Part 12

The life of St. Francis was very mediæval, which was but another way of saying that its idealism was not balanced by the scientific temper. Men in those days delighted in paradoxes, and were contented with no half measures. His experience was different from ours. He did not confront the poverty of the slums of our great cities. It was the poverty of Umbria. It was a poverty that was acquainted with hunger and which wore coarse garments, but it had the freedom of the fields and the open roads. We have problems to solve with which he was unacquainted.

Yet there is something in his daring paradox which attracts us. Beneath all its extravagance there is a vitality in the joyous worship of My Lady Poverty. For what is worship? It is, literally, worth-ship. It is the recognition of intrinsic values. It is just here that the modern man is beginning to be distrustful of himself. He has been marvelously successful in obtaining his desires, but has he desired the best things? In the height of his achievement he cannot help asking, “After all, is it worth what it has cost?”

Things turn out differently from what had been expected. A life devoted to personal gain is likely to be disappointing. A whole community which has no other means of estimating worth than the increase in wealth is still more disappointing. It has no proper means of government. A plutocracy is but another name for moral anarchy. Special interests become intolerably domineering and override the common good. In a society where everything is measured by money, where is the limitation to despotism? What is to prevent the rich man from buying up his neighbors and using all their talents to serve his own narrow purposes? He is able to pay for the best food and drink and shelter. Why may he not bend to his will the best human ability?

The answer comes from the iconoclasts, who strike boldly at the idols of the market-place. They have something that is not for sale, and they can afford to laugh at the highest bidders. They are not asking favors. They are likely to be inexperienced in the ways of the world, but the world fears them as it fears all forces which it cannot understand. They cannot be cajoled or threatened, for they have learned that it is possible to be happy and poor.

My Lady Poverty has still her worshipers. She has long been honored by the devotion of true artists. The man of science gravely acknowledges her, and confesses without shame that he is too busy to make money. There are statesmen who are the despair of the party managers because when the question comes, “What can we do for you?” they answer “Nothing.” Every now and then there occurs that disconcerting phenomenon which we call genius. It upsets all calculations and refuses to respond to the law of supply and demand. The second best may be bought, but the very best is given away. Now and then, too, out of our conventional gentilities there comes an ideal gentleman. He would adorn the most exclusive circles, were it not that he has a passion for the best society, and he has learned that the best society is never exclusive. He takes the part of the uttermost man, and finds his joy in the companionship of those who are aspiring and struggling. And there is the increasing number of the nature-lovers who enter into the religious feelings which St. Francis voiced in “The Song of the Creatures.” They love one who could worship out of doors, and speak familiarly of Master Sun and Brother Wind and Sister Water. As they sit around their campfires they join heartily in the praise of Brother Fire. “He is jocund, robust, and strong and bright.”

They love to read again the story of how St. Francis and Brother Masseo stopped at noon under a tree where there was a broad smooth stone to serve as a table for their simple meal. Close by was a spring of cold water.

“What a treasure we have here!” cried Francis in delight.

“Father,” answered Brother Masseo, “how can you talk so when we have no tablecloth or knife or cup!”

Brother Masseo voices the opinion of the majority, but there are increasing numbers of true Franciscans. St. Francis is the patron saint of those who believe in Nature as well as in Grace. In spite of all his austerities he is endeared to us because he represented the bohemianism of piety.

AS HE SEES HIMSELF

The exercises of Commencement Day had been unusually interesting, though prolonged. I had attended them all. I had listened to the wisdom of the selected members of the graduating class, and afterwards to the less dignified but more optimistic remarks of the old graduates. The general impression that I received was that though the country had been in danger, the worst was over.

Returning home I found a caller waiting for me in the library. He was a rather handsome man in his way, but a close observer might have noticed a certain shiftiness in his eyes and hard lines about his mouth, and perhaps other signs of a misspent life. Not being a close observer, I did not notice any of these things. He struck me as an ordinary person with whom it might be a pleasure to talk. I was somewhat surprised at his first remark, which was made by way of introduction.

“I am,” he said, “well known to the police, and am said to be the most dangerous criminal of my class now at large. I am an expert forger and have served time in four prisons.”

His frank statement was preliminary to the request for a temporary loan that would enable him to complete the work of reformation, that was endangered by a lack of funds. It was late in the day, and before acceding to his request it was necessary that there should be some investigation, so I asked him to call on the morrow.

“I have been at the Commencement exercises all day,” I said, “and am not in a condition to be of much help to you just now; but if you would like to stay a while and chat, I should be glad.”

He welcomed the suggestion, and, now that the matter of business had been postponed, he was at his ease. In a friendly way he made me acquainted with the general theory of forging and check-raising,--at least so far as it is intelligible to the lay mind. His criticism of prison management was acute, and he pointed out the seamy side of the plans of the reformers. I listened with docility to his story of the under world. He was a well-educated man with an appreciation of good literature, which was a characteristic, he informed me, of most forgers. He was especially interested in sociology, and had all its best phrases at his tongue’s end. He attributed all his misfortunes to Society. For one thing I listened in vain,--the admission that in some respects he might himself have been remiss. The idea of reciprocal obligation did not seem to have any place in his philosophy. As delicately as I could I tried to turn the conversation from the sin of Society, which I readily acknowledged, to the less obvious point of personal responsibility. Granting that Society was imperfectly organized, that juries were ignorant, and judges lacking in the quality of mercy, and prison wardens harsh, and chaplains too simple-minded, were there not faults on the other side that it might be profitable to correct? It was of no use to try to induce such currents of thought; they were quickly short-circuited.

At last I said, “You have told me what you did before you concluded to reform. I am curious to know how, in those days, you looked at things. Was there anything which you wouldn’t have done, not because you were afraid of the law, but because you felt it would be wrong?”

“Yes,” he said, “there is one thing I never would do, because it always seemed low down. I never would steal.”

It was evident that further discussion would be unprofitable without definition of terms. I found that by stealing he meant petty larceny, which he abhorred. In our condemnation of the sneak thief and the pickpocket we were on common ground. His feeling of reprobation was, if anything, more intense than that which I felt at the time. He alluded to the umbrellas and other portable articles he had noticed in the hallway. Any one who would take advantage of an unsuspecting householder by purloining such things was a degenerate. He had no dealings with such moral imbeciles.

It seemed to me that I might press the analogy which instantly occurred to me between “stealing” and forgery.

“Do they not,” I said, “seem to you to amount to very much the same thing?”

I had struck a wrong note. Analogies are ticklish things to handle, for things which are alike in certain respects are apt to be quite different in other respects. His mind was intent on the differences. The sneak thief, he told me, is a vulgar fellow of no education. The forger and the check-raiser are experts. They are playing a game. Their wits are pitted against the wits of the men who are paid high salaries for detecting them. They belong to quite different spheres. If we are looking for analogies we should look up and not down.

“You wanted to know,” he said, “what was the difference between stealing and check-raising. Now, let me ask you a question. What’s the difference between check-raising and some of those big financial operations we’ve all been reading about? Suppose I have a check for five dollars, and I put my brains into it and I manipulate it so that I can pass it off for five hundred. I shove it in to the cashier and he takes it. Before he finds out his mistake, I have made myself scarce. What’s the difference between that transaction and what the ‘big fellows’ on the street are doing?” He mentioned several names that I had not thought of in that connection.

“The difference,” said I, “is--” Then it occurred to me that it was a subject to which I should give further thought. So we postponed the conversation till he should call again--which he never did.

* * * * *

I may be doing injustice to my friend the forger, but he gave me the impression that he considered himself to be, on the whole, a rather admirable character. His proposed change of business seemed to be rather a concession to the prejudices of the legal profession than the result of any personal scruple. As he saw himself he was a man of idealistic temper whose ideals conflicted with social usage. Society was all the time getting into his way, and in the inevitable collisions he had usually the worst of it. He regretted this, but he bore no malice. By the time a man has reached middle life and accumulated a good deal of experience he takes the world as he finds it.

He had encased himself in a moral system which was self-consistent and which explained to his own satisfaction all that had happened to him. One thing fitted into another, and there was no room for self-reproach.

* * * * *

Many attempts have been made to depict the character of an accomplished scamp. But Gil Blas and Roderick Random and Jonathan Wild the Great are after all seen from the outside. The author may attempt to do them justice, but there is a vein of irony that reveals a judgment of his own. They lack the essential element of incorrigibility, which is that the scamp does not suspect himself, has not found himself out.

No novelist has ever been able to give such a portraiture of a complacent criminal as was given a century ago in the autobiography of Stephen Burroughs.

Burroughs was the son of a worthy clergyman of Hanover, New Hampshire, and from the outset was looked upon as a black sheep. As a mere boy he ran away from home and joined the army, and then with equal irresponsibility deserted. He became a ship’s surgeon, a privateersman, then a self-ordained minister, a counterfeiter, a teacher of youth, a founder of libraries, and a miscellaneous philanthropist. He was a patriot and an optimist and an enthusiastic worker in the cause of general education. He was chock-full of fine sentiment and had a gift for its expression. He enjoyed doing good, though in his own way, and never neglected any opportunity to rebuke those who he felt were in the wrong. He had a desire to reform the world, and had no doubt of the plans which he elaborated. He was capable on occasions of acts of magnanimity, which, while not appreciated by the public, gave him great pleasure in the retrospect. The intervals between his various enterprises were spent in New England jails. These experiences only deepened his love of liberty, which was one of the passions of his life.

Burroughs had a happy disposition that enabled him to get a measure of satisfaction out of all the vicissitudes of his life. He had learned neither to worry nor to repine. He was not troubled by the harsh judgments of his fellow men, for he had learned to find his happiness in the approbation of his own conscience.

He writes: “I possess an uncommon share of sensibility, and at the same time maintain an equality of mind that is uncommon, particularly in the midst of those occurrences which are calculated to wound the feelings. I have learned fortitude in the school of adversity. In draining the cup of bitterness to its dregs, I have been taught to despise the occurrences of misfortune. This one thing I fully believe, that our happiness is more in our power than is generally thought, or at least we have the ability of preventing that misery which is so common to unfortunate situations. No state or condition in life, but from which we may (if we exercise that reason which the God of Nature has given us) draw comfort and happiness. We are too apt to be governed by the opinions of others, and if they think our circumstances unhappy, to consider them so ourselves, and of course make them so. The state of mind is the only criterion of happiness or misery.”

It was from this lofty point of view that Stephen Burroughs wrote the history of his own life. His tendency to didacticism interferes with the limpid flow of the narrative. Sometimes a whole chapter will be given over to moralizings, but the observations are never painful. They all reveal the author’s cheerful acquiescence in the inevitability of his own actions. Along with this there is the air of chastened surprise over the fact that he was made the object of persecution.

At the very beginning of the narrative one recognizes an independence which would do credit to a better man. In New England, clergymen have always been looked upon as making good ancestors, and Burroughs might have been pardoned if he had shown some family pride. From this weakness he was free. “I am,” he says, “the only son of a clergyman, living in Hanover, in the State of New Hampshire; and were any to expect merit from their parentage, I might justly look for that merit. But I am so far a Republican that I consider a man’s merit to rest entirely with himself, without any regard to family, blood, or connection.”

The accounts of the escapades of his boyhood are intermingled with dissertations on the education of youth. “I have been in the habit of educating youth for seven years, constantly; in the course of my business I have endeavored to study the operations of the human heart, that I might be able to afford that instruction which would be salutary; and in this I find one truth clearly established, viz.: a child will endeavor to be what you make him think mankind in general are.”

The neglect of this truth on the part of his parents and teachers was the cause of much annoyance to Burroughs. Throughout his life he was the innocent victim of an educational mistake. Though after a while he learned to forgive the early injustice, one can see that it rankled. He endeavored to think well of mankind in general, but it was more difficult than if he had been habituated to the exercise in infancy.

At Dartmouth young Burroughs was peculiarly unfortunate; he fell into bad company. As an unkind fate would have it, his room-mate was an exemplary young man who was studying for the ministry. It appears that this misguided youth attempted to entice him into what he describes as “a sour, morose, and misanthropic line of conduct.” Nothing could have been more disastrous. “To be an inmate with such a character, you will readily conceive, no way comported with a disposition like mine, and consequently we never enjoyed that union and harmony of feeling in our intercourse as room-mates which was necessary for the enjoyment of social life.”

To the malign influence of his priggish room-mate several misfortunes were attributed. In endeavoring to restore the moral equilibrium which had been disturbed by the too great scrupulosity of his chum, he exerted too much strength in the other direction. The result was that “a powerful triumvirate” was formed against him in the Faculty. The triumvirate triumphed and his connection with Dartmouth ended suddenly.

This gave occasion to a chapter on the failure of the institutions of learning to prepare for real life. The author declares “more than one half of the time spent in the universities, according to their present establishment on this continent, is thrown away, and that my position is founded in fact I will endeavor to prove.”

I do not see how his argument is affected by the fact to which the editor calls attention in a carping footnote. “It is not strange that the author should reason in this manner. He was expelled from college in the second quarter of his second year, and in fact he studied but little while he was a member.” The editor, I fear, had a narrow mind and judged according to an academic standard which Burroughs would have despised.

From the uncongenial limitations of a college town it was a satisfaction to escape to sea. Here Burroughs’s versatility stood him in good stead. “Having no doctor engaged, I undertook to act in that capacity; and after obtaining the assistance, advice, and direction of an old practitioner, together with marks set on each parcel of medicine, I thought myself tolerably well qualified to perform the office of a physician on board the ship.”

From his seafaring life Burroughs returned with his reputation under a cloud. There were ugly rumors afloat which were readily believed by a censorious world. For once he confesses that his philosophy failed him. “I returned to my father’s house sunken and discouraged; the world appeared a gloomy chaos; the sun arose to cast a sickly glimmer on surrounding objects; the flowers of the field insulted my feelings with their gayety and splendor; the frolicsome lamb, the playful kitten, and the antic colt were beheld with those painful emotions which are beyond description. Shall all nature, shall the brute creation break out into irregular transports, by the overflowing of pleasing sensations, whilst I am shut out from even the dim rays of hope?”

Certainly not. To a mind constituted as was his there was an absurdity in the very suggestion. The brute creation should not have any monopoly of comfortable sensations, so he cheered up immediately and spent the next year loafing around his father’s house.

He had been on the coast of Africa and had taken part in some strange scenes, but his moral sense had not been blunted to such an extent that he could not grieve over some infractions of the moral law which he observed in peaceful Hanover. He regretted that he had been led inadvertently by a young man named Huntington to join a party which robbed a farmer’s beehive.

“For some unaccountable reason or other, youth are carried away with false notions of right and wrong. I know, for instance, that Huntington possessed those principles of integrity that no consideration would have induced him to deprive another of any species of property, except fruit, bees, pigs, and poultry. And why it is considered by youth that depriving another of these articles is less criminal than stealing any other kind of property, I cannot tell.”

Burroughs himself was inclined to take a harsher view of these transgressions than he did of some others; for example, of counterfeiting, in which he was afterwards for a time engaged during one of his brief pastorates.

The argument by which his scruples in this particular were overcome are worth repeating. The law was indeed violated in its letter, but might not a justification be found by one who interpreted it in a large spirit of charity?

“Money is of itself of consequence only as we annex to it a nominal value as the representation of property. Therefore we find the only thing necessary to make a matter valuable is to induce the world to deem it so; and let that esteem be raised by any means whatever, yet the value is the same, and no one becomes injured by receiving it at the valuation.”

The principle of fiat money having been established, the only question that remained was whether the circumstances of the times were such as to justify him in issuing the fiat. The answer was in the affirmative. “That an undue scarcity of cash now prevails is a truth too obvious for me to attempt to prove. Hence whoever contributes to increase the quantity of cash does not only himself but likewise the community an essential benefit.”

It was in his attempt to benefit the community in this way that he first experienced the ingratitude of republics, being landed in the Northampton jail.

But to see Burroughs at his best one must enter into his thoughts at that crisis in his life when he determined that his true vocation was preaching. He lingers fondly on his emotions at that period. It was at a time when he had been driven out of Hanover for conduct which had outraged the feelings of that long-suffering community.

“One pistareen was all the ready cash I had on hand, and the suddenness with which I departed deprived me of the chance to raise more. Traveling on leisurely I had time for reflection.”

As was usually the case when he reflected, he grew more serene and enjoyed a frame of mind that bordered on the heroic.

“I began to look about me to see what was to be done in my present situation and to what business I could turn my attention. The practice of law, which would have been most to my mind, I could not undertake until I had spent some time in the study, which would have been attended with expense far beyond my abilities; therefore this object must be laid aside. Physic was under the same embarrassments; business in the mercantile line I could not pursue for want of capital. ... What can be done? There is one thing, said contrivance, that you can do, and it will answer your purpose--preach.”