Sunday
I
WHEN this country at last falls into line and accepts the idea of a dictatorship, when politicians, bankers, and economists finally throw up their hands and ask me to take sole charge of affairs, one of the first things I shall do will be to revive the old-fashioned Sunday.
I shall do this, not primarily as a moral or religious move, but because, with the passage of time, I have come increasingly to believe that the old-fashioned Sunday is the best device ever evolved for restoring poise and judgment to a fidgety world.
The decline of the old-fashioned Sunday is an event still so recent that it needs little recounting. When the first golfer discovered that he could play eighteen holes on the Sabbath and still not be struck by lightning, when the first druggist found that he could sell ice-cream sodas between Saturday and Monday without a frown from his leading patrons, Sunday as a day of universal rest was judged to be obsolete. Like melting snow, its customs and rigidities disappeared in a single decade, and during the next twenty high-pitched years they were scarcely missed.
Sooner or later, however, the world may be brought to realize that the old-fashioned Sunday was not a mere rustic survival from early Calvinism or a tribal rite of the ancient Hebrews, but was a social check-valve developed by centuries of human experience, and that a nervous, high-strung society which has suddenly abolished it will rue its loss. The old-fashioned Sunday, in short, was one of nature’s regulators, checking the tempo of life and readjusting it every seven days. It did for a very large part of the civilized world exactly what every physician and modern psychologist would be eager to do if he could. It forced whole communities of men, women, and children to come, once a week, to a complete halt and, for twenty-four hours, alter entirely their physical, mental, and social habits.
This is, in no sense, a ‘confessional’ article, and, as I have taken pains to make clear, its point of view is not primarily religious. As a churchgoer my record for many years has been no better and probably much worse than that of the average Protestant American. But out of the untidy welter of Sunday papers and cigarette smoke that constitutes the usual present-day Sabbath, out of the chatter of golf scores and the smell of locker rooms, the hurried, tardy engagements, the rushed, undigested meals, and the long, nervous driving on crowded highways that make up a modern week-end, I find myself, with greater and greater longing, looking back to the peace and dignity of the old-fashioned Sunday as it was known to at least one small boy in a medium-sized New England city in the eighteen-nineties.
II
In those days, of course, the word ‘week-end’ was entirely unknown, unless possibly one ran across it in some English novel. A modern weekend is nothing but two and a half Saturdays, and workdays are merely days that are not week-ends; but at that time every day of the week seemed to have a peculiar character of its own, a sort of mounting progression which ended with Sunday, when abruptly the slate was wiped clean and one began all over again. Tuesday had quite a different ‘feel’ from Thursday, and Monday from Wednesday. You could almost tell what day of the week it was from the very atmosphere of the little city, from the different kinds of delivery carts that drove around the streets, from the general appearance of the postman’s bag, and even from the faces and attitudes of the people themselves.
To a small boy, of course, the most ecstatic moment of the week came at 3.45 on Friday afternoon. He had before him what seemed like an almost endless freedom, and at the same time a wealthy, snug feeling that he had not yet used up a minute of it. The hours between the closing of school and supper time on Friday were quite unlike the same hours on any other day. In sheer golden glory, in the feeling of relaxation and expansiveness, they probably surpassed even Saturday itself. Except for ‘ dancing school,’ which boys of the ’nineties hated with a black venom that the modern fox-trotting child does not seem to share, Saturdays were then very much what they are to-day. But when the boy of that era went to bed on Saturday night, he was to awake next morning to a set of mental experiences which very few children of to-day could even understand.
Now I do not pretend that boys and girls of thirty-five years ago actually liked the old-fashioned Sunday in the sense that, if given the choice, they would deliberately have chosen it. Left to themselves, they would probably have done just what their elders have done since — created a week-end consisting of two and a half Saturdays. I do maintain that few of them really chafed and pined under the exactions of the old-fashioned Sunday, as later tradition has pictured them as doing. From their point of view, Sunday was simply there. They no more questioned it than they questioned the rising of the sun. I further maintain that, once the mere fact of Sunday had been admitted, children of that day, consciously or unconsciously, really did enjoy it. I believe that, to-day, most middle-aged men and women, looking back on the outstanding and pleasantest recollections of childhood, would be astonished to discover how many of them were connected with the old-fashioned Sunday.
In the first place, as I have suggested, the chief social value of the old-fashioned Sunday lay in its utter difference from all other days, and, in the ’nineties, that difference was apparent from the moment one opened one’s eyes. In a city there was a strange sense of stillness. The street cars ran on a different schedule, the sound of horses’ hoofs seemed to come with a different rhythm, and only after long gaps of silence. The footsteps of pedestrians were uncannily loud, voices were heard through the open window with an odd clearness, and, in the country, the strokes of the church clock came across the meadows with quite a different tone. It may have been mental, of course, but, even in the woods or on a ship at sea, Sunday ‘ looked ’ different from any other day.
The second great influence of the old-fashioned Sunday began to work from the moment the boy of the ’nineties put his foot out of bed, for at once he not only dressed in clean raiment from head to foot, but put on a formal dark suit of clothes that he seldom wore at any other time; and, on going downstairs, he found a company of elegants whom only custom enabled him to recognize as the members of his own family. If Father were well-to-do, or, possibly, somewhat ‘sporty,’ he wore a frock coat, and later would put on a silk hat. Otherwise he wore a black cutaway. Mother was a swirl and swish in silk or satin, while Sister positively billowed in muslin or dimity. Even the gardener or furnace man appeared in his best clothes and went through his few chores in a gingerly, dainty fashion. And the point is that these clothes were not just assumed for the church service. They would be kept on all day, and for twelve hours would mould both the acts and the mental states of their wearers.
I know that a great deal of scorn has been packed into the phrase ‘Sundaygo-to-meeting-best,’ but was there not, under these frock coats and dimities, a very sound psychological principle? Anyone will admit that there is a strong tonic effect in dressing for dinner — indeed, in changing one’s clothes at any time of the day; but, while Americans as a race are the first to admit this fact, they are the last to practise it. At every lift of the bars, their habits in this respect take a slip downward. The old-fashioned Sunday was, in short, the only institution that has ever made the entire American people, from top to bottom, realize the obligations and feel the benefits of dressing deliberately and appropriately for a given event. Those Sunday clothes did for their wearers exactly what a uniform does for a soldier. They induced and maintained a complete mental attitude. The moment frock coats were abandoned for knickerbockers, the day ceased to be Sunday. I will admit that I myself would blanch at the idea of wearing a heavy tail coat all through a June day, but, as an observer, I insist that it would be better for the race than the bathrobes and negligees which nowadays can be seen sprawled around almost any American home any Sunday morning.
III
I cannot remember at just what hour my own family breakfasted on Sunday. It was probably later than on weekdays and earlier than would be the case to-day, but I do remember that between breakfast and church time came one of the pleasantest hours of the day. It was an hour of complete, irresponsible leisure — a kind of leisure that I, for one, have not known in twenty years. To realize its peculiar quality one must remember that it could only have existed because every usual occupation for mind or body had been momentarily abolished. No mail came to the door and no telephone rang. No Sunday papers appeared, with the modern fight for the various sections and the subsequent dip into the commonplace. All tasks were at a standstill, even ‘homework’ being prohibited, while, on the other hand, routine pleasures were out of the question. Noisy and running games were forbidden either by decree or by the necessities of Sunday clothes, and, even if this had not been so, other boys and girls of the neighborhood were occupied with their own Sunday régime and did not appear, tantalizingly, outside the door.
The result was a state of mind which is probably known to-day only during a long voyage on a slow steamer. It was a state of mind in which even children found it quite pleasant to do nothing more than walk up and down the garden paths or sit under the apple trees. It was the state of perfect relaxation — without even a book, a tool, or a pack of cards — which modern psychologists are constantly trying to induce, the state in which the body rests while the imagination flourishes. In our household, while Father disappeared to the luxuries of his special Sunday-morning cigar and Mother to the last-minute details of her churchgoing costume, my sister and I, in conscious, tiptoeing elegance, would explore odd corners of the garden which suddenly seemed picturesque and dramatic, would chat over the fence with our neighbor’s coachman, or would simply sit in the leafy grape arbor and let fancy roam to fine worlds in which little girls were suddenly grown up and all little boys had six ponies.
For us children the call to church came all too soon, as I imagine it did also for our father, who was still at his ease in the pleasant, shabby old room that we knew as ‘the library.’ Here, again, I cannot contend that a boy of the ’nineties liked church for its own sake any better than a boy likes it today, but I do insist that he got a good deal out of it and that, both for him and for his elders, one of the chief benefits was that same enforced relaxation of mind and body, which few men or women will take of their own accord.
Once in church, the slow hum of the service had a charm of its own, especially in the spring months, when the warm sounds and scents from out of doors came through the open windows to mingle with that peculiar smell of church cushions and stone walls which a witty minister of my acquaintance once called ‘ the odor of sanctity.’ Into the daydreams which rose and soared during the church hours even the sermon did not break particularly, for there is a technique of listening to sermons, just as there is a technique of listening to symphonies. Although our minds were apparently anywhere except on the discourse, yet we all seemed to find, at dinner time, that we had gathered in the main points, especially if they were anecdotal or humorous.
One of the principal benefits of almost universal church attendance was one which, so far as I know, has never been noted. This was the fact that, in a city at least, church and Sunday School compelled, every week, a complete stirring up and reassortment of the whole community. Then, as now, boys and girls played largely, during the week, with other boys and girls of the immediate neighborhood or with a small group with which they had some common tie. On Sunday these groups split up automatically and each member went to his own church and Sunday School. On Sunday mornings all the Baptist, Methodist, and Catholic boys of our neighborhood disappeared entirely from my Presbyterian ken, and I found myself plunked down in a pew with an entirely new set of boys who were picked at random from all over the parish and who might attend quite different schools during the week. Even the boys whom one saw frequently at other times appeared in a different relationship at church and Sunday School. It may have been due to the atmosphere of the sacred edifice or the consciousness of our Sunday collars. Perhaps it was nothing more than a recognition of our common plight. I can remember one big bully of a boy whom I avoided like poison from Monday to Saturday, and who probably despised me as much as I dreaded him, but with whom I sat on friendly and even jocular terms in Sunday School.
What was true of us children was equally true of our elders. My father and mother had two complete sets of friends — their social friends and their church friends — and the two groups had, in their minds, almost equal importance.
IV
In my very earliest years Sunday dinner in many New England families was still served at three o’clock in the afternoon, and in winter it was often dusk before we arose from the table. Later, owing no doubt to the increasing servant problem, the hour was moved forward to one or one-thirty. In either case the dinner was a formal affair. The best linen and silver were laid out, and the feast progressed in steady courses from olives and celery through a heavy soup, a huge roast, ice cream (delivered in a wooden bucket every Sunday morning), to nuts and raisins. Those colossal dinners are, I know, one of the favorite modern indictments of the old-fashioned Sunday, but at least we took time to eat them and, afterward, to digest them. They had the slow majesty of a banquet. There was no rushing in from a dozen directions twenty minutes after the hour set, and there was no glancing at watches as the meal progressed. There was nothing else for anyone to do, and, since every other family of our acquaintance was undergoing the same ordeal at the same hour, we were completely free from interruption. In many houses, indeed, the Sunday dinner was quite a patriarchal affair, married sons and daughters with their entire families being present, not once or twice a winter, but every Sunday from September to June.
If the weather was cold or stormy, or if dinner was still served at a late hour, there followed a period very much like that which still follows a Thanksgiving dinner, and it continued, with more or less regularity, until the family went to bed. An awful period, in the modern opinion, but we children of the ’nineties did not find it so. On the contrary, it never lost a certain holiday flavor, if only for the reason that, for once, we were allowed to share completely the life of our elders. With a common thought, the whole family made at once for the parlor or the drawingroom (it might be called either), and quietly sat down to talk or read — which, after all, was not a very strange thing for intelligent people to do.
In the house which I like best to remember, the parlor was a really beautiful old room, purely Victorian, but containing many of those fine, substantial things which scorners of all things Victorian seem never to have known. It occupied most of one side of the big square brick house, having as much space as was comprised in the ‘reception room’ and the ‘library’ on the other side of the hall. It had walls fourteen feet high, great silver-knobbed doors, which boomed when they were closed, a marble mantel and fireplace, and long windows with inside wooden shutters which folded back into the walls. The furnishings in this room were not changed from one year to another, not even the books on the tables, but since we saw them so seldom they never lost a sense of exciting novelty. I can remember one great flat volume — Paradise Lost, with illustrations by Gustave Doré — over which we pored, Sunday after Sunday. We never, of course, read a word of the text, but Doré alone must surely have been as good for us as ‘Happy Hooligan’ and ‘Buster Brown,’ who within ten years were to furnish the most popular Sunday reading.
As a matter of fact, after dinner, when it was no longer necessary to keep collars clean or hair in order, we children were really free to do about as we liked, and if we remained with our elders in the parlor it was purely by choice. We could now even play running games in the upper halls, if we did not make too much noise. But there was one tacit rule which was widely observed. Children of other families seldom, if ever, came into our house on Sunday, — unless, of course, they came with their parents, — nor did we often go into theirs. I do not remember that either act was expressly forbidden. The rule was probably based on the idea that the head of the house was entitled to quiet during his one day at home, but its effect, like that of most customs of the old-fashioned Sunday, was to force children unconsciously to seek new occupations or diversions which they did not follow during the week. Naturally, as we grew older, reading was the chief of these. While I cannot pretend, like other memorialists of the ’nineties, that I devoured all the classics at a tender age, yet I can look back with special affection to those long hours of unbroken reading on Sunday afternoons.
V
As the day wore on, another and livelier diversion might be expected — a ring at the door, the slow, expectant steps of the maid through the hall, and then the appearance of some beaming caller; for, although lone children were not encouraged to enter a neighbor’s house on Sunday, the rule by no means applied to adults. In fact, almost every household had its own little following of what might be called professional Sunday visitors— individuals whom it seldom saw at any other time and who almost constituted a distinct race. Most of them were unmarried men and women who had no real homes of their own, but who, dressed in their Sunday best, had a small list of congenial houses at which they called with the regularity of a calendar. One or two of them usually had the brevet title of ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt,’ but all of them were welcomed by us children with frenzied delight, because we were fully privileged, as we were not at other times, to sit in the circle of conversation, sharing in any news that might be forthcoming and any stories that might be told. It was assumed that a visitor who came on Sunday came to visit the whole household and not merely its head.
Many of these Sunday visitors had marked eccentricities, and most of them, for some reason, seemed to be followers of unusual occupations: they were likely to be organists, librarians, or curators of the local museum. One of the regulars at our house was an elderly machinist who, late in life, had developed an extraordinary knowledge of botany, even to the Latin names, but whose learned talk always contrasted oddly, in the minds of the children, with his rough, blackened finger nails. Another was a queer, florid German lady whose life, I have since learned, had been exceedingly colorful, but, because of her accent and manners, we youngsters always considered her to be mildly insane. Even the most commonplace of our visitors seemed, in their tail coats or silk dresses, to have an air of importance and interest, and it was something of a shock, in later years, to see most of them sink back to the mere level of very ordinary old men and women.
As the children grew in years, the Sunday routine naturally changed. The time came, soon enough, in our own family, when my sister had prior rights to the parlor on Sunday evenings and was surrounded regularly by a small circle of high-collared, rather embarrassed young men, while Father and Mother, with those of their regular visitors who remained, were driven back to the greater informality of the library. Moreover, the prohibition of playmates had never included meetings out of doors. As soon as they were ten or twelve years of age, the boys of our neighborhood would gather regularly in someone’s back yard or take long walks out into the country, chattering eagerly of all manner of strange things. Nevertheless the spirit of the day still held firmly. A game of baseball in our own yard would have been instantly stopped by the family and in the corner lots by the police.
VI
The waning of the old-fashioned Sunday came, of course, at different times and at varying rates of speed in different parts of the country. In New England, the change was most visible between the years 1900 and 1910. In our own family the first sign was the regular appearance of the Sunday papers, which we began to read during the Spanish War. I do not believe, however, that the final tottering of the old barriers was caused by any sudden slackening in religious interest, as is commonly supposed. Anything of that kind which might have happened had happened long before. Thousands of families that were not really religious scrupulously observed the oldfashioned Sunday, just as other thousands that are religious to-day play golf on Sunday afternoons.
The real truth was that the American people were rapidly becoming cosmopolitan at both ends of the social scale. At one end, immigrant families which had never known the Puritan Sunday or even the North European Sunday were rising up in all communities to sufficient importance so that they could impose their habits on at least their part of the world. At the same time the younger members of old American families were absorbing the English week-end idea or the much advertised freedom of the Continental Sunday. The two influences simply crept toward each other until they met in the middle. Furthermore, the suddenly increased use of the telephone destroyed the power of any family to isolate itself, while, shortly afterward, the motor car offered an invitation to country excursions which at first seemed quite within the spirit of the day.
Even so, the old-fashioned Sunday did not give in without a stiff fight, and for years repeated attempts were made to enforce by law something that could no longer be enforced by social custom. Bills or ordinances to forbid or permit such things as movies, professional baseball games, or even the sale of candy and chewing gum appeared again and again in state legislatures and municipal councils. It is amusing to note that one argument which was used on both sides of the Prohibition question was also used fervently in the earlier battle — namely, the interest of the workingman. The poor abused workingman, it was argued, after his week of gray uninspiring toil, should be allowed the privilege of spending two dollars to watch the Cubs play the Red Sox or of going to nice restful concerts in the local movie theatre.
As a matter of fact , the real workingman knew or cared little about the whole question, just as he later knew little about the famous ‘light wines’ which were supposed to be his fundamental privilege. The real fight was between the professional amusement interests on one side and the strict religionists on the other. Indeed, if anyone to-day is still observing the oldfashioned Sunday, it is the real American workingman. He still puts on his best clothes, sleeps half the day, and then goes with his family to visit his wife’s folks. Or if he spends the afternoon pitching horsehoes in his shirt sleeves or hanging around the nearest garage, it is only what he did thirty years ago, except that then the garage was a livery stable. In either case it is his own chosen way of breaking his routine.
Yet in 1912, in the New England city which I have described, when the conservatives would not allow the theatres to open on Sunday, the selfappointed champions of the workingman threatened to swear out a warrant for the first golfer who teed up a ball at the country club. More recently a New Jersey official, angered because certain commercial privileges of his own had been curtailed on Sunday, dug up an ancient blue law and arrested every motorist who passed through his town. To-day, in Connecticut, it is legal to fish on Sunday but not to shoot a woodchuck, even with a bow and arrow.
It is further interesting to note that, precisely during the years when America was fighting to throw off the old-fashioned Sunday, the authorities of Paris were proposing to establish it — not in the interests of religion, but to ease social and economic strain. In 1906 a law was outlined for repos hebdomadaire, an enforced weekly day of rest in all occupations. The English and American Sunday was widely cited as a beneficial example, but, so far as I know, the law never got much further than the music halls, where comedians had high glee in wondering just which of the typically French occupations would come under the rule.
No, short of a dictatorship, it will be impossible by law ever to reëstablish the old-fashioned Sunday, but it is not at all improbable that social necessities, slowly working in a wearied world, may at length force us to recognize and renew many of its features. When hostesses with small houses begin to rebel at carload after carload of jovial motorists who pour in from morning to night, bringing their friends and their friends’ friends, and all expecting cocktails and sandwiches; when the ‘tired business man,’ for once really tired, begins to balk at the idea of driving two or three hundred miles on a speedway between dawn and midnight; when normal, adult persons begin to realize that it is actually possible to ignore the inane ‘features’ of the Sunday paper and pick up a good book — then it will be safe to say that the tide has turned. And when that time comes I, for one, will be in the forefront of the movement — lustily cheering.