"My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is _always_ overdone."
"Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just
right."
"Well, _almost_ always."
"Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlor, and
could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It's very
difficult to get things done with such a girl."
"My mother's things were always well done, no matter what her girl was."
Again: "My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal.
I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size"; or, "My
dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?" or, "My dear, I
shall actually have to give up coming to dinner, if my dinners cannot be
regular"; or, "My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are
ironed,--it is perfectly scandalous"; or, "My dear, you must not let
Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlor"; or, "My dear, you must stop
the children from playing in the garret"; or, "My dear, you must see
that Maggie doesn't leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the
front hall"; and so on, up-stairs and down-stairs, in the lady's
chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, "my dear" is to see that nothing
goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.
Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears,
and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the
charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than
ever,--and perhaps he does. The only thing is that she has passed out of
the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While she
was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course
there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel
has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations
are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the
same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same
circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking
from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it.
Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being
dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to
make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to
introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields
unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but
to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of
elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to
the arrangement of the domestic _ménage_, lead him daily to perceive a
hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.
Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved,
not provoked,--who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make
good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have
we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and
forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now
sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlor.
But there is another side of the picture,--where the wife, provoked and
indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen
arrows of her woman's wit searches and penetrates every joint of the
husband's armor, showing herself full as unjust and far more culpable in
this sort of conflict.
Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends
employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given
them only to harass and provoke,--thrusting and piercing with a
certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could
have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly
thrust they make at one another, and all for such inexpressibly
miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.
For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that
crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what
miserable, worthless things do they commonly begin!--a dinner underdone,
too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish
broken!--and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous,
very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by
double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built, and coal
burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established,--_their
happiness_. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any
inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of _love_; and nothing so surely
burns away love as constant fault-finding.
For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear
friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the
mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof,
occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid stage has once set
in, the restoration of love seems wellnigh impossible.
For example: Enthusius, having got up this morning in the best of
humors, in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of
her _g_s quite so long; and Hermione fires up with--
"And, pray, what else wouldn't you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be
so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of
the things in me that need correcting."
"My dear, you are unreasonable."
"I don't think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements
of my lord and master sometimes."
"Now, my dear, you really are very silly."
"Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has
lost the charm of novelty."
"Come now, Hermione, don't let's quarrel."
"My dear Sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I'm sure I was only
asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to
suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning,
_and_ the tea, _and_ the toast, _and_ the steak, _and_ the servants,
_and_ the front-hall mat, _and_ the upper-story hall-door, _and_ the
basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my
general education. I shall set about the tails of my _g_s at once, but
trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need
emendation."
Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.
"If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe
that it is not good manners to drum on the table," said his fair
opposite.
"Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!" exclaims Enthusius,
rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his
dinner at Delmonico's.
Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a
sprite of a woman,--the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being
he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own
inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so
sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on
the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been
the guilty partner in this morning's encounter; he has said only what is
fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after
all, the fault is remotely his.
When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very
deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not
face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine
things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling
her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her
than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business-manager? Can
a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears
the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?
If his little wife has to learn her domestic _rôle_ of household duty,
as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities,
a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to
her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before
marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and
incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what,
after marriage, proved an annoyance.
And if a man finds that he has a wife ill adapted to wifely duties, does
it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or
ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in
the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as
little preface, apology, or circumlocution, to his business-manager, to
his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never
criticized the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and
studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the
asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should
qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in
the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own
wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or
softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two,
to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find,
too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at,
and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill
than a man.
But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often
is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited
by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent
seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make
manifest the weak point in everything.
We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of
mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and
disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do,
they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they
have abated by not trying to please.
We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs,
exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to
his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and
neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal
indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she
did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper,
without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her
grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and
gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he
breathed freely as a man released. He married again,--a woman with no
beauty, but much love and goodness,--a woman who asked little, blamed
seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost
thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became
the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in
the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism
from her lips, who criticized so little and so thoughtfully, weighed
more with him than many outspoken words. So different is the same human
being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!
I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its
consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once
suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the
family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more
hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one
thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the
susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood.
Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all
points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right
and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in
callous hardness or irritable moroseness.
A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother
something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out,--
"Oh, you've left the door open! I do wish you wouldn't always leave the
door open! And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I
tell you to wipe your feet?"
"Now there you've thrown your cap on the sofa again. When will you learn
to hang it up?"
"Don't put your slate there; that isn't the place for it."
"How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?"
"Don't sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing."
"Mercy! how your hair looks! Do go up-stairs and comb it."
"There, if you haven't torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a
boy!"
"Don't speak so loud; your voice goes through my head."
"I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I
have been saving for brown flour."
"I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor."
"Jim's been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best
paper."
Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run
the gantlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as
those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it
than he is?
No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound
to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about
everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be
terrible reactions?
Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same
considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced
into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There
are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant
and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to
be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or
poison it with foul air, or bring innumerable inconveniences. The
setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty
possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of
a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of
fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no
wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the
bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a
high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face
in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated,
despairing, and with good reason: the maid is the same, and with equally
good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a
printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given
her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning
paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy
in her beautifully arranged house.
There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed
like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has
become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their
welfare a trap. Their gas and their water and their fire and their
elegancies and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only
so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their
Christian graces day and night,--so that, if their house is kept in
order, their temper and religion are not.
I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are in
will and purpose real saints. Their souls go up to heaven--its love, its
purity, its rest--with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in church;
and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to despise
themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross looks,
the universal nervous irritability, that result from this constant
jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.
Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as
means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman
once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her
scourges,--accept them,--rejoice in them,--smile and be quiet, silent,
patient, and loving under them,--and the convent can teach her no more;
she is a victorious saint.
When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after
the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes
coughing, sneezing, strangling,--when the gas is blown out in the
nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the
danger of such a proceeding,--when the tumblers on the dinner-table are
found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business
of washing and wiping,--when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left
soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the
consequences,--when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below,
and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important
things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember
them,--there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very
deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting.
It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and
distresses, but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the
Apostle, might say, "When I am weak, then am I strong."
The burden ceases to gall when we have learned how to carry it. We can
suffer patiently, if we see any good come of it, and say, as an old
black woman of our acquaintance did of an event that crossed her
purpose, "Well, Lord, if it's _you_, send it along."
But that this may be done, that home-life, in our unsettled, changing
state of society, may become peaceful and restful, there is one
Christian grace, much treated of by mystic writers, that must return to
its honor in the Christian Church. I mean--THE GRACE OF SILENCE.
No words can express, no tongue can tell, the value of NOT SPEAKING.
"Speech is silvern, but silence is golden," is an old and very precious
proverb.
"But," say many voices, "what is to become of us, if we may not speak?
Must we not correct our children and our servants and each other? Must
we let people go on doing wrong to the end of the chapter?"
No; fault must be found; faults must be told, errors corrected. Reproof
and admonition are duties of householders to their families, and of all
true friends to one another.
But, gentle reader, let us look over life, our own lives and the lives
of others, and ask, How much of the fault-finding which prevails has the
least tendency to do any good? How much of it is well-timed,
well-pointed, deliberate, and just, so spoken as to be effective?
"A wise reprover upon an obedient ear" is one of the _rare_ things
spoken of by Solomon,--the rarest, perhaps, to be met with. How many
really religious people put any of their religion into their manner of
performing this most difficult office? We find fault with a stove or
furnace which creates heat only to go up chimney and not warm the house.
We say it is wasteful. Just so wasteful often seem prayer-meetings,
church-services, and sacraments; they create and excite lovely, gentle,
holy feelings,--but, if these do not pass out into the atmosphere of
daily life, and warm and clear the air of our homes, there is a great
waste in our religion.
We have been on our knees, confessing humbly that we are as awkward in
heavenly things, as unfit for the Heavenly Jerusalem, as Biddy and Mike,
and the little beggar-girl on our door-steps, are for our parlors. We
have deplored our errors daily, hourly, and confessed that "the
remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is
intolerable," and then we draw near in the sacrament to that Incarnate
Divinity whose infinite love covers all our imperfections with the
mantle of His perfections. But when we return, do we take our servants
and children by the throat because they are as untrained and awkward and
careless in earthly things as we have been in heavenly? Does no
remembrance of Christ's infinite patience temper our impatience, when we
have spoken seventy times seven, and our words have been disregarded?
There is no mistake as to the sincerity of the religion which the church
excites. What we want is to have it _used_ in common life, instead of
going up like hot air in a fireplace to lose itself in the infinite
abysses above.
In reproving and fault-finding, we have beautiful examples in Holy Writ.
When Saint Paul has a reproof to administer to delinquent Christians,
how does he temper it with gentleness and praise! how does he first make
honorable note of all the good there is to be spoken of! how does he
give assurance of his prayers and love!--and when at last the arrow
flies, it goes all the straighter to the mark for this carefulness.
But there was a greater, a purer, a lovelier than Paul, who made His
home on earth with twelve plain men, ignorant, prejudiced, slow to
learn,--and who to the very day of His death were still contending on a
point which He had repeatedly explained, and troubling His last earthly
hours with the old contest, "Who should be greatest." When all else
failed, on His knees before them as their servant, tenderly performing
for love the office of a slave, he said, "If I, your Lord and Master,
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet."
When parents, employers, and masters learn to reprove in this spirit,
reproofs will be more effective than they now are. It was by the
exercise of this spirit that Fénelon transformed the proud, petulant,
irritable, selfish Duke of Burgundy, making him humble, gentle, tolerant
of others, and severe only to himself: it was he who had for his motto,
that "Perfection alone can bear with imperfection."
But apart from the fault-finding which has a definite aim, how much is
there that does not profess or intend or try to do anything more than
give vent to an irritated state of feeling! The nettle stings us, and we
toss it with both hands at our neighbor; the fire burns us, and we throw
coals and hot ashes at all and sundry of those about us.
There is _fretfulness_, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting
remark; there is _grumbling_, a northeast storm that never clears; there
is _scolding_, the thunderstorm with lightning and hail. All these are
worse than useless; they are positive _sins_, by whomsoever
indulged,--sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in
polite society.
All these are for the most part but the venting on our fellow-beings of
morbid feelings resulting from dyspepsia, overtaxed nerves, or general
ill health.
A minister eats too much mince-pie, goes to his weekly lecture, and,
seeing only half a dozen people there, proceeds to grumble at those
half-dozen for the sins of such as stay away. "The Church is cold, there
is no interest in religion," and so on: a simple outpouring of the
blues.
You and I do in one week the work we ought to do in six; we overtax
nerve and brain, and then have weeks of darkness in which everything at
home seems running to destruction. The servants never were so careless,
the children never so noisy, the house never so disorderly, the State
never so ill-governed, the Church evidently going over to Antichrist.
The only thing, after all, in which the existing condition of affairs
differs from that of a week ago is, that we have used up our nervous
energy, and are looking at the world through blue spectacles. We ought
to resist the devil of fault-finding at this point, and cultivate
silence as a grace till our nerves are rested. There are times when no
one should trust himself to judge his neighbors, or reprove his children
and servants, or find fault with his friends,--for he is so sharp-set
that he cannot strike a note without striking too hard. Then is the time
to try the grace of silence, and, what is better than silence, the power
of prayer.
But it being premised that we are _never_ to fret, never to grumble,
never to scold, and yet it being our duty in some way to make known and
get rectified the faults of others, it remains to ask how; and on this
head we will improvise a parable of two women.
Mrs. Standfast is a woman of high tone, and possessed of a power of
moral principle that impresses one even as sublime. All her perceptions
of right and wrong are clear, exact, and minute; she is charitable to
the poor, kind to the sick and suffering, and devoutly and earnestly
religious. In all the minutiæ of woman's life she manifests an
inconceivable precision and perfection. Everything she does is perfectly
done. She is true to all her promises to the very letter, and so
punctual that railroad time might be kept by her instead of a
chronometer.
Yet, with all these excellent traits, Mrs. Standfast has not the faculty
of making a happy home. She is that most hopeless of fault-finders,--a
fault-finder from principle. She has a high, correct standard for
everything in the world, from the regulation of the thoughts down to the
spreading of a sheet or the hemming of a towel; and to this exact
standard she feels it her duty to bring every one in her household. She
does not often scold, she is not actually fretful, but she exercises
over her household a calm, inflexible severity, rebuking every fault;
she overlooks nothing, she excuses nothing, she will accept of nothing
in any part of her domain but absolute perfection; and her reproofs are
aimed with a true and steady point, and sent with a force that makes
them felt by the most obdurate.
Hence, though she is rarely seen out of temper, and seldom or never
scolds, yet she drives every one around her to despair by the use of the
calmest and most elegant English. Her servants fear, but do not love
her. Her husband, an impulsive, generous man, somewhat inconsiderate and
careless in his habits, is at times perfectly desperate under the
accumulated load of her disapprobation. Her children regard her as
inhabiting some high, distant, unapproachable mountain-top of goodness,
whence she is always looking down with reproving eyes on naughty boys
and girls. They wonder how it is that so excellent a mamma should have
children who, let them try to be good as hard as they can, are always
sure to do something dreadful every day.
The trouble with Mrs. Standfast is, not that she has a high standard,
and not that she purposes and means to bring every one up to it, but
that she does not take the right way. She has set it down that to blame
a wrong-doer is the only way to cure wrong. She has never learned that
it is as much her duty to praise as to blame, and that people are drawn
to do right by being praised when they do it, rather than driven by
being blamed when they do not.
Right across the way from Mrs. Standfast is Mrs. Easy, a pretty little
creature, with not a tithe of her moral worth,--a merry, pleasure-loving
woman, of no particular force of principle, whose great object in life
is to avoid its disagreeables and to secure its pleasures.
Little Mrs. Easy is adored by her husband, her children, her servants,
merely because it is her nature to say pleasant things to every one. It
is a mere tact of pleasing, which she uses without knowing it. While
Mrs. Standfast, surveying her well-set dining-table, runs her keen eye
over everything, and at last brings up with, "Jane, look at that black
spot on the salt-spoon! I am astonished at your carelessness!"--Mrs.
Easy would say, "Why, Jane, where _did_ you learn to set a table so
nicely? All looking beautifully, except--ah! let's see--just give a rub
to this salt-spoon;--now all is quite perfect." Mrs. Standfast's
servants and children hear only of their failures; these are always
before them and her. Mrs. Easy's servants hear of their successes. She
praises their good points; tells them they are doing well in this, that,
and the other particular; and finally exhorts them, on the strength of
having done so many things well, to improve in what is yet lacking. Mrs.
Easy's husband feels that he is always a hero in her eyes, and her
children feel that they are dear good children, notwithstanding Mrs.
Easy sometimes has her little tiffs of displeasure, and scolds roundly
when something falls out as it should not.
The two families show how much more may be done by a very ordinary
woman, through the mere instinct of praising and pleasing, than by the
greatest worth, piety, and principle, seeking to lift human nature by a
lever that never was meant to lift it by.
The faults and mistakes of us poor human beings are as often perpetuated
by despair as by any other one thing. Have we not all been burdened by a
consciousness of faults that we were slow to correct because we felt
discouraged? Have we not been sensible of a real help sometimes from the
presence of a friend who thought well of us, believed in us, set our
virtues in the best light, and put our faults in the background?
Let us depend upon it, that the flesh and blood that are in us--the
needs, the wants, the despondencies--are in each of our fellows, in
every awkward servant and careless child.