THERE are men who have great fame during their lives, and then disappear forever; and there are others who live unknown to their contemporaries, and then emerge upon posterity, and cast back a perpetual reproach upon their own times which were not worthy of them. To neither of these classes does Dr. Howe belong; for he was a hero in his own day, and has left behind him so many memorials of his mind and times that he can never become wholly lost to the world. He belongs rather to that class of reappearing reputations which die through successive resurrections, and distribute their message to humanity through many undulations of loss and rediscovery.
One cannot tell where to set the boundary to such men’s influence, for while the student writes, the shadow moves. The scribbler who is assigning values and labels to history becomes an instrument in the hands of his subject, and something is accomplished through him which is beyond his own horizon. This is the mechanism through which great men reach the world. The present age has all but forgotten Dr. Howe: his name has for some years been on the road to oblivion. For I do not count as fame the dusty memorials and busts of dead philanthropists which adorn and disfigure college libraries. Their honored and obliterated features carry something, but it is not fame. They are like neglected finger-boards which have fallen by the wayside and are calmly undergoing unimaginable dissolution through the soft handling of the elements. Wordsworth might have addressed a sonnet to these men had he not been so preoccupied with external nature. “Behold, this man was once the sign-board of classical learning, this of electricity, this of natural science.” But Wordsworth would have been obliged first to rub the moss from the inscriptions.
Some years ago it looked as if Dr. Howe, the great and famous Dr. Howe, had fallen by the wayside of progress and was to remain forever a dead finger-post and a reminiscence in the history of the world’s care for the blind. To-day a new image of him is beginning to form above the mass of letters, documents, and written reports which his busy life bequeathed to the garret, and in which his daughter, Laura E. Richards, has recently quarried for a book of memoirs. She has produced two large volumes which give us Dr. Howe from the intimate side of his character, and in a way that no man can be publicly known to his contemporaries. It is of this new image or vita nuova of Dr. Howe that I mean to speak.
There is a variety of interest in his life, which shatters the picture of a philanthropist and leaves in its place the picture of an adventurer—an unselfish adventurer; that is to say, a sort of Theseus or Hercules, an unaccountable person who visits this world from somewhere else. After all, this is the impression he made upon his own times. Perhaps we are getting a breeze of the same wind that blew through him in life: I cannot tell. At any rate, it was not to Laura Bridgman only that Howe was sent into the world. I confess to a feeling that he was one of the greatest of Americans and one of the best men who ever lived.
Seventy years ago his name was known to everybody in the civilized world. The part he took in the Greek Revolution (1825-29) had made him famous while still a very young man, and his success in teaching the blind deaf-mute, Laura Bridgman, (1837-41) seemed at the time, and still seems, one of the great triumphs in the history of human intellect. The world rang with it. The miracle was done in the sight of all men, and humanity stood on the benches and shouted themselves blind with applause. This accomplishment, which was the great accomplishment of his life, will always remain Dr. Howe’s trade-mark and proverbial significance; but other parts of his life almost equal it in permanent value. The historical interest of the Greek Revolution, and of the latter half of the anti-slavery period, are supplemented by the scientific interest of all Dr. Howe’s philanthropic work and by the personal interest of an extraordinary and unique character.
Samuel Gridley Howe was born in Boston in 1801, and was thus just twenty years old when the Greek Revolution broke out in 1821. In that year he was graduated at Brown University, Providence, and thereafter studied medicine for three years in Boston. Byron’s poems had prepared the youths of Europe and of America for the Greek struggle, and Howe was one of the young men who responded in person to Byron’s final call to arms. Howe did not reach Greece till a few months after Byron’s death at Missolonghi in 1824. Howe spent six years in campaigning with the Greek patriots. He had enlisted in the capacity of a surgeon; but the exigencies of the primitive and very severe guerilla warfare tended to obliterate official rank and to throw the work upon those who had executive ability. The war was a scramble of patriot banditti and peasant militia against Mahommetan ruffians. The name of Greece, the name of Byron, the beauty of the scenery in whose midst the war proceeded, the heart-rending nature of the struggle and its happy outcome, all combine to make this the most romantic war in history. It was one of the last wars before that effective development of steam and gunpowder which have forever merged the picturesque in the horrible.
The young Howe kept a journal, which shows a character entirely at one with his rapturously poetic surroundings. Before I had read this journal I did not know that the United States had ever produced a man of this type, the seventeenth century navigator, whose daily life is made up of hair-breadth escapes and who writes in the style of Robinson Crusoe.—“Passed a pirate boat, but he saw too many marks of preparation about us to attack us; in fact, if vessels only knew what cowards these pirates are they would never be robbed, for the least resistance will keep them off. Give me a vessel with moderately high sides, two light guns and twelve resolute men, and I would pledge my all on sailing about every port of the archipelago and beating off every vessel which approaches. The pirates always come in long, light, open boats which pull from sixteen to thirty-six and forty oars. They sometimes have a gun, and always select calm weather to attack. But how to get up the sides of a vessel if twelve men with cutlasses were to oppose them.”...
“But it was a great fault on the part of commanders of vessels of war not to have made examples. A few bodies hanging at their yard-arms, and displayed round among the islands, would have had more effect than all they have done.”...
There we have the reality of which Stevenson’s tales are the reflection and the traditional imitation. Again—“If he challenges, I shall have my choice of weapons. I am pretty good master of the small sword, and think I could contrive to disarm him and make him beg on his knees, for I am sure he is one of the most arrant cowards.”... Again—“They passed along the beach at full gallop not far from us, and I gave them a rifle ball which missed them.”... In another place—“But one of them held his head out long enough for me to take aim at it and level him with a rifle ball; he fell sprawling upon his face, and I hardly know whether pleasure or pain predominated in my mind as I witnessed his fall. Said I ‘A moment more and I may fall in the same way.’”...
On another occasion—“I plied my rifle as fast as possible, and luckily was not called to one single wounded man, they being sheltered by the high sides of the vessel.”... It must be remembered that inasmuch as Howe was a surgeon he had no right to be fighting at all; but dear me! we are on the Spanish main in Elizabeth’s time; and, as Howe observed a few days later, “I had been directed to keep below, but the scene was too interesting for a young man to lose sight of.”...
There was a touch of the buccaneer about Howe. His slight tendency toward lawlessness kept cropping out all through his life. It appears in an assault which he made on a sentinel at Rome in 1844, and in all his anti-slavery work—of which later. A great descriptive power is revealed in this journal, which he kept during the months when he often slept with his head on a stone and subsisted on fried wasps. As an example of vivid sketching take the following:
“On the road I had met bodies of peasantry of the lower class called Vlachoi (Wallachians), driving before them all their little stock, perhaps a few dozen sheep, as many goats, a donkey and a half-dozen fowls, all guarded by a pair of fine-looking mountain dogs and followed by the father lugging his rough capote, with gun in hand and an old pistol and knife in his belt, and the mother with her baby lashed to her back in a bread-trough, a kettle on her head, and sundry articles of furniture in her hands. A troop of dirty ragged boys and girls, brought up the rear, each bearing a load of baggage proportionate to their strength, a little donkey carrying all the rest of the furniture and farming tools, in fine, all their goods and chattels. Land they have none; they feed their flocks on the high mountains in summer, and now on the approach of winter they descend to the warmer valleys, where they build a wigwam and pass the winter.”... Sieges and battles on land and sea, assassinations and conspiracies, pictures of natural scenery and domestic life, of happiness, pathos, humor, heroism,—the diaries abound in all such things; and the pictures often burn and glow and sparkle. I cannot tell whether this sparkle is a literary quality, or a ray from Howe’s character, or an illusion of my own. But certainly, something remarkable appears in the step and carriage of the young man. He does not stay in the book, he walks into the room where you are reading. The substance and setting of these Greek journals at times remind us of George Borrow’s books; but Howe’s writing is done without literary intention and therefore speaks from a more unusual depth. No time has been spent over these jottings, the recorder is hardly more responsible for them than the pen that writes them down. The scenes have whirled themselves upon the paper. Howe was always somewhat wanting in the reverence for letters which obtains in Boston. He regarded himself as inferior in literary attainment to several of his friends. He had, however, the descriptive power sometimes found in condottieri. It is the thrilling stuff they deal in that endows these men with such talent. I cannot forbear transcribing a passage from a very different style of adventurer, Trelawney. It does not concern Howe directly; but it may serve as a sample page from the Greek revolutionary period. The passage is quoted by Sanborn in his Life of Howe.
“On our way from Argos to Corinth, in 1823, we passed through the defiles of Dervenakia; our road was a mere mule-path for about two leagues, winding along in the bed of a brook, flanked by rugged precipices. In this gorge, and a more rugged path above it, a large Ottoman force, principally cavalry, had been stopped in the previous autumn, by barricades of rocks and trees, and slaughtered like droves of cattle by the wild and exasperated Greeks. It was a perfect picture of the war, and told its own story; the sagacity of the nimble-footed Greeks and the hopeless stupidity of the Turkish commanders were palpable. Detached from the heaps of dead we saw the skeletons of some bold riders, who had attempted to scale the acclivities, still astride the skeletons of their horses, and in the rear, as if in the attempt to back out of the fray, the bleached bones of the negroes’ hands still holding the hair ropes attached to the skulls of the camels—death, like sleep, is a strange posture-master. There were grouped in a narrow space 5,000 or more skeletons of men, horses, camels, and mules; vultures had eaten their flesh, and the sun had bleached their bones.”... Is not this picture worthy of the prophet Ezekiel? It was among such scenes as this that the Greek Revolution went forward.
In 1827-8 Dr. Howe concluded that the best service he could render the Greeks was to go to America and procure help. He came to America, and went about holding public meetings and pleading for the starving Greeks. Great enthusiasm was excited, and money, food, and clothing was generously contributed. Howe took charge of a vessel laden with provisions and clothing, and hastening back to Greece, arrived in time to prevent thousands from starving. “These American contributions,” he says, “went directly to the people; and their effect was very great, not only by relieving from hunger and cold, but by inspiring courage and hope. I made several depots in different places; I freighted small vessels and ran up the bays with them. The people came trooping from their hiding places, men, women, children, hungry, cold, ragged and dirty. They received rations of flour, corn, biscuit, pork, etc., and were clad in the warm garments made up by American women. It was one of the happiest sights a man could witness; one of the happiest agencies he could discharge. They came, sometimes twenty, thirty, forty miles, on foot, to get rations and clothing. Several vessels followed mine and distributions were made.
“An immense number of families from Attica, from Psara, and from other Islands, had taken refuge in Ægina, and there was the most concentrated suffering. I established a main depot there, and commenced a systematic distribution of the provisions and clothing. As the Greeks were all idle, I concluded it was not best to give alms except to the feeble; but I commenced a public work on which men, women, and children could be occupied. The harbor of Ægina was not a natural one, but the work of the old Greeks. The long walls projecting into the sea for breakwaters were in pretty good condition, but the land side of the harbor was nearly ruined from being filled up with débris and washings from the town.
“I got some men who had a little ‘gumption’ and built a coffer-dam across the inner side of the harbor. Then we bailed out the water, and, digging down to get a foundation, laid a solid wall, which made a beautiful and substantial quay, which stands to this day, and is called the American Molos or Mole. In this work as many as five hundred people, men, women, and children, ordinarily worked; on some days as many as seven hundred, I think.”...
Encouraged by the success of his mole, Dr. Howe determined upon a more ambitious venture.—“I applied to the government, and obtained a large tract of land upon the Isthmus of Corinth, where I founded a colony of exiles. We put up cottages, procured seed, cattle, and tools, and the foundations of a flourishing village were laid. Capo d’Istria had encouraged me in the plan of the colony, and made some promises of help. The government granted ten thousand ‘stremmata’ of land to be free from taxes for five years; but they could not give much practical help. I was obliged to do everything, and had only the supplies sent out by the American committees to aid me. The colonists, however, coöperated, and everything went on finely. We got cattle and tools, ploughed and prepared the earth, got up a school-house and a church.
“Everything went on finely, and we extended our domain over to the neighboring port of Cenchraea, where we had cultivated ground and a harbor. This was perhaps the happiest part of my life. I was alone among my colonists, who were all Greeks. They knew I wanted to help them, and they let me have my own way. I had one civilized companion for awhile, David Urquhart, the eccentric Englishman, afterward M. P. and pamphleteer. I had to journey much to and from Corinth, Napoli, etc., always on horseback, or in boat, and often by night. It was a time and place where law was not; and sometimes we had to defend ourselves against armed and desperate stragglers from the bands of soldiers now breaking up. We had many ‘scrimmages,’ and I had several narrow escapes with life.
“In one affair Urquhart showed extraordinary pluck and courage, actually disarming and taking prisoner two robbers, and marching them before him into the village. I labored here day and night, in season and out, and was governor, clerk, constable, and everything but patriarch; for, though I was young, I took to no maiden, nor ever thought about womankind but once. The government (or rather, Capo d’Istria, the president) treated the matter liberally—for a Greek—and did what he could to help me.”...
In 1844, about seventeen years after the planting of this Corinthian colony Howe returned to the Isthmus in the course of his wedding journey. “As he rode through the principal street of the village,” says Mrs. Howe, “the elder people began to take note of him and to say to one another ‘This man looks like Howe.’ At length they cried, ‘It must be Howe himself’! His horse was surrounded and his progress stayed. A feast was immediately prepared for him in the principal house of the place, and a throng of friends, old and new, gathered round him, eager to express their joy in seeing him.”
So let us leave him for one moment, surrounded by the children of his adoption, submitting to their gratitude as Hercules might have submitted, if humanity had recognized him on his return to the scene of an earthly exploit,—let us leave him, I say, thus posed for the monument that should express his whole life’s work, while we consider what manner of man he was.
At whatever point you examine him, you find a man of remarkable energy and benevolence, of a practical turn of mind, devoid of mysticism or philosophic curiosity, a man to whom the word is a very plain proposition, whose eyes see what they see with the power of microscopes, and are blind to all else. Dr. Howe’s work in Greece gives a specimen, a prophetic summary, of his whole life-work, that is to say, it was practical aid to those laboring under disability. The devastation of Greece at that time was incredible. The peasants were living in caves and hiding their food under ground from the guerillas. Dr. Howe goes with his hands full of supplies and distributes them, turning the starving wretches into human beings again, through his methods, and through his power of organization. One is reminded by turns of Benjamin Franklin and of Prometheus, in reading of the astute shifts of this benevolent despot, who deals with men as if they were children, coercing them into thrift and decency. Of course the circumstances were extraordinary, or Howe’s peculiar genius could not have showed itself so early. A man of genius he was, but the limitations of this remarkable man’s mind are as clear cut as his features, which had the accuracy of bronze.
Within the field of his peculiar activity he is a great genius. Outside of that field he was not a genius at all—as will appear by his political course in 1859. His mission was to deal with persons laboring under a disability, with criminals, paupers, young people—blind or deaf people, idiots, the maimed in spirit, the defective—the people who have no chance, no future, no hope. These were the persons to whom his life was to be devoted: the Greek sufferers were merely the earliest in the series of persons whom Howe pitied.
He has left behind voluminous papers and reports, and in them lives his creed. He can hardly open his mouth without saying something of universal application to all defective persons in all ages. From the statement of abstract principles to the details of ward management—whether he is writing advice to an anxious mother or addressing the legislature—there is no side of the subject on which he is not great. His attitude toward defectives and his point of view about them form a splinter of absolute truth; religion, morality, practical wisdom, and the divinest longings of the spirit are all satisfied by it. The sight of any of these persons aroused in him such a passion of benevolence, such a whirlwind of pity, that he could do whatever was necessary. He lifted them in his arms and flew away with them like an angel. It made no difference that the cause was hopeless. He would labor a year to improve the articulation of an adult idiot, and rejoice as much over a gain of two vowels as if he had given a new art to mankind.
As has been seen, Howe was originally attracted to the Greek cause through its romantic and historic appeal; but the poetry and the patriotism of the Greek Revolution were, for him, soon merged in philanthropy. His work in the Greek cause and the books and papers and speeches he had written had brought him into the world’s eye. He returned to America a famous man. He was still under thirty years of age, an unambitious man, unaware that he was in any way remarkable. He did not take up the cause of the blind because he felt within him a deep desire, a God-given calling to help the blind, but because the cause of the blind was brought to his notice by Dr. John D. Fisher, and other gentlemen in Boston, who had been studying the methods of the Abbé Haüy in Paris, and who contemplated founding a school for the blind in Boston. It was a happy hour in which they met Howe; for he was a man whose response to any call for help was automatic.
He was one of those singular men in whom we can trace no course of development. Such as they are in early manhood, so they remain. It is interesting to bring together two passages, one from the beginning and the other from the latter half of his life, to show the identity of their intellectual content.
The following is from Howe’s First Report of the Blind Asylum: “Blindness has been in all ages one of those instruments by which a mysterious Providence has chosen to afflict man; or rather it has not seen fit to extend the blessing of sight to every member of the human family. In every country there exists a large number of human beings, who are prevented by want of sight from engaging with advantage in the pursuits of life, and who are thrown upon the charity of their more favored fellows.”...
The following is from the monumental justification of his ideas as put forth in the Second Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Charities in 1866:—
“Finally, they (the board) have dwelt upon the importance of knowing and obeying all the natural laws, because they are ordained by our beneficent God and Father, to bind together by bonds of mutual interest and affection all the children of His great human family; and to prepare them here, for his good will and pleasure hereafter.”
The thought in each of these passages is the same. Blindness, deficiency, in fact evil, are to be accepted as part of the divine will. This thought, taken in conjunction with the conception of the unity of human nature, form the whole of Howe’s philosophy. The conventional language of piety in which Howe generally expresses himself, may perhaps conceal from some persons the first-hand power of his nature. He seems only to be saying what everybody knows; but the difference is that Howe sees the truth as a fact. It is not so much a philosophic reality or abstraction as a first-hand visual perception, always new, always reliable.
The different specific reforms with which Howe is to be credited are neither deductions from theory, nor the summary of experiments made by him; but simply things seen in themselves to be true. They can all of them be grouped under almost any one of Christ’s sayings. I shall return to this subject after speaking of Laura Bridgman, who has been waiting too long.
The early history of the Boston Blind Asylum is like a great mediæval romance—voluminous, glowing, many-sided. That history is recorded in multitudinous documents and papers, letters, arguments, reports, anecdotes—the whole mass of them being illumined by the central figure of Howe who looms through the story like Launcelot or Parsifal. Overpowering indeed is this literature, and it ought not to be condensed. One should wander, and explore and browse in it. If I make a few extracts from the story, it is not as a summary, but rather as an advertisement. There are certain events that you cannot summarize, but only introduce. The texture of them is greater than any condensation can make it.
The New England Institution for the Education of the Blind began its work in 1832. Howe, having neither house nor fortune of his own, received a few blind children at his father’s house in Boston. Within a very few years, however, the school was properly housed and supported, and it remained ever a favorite with the public. It was not until 1837 that news was brought to Howe of the existence of Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute aged seven, then living with her parents on a New Hampshire farm. He made a journey to New Hampshire to visit her, and through good fortune was accompanied by Longfellow, Rufus Choate, George Hilliard, and Dr. Samuel Eliot. The friends waited at Hanover while Howe visited the Bridgman farmhouse in quest of his prize. “He won it, and came back to the hotel triumphant,” says Dr. Eliot, “I perfectly recollect his exultation at having secured her, and the impression he made on me of chivalric benevolence.”
Laura Bridgman had lost her sight and hearing at the age of two, through scarlet fever; and when she reached the school in Boston was blind, deaf, dumb, and “without that distinct consciousness of individual existence which is developed by the exercise of the senses.” She was, nevertheless, a very remarkable being, sensitive, passionate, and highly organized. Upon being transferred to the school “she seemed quite bewildered at first, but soon grew contented, and began to explore her new dwelling. Her little hands were continually stretched out, and her tiny fingers in constant motion, like the feelers of an insect. She was left for several days to form acquaintance with the little blind girls, and to become familiar with her new home.”
Within two months Howe was able to write to Laura’s father—“I have succeeded in making her understand several words in raised print, and I am very sanguine in the hope that she will learn to read, and perhaps to express her wants in writing.”... Such were the beginnings of that remarkable intimacy which was fraught with so much consequence to the world.
The process by which Laura Bridgman was taught the alphabet was in principle the same as that now often employed in teaching ordinary children; that is to say, certain words are first given to the child as unities, and the child is led to discover the letters by thereafter himself dissolving the words into component letters. “I had to trust, however, to some chance effort of mine, causing her to perceive the analogy between the signs which I gave her, and the things for which they stood.... The first experiments were made by pasting upon several common articles, such as keys, spoons, knives, and the like, little paper labels on which the name of the article had been printed in raised letters. The child sat down with her teachers and was easily led to feel these labels, and examine them curiously. So keen was the sense of touch in her tiny fingers that she immediately perceived that the crooked lines in the word KEY, differed as much in form from the crooked lines in the word SPOON as one article differed from the other.
“Next, similar labels, on detached pieces of paper, were put into her hands, and now she observed that the raised letters on these labels resembled those pasted upon the articles....
“The next step was to give a knowledge of the component parts of the complex sign, BOOK, for instance. This was done by cutting up the labels into four parts, each part having one letter upon it. These were first arranged in order, b-o-o-k, until she had learned it, then mingled up together, then rearranged, she feeling her teacher’s hand all the time, and eager to begin and try to solve a new step in this strange puzzle.
“Slowly and patiently, day after day, and week after week, exercises like these went on, as much time being spent at them as the child could give without fatigue. Hitherto there had been nothing very encouraging; not much more success than in teaching a very intelligent dog a variety of tricks. But we were approaching the moment when the thought would flash upon her that all these were efforts to establish a means of communication between her thoughts and ours.”...
“The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated everything her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her, her intellect began to work, she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make up a sign of anything that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind, and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression; it was no longer a dog or parrot—it was an immortal spirit, eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome, and that henceforward nothing but patience and persevering, plain and straightforward efforts were to be used.”...
The visit of Laura’s mother to her daughter at the Institution must be chronicled, not only because of the singular beauty of Dr. Howe’s description; but because it shows an attitude on his part of welcome toward the parent, reverence for home influence, which is seldom found in managers of institutions. The school-teacher and the director in a reformatory generally regard the parent as their enemy. But with Howe it was different. He seems really to have been able to shed a domestic atmosphere through his Institution. He merged his own family life into the Institution’s life, and yet enriched his own hearth thereby. This is an accomplishment which can neither be understood nor imitated. It was a gift.
“During this year and six months after she had left home, her mother came to visit her, and the scene of their meeting was an interesting one. The mother stood some time gazing with overflowing eyes upon her unfortunate child, who, all unconscious of her presence, was playing about the room. Presently Laura ran against her, and at once began feeling of her hands, examining her dress, and trying to find out if she knew her; but not succeeding in this, she turned away as from a stranger, and the poor woman could not conceal the pang she felt at finding that her beloved child did not know her.
“She then gave Laura a string of beads which she used to wear at home, which were recognized by the child at once, who, with much joy, put them around her neck, and sought me eagerly to say she understood the string was from home. The mother tried to caress her, but poor Laura repelled her, preferring to be with her acquaintances.”...
“The distress of the mother was now painful to behold; for, although she had feared that she should not be recognized, the painful reality of being treated with cold indifference by a darling child was too much for woman’s nature to bear.
“After a while, on the mother taking hold of her again, a vague idea seemed to flit across Laura’s mind that this could not be a stranger; she therefore felt of her hands very eagerly, while her countenance assumed an expression of intense interest. She b