without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to
their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence
to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it,
children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their
fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows
intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than
the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and
does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the
things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows
the rules and how to play the game.
Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s
characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his
slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a
veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand
in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and
a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally
recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a
girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs
to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her
contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must
have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead
of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a
divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up,
kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a
good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in
her.
A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by
father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.
LXV
THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN
The bitterest cry of poor people is that they have nothing to give
their children. The fathers and mothers who cannot buy imported finery
for their girls or sports-model cars for their boys and send them off
to expensive colleges and fill their pockets with money feel that they
have come empty-handed to their children and have nothing to give them.
Yet the poorest man and woman who bend above a cradle have it in their
power to bestow upon their babe treasures so great that their worth
cannot be computed in dollars and cents, and that will bring the child
more pleasure and happiness in life than they could purchase with all
the wealth of the Rothschilds. For there is no price tag on the most
precious things in the world. They are equally free to prince and
pauper, and more often the beggar gets them than the millionaire does.
For example, there is love—a close, intimate, personal association—and
tenderness and understanding. Poor parents can more easily give to
their children than the wealthy can. And the child that has them is
rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and the child that has them not
is poverty-stricken, although it has all else besides. The mother who
rocks her baby to sleep on her breast, whose tender arms are always
outstretched to gather her youngsters to her heart, who is never too
tired or too busy to listen to childish confidences, who surrounds
her little ones with a brooding atmosphere of affection,—gives to her
children far more than does the rich mother who gives her children
nurses and governesses and pony carts and fine clothes and costly
playthings but who does not give them herself; who bestows on them
everything but the things that a child wants most and needs most—mother
love and tenderness, the real mother touch.
Not long ago a very rich young man figured in a disgraceful scandal,
and the one excuse offered in his defense was that his mother was dead
and his father had never given him anything except money. He had never
had any affection bestowed upon him. He had had no parental guidance.
When a little lad he had been put in a school and kept there without
even being visited by any one who loved him, without even going home
for vacations. He had been just a pitiful little millionaire waif for
whom nobody cared. The lot of such a child is infinitely worse than
that of the one whose parents are in such humble circumstances that
they can give it perhaps only the plainest of food and clothes, but who
do give it a real home that is full of close, warm family life. The
fathers and mothers to whom children are grateful and whose memories
they revere are not those who bequeath them great fortunes, but those
who leave them the memory of a love and understanding that never failed
and of a childhood that was made sweet by their parents’ cherishing.
No matter how poor you are, you can give your children love and
companionship and the privilege of growing up in a peaceful and
cheerful home, and that is something that few rich parents can give
their children.
Another gift that you can make your children is that of teaching them
how to read. When you do that you really don’t need to do much more
for them, because you have put a magic coin in their hands that will
buy them entrance into all the doors of delight and open to them all
of the portals of romance. No one who loves to read can ever be bored
or lonely. He or she has only to open a book, and, presto, he or she
has for company all of the wit and wisdom of the ages. Gay adventures,
beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen beckon, and one has only to
follow them into realms of enchantment. All of interest, all that
informs, that thrills, that amuses, is the property of the reader.
But, reading does not always come by nature, as Dogberry thought it
did. Often it has to be acquired by art, but any child can be taught
to like to read; it can be given the reading habit, and no other gift
can possibly be bestowed upon it that is half so valuable or that will
bring it in such happiness or that will be such an ark of refuge to it
in times of trouble.
Another gift that the poorest parents can make to their children is to
teach them how to see. Most persons go through the world as blind as
bats. They never see anything that isn’t directly under their noses,
and thereby they miss half of the fun and pleasure in living. There
are men and women to whom a sunset is just a phenomenon of nature that
happens every day; to whom a crowd is just a jam of people; who get
nothing out of travel but inconvenience and missing the particular kind
of breakfast food they prefer, and who loathe rain because they get
their feet wet and hate snow because it is messy. And there are other
men and women who see the glory of God in every flaming sunset; who
thrill to the finger tips at the drama they see enacted in every crowd;
to whom travel opens up a new world; to whom every rain is a symphony
and every snowstorm a poem.
Which of these get the most out of life—those who see or those who are
blind; those who can get pleasure out of little things or those who are
too dull and dumb to amuse themselves; those who are sensitive to every
beauty in nature, who appreciate music and art and literature, who get
the last flavor out of good cooking, or those who find everything flat
and stale and uninteresting because they have never been taught to see
the under side of things?
Finally, the poorest parents can teach their children that brave
attitude toward life without which all the balance is cinders, ashes,
and dust. For disappointments and trouble come to us all, and it is
only those who have been taught how to make the best of their bad
bargains, how to laugh at misfortune and mock at fate, who achieve any
real happiness in life. So cheer up, you parents who complain that you
have nothing to give your children. You can give them love. You can
teach them to read and to see things. You can give them a brave heart.
These gifts are worth more than money. And nobody can take them away
from those who have them.
LXVI
A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME
It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize
how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course,
a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper
that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average
man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife
spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it
should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should
have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to
live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across
the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume
to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets
in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man
interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it
runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing
forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it,
fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good
husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.
But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home
and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it
does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who
supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even
a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common
fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps
a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a
thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which
he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess
around as much as he likes.
I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves
in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their
collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not
disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the
place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a
couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their
private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their
wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their
best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So
universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire
house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp
to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention
to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her
husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered
household pet.
Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise
the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will
observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are
perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family
makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are
ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose
mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in
him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and
Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing
to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with
them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to
register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a
month or two.
But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s
relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a
bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask
even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would
fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she
considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and
heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have
his family stay with them as she had to have hers.
As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her
prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her
husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome”
on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces
of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her
husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having
his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with
Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother,
drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they
do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are
always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at
home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an
autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might
like staying in it better.
LXVII
DEVOURING FRIENDS
“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring
friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal
who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself
against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all
the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other
bores and social nuisances.
“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one
who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited
guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through
your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants
to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see
her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient
for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being
translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.
“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because
she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments
with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having
a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she
inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you
have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of
you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because
she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her
calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a
cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it
and goes into action.
“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy
woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have
a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation
in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that
I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s
clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole
schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as
hard.
“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time
Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a
whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s
husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable
time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time
Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about
their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me
up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am
interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and
fruitless conversations about nothing.
“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against
these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me
and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut
my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to
leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over
the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I
am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if
God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his
enemies.
“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your
home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two
evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to
keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We
have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse
every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred
occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.
“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is
regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory _hors
d’œuvre_, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without
the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will
come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real
heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening
with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and
protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone
that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.
“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our
independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake
up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of
liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have
to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their
footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly
on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us
bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our
hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no
way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to
the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household
pests.”
LXVIII
THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS
What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this
question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then
to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and
husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went
on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my
career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back,
no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in
my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the
brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew
what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all
temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”
Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we
are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are
unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no
clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between
conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find
contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who
are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with
their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work.
You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers,
complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have
missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who
have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness
because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who
lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and
take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold
so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast
numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.
But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the
conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have
leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other
pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some
useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind
and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a
never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in
the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf.
Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.
My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the
bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at
the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are
always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when
they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they
are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they
are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when
the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they
have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and
pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have
formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend
money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire.
Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on
Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.
So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods
provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy
day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty
home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that
are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some
mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace
and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too
old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but
sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder
philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I
want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is
dust and ashes in our teeth.
Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and
great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them,
for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest
competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that
blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest
of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He
suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman
he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children.
The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous
sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk
of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms
around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and
joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to
the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.
Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be
Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to
others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.
LXIX
PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE
What are you storing up for your old age? Are you laying up any money
against the time when you will be old and feeble and no longer able to
work? The hour will strike for you, as it does for others, when your
earning powers will be gone. Your hands will be too stiff and clumsy
to keep on with their accustomed task. Your mind will be too slow to
go the pace in the fierce competition in the commercial world. If you
are an employee, you will lose your job. If you are a business man, you
will find that your trade has somehow drifted away from you. If you are
a professional man, you will be superseded by the new men whose stars
are just rising on the horizon.