Oscar . Born Jamestown, 1825. About 1842, aged 17, went to St. L to learn to be a printer, in Ustick’s job office.
At 18, wrote home to his mother, that he was studying the life of Franklin and closely imitating him; that in his boarding house he was confining himself to bread and [water,] and was [ trying to persuade the other young boarders and Ustick’s other cubs, to eschew beer. They called him Parson Snivel and gave him frank and admirable cursings, and urged him to mind his own business. All of which pleased him, and made him a hero to himself: for he was turning his other cheek, as commanded, he was being reviled and persecuted for righteousness’ sake, and all that. Privately his little Presbyterian mother was not pleased with this too-literal loyalty to the theoretical Bible-teachings which he had acquired through her agency, for, slender and delicately moulded as she was, she had a dauntless courage and a high spirit, and was not of the cheek-turning sort. She believed fervently in her religion and strenuously believed it was a person’s duty to turn the cheek, but she was quite open and aboveboard in saying that she wouldn’t turn her own cheek nor respect anybody that did. “Why, how do you reconcile that with—” “I don’t reconcile it with anything. I am the [begin page 106] way I am made. Religion is a [jugfull]; I hold a [dipperfull; you] can’t crowd a jugful of [anything] into a dipper—there’s no way. I’m holding what I can, and I’m not going to cry because I can’t crowd the rest in. I know that a person that can turn his cheek is higher and holier than I am, and better every way. And of course I reverence him; but I despise him, too, and I wouldn’t have him for a doormat.”
We know what she meant. Her attitude is easily understandable, but we get our comprehension of it not through her explanation of it but in spite of it. Her language won’t scan, but its meaning is clear, all the same.
She did not show Oscar’s letter to his father; the Judge would have taken no great interest in it. There were few points of contact between him and his son; there were few or no openings for sympathy between the two. The father was as steady as a church-tower, the son as capricious as the weather-vane on its top. Steady people do not admire the weather-vane sort.
But the mother answered the letter; and she poured out her affection upon her boy, and her praises, too; praises of his resolution to be a Franklin and become great and good and renowned; for she always said that he was distrustful of himself and a prey to [ despondences], and that no opportunity to praise him and encourage him must be lost, or he would lose heart and be defeated in his struggles to gain the front in the race of life. She had to do all the encouraging herself; the rest of the family were indifferent, and this wounded her, and brought gentle reproaches out of her that were strangely eloquent and moving, considering how simple and unaffected her language was, and how effortless and unconscious. But there was a subtle something in her voice and her manner that was [irresistably] pathetic, and perhaps that was where a great part of the power lay; in that and in her moist eyes and trembling lip. I know now that she was the most eloquent person whom I have met in all my days, but I did not know it then, and I suppose that no one in all the village suspected that she was a marvel, or indeed that she was in any degree above the common. I had been abroad in the world for twenty years and known and listened to many of its best talkers before it at last dawned upon me that in the matter of [begin page 107] moving and pathetic eloquence none of them was the equal of that untrained and artless talker out there in the western village, that obscure little woman with the beautiful spirit and the great heart and the enchanted tongue.
Oscar’s mother praised in her letter what she was able to praise; and she praised forcefully and generously and heartily, too. There was no uncertain ring about her words. But her gorge rose at the cheek-turning heroisms, and since she could not commend them and be honest, she skipped them wholly, and made no reference to them.
Oscar’s next week’s letter showed further progress. He was now getting up at four in the morning, because that was Franklin’s way; he had divided his day on the Franklin plan—eight hours for labor, eight for sleep, eight for study, meditation and exercise; he had pinned Franklin’s rules up in a handy place, and divided the hours into minutes, and distributed the minutes among the rules, each minute sacred to its appointed duty: so many minutes for the morning prayer; so many for the Bible chapter; so many for the dumb-bells; so many for the bath; so many for What did I do yesterday that was morally and mentally profitable? What did I do which should have been left undone? What opportunity did I neglect of doing good? Whom did I injure, whom did I help, whose burden did I lighten? How shall I order this day to the approval of God, my own spiritual elevation, and the betterment of my fellow beings? And so on, and so on, all the way through: sixteen waking hours cut up into minutes, and each minute labeled with its own particular duty-tag.
He wrote it all home to his mother; and added that he found that life was a noble and beautiful thing when reduced to order and system; that he was astonished to see what briskness, mentally and physically, early rising gave him, and what a difference he could already notice between himself and the late-rising boarders—the greatest difference in the world, and all in four days.
But he said he had taken to his lamp again, for he had found that he could not read his fine-print books by the Franklin tallow candle. Also, he had been to a lecture, and was now a vegetarian, and an [begin page 108] enthusiastic one. He had discarded bread, and also water; vegetables, pure and simple, made the most effective and inspiring diet in the world, and the most thoroughly satisfying; he wondered how his intellect had ever survived the gross food with which he had formerly burdened it; but he sometimes almost feared that it had suffered impairment. He had mentioned this fear to the foreman of the office, but the foreman had said, almost with enthusiasm, considering what a lifeless and indifferent man he usually was, “Don’t worry—nothing can impair your intellect.”
The mother’s face flushed when she read that, and the foreman was better off where he was than he would have been, here, in reach of her tongue.]
