Greenleaf's Penmanship Booklet, Essay Three

15. Page 19, with his name at the bottom, followed by "AE 9," or "aetate 9" (age 9). He still signs it "1792," so this must also have been from December 1792. The sentence copied nine times here was "Make no man's misfortune the Subject of ..." He ran out of space in almost all the sentences. Sometimes he had room for "De" or "Der." The third exemplar has "Deri" and then, in much smaller letters above it "sion." Thus, the teacher was probably intoning, "Make no man's misfortune the Subject of Derision," but this longish sentence requires a lot of planning for youthful students to copy completely, and so Grenleaf ran out of room on each line. I wonder if he was bothered by this, or simply was so focused on forming his letters that this didn't come to mind. There is no Internet reference to this aphorism; thus, I will be contributing the first such aphorism to the "Net." Thanks to Greenleaf, of course.

16, Page 20, also dated 1792 at the bottom. It has November 30, 1792, so Greenleaf didn't use all the pages consecutively. This differs from other pages in that it has a heading: "On General Washington," with the following poem written in his hand:

"Let laurel green, from laurel hill that lies
Extended westward to the evening skies,
Be brought me here by some fair virgin ife
(For sprigs of laurel make the weath--with a very small "r" written above--Schuse)
To plant eeternal on the Warrior brow
Of Washington, who drubb'd Sir William Howe."

This little poem, only appearing in one place on the Internet, apparently was from a "Commonplace Book" of Hannah Marshall, in 1781. No doubt it was written in commemoration of Washington's Revolutionary War victory. In Greenleaf's autobiographical letter to his son is a mention of General Washington's coming to Newburyport and the excitement it generated.

17. Page 21, dated December 14, 1792. Written five times is "Contentment is the greatest of Moral Virtues." The rest of the page has Greenleaf practicing his cursive capital letters. If you do a quick online search, you run into variations on this aphorism, such as "Contentment is the greatest treasure," or "Contentment is the greatest wealth." I am sure they are lineal descendants of the statement which Greenleaf had to copy, and we can see why the "Moral Virtues" language of 1792 would have dropped out in the 19th and especially the 20th century. Why? Not because people aren't interested in "morality" or "doing the right thing" anymore, but simply because we don't speak the language of "moral virtue" to each other. There may also be something more going on here, as "Moral Virtues" became transmuted into "wealth" or "treasure." By the end of the 19th century, with the rapid expansion of the American infrastructure through the railroads and with the industrial revolution at its height, and then, in the early 20th century, with the advent of Frederick Winslow Taylor's models of efficient production, it was possible for many, many more Americans to become rich. Thus, "wealth" rather than "moral virtue" began to occupy people's mental spaces as never before. We still live in that time, even though there are frequent exhortations "out there" to be content with what you have, or to embrace the things that can't be bought or owned.

While involved in these ruminations, I began to wonder if there was an "intermediate" step in American culture between the heavy "moral virtues" language of Greenleaf's time and the "wealth" or "treasure" language of the Gilded Age and early 20th century, more than a century later. I am not sure there was, but I found the following suggestive reference, which would fit rather nicely in our chronology. Attributed to a certain Swami Sivananda (1877-1963) is the statement: "Contentment is the greatest virtue." His web site says that he never came to America nor really wandered very far from his Indian village, but he sent a disciple to the West in the 1950s. One might wonder if he, who wanted an "international reach" could have picked up the "moral virtues" language and transmuted it ever so slightly into "virtues" (because talk about wealth, treasure might have been a bit foreign to him), and thus present a statement that the world think derives from him but is really a sort of half-way station between Greenleaf's childhood aphorism and the modern "treasure/wealth" example of it. Well, that is far more than you "asked for" on this issue, but I wanted to take the issue this way.

18. Page 22, the final page, dated Nov. 23, 1792. It is a reflection entitled "Time." Here it is:

"Time is one of the most precious talents in the world, which the Author of it has committed to our management! So precious, that he gives it us by drops; nor ever affords us two moments at once, but always takes away one when he lets us have another."

An Internet source has this quotation from the popularly-used schoolbook of the Rev. Mr. Thomas Dilworth (d. 1780), an English cleric. His book was not explictly titled a sort of moralistic guide to life but was A New Guide to the English Tongue (I think the first edition was put out in 1751). As this article says, Noah Webster studied Dilworth's book as a boy and was inspired partly by it to create his own spelling book on completely different principles. So we have in this moral statement by Dilworth (p. 123), copied in Greenleaf's booklet, a sort of window into the age. Moral advice books were prevalent; they weren't always so named; their advice was transmuted in the 19th/20th centuries as the culture changed, as Christianity changed, as the "virtues" or skills needed to succeed in this new culture changed.

Thus, Simon Greenleaf's booklet, which we can discard rather quickly as simply a "schoolboy exercise" book, really provides a very nice window into a changing culture. Greenleaf was no doubt strongly influenced by these principles and lived a rather orderly and simple life in Maine as an attorney and then as a reporter for the cases handed down by the Maine Supreme Court in the 1820s and early 1830s. By the time he began to teach at Harvard Law School in 1833, he was already 49 years old, and his values were quite fixed.

Conclusion

My "evolution" on studying this simple penmanship book should be clear to you. At first I was interested in little things, such as orthography or where a particular aphorism might have derived. But, as I kept working with this book, I saw it not simply as a penmanship book or even as a moral guide book, but as something that brings us into another world, a world which has substantially disappeared from us today. That world was no more virtuous than ours, I am convinced, but it talked a lot more about virtue, and it had guidebooks galore to provide pithy statements about how one should understand life and live one's life. Now I am interested in trying to trace the arc of these moral advice books, and see how advice changes or stays the same, based on the social, economic and religious realities around us. I think that people need and want advice, and they want something they can "take with them" without too much effort. Real study is the province of scholars and students, in most people's minds. So, Greenleaf has unwittingly given me guidance on how to understand the world better.

If you have comments on Greenleaf's exercise book or his autobiographical statement, I would be happy to hear them.

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