Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOUSE AND HOME
PAPERS.
BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.
SEVENTH EDITION.
Publisher’s Logo
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1887.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,
in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. THE RAVAGES OF A CARPET 1
II. HOME-KEEPING _vs._ 23
HOUSE-KEEPING
III. WHAT IS A HOME? 48
IV. THE ECONOMY OF THE BEAUTIFUL 79
V. RAKING UP THE FIRE 101
VI. THE LADY WHO DOES HER OWN WORK 125
VII. WHAT CAN BE GOT IN AMERICA 148
VIII. ECONOMY 164
IX. SERVANTS 195
X. COOKERY 225
XI. OUR HOUSE 266
XII. HOME RELIGION 309
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.
─────
I.
THE RAVAGES OF A CARPET.
“MY dear, it’s so cheap!”
These words were spoken by my wife, as she sat gracefully on a roll of
Brussels carpet which was spread out in flowery lengths on the floor of
Messrs. Ketchem & Co.
“It’s _so_ cheap!”
Milton says that the love of fame is the last infirmity of noble minds.
I think he had not rightly considered the subject. I believe that last
infirmity is the love of getting things cheap! Understand me, now. I
don’t mean the love of getting cheap things, by which one understands
showy, trashy, ill-made, spurious articles, bearing certain apparent
resemblances to better things. All really sensible people are quite
superior to that sort of cheapness. But those fortunate accidents which
put within the power of a man things really good and valuable for half
or a third of their value what mortal virtue and resolution can
withstand? My friend Brown has a genuine Murillo, the joy of his heart
and the light of his eyes, but he never fails to tell you, as its
crowning merit, how he bought it in South America for just nothing,—how
it hung smoky and deserted in the back of a counting-room, and was
thrown in as a makeweight to bind a bargain, and, upon being cleaned,
turned out a genuine Murillo; and then he takes out his cigar, and calls
your attention to the points in it; he adjusts the curtain to let the
sunlight fall just in the right spot; he takes you to this and the other
point of view; and all this time you must confess, that, in your mind as
well as his, the consideration that he got all this beauty for ten
dollars adds lustre to the painting. Brown has paintings there for which
he paid his thousands, and, being well advised, they are worth the
thousands he paid; but this ewe-lamb that he got for nothing always
gives him a secret exaltation in his own eyes. He seems to have credited
to himself personally merit to the amount of what he should have paid
for the picture. Then there is Mrs. Crœsus, at the party yesterday
evening, expatiating to my wife on the surprising cheapness of her
point-lace set,—“Got for just nothing at all, my dear!” and a circle of
admiring listeners echoes the sound. “Did you ever _hear_ anything like
it? I never heard of such a thing in my life”; and away sails Mrs.
Crœsus as if she had a collar composed of all the cardinal virtues. In
fact, she is buoyed up with a secret sense of merit, so that her satin
slippers scarcely touch the carpet. Even I myself am fond of showing a
first edition of “Paradise Lost,” for which I gave a shilling in a
London book-stall, and stating that I would not take a hundred dollars
for it. Even I must confess there are points on which I am mortal.
But all this while my wife sits on her roll of carpet, looking into my
face for approbation, and Marianne and Jenny are pouring into my ear a
running-fire of “How sweet! How lovely! Just like that one of Mrs.
Tweedleum’s!”
“And she gave two dollars and seventy-five cents a yard for hers, and
this is—”
My wife here put her hand to her mouth, and pronounced the incredible
sum in a whisper, with a species of sacred awe, common, as I have
observed, to females in such interesting crises. In fact, Mr. Ketchem,
standing smiling and amiable by, remarked to me that really he hoped
Mrs. Crowfield would not name generally what she gave for the article,
for positively it was so far below the usual rate of prices that he
might give offence to other customers; but this was the very last of the
pattern, and they were anxious to close off the old stock, and we had
always traded with them, and he had a great respect for my wife’s
father, who had always traded with their firm, and so, when there were
any little bargains to be thrown in any one’s way, why, he naturally, of
course—And here Mr. Ketchem bowed gracefully over the yardstick to my
wife, and I consented.
Yes, I consented; but whenever I think of myself at that moment, I
always am reminded, in a small way, of Adam taking the apple; and my
wife, seated on that roll of carpet, has more than once suggested to my
mind the classic image of Pandora opening her unlucky box. In fact, from
the moment I had blandly assented to Mr. Ketchem’s remarks, and said to
my wife, with a gentle air of dignity, “Well, my dear, since it suits
you, I think you had better take it,” there came a load on my prophetic
soul, which not all the fluttering and chattering of my delighted girls
and the more placid complacency of my wife could entirely dissipate. I
presaged, I know not what, of coming woe; and all I presaged came to
pass.
In order to know just _what_ came to pass, I must give you a view of the
house and home into which this carpet was introduced.
My wife and I were somewhat advanced housekeepers, and our dwelling was
first furnished by her father, in the old-fashioned jog-trot days, when
furniture was made with a view to its lasting from generation to
generation. Everything was strong and comfortable,—heavy mahogany,
guiltless of the modern device of veneering, and hewed out with a square
solidity which had not an idea of change. It was, so to speak, a sort of
granite foundation of the household structure. Then, we commenced
housekeeping with the full idea that our house was a thing to be lived
in, and that furniture was made to be used. That most sensible of women,
Mrs. Crowfield, agreed fully with me, that in our house there was to be
nothing too good for ourselves,—no rooms shut up in holiday attire to be
enjoyed by strangers for three or four days in the year, while we lived
in holes and corners,—no best parlor from which we were to be
excluded,—no silver plate to be kept in the safe in the bank, and
brought home only in case of a grand festival, while our daily meals
were served with dingy Britannia. “Strike a broad, plain average,” I
said to my wife; “have everything abundant, serviceable; and give all
our friends exactly what we have ourselves, no better and no worse”;—and
my wife smiled approval on my sentiment.
Smile! she did more than smile. My wife resembles one of those convex
mirrors I have sometimes seen. Every idea I threw out, plain and simple,
she reflected back upon me in a thousand little glitters and twinkles of
her own; she made my crude conceptions come back to me in such perfectly
dazzling performances that I hardly recognized them. My mind warms up,
when I think what a home that woman made of our house from the very
first day she moved into it. The great, large, airy parlor, with its
ample bow-window, when she had arranged it, seemed a perfect trap to
catch sunbeams. There was none of that discouraging trimness and newness
that often repel a man’s bachelor-friends after the first call, and make
them feel,—“O, well, one cannot go in at Crowfield’s now, unless one is
dressed; one might put them out.” The first thing our parlor said to any
one was, that we were not people to be put out, that we were
wide-spread, easy-going, and jolly folk. Even if Tom Brown brought in
Ponto and his shooting-bag, there was nothing in that parlor to strike
terror into man and dog; for it was written on the face of things, that
everybody there was to do just as he or she pleased. There were my books
and my writing-table spread out with all its miscellaneous confusion of
papers on one side of the fireplace, and there were my wife’s great,
ample sofa and work-table on the other; there I wrote my articles for
the “North American,” and there she turned and ripped and altered her
dresses, and there lay crochet and knitting and embroidery side by side
with a weekly basket of family-mending, and in neighborly contiguity
with the last book of the season, which my wife turned over as she took
her after-dinner lounge on the sofa. And in the bow-window were canaries
always singing, and a great stand of plants always fresh and blooming,
and ivy which grew and clambered and twined about the pictures. Best of
all, there was in our parlor that household altar, the blazing
wood-fire, whose wholesome, hearty crackle is the truest household
inspiration. I quite agree with one celebrated American author who holds
that an open fireplace is an altar of patriotism. Would our
Revolutionary fathers have gone barefooted and bleeding over snows to
defend air-tight stoves and cooking-ranges? I trow not. It was the
memory of the great open kitchen-fire, with its back-log and fore-stick
of cord-wood, its roaring, hilarious voice of invitation, its dancing
tongues of flame, that called to them through the snows of that dreadful
winter to keep up their courage, that made their hearts warm and bright
with a thousand reflected memories. Our neighbors said that it was
delightful to sit by our fire,—but then, for their part, they could not
afford it, wood was so ruinously dear, and all that. Most of these
people could not, for the simple reason that they felt compelled, in
order to maintain the family-dignity, to keep up a parlor with great
pomp and circumstance of upholstery, where they sat only on
dress-occasions, and of course the wood-fire was out of the question.
When children began to make their appearance in our establishment, my
wife, like a well-conducted housekeeper, had the best of
nursery-arrangements,—a room all warmed, lighted, and ventilated, and
abounding in every proper resource of amusement to the rising race; but
it was astonishing to see how, notwithstanding this, the centripetal
attraction drew every pair of little pattering feet to our parlor.
“My dear, why don’t you take your blocks up-stairs?”
“I want to be where oo are,” said with a piteous under-lip, was
generally a most convincing answer.
Then the small people could not be disabused of the idea that certain
chief treasures of their own would be safer under papa’s writing-table
or mamma’s sofa than in the safest closet of their own domains. My
writing-table was dock-yard for Arthur’s new ship, and stable for little
Tom’s pepper-and-salt-colored pony, and carriage-house for Charley’s new
wagon, while whole armies of paper-dolls kept house in the recess behind
mamma’s sofa.
And then, in due time, came the tribe of pets who followed the little
ones and rejoiced in the blaze of the firelight. The boys had a splendid
Newfoundland, which, knowing our weakness, we warned them with awful
gravity was never to be a parlor dog; but, somehow, what with little
beggings and pleadings on the part of Arthur and Tom, and the piteous
melancholy with which Rover would look through the window-panes, when
shut out from the blazing warmth into the dark, cold, veranda, it at
last came to pass that Rover gained a regular corner at the hearth, a
regular _status_ in every family-convocation. And then came a little
black-and-tan English terrier for the girls; and then a fleecy poodle,
who established himself on the corner of my wife’s sofa; and for each of
these some little voices pleaded, and some little heart would be so near
broken at any slight, that my wife and I resigned ourselves to live in
menagerie, the more so as we were obliged to confess a lurking weakness
towards these four-footed children ourselves.
So we grew and flourished together,—children, dogs, birds, flowers, and
all; and although my wife often, in paroxysms of housewifeliness to
which the best of women are subject, would declare that we never were
fit to be seen, yet I comforted her with the reflection that there were
few people whose friends seemed to consider them better worth seeing,
judging by the stream of visitors and loungers which was always setting
towards our parlor. People seemed to find it good to be there; they said
it was somehow home-like and pleasant, and that there was a kind of
charm about it that made it easy to talk and easy to live; and as my
girls and boys grew up, there seemed always to be some merry doing or
other going on there. Arty and Tom brought home their college friends,
who straightway took root there and seemed to fancy themselves a part of
us. We had no reception-rooms apart, where the girls were to receive
young gentlemen; all the courting and flirting that were to be done had
for their arena the ample variety of surface presented by our parlor,
which, with sofas and screens and lounges and recesses and writing-and
work-tables, disposed here and there, and the genuine _laisser aller_ of
the whole _menage_, seemed, on the whole, to have offered ample
advantages enough; for, at the time I write of, two daughters were
already established in marriage, while my youngest was busy, as yet, in
performing that little domestic ballet of the cat with the mouse, in the
case of a most submissive youth of the neighborhood.
All this time our parlor-furniture, though of that granitic formation I
have indicated, began to show marks of that decay to which things
sublunary are liable. I cannot say that I dislike this look in a room.
Take a fine, ample, hospitable apartment, where all things, freely and
generously used, softly and indefinably grow old together, there is a
sort of mellow tone and keeping which pleases my eye. What if the seams
of the great inviting arm-chair, where so many friends have sat and
lounged, do grow white? What, in fact, if some easy couch has an
undeniable hole worn in its friendly cover? I regard with tenderness
even these mortal weaknesses of these servants and witnesses of our good
times and social fellowship. No vulgar touch wore them; they may be
called, rather, the marks and indentations which the glittering in and
out of the tide of social happiness has worn in the rocks of our strand.
I would no more disturb the gradual toning-down and aging of a well-used
set of furniture by smart improvements than I would have a modern dauber
paint in emendations in a fine old picture.
So we men reason; but women do not always think as we do. There is a
virulent demon of housekeeping, not wholly cast out in the best of them,
and which often breaks out in unguarded moments. In fact, Miss Marianne,
being on the lookout for furniture wherewith to begin a new
establishment, and Jenny, who had accompanied her in her peregrinations,
had more than once thrown out little disparaging remarks on the
time-worn appearance of our establishment, suggesting comparison with
those of more modern-furnished rooms.
“It is positively scandalous, the way our furniture looks,” I one day
heard one of them declaring to her mother; “and this old rag of a
carpet!”
My feelings were hurt, not the less so that I knew that the large cloth
which covered the middle of the floor, and which the women call a
bocking, had been bought and nailed down there, after a solemn
family-counsel, as the best means of concealing the too evident darns
which years of good cheer had made needful in our stanch old household
friend, the three-ply carpet, made in those days when to be a three-ply
was a pledge of continuance and service.
Well, it was a joyous and bustling day, when, after one of those
domestic whirlwinds which the women are fond of denominating
house-cleaning, the new Brussels carpet was at length brought in and
nailed down, and its beauty praised from mouth to mouth. Our old friends
called in and admired, and all seemed to be well, except that I had that
light and delicate presage of changes to come which indefinitely brooded
over me.
The first premonitory symptom was the look of apprehensive suspicion
with which the female senate regarded the genial sunbeams that had
always glorified our bow-window.
“This house ought to have inside blinds,” said Marianne, with all the
confident decision of youth, “this carpet will be ruined, if the sun is
allowed to come in like that.”
“And that dirty little canary must really be hung in the kitchen,” said
Jenny; “he always did make such a litter, scattering his seed-chippings
about; and he never takes his bath without flirting out some water. And,
mamma, it appears to me it will never do to have the plants here. Plants
are always either leaking through the pots upon the carpet, or
scattering bits of blossoms and dead leaves, or some accident upsets or
breaks a pot. It was no matter, you know, when we had the old carpet;
but this we really want to have kept nice.”
Mamma stood her ground for the plants,—darlings of her heart for many a
year,—but temporized, and showed that disposition towards compromise
which is most inviting to aggression.
I confess I trembled; for, of all radicals on earth, none are to be
compared to females that have once in hand a course of domestic
innovation and reform. The sacred fire, the divine _furor_, burns in
their bosoms, they become perfect Pythonesses, and every chair they sit
on assumes the magic properties of the tripod. Hence the dismay that
lodges in the bosoms of us males at the fateful spring and autumn
seasons, denominated house-cleaning. Who can say whither the awful gods,
the prophetic fates, may drive our fair household divinities; what sins
of ours may be brought to light; what indulgences and compliances, which
uninspired woman has granted in her ordinary mortal hours, may be torn
from us? He who has been allowed to keep a pair of pet slippers in a
concealed corner, and by the fireside indulged with a chair which he
might, _ad libitum_, fill with all sorts of pamphlets and miscellaneous
literature, suddenly finds himself reformed out of knowledge, his
pamphlets tucked away into pigeon-holes and corners, and his slippers
put in their place in the hall, with, perhaps, a brisk insinuation about
the shocking dust and disorder that men will tolerate.
The fact was, that the very first night after the advent of the new
carpet I had a prophetic dream. Among our treasures of art was a little
etching, by an English artist-friend, the subject of which was the
gambols of the household fairies in a baronial library after the
household were in bed. The little people are represented in every
attitude of frolic enjoyment. Some escalade the great arm-chair, and
look down from its top as from a domestic Mont Blanc; some climb about
the bellows; some scale the shaft of the shovel; while some, forming in
magic ring, dance festively on the yet glowing hearth. Tiny troops
promenade the writing-table. One perches himself quaintly on the top of
the inkstand, and holds colloquy with another who sits cross-legged on a
paper-weight, while a companion looks down on them from the top of the
sand-box. It was an ingenious little device, and gave me the idea, which
I often expressed to my wife, that much of the peculiar feeling of
security, composure, and enjoyment which seems to be the atmosphere of
some rooms and houses came from the unsuspected presence of these little
people, the household fairies, so that the belief in their existence
became a solemn article of faith with me.
Accordingly, that evening, after the installation of the carpet, when my
wife and daughters had gone to bed, as I sat with my slippered feet
before the last coals of the fire, I fell asleep in my chair, and, lo!
my own parlor presented to my eye a scene of busy life. The little
people in green were tripping to and fro, but in great confusion.
Evidently something was wrong among them; for they were fussing and
chattering with each other, as if preparatory to a general movement. In
the region of the bow-window I observed a tribe of them standing with
tiny valises and carpet-bags in their hands, as though about to depart
on a journey. On my writing-table another set stood around my inkstand
and pen-rack, who, pointing to those on the floor, seemed to debate some
question among themselves; while others of them appeared to be
collecting and packing away in tiny trunks certain fairy treasures,
preparatory to a general departure. When I looked at the social hearth,
at my wife’s sofa and work-basket, I saw similar appearances of
dissatisfaction and confusion. It was evident that the household fairies
were discussing the question of a general and simultaneous removal. I
groaned in spirit, and, stretching out my hand, began a conciliatory
address, when whisk went the whole scene from before my eyes, and I
awaked to behold the form of my wife asking me if I were ill or had had
the nightmare that I groaned so. I told her my dream, and we laughed at
it together.
“We must give way to the girls a little,” she said. “It is natural, you
know, that they should wish us to appear a little as other people do.
The fact is, our parlor is somewhat dilapidated; think how many years we
have lived in it without an article of new furniture.”
“I hate new furniture,” I remarked, in the bitterness of my soul. “I
hate anything new.”
My wife answered me discreetly, according to approved principles of
diplomacy. I was right. She sympathized with me. At the same time, it
was not necessary, she remarked, that we should keep a hole in our
sofa-cover and arm-chair; there would certainly be no harm in sending
them to the upholsterer’s to be new-covered; she didn’t much mind, for
her part, moving her plants to the south back-room, and the bird would
do well enough in the kitchen: I had often complained of him for singing
vociferously when I was reading aloud.
So our sofa went to the upholsterer’s; but the upholsterer was struck
with such horror at its clumsy, antiquated, unfashionable appearance,
that he felt bound to make representations to my wife and daughters:
positively, it would be better for them to get a new one, of a tempting
pattern, which he showed them, than to try to do anything with that.
With a stitch or so here and there it might do for a basement
dining-room; but, for a parlor, he gave it as his disinterested
opinion,—he must say, if the case were his own, he should get, etc.,
etc. In short, we had a new sofa and new chairs, and the plants and the
birds were banished, and some dark green blinds were put up to exclude
the sun from the parlor, and the blessed luminary was allowed there only
at rare intervals, when my wife and daughters were out shopping, and I
acted out my uncivilized male instincts by pulling up every shade and
vivifying the apartment as in days of old.
But this was not the worst of it. The new furniture and new carpet
formed an opposition party in the room. I believe in my heart that for
every little household fairy that went out with the dear old things
there came in a tribe of discontented brownies with the new ones. These
little wretches were always twitching at the gowns of my wife and
daughters, jogging their elbows, and suggesting odious comparisons
between the smart new articles and what remained of the old ones. They
disparaged my writing-table in the corner; they disparaged the
old-fashioned lounge in the other corner, which had been the maternal
throne for years; they disparaged the work-table, the work-basket, with
constant suggestions of how such things as these would look in certain
well-kept parlors where new-fashioned furniture of the same sort as ours
existed.
“We don’t have any parlor,” said Jenny, one day. “Our parlor has always
been a sort of log-cabin,—library, study, nursery, greenhouse, all
combined. We never have had things like other people.”
“Yes, and this open fire makes such a dust; and this carpet is one that
shows every speck of dust; it keeps one always on the watch.”
“I wonder why papa never had a study to himself; I’m sure I should think
he would like it better than sitting here among us all. Now there’s the
great south-room off the dining-room; if he would only move his things
there, and have his open fire, we could then close up the fireplace, and
put lounges in the recesses, and mamma could have her things in the
nursery,—and then we should have a parlor fit to be seen.”
I overheard all this, though I pretended not to,—the little busy chits
supposing me entirely buried in the recesses of a German book over which
I was poring.
There are certain crises in a man’s life when the female element in his
household asserts itself in dominant forms that seem to threaten to
overwhelm him. The fair creatures, who in most matters have depended on
his judgment, evidently look upon him at these seasons as only a
forlorn, incapable male creature, to be cajoled and flattered and
persuaded out of his native blindness and absurdity into the fairy-land
of their wishes.
“Of course, mamma,” said the busy voices, “men can’t understand such
things. What _can_ men know of housekeeping, and how things ought to
look? Papa never goes into company; he don’t know and don’t care how the
world is doing, and don’t see that nobody now is living as we do.”
“Aha, my little mistresses, are you there?” I thought; and I mentally
resolved on opposing a great force of what our politicians call
_backbone_ to this pretty domestic conspiracy.
“When you get my writing-table out of this corner, my pretty dears, I’d
thank you to let me know it.”
Thus spake I in my blindness, fool that I was. Jupiter might as soon
keep awake, when Juno came in best bib and tucker, and with the _cestus_
of Venus, to get him to sleep. Poor Slender might as well hope to get
the better of pretty Mistress Anne Page, as one of us clumsy-footed men
might endeavor to escape from the tangled labyrinth of female wiles.
In short, in less than a year it was all done, without any quarrel, any
noise, any violence,—done, I scarce knew when or how, but with the
utmost deference to my wishes, the most amiable hopes that I would not
put myself out, the most sincere protestations that, if I liked it
better as it was, my goddesses would give up and acquiesce. In fact, I
seemed to do it of myself, constrained thereto by what the Emperor
Napoleon has so happily called the logic of events,—that old, well-known
logic by which the man who has once said A must say B, and he who has
said B must say the whole alphabet. In a year, we had a parlor with two
lounges in decorous recesses, a fashionable sofa, and six chairs and a
looking-glass, and a grate always shut up, and a hole in the floor which
kept the parlor warm, and great, heavy curtains that kept out all the
light that was not already excluded by the green shades.
It was as proper and orderly a parlor as those of our most fashionable
neighbors; and when our friends called, we took them stumbling into its
darkened solitude, and opened a faint crack in one of the window-shades,
and came down in our best clothes, and talked with them there. Our old
friends rebelled at this, and asked what they had done to be treated so,
and complained so bitterly that gradually we let them into the secret
that there was a great south-room which I had taken for my study, where
we all sat, where the old carpet was down, where the sun shone in at the
great window, where my wife’s plants flourished and the canary-bird
sang, and my wife had her sofa in the corner, and the old brass andirons
glistened and the wood-fire crackled,—in short, a room to which all the
household fairies had emigrated.
When they once had found _that_ out, it was difficult to get any of them
to sit in our parlor. I had purposely christened the new room _my
study_, that I might stand on my rights as master of ceremonies there,
though I opened wide arms of welcome to any who chose to come. So, then,
it would often come to pass, that, when we were sitting round the fire
in my study of an evening, the girls would say,—
“Come, what do we always stay here for? Why don’t we ever sit in the
parlor?”
And then there would be manifested among guests and family-friends a
general unwillingness to move.
“O, hang it, girls!” would Arthur say; “the parlor is well enough, all
right; let it stay as it is, and let a fellow stay where he can do as he
pleases and feels at home”; and to this view of the matter would respond
divers of the nice young bachelors who were Arthur’s and Tom’s sworn
friends.
In fact, nobody wanted to stay in our parlor now. It was a cold,
correct, accomplished fact; the household fairies had left it,—and when
the fairies leave a room, nobody ever feels at home in it. No pictures,
curtains, no wealth of mirrors, no elegance of lounges, can in the least
make up for their absence. They are a capricious little set; there are
rooms where they will _not_ stay, and rooms where they _will_; but no
one can ever have a good time without them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
II.
HOME-KEEPING _vs._ HOUSE-KEEPING.
I AM a frank, open-hearted man, as, perhaps, you have by this time
perceived, and you will not, therefore, be surprised to know that I read
my last article on the carpet to my wife and the girls before I sent it
to the “Atlantic,” and we had a hearty laugh over it together. My wife
and the girls, in fact, felt that they could afford to laugh, for they
had carried their point, their reproach among women was taken away, they
had become like other folks. Like other folks they had a parlor, an
undeniable best parlor, shut up and darkened, with all proper carpets,
curtains, lounges, and marble-topped tables, too good for human nature’s
daily food; and being sustained by this consciousness, they cheerfully
went on receiving their friends in the study, and having good times in
the old free-and-easy way; for did not everybody know that this room was
not their best? and if the furniture was old-fashioned and a little the
worse for antiquity, was it not certain that they had better, which they
could use, if they would?
“And supposing we wanted to give a party,” said Jenny, “how nicely our
parlor would light up! Not that we ever do give parties, but if we
should,—and for a wedding-reception, you know.”
I felt the force of the necessity; it was evident that the four or five
hundred extra which we had expended was no more than such solemn
possibilities required.
“Now, papa thinks we have been foolish,” said Marianne, “and he has his
own way of making a good story of it; but, after all, I desire to know
if people are never to get a new carpet. Must we keep the old one till
it actually wears to tatters?”
This is a specimen of the _reductio ad absurdum_ which our fair
antagonists of the other sex are fond of employing. They strip what we
say of all delicate shadings and illusory phrases, and reduce it to some
bare question of fact, with which they make a home-thrust at us.
“Yes, that’s it; are people _never_ to get a new carpet?” echoed Jenny.
“My dears,” I replied, “it is a fact that to introduce anything new into
an apartment hallowed by many home-associations, where all things have
grown old together, requires as much care and adroitness as for an
architect to restore an arch or niche in a fine old ruin. The fault of
our carpet was that it was in another style from everything in our room,
and made everything in it look dilapidated. Its colors, material, and
air belonged to another manner of life, and were a constant plea for
alterations; and you see it actually drove out and expelled the whole
furniture of the room, and I am not sure yet that it may not entail on
us the necessity of refurnishing the whole house.”
“My dear!” said my wife, in a tone of remonstrance; but Jane and
Marianne laughed and colored.
“Confess, now,” said I, looking at them, “have you not had secret
designs on the hall- and stair-carpet?”
“Now, papa, how could you know it? I only said to Marianne that to have
Brussels in the parlor and that old mean-looking ingrain carpet in the
hall did not seem exactly the thing; and, in fact, you know, mamma,
Messrs. Ketchem & Co. showed us such a lovely pattern, designed to
harmonize with our parlor-carpet.”
“I know it, girls,” said my wife; “but you know I said at once that such
an expense was not to be thought of.”
“Now, girls,” said I, “let me tell you a story I heard once of a very
sensible old New-England minister, who lived, as our country ministers
generally do, rather near to the bone, but still quite contentedly. It
was in the days when knee-breeches and long stockings were worn, and
this good man was offered a present of a very nice pair of black silk
hose. He declined, saying, he ‘could not afford to wear them.’
“‘Not afford it?’ said the friend; ‘why, I _give_ them to you.’
“‘Exactly; but it will cost me not less than two hundred dollars to take
them, and I cannot do it.’
“‘How is that?’
“‘Why, in the first place, I shall no sooner put them on than my wife
will say, “My dear, you must have a new pair of knee-breeches,” and I
shall get them. Then my wife will say, “My dear, how shabby your coat
is! You must have a new one,” and I shall get a new coat. Then she will
say, “Now, my dear, that hat will never do,” and then I shall have a new
hat; and then I shall say, “My dear, it will never do for me to be so
fine and you to wear your old gown,” and so my wife will get a new gown;
and then the new gown will require a new shawl and a new bonnet; all of
which we shall not feel the need of, if I don’t take this pair of silk
stockings, for, as long as we don’t see them, our old things seem very
well suited to each other.’”
The girls laughed at this story, and I then added, in my most determined
manner,—
“But I must warn you, girls, that I have compromised to the utmost
extent of my power, and that I intend to plant myself on the old
stair-carpet in determined resistance. I have no mind to be forbidden
the use of the front-stairs, or condemned to get up into my bedroom by a
private ladder, as I should be immediately, if there were a new carpet
down.”
“Why, papa!”
“Would it not be so? Can the sun shine in the parlor now for fear of
fading the carpet? Can we keep a fire there for fear of making dust, or
use the lounges and sofas for fear of wearing them out? If you got a new
entry- and stair-carpet, as I said, I should have to be at the expense
of another staircase to get up to our bedroom.”
“O no, papa,” said Jane, innocently; “there are very pretty druggets,
now, for covering stair-carpets, so that they can be used without
hurting them.”
“Put one over the old carpet, then,” said I, “and our acquaintance will
never know but it is a new one.”
All the female senate laughed at this proposal, and said it sounded just
like a man.
“Well,” said I, standing up resolutely for my sex, “a man’s ideas on
woman’s matters may be worth some attention. I flatter myself that an
intelligent, educated man doesn’t think upon and observe with interest
any particular subject for years of his life without gaining some ideas
respecting it that are good for something; at all events, I have written
another article for the ‘Atlantic,’ which I will read to you.”
“Well, wait one minute, papa, till we get our work,” said the girls,
who, to say the truth, always exhibit a flattering interest in anything
their papa writes, and who have the good taste never to interrupt his
readings with any conversations in an undertone on cross-stitch and
floss-silks, as the manner of some is. Hence the little feminine bustle
of arranging all these matters beforehand. Jane, or Jenny, as I call her
in my good-natured moods, put on a fresh clear stick of hickory, of that
species denominated shagbark, which is full of most charming slivers,
burning with such a clear flame, and emitting such a delicious perfume
in burning, that I would not change it with the millionnaire who kept up
his fire with cinnamon.
You must know, my dear Mr. Atlantic, and you, my confidential friends of
the reading public, that there is a certain magic or spiritualism which
I have the knack of in regard to these mine articles, in virtue of which
my wife and daughters never hear or see the little personalities
respecting _them_ which form parts of my papers. By a peculiar
arrangement which I have made with the elves of the inkstand and the
familiar spirits of the quill, a sort of glamour falls on their eyes and
ears when I am reading, or when they read the parts personal to
themselves; otherwise their sense of feminine propriety would be shocked
at the free way in which they and their most internal affairs are
confidentially spoken of between me and you, O loving readers.
Thus, in an undertone, I tell you that my little Jenny, as she is
zealously and systematically arranging the fire, and trimly whisking
every untidy particle of ashes from the hearth, shows in every movement
of her little hands, in the cock of her head, in the knowing, observing
glance of her eye, and in all her energetic movements, that her small
person is endued and made up of the very expressed essence of
house-wifeliness,—she is the very attar, not of roses, but of
housekeeping. Care-taking and thrift and neatness are a nature to her;
she is as dainty and delicate in her person as a white cat, as
everlastingly busy as a bee; and all the most needful faculties of time,
weight, measure, and proportion ought to be fully developed in her
skull, if there is any truth in phrenology. Besides all this, she has a
sort of hard-grained little vein of common sense, against which my
fanciful conceptions and poetical notions are apt to hit with just a
little sharp grating, if they are not well put. In fact, this kind of
woman needs carefully to be idealized in the process of education, or
she will stiffen and dry, as she grows old, into a veritable household
Pharisee, a sort of domestic tyrant. She needs to be trained in artistic
values and artistic weights and measures, to study all the arts and
sciences of the beautiful, and then she is charming. Most useful, most
needful, these little women: they have the centripetal force which keeps
all the domestic planets from gyrating and frisking in unseemly
orbits,—and properly trained, they fill a house with the beauty of
order, the harmony and consistency of proportion, the melody of things
moving in time and tune, without violating the graceful appearance of
ease which Art requires.
So I had an eye to Jenny’s education in my article which I unfolded and
read, and which was entitled,
HOME-KEEPING _vs._ HOUSE-KEEPING.
There are many women who know how to keep a house, but there are
but few that know how to keep a _home_. To keep a house may seem
a complicated affair, but it is a thing that may be learned; it
lies in the region of the material, in the region of weight,
measure, color, and the positive forces of life. To keep a home
lies not merely in the sphere of all these, but it takes in the
intellectual, the social, the spiritual, the immortal.
Here the hickory-stick broke in two, and the two brands fell
controversially out and apart on the hearth, scattering the ashes and
coals, and calling for Jenny and the hearth-brush. Your wood-fire has
this foible, that it needs something to be done to it every five
minutes; but, after all, these little interruptions of our bright-faced
genius are like the piquant sallies of a clever friend,—they do not
strike us as unreasonable.
When Jenny had laid down her brush, she said,—
“Seems to me, papa, you are beginning to soar into metaphysics.”
“Everything in creation is metaphysical in its abstract terms,” said I,
with a look calculated to reduce her to a respectful condition.
“Everything has a subjective and an objective mode of presentation.”
“There papa goes with subjective and objective!” said Marianne. “For my
part, I never can remember which is which.”
“I remember,” said Jenny; “it’s what our old nurse used to call internal
and _out_-ternal,—I always remember by that.”
“Come, my dears,” said my wife, “let your father read”; so I went on as
follows:—
* * * * *
I remember in my bachelor days going with my boon companion, Bill
Carberry, to look at the house to which he was in a few weeks to
introduce his bride. Bill was a gallant, free-hearted, open-handed
fellow, the life of our whole set, and we felt that natural aversion to
losing him that bachelor friends would. How could we tell under what
strange aspects he might look forth upon us, when once he had passed
into “that undiscovered country” of matrimony? But Bill laughed to scorn
our apprehensions.
“I’ll tell you what, Chris,” he said, as he sprang cheerily up the steps
and unlocked the door of his future dwelling, “do you know what I chose
this house for? Because it’s a social-looking house. Look there, now,”
he said, as he ushered me into a pair of parlors,—“look at those long
south windows, the sun lies there nearly all day long; see what a
capital corner there is for a lounging-chair; fancy us, Chris, with our
books or our paper, spread out loose and easy, and Sophie gliding in and
out like a sunbeam. I’m getting poetical, you see. Then, did you ever
see a better, wider, airier dining-room? What capital suppers and things
we’ll have there! the nicest times,—everything free and easy, you
know,—just what I’ve always wanted a house for. I tell you, Chris, you
and Tom Innis shall have latch-keys just like mine, and there is a
capital chamber there at the head of the stairs, so that you can be free
to come and go. And here now’s the library,—fancy this full of books and
engravings from the ceiling to the floor; here you shall come just as
you please and ask no questions,—all the same as if it were your own,
you know.”
“And Sophie, what will she say to all this?”
“Why, you know Sophie is a prime friend to both of you, and a capital
girl to keep things going. O, Sophie ’ll make a house of this, you may
depend!”
A day or two after, Bill dragged me stumbling over boxes and through
straw and wrappings to show me the glories of the parlor-furniture,—with
which he seemed pleased as a child with a new toy.
“Look here,” he said; “see these chairs, garnet-colored satin, with a
pattern on each; well, the sofa’s just like them, and the curtains to
match, and the carpets made for the floor with centre-pieces and
borders. I never saw anything more magnificent in my life. Sophie’s
governor furnishes the house, and everything is to be A No. 1, and all
that, you see. Messrs. Curtain and Collamore are coming to make the
rooms up, and her mother is busy as a bee getting us in order.”
“Why, Bill,” said I, “you are going to be lodged like a prince. I hope
you’ll be able to keep it up; but law-business comes in rather slowly at
first, old fellow.”
“Well, you know it isn’t the way I should furnish, if my capital was the
one to cash the bills; but then, you see, Sophie’s people do it, and let
them,—a girl doesn’t want to come down out of the style she has always
lived in.”
I said nothing, but had an oppressive presentiment that social freedom
would expire in that house, crushed under a weight of upholstery.
But there came in due time the wedding and the wedding-reception, and we
all went to see Bill in his new house splendidly lighted up and complete
from top to toe, and everybody said what a lucky fellow he was; but that
was about the end of it, so far as our visiting was concerned. The
running in, and dropping in, and keeping latch-keys, and making informal
calls, that had been forespoken, seemed about as likely as if Bill had
lodged in the Tuileries.
Sophie, who had always been one of your snapping, sparkling, busy sort
of girls, began at once to develop her womanhood, and show her
principles, and was as different from her former self as your careworn,
mousing old cat is from your rollicking, frisky kitten. Not but that
Sophie was a good girl. She had a capital heart, a good, true womanly
one, and was loving and obliging; but still she was one of the
desperately painstaking, conscientious sort of women whose very blood,
as they grow older, is devoured with anxiety, and she came of a race of
women in whom housekeeping was more than an art or a science,—it was, so
to speak, a religion. Sophie’s mother, aunts, and grandmothers, for
nameless generations back, were known and celebrated housekeepers. They
might have been genuine descendants of the inhabitants of that Hollandic
town of Broeck, celebrated by Washington Irving, where the cows’ tails
are kept tied up with unsullied blue ribbons, and the ends of the
firewood are painted white. He relates how a celebrated preacher,
visiting this town, found it impossible to draw these housewives from
their earthly views and employments, until he took to preaching on the
_neatness_ of the celestial city, the unsullied crystal of its walls and
the polish of its golden pavement, when the faces of all the housewives
were set Zionward at once.
Now this solemn and earnest view of housekeeping is onerous enough when
a poor girl first enters on the care of a moderately furnished house,
where the articles are not too expensive to be reasonably renewed as
time and use wear them; but it is infinitely worse when a cataract of
splendid furniture is heaped upon her care,—when splendid crystals cut
into her conscience, and mirrors reflect her duties, and moth and rust
stand ever ready to devour and sully in every room and passage-way.
Sophie was solemnly warned and instructed by all the mothers and
aunts,—she was warned of moths, warned of cockroaches, warned of flies,
warned of dust; all the articles of furniture had their covers, made of
cold Holland linen, in which they looked like bodies laid out,—even the
curtain-tassels had each its little shroud,—and bundles of receipts and
of rites and ceremonies necessary for the preservation and purification
and care of all these articles were stuffed into the poor girl’s head,
before guiltless of cares as the feathers that floated above it.