Elsie Venner | Page 6

process of disintegration in the
third generation. This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one
need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in
childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands

of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels
when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their
venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in
embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in
long boots with silken tassels.
There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to
call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown
to be a caste,--not in any odious sense;--but, by the repetition of the
same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct
organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere
stupidity, and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the
good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all
we can and tell all we see.
If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our colleges,
you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two different
aspects of youthful manhood. Of course I shall choose extreme cases to
illustrate the contrast between them. In the first, the figure is perhaps
robust, but often otherwise,--inelegant, partly from careless attitudes,
partly from ill-dressing,--the face is uncouth in feature, or at least
common,--the mouth coarse and unformed,--the eye unsympathetic,
even if bright,--the movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the
limbs,--the voice is unmusical,--and the enunciation as if the words
were coarse castings, instead of fine carvings. The youth of the other
aspect is commonly slender, his face is smooth, and apt to be
pallid,--his features are regular and of a certain delicacy,--his eye is
bright and quick,--his lips play over the thought he utters as a pianist's
fingers dance over their music, and his whole air, though it may be
timid, and even awkward, has nothing clownish. If you are a teacher,
you know what to expect from each of these young men. With equal
willingness, the first will be slow at learning; the second will take to his
books as a pointer or a setter to his field-work.
The first youth is the common country-boy, whose race has been bred
to bodily labor. Nature has adapted the family organization to the kind
of life it has lived. The hands and feet by constant use have got more

than their share of development,--the organs of thought and expression
less than their share. The finer instincts are latent and must be
developed. A youth of this kind is raw material in its first stage of
elaboration. You must not expect too much of any such. Many of them
have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical
life; but very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a
large proportion of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons.
That is exactly what the other young man is. He comes of the Brahmin
caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled
aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once
acknowledge. There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude
for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital
and hereditary. Their names are always on some college catalogue or
other. They break out every generation or two in some learned labor
which calls them up after they seem to have died out. At last some
newer name takes their place, it maybe,--but you inquire a little and
you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys
or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name
of a female descendant.
There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our
Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general
distinction. But the reader who has never been a teacher will very
probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have
come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,--and he may,
perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters
of the English alphabet, but of no other.
It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of
those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual
classes. The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training
are occasionally brought about without it. There are natural filters as
well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more
or less turbid, if you will look long enough,