"And what are you going to preach about this month, Mr. Crowfield?"
"I am going to give a sermon on _Intolerance_, Mrs. Crowfield."
"Religious intolerance?"
"No,--domestic and family and educational intolerance,--one of the seven
deadly sins on which I am preaching,--one of 'the foxes.'"
* * * * *
People are apt to talk as if all the intolerance in life were got up and
expended in the religious world; whereas religious intolerance is only a
small branch of the radical, strong, all-pervading intolerance of human
nature.
Physicians are quite as intolerant as theologians. They never have had
the power of burning at the stake for medical opinions, but they
certainly have shown the will. Politicians are intolerant. Philosophers
are intolerant, especially those who pique themselves on liberal
opinions. Painters and sculptors are intolerant. And housekeepers are
intolerant, virulently denunciatory concerning any departures from their
particular domestic creed.
Mrs. Alexander Exact, seated at her domestic altar, gives homilies on
the degeneracy of modern housekeeping equal to the lamentations of Dr.
Holdfast as to the falling off from the good old faith.
"Don't tell me about pillow-cases made without felling," says Mrs.
Alexander; "it's slovenly and shiftless. I wouldn't have such a
pillow-case in my house any more than I'd have vermin."
"But," says a trembling young housekeeper, conscious of unfelled
pillow-cases at home, "don't you think, Mrs. Alexander, that some of
these old traditions might be dispensed with? It really is not necessary
to do all the work that has been done so thoroughly and exactly,--to
double-stitch every wristband, fell every seam, count all the threads of
gathers, and take a stitch to every gather. It makes beautiful sewing,
to be sure; but when a woman has a family of little children and a small
income, if all her sewing is to be kept up in this perfect style, she
wears her life out in stitching. Had she not better slight a little, and
get air and exercise?"
"Don't tell me about air and exercise! What did my grandmother do? Why,
she did all her own work, and made grandfather's ruffled shirts besides,
with the finest stitching and gathers; and she found exercise enough, I
warrant you. Women of this day are miserable, sickly, degenerate
creatures."
"But, my dear Madam, look at poor Mrs. Evans, over the way, with her
pale face and her eight little ones."
"Miserable manager," said Mrs. Alexander. "If she'd get up at five
o'clock the year round, as I do, she'd find time enough to do things
properly, and be the better for it."
"But, my dear Madam, Mrs. Evans is a very delicately organized, nervous
woman."
"Nervous! Don't tell me! Every woman nowadays is nervous. She can't get
up in the morning, because she's nervous. She can't do her sewing
decently, because she's nervous. Why, I might have been as nervous as
she is, if I'd have petted and coddled myself as she does. But I get up
early, take a walk in the fresh air of a mile or so before breakfast,
and come home feeling the better for it. I do all my own sewing,--never
put out a stitch; and I flatter myself my things are made as they ought
to be. I always make my boys' shirts and Mr. Exact's, and they are made
as shirts ought to be,--and yet I find plenty of time for calling,
shopping, business, and company. It only requires management and
resolution."
"It is perfectly wonderful, to be sure, Mrs. Exact, to see all that you
do; but don't you get very tired sometimes?"
"No, not often. I remember, though, the week before last Christmas, I
made and baked eighteen pies and ten loaves of cake in one day, and I
was really quite worn out; but I didn't give way to it. I told Mr. Exact
I thought it would rest me to take a drive into New York and attend the
Sanitary Fair, and so we did. I suppose Mrs. Evans would have thought
she must go to bed and coddle herself for a month."
"But, dear Mrs. Exact, when a woman is kept awake nights by crying
babies"--
"There's no need of having crying babies; my babies never cried; it's
just as you begin with children. I might have had to be up and down
every hour of the night with mine, just as Mrs. Evans does; but I knew
better. I used to take 'em up about ten o'clock, and feed and make 'em
all comfortable; and that was the last of 'em, till I was ready to get
up in the morning. I never lost a night's sleep with any of mine."
"Not when they were teething?"
"No. I knew how to manage that. I used to lance their gums myself, and I
never had any trouble: it's all in management. I weaned 'em all myself,
too: there's no use in having any fuss in weaning children."
"Mrs. Exact, you are a wonderful manager; but it would be impossible to
bring up all babies so."
"You'll never make me believe that: people only need to begin right. I'm
sure I've had a trial of eight."
"But there's that one baby of Mrs. Evans's makes more trouble than all
your eight. It cries every night so that somebody has to be up walking
with it; it wears out all the nurses, and keeps poor Mrs. Evans sick
all the time."
"Not the least need of it; nothing but shiftless management. Suppose I
had allowed my children to be walked with; I might have had terrible
times, too; but I began right. I set down my foot that they should lie
still, and they did; and if they cried, I never lighted a candle, or
took 'em up, or took any kind of notice of it; and so, after a little,
they went off to sleep. Babies very soon find out where they can take
advantage, and where they can't. It's nothing but temper makes babies
cry; and if I couldn't hush 'em any other way, I should give 'em a few
good smart slaps, and they would soon learn to behave themselves."
"But, dear Mrs. Exact, you were a strong, healthy woman, and had strong,
healthy children."
"Well, isn't that baby of Mrs. Evans's healthy, I want to know? I'm sure
it is a great creature, and thrives and grows fat as fast as ever I saw
a child. You needn't tell me anything is the matter with that child but
temper, and its mother's coddling management."
Now, in the neighborhood where she lives, Mrs. Alexander Exact is the
wonderful woman, the Lady Bountiful, the pattern female. Her cake never
rises on one side, or has a heavy streak in it. Her furs never get a
moth in them; her carpets never fade; her sweetmeats never ferment; her
servants never neglect their work; her children never get things out of
order; her babies never cry, never keep one awake o' nights; and her
husband never in his life said, "My dear, there's a button off my
shirt." Flies never infest her kitchen, cockroaches and red ants never
invade her premises, a spider never had time to spin a web on one of her
walls. Everything in her establishment is shining with neatness, crisp
and bristling with absolute perfection,--and it is she, the
ever-up-and-dressed, unsleeping, wide-awake, omnipresent, never-tiring
Mrs. Exact, that does it all.
Besides keeping her household ways thus immaculate, Mrs. Exact is on all
sorts of charitable committees, does all sorts of fancy-work for fairs;
and whatever she does is done perfectly. She is a most available, most
helpful, most benevolent woman, and general society has reason to
rejoice in her existence.
But, for all this, Mrs. Exact is as intolerant as Torquemada or a
locomotive-engine. She has her own track, straight and inevitable; her
judgments and opinions cut through society in right lines, with all the
force of her example and all the steam of her energy, turning out
neither for the old nor the young, the weak nor the weary. She cannot,
and she will not, conceive the possibility that there may be other sorts
of natures than her own, and that other kinds of natures must have other
ways of living and doing.
Good and useful as she is, she is terrible as an army with banners to
her poor, harassed, delicate, struggling neighbor across the way, who,
in addition to an aching, confused head, an aching back, sleepless,
harassed nights, and weary, sinking days, is burdened everywhere and
every hour with the thought that Mrs. Exact thinks all her troubles are
nothing but poor management, and that she might do just like her, if she
would. With very little self-confidence or self-assertion, she is
withered and paralyzed by this discouraging thought. _Is_ it, then, her
fault that this never-sleeping baby cries all night, and that all her
children never could and never would be brought up by those exact rules
which she hears of as so efficacious in the household over the way? The
thought of Mrs. Alexander Exact stands over her like a constable; the
remembrance of her is grievous; the burden of her opinion is heavier
than all her other burdens.
Now the fact is, that Mrs. Exact comes of a long-lived, strong-backed,
strong-stomached race, with "limbs of British oak and nerves of wire."
The shadow of a sensation of nervous pain or uneasiness never has been
known in her family for generations, and her judgments of poor little
Mrs. Evans are about as intelligent as those of a good stout Shanghai
hen on a humming-bird. Most useful and comfortable, these Shanghai
hens,--and very ornamental, and in a small way useful, these
humming-birds; but let them not regulate each other's diet, or lay down
schemes for each other's housekeeping. Has not one as much right to its
nature as the other?
This intolerance of other people's natures is one of the greatest causes
of domestic unhappiness. The perfect householders are they who make
their household rule so flexible that all sorts of differing natures may
find room to grow and expand and express themselves without infringing
upon others.
Some women are endowed with a tact for understanding human nature and
guiding it. They give a sense of largeness and freedom; they find a
place for every one, see at once what every one is good for, and are
inspired by Nature with the happy wisdom of not wishing or asking of any
human being more than that human being was made to give. They have the
portion in due season for all: a bone for the dog; catnip for the cat;
cuttle-fish and hemp-seed for the bird; a book or review for their
bashful literary visitor; lively gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen;
knitting for Grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and gunpowder for Young
Restless, whose beard is just beginning to grow;--and they never fall
into pets, because the canary-bird won't relish the dog's bone, or the
dog eat canary-seed, or young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty's
review, or young Master Restless take delight in knitting-work, or old
Grandmamma feel complacency in guns and gunpowder.
Again, there are others who lay the foundations of family life so
narrow, straight, and strict, that there is room in them only for
themselves and people exactly like themselves; and hence comes much
misery.
A man and woman come together out of different families and races, often
united by only one or two sympathies, with many differences. Their first
wisdom would be to find out each other's nature, and accommodate to it
as a fixed fact; instead of which, how many spend their lives in a blind
fight with an opposite nature, as good as their own in its way, but not
capable of meeting their requirements!
A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business family, where her father
and brothers bore everything along with true worldly skill and energy,
falls in love with a literary man, who knows nothing of affairs, whose
life is in his library and his pen. Shall she vex and torment herself
and him because he is not a business man? Shall she constantly hold up
to him the example of her father and brothers, and how they would manage
in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once for all to
herself,--"My husband has no talent for business; that is not his forte;
but then he has talents far more interesting: I cannot have everything;
let him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well, and let me try to
make up for what he cannot do; and if there be disabilities come on us
in consequence of what we neither of us can do, let us both take them
cheerfully"?
In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of an adoring family one
of those delicate, petted singing-birds that seem to be created simply
to adorn life and make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to
compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the
material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are
strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything
but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself
and her with the remembrance of how his mother used to get up at five
o'clock and arrange all the business of the day,--how she kept all the
accounts,--how she saw to everything and settled everything,--how there
never were break-downs or irregularities in her system?
This would be unfair. If a man wanted such a housekeeper, why did he not
get one? There were plenty of single women, who understood washing,
ironing, clear-starching, cooking, and general housekeeping, better than
the little canary-bird which he fell in love with, and wanted for her
plumage and her song, for her merry tricks, for her bright eyes and
pretty ways. Now he has got his bird, let him keep it as something fine
and precious, to be cared for and watched over, and treated according to
the laws of its frail and delicate nature; and so treating it, he may
many years keep the charms which first won his heart. He may find, too,
if he watches and is careful, that a humming-bird can, in its own small,
dainty way, build a nest as efficiently as a turkey-gobbler, and hatch
her eggs and bring up her young in humming-bird fashion; but to do it,
she must be left unfrightened and undisturbed.
But the evils of domestic intolerance increase with the birth of
children. As parents come together out of different families with
ill-assorted peculiarities, so children are born to them with natures
differing from their own and from each other.
The parents seize on their first new child as a piece of special
property which they are forthwith to turn to their own account. The poor
little waif, just drifted on the shores of Time, has perhaps folded up
in it a character as positive as that of either parent; but, for all
that, its future course is marked out for it, all arranged and
predetermined.
John has a perfect mania for literary distinction. His own education was
somewhat imperfect, but he is determined his children shall be
prodigies. His first-born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame
de Stael,--to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores her with
literature from her earliest years, reads extracts from Milton to her
when she is only eight years old and is secretly longing to be playing
with her doll's wardrobe. He multiplies governesses, spares no expense,
and when, after all, his daughter turns out to be only a very pretty,
sensible, domestic girl, fond of cross-stitching embroidery, and with a
more decided vocation for sponge-cake and pickles than for poetry and
composition, he is disappointed and treats her coldly; and she is
unhappy and feels that she has vexed her parents, because she cannot be
what Nature never meant her to be. If John had taken meekly the present
that Mother Nature gave him, and humbly set himself to inquire what it
was and what it was good for, he might have had years of happiness with
a modest, amiable, and domestic daughter, to whom had been given the
instinct to study household good.
But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-knitting,
universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter who dreams over her
knitting-work and hides a book under her sampler,--whose thoughts are
straying in Greece, Rome, Germany,--who is reading, studying, thinking,
writing, without knowing why; and the mother sets herself to fight this
nature, and to make the dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going,
exact woman-of-business. How many tears are shed, how much temper
wasted, how much time lost, in such encounters!
Each of these natures, under judicious training, might be made to
complete itself by cultivation of that which it lacked. The born
housekeeper can never be made a genius, but she may add to her household
virtues some reasonable share of literary culture and appreciation,--and
the born scholar may learn to come down out of her clouds, and see
enough of this earth to walk its practical ways without stumbling; but
this must be done by tolerance of their nature,--by giving it play and
room,--first recognizing its existence and its rights, and then seeking
to add to it the properties it wants.
A driving Yankee housekeeper, fruitful of resources, can work with any
tools or with no tools at all. If she absolutely cannot get a
tack-hammer with a claw on one end, she can take up carpet-nails with an
iron spoon, and drive them down with a flat-iron; and she has sense
enough not to scold, though she does her work with them at considerable
disadvantage. She knows that she is working with tools made to do
something else, and never thinks of being angry at their unhandiness.
She might have equal patience with a daughter unhandy in physical
things, but acute and skilful in mental ones, if she once had the idea
suggested to her.
An ambitious man has a son whom he destines to a learned profession. He
is to be the Daniel Webster of the family. The boy has a robust,
muscular frame, great physical vigor and enterprise, a brain bright and
active in all that may be acquired through the bodily senses, but which
is dull and confused and wandering when put to abstract book-knowledge.
He knows every ship at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing
qualities; he knows every railroad-engine, its power, speed, and hours
of coming and going; he is always busy, sawing, hammering, planing,
digging, driving, making bargains, with his head full of plans, all
relating to something outward and physical. In all these matters his
mind works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation acute, his
conversation sensible and worth listening to. But as to the distinction
between common nouns and proper nouns, between the subject and the
predicate of a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the
demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the
preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of
abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth
is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible
studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual
failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to
make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till
the soil or manage the material forces of the world. He might be a
farmer, an engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a soldier,
a thriving man of business; but he grows up feeling that his nature is a
crime, and that he is good for nothing, because he is not good for what
he had been blindly predestined to before he was born.
Another boy is a born mechanic; he understands machinery at a glance; he
is all the while pondering and studying and experimenting. But his
wheels and his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much
irrelevant lumber; he is doomed to go into the Latin School, and spend
three or four years in trying to learn what he never can learn
well,--disheartened by always being at the tail of his class, and seeing
many a boy inferior to himself in general culture who is rising to
brilliant distinction simply because he can remember those hopeless,
bewildering Greek quantities and accents which he is constantly
forgetting,--as, for example, how properispomena become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones when
the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with a short penult remain
paroxytones. Each of this class of rules, however, having about sixteen
exceptions, which hold good except in three or four other exceptional
cases under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder and wilder;
and the crowning beauty of the whole is, that, when the bewildered boy
has swallowed the whole,--tail, scales, fins, and bones,--he then is
allowed to read the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to
refer to them again during his college course.
The great trouble with the so-called classical course of education is,
that it is made strictly for but one class of minds, which it drills in
respects for which they have by nature an aptitude, and to which it
presents scarcely enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline,
while to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents
difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage. There are, we
will venture to say, in every ten boys in Boston four, and those not the
dullest or poorest in quality, who could never go through the discipline
of the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the brain and
nervous system as would leave them no power for anything else.
A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the line of natural
philosophy and mechanics, passed with brilliant success through the
Boston English High School. He won the first medals, and felt all that
pride and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student. He entered
the Latin Classical School. With a large philosophic and reasoning
brain, he had a very poor verbal and textual memory; and here he began
to see himself distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to him. They
could rattle off catalogues of names; they could do so all the better
from the habit of not thinking of what they studied. They could commit
the Latin Grammar, coarse print and fine, and run through the
interminable mazes of Greek accents and Greek inflections. This boy of
large mind and brain, always behindhand, always incapable, utterly
discouraged, no amount of study could place on an equality with his
former inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from school. Many a
fine fellow has been lost to himself, and lost to an educated life, by
just such a failure. The collegiate system is like a great coal-screen:
every piece not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well
enough for screening coal; but what if it were used indiscriminately for
a mixture of coal and diamonds?
"Poor boy!" said Ole Bull, compassionately, when one sought to push a
schoolboy from the steps of an omnibus, where he was getting a
surreptitious ride. "Poor boy! let him stay. Who knows his trials?
Perhaps he studies Latin."
The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early
sufferings,--"The Romans would never have conquered the world, if they
had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were
born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in _im_."
Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We
think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and
that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of
the splendid minds of those olden times loses a part of his birthright;
and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical
path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land
of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and
Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal
memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek
verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one
termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his
faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and
Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and
that is all that they are worth caring for. We have known one young
scholar, who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions
to the rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his
private note-book with quotations from the "AEneid," and was making
extracts of literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that
he was every day "screwed" by his tutor upon some technical point of the
language.
Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who
could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in _y_ that form
their plural in _ies_, with the exceptions under it? How many of us
could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know
the whole of Murray's Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a
language ever come in this way?
At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the
savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch's
kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting
it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice,
and her "Gape, sinner, and swallow," is the only introduction,--and so,
many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.
This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to
them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to
speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of
expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a
simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.
Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in
families, because family pride decrees that every boy of good status in
society, will he, nill he, shall go through college, or he almost
forfeits his position as a gentleman.
"Not go to Cambridge!" says Scholasticus to his first-born. "Why, I went
there,--and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look
at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever
since the College was founded!"
"But I can't learn Latin and Greek," says young Scholasticus. "I can't
remember all those rules and exceptions. I've tried, and I can't. If you
could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won't be at the foot
of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging."
Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind
of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that
requires faculties which Nature has not given him,--what occurs?
He goes through his course, either shamming, shirking, parrying, all the
while consciously discredited and dishonored,--or else putting forth an
effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a
decent scholar, and loses his health for life.
Now, if the principle of toleration were once admitted into classical
education,--if it were admitted that the great object is to read and
enjoy a language, and the stress of the teaching were placed on the few
things absolutely essential to this result,--if the tortoise were
allowed time to creep, and the bird permitted to fly, and the fish to
swim, towards the enchanted and divine sources of Helicon,--all might in
their own way arrive there, and rejoice in its flowers, its beauty, and
its coolness.
"But," say the advocates of the present system, "it is good mental
discipline."