Chapter IV (1)

Thus far I have been trying to impress upon you the reasons why you should cultivate individuality and independence in word and deed. I have claimed that each one of you has a “call” to some specific work, indicated by God’s gifts to you of brain, or heart, or hand. But I would not have you only, or indeed chiefly, concerned with the evolution of your powers for your own sake. If you acquire, let it be that you may dispense; if you achieve, that others may sun themselves in the kind glow of your prosperity. The people who spend all their strength in absorbing are failures and parasites. It is alike the business of the sun and of the soul to radiate every particle of light that they can muster. There is reason to believe that this is precisely what they are for. And so, having made sure of your light, strength and discipline, strike out from the warm and radiant center of a self-poised brain and heart, into the lives about you, and you will find that “What is good for the hive is also good for the bee.” The luminous characters of history have done this, always. Losing their lives in those of other men, they have found them in the crest of the world’s gratitude and fame. What they have done on a grand scale, we, from identical motives, may do on a small one. Such natures are as different from those who cultivate their strongest gift simply for their own sake, as a _lighthouse_ is different from a _dark lantern_. “Self-culture” is much in vogue nowadays, and has for its high priests some of the most incisive minds of this or any age. But self-culture stops in the middle of the sentence I would fain help you to utter. It says: “Make the most of your powers;” it does not say “_for others’ sake_ as well as your own.” It claims that if we set the candle of our gifts upon the candlestick of modern society, its light will inevitably radiate according to its power of shining, and thus while brightening ourselves we shall have done our utmost toward lighting up the general gloom. But self-culture forgets that a candle is no type of you and me. We are human spirit-lamps, whose rays should be directed and intensified by the blow-pipe of an unceasing purpose; for we are all so made that unless we _will_ to light up other lives, we can never do so to the limit of our power. Self-culture is never base; it is often noble, but it can never be the noblest aim of all.

Why is the memory of Mrs. Browning loved beyond that of almost any poet who has sung? Because “the cry of the human” is so strong in that wondrous voice of hers. Why is the name carved deepest on the republic’s heart that of its martyr President? Because he gave their manhood back to four millions of slaves, and lived and toiled for his people’s sake, “with malice toward none, with charity for all.” Why was the lamentation well nigh universal when under the sea flashed the telegraphic message, “John Stuart Mill is dead?” Because this quiet thinker lived for other men; because he “struck out from the center,” from himself, that pitiful pivot on which so many human wind-mills turn, and measured, in the swift flight of its benignant thought, the long radius between him and the remotest circle of human need; because, more than any other philosopher of his day, he labored for the time when “all men’s weal shall be each man’s care.”

Nay, while I mourn, as I have seldom mourned for an historic character, the cloud that early dimmed, for Stuart Mill, the Star of Bethlehem, I will not, as a woman, withhold from his memory the tribute of my humble gratitude. But while I speak of all these lives, shining like beacon lights of our own day, I would not fail to point you in conclusion toward a wide-armed cross upon a lonely hillside, while I repeat his words who said, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me.” Dear girls, CHRIST is the magnet of humanity, and she has found the best vocation, and the highest, who brings most souls diseased within the healing power of his immortal gospel. This is a work for which women have gifts preëminent. The Saxon word for lady means “a giver of bread,” and is full of beautiful significance, but America’s new century shall evolve another meaning, freighted with greater blessing for humanity: lady, giver of the bread of life! In later years we have had a revelation of our duty to the ungospeled masses, the “elbow heathen,” as an evangelist has called them, to the intemperate (who, as a rule, are quite beyond the hearing of the pulpit’s voice), and to the dusky dwellers in the Zenana, whose faces are misty with the unshed tears of generations passed in misery and shame. Two thirds of the Church of Christ are women. By the freer life and richer opportunity which you and I enjoy; by society’s growing tolerance, not to say its kindly appreciation, of our activities; by the heart transformed and the peace imparted through the gospel, the voice of our Redeemer pleads for our consecrated service. I would not undervalue the culture of the intellect, but would exalt the culture of the heart.

In all that has been written until now, I have simply tried to outline the new horizon opened up to the gentler sex as the supreme outgrowth of that civilization which He introduced, of whom history records the significant fact that women were “last at his cross, first at his sepulchre.” To attempt some delineation of the landscape enclosed by that far-reaching horizon is my more difficult task in the chapters now to follow. Many letters have come to me as a result of the articles thus far; they bristle with questions and are eloquent with aspiration. Later on I may ask space for a “symposium” with these “inquiring friends” in the genial pages of our tolerant CHAUTAUQUAN. One speaking with authority exhorts me to “Be practical—that’s what we want!” As if I hadn’t been! But every mind is the prisoner of its own material and method. I can but give of such things as I have; can only tell what life has told to me. According to my own habits of thought, the sequence seems logical, when I turn for a while from the presentation of the modern outlook for women, with its opportunity and hope, to the _rationale_ of this new horizon stretching so far away. Let us note the pathway that has led up to this more hopeful point of view, asking the inevitable question, “Why does that seem natural and fitting for a young woman to do and to aspire to now, which would have been no less improper than impossible, a hundred years ago?” Sweet friends, it is because _the ideal of woman’s place in the world is changing in the average mind_. For as the artist’s ideal precedes his picture, so the ideal woman must be transformed before the actual one can be. In an age of brute force, the warrior galloping away to his adventures waved his mailed hand to the lady fair who was enclosed for safe keeping in a grim castle with moat and drawbridge. But to-day, when spirit force grows regnant, a woman can circumnavigate the globe alone, without danger of an uncivil word, much less of violence. We shall never span a wider chasm than this change implies. All our inventions have led up to it, and have in nothing else wrought out beneficence so great as they have accomplished here, purely by indirection. In brief, the barriers that have hedged women into one pathway and men into another, altogether different, are growing thin, as physical strength plays a less determining part in our life drama. All through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the fact of sex does not widely differentiate the broader fact of life, its environment and its pursuits. Hence, the immense separateness which sex is called in to explain when we reach the plane of humanity, is to be accounted for largely on other purely artificial grounds. In Eden it did not exist, nor in the original plan of creation, as stated in these just and fatherly words: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. Let them have dominion.’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them, and God blessed them, and said unto them, ‘ … replenish the earth and subdue it … and have dominion over every living thing.’” After the fall came the curse, which was no part of the original design, and from which the gospel’s triumph is releasing us, for there is “neither male nor female in Christ Jesus.” I believe that the origin of evil came in with man’s supremacy over one who was meant to be his comrade, and that Paradise regained will come only when the laureate’s prophecy is realized:

“Two heads in council, two beside the hearth,
Two in the noisy business of the world,
Two in the liberal offices of life;
Two plummets dropped to sound the abyss of science
And the secrets of the mind.”

The times when a new ideal is moulded, in church, state, or society, mark the epochs of history. Amid what throes did Europe pass from that of supreme authority in the church to the incomparably higher one of supreme liberty in conscience; from the divine right of kings to the divine right of the people. But there was to come a wider evolution of the same ideal, namely, the coequal power of the copartners, man and woman, in working out the problem of human destiny. This newest and noblest of ideals marks the transition from physical force ruling, to spiritual force recognized. The gradual adjustment of everyday occupation, custom and law, to this new ideal, marks ours as a transition period. Those who have the most enlargement of opportunity to hope from the change, will, in the nature of the case, move on most rapidly into the new conditions, and this helps to explain, I think, why women seem to be climbing more rapidly than men, to-day, the heights of spiritual power, with souls more open to the “skyey influences” of the oncoming age.

More women study to-day than men; a greater proportion travel abroad for purposes of culture; a larger share are moral and religious. Half of the world’s wisdom, three fourths of its purity, and nearly all its gentleness, are to-day to be set down on woman’s credit side. Weighted with the alcohol and tobacco habits, Brother Jonathan will have to make better time than he is doing now, if he keeps step with Sister Deborah across the threshold of the twentieth century. For the law of survival of the fittest will inevitably choose that member of the firm who is cleanliest, most wholesome, most accordant with God’s laws of nature and of grace, to survive. To the blindness or fatuity which renders him oblivious of the fact that the coming woman is already here, our current writer of the W. D. Howells and Henry James school owes the dreary monotony of his “society novel.” Not more “conventional” was the style of art known as “Byzantine,” which repeated with barren iteration its placid and colorless “type,” than are the dudesque pages of this pair of literary martinets. The “American novel” will not be written until the American woman, a type now to be found in Michigan, Madison, Boston, Cornell, and other universities, shall have taken her place, twentieth century product that she is, beside the best survivals of young men in similar institutions, and wrought out the Home, the Church, the State that are to be. Measuring each other on all planes, these life partners will know each other’s value, and no appeal to the divorce court will be made to relieve them, a few years after marriage, from an incompatibility that has ripened into open war. Happy homes will dot the country from shore to shore, in which both the man and the woman will do their best to lift the world toward God.

“Self-knowledge, self-reverence, and self-control; these three alone lead life to a sovereign power,” and these are fast becoming essential to any ideal of womanly character which the modern age will recognize as the product of its institutions. Of self-knowledge, these talks have said much. Self-reverence I would fain help you to develop in your character as a woman. If my dear mother did me one crowning kindness it was in making me believe that next to being an angel, the greatest bestowment of God is to make one a woman. With what contempt she referred to the old Jewish formula in which the less refined sex rolled out the words, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast not made me a woman,” and with what pathos she repeated the gentle prayer of the other, “I thank thee, O God, that thou hast made me as it pleased thee,” with the pithy comment, “What could have pleased Him better, I should like to know, than to make one so rare, so choice, so spiritual as woman is?” Perhaps some of you may have thought you wanted to be a boy, but I seriously doubt it. You may have wanted a boy’s freedom, his independence, his healthful, unimpeding style of dress, but I do not believe any true girl could ever have been coaxed to be a boy. Reverence yourself, then, if you would learn one of the first elements of “How to Win” in this great world race, with its “go-as-you-please” terms, but its “Lucifer-may-take-the-hindmost” penalty for failure.

What will the new ideal of woman _not_ be? She will never be written down in the hotel register by her husband after this fashion: “John Smith and Wife.” He would as soon think of her writing “Mrs. John Smith and Husband.” Why does it not occur to any one to designate him thus? Simply because he is so much more than that. He is a leading force in the affairs of the church; he helps decide who shall be pastor. (So will she.) He is perhaps the village physician, or merchant (so she will be, perhaps—indeed, they are oftentimes in partnership, nowadays, and I have found their home a blessed one). He is the village editor. (Very likely she will be associate.) He is a voter. (She will be, beyond a peradventure.) For the same reason you will never read of her marriage that “the minister pronounced them _man_ and _wife_” for that functionary would have been just as likely to pronounce them “husband and woman,” a form of expression into which the regulation reporter will be likely to fall one of these days, it being, really, not one whit more ridiculous than the time-worn phrase, “man and wife.” The ideal woman of the future will never be designated as “the Widow Jones,” because she will be so much more than that—“a provider” for her children, “a power” in the church, “a felt force” in the state. I think George Eliot is the first woman to attain the post-mortem honor of having her husband called “her widower,” John W. Cross having been thus indicated in English papers of the period. A turn about is fair play, and the phrase is really quite refreshing to one’s sense of justice. The ideal woman will not write upon her visiting card, nor insist on having her letters addressed, to Mrs. John Smith, or Mrs. Gen. Smith, as the case may be, but will, if her maiden name was Jones, fling her banner to the breeze as “Mrs. Mary Jones Smith,” and will be sure to make it honorable. She will not be the lay figure made and provided to illustrate the fashions of Monsieur Worth and lesser lights of the same guild, but will insist that the goddess Hygiea is the only true modiste, and will dutifully obey her orders. As the Louvre gallery proves that when men were but the parasites of the court they too decked themselves with ear-rings, high heels, powdered hair and gaudy garments, so the distorted figures in the detestable fashion plates of to-day are the irrefutable proofs of woman’s fractional estate; but this will not be so to-morrow, when she finds her kingdom—which is her own true self. The ideal woman will cease to heed the cruel “Thus far and no farther,” which has issued from the pinched lips of old Dame Custom, checking her ardent steps throughout all the ages past, and will be studious only to hear the kindly “Thus far and no farther” of God.

The ideal woman will play Beatrice to man’s Dante in the Inferno of his passions. She will give him the clue out of materialism’s Labyrinth. She will be civilization’s Una, taming the Lion of disease and misery. The State shall no longer go limping on one foot through the years, but shall march off with steps firm and equipoised. The keen eye and deft hand of the housekeeper shall help to make its everyday walks wholesome; the skill in detail, trustworthiness in finance, motherliness in sympathy, so long extolled in private life, shall exalt public station. Indeed, if I were asked the mission of the ideal woman, I would reply: IT IS TO MAKE THE WHOLE WORLD HOMELIKE. Some one has said that “Temperament is the climate of the individual,” but home is woman’s climate, her vital breath, her native air. A true woman carries home with her everywhere. Its atmosphere surrounds her; its mirror is her face; its music attunes her gentle voice; its longitude may be reckoned from wherever you happen to find her. But

“Home’s not merely four square walls.”

Some people once thought it was, and they thought, also, that you might as well throw down its Lares and Penates as to carry away its weaving loom and spinning wheel. But it survived this spoliation; and when women ceased to pick their own geese and do their own dyeing, it still serenely smiled. The sewing machine took away much of its occupation; the French and Chinese laundries have intruded upon its domain; indeed, men, by their “witty inventions,” are perpetually encroaching on “woman’s sphere,” so that the next generation will no doubt turn the cook stove out of doors, and the housekeeper, standing at the telephone, will order better cooked meals than almost any one has nowadays, sent from scientific caterers by pneumatic tubes, and the debris thereof returned to a general cleaning-up establishment; while houses will be heated, as they are now lighted and supplied with water, from general reservoirs.

Women are fortunate in belonging to the less tainted half of the race. Dr. Benjamin Ward Richardson says that but for this conserving fact it would deteriorate to the point of failure. A bright old lady said, after viewing a brewery, distillery and tobacco factory: “Ain’t I thankful that the women folks hain’t got all that stuff to chew and smoke and swallow down!” It behooves us to offset force of muscle by force of heart, that what our strong brothers have done to subdue the material world for us, who are not their equals in physical strength, may be offset by what we shall achieve for them in bringing in the reign of “Sweeter manners, purer laws.” For the world is slowly making the immense discovery that not what woman does, but what she is, makes home a possible creation. It is the Lord’s ark, and does not need steadying; it will survive the wreck of systems and the crash of theories, for the home is but the efflorescence of woman’s nature under the nurture of Christ’s gospel. She came into the college and elevated it, into literature and hallowed it, into the business world and ennobled it. She will come into government and purify it, into politics and cleanse that Stygian pool as the waters of Marah were cleansed; for woman will make homelike every place she enters, and she will enter every place on this round earth. Any custom, or traffic, or party, on which a woman can not look with favor is irrevocably doomed. Its welcome of her presence and her power is to be the final test of its fitness to survive. All Gospel civilization is radiant with the demonstration of this truth:

“It is not good for man to be alone.”

The most vivid object lesson on history’s page is the fact that his deterioration is in exact proportion to his isolation from the home of woman’s pure companionship. To my own grateful thought, the most sacred significance of woman’s work to-day lies in the fact that she occupies the outer circle in this tremendous evolution of the Christian idea of home. Ours is a high and sacred calling. Out of pure hearts, fervently let us love God and humanity; so shall we be Christ’s disciples, and so shall we safely follow on to know the work whereunto we have been called.

“’Tis home where’er the heart is,”

and no true mother, sister, daughter or wife, can fail to go in spirit after her beloved and tempted ones, as their adventurous steps enter the labyrinth of the world’s temptations. We can not call them back.

“All before them lies the way.”

There is but one remedy; we must bring the home to them, for they will not return to it. Still must their mothers walk beside them, sweet and serious, and clad in the garments of power. The occupations, pleasures and ambitions of men and women must not diverge so widely from each other. Potent beyond all other facts of everyday experience is the rapidly increasing similarity between the pursuits of these two factions that make up the human integer. When brute force reigned, this rapport was at zero. “Impediments to the rear,” was the command of Cæsar and the rule of every warrior—women and children being the hindrances referred to. But to-day there is not a motto more popular than that of the inspired old German, “Come, let us live for our children;” and as for women, “the world is all before them where to choose.”

No greater good can come to the manhood of the world than is prophesied in the increasing community of thought and works between it and the world’s womanhood. The growing individuality, independence and prestige of the gentler sex steadily require from the stronger a higher standard of character and purer habits of life. This blessed consummation, so devoutly to be wished, is hastened, dear girlish hearts, by every prayer you offer, by every hymn you sing, by every loving errand of your willing feet and gentle hands. You are the true friends of tempted manhood, bewildered youth and every little child. The steadfast faith and loyal, patient work you are to do, will be the mightiest factor in woman’s contribution to the solution of this Republic’s greatest problem, and will have their final significance in the thought and purpose, not that the world shall come into the home, but that the home, embodied and impersonated in its womanhood, shall go forth into the world.

I have no fears for the women of America. They will never content themselves remaining stationary in methods or in policy, much less sound a retreat in their splendid warfare against the saloon in law and in politics. The tides of the mother’s heart do not change; we can count upon them always. The voice of Miriam still cheers the brave advance, and all along the line we hear the battle cry: “Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.”

THE CATLIN PAINTINGS.

BY O. T. MASON.

If you will enter the National Museum at Washington, and give your cane or umbrella to the venerable gentleman at the stand, you will see some wonderful old pictures. Turn abruptly to your right, cast a patriotic glance at the clothing and camp furniture of the Father of his Country, and a few steps will bring you into the museum lecture room, whose east, south, and west walls are covered with quaint sketches of American aboriginal life, mounted in the dingiest possible black frames. This is the Catlin Collection, by far the most celebrated Indian paintings in the world, since the dreadful fire in the Smithsonian Institution burned up the Stanley portraits in 1864. A few words about this wonderful painter would certainly interest you before you begin to look at his pictures.

George Catlin was born in Wilkesbarre, Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, in 1796. His father was a lawyer, and, naturally, took every pains to educate his son for that profession, sending him at last to Yale College to finish his course. But that which has often happened to boys was true in George’s case—he loved fishing and painting more than he loved the bar. His law practice lasted two years, after which he established himself in New York and Philadelphia as a portrait painter. In the year 1832 he saw a delegation of Indians from St. Louis, a town of 25,000 inhabitants, then headquarters for the Central Superintendency (see painting 311), and was so overwhelmed by their appearance that nothing could overcome his desire to visit them in their homes. Convinced that the noble savage would rapidly decline before the advance of civilization, and realizing as if by inspiration the value which a pictorial history of the dying race would possess to future students of primitive history, he set out alone for St. Louis, with pen and brush, to accomplish this noble design. Here he became acquainted with Mr. Chouteau, a gentleman thoroughly conversant with the Indian country and character, who secured for the painter a free ride to the mouth of the Yellowstone in a little, rude steamer called the “Yellowstone.”

He devoted eight years, from 1832 to 1840, to his enterprise, visiting forty-eight tribes of Indians residing within British America, the United States and Mexico. Speaking of these years in after life he says: “I have seen them in their own villages, have carried my canvas and colors the whole way, and painted my portraits from life as they now stand in the gallery. Some of them have been taken while I have been paddling my canoe, or leading my pack-horse through trackless wilds, even at the hazard of my life.”

On his return to the East from this remarkable Odyssey, Mr. Catlin exhibited his sketches, together with such a collection of weapons, dress, ornaments and implements as it will never be possible to procure again, in Philadelphia, New York and Boston, to great crowds of visitors. The papers were filled with praises respecting it. The _United States Gazette_ says: “There can be no mistake or exaggeration in pronouncing the exhibition of these views of the scenery and natural history of the western country the most important and interesting object for public attention which has ever been offered to the eastern division of the United States.”

Many of Mr. Catlin’s friends were anxious for the government or some well founded institution to buy the collection, but nothing was accomplished.

In 1840 Mr. Catlin took his pictures abroad, prospects having been held out to him of getting a handsome price for them. The Chancellor of the Exchequer admitted the packages free of duty, and the whole was set up in a room 106 feet long, in Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, London.

Numerous assemblages, comprising many of the distinguished members of the fashionable and the literary world visited the entertainments and listened to the lectures of Mr. Catlin.

It is just a little to be feared that the painter added to the genius of the artist a modicum of the showman’s vanity, in support of which theory the following is quoted from the London _Morning Post_: “This valuable collection of portraits, landscapes, scenes from savage life, weapons, costumes, and an endless variety of illustrations of Indian life, real as well as pictorial, continues to attract crowds of spectators. We are happy to find our prediction fully borne out by fact, that the exhibition only required to be made known to the public to be fully appreciated. The most pleasing attention is paid by Mr. Catlin and his assistants to gratify the curiosity of visitors, to point out the peculiarities of the various subjects through which they wander, and to explain everything which strikes the eye and attracts the observer to inquire into its use or meaning. During our visit on Saturday the company were startled by a yell, and shortly afterward by the appearance of a stately chief of the Crow Indians stalking silently through the hall, armed to the teeth and painted to the temples, wrapped in a buffalo robe, on which all his battles were depicted, and wearing a tasteful coronet of war eagle’s quills. This personation was volunteered by a nephew of Mr. Catlin, who has seen the red man in his native wilds, and presents the most proud and picturesque similitude of the savage warrior that can be conceived. His war-whoop, his warlike appearance and dignified movements seem to impress the assemblage more strikingly with a feeling of the character of the North American Indian than all the other evidences which crowded the walls. Subsequently he appeared in another splendid costume worn by the braves of the Mandan tribe, also remarkable for its costly and magnificent head-dress, in which we see the ‘horns of power’ assume a conspicuous place. The crowds that gathered around him on each occasion were so dense that Mr. Catlin could scarcely find space to explain in full detail all the costumes; but we are glad to find he is preparing a central stage where all may enjoy a full and fair sight of ‘the Red Man,’ as he issues from his wigwam, clad in the peculiar robes and ornaments of his tribe, to fight, hunt, smoke, or join in the dances, festivals, and amusements of each nation.”

This, of course, smacks a little of Buffalo Bill, but it pleased the Europeans amazingly. Mr. Catlin gave exhibitions in Waterloo rooms, Edinburgh; in the Louvre, at Paris, where Louis Philippe gave him ample space; and in many other European cities, occupying in all about eight years. During this time he published “Manners and Customs,” etc.; “The North American Portfolio;” “Eight Years’ Travels.” In 1861 he published a little work on “The Breath of Life,” certainly the funniest serious book we have ever read. In 1862 appeared “Last Rambles Among the Indians,” etc.

As many other people have done concerning their own handiwork, Mr. Catlin overestimated the intrinsic value of his paintings and specimens, and made the mistake of thinking that everybody would surely be as enthusiastic as himself. The British government did not buy the gallery. Even the platform and Mr. Catlin’s nephew could not save the ship. In Belgium financial embarrassment overtook the painter and his works. The whole material was likely to go under the hammer, when Mr. Thomas Harrison, a wealthy Philadelphian, advanced the money and took the collection as security, with the understanding that it could be redeemed. This proving beyond Mr. Catlin’s means, all of the paintings and specimens were transferred to Philadelphia and stored until Mr. Harrison’s death, when his widow presented the entire gallery to the National Museum, together with such dresses, etc., as time and moths had spared.

Perhaps you have heard that the Washington pictures are not the originals. The facts are these: After transferring his material in Belgium to Mr. Harrison, Mr. Catlin traveled throughout North America, and even in South America, making aboriginal sketches. This second collection was exhibited for a time in the west corridor of the Smithsonian. On his death, in 1872, the pictures were packed up and stored in the Smithsonian building until 1876, when they were transferred to the Philadelphia Exposition. They are now to be seen in the permanent exhibition there.

Now for the pictures. A great American ethnologist says “Catlin is the great American Indian liar;” another, quite as eminent, says that when he showed one of these pictures to a Sioux Indian, the latter was affected to tears at the recognition of a dear friend long deceased. Both were right. Recently M. Achille Collin, a French sculptor, was employed to produce several busts of celebrated Indians, from photographs and portraits, for the New Orleans Exposition. Among them was Osceola, whose portrait is in the Catlin gallery. Fortunately, the Museum has also Osceola’s death mask. M. Collin found that Catlin had placed the eyes too far apart, and had perpetrated several other little artistic outrages, yet the sculptor was able to rectify these and to produce a wonderful bust of the wily Seminole. In one sense everything is wrong in these paintings, in another sense they are teeming with life and spirit. A French critic said in the Paris _Constitutionnel_: “A professional painter is perfectly lost in the presence of a nature new to him, in such singular lands, such original colors of sky, foliage and men.” You must know a language in order to appreciate its beauties, you must know Indian life to appreciate Catlin. His images do not pose, they fly across the canvas. M. Schindler, whose lifelike portraiture of fishes has given him a world-wide reputation, and who has lived among the Sioux and painted them, has the same admiration of these savage portraitures, whose shadowy looks are ominous of their fast fading originals. A workman in the Museum whose business it is to arrange Indian costumes says that in those things which anybody can do, Catlin was careless; but in the arrangement of dress, ornaments and weapons, which nobody now knows how to fix, he is an invaluable guide. It may not be known to all that the numberless tribes formerly living within our domain belonged to a few well defined stocks, recognizable by language, institutions, and customs. East of the Rocky Mountains, where most of these pictures were painted, were the Athapascan of the north, the Algonquin and Iroquois of the east, the Cherokee and Muskokee of the south, and the Dakotan of the west. In the great interior basin were the Shoshones, and west of the Sierras the Flatheads, Chinuks, and many other little known stocks.

The Algonkin stock is represented in Mr. Catlin’s gallery by portraits and groups of Sacs and Foxes, Sheyennes, Blackfeet, Chippewas and Ottawas, Crees, Menomonees, Pottawatomies, Kickapoos, Kaskaskias, Weeahs, Peorias, Piankeshaws, Mohegans, Delawares and Shawnees.

The celebrated league of the Iroquois by representatives from the following tribes looks down upon us as Oneidas, Tuscaroras and Senecas.

John Ross, a civilized and well educated chief, with four other celebrated faces, represents the Cherokee stock. The great Muskogee or Creek confederacy includes paintings of distinguished Creeks, Choktas, Seminoles, and Yuchees. Most of the last two stocks were well instructed by Protestant missionaries, previously to their transfer into the Indian Territory. It is this fact alone which explains their steady increase while so many other tribes have melted away. It was among the Dakotas, however, that Catlin’s enthusiasm first took fire and increased most fervently. In addition to the many landscape and hunting pictures, whose scenes are laid in this romantic country, you will see staring at you from these dingy frames, men and women of many Dakotan tribes, Kansas, Osages, Ponkas, Omahas, Otoes, Missourias, Iowas, Mandans, Blackfeet Sioux, Crows, Assiniboins, Winnebagos, and Sioux proper. A few Comanches, Pawnee Picts, Weecos, Pawnees and Arikarees, Flatheads and Chinuks complete the list.

Of all the tribes visited by Mr. Catlin, the Mandans awaken the most lively interest, not only by their impressive ceremonies, but because the whole tribe were extinguished by smallpox and suicide in 1837, excepting about forty who afterward fell victims to their enemies.

Look along on the wall until you find the pictures numbered 504, 505, 506 and 507. In these, by a series of tableaux, the painter presents to us the annual ceremony of initiation, called the Sun dance by the modern Dakotas, and witnessed two years ago by Miss Alice Fletcher. This ceremony continues four days and nights in succession, in commemoration of the subsiding of the flood, and also for the purpose of conducting all the young men, as they arrive at manhood, through an ordeal of voluntary torture, which when endured entitles them to the respect of the chiefs, to the privileges of going on war-parties, and of taking a wife. The floor and sides of the medicine lodge are ornamented with green willow boughs. The young men who are to do penance by torture lie along the sides of the lodge, their bodies covered with clay of different colors, their respective shields and weapons hanging over their heads. In the middle of the lodge the medicine man prays to the Great Spirit and watches the young men through their four days’ fast, preparatory to the torture. Near the medicine man lies a scalping knife, and a bunch of splints which are to be passed through the flesh of the novitiates like belaying pins. The Buffalo dance takes place several times each day outside the lodge in which the young men lie. The principal actors in this dance are eight men with the skins of buffaloes around them and a bunch of green willows on their backs. The evil spirit, Okeehedee, enters the village from the prairie, alarming the women, who cry for assistance and are relieved by the old medicine man. Okeehedee is at length disarmed of his lance, which is broken by the women, and he is driven by them in disgrace out of the village. On the fourth day of the festival the young men are subjected to the torture, which in many forms amounts essentially to this: Two gashes, parallel and near together, are cut quite through the skin, either on the breast, back or arms, looking for all the world like those on the sides of a sheep dressed for market. A wooden pin is thrust from gash to gash, under the intervening strip of skin. One end of a long and strong rawhide line is wrapped or belayed around this peg securely. Now comes the tug of war, the problem always being either to tear this peg out by breaking the strip of flesh or to see how much pain the sufferer can stand. He is hauled up to the roof of the lodge, suspended from an elastic sapling, or dragged around the camp; finally having fastened the end of the line farthest from him to a post, he tugs away with might and main until his flesh is torn loose.

Turn now away from this dreadful scene and take a look at the funny side of Indian life. Here is a fellow whose eager haste after a buffalo ends in being thrown on the monster’s back and taking a bison ride over the prairie. There the clans contend nip and tuck for mastery in the ball play. On this canvas a celebrated archer is showing how many arrows he can shoot before the first one falls. Perhaps your delicate sensibility will not enjoy the dog dance, where the Sioux braves are dancing up grotesquely and biting off pieces of a heart taken raw and bleeding from a dog. Well, here is a sham battle of Mandan boys, their school of practice every morning at sunrise, and just there a prairie-dog village. This picture, No. 337, is the celebrated Pipestone quarry on the Couteau des Prairies, 300 miles northwest of the Falls of St. Anthony, on the divide between the St. Peters and the Missouri. Here is where from time immemorial the Indians have obtained for making pipes that beautiful red steatite, which the mineralogists now call _catlinite_, after our hero. There are many more just as strange and interesting stories hanging about this dear old Smithsonian, and some day THE CHAUTAUQUAN may let you into the secret. You notice here and there that the fatal pointer has gone quite through the noble brave, and that accounts for solicitude about your cane and umbrella at the beginning. You will find them at the door, and don’t fail to reclaim them with your check.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

BY PROF. W. W. GIST.

George Bancroft is the Nestor of American men of letters. Born October 3, 1800, he received his early training at Exeter Academy, and graduated at Harvard in 1817. He is now eighty-four years old, and his life has touched every administration in the history of our nation except Washington’s. What mighty changes have been wrought in the land since George Bancroft, a manly youth, stepped forth from his _alma mater_ a full-fledged graduate! Two generations have passed away and a third is now on the stage of action. Webster, Clay, Calhoun and Benton had not yet reached the zenith of their power. These men have passed away, and another group, equally great, of whom Abraham Lincoln was the central figure, became conspicuous leaders in the most thrilling period of our history, and have passed away likewise. Indeed, there are thousands of voters to-day who were born during the exciting events of Lincoln’s administration. At the time George Bancroft graduated which, in the general acceptation of the term, marked the commencement of his life’s work, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Blaine, Cleveland, and Generals Sherman and Sheridan had not been born. Some of these have won never-fading honors in events that have attracted the attention of the whole world, and are numbered among our heroes. At that time Harvard was a very different institution from what it is now; American literature was in its infancy; Washington Irving had scarcely gained a recognition on the other side of the waters.

Forty-five years ago Bancroft held a government office and secured for Nathaniel Hawthorne an appointment in the Boston Custom House. Hawthorne was then a literary man with some reputation, but his pen did not afford him a livelihood. His great masterpieces were written during the next quarter of a century, and twenty years have passed since the announcement of his death cast a gloom over the literary world, while his friend and benefactor still survives in the full vigor of his intellectual powers.

Macaulay and Bancroft were born in the same year; the former has been dead nearly twenty-five years; the latter is giving finishing touches to his great history, which merits a place with Macaulay’s and Gibbon’s.

George Bancroft’s father was the Rev. Aaron Bancroft, D.D., who as a young man participated in the battles of Lexington and Bunker Hill, and who in later years won an honorable name as a theologian and man of letters, his “Life of Washington” attracting considerable attention in Europe. The son inherited many of the admirable characteristics of the father.

After his graduation at Harvard, George Bancroft spent five years in Europe, receiving a degree from the University of Göttingen, mastering the principal modern languages, giving special attention to the study of history, visiting the most important nations of the continent, and above all communing with some of the greatest minds of the age. It was his rare privilege to meet, and to enjoy the friendship of, such men as Wolf, the distinguished classic scholar, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, Cousin, Alexander von Humboldt, Chevalier Bunsen, Niebuhr, and others scarcely less distinguished.

Returning to his native land in 1822, he spent one year as tutor of Greek in Harvard, and afterward assisted in establishing a preparatory school at Northampton. The subject of United States history already absorbed his mind, and the next few years were spent in special study for his great work.

Bancroft has held a number of offices. In 1838 President Van Buren appointed him collector at the port of Boston, and he discharged the duties of the office with marked ability. In 1845 he entered President Polk’s cabinet as Secretary of the Navy. A number of important events of this administration are linked with his name. Through his influence the naval academy at Annapolis was established, and he introduced many needed reforms into the naval service. He ordered the United States fleet to assist Captain Fremont in taking possession of California, and as Acting Secretary of War he issued orders for the United States army to march into Texas at the commencement of the Mexican war. In 1846 he was appointed minister to England, and held the position for three years. While in England unusual courtesies were extended to him, and every facility was granted for carrying on his historical researches, official state papers and many valuable private libraries being accessible. He also visited Paris for the purpose of study, and received valuable assistance from Guizot and Lamartine. In 1867 he was appointed minister to Berlin and remained abroad a number of years, calling forth a special commendation from President Grant for his wise diplomatic services.

Mr. Bancroft has done considerable literary work in addition to writing his “History of the United States.” When a young man he published a volume of poems; he has contributed a great many articles to magazines, and has delivered a number of memorial addresses on prominent Americans. In 1859 he prepared a paper on “Prescott” for the New York Historical Society; also one on “Washington Irving.” In 1860 he delivered an address in Cleveland at the unveiling of the statue of Commodore Oliver H. Perry, and February 12, 1866, he delivered before the two houses of Congress a memorial address on President Lincoln.

Bancroft is known most widely, however, as an historian, and his noble history is a monument more durable than granite. He brought to his task a mind philosophic in character, broad in grasp, impartial in judgment, believing firmly in God’s superintending care, rich in scholarship, and with enough of the imaginative and poetical to quicken and vivify all his intellectual powers. He has bestowed nearly sixty years of conscientious labor on this great historical work, the first volume of which appeared in 1834, fifty years ago.

The historian requires peculiar talent for his work. He must have such patience and energy as will enable him to carry on any research that will throw light on the subject he is investigating; he must weigh all evidence as coolly as the most unprejudiced judge; he must not assume the part of an advocate until he has examined the subject from every standpoint and reached an unbiased conclusion; he must grasp the real ideas and principles that underlie the events and are hastening the progress of civilization; he must have sufficient imagination to see the events as real, and to make his readers see them as such; in addition, he must have a copiousness of illustration and a fluency of language that will enable him to present his subject in an attractive form. In short, he must be a scholar, an explorer, a philosopher, and a rhetorician. Few, if any, have possessed all these qualifications in a preëminent degree; Bancroft certainly possesses them all in no small degree.

Gibbon will doubtless ever hold an honorable place as an historical writer; and yet he attempts to account for the rapid spread of Christianity entirely on human grounds, and refuses to recognize the greatest force then at work in effecting changes among the nations of the world. Macaulay well says of Gibbon: “He writes like a man who had received some personal injury from Christianity and wished to be revenged on it and all its possessors.” No such charge can be made against George Bancroft. He is a firm believer in God, recognizes Christianity as the most powerful factor in the progress of civilization, and continually evinces his unfaltering belief in God’s superintending care over human affairs. The opening paragraph of his address on President Lincoln may be taken as his creed on God in history. Notice how clear his statement and triumphant his faith:

“That God rules in the affairs of men is as certain as any truth of physical science. On the great moving power which is from the beginning hangs the world of the senses and the world of thought and action. Eternal wisdom marshals the great procession of the nations, working in patient continuity through the ages, never halting and never abrupt, encompassing all events in its oversight, and ever effecting its will, though mortals may slumber in apathy or oppose with madness. Kings are lifted up or thrown down, nations come and go, republics flourish and wither, dynasties pass away as a tale that is told; but nothing is by chance, though men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The deeds of time are governed, as well as judged, by the decrees of eternity.”

A quotation from his history will show his estimate of Christianity:

“To have asserted clearly the unity of mankind was the distinctive character of the Christian religion. No more were the nations to be severed by the worship of exclusive deities. The world was instructed that all men are of one blood; that for all there is but one divine nature and but one moral law; and the renovating faith taught the singleness of the race, of which it embodied the aspirations and guided the advancement.”[E]

Notice also this noble tribute to Christianity in his history:

“The colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth had little share in colonizing our America. The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the proscribed Puritans that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as the sovereign—all had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had been revealed in Judea—the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of Greece—the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guaranteeing absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty; in the highest degree theoretical, yet in the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and human—this system was professed in every part of our widely extended country, and cradled our freedom. Our fathers were not only Christians; they were, even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, protestants. Now the Protestant Reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the awakening of the common people to freedom of mind.”[F]

In a recent private letter to Dr. Buckley, of the _Christian Advocate_, Bancroft uses these words quoted in that paper:

“Certainly our great united commonwealth is the child of Christianity; it may with equal truth be asserted that modern civilization sprung into life with our religion; and faith in its principles is the life-boat on which humanity has at divers times escaped the most threatening perils.”

And again:

“The principles that govern human affairs, extending like a path of light from century to century, become the highest demonstration of the superintending providence of God.”[G]

But it is not necessary to multiply quotations illustrative of his faith in the Deity. Throughout the whole of his writings he manifests a devout, reverential state of mind, and keeps constantly before the reader the idea that God is the great power back of those mighty movements that stir the nations of the world.

The philosophic cast of his mind is clearly revealed in all his discussions of causes and results. He firmly believes that “the problems of politics can not be solved without passing behind transient forms to efficient causes,” and he ever seeks to find the real origin of an event. He dates the American Revolution back to the Reformation under Luther and Calvin, and in relating the events that led to a separation from the mother country he discusses with great clearness and elaborateness three points essential to the proper understanding of the subject: In the first place he speaks of the emancipation of the mind at the Reformation, and the consequent birth of the idea of freedom. In the second place he discusses the growth of this idea of freedom in the nations of Europe and on this continent. In the third place he describes with wonderful fairness the violent discussions that arose in England and in this country when the colonists raised a protest against the tyrannies of the mother country. Referring to the origin of our present liberty, he says explicitly:

“The Reformation was an expression of the right of the human intellect to freedom.”[H]