Cicero in Maine

WHEN I was a girl attending the high school, — a when that opens the gateway into a magic land of youth, — we were fortunate enough to have a teacher who was, as I heard a college youth phrase it the other day, “ dead stuck on Latin.” It was not simply that this gifted man had a passion for Latin literature, but he was, or seemed so to our youthful imaginations, besotted with the grammar of the language. No degree of proficiency or distinction to which we could attain in the matter of fluent translations was ever allowed to excuse us from the daily collection of gems of knowledge from Andrews’s and Stoddard’s Latin Grammar.

The class of which I was a member was a small but unique aggregation. Our teacher had high hopes of classical triumphs for us because, though our intellectual gifts might not be of surpassing lustre, our critical faculties were abnormally developed. The heroic degree of discipline which enabled the immortal Light Brigade to feel that it was

would have found no favor in our ranks. The most uncouth lad in the class, the least hopeful of success in polite literary attainments, was the very one, it seems to me now, who oftenest voiced our united conclusions most clearly.

“ If we ain’t to ask questions, and ain’t to say what we think, what are we goin’ to do ? ” he queried ; and one and all felt that to such a question there could be but one reply : we were to ask questions, we were to say what we thought, — for what else were we in school ?

To this method of pursuing our researches our teacher had no objection provided we kept within reasonable bounds, and he had his own way of setting the limits.

“ Ain’t we ever goin’ to git through studyin’ grammar ? ” inquired the aforementioned awkward lad, after months of hope deferred.

“ If Mr. Brown thinks he has learned all the grammar has to impart, perhaps he will kindly give us a little information about its contents,” the teacher suggested blandly; and then followed a terrible ten minutes for Mr. Brown, during which every vestige of his fancied familiarity with Andrews and Stoddard fled from his grasp.

The victim sat down at last baffled, perspiring, but by no means entirely vanquished ; no sooner was he seated than his hand began to wave frantically aloft, signaling the fact that he had yet a Parthian arrow to dispatch.

he quoted in a quavering voice from yesterday’s lesson, while we looked at him open-mouthed at such erudition. “ When I’m all badgered up so, I know a good deal more ’n I ’pear to be able to tell.”

“ It would seem so, Mr. Brown, it would seem so,” the teacher assented with a darkling glance which warned the rest of us of sorrow to come, “ and therein you differ from some of your classmates who are often able to tell more than they can know.”

It was owing to this lively, though shallow, intelligence of ours, and the facility with which we engrafted pagan Rome on Puritan New England, that our instructor was encouraged to jump us from Cæsar to Virgil with no intervening stages. To him, as to Mr. Cooper, the commentator whose notes assisted our studies, the reading of Virgil was a joy of which one could not partake too soon or too copiously. He expected us to become rapturously interested in the progress of the story, to enjoy with him the favorite passages which he rolled out sonorously for our benefit ; mouth-filling lines like

or the softer modulations of

Alas, how grievously we disappointed the good man’s hopes ! Virgil’s poetic genius appealed to us little more than Milton’s Paradise Lost would appeal to a primer class suddenly plunged into its mysteries. Even when we translated most glibly we were like creatures

The virtues of the pious Æneas were of a variety not mentioned in our Sundayschool lessons; we held his seamanship very cheap; we had reasons of our own for doubting the authenticity of the whole Trojan legend.

“ How did they ever git to Troy ? ” our class orator inquired dubiously. “ There wa’n’t one in the whole lot’t knew any more ’bout navigation ’n a fly in a pan o’ milk ! ” This was after we had learned from Mr. Cooper’s preface to Book I that our friend Æneas had already been roaming the seas for seven years before presenting himself for the pleasure of our acquaintance.

From the first we had no use for Dido. Love was an emotion which had been mentioned in our hearing, and there were boys and girls among our number who “ went together,” and displayed varying degrees of what we called “ softness ” in so doing ; but that any human creature could be soft enough deliberately to toast herself upon a funeral pile, simply because another human creature sailed away and left her, was beyond our wildest conception of the tender passion.

The uncouth lad, who frequently wrote notes for general circulation among the girls of the class, issued the following as soon as Dido’s funereal intentions were announced:—

“ Pass this On.

“ Dido was a Fool; how’d she know but Eneeus would be Blowed back by the first Wind ? ”

Some of the boys who were studying Greek originated a sort of class chant, and the schoolroom for a time resounded during play hours with the ringing notes of

“ Dido, Dido, died ou’ doors ! ”

As a result of such callousness to all the tender and lofty emotions, we were at last transferred to Cicero, and here, for the first time, we touched solid ground. We lived in an age when treason and traitors were matters of recent history, and philippics were something we were very familiar with, albeit under a different name.

The class lyric, by an easy transition, blossomed into

and without a dissenting voice we took the great orator to our homes and hearts.

The teacher, when he discerned our enthusiasm, and heard the uncouth lad vociferating genially, “ He’s jest givin’ it to the old Cat to-day, ain’t he ? ” heaved a sigh, perhaps, over the incomprehensible vagaries of pupils, and wisely addressed himself to making the most of the situation.

One Saturday forenoon he brought Rufus Choate’s Eloquence of Revolutionary Periods, and read us what a great American orator had to say about the genius of Cicero. Splendid words they were, these vibrating sentences of Choate’s, and as we listened our eyes shone and our hearts beat: —

“ From that purer eloquence, from that nobler orator, the great trial of fire and blood through which the spirit of Rome was passing had burned and purged away all things light, all things gross; the purple robe, the superb attitude and action, the splendid commonplaces of a festal rhetoric, are all laid by ; the ungraceful, occasional vanity of adulation, the elaborate speech of the abundant, happy mind at its ease, all disappear; and instead, what directness, what plainness, what rapidity, what fire, what abnegation of himself, what disdain, what hate of the usurper and the usurpation, what grand, swelling sentiments, what fine raptures of liberty, roll and revel there! ”

On the next declamation day, as soon as the class orator mounted the platform, we realized by the light in his dark eyes that he had something new to offer us. There never was a more moving speaker than our class orator. No matter how many times he declaimed Virginius, — and, owing to many pressing engagements which swallowed up his time for learning new “ pieces,” this happened with tolerable frequency, — with that slow, deliberate, musical accent he captured his audience. At every repetition,

as if it were for us a new birth; when, at the critical moment,

we greeted its disappearance with the same shuddering breath; and that “ hoarse, changed voice ” in which he spake, “ Farewell, sweet child, farewell! ” never lost its magic for tears.

On this well-remembered day, however, the sorrows of Virginius were forgotten ; it was Rufus Choate’s magnificent version of a representative passage of Cicero’s oratory that fell upon our charmed ears, and we listened to the swelling tones of the speaker with that quickened, thrilling breath which marks the hearer who has surrendered himself to the emotion of the moment.

“ Lay hold on this opportunity of our salvation, conscript fathers — by the immortal gods I conjure you ! — and remember that you are the foremost men here, in the council chamber of the whole earth. Give one sign to the Roman people that even now as they pledge their valor, so you pledge your wisdom to the crisis of the state,” — thus the appeal opened. It was the ageless cry for liberty, the cry that is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

“ Born to glory and to liberty, let us hold these distinctions fast, or let us greatly die!” — these are words that belong to every century and to every race of men. We did not know how to formulate what we felt, but it was a moment when Bull Run and Gettysburg, that worn face of Abraham Lincoln, and all the unmarked graves on Southern battlefields confused themselves within us in some indefinable passion, and took hold on the heroic memories of ancient Rome. — a moment when, as in all the high impulses of life, the barriers of time and place were melted away.

I believe, as I look back now, that our first conscious inspiration toward what was best in literature and noblest in statesmanship took root from that time. We were living in strenuous days of reconstruction after a great war, and the air was still full of battle echoes, but we drank in the influences of the hour as unheedingly as a plant drinks the sunshine and the dew ; it needed this breath from ancient Rome to shape the cumulative forces within us into the beginnings of American citizenship.

No healthy young creature realizes the process of his own growth, but many of us can vaguely remember the period when

first reminded our bodies of the souls that dwelt mysteriously within. We received that reminder noisily or undemonstratively according to our varying temperaments, but in each one of us, none the less, life marked the hour when a new epoch began.

The regular daily session of the school closed at half-past four in the afternoon, but from that time until five o’clock a dark-faced, sweet-voiced woman, with what seemed to us a marvelous twist to her tongue, gave instruction in French to the ambitious few who aspired to a knowledge of that polished language. There was the girl who learned easily and forgot everything, the girl who learned ploddingly and forgot nothing, and another, still, who seems to me now the farthest away of all, although there are buoyant hours when her once overflowing youth and bounding vitality return to her pulses like the resurrection of a lost joy.

Of the three male members— for the class was a well-balanced one — the class orator and the uncouth lad constituted two, and the third was the genius of the school, the only scholar, perhaps, whose intuitions leaped unerringly to the goal, who saw a subject whole, and wrested the inwardness from it while the rest of us were laboriously pondering its earliest developments. Just why the uncouth lad elected to study the French language I could not then comprehend, though I have often told myself that the mere recollection of his recitations added a distinct flavor to life.

He himself accounted for his presence in the class by the statement that “ as he took care o’ the schoolhouse he might’s well be recitin’ French as doin’ nothin’, seein’ as he’d got to stay anyway; ” and to behold the vital interest which he displayed in the sugar and spice of the grocer, or the mahogany table of the cabinet maker, was only one degree less joy-inspiring than when he announced, giving to each syllable its full value, “Jay lese belles pantou-flees de ma bellemare,” or clothed himself gayly in the ribbons of his father-in-law.

It was when the French recitation had ended, however, and the old brick schoolhouse was left to our undisturbed possession, that we sat around the great sheet-iron stove, with no light but the red blur of the setting sun through the western windows, and told all things that ever we knew. On one Tuesday afternoon in particular, I remember, the talk began with that tale of the celebrated wooden horse which Virgil makes Æneas tell as a sort of after-dinner story in the second book of the Æneid. Our teacher, always hoping against hope that he might some day interest us in his beloved Virgil, had that afternoon been dwelling on the great poet’s talent as a raconteur.

It is needless to say that we rejected the whole narrative as puerile. The school genius, indeed, made some modifying reflections in regard to the primitiveness of the age in which the deception was located. “ I s’pose we ought to consider ” — he began deprecatingly, but the uncouth lad brusquely interrupted, —

“ We ain’t got to consider nothin’, ” he declared, “ except that the’ wa’n’t any last one of ’em’t had any more head ’n a carpet tack.”

“ A wooden hoss,” the class orator sneered, taking up the theme ; — “ poh! ’t would n’t fool a baby. My little brother had one for a Christmas present, an’ ’t would n’t go into his stockin’, so mother took an’ hitched it on with a string.”

“ I ’ll bait ye, sir,” the uncouth lad declaimed oratorically, “ that we could n’t ’a’ fooled the rebels with any wooden hoss when we was tryin’ to take Richmond. If they ’d seen us drawin’ off an’ leavin’ any such contrivance round to hitch to their stockin’, they’d said, ‘ No, thank ye. We ain’t keepin’ Christmas this year, an’ if we was, the Yankees ain’t no Santy Claus.’ ”

“ What do you think,” asked the girl who was quick to learn, “ of the man that came into school to-day ? ” It was a part of her adaptability that she knew how to change a subject in season to prevent it from growing threadbare.

We lived within two miles of the State capitol, and in all the high moments of life we felt ourselves enhaloed by the shadow of its dome. The state legislature was in session, and our visitor that day had been one of the members of this august body. Our generation was much less sophisticated than the present upto-date class of young people, and for us very simple things frequently assumed heroic proportions. To our admiring eyes this visitor was not a mere country lawyer, with that taste for the literature of Latin which many country lawyers used to possess ; he was a wise and powerful being, who created laws out of his inner consciousness, and hobnobbed with principalities and powers, and we venerated him accordingly. The teacher had informed him of our intimacy with Cicero, and when, at the close of the recitation, the great man “ addressed ” us, he had the acumen to leave the ordinary platitudes unsaid, and draw from the Roman orator’s life and words the message of that nobler patriotism, that larger citizenship, whose ideal forever appeals to ardent souls with the thrill of a passion for which men have been content to die.

When the girl who was quick to learn recalled our visitor to our minds the thrill came back too, and our eyes turned toward the red streamers in the darkening west, as if they were the banners of victory beckoning us on.

“ Le’s go up to the legislature to-morrow,” the slow girl suddenly suggested, seized by an unwonted inspiration; and with one accord we assented, for Wednesday afternoon would be a holiday.

When, next day, we met at the appointed hour for our long walk, the afternoon seemed to have been created for our purpose. It was one of those clear, bracing winter days when the snowy path echoes crisply under one’s tread, and snow and sky melt into a dazzle, whose blended light and color is emphasized by the dark shapes of feathery pine and fir trees.

It must not be thought that our little company dallied along in couples absorbed in any sentimental discourse. On the contrary, we marched by threes, the boys leading the way, the girls briskly keeping pace. The road which we followed was then, and to me is to this day, filled with childhood memories of “ the war,” and it was of these things that we discoursed as we went along. That commonplace-looking, hip-roofed farmhouse had been the military pesthouse, and awesome associations lingered around it still ; in yonder field a battery had once encamped, and one of the girls related the story of how, at the venturesome age of twelve, she, with several companions of equally mature years, having wandered within the limits of the camp, had been promptly arrested and haled before the commanding officer, the terrors of whose cross-examination had been little mitigated by roars of laughter from surrounding listeners. The echoes of marching infantry and the beating hoofs of cavalry horses seemed to us hardly to have died from the air, and when we reached the State House at last we were keyed for heroic doings.

The capitol building of our native state was to us, in those days, the grandest structure in the world. I confess here that it has never lost its ancient charm for me. It stands on high ground, and I have seen its dome blur grandly into many sunrises and sunsets ; when one begins to mount the successive flights of broad, granite steps that lead to the majestic front entrance, one begins to say to one’s “ inward ear,” “ Here is a centre of deeds; here events are shaped for good or ill; ” and the fact that many of these shapings are trivial in themselves — sometimes, indeed, illshaped — does not altogether rob them of their significance in the eternal framework of things.

As we entered the rotunda that day, our footsteps resounding on the floor seemed almost an impertinence. We lingered to look at the portraits of the old-time governors in their gay coats ; we paused in sincere homage before the clustering battle-flags, which were then being gathered into the State House as their last, honored resting-place. A copy of Moses Owen’s stirring poem, the Returned Maine Battle-Flags, hung beside the sacred relics, and the class orator could not resist the opportunity to thrill us with its music. As he read he forgot himself and the place, and more than one hurrying foot checked itself at the sound, as if a sentinel had called “Halt!”

After numerous digressions we reached the gallery of the House of Representatives, and hung over the rail gazing at the mighty men below. The triviality of the subjects under discussion might, had we been maturer auditors, have served to dampen our heroic mood, but to us it was all mysteriously large and significant. When two honorable members chanced to indulge in lively recrimination, the uncouth lad was observed to murmur as in meditation, “ How long, O Catiline,” — the familiar phrase which had become to us like a household word.

Once during the afternoon a large, blond young man, with a cherubic visage, rose in answer to a question, and drawled forth a reply which commanded the instant and amused attention of the house.

“ That’s Tom Reed,” we heard somebody say, and we looked with quickened interest at a speaker who had already begun to make himself felt as a power.

By and by there was a stir in the rear of the great hall as loitering men in the corridor greeted a fresh comer. Now Cicero was indeed among us! We all knew that erect form, with the head gallantly thrown back, and the keen, dark eyes that had not then learned to question Fate otherwise than blithely ; the eyes that had ever a smile of quick recognition, as we well knew, for every boy and girl to whom their glance had been directed. It was little wonder that we all loved Mr. Blaine, — there was much about him that was supremely lovable.

The usual routine of a visit to the State House included the climbing of the winding stairs which led to the cupola, to assure ourselves that Kennebec County remained securely anchored below; but, on this occasion, as the short winter afternoon was waning fast, we contented ourselves with a visit to the massive stone balcony which opens from the second story. A tinge of rosy light was already reflected in the eastern sky, and a few ambitious stars had begun to show themselves. In front of us lay the “state grounds,” which had so lately been a bustling camp, empty now and solitary save where a marble shaft glimmered whitely to mark the spot where some departed statesman had wrapped the drapery of his couch about him and lain down to pleasant dreams. Even the glimmering line of the river was white, too. As we stood at the balustrade’s edge, brooding over the landscape, life thrilled large within us, life uncomprehended, unformulated, the full cup, the fulfilled dream, which seem wholly possible only to the hopefulness of youth. When the

A large bird rose slowly in the distant sky, his wings showing black against the clear ether. “ It’s funny, too,” the genius said, thinking aloud ; “ the Roman eagles, the American eagle, — and those old chaps thought their birds were the emblems o’ freedom jest as we think ours is ! Well, I don’ know’s I ’d change James G. Blaine for old Cicero.”

In the middle of the Latin recitation next day the uncouth lad inquired abruptly, “ What ever became o’ him, anyhow, — I mean what end did he make ? ”

The teacher stared for a moment, uncomprehending. “ Oh, you mean Cicero ? ”

“ Course,” the uncouth one replied laconically.

Then the teacher — how fortunate it was for us that this wise man always knew how to seize the heart of an opportunity— gave us a brief sketch of the great Roman’s life, showing us how his true nobleness overbalanced his political weaknesses and vanity. He — the teacher — “ knew a man ” who had visited Tusculum and seen the spot where the ruins of Cicero’s villa still stand, with the great ivy tree growing against the sunny wall. He told us of the neighbors whose country houses surrounded Cicero’s dwelling, — Cæsar, Pompey, Brutus, the poet Catullus, Lucullus, celebrated for his feasts, with whom Cicero used to exchange books, — names these were to conjure with. He told us, too, of our hero’s beloved daughter, his little Tullia, and her early death ; and he made it all more real by reminding us that this was the same Tusculum with whose long, “ white streets ” we were so familiar in Macaulay’s poem. Here the class orator’s lips began to move, and we knew that he was muttering dumbly, —

He had often declaimed it.

When the narrator went on to describe how Cicero, betrayed and deserted, was finally assassinated, the fatal blow being struck by a man whom he had formerly defended, the uncouth lad, forgetting the dignity of the place and hour, brought his hand down on his knee with a resounding smack, and declared in quivering tones, “ I call it gol-darned mean ! ”

All this passed years ago. The girl who was quick to learn and the school genius both heard the call early in life to that land where naught but evil is ever forgotten, and where insight is divine and eternal. The girl who never forgot has spent her powers in patiently bestowing her accumulations on others; the class orator has disseminated his gifts of language through the pen rather than the persuasive voice ; and it was, after all, the uncouth lad, uncouth no longer, magnificent in stature and in wisdom, who, on a well-remembered day, rolled grandly forth that noble address on Christian Citizenship.

There was a lump in my throat when I heard him say, “ My own first conscious impulse towards making a good citizen of myself dates from the time when I was awkwardly but enthusiastically translating Cicero’s orations in the old brick schoolhouse in my native town. I was fortunate enough to begin the study of Latin under a teacher who taught with the spirit and the understanding also, and who had the magnetic power of making his pupils realize that every great language possesses a soul as well as an anatomy.”

When I stood before that former uncouth lad at the close of his discourse, and saw him look at me questioningly, as one who dimly divines a ghost of the past, I said to him, — since it is generally wiser to laugh than to cry, — “ Avezvous les pantoufles de velours de l’épicier ? ”

He seized my hand in a mighty grasp of recognition and welcome : “ I have, — and those of the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker as well. The women in my parish were always sending ’em to me before I was married.”

But, when all is said, the true link between us, in the new as in the old day, was something in which the grocer’s velvet slippers had little part: that which made our old school days worth remembering, the image which shaped itself in both our minds as we stood there, —

“ One and one with a shadowy third,”

was that of the wise schoolmaster, who had known how to draw us into the grand circle where old Rome and young America, all nations, indeed, and all races of men, were made one and indivisible in the deathless continuity of a moral ideal.

Martha Baker Dunn.