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 _employe_, 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 mosquitoes. 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 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 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 some how 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, an 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 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
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 firm 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 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 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."
ACCOMPLICES.
VIRGINIA, 1865.
The soft new grass is creeping o'er the graves
By the Potomac; and the crisp ground-flower
Lifts its blue cup to catch the passing shower;
The pine-cone ripens, and the long moss waves
Its tangled gonfalons above our braves.
Hark, What a burst of music from yon wood!
The Southern nightingale, above its brood,
In its melodious summer madness raves.
Ah, with what delicate touches of her hand,
With what sweet voices, Nature seeks to screen
The awful Crime of this distracted land,--
Sets her birds singing, while she spreads her green
Mantle of velvet where the Murdered lie,
As if to hide the horror from God's eye!
THE CHICAGO CONSPIRACY.