many and great. Nor are they to be disposed of by any criticism
or amendment of particulars taken one at a time, but only by the
arrangement of the household to a higher end than those to which our
dwellings are usually built and furnished. And is there any calamity
more grave, or that more invokes the best good-will to remove it,
than this?--to go from chamber to chamber, and see no beauty; to find
in the housemates no aim; to hear an endless chatter and blast; to be
compelled to criticise; to hear only to dissent and to be disgusted;
to find no invitation to what is good in us, and no receptacle for
what is wise;--this is a great price to pay for sweet bread and warm
lodging,--being defrauded of affinity, of repose, of genial culture,
and the inmost presence of beauty.
It is a sufficient accusation of our ways of living, and certainly
ought to open our ear to every good-minded reformer, that our idea of
domestic well-being now needs wealth to execute it. Give me the means,
says the wife, and your house shall not annoy your taste nor waste
your time. On hearing this, we understand how these Means have come
to be so omnipotent on earth. And indeed the love of wealth seems to
grow chiefly out of the root of the love of the Beautiful. The desire
of gold is not for gold. It is not the love of much wheat and wool
and household-stuff. It is the means of freedom and benefit. We scorn
shifts; we desire the elegance of munificence; we desire at least to
put no stint or limit on our parents, relatives, guests, or dependents;
we desire to play the benefactor and the prince with our townsmen, with
the stranger at the gate, with the bard, or the beauty, with the man
or woman of worth, who alights at our door. How can we do this, if the
wants of each day imprison us in lucrative labors, and constrain us to
a continual vigilance lest we be betrayed into expense?
_Give us wealth, and the home shall exist._ But that is a very
imperfect and inglorious solution of the problem, and therefore no
solution. “_Give us wealth._” You ask too much. Few have wealth; but
all must have a home. Men are not born rich; and in getting wealth, the
man is generally sacrificed, and often is sacrificed without acquiring
wealth at last. Besides, that cannot be the right answer;--there are
objections to wealth. Wealth is a shift. The wise man angles with
himself only, and with no meaner bait. Our whole use of wealth needs
revision and reform. Generosity does not consist in giving money or
money’s worth. These so-called _goods_ are only the shadow of good. To
give money to a sufferer is only a come-off. It is only a postponement
of the real payment, a bribe paid for silence,--a credit-system
in which a paper promise to pay answers for the time instead of
liquidation. We owe to man higher succors than food and fire. We owe to
man man. If he is sick, is unable, is mean-spirited and odious, it is
because there is so much of his nature which is unlawfully withholden
from him. He should be visited in this his prison with rebuke to the
evil demons, with manly encouragement, with no mean-spirited offer of
condolence because you have not money, or mean offer of money as the
utmost benefit, but by your heroism, your purity, and your faith.
You are to bring with you that spirit which is understanding, health
and self-help. To offer him money in lieu of these is to do him the
same wrong as when the bridegroom offers his betrothed virgin a sum
of money to release him from his engagements. The great depend on
their heart, not on their purse. Genius and virtue, like diamonds,
are best plain-set,--set in lead, set in poverty. The greatest man in
history was the poorest. How was it with the captains and sages of
Greece and Rome, with Socrates, with Epaminondas? Aristides was made
general receiver of Greece, to collect the tribute which each state
was to furnish against the barbarian. “Poor,” says Plutarch, “when he
set about it, poorer when he had finished it.” How was it with Æmilius
and Cato? What kind of house was kept by Paul and John,--by Milton and
Marvell,--by Samuel Johnson,--by Samuel Adams in Boston, and Jean Paul
Richter at Baireuth?
I think it plain that this voice of communities and ages, ‘Give us
wealth, and the good household shall exist,’ is vicious, and leaves
the whole difficulty untouched. It is better, certainly, in this form,
‘Give us your labor, and the household begins.’ I see not how serious
labor, the labor of all and every day, is to be avoided; and many
things betoken a revolution of opinion and practice in regard to manual
labor that may go far to aid our practical inquiry. Another age may
divide the manual labor of the world more equally on all the members
of society, and so make the labors of a few hours avail to the wants
and add to the vigor of the man. But the reform that applies itself to
the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of
our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking; it
must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation.
It must come in connection with a true acceptance by each man of his
vocation,--not chosen by his parents or friends, but by his genius,
with earnestness and love.
Nor is this redress so hopeless as it seems. Certainly, if we begin by
reforming particulars of our present system, correcting a few evils
and letting the rest stand, we shall soon give up in despair. For our
social forms are very far from truth and equity. But the way to set the
axe at the root of the tree is, to raise our aim. Let us understand,
then, that a house should bear witness in all its economy that human
culture is the end to which it is built and garnished. It stands there
under the sun and moon to ends analogous, and not less noble than
theirs. It is not for festivity, it is not for sleep: but the pine and
the oak shall gladly descend from the mountains to uphold the roof of
men as faithful and necessary as themselves; to be the shelter always
open to good and true persons;--a hall which shines with sincerity,
brows ever tranquil, and a demeanor impossible to disconcert; whose
inmates know what they want; who do not ask your house how theirs
should be kept. They have aims: they cannot pause for trifles. The
diet of the house does not create its order, but knowledge, character,
action, absorb so much life and yield so much entertainment that the
refectory has ceased to be so curiously studied. With a change of aim
has followed a change of the whole scale by which men and things were
wont to be measured. Wealth and poverty are seen for what they are.
It begins to be seen that the poor are only they who feel poor, and
poverty consists in feeling poor. The rich, as we reckon them, and
among them the very rich, in a true scale would be found very indigent
and ragged. The great make us feel, first of all, the indifference of
circumstances. They call into activity the higher perceptions, and
subdue the low habits of comfort and luxury; but the higher perceptions
find their objects everywhere: only the low habits need palaces and
banquets.
Let a man, then, say, My house is here in the county, for the culture
of the county;--an eating-house and sleeping-house for travellers it
shall be, but it shall be much more. I pray you, O excellent wife, not
to cumber yourself and me to get a rich dinner for this man or this
woman who has alighted at our gate, nor a bedchamber made ready at too
great a cost. These things, if they are curious in, they can get for
a dollar at any village. But let this stranger, if he will, in your
looks, in your accent and behavior, read your heart and earnestness,
your thought and will, which he cannot buy at any price, in any village
or city, and which he may well travel fifty miles, and dine sparely
and sleep hard, in order to behold. Certainly, let the board be spread
and let the bed be dressed for the traveller; but let not the emphasis
of hospitality lie in these things. Honor to the house where they are
simple to the verge of hardship, so that there the intellect is awake
and reads the laws of the universe, the soul worships truth and love,
honor and courtesy flow into all deeds.
There was never a country in the world which could so easily exhibit
this heroism as ours; never anywhere the State has made such efficient
provision for popular education, where intellectual entertainment is
so within reach of youthful ambition. The poor man’s son is educated.
There is many a humble house in every city, in every town, where talent
and taste, and sometimes genius, dwell with poverty and labor. Who
has not seen, and who can see unmoved, under a low roof, the eager,
blushing boys discharging as they can their household chores, and
hastening into the sitting-room to the study of to-morrow’s merciless
lesson, yet stealing time to read one chapter more of the novel hardly
smuggled into the tolerance of father and mother,--atoning for the
same by some pages of Plutarch or Goldsmith; the warm sympathy with
which they kindle each other in school-yard, or in barn or wood-shed,
with scraps of poetry or song, with phrases of the last oration, or
mimicry of the orator; the youthful criticism, on Sunday, of the
sermons; the school declamation faithfully rehearsed at home, sometimes
to the fatigue, sometimes to the admiration of sisters; the first
solitary joys of literary vanity, when the translation or the theme has
been completed, sitting alone near the top of the house; the cautious
comparison of the attractive advertisement of the arrival of Macready,
Booth, or Kemble, or of the discourse of a well-known speaker, with
the expense of the entertainment; the affectionate delight with which
they greet the return of each one after the early separations which
school or business require; the foresight with which, during such
absences, they hive the honey which opportunity offers, for the ear and
imagination of the others; and the unrestrained glee with which they
disburden themselves of their early mental treasures when the holidays
bring them again together? What is the hoop that holds them stanch?
It is the iron band of poverty, of necessity, of austerity, which,
excluding them from the sensual enjoyments which make other boys too
early old, has directed their activity in safe and right channels, and
made them, despite themselves, reverers of the grand, the beautiful,
and the good. Ah! short-sighted students of books, of Nature, and of
man! too happy, could they know their advantages. They pine for freedom
from that mild parental yoke; they sigh for fine clothes, for rides,
for the theatre, and premature freedom and dissipation, which others
possess. Woe to them, if their wishes were crowned! The angels that
dwell with them, and are weaving laurels of life for their youthful
brows, are Toil, and Want, and Truth, and Mutual Faith.
In many parts of true economy a cheering lesson may be learned from the
mode of life and manners of the later Romans, as described to us in
the letters of the younger Pliny. Nor can I resist the temptation of
quoting so trite an instance as the noble housekeeping of Lord Falkland
in Clarendon: “His house being within little more than ten miles from
Oxford, he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polite
and accurate men of that University, who found such an immenseness of
wit, and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound
in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was
not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility, as if he had
known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in
a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university
in a less volume, whither they came, not so much for repose as study,
and to examine and refine those grosser propositions which laziness
and consent made current in vulgar conversation.”
I honor that man whose ambition it is, not to win laurels in the state
or the army, not to be a jurist or a naturalist, not to be a poet or
a commander, but to be a master of living well, and to administer
the offices of master or servant, of husband, father, and friend.
But it requires as much breadth of power for this as for those other
functions,--as much, or more,--and the reason for the failure is the
same. I think the vice of our housekeeping is, that it does not hold
man sacred. The vice of government, the vice of education, the vice of
religion, is one with that of private life.
In the old fables, we used to read of a cloak brought from fairy-land
as a gift for the fairest and purest in Prince Arthur’s court. It was
to be her prize whom it would fit. Every one was eager to try it on,
but it would fit nobody: for one it was a world too wide, for the next
it dragged on the ground, and for the third it shrunk to a scarf. They,
of course, said that the devil was in the mantle, for really the truth
was in the mantle, and was exposing the ugliness which each would fain
conceal. All drew back with terror from the garment. The innocent
Genelas alone could wear it. In like manner, every man is provided in
his thought with a measure of man which he applies to every passenger.
Unhappily, not one in many thousands comes up to the stature and
proportions of the model. Neither does the measurer himself; neither
do the people in the street; neither do the select individuals whom he
admires,--the heroes of the race. When he inspects them critically, he
discovers that their aims are low, that they are too quickly satisfied.
He observes the swiftness with which life culminates, and the humility
of the expectations of the greatest part of men. To each occurs, soon
after the age of puberty, some event, or society, or way of living,
which becomes the crisis of life, and the chief fact in their history.
In woman, it is love and marriage (which is more reasonable); and
yet it is pitiful to date and measure all the facts and sequel of an
unfolding life from such a youthful, and generally inconsiderate,
period as the age of courtship and marriage. In men, it is their place
of education, choice of an employment, settlement in a town, or removal
to the East or to the West, or some other magnified trifle, which makes
the meridian moment, and all the after years and actions only derive
interest from their relation to that. Hence it comes that we soon catch
the trick of each man’s conversation, and, knowing his two or three
main facts, anticipate what he thinks of each new topic that rises. It
is scarcely less perceivable in educated men, so called, than in the
uneducated. I have seen finely endowed men at college festivals, ten,
twenty years after they had left the halls, returning, as it seemed,
the same boys who went away. The same jokes pleased, the same straws
tickled; the manhood and offices they brought thither at this return
seemed mere ornamental masks: underneath they were boys yet. We never
come to be citizens of the world, but are still villagers, who think
that everything in their petty town is a little superior to the same
thing anywhere else. In each the circumstance signalized differs, but
in each it is made the coals of an ever-burning egotism. In one, it was
his going to sea; in a second, the difficulties he combated in going to
college; in a third, his journey to the West, or his voyage to Canton;
in a fourth, his coming out of the Quaker Society; in a fifth, his
new diet and regimen; in a sixth, his coming forth from the abolition
organizations; and in a seventh, his going into them. It is a life of
toys and trinkets. We are too easily pleased.
I think this sad result appears in the manners. The men we see in each
other do not give us the image and likeness of man. The men we see are
whipped through the world; they are harried, wrinkled, anxious; they
all seem the hacks of some invisible riders. How seldom do we behold
tranquillity! We have never yet seen a man. We do not know the majestic
manners that belong to him, which appease and exalt the beholder. There
are no divine persons with us, and the multitude do not hasten to be
divine. And yet we hold fast, all our lives long, a faith in a better
life, in better men, in clean and noble relations, notwithstanding
our total inexperience of a true society. Certainly, this was not the
intention of nature, to produce, with all this immense expenditure of
means and power, so cheap and humble a result. The aspirations in the
heart after the good and true teach us better,--nay, the men themselves
suggest a better life.
Every individual nature has its own beauty. One is struck in every
company, at every fireside, with the riches of nature, when he hears
so many new tones, all musical, sees in each person original manners,
which have a proper and peculiar charm, and reads new expressions of
face. He perceives that nature has laid for each the foundations of a
divine building, if the soul will build thereon. There is no face, no
form, which one cannot in fancy associate with great power of intellect
or with generosity of soul. In our experience, to be sure, beauty is
not, as it ought to be, the dower of man and of woman as invariably as
sensation. Beauty is, even in the beautiful, occasional,--or, as one
has said, culminating and perfect only a single moment, before which
it is unripe, and after which it is on the wane. But beauty is never
quite absent from our eyes. Every face, every figure, suggests its own
right and sound estate. Our friends are not their own highest form.
But let the hearts they have agitated witness what power has lurked in
the traits of these structures of clay that pass and repass us! The
secret power of form over the imagination and affections transcends all
our philosophy. The first glance we meet may satisfy us that matter is
the vehicle of higher powers than its own, and that no laws of line
or surface can ever account for the inexhaustible expressiveness of
form. We see heads that turn on the pivot of the spine,--no more; and
we see heads that seem to turn on a pivot as deep as the axle of the
world,--so slow, and lazily, and great, they move. We see on the lip of
our companion the presence or absence of the great masters of thought
and poetry to his mind. We read in his brow, on meeting him after many
years, that he is where we left him, or that he has made great strides.
Whilst thus nature and the hints we draw from man suggest a true and
lofty life, a household equal to the beauty and grandeur of this world,
especially we learn the same lesson from those best relations to
individual men which the heart is always prompting us to form. Happy
will that house be in which the relations are formed from character,
after the highest, and not after the lowest order; the house in which
character marries, and not confusion and a miscellany of unavowable
motives. Then shall marriage be a covenant to secure to either party
the sweetness and honor of being a calm, continuing, inevitable
benefactor to the other. Yes, and the sufficient reply to the sceptic
who doubts the competence of man to elevate and to be elevated is in
that desire and power to stand in joyful and ennobling intercourse with
individuals, which makes the faith and the practice of all reasonable
men.
The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it. There is no
event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our
hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.
It has been finely added by Landor to his definition of the _great
man_, “It is he who can call together the most select company when it
pleases him.” A verse of the old Greek Menander remains, which runs in
translation:--
“Not on the store of sprightly wine,
Nor plenty of delicious meats,
Though generous Nature did design
To court us with perpetual treats,--
’Tis not on these we for content depend,
So much as on the shadow of a Friend.”
It is the happiness which, where it is truly known, postpones all other
satisfactions, and makes politics and commerce and churches cheap. For
we figure to ourselves,--do we not?--that when men shall meet as they
should, as states meet,--each a benefactor, a shower of falling stars,
so rich with deeds, with thoughts, with so much accomplishment,--it
shall be the festival of nature, which all things symbolize; and
perhaps Love is only the highest symbol of Friendship, as all other
things seem symbols of love. In the progress of each man’s character,
his relations to the best men, which at first seem only the romances of
youth, acquire a graver importance; and he will have learned the lesson
of life who is skilful in the ethics of friendship.
Beyond its primary ends of the conjugal, parental, and amicable
relations, the household should cherish the beautiful arts and the
sentiment of veneration.
* * * * *
1. Whatever brings the dweller into a finer life, what educates his
eye, or ear, or hand, whatever purifies and enlarges him, may well find
place there. And yet let him not think that a property in beautiful
objects is necessary to his apprehension of them, and seek to turn
his house into a museum. Rather let the noble practice of the Greeks
find place in our society, and let the creations of the plastic arts
be collected with care in galleries by the piety and taste of the
people, and yielded as freely as the sunlight to all. Meantime, be it
remembered, we are artists ourselves, and competitors, each one, with
Phidias and Raphael in the production of what is graceful or grand. The
fountain of beauty is the heart, and every generous thought illustrates
the walls of your chamber. Why should we owe our power of attracting
our friends to pictures and vases, to cameos and architecture? Why
should we convert ourselves into show-men and appendages to our fine
houses and our works of art? If by love and nobleness we take up into
ourselves the beauty we admire, we shall spend it again on all around
us. The man, the woman, needs not the embellishment of canvas and
marble, whose every act is a subject for the sculptor, and to whose eye
the gods and nymphs never appear ancient; for they know by heart the
whole instinct of majesty.
I do not undervalue the fine instruction which statues and pictures
give. But I think the public museum in each town will one day relieve
the private house of this charge of owning and exhibiting them. I
go to Rome and see on the walls of the Vatican the Transfiguration,
painted by Raphael, reckoned the first picture in the world; or in the
Sistine Chapel I see the grand sibyls and prophets, painted in fresco
by Michael Angelo,--which have every day now for three hundred years
inflamed the imagination and exalted the piety of what vast multitudes
of men of all nations! I wish to bring home to my children and my
friends copies of these admirable forms, which I can find in the shops
of the engravers; but I do not wish the vexation of owning them. I
wish to find in my own town a library and museum which is the property
of the town, where I can deposit this precious treasure, where I and
my children can see it from time to time, and where it has its proper
place among hundreds of such donations from other citizens who have
brought thither whatever articles they have judged to be in their
nature rather a public than a private property.
A collection of this kind, the property of each town, would dignify the
town, and we should love and respect our neighbors more. Obviously, it
would be easy for every town to discharge this truly municipal duty.
Every one of us would gladly contribute his share; and the more gladly,
the more considerable the institution had become.
* * * * *