VI.

The much talk of fitness for marriage leads one to reflect on the

advantages of living in the nineteenth century. With all the

sewing-machines, washing-machines, wringing-machines, carpet-sweepers,

cooking-ranges, and the innumerable devices by which labor is sought

and is supposed to be saved, I do not see that there is any great

gain. The requirements of civilized society rather more than keep

abreast with the inventions of civilized ingenuity. Fifty years ago a

bonnet cost twenty dollars. Now a comely bonnet can be bought for one

dollar. But the twenty-dollar bonnet lasted ten years, and the

one-dollar bonnet three months, so that, notwithstanding the superior

cheapness of the material, the item bonnet costs more money than it

used, and vastly more time and thought. A calico dress was not deemed

unreasonable at seventy cents a yard. Lately it could be had for

twelve and a half: but at seventy-five cents it was an heirloom, while

at twelve and a half it stands over the wash-tub by the second year,

and by the third goes into the rag-bag. The lively sewing-machine runs

up a seam twenty times as swiftly as the most lively fingers: but

there are twenty times as many seams to run up. Just as fast as skill

"turns off" work, just so fast fashion turns it on. Nay, fashion in

heaping up entirely outstrips ingenuity in lowering the pile of work;

so that we do not get the benefit of our skill. The day now is no

longer than the day of fifty years ago. The mother of five children

seems to have no more time for educating her five children, for

enjoying and training their opening lives, for studying their

characters, for associating with them and acquiring their confidence,

for planting unexpected roses in the little flower-plats of their

years, for sitting a whole summer day with them among the beauties and

wonders and delights of the woods, for spending a whole winter evening

with them in games and reading, for informing her own mind and

disciplining her own heart and strengthening and beautifying her own

body, for cultivating the possible beneficences of society, for genial

and growing acquaintance and sympathy with the poets, the

philosophers, the historians, and the sages, than the mother of five

children had fifty years ago. I suppose more women now-a-days know how

to read and write; but do they read and write? Of the people in your

village, your street, your sewing-society: how many do you find who

spend as much as an hour a day in reading Milton, or Chaucer, or

Spenser, or Tennyson, or Mrs. Browning? How many are there who are

familiar with Hume, or Robertson, or Macaulay, or Motley, or Palfrey?

How many have lingered with delight over the pages of Lord Bacon, or

Jeremy Taylor, or John Stuart Mill? How many know the relation between

a cat and a tiger, or what are the ingredients of buttermilk, or why

yeast makes bread rise, or how the heat of the oven works, or whether

a cloverhead has anything to do with a marrowfat pea? How many are

interested to peer into the mysteries of the heavens above or the

earth beneath or the waters under the earth? How many ever heard of

the Areopigitica or the Witena-gemot, or discern any connection

between Runnymede and Fort Sumter, or have the faintest opinion as to

whether Runnymede is a man or a mouse? How many can tell you whether

the Reformation was a revelation confronting a superstition or a

fruitful branch grafted upon a barren olive-tree, or an old religion

throwing off the layers of acquired corruption? How many understand

the origin and bearings of Calvinism or the Nicene Creed or the

Pauline Epistles? I speak, you see, not of things which have passed

away leaving only a slender and hidden thread of connection, but of

those which still touch life at many points. The great boast of the

present day is the dissemination of knowledge: but knowledge is trash

if it is not assimilated into wisdom. Knowledge which is simply

plastered on to the outside of the soul and does not chemically

combine to become part and parcel of the soul's substance, produces an

effect little better than grotesque. Names and dates may store the

memory; but why have the memory stored if you do not use its

treasures? What better off am I for having a heap of isolated facts in

my lumber-room if I have nothing for those facts to do? I may know in

what year the battle of Hastings was fought, but unless I can locate

that battle otherwhere than in geography and chronology, I might as

well have committed to the charge of my memory the youthful facts of

"Onery Twoery ickery see,

Halibut crackibut pendalee.

Pin pon musket John,

Triddle traddlecome Twenty-one."

Bricks and boards are neither shelter from wind nor shade from sun. It

is only when all are fitly framed together into the strength and

sweetness of spirit that they become the temple of the living God,

whereinto Shekinah shall come. We talk about the universal circulation

of newspapers, but sometimes it seems to me that newspapers are only

an enormous expansion of village gossip. Now if a murder is committed

in New York we hear of it, whereas formerly we did not know it unless

it were committed in the next town. But such knowledge we could very

readily dispense with. Is anything added to the worth of life by

learning that Bridget McArthy has been fined five dollars and costs

for breaking Ellen Maloney's windows. In the old wars, it was three

weeks after a victory was gained before you heard of it; now you hear

of it six months before the battle is fought, and after all it turns

out to be no victory, but a masterpiece of strategy.[2] What I wish to

know is this: does the constant interflow of currents really deepen

and broaden the channel of life? Are women any stronger of will,

firmer of purpose, broader of view, sounder of judgment, than they

used to be? Can they front fortune with serener brow, unawed by her

malice, unflattered by her promise, unmoved by her caprice? Are they

any more independent of the circumstances of life, any more

concentrated in its essence? Do they think more deeply, love more

nobly, live more spiritually? Are they any more divorced from the lust

of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life; any more

wedded to whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest,

whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever

things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report?

[2] Heaven be praised that the course of events has blunted

the point of this sentence.

I think we are in a transition-state. The increased facilities of

labor are improvements, and we shall by and by reap the fruits of

them; but we have hardly yet done so. We have lassoed our wild horse,

but we have not harnessed him. He shows us wonderful freaks of

strength, but he drags us quite as often as we drive him. "Sweet Puck"

has been caught, and made to put his girdle round about the earth in

forty minutes; in

"one night, ere glimpse of morn,

His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn,

That ten day-laborers could not end."

But he is not yet tamed down into a trustworthy domestic drudge. If he

does not actually transmute himself into a Robin Goodfellow, that

bootless makes the breathless housewife churn, and the drink to bear

no barm, and mislead night-wanderers, he yet annuls his work, shutting

the eyes of the ten day-laborers so that they do not gain rest for his

interference; his earth-girdle binds no bundle of myrrh for the

well-beloved. Our great diffusion of knowledge has not given us

corresponding mastery. Our knives are sharper, but we only whittle.

Knowledge is poured abroad, but it is not absorbed. Yet the hour

approaches. By and by, out of this wishy-washy chaos, slowly shall

arise the coast-line of a new continent whereon the redeemed shall

walk: meanwhile, do not let us deceive ourselves. The millennium is

not yet come. We are scarcely beyond the multiplication-table of our

mathematics. We are blind and blundering, and for all our skill and

science, we stumble through life but little wiser than our fathers. We

have the swift, clean stove-oven for the cumbrous old bake-kettle, but

meanwhile we have lost the fireside, and have found no substitute; and

a man's life lies not in ovens or bake-kettles, but in firesides.

This truth needs to be engraven on our brains and hearts with a pen of

iron and the point of a diamond. The soul is the king and not the

servant of the body. Every device, every invention, every measure,

that does not subserve the interests of the soul, is worthless. Every

invention that may subserve those interests, but stops short of such

subserviency, stops so far short of its goal. If the cooking-range

only makes that mince-pie be eaten once a day instead of once a year;

if steam-power only causes that fine wheat-bread shall take the place

of coarse corn-bread; if sewing-machines are going to give women more

tucks to their skirts, more flounces to their gowns, more dresses to

their wardrobes, and not more hours to their day, we might just as

well be without the sewing-machines and the cooking-ranges and the

steam-power. Is a woman any better, or any better off, for having six

gowns where her mother had three? Is she not worse off? She can wear

but one at a time, and she is expending brain-power and heart-power,

and lifting the incidents of life into the sphere of its essentials.

There are women who buy dresses, and make them, and hang them up in

their closets, there to remain till the fashion changes, and the dress

has to be re-made without having been once worn. O terrible emptiness

of life which this signalizes! O wanton and wicked waste of priceless

treasures! What shall be said in the day when God maketh inquisition?

I wage no war against the aesthetics of life; but I do protest that

they shall be means and not ends. Let richness drape the form, and

variety crown the board, and luxury fill the house, if so be you do

not wrong the king, the Master. There need be no other limitation.

Wrong to one's self involves and implies all other wrong. Nothing

human is foreign to any man. Nothing personal is foreign to humanity.

You cannot defraud yourself of your birthright without defrauding all

those to whom your birthright might bring blessings. The keenest barb

of your injustice to another pierces your own breast.

But the larger number of New England families earn their bread by the

sweat of their brow, and must sacrifice the one or the other,--the

soul or the body. They cannot command both luxury and life; and they

choose--which? Look around and answer. How many houses do you know

that have no carpets on the floors, no cushions in the chairs, no

paper on the walls, no silks in the wardrobes, no china in the

closets, but plenty of books in the library; a harp, a piano, a

violin, in one corner, an easel, a box of crayons in another; an

aquarium by the window, a camp-stool in the cupboard, a fishing-rod on

the shelf, a portfolio on the table; where pies and fries and cakes

and preserves and pickles and puddings seldom come; where flounces and

velvets and feathers and embroideries are unseen, but where the walls

are adorned with drawings from the mother's own hands, with bouquets,

finely selected, pressed and arranged by the daughters; with cabinets

of minerals gathered, classified, and labelled by the sons; and fresh

flowers from the garden, cultivated and culled by the father; where

the homely fare is seasoned with Attic salt; where wit and wisdom and

sprightliness and fun and heart's-ease make the simple, wholesome, and

plentiful meal a fit banquet for gods; where work is work, and not

simply labor; where rest is change, and not simply torpidity; where

the heart is rich in love, and the head rich in lore, and intellect

and affection go hand in hand; where the inmates are not the creatures

of the house, but the house is the dear handiwork of the inmates;

where they derive no lustre from their dwelling, but shine all through

it with such sweet, soft lights, that elegance waits upon their

footsteps, beauty lingers upon their brows, every spot which they

tread is enchanted ground, every room which they enter is the

audience-chamber of a king. On the other hand, how many houses do you

know where everything is in abundance except that which alone gives

abundance its value? Where moss-soft carpets and heavy curtains and

gilded cornices and silver and china and sumptuous fare make a

glittering pageant, but work and worry and weariness, or frivolous

pleasures and frivolous interests, empty life of all its priceless

possessions. How many do you know where neither wealth nor worth

reigns? Where hard, grinding, pinching toil is all that the evening

and the morning have to give, and everything lovely to the eye and

pleasant to the soul is crushed between the upper and the nether

millstones? How many young couples think they could begin housekeeping

without a carpet for the parlor floor? How many think of providing

that parlor with a score of the rich, ripe, mellow English classics?

But to the end of the days, the authors will be a joy and strength and

consolation, and the carpet will be only a dusty woollen rag. No, no;

we cannot give up our trappings. Such is the poverty of our life, and

we may not uncover its nakedness. We must have jewels and gold to hide

our squalor and our leanness. It is tinsel or nothing. Take away our

fine clothes, our fine furniture, our much eating and drinking, and

what is left? True,--what is left? Vacancy and desolation. Suppose the

work and worry to be suddenly abrogated to the degree that the

thousands of harassed women who toil with broom or needle or

dish-cloth or kneading-trough from morning till night should suddenly

find on their hands four hours every day of leisure,--leisure that

absolutely need be filled up by no family knitting, mending, or

oversight,--would it be a boon? In many cases I greatly fear not.

After the first luxury of utter rest from strenuous work, I greatly

fear that that four hours would be the dullest and dreariest part of

the day, and its close more gladly welcomed than its commencement. But

this only shows the need, not the impossibility, of reformation. If it

has come to this, that we know not what to do with ourselves, shall we

go on providing toys, or shall we turn about and straightway learn

self-direction? Is it so that we must fill our lives with husks,

because we have fed on them so long that we have no relish for

nourishing food? Have we so held in abeyance our spiritual forces that

they have lost their life? Have we so given ourselves to our grosser

uses, that they have usurped the throne, and shall we now make no

effort to depose them and restore the rightful lord? Shall we go on

forming and frocking our wax dolls, and give no heed to the marble

which it is our life-work to fashion into the image and likeness of

God? Better Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf, than our puny

nurslings of conventionality! O for men and women with blood in their

veins, and muscles in their bodies, and brains in their skulls,--men

and women who believe in their manhood and their womanhood! who will

be as valiant, as aggressive, as enduring in peace as they are showing

themselves in war, who dare stand erect, who will walk their own

paths, who brave solitudes, who see things and not the traditions of

things, who will blow away, with one honest breath, our shabby gew-gaw

finery! America was founded on the rights of man: why do we set our

affections on silks and satins? Why entangle our young limbs with the

fetters of an old civilization, golden though they be? Never had any

nation such opportunity as ours. Here is the race-course ready, the

battle-ground prepared. It needs only that we be swift and strong.

There are no morasses of old prejudice to beguile our feet, no tangle

of old growths to retard our progress. We have no institutions to

fight against: all our institutions fight with us. No garter, no

ribbon, no courtly presentation, is demanded as our stamp of rank; the

badge of each man's order is set on his brow and breast. Worth needs

not to have flowed down through musty ages if it would receive its

meed; every man bears his seal direct from God. Humanity is more

accounted of than a coat of arms. We have only to be noble, and we

belong at once to the nobility. It is ourselves alone that will fail

if there be failure; not opportunity. It is for us to rise to the

height of the great argument. It is only that we reverence ourselves,

that we esteem man as of greater mark than his meat or his raiment.

Give us full and free development. Tear away these gilded fetters, and

let the children of God have free course to run and be glorified.

Throw off allegiance to trifles, and with the heart believe, and with

the mouth make confession, and with the upright life attest: There is

no God but God.

This can be done only when women and men will work together to the

same end. It is not to be done by stripping away the restraints of

fashion and society and leaving life bare of its proprieties.

Deformity is not lovely by being exposed. What we are to do is to

supplant those restraints by the gentle growths of a larger and finer

culture; to replace meagreness with rounded beauty; to make the life

so rich and full that all else shall seem poor in comparison; to show

it so fair and fertile that every luxury shall seem but its natural

outgrowth, its proper adornment; to make the soul so simply dominant

as to give their laws to fashion and society instead of receiving laws

from them, and so have fashion and society for its nimble servitors

instead of being itself their creature and slave. Is it not so now?

Who dares bend social life to his uses? Who dares run counter to its

caprices? Who dares stand on his own dignity and defy its frown or

sneer? But, you say, this adaptation of one's self to others is what

Christianity requires. This self-seeking, this self-elevation, is

directly opposed to the spirit of the Gospel, which demands that every

one seek not his own, but the things which are another's. Not at all.

You can in no other way benefit your generation than through your own

heart and life. Can a stream rise higher than its fountain? Can a

corrupt tree bring forth good fruits? The Apostle says: Let no man

seek his own, but every man another's wealth. Does that mean that a

farmer must not plough his own field, or plant his own corn, or hoe

his own potatoes, but go over to till his neighbor's farm and leave

his own fallow? But it is written, "He that provideth not for his own

house hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel," and common

sense need not be propped up by revelation, for it stands firmly on

the same ground. You say a woman must not be thinking of herself, her

own growth, and good all the time. So do I. But is she to obtain and

exhibit self-forgetfulness by self-culture, or self-neglect? Will you

be most likely to forget your head by thoroughly combing and brushing

your hair every morning, or by brushing it not at all? Does not health

consist in having your organs in such a condition that you do not know

you have organs? A dyspeptic man is the most subjective person in the

world. He thinks more about himself in a week than a well person does

in a year. The true way for women and men to be thoroughly

self-forgetful, is to be so thoroughly self-cultured, so healthy, so

normal, so perfect, that all they have to do is their work. Themselves

are perfectly transparent. No headaches and heartaches interpose

between themselves and their duties. They are not forced back to

concentrate their interest on a torpid liver, or tubercled lungs. They

are not wasting their power by working in constant jar and clash. They

are at full liberty to bring means to bear on ends. And just in

proportion as sound minds have sound bodies, will people be able to

forget themselves and do good to others.

Now--the connection between some of my paragraphs may be a little

underground, but it is always there. If you don't quite see it, you

must jump. If I should stop to say everything, I should never get

through. I am not sure I shall, as it is--now, such has been the

amount of gluttony, and all manner of frivolity and materialism,

indirectly but strenuously inculcated by literature, that we are

arrived at a point where they are almost the strongest grappling-hooks

between the sexes. Understand: I am not saying that dress is

frivolity. Dress is development. A woman's dress is not her first

duty, but it follows closely on first duty's heels. She should dress

so as to be grateful to her husband's eye, I grant, nay, I enjoin: and

he is under equally strong obligations to dress so as to be grateful

to her eye. But this is scarcely a matter of expense. It need not

cost, appreciably, more to be neat and tasteful than it does to be

dowdy and slouching. But, I have heard women say, variety in dress is

necessary in order that a husband may not be wearied. But does a man

ever think of having several winter coats or summer waistcoats, so

that his wife may not weary of him? Does she ever think of being tired

of seeing one hat till it begins to look shabby? And if a man buys his

clothes and wears them according to his needs,--which is quite

right,--why shall not a woman do the same? Is there any law or gospel

for forcing a woman to be pleasing to her husband, while the husband

is left to do that which is right in his own eyes? Or are the visual

organs of a man so much more exquisitely arranged than those of a

woman, that special adaptations must be made to them, while a woman

may see whatever happens to be _a la mode_? Or has a man's dress

intrinsically so much more beauty and character than a woman's, that

less pains need be taken to make it charming?

But granting to variety all the importance that is claimed for it, are

we using the lever to advantage? Suppose the gown is changed every

day, while the face above it never varies, or varies only from one

vapidity to another, and what is gained? If variety is the

desideratum, why not attempt it in the direction in which variety is

spontaneous, resultant, and always delightful? You may flit from brown

merino to blue poplin, and from blue poplin to black alpaca, and be

queen of all that is tiresome still. But enlarge every day the horizon

of your heart: be tuneful on Monday with the birds; be fragrant on

Tuesday among your roses; be thoughtful on Wednesday with the sages;

be chemical on Thursday over your bread-trough; be prophetic on Friday

with history; be aspiring on Saturday in spite of broom and duster; be

liberal and catholic on Sunday: be fresh and genial and natural and

blooming with the dews that are ready to gather on every smallest

grass-blade of life, and a pink-sprigged muslin will be new for a

whole season, yes, and half a dozen of them. Take example from the

toad: swallow your dress; not precisely in the same sense, but as

effectually. Overpower, subordinate your dress, till it shall be only

a second cuticle, not to be distinguished from yourself, but a natural

element of your universal harmony.

What are you going to wear to church this summer? I say church,

because I am speaking now to people whose best dress is their Sunday

dress. I am not writing for the Newport and Niagara frequenters, who

know no currency smaller than gold eagles. You will not have many new

clothes because it is "war-times," but you must have a silk mantle;

that will cost fifteen dollars. You could have bought one last summer

for ten dollars, but silk is now higher. You will have a barege dress,

which, with the increased price of linings and trimmings and making,

will cost before it is ready to be worn fifteen more. Your gloves will

be a dollar and a half, and your bonnet, whitened and newly trimmed

with last summer's ribbon, will be three dollars or so. The whole cost

will be about thirty-five dollars. But suppose, instead of a barege

gown and silk shawl, you had bought a pretty gingham and had it made

in the same way, dress and mantle alike, and had taken that for your

summer outfit; and had substituted for your kid gloves a pair of

Lisle-thread at sixty-two cents. The gingham will last longer than the

barege, and will be good for more uses after it is outworn as a dress.

It will last as long in the mantle as the shape of the mantle will be

fashionable, and then it will make over as economically, and into a

larger number of articles. The Lisle-thread gloves will last as long

as the kid, and will be much better on the whole, because they will

wash. "But I should make a figure, walking up the broad aisle in a

gingham mantilla!" Be sure you would, and a very pretty figure too.

For you look, in it, perfectly fresh and tidy; and because you have

not been fagged and fretted with its great cost you will be quite

happy and pleased, and that pleasure will beam out in your face and

figure, and your young, elastic tread; and there is not a man in

church who will suspect that everything is not precisely as it should

be. Men judge in generals, not in particulars; and the few who are

conversant with minutiae, and look beyond the facts of becomingness or

unbecomingness into the question of texture and fabric, are such

microscopic sort of men that you do not value their opinion one way or

the other. You are triumphant so far as the men are concerned.

The women will not let you off so easily. Mrs. Judkins will think you

are "very odd"; but how much better to be oddly right than evenly

wrong! Mrs. Jenkins will call it _real mean_, when you are as well

able to dress decently as she is! But you are the very plant and

flower of decency. Mrs. Perkins will hate to see people try to be

different from other folks. Ah! Mrs. Perkins, when the vapor from your

heated face goes down to-morrow meeting the vapor that comes steaming

up from your foaming tub, will you find it any consolation for your

heat and fatigue that you went to church yesterday and are broiling

over your wash-tub to-day "like other folks." Meanwhile you, by your

gingham, have saved ten dollars. Ten dollars! I am lost in amazement

when I think of the good that may be accomplished with ten dollars!

For ten dollars you can hire a washerwoman all summer and

save--absolutely add to your life six hours every Monday for three

months; look at the reading, the writing, the conversation, the

enjoyment that can be crowded into an hour, and then multiply it by

seventy-five, and say whether your gingham dress be not a very robe of

royalty. And besides the good you do yourself, and the good that will

shine from you upon all around you, you will be helping to solve the

great problem of the age: you will be helping to give employment to

the thousands of women who are perishing for lack of something to do,

and dragging society down with them. You will be setting supply and

demand face to face. If you could but induce a few of your neighbors

to join you,--which they will be glad to do when they see how happy

and fresh it makes you,--the employment you would furnish would

comfortably support some destitute unmarried woman, or some childless

widow, and go far towards providing bread and butter, perhaps shoes

and stockings, possibly spelling-books, to a family of children. There

are, possibly, as many women who need to do more than they are doing

as there are who need to do less, and you will be helping to restore

or create the desired equilibrium. Or, if you choose instead, ten

dollars will take your rustic little ones into the city to stock and

startle their minds with ideas from the navy-yard, the museum, the

aquarial gardens, the picture-galleries; or it will take your civic

little ones into the country and set them down in the midst of

orchards and blooms and birds, and all the pure sweet influences of

long summer days. It will give you four or five drives with your

husband and children,--drives that involve fascinating white baskets;

napkins spread out on the grass, hungry mouths, chattering tongues,

and oh! such happy hearts. Or you can go to the beach and hear the

little monkeys scream for joy and terror in the rushing, lapping,

embracing waves, and see them roll over and over in the soft sand, and

gather untold wealth of worthless shells and heaps of shining sand for

back-yard gardens. For ten dollars you can buy picture-books,

long-desired toys, flowers and flower-stands for winter, roots for

bedding in summer, and still have enough left to give an extra lemon

to a score of wounded soldiers in a hospital ward. You can buy

yourself leisure to become acquainted with your children and to make

them acquainted with the brightest phases of yourself. You can put

into their lives such sunny memories as no after bitterness can

efface; such sunny memories as shall wreathe you with a glory in the

coming years when your head is laid low in the grave. O my friend, I

can almost see the light of the celestial city shining through that

ten dollars,--and you talk about a silk cape!

Mind, I counsel no penuriousness, no mean retrenchment for

accumulation, no domestic pillage, no mere selfish gratification. I

suggest intelligent and high-minded economy for the purpose of liberal

expenditure. I would take in sail where only sensualism and

ostentation blow; but I would spread every rag of canvas to catch the

smallest breath of an enlarged and Christian happiness. I would cease

to pinch the angel, that the beast may wax fat. I would keep the beast

under, that the angel may have room.

Do you say that the picture is fanciful? Everything is fanciful till

it is put in practice. Fancy is often but the foreshadow of a coming

fact.

If some such course as this is not possible, if we must inevitably and

perpetually move on in the same rut in which we move now, then, in a

thousand and a thousand cases, life seems to me not worth the living.