Axminster. I admit that more beautiful effects can be found in those
goods than in the humbler fabrics of the carpet-rooms. Nothing would
delight me more than to put an unlimited credit to Marianne’s account,
and let her work out the problems of harmonious color in velvet and
damask. All I have to say is, that certain unities of color, certain
general arrangements, will secure very nearly as good general effects in
either material. A library with a neat, mossy green carpet on the floor,
harmonizing with wall-paper and furniture, looks generally as well,
whether the mossy green is made in Brussels or in ingrain. In the
carpet-stores, these two materials stand side by side in the very same
pattern, and one is often as good for the purpose as the other. A lady
of my acquaintance, some years since, employed an artist to decorate her
parlors. The walls being frescoed and tinted to suit his ideal, he
immediately issued his decree that her splendid velvet carpets must be
sent to auction, and others bought of certain colors, harmonizing with
the walls. Unable to find exactly the color and pattern he wanted, he at
last had the carpets woven in a neighboring factory, where, as yet, they
had only the art of weaving ingrains. Thus was the material sacrificed
at once to the harmony.”
I remarked, in passing, that this was before Bigelow’s mechanical genius
had unlocked for America the higher secrets of carpet-weaving, and made
it possible to have one’s desires accomplished in Brussels or velvet. In
those days, English carpet-weavers did not send to America for their
looms, as they now do.
“But now to return to my analysis of John’s rooms.
“Another thing which goes a great way towards giving them their
agreeable air is the books in them. Some people are fond of treating
books as others do children. One room in the house is selected, and
every book driven into it and kept there. Yet nothing makes a room so
home-like, so companionable, and gives it such an air of refinement, as
the presence of books. They change the aspect of a parlor from that of a
mere reception-room, where visitors perch for a transient call, and give
it the air of a room where one feels like taking off one’s things to
stay. It gives the appearance of permanence and repose and quiet
fellowship; and next to pictures on the walls, the many-colored bindings
and gildings of books are the most agreeable adornment of a room.”
“Then, Marianne,” said Bob, “we have something to start with, at all
events. There are my English Classics and English Poets, and my uniform
editions of Scott and Thackeray and Macaulay and Prescott and Irving and
Longfellow and Lowell and Hawthorne and Holmes and a host more. We
really have something pretty there.”
“You are a lucky girl,” I said, “to have so much secured. A girl brought
up in a house full of books, always able to turn to this or that author
and look for any passage or poem when she thinks of it, doesn’t know
what a blank a house without books might be.”
“Well,” said Marianne, “mamma and I were counting over my treasures the
other day. Do you know, I have one really fine old engraving, that Bob
says is quite a genuine thing; and then there is that pencil-sketch that
poor Schöne made for me the month before he died,—it is truly artistic.”
“And I have a couple of capital things of Landseer’s,” said Bob.
“There’s no danger that your rooms will not be pretty,” said I, “now you
are fairly on the right track.”
“But, papa,” said Marianne, “I am troubled about one thing. My love of
beauty runs into everything. I want pretty things for my table,—and yet,
as you say, servants are so careless, one cannot use such things freely
without great waste.”
“For my part,” said my wife, “I believe in best china, to be kept
carefully on an upper-shelf, and taken down for high-days and holidays;
it may be a superstition, but I believe in it. It must never be taken
out except when the mistress herself can see that it is safely cared
for. My mother always washed her china herself; and it was a very pretty
social ceremony, after tea was over, while she sat among us washing her
pretty cups, and wiping them on a fine damask towel.”
“With all my heart,” said I; “have your best china, and venerate it,—it
is one of the loveliest of domestic superstitions; only do not make it a
bar to hospitality, and shrink from having a friend to tea with you,
unless you feel equal to getting up to the high shelf where you keep it,
getting it down, washing, and putting it up again.
“But in serving a table, I say, as I said of a house, beauty is a
necessity, and beauty is cheap. Because you cannot afford beauty in one
form, it does not follow that you cannot have it in another. Because one
cannot afford to keep up a perennial supply of delicate china and
crystal, subject to the accidents of raw, untrained servants, it does
not follow that the every-day table need present a sordid assortment of
articles chosen simply for cheapness, while the whole capacity of the
purse is given to the set forever locked away for state-occasions.
“A table-service, all of simple white, of graceful forms, even though
not of china, if arranged with care, with snowy, well-kept table-linen,
clear glasses, and bright American plate in place of solid silver, may
be made to look inviting; add a glass of flowers every day, and your
table may look pretty;—and it is far more important that it should look
pretty for the family every day than for company once in two weeks.”
“I tell my girls,” said my wife, “as the result of my experience, you
may have your pretty china and your lovely fanciful articles for the
table only so long as you can take all the care of them yourselves. As
soon as you get tired of doing this, and put them into the hands of the
trustiest servants, some good, well-meaning creature is sure to break
her heart and your own and your very pet darling china pitcher all in
one and the same minute; and then her frantic despair leaves you not
even the relief of scolding.”
“I have become perfectly sure,” said I, “that there are spiteful little
brownies, intent on seducing good women to sin, who mount guard over the
special idols of the china-closet. If you hear a crash, and a loud Irish
wail from the inner depths, you never think of its being a yellow
pie-plate, or that dreadful one-handled tureen that you have been
wishing were broken these five years; no, indeed,—it is sure to be the
lovely painted china bowl, wreathed with morning-glories and sweet-peas,
or the engraved glass goblet, with quaint old-English initials. China
sacrificed must be a great means of saintship to women. Pope, I think,
puts it as the crowning grace of his perfect woman, that she is
‘Mistress of herself, though china fall.’”
“I ought to be a saint by this time, then,” said mamma; “for in the
course of my days I have lost so many idols by breakage, and peculiar
accidents that seemed by a special fatality to befall my prettiest and
most irreplaceable things, that in fact it has come to be a
superstitious feeling now with which I regard anything particularly
pretty of a breakable nature.”
“Well,” said Marianne, “unless one has a great deal of money, it seems
to me that the investment in these pretty fragilities is rather a poor
one.”
“Yet,” said I, “the principle of beauty is never so captivating as when
it presides over the hour of daily meals. I would have the room where
they are served one of the pleasantest and sunniest in the house. I
would have its coloring cheerful, and there should be companionable
pictures and engravings on the walls. Of all things, I dislike a room
that seems to be kept like a restaurant, merely to eat in. I like to see
in a dining-room something that betokens a pleasant sitting-room at
other hours. I like there some books, a comfortable sofa or lounge, and
all that should make it cosey and inviting. The custom in some families,
of adopting for the daily meals one of the two parlors which a
city-house furnishes has often seemed to me a particularly happy one.
You take your meals, then, in an agreeable place, surrounded by the
little pleasant arrangements of your daily sitting-room; and after the
meal, if the lady of the house does the honors of her own pretty china
herself, the office may be a pleasant and social one.
“But in regard to your table-service I have my advice at hand. Invest in
pretty table-linen, in delicate napkins, have your vase of flowers, and
be guided by the eye of taste in the choice and arrangement of even the
every-day table-articles, and have no ugly things when you can have
pretty ones by taking a little thought. If you are sore tempted with
lovely china and crystal, too fragile to last, too expensive to be
renewed, turn away to a print-shop and comfort yourself by hanging
around the walls of your dining-room beauty that will not break or fade,
that will meet your eye from year to year, though plates, tumblers, and
tea-sets successively vanish. There is my advice for you, Marianne.”
At the same time, let me say, in parenthesis, that my wife, whose
weakness is china, informed me that night, when we were by ourselves,
that she was ordering secretly a tea-set as a bridal gift for Marianne,
every cup of which was to be exquisitely painted with the wild-flowers
of America, from designs of her own,—a thing, by the by, that can now be
very nicely executed in our country, as one may find by looking in at
our friend Briggs’s on School Street. “It will last her all her life,”
she said, “and always be such a pleasure to look at,—and a pretty
tea-table is such a pretty sight!” So spoke Mrs. Crowfield, “unweaned
from china by a thousand falls.” She spoke even with tears in her eyes.
Verily, these women are harps of a thousand strings!
But to return to my subject.
“Finally and lastly,” I said, “in my analysis and explication of the
agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,—their
_homeliness_. By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to
be used, but the air that is given to a room by being _really_ at home
in it. Not the most skilful arrangement can impart this charm.
“It is said that a king of France once remarked,—‘My son, you must seem
to love your people.’
“‘Father, how shall I _seem_ to love them?’
“‘My son, you _must_ love them.’
“So to make rooms _seem_ home-like you must be at home in them. Human
light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that
they are never used, that you can never be at ease there. In vain the
house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in
vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the
centre-table.
“Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really
been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a
sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live
and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from
a wax image.
“Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one
grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current.
You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into the family,
and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at a distance in
some outer court of the gentiles.
“How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of
their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they
lived in Kamtschatka! And why? Because the room which they call a
front-parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know. They sit in
a back-room,—work, talk, read, perhaps. After the servant has let you in
and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting for them
to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what they may be
doing. From some distant region, the laugh of a child, the song of a
canary-bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily to. Do they love
plants? Do they write letters, sew, embroider, crochet? Do they ever
romp and frolic? What books do they read? Do they sketch or paint? Of
all these possibilities the mute and muffled room says nothing. A sofa
and six chairs, two ottomans fresh from the upholsterer’s, a Brussels
carpet, a centre-table with four gilt Books of Beauty on it, a
mantel-clock from Paris, and two bronze vases,—all these tell you only
in frigid tones, ‘This is the best room,’—only that, and nothing
more,—and soon _she_ trips in in her best clothes, and apologizes for
keeping you waiting, asks how your mother is, and you remark that it is
a pleasant day,—and thus the acquaintance progresses from year to year.
One hour in the little back-room, where the plants and canary-bird and
children are, might have made you fast friends for life; but as it is,
you care no more for them than for the gilt clock on the mantel.
“And now, girls,” said I, pulling a paper out of my pocket, “you must
know that your father is getting to be famous by means of these ‘House
and Home Papers.’ Here is a letter I have just received:—
“‘MOST EXCELLENT MR. CROWFIELD,—Your thoughts have lighted into
our family-circle, and echoed from our fireside. We all feel the
force of them, and are delighted with the felicity of your
treatment of the topic you have chosen. You have taken hold of a
subject that lies deep in our hearts, in a genial, temperate,
and convincing spirit. All must acknowledge the power of your
sentiments upon their imaginations;—if they could only trust to
them in actual life! There is the rub.
“‘Omitting further upon these points, there is a special feature
of your articles upon which we wish to address you. You seem as
yet (we do not know, of course, what you may hereafter do) to
speak only of homes whose conduct depends upon the help of
servants. Now your principles apply, as some of us well
conceive, to nearly all classes of society; yet most people, to
take an impressive hint, must have their portraits drawn out
more exactly. We therefore hope that you will give a reasonable
share of your attention to us who do not employ servants, so
that you may ease us of some of _our_ burdens, which, in spite
of common sense, we dare not throw off. For instance, we have
company,—a friend from afar, (perhaps wealthy,) or a minister,
or some other man of note. What do we do? Sit down and receive
our visitor with all good-will and the freedom of a home? No; we
(the lady of the house) flutter about to clear up things,
apologizing about this, that, and the other condition of
unpreparedness, and, having settled the visitor in the parlor,
set about marshalling the elements of a grand dinner or supper,
such as no person but a gourmand wants to sit down to, when at
home and comfortable; and in getting up this meal, clearing
away, and washing the dishes, we use up a good half of the time
which our guest spends with us. We have spread ourselves, and
shown him what we could do; but what a paltry, heart-sickening
achievement! Now, good Mr. Crowfield, thou friend of the robbed
and despairing, wilt thou not descend into our purgatorial
circle, and tell the world what thou hast seen there of doleful
remembrance? Tell us how we, who must do and desire to do our
own work, can show forth in our homes a homely, yet genial
hospitality, and entertain our guests without making a fuss and
hurly-burly, and seeming to be anxious for their sake about many
things, and spending too much time getting meals, as if eating
were the chief social pleasure. _Won’t_ you do this, Mr.
Crowfield?
“‘Yours beseechingly,
“R. H. A.’”
“That’s a good letter,” said Jenny.
“To be sure it is,” said I.
“And shall you answer it, papa?”
“In the very next ‘Atlantic,’ you may be sure I shall. The class that do
their own work are the strongest, the most numerous, and, taking one
thing with another, quite as well cultivated a class as any other. They
are the anomaly of our country,—the distinctive feature of the new
society that we are building up here; and if we are to accomplish our
national destiny, that class must increase rather than diminish. I shall
certainly do my best to answer the very sensible and pregnant questions
of that letter.”
Here Marianne shivered and drew up a shawl, and Jenny gaped; my wife
folded up the garment in which she had set the last stitch, and the
clock struck twelve.
Bob gave a low whistle. “Who knew it was so late?”
“We have talked the fire fairly out,” said Jenny.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
VI.
THE LADY WHO DOES HER OWN WORK.
“MY dear Chris,” said my wife, “isn’t it time to be writing the next
‘House and Home Paper’?”
I was lying back in my study-chair, with my heels luxuriously propped on
an ottoman, reading for the two-hundredth time Hawthorne’s “Mosses from
an Old Manse,” or his “Twice-Told Tales,” I forget which,—I only know
that these books constitute my cloud-land, where I love to sail away in
dreamy quietude, forgetting the war, the price of coal and flour, the
rates of exchange, and the rise and fall of gold. What do all these
things matter, as seen from those enchanted gardens in Padua where the
weird Rappaccini tends his enchanted plants, and his gorgeous daughter
fills us with the light and magic of her presence, and saddens us with
the shadowy allegoric mystery of her preternatural destiny? But my wife
represents the positive forces of time, place, and number in our family,
and, having also a chronological head, she knows the day of the month,
and therefore gently reminded me that by inevitable dates the time drew
near for preparing my—which is it now, May or June number?
“Well, my dear, you are right,” I said, as by an exertion I came
head-uppermost, and laid down the fascinating volume. “Let me see, what
was I to write about?”
“Why, you remember you were to answer that letter from the lady who does
her own work.”
“Enough!” said I, seizing the pen with alacrity; “you have hit the exact
phrase:—
“‘The _lady_ who _does her own work_.’”
* * * * *
America is the only country where such a title is possible,—the only
country where there is a class of women who may be described as _ladies_
who do their own work. By a lady we mean a woman of education,
cultivation, and refinement, of liberal tastes and ideas, who, without
any very material additions or changes, would be recognized as a lady in
any circle of the Old World or the New.
What I have said is, that the existence of such a class is a fact
peculiar to American society, a clear, plain result of the new
principles involved in the doctrine of universal equality.
When the colonists first came to this country, of however mixed
ingredients their ranks might have been composed, and however imbued
with the spirit of feudal and aristocratic ideas, the discipline of the
wilderness soon brought them to a democratic level; the gentleman felled
the wood for his log-cabin side by side with the ploughman, and thews
and sinews rose in the market. “A man was deemed honorable in proportion
as he lifted his hand upon the high trees of the forest.” So in the
interior domestic circle. Mistress and maid, living in a log-cabin
together, became companions, and sometimes the maid, as the more
accomplished and stronger, took precedence of the mistress. It became
natural and unavoidable that children should begin to work as early as
they were capable of it. The result was a generation of intelligent
people brought up to labor from necessity, but turning on the problem of
labor the acuteness of a disciplined brain. The mistress, out-done in
sinews and muscles by her maid, kept her superiority by skill and
contrivance. If she could not lift a pail of water, she could invent
methods which made lifting the pail unnecessary,—if she could not take a
hundred steps without weariness, she could make twenty answer the
purpose of a hundred.
Slavery, it is true, was to some extent introduced into New England, but
it never suited the genius of the people, never struck deep root, or
spread so as to choke the good seed of self-helpfulness. Many were
opposed to it from conscientious principle,—many from far-sighted
thrift, and from a love of thoroughness and well-doing which despised
the rude, unskilled work of barbarians. People, having once felt the
thorough neatness and beauty of execution which came of free, educated,
and thoughtful labor, could not tolerate the clumsiness of slavery. Thus
it came to pass that for many years the rural population of New England,
as a general rule, did their own work, both out doors and in. If there
were a black man or black woman or bound girl, they were emphatically
only the _helps_, following humbly the steps of master and mistress, and
used by them as instruments of lightening certain portions of their
toil. The master and mistress with their children were the head workers.
Great merriment has been excited in the Old Country, because years ago
the first English travellers found that the class of persons by them
denominated servants were in America denominated _help_ or helpers. But
the term was the very best exponent of the state of society. There were
few servants, in the European sense of the word; there was a society of
educated workers, where all were practically equal, and where, if there
was a deficiency in one family and an excess in another, a _helper_, not
a servant, was hired. Mrs. Browne, who has six sons and no daughters,
enters into agreement with Mrs. Jones, who has six daughters and no
sons. She borrows a daughter, and pays her good wages to help in her
domestic toil, and sends a son to help the labors of Mr. Jones. These
two young people go into the families in which they are to be employed
in all respects as equals and companions, and so the work of the
community is equalized. Hence arose, and for many years continued, a
state of society more nearly solving than any other ever did the problem
of combining the highest culture of the mind with the highest culture of
the muscles and the physical faculties.
Then were to be seen families of daughters, handsome, strong females,
rising each day to their in-door work with cheerful alertness,—one to
sweep the room, another to make the fire, while a third prepared the
breakfast for the father and brothers who were going out to manly labor;
and they chatted meanwhile of books, studies, embroidery, discussed the
last new poem, or some historical topic started by graver reading, or
perhaps a rural ball that was to come off the next week. They spun with
the book tied to the distaff; they wove; they did all manner of fine
needlework; they made lace, painted flowers, and, in short, in the
boundless consciousness of activity, invention, and perfect health, set
themselves to any work they had ever read or thought of. A bride in
those days was married with sheets and table-cloths of her own weaving,
with counterpanes and toilet-covers wrought in divers embroidery by her
own and her sisters’ hands. The amount of fancy-work done in our days by
girls who have nothing else to do will not equal what was done by these,
who performed besides, among them, the whole work of the family.
For many years these habits of life characterized the majority of our
rural towns. They still exist among a class respectable in numbers and
position, though perhaps not as happy in perfect self-satisfaction and a
conviction of the dignity and desirableness of its lot as in former
days. Human nature is above all things—lazy. Every one confesses in the
abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind
is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they
can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than
circumstances drive him to do. Even I would not write this article, were
not the publication-day hard on my heels. I should read Hawthorne and
Emerson and Holmes, and dream in my arm-chair, and project in the clouds
those lovely unwritten stories that curl and veer and change like
mist-wreaths in the sun. So, also, however dignified, however
invigorating, however really desirable are habits of life involving
daily physical toil, there is a constant evil demon at every one’s
elbow, seducing him to evade it, or to bear its weight with sullen,
discontented murmurs.