New England Villages

I

LESS than seventy-five years ago there was no day in the seven so distinctive of the real New England as its Sunday. This, we know, is no longer true. Little enough distinguishes Sunday from any other day in the week. Men work or play, as their mood suggests. Women do the same. Young people live in a whirl of their own, and all of them speed the world over in their cars.

But in New England village life, mingled with the modern, there is, now and then, something of exception. In a few of their old churches, their people, and tradition, still lingers a flavor of the vanished years. Faint though it be, it is an interesting reminder of the last stage of a passing history.

I confess this was in my mind when, on a Sunday morning not long ago, I decided to attend services in the village church and sit in my grandfather’s pew. I had to ignore the lure of the world without—its ‘green hills and far horizons.’ But I knew the compensations of my choice. There is a peculiar charm in the quiet revery, the meditative appraisal of men and things, which is always a part of this hour in the village church.

As I waited on the old porch for the family carriage, I heard far off the tolling of the bell. Deep and melodious, it rose and fell, a splendid overtone to the beauty of the midsummer morning.

But why church-bells in August? you may ask. The reason is simple. The minister’s vacation is not only unknown, it is unneeded and unwanted. Seventy years the old bell has swung above this village of Fairport, but its voice has never been silent because of the minister’s vacation.

Summer is the golden time of the year to church and community; for their numbers are increased by many a native son and daughter, who have come back to the old town as one of that vast New England company known as ‘summer people.’ Colloquially perhaps, they are ‘Martin’s folks,’ or ‘Cap’n Dyer’s boys,’ or ‘The Chicago crowd.’ Simultaneously, many an old homestead, which has been transformed by its screened porches, stepping-stone paths, and rioting flowerbeds, till it could not be recognized by its ancestral founders themselves, opens its shutters and wakes to life after its long winter silence.

These people went away years ago to make money. Some of them have done so, in varying degrees, even to actual wealth; and although they return with abundant evidence of it, they do not return with a y in their Martins and their Carolines. They were named for their grandfathers and grandmothers; and for two generations, at least on the patronymic side of the house, there will be no departure from the literalness of the fact. There is a sane, self-respecting simplicity about them, an unspoiled strain of the old stock, which makes discrimination between natural change and what they call plain foolishness. It is a reflection of something — would that the gods could cherish it — which belongs with the few and diminishing influences that would still stand between their moneyspending, fast-living sons and the highpowered pace of a generation which must start importantly where its fathers left off.

It might be claimed that these people are not in reality Fairport people; that city life has made them what they are. But exception should be taken to this. Intrinsically, they are the product of Fairport and what it stands for. They drew from its earnestness and simplicity, and its universal law of work, especially the latter, an invaluable grasp of essentials — realities as distinguished from inclination. They perceived the fact of their own personal accountability, and became mentally adjusted to a balanced existence, which, first of all, eliminated — or, rather, never knew — the pernicious philosophy of getting everything for nothing.

There is a moral discipline in such a life, which subsoils human character to its lasting good. It is always a short road to understanding through denial — through getting rather than receiving. They have rendered, and were willing to render, an equivalent to the world; and that principle and spirit came out of Fairport.

In their present lives the money they have made is, of course, the great determining force. Yet it has issues which fall even more vitally on the succeeding generation than upon their own. Because of a curious blindness, and because the pressure of modern standards so easily force it, that generation is prone to be brought up out of joint with the idea of work. Work is at a discount. They must reap where they have not sown. It is a generation that has been elaborated rather than developed.

Now there are villages and villages, some of more and some of less importance, as illustrating their own particular part of the many and diverse features of village life. But the two of which I write, one large and the other small, are not composite pictures. They stand as portrayed, and are typical of a large class, which is representative of New England village life. In fact, there is a slow homogeneity creeping over these places, due to the automobile, the telephone, and the farm bureau. There is a closer community of interest throughout a county in these days than existed between adjacent towns twentyfive years ago.

Yet villages have their own psychology as distinguished from that of the country proper or city life. Of course, in certain phases, there are individual variations. As, for instance, there is not precisely the same degree of unity, of placid calm, in most cases, probably, as obtains in this particular Fairport church. Yet one knows that it cannot last indefinitely, or even much longer. In looking into its underlying causes, one realizes that its cohesive element has been the character of the generation which is slowly passing. That has been the foundation, the substratum of its identity, held together by many subtle forces other than its religion — by memories, old association, kindred experiences, joys and sorrows.

Speaking strictly, its religious views have undergone more change than anything else; although, whenever this particular subject threatens to come to the surface with these good folk themselves, it is managed with a gentle, deprecatory dismissal — an attitude alike mysterious and fascinating to the thoughtful observer. Because, although they are not given very much to conscious introspection or other selfanalytical processes, they do know when they have lost such an ancestral possession as hell, or any similar Calvinistic legacy. They do not know when, or where, or the process by which, they lost it. They only know that they have.

But it is in a much more unconscious way that their shyness in admitting such facts has anything of that spirit which, juggling with reason and moral sense, would make a virtue out of holding to the outward form of an orthodoxy whose substance is dead. To an age that demands almost instinctively the facts of knowledge and truth, it is increasingly difficult to square this attitude with one of strict sincerity.

But lack of sincerity has nothing whatever to do with the two churches, one Baptist, the other Unitarian, of Fairport village. Questioned directly, their answer would be plain.

The shifting of the old fundamentals of religion to the new bases of liberal thought and the uncompromising decrees of science, to the exigencies of modern life and truth, is a new interpretation of human destiny and the universe, which is still a word in a foreign tongue to many people. And it is perplexity over the mere fact of the open door in their own little religious world, and the inescapable consequences that it plainly lets in, which give to Fairport its hesitancy and silence. Dismayed that their one ancient point, the absolute and literal authority of their Bible, is to them no longer valid, they are dumb before the realization that all their eternal verities have a new and strange evaluation.

II

I wonder if my reader ever had the privilege of riding to church of a Sunday morning in a family carriage? If his experiences all lie on this side of the world’s transition from carriages to cars, then he has been denied one of the rare pleasures of life; for, in the passing of the horse and carriage, there is almost a national misfortune. One has not the temerity to decry, by ever so little, the great place of the automobile in the present age. I am as dependent on one as anybody. But it has brought a new psychology into the world, and in the bringing has discountenanced and thrust out an old psychology which the heart of the world will never cease to need. There is probably no price to pay; but if there is, humanity will pay it.

Now, leisure goes with a family carriage— time enough. ‘Time enough,’ you vaguely echo, ‘time enough for what?' Well, for most of the things that most of us are missing — time enough for meditation; time enough to rest; time enough to discover the beauty of the world; time to grow a little finer and mellower, to be a little plainer and more moderate and contented.

I do not know the name or species of our carriage. I only know that from the time you step onto its broad guard and sink into its foot-deep old broadcloth upholstery, you have before you a little journey of utter peace and comfort. Black Major, the big handsome old horse, full of years and philosophy, is as unmoved by the passing show of this world as anything still alive can be. Whether it is the oncoming blare of a brass band in front, or honks and wailings in our rear, he jogs heavily along on his own side of the road, too well aware of having charge of his own family to be moved by trivial matters.

It is two miles to the village, through as beautiful a bit of scenery as lies on the Atlantic seaboard. The family Fords and Franklins are parked in dignity under the magnificent pines at the back of the church, and a few grave steeds keep Major company, as he moves to his own particular tree. This tree has an ingrowing ship’s bolt for the looping of his rein, which my sea-captain grandfather placed there forty years ago. In a little while now it will be out of sight, buried in the heart of the pine.

This church is admittedly one of the best pieces of church architecture in the state. White as snow, with darkshuttered windows of just the right size and position, its tall spire gleaming against the rich darkness of the pines, it is a delight to look upon. Its inset porch is upheld by splendid fluted Doric columns, and the gable and entablature above are of such perfect and suggestive proportions, that, for a moment, one thinks of a pale vision of Athenian maidens passing in ghostly panathenæa across it. Within, restfulness abides. Subdued color and soft light and decorous quiet reign.

It may be said that this church, in the past, was long under a sort of tradition of music. For more than two generations, the town and many surrounding towns were subject to some of the best musical training which it is often the fortune of country people to obtain, in two singing masters and violinists. One was a native American, the other a naturalized foreigner. The former was a native of Fairport, the latter a resident of a neighboring town; and both, by education and natural endowment, past masters of their art.

Young men and women, who in turn became fathers and mothers, and sometimes the children of these children, both in their homes and in the old-time singing school, — a stable institution fifty years ago, — were for years under the instruction of one or the other of these men. It was an age that valued learning of every kind for the old love of learning itself, and that listened with deference and respect to its superiors. Its very spirit of appreciation led it far toward perceiving and acquiring many a finer phase of these men’s musical knowledge. Ragtime and jazz had not then descended upon a troubled world, and no high-heeled miss, home with her violin from her first winter’s tarrying at some ‘school of art,’ ever played her little rôle on this country stage. Instead, what they had they intelligently understood, and possessed an insight, at least, into the dignity and beauty of a great art.

So that, as I listened, this Sunday morning, to the little cottage organ played with consummate skill, and to the simple but perfectly rendered music of the service, I wondered if it were not the last faint echo from the lives of the two old masters whose violins have long been mute.

The sermon was that of a man who had never seen the inside of a college or divinity school; who laid down the yard-stick, when in the midst of his forties, because he had a call; and who, at sixty-odd, was preaching, fervently and devoutly, the necessity and efficacy of beliefs, — or of belief, — rather than facts, or knowledge, or history, or science, or philosophy, or ethics, or their reasonable application to modern life. That the church has or could have any essential function or secondary office concerning the human race, other than the saving of your soul from eternal perdition, and the worship of God by the prescribed means and methods embodied in the church, is to him the borderland of heresy.

Yet, notwithstanding the strength and sincerity of his own belief, one still feels that, because of some intuition of its need, his attitude is one of defense. The one thing that would give him assurance of having accomplished the greatest life-work would be the keeping of his people ‘strong in the faith,’ secure from inward questioning, from any toleration of liberal thought or ‘higher criticism,’of which he knows little save the sinister sound of its name. And, with sincerest inward concern, would he save them from Unitarianism.

There is not a shadow of selfishness or jealousy in his motives. Every man is his brother, and he would give of his time, his substance, and his strength, for what he believes is his soul’s safety, although proselyting in the narrow sense of the word is not the way of this good man’s Christianity. Indeed, there is a mutual tolerance in these two churches, whose overstepping is carefully guarded. Barring the few exceptions which exist always, everywhere, and in everything, there is a refinement of neighborliness and brotherhood throughout the place, which values harmony and peace in the highest.

It is perfectly well known that at two-thirty, a goodly number of the morning’s congregation will wend their way to the Unitarian church, to listen to a sermon by a man whose name perhaps is illustrious; for this church has not a settled pastor the year round, being open practically only through the summer months. But its privileges then are sometimes great. But there is entire forgetfulness of this church-going flexibility by the Baptist people themselves, not excepting even the very small number of those still remaining of the original body. As against human fellowship for each other, creeds are thrust into a sort of impersonal background.

This is what, as a whole, I have referred to as the unity, the ‘placid calm,’ of the Fairport churches, the religious psychology of this particular village.

The minister has been retained for nearly ten years. This is not only because he fills the bill as well as another might, but because, with the few of its more prominent citizens, there is a little prideful responsibility of running the community properly. And, therefore, so handsome a little church calls for a settled pastor, both for convenience and tradition’s sake, and for the general look of things. If there are other reasons, my reader may draw, as I do, his own conclusions.

The minister’s salary is five hundred dollars a year, but his manner of life is quite out of proportion to that surprising sum. He lives in his own house, which he has bought since coming there — a home of comfort and attractiveness. He owns his own horse and carriage. His clothes are suitable to his calling. These things, as may be guessed, are the fruits of his earlier life. His business, outside of the ministry, is that of his village farm, his cows and poultry. These yield him his entire living. His five hundred is the surplus of his income.

But as an expression of religious realities, with nine tenths of its congregation, the attendance at this church is a custom only, a Sunday habit. It is a pleasant meeting-place, — Fairport is always cordial, — a restful change from the routine of the other six days, an occasion for the donning of other raiment, and, withal, an opportunity of hearing some form of speaking. It is an interesting phenomenon — the readiness, nay, eagerness, of people outside of the cities, for this ‘speaking’; and their denial of the strong meat of thought and truth is all but pathetic, in view of the fact that their minds, given the opportunity, grasp much of the best, in spite of what they often accept with uncritical pleasure in place of it.

But the church, as a church, is not a positive force, it is not vital, it is not convincing. It is a survival, and a steadily diminishing one, plain to the most indifferent, and voiced in the words of one of its old members when he said to me, ‘I hate to think of this church in a few years from now. There will not be a soul to keep it up.’ In other words, its membership will be nothing, its present supporters being such only in a social and unclassified sense. During the last decade, one or two children have been accompanied to the river, baptized, and made passive, non-understanding members. The addition of an adult is of rarest occurrence. As the old member foresaw, when the present generation has passed, there seems no source of replacement.

Yet, after all, I question if this will be exactly what will happen. That it will not be kept up in anything remotely like its original form is a foregone conclusion. But as an undenominational, twentieth-century meeting-house, it is an ideal possibility, and may survive as such, for many years to come.

That the world steadily changes, that nothing is exempt from that law, either religious or secular, no more vivid examples as proof could be found than those which present themselves here. The sedate business man, a Westerner, sitting across the aisle from me, was born in Fairport. At intervals of a few years, he visits his native town. In his youth he worked on the home farm. He ploughed and sowed and reaped. He built fences and picked up rocks. He cut the year’s firewood in winter. He went to the Grand Banks at eighteen. He taught fall schools before he was twenty-one, walking the ten miles of a winter morning, after his week-end at home, as often as he rode. A diary kept at the age of thirteen, abounds with such entries as these: ‘— Oct. 5. Ben and I dug potatoes all day in lower field. Good crop. — Oct. 6. Wheeled in wood all day. Heavy frost last night. — Dec. 14. Went to Milton for load of ship timbers. Stayed all night. Brought down eight knees. Very cold. [This was a ride of forty miles in all.] — Dec. 16.

Went to church in A.M. Full house. Evening went to church.'

Never again in Fairport, or any other place that I know, can there be a boyhood like this. Its day is past. The coveted education which this man sought and obtained, although receiving all the parental aid and encouragement possible, he earned himself. Consider, in passing, the education of his son, with its three years of fitting school, four years of college, three years of professional school, with money for every demand of the modern college régime, from clothes to convivialities, and every bill paid by father. But — and here is a sequel too logically a part of things to be omitted — with this difference, the seriousness of purpose, the moral fibre and stability, which it would seem should have been the son’s birthright, he utterly lacks. He is mentally brilliant, amiable, generous, handsome, likable, immoral, irresponsible, a free drinker. Though the purpose of this paper is to record rather than to moralize, it is not fair to leave the subject without reminding the reader that the fault is not the son’s, but absolutely the upbringing and environment. Too much money and no work.

If, as an illustration of change in two generations, the case seems somewhat extreme, the world has changed quite as much, proportionately, for the man who has remained in his native town, a citizen of Fairport all his life. His boyhood was much like that of the first man. But the old farm, more intelligently worked, has been a reasonably profitable business. The old house has many comforts — a pleasant porch, piped water in the kitchen, a furnace, daily papers, a telephone, a modest car added to the baggage-wagon and the Concord buggy. He sees his grandchildren carried to the town schools by public conveyance, where he himself walked a mile in zero weather. Those of his own children who have remained near him have widened their earlier education by many books and magazines, and at least a Saturday-night trip to the movie theatre, ten miles away. As he remembers, the magazine habit did not much prevail in the country, forty years ago. He read Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, which in some unaccountable way fell into his hands when he was twenty-one; but it was kept far under the mattress of his bed, out of consideration for the religious principles of his father and mother. Now his family may very likely discuss the evolution of man, of a Sunday morning, at the breakfast-table.

The trip to the theatre is one of the two events of the week. The other is the weekly dance in the Grange hall, being the climax of the social gayety of Fairport and, of all innovations, originally taken the most dubiously by the town fathers and mothers. The patrons of the dance are the younger married people, which lends a sort of chaperonage to the affair; and long before their own children have outgrown their braids and knickerbockers, they consistently take them along and teach them the art.

It must be confessed however, that these dances have brought to Fairport its most undesirable acquaintances. Their ‘orchestras’ alone are a sin. But they are popular, for they furnish a needed occasion for specific pleasure and relaxation.

The Grange meeting affords a social evening for all ages and classes, while the Grange store and the other two grocery stores are still time-honored places, where the middle-aged fathers foregather on rainy afternoons, to descant on the questions of the hour. The young men are always away somewhere with the family car.

But the village has no clubs or gatherings for the pursuit of literary subjects of any sort. There has been even no sewing-circle for years. Its Sunday school is the nearest approach to any organized effort in the line of study. And this might be enough, a source of much intellectual interest, if its reactive questioning could but be met with a little more light, a little application of modern truth and understanding; if, in addition to the study of the Bible, subjects not collateral might be accepted as legitimate material for study inside the walls of a church. One would rather see a class on almost any subject gather in this church on Sunday mornings, than see its fine old doors close against life, the end of its use to the world.

Thus runs the tale of Fairport.

To those who know it best, it must always be distinguished for its sincerity and kind heartedness, its rightmindedness, and good-will to men. It might be a pattern for many a more pretentious but less righteous community.

III

It would be profitable, indeed, if more of the Fairport spirit prevailed in the larger village, including the churches; for the village of Dale has four — Congregational, Unitarian, Baptist, and Methodist, — supposed to stand in its social organization about in the order named, and forming a very considerable part of it.

Now this social organization, or, speaking more concisely, ‘Society,’ with its big S, in Dale, is not only the difference between Dale and Fairport, but it is the one difference in general between the large and the small village. Fairport has nothing of the sort; in Dale there is little that is not touched by it. It is to be reckoned with in general and in particular, always including the churches. So that to consider it here, to the exclusion of other points, is to get the clearer view.

In itself, however, its history is not an uninteresting page; for Dale is one of the oldest villages in this part of the state, and its origin held much that was delightful. But it passed — Revolutionary ancestors, titles, Colonial homes and all. There is not, by claim, a D.A.R. in Dale.

Years later Dale began to make money, a good deal of it; and for a generation or two mills hummed and its river raced to the sea bearing fortunes in lumber. Then arose a social order very wise in its own conceit. Monstrosities in architecture took the place of the Colonial homes, when they were not built over; and the ostentatious display of wealth flourished for a season. The Winthrop Joneses became quietly the common citizens, although to this day, every last one of them is stamped, in the poise and charm of his manner, with the hall mark of his old blue blood.

But in its final results it was an unfortunate era for Dale. Its prosperity was only temporary, at least not extending far into the second generation. The mills grew silent, for the sons had learned only how to spend money, not how to run mills; drink and wastefulness ran riot; and, from good old red-blooded, twelve-hour-a-day stock, nothing of permanence or excellence remained. There was actually but the one proverbial exception.

Then, by accident, Dale began another era, the echoes of which may still be heard, when it awoke one day to find itself possessed of a millionaire. But it was a period not founded on itself. It was not indigenous. There was hardly a drop of real New Englandism in it. It was imported, and arrived complete, with the butler and lady’s maid and liveried coachman and colored household personnel.

But Society took a new lease of life. It allied itself assiduously, taking to itself a sort of vicarious foundation, of proportions; for there was not only the money, but there were brains and some fame and a great deal of genuineness. Henceforth, it was epitomized in the uprisings and downsittings of its one great house. But its real identity was lost.

It was a wrong standard from any point of view for Dale; for nobody could afford it, and the town was not large enough for its interests and goodfellowship to be divided. But imitate and pretend it did, to its own foolish enjoyment, but not to the upbuilding of common sense and broadmindedness and the cherishing of old ideals and things worth while in general.

The millionaires were in nowise to blame. They could not help having their wealth or their fame or their way of life. They were sensible and democratic. They accepted the friendships and attentions offered them, in perfect good faith. They scrupulously kept up their own side of every social obligation. They were faultless as citizens, for they were resident during that part of the year when their residence made them citizens.

Through all these years — more than a hundred — in the midst of its ancient elms, stood Dale’s oldest and finest church, the Congregational. It is and always has been Society’s church, and is always called the ‘Orthodox.’ Not that it is orthodox — not if by church is meant the people who belong to it, who go to it, who manage it and support it. It is sophisticated — for want of a better word — to the last degree. Individually and collectively, it is fully aware of all its outworn theological ideas. Its distinctive forms and customs are observed with unlimited private reservations, or not observed at all. It defends no precious convictions or faith for the faith itself. Its very oldest male member said to me one Sunday morning, in passing out in the midst of delighted comments on a sermon liberal to the last ditch, ‘Oh, we are all Unitarians now’; this being to him the last word in religious limits, rather than knowledge of Unitarianism.

But the old gentleman meant it cheerfully; there was no latent fling in the words. Long life and experience had brought to him reconciliation to what he knew was his own vastly changed outlook; anD he knew it also as the index of what had gone on all about him. He had not forsaken his religion, or felt that it had forsaken him. It was simply as he saw things.

But he had, nevertheless, committed a solecism, because such an admission is the one point zealously guarded. Whatever their changes, the resultmust be regarded as strictly Congregational. Their delight that morning was selfcongratulatory over the brilliancy of their minister in preaching such a splendid sermon. Emersonian, they called it, meaning rhetorical. And Emersonian it was, but in quite another sense—the very sense whose truth and power they felt so keenly.

To the wealthiest and most partisan supporter of this church there is, privately, no choice whatever between the creeds and beliefs of these two churches. Yet the partisanship is tense, notwithstanding it is not founded on religious reasons.

There is little to produce envy in the smaller membership, the absence of wealth, the lesser social prestige, the quiet unaggressiveness, and the not always interesting ministers of Dale’s Unitarian church. But there is something in its reasonableness, its intellectual sureness, the possibleness of its faith for human beings, and the fine patience with which it pursues its way in the midst of a cold-shouldered community, which suggests an elemental strength, to which the sister church is not blind. Blind it doubtless must be to the fact that its own house is not in order, that it is not running on the inner force of Christianity; blind to its own coldness, its ideals of exclusiveness, and superiority, and intellectual supremacy, its better-than-thou spirit — the one church of Dale which is never appraised with the faintest touch of fellowship by its own townspeople who are without the pale.

But it can hardly be unaware of certain of the present, anomalous conditions of its existence. One of its most dependable spokesmen at parish meetings and times of critical pressure is, on his own word, privately, an absolute unbeliever. Another, a member for forty-five years, said to me six months before her death: ‘There is nothing beyond the grave; death ends it all.’

Skepticism is in the air they breathe. As a church, it is not able to teach the end of man acceptably, and it would not dream of teaching his beginning authoritatively. It is not without the enlightenment of truth and science; yet it gets nowhere with it. It seeks no adjustment with truth as it is, because its moral hunger is drugged. Such an adjustment is not popular; the result might be un-Congregational; it is too much trouble to find it, or to get anybody interested in it if it were found.

In spite of the Emersonian sermons, their author had a short pastorate. Whispers concerning these sermons arose from without, difficult for the body politic to explain away. A successor was appointed — a man after their own heart.

Thus the church is left to burn out its light under a bushel, its extinction foredoomed, and well on its way, as is affirmed by its own people.

Perhaps the other greatest difference between the large and small village is, in briefest terms, the question of beauty, the cultivation of the arts, to use a worn phrase, especially in its more practical aspect, the home. Dale possesses some of much excellence.

Now, the cult of the ‘antique’ has long had its disciples and wise men in this village. Beautiful Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Chippendale give the key-note to many a house and room; and one who has evolved to the subtle understanding and admiration of these things knows how satisfying beyond all other household gods they are to possess. But there seems no way of making these correctly beautiful homes an object-lesson to those who spend goodly sums of money to gather a medley of yellow oak and near Davenports and hybrid Morris chairs into their rooms — the great majority of rooms in Dale.

Now, Fairport possesses its own ancestral mahogany, but without any awakened artistic appreciation of it. Grandfather’s desk and grandmother’s highboy are still doing service in livingroom and chamber, cherished because they were belongings of the old folks, and because of their usefulness; and, though they are rarely ever restored externally from the marks of a hundred years of service, they would as rarely be parted with, for the two reasons above named.

But Dale possesses not only all that was its own originally, but all of everybody’s else that it can lay hands upon. And there is something fundamentally wrong in the situation, because many of these antiques originally came out of the very homes that are so wrongly furnished.

Here arises a query: is not the person who buys from its uncomprehending owner a fine old piece of mahogany for five dollars, and pays fifteen for having its surface refinished, — a piece whose market value he knows to be a hundred dollars, and perhaps twice that, and which he may himself eventually sell for that, when he has no more space in his house for another antique, — is not this person a profiteer in the intelligence and happiness of his fellow man?

I know a houseful of such examples, worth thousands of dollars, every one of which was obtained in just this way.

Can there not arise a philanthropy which shall enlighten people against themselves, shall teach them the significance and beauty of their own ancestral possessions, rather than leave them to gather, by a sort of slow accident — or never gather at all — that indefinable understanding and love of them, with its accompanying revelation that money does not represent their value to themselves?

In any case, the initiated have no franchise in appreciation of the beautiful, in learning the good from the bad artistically, against the uninformed. It needs only opportunity and awakening.

The answer always is, they do not want their mahogany, they would rather have the money. But it is a specious argument. The point is, they should be given a chance to want it before it is too late. Then they may do as they please. It is, at least, not then a transaction between a blind man and one who can see.

Dale is not different from other places in this matter. It prevails in every place that ever harbored an antique. And that is the pity of it, because this particular thing might so easily and naturally be made a concrete starting-point for the evolution of beauty in the home — that magic key which unlocks so much else in life.