Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Sankar Viswanathan,
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
THE
Secret of a Happy Home
BY
MARION HARLAND
PUBLISHED BY
THE CHRISTIAN HERALD,
LOUIS KLOPSCH, Proprietor,
BIBLE HOUSE, NEW YORK.
Copyright, 1896, BY LOUIS KLOPSCH.
Dedication.
To My Children,
"The Blessed Three,"
Whose Love and Loyalty
Have made mine a Happy Home
And my Life Worth Living,
The volume is
Gratefully Dedicated.
MARION HARLAND.
The Secret of a Happy Home.
INTRODUCTORY.
An Open Secret,
CHAPTER I.
Sisterly Discourse with John's Wife Concerning
John,
CHAPTER II.
The Family Purse,
CHAPTER III.
The Parable of the Rich Woman and the
Farmer's Wife,
CHAPTER IV.
Little Things that are Trifles,
CHAPTER V.
A Mistake on John's Part,
CHAPTER VI.
"Chink-Fillers,"
CHAPTER VII.
Must-haves and May-bes,
CHAPTER VIII.
What Good Will It Do?
CHAPTER IX.
Shall I Pass It On?
CHAPTER X.
"Only Her Nerves,"
CHAPTER XI.
The Rule of Two,
CHAPTER XII
The Perfect Work of Patience,
CHAPTER XIII.
According to His Folly,
CHAPTER XIV.
"Buttered Parsnips,"
CHAPTER XV.
Is Marriage Reformatory?
CHAPTER XVI.
"John's" Mother,
CHAPTER XVII.
And Other Relations-in-Law,
CHAPTER XVIII.
A Timid Word for the Step-mother,
CHAPTER XIX.
Children as Helpers,
CHAPTER XX.
Children as Burden-bearers,
CHAPTER XXI.
Our Young Person,
CHAPTER XXII.
Our Boy,
CHAPTER XXIII.
That Spoiled Child,
CHAPTER XXIV.
Getting Along in Years,
CHAPTER XXV.
Truth-telling,
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Gospel of Conventionalities,
CHAPTER XXVII.
Familiar, or Intimate?
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Our Stomachs,
CHAPTER XXIX.
Cheerfulness as a Christian Duty,
CHAPTER XXX.
The Family Invalid,
CHAPTER XXXI.
A Temperance Talk,
CHAPTER XXXII.
Family Music,
CHAPTER XXXIII.
Family Religion,
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A Parting Word for Boy,
CHAPTER XXXV.
Homely, But Important,
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Four-Feet-Upon-a-Fender,
INTRODUCTORY.
AN OPEN SECRET.
Some one asked me the other day, if I were not "weary of being so
often put forward to talk of 'How to Make Home Happy,' a subject upon
which nothing new could be said."
My answer was then what it is now: Were I to undertake to utter
one-thousandth part that the importance of the theme demands, the
contest would be between me and Time. I should need "all the time
there is."
Henry Ward Beecher once prefaced a lecture delivered during the Civil
War by saying: "The Copperhead species chancing to abound in this
locality, I have been requested to select as my subject this evening
something that will not be likely to lead to the mention of Slavery."
"I confess myself to be somewhat perplexed by this petition," the
orator went on to say, with the twinkle in his eye we all
recollect--"for I have yet to learn of any subject that could not
easily lead me up to the discussion of a sin against God and man which
I could not exaggerate were every letter a Mt. Sinai--I mean,
American Slavery."
Likening the lesser to the greater, allow me to say that I cannot
imagine any topic worthy the attention of God-fearing, humanity-loving
men and women that would not be connected in some degree, near or
remote, with "Home, and How to Make Home Happy."
The general principles underlying home-making of the right kind are as
well-known as the fact that what is named gravitation draws falling
bodies to the earth. These principles may be set down roughly as
Order, Kindness and Mutual Forbearance. Upon one or another of these
pegs hangs everything which enters into the comfort and pleasure of
the household, taken collectively and individually. They are the
beams, the uprights and the roofing of the building.
The chats, more or less confidential and altogether unconventional,
which I propose to hold with the readers of this modest volume have to
do with certain sub-laws which are so often overlooked that--to return
to the figure of the building--the wind finds its way through chinks;
the floors creak and the general impression is that of bare
homeliness. House and Home go together upon tongue and upon pen as
naturally as hook-and-eye, shovel-and-tongs, knife-and-fork,--yet
the coupling is rather a trick learned through habit than an act of
reason. The words are not synonyms of necessity or in fact.
Upon these, the first pages of my unconventional book, I avow my
knowledge of what, so far from humiliating, stimulates me--to wit,
that nine-tenths of those who will look beyond the title-page will be
women. This is well, and as I would have it to be, for without
feminine agency no house, however well appointed, can be anything
higher than an official residence.
Man's first possession in a world then unmarred by sin was a
dwelling-place--but Eden was not a home until the woman joined him
there. Throughout the ages and all over the world, as mother, wife,
sister, daughter (often, let me observe in passing, as old-maid aunt)
she has stood with him as the representative of the rest, sympathy and
love to be found nowhere except under his own roof-tree, and beside
his own fireside. It is not the house that makes the home, any more
than it is the jeweled case that makes the watch, or the body that
makes the human being. It is the Presence, the nameless influence
which is the earliest acknowledged by the child, and the latest to be
forgotten by man or woman. The establishment of this power is
essentially woman's prerogative.
In this one respect--I dare not say in any other--we outrank our
brothers. They can build palaces and the furniture that fits them up
in regal state; they can, even better than we, prepare for the royal
tables food convenient for them, and fashion the attire of the
revelers, and make the music and sing the songs and write the books
and paint the pictures of the world. They may make and execute our
laws and sail our seas, and fight our battles, and--after dutiful
consultation with us--cast our votes. There is no magnanimity in
admitting all this. It is the due of that noblest work of God, a
strong, good, gentle man to receive the concession and to know how
frankly we make it. To them as theologians, logicians, impartial
historians, as priests, prophets, and kings--we do cheerful obeisance,
yet with the look of one who but half hides a happy secret in her
heart that compensates for all she resigns. There is not a
true-hearted woman alive who would give up her birthright to
become--we will say Christopher Columbus himself.
It must be a fine thing, though, to be a man on some accounts;--to be
emancipated forever-and-a-day from the thraldom of skirts for
instance, and to push through a crowd to read the interjectional
headlines upon a bulletin board, instead of going meekly and
unenlightened home, to be told by John three hours later that "a
woman's curiosity passes masculine comprehension, and that he is too
tired and hungry to talk." It must be a satisfaction to be able to hit
another nail with a hammer than that attached to one's own thumb, and
to hurl a stone from the shoulder instead of tossing it from the
wrist; there must be sublimity in the thrill with which the stroke-oar
of the 'Varsity's crew bends to his work, and the ecstasy of the
successful crack pitcher of a baseball team passes the descriptive
power of a woman's tongue. Nevertheless, the greatest architectural
genius who ever astonished the world with a pyramid, a cathedral, or a
triumphal street-arch, could never create and keep a Home. The meanest
hut in the Jersey meadows, the doorway of which frames in the dusk of
evening the figure of a woman with a baby in her arms, silhouetted
upon the red background of fire and lamp kindled to welcome the
returning husband and father, harbors as guest a viewless but
"incomparable sweet" angel that never visits the superb club-house
where men go from spirit to spirit in the vain attempt to make home of
that which is no home.
"You write--do you?" snarled Napoleon I, insolently to the wittiest
woman of the Paris salons. "What, for instance, have been some of your
works since you have been in this country?"
"Three children, sire!" retorted the mother of Madame Emile de
Girardin.
It was this same ready witted mother whom another woman pronounced the
happiest of mortals.
"She does everything well--children, books and preserves."
Her range was wide. Comparatively few of her sex can grasp that
octave. Upon the simplest, as upon the wisest, Heaven has bestowed the
talent of home-making, precious and incommunicable.
Woman's Work in the Home! Taking up, without irreverence, the
magnificent hyperbole of the beloved disciple, I may truly say, "that
if they should be written, every one, I suppose the world itself would
not contain the books that would be written."
Let us touch one or two points very briefly. I have said that men can
furnish houses more artistically than we, and that as professional
cooks they surpass us. It should follow naturally that men, to whose
hearts the stomach is the shortest thoroughfare, would, in a body,
resort to hotels for daily food. There is but one satisfactory
explanation of the unphilosophical fact that the substantial citizen
who, during a domestic interregnum, makes the experiment of three
meals a day for one month at the best restaurant in New York City (and
there are no better anywhere) returns with gladness and singleness of
heart to his own extension-table--and that were I to put the question
"Contract Cookery or Home Cookery?" to the few Johns who deign to
peruse these lines, the acclaim would be--"Better, as everyday fare,
is a broiled beefsteak and a mealy potato at home, than a palatial
hotel and ten courses."
There is individuality in the steak broiled for John's very self, and
sentiment in the pains taken to keep the starch in his potato, and
solid satisfaction in putting one's knees under his own mahogany. The
least romantic of gourmands objects to stirring his appetite into a
common vat with five hundred others. But there is something back of
all this that makes home-fare delicious, when the house mother smiles
across the dish she has sweetened with love and spiced with good-will,
and thus transformed it into a message from her heart to the hearts of
the dear ones to whom she ministers.
John--being of the masculine gender according to a decree of Nature,
and, therefore, irresponsible for the slow pace at which his wits
move--may not be able at once to analyze the odd heartache he feels in
surveying the apartments fitted up by the upholsterer--or to tell you
why they become no longer a tri-syllabled word, but "our rooms,"
within a day after wife and daughters have taken possession of them.
The honest fellow cannot see but that the furniture is the same, and
each article standing in the same place--but the new atmosphere "which
is the old," greets him upon the threshold, and steals into his heart
before he has fairly entered. Anybody could have shaken the stiffness
out of that portière, and put a low, shaded lamp under the picture he
likes best, and broken up the formal symmetry of the bric-a-brac that
reminded him, although he did not dare confess it, of a china shop,
and set a slender vaselet with one big ragged golden globe of a
chrysanthemum in it here, and over there a bowl of long-stemmed
roses--(his favorite Bon Silenes, too). But what hireling, O blind and
dear John! would have left a bit of fancy work with the needle
sticking in it, and scissors lying upon it, on the table in library or
smoking room, and put the song you always ask for at twilight upon the
open piano, and, just where you would choose to cast yourself down to
listen, your especial Sleepy Hollow of chair or lounge with the
slumber robe worked last Christmas by loving fingers thrown invitingly
across it?
What professional art could make the vestibule of your house--a rented
cottage, maybe--the gateway to another, and a purer, higher, happier
sphere than the world you shut out with the closing of the front
door? You would never get upon so much as bowing terms with your
better self but for that front door and the latch key which lets you
into the hall brightened by loving smiles, made merry by welcoming
voices.
Talk of the prose of everyday life! When Poetry is hounded from every
other nook of the earth which the Maker of it meant should be one
vast, sublime epic, she will find an inviolable retreat under the
Lares and Penates guarding the ingleside, and crown as priestess
forever the wife and mother who makes and keeps the Home.
It could hardly be otherwise. To no other of his co-workers does the
Lord of life grant such opportunities as to woman. Her baby is laid in
the mother's arms to have, and to hold, and to fashion, without let or
hindrance. His mind and heart are unwritten paper, and Nature and
Providence unite in waving aside all who would interfere with what she
chooses to inscribe thereupon. Her growing boys and girls believe in
her with absoluteness no other friend will ever inspire--not in her
love alone, but in her infallibility and her omnipotence. It is a
moment of terror and often the turning point in a child's life, when
first he comprehends that there are hurts his mother cannot heal,
knowledge which he needs and she cannot impart.
If the boundaries of home seem sometimes to circumscribe a woman's
sphere, they are also a safe barricade within which husband, and the
children who have come to man's estate, find retreat from the outer
storm and stress, a sanctuary where love feeds the flame upon the
domestic altar. There, the atmosphere, like that of St. Peter's
Church, never changes. It refreshes when the breath of the world is a
simoon, withering heart and strength. When the winds of adversity are
bleak, the shivering wanderer returns to the fold, "curtained and
closed and warm--" to gather force for to-morrow's strain.
"Love, rest and home!"
we sing with moistened eyes. The blessed three are put in trust with
woman. Other stations of honor and usefulness may be opened to her,
but this is the realm of which nothing can dispossess her. The leaven
that leavens the nations is wrought by her hands. Hers is the seedtime
that determines what harvest the Master shall reap. To her is
committed the holy task of preserving all that we can know of a lost
paradise until we see the light flash out for our eager eyes from the
wide doors of what--when we would draw it nearest and make it dearest
to our hearts--we call our Changeless Home.
CHAPTER I.
SISTERLY DISCOURSE WITH JOHN'S WIFE CONCERNING JOHN.
John is not John until he is married. He assumes the sobriquet at the
altar as truly as his bride takes the title of "Mistress" or "Madame."
Once taken, the name is generic, inalienable and untransferable. Yet,
as few men marry until they have attained legal majority, it follows
that your John--my John--every wife's John--must have been in making
for a term of years before he fell into our hands.
Sometimes he is marred in the making.
The most loyal wife admits to her inmost self in the most confidential
season of self-communion, that she could have brought up her husband
better than his mother or whatever feminine relative had the training
of him succeeded in doing. An opinion which, I remark, is not shared
by the relative in question. The mother of a growing son will know how
to sympathize with her Mamma-in-law, when her own son--
"--will a-wooing go,
Whether his mother will or no."
I am John's advocate and best friend, but I cannot withhold the
admission that he has some grave faults, and one or two incurable
disabilities. Grappling, forthwith, with the most obstinate of these
last--I name it boldly. John is not--he never can be--and would not be
if he could--a woman. Taking into consideration the incontrovertible
truth that nobody but a woman ever understood another woman--the
situation is serious enough. So desperate in fact, that every mother's
daughter of the missionary sex is fired with zealous desire to mend
it, and chooses for a subject her own special John--_in esse_ or _in
posse_.
This may sound like badinage, but it is uttered in sad earnest. The
wife's irrational longing to extract absolute sympathy of taste,
opinion and feeling, from her wedded lord, is a baneful growth which
is as sure to spring up about the domestic hearth as pursley--named by
the Indian, "the white man's foot"--to show itself about the
squatter's door. Once rooted it is as hard to eradicate as plantain
and red sorrel.
I brand it as "irrational," because common sense shows the extreme
improbability that two people--born of different stocks, and brought
up in different households--the man, sometimes, in no household at
all--should each be the exact counterpart of the other; should come
together provided respectively, with the very qualities, likes and
dislikes, that the partner needs and prefers.
Add to the improbability aforesaid the inevitable variance of views
upon divers important subjects consequent upon the standpoint
masculine and the standpoint feminine, and the wonder grows--not that
some marriages are unhappy, but that a large percentage of wedded
couples jog on comfortably, and, if not without jar, without open
scandal. That they do speaks volumes for the wisdom of Him who
ordained marriage as man's best estate--and something--not
volumes--perhaps, but a pamphlet or two--in behalf of human powers of
philosophical endurance.
Before going farther it would be well to look our subject in the
face--inspect it fairly and without prejudice pro or con.
Stand forth, honest John! and let us behold you, as God made and your
mother--in blood, or in heart--trained you. Let the imagination of my
readers survey him, as he plants himself before us. Albeit a trifle
more conscious than a woman would be in like circumstances, of the
leading fact that he has the full complement of hands and feet usually
prescribed by Nature, he bears scrutiny bravely. He is what he would
denominate in another, "a white man;" square in his dealings with his
fellow-men and with a soft place, on the sunny side of his heart, for
the women. He would add--"God bless them!" did we allow him to speak.
Men of his sort rarely think of their own womenkind or of pure, gentle
womanhood in the abstract, without a benediction, mental or audible.
Our specimen, you will note, as he begins to feel at ease in the
honorable pillory to which we have called him--puts his hands into his
pockets. The gesture supplies us with the first clause of our
illustrated lecture. Without his pockets John would be a cipher, and a
decimal cipher at that. If some men were not all pocket they would
never be Johns, for no Jill would be so demented as to "come tumbling
after" them. I have seen a pocket marry off a hump-back, a twisted
foot and sixty winters' fall of snow upon the head, while a pocketless
Adonis sighed in vain for Beauty's glance. A full pocket balances an
empty skull as a good heart cannot; a plethoric pocket overshadows
monstrous vices.
But at his cleanly best, John's pockets are an integral part of his
personality. He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what
corresponds in the _genus homo_ with the polywog state in batrachia.
The incipient man begins to strut as soon as mamma puts pockets into
his kilted skirt--a stride as prophetic as the strangled crow of the
cockerel upon the lowest bar of the fence.
The direst penance Johnny can know is to have his pockets stitched up
because he will keep his hands in them. To deny him the right is to do
violence to natural laws. He is the born money-maker, bread-winner,
provider--the _hüsbonda_ of our Anglo-Saxon ancestry--and the pocket
is his heraldic symbol, his birthright.
The pocket question obtrudes itself at an alarmingly early period of
married life--whoever may be the moneyed member of the new firm. When,
as most frequently happens, this is John, the ultra-conscientious may
think that he ought, prior to the wedding-day, to have hinted to his
highland or lowland Mary, that he did not intend to throw unlimited
gold into her apron every day. If he had touched this verity however
remotely, she would not have married him. The man who speaks the
straight-forward truth in such circumstances might as well put a knife
to his throat, if love and life are synonyms.
Honest John, thrusting his hands well towards the bottom of his
pockets, smiles sheepishly, yet knowingly, in listening to this
"discourse." Courtship is one thing and marriage is another in his
code. Mary's primal mistake is in assuming--(upon John's authority, I
regret as his advocate to say), that the two states are one and the
same. Moonlight vows and noonday action should, according to her
theory, be in exact harmony. John does not deceive consciously.
Wemmick's office tenets differed diametrically from those he held at
Walworth where his aged parent toasted the muffins, and Miss. Skiffins
made the tea. The mellow fervency of John's "With all my worldly goods
I thee endow"--must be taken in a Pickwickian and Cupidian sense.
Reason and experience sustain him in the belief that a tyro should
learn a business before being put in charge of important interests.
Mary is a tyro whose abilities and discretion he must test before--in
the words of the old song--he
"gives her the key of his chest,
To get the gold at her request."
Most women take to married and home-life easily, because naturally.
The shadow of the roof-tree, the wholesome restraint of household
routine and the peaceful monotony of household tasks accord well with
preconceived ideas and early education. John's liking for domesticity
is usually an acquired taste, like that for olives and caviare, and to
gain aptitude for the duties it involves, requires patience. He needs
filing down and chinking, and rounding off, and sand-papering before
he fits decorously into the chimney-corner. And when there, he
sometimes does not "season straight." He was hewed across the grain,
or the native grain ran awry, or there is a knot in the wood.
"Why were those newel posts oiled before they were set up?" I asked of
a carpenter.
"T' keep'em from checkin', to be sure."
"Checking?"
"Yes, ma'am. Goin' in shaller cracks all over, 's wood's apt to do
without it's properly treated beforehand. Sometimes 'twould crack
clean through ef 'twarnt for the ile."
In his new position John is apt "to go in shaller cracks all over,"
unless his feminine trainer has been judicious in the use of
lubricants--assuasive and dissuasive. If handled aright by the owner
he, to do him justice, rarely "cracks clean through."
"Checking" in this case signifies the lack of the small, sweet
courtesies which are the peaceable fruits of the Gospel of
Conventionality. Breeding, good or bad, environs the growing lad, as
Wordsworth tells us heaven lies about us in our infancy. The boy whose
mother allows him to lounge into her presence with his cap upon his
head, whose sisters wink indulgently at his shirt sleeves in parlor
and at table--will don his hat and doff his coat in his wife's
sitting-room. Politeness, like gingerbread, is only excellent when
home-made, and is not to be bought for money.
I wonder if John--disposed by nature and too often by education to
hold such niceties of custom as trifles and cheap--suspects what a
blow is dealt to his wife's ideals when he begins to show, either that
he respects her less than of old, or that he is less truly a gentleman
than his careful conservation of elegant proprieties during their
courtship led her to imagine. It costs him but a second's thought and
slight muscular exertion to lift his hat in kissing her on leaving
home in the morning, and in returning at evening. It ought not to be
an effort for him to rise to his feet when she enters the room, and to
comport himself at her table and in her drawing-room as he would at
the board and in the parlor of his neighbor's wife. Each of these
slight civilities elevates her in her own and in others' eyes, and
tends to give her her rightful place as queen of the home and of his
heart. She may be maid-of-all-work in a modest establishment, worn and
depressed by over-much drudgery, but in her husband's eyes she is the
equal of any lady in the land. Her stove-burned face and print gown do
not delude him as to her real position. Furthermore--and this hint is
directed sidewise at our "model"--a sense of the incongruity between
the fine courtesy of her husband's manner, and of slovenly attire upon
the object of his attentions--would incite her to neatness and
becomingness in dress. It is worth while to look well in the eyes of
one who never for a moment forgets that he is a gentleman, and his
wife a lady.
When John finds himself excusing this and that lapse from perfect
breeding in his home life with the plea--"It is only my wife!" he
needs to look narrowly at his grain and his seasoning. He is in danger
of "checking."
Being a man--or I would better say--not being a woman--John is
probably made up without domestic tact, and his wife must be on her
guard to cover the deficiency. For example, if by some mortifying
combination of mischances, a dish is scantily supplied, he helps it
out lavishly, scrapes the bottom officiously, and with innocent
barbarity calls your attention to the fact that it needs replenishing.
"I tried once to hold my husband back from the brink of social
disaster," said one wife. "We sat opposite to one another at a dinner
party where the conversation neared a topic that would be, I knew,
extremely painful and embarrassing to our hostess. My John led the
talk--all unaware of the peril--and when the next sentence would, I
felt, be fatal, I pressed his foot under the table. What do you think
that blessed innocent did? Winced visibly and sharply--stopped short
in the middle of a word, and stared at me with pendulous jaw,
and--while everybody looked at him for the next breath--said,
resonantly--'_Jane! did you touch my foot?_'"
The incident is essentially John-esque. I am as positive as if I had
called for a comparison of experience, that every wife who reads this
could furnish a parallel sketch from life. The average John is
impervious to glance or gesture. I know one who is a model husband in
most respects, who, when a danger-signal is hung out from the other
end of the table, draws general attention in diplomatic fashion thus--
"Halloo! I have no idea what I have done or said, now! but when Madame
gives her three-cornered frown, I know there are reefs ahead, on the
starboard or the larboard side, and I'd better take my soundings."
Women are experts in this sort of telegraphy. From one of them, such
an _exposé_ would mean downright malice, or mischief, and be
understood as such. John's voiced bewilderment may be harmful, but it
is as guileless as a baby's. It may be true that men are deceivers
ever, in money or love affairs. In everyday home life, there is about
the most sophisticated, a simplicity of thought and word, a
transparency of motive, and, when vanity is played upon cunningly, a
naive gullibility--that move us to wondering admiration. It,
furthermore, I grieve to admit, furnishes manoeuvring wives with a
ready instrument for the accomplishment of their designs.
For another fixed fact in the natural history of John is that, however
kindly and intelligent and reasonable he may be--he needs, in double
harness, to be cleverly managed, to be coaxed and petted up to what
else would make him shy. If driven straight at it, the chances are
forty-eight out of fifty that he will balk or bolt.
A stock story of my girlish days was of a careless, happy-go-lucky
housewife, who, upon the arrival of unexpected guests, told her maid
"not to bother about changing the cloth, but to set plates and dishes
so as to humor the spots."
She is a thrifty, not a slovenly manager, who accommodates the trend
of daily affairs to humor her John's peculiarities and foibles; who
ploughs around stumps, and, instead of breaking the share in tough
roots, _eases up_, and goes over them until they decay of themselves.
In really good ground they leave the soil the richer for having
suffered natural decomposition. If John is prone to savagery when
hungry (and he usually is), our wise wife will wait until he has dined
before broaching matters that may ruffle his spirit.
It is more than likely that he has the masculine bias toward
wet-blanketism that tries sanguine women's souls more sorely than open
opposition. Some Johns make it a point of manly duty to discourage at
first hearing any plan that has originated with a woman. I am fond of
John, but this idiosyncrasy cannot be ignored. Nor is it entirely
explicable upon any principle known in feminine ethics, unless it be
intended by Providence as a counterweight to the womanly proclivity to
see but one side of a question when we are interested in carrying it
to a vote. John is as positive that there are two sides to everything,
as Columbus was that the Eastern Hemisphere must have something to
balance it. When Mary looks to him for instant assent and earnest
sympathy, he casts about for objections, and sets them in calm array.
She may have demonstrated in a thousand instances her ability to judge
and act for herself, and may preface her exposition of the case in
hand by saying that she has given it mature deliberation. It never
occurred to him until she mentioned it; he may have sincerest respect
for her sense and prudence--the chances are, nevertheless, a thousand
to one that he will begin his reply with--
"That is all very well, my dear--but you must reflect, that, etc.,
etc., et cetera"--each et cetera a dab of wet wool, taking out more
and more stiffening and color, until the beautiful project hangs, a
limp rag, on her hands, a forlorn wreck over which she could weep in
self-pity.
This is one of the "spots" to be "humored." Wives there are, and not a
few of them, sagacious and tender, who have learned the knack of
insinuating a scheme upon husbandly attention until the logical
spouses find themselves proposing--they believe of their own free
will--the very designs born of their partner's brains. This is genius,
and the practical application thereof is an art in itself. It may also
be classified for John's admonition, as the natural reaction of
ingenious wits against wet-blanketism. The funniest part of the
transaction is that John never suspects the ruse, even at the
hundredth repetition, and esteems himself, in dogged complacency, the
author of his spouse's goodliest ideas.
Such a one dreads nothing more than the reputation of being ruled by
his wife. The more hen-pecked he is, the less he knows it--and vice
versâ. "He jests at scars who never felt a wound." She who has her
John well in hand has broken him in too thoroughly to allow him to
resent the curb, or to play with the bit.
His intentions--so far as he knows them--are so good, he tries so
steadfastly to please his wife--he is so often piteously
perplexed--this big, burly, blundering, blind-folded, _blesséd_ John
of ours--that our knowledge of his disabilities enwraps him in a
mantle of affectionate charity. His efforts to master the delicate
intricacy of his darling's mental and spiritual organization may be
like the would-be careful hold of thumb and finger upon a butterfly's
wing, but the pain he causes is inconceivable by him. The suspicion of
hurt to the beautiful thing would break his heart. He could more
easily lie down and die for her than sympathize intelligently in her
vague, delicious dreams, the aspirations, half agony, half rapture,
which she cannot convey to his comprehension--yet which she feels that
he ought to share.
Ah! the pathos and the pity--sometimes the godlike patience of that
silent side of our dear John! Mrs. Whitney, writing of Richard
Hathaway, tells us enough of it to beget in us infinite tolerance.
"Everything takes hold away down where I can't reach or help," says
the poor fellow of his sensitive, poetical wife. "She is all the time
holding up her soul to me with a thorn in it."
"He did not know that that was poetry and pathos. It was a natural
illustration out of his homely, gentle, compassionate life. He knew
how to help dumb things in their hurts. His wife he could not help."
It reminds us of Ham Peggotty's tender adjustment upon his palm of the
purse committed to him by Emily for fallen Martha.
"'Such a toy as it is!' apostrophized Ham, thoughtfully, looking on
it. 'With, such a little money in it, Em'ly, my dear.'"
We are reminded more strongly of rough, gray boulders holding in their
hearts the warmth of the sunshine for the comfortable growth of mosses
that creep over and cling to and beautify them.
John is neither saint nor hero, except in Mary's fancy sketch of the
Coming Man. He remonstrates against canonization strenuously--dissent
that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her
admiration. She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he. With
the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into
coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference. Until women
get at the truth in this matter of self-deception, disappointment
surely awaits upon awakening from Love's young dream.
The surest guard against the shock of broken ideals is to keep ever
before the mind that men are not to be measured by feminine standards
of perfection. Mary has as little perception of perspective as a
Chinese landscape painter; she colors floridly and her drawing is out
of line.
Put John in his proper place as regards distances, shadow and
environment, and survey him in the cool white light of common sense.
Unless he is a _poseur_ of uncommon skill, he will appear best thus.
Conjugal quarrels are so constantly the theme of ridicule and the text
of warnings to the unwedded that we lose sight of the plain truth that
husbands and wives bicker no more than parents and children, brothers
and sisters. In every community there are more blood-relations who do
not speak to one another than divorced couples. Wars and fightings
come upon us, not through matrimony so much as through the manifold
infirmities of mortal nature. John, albeit not a woman, is a
vertebrate human being, "with hands, organs, dimensions, senses,
affections, passions. If you prick him he will bleed, if you tickle
him he will laugh, if you poison him he will die." In the true
marriage, he is the wife's other self--one lobe of her brain--one
ventricle of her heart--the right hand to her left. This is the
marriage the Lord hath made.
The occasional clash of opinions, the passing heat of temper, are but
surface-gusts that do not stir the brooding love of hearts at rest in
one another.
While John remains loyal to his wedded wife, forsaking all others and
cleaving to her alone, the inventory of his faults should be a sealed
book to her closest confidante, the carping discussion of his failings
be prohibited by pride, affection and right taste. This leads me to
offer one last tribute to our patient (and maybe bored) subject. He
has as a rule, a nicer sense of honor in the matter of comment upon
his wife's shortcomings and foibles than she exhibits with regard to
his.
Set it down to gallantry, chivalry, pride--custom--what you will--but
the truth sheds a lustre upon our John of which I mean he shall have
the full advantage. Perhaps the noblest reticence belongs to the
Silent Side of him. I hardly think it is because he has no yearning
for sympathy, no need of counsel, when he reluctantly admits to
himself that that upon which he has ventured most is, in some measure,
a disappointment. Be this as it may, Mary may learn discretion from
him--and the lesson conned should be forbearance with offensive
peculiarities, and, what she names to her sore spirit, lack of
appreciation. Given the conditions of his fidelity and devotion--and
she may well "down on her knees and thank God fasting for a good man's
love."