Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teeth
must be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but the
processes are wonderfully parallel,--the results too, alas! If clergymen
knew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do of
disease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of
each year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality in
Brooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th." We
are so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eye
glances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens and
by scores they have gone,--the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds new
mourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiar
with black as with scarlet, with the hearse as with the pleasure-carriage;
and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can be
merry.
But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, our
hearts would break. The air would be dark and stifling. We should be
afraid to move,--lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor's
spiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously spoken the one word
which was poison to his fever!
Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than half take place in
the period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer
it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet,
unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which
knows but three things,--hunger and food and sleep! There is only a little
space for this delight. In our seventh month we begin to be wretched. We
drink our milk, but we are aware of a constant desire to bite; doubts
which we do not know by name, needs for which there is no ready supply,
make us restless. Now comes the old-school doctor, and thrusts in his
lancet too soon. We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved. The
tooth is said to be "through."
Through! Oh, yes; through before its time. Through to no purpose. In a
week, or a year, the wounded flesh, or soul, has reasserted its right,
shut down on the tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrized
crust, out of which it will take double time and double strength for the
tooth to break.
The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a bad taste; or an ivory
one, it is too hard and hurts us. But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the new
pain a little easier to bear than the old. Probably it is; probably the
tooth gets through a little quicker for the days and nights of gnawing.
But what a picture of patient misery is a baby with its rubber ring!
Really one sees sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face such
grotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness to the soul's
processes of grappling with problems, that it is uncanny.
When we come to the analysis of the diseases incident to the teething
period, and the treatment of them, the similitude is as close.
We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadly
things, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too
late to cure them,--like water on the brain; and we have slow wastings
away; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough to
prolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths.
Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these,--outbreaks of
rebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptions
of perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down into
indifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?
These are they who live. Shall we say any thing of those of us who die
between our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month? They never put on
babies' tombstones "Died of teething." There is always a special name for
the special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days.
But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been for
the teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup would
not have killed the child.
Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so close
as to be ludicrous. The lancet and the rubber ring fail. We are still
restless, and scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk with
us; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they jounce us
from top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies is
not displaced. They beat on glass and tin and iron to distract our
attention and drown out our noise by a bigger one; they shake back and
forth before our eyes all things that glitter and blaze; they shout and
sing songs; the house and the neighborhood are searched and racked for
something which will "amuse" the baby. Then, when we will no longer be
"amused," and when all this restlessness outside and around us, added to
the restlessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and the day
or the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly over, their strength
worn out, and their wits at end,--then comes the "soothing syrup,"
deadliest weapon of all. This we cannot resist. If there be they who are
mighty enough to pour it down our throats, physically or spiritually, to
sleep we must go, and asleep we must stay so long as the effect of the
dose lasts.
It is of this, we oftenest die,--not in a day or a year, but after many
days and many years; when in some sharp crisis we need for our salvation
the force which should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle or
the nerve which should have been steadily growing strong till that moment.
But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; and
we die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under sudden
grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups when
we were babies.
Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in the
natural ways. Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on one
side; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possible
for love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only animal that has trouble
from the growing of the teeth in his body. It must be his own fault
somehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of a
likeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural to
his body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible and
just opinions; for it has passed into the immortality of a proverb that a
shrewd man is a man who has "cut his eye-teeth;" and the four last teeth,
which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of real
illness, are called in all tongues, all countries, "wisdom teeth!"
Glass Houses.
Who would live in one, if he could help it? And who wants to throw stones?
But who lives in any thing else, nowadays? And how much better off are
they who never threw a stone in their lives than the rude mob who throw
them all the time?
Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from our books and
dropped from our speech. It has no longer use or meaning.
It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, or rather what can
be done, to secure to fastidious people some show and shadow of privacy in
their homes. The silly and vulgar passion of people for knowing all about
their neighbors' affairs, which is bad enough while it takes shape merely
in idle gossip of mouth, is something terrible when it is exalted into a
regular market demand of the community, and fed by a regular market supply
from all who wish to print what the community will read.
We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the buyer or the seller; we
think, on the whole, the buyer. But then he is again a seller; and so
there it is,--wheel within wheel, cog upon cog. And, since all these
sellers must earn their bread and butter, the more one searches for a fair
point of attacking the evil, the more he is perplexed.
The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his work, write what the man
who prints will buy. The man who prints must print what the people who
read will buy. Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest hands? Clearly, upon
the last buyer,--upon him who reads. But things have come to such a pass
already that to point out to the average American that it is vulgar and
also unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details about
his neighbors' business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to
the currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire and
strychnine upon mucous membranes. The diseased palate craves what has made
it diseased,--craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stomachs,
Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abuses
to a stand-still,--dyspepsia, and delirium-tremens, and so on.
But she takes no account, apparently, of the diseased conditions of brains
incident to the long use of unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food.
Perhaps she never anticipated this class of excesses. And, if there were
to be a precisely correlative punishment, it is to be feared it would fall
more heavily on the least guilty offender. It is not hard to fancy a poor
soul who, having been condemned to do reporters' duty for some years, and
having been forced to dwell and dilate upon scenes and details which his
very soul revolted from mentioning,--it is not hard to fancy such a soul
visited at last by a species of delirium-tremens, in which the speeches of
men who had spoken, the gowns of women who had danced, the faces, the
figures, the furniture of celebrities, should all be mixed up in a
grotesque phantasmagoria of torture, before which he should writhe as
helplessly and agonizingly as the poor whiskey-drinker before his snakes.
But it would be a cruel misplacement of punishment. All the while the true
guilty would be placidly sitting down at still further unsavory banquets,
which equally helpless providers were driven to furnish!
The evil is all the harder to deal with, also, because it is like so many
evils,--all, perhaps,--only a diseased outgrowth, from a legitimate and
justifiable thing. It is our duty to sympathize; it is our privilege and
pleasure to admire. No man lives to himself alone; no man can; no man
ought. It is right that we should know about our neighbors all which will
help us to help them, to be just to them, to avoid them, if need be; in
short, all which we need to know for their or our reasonable and fair
advantage. It is right, also, that we should know about men who are or
have been great all which can enable us to understand their greatness; to
profit, to imitate, to revere; all that will help us to remember whatever
is worth remembering. There is education in this; it is experience, it is
history.
But how much of what is written, printed, and read to-day about the men
and women of to-day comes under these heads? It is unnecessary to do more
than ask the question. It is still more unnecessary to do more than ask
how many of the men and women of to-day, whose names have become almost as
stereotyped a part of public journals as the very titles of the journals
themselves, have any claim to such prominence. But all these
considerations seem insignificant by side of the intrinsic one of the
vulgarity of the thing, and its impudent ignoring of the most sacred
rights of individuals. That there are here and there weak fools who like
to see their names and most trivial movements chronicled in newspapers
cannot be denied. But they are few. And their silly pleasure is very small
in the aggregate compared with the annoyance and pain suffered by
sensitive and refined people from these merciless invasions of their
privacy. No precautions can forestall them, no reticence prevent; nothing,
apparently, short of dying outright, can set one free. And even then it is
merely leaving the torture behind, a harrowing legacy to one's friends;
for tombs are even less sacred than houses. Memory, friendship,
obligation,--all are lost sight of in the greed of desire to make an
effective sketch, a surprising revelation, a neat analysis, or perhaps an
adroit implication of honor to one's self by reason of an old association
with greatness. Private letters and private conversations, which may touch
living hearts in a thousand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as if
they had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the hands of the
pawn-broker! "Dead men tell no tales," says the proverb. One wishes they
could! We should miss some spicy contributions to magazine and newspaper
literature; and a sudden silence would fall upon some loud-mouthed living.
But we despair of any cure for this evil. No ridicule, no indignation
seems to touch it. People must make the best they can of their glass
houses; and, if the stones come too fast, take refuge in the cellars.
The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism.
The old-clothes business has never been considered respectable. It is
supposed to begin and to end with cheating; it deals with very dirty
things. It would be hard to mention a calling of lower repute. From the
men who come to your door with trays of abominable china vases on their
heads, and are ready to take any sort of rags in payment for them,
down--or up?--to the bigger wretches who advertise that "ladies and
gentlemen can obtain the highest price for their cast-off clothing by
calling at No. so and so, on such a street," they are all alike odious and
despicable.
We wonder when we find anybody who is not an abject Jew, engaged in the
business. We think we can recognize the stamp of the disgusting traffic on
their very faces. It is by no means uncommon to hear it said of a sorry
sneak, "He looks like an old-clothes dealer."
But what shall we say of the old-clothes mongers in journalism? By the
very name we have defined, described them, and pointed them out. If only
we could make the name such a badge of disgrace that every member of the
fraternity should forthwith betake him or herself to some sort of honest
labor!
These are they who crowd the columns of our daily newspapers with the
dreary, monotonous, worthless, scandalous tales of what other men and
women did, are doing, or will do, said, say, or will say, wore, wear, or
will wear, thought, think, or will think, ate, eat, or will eat, drank,
drink, or will drink: and if there be any other verb coming under the head
of "to do, to be, to suffer," add that to the list, and the old-clothes
monger will furnish you with something to fill out the phrase.
These are they who patch out their miserable, little, sham "properties"
for mock representations of life, by scraps from private letters, bits of
conversation overheard on piazzas, in parlors, in bedrooms, by odds and
ends of untrustworthy statements picked up at railway-stations,
church-doors, and offices of all sorts, by impudent inferences and
suppositions, and guesses about other people's affairs, by garblings and
partial quotings, and, if need be, by wholesale lyings.
The trade is on the increase,--rapidly, fearfully on the increase. Every
large city, every summer watering-place, is more or less infested with
this class of dealers. The goods they have to furnish are more and more in
demand. There is hardly a journal in the country but has column after
column full of their tattered wares; there is hardly a man or woman in the
country but buys them.
There is, perhaps, no remedy. Human nature has not yet shed all the
monkey. A lingering and grovelling baseness in the average heart delights
in this sort of cast-off clothes of fellow-worms. But if the trade must
continue, can we not insist that the profits be shared? If A is to receive
ten dollars for quoting B's remarks at a private dinner yesterday, shall
not B have a small percentage on the sale? Clearly, this is only justice.
And in cases where the wares are simply stolen, shall there be no redress?
Here is an opening for a new Bureau. How well its advertisements would
read:--
"Ladies and gentlemen wishing to dispose of their old opinions,
sentiments, feelings, and so forth, and also of the more interesting facts
in their personal history, can obtain good prices for the same at No.--
Tittle-tattle street. Inquire at the door marked 'Regular and Special
Correspondence.'
"N. B.--Persons willing to be reported _verbatim_ will receive especial
consideration."
We commend this brief suggestion of a new business to all who are anxious
to make a living and not particular how they make it. Perhaps the class of
whom we have been speaking would find it profitable to set it up as a
branch of their own calling. It is quite possible that nobody else in the
country would like to meddle with it.
The Country Landlord's Side.
It is only one side, to be sure. But it is the side of which we hear
least. The quarrel is like all quarrels,--it takes two to make it; but
as, of those two, one is only one, and the other is from ten to a hundred,
it is easy to see which side will do most talking in setting forth its
grievances.
"It is naught, it is naught, saith the buyer; and when he is gone his way
then he boasteth." We are oftener reminded of this text of Scripture than
of any other when we listen to conversations in regard to boarders in
country houses.
"Oh, let me tell you of such a nice place we have found to board in the
country. It is only--miles from Mt.--or--Lake; the drives are delightful,
and board is only $7 a week."
"Is the table a good one?"
"Oh, yes; very good for the country. We had good butter and milk, and eggs
in abundance. Meats, of course, are never very good in the country. But
everybody gained a pound a week; and we are going again this year, if they
have not raised their prices."
Then this model of a city woman, in search of country lodgings, sits down
and writes to the landlord:--
"Dear Sir,--We would like to secure our old rooms in your house for the
whole of July and August. As we shall remain so long a time, we hope you
may be willing to count all the children at half-price. Last year, you may
remember, we paid full price for the two eldest, the twins, who are not
yet quite fourteen. I hope, also, that Mrs. ---- has better arrangements
for washing this summer, and will allow us to have our own servant to do
the washing for the whole family. If these terms suit you, the price for
my family--eight children, myself, and servant--would be $38.50 a week.
Perhaps, if the servant takes the entire charge of my rooms, you would
call it $37; as, of course, that would save the time of your own
servants."
Then the country landlord hesitates. He is not positively sure of filling
all his rooms for the season. Thirty-seven dollars a week would be, he
thinks, better than nothing. In his simplicity, he supposes that, if he
confers, as he certainly does, a favor on Mrs.----, by receiving her great
family on such low terms, she will be thoroughly well disposed toward him
and his house, and will certainly not be over-exacting in matter of
accommodations. In an evil hour, he consents; they come, and he begins to
reap his reward. The twins are stout boys, as large as men, and much
hungrier. The baby is a sickly child of eighteen months, and requires
especial diet, which must be prepared at especial and inconvenient hours,
in the crowded little kitchen. The other five children are average boys
and girls, between the ages of three and twelve, eat certainly as much as
five grown people, and make twice as much trouble. The servant is a slow,
inefficient, impudent Irish girl, who spends the greater part of four days
in doing the family washing, and makes the other servants uncomfortable
and cross.
If this were all; but this is not. Mrs.----, who writes to all her friends
boastingly of the cheap summer quarters that she has found, and who gains
by the village shop-keeper's scales a pound of flesh a week, habitually
finds fault with the food, with the mattresses, with the chairs, with the
rag-carpets, with every thing, in short, down to the dust and the flies,
for neither of which last the poor landlord could be legitimately held
responsible. This is not an exaggerated picture. Everybody who has boarded
in country places in the summer has known dozens of such women. Every
country landlord can produce dozens of such letters, and of letters still
more exacting and unreasonable.
The average city man or woman who goes to a country house to board, goes
expecting what it is in the nature of things impossible that they should
have. The man expects to have boots blacked and hot water ready, and a
bell to ring for both. What experienced country boarder has not laughed in
his sleeve to see such an one, newly arrived, putting his head out
snappingly, like a turtle, from his doorway, and calling to chance
passers, "How d'ye get at anybody in this house?"
If it is a woman, she expects that the tea will be of the finest flavor,
and never boiled; that steaks will be porter-house steaks; that green peas
will be in plenty; and that the American girl, who is chambermaid for the
summer, and school-teacher in the winter, and who, ten to one, could put
her to the blush in five minutes by superior knowledge on many subjects,
will enter and leave her room and wait upon her at the table with the
silent respectfulness of a trained city servant.
This is all very silly. But it happens. At the end of every summer
hundreds of disappointed city people go back to their homes grumbling
about country food and country ways. Hundreds of tired and discouraged
wives of country landlords sit down in their houses, at last emptied, and
vow a vow that never again will they take "city folks to board." But the
great law of supply and demand is too strong for them. The city must come
out of itself for a few weeks, and get oxygen for its lungs, sunlight for
its eyes, and rest for its overworked brain. The country must open its
arms, whether it will or not, and share its blessings. And so the summers
and the summerings go on, and there are always to be heard in the land the
voices of murmuring boarders, and of landlords deprecating, vindicating.
We confess that our sympathies are with the landlords. The average country
landlord is an honest, well-meaning man, whose idea of the profit to be
made "off boarders" is so moderate and simple that the keepers of city
boarding-houses would laugh it and him to scorn. If this were not so,
would he be found undertaking to lodge and feed people for one dollar or a
dollar and a half a day? Neither does he dream of asking them, even at
this low price, to fare as he fares. The "Excelsior" mattresses, at which
they cry out in disgust, are beds of down in comparison with the straw
"tick" on which he and his wife sleep soundly and contentedly. He has paid
$4.50 for each mattress, as a special concession to what he understands
city prejudice to require. The cheap painted chamber-sets are holiday
adorning by the side of the cherry and pine in the bedrooms of his family.
He buys fresh meat every day for dinner; and nobody can understand the
importance of this fact who is not familiar with the habit of salt-pork
and codfish in our rural districts. That the meat is tough, pale, stringy
is not his fault; no other is to be bought. Stetson, himself, if he dealt
with this country butcher, could do no better. Vegetables? Yes, he has
planted them. If we look out of our windows, we can see them on their
winding way. They will be ripe by and by. He never tasted peas in his life
before the Fourth of July, or cucumbers before the middle of August. He
hears that there are such things; but he thinks they must be "dreadful
unhealthy, them things forced out of season,"--and, whether healthy or
not, he can't get them. We couldn't ourselves, if we were keeping house in
the same township. To be sure, we might send to the cities for them, and
be served with such as were wilted to begin with, and would arrive utterly
unfit to be eaten at end of their day's journey, costing double their
market price in the added express charge. We should not do any such thing.
We should do just as he does, make the best of "plum sauce," or even dried
apples. We should not make our sauce with molasses, probably; but he does
not know that sugar is better; he honestly likes molasses best. As for
saleratus in the bread, as for fried meat, and fried doughnuts, and
ubiquitous pickles,--all those things have he, and his fathers before him,
eaten, and, he thinks, thriven on from time immemorial. He will listen
incredulously to all we say about the effects of alkalies, the change of
fats to injurious oils by frying, the indigestibility of pickles, &c.;
for, after all, the unanswerable fact remains on his side, though he may
be too polite or too slow to make use of it in the argument, that, having
fed on these poisons all his life, he can easily thrash us to-day, and his
wife and daughters can and do work from morning till night, while ours
must lie down and rest by noon. In spite of all this, he will do what he
can to humor our whims. Never yet have we seen the country boarding-house
where kindly and persistent remonstrance would not introduce the gridiron
and banish the frying-pan, and obtain at least an attempt at yeast-bread.
Good, patient, long-suffering country people! The only wonder to us is
that they tolerate so pleasantly, make such effort to gratify, the
preferences and prejudices of city men and women, who come and who remain
strangers among them; and who, in so many instances, behave from first to
last as if they were of a different race, and knew nothing of any common
bonds of humanity and Christianity.
The Good Staff of Pleasure.
In an inn in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, where I dined every day for three
weeks, one summer, I made the acquaintance of a little maid called
Gretchen. She stood all day long washing dishes, in a dark passageway
which communicated in some mysterious fashion with cellar, kitchen,
dining-room, and main hall of the inn. From one or other of these quarters
Gretchen was sharply called so often that it was a puzzle to know how she
contrived to wash so much as a cup or a plate in the course of the day.
Poor child! I am afraid she did most of her work after dark; for I
sometimes left her standing there at ten o'clock at night. She was
blanched and shrunken from fatigue and lack of sunlight. I doubt if ever,
unless perhaps on some exceptional Sunday, she knew the sensation of a
full breath of pure air or a warm sunbeam on her face.
But whenever I passed her she smiled, and there was never-failing
good-cheer in her voice when she said "Good-morning." Her uniform
atmosphere of contentedness so impressed and surprised me that, at last, I
said to Franz, the head waiter,--
"What makes Gretchen so happy? She has a hard life, always standing in
that narrow dark place, washing dishes."
Franz was phlegmatic, and spoke very little English. He shrugged his
shoulders, in sign of assent that Gretchen's life was a hard one, and
added,--
"Ja, ja. She likes because all must come at her door. There will be no one
which will say not nothing if they go by."
That was it. Almost every hour some human voice said pleasantly to her,
"Good-morning, Gretchen," or "It is a fine day;" or, if no word were
spoken, there would be a friendly nod and smile. For nowhere in
kind-hearted, simple Germany do human beings pass by other human beings,
as we do in America, without so much as a turn of the head to show
recognition of humanity in common.
This one little pleasure kept Gretchen not only alive, but comparatively
glad. Her body suffered for want of sun and air. There was no helping
that, by any amount of spiritual compensation, so long as she must stand,
year in and year out, in a close, dark corner, and do hard drudgery. But,
if she had stood in that close, dark corner, doing that hard drudgery, and
had had no pleasure to comfort her, she would have been dead in three
months.
If all men and women could realize the power, the might of even a small
pleasure, how much happier the world would be! and how much longer bodies
and souls both would bear up under living! Sensitive people realize it to
the very core of their being. They know that often and often it happens
to them to be revived, kindled, strengthened, to a degree which they could
not describe, and which they hardly comprehend, by some little
thing,--some word of praise, some token of remembrance, some proof of
affection or recognition. They know, too, that strength goes out of them,
just as inexplicably, just as fatally, when for a space, perhaps even a
short space, all these are wanting.
People who are not sensitive also come to find this out, if they are
tender. They are by no means inseparable,--tenderness and sensitiveness;
if they were, human nature would be both more comfortable and more
agreeable. But tender people alone can be just to sensitive ones; living
in close relations with them, they learn what they need, and, so far as
they can, supply it, even when they wonder a little, and perhaps grow a
little weary.
We see a tender and just mother sometimes sighing because one
over-sensitive child must be so much more gently restrained or admonished
than the rest. But she has her reward for every effort to adjust her
methods to the instrument she does not quite understand. If she doubts
this, she has only to look on the right hand and the left, and see the
effect of careless, brutal dealing with finely strung, sensitive natures.
We see, also, many men,--good, generous, kindly, but not
sensitive-souled,--who have learned that the sunshine of their homes all
depends on little things, which it would never have entered into their
busy and composed hearts to think of doing, or saying, or providing, if
they had not discovered that without them their wives droop, and with them
they keep well.
People who are neither tender nor sensitive can neither comprehend nor
meet these needs. Alas! that there are so many such people; or that, if
there must be just so many, as I suppose there must, they are not
distinguishable at first sight, by some mark of color, or shape, or sound,
so that one might avoid them, or at least know what to expect in entering
into relation with them. Woe be to any sensitive soul whose life must, in
spite of itself, take tone and tint from daily and intimate intercourse
with such! No bravery, no philosophy, no patience can save it from a slow
death. But, while the subtlest and most stimulating pleasures which the
soul knows come to it through its affections, and are, therefore, so to
speak, at every man's mercy, there is still left a world of possibility of
enjoyment, to which we can help ourselves, and which no man can hinder.
And just here it is, I think, that many persons, especially those who are
hard-worked, and those who have some special trouble to bear, make great
mistake. They might, perhaps, say at hasty first sight that it would be
selfish to aim at providing themselves with pleasures. Not at all. Not one
whit more than it is for them to buy a bottle of Ayer's Sarsaparilla (if
they do not know better) to "cleanse their blood" in the spring! Probably
a dollar's worth of almost any thing out of any other shop than a
druggist's would "cleanse their blood" better,--a geranium, for instance,
or a photograph, or a concert, or a book, or even fried oysters,--any
thing, no matter what, so it is innocent, which gives them a little
pleasure, breaks in on the monotony of their work or their trouble, and
makes them have for one half-hour a "good time." Those who have near and
dear ones to remember these things for them need no such words as I am
writing here. Heaven forgive them if, being thus blessed, they do not
thank God daily and take courage.
But lonely people, and people whose kin are not kind or wise in these
things, must learn to minister even in such ways to themselves. It is not
selfish. It is not foolish. It is wise. It is generous. Each contented
look on a human face is reflected in every other human face which sees it;
each growth in a human soul is a blessing to every other human soul which
comes in contact with it.
Here will come in, for many people, the bitter restrictions of poverty.
There are so many men and women to whom it would seem simply a taunt to
advise them to spend, now and then, a dollar for a pleasure. That the poor
must go cold and hungry has never seemed to me the hardest feature in
their lot; there are worse deprivations than that of food or raiment, and
this very thing is one of them. This is a point for charitable people to
remember, even more than they do.
We appreciate this when we give some plum-pudding and turkey at Christmas,
instead of all coal and flannel. But, any day in the year, a picture on
the wall might perhaps be as comforting as a blanket on the bed; and, at
any rate, would be good for twelve months, while the blanket would help
but six. I have seen an Irish mother, in a mud hovel, turn red with
delight at a rattle for her baby, when I am quite sure she would have been
indifferently grateful for a pair of socks.
Food and physicians and money are and always will be on the earth. But a
"merry heart" is a "continual feast," and "doeth good like-a medicine;"
and "loving favor" is "chosen," "rather than gold and silver."
Wanted.--A Home.
Nothing can be meaner than that "Misery should love company." But the
proverb is founded on an original principle in human nature, which it is
no use to deny and hard work to conquer. I have been uneasily conscious of
this sneaking sin in my own soul, as I have read article after article in
the English newspapers and magazines on the "decadence of the home spirit
in English family life, as seen in the large towns and the metropolis." It
seems that the English are as badly off as we. There, also, men are
wide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy and morose in their own
houses; "sons lead lives independent of their fathers and apart from their
sisters and mothers;" "girls run about as they please, without care or
guidance." This state of things is "a spreading social evil," and men are
at their wit's end to know what is to be done about it. They are
ransacking "national character and customs, religion, and the particular
tendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teaching
and preaching of the public press," to find out the root of the trouble.
One writer ascribes it to the "exceeding restlessness and the desire to be
doing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon
race;" another to the passion which almost all families have for seeming
richer and more fashionable than their means will allow. In these, and in
most of their other theories, they are only working round and round, as
doctors so often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, without
so much as touching or perhaps suspecting their real centre. How many
people are blistered for spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, when
the real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in the lining of
the stomach! and all these difficulties in the outworks are merely the
creaking of the machinery, because the central engine does not work
properly. Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years coddling the
poor victim; but he will stay ill to the last if his stomach be not set
right.
There is a close likeness between the doctor's high-sounding list of
remote symptoms, which he is treating as primary diseases, and the hue and
outcry about the decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of excessive
and improper amusements, club-houses, billiard-rooms, theatres, and so
forth, which are "the banes of homes."
The trouble is in the homes. Homes are stupid, homes are dreary, homes are
insufferable. If one can be pardoned for the Irishism of such a saying,
homes are their own worst "banes." If homes were what they should be,
nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, which
would do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer,
their pleasanter ways, their wholesomer joys.
Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a heavy word. It
includes generations in its pitiless entail. Sufficient for the day is the
evil thereof is but one side of the truth. No day is sufficient unto the
evil thereof is the other. Each day has to bear burdens passed down from
so many other days; each person has to bear burdens so complicated, so
interwoven with the burdens of others; each person's fault is so fevered
and swollen by faults of others, that there is no disentangling the
question of responsibility. Every thing is everybody's fault is the
simplest and fairest way of putting it. It is everybody's fault that the
average home is stupid, dreary, insufferable,--a place from which fathers
fly to clubs, boys and girls to streets. But when we ask who can do most
to remedy this,--in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight against
the tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instability which are inherent
in human nature,--then the answer is clear and loud. It is the work of
women; this is the true mission of women, their "right" divine and
unquestionable, and including most emphatically the "right to labor."
To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home,--it is easily said in a
very few words; but how many women have done it? How many women can say to
themselves or others that this is their aim? To keep house well women
often say they desire. But keeping house well is another affair,--I had
almost said it has nothing to do with creating a home. That is not true,
of course; comfortable living, as regards food and fire and clothes, can
do much to help on a home. Nevertheless, with one exception, the best
homes I have ever seen were in houses which were not especially well kept;
and the very worst I have ever known were presided (I mean tyrannized)
over by "perfect housekeepers."
All creators are single-aimed. Never will the painter, sculptor, writer
lose sight of his art. Even in the intervals of rest and diversion which
are necessary to his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers to
his passion. Consciously or unconsciously, he makes each shape, color,
incident his own; sooner or later it will enter into his work.
So it must be with the woman who will create a home. There is an evil
fashion of speech which says it is a narrowing and narrow life that a
woman leads who cares only, works only for her husband and children; that
a higher, more imperative thing is that she herself be developed to her
utmost. Even so clear and strong a writer as Frances Cobbe, in her
otherwise admirable essay on the "Final Cause of Woman," falls into this
shallowness of words, and speaks of women who live solely for their
families as "adjectives."
In the family relation so many women are nothing more, so many women
become even less, that human conception may perhaps be forgiven for losing
sight of the truth, the ideal. Yet in women it is hard to forgive it.
Thinking clearly, she should see that a creator can never be an adjective;
and that a woman who creates and sustains a home, and under whose hands
children grow up to be strong and pure men and women, is a creator, second
only to God.
Before she can do this, she must have development; in and by the doing of
this comes constant development; the higher her development, the more
perfect her work; the instant her own development is arrested, her
creative power stops. All science, all art, all religion, all experience
of life, all knowledge of men--will help her; the stars in their courses
can be won to fight for her. Could she attain the utmost of knowledge,
could she have all possible human genius, it would be none too much.
Reverence holds its breath and goes softly, perceiving what it is in this
woman's power to do; with what divine patience, steadfastness, and
inspiration she must work.
Into the home she will create, monotony, stupidity, antagonisms cannot
come. Her foresight will provide occupations and amusements; her loving
and alert diplomacy will fend off disputes. Unconsciously, every member of
her family will be as clay in her hands. More anxiously than any statesman
will she meditate on the wisdom of each measure, the bearing of each word.
The least possible governing which is compatible with order will be her
first principle; her second, the greatest possible influence which is
compatible with the growth of individuality. Will the woman whose brain
and heart are working these problems, as applied to a household, be an
adjective? be idle?
She will be no more an adjective than the sun is an adjective in the
solar system; no more idle than Nature is idle. She will be perplexed; she
will be weary; she will be disheartened, sometimes. All creators, save
One, have known these pains and grown strong by them. But she will never
withdraw her hand for one instant. Delays and failures will only set her
to casting about for new instrumentalities. She will press all things into
her service. She will master sciences, that her boys' evenings need not be
dull. She will be worldly wise, and render to Caesar his dues, that her
husband and daughters may have her by their side in all their pleasures.
She will invent, she will surprise, she will forestall, she will remember,
she will laugh, she will listen, she will be young, she will be old, and
she will be three times loving, loving, loving.
This is too hard? There is the house to be kept? And there are poverty and
sickness, and there is not time?
Yes, it is hard. And there is the house to be kept; and there are poverty
and sickness; but, God be praised, there is time. A minute is time. In one
minute may live the essence of all. I have seen a beggar-woman make half
an hour of home on a doorstep, with a basket of broken meat! And the most
perfect home I ever saw was in a little house into the sweet incense of
whose fires went no costly things. A thousand dollars served for a year's
living of father, mother, and three children. But the mother was a creator
of a home; her relation with her children was the most beautiful I have
ever seen; even a dull and commonplace man was lifted up and enabled to
do good work for souls, by the atmosphere which this woman created; every
inmate of her house involuntarily looked into her face for the key-note of
the day; and it always rang clear. From the rose-bud or clover-leaf which,
in spite of her hard housework, she always found time to put by our plates
at breakfast, down to the essay or story she had on hand to be read or
discussed in the evening, there was no intermission of her influence. She
has always been and always will be my ideal of a mother, wife, home-maker.
If to her quick brain, loving heart, and exquisite tact had been added the
appliances of wealth and the enlargements of a wider culture, hers would
have been absolutely the ideal home. As it was, it was the best I have
ever seen. It is more than twenty years since I crossed its threshold. I
do not know whether she is living or not. But, as I see house after house
in which fathers and mothers and children are dragging out their lives in
a hap-hazard alternation of listless routine and unpleasant collision, I
always think with a sigh of that poor little cottage by the seashore, and
of the woman who was "the light thereof;" and I find in the faces of many
men and children, as plainly written and as sad to see as in the newspaper
columns of "Personals," "Wanted,--a home."