Relation of Literature to Life

Dudley Warner Charles

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pubOne.info present you this new edition. The county of Franklin in Northwestern Massachusetts, if not rivaling in certain ways the adjoining Berkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its own. In the former half of the nineteenth century its population was largely given up to the pursuit of agriculture, though not under altogether favorable conditions. Manufactures had not yet invaded the region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams. The villages were small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer, and from many of the fields the most abundant crop that could be gathered was that of stones.

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• Publié par: Pub One Info
• Date de parution: 06 novembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9782819945796
• Langue: English

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THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
By Charles Dudley Warner
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY. THERELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
The county of Franklin in NorthwesternMassachusetts, if not rivaling in certain ways the adjoiningBerkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its own. In the formerhalf of the nineteenth century its population was largely given upto the pursuit of agriculture, though not under altogetherfavorable conditions. Manufactures had not yet invaded the regioneither to add to its wealth or to defile its streams. The villageswere small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer, andfrom many of the fields the most abundant crop that could begathered was that of stones.
The character of the people conformed in many waysto that of the soil. The houses which lined the opposite sides ofthe single street, of which the petty places largely consisted, aswell as the dwellings which dotted the country, were the homes ofmen who possessed in fullness many of the features, good and bad,that characterized the Puritan stock to which they belonged. Therewas a good deal of religion in these rural communities andoccasionally some culture. Still, as a rule, it must be confessed,there would be found in them much more of plain living than of highthinking. Broad thinking could hardly be said to exist at all. Bythe dwellers in that region Easter had scarcely even been heard of;Christmas was tolerated after a fashion, but was neverthelesslooked upon with a good deal of suspicion as a Popish invention. Inthe beliefs of these men several sins not mentioned in thedecalogue took really, if unconsciously, precedence of those whichchanced to be found in that list. Dancing was distinctly immoral;card-playing led directly to gambling with all its attendant evils;theatre-going characterized the conduct of the more disreputabledenizens of great cities. Fiction was not absolutely forbidden; butthe most lenient regarded it as a great waste of time, and the boywho desired its solace on any large scale was under the frequentnecessity of seeking the seclusion of the haymow.
But however rigid and stern the beliefs of men mightbe, nature was there always charming, not only in her summerbeauty, but even in her wildest winter moods. Narrow, too, as mightbe the views of the members of these communities about the conductof life, there was ever before the minds of the best of them anideal of devotion to duty, an earnest all-pervading moral purposewhich implanted the feeling that neither personal success norpleasure of any sort could ever afford even remotely compensationfor the neglect of the least obligation which their situationimposed. It was no misfortune for any one, who was later to betransported to a broader horizon and more genial air, to havestruck the roots of his being in a soil where men felt the fullsense of moral responsibility for everything said or done, andwhere the conscience was almost as sensitive to the suggestion ofsin as to its actual accomplishment.
It was amidst such surroundings that Charles DudleyWarner was born on the 12th of September, 1829. His birthplace wasthe hill town of Plainfield, over two thousand feet above the levelof the sea. His father, a farmer, was a man of cultivation, thoughnot college-bred. He died when his eldest son had reached the ageof five, leaving to his widow the care of two children. Three yearslonger the family continued to remain on the farm. But howeverdelightful the scenery of the country might be, its aestheticattractions did not sufficiently counterbalance its agriculturaldisadvantages. Furthermore, while the summers were beautiful onthis high table land, the winters were long and dreary in theenforced solitude of a thinly settled region. In consequence, thefarm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the homebroken up. The mother with her two children, went to theneighboring village of Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield.There the elder son took up his residence with his guardian andrelative, a man of position and influence in the community, who wasthe owner of a large farm. With him he stayed until he was twelveyears old, enjoying all the pleasures and doing all themiscellaneous jobs of the kind which fall to the lot of a boybrought up in an agricultural community.
The story of this particular period of his life wasgiven by Warner in a work which was published about forty yearslater. It is the volume entitled “Being a Boy. ” Nowhere has therebeen drawn a truer or more vivid picture of rural New England.Nowhere else can there be found such a portrayal of the sights andsounds, the pains and pleasures of life on a farm as seen from thepoint of view of a boy. Here we have them all graphicallyrepresented: the daily “chores” that must be looked after; thedriving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fieldswhere vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailingstones; the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forthin the wind on their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; thenutting excursions of November days, culminating in the glories ofThanksgiving; the romance of school life, over which vacations, farfrom being welcomed with delight, cast a gloom as involving extrawork; the cold days of winter with its deep or drifting snows, themercury of the thermometer clinging with fondness to zero, evenwhen the sun was shining brilliantly; the long chilling nights inwhich the frost carved fantastic structures on the window-panes;the eager watching for the time when the sap would begin to run inthe sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with theinevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; thelonging for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhideboots could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in thecovering for his feet which the Lord had provided. These and scoresof similar descriptions fill up the picture of the life furnishedhere. It was nature's own school wherein was to be gained thefullest intimacy with her spirit. While there was much which shecould not teach, there was also much which she alone could teach.From his communion with her the boy learned lessons which thestreets of crowded cities could never have imparted.
At the age of twelve this portion of his educationcame to an end. The family then moved to Cazenovia in Madisoncounty in Central New York, from which place Warner's mother hadcome, and where her immediate relatives then resided. Until he wentto college this was his home. There he attended a preparatoryschool under the direction of the Methodist Episcopal Church, whichwas styled the Oneida Conference Seminary. It was at thisinstitution that he fitted mainly for college; for to college ithad been his father's dying wish that he should go, and the boyhimself did not need the spur of this parting injunction. A collegenear his home was the excellent one of Hamilton in the not distanttown of Clinton in the adjoining county of Oneida. Thither herepaired in 1848, and as he had made the best use of hisadvantages, he was enabled to enter the sophomore class. He wasgraduated in 1851.
But while fond of study he had all these years beendoing something besides studying. The means of the family werelimited, and to secure the education he desired, not only was itnecessary to husband the resources he possessed, but to increasethem in every possible way. Warner had all the American boy'swillingness to undertake any occupation not in itselfdiscreditable. Hence to him fell a full share of those experienceswhich have diversified the early years of so many men who haveachieved success. He set up type in a printing office; he acted asan assistant in a bookstore; he served as clerk in a post-office.He was thus early brought into direct contact with persons of allclasses and conditions of life.
The experience gave to his keenly observant mind aninsight into the nature of men which was to be of special serviceto him in later years. Further, it imparted to him a familiaritywith their opinions and hopes and aspirations which enabled him tounderstand and sympathize with feelings in which he did not alwaysshare.
During the years which immediately followed hisdeparture from college, Warner led the somewhat desultory andapparently aimless life of many American graduates whose futuredepends upon their own exertions and whose choice of a career ismainly determined by circumstances. From the very earliest periodof his life he had been fond of reading. It was an inherited taste.The few books he found in his childhood's home would have beenalmost swept out of sight in the torrent, largely of trash, whichpours now in a steady stream into the humblest household. But thebooks, though few, were of a high quality; and because they werefew they were read much, and their contents became an integral partof his intellectual equipment. Furthermore, these works of thegreat masters, with which he became familiar, set for him astandard by which to test the value of whatever he read, and savedhim even in his earliest years from having his taste impaired andhis judgment misled by the vogue of meretricious productions whichevery now and then gain popularity for the time. They gave him alsoa distinct bent towards making literature his profession. Butliterature, however pleasant and occasionally profitable as anavocation, was not to be thought of as a vocation. Few there are atany period who have succeeded in finding it a substantial andpermanent support; at that time and in this country such a prospectwas practically hopeless for any one. It is no matter of surprise,therefore, that Warner, though often deviating from the directpath, steadily gravitated toward the profession of law.
Still, even in those early days his naturalinclination manifested itself. The Knickerbocker Magazine was thenthe chosen organ to which all young literary aspirants sent theirproductions