_There can be no true home without liberty._
The very idea of home is of a retreat where we shall be free to act
out personal and individual tastes and peculiarities, as we cannot
do before the wide world. We are to have our meals at what hour we
will, served in what style suits us. Our hours of going and coming
are to be as we please. Our favorite haunts are to be here or there;
our pictures and books so disposed as seems to us good; and our
whole arrangements the expression, so far as our means can compass it,
of our own personal ideas of what is pleasant and desirable in
life. This element of liberty, if we think of it, is the chief
charm of home. "Here I can do as I please," is the thought with
which the tempest-tossed earth-pilgrim blesses himself or herself,
turning inward from the crowded ways of the world. This thought
blesses the man of business, as he turns from his day's care and
crosses the sacred threshold. It is as restful to him as the slippers
and gown and easy-chair by the fireside. Everybody understands him
here. Everybody is well content that he should take his ease in his
own way. Such is the case in the ideal home. That such is not always
the case in the real home comes often from the mistakes in the
house-furnishing. Much house-furnishing is too fine for liberty.
In America there is no such thing as rank and station which impose a
sort of prescriptive style on people of certain income. The
consequence is that all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in
the Old World have a recognized relation to certain possibilities of
income, and which require certain other accessories to make them in
good keeping, are thrown in the way of all sorts of people.
Young people who cannot expect by any reasonable possibility to keep
more than two or three servants, if they happen to have the means in
the outset furnish a house with just such articles as in England would
suit an establishment of sixteen. We have seen houses in England
having two or three housemaids, and tables served by a butler and two
waiters, where the furniture, carpets, china, crystal, and silver were
in one and the same style with some establishments in America where
the family was hard pressed to keep three Irish servants.
This want of servants is the one thing that must modify everything in
American life; it is, and will long continue to be, a leading feature
in the life of a country so rich in openings for man and woman that
domestic service can be only the stepping-stone to something higher.
Nevertheless we Americans are great travelers; we are sensitive,
appreciative, fond of novelty, apt to receive and incorporate into our
own life what seems fair and graceful in that of other people. Our
women's wardrobes are made elaborate with the thousand elegancies of
French toilet,--our houses filled with a thousand knick-knacks of
which our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on
the Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young
American bride is often ushered into her new home,--her wardrobe all
gossamer lace and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a
museum of elegant and costly gewgaws, and, amid the whole collection
of elegancies and fragilities, she, perhaps, the frailest.
Then comes the tug of war. The young wife becomes a mother, and while
she is retired to her chamber, blundering Biddy rusts the elegant
knives, or takes off the ivory handles by soaking in hot water; the
silver is washed in greasy soapsuds, and refreshed now and then with a
thump, which cocks the nose of the teapot awry, or makes the handle
assume an air of drunken defiance. The fragile china is chipped here
and there around its edges with those minute gaps so vexatious to a
woman's soul; the handles fly hither and thither in the wild confusion
of Biddy's washing-day hurry, when cook wants her to help hang out the
clothes. Meanwhile Bridget sweeps the parlor with a hard broom, and
shakes out showers of ashes from the grate, forgetting to cover the
damask lounges, and they directly look as rusty and time-worn as if
they had come from an auction-store; and all together unite in making
such havoc of the delicate ruffles and laces of the bridal outfit and
baby _layette_ that, when the poor young wife comes out of her
chamber after her nurse has left her, and, weakened and embarrassed
with the demands of the newcomer, begins to look once more into the
affairs of her little world, she is ready to sink with vexation and
discouragement. Poor little princess! Her clothes are made as
princesses wear them, her baby's clothes like a young duke's, her
house furnished like a lord's, and only Bridget and Biddy and Polly to
do the work of cook, scullery-maid, butler, footman, laundress,
nursery-maid, housemaid, and lady's maid. Such is the array that in
the Old Country would be deemed necessary to take care of an
establishment got up like hers. Everything in it is too fine,--not too
fine to be pretty, not in bad taste in itself, but too fine for the
situation, too fine for comfort or liberty.
What ensues in a house so furnished? Too often, ceaseless fretting of
the nerves, in the wife's despairing, conscientious efforts to keep
things as they should be. There is no freedom in a house where things
are too expensive and choice to be freely handled and easily replaced.
Life becomes a series of petty embarrassments and restrictions,
something is always going wrong, and the man finds his fireside
oppressive,--the various articles of his parlor and table seem like so
many temper-traps and spring-guns, menacing explosion and disaster.
There may be, indeed, the most perfect home-feeling, the utmost
cosiness and restfulness, in apartments crusted with gilding, carpeted
with velvet, and upholstered with satin. I have seen such, where the
home-like look and air of free use was as genuine as in a Western log
cabin; but this was in a range of princely income that made all these
things as easy to be obtained or replaced as the most ordinary of our
domestic furniture. But so long as articles must be shrouded from use,
or used with fear and trembling, because their cost is above the
general level of our means, we had better be without them, even
though the most lucky of accidents may put their possession in our
power.
But it is not merely by the effort to maintain too much elegance
that the sense of home liberty is banished from a house. It is
sometimes expelled in another way, with all painstaking and
conscientious strictness, by the worthiest and best of human beings,
the blessed followers of Saint Martha. Have we not known them, the
deaf, worthy creatures, up before daylight, causing most scrupulous
lustrations of every pane of glass and inch of paint in our
parlors, in consequence whereof every shutter and blind must be
kept closed for days to come, lest the flies should speck the freshly
washed windows and wainscoting? Dear shade of Aunt Mehitabel,
forgive our boldness! Have we not been driven for days, in our
youth, to read our newspaper in the front veranda, in the kitchen,
out in the barn,--anywhere, in fact, where sunshine could be
found,--because there was not a room in the house that was not
cleaned, shut up, and darkened? Have we not shivered with cold, all
the glowering, gloomy month of May, because, the august front parlor
having undergone the spring cleaning, the andirons were snugly tied
up in the tissue-paper, and an elegant frill of the same material
was trembling before the mouth of the once glowing fireplace? Even so,
dear soul, full of loving-kindness and hospitality as thou wast, yet
ever making our house seem like a tomb! And with what patience
wouldst thou sit sewing by a crack in the shutters an inch wide,
rejoicing in thy immaculate paint and clear glass! But was there
ever a thing of thy spotless and unsullied belongings which a boy
might use? How I trembled to touch thy scoured tins, that hung in
appalling brightness! with what awe I asked for a basket to pick
strawberries! and where in the house could I find a place to eat a
piece of gingerbread? How like a ruffian, a Tartar, a pirate, I
always felt when I entered thy domains! and how, from day to day,
I wondered at the immeasurable depths of depravity which were always
leading me to upset something, or break or tear or derange something,
in thy exquisitely kept premises! Somehow the impression was burned
with overpowering force into my mind that houses and furniture,
scrubbed floors, white curtains, bright tins and brasses, were the
great, awful, permanent facts of existence; and that men and women,
and particularly children, were the meddlesome intruders upon this
divine order, every trace of whose intermeddling must be scrubbed
out and obliterated in the quickest way possible. It seemed evident
to me that houses would be far more perfect if nobody lived in them at
all, but that, as men had really and absurdly taken to living in
them, they must live as little as possible. My only idea of a house
was a place full of traps and pitfalls for boys, a deadly temptation
to sins which beset one every moment; and when I read about a
sailor's free life on the ocean, I felt an untold longing to go forth
and be free in like manner.
But a truce to these fancies, and back again to our essay.
If liberty in a house is a comfort to a husband, it is a necessity to
children. When we say liberty, we do not mean license. We do not mean
that Master Johnny be allowed to handle elegant volumes with
bread-and-butter fingers, or that little Miss be suffered to drum on
the piano, or practice line-drawing with a pin on varnished furniture.
Still it is essential that the family parlors be not too fine for the
family to sit in,--too fine for the ordinary accidents, haps and
mishaps of reasonably well-trained children. The elegance of the
parlor where papa and mamma sit and receive their friends should wear
an inviting, not a hostile and bristling, aspect to little people. Its
beauty and its order gradually form in the little mind a love of
beauty and order, and the insensible carefulness of regard.
Nothing is worse for a child than to shut him up in a room which he
understands is his, _because_ he is disorderly,--where he is expected,
of course, to maintain and keep disorder. We have sometimes pitied the
poor little victims who show their faces longingly at the doors of
elegant parlors, and are forthwith collared by the domestic police and
consigned to some attic apartment, called a playroom, where chaos
continually reigns. It is a mistake to suppose, because children
derange a well-furnished apartment, that they like confusion. Order
and beauty are always pleasant to them as to grown people, and
disorder and defacement are painful; but they know neither how to
create the one nor to prevent the other,--their little lives are a
series of experiments, often making disorder by aiming at some new
form of order. Yet, for all this, I am not one of those who feel that
in a family everything should bend to the sway of these little people.
They are the worst of tyrants in such houses: still, where children
are, though the fact must not appear to them, _nothing must be done
without a wise thought of them_.
Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, "_Ars est celare
artem_." Children who are taught too plainly, by every anxious look
and word of their parents, by every family arrangement, by the
impressment of every chance guest into the service, that their parents
consider their education as the one important matter in creation, are
apt to grow up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious.
The stars cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal
improvement, and the sooner children learn this the better. The great
art is to organize a home which shall move on with a strong, wide,
generous movement, where the little people shall act themselves out as
freely and impulsively as can consist with the comfort of the whole,
and where the anxious watching and planning for them shall be kept as
secret from them as possible.
It is well that one of the sunniest and airiest rooms in the house be
the children's nursery. It is good philosophy, too, to furnish it
attractively, even if the sum expended lower the standard of parlor
luxuries. It is well that the children's chamber, which is to act
constantly on their impressible natures for years, should command a
better prospect, a sunnier aspect, than one which serves for a day's
occupancy of the transient guest. It is well that journeys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children; that guests
should be invited with a view to their improvement; that some
intimacies should be chosen and some rejected on their account. But it
is not well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out
before the child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere
where everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with
reference to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect
combined with real care and never ceasing watchfulness has often
seemed to do wonders in this work of setting human beings on their own
feet for the life journey.
Education is the highest object of home, but education in the widest
sense,--education of the parents no less than of the children. In a
true home the man and the woman receive, through their cares, their
watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and highest
finish that earth can put upon them. From that they must pass upward,
for earth can teach them no more.
The home education is incomplete unless it include the idea of
hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a Biblical and apostolic
virtue, and not so often recommended in Holy Writ without reason.
Hospitality is much neglected in America for the very reasons touched
upon above. We have received our ideas of propriety and elegance of
living from old countries, where labor is cheap, where domestic
service is a well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted cheerfully
for life, and where of course there is such a subdivision of labor as
insures great thoroughness in all its branches. We are ashamed or
afraid to conform honestly and hardily to a state of things purely
American. We have not yet accomplished what our friend the Doctor
calls "our weaning," and learned that dinners with circuitous courses
and divers other Continental and English refinements, well enough in
their way, cannot be accomplished in families with two or three
untrained servants, without an expense of care and anxiety which makes
them heart-withering to the delicate wife, and too severe a trial to
occur often. America is the land of subdivided fortunes, of a general
average of wealth and comfort, and there ought to be, therefore, an
understanding in the social basis far more simple than in the Old
World.
Many families of small fortunes know this,--they are quietly living
so,--but they have not the steadiness to share their daily average
living with a friend, a traveler, or guest, just as the Arab shares
his tent and the Indian his bowl of succotash. They cannot have
company, they say. Why? Because it is such a fuss to get out the best
things, and then to put them back again. But why get out the best
things! Why not give your friend what he would like a thousand times
better,--a bit of your average home life, a seat at any time at your
board, a seat at your fire? If he sees that there is a handle off your
teacup, and that there is a crack across one of your plates, he only
thinks, with a sigh of relief, "Well, mine aren't the only things that
meet with accidents," and he feels nearer to you ever after; he will
let you come to his table and see the cracks in his teacups, and you
will condole with each other on the transient nature of earthly
possessions. If it become apparent in these entirely undressed
rehearsals that your children are sometimes disorderly, and that your
cook sometimes overdoes the meat, and that your second girl sometimes
is awkward in waiting, or has forgotten a table propriety, your friend
only feels, "Ah, well, other people have trials as well as I," and he
thinks, if you come to see him, he shall feel easy with you.
"Having company" is an expense that may always be felt; but easy daily
hospitality, the plate always on your table for a friend, is an
expense that appears on no accounts book, and a pleasure that is daily
and constant.
Under this head of hospitality, let us suppose a case. A traveler
comes from England; he comes in good faith and good feeling to see how
Americans live. He merely wants to penetrate into the interior of
domestic life, to see what there is genuinely and peculiarly American
about it. Now here is Smilax, who is living, in a small, neat way, on
his salary from the daily press. He remembers hospitalities received
from our traveler in England, and wants to return them. He remembers,
too, with dismay, a well-kept establishment, the well-served table,
the punctilious, orderly servants. Smilax keeps two, a cook and
chambermaid, who divide the functions of his establishment between
them. What shall he do? Let him say, in a fair, manly way, "My dear
fellow, I'm delighted to see you. I live in a small way, but I'll do
my best for you, and Mrs. Smilax will be delighted. Come and dine with
us, so and so, and we'll bring in one or two friends." So the man
comes, and Mrs. Smilax serves up such a dinner as lies within the
limits of her knowledge and the capacities of her servants. All plain,
good of its kind, unpretending, without an attempt to do anything
English or French,--to do anything more than if she were furnishing a
gala dinner for her father or returned brother. Show him your house
freely, just as it is, talk to him freely of it, just as he in England
showed you his larger house and talked to you of his finer things. If
the man is a true man, he will thank you for such unpretending,
sincere welcome; if he is a man of straw, then he is not worth wasting
Mrs. Smilax's health and spirits for, in unavailing efforts to get up
a foreign dinner-party.
A man who has any heart in him values a genuine, little bit of home
more than anything else you can give him. He can get French cooking
at a restaurant; he can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if
he wants them; but the traveler, though ever so rich and ever so
well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but a man as you are, and
he is craving something that doesn't seem like an hotel,--some bit
of real, genuine heart life. Perhaps he would like better than
anything to show you the last photograph of his wife, or to read to
you the great, round-hand letter of his ten-year-old which he has got
to-day. He is ready to cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes
to see you, hoping for something like, home, and you first receive
him in a parlor opened only on state occasions, and that has been
circumstantially and exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures
you, as every other parlor of the kind in the city is furnished.
You treat him to a dinner got up for the occasion, with hired
waiters,--a dinner which it has taken Mrs. Smilax a week to prepare
for, and will take her a week to recover from,--for which the baby has
been snubbed and turned off, to his loud indignation, and your young
four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your traveler eats your dinner, and
finds it inferior, as a work of art, to other dinners,--a poor
imitation. He goes away and criticises; you hear of it, and resolve
never to invite a foreigner again. But if you had given him a little
of your heart, a little home warmth and feeling,--if you had shown
him your baby, and let him romp with your four-year-old, and eat a
genuine dinner with you,--would he have been false to that? Not so
likely. He wanted something real and human,--you gave him a bad
dress rehearsal, and dress rehearsals always provoke criticism.
Besides hospitality, there is, in a true home, a mission of charity.
It is a just law which regulates the possession of great or beautiful
works of art in the Old World, that they shall in some sense be
considered the property of all who can appreciate. Fine grounds have
hours when the public may be admitted; pictures and statues may be
shown to visitors: and this is a noble charity. In the same manner the
fortunate individuals who have achieved the greatest of all human
works of art should employ it as a sacred charity. How many, morally
wearied, wandering, disabled, are healed and comforted by the warmth
of a true home! When a mother has sent her son to the temptations of a
distant city, what news is so glad to her heart as that he has found
some quiet family where he visits often and is made to feel at HOME?
How many young men have good women saved from temptation and shipwreck
by drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The
poor artist; the wandering genius who has lost his way in this world,
and stumbles like a child among hard realities; the many men and women
who, while they have houses, have no homes, see from afar, in their
distant, bleak life journey, the light of a true home fire, and, if
made welcome there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger
to their pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful
and perfect work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them
not seek to bolt the doors and draw the curtains; for they know not,
and will never know till the future life, of the good they may do by
the ministration of this great charity of home.
We have heard much lately of the restricted sphere of woman. We have
been told how many spirits among women are of a wider, stronger, more
heroic mould than befits the mere routine of housekeeping. It may be
true that there are many women far too great, too wise, too high, for
mere housekeeping. But where is the woman in any way too great, or too
high, or too wise, to spend herself in creating a home? What can any
woman make diviner, higher, better? From such homes go forth all
heroisms, all inspirations, all great deeds. Such mothers and such
homes have made the heroes and martyrs, faithful unto death, who have
given their precious lives to us during these three years of our
agony!
Homes are the work of art peculiar to the genius of woman. Man helps
in this work, but woman leads; the hive is always in confusion without
the queen bee. But what a woman must she be who does this work
perfectly! She comprehends all, she balances and arranges all; all
different tastes and temperaments find in her their rest, and she can
unite at one hearthstone the most discordant elements. In her is
order, yet an order ever veiled and concealed by indulgence. None are
checked, reproved, abridged of privileges by her love of system; for
she knows that order was made for the family, and not the family for
order. Quietly she takes on herself what all others refuse or
overlook. What the unwary disarrange she silently rectifies. Everybody
in her sphere breathes easy, feels free; and the driest twig begins in
her sunshine to put out buds and blossoms. So quiet are her operations
and movements that none sees that it is she who holds all things in
harmony; only, alas, when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear
disordered, inharmonious, neglected! All these threads have been
smilingly held in her weak hand. Alas, if that is no longer there!
Can any woman be such a housekeeper without inspiration? No. In the
words of the old church service, "her soul must ever have affiance in
God." The New Jerusalem of a perfect home cometh down from God out of
heaven. But to make such a home is ambition high and worthy enough for
any woman, be she what she may.
One thing more. Right on the threshold of all perfection lies the
cross to be taken up. No one can go over or around that cross in
science or in art. Without labor and self-denial neither Raphael nor
Michel Angelo nor Newton was made perfect. Nor can man or woman
create a true home who is not willing in the outset to embrace life
heroically to encounter labor and sacrifice. Only to such shall this
divinest power be given to create on earth that which is the nearest
image of heaven.