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CHAPTER XVIII.
LITTLE BEN'S ADVENTURES AS A POET
That was a charmed life that little Ben Franklin led in the early days of his apprenticeship. He always thought of provincial Boston as his "beloved city." When he grew old, the Boston of his boyhood was to him a delightful dream.
He and his father were on excellent terms with each other. His father, though a very grave, pious man, whose delight was to go to the Old South Church with his large family, allowed little Ben to crack his jokes on him.
He was accustomed to say long graces at meals, at which the food was not overmuch, and the hungry children many. One day, after he had salted down a large quantity of meat in a barrel, he was surprised to hear Ben ask:
"Father, why don't you say grace over it now?"
"What do you mean, Ben?"
"Wouldn't it be saving of time to say grace now over the whole barrel of provisions, and then you could omit it at meals?"
But the strong member of the Old South Church had no such ideas of religious economy as revealed his son's mathematical mind.
The Franklin family must have presented a lively appearance at church in old Dr. Joseph Sewell's day. They heard some sound preaching there, and Dr. Sewell lived as he preached. He was offered the presidency of Harvard College, but honors were as bubbles to him, and he refused it for a position of less money and fame, but of more direct spiritual influence, and better in accord with the modest views of his ability. He began to preach in the Old South Church when Ben was seven years of age; he preached a sermon there on his eightieth birthday.
These were fine old times in Boston town. Some linen spinners came over from Londonderry, in Ireland, and they established a spinning school. They also brought with them the potato, which soon became a great luxury.
Josiah Franklin probably pastured his cows on the Common, and little Ben may often have sat down under the old elm by the frog pond and looked over the Charles River marshes, which were then where the Public Garden now is.
But the delight of the boy's life was still Uncle Benjamin, the poet. The two read and roamed together. Now Ben had a poetic vein in him, a small one probably inherited from his grandfather Folger, and it began to be active at this time.
There were terrible stories of pirates in the air. They kindled the boy's lively imagination; they represented the large subject of retributive justice, and he resolved to devote his poetic sense to one of these alarming characters.
There was a dreadful pirate by the name of Edward Teach, but commonly called "Blackbeard." He was born in Bristol, England. He became the terror of the Atlantic coast, and had many adventures off the Carolinas. He was at length captured and executed.
One day little Ben came to his brother James with a paper.
"James, I have been writing something, and I have come to read it to you."
"What?"
"Poetry."
"Like Uncle Ben's?"
"No; it is on Blackbeard."
James thought that a very interesting subject, and prepared to listen to his poet brother.
Little Ben unfolded the paper and began to read his lines, which were indeed heroic.
"Come, all you jolly sailors,
You all so stout and brave!"
"Good!" said James. "That starts off fine."
Ben continued:
"Come, hearken and I'll tell you
What happened on the wave."
"Better yet – I like that. Why, Uncle Ben could not excel that. What next?"
"Oh, 'tis of that bloody Blackbeard
I'm going now to tell,
And as how, by gallant Maynard,
He soon was sent to hell,
With a down, down, down, derry down!"
James lifted his hands at this refrain after the old English ballad style.
"Ben, I'll tell you what we'll do. I'll print the verses for you, and you shall sell them on the street."
The poet Arion at his coronation at Corinth could not have felt prouder than little Ben at that hour. He would be both a poet and bookseller, and his brother would be his publisher.
He may have cried on Boston street:
"Blackboard – broadside!" or something like that. It would have been honorable advertising.
His success as a poet was instantaneous. His poem sold well. Compliments fell upon him like a sun shower. He wrote another poem of like value, and it sold "prodigiously." He thought indeed he was a great poet, and had started out on Shakespeare's primrose way to fame and glory. Alas! how many under like circumstances have been deceived. He lived to call his ballads "wretched stuff." How many who thought they were poets have lived to take the same view of their work!
His second poem was called the Light-House Tragedy. It related to a recent event, and set the whole town to talking, and the admiration for the young poet was doubled.
In the midst of the great sale of his poems by himself, and of all the flatteries of the town, he went for approval to his father. The result was unexpected; the rain of sunshine changed into a winter storm indeed.
"Father, you have heard that I have become a poet?"
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed Josiah, in his paper cap and leather breeches. "Like your Uncle Ben, my boy, and he amounted to nothing at all as a poet. A poet – my stars!"
"I thought that you looked upon Uncle Ben as the best man in all the world. The people love him. When he enters the Old South Church there is silence."
"That is all very true, my boy, but he lives between the heavens and the earth, and can not get up to the one or down to the other. Poets are beggars, in some way or other. They live in garrets among the mice and bats. Their country is the imagination, and that is the next door to nowhere. You a poet! What puckers my face up —so?"
"But my poetry sells, father," looking into his father's droll face, his heart sinking.
"Your poetry! It sells, my boy, because you are a little shaver and appear to be smart, and also because your rhymes refer to events in which everybody is interested. But, my son, your poetry, as you call it, has no merit in itself. It is full of all kinds of errors. It is style that makes a poem live; yours has no style."
"But, father, many people do not think so."
"But they will. You will think so some day."
"But isn't there something good in it?"
"Nothing, Ben. You never was born to be a poet. You have the ability to earn a living, same as I have done. Poets don't have that kind of ability; they beg. There are not many men who can earn a living by selling their fancies, which is mostly moonshine."
This was unsympathetic. Ben looked at the soap kettles and candle molds and wondered if these things had not blinded his father's poetic perceptions. There was no Vale of Tempe here.
But Josiah Franklin had hard common sense. Little Ben's dreams of poetic fame came down from the skies at one arrow. That was a bitter hour.
"If I can not be a poet," he thought, "I can still be useful," and he reverted from heroic ballads to stern old Cotton Mather's Essays to do Good. The fated poet is always left a like resource.
Yet many people who have not become poets, but who have risen to be eminent men, have had poetic dreams in early life; they have had the poetic mind. A little poetry in one's composition is no common gift; it is a stamp of superiority in some direction. Josiah Franklin was a wise man, but his views of poetry as such were of a low standard. Poetry is the highest expression of life, the noblest exercise of the spiritual faculties.
So poor little Ben had soared to be laughed at again. But there was something out of the common stirring in him, and he would fly again some day. The victories of the vanquished are the brightest of all.
Franklin, after having been thus given over to the waste barrel by his father, now resolved to acquire a strong, correct, and impressive prose style of writing. He found Addison's Spectator one of the best of all examples of literary style, and he began to make it a study. In works of the imagination he read De Foe and Bunyan.
This good resolution was his second step up on the ladder of life.
Others were contributing to his brother James's paper, why should not he? But James, after the going out of the poetic meteor, might not be willing to consider his plain prose.
Benjamin Franklin has now written an article in plain prose, which he wishes to appear in his brother's paper. If it were accepted, he would have to put it into type himself, and probably to deliver the paper to its patrons. He is sixteen years old. He has become a vegetarian, and lives by himself, and seeks pleasure chiefly in books.
It is night. There are but few lamps in the Boston streets. With a manuscript hidden in his pocket Benjamin walks slyly toward the office of James Franklin, Printer, where all is dark and still. He looks around, tucks his manuscript suddenly under the office door, turns and runs. Oh, how he does glide away! Is he a genius or a fool? He wonders what his brother will say of the manuscript, when he reads it in the morning.
In the morning he went to his work.
Some friends of James came into the office.
"I have found something here this morning," said James, "that I think is good. It was tucked under the door. It seems to me uncommonly good. You must read it."
He handed it to one of his friends.
"That is the best article I have read for a long time," said one of the callers. "There is force in it. It goes like a song that whistles. It carries you. I advise you to use it. Everybody would read that and like it. I wonder who wrote it? You should find out. A person who can write like that should never be idle. He was born to write."
James handed it to another caller.
"There are brains in that ink. The piece flows out of life. Who do you think wrote it?"
"I have no idea," said James. – "Here, Ben, set it up. Here's nuts for you. If I knew who wrote it I would ask the writer to send in other articles."
Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Charles Dickens's novels have had a sale equaled by a few books in the world. The two authors began their literary life in a like manner, by tucking their manuscripts under the editor's door at night and running away. They both came to wonder at themselves at finding themselves suddenly people of interest. Still, we could hardly say to the literary candidate, "Fling your article into the editor's room at night and run," though modesty, silence, and prudence are commendable in a beginner, and qualities that win.
What pen name did Ben Franklin sign to this interesting article? It was one that implies his purpose in life; you may read his biography in it – Silence Dogood.
The day after the name of Silence Dogood had attracted the attention of Boston town, Benjamin said to Jane, his sympathetic little sister:
"Jenny, let's go to walk this evening upon Beacon Hill. I have something to tell you."
They went out in the early twilight together, up the brow of the hill which the early settlers seem to have found a blackberry pasture, to the tree where they had gone with Uncle Benjamin on the showery, shining midsummer Sunday.
"Can you repeat what Uncle Benjamin said to us here, two years ago?" asked Ben.
"No; it was too long. You repeat it to me again and I will learn it."
"He said, 'More than wealth, or fame, or anything, is the power of the human heart, and that that power is developed in seeking the good of others.' Jenny, what did father say when he read the piece by Silence Dogood in the Courant?"
"He clapped his hand on his leather breeches so that they rattled; he did, Ben, and he exclaimed, 'That is a good one!' and he read the piece to mother, and she asked him who he supposed wrote it, and she shook her head, and he said, 'I wish that I knew.'"
"Would you like to know who wrote it, Jenny?"
"Yes. Do you know?"
"I wrote it. Jenny, you must not tell. I am writing another piece. James does not know. I tucked the manuscript under the door. I am going to put another one under the door at night."
"O Ben, Ben, you will be a great man yet, and I hope that I will live to see it. But why did you take the name of Silence Dogood?"
"That carries out Uncle Ben's idea. It stands for seeking the good of others quietly. That name is what I would like to be."
"It is what you will be, Ben. Uncle would say that the Franklin heart is in that name. If you should ever become a big man, Ben, and I should come to see you when we are old, I will say, 'Silence Dogood, more than wealth, more than fame, and more than anything else, is the power of the human heart.' There, I have quoted it correctly now. Maybe the day will come. Maybe we will live to be old, and you will write things that everybody will read, and I will take care of father and mother while you go out into the world."
"Wherever I may go, and whatever I may become or fail to be, my heart will always be true to you, Jenny."
"And I will do all I can for father and mother; I will be your heart to them, so that you may give your time to your pen. Every one in a family should seek to do for the family what others lack or are not able to do. You can write; I can not, but, Ben, I can love."
She walked about the wild rose bushes, where the red-winged blackbirds were singing.
"O Ben," she continued, "I am so glad that you wrote that piece, and that father liked it so well! I would not have been more glad had you received a present from a king. Maybe you will receive a present from a king some day, if you write as well as that."
"You will keep the secret, Jenny?"
"Yes, Ben, I will look for the paper to-morrow. How glad Uncle Ben would be if he knew it. Why, Ben, that name, Silence Dogood, is a piece in itself. It is a picture of your heart. You are just like Uncle Ben, Silence Dogood."
The name of Silence Dogood became famous in Boston town. Jenny obtained Ben's permission to tell Uncle Benjamin the great secret, and Uncle Benjamin's heart was so delighted that he went to his room and told the secret "to the Lord."
The three hearts were now very, very happy for a time. Jenny was growing up a beautiful girl, and her thoughts were much given to her hard-working parents and to laughed-at, laughing little Ben.
When Uncle Benjamin had heard of Ben's failure as a poet and success as Silence Dogood, he took him down to Long Wharf again.
"I am an old man," he said. "But here I have a lesson for you. If you are conscious that you have any gift, even in small degree, never let the world laugh it away. See 'that no man take thy crown,' the Scripture says. Every one who has contributed anything to the progress of the world has been laughed at. Stick a pin in thee, Ben.
"Now, Ben, you may not have the poet's imagination or art, but if you have the poetical mind do not be laughed out of an attempt to express it. You may not become a poet; I do not think that you ever will. Perhaps you will write proverbs, and proverbs are a kind of poems. I am going to reprove Brother Josiah for what he has said. He has given over your education to me, and it is my duty to develop you after your own gifts.
"Let us go back to the shop. I want to have a talk with Josiah; but, before we leave, I have a short word to say to you.
"Hoi, Ben, hoi! – I don't know what makes me repeat these words; they are not swear words, Ben, but they come to me when my feelings are awakened.
"It is hard, hard for one to see what he wants to be and to be kept back. I wanted to be a philosopher and a poet. Don't you laugh, Ben. I did; I wanted to be both, and I was so poor that I was obliged to write my thoughts on the margin of the leaves of my pamphlets, which I sold to come to teach you. Ben, Ben, listen: I can never be a philosopher or a poet, but you may. Don't laugh, Ben. Don't let any one laugh you out of your best ideas, Ben. You may. The world will never read what I wrote. They may read what you will write, and if you follow my ideas and they are read, you will be content. Hoi, Ben, hoi!"
They went to the candle shop.
"Josiah, you do wrong to try to suppress Ben's gift at rhyme. A man without poetry in his soul amounts to no more than a chopping block. The world just hammers itself on him, and that is all. You would not make Ben a dunce!"
"No, brother, no; but a goose is not a nightingale, and the world will not stop to listen if she mounts a tree and attempts to sing."
"No, Brother Josiah, but a goose that would like to sing like a nightingale would be no common goose; she would find better pasture than other geese. Small gifts are to be prized. 'A little diamond is worth a mountain of glass,' as the proverb says."
"Well, if you must write poetry, don't publish it until it is called for."
"Well, Brother Josiah, your advice will do for me, for I am an old man; but I must teach Ben never to be laughed out of any good idea that may come to him. Is not that right, brother?"
"Yes, Uncle Ben. But you can't make a hen soar to the skies like an eagle. If you are not a poet, you have a perfect character, and that is why I leave the training of Ben to you. If you can make a man of him, the world will be better for him; and if you can make something else of him besides a poet out of his poetical gift, I shall be very glad. Your poetry has not helped you in life, has it, Benjamin?"
"I don't know. You think it is that that has made me a burden to you."
Josiah looked his brother in the face.
"A burden? No, brother. One of the greatest joys of my life was to have you come here, and it will be the greatest blessing to my life if you can make the life of little Ben a blessing to the world. I am not much of a musician, but I like to sound the fiddle, and if you have any poetic light, let it shine – but as a tallow dip, like my fiddling. You are right, brother, in teaching little Ben never to be laughed down. I don't blame any one for crying his goods if he has anything to sell. But if he has not, he had better be content to warm his hands by his own fire."
"Brother Josiah, listen to me. Little Ben here has something to sell. – Hoi, Ben, hoi! you listen. – There have thoughts come to me that I know did not rise out of the dust. I have been too poor to publish them. You may laugh at me, and call me a poor philosopher and say that my philosophy has kept me poor. But Benjamin here is going to give my thoughts to the world, and the things that I put into my pamphlets are going to live. It was not you that gave Ben to me: it was Heaven. A veil hangs over us in this world, and if a man does good in his heart, the hand behind that veil moves all the events of his life for good.
"Don't laugh at us, Josiah; we are weaving together thoughts that will feed the world. That we are. – Hoi, Ben, hoi!"
"Well, Brother, your faith makes you a happy old man. I hope that you will be able to make something of Ben, and that he may do credit to your good name. It may be so. Faith sees.
"I love to see you go into the South Church, Brother. As soon as your face appears all the people look very happy, and sit still. The children all sit still. The tithingman stands still; he has nothing to do for a time.
"It is something, Brother Ben, to be able to cast such an influence as that – something that money can not buy. I am sorry if I have hurt your feelings. Heaven be praised for such men as you are, Brother Ben! I hope that I may live to see all that you see by faith. I think I may, Brother Ben. 'Men do not gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles,' but they do gather grapes of grapes and figs of figs. I hope that Ben will be the book of your life, and make up for the pamphlets. It would be a good book for men to read."
"Hoi, Ben, hoi!" said the old man, "I can see that it will."
One Sunday, after church, in summer, Uncle Ben the poet and Silence Dogood went down on Long Wharf to enjoy the breezes from the sea. Uncle Ben was glad to learn more of the literary successes of Silence Dogood.
"To fail in poetry is to succeed in prose," said the fine old man. "But much that we call prose is poetry; rhymes are only childish jingles. The greatest poetry in the world is written without rhyme. It is the magic spirit and the magic words that make true poetry. The book of Job, in my opinion, is the greatest poetry ever written. Poetry is not made, it exists; and one who is prepared to receive it catches it as it flows. Ben, you are going to succeed in prose. You are going to become a ready writer. Study Addison more and more."
"Uncle Ben, do you not think that it is the hardest thing in life for one to be told that he can not do what he most wants to do?"
"Yes, Ben, that is the hardest thing in life. It is a cruel thing to crush any one in his highest hope and expectation."
"Was Solomon a poet? Are the Proverbs poetry?"
"Yes, yes. The book of Proverbs is a thousand poems."
"Then, Uncle Ben, I may be a poet yet. That kind of little poems come to me."
"Ha! ha! ha!"
A voice rang out behind them.
It was Jamie the Scotchman.
"Well, Ben, it is good to fly high. I infer that you expect to become a proverb poet, after the manner of Solomon. The people here will all be quoting you some day. It may be that you will be quoted in England and France. Ha! ha! ha! What good times," he added, "you two have together – dreaming! Well, it costs nothing to dream. There is no toll demanded of him who travels in the clouds. Move along, young Solomon, and let me sit down on the sea wall beside you. When you write a book of proverb poetry I hope I'll be living to read it. One don't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear – there's a proverb for you! – nor gather wisdom except by experience – there's another; and some folks do not get wisdom even from experience." He looked suspiciously toward Uncle Ben.
"Experience keeps a dear school," said Uncle Ben in a kindly way.
"And some people can learn of no other," added Silence Dogood.
"And some folks not even there," said Jamie the Scotchman.
The loons came semicircling along the sea wall, their necks aslant, and uttering cries in a mocking tone.
"Well, I declare, it makes the loons laugh – and no wonder!" said Jamie the Scotchman. He lighted his pipe, whose bowl was a piece of corncob, and whiffed away in silence for a time, holding up one knee in his clasped hands.
Silence Dogood surveyed his surroundings, which were ship cargoes.
"The empty bags do not stand up," he said.
"Well, what do you infer from that?" asked Jamie.
Silence Dogood did not answer, but the thought in his mind was evident. It was simply this: that, come what would in life, he would not fail. He put his hand on Uncle Benjamin's shoulder, for who does not long to reach out his hand toward the fire in the cold, and to touch the form that entemples the most sympathetic heart? He dreamed there on the sea wall, where the loons seemed to laugh, and his dreams came true. Every attainment in life is first a dream.
Silence Dogood, dream on! Add intelligence to intelligence, virtue to virtue, benevolence to benevolence, faith to faith, for so ascends the ladder of life.
Uncle Benjamin was right. Let no man be laughed out of ideals that are true, because they do not reach their development at once.
Many young people stand in the situation in which we find young Franklin now. Many older people do in their early work. England laughed at Boswell, but he came to be held as the prince of biographers, and his methods as the true manner of picturing life and making the past live in letters.
People with a purpose who have been laughed at are many in the history of the world. From Romulus and the builders of the walls of Jerusalem to Columbus, ridicule makes a long record, and the world does not seem to grow wiser by its mistakes. Even Edison, in our own day, was ridiculed, when a youth, for his abstractions, and his efforts were ignored by scientists.
Two generations ago a jeering company of people, uttering comical jests under the cover of their hands, went down to a place on the banks of the Hudson to see, as they said, "a crazy man attempt to move a boat by steam." They returned with large eyes and free lips. That boat moved.
In the early part of the century a young Scotchman named Carlyle laid before the greatest of English scholars and critics a manuscript entitled Sartor Resartus. The great critic read the manuscript and pronounced it "the stupidest stuff that he ever set eyes on." He laughed at a manuscript that became one of the literary masterpieces of the century. A like experience had Milton, when he once said that he would write a poem that should be the glory of his country.
A young graduate named Longfellow wrote poems that came to him amid the woods and fields, and published them in newspapers and magazines, and gathered them into a book. The book fell into the hands of one then held to be supreme as a literary judge – Edgar Allen Poe. It was laughed at in ink that made the literary world laugh. The poet Longfellow's bust now holds an ideal place in Westminster Abbey, between the memorials of Dryden and Chaucer, and at the foot of the tombs of England's kings.
Keats was laughed at; Wordsworth was deemed a fool.
A number of disdainful doctors met on October 16, 1846, in the amphitheater of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, to see a young medical student try to demonstrate that a patient upon whom a surgical operation was to be performed could be rendered insensible to pain. The sufferer was brought into the clear light. The young student touched his face with an unknown liquid whose strange odor filled the room. He was in oblivion. The knives cut and the blood flowed, and he knew it not. Pain was thus banished from the room of surgery. That young medical student and dentist was Dr. W. T. G. Morton, whose monument may be seen in the Boston Public Garden, and in whose honor the semicentennial of the discovery of anæsthesia has but recently been celebrated.
"So, with a few romantic boys and crazy girls you expect to see the world converted," said a wise New York journal less than a century ago, as the first missionaries began to sail away. But the song still arose over the sea —
"In the desert let me labor,
On the mountain let me till" —
until there came a missionary jubilee, whose anthems were repeated from land to land until they encircled the earth.
When Browning first published Sordello, the poem met with common ridicule. Even Alfred Tennyson is said to have remarked that "there were but two lines in it that he could understand, and they were both untrue." The first line of the poem was, "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told"; and the last line of the poem was, "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told." Yet the poem is ranked now among the intellectual achievements of the century in the analysis of one of the deeper problems of life.
Samuel F. B. Morse was laughed at. McCormick, whose invention reaps the fields of the world, was ridiculed by the London Times, "the Thunderer." "If that crazy Wheelwright calls again, do not admit him," said a British consul to his servant, of one who wished to make new ports and a new commerce for South America, and whose plans are about to harness the Andes with railways. William Wheelwright's memory lives in grateful statues now.
Columbus was not only laughed at by the Council of Salamanca, but was jeered at by the children in the streets, as he journeyed from town to town holding his orphan boy by the hand. He wandered in the visions of God and the stars, and he came to say, after the shouts of homage that greeted him as the viceroy of isles, "God made me the messenger of the new heavens and new earth, and told me where to find them!"
Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, presents a picture of the unfortunate condition of many lives of whom the world expected nothing, and for whom it had only the smile of incredulity when in them the Godlike purpose appeared. He says:
"Hannibal had but one eye; Appius Claudius and Timoleon were blind, as were John, King of Bohemia, and Tiresais the prophet. Homer was blind; yet who, saith Tully, made more accurate, lively, or better descriptions with both his eyes! Democritus was blind, yet, as Laertius writes of him, he saw more than all Greece besides… Æsop was crooked, Socrates purblind, Democritus withered, Seneca lean and harsh, ugly to behold; yet show me so many flourishing wits, such divine spirits. Horace, a little, blear-eyed, contemptible fellow, yet who so sententious and wise? Marcilius Ficinus, Faber Stapulensis, a couple of dwarfs; Melanchthon, a short, hard-favored man, yet of incomparable parts of all three; Galba the emperor was crook-backed; Epictetus, lame; the great Alexander a little man of stature; Augustus Cæsar, of the same pitch; Agesilaus, despicabili forma, one of the most deformed princes that Egypt ever had, was yet, in wisdom and knowledge, far beyond his predecessors."
Why do I call your attention to these struggles in this place in association of an incident of a failure in life that was ridiculed?
It has been my lot, in a somewhat active life in the city of Boston for twenty-five years, to meet every day an inspiring name that all the world knows, and that stands for what right resolution, the overcoming of besetting sins in youth, and persevering energy may accomplish against the ridicule of the world. There have been many books written having that name as a title – Franklin.
I have almost daily passed the solemn, pyramidal monument in the old Granary Burying Ground, between the Tremont Building and Park Street Church, that bears the names of the Franklin family, in which the parents have found eternal honor by the achievements of their son.
As I pass the Boston City Hall there appears the Franklin statue.
As I face the Old South Church and its ancient neighborhood I am in the place of the traditions of the birth of Benjamin Franklin and of his baptism. It may be that I will return by the way of Franklin Street, or visit the Franklin School, or go to the Mechanics' Building, where I may see the primitive printing press at which Franklin worked, and which was buried in the earth at Newport, Rhode Island, at the time of the Revolutionary War.
If I go to the Public Library, I may find there two original portraits of Franklin and a Franklin gallery, and a picture of him once owned by Thomas Jefferson.
