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Title: Little Foxes
Author: Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Little Foxes" ***
Mrs. Stowe’s Writings.
_LITTLE FOXES._
One Volume.
_HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS._
One Volume.
_THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND._
One Volume.
_AGNES OF SORRENTO._
One Volume.
_UNCLE TOM’S CABIN._
One Volume.
_THE MINISTER’S WOOING._
One Volume.
_OLDTOWN FOLKS._
One Volume.
James R. Osgood, & Co., Publishers.
LITTLE FOXES.
BY
CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD,
AUTHOR OF “HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.”
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1875.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. FAULT-FINDING 7
II. IRRITABILITY 53
III. REPRESSION 91
IV. PERSISTENCE 133
V. INTOLERANCE 176
VI. DISCOURTESY 218
VII. EXACTINGNESS 249
LITTLE FOXES.
I.
FAULT-FINDING.
“Papa, what are you going to give us this winter for our evening
readings?” said Jennie.
“I am thinking, for one thing,” I replied, “of preaching a course of
household sermons from a very odd text prefixed to a discourse which I
found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel in the garret.”
“Don’t say sermon, Papa,--it has such a dreadful sound; and on winter
evenings one wants something entertaining.”
“Well, treatise, then,” said I, “or discourse, or essay, or prelection;
I’m not particular as to words.”
“But what is the queer text that you found at the bottom of the
pamphlet-barrel?”
“It was one preached upon by your mother’s great-great-grandfather, the
very savory and much-respected Simeon Shuttleworth, ‘on the occasion of
the melancholy defections and divisions among the godly in the town of
West Dofield’; and it runs thus,--‘_Take us the foxes, the little foxes,
that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes._’”
“It’s a curious text enough; but I can’t imagine what you are going to
make of it.”
“Simply an essay on Little Foxes,” said I, “by which I mean those
unsuspected, unwatched, insignificant _little_ causes, that nibble away
domestic happiness, and make home less than so noble an institution
should be.
“You may build beautiful, convenient, attractive houses,--you may hang
the walls with lovely pictures and stud them with gems of Art; and there
may be living there together persons bound by blood and affection in one
common interest, leading a life common to themselves and apart from
others; and these persons may each one of them be possessed of good and
noble traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of generosity,
of good principle, of religion; and yet, through the influence of some
of these perverse, nibbling, insignificant little foxes, half the
clusters of happiness on these so promising vines may fail to come to
maturity. A little community of people, all of whom would be willing to
die for each other, may not be able to live happily together; that is,
they may have far less happiness than their circumstances, their fine
and excellent traits, entitle them to expect.
“The reason for this in general is that home is a place not only of
strong affections, but of entire unreserves; it is life’s undress
rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to
more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much _débris_ of
cast-off and every-day clothing. Hence has arisen the common proverb,
‘No man is a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_’; and the common warning,
‘If you wish to keep your friend, don’t go and live with him.’”
“Which is only another way of saying,” said my wife, “that we are all
human and imperfect; and the nearer you get to any human being, the more
defects you see. The characters that can stand the test of daily
intimacy are about as numerous as four-leaved clovers in a meadow; in
general, those who do not annoy you with positive faults bore you with
their insipidity. The evenness and beauty of a strong, well-defined
nature, perfectly governed and balanced, is about the last thing one is
likely to meet with in one’s researches into life.”
“But what I have to say,” replied I, “is this,--that, family-life being
a state of unreserve, a state in which there are few of those barriers
and veils that keep people in the world from seeing each other’s defects
and mutually jarring and grating upon each other, it is remarkable that
it is entered upon and maintained generally with less reflection, less
care and forethought, than pertain to most kinds of business which men
and women set their hands to. A man does not undertake to run an engine
or manage a piece of machinery without some careful examination of its
parts and capabilities, and some inquiry whether he have the necessary
knowledge, skill, and strength to make it do itself and him justice. A
man does not try to play on the violin without seeing if his fingers are
long and flexible enough to bring out the harmonies and raise his
performance above the grade of dismal scraping to that of divine music.
What should we think of a man who should set a whole orchestra of
instruments upon playing together without the least provision or
forethought as to their chord, and then howl and tear his hair at the
result? It is not the fault of the instruments that they grate harsh
thunders together; they may each be noble and of celestial temper; but
united without regard to their nature, dire confusion is the result.
Still worse were it, if a man were supposed so stupid as to expect of
each instrument a _rôle_ opposed to its nature,--if he asked of the
octave-flute a bass solo, and condemned the trombone because it could
not do the work of the many-voiced violin.
“Yet just so carelessly is the work of forming a family often performed.
A man and woman come together from some affinity, some partial accord of
their nature which has inspired mutual affection. There is generally
very little careful consideration of who and what they are,--no thought
of the reciprocal influence of mutual traits,--no previous chording and
testing of the instruments which are to make lifelong harmony or
discord,--and after a short period of engagement, in which all their
mutual relations are made as opposite as possible to those which must
follow marriage, these two furnish their house and begin life together.
“Then in many cases the domestic roof is supposed at once to be the
proper refuge for relations and friends on both sides, who also are
introduced into the interior concert without any special consideration
of what is likely to be the operation of character on character, the
play of instrument with instrument;--then follow children, each of whom
is a separate entity, a separate will, a separate force in the circle;
and thus, with the lesser powers of servants and dependants, a family is
made up. And there is no wonder if all these chance-assorted
instruments, playing together, sometimes make quite as much discord as
harmony. For if the husband and wife chord, the wife’s sister or
husband’s mother may introduce a discord; and then again, each child of
marked character introduces another possibility of confusion.
“The conservative forces of human nature are so strong and so various,
that with all these drawbacks the family state is after all the best and
purest happiness that earth affords. But then, with cultivation and
care, it might be a great deal happier. Very fair pears have been
raised by dropping a seed into a good soil and letting it alone for
years; but finer and choicer are raised by the watchings, tendings,
prunings of the gardener. Wild grape-vines bore very fine grapes, and an
abundance of them, before our friend Dr. Grant took up his abode at
Iona, and, studying the laws of Nature, conjured up new species of rarer
fruit and flavor out of the old. And so, if all the little foxes that
infest our domestic vine and fig-tree were once hunted out and killed,
we might have fairer clusters and fruit all winter.”
“But, Papa,” said Jennie, “to come to the foxes; let’s know what they
are.”
“Well, as the text says, _little_ foxes, the pet foxes of good people,
unsuspected little animals,--on the whole, often thought to be really
creditable little beasts, that may do good, and at all events cannot do
much harm. And as I have taken to the Puritanic order in my discourse, I
shall set them in sevens, as Noah did his clean beasts in the ark. Now
my seven little foxes are these:--Fault-Finding, Intolerance,
Reticence, Irritability, Exactingness, Discourtesy, Self-Will. And
here,” turning to my sermon, “is what I have to say about the first of
them.”
_FAULT-FINDING_,--
A most respectable little animal, that many people let run freely among
their domestic vines, under the notion that he helps the growth of the
grapes, and is the principal means of keeping them in order.
Now it may safely be set down as a maxim, that nobody likes to be found
fault with, but everybody likes to find fault when things do not suit
him.
Let my courteous reader ask him or herself if he or she does not
experience a relief and pleasure in finding fault with or about whatever
troubles them.
This appears at first sight an anomaly in the provisions of Nature.
Generally we are so constituted that what it is a pleasure to us to do
it is a pleasure to our neighbor to have us do. It is a pleasure to
give, and a pleasure to receive. It is a pleasure to love, and a
pleasure to be loved; a pleasure to admire, a pleasure to be admired. It
is a pleasure also to find fault, but _not_ a pleasure to be found fault
with. Furthermore, those people whose sensitiveness of temperament leads
them to find the most fault are precisely those who can least bear to be
found fault with; they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and
lay them on other men’s shoulders, but they themselves cannot bear the
weight of a finger.
Now the difficulty in the case is this: There are things in life that
need to be altered; and that things may be altered, they must be spoken
of to the people whose business it is to make the change. This opens
wide the door of fault-finding to well-disposed people, and gives them
latitude of conscience to impose on their fellows all the annoyances
which they themselves feel. The father and mother of a family are
fault-finders, _ex officio_; and to them flows back the tide of every
separate individual’s complaints in the domestic circle, till often the
whole air of the house is chilled and darkened by a drizzling Scotch
mist of querulousness. Very bad are these mists for grape-vines, and
produce mildew in many a fair cluster.
Enthusius falls in love with Hermione, because she looks like a
moonbeam,--because she is ethereal as a summer cloud, _spirituelle_. He
commences forthwith the perpetual adoration system that precedes
marriage. He assures her that she is too good for this world, too
delicate and fair for any of the uses of poor mortality,--that she ought
to tread on roses, sleep on the clouds,--that she ought never to shed a
tear, know a fatigue, or make an exertion, but live apart in some
bright, ethereal sphere worthy of her charms. All which is duly chanted
in her ear in moonlight walks or sails, and so often repeated that a
sensible girl may be excused for believing that a little of it may be
true.
Now comes marriage,--and it turns out that Enthusius is very particular
as to his coffee, that he is excessively disturbed if his meals are at
all irregular, and that he cannot be comfortable with any table
arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable mother, lately
deceased in the odor of sanctity; he also wants his house in perfect
order at all hours. Still he does not propose to provide a trained
housekeeper; it is all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish
girls, under the superintendence of this angel who was to tread on
roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an earthly care. Neither has
Enthusius ever considered it a part of a husband’s duty to bear personal
inconveniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood for
Hermione,--nay, has often frantically proposed the same in the hours of
courtship, when of course nobody wanted it done, and it could answer no
manner of use; but now to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed
such as these:--
“My dear, this tea is smoked: can’t you get Jane into the way of making
it better?”
“My dear, I have tried; but she will not do as I tell her.”
“Well, all I know is, _other_ people can have good tea, and I should
think we might.”
And again at dinner:--
“My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is _always_ overdone.”
“Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just
right.”
“Well, _almost_ always.”
“Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and
could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It’s very
difficult to get things done with such a girl.”
“My mother’s things were always well done, no matter what her girl was.”
Again: “My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal.
I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size”; or, “My
dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?” or, “My dear, I
shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be
regular”; or, “My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are
ironed,--it is perfectly scandalous”; or, “My dear, you must not let
Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor”; or, “My dear, you must stop
the children from playing in the garret”, or, “My dear, you must see
that Maggie doesn’t leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the
front hall”; and so on, up stairs and down stairs, in the lady’s
chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, “my dear” is to see that nothing
goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.
Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears,
and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the
charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than
ever,--and perhaps he does. The only difficulty is that she has passed
out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While
she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course
there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel
has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations
are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the
same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same
circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking
from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it at
the moment. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an
ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his
very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to
which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still
yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to
praise, but to criticise and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and
love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now
transferred to the arrangement of the domestic _ménage_, lead him daily
to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.
Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved,
not provoked,--who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make
good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have
we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and
forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now
sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.
But there is another side of the picture,--where the wife, provoked and
indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen
arrows of her woman’s wit searches and penetrates every joint of the
husband’s armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more capable in
this sort of conflict.
Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends
employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given
them only to harass and provoke,--thrusting and piercing with a
certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could
have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly
thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly
miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.
For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that
crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what
miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!--a dinner underdone,
too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish
broken!--and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous,
very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by
double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built and coal
burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,--_their
happiness_. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any
inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of _love_; and nothing so surely
burns away love as constant fault-finding.
For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear
friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the
mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof,
occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid stage has once set
in, the restoration of love seems wellnigh impossible.
For example: Enthusius, having risen this morning in the best of humors,
in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of her g’s
quite so long; and Hermione fires up with with--
“And, pray, what else wouldn’t you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be
so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of
the things in me that need correcting.”
“My dear, you are unreasonable.”
“I don’t think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements
of my lord and master sometimes.”
“Now, my dear, you really are very silly.”
“Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has
lost the charm of novelty.”
“Come now, Hermione, don’t let’s quarrel.”
“My dear sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I’m sure I was only
asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to
suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning,
_and_ the tea, _and_ the toast, _and_ the steak, _and_ the servants,
_and_ the front-hall mat, _and_ the upper-story hall-door, _and_ the
basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my
general education. I shall set about the tails of my g’s at once, but
trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need
emendation.”
Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.
“If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe
that it is not good manners to drum on the table,” says his fair
opposite.
“Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!” exclaims Enthusius,
rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his
dinner at Delmonico’s.
Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a
sprite of a woman,--the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being
he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own
inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so
sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on
the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been
the guilty partner in this morning’s encounter; he has said only what
is fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after
all, the fault is remotely his.
When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very
deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not
face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine
things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling
her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her
than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can
a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears
the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?
If his little wife has to learn her domestic _rôle_ of household duty,
as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities,
a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to
her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before
marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and
incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what,
after marriage, proved an annoyance.
And if a man finds that he has a wife ill-adapted to wifely duties, does
it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or
ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in
the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as
little preface, apology, or circumlocution to his business manager, to
his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never
criticised the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and
studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the
asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should
qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in
the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own
wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or
softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two,
to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find,
too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at,
and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill
than a man.
But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often
is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited
by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent
seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make
manifest the weak point in everything.
We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of
mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and
disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do,
they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they
have abated by not trying to please.
We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs,
exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to
his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and
neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal
indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she
did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper,
without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her
grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and
gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he
breathed freely as a man released. He married again,--a woman with no
beauty, but much love and goodness,--a woman who asked little, blamed
seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost
thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became
the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in
the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism
from her lips, who criticised so little and so thoughtfully, weighed
more with him than many out-spoken words. So different is the same human
being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!
I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its
consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once
suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the
family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more
hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one
thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the
susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood.
Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all
points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticise him to right
and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in
callous hardness or irritable moroseness.
A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother
something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out,--“O, you’ve
left the door open! I do wish you wouldn’t always leave the door open!
And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I tell you to
wipe your feet?”
“Now there you’ve thrown your cap on the sofa again. When will you learn
to hang it up?”
“Don’t put your slate there; that isn’t the place for it.”
“How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?”
“Don’t sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing.”
“Child, how your hair looks! Do go up stairs and comb it.”
“There, if you haven’t torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a
boy!”
“Don’t speak so loud; your voice goes through my head.”
“I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I
have been saving for brown flour.”
“I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor.”
“Jim’s been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best
paper.”
Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run
the gantlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as
those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it
than he is?
No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound
to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about
everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be
terrible reactions?
Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same
considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced
into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There
are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant
and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to
be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or
poison it with foul air, or bring innumerable inconveniences. The
setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty
possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of
a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of
fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no
wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the
bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a
high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face
in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated,
despairing, and with good reason: the maid is the same, and with equally
good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a
printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given
her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning
paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy
in her beautifully arranged house.
There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed
like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has
become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their
welfare a trap. Their gas and their water and their fire and their
elegances and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only
so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their
Christian graces day and night,--so that, if their house is kept in
order, their temper and religion are not.
I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are in
will and purpose real saints. Their souls go up to heaven,--its love,
its purity, its rest,--with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in
church; and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to
despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross
looks, the universal nervous irritability, that result from this
constant jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.
Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as
means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman
once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her
scourges,--accept them,--rejoice in them,--smile and be quiet, silent,
patient, and loving under them,--and the convent can teach her no more;
she is a victorious saint.
When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after
the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes
coughing, sneezing, strangling,--when the gas is blown out in the
nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the
danger of such a proceeding,--when the tumblers on the dinner-table are
found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business
of washing and wiping,--when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left
soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the
consequences,--when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below,
and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important
things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember
them,--there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very
deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting.
It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and
distresses, but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the
Apostle, might say, “When I am weak, then am I strong.”
The burden ceases to gall when we have learned how to carry it. We can
suffer patiently, if we see any good come of it, and say, as an old
black woman of our acquaintance did of an event that crossed her
purpose, “Well, Lord, if it’s _you_, send it along.”
But that this may be done, that home-life, in our unsettled, changing
state of society, may become peaceful and restful, there is one
Christian grace, much treated of by mystic writers, that must return to
its honor in the Christian Church. I mean,--THE GRACE OF SILENCE.
No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value of NOT SPEAKING.
“Speech is silvern, but silence is golden,” is an old and very precious
proverb.
“But,” say many voices, “what is to become of us, if we may not speak?
Must we not correct our children and our servants and each other? Must
we let people go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter?”
No; fault must be found; faults must be told, errors corrected. Reproof
and admonition are duties of householders to their families, and of all
true friends to one another.
But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own lives and the lives
of others, and ask, How much of the fault-finding which prevails has the
least tendency to do any good? How much of it is well-timed,
well-pointed, deliberate, and just, so spoken as to be effective?
“A wise reprover upon an obedient ear” is one of the _rare_ things
spoken of by Solomon,--the rarest, perhaps, to be met with. How many
really religious people put any of their religion into their manner of
performing this most difficult office? We find fault with a stove or
furnace which creates heat only to go up chimney and not warm the house.
We say it is wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings,
church-services, and sacraments; they create and excite lovely, gentle,
holy feelings,--but, if these do not pass out into the atmosphere of
daily life, and warm and clear the air of our homes, there is a great
waste in our religion.
We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that we are as awkward in
heavenly things, as unfit for the Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and
Mike, and the little beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlors.
We have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed that “the
remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is
intolerable,” and then we draw near in the sacrament to that Incarnate
Divinity whose infinite love covers all our imperfections with the
mantle of His perfections. But when we return, do we take our servants
and children by the throat because they are as untrained and awkward and
careless in earthly things as we have been in heavenly? Does no
remembrance of Christ’s infinite patience temper our impatience, when we
have spoken seventy times seven, and our words have been disregarded?
There is no mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the Church
excites. What we want is to have it _used_ in common life, instead of
going up like hot air in a fireplace to lose itself in the infinite
abysses above.
In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful examples in Holy Writ.
When Saint Paul has a reproof to administer to delinquent Christians,
how does he temper it with gentleness and praise! how does he first make
honorable note of all the good there is to be spoken of! how does he
give assurance of his prayers and love!--and when at last the arrow
flies, it goes all the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.
But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than Paul, who made His
home on earth with twelve plain men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to
learn,--and who to the very day of His death were still contending on a
point which He had repeatedly explained, and troubling His last earthly
hours with the old contest, “Who should be greatest.” When all else
failed, on His knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing
for love the office of a slave, he said, “If I, your Lord and Master,
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
When parents, employers, and masters learn to reprove in this spirit,
reproofs will be more effective than they now are. It was by the
exercise of this spirit that Fénelon transformed the proud, petulant,
irritable, selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle, tolerant
of others, and severe only to himself: it was he who had for his motto,
that “Perfection alone can bear with imperfection.”
But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite aim, how much is
there that does not profess or intend or try to do anything more than
give vent to an irritated state of feeling! The nettle stings us, and we
toss it with both hands at our neighbor; the fire burns us, and we throw
coals and hot ashes at all and sundry of those about us.
There is _fretfulness_, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting
remark; there is _grumbling_, a northeast storm that never clears; there
is _scolding_, the thunder-storm with lightning and hail. All these are
worse than useless; they are positive _sins_, by whomsoever
indulged,--sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in
polite society.
All these are for the most part but the venting on our fellow-beings of
morbid feelings resulting from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general
ill health.
A minister eats too much mince-pie, goes to his weekly lecture, and,
seeing only half a dozen people there, proceeds to grumble at those
half-dozen for the sins of such as stay away. “The Church is cold, there
is no interest in religion,” and so on: a simple outpouring of the
blues.
You and I do in one week the work we ought to do in six; we overtax
nerve and brain, and then have weeks of darkness in which everything at
home seems running to destruction. The servants never were so careless,
the children never so noisy, the house never so disorderly, the State
never so ill-governed, the Church evidently going over to Antichrist.
The only thing, after all, in which the existing condition of affairs
differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used up our nervous
energy, and are looking at the world through blue spectacles. We ought
to resist the devil of fault-finding at this point, and cultivate
silence as a grace till our nerves are rested. There are times when no
one should trust himself to judge his neighbors, or reprove his children
and servants, or find fault with his friends,--for he is so sharp-set
that he cannot strike a note without striking too hard. Then is the time
to try the grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the power
of prayer.
But it being premised that we are _never_ to fret, never to grumble,
never to scold, and yet it being our duty in some way to make known and
get rectified the faults of others, it remains to ask how; and on this
head we will improvise a parable of two women.
Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of
moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions
of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to
the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly
religious. In all the minutiæ of woman’s life she manifests an
inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly
done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so
punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a
chronometer.
Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty
of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,--a
fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for
everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the
spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact
standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She
does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises
over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault;
she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing
in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are
aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes
them felt by the most obdurate.
Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never
scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the
calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love
her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and
careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the
accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as
inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness,
whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys
and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have
children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always
sure to do something dreadful every day.
The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard,
and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but
that she does not take the right way. She has set it down in her mind
that to blame a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never
learned that it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, and that
people are drawn to do right by being praised when they do it, rather
than driven by being blamed when they do not.
Right across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy, a pretty little
creature, with not a tithe of her moral worth,--a merry, pleasure-loving
woman, of no particular force of principle, whose great object in life
is to avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.
Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her children, her servants,
merely because it is her nature to say pleasant things to every one. It
is a mere tact of pleasing, which she uses without knowing it. While
Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs her keen eye
over everything, and at last brings up with, “Jane, look at that black
spot on the salt-spoon! I am astonished at your carelessness!"--Mrs.
Easy would say, “Why, Jane, where _did_ you learn to set a table so
nicely? All looking beautifully, except,--ah! let’s see,--just give a
rub to this salt-spoon;--now all is quite perfect.” Mrs. Standfast’s
servants and children hear only of their failures; these are always
before them and her. Mrs. Easy’s servants hear of their successes. She
praises their good points; tells them they are doing well in this, that,
and the other particular; and finally exhorts them, on the strength of
having done so many things well, to improve in what is yet lacking. Mrs.
Easy’s husband feels that he is always a hero in her eyes, and her
children feel that they are dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs.
Easy sometimes has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds roundly
when something falls out as it should not.
The two families show how much more may be done by a very ordinary
woman, through the mere instinct of praising and pleasing, than by the
greatest worth, piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a
lever that never was meant to lift it by.
The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated
by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a
consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt
discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the
presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our
virtues in the best light, and put our faults in the background?
Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that are in us,--the
needs, the wants, the despondencies,--are in each of our fellows, in
every awkward servant and careless child.
Finally, let us all resolve,--
First, to attain to the grace of SILENCE.
Second, to deem all FAULT-FINDING that does no good a SIN; and to
resolve, when we are happy ourselves, not to poison the atmosphere for
our neighbors by calling on them to remark every painful and
disagreeable feature of their daily life.
Third, to practise the grace and virtue of PRAISE. We have all been
taught that it is our duty to praise God, but few of us have reflected
on our duty to praise men; and yet for the same reason that we should
praise the divine goodness it is our duty to praise human excellence.
We should praise our friends,--our near and dear ones; we should look on
and think of their virtues till their faults fade away; and when we love
most, and see most to love, then only is the wise time wisely to speak
of what should still be altered.
Parents should look out for occasions to commend their children, as
carefully as they seek to reprove their faults; and employers should
praise the good their servants do as strictly as they blame the evil.
Whoever undertakes to use this weapon will find that praise goes farther
in many cases than blame. Watch till a blundering servant does something
well, and then praise him for it, and you will see a new fire lighted in
the eye, and often you will find that in that one respect at least you
have secured excellence thenceforward.
When you blame, which should be seldom, let it be alone with the person,
quietly, considerately, and with all the tact you are possessed of. The
fashion of reproving children and servants in the presence of others
cannot be too much deprecated. Pride, stubbornness, and self-will are
aroused by this, while a more private reproof might be received with
thankfulness.
As a general rule, I would say, treat children in these respects just as
you would grown people; they are grown people in miniature, and need as
careful consideration of their feelings as any of us.
Lastly, let us all make a bead-roll, a holy rosary, of all that is good
and agreeable in our position, our surroundings, our daily lot, of all
that is good and agreeable in our friends, our children, our servants,
and charge ourselves to repeat it daily, till the habit of our minds be
to praise and to commend; and so doing, we shall catch and kill one
_Little Fox_ who hath destroyed many tender grapes.
II.
IRRITABILITY.
It was that Christmas-day that did it; I’m quite convinced of that; and
the way it was is, what I am going to tell you.
You see, among the various family customs of us Crowfields, the
observance of all sorts of _fêtes_ and festivals has always been a
matter of prime regard; and among all the festivals of the round ripe
year, none is so joyous and honored among us as Christmas.
Let no one upon this prick up the ears of Archæology, and tell us that
by the latest calculations of chronologists our ivy-grown and
holly-mantled Christmas is all a hum,--that it has been demonstrated, by
all sorts of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates did
not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing it be so, what have we
to do with that? If so awful, so joyous an event _ever_ took place on
our earth, it is surely worth commemoration. It is the _event_ we
celebrate, not the _time_. And if all Christians for eighteen hundred
years, while warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have
agreed to give this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is
he that shall gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on
the friendly greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of
re-writing Milton’s Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and
Hopkins.
In our house, however, Christmas has always been a high day, a day whose
expectation has held waking all the little eyes in our bird’s nest, when
as yet there were only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye
open, hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christmas and grasp
the wonderful stocking.
This year our whole family train of married girls and boys, with the
various toddling tribes thereto belonging, held high festival around a
wonderful Christmas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had kept
my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week beforehand. If the little
folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as
little about them as they do about most of the other blessings which
rain down on their dear little thoughtless heads. Such scrambling and
clambering and fussing and tying and untying, such alterations and
rearrangements, such agilities in getting up and down and everywhere to
tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things innumerable, to hang
airy dolls in graceful positions, to make branches bear stiffly up under
loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom
upward!
Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of
rheumatism, most careless of dignity,--the round, bald top of my head to
be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now
devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting
far back on a stiff branch Tom’s new little skates, now balancing bags
of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some
contumacious taper that would turn slantwise or crosswise, or anywise
but upward, as a Christian taper should,--regardless of Mrs. Crowfield’s
gentle admonitions and suggestions, sitting up to most dissipated hours,
springing out of bed suddenly to change some arrangement in the middle
of the night, and up long before the lazy sun at dawn to execute still
other arrangements. If that Christmas-tree had been a fort to be taken,
or a campaign to be planned, I could not have spent more time and
strength on it. My zeal so far outran even that of sprightly Miss
Jennie, that she could account for it only by saucily suggesting that
papa must be fast getting into his second childhood.
But didn’t we have a splendid lighting-up? Didn’t I and my youngest
grandson, little Tom, head the procession magnificent in paper
soldier-caps, blowing tin trumpets and beating drums, as we marched
round the twinkling glories of our Christmas-tree, all glittering with
red and blue and green tapers, and with a splendid angel on top with
great gold wings, the cutting-out and adjusting of which had held my
eyes waking for nights before? I had had oceans of trouble with that
angel, owing to an unlucky sprain in his left wing, which had required
constant surgical attention through the week, and which I feared might
fall loose again at the important and blissful moment of exhibition: but
no, the Fates were in our favor; the angel behaved beautifully, and kept
his wings as crisp as possible, and the tapers all burned splendidly,
and the little folks were as crazy with delight as my most ardent hopes
could have desired; and then we romped and played and frolicked as long
as little eyes could keep open, and long after; and so passed away our
Christmas.
I had forgotten to speak of the Christmas-dinner, that solid feast of
fat things, on which we also luxuriated. Mrs. Crowfield outdid all
household traditions in that feast: the turkey and the chickens, the
jellies and the sauces, the pies and the pudding, behold, are they not
written in the tablets of Memory which remain to this day?
The holidays passed away hilariously, and at New-Year’s I, according to
time-honored custom, went forth to make my calls and see my fair
friends, while my wife and daughters stayed at home to dispense the
hospitalities of the day to their gentlemen friends. All was merry,
cheerful, and it was agreed on all hands that a more joyous holiday
season had never flown over us.
But, somehow, the week after, I began to be sensible of a running-down
in the wheels. I had an article to write for the “Atlantic,” but felt
mopish and could not write. My dinner had not its usual relish, and I
had an indefinite sense everywhere of something going wrong. My coal
bill came in, and I felt sure we were being extravagant, and that our
John Furnace wasted the coal. My grandsons and granddaughters came to
see us, and I discovered that they had high-pitched voices, and burst in
without wiping their shoes, and it suddenly occurred powerfully to my
mind that they were not being well brought up,--evidently, they were
growing up rude and noisy. I discovered several tumblers and plates with
the edges chipped, and made bitter reflections on the carelessness of
Irish servants;--our crockery was going to destruction, along with the
rest. Then, on opening one of my paper-drawers, I found that Jennie’s
one drawer of worsted had overflowed into two or three; Jennie was
growing careless; besides, worsted is dear, and girls knit away small
fortunes, without knowing it, on little duds that do nobody any good.
Moreover, Maggie had three times put my slippers into the hall-closet,
instead of leaving them where I wanted, under my study-table. Mrs.
Crowfield ought to look after things more; every servant, from end to
end of the house, was getting out of the traces, it was strange she did
not see it.
All this I vented, from time to time, in short, crusty sayings and
doings, as freely as if I hadn’t just written an article on “Little
Foxes” in the last “Atlantic,” till at length my eyes were opened on my
own state and condition.
It was evening, and I had just laid up the fire in the most approved
style of architecture, and, projecting my feet into my slippers, sat
spitefully cutting the leaves of a caustic review.
Mrs. Crowfield took the tongs and altered the disposition of a stick.
“My dear,” I said, “I do wish you’d let the fire alone,--you always put
it out.”
“I was merely admitting a little air between the sticks,” said my wife.
“You always make matters worse, when you touch the fire.”
As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame darted up between the
sticks, and the fire began chattering and snapping defiance at me. Now,
if there’s anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be jeered and
snapped at in that way by a man’s own fire. It’s an unbearable
impertinence. I threw out my leg impatiently, and hit Rover, who yelped
a yelp that finished the upset of my nerves. I gave him a hearty kick,
that he might have something to yelp for, and in the movement upset
Jennie’s embroidery-basket.
“Oh, papa!”
“Confound your baskets and balls! they are everywhere, so that a man
can’t move; useless, wasteful things, too.”
“Wasteful?” said Jennie, coloring indignantly; for if there’s anything
Jennie piques herself upon, it’s economy.
“Yes, wasteful,--wasting time and money both. Here are hundreds of
shivering poor to be clothed, and Christian females sit and do nothing
but crochet worsted into useless knicknacks. If they would be working
for the poor, there would be some sense in it. But it’s all just alike,
no real Christianity in the world, nothing but organized selfishness and
self-indulgence.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Crowfield, “you are not well to-night. Things are
not quite so desperate as they appear. You haven’t got over
Christmas-week.”
“I _am_ well. Never was better. But I can see, I hope, what’s before my
eyes; and the fact is, Mrs. Crowfield, things must not go on as they are
going. There must be more care, more attention to details. There’s
Maggie,--that girl never does what she is told. You are too slack with
her, Ma’am. She will light the fire with the last paper, and she won’t
put my slippers in the right place; and I can’t have my study made the
general catch-all and menagerie for Rover and Jennie, and her baskets
and balls, and for all the family litter.”
Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from Jennie, who was
swelling with repressed indignation at my attack on her worsted. She sat
with her back to me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but
very decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn,--
“Now if _I_ should talk in that way, people would call me _cross_,--and
that’s the whole of it.”
I pretended to be looking into the fire in an absent-minded state; but
Jennie’s words had started a new idea. Was _that_ it? Was that the whole
matter? Was it, then, a fact, that the house, the servants, Jennie and
her worsteds, Rover and Mrs. Crowfield, were all going on pretty much as
usual, and that the only difficulty was that I was _cross_? How many
times had I encouraged Rover to lie just where he was lying when I
kicked him! How many times, in better moods, had I complimented Jennie
on her neat little fancy-works, and declared that I liked the social
companionship of ladies’ work-baskets among my papers! Yes, it was
clear. After all, things were much as they had been; only I was cross.
_Cross._ I put it to myself in that simple, old-fashioned word, instead
of saying that I was out of spirits, or nervous, or using any of the
other smooth phrases with which we good Christians cover up our little
sins of temper. “Here you are, Christopher,” said I to myself, “a
literary man, with a somewhat delicate nervous organization and a
sensitive stomach, and you have been eating like a sailor or a
ploughman; you have been gallivanting and merry-making and playing the
boy for two weeks; up at all sorts of irregular hours, and into all
sorts of boyish performances; and the consequence is, that, like a
thoughtless young scapegrace, you have used up in ten days the capital
of nervous energy that was meant to last you ten weeks. You can’t eat
your cake and have it too, Christopher. When the nervous-fluid, source
of cheerfulness, giver of pleasant sensations and pleasant views, is
all spent, you can’t feel cheerful; things cannot look as they did when
you were full of life and vigor. When the tide is out, there is nothing
but unsightly, ill-smelling tide-mud, and you can’t help it; but you
_can_ keep your senses,--you _can_ know what is the matter with
you,--you can keep from visiting your overdose of Christmas mincepies
and candies and jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Rover, and
Jennie, whether in the form of virulent morality, pungent criticisms, or
a free kick, such as you just gave the poor brute.”
“Come here, Rover, poor dog!” said I, extending my hand to Rover, who
cowered at the farther corner of the room, eying me wistfully,--“come
here, you poor doggie, and make up with your master. There, there! Was
his master cross? Well, he knows it. We must forgive and forget, old
boy, mustn’t we?” And Rover nearly broke his own back and tore me to
pieces with his tumultuous tail-waggings.
“As for you, puss,” I said to Jennie, “I am much obliged to you for your
free suggestion. You must take my cynical moralities for what they are
worth, and put your little traps into as many of my drawers as you
like.”
In short, I made it up handsomely all around,--even apologizing to Mrs.
Crowfield, who, by the by, has summered and wintered me so many years,
and knows all my little seams and crinkles so well, that she took my
irritable, unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I had been a baby
cutting a new tooth.
“Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was; don’t disturb yourself,”
she said, as I began my apology; “we understand each other. But there is
one thing I have to say; and that is, that your article ought to be
ready.”
“Ah, well, then,” said I, “like other great writers, I shall make
capital of my own sins, and treat of the second little family fox; and
his name is--
_IRRITABILITY._
IRRITABILITY is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It
is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose
to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit. In fact, it
comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. There
are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we
could not conceive of even an angelic spirit confined in a body thus
disordered as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a
state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim
makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and
biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.
Then, again, there are other people who go through life loving and
beloved, desired in every circle, held up in the Church as examples of
the power of religion, who, after all, deserve no credit for these
things. Their spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so
cheerful, all the sensations which come to them are so fresh and
vigorous and pleasant, that they cannot help viewing the world
charitably and seeing everything through a glorified medium. The
ill-temper of others does not provoke them; perplexing business never
sets their nerves to vibrating; and all their lives long they walk in
the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.
Look at Rover there. He is never nervous, never cross, never snaps or
snarls, and is ready, the moment after the grossest affront, to wag the
tail of forgiveness,--all because kind Nature has put his dog’s body
together so that it always works harmoniously. If every person in the
world were gifted with a stomach and nerves like his, it would be a far
better and happier world, no doubt. The man said a good thing who made
the remark, that the foundation of all intellectual and moral worth must
be laid in a good healthy animal.
Now I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the
home-circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its
members of these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he
thinks the matter over, will see that his condition in life, the
character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and failings,
his hopes and expectations, are all very much modified by these things.
Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted
individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of
trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing morning to
find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our friends
are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look
ridiculous by bright sunshine and we are fortunate individuals.
The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must
consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily
states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we
cannot ward them off.
Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all
things, it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find
abundant rules for the government of the tongue and temper; it is a
slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cart-loads of wholesome
instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that healthy
state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the temptation to
ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and religious teachers
seem scarcely to touch upon.
Now, without running into technical, physiological language, it is
evident, as regards us human beings, that there is a power by which we
live and move and have our being,--by which the brain thinks and wills,
the stomach digests, the blood circulates, and all the different
provinces of the little man-kingdom do their work. This something--call
it nervous fluid, nervous power, vital energy, life-force, or anything
else that you will--is a perfectly understood, if not a definable thing.
It is plain, too, that people possess this force in very different
degrees; some generating it as a high pressure engine does steam, and
using it constantly, with an apparently inexhaustible flow and others
who have little, and spend it quickly. We have a common saying, that
this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous irritable states
of temper are the mere physics’ result of a used-up condition. The
person has overspent his nervous energy,--like a man who should eat up
on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go
growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of nervous
force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is
seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used up to the loss and
detriment of the rest. Thus, with men of letters, an exorbitant brain
expends on its own wreckings what belongs to the other offices of the
body: the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion; the secretions are
badly made; and the imperfectly assimilated nourishment, that is
conveyed to every little nerve and tissue, carries with it an acrid,
irritating quality, producing general restlessness and discomfort. So
men and women go struggling on through their threescore and ten years,
scarcely one in a thousand knowing through life that perfect balance of
parts, that appropriate harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly
animal condition, predisposing to cheerfulness and good-will.
We Americans are, in the first place, a nervous, excitable people.
Multitudes of children, probably the great majority in the upper walks
of life, are born into the world with weaknesses of the nervous
organization, or of the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of
any strong excitement or prolonged exertion without some lesion or
derangement; so that they are continually being checked, laid up, and
made invalids in the midst of their days. Life here in America is so
fervid, so fast, our climate is so stimulating, with its clear, bright
skies, its rapid and sudden changes of temperature, that the tendencies
to nervous disease are constantly aggravated.
Under these circumstances, unless men and women make a conscience, a
religion, of saving and sparing something of themselves expressly for
home-life and home-consumption, it must follow that home will often be
merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and
irritable.
Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives all day in his
business, putting into it all there is in him, letting it drink up brain
and nerve and body and soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so
that he cannot bear the cry of the baby, and the frolics and pattering
of the nursery seem horrid and needless confusion. The little ones say,
in their plain vernacular, “Papa is cross.”
Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one or two in the
morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible food, and the next day is
so nervous that every straw and thread in her domestic path is
insufferable.
Papas that pursue business thus day after day, and mammas that go into
company, as it is called, night after night, what is there left in or of
them to make an agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and
inspire their children?
True, the man says he cannot help himself,--business requires it. But
what is the need of rolling up money at the rate at which he is seeking
to do it? Why not have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and
cheer up his wife, and form the minds of his children? Why spend himself
down to the last drop on the world, and give to the dearest friends he
has only the bitter dregs?
Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the Church have levelled at
fashionable amusements has failed of any effect at all, because wrongly
put. A cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example, and all for
reasons that will not, in the least, bear looking into. It is vain to
talk of dancing as a sin because practised in a dying world where souls
are passing into eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is
playing marbles, or frolicking with one’s children, or enjoying a good
dinner, or doing fifty other things which nobody ever dreamed of
objecting to.
If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin which uses up the
strength we need for daily duties, and leaves us fagged out and
irritable at just those times and in just those places when and where we
need most to be healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would say a
thing that none of his hearers would dispute. If he should add, that
dancing-parties, beginning at ten o’clock at night and ending at four
o’clock in the morning, do use up the strength, weaken the nerves, and
leave a person wholly unfit for any home duty, he would also be saying
what very few people would deny; and then his case would be made out. If
he should say that it is wrong to breathe bad air and fill the stomach
with unwholesome dainties, so as to make one restless, ill-natured, and
irritable for days, he would also say what few would deny, and his
preaching might have some hope of success.
The true manner of judging of the worth of amusements is to try them by
their effects on the nerves and spirits the day after. True amusement
ought to be, as the word indicates, _recreation_,--something that
refreshes, turns us out anew, rests the mind and body by change, and
gives cheerfulness and alacrity to our return to duty.
The true objection to all stimulants, alcoholic and narcotic, consists
simply in this,--that they are a form of overdraft on the nervous
energy, which helps us to use up in one hour the strength of whole
days.
A man uses up all the fair, legal interest of nervous power by too much
business, too much care, or too much amusement. He has now a demand to
meet. He has a complicate account to make up, an essay or a sermon to
write, and he primes himself by a cup of coffee, a cigar, a glass of
spirits. This is exactly the procedure of a man who, having used the
interest of his money, begins to dip into the principal. The strength a
man gets in this way is just so much taken out of his life-blood; it is
borrowing of a merciless creditor, who will exact, in time, the pound of
flesh nearest his heart.
Much of the irritability which spoils home happiness is the letting-down
from the over-excitement of stimulus. Some will drink coffee, when they
own every day that it makes them nervous; some will drug themselves with
tobacco, and some with alcohol, and, for a few hours of extra
brightness, give themselves and their friends many hours when amiability
or agreeableness is quite out of the question. There are people calling
themselves Christians who live in miserable thraldom, forever in debt to
Nature, forever overdrawing on their just resources, and using up their
patrimony, because they have not the moral courage to break away from a
miserable appetite.
The same may be said of numberless indulgences of the palate, which tax
the stomach beyond its power, and bring on all the horrors of
indigestion. It is almost impossible for a confirmed dyspeptic to act
like a good Christian; but a good Christian ought not to become a
confirmed dyspeptic. Reasonable self-control, abstaining from all
unseasonable indulgence, may prevent or put an end to dyspepsia, and
many suffer and make their friends suffer only because they will persist
in eating what they know is hurtful to them.
But it is not merely in worldly business, or fashionable amusements, or
the gratification of appetite, that people are tempted to overdraw and
use up in advance their life-force. It is done in ways more insidious,
because connected with our moral and religious faculties. There are
religious exaltations beyond the regular pulse and beatings of ordinary
nature, that quite as surely gravitate downward into the mire of
irritability. The ascent to the third heaven lets even the Apostle down
to a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet him.
It is the temptation of natures in which the moral faculties predominate
to overdo in the outward expression and activities of religion till they
are used up and irritable, and have no strength left to set a good
example in domestic life.
The Reverend Mr. X. in the pulpit to-day appears with the face of an
angel; he soars away into those regions of exalted devotion where his
people can but faintly gaze after him; he tells them of the victory that
overcometh the world, of an unmoved faith that fears no evil, of a
serenity of love that no outward event can ruffle; and all look after
him and wonder, and wish they could so soar.
Alas! the exaltation which inspires these sublime conceptions, these
celestial ecstasies, is a double and treble draft on Nature,--and poor
Mrs. X. knows, when she hears him preaching, that days of miserable
reaction are before her. He has been a fortnight driving before a gale
of strong excitement, doing all the time twice or thrice as much as in
his ordinary state he could, and sustaining himself by the stimulus of
strong coffee. He has preached or exhorted every night, and conversed
with religious inquirers every day, seeming to himself to become
stronger and stronger, because every day more and more excitable and
excited. To his hearers, with his flushed sunken cheek and his
glittering eye, he looks like some spiritual being just trembling on his
flight for upper worlds; but to poor Mrs. X., whose husband he is,
things wear a very different aspect. Her woman and mother instincts
tell her that he is drawing on his life-capital with both hands, and
that the hours of a terrible settlement must come, and the days of
darkness will be many. He who spoke so beautifully of the peace of a
soul made perfect will not be able to bear the cry of his baby or the
pattering feet of any of the poor little X.s, who must be sent
“Anywhere, anywhere,
Out of his sight”;
he who discoursed so devoutly of perfect trust in God will be nervous
about the butcher’s bill, sure of going to ruin because both ends of the
salary don’t meet; and he who could so admiringly tell of the silence of
Jesus under provocation will but too often speak unadvisedly with his
lips. Poor Mr. X. will be morally insane for days or weeks, and
absolutely incapable of preaching Christ in the way that is the most
effective, by setting Him forth in his own daily example.
What then? must we not do the work of the Lord?
Yes, certainly; but the first work of the Lord, that for which provision
is to be made in the first place, is to set a good example as a
Christian man. Better labor for years steadily, diligently, doing every
day only what the night’s rest can repair, avoiding those cheating
stimulants that overtax Nature, and illustrating the sayings of the
pulpit by the daily life in the family, than to pass life in exaltations
and depressions, resulting from overstrained labors, supported by
unnatural stimulus.
The same principles apply to hearers as to preachers. Religious services
must be judged of like amusements, by their effect on the life. If an
overdose of prayers, hymns, and sermons leaves us tired, nervous, and
cross, it is only not quite as bad as an overdose of fashionable folly.
It could be wished that in every neighborhood there might be one or two
calm, sweet, daily services which should morning and evening unite for
a few solemn moments the hearts of all as in one family, and feed with a
constant, unnoticed, daily supply the lamp of faith and love. Such are
some of the daily prayer-meetings which for eight or ten years past have
held their even tenor in some of our New England cities, and such the
morning and evening services which we are glad to see obtaining in the
Episcopal churches. Everything which brings religion into habitual
contact with life, and makes it part of a healthy, cheerful average
living, we hail as a sign of a better day. Nothing is so good for health
as daily devotion. It is the best soother of the nerves, the best
antidote to care; and we trust erelong that all Christian people will be
of one mind in this, and that neighborhoods will be families gathering
daily around one altar, praying not for themselves merely, but for each
other.
The conclusion of the whole matter is this: Set apart some provision to
make merry with _at home_, and guard that reserve as religiously as the
priests guarded the shew-bread in the temple. However great you are,
however good, however wide the general interests that you may control,
you gain nothing by neglecting home-duties. You must leave enough of
yourself to be able to bear and forbear, give and forgive, and be a
source of life and cheerfulness around the hearthstone. The great sign
given by the Prophets of the coming of the Millennium is,--what do you
suppose?--“He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and
the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the
earth with a curse.”
Thus much on avoiding unhealthy, irritable states.
But it still remains that a large number of people will be subject to
them unavoidably for these reasons.
_First._ The use of tobacco, alcohol, and other kindred stimulants, for
so many generations, has vitiated the brain and nervous system of
modern civilized races so that it is not what it was in former times.
Michelet treats of this subject quite at large in some of his late
works; and we have to face the fact of a generation born with an
impaired nervous organization, who will need constant care and wisdom to
avoid unhealthy, morbid irritation.
There is a temperament called the HYPOCHONDRIAC, to which many persons,
some of them the brightest, the most interesting, the most gifted, are
born heirs,--a want of balance of the nervous powers, which tends
constantly to periods of high excitement and of consequent
depression,--an unfortunate inheritance for the possessor, though
accompanied often with the greatest talents. Sometimes, too, it is the
unfortunate lot of those who have not talents, who bear its burdens and
its anguish without its rewards.
People of this temperament are subject to fits of gloom and despondency,
of nervous irritability and suffering, which darken the aspect of the
whole world to them, which present lying reports of their friends, of
themselves, of the circumstances of their life, and of all with which
they have to do.
Now the highest philosophy for persons thus afflicted is to _understand
themselves_ and their tendencies, to know that these fits of gloom and
depression are just as much a form of disease as a fever or a toothache,
to know that it is the peculiarity of the disease to fill the mind with
wretched illusions, to make them seem miserable and unlovely to
themselves, to make their nearest friends seem unjust and unkind, to
make all events appear to be going wrong and tending to destruction and
ruin.
The evils and burdens of such a temperament are half removed when a man
once knows that he has it and recognizes it for a disease, and when he
does not trust himself to speak and act in those bitter hours as if
there were any truth in what he thinks and feels and sees. He who has
not attained to this wisdom overwhelms his friends and his family with
the waters of bitterness; he stings with unjust accusations, and makes
his fireside dreadful with fancies which are real to him, but false as
the ravings of fever.
A sensible person, thus diseased, who has found out what ails him, will
shut his mouth resolutely, not to give utterance to the dark thoughts
that infest his soul.
A lady of great brilliancy and wit, who was subject to these periods,
once said to me, “My dear sir, there are times when I know I am
possessed of the Devil, and then I never let myself speak.” And so this
wise woman carried her burden about with her in a determined, cheerful
reticence, leaving always the impression of a cheery, kindly temper,
when, if she had spoken out a tithe of what she thought and felt in her
morbid hours, she would have driven all her friends from her, and made
others as miserable as she was herself. She was a sunbeam, a life-giving
presence in every family, by the power of self-knowledge and
self-control. Such victories as this are the victories of real saints.
But if the victim of these glooms is once tempted to lift their heavy
load by the use of _any stimulus whatever_, he or she is a lost man or
woman. It is from this sad class more than any other that the vast army
of drunkards and opium-eaters is recruited. Dr. Johnson, one of the most
brilliant examples of the hypochondriac temperament which literature
affords, has expressed a characteristic of the race, in what he says of
himself, that he could “_practise_ ABSTINENCE _but not_ TEMPERANCE.”
Hypochondriacs who begin to rely on stimulus, almost without exception
find this to be true. They cannot, they will not be moderate. Whatever
stimulant they take for relief will create an uncontrollable appetite, a
burning passion. The temperament itself lies in the direction of
insanity. It needs the most healthful, careful, even regimen and
management to keep it within the bounds of soundness; but the
introduction of stimulants deepens its gloom with the shadows of utter
despair.
All parents, in the education of their children, should look out for and
understand the signs of this temperament. It appears in early childhood;
and a child inclined to fits of depression should be marked as a subject
of the most thoughtful, painstaking physical and moral training. All
over-excitement and stimulus should be carefully avoided, whether in the
way of study, amusement, or diet. Judicious education may do much to
mitigate the unavoidable pains and penalties of this most undesirable
inheritance.
The second class of persons who need wisdom in the control of their
moods is that large class whose unfortunate circumstances make it
impossible for them to avoid constantly overdoing and overdrawing upon
their nervous energies, and who therefore are always exhausted and worn
out. Poor souls, who labor daily under a burden too heavy for them, and
whose fretfulness and impatience are looked upon with sorrow, not anger,
by pitying angels. Poor mothers, with families of little children
clinging round them, and a baby that never lets them sleep; hard-working
men, whose utmost toil, day and night, scarcely keeps the wolf from the
door; and all the hard-laboring, heavy-laden, on whom the burdens of
life press far beyond their strength.
There are but two things we know of for these,--two only remedies for
the irritation that comes of these exhaustions; the habit of silence
towards men, and of speech towards God. The heart must utter itself or
burst; but let it learn to commune constantly and intimately with One
always present and always sympathizing. This is the great, the only
safeguard against fretfulness and complaint. Thus and thus only can
peace spring out of confusion, and the breaking chords of an overtaxed
nature be strung anew to a celestial harmony.
III.
REPRESSION.
I am going now to write on another cause of family unhappiness, more
subtile than either of those before enumerated.
In the General Confession of the Church, we poor mortals all unite in
saying two things: “We have left undone those things which we ought to
have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have
done.” These two heads exhaust the subject of human frailty.
It is the things left undone which we ought to have done, the things
left unsaid which we ought to have said, that constitute the subject I
am now to treat of.
I remember my school-day speculations over an old “Chemistry” I used to
study as a textbook, which informed me that a substance called Caloric
exists in all bodies. In some it exists in a latent state: it is there,
but it affects neither the senses nor the thermometer. Certain causes
develop it, when it raises the mercury and warms the hands. I remember
the awe and wonder with which, even then, I reflected on the vast amount
of blind, deaf, and dumb comfort which Nature had thus stowed away. How
mysterious it seemed to me that poor families every winter should be
shivering, freezing, and catching cold, when Nature had all this latent
caloric locked up in her store-closet,--when it was all around them, in
everything they touched and handled!
In the spiritual world there is an exact analogy to this. There is a
great life-giving, warming power called Love, which exists in human
hearts dumb and unseen, but which has no real life, no warming power,
till set free by expression.
Did you ever, in a raw, chilly day, just before a snow-storm, sit at
work in a room that was judiciously warmed by an exact thermometer? You
do not freeze, but you shiver; your fingers do not become numb with
cold, but you have all the while an uneasy craving for more positive
warmth. You look at the empty grate, walk mechanically towards it, and,
suddenly awaking, shiver to see that there is nothing there. You long
for a shawl or cloak; you draw yourself within yourself; you consult the
thermometer, and are vexed to find that there is nothing there to be
complained of,--it is standing most provokingly at the exact temperature
that all the good books and good doctors pronounce to be the proper
thing,--the golden mean of health; and yet perversely you shiver, and
feel as if the face of an open fire would be to you as the smile of an
angel.
Such a lifelong chill, such an habitual shiver, is the lot of many
natures, which are not warm, when all ordinary rules tell them they
ought to be warm,--whose life is cold and barren and meagre,--which
never see the blaze of an open fire.
I will illustrate my meaning by a page out of my own experience.
I was twenty-one when I stood as groomsman for my youngest and favorite
sister Emily. I remember her now as she stood at the altar,--a pale,
sweet, flowery face, in a half-shimmer between smiles and tears, looking
out of vapory clouds of gauze and curls and all the vanishing mysteries
of a bridal morning.
Everybody thought the marriage such a fortunate one!--for her husband
was handsome and manly, a man of worth, of principle good as gold and
solid as adamant,--and Emmy had always been such a flossy little kitten
of a pet, so full of all sorts of impulses, so sensitive and nervous, we
thought her kind, strong, composed, stately husband made just on purpose
for her. “It was quite a Providence,” sighed all the elderly ladies, who
sniffed tenderly, and wiped their eyes, according to approved custom,
during the marriage ceremony.
I remember now the bustle of the day,--the confused whirl of white
gloves, kisses, bridemaids, and bride-cakes, the losing of trunk-keys
and breaking of lacings, the tears of mamma--God bless her!--and the
jokes of irreverent Christopher, who could, for the life of him, see
nothing so very dismal in the whole phantasmagoria, and only wished he
were as well off himself.
And so Emmy was whirled away from us on the bridal tour, when her
letters came back to us almost every day, just like herself, merry,
frisky little bits of scratches,--as full of little nonsense-beads as a
glass of Champagne, and all ending with telling us how perfect he was,
and how good, and how well he took care of her, and how happy, etc.,
etc.
Then came letters from her new home. His house was not yet built; but
while it was building, they were to live with his mother, who was “such
a good woman,” and his sisters, who were also “such nice women.”
But somehow, after this, a change came over Emmy’s letters. They grew
shorter; they seemed measured in their words; and in place of sparkling
nonsense and bubbling outbursts of glee, came anxiously worded praises
of her situation and surroundings, evidently written for the sake of
arguing herself into the belief that she was extremely happy.
John, of course, was not as much with her now: he had his business to
attend to, which took him away all day, and at night he was very tired.
Still he was very good and thoughtful of her, and how thankful she ought
to be! And his mother was very good indeed, and did all for her that she
could reasonably expect,--of course she could not be like her own mamma;
and Mary and Jane were very kind,--“in their way,” she wrote, but
scratched it out, and wrote over it, “very kind indeed.” They were the
best people in the world,--a great deal better than she was; and she
should try to learn a great deal from them.
“Poor little Em!” I said to myself, “I am afraid these very nice people
are slowly freezing and starving her.” And so, as I was going up into
the mountains for a summer tour, I thought I would accept some of John’s
many invitations and stop a day or two with them on my way, and see how
matters stood. John had been known among us in college as a taciturn
fellow, but good as gold. I had gained his friendship by a regular
siege, carrying parallel after parallel, till, when I came into the fort
at last, I found the treasures worth taking.
I had little difficulty in finding Squire Evans’s house. It was _the_
house of the village,--a true, model, New England house,--a square,
roomy, old-fashioned mansion, which stood on a hillside, under a group
of great, breezy old elms, whose wide, wind-swung arms arched over it
like a leafy firmament. Under this bower the substantial white house,
with all its window-blinds closed, with its neat white fences all tight
and trim, stood in its faultless green turfy yard, a perfect Pharisee
among houses. It looked like a house all finished, done, completed,
labelled, and set on a shelf for preservation; but, as is usual with
this kind of edifice in our dear New England, it had not the slightest
appearance of being lived in, not a door or window open, not a wink or
blink of life: the only suspicion of human habitation was the thin,
pale-blue smoke from the kitchen-chimney.
And now for the people in the house.
In making a New England visit in winter, was it ever your fortune to be
put to sleep in the glacial spare-chamber, that had been kept from time
immemorial as a refrigerator for guests,--that room which no ray of
daily sunshine and daily living ever warms, whose blinds are closed the
whole year round, whose fireplace knows only the complimentary blaze
which is kindled a few moments before bedtime in an atmosphere where you
can see your breath? Do you remember the process of getting warm in a
bed of most faultless material, with linen sheets and pillow-cases,
slippery and cold as ice? You did get warm at last, but you warmed your
bed by giving out all the heat of your own body.
Such are some families where you visit. They are of the very best
quality, like your sheets, but so cold that it takes all the vitality
you have to get them warmed up to the talking-point. You think, the
first hour after your arrival, that they must have heard some report to
your disadvantage, or that you misunderstood your letter of invitation,
or that you came on the wrong day; but no, you find in due course that
you _were_ invited, you were expected, and they are doing for you the
best they know how, and treating you as they suppose a guest ought to be
treated.
If you are a warm-hearted, jovial fellow, and go on feeling your way
discreetly, you gradually thaw quite a little place round yourself in
the domestic circle, till, by the time you are ready to leave, you
really begin to think it is agreeable to stay, and resolve that you will
come again. They are nice people; they like you; at last you have got
to feeling at home with them.
Three months after, you go to see them again, when, lo! there you are,
back again just where you were at first. The little spot which you had
thawed out is frozen over again, and again you spend all your visit in
thawing it and getting your hosts limbered and in a state for
comfortable converse.
The first evening that I spent in the wide, roomy front-parlor, with
Judge Evans, his wife, and daughters, fully accounted for the change in
Emmy’s letters. Rooms, I verily believe, get saturated with the aroma of
their spiritual atmosphere; and there are some so stately, so correct,
that they would paralyze even the friskiest kitten or the most impudent
Scotch terrier. At a glance, you perceive, on entering, that nothing but
correct deportment, an erect posture, and strictly didactic conversation
is possible there.
The family, in fact, were all eminently didactic, bent on improvement,
laboriously useful. Not a good work or charitable enterprise could put
forth its head in the neighborhood, of which they were not the support
and life. Judge Evans was the stay and staff of the village and township
of ----; he bore up the pillars thereof. Mrs. Evans was known in the
gates for all the properties and deeds of the virtuous woman, as set
forth by Solomon; the heart of her husband did safely trust in her. But
when I saw them, that evening, sitting, in erect propriety, in their
respective corners each side of the great, stately fireplace, with its
tall, glistening brass andirons, its mantel adorned at either end with
plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in the middle,--she so
collectedly measuring her words, talking in all those well-worn grooves
of correct conversation which are designed, as the phrase goes, to
“entertain strangers,” and the Misses Evans, in the best of grammar and
rhetoric, and in most proper time and way possible, showing themselves
for what they were, most high-principled, well-informed, intelligent
women,--I set myself to speculate on the cause of the extraordinary
sensation of stiffness and restraint which pervaded me, as if I had been
dipped in some petrifying spring and was beginning to feel myself
slightly crusting over on the exterior.
This kind of conversation is such as admits quite easily of one’s
carrying on another course of thought within; and so, as I found myself
like a machine, striking in now and then in good time and tune, I looked
at Judge Evans, sitting there so serene, self-poised, and cold, and
began to wonder if he had ever been a boy, a young man,--if Mrs. Evans
ever was a girl,--if he was ever in love with her, and what he did when
he was.
I thought of the lock of Emmy’s hair which I had observed in John’s
writing-desk in days when he was falling in love with her,--of sun dry
little movements in which at awkward moments I had detected my grave and
serious gentleman when I had stumbled accidentally upon the pair in
moonlight strolls or retired corners,--and wondered whether the models
of propriety before me had ever been convicted of any such human
weaknesses. Now, to be sure, I could as soon imagine the stately tongs
to walk up and kiss the shovel as conceive of any such bygone effusion
in those dignified individuals. But how did they get acquainted? how
came they ever to be married?
I looked at John, and thought I saw him gradually stiffening and
subsiding into the very image of his father. As near as a young fellow
of twenty-five can resemble an old one of sixty-two, he was growing to
be exactly like him, with the same upright carriage, the same silence
and reserve. Then I looked at Emmy: she, too, was changed,--she, the
wild little pet, all of whose pretty individualities were dear to
us,--that little unpunctuated scrap of life’s poetry, full of little
exceptions referable to no exact rule, only to be tolerated under the
wide score of poetic license. Now, as she sat between the two Misses
Evans, I thought I could detect a bored, anxious expression on her
little mobile face,--an involuntary watchfulness and self-consciousness,
as if she were trying to be good on some quite new pattern. She seemed
nervous about some of my jokes, and her eye went apprehensively to her
mother-in-law in the corner; she tried hard to laugh and make things go
merrily for me; she seemed sometimes to look an apology for me to them,
and then again for them to me. For myself, I felt that perverse
inclination to shock people which sometimes comes over one in such
situations. I had a great mind to draw Emmy on to my knee and commence a
brotherly romp with her, to give John a thump on his very upright back,
and to propose to one of the Misses Evans to strike up a waltz, and get
the parlor into a general whirl, before the very face and eyes of
propriety in the corner: but “the spirits” were too strong for me; I
couldn’t do it.
I remembered the innocent, saucy freedom with which Emmy used to treat
her John in the days of their engagement,--the little ways, half loving,
half mischievous, in which she alternately petted and domineered over
him. _Now_ she called him “Mr. Evans,” with an anxious affectation of
matronly gravity. Had they been lecturing her into these conjugal
proprieties? Probably not. I felt sure, by what I now experienced in
myself, that, were I to live in that family one week, all deviations
from the one accepted pattern of propriety would fall off, like
many-colored sumach-leaves after the first hard frost. I began to feel
myself slowly stiffening, my courage getting gently chilly. I tried to
tell a story, but had to mangle it greatly, because I felt in the air
around me that parts of it were too vernacular and emphatic; and then,
as a man who is freezing makes desperate efforts to throw off the
spell, and finds his brain beginning to turn, so I was beginning to be
slightly insane, and was haunted with a desire to say some horribly
improper or wicked thing which should start them all out of their
chairs. Though never given to profane expressions, I perfectly hankered
to let out a certain round, unvarnished, wicked word, which I knew would
create a tremendous commotion on the surface of this enchanted
mill-pond,--in fact, I was so afraid that I should make some such mad
demonstration, that I rose at an early hour and begged leave to retire.
Emmy sprang up with apparent relief, and offered to get my candle and
marshal me to my room.
When she had ushered me into the chilly hospitality of that stately
apartment, she seemed suddenly disenchanted. She set down the candle,
ran to me, fell on my neck, nestled her little head under my coat,
laughing and crying, and calling me her dear old boy; she pulled my
whiskers, pinched my ear, rummaged my pockets, danced round me in a sort
of wild joy, stunning me with a volley of questions, without stopping to
hear the answer to one of them; in short, the wild little elf of old
days seemed suddenly to come back to me, as I sat down and drew her on
to my knee.
“It does look so like home to see you, Chris!--dear, dear home!--and the
dear old folks! There never, never was such a home!--everybody there did
just what they wanted to, didn’t they, Chris?--and we love each other,
don’t we?”
“Emmy,” said I, suddenly, and very improperly, “you aren’t happy here.”
“Not happy?” she said, with a half-frightened look,--“what makes you say
so? O, you are mistaken. I have everything to make me happy. I should be
very unreasonable and wicked, if I were not. I am very, very happy, I
assure you. Of course, you know, everybody can’t be like our folks at
home. _That_ I should not expect, you know,--people’s ways are
different,--but then, when you know people are so good, and all that,
why, of course you must be thankful, be happy. It’s better for me to
learn to control my feelings, you know, and not give way to impulses.
They are all so good here, they never give way to their feelings,--they
always do right. O, they are quite wonderful!”
“And agreeable?” said I.
“O Chris, we mustn’t think so much of that. They certainly aren’t
pleasant and easy, as people at home are; but they are never cross, they
never scold, they always are good. And we oughtn’t to think so much of
living to be happy; we ought to think more of doing right, doing our
duty, don’t you think so?”
“All undeniable truth, Emmy; but, for all that, John seems stiff as a
ramrod, and their front-parlor is like a tomb. You mustn’t let them
petrify him.”
Her face clouded over a little.
“John is different here from what he was at our house. He has been
brought up differently,--O, entirely differently from what we were; and
when he comes back into the old house, the old business, and the old
place between his father and mother and sisters, he goes back into the
old ways. He loves me all the same, but he does not show it in the same
ways, and I must learn, you know, to take it on trust. He is _very_
busy,--works hard all day, and all for me; and mother says women are
unreasonable that ask any other proof of love from their husbands than
what they give by working for them all the time. She never lectures me,
but I know she thought I was a silly little petted child, and she told
me one day how she brought up John. She never petted him; she put him
away alone to sleep, from the time he was six months old; she never fed
him out of his regular hours when he was a baby, no matter how much he
cried; she never let him talk baby-talk, or have any baby-talk talked
to him, but was very careful to make him speak all his words plain from
the very first; she never encouraged him to express his love by kisses
or caresses, but taught him that the only proof of love was exact
obedience. I remember John’s telling me of his running to her once and
hugging her round the neck, when he had come in without wiping his
shoes, and she took off his arms and said: ‘My son, this isn’t the best
way to show love. I should be much better pleased to have you come in
quietly and wipe your shoes than to come and kiss me when you forget to
do what I say.’”
“Dreadful old jade!” said I, irreverently, being then only twenty-three.
“Now, Chris, I won’t have anything to say to you, if this is the way you
are going to talk,” said Emily, pouting, though a mischievous gleam
darted into her eyes. “Really, however, I think she carried things too
far, though she is so good. I only said it to excuse John, and show how
he was brought up.”
“Poor fellow!” said I. “I know now why he is so hopelessly shut up, and
walled up. Never a warmer heart than he keeps stowed away there inside
of the fortress, with the drawbridge down and moat all round.”
“They are all warm-hearted inside,” said Emily. “Would you think she
didn’t love him? Once when he was sick, she watched with him seventeen
nights without taking off her clothes; she scarcely would eat all the
time: Jane told me so. She loves him better than she loves herself. It’s
perfectly dreadful sometimes to see how intense she is when anything
concerns him; it’s her _principle_ that makes her so cold and quiet.”
“And a devilish one it is!” said I.
“Chris, you are really growing wicked!”
“I use the word seriously, and in good faith,” said I. “Who but the
Father of Evil ever devised such plans for making goodness hateful, and
keeping the most-heavenly part of our nature so under lock and key that
for the greater part of our lives we get no use of it? Of what benefit
is a mine of love burning where it warms nobody, does nothing but
blister the soul within with its imprisoned heat? Love repressed grows
morbid, acts in a thousand perverse ways. These three women, I’ll
venture to say, are living in the family here like three frozen islands,
knowing as little of each other’s inner life as if parted by eternal
barriers of ice,--and all because a cursed principle in the heart of the
mother has made her bring them up in violence to Nature.”
“Well,” said Emmy, “sometimes I do pity Jane; she is nearest my age,
and, naturally, I think she was something like me, or might have been.
The other day I remember her coming in looking so flushed and ill that I
couldn’t help asking if she were unwell. The tears came into her eyes;
but her mother looked up, in her cool, business-like way, and said, in
her dry voice,--
“‘Jane, what’s the matter?’
“‘O, my head aches dreadfully, and I have pains in all my limbs!’
“I wanted to jump and run to do something for her,--you know at our
house we feel that a sick person must be waited on,--but her mother only
said, in the same dry way,--
“‘Well, Jane, you’ve probably got a cold; go into the kitchen and make
yourself some good boneset tea, soak your feet in hot water, and go to
bed at once’; and Jane meekly departed.
“I wanted to spring and do these things for her; but it’s curious, in
this house I never dare offer to do anything; and mother looked at me,
as she went out, with a significant nod,--
“‘That’s always _my_ way; if any of the children are sick, I never
coddle them; it’s best to teach them to make as light of it as
possible.’”
“Dreadful!” said I.
“Yes, it is dreadful,” said Emmy, drawing her breath, as if relieved
that she might speak her mind; “it’s dreadful to see these people, who I
know love each other, living side by side and never saying a loving,
tender word, never doing a little loving thing,--sick ones crawling off
alone like sick animals, persisting in being alone, bearing everything
alone. But I won’t let them; I will insist on forcing my way into their
rooms. I would go and sit with Jane, and pet her and hold her hand and
bathe her head, though I knew it made her horridly uncomfortable at
first; but I thought she ought to learn to be petted in a Christian way,
when she was sick. I will kiss her too, sometimes, though she takes it
just like a cat that isn’t used to being stroked, and calls me a silly
girl; but I know she is getting to like it. What is the use of people’s
loving each other in this horridly cold, stingy, silent way? If one of
them were dangerously ill now, or met with any serious accident, I know
there would be no end to what the others would do for her; if one of
them were to die, the others would be perfectly crushed: but it would
all go inward,--drop silently down into that dark, cold, frozen well;
they couldn’t speak to each other; they couldn’t comfort each other;
they have lost the power of expression; they absolutely _can’t_.”
“Yes,” said I, “they are like the fakirs who have held up an arm till it
has become stiffened,--they cannot now change its position; like the
poor mutes, who, being deaf, have become dumb through disuse of the
organs of speech. Their education has been like those iron suits of
armor into which little boys were put in the Middle Ages, solid,
inflexible, put on in childhood, enlarged with every year’s growth, till
the warm human frame fitted the mould as if it had been melted and
poured into it. A person educated in this way is hopelessly crippled,
never will be what he might have been.”
“O, don’t say that, Chris; think of John; think how good he is.”
“I do think how good he is,"--with indignation,--“and how few know it,
too. I think; that, with the tenderest, truest, gentlest heart, the
utmost appreciation of human friendship, he has passed in the world for
a cold, proud, selfish man. If your frank, impulsive, incisive nature
had not unlocked gates and opened doors, he would never have known the
love of woman: and now he is but half disenchanted; he every day tends
to go back to stone.”
“But I sha’n’t let him; O, indeed, I know the danger! I shall bring him
out. I shall work on them all. I know they are beginning to love me a
good deal: in the first place, because I belong to John, and everything
belonging to him is perfect; and in the second place--”
“In the second place, because they expect to weave, day after day, the
fine cobweb lines of their cold system of repression around you, which
will harden and harden, and tighten and tighten, till you are as stiff
and shrouded as any of them. You remind me of our poor little duck:
don’t you remember him?”
“Yes, poor fellow! how he would stay out, and swim round and round,
while the pond kept freezing and freezing, and his swimming-place grew
smaller and smaller every day; but he was such a plucky little fellow
that--”
“That at last we found him one morning frozen tight in, and he has
limped ever since on his poor feet.”
“O, but I won’t freeze in,” she said, laughing.
“Take care, Emmy! You are sensitive, approbative, delicately organized;
your whole nature inclines you to give way and yield to the nature of
those around you. One little lone duck such as you, however
warm-blooded, light-hearted, cannot keep a whole pond from freezing.
While you have any influence, you must use it all to get John away from
these surroundings, where you can have him to yourself.”
“O, you know we are building our house; we shall go to housekeeping
soon.”
“Where? Close by, under the very guns of this fortress, where all your
housekeeping, all your little management, will be subject to daily
inspection.”
“But mamma never interferes, never advises,--unless I ask advice.”
“No, but she influences; she lives, she looks, she is there; and while
she is there, and while your home is within a stone’s throw, the old
spell will be on your husband, on your children, if you have any; you
will feel it in the air; it will constrain, it will sway you, it will
rule your house, it will bring up your children.”
“O no! never! never! I never could! I never will! If God should give me
a dear little child, I will not let it grow up in these hateful ways!”
“Then, Emmy, there will be a constant, still, undefined, but real
friction of your life-power from the silent grating of your wishes and
feelings on the cold, positive millstone of their opinion; it will be a
life-battle with a quiet, invisible, pervading spirit, who will never
show himself in fair fight, but who will be around you in the very air
you breathe, at your pillow when you lie down and when you rise. There
is so much in these friends of yours noble, wise, severely good,--their
aims are so high, their efficiency so great, their virtues so
many,--that they will act upon you with the force of a conscience,
subduing, drawing, insensibly constraining you into their moulds. They
have stronger wills, stronger natures than yours; and between the two
forces of your own nature and theirs you will be always oscillating, so
that you will never show what you can do, working either in your own way
or yet in theirs: your life will be a failure.”
“O Chris, why do you discourage me?”
“I am trying tonic treatment, Emily; I am showing you a real danger; I
am rousing you to flee from it. John is making money fast; there is no
reason why he should always remain buried in this town. Use your
influence as they do,--daily, hourly, constantly,--to predispose him to
take you to another sphere. Do not always shrink and yield; do not
conceal and assimilate and endeavor to persuade him and yourself that
you are happy; do not put the very best face to him on it all; do not
tolerate his relapses daily and hourly into his habitual, cold,
inexpressive manner; and don’t lay aside your own little impulsive,
out-spoken ways. Respect your own nature, and assert it; woo him, argue
with him; use all a woman’s weapons to keep him from falling back into
the old Castle Doubting where he lived till you let him out. Dispute
your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken for granted
without daily proof between lovers; cry down latent caloric in the
market; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is not enough,--that
the words spoken once, years ago, are not enough,--that love needs new
leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-trees, and new branches
to grow broader and wider, and new flowers at the root to cover the
ground.”
“O, but I have heard that there is no surer way to lose love than to be
exacting, and that it never comes for a woman’s reproaches.”
“All true as Gospel, Emmy. I am not speaking of reproaches, or of
unreasonable self-assertion, or of ill-temper,--you could not use any of
these forces, if you would, you poor little chick! I am speaking now of
the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred,--that
of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt.
Thoughtless, instinctive, unreasoning love and self-sacrifice, such as
many women long to bestow on husband and children, soil and lower the
very objects of their love. _You_ may grow saintly by self-sacrifice;
but do your husband and children grow saintly by accepting it without
return? I have seen a verse which says,--
‘They who kneel at woman’s shrine
Breathe on it as they bow.’
Is not this true of all unreasoning love and self-devotion? If we _let_
our friend become cold and selfish and exacting without a remonstrance,
we are no true lover, no true friend. Any good man soon learns to
discriminate between the remonstrance that comes from a woman’s love to
his soul, her concern for his honor, her anxiety for his moral
development, and the pettish cry which comes from her own personal
wants. It will be your own fault, if, for lack of anything you can do,
your husband relapses into these cold, undemonstrative habits which have
robbed his life of so much beauty and enjoyment. These dead, barren ways
of living are as unchristian as they are disagreeable; and you, as a
good little Christian sworn to fight heroically under Christ’s banner,
must make headway against this sort of family Antichrist, though it
comes with a show of superior sanctity and self-sacrifice. Remember,
dear, that the Master’s family had its outward tokens of love as well as
its inward life. The beloved leaned on His bosom; and the traitor could
not have had a sign for his treachery, had there not been a daily kiss
at meeting and parting with His children.”
“I am glad you have said all this,” said Emily, “because now I feel
stronger for it. It does not now seem so selfish for me to want what it
is better for John to give. Yes, I must seek what will be best for him.”
And so the little one, put on the track of self-sacrifice, began to see
her way clearer, as many little women of her sort do. Make them look on
self-assertion as one form of martyrdom, and they will come into it.
But, for all my eloquence on this evening, the house was built in the
selfsame spot as projected; and the family life went on, under the
shadow of Judge Evans’s elms, much as if I had not spoken. Emmy became
mother of two fine, lovely boys, and waxed dimmer and fainter; while
with her physical decay came increasing need of the rule in the
household of mamma and sisters, who took her up energetically on eagles’
wings, and kept her house, and managed her children: for what can be
done when a woman hovers half her time between life and death?
At last I spoke out to John, that the climate and atmosphere were too
severe for her who had become so dear to him,--to them all; and then
they consented that the change much talked of and urged, but always
opposed by the parents, should be made.
John bought a pretty cottage in our neighborhood, and brought his wife
and boys; and the effect of change of moral atmosphere verified all my
predictions. In a year we had our own blooming, joyous, impulsive little
Emily once more,--full of life, full of cheer, full of energy,--looking
to the ways of her household,--the merry companion of her growing
boys,--the blithe empress over her husband, who took to her genial sway
as in the old happy days of courtship. The nightmare was past, and John
was as joyous as any of us in his freedom. As Emmy said, he was turned
right side out for life; and we all admired the pattern. And that is the
end of my story.
And now for the moral,--and that is, that life consists of two
parts,--_Expression_ and _Repression_,--each of which has its solemn
duties. To love, joy, hope, faith, pity, belongs the duty of
_expression_: to anger, envy, malice, revenge, and all uncharitableness,
belongs the duty of _repression_.
Some very religious and moral people err by applying _repression_ to
both classes alike. They repress equally the expression of love and of
hatred, of pity and of anger. Such forget one great law, as true in the
moral world as in the physical,--that repression lessens and deadens.
Twice or thrice mowing will kill off the sturdiest crop of weeds; the
roots die for want of expression. A compress on a limb will stop its
growing; the surgeon knows this, and puts a tight bandage around a
tumor; but what if we put a tight bandage about the heart and lungs, as
some young ladies of my acquaintance do,--or bandage the feet, as they
do in China? And what if we bandage a nobler inner faculty, and wrap
_love_ in grave-clothes?
But again there are others, and their number is legion,--perhaps you and
I, reader, may know something of it in ourselves,--who have an
instinctive habit of repression in regard to all that is noblest and
highest within them, which they do not feel in their lower and more
unworthy nature.
It comes far easier to scold our friend in an angry moment than to say
how much we love, honor, and esteem him in a kindly mood. Wrath and
bitterness speak themselves and go with their own force; love is
shame-faced, looks shyly out of the window, lingers long at the
door-latch.
How much freer utterance among many good Christians have anger,
contempt, and censoriousness, than tenderness and love! _I hate_ is said
loud and with all our force. _I love_ is said with a hesitating voice
and blushing cheek.
In an angry mood we do an injury to a loving heart with good, strong,
free emphasis; but we stammer and hang back when our diviner nature
tells us to confess and ask pardon. Even when our heart is broken with
repentance, we haggle and linger long before we can
“Throw away the worser part of it.”
How many live a stingy and niggardly life in regard to their richest
inward treasures! They live with those they love dearly, whom a few more
words and deeds expressive of this love would make so much happier,
richer, and better; and they cannot, will not, turn the key and give it
out. People who in their very souls really do love, esteem, reverence,
almost worship each other, live a barren, chilly life side by side,
busy, anxious, preoccupied, letting their love go by as a matter of
course, a last year’s growth, with no present buds and blossoms.
Are there not sons and daughters who have parents living with them as
angels unawares,--husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, in whom the
material for a beautiful life lies locked away in unfruitful
silence,--who give time to everything but the cultivation and expression
of mutual love?
The time is coming, they think, in some far future, when they shall find
leisure to enjoy each other, to stop and rest side by side, to discover
to each other these hidden treasures which lie idle and unused.
Alas! time flies and death steals on, and we reiterate the complaint of
one in Scripture,--“It came to pass, while thy servant was busy hither
and thither, the man was gone.”
The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and
deeds left undone. “She never knew how I loved her.” “He never knew what
he was to me.” “I always meant to make more of our friendship.” “I did
not know what he was to me till he was gone.” Such words are the
poisoned arrows which cruel Death shoots backward at us from the door of
the sepulchre.
How much more we might make of our family life, of our friendships, if
every secret thought of love blossomed into a deed! We are not now
speaking merely of personal caresses. These may or may not be the best
language of affection. Many are endowed with a delicacy, a
fastidiousness of physical organization, which shrinks away from too
much of these, repelled and overpowered. But there are words and looks
and little observances, thoughtfulnesses, watchful little attentions,
which speak of love, which make it manifest, and there is scarce a
family that might not be richer in heart-wealth for more of them.
It is a mistake to suppose that relations must of course love each other
because they are relations. Love must be cultivated, and can be
increased by judicious culture, as wild fruits may double their bearing
under the hand of a gardener; and love can dwindle and die out by
neglect, as choice flower-seeds planted in poor soil dwindle and grow
single.
Two causes in our Anglo-Saxon nature prevent this easy faculty and flow
of expression which strike one so pleasantly in the Italian or the
French life: the dread of flattery, and a constitutional shyness.
“I perfectly longed to tell So-and-so how I admired her, the other day,”
says Miss X.
“And why in the world didn’t you tell her?”
“O, it would seem like flattery, you know.”
Now what is flattery?
Flattery is _insincere_ praise given from interested motives, not the
sincere utterance to a friend of what we deem good and lovely in him.
And so, for fear of nattering, these dreadfully sincere people go on
side by side with those they love and admire, giving them all the time
the impression of utter indifference. Parents are so afraid of exciting
pride and vanity in their children by the expression of their love and
approbation, that a child sometimes goes sad and discouraged by their
side, and learns with surprise, in some chance way, that they are proud
and fond of him. There are times when the open expression of a father’s
love would be worth more than church or sermon to a boy; and his father
cannot utter it, will not show it.
The other thing that represses the utterances of love is the
characteristic _shyness_ of the Anglo-Saxon blood. Oddly enough, a race
born of two demonstrative, out-spoken, nations--the German and the
French--has an habitual reserve that is like neither. There is a
powerlessness of utterance in our blood that we should fight against,
and struggle outward towards expression. We can educate ourselves to
it, if we know and feel the necessity; we can make it a Christian duty,
not only to love, but to be loving,--not only to be true friends, but to
_show_ ourselves friendly. We can make ourselves say the kind things
that rise in our hearts and tremble back on our lips,--do the gentle and
helpful deeds which we long to do and shrink back from; and, little by
little, it will grow easier,--the love spoken will bring back the answer
of love,--the kind deed will bring back a kind deed in return,--till the
hearts in the family-circle, instead of being so many frozen, icy
islands, shall be full of warm airs and echoing bird-voices answering
back and forth with a constant melody of love.
IV.
PERSISTENCE.
My little foxes are interesting little beasts; and I only hope my reader
will not get tired of my charming menagerie before I have done showing
him their nice points. He must recollect there are seven of them, and as
yet we have shown up only three; so let him have patience.
As before stated, little foxes are the little pet sins of us educated
good Christians, who hope that we are above and far out of sight of
stealing, lying, and those other gross evils against which we pray every
Sunday, when the Ten Commandments are read. They are not generally
considered of dignity enough to be fired at from the pulpit; they seem
to us too trifling to be remembered in church; they are like the red
spiders on plants,--too small for the perception of the naked eye, and
only to be known by the shrivelling and dropping of leaf after leaf that
ought to be green and flourishing.
I have another little fox in my eye, who is most active and most
mischievous in despoiling the vines of domestic happiness,--in fact, who
has been guilty of destroying more grapes than anybody knows of. His
name I find it difficult to give with exactness. In my enumeration I
called him _Self-Will_; another name for him--perhaps a better
one--might be _Persistence_.
Like many another, this fault is the over-action of a most necessary and
praiseworthy quality. The power of firmness is given to man as the very
granite foundation of life. Without it, there would be nothing
accomplished; all human plans would be unstable as water on an inclined
plane. In every well-constituted nature there must be a power of
tenacity, a gift of perseverance of will; and that man might not be
without a foundation for so needful a property, the Creator has laid it
in an animal faculty, which he possesses in common with the brutes.
The animal power of firmness is a brute force, a matter of brain and
spinal cord, differing in different animals. The force by which a
bulldog holds on to an antagonist, the persistence with which a mule
will plant his four feet and set himself against blows and menaces, are
good examples of the pure animal phase of a property which exists in
human beings, and forms the foundation for that heroic endurance, for
that perseverance, which carries on all the great and noble enterprises
of life.
The domestic fault we speak of is the wild, uncultured growth of this
faculty, the instinctive action of firmness uncontrolled by reason or
conscience,--in common parlance, the being “_set in one’s way_.” It is
the _animal_ instinct of being “set in one’s way” which we mean by
self-will or persistence; and in domestic life it does the more mischief
from its working as an instinct unwatched by reason and unchallenged by
conscience.
In that pretty new cottage which you see on yonder knoll are a pair of
young people just in the midst of that happy bustle which attends the
formation of a first home in prosperous circumstances, and with all the
means of making it charming and agreeable. Carpenters, upholsterers, and
artificers await their will; and there remains for them only the
pleasant task of arranging and determining where all their pretty and
agreeable things shall be placed. Our Hero and Leander are decidedly
nice people, who have been through all the proper stages of being in
love with each other for the requisite and suitable time. They have
written each other a letter every day for two years, beginning with “My
dearest,” and ending with “Your own,” etc.; they have sent each other
flowers and rings and locks of hair; they have worn each other’s
pictures on their hearts; they have spent hours and hours talking over
all subjects under the sun, and are convinced that never was there such
sympathy of souls, such unanimity of opinion, such a just, reasonable,
perfect foundation for mutual esteem.
Now it is quite true that people may have a perfect agreement and
sympathy in their higher intellectual nature,--may like the same books,
quote the same poetry, agree in the same principles, be united in the
same religion,--and nevertheless, when they come together in the
simplest affair of every-day business, may find themselves jarring and
impinging upon each other at every step, simply because there are to
each person, in respect of daily personal habits and personal likes and
dislikes, a thousand little individualities with which reason has
nothing to do, which are not subjects for the use of logic, and to which
they never think of applying the power of religion,--which can only be
set down as the positive ultimate facts of existence with two people.
Suppose a blue-jay courts and wins and weds a Baltimore oriole. During
courtship there may have been delightful sympathetic conversation on the
charm of being free birds, the felicity of soaring in the blue summer
air. Mr. Jay may have been all humility and all ecstasy in comparing the
discordant screech of his own note with the warbling tenderness of Miss
Oriole. But, once united, the two commence business relations. He is
firmly convinced that a nest built among the reeds of a marsh is the
only reasonable nest for a bird; she is positive that she should die
there in a month of damp and rheumatism. She never heard of going to
housekeeping in anything but a nice little pendulous bag swinging down
from under the branches of a breezy elm; he is sure he should have water
on the brain before summer was over, from constant vertigo, in such
swaying, unsteady quarters,--he would be a sea-sick blue-jay on land,
and he cannot think of it. She knows now he don’t love her, or he never
would think of shutting her up in an old mouldy nest where she is sure
she shall have the chills; and _he_ knows she doesn’t love him, or she
never would want to make him uncomfortable all his days by tilting and
swinging him about as no decent bird ought to be swung. Both are
dead-set in their own way and opinion; and how is either to be convinced
that the way which seemeth right unto the other is not best? Nature
knows this, and therefore, in her feathered tribes, blue-jays do not
mate with orioles; and so bird-housekeeping goes on in peace.
But men and women as diverse in their physical tastes and habits as
blue-jays and orioles are wooing and wedding every day, and coming to
the business of nest-building, _alias_ housekeeping, with predilections
as violent, and as incapable of any logical defence, as the oriole’s
partiality for a swing-nest and the jay’s preference of a nest among the
reeds.
Our Hero and Leander, there, who are arranging their cottage to-day, are
examples just in point. They have both of them been only
children,--both the idols of circles where they have been universally
deferred to. Each in his or her own circle has been looked up to as a
model of good taste, and of course each has the habit of exercising and
indulging very distinct personal tastes. They truly, deeply esteem,
respect, and love each other, and for the very best of reasons,--because
there are sympathies of the very highest kind between them. Both are
generous and affectionate,--both are highly cultured in intellect and
taste,--both are earnestly religious; and yet, with all this, let me
tell you that the first year of their married life will be worthy to be
recorded as _a year of battles_. Yes, these friends so true, these
lovers so ardent, these individuals in themselves so admirable, cannot
come into the intimate relations of life without an effervescence as
great as that of an acid and alkali; and it will be impossible to decide
which is most in fault, the acid or the alkali, both being in their way
of the very best quality.
The reason of it all is, that both are intensely “_set in their way_,”
and the ways of no two human beings are altogether coincident. Both of
them have the most sharply defined, exact tastes and preferences. In the
simplest matter both have _a way_,--an exact way,--which seems to be
dear to them as life’s blood. In the simplest appetite or taste they
know exactly what they want, and cannot, by any argument, persuasion, or
coaxing, be made to want anything else.
For example, this morning dawns bright upon them, as she, in her tidy
morning wrapper and trimly laced boots, comes stepping over the bales
and boxes which are discharged on the verandah; while he, for joy of his
new acquisition, can hardly let her walk on her own pretty feet, and is
making every fond excuse to lift her over obstacles and carry her into
her new dwelling in triumph.
Carpets are put down, the floors glow under the hands of obedient
workmen, and now the furniture is being wheeled in.
“Put the piano in the bow-window,” says the lady.
“No, not in the bow-window,” says the gentleman.
“Why, my dear, of course it must go in the bow-window. How awkward it
would look anywhere else! I have always seen pianos in bow-windows.”
“My love, certainly you would not think of spoiling that beautiful
prospect from the bow-window by blocking it up with the piano. The
proper place is just here, in the corner of the room. Now try it.”
“My dear, I think it looks dreadfully there; it spoils the appearance of
the room.”
“Well, for my part, my love, I think the appearance of the room would be
spoiled, if you filled up the bow-window. Think what a lovely place that
would be to sit in!”
“Just as if we couldn’t sit there behind the piano, if we wanted to!”
says the lady.
“But then, how much more ample and airy the room looks as you open the
door, and see through the bow-window down that little glen, and that
distant peep of the village-spire!”
“But I never could be reconciled to the piano standing in the corner in
that way,” says the lady. “_I insist_ upon it, it ought to stand in the
bow-window: it’s the way mamma’s stands, and Aunt Jane’s, and Mrs.
Wilcox’s; everybody has their piano so.”
“If it comes to _insisting_,” says the gentleman, “it strikes me that is
a game two can play at.”
“Why, my dear, you know a lady’s parlor is her own ground.”
“Not a married lady’s parlor, I imagine. I believe it is at least
equally her husband’s, as he expects to pass a good portion of his time
there.”
“But I don’t think you ought to insist on an arrangement that really is
disagreeable to me,” says the lady.
“And I don’t think you ought to insist on an arrangement that is really
disagreeable to me,” says the gentleman.
And now Hero’s cheeks flush, and the spirit burns within, as she says,--
“Well, if you insist upon it I suppose it must be as you say; but I
shall never take any pleasure in playing on it”; and Hero sweeps from
the apartment, leaving the victor very unhappy in his conquest.
He rushes after her, and finds her up-stairs sitting disconsolate and
weeping on a packing-box.
“Now, Hero, how silly! Do have it your own way. I’ll give it up.”
“No,--let it be as you say. I forgot that it was a wife’s duty to
submit.”
“Nonsense, Hero! Do talk like a rational woman. Don’t let us quarrel
like children.”
“But it’s so evident that I was in the right.”
“My dear, I cannot concede that you were in the right; but I am willing
it should be as you say.”
“Now I perfectly wonder, Leander, that you don’t see how awkward your
way is. It would make me nervous every time I came into the room, and it
would be so dark in that corner that I never could see the notes.”
“And I wonder, Hero, that a woman of your taste don’t see how shutting
up that bow-window spoils the parlor. It’s the very prettiest feature of
the room.”
And so round and round they go, stating and restating their arguments,
both getting more and more nervous and combative, both declaring
themselves perfectly ready to yield the point as an oppressive exaction,
but to do battle for their own opinion as right and reason,--the animal
instinct of self-will meanwhile rising and rising and growing stronger
and stronger on both sides. But meanwhile in the heat of argument some
side-issues and personal reflections fly out like splinters in the
shivering of lances. He tells her, in his heat, that her notions are
formed from deference to models in fashionable life, and that she has
no idea of adaptation,--and she tells him that he is domineering, and
dictatorial, and wanting to have everything his own way; and in fine,
this battle is fought off and on through the day, with occasional
armistices of kisses and makings-up,--treacherous truces, which are all
broken up by the fatal words, “My dear, after all, you must admit _I_
was in the right,” which of course is the signal to fight the whole
battle over again.
One such prolonged struggle is the parent of many lesser ones,--the
aforenamed splinters of injurious remark and accusation, which flew out
in the heat of argument, remaining and festering and giving rise to
nervous soreness; yet, where there is at the foundation real, genuine
love, and a good deal of it, the pleasure of making up so balances the
pain of the controversy that the two do not perceive exactly what they
are doing, nor suspect that so deep and wide a love as theirs can be
seriously affected by causes so insignificant.
But the cause of difficulty in both, the silent, unwatched, intense
power of self-will in trifles, is all the while precipitating them into
new encounters. For example, in a bright hour between the showers, Hero
arranges for her Leander a repast of peace and good-will, and compounds
for him a salad which is a _chef d’œuvre_ among salads. Leander is also
bright and propitious; but after tasting the salad, he pushes it
silently away.
“My dear, you don’t like your salad.”
“No, my dear; I never eat anything with salad oil in it.”
“Not eat salad oil! How absurd! I never heard of a salad without oil.”
And the lady looks disturbed.
“But, my dear, as I tell you, I never take it. I prefer simple sugar and
vinegar.”
“Sugar and vinegar! Why, Leander, I’m astonished! How very _bourgeois_!
You must really try to like my salad"--(spoken in a coaxing tone).
“My dear, I _never_ try to like anything new, I am satisfied with my old
tastes.”
“Well, Leander, I must say that is very ungracious and disobliging of
you.”
“Why any more than for you to annoy me by forcing on me what I don’t
like?”
“But you would like it, if you would only try. People never like olives
till they have eaten three or four, and then they become passionately
fond of them.”
“Then I think they are very silly to go through all that trouble, when
there are enough things that they do like.”
“Now, Leander, I don’t think that seems amiable or pleasant at all. I
think we ought to try to accommodate ourselves to the tastes of our
friends.”
“Then, my dear, suppose you try to like your salad with sugar and
vinegar.”
“But it’s so _gauche_ and unfashionable! Did you ever hear of a salad
made with sugar and vinegar on a table in good society?”
“My mother’s table, I believe, was good society, and I learned to like
it there. The truth is, Hero, for a sensible woman, you are too fond of
mere fashionable and society notions.”
“Yes, you told me that last week, and I think it was very unjust,--_very
unjust, indeed_"--(uttered with emphasis).
“No more unjust than your telling me that I was dictatorial and
obstinate.”
“Well, now, Leander, dear, you must confess that you are rather
obstinate.”
“I don’t see the proof.”
“You insist on your own ways and opinions so, heaven and earth won’t
turn you.”
“Do I insist on mine more than you on yours?”
“Certainly, you do.”
“I don’t think so.”
Hero casts up her eyes and repeats with expression,--
“O, wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as others see us!”
“Precisely,” says Leander. “I would that prayer were answered in your
case, my dear.”
“I think you take pleasure in provoking me,” says the lady.
“My dear, how silly and childish all this is!” says the gentleman. “Why
can’t we let each other alone?”
“You began it.”
“No, my dear, begging your pardon, I did not.”
“Certainly, Leander, you did.”
Now a conversation of this kind may go on hour after hour, as long as
the respective parties have breath and strength, both becoming secretly
more and more “set in their way.” On both sides is the consciousness
that they might end it at once by a very simple concession.
She might say,--“Well, dear, you shall always have your salad as you
like”; and he might say,--“My dear, I will try to like your salad, if
you care much about it”; and if either of them would utter one of these
sentences, the other would soon follow. Either would give up, if the
other would set the example; but as it is, they remind us of nothing so
much as two cows that we have seen standing with locked horns in a
meadow, who can neither advance nor recede an inch. It is a mere
deadlock of the animal instinct of firmness; reason, conscience,
religion, have nothing to do with it.
The questions debated in this style by our young couple were
surprisingly numerous; as, for example, whether their favorite copy of
Turner should hang in the parlor or in the library,--whether their pet
little landscape should hang against the wall, or be placed on an
easel,--whether the bust of the Venus de Milos should stand on the
marble table in the hall, or on a bracket in the library; all of which
points were debated with a breadth of survey, a richness of imagery, a
vigor of discussion, that would be perfectly astonishing to any one who
did not know how much two very self-willed argumentative people might
find to say on any point under heaven. Everything in classical
antiquity,--everything in Kugler’s “Hand-Book of Painting,"--every
opinion of living artists,--besides questions social, moral, and
religious,--all mingled in the grand _mêlée_: because there is nothing
in creation that is not somehow connected with everything else.
Dr. Johnson has said,--“There are a thousand familiar disputes which
reason never can decide; questions that elude investigation, and make
logic ridiculous; cases where something must be done, and where little
can be said.”
With all deference to the great moralist, we must say that this
statement argues a very limited knowledge of the resources of talk
possessed by two very cultivated and very self-willed persons fairly
pitted against each other in practical questions; the logic may indeed
be ridiculous, but such people as our Hero and Leander find no cases
under the sun where something is to be done, yet where little can be
said. And these wretched wranglings, this interminable labyrinth of
petty disputes, waste and crumble away that high ideal of truth and
tenderness, which the real, deep sympathies and actual worth of their
characters entitled them to form. Their married life is not what they
expected; at times they are startled by the reflection that they have
somehow grown unlovely to each other; and yet, if Leander goes away to
pass a week, and thinks of his Hero in the distance, he can compare no
other woman to her; and the days seem long and the house empty to Hero
while he is gone, both wonder at themselves when they look over their
petty bickerings, but neither knows exactly how to catch the little fox
that spoils their vines.
It is astonishing how much we think about ourselves, yet to how little
purpose,--how very clever people will talk and wonder about themselves
and each other, and yet go on year after year, not knowing how to use
either themselves or each other,--not having as much practical
philosophy in the matter of their own characters and that of their
friends as they have in respect of the screws of their gas-fixtures or
the management of their water-pipes.
“But _I_ won’t have any such scenes with _my_ wife,” says Don Positivo.
“I won’t marry one of your clever women; they are always positive and
disagreeable. _I_ look for a wife of a gentle and yielding nature, that
shall take her opinions from me, and accommodate her tastes to mine.”
And so Don Positivo goes and marries a pretty little pink-and-white
concern, so lisping and soft and delicate that he is quite sure she
cannot have a will of her own. She is the moon of his heavens, to shine
only by his reflected light.
We would advise our gentlemen friends who wish to enjoy the felicity of
having their own way not to try the experiment with a pretty fool; for
the obstinacy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinacy of
folly and inanity.
Let our friend once get in the seat opposite to him at table a pretty
creature who cries for the moon, and insists that he don’t love her
because he doesn’t get it for her; and in vain may he display his
superior knowledge of astronomy, and prove to her that the moon is not
to be got. She listens with her head on one side, and after he has
talked himself quite out of breath, repeats the very same sentence she
began the discussion with, without variation or addition.
If she wants darling Johnny taken away from school, because cruel
teachers will not give up the rules of the institution for his pleasure,
in vain does Don Positivo, in the most select and superior English,
enlighten her on the necessity of habits of self-control and order for a
boy,--the impossibility that a teacher should make exceptions for their
particular darling,--the absolute, perishing need that the boy should
begin to do something. She hears him all through, and then says, “I
don’t know anything about that. I know what I want; I want Johnny taken
away.” And so she weeps, sulks, storms, entreats, lies awake nights, has
long fits of sick-headache,--in short, shows that a pretty animal,
without reason or cultivation, can be, in her way, quite as formidable
an antagonist as the most clever of her sex.
Leander can sometimes vanquish his Hero in fair fight by the weapons of
good logic, because she is a woman capable of appreciating reason, and
able to feel the force of the considerations he adduces; and when he
does vanquish and carry her captive by his bow and spear, he feels that
he has gained a victory over no ignoble antagonist, and he becomes a
hero in his own eyes. Though a woman of much will, still she is a woman
of much reason; and if he has many vexations with her pertinacity, he is
never without hope in her good sense; but alas for him whose wife has
only the animal instinct of firmness, without any development of the
judgment or reasoning faculties! The conflicts with a woman whom a man
respects and admires are often extremely trying; but the conflicts with
one whom he cannot help despising, become in the end simply disgusting.
But the inquiry now arises, What shall be done with all the questions
Dr. Johnson speaks of, which reason cannot decide, which elude
investigation, and make logic ridiculous,--cases where something must be
done, and where little can be said?
Read Mrs. Ellis’s “Wives of England,” and you have one solution of the
problem. The good women of England are there informed that there is to
be no discussion, that everything in the _ménage_ is to follow the rule
of the lord, and that the wife has but one hope, namely, that grace may
be given him to know exactly what his own will is. “_L’état, c’est
moi_,” is the lesson which every English husband learns of Mrs. Ellis,
and we should judge from the pictures of English novels that this
“awful right divine” is insisted on in detail in domestic life.
Miss Edgeworth makes her magnificent General Clarendon talk about his
“commands” to his accomplished and elegant wife; and he rings the
parlor-bell with such an air, calls up and interrogates trembling
servants with such awful majesty, and lays about him generally in so
very military and tremendous a style, that we are not surprised that
poor little Cecilia is frightened into lying, being half out of her wits
in terror of so very martial a husband.
During his hours of courtship he majestically informs her mother that he
never could consent to receive as _his_ wife any woman who has had
another attachment; and so the poor puss, like a naughty girl, conceals
a little schoolgirl flirtation of bygone days, and thus gives rise to
most agonizing and tragic scenes with her terrible lord, who petrifies
her one morning by suddenly drawing the bed-curtains and flapping an old
love-letter in her eyes, asking, in tones of suppressed thunder,
“Cecilia, is this your writing?”
The more modern female novelists of England give us representations of
their view of the right divine no less stringent. In a very popular
story, called “Agatha’s Husband,” the plot is as follows. A man marries
a beautiful girl with a large fortune. Before the marriage, he discovers
that his brother, who has been guardian of the estate, has fraudulently
squandered the property, so that it can only be retrieved by the
strictest economy. For the sake of getting her heroine into a situation
to illustrate her moral, the authoress now makes her hero give a solemn
promise not to divulge to his wife or to any human being the fraud by
which she suffers.
The plot of the story then proceeds to show how very badly the young
wife behaves when her husband takes her to mean lodgings, deprives her
of wonted luxuries and comforts, and obstinately refuses to give any
kind of sensible reason for his conduct. Instead of looking up to him
with blind faith and unquestioning obedience, following his directions
without inquiry, and believing not only without evidence, but against
apparent evidence, that he is the soul of honor and wisdom, this
perverse Agatha murmurs, complains, thinks herself very ill-used, and
occasionally is even wicked enough, in a very mild way, to say
so,--whereat her husband looks like a martyr and suffers in silence; and
thus we are treated to a volume of mutual distresses, which are at last
ended by the truth coming out, the abused husband mounting the throne in
glory, and the penitent wife falling in the dust at his feet, and
confessing what a wretch she has been all along to doubt him.
The authoress of “Jane Eyre” describes the process of courtship in much
the same terms as one would describe the breaking of a horse. Shirley is
contumacious and self-willed, and Moore, her lover and tutor, gives her
“_Le Cheval dompté_” for a French lesson, as a gentle intimation of the
work he has in hand in paying her his addresses; and after long
struggling against his power, when at last she consents to his love, he
addresses her thus, under the figure of a very fierce leopardess:--
“Tame or wild, fierce or subdued, you are _mine_.”
And she responds:--
“I am glad I know my keeper and am used to him. Only his voice will I
follow, only his hand shall manage me, only at his feet will I repose.”
The accomplished authoress of “Nathalie” represents the struggles of a
young girl engaged to a man far older than herself, extremely dark and
heroic, fond of behaving in a very unaccountable manner, and declaring,
nevertheless, in awful and mysterious tones, that he has such a passion
for being believed in, that, if any one of his friends, under the most
suspicious circumstances, admits _one doubt_ of his honor, all will be
over between them forever.
After establishing his power over Nathalie fully, and amusing himself
quietly for a time with the contemplation of her perplexities and
anxieties, he at last unfolds to her the mysterious counsels of his will
by declaring to another of her lovers, in her presence, that he “has the
intention of asking this young lady to become his wife.” During the
engagement, however, he contrives to disturb her tranquillity by
insisting prematurely on the right divine of husbands, and, as she
proves fractious, announces to her, that, much as he loves her, he sees
no prospect of future happiness in their union, and that they had better
part.
The rest of the story describes the struggles and anguish of the two,
who pass through a volume of distresses, he growing more cold, proud,
severe, and misanthropic than ever, all of which is supposed to be the
fault of naughty Miss Nathalie, who might have made a saint of him,
could she only have found her highest pleasure in letting him have his
own way. Her conscience distresses her; it is all her fault; at last,
worn out in the strife, she resolves to be a good girl, goes to his
library, finds him alone, and, in spite of an insulting reception,
humbles herself at his feet, gives up all her naughty pride, begs to be
allowed to wait on him as a handmaid, and is rewarded by his graciously
announcing, that, since she will stay with him at all events, she _may_
stay as his wife; and the story leaves her in the last sentence sitting
in what we are informed is the only true place of happiness for a woman,
at her husband’s feet.
This is the solution which the most cultivated women of England give of
the domestic problem.
According to these fair interpreters of English ideas, the British lion
on his own domestic hearth, standing in awful majesty with his back to
the fire and his hands under his coat-tails, can be supposed to have no
such disreputable discussions as we have described; since his partner,
as Miss Bronté says, has learned to know her keeper, and her place at
his feet, and can conceive no happiness so great as hanging the picture
and setting the piano exactly as he likes.
Of course this will be met with a general shriek of horror on the part
of our fair republican friends, and an equally general disclaimer on the
part of our American gentlemen, who, so far as we know, would be quite
embarrassed by the idea of assuming any such pronounced position at the
fireside.
The genius of American institutions is not towards a _display_ of
authority. All needed authority exists among us, but exists silently,
with as little external manifestation as possible.
Our President is but a fellow-citizen, personally the equal of other
citizens. We obey him because we have chosen him, and because we find it
convenient, in regulating our affairs, to have one final appeal and one
deciding voice.
The position in which the Bible and the marriage service place the
husband in the family amounts to no more. He is the head of the family
in all that relates to its material interests, its legal relations, its
honor and standing in society; and no true woman who respects herself
would any more hesitate to promise to yield to him this position and the
deference it implies than an officer of state to yield to the President.
But because Mr. Lincoln is officially above Mr. Seward, it does not
follow that there can be nothing between them but absolute command on
the one part and prostrate submission on the other; neither does it
follow that the superior claims in all respects to regulate the affairs
and conduct of the inferior. There are still wide spheres of individual
freedom, as there are in the case of husband and wife; and no sensible
man but would feel himself ridiculous in entering another’s proper
sphere with the voice of authority.
The inspired declaration, that “the husband is the head of the wife,
even as Christ is the head of the Church,” is certainly to be qualified
by the evident points of difference in the subjects spoken of. It
certainly does not mean that any man shall be invested with the rights
of omnipotence and omniscience, but simply that in the family state he
is the head and protector, even as in the Church is the Saviour. It is
merely the announcement of a great natural law of society which obtains
through all the tribes and races of men,--a great and obvious fact of
human existence.
The silly and senseless reaction against this idea in some otherwise
sensible women is, I think, owing to the kind of extravagances and
overstatements to which we have alluded. It is as absurd to cavil at the
word _obey_ in the marriage ceremony as for a military officer to set
himself against the etiquette of the army, or a man to refuse the
freeman’s oath.
Two young men every way on a footing of equality and friendship may be
one of them a battalion-commander and the other a staff-officer. It
would be alike absurd for the one to take airs about not obeying a man
every way his equal, and for the other to assume airs of lordly
dictation out of the sphere of his military duties. The mooting of the
question of marital authority between two well-bred, well-educated
Christian people of the nineteenth century is no less absurd.
While the husband has a certain power confided to him for the support
and maintenance of the family, and for the preservation of those
relations which involve its good name and well-being before the world,
he has no claim to an authoritative exertion of will in reference to the
little personal tastes and habits of the interior. He has no divine
right to require that everything shall be arranged to please him, at the
expense of his wife’s preferences and feelings, any more than if he were
not the head of the household. In a thousand indifferent matters which
do not touch the credit and respectability of the family, he is just as
much bound sometimes to give up his own will and way for the comfort of
his wife as she is in certain other matters to submit to his decisions.
In a large number of cases the husband and wife stand as equal human
beings before God, and the indulgence of unchecked and inconsiderate
self-will on either side is a sin.
It is my serious belief that writings such as we have been considering
do harm both to men and women, by insensibly inspiring in the one an
idea of a licensed prerogative of selfishness and self-will, and in the
other an irrational and indiscreet servility.
Is it any benefit to a man to find in the wife of his bosom the
flatterer of his egotism, the acquiescent victim of his little selfish
exactions, to be nursed and petted and cajoled in all his faults and
fault-findings, and to see everybody falling prostrate before his will
in the domestic circle? Is this the true way to make him a manly and
Christ-like man? It is my belief that many so-called good wives have
been accessory to making their husbands very bad Christians.
However, then, the little questions of difference in every-day life are
to be disposed of between two individuals, it is in the worst possible
taste and policy to undertake to settle them by mere authority. All
romance, all poetry, all beauty are over forever with a couple between
whom the struggle of mere authority has begun. No, there is no way out
of difficulties of this description but by the application, on both
sides, of good sense and religion to the little differences of life.
A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that
_setness in trifles_ which is the result of the unwatched instinct of
self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.
Every man and every woman, in their self-training and self-culture,
should study the art of _giving up in little things_ with a good grace.
The charm of polite society is formed by that sort of freedom and
facility in all the members of a circle which makes each one pliable to
the influences of the others, and sympathetic to slide into the moods
and tastes of others without a jar.
In courteous and polished circles, there are no stiff railroad-tracks,
cutting straight through everything, and grating harsh thunders all
along their course, but smooth, meandering streams, tranquilly bending
hither and thither to every undulation of the flowery banks. What makes
the charm of polite society would make no less the charm of domestic
life; but it can come only by watchfulness and self-discipline in each
individual.
Some people have much more to struggle with in this way than others.
Nature has made them precise and exact. They are punctilious in their
hours, rigid in their habits, pained by any deviation from regular rule.
Now Nature is always perversely ordering that men and women of just
this disposition should become desperately enamored of their exact
opposites. The man of rules and formulas and hours has his heart carried
off by a gay, careless little chit, who never knows the day of the
month, tears up the newspaper, loses the door-key, and makes curl-papers
out of the last bill; or, _per contra_, our exact and precise little
woman, whose belongings are like the waxen cells of a bee, gives her
heart to some careless fellow, who enters her sanctum in muddy boots,
upsets all her little nice household divinities whenever he is going on
a hunting or fishing bout, and can see no manner of sense in the
discomposure she feels in the case.
What can such couples do, if they do not adopt the compromise of reason
and sense,--if each arms his or her own peculiarities with the back
force of persistent self-will, and runs them over the territories of the
other?
A sensible man and woman, finding themselves thus placed, can govern
themselves by a just philosophy, and, instead of carrying on a
life-battle, can modify their own tastes and requirements, turn their
eyes from traits which do not suit them to those which do, resolving, at
all events, however reasonable be the taste or propensity which they
sacrifice, to give up all rather than have domestic strife.
There is one form which persistency takes that is peculiarly trying: I
mean that persistency of opinion which deems it necessary to stop and
raise an argument in self-defence on the slightest personal criticism.
John tells his wife that she is half an hour late with her breakfast
this morning, and she indignantly denies it.
“But look at my watch!”
“Your watch isn’t right.”
“I set it by railroad time.”
“Well, that was a week ago; that watch of yours always gains.”
“No, my dear, you’re mistaken.”
“Indeed I’m not. Did I not hear you telling Mr. B---- about it?”
“My dear, that was a year ago,--before I had it cleaned.”
“How can you say so, John? It was only a month ago.”
“My dear, you are mistaken.”
And so the contest goes on, each striving for the last word.
This love of the last word has made more bitterness in families and
spoiled more Christians than it is worth. A thousand little differences
of this kind would drop to the ground, if either party would let them
drop. Suppose John is mistaken in saying breakfast is late,--suppose
that fifty of the little criticisms which we make on one another are
well-or ill-founded, are they worth a discussion? Are they worth
ill-tempered words, such as are almost sure to grow out of a discussion?
Are they worth throwing away peace and love for? Are they worth the
destruction of the only fair ideal left on earth,--a quiet, happy home?
Better let the most unjust statements pass in silence than risk one’s
temper in a discussion upon them.
Discussions, assuming the form of warm arguments, are never pleasant
ingredients of domestic life, never safe recreations between near
friends. They are, generally speaking, mere unsuspected vents for
self-will, and the cases are few where they do anything more than to
make both parties more positive in their own way than they were before.
A calm comparison of opposing views, a fair statement of reasons on
either side, may be valuable; but when warmth and heat and love of
victory and pride of opinion come in, good temper and good manners are
too apt to step out.
And now Christopher, having come to the end of his subject, pauses for a
sentence to close with. There are a few lines of a poet that sum up so
beautifully all he has been saying that he may be pardoned for closing
with them.
“Alas! how light a cause may move
Dissension between hearts that love;
Hearts that the world has vainly tried,
And sorrow but more closely tied;
That stood the storm when waves were rough,
Yet in a sunny hour fall off,
Like ships that have gone down at sea
When heaven was all tranquillity!
A something light as air, a look,
A word unkind, or wrongly taken,--
O, love that tempests never shook,
A breath, a touch like this hath shaken!
For ruder words will soon rush in
To spread the breach that words begin,
And eyes forget the gentle ray
They wore in courtship’s smiling day,
And voices lose the tone which shed
A tenderness round all they said,--
Till, fast declining, one by one,
The sweetnesses of love are gone,
And hearts so lately mingled seem
Like broken clouds, or like the stream,
That, smiling, left the mountain-brow
As though its waters ne’er could sever,
Yet, ere it reach the plain below,
Breaks into floods that part forever.”
V.
INTOLERANCE.
“And what are you going to preach about this month, Mr. Crowfield?”
“I am going to give a sermon on _Intolerance_, Mrs. Crowfield.”
“Religious intolerance?”
“No,--domestic and family and educational intolerance,--one of the seven
deadly sins on which I am preaching,--one of ‘the foxes.’”
* * * * *
PEOPLE are apt to talk as if all the intolerance in life were got up and
expended in the religious world; whereas religious intolerance is only a
small branch of the radical, strong, all-pervading intolerance of human
nature.
Physicians are quite as intolerant as theologians. They never have had
the power of burning at the stake for medical opinions, but they
certainly have shown the will. Politicians are intolerant. Philosophers
are intolerant, especially those who pique themselves on liberal
opinions. Painters and sculptors are intolerant. And housekeepers are
intolerant, virulently denunciatory concerning any departures from their
particular domestic creed.
Mrs. Alexander Exact, seated at her domestic altar, gives homilies on
the degeneracy of modern housekeeping equal to the lamentations of Dr.
Holdfast as to the falling off from the good old faith.
“Don’t tell me about pillow-cases made without felling,” says Mrs.
Alexander; “it’s slovenly and shiftless. I wouldn’t have such a
pillow-case in my house any more than I’d have vermin.”
“But,” says a trembling young housekeeper, conscious of unfelled
pillow-cases at home, “don’t you think, Mrs. Alexander, that some of
these old traditions might be dispensed with? It really is not necessary
to do all the work that has been done so thoroughly and exactly,--to
double-stitch every wristband, fell every seam, count all the threads of
gathers, and take a stitch to every gather. It makes beautiful sewing,
to be sure; but when a woman has a family of little children and a small
income, if all her sewing is to be kept up in this perfect style, she
wears her life out in stitching. Had she not better slight a little, and
get air and exercise?”
“Don’t tell me about air and exercise! What did my grandmother do? Why,
she did all her own work, and made grandfather’s ruffled shirts besides,
with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I
warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate
creatures.”
“But, my dear Madam, look at poor Mrs. Evans, over the way, with her
pale face and her eight little ones.”
“Miserable manager,” said Mrs. Alexander. “If she’d get up at five
o’clock the year round, as I do, she’d find time enough to do things
properly, and be the better for it.”
“But, my dear Madam, Mrs. Evans is a very delicately organized, nervous
woman.”
“Nervous! Don’t tell me! Every woman now-a-days is nervous. She can’t
get up in the morning, because she’s nervous. She can’t do her sewing
decently, because she’s nervous. Why, I might have been as nervous as
she is, if I’d have petted and coddled myself as she does. But I get up
early, take a walk in the fresh air of a mile or so before breakfast,
and come home feeling the better for it. I do all my own sewing,--never
put out a stitch; and I flatter myself my things are made as they ought
to be. I always make my boys’ shirts and Mr. Exact’s, and they are made
as shirts ought to be,--and yet I find plenty of time for calling,
shopping, business, and company. It only requires management and
resolution.”
“It is perfectly wonderful, to be sure, Mrs. Exact, to see all that you
do; but don’t you get very tired sometimes?”
“No, not often. I remember, though, the week before last Christmas, I
made and baked eighteen pies and ten loaves of cake in one day, and I
was really quite worn out; but I didn’t give way to it. I told Mr. Exact
I thought it would rest me to take a drive into New York and attend the
Sanitary Fair; and so we did. I suppose Mrs. Evans would have thought
she must go to bed and coddle herself for a month.”
“But, dear Mrs. Exact, when a woman is kept awake nights by crying
babies--”
“There’s no need of having crying babies; my babies never cried; it’s
just as you begin with children. I might have had to be up and down
every hour of the night with mine, just as Mrs. Evans does; but I knew
better. I used to take ’em up about ten o’clock, and feed and make ’em
all comfortable; and that was the last of ’em, till I was ready to get
up in the morning. I never lost a night’s sleep with any of mine.”
“Not when they were teething?”
“No. I knew how to manage that. I used to lance their gums myself, and I
never had any trouble: it’s all in management. I weaned ’em all myself,
too: there’s no use in having any fuss in weaning children.”
“Mrs. Exact, you are a wonderful manager; but it would be impossible to
bring up all babies so.”
“You’ll never make me believe that: people only need to begin right. I’m
sure I’ve had a trial of eight.”
“But there’s that one baby of Mrs. Evans’s makes more trouble than all
your eight. It cries every night so that somebody has to be up walking
with it; it wears out all the nurses, and keeps poor Mrs. Evans sick all
the time.”
“Not the least need of it; nothing but shiftless management. Suppose I
had allowed my children to be walked with; I might have had terrible
times, too; but I began right. I set down my foot that they should lie
still, and they did; and if they cried, I never lighted a candle, or
took ’em up, or took any kind of notice of it; and so, after a little,
they went off to sleep. Babies very soon find out where they can take
advantage, and where they can’t. It’s nothing but temper makes babies
cry; and if I couldn’t hush ’em any other way, I should give ’em a few
good smart slaps, and they would soon learn to behave themselves.”
“But, dear Mrs. Exact, you were a strong, healthy woman, and had strong,
healthy children.”
“Well, isn’t that baby of Mrs. Evans’s healthy, I want to know? I’m sure
it is a great creature, and thrives and grows fat as fast as ever I saw
a child. You needn’t tell me anything is the matter with that child but
temper and its mother’s coddling management.”
Now, in the neighborhood where she lives, Mrs. Alexander Exact is the
wonderful woman, the Lady Bountiful, the pattern female. Her cake never
rises on one side, or has a heavy streak in it. Her furs never get a
moth in them; her carpets never fade; her sweetmeats never ferment; her
servants never neglect their work; her children never get things out of
order; her babies never cry, never keep one awake o’ nights; and her
husband never in his life said, “My dear, there’s a button off my
shirt.” Flies never infest her kitchen, cockroaches and red ants never
invade her premises, a spider never had time to spin a web on one of her
walls. Everything in her establishment is shining with neatness, crisp
and bristling with absolute perfection,--and it is she, the
ever-up-and-dressed, unsleeping, wide-awake, omnipresent, never-tiring
Mrs. Exact, that does it all.
Besides keeping her household ways thus immaculate, Mrs. Exact is on all
sorts of charitable committees, does all sorts of fancy-work for fairs;
and whatever she does is done perfectly. She is a most available, most
helpful, most benevolent woman, and general society has reason to
rejoice in her existence.
But, for all this, Mrs. Exact is as intolerant as Torquemada or a
locomotive-engine. She has her own track, straight and inevitable; her
judgments and opinions cut through society in right lines, with all the
force of her example and all the steam of her energy, turning out
neither for the old nor the young, the weak nor the weary. She cannot,
and she will not, conceive the possibility that there may be other sorts
of natures than her own, and that other kinds of natures must have other
ways of living and doing.
Good and useful as she is, she is terrible as an army with banners to
her poor, harassed, delicate, struggling neighbor across the way, who,
in addition to an aching, confused head, an aching back, sleepless,
harassed nights, and weary, sinking days, is burdened everywhere and
every hour with the thought that Mrs. Exact thinks all her troubles are
nothing but poor management, and that she might do just like her, if she
would. With very little self-confidence or self-assertion, she is
withered and paralyzed by this discouraging thought. _Is_ it, then, her
fault that this never-sleeping baby cries all night, and that all her
children never could and never would be brought up by those exact rules
which she hears of as so efficacious in the household over the way? The
thought of Mrs. Alexander Exact stands over her like a constable; the
remembrance of her is grievous; the burden of her opinion is heavier
than all her other burdens.
Now the fact is, that Mrs. Exact comes of a long-lived, strong-backed,
strong-stomached race, with “limbs of British oak and nerves of wire.”
The shadow of a sensation of nervous pain or uneasiness never has been
known in her family for generations, and her judgments of poor little
Mrs. Evans are about as intelligent as those of a good stout Shanghai
hen on a humming-bird. Most useful and comfortable, these Shanghai
hens,--and very ornamental, and in a small way useful, these
humming-birds; but let them not regulate each other’s diet, or lay down
schemes for each other’s housekeeping. Has not one as much right to its
nature as the other?
This intolerance of other people’s natures is one of the greatest causes
of domestic unhappiness. The perfect householders are they who make
their household rule so flexible that all sorts of differing natures may
find room to grow and expand and express themselves without infringing
upon others.
Some women are endowed with a tact for understanding human nature and
guiding it. They give a sense of largeness and freedom; they find a
place for every one, see at once what every one is good for, and are
inspired by Nature with the happy wisdom of not wishing or asking of any
human being more than that human being was made to give. They have the
portion in due season for all: a bone for the dog; catnip for the cat;
cuttle-fish and hempseed for the bird; a book or review for their
bashful literary visitor; lively gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen;
knitting for Grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and gunpowder, for Young
Restless, whose beard is just beginning to grow;--and they never fall
into pets, because the canary-bird won’t relish the dog’s bone, or the
dog eat canary-seed, or young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty’s
review, or young Master Restless take delight in knitting-work, or old
Grandmamma feel complacency in guns and gunpowder.
Again, there are others who lay the foundations of family life so
narrow, straight, and strict, that there is room in them only for
themselves and people exactly like themselves; and hence comes much
misery.
A man and woman come together out of different families and races, often
united by only one or two sympathies, with many differences. Their first
wisdom would be to find out each other’s nature, and accommodate to it
as a fixed fact; instead of which, how many spend their lives in a
blind fight with an opposite nature, as good as their own in its way,
but not capable of meeting their requirements!
A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business family, where her father
and brothers bore everything along with true worldly skill and energy,
falls in love with a literary man, who knows nothing of affairs, whose
life is in his library and his pen. Shall she vex and torment herself
and him because he is not a business man? Shall she constantly hold up
to him the example of her father and brothers, and how they would manage
in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once for all to
herself,--“My husband has no talent for business; that is not his forte;
but then he has talents far more interesting: I cannot have everything;
let him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well, and let me try to
make up for what he cannot do; and if there be disabilities come on us
in consequence of what we neither of us can do, let us both take them
cheerfully”?
In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of an adoring family one
of those delicate, petted singing-birds that seem to be created simply
to adorn life and make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to
compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the
material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are
strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything
but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself
and her with the remembrance of how his mother used to get up at five
o’clock and arrange all the business of the day,--how she kept all the
accounts,--how she saw to everything and settled everything,--how there
never were breakdowns or irregularities in her system?
This would be unfair. If a man wanted such a housekeeper, why did he not
get one? There were plenty of single women, who understood washing,
ironing, clear-starching, cooking, and general housekeeping, better than
the little canary-bird which he fell in love with, and wanted for her
plumage and her song, for her merry tricks, for her bright eyes and
pretty ways. Now he has got his bird, let him keep it as something fine
and precious, to be cared for and watched over, and treated according to
the laws of its frail and delicate nature; and so treating it, he may
many years keep the charms which first won his heart. He may find, too,
if he watches and is careful, that a humming-bird can, in its own small,
dainty way, build a nest as efficiently as a turkey-gobbler, and hatch
her eggs and bring up her young in humming-bird fashion; but to do it,
she must be left unfrightened and undisturbed.
But the evils of domestic intolerance increase with the birth of
children. As parents come together out of different families with
ill-assorted peculiarities, so children are born to them with natures
differing from their own and from each other.
The parents seize on their first new child as a piece of special
property which they are forthwith to turn to their own account. The poor
little waif, just drifted on the shores of Time, has perhaps folded up
in it a character as positive as that of either parent; but, for all
that, its future course is marked out for it, all arranged and
predetermined.
John has a perfect mania for literary distinction. His own education was
somewhat imperfect, but he is determined his children shall be
prodigies. His first-born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame
de Staël,--to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores her with
literature from her earliest years, reads extracts from Milton to her
when she is only eight years old, and is secretly longing to be playing
with her doll’s wardrobe. He multiplies governesses, spares no expense,
and when, after all, his daughter turns out to be only a very pretty,
sensible, domestic girl, fond of cross-stitching embroidery, and with a
more decided vocation for sponge-cake and pickles than for poetry and
composition, he is disappointed and treats her coldly; and she is
unhappy and feels that she has vexed her parents, because she cannot be
what Nature never meant her to be. If John had taken meekly the present
that Mother Nature gave him, and humbly set himself to inquire what it
was and what it was good for, he might have had years of happiness with
a modest, amiable, and domestic daughter, to whom had been given the
instinct to study household good.
But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-knitting,
universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter who dreams over her
knitting-work and hides a book under her sampler,--whose thoughts are
straying in Greece, Rome, Germany,--who is reading, studying, thinking,
writing, without knowing why; and the mother sets herself to fight this
nature, and to make the dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going,
exact woman-of-business. How many tears are shed, how much temper
wasted, how much time lost, in such encounters!
Each of these natures, under judicious training, might be made to
complete itself by cultivation of that which it lacked. The born
housekeeper can never be made a genius, but she may add to her household
virtues some reasonable share of literary culture and appreciation,--and
the born scholar may learn to come down out of her clouds, and see
enough of this earth to walk its practical ways without stumbling; but
this must be done by tolerance of their nature,--by giving it play and
room,--first recognizing its existence and its rights, and then seeking
to add to it the properties it wants.
A clever Yankee housekeeper, fruitful of resources, can work with any
tools or with no tools at all. If she absolutely cannot get a
tack-hammer with a claw on one end, she can take up carpet-nails with an
iron spoon, and drive them down with a flat-iron; and she has sense
enough not to scold, though she does her work with them at considerable
disadvantage. She knows that she is working with tools made for another
purpose, and never thinks of being angry at their unhandiness. She might
have equal patience with a daughter unhandy in physical things, but
acute and skilful in mental ones, if she once had the idea suggested to
her.
An ambitious man has a son whom he destines to a learned profession. He
is to be the Daniel Webster of the family. The boy has a robust,
muscular frame, great physical vigor and enterprise, a brain bright and
active in all that may be acquired through the bodily senses, but which
is dull and confused and wandering when put to abstract book-knowledge.
He knows every ship at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing
qualities; he knows every railroad-engine, its power, speed, and hours
of coming and going; he is always busy, sawing, hammering, planing,
digging, driving, making bargains, with his head full of plans, all
relating to something outward and physical. In all these matters his
mind works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation acute, his
conversation sensible and worth listening to. But as to the distinction
between common nouns and proper nouns, between the subject and the
predicate of a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the
demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the
preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of
abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth
is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible
studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual
failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to
make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till
the soil or manage the material forces of the world. He might be a
farmer, an engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a soldier,
a thriving man of business; but he grows up feeling that his nature is a
crime, and that he is good for nothing, because he is not good for what
he had been blindly predestined to before he was born.
Another boy is a born mechanic; he understands machinery at a glance; he
is all the while pondering and studying and experimenting. But his
wheels and his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much
irrelevant lumber; he is doomed to go into the Latin School, and spend
three or four years in trying to learn what he never can learn
well,--disheartened by always being at the tail of his class, and seeing
many a boy inferior to himself in general culture who is rising to
brilliant distinction simply because he can remember those hopeless,
bewildering Greek quantities and accents which he is constantly
forgetting,--as, for example, how properispomena become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with a short penult remain
paroxytones. Each of this class of rules, however, having about sixteen
exceptions, which hold good except in three or four other exceptional
cases under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder and wilder;
and the crowning beauty of the whole is, that, when the bewildered boy
has swallowed the whole,--tail, scales, fins, and bones,--he then is
allowed to read the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to
refer to them again during his college course.
The great trouble with the so-called classical course of education is,
that it is made strictly for but one class of minds, which it drills in
respects for which they have by nature an aptitude, and to which it
presents scarcely enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline,
while to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents
difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage. There are, we
will venture to say, in every ten boys in Boston, four, and those not
the dullest or poorest in quality, who could never go through the
discipline of the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the brain
and nervous system as would leave them no power for anything else.
A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the line of natural
philosophy and mechanics, passed with brilliant success through the
Boston English High School. He won the first medals, and felt all that
pride and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student. He entered
the Latin Classical School as the next step on his way to a collegiate
education. With a large philosophic and reasoning brain, he had a very
poor verbal and textual memory; and here he began to see himself
distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to him. They could rattle
off catalogues of names; they could do so all the better from the habit
of not thinking of what they studied. They could commit the Latin
Grammar, coarse print and fine, and run through the interminable mazes
of Greek accents and Greek inflections. This boy of large mind and brain
found himself always behindhand, and became, in time, utterly
discouraged; no amount of study could place him on an equality with his
former inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from school. Many a
fine fellow has been lost to himself, and lost to an educated life, by
just such a failure. The collegiate system is like a great coal-screen:
every piece not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well
enough for screening coal; but what if it were used indiscriminately for
a mixture of coal and diamonds?
“Poor boy!” said Ole Bull, compassionately, when one sought to push a
schoolboy from the steps of an omnibus, where he was getting a
surreptitious ride. “Poor boy! let him stay. Who knows his trials?
Perhaps he studies Latin.”
The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early
sufferings,--“The Romans would never have conquered the world, if they
had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were
born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in _im_.”
Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We
think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and
that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of
the splendid minds of those olden times loses a part of his birthright;
and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical
path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land
of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and
Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal
memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek
verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one
termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his
faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and
Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and
that is all that is worth caring for. We have known one young scholar,
who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions to the
rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his private
note-book with quotations from the “Æneid,” and was making extracts of
literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that he was every
day “screwed” by his tutor upon some technical point of the language.
Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who
could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in _y_ that form
their plural in _ies_, with the exceptions under it? How many of us
could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know
the whole of Murray’s Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a
language ever come in this way?
At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the
savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch’s
kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting
it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice,
and her “Gape, sinner, and swallow,” is the only introduction,--and so,
many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.
This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to
them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to
speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of
expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a
simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.
Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in
families, because family pride decrees that every boy of good status in
society, will he, nill he, shall go through college, or he almost
forfeits his position as a gentleman.
“Not go to Cambridge!” says Scholasticus to his first-born. “Why, I went
there,--and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look
at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever
since the College was founded!”
“But I can’t learn Latin and Greek,” says young Scholasticus. “I can’t
remember all those rules and exceptions. I’ve tried, and I can’t. If you
could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won’t be at the foot
of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging.”
Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind
of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that
requires faculties which Nature has not given him,--what occurs?
He goes through his course, either shamming, _shirking_, _ponying_, all
the while consciously discredited and dishonored,--or else, putting
forth an effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes
merely a decent scholar, and loses his health for life.
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical
education,--if it were admitted that the great object is to read and
enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few
things absolutely essential to this result,--if the tortoise were
allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to
swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon,--all might in
their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and
its coolness.
“But,” say the advocates of the present system, “it is good mental
discipline.”
I doubt it. It is mere waste of time.
When a boy has learned that in the genitive plural of the first
declension of Greek nouns the final syllable is circumflexed, but to
this there are the following exceptions: 1. That feminine adjectives
and participles in-ος,-η,-ον are accented like the genitive masculine,
but other feminine adjectives and participles are perispomena in the
genitive plural; 2. That the substantives _chrestes_, _aphue_,
_etesiai_, and _chlounes_ in the genitive plural remain paroxytones,
(Kühner’s _Elementary Greek Grammar_, page 22,)--I say, when a boy has
learned this and twenty other things just like it, his mind has not been
one whit more disciplined than if he had learned the list of the old
thirteen States, the number and names of the newly adopted ones, the
times of their adoption, and the population, commerce, mineral and
agricultural wealth of each. These, too, are merely exercises of memory,
but they are exercises in what is of some interest and some use.
The particulars above cited are of so little use in understanding the
Greek classics that I will venture to say that there are intelligent
English scholars, who have never read anything but Bohn’s translations,
who have more genuine knowledge of the spirit of the Greek mind, and the
peculiar idioms of the language, and more enthusiasm for it, than many a
poor fellow who has stumbled blindly through the originals with the
bayonet of the tutor at his heels, and his eyes and ears full of the
Scotch snuff of the Greek Grammar.
What then? Shall we not learn these ancient tongues? By all means. “So
many times as I learn a language, so many times I become a man,” said
Charles V.; and he said rightly. Latin and Greek are foully belied by
the prejudices created by this technical, pedantic mode of teaching
them, which makes one ragged, prickly bundle of all the dry facts of the
language, and insists upon it that the boy shall not see one glimpse of
its beauty, glory, or interest, till he has swallowed and digested the
whole mass. Many die in this wilderness with their shoes worn out before
reaching the Promised Land of Plato and the Tragedians.
“But,” say our college authorities, “look at England. An English
schoolboy learns three times the Latin and Greek that our boys learn,
and has them well drubbed in.”
And English boys have three times more beef and pudding in their
constitution than American boys have, and three times less of nerves.
The difference of nature must be considered here; and the constant
influence flowing from English schools and universities must be tempered
by considering who we are, what sort of boys we have to deal with, what
treatment they can bear, and what are the needs of our growing American
society.
The demands of actual life, the living, visible facts of practical
science, in so large and new a country as ours, require that the ideas
of the ancients should be given us in the shortest and most economical
way possible, and that scholastic technicalities should be reserved to
those whom Nature made with especial reference to their preservation.
On no subject is there more intolerant judgment, and more suffering from
such intolerance, than on the much mooted one of the education of
children.
Treatises on education require altogether too much of parents, and
impose burdens of responsibility on tender spirits which crush the life
and strength out of them. Parents have been talked to as if each child
came to them a soft, pulpy mass, which they were to pinch and pull and
pat and stroke into shape quite at their leisure,--and a good pattern
being placed before them, they were to proceed immediately to set up and
construct a good human being in conformity therewith.
It is strange that believers in the divine inspiration of the Bible
should have entertained this idea, overlooking the constant and
affecting declaration of the great Heavenly Father that _He_ has
nourished and brought up children and they have rebelled against Him,
together with His constant appeals,--“What could have been done more to
my vineyard that I have not done in it? Wherefore, when I looked that it
should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?” If even God,
wiser, better, purer, more loving, admits Himself baffled in this great
work, is it expedient to say to human beings that the forming power, the
deciding force, of a child’s character is in their hands?
Many a poor feeble woman’s health has been strained to breaking, and her
life darkened, by the laying on her shoulders of a burden of
responsibility that never ought to have been placed there; and many a
mother has been hindered from using such powers as God has given her,
because some preconceived mode of operation has been set up before her
which she could no more make effectual than David could wear the armor
of Saul.
A gentle, loving, fragile creature marries a strong-willed, energetic
man, and by the laws of natural descent has a boy given to her of twice
her amount of will and energy. She is just as helpless, in the mere
struggle of will and authority with such a child, as she would be in a
physical wrestle with a six-foot man.
What then? Has Nature left her helpless for her duties? Not if she
understands her nature, and acts in the line of it. She has no power of
command, but she has power of persuasion. She can neither bend nor break
the boy’s iron will, but she can melt it. She has tact to avoid the
conflict in which she would be worsted. She can charm, amuse, please,
and make willing; and her fine and subtile influences, weaving
themselves about him day after day, become more and more powerful. Let
her alone, and she will have her boy yet.
But now some bustling mother-in-law or other privileged expounder says
to her,--
“My dear, it’s your solemn duty to break that boy’s will. I broke my
boy’s will short off. Keep your whip in sight, meet him at every turn,
fight him whenever he crosses you, never let him get one victory, and
finally his will will be wholly subdued.”
Such advice is mischievous, because what it proposes is as utter an
impossibility to the woman’s nature as for a cow to scratch up worms for
her calf, or a hen to suckle her chickens.
There are men and women of strong, resolute will who are gifted with the
power of governing the wills of others. Such persons can govern in this
way,--and their government, being in the line of their nature, acting
strongly, consistently, naturally, makes everything move harmoniously.
Let them be content with their own success, but let them not set up as
general education-doctors, or apply their experience to all possible
cases.
Again, there are others, and among them some of the loveliest and purest
natures, who have no power of command. They have sufficient tenacity of
will as respects their own course, but have no compulsory power over
the wills of others. Many such women have been most successful mothers,
when they followed the line of their own natures, and did not undertake
what they never could do.
_Influence_ is a slower acting force than authority. It seems weaker,
but in the long run it often effects more. It always does better than
mere force and authority without its gentle modifying power.
She who obtains an absolute and perfect government over a child, so that
he obeys, certainly and almost mechanically produces effects which are
more appreciable in their immediate action on family life; her family
will be more orderly, her children in their childhood will do her more
credit.
But she who has consciously no power of this kind, whose children are
often turbulent and unmanageable, need not despair if she feel that
through affection, reason, and conscience, she still retains a strong
_influence_ over them. If she cannot govern her boy, she can do even a
better thing if she can inspire him with a purpose to _govern himself_;
for a boy taught to govern himself is a better achievement than a boy
merely governed.
If a mother, therefore, is high-principled, religious, affectionate, if
she never uses craft or deception, if she governs her temper and sets a
good example, let her hold on in good hope, though she cannot produce
the discipline of a man-of-war in her noisy little flock, or make all
move as smoothly as some other women to whom God has given another and
different talent; and let her not be discouraged, if she seem often to
accomplish but little in that arduous work of forming human character
wherein the great Creator of the world has declared Himself at times
baffled.
Family tolerance must take great account of the stages and periods of
development and growth in children.
The passage of a human being from one stage of development to another,
like the sun’s passage across the equator, frequently has its storms
and tempests. The change to manhood and womanhood often involves brain,
nerves, body, and soul in confusion; the child sometimes seems lost to
himself and his parents,--his very nature changing. In this sensitive
state come restless desires, unreasonable longings, unsettled purposes;
and the fatal habit of indulgence in deadly stimulants, ruining all the
life, often springs from the cravings of this transition period.
Here must come in the patience of the saints. The restlessness must be
soothed, the family hearth must be tolerant enough to keep there the
boy, whom Satan will receive and cherish, if his mother does not. The
male element sometimes pours into a boy, like the tides in the Bay of
Fundy, with tumult and tossing. He is noisy, vociferous, uproarious, and
seems bent only on disturbance; he despises conventionalities, he hates
parlors, he longs for the woods, the sea, the converse of rough men,
and kicks at constraint of all kinds. Have patience now, let love have
its perfect work, and in a year or two, if no deadly physical habits set
in, a quiet, well-mannered gentleman will be evolved. Meanwhile, if he
does not wipe his shoes, and if he will fling his hat upon the floor,
and tear his clothes, and bang and hammer and shout, and cause general
confusion in his belongings, do not despair; for if you only get your
son, the hat and clothes and shoes and noise and confusion do not
matter. Any amount of toleration that keeps a boy contented at home is
treasure well expended at this time of life.
One thing not enough reflected on is, that in this transition period
between childhood and maturity the heaviest draft and strain of school
education occurs. The boy is fitting for the university, the girl going
through the studies of the college senior year, and the brain-power,
which is working almost to the breaking-point to perfect the physical
change, has the additional labor of all the drill and discipline of
school.
The girl is growing into a tall and shapely woman, and the poor brain is
put to it to find enough phosphate of lime, carbon, and other what not,
to build her fair edifice. The bills flow in upon her thick and fast;
she pays out hand over hand: if she had only her woman to build, she
might get along, but now come in demands for algebra, geometry, music,
language, and the poor brain-bank stops payment; some part of the work
is shabbily done, and a crooked spine or weakened lungs are the result.
Boarding-schools, both for boys and girls, are for the most part
composed of young people in this most delicate, critical portion of
their physical, mental, and moral development, whose teachers are
expected to put them through one straight, severe course of drill,
without the slightest allowance for the great physical facts of their
being. No wonder they are difficult to manage, and that so many of them
drop, physically, mentally, and morally halt and maimed. It is not the
teacher’s fault; he but fulfils the parent’s requisition, which dooms
his child without appeal to a certain course simply because others have
gone through it.
Finally, as my sermon is too long already, let me end with a single
reflection. Every human being has some handle by which he may be lifted,
some groove in which he was meant to run; and the great work of life, as
far as our relations with each other are concerned, is to lift each one
by his own proper handle, and run each one in his own proper groove.
VI.
DISCOURTESY.
“For my part,” said my wife, “I think one of the greatest destroyers of
domestic peace is Discourtesy. People neglect, with their nearest
friends, those refinements and civilities which they practise with
strangers.”
“My dear Madam, I am of another opinion,” said Bob Stephens. “The
restraints of etiquette, the formalities of ceremony, are tedious enough
in out-door life; but when a man comes home, he wants leave to take off
his tight boots and gloves, wear the gown and slippers, and speak his
mind freely without troubling his head where it hits. Home-life should
be the communion of people who have learned to understand each other,
who allow each other a generous latitude and freedom. One wants one
place where he may feel at liberty to be tired or dull or disagreeable
without ruining his character. Home is the place where we should expect
to live somewhat on the credit which a full knowledge of each other’s
goodness and worth inspires; and it is not necessary for intimate
friends to go every day through those civilities and attentions which
they practise with strangers, any more than it is necessary, among
literary people, to repeat the alphabet over every day before one begins
to read.”
“Yes,” said Jennie, “when a young gentleman is paying his addresses, he
helps a young lady out of a carriage so tenderly, and holds back her
dress so adroitly, that not a particle of mud gets on it from the
wheels; but when the mutual understanding is complete, and the affection
perfect, and she is his wife, he sits still and holds the horse and lets
her climb out alone. To be sure, when pretty Miss Titmouse is visiting
them, he still shows himself gallant, flies from the carriage, and holds
back _her_ dress: that’s because he doesn’t love her nor she him, and
they are _not_ on the ground of mutual affection. When a gentleman is
only engaged, or a friend, if you hem him a cravat or mend his gloves,
he thanks you in the blandest manner; but when you are once sure of his
affection, he only says, ‘Very well; now I wish you would look over my
shirts, and mend that rip in my coat,--and be sure don’t forget it, as
you did yesterday.’ For all which reasons,” said Miss Jennie, with a
toss of her pretty head, “I mean to put off marrying as long as
possible, because I think it far more agreeable to have gentlemen
friends with whom I stand on the ground of ceremony and politeness than
to be restricted to one who is living on the credit of his affection. I
don’t want a man who gapes in my face, reads a newspaper all
breakfast-time while I want somebody to talk to, smokes cigars all the
evening, or reads to himself when I would like him to be entertaining,
and considers his affection for me as his right and title to make
himself generally disagreeable. If he has a bright face, and pleasant,
entertaining, gallant ways, I like to be among the ladies who may have
the benefit of them, and should take care how I lost my title to it by
coming with him on to the ground of domestic affection.”
“Well, Miss Jennie,” said Bob, “it isn’t merely our sex who are guilty
of making themselves less agreeable after marriage. Your dapper little
fairy creatures, who dazzle us so with wondrous and fresh toilettes, who
are so trim and neat and sprightly and enchanting, what becomes of them
after marriage? If _he_ reads the newspaper at the breakfast-table,
perhaps it’s because there is a sleepy, dowdy woman opposite, in a faded
gingham wrapper, put on in the sacredness of domestic privacy, and
perhaps she has laid aside those crisp, sparkling, bright little sayings
and doings that used to make it impossible to look at or listen to
anybody else when she was about. Such things _are_, sometimes, among
the goddesses, I believe. Of course, Marianne and I know nothing of
these troubles; we, being a model pair, sit among the clouds and
speculate on all these matters as spectators merely.”
“Well, you see what your principle leads to, carried out,” said Jennie.
“If home is merely the place where one may feel at liberty to be tired
or dull or disagreeable, without losing one’s character, I think the
women have far more right to avail themselves of the liberty than the
men; for all the lonesome, dull, disagreeable part of home-life comes
into their department. It is they who must keep awake with the baby, if
it frets; and if they do not feel spirits to make an attractive toilette
in the morning, or have not the airy, graceful fancies that they had
when they were girls, it is not so very much against them. A housekeeper
and nursery-maid cannot be expected to be quite as elegant in her
toilette and as entertaining in her ways as a girl without a care in
her father’s house; but I think that this is no excuse for husbands
neglecting the little civilities and attentions which they used to show
before marriage. They are strong and well and hearty; go out into the
world and hear and see a great deal that keeps their minds moving and
awake; and they ought to entertain their wives after marriage just as
their wives entertained them before. That’s the way my husband must do,
or I will never have one,--and it will be small loss, if I don’t,” said
Miss Jennie.
“Well,” said Bob, “I must endeavor to initiate Charley Sedley in time.”
“Charley Sedley, Bob!” said Jennie, with crimson indignation. “I wonder
you will always bring up that old story, when I’ve told you a hundred
times how disagreeable it is! Charley and I are good friends, but--”
“There, there,” said Bob, “that will do; you don’t need to proceed
further.”
“You only said that because you couldn’t answer my argument,” said
Jennie.
“Well, my dear,” said Bob, “you know everything has two sides to it, and
I’ll admit that you have brought up the opposite side to mine quite
handsomely; but, for all that, I am convinced, that, if what I said was
not really the truth, yet the truth lies somewhere in the vicinity of
it. As I said before, so I say again, true love ought to beget a freedom
which shall do away with the necessity of ceremony, and much may and
ought to be tolerated among near and dear friends that would be
discourteous among strangers. I am just as sure of this as of anything
in the world.”
“And yet,” said my wife, “there is certainly truth in the much quoted
lines of Cowper, on Friendship, where he says,--
“As similarity of mind,
Or something not to be defined,
First fixes our attention,
So manners decent and polite,
The same we practised at first sight,
Will save it from declension.”
“Well, now,” said Bob, “I’ve seen enough of French politeness between
married people. When I was in Paris, I remember there was in our
boarding-house a Madame de Villiers, whose husband had conferred upon
her his name and the _de_ belonging to it, in consideration of a snug
little income which she brought to him by the marriage. His conduct
towards her was a perfect model of all the graces of civilized life. It
was true that he lived on her income, and spent it in promenading the
Boulevards, and visiting theatres and operas with divers fair friends of
easy morals; still all this was so courteously, so politely, so
diplomatically arranged with Madame, that it was quite worth while to be
neglected and cheated for the sake of having the thing done in so
finished and elegant a manner. According to his showing, Monsieur had
taken the neat little apartment for her in our _pension_, because his
circumstances were embarrassed, and he would be in despair to drag such
a creature into hardships which he described as terrific, and which he
was resolved heroically to endure alone. No, while a sous remained to
them, his adored Julie should have her apartment and the comforts of
life secured to her, while the barest attic should suffice for him.
Never did he visit her without kissing her hand with the homage due to a
princess, complimenting her on her good looks, bringing bonbons,
entertaining her with most ravishing small-talk of all the interesting
_on-dits_ in Paris; and these visits were most particularly frequent as
the time for receiving her quarterly instalments approached. And so
Madame adored him and could refuse him nothing, believed all his
stories, and was well content to live on a fourth of her own income for
the sake of so engaging a husband.”
“Well,” said Jennie, “I don’t know to what purpose your anecdote is
related, but to me it means simply this: if a rascal, without heart,
without principle, without any good quality, can win and keep a woman’s
heart merely by being invariably polite and agreeable, while in her
presence, how much more might a man of sense and principle and real
affection do by the same means! I’m sure, if a man who neglects a woman,
and robs her of her money, nevertheless keeps her affections, merely
because whenever he sees her he is courteous and attentive, it certainly
shows that courtesy stands for a great deal in the matter of love.”
“With foolish women,” said Bob.
“Yes, and with sensible ones too,” said my wife. “Your Monsieur presents
a specimen of the French way of doing a bad thing; but I know a poor
woman whose husband did the same thing in English fashion, without
kisses or compliments. Instead of flattering, he swore at her, and took
her money away without the ceremony of presenting bonbons; and I assure
you, if the thing must be done at all, I would, for my part, much rather
have it done in the French than the English manner. The courtesy, as far
as it goes, is a good, and far better than nothing,--though, of course,
one would rather have substantial good with it. If one must be robbed,
one would rather have one’s money wheedled away agreeably, with kisses
and bonbons, than be knocked down and trampled upon.”
“The mistake that is made on this subject,” said I, “is in comparing, as
people generally do, a polished rascal with a boorish good man; but the
polished rascal should be compared with the polished good man, and the
boorish rascal with the boorish good man, and then we get the true value
of the article.
“It is true, as a general rule, that those races of men that are most
distinguished for outward urbanity and courtesy are the least
distinguished for truth and sincerity; and hence the well-known
alliterations, ‘fair and false,’ ‘smooth and slippery.’ The fair and
false Greek, the polished and wily Italian, the courteous and deceitful
Frenchman, are associations which, to the strong, downright, courageous
Anglo-Saxon, make up-and-down rudeness and blunt discourtesy a type of
truth and honesty.
“No one can read French literature without feeling how the element of
courtesy pervades every department of life,--how carefully people avoid
being personally disagreeable in their intercourse. A domestic quarrel,
if we may trust French plays, is carried on with all the refinements of
good breeding, and insults are given with elegant civility. It seems
impossible to translate into French the direct and downright brutalities
which the English tongue allows. The whole intercourse of life is
arranged on the understanding that all personal contacts shall be smooth
and civil, and such as to obviate the necessity of personal jostle and
jar.
“Does a Frenchman engage a clerk or other _employé_, and afterwards hear
a report to his disadvantage, the last thing he would think of would be
to tell a downright unpleasant truth to the man. He writes him a civil
note, and tells him, that, in consequence of an unexpected change of
business, he shall not need an assistant in that department, and much
regrets that this will deprive him of Monsieur’s agreeable society, etc.
“A more striking example cannot be found of this sort of intercourse
than the representation in the life of Madame George Sand of the
proceedings between her father and his mother. There is all the romance
of affection between this mother and son. He writes her the most devoted
letters, he kisses her hand on every page, he is the very image of a
gallant, charming, lovable son, while at the same time he is secretly
making arrangements for a private marriage with a woman of low rank and
indifferent reputation,--a marriage which he knows would be like death
to his mother. He marries, lives with his wife, has one or two children
by her, before he will pain the heart of his adored mother by telling
her the truth. The adored mother suspects her son, but no trace of the
suspicion appears in her letters to him. The questions which an English
parent would level at him point-blank she is entirely too delicate to
address to her dear Maurice; but she puts them to the Prefect of Police,
and ferrets out the marriage through legal documents, while yet no trace
of this knowledge dims the affectionateness of her letters, or the
serenity of her reception of her son when he comes to bestow on her the
time which he can spare from his family cares. In an English or American
family there would have been a battle royal, an open rupture; whereas
this courteous son and mother go on for years with this polite drama,
she pretending to be deceived while she is not, and he supposing that he
is sparing her feelings by the deception.
“Now it is the reaction from such a style of life on the truthful
Anglo-Saxon nature that leads to an undervaluing of courtesy, as if it
were of necessity opposed to sincerity. But it does not follow, because
all is not gold that glitters, that nothing that glitters is gold, and
because courtesy and delicacy of personal intercourse are often
perverted to deceit, that they are not valuable allies of truth. No
woman would prefer a slippery, plausible rascal to a rough,
unceremonious honest man; but of two men equally truthful, and
affectionate, every woman would prefer the courteous one.”
“Well,” said Bob, “there is a loathsome, sickly stench of cowardice and
distrust about all this kind of French delicacy that is enough to drive
an honest fellow to the other extreme. True love ought to be a robust,
hardy plant, that can stand a free out-door life of sun and wind and
rain. People who are too delicate and courteous ever fully to speak
their minds to each other are apt to have stagnant residuums of
unpleasant feelings which breed all sorts of gnats and mosquitos. My
rule is, Say everything out as you go along; have your little tiffs, and
get over them; jar and jolt and rub a little, and learn to take rubs and
bear jolts.
“If I take less thought and use less civility of expression, in
announcing to Marianne that her coffee is roasted too much, than I did
to old Mrs. Pollux when I boarded with her, it’s because I take it
Marianne is somewhat more a part of myself than old Mrs. Pollux
was,--that there is an intimacy and confidence between us which will
enable us to use the short-hand of life,--that she will not fall into a
passion or fly into hysterics, but will merely speak to cook in good
time. If I don’t thank her for mending my glove in just the style that I
did when I was a lover, it is because now she does that sort of thing
for me so often that it would be a downright bore to her to have me
always on my knees about it. All that I could think of to say about her
graceful handiness and her delicate needle-work has been said so often,
and is so well understood, that it has entirely lost the zest of
originality. Marianne and I have had sundry little battles, in which the
victory came out on both sides, each of us thinking the better of the
other for the vigor and spirit with which we conducted matters; and our
habit of perfect plain-speaking and truth-telling to each other is
better than all the delicacies that ever were hatched up in the hot-bed
of French sentiment.”
“Perfectly true, perfectly right,” said I. “Every word good as gold.
Truth before all things; sincerity before all things: pure, clear,
diamond-bright sincerity is of more value than the gold of Ophir; the
foundation of all love must rest here. How those people do who live in
the nearest and dearest intimacy with friends who they believe will lie
to them for any purpose, even the most refined and delicate, is a
mystery to me. If I once know that my wife or my friend will tell me
only what they think will be agreeable to me, then I am at once lost, my
way is a pathless quicksand. But all this being premised, I still say
that we Anglo-Saxons might improve our domestic life, if we would graft
upon the strong stock of its homely sincerity the courteous graces of
the French character.
“If anybody wishes to know exactly what I mean by this, let him read the
Memoir of De Tocqueville, whom I take to be the representative of the
French ideal man; and certainly the kind of family life which his
domestic letters disclose has a delicacy and a beauty which adorn its
solid worth.
“What I have to say on this matter is, that it is very dangerous for any
individual man or any race of men continually to cry up the virtues to
which they are constitutionally inclined, and to be constantly dwelling
with reprobation on faults to which they have no manner of temptation.
“I think that we of the English race may set it down as a general rule,
that we are in no danger of becoming hypocrites in domestic life through
an extra sense of politeness, and in some danger of becoming boors from
a rough, uncultivated instinct of sincerity. But to bring the matter to
a practical point, I will specify some particulars in which the
courtesy we show to strangers might with advantage be grafted into our
home-life.
“In the first place, then, let us watch our course when we are
entertaining strangers whose good opinion we wish to propitiate. We
dress ourselves with care, we study what it will be agreeable to say, we
do not suffer our natural laziness to prevent our being very alert in
paying small attentions, we start across the room for an easier chair,
we stoop to pick up the fan, we search for the mislaid newspaper, and
all this for persons in whom we have no particular interest beyond the
passing hour; while with those friends whom we love and respect we too
often sit in our old faded habiliments, and let them get their own
chair, and look up their own newspaper, and fight their own way daily,
without any of this preventing care.
“In the matter of personal adornment, especially, there are a great many
people who are chargeable with the same fault that I have already
spoken of in reference to household arrangements. They have a splendid
wardrobe for company, and a shabby and sordid one for domestic life. A
woman puts all her income into party-dresses, and thinks anything will
do to wear at home. All her old tumbled finery, her frayed, dirty silks
and soiled ribbons, are made to do duty for her hours of intercourse
with her dearest friends. Some seem to be really principled against
wearing a handsome dress in every-day life; they ‘cannot afford’ to be
well-dressed in private. Now what I should recommend would be to take
the money necessary for one or two party-dresses and spend it upon an
appropriate and tasteful home-toilette, and to make it an avowed object
to look prettily at home.
“We men are a sort of stupid, blind animals: we know when we are
pleased, but we don’t know what it is that pleases us; we say we don’t
care anything about flowers, but if there is a flower-garden under our
window, somehow or other we are dimly conscious of it, and feel that
there is something pleasant there; and so when our wives and daughters
are prettily and tastefully attired, we know it, and it gladdens our
life far more than we are perhaps aware of.”
“Well, Papa,” said Jennie, “I think the men ought to take just as much
pains to get themselves up nicely after marriage as the women. I think
there are such things as tumbled shirt-collars and frowzy hair and muddy
shoes brought into the domestic sanctuary, as well as frayed silks and
dirty ribbons.”
“Certainly,” I said; “but you know we are the natural Hottentot, and you
are the missionaries who are to keep us from degenerating; we are the
clumsy, old, blind Vulcan, and you the fair Cytherea, the bearers of the
magic cestus, and therefore it is to you that this head more
particularly belongs.
“Now I maintain that in family-life there should be an effort not only
to be neat and decent in the arrangement of our person, but to be also
what the French call _coquette_,--or to put it in plain English, there
should be an endeavor to make ourselves look handsome in the eyes of our
dearest friends.
“Many worthy women, who would not for the world be found wanting in the
matter of personal neatness, seem somehow to have the notion that any
study of the arts of personal beauty in family-life is unmatronly; they
buy their clothes with simple reference to economy, and have them made
up without any question of becomingness; and hence marriage sometimes
transforms a charming, trim, tripping young lady into a waddling matron
whose every-day toilette suggests only the idea of a feather-bed tied
round with a string. For my part, I do not believe that the summary
banishment of the Graces from the domestic circle as soon as the first
baby makes its appearance is at all conducive to domestic affection. Nor
do I think that there is any need of so doing. These good housewives
are in danger, like other saints, of falling into the error of
neglecting the body through too much thoughtfulness for others and too
little for themselves. If a woman ever had any attractiveness, let her
try and keep it, setting it down as one of her domestic talents. As for
my erring brothers who violate the domestic sanctuary by tousled hair,
tumbled linen, and muddy shoes, I deliver them over to Miss Jennie
without benefit of clergy.
“My second head is, that there should be in family-life the same
delicacy in the avoidance of disagreeable topics that characterizes the
intercourse of refined society among strangers.
“I do not think that it makes family-life more sincere, or any more
honest, to have the members of a domestic circle feel a freedom to blurt
out in each other’s faces, without thought or care, all the disagreeable
things that may occur to them: as, for example, ‘How horridly you look
this morning! What’s the matter with you?’--‘Is there a pimple coming on
your nose? or what is that spot?’--‘What made you buy such a dreadfully
unbecoming dress? It sets like a witch! Who cut it?’--‘What makes you
wear that pair of old shoes?’--‘Holloa, Bess! is that your party-rig? I
should think you were going out for a walking advertisement of a
flower-store!’--Observations of this kind between husbands and wives,
brothers and sisters, or intimate friends, do not indicate sincerity,
but obtuseness; and the person who remarks on the pimple on your nose is
in many cases just as apt to deceive you as the most accomplished
Frenchwoman who avoids disagreeable topics in your presence.
“Many families seem to think that it is a proof of family union and
good-nature that they can pick each other to pieces, joke on each
other’s feelings and infirmities, and treat each other with a general
tally-ho-ing rudeness without any offence or ill-feeling. If there is a
limping sister, there is a never-failing supply of jokes on
‘Dot-and-go-one’; and so with other defects and peculiarities of mind or
manners. Now the perfect good-nature and mutual confidence which allow
all this liberty are certainly admirable; but the liberty itself is far
from making home-life interesting or agreeable.
“Jokes upon personal or mental infirmities, and a general habit of
saying things in jest which would be the height of rudeness if said in
earnest, are all habits which take from the delicacy of family
affection.
“In all this rough playing with edge-tools many are hit and hurt who are
ashamed or afraid to complain. And after all, what possible good or
benefit comes from it? Courage to say disagreeable things, when it is
necessary to say them for the highest good of the person addressed, is a
sublime quality; but a careless habit of saying them, in the mere
freedom of family intercourse, is certainly as great a spoiler of the
domestic vines as any fox running.
“There is one point under this head which I enlarge upon for the benefit
of my own sex: I mean table-criticisms. The conduct of housekeeping, in
the present state of domestic service, certainly requires great
allowance; and the habit of unceremonious comment on the cooking and
appointments of the table, in which some husbands habitually allow
themselves, is the most unpardonable form of domestic rudeness. If a
wife has philosophy enough not to mind it, so much the worse for her
husband, as it confirms him in an unseemly habit, embarrassing to guests
and a bad example to children. If she has no feelings that he is bound
to respect, he should at least respect decorum and good taste, and
confine the discussion of such matters to private intercourse, and not
initiate every guest and child into the grating and greasing of the
wheels of the domestic machinery.
“Another thing in which families might imitate the politeness of
strangers is a wise reticence with regard to the asking of questions and
the offering of advice.
“A large family includes many persons of different tastes, habits, modes
of thinking and acting, and it would be wise and well to leave to each
one that measure of freedom in these respects which the laws of general
politeness require. Brothers and sisters may love each other very much,
and yet not enough to make joint-stock of all their ideas, plans,
wishes, schemes, friendships. There are in every family-circle
individuals whom a certain sensitiveness of nature inclines to quietness
and reserve; and there are very well-meaning families where no such
quietness or reserve is possible. Nobody can be let alone, nobody may
have a secret, nobody can move in any direction, without a host of
inquiries and comments, ‘Who is your letter from? Let’s see.’--‘My
letter is from So-and-So.’--‘_He_ writing to you? I didn’t know that.
What’s he writing about?’--‘Where did you go yesterday? What did you
buy? What did you give for it? What are you going to do with
it?’--‘Seems to me that’s an odd way to do. I shouldn’t do so.’--‘Look
here, Mary; Sarah’s going to have a dress of silk tissue this spring.
Now I think they’re too dear,--don’t you?’
“I recollect seeing in some author a description of a true gentleman, in
which, among other traits, he was characterized as the man that asks the
fewest questions. This trait of refined society might be adopted into
home-life in a far greater degree than it is, and make it far more
agreeable.
“If there is perfect unreserve and mutual confidence, let it show itself
in free communications coming unsolicited. It may fairly be presumed,
that, if there is anything our intimate friends wish us to know, they
will tell us of it,--and that when we are on close and confidential
terms with persons, and there are topics on which they do not speak to
us, it is because for some reason they prefer to keep silence concerning
them; and the delicacy that respects a friend’s silence is one of the
charms of life.
“As with the asking of questions, so with the offering of advice, there
should be among friends a wise reticence.
“Some families are always calling each other to account at every step of
the day. ‘What did you put on that dress for? Why didn’t you wear
that?’--‘What did you do this for? Why didn’t you do that?’--‘Now _I_
should advise you to do thus and so.’--And these comments and criticisms
and advices are accompanied with an energy of feeling that makes it
rather difficult to disregard them.
“Now it is no matter how dear and how good our friends may be, if they
abridge our liberty and fetter the free exercise of our life, it is
inevitable that we shall come to enjoying ourselves much better where
they are not than where they are; and one of the reasons why brothers
and sisters or children so often diverge from the family-circle in the
choice of confidants is, that extraneous friends are bound by certain
laws of delicacy not to push inquiries, criticisms, or advice too far.
“Parents would do well to remember in time when their children have
grown up into independent human beings, and use with a wise moderation
those advisory and admonitory powers with which they guided their
earlier days. Let us give everybody a right to live his own life, as far
as possible, and avoid imposing our own personalities on another.
“If I were to picture a perfect family, it should be a union of people
of individual and marked character, who through love have come to a
perfect appreciation of each other, and who so wisely understand
themselves and one another that each may move freely along his or her
own track without jar or jostle,--a family where affection is always
sympathetic and receptive, but never inquisitive,--where all personal
delicacies are respected,--and where there is a sense of privacy and
seclusion in following one’s own course, unchallenged by the
watchfulness of others, yet withal a sense of society and support in a
knowledge of the kind dispositions and interpretations of all around.
“In treating of family discourtesies, I have avoided speaking of those
which come from ill-temper and brute selfishness, because these are sins
more than mistakes. An angry person is generally impolite; and where
contention and ill-will are, there can be no courtesy. What I have
mentioned are rather the lackings of good and often admirable people,
who merely need to consider in their family-life a little more of
whatsoever things are lovely. With such the mere admission of anything
to be pursued as a duty secures the purpose; only in their somewhat
earnest pursuit of the substantials of life they drop and pass by the
little things that give it sweetness and perfume. To such a word is
enough, and that word is said.”
VII.
EXACTINGNESS.
At length I am arrived at my seventh fox,--the last of the domestic
quadrupeds against which I have vowed a crusade,--and here opens the
chase of him. I call him
_EXACTINGNESS_.
And having done this, I drop the metaphor, for fear of chasing it beyond
the rules of graceful rhetoric, and shall proceed to define the trait.
All the other domestic faults of which I have treated have relation to
the manner in which the ends of life are pursued; but this one is an
underlying, false, and diseased state of conception as to the very ends
and purposes of life itself.
If a piano is tuned to exact concert pitch, the majority of voices must
fall below it; for which reason, most people indulgently allow their
pianos to be tuned a little below this point, in accommodation to the
average power of the human voice. Persons of only ordinary powers of
voice would be considered absolute monomaniacs, who should insist on
having their pianos tuned to accord with any abstract notion of
propriety or perfection,--rendering themselves wretched by persistently
singing all their pieces miserably out of tune in consequence.
Yet there are persons who keep the requirements of life strained up
always at concert pitch, and are thus worn out and made miserable all
their days by the grating of a perpetual discord.
There is a faculty of the human mind to which phrenologists have given
the name of _Ideality_, which is at the foundation of this exactingness.
Ideality is the faculty by which we conceive of and long for perfection;
and at a glance it will be seen, that, so far from being an evil
ingredient of human nature, it is the one element of progress that
distinguishes man’s nature from that of the brute. While animals go on
from generation to generation, learning nothing and forgetting nothing,
practising their small circle of the arts of life no better and no worse
from year to year, man is driven by ideality to constant invention and
alteration, whence come arts, sciences, and the whole progress of
society. Ideality induces discontent with present attainments,
possessions, and performances, and hence come better and better ones. So
in morals, ideality constantly incites to higher and nobler modes of
living and thinking, and is the faculty to which the most effective
teachings of the great Master of Christianity are addressed. To be
dissatisfied with present attainments, with earthly things and scenes,
to aspire and press on to something forever fair, yet forever receding
before our steps,--this is the teaching of Christianity, and the work of
the Christian.
But every faculty has its own instinctive, wild growth, which, like the
spontaneous produce of the earth, is crude and weedy.
Revenge, says Lord Bacon, is a sort of wild justice, obstinacy is
untutored firmness,--and so exactingness is untrained ideality; and a
vast deal of misery, social and domestic, comes, not of the faculty, but
of its untrained exercise.
The faculty which is ever conceiving and desiring something better and
more perfect must be modified in its action by good sense, patience, and
conscience, or it induces a morbid, discontented spirit, which courses
through the veins of individual and family life like a subtle poison.
In a certain neighborhood are two families whose social and domestic
_animus_ illustrates the difference between ideality and the want of it.
The Daytons are a large, easy-natured, joyous race, hospitable, kindly,
and friendly.
Nothing about their establishment is much above mediocrity. The grounds
are tolerably kept, the table is tolerably fair, the servants moderately
good, and the family character and attainments of the same average
level.
Mrs. Dayton is a decent housekeeper, and so her bread be not sour, her
butter not frowy, the food abundant, and the table-cloth and dishes
clean, she troubles her head little with the niceties and refinements of
the _ménage_.
She accepts her children as they come from the hand of Nature, simply
opening her eyes to discern what they _are_, never raising the query
what she would have had them,--forming no very high expectations
concerning them and well content with whatever develops.
A visitor in the family can easily see a thousand defects in the conduct
of affairs, in the management of the children, and in this, that, and
the other portion of the household arrangements; but he can see and
feel, also, a perfect comfortableness in the domestic atmosphere that
almost atones for any defects. He can see that in a thousand respects
things might be better done, if the family were not perfectly content to
have them as they are, and that each individual member might make higher
attainments in various directions, were there not such entire
satisfaction with what is already attained.
Trying each other by very moderate standards and measurements, there is
great mutual complacency. The oldest boy does not get an appointment in
college,--they never expected he would; but he was a respectable
scholar, and they receive him with acclamations such as another family
would bestow on a valedictorian. The daughters do not profess, as we are
told, to draw like artists, but some very moderate performances in the
line of the fine arts are dwelt on with much innocent pleasure. They
thrum a few tunes on the piano, and the whole family listen and approve.
All unite in singing in a somewhat uncultured manner a few psalm-tunes
or songs, and take more comfort in them than many amateurs do in their
well-drilled performances.
So goes the world with the Daytons; and when you visit them, if you
often feel that you could ask more and suggest much improvement, yet you
cannot help enjoying the quiet satisfaction which breathes around you.
Now right across the way from the Daytons live the Mores; and the Mores
are the very opposites of the Daytons.
Everything about their establishment is brought to the highest point of
culture. The carriage-drive never shows a weed, the lawn is velvet, the
flower-beds ever-blooming, the fruit-trees and vines grow exactly like
the patterns in the best pomological treatises. Within doors the
housekeeping is faultless,--all seems to be moving in time and
tune,--the table is more than good, it is superlative,--every article is
in its way a model,--the children appear to you to be growing up after
the most patent-right method, duly trained, snipped, and cultured, like
the pear-trees and grape-vines. Nothing is left to accident, or done
without much laborious consideration of the best manner of doing it; and
the consequences, in the eyes of their simple, unsophisticated
neighbors, are very wonderful.
Nevertheless this is not a happy family. All their perfections do not
begin to afford them one tithe of the satisfaction that the Daytons
derive from their ragged and scrambling performances.
The two daughters, Jane and Maria, had naturally very sweet voices, and
when they were little, trilled tunes in a very pleasant and bird-like
manner. But now, having been instructed by the best masters, and heard
the very first artists, they never sing or play; the piano is shut, and
their voices are dumb. If you request a song, they tell you that they
never sing now; papa has such an exquisite taste, he takes no interest
in any common music; in short, having heard Jenny Lind, Grisi, Alboni,
Mario, and others of the tuneful shell, this family have concluded to
abide in silence. As to any music that _they_ could make, it isn’t to be
thought of.
For the same reason, the daughters, after attending a quarter or two on
the drawing-exercises of a celebrated teacher, threw up their pencils in
disgust, and tore up very pretty and agreeable sketches which were the
marvel of their good-natured admiring neighbors. If they could draw like
Signor Scratchalini, if they could hope to become perfect artists, they
tell you, they would have persevered; but they have taken lessons enough
to learn that drawing is the labor of a lifetime, and, not having a
lifetime to give to it, they resolve to do nothing at all.
They have also, for a similar reason, given up letter-writing. If their
chirography were as elegant as Charlotte Cushman’s,--if they were
perfect mistresses of polite English,--if they were gifted with wit,
humor, and fancy, like the first masters of style,--they would take
pleasure in epistolary composition, and be good correspondents; but
anything short of that is so intolerable, that, except in cases of life
and death or urgent business, you cannot get a line out of them. Yet
they write very fair, agreeable, womanly letters, and would write much
better ones, if they allowed themselves a little more practice.
Mrs. More is devoured by care. She sits with a clouded brow in her
elegant, well-regulated house; and when you talk with her, you are
surprised to learn that everything in it is in the most dreadful
disorder from one end to the other. You ask for particulars, and find
that the disorder has relation to exquisite standards of the ways of
doing things, derived from observation of life in the most subdivided
state of European service,--to all of which she has not as yet been able
to raise her domestics. You compliment her on her cook, and she
responds, in plaintive accents, “She can do a few things decently, but
she is nothing of a cook.” You refer with enthusiasm to her bread, her
coffee, her muffins and hot rolls, and she listens and sighs. “Yes,” she
admits, “these are eatable,--not bad; but you should have seen the rolls
at a certain _café_ in Paris, and the bread at a certain nobleman’s in
England, where they had a bakery in the castle, and a French baker, who
did nothing all the while but to refine and perfect the idea of bread.
When she thinks of these things, everything in comparison is so coarse
and rough!--but then she has learned to be comfortable.” Thus, in every
department of housekeeping, to this too well-instructed person,
“Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise.”
Not a thing in her wide and apparently beautifully kept establishment is
ever done well enough to elicit from her more than a sigh of toleration.
“I suppose it must do,” she faintly breathes, when pool human nature,
having tried and tried again, evidently has got to the boundaries of
its capabilities; “you may let it go, Jane; I never expect to be
suited.”
The poor woman, in the midst of possessions and attainments which excite
the envy of her neighbors, is utterly restless and wretched, and feels
herself always baffled and unsuccessful. Her exacting nature makes her
dissatisfied with herself in everything that she undertakes, and equally
dissatisfied with others. In the whole family there is little of that
pleasure which comes from the consciousness of mutual admiration and
esteem, because each one is pitched to so exquisite a tone that each is
afraid to touch another for fear of making discord. They are afraid of
each other everywhere. They cannot sing to each other, play to each
other, write to each other; they cannot even converse together with any
freedom, because each knows that the others are so dismally well
informed and critically instructed.
Though all agree in a secret contempt for their neighbors over the way,
as living in a most heathenish state of ignorant contentment, yet it is
a fact that the elegant brother John will often, on the sly, slip into
the Daytons’ to spend an evening, and join them in singing glees and
catches to their old rattling piano, and have a jolly time of it, which
he remembers in contrast with the dull, silent hours at home. Kate
Dayton has an uncultivated voice, which often falls from pitch; but she
has a perfectly infectious gayety of good-nature, and when she is once
at the piano, and all join in some merry troll, he begins to think that
there may be something better even than good singing; and then they have
dances and charades and games, all in such contented, jolly, impromptu
ignorance of the unities of time, place, and circumstance, that he
sometimes doubts, where ignorance is such bliss, whether it isn’t in
truth folly to be wise.
Jane and Maria laugh at John for his partiality to the Daytons, and yet
they themselves feel the same attraction. At the Daytons’ they somehow
find themselves heroines; their drawings are so admired, their singing
is so charming to these simple ears, that they are often beguiled into
giving pleasure with their own despised acquirements; and Jane, somehow,
is very tolerant of the devoted attention of Will Dayton, a joyous,
honest-hearted fellow, whom, in her heart of hearts, she likes none the
worse for being unexacting and simple enough to think her a wonder of
taste and accomplishments. Will, of course, is the farthest possible
from the Admirable Crichtons and exquisite Sir Philip Sidneys whom Mrs.
More and the young ladies talk up at their leisure, and adorn with
feathers from every royal and celestial bird, when they are discussing
theoretic possible husbands. He is not in any way distinguished, except
for a kind heart, strong native good sense, and a manly energy that has
carried him straight into the very heart of many a citadel of life,
before which the superior and more refined Mr. John had set himself
down to deliberate upon the best and most elegant way of taking it.
Will’s plain, homely intelligence has often in five minutes disentangled
some ethereal snarl in which these exquisite Mores had spun themselves
up, and brought them to his own way of thinking by that sort of
disenchanting process which honest, practical sense sometimes exerts
over ideality.
The fact is, however, that in each of these families there is a natural
defect which requires something from the other for completeness. Taking
happiness as the standard, the Daytons have it as against the Mores.
Taking attainment as the standard, the Mores have it as against the
Daytons. A portion of the discontented ideality of the Mores would
stimulate the Daytons to refine and perfect many things which might
easily be made better, did they care enough to have them so; and a
portion of the Daytons’ self-satisfied contentment would make the
attainments and refinements of the Mores of some practical use in
advancing their own happiness.
But between these two classes of natures lies another, to which has been
given an equal share of ideality,--in which the conception and the
desire of excellence are equally strong, but in which a discriminating
common-sense acts like a balance-wheel in machinery. What is the reason
that the most exacting idealists never make themselves unhappy about not
being able to fly like a bird or swim like a fish? Because common-sense
teaches them that these accomplishments are so utterly out of the
question that they never arise to the mind as objects of desire. In
these well-balanced minds we speak of, common-sense runs an instinctive
line all through life between the attainable and the unattainable, and
sets the key of desire accordingly.
Common-sense teaches that there is no one branch of human art or science
in which perfection is not a point forever receding. A botanist gravely
assures us, that to become perfect in the knowledge of one branch of
seaweeds would take all the time and strength of a man for a lifetime.
There is no limit to music, to the fine arts. There is never a time when
the gardener can rest, saying that his garden is perfect. Housekeeping,
cooking, sewing, knitting, may all, for aught we know, be pushed on
forever, without exhausting the capabilities for better doing.
But while attainment in everything is endless, circumstances forbid the
greater part of human beings from attaining in any direction the half of
what they see would be desirable; and the difference between the
miserable idealist and the contented realist often is, not that both do
not see what needs to be done for perfection, but that, seeing it, one
is satisfied with the attainable, and the other forever frets and wears
himself out on the unattainable.
The principal of a large and complicated public institution was
complimented on maintaining such uniformity of cheerfulness amid such a
diversity of cares. “I’ve made up my mind to be satisfied, when things
are done _half_ as well as I would have them,” was his answer; and the
same philosophy would apply with cheering results to the domestic
sphere.
There is a saying which one often hears among common people, that such
and such a one are persons who never could be happy, unless everything
went “_just so_,"--that is, in accordance with their highest
conceptions.
When these persons are women, and undertake the sway of a home empire,
they are sure to be miserable, and to make others so; for home is a
place where by no kind of magic possible to woman can everything be
always made to go “just so.”
We may read treatises on education,--and very excellent ones there are.
We may read very nice stories illustrating home management, in which
book-children and book-servants all work into the author’s plan with
obliging unanimity; but every real child and real servant is an
uncompromising fact, whose working into our ideal of life cannot be
predicted with any degree of certainty. A husband is another absolute
fact, of whose conformity to any ideal conceptions no positive account
can be given. So, when a person has the most charming theories of
education, the most complete ideals of life, it is often his lot to sit
bound hand and foot and see them all trampled under the heel of opposing
circumstances.
Nothing is easier than to make an ideal garden. We lay out our grounds,
dig, plant, transplant, manure. We read catalogues of roses till we are
bewildered with their lustrous glories. We set out plum, pear, and
peach, we luxuriate in advance on bushels of choicest grapes, and our
theoretic garden is Paradise Regained. But in the actual garden there
are cut-worms for every cabbage, squash-bugs for all the melons, slugs
and rose-bugs for the roses, curculios for the plums, fire-blight for
pears, yellows for peaches, mildew for grapes, and late and early
frosts, droughts, winds, and hail-storms here and there for all.
The garden and the family are fair pictures of each other. Both are
capable of the most ravishing representations on paper; and the rules
and directions for creating beauty and perfection in both can be made so
apparently plain that he who runneth may read, and it would seem that a
fool need not err therein; and yet the actual results are always halting
miles away behind expectation and desire.
It would be an incalculable gain to domestic happiness, if people would
begin the concert of life with their instruments tuned to a very low
pitch: they who receive the most happiness are generally they who demand
and expect the least.
Ideality often becomes an insidious mental and moral disease, acting all
the more subtly from its alliances with what is highest and noblest
within us. Shall we not aspire to be perfect? Shall we be content with
low measures and low standards in anything? To these inquiries there
seems of course to be but one answer; yet the individual driven forward
in blind, unreasoning aspiration becomes wearied, bewildered,
discontented, restless, fretful, and miserable.
An unhappy person can never make others happy. The creators and
governors of a home, who are themselves restless and inharmonious,
cannot make harmony and peace. This is the secret reason why many a
pure, good, conscientious person is only a source of uneasiness in
family life. They are exacting, discontented, unhappy; and spread the
discontent and unhappiness about them. They are, to begin with, on poor
terms with themselves; they do not like themselves; they do not like
their own appearance, manners, education, accomplishments; on all these
points they try themselves by ideal standards, and find themselves
wanting. In morals, in religion, too, the same introverted scrutiny
detects only errors and evils, till all life seems to them a miserable,
hopeless failure, and they wish they had never been born. They are angry
and disgusted with themselves; there is no self-toleration or
self-endurance. And persons in a chronic quarrel with themselves are
very apt to quarrel with others. That exacting nature which has no
patience with one’s own inevitable frailties and errors has none for
those of others; and thus the great motive by which Christianity
enforces tolerance of the faults of others loses its hold. There are
people who make no allowances either for themselves or anybody else, but
are equally angry and disgusted with both.
Now it is important that those finely strung natures in which ideality
largely predominates should begin life by a religious care and restraint
of this faculty. As the case often stands, however, religion only
intensifies the difficulty, by adding stringency to exaction and
censoriousness, driving the subject up with an unremitting strain till
the very cords of reason sometimes snap. Yet, properly understood and
used, religion is the only cure for the evil of diseased ideality. The
Christian religion is the only one that ever proposed to give to all
human beings, however various the range of their nature and desires, the
great underlying gift of _rest_. Its Author, with a strength of
assurance which only supreme Divinity can justify, promises _rest_ to
all persons, under all circumstances, with all sorts of natures, all
sorts of wants, and all sorts of defects. The invitation is as wide as
the human race: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy-laden,
and I will give you REST.”
Now this is the more remarkable, as this gracious promise is accompanied
by the presentation of a standard of perfection which is more ideal and
exacting than any other that has ever been placed before
mankind,--which, in so many words, sets up absolute perfection as the
only true goal of aspiration.
The problem which Jesus proposes to human nature is endless aspiration
steadied by endless peace,--a perfectly restful, yet unceasing effort
after a good which is never to be attained till we attain a higher and
more perfect form of existence. It is because this problem is insolvable
by any human wisdom, that He says that they who take His yoke upon them
must learn of Him, for He alone can make the perfect yoke easy and its
burden light.
The first lesson in this benignant school must lie like a strong, broad
foundation under every structure on which we wish to rear a happy
life,--and that is, that the full gratification of the faculty of
ideality is never to be expected in this present stage of existence, but
is to be transferred to a future life. Ideality, with its incessant,
restless longings and yearnings, is snubbed and turned out of doors by
human philosophy, when philosophy becomes middle-aged and sulky with
repeated disappointments,--it is berated as a cheat and a liar,--told to
hold its tongue and take itself elsewhere; but Christianity bids it be
of good cheer, still to aspire and hope and prophesy, and points to a
future where all its dreams shall be outdone by reality.
A full faith in such a perfect future--a perfect faith that God has
planted in man no desire which he cannot train to complete enjoyment in
that future--gives the mind rest and contentment to postpone for a while
gratifications that will certainly come at last.
Such a faith is better even than that native philosophical good sense
which restrains the ideal calculations and hopes of some; for it has a
wider scope and a deeper power.
We have seen in our time a woman gifted with all those faculties which
rejoice in the refinements of society, dispensing the elegant
hospitalities of a bountiful home, joyful and giving joy. A sudden
reverse has swept all this away, the wealth on which it was based has
melted like a fog-bank in a warm morning, and we have seen her with her
little family beginning life again in the log-cabin of a Western
settlement. We have seen her sitting in the door of the one room that
took the place of parlor, bed-room, nursery, and cheerfully making her
children’s morning toilette by the help of the one tin wash-bowl that
takes the place of her well-arranged bathing-and dressing-rooms; and
yet, as she twined their curls over her fingers, she had a laugh and a
jest and cheerful word for all. The few morning-glories that she was
training over her rude porch seemed as much a source of delight to her
as her former greenhouse and garden; and the adjustment of the one or
two shelves whereon were the half-dozen books left of the library, her
husband’s private papers, and her own and her children’s wardrobe, was
entered into daily with a zealous interest as if she had never known a
wider sphere.
Such facility of accommodation to life’s reverses is sometimes supposed
to be merely the result of a hopeful and cheerful temperament; in this
case it was purely the work of religion. In early life, this same woman
had been the discontented slave of ideality, had sighed with vain
longings in the midst of real and substantial comfort, had felt even the
creasing of the rose-leaves of her pillow an intolerable annoyance. Now
she has resigned herself to the work and toil of life as the soldier
does to the duties of the camp, satisfied to do and to bear, enjoying
with a free heart the small daily pleasures which spring up like
wild-flowers amid daily toils and annoyances, and looking to the end of
the campaign for rest and congenial scenes.
This woman has within her the powers and gifts of an artist; but her
pencils and her colors are resolutely laid away, and she sits hour after
hour darning her children’s stockings and turning and arranging a scanty
wardrobe which no ingenuity can make more than decent. She was a
beautiful musician; but a musical instrument is now a thing of the past;
she only lulls her baby to sleep with snatches of the songs which used
to form the attraction of brilliant salons. She feels that a world of
tastes and talents are lying dormant in her while she is doing the daily
work of a nurse, cook, and seamstress; but she remembers WHO took upon
Him the form of a servant before her, and she has full faith that her
beautiful gifts, like bulbs sleeping under ground, shall come up and
blossom again in that fair future which He has promised. Therefore it is
that she has no sighs for the present or the past,--no quarrel with her
life, or her lot in it; she is in harmony with herself and with all
around her; her husband looks upon her as a fair daily miracle, and her
children rise up and call her blessed.
But, having laid the broad foundation of faith in a better life, as the
basis on which to ground our present happiness, we who are of the ideal
nature must proceed to build thereon wisely.
In the first place, we must cultivate the duty of _self-patience_ and
self-toleration. Of all the religionists and moralists who ever taught,
Fénelon is the only one who has distinctly formulated the duty which a
self-educator owes to himself. HAVE PATIENCE WITH YOURSELF is a
direction often occurring in his writings, and a most important one it
is,--because patience with ourselves is essential, if we would have
patience with others. Let us look through the world. Who are the people
easiest to be pleased, most sunny, most urbane, most tolerant? Are they
not persons from constitution and temperament on good terms with
themselves,--people who do not ask much of themselves or try themselves
severely, and who therefore are in a good humor for looking upon others?
But how is a person who is conscious of a hundred daily faults and
errors to have patience with himself? The question may be answered by
asking, What would you say to a child who fretted, scolded, dashed down
his slate, and threw his book on the floor, because he made mistakes in
his arithmetic? You would say, of course, “You are but a learner; it is
not to be expected that you will not make mistakes; all children do.
Have patience.” Just as you would talk to that child, talk to yourself.
Be reconciled to a lot of inevitable imperfection; be content to try
continually, and often to fail. It is the inevitable condition of human
existence, and is to be accepted as such. A patient acceptance of
mortifications and of defeats of our life’s labor, is often more
efficacious for our moral advancement than even our victories.
In the next place, we must school ourselves not to look with restless
desire to degrees of excellence in any department of life which
circumstances evidently forbid our attaining. For a woman with plenty of
money and plenty of well-trained servants to be content to have
fly-specked windows, or littered rooms, or a slovenly-ordered table, is
a sin. But in a woman in feeble health, incumbered with a flock of
restless little ones, and whose circumstances allow her to keep but one
servant, it may be a piece of moral heroism to shut her eyes on many
such things, while securing mere essentials to life and health. It may
be a virtue in her not to push neatness to such lengths as to wear
herself out, or to break down her only servant, and to be resigned to
have her tastes and preferences for order, cleanliness, and beauty
crossed, as she would resign herself to any other affliction. No
purgatory can be more severe to people of a thorough and exact nature
than to be so situated that they can only half do everything they
undertake; yet such is the fiery trial to which many a one is subjected.
Life seems to drive them along without giving them time for anything;
everything is ragged, hasty performance, of which the mind most keenly
sees and feels the raggedness and hastiness. Even one thing done as it
really ought to be done would be a rest and refreshment to the soul; but
nowhere, in any department of its undertakings, is there any such thing
to be perceived.
But there are cases where a great deal of wear and tear can be saved to
the nerves by a considerate making up of one’s mind as to how much in
certain circumstances had better be undertaken at all. Let the
circumstances of life be surveyed, the objects we are pursuing arranged
and counted, and see if there are not things here and there that may be
thrown out of our plans entirely, that others may be better done.
What if the whole care of expensive table luxuries, like cake and
preserves, be thrown out of a housekeeper’s budget, in order that the
essential articles of cookery may be better prepared? What if ruffling,
embroidery, and the entire department of kindred fine arts, be thrown
out of her calculations, in providing for the clothing of a family? Many
a feeble woman has died of too much ruffling, as she patiently sat up
night after night sewing the thread of a precious, invaluable life into
elaborate articles which her children were none the healthier or more
virtuous for wearing.
Ideality is constantly ramifying and extending the department of the
toilette and the needle into a world of work and worry, wherein
distracted women wander up and down, seeing no end anywhere. The
sewing-machine was announced as a relief to these toils; but has it
proved so? We trow not. It only amounts to this,--that now there can be
seventy-two tucks on each little petticoat, instead of fifteen, as
before, and that twice as many garments are made up and held to be
necessary as formerly. The women still sew to the limit of human
endurance; and still the old proverb holds good, that woman’s work is
never done.
In the matter of dress, much wear and tear of spirit and nerves may be
saved by not beginning to go in certain directions, well knowing that
they will take us beyond our resources of time, strength, and money.
There is one word of fear in the vocabulary of women of our time which
must be pondered advisedly,--TRIMMING. In old times a good garment was
enough; now-a-days a garment is nothing without trimming. Everything,
from the first article that the baby wears up to the elaborate dress of
the bride, must be trimmed at a rate that makes the trimming more than
the original article. A dress can be made in a day, but it cannot be
trimmed under two or three days. Let a faithful, conscientious woman
make up her mind how much of all this burden of life she will assume,
remembering wisely that there is no end to ideality in anything, and
that the only way to deal with many perplexing parts of life is to leave
them out altogether.
Mrs. Kirkland, in her very amusing account of her log-cabin experiences,
tells us of the great disquiet and inconvenience she had in attempting
to arrange in her lowly abode a most convenient clothes-press, which was
manifestly too large for the establishment. Having labored with the
cumbersome convenience for a great length of time, and with much
discomfort, she at last resigned the ordering of it to a brawny-armed
damsel of the forest, who began by pitching it out of doors, with the
comprehensive remark, that, “where there wasn’t room for a thing, there
wasn’t.”
The wisdom which inspired the remark of this rustic maiden might have
saved the lives of many matrons who have worn themselves out in vain
attempts to make comforts and conveniences out of things which they had
better have thrown out of doors altogether.
True, it requires some judgment to know what, among objects commonly
pursued in any department, we really ought to reject; and it requires
independence and steadiness to say, “I will not begin to try to do
certain things that others are doing, and that, perhaps, they expect of
me”; but there comes great leisure and quietness of spirit from the gaps
thus made. When the unwieldy clothes-press was once cast out, everything
in the log-cabin could have room.
A mother, who is anxiously trying to reconcile the watchful care and
training of her little ones with the maintenance of fashionable calls
and parties, may lose her life in the effort to do both, and do both in
so imperfect a manner as never to give her a moment’s peace. But on the
morrow after she comes to the serious and Christian resolve, “The
training of my children is all that I _can_ do well, and henceforth it
shall be my _sole_ object,” there falls into her tumultuous life a
Sabbath pause of peace and leisure. It is true that she is still doing a
work in which absolute perfection ever recedes; but she can make
relative attainments far nearer the standard than before.
Lastly, under the head of ideality let us resolve _to be satisfied with
our own past doings, when at the time of doing we used all the light God
gave us, and did all in our power_.
The backward action of ideality is often full as tormenting as its
forward and prospective movements. The moment a thing is done and over,
one would think that good sense would lead us to drop it like a stone in
the ocean; but the morbid idealist cannot cut loose from the past.
“Was that, after all, the _best_ thing? Would it not have been better so
or so?” And the self-tormented individual lies wakeful, during weary
night-hours, revolving a thousand possibilities, and conjuring up a
thousand vague perhapses. “If I had only done _so_ now, perhaps this
result would have followed, or that would not”; and as there is never
any saying but that so it might have turned out, the labyrinth and the
discontent are alike endless.
Now there is grand good sense in the Apostle’s direction, “Forgetting
the things that are behind, press forward.” The idealist should charge
himself, as with an oath of God, to let the past alone as an
accomplished fact, solely concerning himself with the inquiry, “Did I
not do the best I _then_ knew how?”
The maxim of the Quietists is, that, when we have acted according to
the best light we have, we have expressed the will of God under those
circumstances,--since, had it been otherwise, more and different light
would have been given us; and with the will of God done by ourselves as
by Himself, it is our duty to be content.
* * * * *
Having written thus far in my article, and finding nothing more at hand
to add to it, I went into the parlor to read it to Jenny and Mrs.
Crowfield. I found the former engaged in the task of binding sixty yards
of quilling, (so I think she called it,) which were absolutely necessary
for perfecting a dress; and the latter was braiding one of seven little
petticoats, stamped with elaborate patterns, which she had taken from
Marianne, because that virtuous matron was ruining her eyes and health
in a blind push to get them done before October.
Both approved and admired my piece, and I thought of Saint Anthony’s
preaching the fishes:--
The sermon now ended,
Each turned and descended;
The pikes went on stealing,
The eels went on eeling.
Much delighted were they,
But preferred the old way.
THE END.
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
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