Mrs. Stowe’s Writings.
_LITTLE FOXES._
One Volume.
_HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS._
One Volume.
_THE PEARL OF ORR’S ISLAND._
One Volume.
_AGNES OF SORRENTO._
One Volume.
_UNCLE TOM’S CABIN._
One Volume.
_THE MINISTER’S WOOING._
One Volume.
_OLDTOWN FOLKS._
One Volume.
James R. Osgood, & Co., Publishers.
LITTLE FOXES.
BY
CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD,
AUTHOR OF “HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.”
[Illustration]
BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1875.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & CO.,
CAMBRIDGE.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. FAULT-FINDING 7
II. IRRITABILITY 53
III. REPRESSION 91
IV. PERSISTENCE 133
V. INTOLERANCE 176
VI. DISCOURTESY 218
VII. EXACTINGNESS 249
LITTLE FOXES.
I.
FAULT-FINDING.
“Papa, what are you going to give us this winter for our evening
readings?” said Jennie.
“I am thinking, for one thing,” I replied, “of preaching a course of
household sermons from a very odd text prefixed to a discourse which I
found at the bottom of the pamphlet-barrel in the garret.”
“Don’t say sermon, Papa,--it has such a dreadful sound; and on winter
evenings one wants something entertaining.”
“Well, treatise, then,” said I, “or discourse, or essay, or prelection;
I’m not particular as to words.”
“But what is the queer text that you found at the bottom of the
pamphlet-barrel?”
“It was one preached upon by your mother’s great-great-grandfather, the
very savory and much-respected Simeon Shuttleworth, ‘on the occasion of
the melancholy defections and divisions among the godly in the town of
West Dofield’; and it runs thus,--‘_Take us the foxes, the little foxes,
that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes._’”
“It’s a curious text enough; but I can’t imagine what you are going to
make of it.”
“Simply an essay on Little Foxes,” said I, “by which I mean those
unsuspected, unwatched, insignificant _little_ causes, that nibble away
domestic happiness, and make home less than so noble an institution
should be.
“You may build beautiful, convenient, attractive houses,--you may hang
the walls with lovely pictures and stud them with gems of Art; and there
may be living there together persons bound by blood and affection in one
common interest, leading a life common to themselves and apart from
others; and these persons may each one of them be possessed of good and
noble traits; there may be a common basis of affection, of generosity,
of good principle, of religion; and yet, through the influence of some
of these perverse, nibbling, insignificant little foxes, half the
clusters of happiness on these so promising vines may fail to come to
maturity. A little community of people, all of whom would be willing to
die for each other, may not be able to live happily together; that is,
they may have far less happiness than their circumstances, their fine
and excellent traits, entitle them to expect.
“The reason for this in general is that home is a place not only of
strong affections, but of entire unreserves; it is life’s undress
rehearsal, its back-room, its dressing-room, from which we go forth to
more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much _débris_ of
cast-off and every-day clothing. Hence has arisen the common proverb,
‘No man is a hero to his _valet-de-chambre_’; and the common warning,
‘If you wish to keep your friend, don’t go and live with him.’”
“Which is only another way of saying,” said my wife, “that we are all
human and imperfect; and the nearer you get to any human being, the more
defects you see. The characters that can stand the test of daily
intimacy are about as numerous as four-leaved clovers in a meadow; in
general, those who do not annoy you with positive faults bore you with
their insipidity. The evenness and beauty of a strong, well-defined
nature, perfectly governed and balanced, is about the last thing one is
likely to meet with in one’s researches into life.”
“But what I have to say,” replied I, “is this,--that, family-life being
a state of unreserve, a state in which there are few of those barriers
and veils that keep people in the world from seeing each other’s defects
and mutually jarring and grating upon each other, it is remarkable that
it is entered upon and maintained generally with less reflection, less
care and forethought, than pertain to most kinds of business which men
and women set their hands to. A man does not undertake to run an engine
or manage a piece of machinery without some careful examination of its
parts and capabilities, and some inquiry whether he have the necessary
knowledge, skill, and strength to make it do itself and him justice. A
man does not try to play on the violin without seeing if his fingers are
long and flexible enough to bring out the harmonies and raise his
performance above the grade of dismal scraping to that of divine music.
What should we think of a man who should set a whole orchestra of
instruments upon playing together without the least provision or
forethought as to their chord, and then howl and tear his hair at the
result? It is not the fault of the instruments that they grate harsh
thunders together; they may each be noble and of celestial temper; but
united without regard to their nature, dire confusion is the result.
Still worse were it, if a man were supposed so stupid as to expect of
each instrument a _rôle_ opposed to its nature,--if he asked of the
octave-flute a bass solo, and condemned the trombone because it could
not do the work of the many-voiced violin.
“Yet just so carelessly is the work of forming a family often performed.
A man and woman come together from some affinity, some partial accord of
their nature which has inspired mutual affection. There is generally
very little careful consideration of who and what they are,--no thought
of the reciprocal influence of mutual traits,--no previous chording and
testing of the instruments which are to make lifelong harmony or
discord,--and after a short period of engagement, in which all their
mutual relations are made as opposite as possible to those which must
follow marriage, these two furnish their house and begin life together.
“Then in many cases the domestic roof is supposed at once to be the
proper refuge for relations and friends on both sides, who also are
introduced into the interior concert without any special consideration
of what is likely to be the operation of character on character, the
play of instrument with instrument;--then follow children, each of whom
is a separate entity, a separate will, a separate force in the circle;
and thus, with the lesser powers of servants and dependants, a family is
made up. And there is no wonder if all these chance-assorted
instruments, playing together, sometimes make quite as much discord as
harmony. For if the husband and wife chord, the wife’s sister or
husband’s mother may introduce a discord; and then again, each child of
marked character introduces another possibility of confusion.
“The conservative forces of human nature are so strong and so various,
that with all these drawbacks the family state is after all the best and
purest happiness that earth affords. But then, with cultivation and
care, it might be a great deal happier. Very fair pears have been
raised by dropping a seed into a good soil and letting it alone for
years; but finer and choicer are raised by the watchings, tendings,
prunings of the gardener. Wild grape-vines bore very fine grapes, and an
abundance of them, before our friend Dr. Grant took up his abode at
Iona, and, studying the laws of Nature, conjured up new species of rarer
fruit and flavor out of the old. And so, if all the little foxes that
infest our domestic vine and fig-tree were once hunted out and killed,
we might have fairer clusters and fruit all winter.”
“But, Papa,” said Jennie, “to come to the foxes; let’s know what they
are.”
“Well, as the text says, _little_ foxes, the pet foxes of good people,
unsuspected little animals,--on the whole, often thought to be really
creditable little beasts, that may do good, and at all events cannot do
much harm. And as I have taken to the Puritanic order in my discourse, I
shall set them in sevens, as Noah did his clean beasts in the ark. Now
my seven little foxes are these:--Fault-Finding, Intolerance,
Reticence, Irritability, Exactingness, Discourtesy, Self-Will. And
here,” turning to my sermon, “is what I have to say about the first of
them.”
_FAULT-FINDING_,--
A most respectable little animal, that many people let run freely among
their domestic vines, under the notion that he helps the growth of the
grapes, and is the principal means of keeping them in order.
Now it may safely be set down as a maxim, that nobody likes to be found
fault with, but everybody likes to find fault when things do not suit
him.
Let my courteous reader ask him or herself if he or she does not
experience a relief and pleasure in finding fault with or about whatever
troubles them.
This appears at first sight an anomaly in the provisions of Nature.
Generally we are so constituted that what it is a pleasure to us to do
it is a pleasure to our neighbor to have us do. It is a pleasure to
give, and a pleasure to receive. It is a pleasure to love, and a
pleasure to be loved; a pleasure to admire, a pleasure to be admired. It
is a pleasure also to find fault, but _not_ a pleasure to be found fault
with. Furthermore, those people whose sensitiveness of temperament leads
them to find the most fault are precisely those who can least bear to be
found fault with; they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and
lay them on other men’s shoulders, but they themselves cannot bear the
weight of a finger.
Now the difficulty in the case is this: There are things in life that
need to be altered; and that things may be altered, they must be spoken
of to the people whose business it is to make the change. This opens
wide the door of fault-finding to well-disposed people, and gives them
latitude of conscience to impose on their fellows all the annoyances
which they themselves feel. The father and mother of a family are
fault-finders, _ex officio_; and to them flows back the tide of every
separate individual’s complaints in the domestic circle, till often the
whole air of the house is chilled and darkened by a drizzling Scotch
mist of querulousness. Very bad are these mists for grape-vines, and
produce mildew in many a fair cluster.
Enthusius falls in love with Hermione, because she looks like a
moonbeam,--because she is ethereal as a summer cloud, _spirituelle_. He
commences forthwith the perpetual adoration system that precedes
marriage. He assures her that she is too good for this world, too
delicate and fair for any of the uses of poor mortality,--that she ought
to tread on roses, sleep on the clouds,--that she ought never to shed a
tear, know a fatigue, or make an exertion, but live apart in some
bright, ethereal sphere worthy of her charms. All which is duly chanted
in her ear in moonlight walks or sails, and so often repeated that a
sensible girl may be excused for believing that a little of it may be
true.
Now comes marriage,--and it turns out that Enthusius is very particular
as to his coffee, that he is excessively disturbed if his meals are at
all irregular, and that he cannot be comfortable with any table
arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable mother, lately
deceased in the odor of sanctity; he also wants his house in perfect
order at all hours. Still he does not propose to provide a trained
housekeeper; it is all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish
girls, under the superintendence of this angel who was to tread on
roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an earthly care. Neither has
Enthusius ever considered it a part of a husband’s duty to bear personal
inconveniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood for
Hermione,--nay, has often frantically proposed the same in the hours of
courtship, when of course nobody wanted it done, and it could answer no
manner of use; but now to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed
such as these:--
“My dear, this tea is smoked: can’t you get Jane into the way of making
it better?”
“My dear, I have tried; but she will not do as I tell her.”
“Well, all I know is, _other_ people can have good tea, and I should
think we might.”
And again at dinner:--
“My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is _always_ overdone.”
“Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just
right.”
“Well, _almost_ always.”
“Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and
could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It’s very
difficult to get things done with such a girl.”
“My mother’s things were always well done, no matter what her girl was.”
Again: “My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal.
I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size”; or, “My
dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?” or, “My dear, I
shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be
regular”; or, “My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are
ironed,--it is perfectly scandalous”; or, “My dear, you must not let
Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor”; or, “My dear, you must stop
the children from playing in the garret”, or, “My dear, you must see
that Maggie doesn’t leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the
front hall”; and so on, up stairs and down stairs, in the lady’s
chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, “my dear” is to see that nothing
goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.
Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears,
and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the
charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than
ever,--and perhaps he does. The only difficulty is that she has passed
out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While
she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course
there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel
has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations
are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the
same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same
circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking
from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it at
the moment. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an
ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his
very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to
which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still
yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to
praise, but to criticise and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and
love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now
transferred to the arrangement of the domestic _ménage_, lead him daily
to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.
Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved,
not provoked,--who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make
good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have
we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and
forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now
sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.
But there is another side of the picture,--where the wife, provoked and
indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen
arrows of her woman’s wit searches and penetrates every joint of the
husband’s armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more capable in
this sort of conflict.
Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends
employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given
them only to harass and provoke,--thrusting and piercing with a
certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could
have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly
thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly
miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.
For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that
crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what
miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!--a dinner underdone,
too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish
broken!--and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous,
very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by
double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built and coal
burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,--_their
happiness_. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any
inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of _love_; and nothing so surely
burns away love as constant fault-finding.
For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear
friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the
mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof,
occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid stage has once set
in, the restoration of love seems wellnigh impossible.
For example: Enthusius, having risen this morning in the best of humors,
in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of her g’s
quite so long; and Hermione fires up with with--
“And, pray, what else wouldn’t you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be
so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of
the things in me that need correcting.”
“My dear, you are unreasonable.”
“I don’t think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements
of my lord and master sometimes.”
“Now, my dear, you really are very silly.”
“Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has
lost the charm of novelty.”
“Come now, Hermione, don’t let’s quarrel.”
“My dear sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I’m sure I was only
asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to
suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning,
_and_ the tea, _and_ the toast, _and_ the steak, _and_ the servants,
_and_ the front-hall mat, _and_ the upper-story hall-door, _and_ the
basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my
general education. I shall set about the tails of my g’s at once, but
trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need
emendation.”
Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.
“If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe
that it is not good manners to drum on the table,” says his fair
opposite.
“Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!” exclaims Enthusius,
rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his
dinner at Delmonico’s.
Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a
sprite of a woman,--the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being
he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own
inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so
sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on
the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been
the guilty partner in this morning’s encounter; he has said only what
is fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after
all, the fault is remotely his.
When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very
deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not
face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine
things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling
her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her
than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can
a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears
the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?
If his little wife has to learn her domestic _rôle_ of household duty,
as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities,
a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to
her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before
marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and
incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what,
after marriage, proved an annoyance.
And if a man finds that he has a wife ill-adapted to wifely duties, does
it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or
ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in
the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as
little preface, apology, or circumlocution to his business manager, to
his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never
criticised the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and
studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the
asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should
qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in
the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own
wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or
softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two,
to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find,
too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at,
and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill
than a man.
But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often
is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited
by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent
seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make
manifest the weak point in everything.
We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of
mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and
disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do,
they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they
have abated by not trying to please.
We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs,
exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to
his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and
neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal
indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she
did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper,
without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her
grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and
gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he
breathed freely as a man released. He married again,--a woman with no
beauty, but much love and goodness,--a woman who asked little, blamed
seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost
thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became
the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in
the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism
from her lips, who criticised so little and so thoughtfully, weighed
more with him than many out-spoken words. So different is the same human
being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!
I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its
consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once
suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the
family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more
hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one
thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the
susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood.
Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all
points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticise him to right
and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in
callous hardness or irritable moroseness.
A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother
something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out,--“O, you’ve
left the door open! I do wish you wouldn’t always leave the door open!
And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I tell you to
wipe your feet?”
“Now there you’ve thrown your cap on the sofa again. When will you learn
to hang it up?”
“Don’t put your slate there; that isn’t the place for it.”
“How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?”
“Don’t sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing.”
“Child, how your hair looks! Do go up stairs and comb it.”
“There, if you haven’t torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a
boy!”
“Don’t speak so loud; your voice goes through my head.”
“I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I
have been saving for brown flour.”
“I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor.”
“Jim’s been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best
paper.”
Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run
the gantlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as
those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it
than he is?
No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound
to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about
everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be
terrible reactions?
Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same
considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced
into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There
are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant
and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to
be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or
poison it with foul air, or bring innumerable inconveniences. The
setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty
possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of
a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of
fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no
wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the
bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a
high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face
in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated,
despairing, and with good reason: the maid is the same, and with equally
good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a
printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given
her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning
paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy
in her beautifully arranged house.
There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed
like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has
become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their
welfare a trap. Their gas and their water and their fire and their
elegances and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only
so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their
Christian graces day and night,--so that, if their house is kept in
order, their temper and religion are not.
I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are in
will and purpose real saints. Their souls go up to heaven,--its love,
its purity, its rest,--with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in
church; and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to
despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross
looks, the universal nervous irritability, that result from this
constant jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.
Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as
means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman
once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her
scourges,--accept them,--rejoice in them,--smile and be quiet, silent,
patient, and loving under them,--and the convent can teach her no more;
she is a victorious saint.
When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after
the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes
coughing, sneezing, strangling,--when the gas is blown out in the
nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the
danger of such a proceeding,--when the tumblers on the dinner-table are
found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business
of washing and wiping,--when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left
soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the
consequences,--when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below,
and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important
things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember
them,--there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very
deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting.
It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and
distresses, but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the
Apostle, might say, “When I am weak, then am I strong.”
The burden ceases to gall when we have learned how to carry it. We can
suffer patiently, if we see any good come of it, and say, as an old
black woman of our acquaintance did of an event that crossed her
purpose, “Well, Lord, if it’s _you_, send it along.”
But that this may be done, that home-life, in our unsettled, changing
state of society, may become peaceful and restful, there is one
Christian grace, much treated of by mystic writers, that must return to
its honor in the Christian Church. I mean,--THE GRACE OF SILENCE.
No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value of NOT SPEAKING.
“Speech is silvern, but silence is golden,” is an old and very precious
proverb.
“But,” say many voices, “what is to become of us, if we may not speak?
Must we not correct our children and our servants and each other? Must
we let people go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter?”
No; fault must be found; faults must be told, errors corrected. Reproof
and admonition are duties of householders to their families, and of all
true friends to one another.
But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own lives and the lives
of others, and ask, How much of the fault-finding which prevails has the
least tendency to do any good? How much of it is well-timed,
well-pointed, deliberate, and just, so spoken as to be effective?
“A wise reprover upon an obedient ear” is one of the _rare_ things
spoken of by Solomon,--the rarest, perhaps, to be met with. How many
really religious people put any of their religion into their manner of
performing this most difficult office? We find fault with a stove or
furnace which creates heat only to go up chimney and not warm the house.
We say it is wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings,
church-services, and sacraments; they create and excite lovely, gentle,
holy feelings,--but, if these do not pass out into the atmosphere of
daily life, and warm and clear the air of our homes, there is a great
waste in our religion.
We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that we are as awkward in
heavenly things, as unfit for the Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and
Mike, and the little beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlors.
We have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed that “the
remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is
intolerable,” and then we draw near in the sacrament to that Incarnate
Divinity whose infinite love covers all our imperfections with the
mantle of His perfections. But when we return, do we take our servants
and children by the throat because they are as untrained and awkward and
careless in earthly things as we have been in heavenly? Does no
remembrance of Christ’s infinite patience temper our impatience, when we
have spoken seventy times seven, and our words have been disregarded?
There is no mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the Church
excites. What we want is to have it _used_ in common life, instead of
going up like hot air in a fireplace to lose itself in the infinite
abysses above.
In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful examples in Holy Writ.
When Saint Paul has a reproof to administer to delinquent Christians,
how does he temper it with gentleness and praise! how does he first make
honorable note of all the good there is to be spoken of! how does he
give assurance of his prayers and love!--and when at last the arrow
flies, it goes all the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.
But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than Paul, who made His
home on earth with twelve plain men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to
learn,--and who to the very day of His death were still contending on a
point which He had repeatedly explained, and troubling His last earthly
hours with the old contest, “Who should be greatest.” When all else
failed, on His knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing
for love the office of a slave, he said, “If I, your Lord and Master,
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.”
When parents, employers, and masters learn to reprove in this spirit,
reproofs will be more effective than they now are. It was by the
exercise of this spirit that Fénelon transformed the proud, petulant,
irritable, selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle, tolerant
of others, and severe only to himself: it was he who had for his motto,
that “Perfection alone can bear with imperfection.”
But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite aim, how much is
there that does not profess or intend or try to do anything more than
give vent to an irritated state of feeling! The nettle stings us, and we
toss it with both hands at our neighbor; the fire burns us, and we throw
coals and hot ashes at all and sundry of those about us.
There is _fretfulness_, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting
remark; there is _grumbling_, a northeast storm that never clears; there
is _scolding_, the thunder-storm with lightning and hail. All these are
worse than useless; they are positive _sins_, by whomsoever
indulged,--sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in
polite society.
All these are for the most part but the venting on our fellow-beings of
morbid feelings resulting from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general
ill health.
A minister eats too much mince-pie, goes to his weekly lecture, and,
seeing only half a dozen people there, proceeds to grumble at those
half-dozen for the sins of such as stay away. “The Church is cold, there
is no interest in religion,” and so on: a simple outpouring of the
blues.
You and I do in one week the work we ought to do in six; we overtax
nerve and brain, and then have weeks of darkness in which everything at
home seems running to destruction. The servants never were so careless,
the children never so noisy, the house never so disorderly, the State
never so ill-governed, the Church evidently going over to Antichrist.
The only thing, after all, in which the existing condition of affairs
differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used up our nervous
energy, and are looking at the world through blue spectacles. We ought
to resist the devil of fault-finding at this point, and cultivate
silence as a grace till our nerves are rested. There are times when no
one should trust himself to judge his neighbors, or reprove his children
and servants, or find fault with his friends,--for he is so sharp-set
that he cannot strike a note without striking too hard. Then is the time
to try the grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the power
of prayer.
But it being premised that we are _never_ to fret, never to grumble,
never to scold, and yet it being our duty in some way to make known and
get rectified the faults of others, it remains to ask how; and on this
head we will improvise a parable of two women.
Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of
moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions
of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to
the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly
religious. In all the minutiæ of woman’s life she manifests an
inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly
done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so
punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a
chronometer.
Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty
of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,--a
fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for
everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the
spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact
standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She
does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises
over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault;
she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing
in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are
aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes
them felt by the most obdurate.
Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never
scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the
calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love
her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and
careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the
accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as
inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness,
whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys
and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have
children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always
sure to do something dreadful every day.
The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard,
and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but
that she does not take the right way. She has set it down in her mind
that to blame a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never
learned that it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, and that
people are drawn to do right by being praised when they do it, rather
than driven by being blamed when they do not.
Right across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy, a pretty little
creature, with not a tithe of her moral worth,--a merry, pleasure-loving
woman, of no particular force of principle, whose great object in life
is to avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.
Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her children, her servants,
merely because it is her nature to say pleasant things to every one. It
is a mere tact of pleasing, which she uses without knowing it. While
Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs her keen eye
over everything, and at last brings up with, “Jane, look at that black
spot on the salt-spoon! I am astonished at your carelessness!"--Mrs.
Easy would say, “Why, Jane, where _did_ you learn to set a table so
nicely? All looking beautifully, except,--ah! let’s see,--just give a
rub to this salt-spoon;--now all is quite perfect.” Mrs. Standfast’s
servants and children hear only of their failures; these are always
before them and her. Mrs. Easy’s servants hear of their successes. She
praises their good points; tells them they are doing well in this, that,
and the other particular; and finally exhorts them, on the strength of
having done so many things well, to improve in what is yet lacking. Mrs.
Easy’s husband feels that he is always a hero in her eyes, and her
children feel that they are dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs.
Easy sometimes has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds roundly
when something falls out as it should not.
The two families show how much more may be done by a very ordinary
woman, through the mere instinct of praising and pleasing, than by the
greatest worth, piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a
lever that never was meant to lift it by.
The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated
by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a
consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt
discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the
presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our
virtues in the best light, and put our faults in the background?
Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that are in us,--the
needs, the wants, the despondencies,--are in each of our fellows, in
every awkward servant and careless child.
Finally, let us all resolve,--
First, to attain to the grace of SILENCE.
Second, to deem all FAULT-FINDING that does no good a SIN; and to
resolve, when we are happy ourselves, not to poison the atmosphere for
our neighbors by calling on them to remark every painful and
disagreeable feature of their daily life.
Third, to practise the grace and virtue of PRAISE. We have all been
taught that it is our duty to praise God, but few of us have reflected
on our duty to praise men; and yet for the same reason that we should
praise the divine goodness it is our duty to praise human excellence.
We should praise our friends,--our near and dear ones; we should look on
and think of their virtues till their faults fade away; and when we love
most, and see most to love, then only is the wise time wisely to speak
of what should still be altered.
Parents should look out for occasions to commend their children, as
carefully as they seek to reprove their faults; and employers should
praise the good their servants do as strictly as they blame the evil.
Whoever undertakes to use this weapon will find that praise goes farther
in many cases than blame. Watch till a blundering servant does something
well, and then praise him for it, and you will see a new fire lighted in
the eye, and often you will find that in that one respect at least you
have secured excellence thenceforward.
When you blame, which should be seldom, let it be alone with the person,
quietly, considerately, and with all the tact you are possessed of. The
fashion of reproving children and servants in the presence of others
cannot be too much deprecated. Pride, stubbornness, and self-will are
aroused by this, while a more private reproof might be received with
thankfulness.
As a general rule, I would say, treat children in these respects just as
you would grown people; they are grown people in miniature, and need as
careful consideration of their feelings as any of us.
Lastly, let us all make a bead-roll, a holy rosary, of all that is good
and agreeable in our position, our surroundings, our daily lot, of all
that is good and agreeable in our friends, our children, our servants,
and charge ourselves to repeat it daily, till the habit of our minds be
to praise and to commend; and so doing, we shall catch and kill one
_Little Fox_ who hath destroyed many tender grapes.
II.
IRRITABILITY.
It was that Christmas-day that did it; I’m quite convinced of that; and
the way it was is, what I am going to tell you.
You see, among the various family customs of us Crowfields, the
observance of all sorts of _fêtes_ and festivals has always been a
matter of prime regard; and among all the festivals of the round ripe
year, none is so joyous and honored among us as Christmas.
Let no one upon this prick up the ears of Archæology, and tell us that
by the latest calculations of chronologists our ivy-grown and
holly-mantled Christmas is all a hum,--that it has been demonstrated, by
all sorts of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates did
not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing it be so, what have we
to do with that? If so awful, so joyous an event _ever_ took place on
our earth, it is surely worth commemoration. It is the _event_ we
celebrate, not the _time_. And if all Christians for eighteen hundred
years, while warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have
agreed to give this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is
he that shall gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on
the friendly greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of
re-writing Milton’s Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and
Hopkins.
In our house, however, Christmas has always been a high day, a day whose
expectation has held waking all the little eyes in our bird’s nest, when
as yet there were only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye
open, hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christmas and grasp
the wonderful stocking.
This year our whole family train of married girls and boys, with the
various toddling tribes thereto belonging, held high festival around a
wonderful Christmas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had kept
my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week beforehand. If the little
folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as
little about them as they do about most of the other blessings which
rain down on their dear little thoughtless heads. Such scrambling and
clambering and fussing and tying and untying, such alterations and
rearrangements, such agilities in getting up and down and everywhere to
tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things innumerable, to hang
airy dolls in graceful positions, to make branches bear stiffly up under
loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom
upward!
Part and parcel of all this was I, Christopher, most reckless of
rheumatism, most careless of dignity,--the round, bald top of my head to
be seen emerging everywhere from the thick boughs of the spruce, now
devising an airy settlement for some gossamer-robed doll, now adjusting
far back on a stiff branch Tom’s new little skates, now balancing bags
of sugar-plums and candy, and now combating desperately with some
contumacious taper that would turn slantwise or crosswise, or anywise
but upward, as a Christian taper should,--regardless of Mrs. Crowfield’s
gentle admonitions and suggestions, sitting up to most dissipated hours,
springing out of bed suddenly to change some arrangement in the middle
of the night, and up long before the lazy sun at dawn to execute still
other arrangements. If that Christmas-tree had been a fort to be taken,
or a campaign to be planned, I could not have spent more time and
strength on it. My zeal so far outran even that of sprightly Miss
Jennie, that she could account for it only by saucily suggesting that
papa must be fast getting into his second childhood.
But didn’t we have a splendid lighting-up? Didn’t I and my youngest
grandson, little Tom, head the procession magnificent in paper
soldier-caps, blowing tin trumpets and beating drums, as we marched
round the twinkling glories of our Christmas-tree, all glittering with
red and blue and green tapers, and with a splendid angel on top with
great gold wings, the cutting-out and adjusting of which had held my
eyes waking for nights before? I had had oceans of trouble with that
angel, owing to an unlucky sprain in his left wing, which had required
constant surgical attention through the week, and which I feared might
fall loose again at the important and blissful moment of exhibition: but
no, the Fates were in our favor; the angel behaved beautifully, and kept
his wings as crisp as possible, and the tapers all burned splendidly,
and the little folks were as crazy with delight as my most ardent hopes
could have desired; and then we romped and played and frolicked as long
as little eyes could keep open, and long after; and so passed away our
Christmas.