Ariosto. There was still another, the Oxford scholar of a later age, of whom the chronicle records that he was a prodigy in the common law, a person of excellent parts, honest in dealing, and of good and generous nature. There was one more, loftier far than these, whose mighty pulses beat for liberty and justice, the brave Utopian of Sidney’s time, who aimed to lay the deep foundations of the perfect and immortal state—James Harrington, the author of Oceana. And among the rest, skilled or famed in law and science and poetry, there was yet another, James Harrington’s true brother by a closer tie than that of blood—the stout jurist of Vermont, who spoke the decision of her Supreme Court on the demand of a slave claimant, decreeing that his title to a man was not good till he could show a bill of sale from the Almighty God. That was Judge Harrington, and by that decree he earned his right to a statue from mankind.

Whatever was best and greatest in the works and days of the ancestral Harringtons, seemed likely to be renewed and excelled by the young scholar who bore their name. Primarily, he was a Baconist. There stood the bust of Bacon on the pedestal in his library, and to him it was the treasure of treasures. Wentworth used to say jestingly, that Harrington was a heathen and worshipped an idol. For the idol, however, Wentworth himself, with Muriel, was responsible. Harrington had been sadly disappointed in not being able to find any bust of Verulam at the statuary’s; so Wentworth and Muriel had collected the various portraits of the great Chancellor, moulded from them a bust in clay, somewhat larger than life, cast it in plaster, and one day Harrington, entering his study, was astonished and enraptured at finding the bust there on its pedestal. It was a magnificent success, and well embodied the noble sagacity, the tender and gentle sweetness, the regal compassion and calm, massive intellectuality, which appear in Bacon’s enormous brow and face of princely majesty, as the painters of his time have pictured him.

Harrington now loved Bacon with tenfold ardor, and Harrington’s love for Bacon was something wonderful. It was absolutely a personal attachment, and there was no surer way to rouse him than to speak disparagingly of Verulam. He put him above all authors or men. He spoke of him as the flower of the human race. He resented any imputation on his fame, scouted at the modern aspersions upon him of Lord Campbell, Macaulay and others, as baseless and infamous slanders, and altered Pope’s epigrammatic line, which he thought the seed-cone of the whole modern libel, to read “the wisest, brightest, noblest of mankind.” With a standing promise to his friends to put the evidence together some day in demonstrable form, having already, he said, begun to make notes to that end, he meanwhile rested in the broad assertion that Bacon’s downfall was the work of the conservatism of his time—that the conservators of social abuses had smelt out his concealed democracy and socialism, trumped up the charge of malfeasance in office against him, ruined and defamed him in his life and flung the mire of a traditionary calumny on his tomb. It was another of Harrington’s heresies that Bacon in the seventeenth century aimed to do for the world what Fourier aimed to do in the nineteenth. This, he insisted, was the key to his works and life—this the torch by which they were to be read and interpreted. It was evident that Harrington had a very pretty affair on his hands, should he ever venture to publish an idea so heretical. The sin of connecting the world-honored Verulam with the man whom modern society has endowed, as Muriel said, with hoofs and horns and a harpoon tail, and of asserting that either or both had meant to bring the kingdom of God upon the earth, would be only less than the effort of both or either to so interfere with our highly respectable institutions.

However this may be, Harrington’s heart was anchored on the idea, and with this faith in him, he studied his Bacon, together with Montaigne and Shakspeare, who, he thought, or seemed to think—for on this point he was mysteriously non-committal—were in the interest of the Baconian design. Possibly, he might yet come to different conclusions, for he was young; and, like Sterne’s Pilgrim, had just begun his journey, and had much to learn.

Meanwhile he pursued his studies, though with the full consciousness that there was no accredited career open to him. To a man who held unpopular convictions as he did; no more a Christian of the modern sort than Christ was; no more a patriot of the modern sort than Sidney was; no more a believer in the modern order of society than Bacon and Fourier were; despising the Government as an engine of force and fraud; refusing assent to the Constitution, and allegiance to the Union, because in his view they legalized and fortified the crime and ruin of Slavery—to such a man the church, the bar, the bench, the senate, the official station of any kind were all closed. But Harrington had a solemn instinct at his heart, that the time was coming when his country would rise against slavery and social wrong and call upon her outlawed sons for their best service. Against that day he prepared himself to do his part, whatever it might prove to be. In his conception of it, the utter annihilation of slavery was first in the programme. This involved the possibility of civil war. It might come between the dark millions of the South and the Government. It might come between the Government’s pro-slavery liegemen and the freemen of the North. In either case, Harrington was pledged to serve liberty, and that his service might be efficient, he had begun the study of military science, and had the best text books, such as those of Mahan, Kinsley, Thiroux and Knowlton, together with the chief standard works relating to warfare, from the Commentaries of Cæsar to the volumes of Durat-Lasalle. To this end also went his varied practice with Bagasse in the school of arms, with rifle practice elsewhere. Hoping, too, that the period of social reconstruction would come in his own time or follow hard upon it, he was preparing to add his thought to bring it on, or shape his thought to guide it when it should come, and to this end were his scholastic labors. His shelves might have hinted as much. There were the works of the masters of law and government, and of those who have studied and schemed for society, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Cicero, Justinian, Grotius, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Puffendorff, Henricius, Milton, Sidney, Harrington, Pothier, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu, Bentham, Burke, St. Simon, Fourier, Compte—legists, jurists, scholiasts, works of practice and theory, statements of codes, and books that are the seed of codes. With them works of exact science in all its branches, and works of history, biography, poetry, travel and fiction, classic and modern—for it was Harrington’s design to grasp the thought and life of all the ages.

So toiled he. No dilettante litterateur; no student forgetful of his time and kind, or gaining lore to fortify or gild oppression;—but kinsman to the golden blood of the gallant scholars to whose graves the heart brings its laurels and its tears. No scholar, either of the modern sort, which stores the brain and saps the arm—but of the large Elizabethan type, training his body in every manly exercise, training his mind in equal skill and power. Such was the budding promise of Harrington.