_First Course._.--GLADNESS.
This must be served hot. No two housekeepers make it alike; no fixed rule
can be given for it. It depends, like so many of the best things, chiefly
on memory; but, strangely enough, it depends quite as much on proper
forgetting as on proper remembering. Worries must be forgotten. Troubles
must be forgotten. Yes, even sorrow itself must be denied and shut out.
Perhaps this is not quite possible. Ah! we all have seen Christmas days on
which sorrow would not leave our hearts nor our houses. But even sorrow
can be compelled to look away from its sorrowing for a festival hour which
is so solemnly joyous as Christ's Birthday. Memory can be filled full of
other things to be remembered. No soul is entirely destitute of blessings,
absolutely without comfort. Perhaps we have but one. Very well; we can
think steadily of that one, if we try. But the probability is that we have
more than we can count. No man has yet numbered the blessings, the
mercies, the joys of God. We are all richer than we think; and if we once
set ourselves to reckoning up the things of which we are glad, we shall be
astonished at their number.
Gladness, then, is the first item, the first course on our bill of fare
for a Christmas dinner.
_Entrées_.--LOVE garnished with Smiles.
GENTLENESS, with sweet-wine sauce of Laughter.
GRACIOUS SPEECH, cooked with any fine, savory herbs, such as Drollery,
which is always in season, or Pleasant Reminiscence, which no one need be
without, as it keeps for years, sealed or unsealed.
_Second Course_.--HOSPITALITY.
The precise form of this also depends on individual preferences. We are
not undertaking here to give exact recipes, only a bill of fare.
In some houses Hospitality is brought on surrounded with Relatives. This
is very well. In others, it is dished up with Dignitaries of all sorts;
men and women of position and estate for whom the host has special likings
or uses. This gives a fine effect to the eye, but cools quickly, and is
not in the long-run satisfying.
In a third class, best of all, it is served in simple shapes, but with a
great variety of Unfortunate Persons,--such as lonely people from
lodging-houses, poor people of all grades, widows and childless in their
affliction. This is the kind most preferred; in fact, never abandoned by
those who have tried it.
_For Dessert_.--MIRTH, in glasses.
GRATITUDE and FAITH beaten together and piled up in snowy shapes. These
will look light if run over night in the moulds of Solid Trust and
Patience.
A dish of the bonbons Good Cheer and Kindliness with every-day mottoes;
Knots and Reasons in shape of Puzzles and Answers; the whole ornamented
with Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver, of the kind mentioned in the
Book of Proverbs.
This is a short and simple bill of fare. There is not a costly thing in
it; not a thing which cannot be procured without difficulty.
If meat is desired, it can be added. That is another excellence about our
bill of fare. It has nothing in it which makes it incongruous with the
richest or the plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition of
roast goose and plum-pudding; it is not harmed by the addition of herring
and potatoes. Nay, it can give flavor and richness to broken bits of stale
bread served on a doorstep and eaten by beggars.
We might say much more about this bill of fare. We might, perhaps, confess
that it has an element of the supernatural; that its origin is lost in
obscurity; that, although, as we said, it has never been printed before,
it has been known in all ages; that the martyrs feasted upon it; that
generations of the poor, called blessed by Christ, have laid out banquets
by it; that exiles and prisoners have lived on it; and the despised and
forsaken and rejected in all countries have tasted it. It is also true
that when any great king ate well and throve on his dinner, it was by the
same magic food. The young and the free and the glad, and all rich men in
costly houses, even they have not been well fed without it.
And though we have called it a Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner, that
is only that men's eyes may be caught by its name, and that they, thinking
it a specialty for festival, may learn and understand its secret, and
henceforth, laying all their dinners according to its magic order, may
"eat unto the Lord."
Children's Parties.
"From six till half-past eleven."
"German at seven, precisely."
These were the terms of an invitation which we saw last week. It was sent
to forty children, between the ages of ten and sixteen.
"Will you allow your children to stay at this party until half-past
eleven?" we said to a mother whose children were invited. "What can I do?"
she replied. "If I send the carriage for them at half-past ten, the
chances are that they will not be allowed to come away. It is impossible
to break up a set. And as for that matter, half-past ten is two hours and
a half past their bed-time; they might as well stay an hour longer. I wish
nobody would ever ask my children to a party. I cannot keep them at home,
if they are asked. Of course, I _might_; but I have not the moral courage
to see them so unhappy. All the other children go; and what can I do?"
This is a tender, loving mother, whose sweet, gentle, natural methods with
her children have made them sweet, gentle, natural little girls, whom it
is a delight to know. But "what can she do?" The question is by no means
one which can be readily answered. It is very easy for off-hand severity,
sweeping condemnation, to say, "Do! Why, nothing is plainer. Keep her
children away from such places. Never let them go to any parties which
will last later than nine o'clock." This is the same thing as saying,
"Never let them go to parties at all." There are no parties which break up
at nine o'clock; that is, there are not in our cities. We hope there are
such parties still in country towns and villages,--such parties as we
remember to this day with a vividness which no social enjoyments since
then have dimmed; Saturday-afternoon parties,--_matinées_ they would have
been called if the village people had known enough; parties which began at
three in the afternoon and ended in the early dusk, while little ones
could see their way home; parties at which there was no "German," only the
simplest of dancing, if any, and much more of blind-man's-buff; parties at
which "mottoes" in sugar horns were the luxurious novelty, caraway cookies
the staple, and lemonade the only drink besides pure water. Fancy offering
to the creature called child in cities to-day, lemonade and a caraway
cooky and a few pink sugar horns and some walnuts and raisins to carry
home in its pocket! One blushes at thought of the scornful contempt with
which such simples would be received,--we mean rejected!
From the party whose invitation we have quoted above the little girls came
home at midnight, radiant, flushed, joyous, looking in their floating
white muslin dresses like fairies, their hands loaded with bouquets of
hot-house flowers and dainty little "favors" from the German. At eleven
they had had for supper champagne and chicken salad, and all the other
unwholesome abominations which are set out and eaten in American evening
entertainments.
Next morning there were no languid eyes, pale cheeks. Each little face was
eager, bright, rosy, though the excited brain had had only five or six
hours of sleep.
"If they only would feel tired the next day, that would be something of an
argument to bring up with them," said the poor mother. "But they always
declare that they feel better than ever."
And so they do. But the "better" is only a deceitful sham, kept up by
excited and overwrought nerves,--the same thing that we see over and over
and over again in all lives which are temporarily kindled and stimulated
by excitement of any kind.
This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing in all our
mismanagements and perversions of the physical life of our children. Their
beautiful elasticity and strength rebound instantly to an apparently
uninjured fulness; and so we go on, undermining, undermining at point
after point, until suddenly some day there comes a tragedy, a catastrophe,
for which we are as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, instead
of to hasten it. Who shall say when our boys die at eighteen, twenty,
twenty-two, our girls either in their girlhood or in the first strain of
their womanhood,--who shall say that they might not have passed safely
through the dangers, had no vital force been unnecessarily wasted in their
childhood, their infancy?
Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much investment of physical
capital for years to come. Every hour after dark that a child is awake is
just so much capital withdrawn. Every hour that a child lives a quiet,
tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on hearths, squirrels
in sunshine, is just so much investment in strength and steadiness and
growth of the nervous system. Every hour that a child lives a life of
excited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a ball-room, is just
so much taken away from the reserved force which enables nerves to triumph
through the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of later
life. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonable
hours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matter
how long it may be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out that
to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transform
the apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey. Who shall say
that to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, an
unwholesome supper of chicken salad and champagne may not leave as lasting
effects on the constitution of a child?
If Nature would only "execute" her "sentences against evil works" more
"speedily," evil works would not so thrive. The law of continuity is the
hardest one for average men and women to comprehend,--or, at any rate, to
obey. Seed-time and harvest in gardens and fields they have learned to
understand and profit by. When we learn, also, that in the precious lives
of these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, and we must reap
all which we do sow, and that the emptiness or the richness of the harvest
is not so much for us as for them, one of the first among the many things
which we shall reform will be "children's parties."
After-Supper Talk.
"After-dinner talk" has been thought of great importance. The expression
has passed into literature, with many records of the good sayings it
included. Kings and ministers condescend to make efforts at it; poets and
philosophers--greater than kings and ministers--do not disdain to attempt
to shine in it.
But nobody has yet shown what "after-supper talk" ought to be. We are not
speaking now of the formal entertainment known as "a supper;" we mean the
every-day evening meal in the every-day home,--the meal known heartily and
commonly as "supper," among people who are neither so fashionable nor so
foolish as to take still a fourth meal at hours when they ought to be
asleep in bed.
This ought to be the sweetest and most precious hour of the day. It is too
often neglected and lost in families. It ought to be the mother's hour;
the mother's opportunity to undo any mischief the day may have done, to
forestall any mischief the morrow may threaten. There is an instinctive
disposition in most families to linger about the supper-table, quite
unlike the eager haste which is seen at breakfast and at dinner. Work is
over for the day; everybody is tired, even the little ones who have done
nothing but play. The father is ready for slippers and a comfortable
chair; the children are ready and eager to recount the incidents of the
day. This is the time when all should be cheered, rested, and also
stimulated by just the right sort of conversation, just the right sort of
amusement.
The wife and mother must supply this need, must create this atmosphere. We
do not mean that the father does not share the responsibility of this, as
of every other hour. But this particular duty is one requiring qualities
which are more essentially feminine than masculine. It wants a light touch
and an _undertone_ to bring out the full harmony of the ideal home
evening. It must not be a bore. It must not be empty; it must not be too
much like preaching; it must not be wholly like play; more than all
things, it must not be always--no, not if it could be helped, not even
twice--the same! It must be that most indefinable, most recognizable
thing, "a good time." Bless the children for inventing the phrase! It has,
like all their phrases, an unconscious touch of sacred inspiration in it,
in the selection of the good word "good," which lays peculiar benediction
on all things to which it is set.
If there were no other reason against children's having lessons assigned
them to study at home, we should consider this a sufficient one, that it
robs them of the after-supper hour with their parents. Even if their
brains could bear without injury the sixth, seventh, or eighth hour, as
it may be, of study, their hearts cannot bear the being starved.
In the average family, this is the one only hour of the day when father,
mother, and children can be together, free of cares and unhurried. Even to
the poorest laborer's family comes now something like peace and rest
forerunning the intermission of the night.
Everybody who has any artistic sense recognizes this instinctively when
they see through the open doors of humble houses the father and mother and
children gathered around their simple supper. Its mention has already
passed into triteness in verse, so inevitably have poets felt the sacred
charm of the hour.
Perhaps there is something deeper than on first thoughts would appear in
the instant sense of pleasure one has in this sight; also, in the
universal feeling that the evening gathering of the family is the most
sacred one. Perhaps there is unconscious recognition that dangers are near
at hand when night falls, and that in this hour lies, or should lie, the
spell to drive them all away.
There is something almost terrible in the mingling of danger and
protection, of harm and help, of good and bad, in that one thing,
darkness. God "giveth his beloved sleep" in it; and in it the devil sets
his worst lures, by help of it gaining many a soul which he could never
get possession of in sunlight.
Mothers, fathers! cultivate "after-supper talk;" play "after-supper
games;" keep "after-supper books;" take all the good newspapers and
magazines you can afford, and read them aloud "after supper." Let boys and
girls bring their friends home with them at twilight, sure of a pleasant
and hospitable welcome and of a good time "after supper," and parents may
laugh to scorn all the temptations which town or village can set before
them to draw them away from home for their evenings.
These are but hasty hints, bare suggestions. But if they rouse one heart
to a new realization of what evenings at home _ought_ to be, and what
evenings at home too often are, they have not been spoken in vain nor out
of season.
Hysteria In Literature.
Physicians tell us that there is no known disease, no known symptom of
disease, which hysteria cannot and does not counterfeit. Most skilful
surgeons are misled by its cunning into believing and pronouncing
able-bodied young women to be victims of spinal disease, "stricture of the
oesophagus," "gastrodynia," "paraplegia," "hemiplegia," and hundreds of
other affections, with longer or shorter names. Families are thrown into
disorder and distress; friends suffer untold pains of anxiety and
sympathy; doctors are summoned from far and near; and all this while the
vertebra, or the membrane, or the muscle, as it may be, which is so
honestly believed to be diseased, and which shows every symptom of
diseased action or inaction, is sound and strong, and as well able as ever
it was to perform its function.
The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is familiar with,--the crying
and laughing in inappropriate places, the fancied impossibility of
breathing, and so forth,--which make such trouble and mortification for
the embarrassed companions of hysterical persons; and which, moreover, can
be very easily suppressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied by
judicious threats or sudden use of cold water. But few people know or
suspect the number of diseases and conditions, supposed to be real,
serious, often incurable, which are simply and solely, or in a great part,
undetected hysteria. This very ignorance on the part of friends and
relatives makes it almost impossible for surgeons and physicians to treat
such cases properly. The probabilities are, in nine cases out of ten, that
the indignant family will dismiss, as ignorant or hard-hearted, any
practitioner who tells them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treat
the sufferer in accordance with it.
In the field of literature we find a hysteria as widespread, as
undetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria which skulks and conquers in
the field of disease.
Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight and sound, and everybody
except the miserably ignorant and silly despises. Yet there are to be
found circles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with the
ridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, and preposterous
adventures of the heroes and heroines of the "Dime Novels" and novelettes,
and the "Flags" and "Blades" and "Gazettes" among the lowest newspapers.
But in well-regulated and intelligent households, this sort of writing is
not tolerated, any more than the correlative sort of physical phenomenon
would be,--the gasping, shrieking, sobbing, giggling kind of behavior in a
man or woman.
But there is another and more dangerous working of the same thing; deep,
unsuspected, clothing itself with symptoms of the most defiant
genuineness, it lurks and does its business in every known field of
composition. Men and women are alike prone to it, though its shape is
somewhat affected by sex.
Among men it breaks out often, perhaps oftenest, in violent illusions on
the subject of love. They assert, declare, shout, sing, scream that they
love, have loved, are loved, do and for ever will love, after methods and
in manners which no decent love ever thought of mentioning. And yet, so
does their weak violence ape the bearing of strength, so much does their
cheat look like truth, that scores, nay, shoals of human beings go about
repeating and echoing their noise, and saying, gratefully, "Yes, this is
love; this is, indeed, what all true lovers must know."
These are they who proclaim names of beloved on house-tops; who strip off
veils from sacred secrets and secret sacrednesses, and set them up naked
for the multitude to weigh and compare. What punishment is for such
beloved, Love himself only knows. It must be in store for them somewhere.
Dimly one can suspect what it might be; but it will be like all Love's
true secrets,--secret for ever.
These men of hysteria also take up specialties of art or science; and in
their behoof rant, and exaggerate, and fabricate, and twist, and lie in
such stentorian voices that reasonable people are deafened and bewildered.
They also tell common tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic
structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to
false-hood; and, the diseased appetite in listeners growing more and more
diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what
it will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a
century or so more of this.
But the worst manifestations of this disease are found in so-called
religious writing. Theology, biography, especially autobiography, didactic
essays, tales with a moral,--under every one of these titles it lifts up
its hateful head. It takes so successfully the guise of genuine religious
emotion, religious experience, religious zeal, that good people on all
hands weep grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwholesome
utterances. Of these are many of the long and short stories setting forth
in melodramatic pictures exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children;
or exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet and refined
Magdalens; minute and prolonged dissections of the processes of spiritual
growth; equally minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exercises
of all sorts,--"manuals of drill," so to speak, or "field tactics" for
souls. Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almost
indistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention and
the finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless,
shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, true
enthusiasm and wise precepts.
Where may be the remedy for this widespread and widely spreading disease
among writers we do not know. It is not easy to keep up courageous faith
that there is any remedy. Still Nature abhors noise and haste, and shams
of all sorts. Quiet and patience are the great secrets of her force,
whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion. We must believe
that sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall have
its dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic,
spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it is
silly. But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extreme
contagiousness. All physicians know what a disastrous effect one
hysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. We
remember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of a
woman who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough. Her
lungs, bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition; but she coughed
almost incessantly, especially on the approach of the hour for the
doctor's visit to the ward. In less than one week half the women in the
ward had similar coughs. A single--though it must be confessed rather
terrific--application of cold water to the original offender worked a
simultaneous cure upon her and all of her imitators.
Not long ago a very parallel thing was to be observed in the field of
story-writing. A clever, though morbid and melodramatic writer published a
novel, whose heroine, having once been an inmate of a house of ill-fame,
escaped, and, finding shelter and Christian training in the home of a
benevolent woman, became a model of womanly delicacy, and led a life of
exquisite and artistic refinement. As to the animus and intent of this
story there could be no doubt; both were good, but in atmosphere and
execution it was essentially unreal, overwrought, and melodramatic. For
three or four months after its publication there was a perfect outburst
and overflow in newspapers and magazines of the lower order of stories,
all more or less bad, some simply outrageous, and all treating, or rather
pretending to treat, the same problem which had furnished theme for that
novel.
Probably a close observation and collecting of the dreary statistics would
bring to light a curious proof of the extent and certainty of this sort of
contagion.
Reflecting on it, having it thrust in one's face at every book-counter,
railway-stand, Sunday-school library, and parlor centre-table, it is hard
not to wish for some supernatural authority to come sweeping through the
wards, and prescribe sharp cold-water treatment all around to half drown
all such writers and quite drown all their books!
Jog Trot.
There is etymological uncertainty about the phrase. But there is no doubt
about its meaning; no doubt that it represents a good, comfortable gait,
at which nobody goes nowadays.
A hundred years ago it was the fashion: in the days when railroads were
not, nor telegraphs; when citizens journeyed in stages, putting up prayers
in church if their journey were to be so long as from Massachusetts into
Connecticut; when evil news travelled slowly by letter, and good news was
carried about by men on horses; when maidens spun and wove for long,
quiet, silent years at their wedding _trousseaux_, and mothers spun and
wove all which sons and husbands wore; when newspapers were small and
infrequent, dingy-typed and wholesomely stupid, so that no man could or
would learn from them more about other men's opinions, affairs, or
occupations than it concerned his practical convenience to know; when even
wars were waged at slow pace,--armies sailing great distances by chance
winds, or plodding on foot for thousands of miles, and fighting doggedly
hand to hand at sight; when fortunes also were slowly made by simple,
honest growths,--no men excepting freebooters and pirates becoming rich
in a day.
It would seem treason or idiocy to sigh for these old days,--treason to
ideas of progress, stupid idiocy unaware that it is well off. Is not
to-day brilliant, marvellous, beautiful? Has not living become subject to
a magician's "presto"? Are we not decked in the whole of color, feasted on
all that shape and sound and flavor can give? Are we not wiser each moment
than we were the moment before? Do not the blind see, the deaf hear, and
the crippled dance? Has not Nature surrendered to us? Art and science, are
they not our slaves,--coining money and running mills? Have we not built
and multiplied religions, till each man, even the most irreligious, can
have his own? Is not what is called the "movement of the age" going on at
the highest rate of speed and of sound? Shall we complain that we are
maddened by the racket, out of breath with the spinning and whirling, and
dying of the strain of it all? What is a man, more or less? What are one
hundred and twenty millions of men, more or less? What is quiet in
comparison with riches? or digestion and long life in comparison with
knowledge? When we are added up in the universal reckoning of races, there
will be small mention of individuals. Let us be disinterested. Let us
sacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the general
average of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark. To
be sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we are
Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall
ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below us
stand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning to
turn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we have
brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously
appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let
us never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and envious
misgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of the
Creator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of all
which created intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best of
dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children. Perhaps we
can do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could in
seventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children that
live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers.
It is a comfort to believe, as we are told, that the world can never lose
an iota that it has gained; that progress is the great law of the
universe. It is consoling to verify this truth by looking backward, and
seeing how each age has made use of the wrecks of the preceding one as
material for new structures on different plans. What are we that we should
mention our preference for being put to some other use, more immediately
remunerative to ourselves!
We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy with the age in which we
live. We might as well be dead as not keep up with it. But which of us
does not sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been born long
enough ago to have been boon companion of his great-grandfather, and have
gone respectably and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot?
The Joyless American.
It is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching these shores, might
suppose that he had chanced to arrive upon a day when some great public
calamity had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be quite safe to
assume that out of the first five hundred faces which he sees there will
not be ten wearing a smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if they
ever could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to any man, let him
try the experiment, for one week, of noting down, in his walks about town,
every face he sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The chances
are that at the end of his seven days he will not have entered seven faces
in his note-book without being aware at the moment of some conscientious
difficulty in permitting himself to call them positively and unmistakably
cheerful.
The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression on the American face is
so common that we are hardened to seeing it, and look for nothing better.
Only when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy or girl or man
or woman flashes the beam of a laughing countenance into the level gloom
do we even know that we are in the dark. Witness the instant effect of
the entrance of such a person into an omnibus or a car. Who has not
observed it? Even the most stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. The
unconscious intruder, simply by smiling, has set the blood moving more
quickly in the veins of every human being who sees him. He is, for the
moment, the personal benefactor of every one; if he had handed about money
or bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less value.
What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of misery from becoming an
organic characteristic of our people? "Make them play more," says one
philosophy. No doubt they need to "play more;" but, when one looks at the
average expression of a Fourth of July crowd, one doubts if ever so much
multiplication of that kind of holiday would mend the matter. No doubt we
work for too many days in the year, and play for too few; but, after all,
it is the heart and the spirit and the expression that we bring to our
work, and not those that we bring to our play, by which our real vitality
must be tested and by which our faces will be stamped. If we do not work
healthfully, reasoningly, moderately, thankfully, joyously, we shall have
neither moderation nor gratitude nor joy in our play. And here is the
hopelessness, here is the root of the trouble, of the joyless American
face. The worst of all demons, the demon of unrest and overwork, broods in
the very sky of this land. Blue and clear and crisp and sparkling as our
atmosphere is, it cannot or does not exorcise the spell. Any old man can
count on the fingers of one hand the persons he has known who led lives of
serene, unhurried content, made for themselves occupations and not tasks,
and died at last what might be called natural deaths.
"What, then?" says the congressional candidate from Mettibemps; the "new
contributor" to the oceanic magazine; Mrs. Potiphar, from behind her
liveries; and poor Dives, senior, from Wall Street; "Are we to give up all
ambition?" God forbid. But, because one has a goal, must one be torn by
poisoned spurs? We see on the Corso, in the days of the Carnival, what
speed can be made by horses under torture. Shall we try those methods and
that pace on our journeys?
So long as the American is resolved to do in one day the work of two, to
make in one year the fortune of his whole life and his children's, to earn
before he is forty the reputation which belongs to threescore and ten, so
long he will go about the streets wearing his present abject, pitiable,
overwrought, joyless look. But, even without a change of heart or a reform
of habits, he might better his countenance a little, if he would. Even if
he does not feel like smiling, he might smile, if he tried; and that would
be something. The muscles are all there; they count the same in the
American as in the French or the Irish face; they relax easily in youth;
the trick can be learned. And even a trick of it is better than none of
it. Laughing masters might be as well paid as dancing masters to help on
society! "Smiling made Easy" or the "Complete Art of Looking
Good-natured" would be as taking titles on book-sellers' shelves as "The
Complete Letter-writer" or "Handbook of Behavior." And nobody can
calculate what might be the moral and spiritual results if it could only
become the fashion to pursue this branch of the fine arts. Surliness of
heart must melt a little under the simple effort to smile. A man will
inevitably be a little less of a bear for trying to wear the face of a
Christian.
"He who laughs can commit no deadly sin," said the wise and sweet-hearted
woman who was mother of Goethe.