wife keeps house, is not always, or of course, a home. What is it, then,
that makes a home? All men and women have the indefinite knowledge of
what they want and long for when that word is spoken. “Home!” sighs the
disconsolate bachelor, tired of boarding-house fare and buttonless
shirts. “Home!” says the wanderer in foreign lands, and thinks of
mother’s love, of wife and sister and child. Nay, the word has in it a
higher meaning, hallowed by religion; and when the Christian would
express the highest of his hopes for a better life, he speaks of his
_home_ beyond the grave. The word home has in it the elements of love,
rest, permanency, and liberty; but besides these it has in it the idea
of an education by which all that is purest within us is developed into
nobler forms, fit for a higher life. The little child by the
home-fireside was taken on the Master’s knee when he would explain to
his disciples the mysteries of the kingdom.
Of so great dignity and worth is this holy and sacred thing, that the
power to create a HOME ought to be ranked above all creative faculties.
The sculptor who brings out the breathing statue from cold marble, the
painter who warms the canvas into a deathless glow of beauty, the
architect who built cathedrals and hung the world-like dome of St.
Peter’s in mid-air, is not to be compared, in sanctity and worthiness,
to the humblest artist, who, out of the poor materials afforded by this
shifting, changing, selfish world, creates the secure Eden of a _home_.
A true home should be called the noblest work of art possible to human
creatures, inasmuch as it is the very image chosen to represent the last
and highest rest of the soul, the consummation of man’s blessedness.
Not without reason does the oldest Christian church require of those
entering on marriage the most solemn review of all the past life, the
confession and repentance of every sin of thought, word, and deed, and
the reception of the holy sacrament; for thus the man and woman who
approach the august duty of creating a home are reminded of the sanctity
and beauty of what they undertake.
In this art of home-making I have set down in my mind certain first
principles, like the axioms of Euclid, and the first is,—
_No home is possible without love._
All business marriages and marriages of convenience, all mere culinary
marriages and marriages of mere animal passion, make the creation of a
true home impossible in the outset. Love is the jewelled foundation of
this New Jerusalem descending from God out of heaven, and takes as many
bright forms as the amethyst, topaz, and sapphire of that mysterious
vision. In this range of creative art all things are possible to him
that loveth, but without love nothing is possible.
We hear of most convenient marriages in foreign lands, which may better
be described as commercial partnerships. The money on each side is
counted; there is enough between the parties to carry on the firm, each
having the appropriate sum allotted to each. No love is pretended, but
there is great politeness. All is so legally and thoroughly arranged,
that there seems to be nothing left for future quarrels to fasten on.
Monsieur and Madame have each their apartments, their carriages, their
servants, their income, their friends, their pursuits,—understand the
solemn vows of marriage to mean simply that they are to treat each other
with urbanity in those few situations where the path of life must
necessarily bring them together.
We are sorry that such an idea of marriage should be gaining foothold in
America. It has its root in an ignoble view of life,—an utter and pagan
darkness as to all that man and woman are called to do in that highest
relation where they act as one. It is a mean and low contrivance on both
sides, by which all the grand work of home-building, all the noble pains
and heroic toils of home-education,—that education where the parents
learn more than they teach,—shall be (let us use the expressive Yankee
idiom) _shirked_.
It is a curious fact that in those countries where this system of
marriages is the general rule there is no word corresponding to our
English word _home_. In many polite languages of Europe it would be
impossible neatly to translate the sentiment with which we began this
essay, that a man’s _house_ is not always his _home_.
Let any one try to render the song, “Sweet Home,” into French, and one
finds how Anglo-Saxon is the very genius of the word. The structure of
life, in all its relations, in countries where marriages are matter of
arrangement, and not of love, excludes the idea of home.
How does life run in such countries? The girl is recalled from her
convent or boarding-school, and told that her father has found a husband
for her. No objection on her part is contemplated or provided for; none
generally occurs, for the child is only too happy to obtain the fine
clothes and the liberty which she has been taught come only with
marriage. Be the man handsome or homely, interesting or stupid, still he
brings these.
How intolerable such a marriage! we say, with the close intimacies of
Anglo-Saxon life in our minds. They are not intolerable, because they
are provided for by arrangements which make it possible for each to go
his or her several way, seeing very little of the other. The son or
daughter, which in due time makes its appearance in this _menage_, is
sent out to nurse in infancy, sent to boarding-school in youth, and in
maturity portioned and married, to repeat the same process for another
generation. Meanwhile, father and mother keep a quiet establishment, and
pursue their several pleasures. Such is the system.
Houses built for this kind of life become mere sets of reception-rooms,
such as are the greater proportion of apartments to let in Paris, where
a hearty English or American family, with their children about them,
could scarcely find room to establish themselves. Individual character,
it is true, does something to modify this programme. There are charming
homes in France and Italy, where warm and noble natures, thrown
together, perhaps, by accident, or mated by wise paternal choice, infuse
warmth into the coldness of the system under which they live. There are
in all states of society some of such domesticity of nature that they
will create a home around themselves under any circumstances, however
barren. Besides, so kindly is human nature, that Love uninvited before
marriage, often becomes a guest after, and with Love always comes a
home.
My next axiom is,—
_There can be no true home without liberty._
The very idea of home is of a retreat where we shall be free to act out
personal and individual tastes and peculiarities, as we cannot do before
the wide world. We are to have our meals at what hour we will, served in
what style suits us. Our hours of going and coming are to be as we
please. Our favorite haunts are to be here or there, our pictures and
books so disposed as seems to us good, and our whole arrangements the
expression, so far as our means can compass it, of our own personal
ideas of what is pleasant and desirable in life. This element of
liberty, if we think of it, is the chief charm of home. “Here I can do
as I please,” is the thought with which the tempest-tossed earth-pilgrim
blesses himself or herself, turning inward from the crowded ways of the
world. This thought blesses the man of business, as he turns from his
day’s care, and crosses the sacred threshold. It is as restful to him as
the slippers and gown and easy-chair by the fireside. Everybody
understands him here. Everybody is well content that he should take his
ease in his own way. Such is the case in the _ideal_ home. That such is
not always the case in the real home comes often from the mistakes in
the house-furnishing. Much house-furnishing is _too fine_ for liberty.
In America there is no such thing as rank and station which impose a
sort of prescriptive style on people of certain income. The consequence
is that all sorts of furniture and belongings, which in the Old World
have a recognized relation to certain possibilities of income, and which
require certain other accessories to make them in good keeping, are
thrown in the way of all sorts of people.
Young people who cannot expect by any reasonable possibility to keep
more than two or three servants, if they happen to have the means in the
outset, furnish a house with just such articles as in England would suit
an establishment of sixteen. We have seen houses in England having two
or three house-maids, and tables served by a butler and two waiters,
where the furniture, carpets, china, crystal, and silver were in one and
the same style with some establishments in America where the family was
hard pressed to keep three Irish servants.
This want of servants is the one thing that must modify everything in
American life; it is, and will long continue to be, a leading feature in
the life of a country so rich in openings for man and woman that
domestic service can be only the stepping-stone to something higher.
Nevertheless, we Americans are great travellers; we are sensitive,
appreciative, fond of novelty, apt to receive and incorporate into our
own life what seems fair and graceful in that of other people. Our
women’s wardrobes are made elaborate with the thousand elegancies of
French toilet,—our houses filled with a thousand knick-knacks of which
our plain ancestors never dreamed. Cleopatra did not set sail on the
Nile in more state and beauty than that in which our young American
bride is often ushered into her new home. Her wardrobe all gossamer lace
and quaint frill and crimp and embroidery, her house a museum of elegant
and costly gewgaws; and amid the whole collection of elegancies and
fragilities, she, perhaps, the frailest.
Then comes the tug of war. The young wife becomes a mother, and while
she is retired to her chamber, blundering Biddy rusts the elegant
knives, or takes off the ivory handles by soaking in hot water,—the
silver is washed in greasy soap-suds, and refreshed now and then with a
thump, which cocks the nose of the teapot awry, or makes the handle
assume an air of drunken defiance. The fragile China is chipped here and
there around its edges with those minute gaps so vexatious to a woman’s
soul; the handles fly hither and thither in the wild confusion of
Biddy’s washing-day hurry, when cook wants her to help hang out the
clothes. Meanwhile, Bridget sweeps the parlor with a hard broom, and
shakes out showers of ashes from the grate, forgetting to cover the
damask lounges, and they directly look as rusty and time-worn as if they
had come from an auction-store; and all together unite in making such
havoc of the delicate ruffles and laces of the bridal outfit and
baby-_layette_, that, when the poor young wife comes out of her chamber
after her nurse has left her, and, weakened and embarrassed with the
demands of the new-comer, begins to look once more into the affairs of
her little world, she is ready to sink with vexation and discouragement.
Poor little princess. Her clothes are made as princesses wear them, her
baby’s clothes like a young duke’s, her house furnished like a lord’s,
and only Bridget and Biddy and Polly to do the work of cook,
scullery-maid, butler, footman, laundress, nursery-maid, house-maid, and
lady’s maid. Such is the array that in the Old Country would be deemed
necessary to take care of an establishment got up like hers. Everything
in it is _too fine_,—not too fine to be pretty, not in bad taste in
itself, but too fine for the situation, too fine for comfort or liberty.
What ensues in a house so furnished? Too often ceaseless fretting of the
nerves, in the wife’s despairing, conscientious efforts to keep things
as they should be. There is no freedom in a house where things are too
expensive and choice to be freely handled and easily replaced. Life
becomes a series of petty embarrassments and restrictions, something is
always going wrong, and the man finds his fireside oppressive,—the
various articles of his parlor and table seem like so many temper-traps
and spring-guns, menacing explosion and disaster.
There may be, indeed, the most perfect home-feeling, the utmost
coseyness and restfulness, in apartments crusted with gilding, carpeted
with velvet, and upholstered with satin. I have seen such, where the
home-like look and air of free use was as genuine as in a Western
log-cabin; but this was in a range of princely income that made all
these things as easy to be obtained or replaced as the most ordinary of
our domestic furniture. But so long as articles must be shrouded from
use, or used with fear and trembling, because their cost is above the
general level of our means, we had better be without them, even though
the most lucky of accidents may put their possession in our power.
But it is not merely by the effort to maintain too much elegance that
the sense of home-liberty is banished from a house. It is sometimes
expelled in another way, with all painstaking and conscientious
strictness, by the worthiest and best of human beings, the blessed
followers of Saint Martha. Have we not known them, the dear, worthy
creatures, up before daylight, causing most scrupulous lustrations of
every pane of glass and inch of paint in our parlors, in consequence
whereof every shutter and blind must be kept closed for days to come,
lest the flies should speck the freshly washed windows and wainscoting?
Dear shade of Aunt Mehitabel, forgive our boldness? Have we not been
driven for days, in our youth, to read our newspaper in the front
veranda, in the kitchen, out in the barn,—anywhere, in fact, where
sunshine could be found, because there was not a room in the house that
was not cleaned, shut up, and darkened? Have we not shivered with cold,
all the glowering, gloomy month of May, because the august front-parlor
having undergone the spring-cleaning, the andirons were snugly tied up
in the tissue-paper, and an elegant frill of the same material was
trembling before the mouth of the once glowing fireplace? Even so, dear
soul, full of loving-kindness and hospitality as thou wast, yet ever
making our house seem like a tomb! And with what patience wouldst thou
sit sewing by a crack in the shutters, an inch wide, rejoicing in thy
immaculate paint and clear glass! But was there ever a thing of thy
spotless and unsullied belongings which a boy might use? How I trembled
to touch thy scoured tins, that hung in appalling brightness! with what
awe I asked for a basket to pick strawberries! and where in the house
could I find a place to eat a piece of gingerbread? How like a ruffian,
a Tartar, a pirate, I always felt, when I entered thy domains! and how,
from day to day, I wondered at the immeasurable depths of depravity
which were always leading me to upset something, or break or tear or
derange something, in thy exquisitely kept premises! Somehow, the
impression was burned with overpowering force into my mind, that houses
and furniture, scrubbed floors, white curtains, bright tins and brasses
were the great, awful, permanent facts of existence,—and that men and
women, and particularly children, were the meddlesome intruders upon
this divine order, every trace of whose inter-meddling must be scrubbed
out and obliterated in the quickest way possible. It seemed evident to
me that houses would be far more perfect, if nobody lived in them at
all; but that, as men had really and absurdly taken to living in them,
they must live as little as possible. My only idea of a house was a
place full of traps and pitfalls for boys, a deadly temptation to sins
which beset one every moment; and when I read about a sailor’s free life
on the ocean, I felt an untold longing to go forth and be free in like
manner.
But a truce to these fancies, and back again to our essay.
If liberty in a house is a comfort to a husband, it is a necessity to
children. When we say liberty, we do not mean license. We do not mean
that Master Johnny be allowed to handle elegant volumes with
bread-and-butter fingers, or that little Miss be suffered to drum on the
piano, or practise line-drawing with a pin on varnished furniture. Still
it is essential that the family-parlors be not too fine for the family
to sit in,—too fine for the ordinary accidents, haps and mishaps, of
reasonably well-trained children. The elegance of the parlor where papa
and mamma sit and receive their friends should wear an inviting, not a
hostile and bristling, aspect to little people. Its beauty and its order
gradually form in the little mind a love of beauty and order, and the
insensible carefulness of regard.
Nothing is worse for a child than to shut him up in a room which he
understands is his, _because_ he is disorderly,—where he is expected, of
course, to maintain and keep disorder. We have sometimes pitied the poor
little victims who show their faces longingly at the doors of elegant
parlors, and are forthwith collared by the domestic police and consigned
to some attic-apartment, called a play-room, where chaos continually
reigns. It is a mistake to suppose, because children derange a
well-furnished apartment, that they like confusion. Order and beauty are
always pleasant to them as to grown people, and disorder and defacement
are painful; but they know neither how to create the one nor to prevent
the other,—their little lives are a series of experiments, often making
disorder by aiming at some new form of order. Yet, for all this, I am
not one of those who feel that in a family everything should bend to the
sway of these little people. They are the worst of tyrants in such
houses,—still, where children are, though the fact must not appear to
them, _nothing must be done without a wise thought of them_.
Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, “_Ars est celare
artem_.” Children who are taught too plainly by every anxious look and
word of their parents, by every family arrangement, by the impressment
of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider
their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow
up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. The stars
cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal improvement, and the
sooner children learn this, the better. The great art is to organize a
home which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous movement, where
the little people shall act themselves out as freely and impulsively as
can consist with the comfort of the whole, and where the anxious
watching and planning for them shall be kept as secret from them as
possible.
It is well that one of the sunniest and airiest rooms in the house be
the children’s nursery. It is good philosophy, too, to furnish it
attractively, even if the sum expended lower the standard of
parlor-luxuries. It is well that the children’s chamber, which is to act
constantly on their impressible natures for years, should command a
better prospect, a sunnier aspect, than one which serves for a day’s
occupancy of the transient guest. It is well that journeys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children,—that guests
should be invited with a view to their improvement,—that some intimacies
should be chosen and some rejected on their account. But it is _not_
well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out before the
child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere where
everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with reference
to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect combined with real
care and never-ceasing watchfulness has often seemed to do wonders in
this work of setting human beings on their own feet for the
life-journey.
Education is the highest object of home, but education in the widest
sense,—education of the parents no less than of the children. In a true
home the man and the woman receive, through their cares, their
watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and highest finish
that earth can put upon them. From that they must pass upward, for earth
can teach them no more.
The home-education is incomplete, unless it include the idea of
hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a Biblical and apostolic virtue,
and not so often recommended in Holy Writ without reason. Hospitality is
much neglected in America for the very reasons touched upon above. We
have received our ideas of propriety and elegance of living from old
countries, where labor is cheap, where domestic service is a
well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted cheerfully for life, and
where of course there is such a subdivision of labor as insures great
thoroughness in all its branches. We are ashamed or afraid to conform
honestly and hardily to a state of things purely American. We have not
yet accomplished what our friend the Doctor calls “our weaning,” and
learned that dinners with circuitous courses and divers other
Continental and English refinements, well enough in their way, cannot be
accomplished in families with two or three untrained servants, without
an expense of care and anxiety which makes them heart-withering to the
delicate wife, and too severe a trial to occur often. America is the
land of subdivided fortunes, of a general average of wealth and comfort,
and there ought to be, therefore, an understanding in the social basis
far more simple than in the Old World.
Many families of small fortunes know this,—they are quietly living
so,—but they have not the steadiness to share their daily average living
with a friend, a traveller, or guest, just as the Arab shares his tent
and the Indian his bowl of succotash. They cannot have company, they
say. Why? Because it is such a fuss to get out the best things, and then
to put them back again. But why get out the best things? Why not give
your friend, what he would like a thousand times better, a bit of your
average home-life, a seat at any time at your board, a seat at your
fire? If he sees that there is a handle off your teacup, and that there
is a crack across one of your plates, he only thinks, with a sigh of
relief, “Well, mine aren’t the only things that meet with accidents,”
and he feels nearer to you ever after; he will let you come to his table
and see the cracks in his teacups, and you will condole with each other
on the transient nature of earthly possessions. If it become apparent in
these entirely undressed rehearsals that your children are sometimes
disorderly, and that your cook sometimes overdoes the meat, and that
your second girl sometimes is awkward in waiting, or has forgotten a
table propriety, your friend only feels, “Ah, well, other people have
trials as well as I,” and he thinks, if you come to see him, he shall
feel, easy with you.
“_Having company_” is an expense that may always be felt; but easy daily
hospitality, the plate always on your table for a friend, is an expense
that appears on no account-book, and a pleasure that is daily and
constant.