NETS AND CAGES.
"I think for a woman to fail to make and keep a happy home, is to
be a 'failure' in a truer sense than to have failed to catch a
husband."--_Frances Power Cobbe._
"We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry."--_Vittoria
Corombona._
When Mr. Wilberforce was a candidate for Hull, his sister, an amiable
and witty young lady, offered a new dress to each of the wives of those
freemen who voted for her brother. When saluted with "Miss Wilberforce
for ever!" she pleasantly observed, "I thank you, gentlemen, but I
cannot agree with you, for really I do not wish to be _Miss_ Wilberforce
for ever."
We do not blame Miss Wilberforce or any other young lady for not wishing
to be a "Miss" for ever; but we desire to point out in this chapter that
all is not done when the husband is gained.
"Even in the happiest choice whom fav'ring Heaven
Has equal love and easy fortune given;
Think not, the husband gained, that all is done,
The prize of happiness must still be won;
And oft the careless find it to their cost;
The lover in the husband may be lost;
The graces might alone his heart allure;
They and the virtues meeting must secure."
According to Dean Swift, "the reason why so few marriages are happy is
because young women spend their time in making nets, not in making
cages." Certainly a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, and girls
are quite justified in trying in all ways, consistent with modesty and
self-respect, to net husbands. Still, she is the really fine woman who
can not merely net the affections of a husband during the honeymoon, but
who can cage and keep them throughout a long married life. Only the
other day, a man told me that after forty years of married life, he
loved his wife almost better than the day they were married. We are not
told that Alexander the Great, after conquering the world, kept his
conquest very long, but this wife kept her conquest forty years. Woman
in her time has been called upon to endure a great deal of definition.
She had been described as, "A good idea--spoiled!" This may be true of
one who can only make nets, but it certainly is not true of a
cage-maker. Always do--
"Her air, her smile, her motions, tell
Of womanly completeness;
A music as of household songs
Is in her voice of sweetness.
Flowers spring to blossom where she walks
The careful ways of duty;
The hard stiff lines of life with her
Are flowing curves of beauty."
Men are often as easily caught as birds, but as difficult to keep. If
the wife cannot make her home bright and happy, so that it shall be the
cleanest, sweetest, cheerfullest place that her husband can find refuge
in--a retreat from the toils and troubles of the outer world--then God
help the poor man, for he is virtually homeless!
In the home more than anywhere else order is Heaven's first law. It is
the duty of a wife to sweetly order her cage so that it may be clean,
neat, and free from muddle. Method is the oil that makes the wheels of
the domestic machine run easily. The mistress of a home who desires
order, and the tranquillity that comes of order, must insist on the
application of method to every branch and department of the household
work. She must rise and breakfast early and give her orders early. Doing
much before twelve o'clock gives her a command of the day.
A friend of Robert Hall, the famous preacher, once asked him regarding a
lady of their acquaintance, "Will she make a good wife for me?" "Well,"
replied Hall, "I can hardly say--I never lived with her!" This is the
real test of happiness in married life. It is one thing to see ladies on
"dress" occasions and when every effort is being made to please them; it
is quite another thing to see them amidst the varied and often
conflicting circumstances of household life. Men may talk in raptures of
youth and beauty, wit and sprightliness; but after seven years of union,
not one of them is to be compared to good family management which is
seen at every meal, and felt every hour in the husband's purse. In the
"Records of Later Life," Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Butler), shortly after she
had begun housekeeping with a staff of six servants, writes from America
to a friend, "I have been reproaching myself, and reproving others, and
heartily regretting that instead of Italian and music, I had not learned
a little domestic economy, and how much bread, butter, flour, eggs,
milk, sugar, and meat ought to be consumed per week by a family of eight
persons." There is no reason why she should not have learned all this,
and Italian and music as well.
Gradually it has come to be seen that practical cookery, which might be
classed under the head of chemistry, is an excellent intellectual
training, as it teaches the application in daily life of knowledge
derived from a variety of branches of study. From this point of view
even sweet girl-graduates may take pride in being good cooks, while as
regards women of the working classes hardly anything drives their
husbands to drink so much as bad cookery and irregular meals.
Leigh Hunt used to say that "the most fascinating women are those that
can most enrich the every-day moments of existence." If we are to
believe Mrs. Carlyle, who lived next door to the Hunts at Chelsea, Mrs.
Hunt did not do much in the way of domestic economy to "enrich the
every-day moments of existence." "I told Mrs. Hunt, one day, I had been
very busy _painting_." "What?" she asked, "is it a portrait?" "Oh! no,"
I told her; "something of more importance--a large wardrobe." She could
not imagine, she said, "how I could have patience for such things." And
so, having no patience for them herself, what is the result? She is
every other day reduced to borrow my tumblers, my tea-cups; even a
cupful of porridge, a few spoonfuls of tea, are begged of me, because
"Missus has got company, and happens to be out of the article;' in
plain anadorned English, because 'missus' is the most wretched of
managers, and is often at the point of having not a copper in her purse.
To see how they live and waste here, it is a wonder the whole city does
not 'bankrape, and go out o' sicht';--flinging platefuls of what they
are pleased to denominate 'crusts' (that is, what I consider all the
best of the bread) into the ashpits.' I often say, with honest
self-congratulation, 'In Scotland we have no such thing as "crusts."' On
the whole, though the English ladies seem to have their wits more at
their finger-ends, and have a great advantage over me in that respect, I
never cease to be glad that I was born on the other side of the Tweed,
and that those who are nearest and dearest to me are Scotch.... Mrs.
Hunt I shall soon be quite terminated with, I foresee. She torments my
life out with borrowing. She actually borrowed one of the brass fenders
the other day, and I had difficulty in getting it out of her hands;
irons, glasses, tea-cups, silver spoons are in constant requisition; and
when one sends for them the whole number can never be found. Is it not a
shame to manage so, with eight guineas a week to keep house on! It makes
me very indignant to see all the waste that goes on around me, when I am
needing so much care and calculation to make ends meet."
When Carlyle was working hard to support himself and his wife by
literature at the lonely farmhouse which was their home, Mrs. Carlyle
did all she could to mitigate by good cookery the miseries which
dyspepsia inflicted upon him. She thus writes of her culinary trials:
"The bread, above all, brought from Dumfries, 'soured on his stomach'
(Oh Heaven!), and it was plainly my duty as a Christian wife to bake at
home; so I sent for Cobbett's 'Cottage Economy,' and fell to work at a
loaf of bread. But knowing nothing about the process of fermentation or
the heat of ovens, it came to pass that my loaf got put into the oven at
the time that myself ought to have been put into bed; and I remained the
only person not asleep in a house in the middle of a desert. One o'clock
struck, and then two, and then three; and still I was sitting there in
an immense solitude, my whole body aching with weariness, my heart
aching with a sense of forlornness and degradation. That I, who had been
so petted at home, whose comfort had been studied by everybody in the
house, who had never been required to do anything but cultivate my mind,
should have to pass all those hours of the night in watching a loaf of
bread--which mightn't turn out bread after all! Such thoughts maddened
me, till I laid down my head on the table and sobbed aloud. It was then
that somehow the idea of Benvenuto Cellini sitting up all night watching
his Perseus in the furnace came into my head, and suddenly I asked
myself: 'After all, in the sight of the Upper Powers, what is the mighty
difference between a statue of Perseus and a loaf of bread, so that each
be the thing one's hand has found to do? The man's determined will, his
energy, his patience, his resource, were the really admirable things of
which his statue of Perseus was the mere chance expression. If he had
been a woman living at Craigenputtoch, with a dyspeptic husband, sixteen
miles from a baker, and he a bad one, all these same qualities would
have come out more fitly in a good loaf of bread.' I cannot express what
consolation this germ of an idea spread over my uncongenial life during
the years we lived at that savage place, where my two immediate
predecessors had gone mad, and the third had taken to drink."
Though the life of that tragic muse Mrs. Siddons was girded about with
observance and worship from the highest in the land, though her mind and
imagination were always employed in realizing the most glorious
creations of the most glorious poets, Mrs. Siddons in her home was at
once the simplest and the tenderest of women. She did a great deal of
the household work herself, and her grand friends, when they called,
would be met by her with a flat-iron in her hand, or would find her
seated studying a new part, while, at the same time, she rocked the
cradle of her latest born, and knitted her husband's stockings. When she
went to the theatre she was generally accompanied by one or more of her
children, and the little things would cling about her, holding her hand
or her dress, as she stood in the side scenes. The fine ladies who
petted her could not put one grain of their fine-ladyism into her. To
the end of her life she remained a proof of the not-generally-believed
fact that an artist can be, at the same time, a most purely domestic
woman. The same too may be said of a mathematician, for the greatest
woman-mathematician of any age, Mary Somerville, was renowned for her
good housekeeping.
An American newspaper lately addressed the following wise words to young
women: "Learn to keep house. If you would be a level-headed woman; if
you would have right instincts and profound views, and that most subtle,
graceful, and irresistible of all things, womanly charm; if you would
make your pen, your music, your accomplishments tell, and would give
them body, character, and life; if you would be a woman of genuine
power, and queen o'er all the earth, learn to keep house thoroughly and
practically. You see the world all awry, and are consumed with a desire
to set it right. Must you go on a mission to the heathen? Very well, but
learn to keep house first. Begin reform, where all true reform must
begin, at the centre and work outwards; at the foundation and work
upwards. What is the basis and centre of all earthly life? It is the
family, the home; these relations dictate and control all others. _There
is nothing from which this distracted world is suffering so much to-day,
as for want of thorough housekeeping and homemaking._"
But a cage-making wife is much more than a good cook and housekeeper.
Indeed it is possible for a wife to be too careful and cumbered about
these things. When such is the case she becomes miserable and grumbles
at a little dust or disorder which the ordinary mortal does not see,
just as a fine musician is pained and made miserable at a slight discord
that is not noticed by less-trained ears. Probably her husband wishes
his house were less perfectly kept, but more peaceful. A woman should
know when to change her _role_ of housewife for that of the loving
friend and companion of her husband. She should be able and willing to
intelligently discuss with him the particular political or social
problem that is to him of vital interest. We will all agree with Dr.
Johnson that a man of sense and education should seek a suitable
_companion_ in a wife. "It was," he said, "a miserable thing when the
conversation could only be such as, whether the mutton should be boiled
or roast, and probably a dispute about that." A good and loyal wife
takes upon her a share of everything that concerns and interests her
husband. Whatever may be his work or even recreation, she endeavours to
learn enough about it to be able to listen to him with interest if he
speaks to her of it, and to give him a sensible opinion if he asks for
it. In every matter she is helpful.
Women's lives are often very dull; but it would help to make them
otherwise if wives would sometimes think over, during the hours when
parted from their husbands, a few little winning ways as surprises for
them on their return, either in the way of conversation, or of some
small change of dress, or any way their ingenuity would have suggested
in courting days. How little the lives of men and women would be dull,
if they thought of and acted towards each other after marriage as they
did before it!
Certainly, it does a wife good to go out of her cage occasionally for
amusement, although her deepest, truest happiness may be found at home.
She, quite as much as her husband, requires change and recreation, but
while this is true she must never forget that a life of pleasure is a
life of pain, and that if much of her time is spent in visiting and
company, anarchy and confusion at home must be the consequence. "Never
seek for amusement," says Mr. Ruskin, "but be always ready to be amused.
The least thing has play in it--the slightest word wit, when your hands
are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life
amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will
not bring you an honest laugh."
Nothing renders a woman so agreeable to her husband as good humour. It
possesses the powers ascribed to magic and imparts beauty to the
plainest features. On the other hand, the bright, sparkling girl, who
turns, after marriage, in her hours of privacy with her husband, into
the dull, silent, or grumbling wife has no one to thank but herself if
he is often absent from his home.
Men hate nagging, and, indeed, husband-nagging is almost as cruel as
wife-beating. There are women whose perpetual contentiousness is a moral
reproduction of an Oriental torture, that drops water on you every ten
seconds. The butler of a certain Scottish laird, who had been in the
family a number of years, at last resigned his situation because his
lordship's wife was always scolding him. "Oh!" exclaimed his master, "if
that be all, ye've very little to complain of." "Perhaps so," replied
the butler; "but I have decided in my own mind to put up with it no
longer." "Go, then," said his lordship; "and be thankful for the rest of
your life that ye're not married to her."
The methods which women adopt in managing husbands vary with the
characters of the individuals to be guided. In illustration of this here
is a short story. Two women, Mrs. A. and Mrs. B., were talking together
one day with some friends over a cup of tea, when the subject of the
management of husbands came up. Each of these two wives boasted that she
could make her husband do exactly what she liked. A spinster who was
present, Miss C, denied the truth of this statement, and this led to
high words, in the course of which it was agreed that each wife should
prove her power by making her husband drive her on a particular
afternoon in a hired carriage to an appointed place, which we will call
Edmonton. The test was considered a good one, because the two husbands
were individuals inclined to economy, who in the ordinary course of
events would never think of hiring a carriage or driving anywhere,
excepting in a 'bus to the City. Mrs. A. was a strong-minded, determined
woman, and Mr. A. was meek and gentle; no one doubted, therefore, that
Mrs. A. could get what she wanted. But Mr. B. was an argumentative,
contradictory, wilful, and pugnacious individual, while Mrs. B. was
sweet and good. It was expected that Mrs. B. would have to own herself
defeated. However, the day arrived and the hour, the unbelieving
spinster repaired to the spot, and up drove the two husbands with their
wives sitting in state by their sides. "How did you manage it?" said
Miss C. "Oh," said Mrs. A., "I simply said to my husband, 'Mr. A., I
wish you to hire a carriage and drive me to Edmonton.' He said, 'Very
well, my dear, but I----,' and here I am." "And how did you manage it,
Mrs. B.?" Mrs. B. was unwilling to confess, but at length she was
induced to do so. "I said to my husband, 'I think Mr. and Mrs. A. are
very extravagant: they are going to hire a carriage and pair to-morrow
and drive to Edmonton.' 'Why should they not do so if they like it?'
said Mr. B. 'Oh, no reason at all, my dear, if you think it right, and
if they can afford it; but we could not do anything of that kind, of
course. Besides, I fancy Mr. A. is more accustomed to driving than you
are.' 'A. is not at all more accustomed to it than I am,' said Mr. B.,
'and I can afford it quite as well as he. Indeed, I will prove that I
can and will, for I will hire a carriage and drive there at the same
time.' 'Very well, my dear, if you think so; but I should not like to go
with you, I should feel so ashamed.' 'Then I wish you to go with me,
Mrs. B.; I insist upon your accompanying me.' So," said quiet little
Mrs. B., "that is the way I manage Mr. B."
Neither of these women is to be congratulated on her method of
management. Each despised her husband, and what sort of basis is scorn
for happiness in married life? If a man's own wife does not believe in
him, and look up to him, and admire him, and like him better than anyone
else, poor man, who else will? If he is not king at home, where is he
king?
Once upon a time, according to an old heathen legend, the gods and
goddesses were assembled together, and were talking over matters
celestial, when one of the company, who was of an inquiring mind, said,
"What are the people who live on the earth like?" No one knew. One or
two guesses were made, but every one knew that they were only guesses.
At last an enterprising little goddess suggested that a special
messenger should be sent to visit the earth, to make inquiries, and to
bring back information concerning the inhabitants thereof. Off the
messenger went. On his return, the gods and goddesses once more
assembled, and every one was very anxious to hear the result of this
mission. "Well," said Jove, who constituted himself speaker on the
occasion, "what have you learnt? What are the people of the earth like?"
"They are very curious people," said the traveller. "They have no
character of their own, but they become what others think them. If you
think them cruel, they act cruelly; if you think them true, they may be
relied on; if you think them false, they lie and steal; if you believe
them to be kind, they are amiability itself."
May not the secret of how to manage a husband be found in this small
fable? A woman has power over her husband (that is, legitimate and
reasonable power, not power to make him hire a carriage, but power to
make him kind, true, and persevering) in proportion to her belief in
him. She is never so helpless with regard to him as when she has lost
faith in him herself.
Milton tells us that a good wife is "heaven's last, best gift to man;"
but what constitutes a good wife? Purity of thought and feeling, a
generous cheerful temper, a disposition ready to forgive, patience, a
high sense of duty, a cultivated mind, and a natural grace of manner.
She should be able to govern her household with gentle resolution, and
to take an intelligent interest in her husband's pursuits. She should
have a clear understanding, and "all the firmness that does not exclude
delicacy," and "all the softness that does not imply weakness." "Her
beauty, like the rose it resembleth, shall retain its sweetness when its
bloom is withered. Her hand seeketh employment; her foot delighteth not
in gadding about. She is clothed with neatness; she is fed with
temperance. On her tongue dwelleth music; the sweetness of honey floweth
from her lips. Her eye speaketh softness and love; but discretion, with
a sceptre, sitteth on her brow. She presideth in the house, and there is
peace; she commandeth with judgment, and is obeyed. She ariseth in the
morning, she considers her affairs, and appointeth to every one their
proper business. The prudence of her management is an honour to her
husband; and he heareth her praise with a secret delight. Happy is the
man that hath made her his wife; happy is the child that calleth her
mother."
The married man must have been blessed with a cage-making wife like this
who defined woman as "An essay on goodness and grace, in one volume,
elegantly bound." Although it may seem a little expensive, every man
should have a copy.