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HOUSE AND HEARTH
BY
HARRIET PRESCOTT SPOFFORD
AUTHOR OF “THE SERVANT GIRL QUESTION,” “IIESTER
STANLEY AT St. MARK’s,” “THE LOST
JEWEL,” ETC.
NEW YORK
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1891
Copyright, 1891,
By DoDD, MEAD AND CoMPANY.
All rights reserved.
Cânibergitg Bregg:
John WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE.

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{.
CHAPTER
I.
II.
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
THE MAID HERSELF
THE GRAND MOTHERS
MORTMA IN
AN UNSEEN GUIDE .
IN SOCIETY .
BEAUTY AND CHARM
IN FAIR ARRAY
THE I/OVERS
THE BETROTHAI. .
THE BRIDAL
MARRIAGE
ON THE PART OF MOTHER AND
FATHER
BONDAGE AND BURDEN
A GREAT HIN DRANCE .
Poor WoRK
THE ALLOWANCE
THE RELATIONS . . . . . .
PAGE
I 5
23
34
45
57
77
8o
93
IOI
117
I25
I4O
I73
I95
217
iy Conlenis.
CHAPTER PAGE
XVIII. THE UNHAPPY WIFE . 233
XIX. THE PLAIN WIFE 24I
XX. THE OLD WIFE 250
XXI. THE ANGEL IS THE CHILD . 263
XXII. IN THE SICK-ROOM . 278
XXIII. THE FAMILY STRAIN . 297
HOUSE AND HEARTH
HOUSE AND HEARTH.
I.
THE MAID HERSELF,
OW fair She is
Dark or light, rosy or pale, statuesque
in outline or tip-tilted and chubby as a
cherub, it makes no difference. She is
young, and necessarily she is fair ; fair
with that loveliness which is independent
of dimples, of damask dyes, of mantling
blushes, – the loveliness of the firm
muscle, the healthy life, of the bound-
ing blood, the elastic movement, and the
inspiring hope.
If she is not beautiful, -strictly speak-
ing, and with the thought of the antique

I
2 House and Hearth.
in mind, -yet she has, at any rate, the
beauty which cannot be separated from
the June of life ; and youth is an en-
chanter that, with hope and strength and
opportunity, transmutes all that is not in
itself lovely into the likeness of loveli-
ness ; and there is always comeliness in
the rondure of the cheek, the soft tinting
of the skin, the free grace of supple
limb. And if by the absolute standards
she is beautiful, so radiant and so delicious
do we find her that we have nothing on
earth with which to parallel her, — the
blush of flowers, the velvet Smoothness of
fruit, the sparkle of jewels, the lightsome
atmosphere of Spring mornings, being too
poor for our comparison.
Such as she is, she is ours. We feel
an inexpressible tenderness toward her ;
and that not altogether because of the
sense of possession, but possibly in Some
degree because we know of the dark
waters the young feet have yet to cross.
We see in her too, perhaps, the apparition
of our own lost youth, which, Say what
we will, is still dear, – that youth which
The Maid Herself. 3
withdrew line by line So shyly, so inappre-
ciably, till as we went Sauntering along
with our happiness through middle life
we were startled by the silent entrance on
the scene of a stranger from a world of
shadows, a cruel and relentless guest, the
awful spectre of old age bearing our first
gray hair. And then we knew that youth,
which loves only pleasant things, had
taken flight, and it was as impossible to
detain him as to detain love when once
the door has been set open ; for he saw
sunnier fields, more cheerful abodes, than
faces turned now toward the gloom of
the grave, than hearts whose emotions
thrilled no more with freshness, – thrilled
only with the remembrance of having
thrilled, - natures that have been clarified
too cruelly, or that have reached too lofty
a habitat for that wing of youth which is
still clogged with something more of earth.
And with that gray hair came presently
the changing color of the skin, telling the
tale of withered pore and duct that refuse
to conduct the old strong tint; came
wrinkles, secretly and silently tracing their
4 House and Hearth.
evil way like the worm in the leaf; came
a slight deadening of the senses, – the
least muffling of Sound, the least dimness
of sight, the least indifference of scent, —
as if the approaching fates trod on wool.
And to say we do not regret it ! We do
with all our hearts. Not regret deli-
cious evenings, with their vague sweet
melancholy, when the moon rode high
through drifting clouds and embowering
trees, when fragrance floated by us on the
breeze, like the breath of a fairer life, and
was gone, when fate lay before us like a
rich land on which we were just to enter?
Not regret the ecstasy of first love, of the
first recognition of beauty in sky or on
distant mountain-side, in the incoming
Ocean tide, the morning star, or the slid-
ing constellations, our senses all virgin to
impression ? Not regret the time when
we felt our life in every limb, when we
looked at the world with an eye single to
innocence, with a heart foreign to sus-
picion, when we held it made for us and
our generation, and were happy in the
belief, before we found that we were only
The Maid Herself. 5
a congregation of atoms in the ceaseless
procession of molecules | Wisdom is
very well in its way; but indeed it is not
so pleasant as happiness. Perhaps it is
that, and not the deadening pulse, which
brings us at last a sense of placidity, where
we love and admire all youth, and feel in
its freshness and its beauty not the re-
membrance of our own, but a tenderer,
a deeper, a more touching feeling, as if it
were the youth of our children, and we find
then that there is something for us to do
when young people have come into our
lives, in reconciling the bloom of youth
and all its headstrong will with the cool
discretion of experience, — “experience,”
says Landor, “which means failure ; ” but
to which we always mean to give another
reading,

II.
THE GRAND MOTHERS.
ERTAINLY no one needs the use
of our discretion and experience
more than this young girl with whom. We
have to deal.
She has been living not only in a world
of her own, but, like the planet Saturn, in-
side ring after ring of her own, – the
Outer world a vague remote nebula, the
home-world something nearer, the world
of blackboard and dictionary nearer still,
and close to her very life the world of
confidante and bosom friend, of her enthu-
siasms and hopes, where she pours out
her Soul, taking it for granted that age
has no sympathy with the longings and

The GrandmotherS. 7
aspirations of youth, and Small interest in
the play of the finer emotions, - between
this world and that where her mother
lives there being fixed a great gulf of
reverence. Boys are Something quite
outside this world of her enthusiasms ;
they are only the dead-weights that keep
her dragging behind the rate at which she
would advance in her classes, and she
never suspects their intellects to be the
Superior things she hears them declared
when these same boys are safe in their
colleges and professions beyond the
chance of feminine competition. In her
literature, in her reading and writing, the
heroes are of as different an order as stars
are different from jack-o'-lanterns: they
are often spiced with sin, if not saturated
in it, but for no other reason than that to
her innocence sin is all an unknown
country. And in this world her mind has
been made up concerning every subject
under heaven, demand though these sub-
jects may long habit, observation, and re-
flection, for righteous judgment. Yet all
this while she has been conscious of a
8 House and Hearth.
dream of happiness flying just before her,
happiness in the years to come so bright
as to dazzle its view into indistinctness, but
as impossible to fail her as the blue sky
itself. It is our part to make the dream
real.
Something of this work has been al-
ready done for the present generation,
through the great physical care that it has
had, in solicitude for simple and plentiful
diet, warm clothing, abundant sleep, out-
door pursuits and sports, all in such wise
as to counteract any unfortunate effect of
too stimulating study, till we have a tribe
of rosy rounded creatures whose spark-
ling eyes, shapely forms, and Springing
steps are full of promise for the health and
strength of the future. If the frame does
not incline to adipose, and if the natural
complexion is of a peculiarly soft and
tender tint that might be mistaken for
pallor, yet neither absence of adipose nor
a tenderly tinted skin is a symptom of ill-
health, and our delicately fashioned young
woman will undergo marvellous fatigue
and strain, and will rise from her sleep
The Grandmothers. 9
afterward fresh as a lark, and wiry and
indomitable, a bundle of strong Sound
nerves, and she will be able to give
younger people odds at eighty.
In all the last fifty years before this new
departure in health took place, we used
to hear So much said about the Superior
health and strength of our grandmothers
that we came to accept the statement as
axiomatic truth. The robustness, the
hardihood of these ancestresses of ours
were flung in our faces at every turn, and
one would really suppose they were born
at the time when the sons of God married
the daughters of men, and, as the record
Says, there were giants in those days.
But was it really true about the grand-
mothers? Were they women of such
heroic mould that they could bear every
Sort of hardship, of exposure, and distress,
and come out from it all rosy and buxom,
and ready for another bout with fate P
We used to . hear corresponding stories
about the strength and stature of our
grandfathers, till our brothers tried on the
ancient armour and found it too small for
10 House and Hearth.
them. Those grandmothers had much to
endure, we know ; but did they endure it?
Living when there were no furnaces, no
water-pipes, no ventilation, no friction-
matches, no carpets, no railroads, no
Spinning-jennies, no creameries, no Sewing-
machines, no life made easy, it would
seem that they must have been of tougher
fibre than the women of to-day are. But
the great order of things does not love an
injustice. Witnesses rise on our side,
ghastly though they be as coming from
the dead ; they are the church register
and the yellow old town records. And
curious as the fact is, it shows us that,
as compared with ourselves, our grand-
mothers had no health at all ; shows us
that a great number of grandfathers,
in all that remote past of Some genera-
tions gone, gave us two, three, four, and
sometimes even more grandmothers.
It may be understood from this testi-
mony of the records and . registers that
the real truth about these grandmothers
is that they were much such women as
we are. If we cannot do all they did,
The Grandmothers, . 11
neither could they have done a great
deal that we can do. The sun burned
them, the wind made them shiver ; their
faces were as hot, and their backs as
frozen before their great wood fires as
ours would be ; they bore fatigue no
better than women do to-day ; caught
cold from draughts as their grand-
daughters do, had fevers and Sore
throats and rheumatisms and Coughs
under the same circumstances; suffered
as much, and died more often in child-
birth ; grew peaked and pale and pining,
and dwindled away under the unobser-
vant eyes of their husbands, who one day
started in astonishment to hear the doctor
announce a hopeless case, and who, when
the end came, felt the loss so much that
they were ſain to supply its place swiftly
with number two, three, or four, as the
case might be.
Not that blame is to be attached to the
grandfathers for their numerous and pos-
sibly precipitate marriages. Far from it.
There was a horde of children in every
house to be cared for, and they were as
12 House and Hearth.
often securing nurses as marrying wives.
With a wilderness before them, waiting
for them to make it blossom, there was no
question as to the future provision of
children; the tally round every hearthstone
Scored up among the high numbers. If
the exhausted mothers had only exhausted
strength to give the later comers, it would
not be remarkable if there were dimin-
ished strength among their descendants.
But, indeed, it is to be doubted if we are
not only as stout and strong as Our grand-
mothers, but if the preponderance of
vigour is not in our favour. If they en-
dured great hardship without deteriora-
tion, so do we endure unhealthy conditions
of life and excitement, heated rooms, late
hours, rich food. But if we need anything
to prove our Superior vigour, we should
have it in the fact that triple and quad-
ruple marriages are far less frequent with
us than they were in the days of old. A
man who had had four wives in the old
days would have found no one consider-
ing it a circumstance worth mention ; in
these days he finds himself a subject of
The Grandmothers. 13
mirth. The whole of the matter is, that
the wives and mothers live now, instead
of dying as they used to do. Our count-
less discoveries and applications for com-
fort and ease have tended to preserve and
lengthen life, and that in spite of the
strange circumstance that we labour in a
struggle with many new ills and ails that
have sprung into existence, like a crop of
dragon's teeth, under modern conditions,
that diseases have attacked us for which
new medicinal compounds have had to be
found, and that our rapid modes of life,
Our steam travel, our receipt of telegrams,
Our Swift and great excitements coming
upon us like blows, all tend to produce
nervous irritation of which our grand
mothers knew nothing whatever. People
who call in the lightning as a yoke-fellow
have to do as the lightning does ; and
when we reckon up all the added burdens
of this generation, and discriminate be-
tween the women of the past and present,
it must be admitted that we are as good
as Our grandmothers, and as much better
as the progress of the whole race should
14 House and Hearth.
intimate, and that the young girl whose
future we are forecasting is to raise the
average and level by being as much
stronger and healthier than we ourselves
are, as Science, care, and love can bring
to pass.

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III.
MORTMAIN.
/ E look at this young being just hov-
ering over life like a butterfly over
a flower, and we find it difficult to believe
that she is of precisely the same nature as
our own. We have, perhaps, seen a pic-
ture where little cherubs flutter and fold
their wings to play with breathing children,
and she seems as different from ourselves
as those angelic playmates do from the
earth-born children. We cannot realize
that she is presently to change from this
idyllic State to one of emotions and pas-
Sions like those of all who have gone be-
fore her. Yet it becomes us to do so,
not to save ourselves from the shock of
discovery one day, but in order that we






16 House and Hearth.
may surround her with the conditions that
shall be best for her. It is true that we
should have begun that undertaking many
years before she was born, by giving her
parents who could bequeathe to her only
healthy and wise tendencies, by overcom-
ing our own inheritance of evil, and by
making ourselves all that we ought to be.
If those who came before us could have
disposed of their personal peculiarities as
of their other personal property, what a
nobler sort of mortmain it would be than
anything under the old feudal condition,
and what a different state of affairs from .
that of the present we should have about
us! How quite to the fancy, indeed,
would we make the world in the next few
centuries if it were possible for us to in-
dite and carry into effect documents regu-
lating affairs after our demise in such
thorough and minute fashion as we would
like. “I, So-and-so, being of Sound mind
and body at this writing,” the document
would run, “do now make this my last
will and testament. And I hereby give
and bequeathe to my daughter Margaret
Mortmain. 17
all my right and title in the pale pink of
my complexion, and to the said Margaret
I also give the high Carriage of my head;
and to my second daughter, Louise, I give
and bequeathe my low forehead, the
straight outline of my nose, my pensive-
ness, and the mole on my left cheek; and
to my daughter Rachel I give the brown
of my eyes and the length of my eye-
lashes, and to the aforesaid Rachel I give
also the old charity I inherited from my
grandmother, but never used. I do also
give and bequeathe and devise to my son
Lawrence my upper lip, as well as my
indolence, my high temper, and my self-
ishness, and I commend him particularly
to the Care of his sisters; and I give and
bequeathe to his little daughter Jane, to-
gether with the arch of my eyebrows, my
emotional insanity, and all that belongs to
the Said emotional insanity; and if my
granddaughter, the said Jane, does not
Survive me, or dies without issue, then I
desire the said emotional insanity, together
with my kleptomania, my love of scandal,
and my browbeating of dependants, to be
2 -
18 House and Hearth.
committed to the flames; and I further
wish, in any event, that my Salt-rheum
and scrofula shall be tied up in a parcel
and buried in the same grave with me.”
In this way, or better yet, by cutting off
the son Lawrence with a whim, and leav-
ing the little Jane unprovided for, we
should be sure that nothing went amiss
or astray, that beauty was perpetuated and
given to the one that could make the best
use of it, that blemishes were doled out
to those whose ill-behaviour deserved no
better, and that ruinous and deadly qual-
ities were destroyed.
But as it is, and unaccountable as it is,
while beauty of the body is or is not
transmissible, – and there is no law for that
dark point yet known, – mora) beauty is
almost as sure to tell in the descendant as
moral ugliness. The father may dye
black his flaming red hair for long years
before his daughter Margaret is born ; but
unless the more vital current of some
stronger ancestor in his veins overcomes
it, Margaret is pretty Sure to have red hair
in spite of the dye ; yet, on the other
Mortmain. 19
hand, if he wash white the stains upon his
soul of selfishness and falsehood and im-
purity before her time, Margaret is very
sure to inherit a Soul white as the washing
has made his own.
After all, then, things of which we had
not dreamed it are to be disposed of by
will ; and our power over them is such that
we can transmit them or destroy them,
let the heir have them with interest com-
pounded, or completely disinherit him.
Have we a virtue that is distinctly our
own, and not an accident, or have we even
an accidental virtue 2 The fostering of
that virtue, if it be an accident, will make
it our own, and will make it not only an
increased and accumulated thing in itself,
but will make it ten other virtues. And
it must be great poverty in this peculiar
thing, great negation of the trait, not to
Say absolute badness, that the heir re-
ceives from the devisor on the other
side, to neutralize and make that virtue
Of no account in the inheritance. And
if we have a sin, under constant re-
pression it may so dwindle that it may
20 House and Hearth.
cease to exist before the heir comes in
Question.
If those before us had not felt some-
thing of this, we should never have risen
from the condition of the cave-dwelling
Savage even to our present moral stature.
Remembering this, remembering the in-
finite peace and beauty that virtues will
give, and the infinite misery that sins,
Swollen as they go on from one to
another, cannot but Create, – the covet-
ousness that in its heir becomes theft, the
jealousy and suspicion and impurity that
sow the seeds of madness, the ill-temper
that one day thrusts out the red hand of
the murderer, — shall we do anything
but tread the terrible traits out of exist-
ence? There are few more sad or solemn
moments in life, more sad and solemn,
too, for the brightness in which their
gloom is set, than that of the young
mother who, after the first rapture of safe
possession of her child is past, reflects
that what she is her child is, and lies
helplessly to see her faults and follies
flaunt themselves in her face; she sees
Mortmain. 21
that her child will have need to take hold
of Saving grace by main strength if he
would escape the evil she herself, who
loves him more than life, may have
wrought in him. She atones in that hour
for years of error; and she watches in the
after years with many a shudder for the
first appearance of the ugly heads of
the evil things she saw in that dark hour,
as a hunter watches for his prey.
The calendar of Saints would overflow
if the list of those who have fought and
overcome their special sins could be
given. Even when those special sins
have been inherited, we all have an ally
in our own identity, which well used is
able to conquer the ancestry that cared
nothing for us, that indulged itself, let
what would be our fate. That ancestry,
it may be, clogged its brains with hot
blood, it sinned against all laws, it re-
Strained itself in nothing, and bequeathed
us a parcel of evil passions and foul
diseases riding us like monsters. It is in
the light of that bale-fire of selfishness
that we begin to undo its work. If our
22 House and Hearth.
fathers gave no thought to those that
were to come after them, we will do the
very opposite; and for the sake of those
to spring from our own root, and for the
sake of the perfection on earth, as far as
that may come to pass, of the great future
race, we will bring the evil inheritance to
naught. And if, whether or no, we must
still rule the world by mortmain, the hand
reaching out of our graves shall be that of
no disgusting decay, but a hand pure and
white as those of the spirits of the blest.

IV.
AN UNSEEN GUIDE.
UR young girl, in her innocence and
purity, has become Something SO
like a type of guileless and spotless life
that we are almost startled when one day
we perceive that she has said to us, as
Elihu said to the desert prince, “I also
am formed out of the clay.” She is not
a being hovering just above the earth ;
She is of the race, and is to take her
place in it.
Of course we knew it all along. The
tempers, wants, exactions, affections, were
all human. But born of our flesh though
She was, yet we regarded her as one might
the plant of some flower brought in from

24 House and Hearth.
foreign lands, wondering into what it
would develop, expecting the blowing of
large fair petals, and not remembering
that she is only the result of fate through
her predecessors. Some, indeed, are
curious in heredity, and search for the re-
appearance or the extinction of this or
that feature of face or spirit in the family
line. The greater number take her as
Something fresh from the Creator's hand,
and a marvellous gift to themselves. Some
few as a trust left by those who have
journeyed into a far country.
Yet if from any great giver they had
really received a thing of beauty and un-
known powers, would they not treat it
with some veneration, study its uses, keep
it from tarnish, provide for it the oppor-
tunity and advantage it needed ? Many
a father and mother are under the impres-
sion that they are doing all this for the
treasure they have, when they are allow-
ing servants and strangers to relieve them
of the care of it, and letting things
slip along in the way that is the least
trouble.
An Unseen Guide. 25
Of whatever stainlessness and delicacy
the child may be, the wise parent will
know that she is born to fulfil her destiny,
and all the more so for her sweetness and
perfections, and will not let idle chance
arrange the fate of that which is dearest
in the world. As her present is provided
for, so shall her future be ; and that not
in mere ways of money, of education, and
accomplishment, not even in the way only
of forming correct tastes and wishes, but
by means of environment, of companion-
ship and affection in the sort best for her.
They will not excuse themselves from this
because the girl will one day come to
years of discretion and remedy their de-
fect; they will not cease from care be-
cause one day she may be able to take
care of herself. They will recognize that
she is to assume her place in the world,
and that after school-books have been
laid aside and housekeeping arts mas-
tered, and there has been a season of
fluttering pleasure, marriage will lift the
curtain upon the larger part of life.
Aware, then, of that great fact in the
26 Hol/Se and Hearth.
future, they will endeavour to put forth a
hand, perhaps unseen, perhaps guiding
with the grip of steel in the velvet glove,
a hand that shall be leading their child
safely along the path even after they
themselves are laid away in the bosom
of mother earth.
With this in view, the discreet parents
will begin at an early period to surround
their daughter with companionship that
shall be helpful. They will bring girls
about their own girl whose thoughts and
ambitions and pleasures are desirable,
girls whose natures and whose habits they
would like to have established as ideals
before their boys. And they will send
their boys only among pure and noble
boys, fully understanding that this age
expects and is going to exact equal purity
in man and woman, and that they are
responsible in this relation to the girl
whom their son marries; fully under-
standing that there is of right no more
of the animal nature in their son than in
their daughter, and that even if there
were it would be his duty to subdue it,
An Unseen Guide. 27
and theirs to begin the work. They will
do as much as this, even in early child-
hood, for the daughter and the son who
are so precious to them ; and later per-
ceiving the folly, not to say the wicked-
ness, of leaving Such matters to chance,
they will exercise a foreseeing care Con-
cerning the possibilities of their marriage.
It has not been the habit among us to
attempt much interference with these af-
fairs, except occasionally to make forcible
opposition or to give assent where refusal
would be unheeded. We have felt that
it was an affair of fate, and that there was
a profanity and an indelicacy in attempt-
ing to meddle with it, as if one laid hands
on the holy of holies, and that if one had
nothing to do with bringing the thing
about, one was not responsible if it turned
out ill, - as if responsibility did not begin
before the child’s first breath, and could
end even with one's own last breath ! It
has been too often the case, moreover, that
there has not been time enough in our
laborious and crowded lives to attend to
anything but the urgent necessities of the
28 House and Hearth.
hour. Owing to the wide-spread educa-
tion and elevation of our people, – which
many of us, if we were in the Old World
still, would have had none of, remaining
untrained peasants, – we have developed
refinements and wants that it takes every
effort we are able to make to suit and
supply even in a limited degree. The
daughter of the small tradesman gradu-
ates from school with finely cultivated
tastes, acquainted to Some extent with
languages, Science, fine arts, literature,
having nearly the same education that the
daughters of princes and nobles have in
other countries. With this education and
these tastes, she has not the rent-rolls
and funds that belong to the princes and
nobles, and life becomes a struggle to
exist with a decency not utterly incom-
patible with these tastes. With this,
parents are so absorbed in looking after
the essentials, in keeping up the home,
and providing for it as they may, that Sons
and daughters are necessarily left much
at large, and at the very time when they
need guiding most are given almost unre-
An Unseen Guide. 29
stricted freedom. There is no feeling
among us more preponderating than that
of the claim and regard for personal
liberty; it is at the base of our political
institutions, and inwrought through the
fabric of our society, and even the parent
has been in the habit of respecting it in
allowing his daughter of sixteen or seven-
teen summers her choice of companions
and usually of lovers. -
Our people are unlikely to adopt any
custom of arranging marriages for conve-
nience, interest, family connections, or
anything else without sentiment and with-
out attraction. And it is with no such
view that parents are urged to realize
that, having children, they are under as
much moral obligation in relation to their
marriage as in relation to their breeding
and education, and are concerned that
they shall marry only those best fitted for
their happiness not only in the first blush
of passion, but in the long years and trials
of life.
Left to themselves, the young are at-
tracted to each other in individual cases
30 House and Hearth.
by one knows not what hidden law, since
in no two cases does it work alike, and .
every happy woman wonders that any
other woman could have chosen any other
husband than the one she herself has
chosen. No parent, in our ways of living
and thinking, would go counter to this
universal law, hidden or not. Neverthe-
less, in So far as parents are interpreters
and administrators of law, by virtue of
their position, they have responsibilities
which give them rights, and are at liberty
So to arrange circumstances that this law
shall work to the utmost good of those
most nearly concerned. Thus, if in-
stead of folding the hands, and turning
away the eyes, and leaving things to
chance, the mother calmly looked at
facts and the future, put out an arranging
hand here and there viewlessly and skil-
fully and without appearance of con-
straint, would she be doing more than
her duty, and would the child be aware
of any exercise of force or persuasion ?
Shall this mother allow a marriage within
an unwise degree of relationship to occur,
An Unseen Guide. 31
if, by imprinting on her child's mind and
prejudices, long before danger is appar-
ent, the undesirableness and risk of such
a thing, and by bringing forward, at the
time she thinks best, people of more at-
tractions than the related ones, it can
be quietly hindered? If, of the several
families of her acquaintance, in this she
knows is lurking insanity, in that is pro-
nounced disease, in the other are un-
lovely traits so marked as to have won the
family name, — meanness, ill-nature, bru-
tality, vanity, falseness, - traits sure to
work misery on their victims eventually,
— shall she be considered a managing
mother, with any but full approbation of
the term, if she wisely prevents intimacy
with such families, and promotes intimacy
with those, on the contrary, where there
are no inherited traits either physical or
moral, of which she is aware, likely to
produce trouble after the first glamour of
new love is gone, and when the married
should be in the calm content of placid af.
ſection? Is she not, in short, playing the
part of discretion and kindness, knowing
32 House and Hearth.
the power of propinquity, in giving her
children, at the right time to fall in love,
the right persons to fall in love with ?
Such help, such hindrance, such icon-
trol as this, is within the power of all
mothers and fathers who look facts in the
face. It is a duty demanded. They
have no right to be pursuing their more
Sordid but not more vital interests and
gains, and letting time go by, without
forming the acquaintance of the young
people about them, and fitting themselves
to know and decide to whom and what it
is best their own young people should be-
come attached. Apart from its usefulness
in that way, this course would, by pro-
moting the mingling of young and old,
add a freshness to society, helping the
old to remain youthful, and giving the
young the atmosphere they need, increas-
ing reverence for the opinions of the
elders, all leading to the quiet Superin-
tendence of the choice of husbands and
wives, and making the choice happy with-
out suspicion of the way in which the
chooser has been led.
An Unseen Guide. 33
For it is not to be supposed that, un-
biassed by passion or prejudice, with their
knowledge of their children's tempera-
ments and needs, and with their own ex-
perience and the presumable wisdom of
years, parents would not be good and
tender judges of what is the best for their
children, save very exceptionally, and
would not be actuated by a desire for
their happiness, not only to-day, but to-
morrow, never destroying or blighting an
existing and righteous affection, but
shielding them from the formation of one
that would be better if blighted.

$º
º
Sº | tº
º º º
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º **** § ºit. jš º
sº º: Nº gº §§
Yºº
IN SOCIETY.
A / HEN all is done in ourselves that
is possible to fit us to become
parents, to license us to add to the human
race and to conduct it forward, we find
our work constantly threatened by the
want of a corresponding effort in other
persons; our Sons and daughters are fain
to do that which all their contemporaries
are at liberty to do ; and the code of
manners, if of morals, is quite beyond our
power to change. We can influence it in
Some measure ; but our individual force
is not sufficient to leaven the mass. We
see this the most uncomfortably when,
our young people having taken their place
in society, the assurance with which many

In Society. 35
of their colleagues there proceed to take
hold of affairs, and like Prince Hal try on
their crown before it is full time, becomes
Conspicuous.
One would not be too captious ; and it
is to be confessed that every generation
makes some croaking of its own in rela-
tion to the misbehaviour of the younger
generation. Whether the eyes of age
are jaundiced with a general bitterness;
whether it is envious of the health and
strength, the beauty and grace and lustre
of youth ; whether old pleasures, palled
Once on the Senses, now disgust ; or
whether it has come to see better things
and understand the worthlessness of those
which youth pursues, – whether one or all
of these are at the root of the matter, age
is still the sharpest critic that youth has
to fear. It asks now if this fast time of
electricity and kindred marvels imparts
its character to everything, and if even
the young girl acquires such a projectile
property that she cannot wait for her
slow unfolding, but must make haste to
be a woman before she has been a girl
36 House and Hearth.
long enough to know the happiness of .
girlhood? Certainly when we see a girl
who is not feverish with impatience for
the future, but is content with the present
and joyous with the bright world’s impres-
sions upon her sweet young senses, we
find her so refreshing that for her sake
we forgive the jaded and artificial little
wretches who have numbered no more
summers than the others, but who are
yet as old as Ninon de l'Enclos herself.
One is tempted to ask if it is not be-
cause this species of young girl takes
hold of life so soon in society that she
is so soon done with it. In regions of
that mythical geography which has no
other latitude or longitude than that of
the vague Orient we are told that women
are in their prime when a dozen summers
have kissed them into bloom, that at
fourteen they are a little past their youth,
and at twenty they are hags. Allowing
for a slight exaggeration, the same thing
applies to ourselves, whenever this sort
of young person is in the ascendant.
Instead of a dozen years, say a dozen
In Society. - 37
and a half, and a woman is Supposed
by this authority to be in her prime;
at twenty she is a little “gone off; ” at
twenty-three she begins to shrink back
before the bold fronts of her pursuers;
at twenty-five she is dubbed with an op-
probrious epithet ; and if at thirty she is
not a hag, it is because civilization does
not admit the word. The younger put
the elder to the wall, as if there were no
question but that was the proper position
for them ; a woman of twenty-five dancing
in the same set with other women who
are only eighteen, is made to feel out of
place and as if she were assuming the
airs of youth ; if she sits and looks on
with pleasure at the gay sight as the flut-
tering flower-like dancers advance and re-
treat and intermingle in the mimicry of
life's drama, she is pronounced a senti-
mental attitudinizer; and if she disap-
proves of any exuberance where her own
earlier experience has enlightened her,
she is classed with the common enemy.
Meanwhile it is her junior, who, in un-
acquaintance and unconsciousness, lays
38 House and Hearth.
down the law and makes her petty tyranny
felt all along the line. And it may be,
after all, the Squire of Dames who is
really accountable, –
“IHe that loves a coral lip,
Or a rosy cheek admires,
Or from star-like eyes doth seek
º Fuel to maintain his fires,” —
and who, leaving the woman lately his
companion, for the smooth new face un-
lettered with the lines of a thought or a
care, gives to the airs and graces of its
owner his deference and to her whims his
authority ; and who may do so to the
end of time; for it is hardly on this earth
that spirit will get the upper hand of flesh.
For even those who condemn the arro-
gance of youth must delight in its sight
and contemplation, in the fruity charm of
its cheek, the supple ivory of its contours,
the music of its laughter ; and One is
hardly to be flouted because, like Pyg-
malion, he falls in love with these things,
and kindles a soul in them by means of
his own passion.
In Society. 39
But the rosy down of the peach would
not please the sight long, if that were all
of it. And these usurping young queens
should turn their sunshine to better ac-
count while they may, adding to their
mere bodily beauty of youth some of that
beauty which outlives youth.
“Upon her eyelids many graces sate,
Under the shadow of her even browes,
Working belgardes and amorous retrate,”
sang Colin Clout ; but he took good care
to add,
“And everie one her with a grace endowes,
And everie one with meeknesse to her bowes.”
But as a naturalist regrets the degener-
ation of some noble species, so one might
look with dismay upon these mothers of
our future race of men. The mother, it
is conceded, even by those who have not
considered the question as to whether the
maternal principle were not the first of all
principles, is the moulder of men, and
posterity is hers, to make or mar; since
wherever woman falls short of the high
ideal, man falls after her ; and surely, the
4() House and Hearth.
bold and boisterous, the selfish, the slangy
young girl who would overrun the gay
world like a new invasion of the barba-
rian, is far beneath the standard of that
womanhood on whom shamefacedness,
and modesty attend. It is of no such
creature that the praiseworthy pages of
history are written ; it is not of her that
pictures are painted or Songs are sung ;
for without the shy charm of girlhood or
the calm Sweetness of womanhood, she is
a nondescript that neither song nor story
cares for, and that Society ought to reject.
For, self-preservation being the first law
of nature, society must become a thing of
the past, of romance, and tradition, if that
which is its essence — the graces and
kindnesses and self-forgetfulness of good-
breeding, the flash of cultured wit, the
glow of tempered enthusiasm, and the
delicacy of reserved behaviour — is to
vanish before a swarm of hoyden Caprices.
The social condition about our young
people experiences real injury from a view
which many of its members take, and
which has obliged them to borrow a for-
In Society. - 41
eign word, – a word hardly applicable to
any foreign state of things, and which they
use with proscriptive audacity in relation
to every unmarried woman whose face has
lost the lustre of its earlier years. Yes,
she is pretty, they say ; she dresses well;
talented, too, and agreeable ; but then
she is a little passée. And with that
Beauty shrugs her shoulders, oblivious of
the time when Youth and Guilelessness
shall put their heads together and whisper
the same shocking word as she goes by, -
a word whose use, if it does not imply
the gratification of the grosser senses
to be the end and aim of all things,
does imply the pre-eminence of the
flesh, indeed, above all things. She is
/assée. Past what? Past her bloom P
IS bloom, then, all that there is to live
for, that she is to be characterized in life
Solely with reference to it? Is it the
object of one side of society merely to
display the bloom, and of the other to
admire it? And do we, then, reduce our
drawing-rooms to the level of a Georgian
girl-market, and count out of life every-
42 House and Hearth.
thing but the supple shape, the flower-like
skin, the creamy shoulder? Is she past
her intelligence, her good-nature, her wit,
her power of entertainment, her general
usefulness? On the contrary, she has
usually but just attained experience enough
to make her conversation something above
the mediocrity of gossip and titter and
compliment ; her gayety is not mere gig-
gling, it has in it the flash of encounter-
ing intellects; her manners have a charm
of ease, which gives ease to all around
her ; if she has accomplishments, they
are practised and mature ; if she has not
the rosy loveliness of her first youth, she
has a knowledge of the arts of the toilette
that makes her dress perfect and herself at-
tractive. In fact, she has only just become
capable of giving enjoyment in Society, and
it is she who should pronounce upon the
fitness of others to enter its charmed
circle, rather than they who bring there
nothing but their youth, whose minds and
manners are almost totally untrained and
insufficient, who are, indeed, objects of
pleasure to the eye, but wherein they
In Society. 43
O
yield other pleasure do so only in a sub-
sidiary way.
Not that the element of innocence and
freshness is to be undervalued. It is, on
the contrary, precious beyond praise, so
long as it really is innocence and fresh-
ness, and keeps its place. But the virtue
of years, with its knowledge of the world
we live in, and its preparation for the
world we hope to live in, its wisdom, its
grace, its charity, is of at least equal value
and deserves equal recognition in the
places where men and women meet to-
gether. It is not to be forgotten that the
chosen companion of the great men of
history, the friend, the lover, the one
whom they have sought to enliven their
hours and give rest to energies wearied
with work, has not been the girl whose
loveliness intoxicates the senses, but the
Woman who has lost her first bloom.
It is by her own recession that the
mother has brought about much of this
Social condition, by encouraging gayeties
of every description, from the simple lunch
and the out-door ſºſe to the evening
44 House and Hearth.
theatre-party, for young people only ; by
withdrawing when young callers come ;
by allowing her opinions to be over-
ruled ; by too often showing-plainly her
want of knowledge of the things in con-
cern, and her want of interest as well. It
is only by ceasing to efface herself, by
making a part, wherever practicable and
at whatever inconvenience, of all the
social life of her children, by letting them
feel the vulgarity of that sort of pleasure
which cannot be pleasure in her presence,
by directing it herself, in fact, that she
is going to make the Social environment
of her sons and daughters that which it
should be if she wishes them to marry
with a view either to their material or
their eternal happiness.

VI.
BEAUTY AND CHARM.
NE of the things which almost every
mother desires for her daughter is
beauty. To her fond eye the girl is often
beautiful, although she has an undercur-
rent of knowledge that other people may
not find her so. She has an idea that
much depends on beauty; and she wants
her to lose nothing in the great lessons of
life by reason of any want either of praise
or love.
But the mother need not concern her-
Self here. Our young girl has no need of
beauty, in the strict sense. Without a
single fine feature in her face, she will
just as surely fill some lover's eye as if
she were faultless in line or tint. She
will seem lovely to him through reflected

46 Hol/Se and Hearth.
qualities, through wont and affection.
For in spite of all arbitrary laws and fixed
equations, we all have our differing ideals.
The races who take the Greek type as
their model, with its slow and delicate
curves and perfect lines, have something
in their eye quite other than the delight
of those who crave the bulging flesh and
sensual suggestion of the Hottentot. While
the Greek himself preferred the straight
line for the nose, the Persian thought
there was no beauty without a nose like
a hawk's bill, and the African preferred
his slit and perforated with trinkets; and
while certain of the poets find an inex-
pressible charm in the feature when tip-
tilted, an older and a greater one than
they long ago expressed his idea of what
a fine nose should be in comparing it to
the “tower of Lebanon which looketh
toward Damascus.” Various ancient
tribes of the East thought nobility and
honour lay in the head with a lofty dome ;
various aboriginal tribes of the West
distort their infants for the sake of
producing a flat head ; and meantime
Beauty and Charm. 47
science declares that too much recedure
of the forehead brings one as near idiocy
as too much recedure of the chin. There
is just as much diversity, again, about the
ears, certain of the old Hindostanee wo-
men thinking that true beauty could only
be attained by boring the cartilage and
imbedding it in a ring to be replaced by a
larger ring until the size of the stretched
and mutilated member became enor-
- mous ; while with the Arabs a small ear
is as infallible a mark of good blood and
birth as the arch of the instep under
which water flows. The Turkish lady,
again, stains her teeth black; the Frank
regards it as one of the last woes that can
befall her when time and decay do as
much for hers; and numerous savages file
theirs into fantastic shapes. As much
difference exists in relation to beauty of
figure : in the West one may lace to the
last catching of the breath ; but the lady
who aspires to a high place in the Eastern
Seraglio feeds on sweetmeats till she is
rolling in folds of fat. And again, where
these admire the straight and superb
48 House and Hearth.
posture of the Apollo, those bend the
limbs of their babies to make them bandy-
legged.
It would seem that the beauty accepted
by the refined and intellectual of the
world must be nearer the true standard
than anything imagined by a lower order,
and that the Greek ideal, informed by a
genius always dwelling among things of
beauty, and feeding on them till it repro-
duced them in transmuted shape, should
be the best, especially as it relates to the
intelligent countenance, since at the time
that ideal was formed the Greek intelli-
gence led the world. Health, strength,
and endurance then allowed the privilege
of fixing the law for the basis of a phys-
ical type made fine by athletic habits
and by the use of the bath and other aids,
that being nearest the perfect type which
meets the conditions of existence with
ImOSt ea.Se.
The Greek, indeed, had tabulated
statements of the perfect proportions of
the face and figure, doubtless expanded
from the practice of the Egyptian, who
Beauty and Charm. 49
had such precise measurements that dif-
ferent Sculptors could be employed on
any work and finish it according to plan.
Flaxman has said that it is impossible to
See “the numerous figures springing,
jumping, dancing, and falling, in the
Herculaneum paintings, on the painted
vases, and the antique basso-relievos, with-
out being assured that the painters and
Sculptors must have employed geometrical
figures to determine the degrees of curva-
ture in the body, and the angular or recti-
linear extent of the limbs, and to fix the
Centre of gravity.” Albrecht Dürer once
gave the subject study; and more re-
cently, careful students, after patient re-
Search and trial, have announced a rule
by which, they assert, all Nature works,
and which is to be detected wherever true
beauty is seen. This rule “is the same
in principle as the elementary geometri-
cal procedure called by Plato the ‘golden
cut,’ and which consists in dividing a line
into two unequal parts in such a manner
that the larger one forms the mean pro-
portional between the entire line and the
4.
50 House and Hearth.
smaller part. . . . Thus in a proportion-
ately featured face, the nose should be
the mean proportional between the con-
joined length of itself and the forehead
and that of the latter ; and so the dis-
tance from the nose to the chin should be
similarly divided by the line of the mouth.”
Mr. Hay, in the “Science of Propor-
tion, as represented in Works of Ancient
Greek Art,” has declared that all funda-
mental beauty of form derives from the
vibrations of the musical chord, and is
thus geometrical or harmonic in its devel-
opment, and cannot fail to be reducible
to mathematical law ; and Mr. Cooley, in
his work on “The Cosmetic Arts,” says
that by this theory “the harmonic re-
lations of form constituting beauty, to-
gether with the ancillary qualities of
colour, fitness, and expression, and mental
association, are thus without limitation,
and consequently the forms and variety
of beauty are Protean and infinite.”
We come, then, through the practical
exhaustlessness of these very harmonic
relations and ancillary qualities, back to
Beauty and Charm. 51
the truth that every eye makes its own
beauty. Even in art, the law being ful-
filled, the province of genius is to produce
the variation, and to translate the thing
from a measured block to all but a breath-
ing soul. The human being meanwhile
has the countenance, the result of the
whole, the interpretation of the sweetness
and vivacity of the inner nature, to con-
tinue the effect. Thus in spite of the
Greek tabulation, we never arrive at fixed
conclusions.
Enumerate the women of ancient times,
famous for their charms, and see how dif-
ferent is the picture in different minds.
There are some who conceive of Helen of
Troy as red-haired, there being for them
no other colour so instinct with life and
loveliness ; others who believe her fair,
with blond tresses rippling from a white
brow, with lucid eyes, neither blue nor
gray, and a smile that if it dazzled it was
not because of dimples: far from the
dignity of this woman for whom armies
died, be dimples | And how many are
there who do not think of the Serpent
52 House and Hearth.
of old Nile as a Swarthy creature, with
a skin
“As when of the costly scarlet wine
They drip so much as will impinge
And spread in a thinnest scale afloat
One thick gold drop from the olive's coat,
Over a silver plate whose sheen
Still through the mixture shall be seen; ”
how few there are who remember that
Cleopatra was a Grecian, the daughter of
the Ptolemies, of intermarried Ptolemaic
strains, and, by rights, as fair as the fairest
yellow-haired Argive that ever Homer
Sung !
With such divergent views there can be
no question that her lover will find in the
plainest of our young girls all the beauty
that his soul desires, and all the more if
her good fairy at birth, or her own later
taste, has supplied her with that charm of
pleasant manners which often have more
conquering effect than all the beauty that
flesh is heir to. Many a lovely creature
with clumsy manners has failed to turn
her beauty to account, and many a plain
person with graceful and genial manners
Beauty and Charm. 53
has achieved a social success to be re-
membered. Often a triumphal career is
due, no less than to peerless loveliness, to
the cordial and delightful ways that win
all hearts.
The manners which evince a warm in-
terest in others, without timidity to hinder
its betrayal, without the intrusion which
makes one's self too prominent, are the
manners potent as beauty. Certain qual-
ities have to be cultivated in connection
with evincing this interest: a light-hearted
courage which never allows one to be put
down by a trifle, by pomposity or ill-tem-
per or brutishness in any shape, and al-
ways makes easy the utterance of the
apropos word; a capacity for keeping
one’s temper under all conditions; and a
reticence Concerning annoyances personal
or domestic. Perfectly regulated man-
ners, indeed, often require a dramatic ap-
titude for throwing one's self into the
identity of others, losing one's self for the
time in each new individual. But this is
as much a gift as the power to get music
out of any instrument; for it is, indeed,
54 House and Hearth.
the power to play on all the stops of
Hamlet's pipe in which there was excel-
lent voice. But even with this special
gift there must be, during its use, an
abnegation of self, and a quick good-will
to parry the shaft that might wound.
With that, in truth, we reach the root of
all the good manners known, in absolute
unselfishness and an unceasing care for
the comfort of others. Aristotle needed
not to call manners the lesser morals ;
they are among the largest and widest
morals. And these pleasant manners can
exist without reference to the minor mat-
ters of etiquette which exact obedience to
rules whose reason is not always appar-
ent. Such rules vary from one generation
to another, and in their variation proclaim
themselves affairs of fashion rather than
of right feeling. There are instances in
which their usage is much more nearly
concerned with selfishness than with its
opposite, providing methods of behaviour
to preserve our own comfort, to prevent
Our Own disgust, on the same plan with
which Old Lady Mary, in Mrs. Oliphant's
Beauty and Charm. 55
touching story, kept everybody comforta-
ble for the sake of being comfortable her-
self. Although pleasant manners can be
had by those quite ignorant of etiquette,
yet not even trifles are, to be evaded by
those who are in the wider world. One
is not excused because one is statesman,
player, writer, or possessed of power in
any other form. One is then the more
bound to obey these rules; and that not
alone because Superior ability makes it
easier to see the necessity, but because
the necessity as a means for general ease
and comfort exists, and the high hand
must hold up the light to others. The
idea has long been exploded that genius
has an immunity of its own, a right to
fertilize itself by any enjoyment chosen,
whether within the written or unwritten
law or not ; and in manners as in morals
it is recognized that the greater the genius
and powers to be exercised upon society,
and that can gain appreciation and reward
Only from Society, the more obedience to
the requirements of society is to be de-
manded. There is no one who can es-
56 House and Hearth.
cape the bondage of good manners; their
fetters may be silken, but they are strong;
and their laws furnish a currency with
which, if the beggar provide himself, he
is better off in all the markets of the
world than the prince who is unprovided.

VII.
IN FAIR ARRAY.
UT if our young girl attracts love
without beauty, and by reason of
Some unformulated charm of mind or
manner, she perhaps owes some of her
attraction to her dress. If she is lovely
in herself, choice dress, like the fit setting
of a jewel, makes her all the lovelier.
“Her purple habit sits with such a grace
On her smooth shoulders, and so suits her face.”
If she is not pleasant to the eye, then
all the more she needs to be careful in
her adorning. For the rest, the exquisite
toilette is a coat of mail under whose
shelter the sharpest criticism of the most
ill-natured envy can be defied.

58 House and Hearth.
Every one, indeed, is under obligation
to add to the pleasantness about her, if
not in the blush of the cheek or the spar-
kle of the glance, then in the garb which
shrouds deformities, counterpoises de-
fects, and compensates the eye by the ex-
hibition of gentle taste. And while in
the universe abroad beauty is so plainly
commended to one’s eyes, and is shown
to be so omnipresent that it can be only
because it is valued by the creative hand,
it is Surely beneath no one's dignity to
endeavour to attain it in one’s self and
one's surroundings.
Yet it is always to be remembered that
gorgeousness is a remnant of barbarism ;
it belongs in our day to courts and thrones,
still the chief remnants of barbarism, and
whoever indulges in it borrows of that
quality. The love of splendour in dress
and equipage is as ancient as barbarism
itself, as the beads of bones and teeth
worn by the primitive Savages; and that
love reached great heights before the
dawn of anything deserving to be called
civilization. There must have been a de-
In Fair Array. 59
mand for ornament among the early He-
brews which signified a degree of taste and
knowledge, more than two thousand years
before the beginning of our era, for they
wrought then with silver and gold and
jewels with great nicety. That there was
an extraordinary love of decoration among
them is apparent from the dress of the
priesthood, in which scarlet and blue and
purple and gold, and fine linen embroi-
dered lavishly, were combined with pre-
cious Stones mounted and engraved, and
with golden bells tinkling with the step.
When the man-servant won the heart of
Rebekah for Isaac, it was with handfuls
of Ornaments, among which was a gold
ear-ring weighing a quarter of an ounce,
and a pair of bracelets weighing five
ounces, which tell their own story. Nor
was it merely in jewels and fine raiment
that this love of splendour exhibited itself;
— the arts of the toilette were quite as
much in request. Jezebel, we are told,
“ put her eyes in painting,” and with her
modern namesake's antimony too; and
to this day we speak of “a painted Jeze-
60 House and Hearth.
bel,” — knowing, by the way, that it would
not sound half so badly if we softened the
name, as we should, to Isabel. Not quite
a hundred years after that wonderſul
woman's career the prophet Isaiah de-
scribes the toilette of the daughters of
Zion, with the bravery of their tinkling
Ornaments about their feet, and their cauls,
and their round tires like the moon, the
chains, and the bracelets, and the muf-
flers, the bonnets, and the ornaments of
the legs, and the head-bands, and the
tablets, and the ear-rings, the rings, and
nose-jewels, the changeable suits of ap-
parel, and the mantles, and the winnples,
and the crisping-pins, the glasses, and the
fine linen, and the hoods, and the veils.
And some fifty years later, Jeremiah de-
clares: “Though thou deckest thee with
ornaments of gold, though thou rentest
thy face with painting, in vain shalt thou
make thyself fair.”
But long before the Jewish era of mag-
nificence was the Egyptian, with a luxury,
and a refined luxury that nothing since
has equalled. The Egyptian was in turn
In Fair Array. 61
followed by the Assyrian, whose robes
were richly dyed and exquisitely em-
broidered with designs that cannot be
improved to-day, who wore many costly
necklaces at once, many armlets and brace-
lets too, mounted with precious stones and
set with them in stars and bands. In the
mean time the neighbouring nations of
the East rivalled the Assyrian in voluptuous
expenditure both as to person, dwelling,
and equipage. Vain of the length of his
hair, the Persian had artificial head-
dresses of great value ; the beautiful Pan-
thea brought to her husband, an ally of
Cyrus, a “golden helmet and arm-pieces,
broad bracelets for his wrists, a purple
habit that reached to his feet and hung in
folds at the bottom, and a crest dyed of a
violet colour; ” and Cyrus himself made
a principle of luxury and splendour. “He
chose,” says Xenophon, “to wear the
Median robe, and persuaded his associ-
ates to put it on ; for in case a man had
anything defective in his person, he
thought that this concealed it, and made
those that wore it appear the handsomest
62 House and Hearth.
and the tallest. And they have a sort of
shoe where they may fit in something
under their feet without its being seen, SO
as to make themselves appear taller than
they really are. He allowed them also to
colour their eyes, that they might seem to
have finer eyes than they really had, and
to paint themselves, that they might ap-
pear to be of better complexions than
they naturally were. . . . All these things,
he thought, contributed something to their
appearing the more awful to the people
that were subject to his dominion.” And
as the Persians adopted the Median vo-
luptuousness, so the Romans at last fell
heir to that of the Persians; and the won-
drousness of it may be conjectured from
the conduct of Cato, who refused to re-
tain the Babylonian garment that was be-
Queathed him, regarding it as something
too sumptuous for the apparel of a Roman
citizen, a garment probably like the
“goodly Babylonish garment” hidden by
Achan in his tent. While far back, be-
yond any of these civilizations, the old
Indian knew what the display of mag-
In Fair Array. 63
nificence was. “All things hang on me,”
says Kreeshna, “even as precious gems
upon a string.”
Among the Hellenes the love of display
reached a height of apotheosis, and be-
came a sort of worship of beauty itself,
rather than a pride of appearance. In its
earlier days we read of luxury even in the
small details. Thus the band that bound
the helmet of Paris beneath his chin is
spoken of as “the needle-pointed ; ” Ve-
nus is made by Homer to beg of her
brother his horses with the “golden front-
lets; ” Helen “shadows her beauty with
white veils;” Hector wears “ day-bright
arms, white plume, white scarf; ” and
when Juno would charm Jove she made a
toilette that no lady of the present time
knows how to excel.
“She made fast
The shining gates, and then upon her lovely body
CaSt *
Ambrosia, that first made it clear, and after laid
on it
An odorous, rich, and sacred oil that was so won-
drous sweet
That even when it was but touched it sweetened
heaven and earth.
64 House and Hearth.
Her body being cleansed with this, her tresses
she let forth
And combed, her comb dipped in the oil; then
wrapped them up in curls;
And thus her deathless head adorned, a heavenly
veil she hurls
On her white shoulders, wrought by her that rules
in housewiferies,
Who wove it full of antique works of most divine
device; -
And this with goodly clasps of gold she fastened
to her breast;
Then with a girdle whose rich sphere a hundred
studs impressed
She girt her small waist. In her ears, tenderly
pierced, she wore -
Pearls, great and, Orient.”
And if these instances are not of real
and historic persons, they are Confessed
to be of real and historic usage, and are
therefore fitting illustrations of their pe-
riod, among a people by whom the most
that colour and form could do was known
and loved. The Ostentatious Romans lost
much of the perfection that the Greeks
had reached, and in their effort for more
display let that simplicity of beauty which
was the charm of Greek work and life be
lost under as much ornament as would
In Fair Array. 65
K
have buried Tarpeia. The habits of the
Romans in relation to the toilette are
finger-posts to the rest of their personal
customs; we can imagine what the per-
petual pageant must have been in dress
and in household affairs, when even the
public baths were floored with costly mo-
saics, the arched ceilings frescoed in ever-
lasting colours, the walls inlaid, and every-
where were statues, vases, and bas-reliefs,
profusely decorated, and of a kind beyond
our power to equal. It was in the public
baths that the Farnese Bull and the Lao-
Coon were found ; and he was a poor
thing whose private bath was not elab-
Orate with chiselled marbles and silver
pipes, and with the water cooled by con-
tact with floors of precious marbles, or
Sometimes even of silver and gold.
Pomp and display, indeed, are things
confined to no race and no land. We are
told of the gold and silver vessels that en-
riched the state apartments of the primate
in the time of Henry the Second of Eng-
land ; and it was three hundred years after
that that the fashion of tying the toes of the
5
66 House and Hearth.
shoes back with threads of twisted gold
and chains of silver was abolished. It
was the inventory of his tapestries, and
cloth of gold and silver,
“The several parcels of his plate, his treasure,
Rich stuffs and ornaments of household,”
which, according to Shakspeare, led to
Wolsey's downfall. And although in the
reign of Elizabeth the splendour became
less barbaric and more luxurious, yet
even then gloves were adorned with
fanciful wrought-work of jewels, and the
queen's dresses numbered by the thou-
sand, her cloak of perfumed Spanish
leather, her shawls, her first silken stock-
ings, are all things of tradition ; while in
the reign of Charles the Second false
hair was as much a matter of every day
as it is at present ; and there being then
the same fancy for blond tresses that
is shared by the existing generation,
blond powder came into vogue, and its
use was only kept within bounds by an
excessive tax. -
With this passion for fine externals al-
ways evident in humanity, it would seem
In Fair Array. 67
to be a natural instinct that directs every
woman toward a cultivation of the art of
dress. It was born with Eve ; it will die
only when Eve's last daughter dies. It is
the instinct which furnishes her with the
whole armory of offence, and teaches her
on whom to use it, — the desire to please,
and the necessity for conquest.
Womankind, indeed, does its best to re-
verse that general order which has made
the male animal the finer, which has
given the splendid plumage to the cock,
the bristling mane to the lion ; for the de-
crees of fashion, which, whether emanating
from the throne or the workshop, woman
has always had a hand in Shaping, have
at last restricted man to a mere straight
line, a shadow ; while woman herself—
in the amplitude of her draperies, in her
ruffles and feathers; in her laces, where a
hoar-frost has fallen on a whole floral
kingdom ; in her jewels, where the sun-
shine of centuries has crystallized ; in her
magnificence of hair, that many dead
women have first laid aside — is atoning
to the female creature of all the animal
68 House and Hearth.
races for the enforced insignificance of
her untold generations. This is no more
apparent than at a wedding, — where
the groom seems only a lackey of the
occasion, while the bride trails her silk,
and is odorous with her orange-blossoms
and blooming beneath her veil, till she
eclipses in her snowy splendour that of the
great white peacock of Oriental courts
itself. -
The fact that the female of the inferior
Organizations always selects the handsom-
est and strongest of her furred and feath-
ered lovers displays from the beginning
how inherent is what may be called the
love of dress in the feminine nature ; and
to her appreciation of colour and contour
we owe it that strength and beauty have
been perpetuated in the male line. It
is not her dictates, but the march of
life's activities, which have robbed man
of chapeau and plume and chains and
knee-buckles and velvet doublets and
slashed sleeves and lace ruffles, and so
reduced him to his lowest terms. And if
this is instinctive — and who that remem-
In Fair Array. 69
bers the processions of Secret Societies
with their regalia, and the glory of train-
ing-day, shall say that it is not instinctive
with men as well as women? — then it
must be, within its own limits, healthy.
Those who have time and opportunity are
able to raise this instinct from its primi-
tive yearnings, develop it and gratify it with
the appliances that have now reached the
fineness of an art. Doubtless that art is
yet no nearer perfection than the human
race itself is near perfection. The paints
with which the Savage woman streaks her-
self when her lord fails to return from the
war-path are only the initial germs of the
rose that blooms on the fine lady's cheek
in rouge when she goes out on her love-
path ; and that rouge, moreover, is but a
groping after the beauty given by health
and righteousness; and when the human
race has in any appreciable measure ap-
proached that perfection which it desires,
we all shall have learned what course
of diet and sleep and exercise, of cleanli-
ness and godliness, will be needful to pro-
duce the velvet bloom that no rouge can
70 House and Hearth.
rival, and that at sixty shall be as fresh,
after its own fashion, as at twenty.
Probably we shall arrive at the per-
fect dress by the same gradual processes
through which we arrive at other improve-
ment ; we shall not reach it by sitting
down contentedly and admiring what we
have with the complacency of an Esqui-
mau admiring her sealskins. It may be
that the Greek woman's flowing lines, her
soft wools and linens, will rise again and
declare themselves as matchless as all the
rest of Greek art; it may be that the
poet’s day will come, and find us clad
with —
“A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with wreaths of myrtle,
A belt of straw and ivy buds
With coral clasps and amber studs.”
But whichever reigns at last, it will be
only because that shall have been found
to be the best dress which ingenuity can
adapt to use. It is doubtful if the Greek
dress ever gains the ascendency again ;
for it was the dress of slavery, - the dress
In Fair Array. 71
of a civilization where modest women
could not walk unveiled on the public
ways with decency; beautiful as its lines
and textures were, it had ineradicable de-
fects, and we see it yet in kindred and
slightly baser shapes among the semi-
civilizations of Moor and Turk and Arab,
where women are still held, not as indi-
vidual souls, but as objects of luxury.
Nor are the grotesque barbarities in
dress of the mediaeval time likely to re-
visit us. In fact, every generation does
away with some superfluity and introduces
some necessity; and the old saying that
fashions return once in seven years has
only a shred of truth. The progress of
growth is in a spiral, round and round,
but always a degree higher ; so the leaves
grow on the stem, so the stars roll in their
orbits, and history, repeating itself, always
repeats on that spiral. Fashions, then,
when they recur, it will be observed, recur
on a plane higher than when they came
before. A little while ago, for example,
we stood on the spiral over that of the
Watteau period ; we had the panier, the
72 House and Hearth.
petticoat, the powdered hair, of that time,
but with an essential difference of modesty
and taste. One extreme always produces
reaction into another, and the two together,
as in the resolution of forces in mechan-
ics, produce a medium ; and in the appli-
cation of such a principle to fashion, we
may notice that this medium line is usu-
ally the starting-place for a new departure
which is a positive advance on what has
gone before. But whatever the advance
must be, it will come through the influ-
ence of individual opinion and example ;
and whatever the future fashions may be,
only that woman will be well dressed who
follows them just as much as, and no
more than, they accent her own style and
beauty, - who balances the colours of her
dress to relieve her complexion, who re-
members the colour of her eyes when she
buys her ribbons, and who understands
that neither purple nor fine linen is abso-
lutely necessary to produce a perfectly
dressed woman.
Both for the woman in her prime and
for the young girl there is something to be
In Fair Array. 73
noted in the way in which Nature gives
suggestion even in so Small a matter as
their toilettes, the arrangement of the
colours, the flowers with which they shall
adorn themselves; as if the Sweet old dame
recalled some of her own youthful pas-
sages, the glad humour in which she used
to put on her bright array for Some gal-
lant roamer of a comet, Some gay Spark
of a meteor, or for her greater lover, the
Sun. And she often gives the material,
too, to rustic belles, from the full lap of her
yearly fruition, in the white and waxen
snow-drop berries, with those of the red
alder and rowan, the rose-hips, and the
brown seaweed bulbs, for necklaces and
armlets, the dropping barberry clusters,
the spray of red creeper, or the feathery
clematis fine as marabou plumes, making
brightness and softening crudeness for the
most unlovely. In a larger sense, too,
she contributes to the ideas of one who
makes dress a Science. Let the dame
trail a rosy cloud over the morning blue
at Sunrise ; straightway we see the deli-
cate Pompadour colours that a pretty
74. House and Hearth.
woman was wise enough in her day and
generation to claim. And any among
the infinite combination of tints which she
shows in Sunsets over water would make
the face of youth forever beautiful if skil-
fully woven into the toilette, – if it were
not that he who would give his fabrics
that depth and lustre labours in vain after
the ravishing but evanescent ray. In the
richest and brightest dyes he can attain,
that spirit of fire fails to shine ; his rubi-
est red is not so warm as the brand that
burns in the west at nightfall; and im-
perial purple is dull beside the lavender
that lies mixed with rose, any morning on
the river's breast. What a delicate sense
of colour the artist soul in this old Dame
Nature shows In what depth over depth
of silver-sheened blue the sky rises above
the head of any dreamer lying face up-
ward on the forenoon's grass, and in what
transfigured azure the lake repeats it, when
he rises to his feet, and sees it hold all
heaven In what a mingling of many tints,
harmonious as a full-bosomed chord, do
the meadows lie, their emerald green soft-
In Fair Array. 75
ening into russet, the russet deepening into
claret, the whole gilt with the sun What
enchantment broods among the mountains
in the colours that inföld them magically
as the robes of Prospero when the Sun
Smites and empurples the rock, or strikes
through the light vapours, or raises rain-
bows out of the dew of the mere mosses,
or when the twilight shadows Creep up and
drown the rosy tips in darkness | If any
beauty in the flock of beauties that every
generation turns out bright as fresh coins
from the mint — beauties, certainly, with
the dimpling bloom and blush, the un-
dimmed eye, and the roundness of youth,
— could find time in the new affairs
crowding upon her consciousness, to note
these changes of sky and sea and land,
the wondrous combining and harmonizing
of tints, how she might enrich her beauty
One asks if the famous beauties of other
days, the Lalages and Livias, never availed
themselves of the hints that Nature gives;
if Diane de Poitiers, carrying kings cap-
tive, binding them with chains so strong
that common people must needs think
76 House and Hearth.
them the work of magic; if ‘Ninon, con-
Sulting with Scarron as to his romances,
with Molière as to his comedies, with
Rochefoucauld as to his maxims, and en-
tertaining queens for guests, – if either of
them was yet wanting in the wit to learn
of Nature how to heighten beauty, what
colours were suited to what hours and what
moods, what Sentiment attached itself to
broken and what to flowing lines, at what
point Nature and art coalesced.
The sea-foam and the coral madrepore
which give the hint of lace, the flowers
that lend their outlines to be wrought into
the work, the vapour which scarfs a hillside
with its gauze, the worm which feeds upon
the leaf and takes its colour, show us how
convertible is beauty; and we may expect
women to preserve their empire years be-
yond their present term of reigning when
they have learned the secrets with which
Nature makes every hedge beautiful and
casts a bloom on bare rocks.
iºr=re:::::::::::::::::::::::
VIII.
THE LOVERS.
ITH or without beauty, charm of
manner, or fine adornment, al-
though our young girl may be, yet One
day Love will find her out. Announced
by blush and tremor, by doubt and fear
and hesitating joy, he comes. She does
not know him in the first moment. There
has come with him vague disquietude,
longings, unrest, uncertainty if this be
earth or that be heaven; and just as Mel-
ancholy seems about to claim her for his
Own, she looks in his eyes and knows
that it is Love.
Simply to recognize him is happiness.
He may not see her, he may pass her

78 House and Hearth.
by ; it was bliss to know him, and know
him for her lord; all her life long she
will be more blessed and holy to herself
for the sanctification, the chrism of that
look.
And if he do not pass her by, if he
pause and claim her for his own, heaven
itself can give no more pure or perfect joy,
for she is lost in him, and self-abnegation
is the blessed force at the root of all joy.
How all the delights of earth lend them-
selves now for the scene of this new
drama, - the soft Summer nights fan them
with floating fragrances on silken winds,
the foam curls up the strand only to break
at their feet, the waves flow into one an-
other only to bear them along, the woods
arch over dim avenues of gold and emer-
ald shadow only to allure their feet, the
winter nights spread their great hollow.
shield of stars before the impenetrable
depths only to invite their thoughts to
soar and consecrate their love by all that
is most mighty and most sacred, and to
bring into it the living streams of infinite
life and progression. -
The Lovers. 79
Lovers who thus take Nature into their
confidence have always a third party for
companion who is never in the way, and
who constantly attunes them to that high
pitch of thought and act which needs no
oversight. Such lovers would hardly know
it for oversight, if they had it. In a
crowd they are alone together ; and in a
desert they have always their great com-
panion. Solitude is not necessary to
them ; and the fact of their love itself is
so sufficient that they do not need to ob-
trude its evidence upon those who never
had, or who, having had, have lost that
joy. And for lovers such as these in all
the years to come no flaming sword will
ever be unsheathed to bar them out of
Eden.

IX.
THE BETROTH AL.
UT there are lovers and lovers; and
in the social world certain rules have
long obtained which it is convenient to ob-
serve and obedience to which, doing away
with all distinctions, puts all lovers on an
equality. These rules do not recognize
the existence of an engagement as afford-
ing reason for the family and friends to
absent themselves from the society of the
lovers, and do not allow the parlours to
be abandoned by every one else in order
that two may occupy them alone and in
the dark. They require the lovers to share
in the general occupations, gather about
the family centre in a community of
interest that includes all, that tends to
make the man about to enter a family

The Befroſthal. 81
feel himself already a part of it, that
accustoms the family to him as Son and
brother, and creates that affectionate
relation which ought to exist between
them, which can hardly be begun too
early, and which must exist if there is to
be happiness in the future. Under these
or any other rules, the betrothed will
always respect each other; the maiden will
maintain her reserves, the lover will rever-
ence them. No young girl can allow a
liberty of any degree without losing some
of the fealty of her lover ; nor can any too
presumptuous lover retain the full meas-
ure of a girl’s adoring worship. If love
is not lessened it will be tempered with
pity or with contempt, and with a recog-
nition that the ideal has not been attained,
perhaps with suspicion in the Succeeding
years.
Comprehension of these things rests
more with the guardians of the young
people than with the latter themselves,
with those who shall rear them right-
eously, make certain conduct obliga-
tory with them, certain other conduct
6
82 House and Hearth.
impossible, till, all that being a matter of
course, the young people need not think of
their behaviour and are at liberty to love
and be happy. These guardians, too,
will have something to do in order to
know at what point to suffer their relations
to be called an engagement, that thus not
too great a length of time shall intervene
between betrothal and marriage, whether
from insufficient income or other reason,
keeping them in the unrest of expectancy,
in the unsettled condition which if it last
too long may result in instability; and on
the other hand that the time shall not be
too brief, and marriage so abrupt that the
contracting parties shall find themselves
bound for life to they knew not what at
the time of binding.
Yet the sentiment which granted every
indulgence to the youth about to be sacri-
ficed, in the month before his sacrifice, is
kindred to that with which older people
are apt to look upon lovers, to look upon
all who approach the great crises of life.
Who knows what the next step into the
great darkness or the great brightness
The Befroſſhal. 83
may be? We want this season to be for
them one of absolute happiness. The
happiness that belongs to each of the
different phases of life is a thing apart,
— the satisfied peace of age, the deep
yearning joy of the mother, the fluttering
irresponsibility of the child, the innocent
gayety of girlhood ignorant of cares and
Sorrows, the intensifying rapture of the
lover. One does not mingle with the
other; neither repeats the other; they
are as separate as the three Colours, as
sorrow and joy. And when this time of
rapture comes no one should mar it, and
every one should regard it — this strange
interval of brief and perfect happiness —
with the honour and reverence that would
be yielded to some one of the young gods
who had left his heaven for a while to
dwell among us.
There is something pathetic, too, for
the hearts of most older observers, in the
sight of this happiness. So much lies in
its way, SO unknown is the path ; and one
sees a young girl looking on her engage-
ment ring as if she were reading her fate
84 House and Hearth.
in some new chiromancy, and prays it
shall be only joyous. How much is held
in that little circlet, and how precious
and how hallowed the engagement ring
is to all lovers | Hallowed with all that
it involves personally of pledge and plight
and hope and faith and surrender and
acceptance, and precious not only in
price, but in its outward and visible sign,
in its symbolic meaning, and for the
beauty, too, which the simplest golden
hoop cannot evade, and which has always
made the ring the choicest and loveliest
of decorations.
One cannot look at the rings preserved
in great collections without a tender feel-
ing, knowing how much each one must
have meant to its wearer, whether they
are those of the days of Charlemagne,
of the lovely women of Cyprus, of the
Egyptian women who wore them of pew-
ter and glass, of curiously wrought silver
set with stones like the ring of the Mexi-
can peasant of to-day, or of gold twisted
in hoops on which, like the bells of the
high-priest’s robe, hung Corals and thin
The Betrothal. 85
laminae of precious metal cut in floral
shapes, tinkling and twinkling as the fin-
gers moved, beautifying still more the
beautiful plaything of a hand that showed
them.
From the time of the Egyptian woman
to the present, the one who did not value
her rings has yet to be found ; for they
have always represented love, association,
and intrinsic beauty. Their use has not
been confined to women; once every man
had his jewels on his fingers, gave them
to friends and hostages, received them in
plight; they were a portion of the outfit
of a gentleman; they were bequeathed
in wills, and given away at funerals. In
the time of the first large merchants and
the beginnings of commerce and inter-
change, not only the nobles but the
commons made use of them ; every
tradesman wore one, employed it for his
signature and sealed his bales with it;
and every nobleman used it where the
impression of his coat-of-arms was re-
quired as a pledge of faith, of Safe-
conduct, of identity.
86 House and Hearth.
The countrymen of Tarpeia regarded
rings for their material value and splen-
dour. But those of Olympia attached to
them the full measure of sentiment; and
we may be sure that at the marriage of
Cana the use of the ring was a special
feature of the marriage ceremony, that it
was large and elaborate, if not, as often,
filigreed, enamelled, and of a fixed weight,
making evident by its means the indis-
soluble consecration of the bride to her
husband. Rowena must have received a
ring from Ivanhoe at her marriage, for
with her people the bride was taken for
“fair or foul,” promised to be “buxom
and bonny,” receiving a ring as part of
the “wed ” at betrothal, wearing it on her
right hand till marriage, when it was
placed on the left.
There is much sad and sweet romance
about those rings once so treasured by
those long dust, so much a part of their
passion and pain, their joy and trouble.
The white hands of queens, the sinewy
Ones of heroes, rise vaguely and spectrally
before us; but the ring is the witness telling
The Beirofthal. 87
still the story of historic loves, of kingly
promises, of knightly faith. In an old
house in Stirlingshire is kept now the ring
with which a new suitor wooed the widow
of the great Dundee of song; she lost it
in the garden where she walked, and be-
moaned herself for the bad omen, – bad,
as it proved, in fact, since shortly after
the marriage the fall of a house crushed
her and put an end to the disasters that
had pursued her through a life of mis-
fortune; but a hundred years later the
ring was found in a clod turned up by
the Spade, and was known by its posy
“Yours only and ever.” In the British
Museum is the signet-ring of Mary Stuart,
bearing the royal Scottish arms, with her
initials and the motto “ In defens.” In
another collection is the deadly troth-ring
of Darnley, carrying his own and Mary
Stuart's cipher in a true-lover's knot, with
his name and the date of his marriage
with the queen engraved on the inside.
The ring with which the Countess of Not-
tingham betrayed the trust that Essex re-
posed in her was not long since in the
88 House and Hearth. t?
possession of the Rev. Lord John Thynne,
having descended to him from Lady Fran-
ces Devereaux, the daughter of Essex; it
is ornamented with blue enamel, and has
an onyx exquisitely engraved by Valerio
Vincentino. Shakspeare's ring — a gold
one, with his initials tied together by a
cord and tassel — is preserved at Strat-
ford ; Luther's ring also is yet to be seen,
with its motto, “O mors, ero mors tua.”
It was with his ring that Raleigh wrote on
the glass, “Fain would I climb, but fear
I to fall,” and it was with her signet that
Elizabeth answered, “If thy heart fail
thee, climb not at all.” They, and others
of a far greater antiquity, are all a part of .
the poetry of history, and bring one with
a strange nearness to those that first wore
them and designed them.
The most beautiful rings, rare in work-
manship and in design, came a few hun-
dred years ago from Venice. There
probably was made the ring which Caesar
Borgia was said to wear, pressure on
which allowed a hidden poison to exude
from a minute point into the friendly hand
The Befroſſhal. 89
that pressed. Such a ring should have
been like the coffin-shaped jewels sup-
ported by gold skeletons twining back-
ward on either side to make the circlet,
— rings that came in under the patronage
of Diane de Poitiers, who had a morbid
fancy for black and white and funereal
ornaments, and brought into fashion a
custom of wearing gold and precious
stones cut into skulls and cross-bones,
which custom was adopted by the bour-
geoisie, with some idea that the serious
character of the ornament was more dig-
nified and respectable than that of a
lovelier nature. Of a similar sort were
the rings that were wont to be given
away at funerals, such as those distributed
at the burial of Charles I. which had a
miniature of the king behind a death's-
head, and the motto, “Prepared be to
follow me,” between the king's initials.
And of the same family were those plain
bands of gold holding a stone or sigil that
flew open by a secret spring and disclosed
signs of abracadabra, names of demons,
and other emblems of alchemy and the
90 House and Hearth.
black arts. Miniatures in rings opening
by springs have been in use immemorially,
especially those containing the unexpected
picture of some contraband chief. Sir
Thomas Gresham's wedding-ring was a
gemel formed of two linked together to
make a close band when folded ; on the one
was engraved, “Quod Deus conjunxit,”
and on the other, “Homo non separet.”
These rings were often broken between
lovers, each retaining and wearing one
hoop ; and sometimes, when they were of
triple hoops, a witness retained the third,
all united by and by in one to be used as
a marriage ring. They were frequently
made with a pair of clasped hands, and
sometimes the pivot on which they worked
was under a bust of Lucrece as an emblem
of chastity; they often had jewels running
upon the hoop like beads, and thrown in-
to any shape desired, – star, Cross, band,
or circle.
The “posy” was almost universal in
rings of the few past centuries, especially
in plain wedding-rings. “United hearts
death only parts,” was one inscribed with-
The Befroſſhal. gº 91
in them ; another was, “A faithful wife
preserveth life; ” a third ran, “Not two,
but one, till life be done ; ” still another,
“Weare we out, Love shall not waste;
Love beyond Tyme is placed.”
Of all finger-rings none are more daz-
zling than the harlequin, where diamond
and emerald and amethyst and ruby
spell the word “dear,” for instance ;
and none are more intrinsically lovely
than the very ancient gem cameos and
intaglios. But in fact, a circle is always
beautiful, and one can hardly fail to see
in any ring something of that which it
represents to the wearer of affection and
memory, shutting up in its little round
the whole world of so many a life.
To our young girl whose lover kissed
her hand when he placed it there, her
engagement ring has all of earth and
heaven in its bond. It does not matter
whether it is a diamond that holds in its
brilliant spark what might be the char of
a planetoid itself, or a pearl, that concre-
tion of moonlight, calmer than the Opal,
92 House and Hearth.
richer than the moonstone, alive where
Onyx and carnelian are dead, infused with
iridescence and filmed with reserves, that
real creature of the flaming Indian seas
or the soft Pacific currents, which is a
thing of poetry from its first shaping to its
placing on her hand, - whether it is any
fanciful stone, the fashion of the hour, or
whether it is the plain hoop of gold that
need never be taken off the finger till the
finger fall to dust, — that engagement ring
is sacred to her beyond all other outward
sign and visible token. It means to her
that one who looms, through her faith in
him, into heroic proportions, has chosen
her for his own, has given himself to her
forever, securely and aside from all the
world. The ring is a microcosm of their
devotion, their trust, their truth, which it
seems to them now has always existed, as
if they could not remember the time when
it was not, and which if it had beginning,
yet, like this ring, shall never have an
end. -
X.
THE BRIDAL.
IT makes but little difference to the
lovers at what time of the year they
join their lives sacramentally and forever,
whether when the high tide of life flushes
every bough, the earth is afoam with blos-
som, sunshine is at the full in the heavens,
and life is at high tide also in the human
heart, when the earth offers a velvet sward
for the bride's feet to tread, the apple-tree
spreads wide its brooding boughs like
hovering mother-wings, and drops the
rosy snow of flower-petals in a veil about
her, and Summer with its Sunbeams,
its south winds, its garlands, its green
woods, is the country through which she
goes to take possession of her king-
dom in her lover's heart and life; or

94 House and Hearth.
whether when all the world is white as a
pure and winged spirit with winter snows ;
or whether when the kindling of the first
autumn fire invites the flame to spring in-
to life upon the new hearth, lighting there
the warmth and cheer of another home.
Times and seasons are naught ; none of
these externals signify. They live in an-
other star; the wine of joy is at their lips,
the bridegroom has pledged his troth in
it as one in the presence of the eternal
verities; and the bride goes forth into her
new life, to the estate of a happiness sur-
passing speech, to the Sweetest and most
honoured name of wife, to reign and to
serve, to lose her life and find it in an-
other's, to be, although she may not dream
of it, as entirely other from her old self as
the earth is other than the maiden moon.
We look at her as she moves along with
her court, her blushes, and her smiles, lost
in the mist of her veils, with the glisten of
her silken robes, the glimmer of her Jace,
as if she were but a feature of a pageant,
a pictorial effect for the pleasuring of our
eyes. We do not realize the solemnity,
The Bridal. 95
the sweet awfulness of the sight, and that
we behold a sacrament in which the Lord
of Life himself bears part as much as
when essential force first evoked visible
shape and spirit took on matter.
Does the young bride among her cloud
of maidens realize all this herself? Are
her thoughts with the great mystery which
is about to absorb her life into another’s P
Or do the weighty matters of her para-
phernalia, of her wedding-gifts, of her
train, of the church processional, the tithe
of mint and anise and cumumin, exclude
perception of the way into that new sphere
just closing about her, in which she shall
walk to all outside view the same, but in
reality another being, although she may
never be aware of it till she has reached
the farther boundary P Has she, as Maria
Mitchell used to say, allowed the infinitesi-
mals to shut out the infinite? Is she los-
ing the great meaning of marriage, that
type of all perfection, that state and con-
dition which is a cosmos in itself, through
which the vast currents of life move ever
upward and keep the individual in rela-
96 House and Hearth.
tion not only to the race, but to all the
universe of being, from the first sponge
that ever built its frame to the last and
finest of humanity?
Let us believe that the bride most like
a butterfly among them all understands
something of the great miracle. It can
only be then with the reverence due the
celebration of some mystery of old, where
one draws near the ancient of ancients,
that she approaches the altar, whether it
be the altar of the church or the equally
consecrated altar of her father's house and
home, – an altar that burns to heaven
with the white flame of all pure love and
devotion and gladness, or else on which
is to be offered the bleeding sacrifice of
broken hearts and lives. -
Full often consciousness of this betrays
itself by the trembling tones in the vow
that invokes invisible powers to witness
the bridal; and quite as often the con-
sciousness of it is so appalling that all the
nervous strength is summoned to carry off
the hour triumphantly, and hide emotion
from the curious crowd that custom calls
The Bridal. 97
into the Solemn acts of lives, to the bridal
and the burial rites, the two moments
when feeling is at its most intense and
should be most sacred and unseen.
Yet because the occasion is supreme, it
does not follow that the beautiful frippery
with which we are wont to surround it is
So frivolous as to be out of place. It
would have its use if it were for nothing
else than to draw the fire of eyes from
self-revelation. Yet since it came into
being the wedding has been a thing of
splendour. “He has covered men with the
robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom
decketh himself with ornaments, and as a
bride adorneth herself with her jewels,”
says the Hebrew poet, whose name for
the bride is “ the perfected one,” and with
whom the word signifying the bride-
groom's ornaments signifies also the
“garments for glory and beauty’’ worn
by the high-priest when robes of white
linen were worn by all priests. It is fit-
ting that everything that can symbolize
innocence and purity and add to grace
and loveliness and lustre should be about
7
98 House and Hearth.
the bride ; that she should wear the mul-
titudinous lilac, the ever-flowering Orange ;
that the altar should be wreathed with the
prolific apple-boughs that droop about
the doors of home ; that she should pass
splendid as a vision, reminding the lover,
the sympathizer, and all them that believe
in the beauty of holiness, in the joy of
sacrifice, in the under-heaven of married
love, in the vital union with God there,
that the altar itself is dressed in flames
and flowers and Snowy drapery, that any
monarch is approached in robes of state,
that all noble ceremonial is pictorial and
beautiful.
If in her soul there is another altar
where the sacrificial fire is ever burning;
if she has said to her beloved, meaning it
as one means an oath, matching her truth
with her hope of his truth, “Set me as a
seal upon thine arm, for love is strong as
death ; ” if she has remembered also that
“jealousy is cruel as the grave; ” if she
has sworn absolute self-surrender and loss
in her beloved ; if she gives thanks for
strength and fineness and fire and ten-
The Bridal. 99
derness in him, thanks that So great a fate
has been given her as that of entering
into the circle of his hours, into the lofti-
ness of his spirit, into the beauty of his
being, then let what will come in all her
length of days, her life will be one long
bridal, and although bitter waters of afflic-
tion pass over her head, she will know that
many waters cannot quench love, neither
can the floods drown it; she will feel that
neither teasing trouble, nor want, nor pain,
nor weariness, sharp thrusts or heavy
blows, shall signify to her, that she can
defy death itself, for fate is her friend and
love is eternal.
Come then | Let it be June or Decem-
ber, whether the snow flies or the birds
build, it will always be summer in the
heart. Whether the air be rich with the
ripe scents of orchards or with the flower-
breath of blooming gardens, let it be full
of the Sweet jangle of wedding-bells, while
the bride listens to the sweeter music that
Cries : “LO, the winter is past, the rain is
Over and gone, the flowers appear on the
earth, the time of the singing of birds is
100 House and Hearth.
come, and the voice of the turtle is heard
in our land ; the fig-tree putteth forth her
green figs, and the vines with the tender
grape give a good Smell. Arise, my love,
my fair one, and come away !”

XI.
MARRIAGE.
BRILLIANT woman once declared
that if in our life the game was a
hundred, marriage, no matter with whom
it was contracted, counted fifty.
It was an extraordinary thing to say,
and aroused a lively opposition. Is there
any married person, whose marriage has
been largely a misery, who will admit its
troubles and vexations to be worth as
much as the rest has been, – worth half
as much, indeed, as all the rest of life
might have been P And if marriage with
any one counts fifty, - the marriage of
Edith Plantagenet, for instance, with the
serf, - should not the marriage of Edith
Plantagenet with the king count at least

102 HollSe and Hearth.
twice as much P Not, by any means, in
relation to the difference of rank or riches
between the king and the serf, but in re-
lation to the difference of advantages,
both of surroundings and education, the
difference of training through refining
generations, and the consequent differ-
ence of experience, to say nothing of
enjoyment.
There is much more involved in the
question than any affair of happiness or
unhappiness. Happiness, after all, ex-
cept in its ultimate effect upon tempera-
ment, is not absolutely important. It
makes but little difference to the universe
at large, perhaps, whether you are happy
or unhappy, but the greatest difference
whether your character was developed to
its utmost or dwarfed and stunted in its
growth. Doubtless unhappiness may
sometimes destroy good-humor, force you
to succumb to it, give up in despair, and
there an end ; but that is only when you
are so lamentably weak that it is of no
Sort of Consequence whether you give up
or not, since your qualities were too poor
Marriage. 103
and feeble to amount to anything, if ever
so well supported. You may, in fact, be
very unhappy, your home may be dis-
agreeable, your circumstances deplorable,
your wife frivolous, your husband unsym-
pathetic ; but if you bravely meet your
difficulties, if you bring energy to bear in
the endeavour to overcome them, iſ out of
your own sadness you can learn how to
touch tenderly and soothe the sadness of
another, then you eventually reap a fuller
happiness than the first ephemeral enjoy-
ments that you craved could possibly have
proved. For one of the greatest bless-
ings given to us is self-content, the feel-
ing that no gifts have rusted in our hands,
the Sense of an approving conscience.
The pleasure of a luxurious home, of fine
dress, of social excitements, the delight
of love itself, -— all these things are noth-
ing in the long run to that approv-
ing Conscience. These pass; but the
other is ours till the reversing stroke of
fate has turned our substance back to
dust.
As we cannot possess that approving
ſy
1()4 House and Hearth.
conscience, unless we have inordinate ca-
pacity for self-glorification, without having
done our best, then with its possession
that development of character must have
taken place in us whose influence is felt in
circles ever widening like the ripples in a
lake. For as the arm withers that is not
exercised, the faculty disappears that is
not used, so the use and exercise of what
is best within us develop those traits into
the strong characteristics that not only
have their effect upon others about us, but
descend and mould the generations to
CO]]]C.
That which exercises to the furthest Our
better and stronger qualities is really of
the most permanent value to us and to
the world ; and thus looked at it will
hardly be doubted that marriage does
this very effectually. Observe, for exam-
ple, the temper of an average married
woman. It has usually gone through an
experience that could touch very few sin-
gle women. Not that the single woman's
temper is unpleasant, perhaps ; but save
when she is exceptionally placed, she is
$ i
Marriage. 105
more or less independent, not necessa-
rily subject to any one's whims and de-
mands, and her temper has been largely
untried. It is, therefore, a negative vir-
tue. But the married woman's "temper
has endured much more trial. Under the
best of conditions — that is, when her
husband is faithful, temperate, kind, and
in easy circumstances — there have been
the frequent surrenders of the will, the re-
pression of wishes, the annoyances of
keeping the house not to please herself
but another, and not always successfully
at that ; the crucial test of servants; the
weakening of some sickness and pain ;
the loss of sleep that fretful children
cause ; the necessity of attending to the
wants of others; patching and darning
when a bit of fancy-work would be de-
lightful and an hour with a novel would
be paradise, – the thousand vexations
which accompany family life, where so
many different natures meet, even under
the most careful management. And if
the conditions are not the best, — if a hus-
band is not faithful and temperate and
106 House and Hearth.
kind; if he is hard, exacting, coarse; if,
tired with business, he gives the irritating
retort or sneer ; if he reduces her to
seeming nonentity; if his fierce outbursts
make her cringe, his manners disgust and
mortify, - if through that furnace her
temper has passed till refined into a
heavenly patience, why, then it is a posi-
tive and tremendous virtue, as strong to
carry her upward as a pair of wings.
And very often that is the state of things
with her.
And then the husband also has learned
to surrender some fraction of his inde-
pendence, to endure question and answer
and complaint, to manifest interest in
trivialities, to control the sharp reply.
Has not marriage then; even in this small
and narrow view, been of use to him P
Has he not grown stronger and nobler
and higher in taking care of another's
happiness and in forgetting himself?
Moreover, the usual experiences of
married life are such as are enriching to
any nature. To live for another; to have
the great object of being the happiness of
Marriage. - 107
another ; for a man to show his wife the
ideal of lofty manhood in himself; for a
woman to be to a husband an example of
the perfection of womanhood, - these
are possibilities that ought to make opu-
lence in the most indigent soul. And for
the rest, where can there be anything in
life equalling the endurance of that great
mystery of motherhood, which takes one
between the gates of life and death, and
almost into the purposes of the Creator? .
What moment can come to the father of
more intense feeling than that first one
where he realizes that he has called an-
other soul into being? Where can there
be any drama better worth seeing than
the kindling of those eternal sparks, the
opening of those new minds, the display
of their parental heritage P. Where can
there be any enjoyment better worth hav-
ing than the hug of little arms, the kiss of
little mouths? And of such enjoyment
neither tyranny nor parsimony nor choler
is apt to deprive one.
At the same time let us remember that
people customarily love where they marry;
108 House and Hearth.
they would prefer to give pleasure rather
than pain, and, except in cases of real
depravity, it is their intention and effort
to do so. If wives become too indifferent
or too exacting, it may be because they
find themselves neglected or betrayed.
If men become too selfish to be tolerated,
it may be that the coddling wife has herself
to blame ; and if irritability develops into
brutality, the wife who made haste to ap-
pease the passion by humbling herself
and fawning, instead of calmly and evenly
meeting the storm, has herself largely to
thank ; for it has been a part of human
nature, ever since it was turned out of
Eden, when it saw a worm to tread
On it.
And meantime it is well known that,
through the compelling power of genera-
tions, the habit of woman is the habit
of a slave. She loves; she obeys; she
marries to worship; and woe be to him
who destroys her god
On the whole, then, it must be con-
fessed that marriage, even if it were not
a state preordained by nature, would
Marriage. 109
be of infinite value as an affair of moral
development. Perhaps its martyrs enter
it with too great expectation. Life,
we have been told, is a state of war-
fare. To our dull sense the bugles
sing truce and the warfare changes into
revelling when really a new division
marches up to the attack. When women
dismiss Something of the ideal of romance,
remembering the adage which declares
that although there is a difference in men,
yet “husbands are much of a muchness; ”
when they dismiss the notion that they
are marrying into a race of Saints and an-
gels, while they themselves are dust in the
balance ; when men and women both look
the case in the face, and stand up Squarely
to their duty before it, seeing that not till
they themselves are perfect can they ex-
pect to mate with perfection, — then also
they may righteously hope to find happi-
ness as well as good experience.
“Seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal nor unequal: each fulfils
Defect in each, and always thought in thought,
110 House and Hearth.
Purpose in purpose, will in will, they grow,
The single pure and perfect animal,
The two-celled heartbeating, with one full stroke,
Life.”
Some pessimistic person has said that
most marriages are unhappy. This is to
say that most lives are unhappy. Yet on
the whole life is a comfortable affair to
the majority, and those who, looking back
at the close, could pronounce their past
quite unhappy would be an exceedingly
small number. The greater proportion
agree with the first criticism that was ever
passed upon the world, – that it is very
good, - too good, in fact, for those who
would better try to deserve it before they
make a business of decrying it. But good
as the world is with all its exterior bless-
ings, its blue sky and golden Sunshine
and green earth, it would be an insuffi-
cient one but for the greater blessings
afforded by domestic life. And the
very root and stay of domestic life is
marriage.
That there can be sweet and fine domes-
tic life where there are only unmarried
Marriage. 111
members of a family to maintain it, or where
friends combine about a mutual hearth,
is true ; but no one will compare such
hearths to those round which a father and
mother sit and see the fire shine upon the
rosy faces of their children. And no one
will pretend that any other companionship
is quite equal to that of a marriage where
either member is complementary to the
other and the union perfect. Of course
in Speaking of marriage good and Sound
marriage is meant, for no one has a right
to judge of such a thing except at its best.
We cannot judge of marriage by an aver-
age, because the statistics for such an
average are unattainable ; but we believe
that there is such a thing as a perfect
marriage possible, and so we have a right
to use that as our standard.
But, indeed, how can happiness be far
away from two people who have a deep
and earnest affection for each other, an
absolute community of interest, a single
aim in work; who can speak with their
whole souls freely, sure each of a listener,
a believer, a supporter; who are upheld
112 House and Hearth.
by unfailing Confidence ; who are con-
Scious of constantly affording pleasure and
help to each other, let come what outside
troubles may ; who are indissolubly bound
by such sacraments as the birth and death
of children? Can a woman be happier
than in knowing that she fills the house
with sunshine for her husband P Can a
man be happier than in knowing that he
wards off all the hard usage of the world
from his wife? And is there any greater
joy to be imagined than the mutual un-
selfishness, the mutual efforts, the mu-
tual rewards in word and deed, of
marriage?
To every healthy nature the pleasures
of generosity exceed all other pleasures, –
while on the contrary we may say there is
no sin in life which does not take root in
selfishness, - and nowhere outside of mar-
riage is there such opportunity of gener-
osity as may be found within its bounds;
simple and easy generosities, Small Sur-
renders more blessed in the gift than the
receipt, those privileges longed for when
dear ones are dead, the chance of still do-
Marriage. 113
ing more for them. Nor is there any joy
in existence comparable to the joy of low-
ing, — a joy So keen as to be close upon
the shadow of pain, as every mother
knows who yearns above her sleeping
child ; and nothing but marriage, with its
perpetual association of two hearts, with
the multiplying occasions brought by chil-
dren, affords this power of loving the full-
est exercise. How much rounder and
completer must be the Soul that has been
shaped by these experiences, how much
wider must be the horizon of its thoughts
and feelings, how much greater its
capabilities
Surely, then, marriage is a school of
life as great as and more beneficent than
any other. Unruly Scholars, truants, and
dunces there may be in it; but to those
who learn its lessons and apply its pre-
cepts the results of the teaching should be
broader and deeper than anything under
heaven. Not that it is without disci-
plines and rigours; indeed it would be of
little service to one's growth if it were
lined with roses. If it were, even roses
8
114 House and Hearth.
have thorns, and one learns something in
learning how to avoid the thorns. One
of the greatest works of marriage, in fact,
is the very discipline of the self-restraint
and the forbearance which it brings about,
and which things it makes, in the light of
devotion, a joy in themselves. There are
exceptional natures, liable to base tempta-
tions, for whom these disciplines are dis-
agreeable, these duties difficult; and yet
it needs nothing beyond obedience to the
simplest and commonest rules of plain
morality to render the path of marriage a
path of pleasantness and peace, into which
the thought of discipline shall not intrude.
The man and woman who control their
tempers, who practise truthfulness, who
tread down selfishness, who in short deal
justly and walk humbly, that man and
woman find
“The stubborn thistles bursting
Into glossy purples, which outredden
All voluptuous garden roses.”
But let the discipline come, if need be ;
it is at the most no sharp flagellation bare-
Marriage. 115
foot over flints; it is once in a while giv-
ing up one's preferred way, it is some-
times preserving silence for the sake of
peace, it is forgetting one's self, till God
and nature remember. And what are
such duties and efforts in comparison with
the recompense, – the recompense of a
purified and exalted being, the recom-
pense of trust and praise and tenderness
received, of trust and admiration and ten-
derness given,_and how much more pre-
cious are these great delights for the alloy
of the trivial hardships | Gold that is all
gold, without alloy, will not pass current ;
it needs the little alloy, that it may not
rub away and disappear in our hands;
life without vexation would be weakening
and worthless. When we see that house
where a true marriage reigns, where the
father is that bond of the house from
which the Saxons coined his title of hus-
band, where the mother moves like the
soul of order and sweetness, where the
children are fearless and fond, we see a
home which is only a miniature cosmos,
and whose light shines out like a star ; a
116 House and Hearth.
home where the harmonies of the universe
repeat themselves on a smaller scale.
There the Spirit of God has brooded over
the waters, there creation has reduced the
elements to rule, there duty and content
go hand in hand, there love is the fulfil-
ling of the law

XII.
ON THE PART OF MOTHER AND
FATHER.
NE often hears married women, wives
and mothers, whose matrimonial
career has perhaps not answered their
expectations, unable to generalize, and
with their little wasted honeymoons eclips-
ing all the light of the Sun, inveigh against
marriage at large and husbands in gen-
eral, and assert that the girl who has a
good home in her father's house is a
fool to leave it for a prince. With these
women, plenty and ease, no care or re-
Sponsibility, fine garments and fine food,
Outshine all other considerations, – all
considerations such as loving and being be-

118 HollSe and Hearth.
loved, the pleasure of doing and sacrificing,
and the joy of mutual thought and action,
possession or deprivation.
It is, to be sure, a comfortable thing to
live in a ſather's house, waited on, with
every desire granted ; more comfortable
than going into a husband's house to see
that it is taken care of, to heap up bur-
dens and illnesses, to add the husband's
worries and ailings to one’s own, to take
serious responsibilities in hand. It is
more comfortable, in one sense, to stay
in a father's house, even if it be a poor
one, than it is to leave it for a fate uncer-
tain in everything except the loss of free-
dom ; and if it is a question of marrying
a poor man, there are the new wants to
meet and manage, and all the pangs of
poverty to be multiplied.
But who that has either magnanimity
or unselfishness will wait to think of any
of these things when the honest lover
comes along? Is he poor? The one
that loves him longs to share his poverty
and help him make the best of it. Is he
ill? Whose hand can bring the ease to
Moſher and Father. 119
him that a wife's can bring P Is he sad
and solitary P Can there then be greater
comfort than that of lightening his burden,
and making the smile conquer the sigh P
Does one even think of it as comfort at
all? It is a necessity. One would be
wretched were it forbidden.
And what would the woman who in-
veighs against marriage have better for
her daughters? Perhaps while she lives,
while those daughters' father lives, things
may glide smoothly enough, if that is all.
But how is it to be when death has broken
the circle, and utter loneliness sets in P
Does she ever think of the condition of
the woman by her lonely hearth, without
— except in the unusual and fortunate
possession of other interests — a hope to
build happy dreams on, with no strong
arm to lend her its support, with no chil-
dren to stay her steps down the slope of
age?
It would appear to the candid as if the
fool were not the girl who goes out with
courageous affection to meet the future
and help her lover bear his share of the
120 House and Hearth.
shocks of life, but the woman who could
entertain an idea of advising her to do
Otherwise. What a fool is she who would
deprive her daughter of the sympathies
that come with marriage, of the infinite
delights in the love of little children, of
the precious satisfactions. in caring for
them, in rearing them, in seeing herself
and him she loves reproduced and blended
together in them, in feeling that her work
has added to the wealth and virtue of the
world ! And of what a sin against Society
is she not guilty; and does she not, as it
were, lay violent hands upon the ark of a
covenant and commit sacrilege against a
bond that more than any other symbolizes
the divine forces of nature ?
It is bad enough that in these piping
times of peace our young men should stay
to think twice before they marry, and
reckon whether the friendship, the love
and companionship of a wife, and the
train of happiness that follows her, are
quite equivalent to the liberties of bache-
lor rooms, the selfishness of bachelor
pleasures, the Society of bachelor friends,
Moſher and Fafher. 121
and all the rest. It would be a misfor-
tune past thought, if such Sordid feeling
overtook our young women.
Examples are always to be found of
single women, with aims and work and
friendships that answer all their require-
ments, and who can lavish on the chil-
dren of others all the love they have to
spare from their pursuits. But even these
must be placed in exceptional circum-
stances and have exceptional strength of
character to make their lot as desirable
as that of the happy wife and mother.
To most women heaven lies in the possi-
bilities of the magic circle of the wedding
ring ; and there most women find it.
Yet if not, if the marriage really brings
grief and trouble, brings want and shame,
its experiences even then are to be looked
upon as but a part of the great lessons of
life, and its discipline is invaluable. In-
dustry, watchfulness, painstaking, care,
Control of temper, are but its rudimen-
tary teaching; it ends by completing not
only the surrender of self, but the forget-
fulness of self. And if one should receive
122 House and Hearth.
nothing in return, nothing of an answer.
ing self-surrender, yet the woman that
has found this power of losing herself—
than which there is nothing more elevat-
ing, more opening, to the Soul — is as
much higher in the scale of humanity
than any girl sitting at ease by her father's
fireside, with only trifling solicitudes that
can be easily stifled, as the butterfly is
higher than the grub. They are of the
same tribe, but the butterfly is in ad-
vance ; the one is pinned to its bough or
leaf or clod, the other soul has all heaven
to fly in.
It is a heedless mother, then, or one
who thinks far more of creature comforts
than they are worth, – and who, even
without intending it, throws a slur upon
her own husband, - who does not recog-
nize that she has no right, by open as-
Sault or underhand remark, to urge her
daughter to a course different from her
own. The good wife, the good mother,
although willing that her daughter should
profit by her loss, if loss there has been,
will not dissuade her from providing her-
Mother and Fafher. 123
self with the possible means of happiness
afforded by a home and husband, and will
remember that society as well as herself
has some share in her child, when she
recalls the sentiment of Epictetus, that
applies no more to the father than to her-
self, and which affirms that “a daughter
is to her father a possession that is not
his own.”
A father, however, is not long in finding
out this truth for himself. Any lover is
quite the equal of the ancient philosopher
in teaching it to him. It is not to be
wondered at, then, if he feels it a hard-
ship to have expended himself on rearing
his daughter, to have given his time, his
thought, his care, and his money, and
just as he would reap the harvest of his
effort in the enjoyment of her society to
surrender her to another. Yet such is
the unselfish love that goes down that
most fathers make all this effort with
delight, repaid in the doing, and feel only
tender satisfaction in their child’s joy at
last ; and many a father pinches and
spares and denies himself for years, in
124 House and Hearth.
order to give his daughter a provision
which shall make her independent of all
chances. If, knowing life and men and
the world, as a father may, he hesitates,
he may well be excused when it is a
question of giving his darling into other
keeping.

XIII.
BOND AGE AND BURDEN.
IT is not only in the misgiving of the
mother, in the reluctance of the
father, of one of the contracting parties,
that marriage meets with hindrance, but
in a general feeling regarding its restraints
upon the happiness and liberty of life,
about the fetter that a wedding-ring be-
comes ; in short, about the bondage of
marriage. -
It seems strange that we have been
marrying during such numberless genera-
tions before discovering the burden of
this bondage; and we ask ourselves if we
are like the oak-tree planted in a vase

126 House and Hearth.
that really became so large at last as to
burst the vase asunder, or if it is an ex-
crescence that we mistake for growth.
Why is it that marriage has become so
irksome that suddenly the air rings with
complaint where nothing but peaceful re-
mark and accepted commonplace once
reigned P Our grandmothers contented
themselves with now and then looking at
the subject of divorce, where their grand-
mothers would have shut their eyes and
run by. For those worthy women re-
garded divorce as disgrace, and would
have been scandalized at anything like
the freedom with which their descendants
handle the matter.
Ever since the first differentiation from
the first maternal cell, through their greater
facilities of freedom, men have been mas-
ters, – masters of the weak, masters of
those who needed protection, masters of
the spoils; and they, out of the Super-
abundance of their power, have yielded,
under that compulsion only of the moral
power, in which women have always been
Superior, every point that has been gained.
Bondage and Burden. 127
The savage, who had his huts full of cap-
tured or stolen or purchased female slaves,
yielded a great point, no matter for what
reason, when he made One among those
slaves a definite and honoured wife. His
successor yielded a greater when he sur-
rendered all the others, and became no
longer the master of a harem, but the
husband of one wife, – became the man
who “loved one only, and who clave to
her.” Never in all his history did he ob-
tain so signal a victory as he obtained over
himself and his passions in establishing
the fact of one man’s marriage with one
WOIO all.
Strange it is, then, when it took such
length of time to gain this concession of
monogamous marriage, that now there
should be such dissatisfaction with it and
such effort to disrupt its bonds ! One
asks if it is man who is chagrined at what
he has surrendered, or woman who is
weary of what she has gained. Has the
luxury and splendour of the age weakened
its moral principle, and are we unable to
maintain ourselves at any height of vir-
128 House and Hearth.
tue 2 If one thing is right and another
pleasant, must we of necessity have the
pleasant? Are we totally unable to exert
sufficient effort to make the right thing the
pleasant one also, or has the love of ease
and delight so lixiviated our natures that
we cannot know the right when we do
See it? * * -
Doubtless, the nature of man and woman
being much the same, whatever may have
happened to their respective powers,
through use and Opportunity on the One
side, through disuse and slavery on the
other, our ancestors had nearly as many do-
mestic trials as we have. If the wife, then
accustomed to look upon herself more as
an inferior, did not demand so much con-
sideration as the wife who has discovered
her equality before Heaven if not before
the law, and so saved much of the trouble
of the modern rebellions round the hearth,
nevertheless the appliances of extended
civilization for comfort in the household,
by doing away with many occasions for
discord, quite counterbalance the other
troubles, so that the average of cause for
Bondage and Burden. 129
differing between husband and wife is
probably no greater now than formerly.
Yet the differing is certainly greater ;
and the blame for it must be laid equally
between the want of self-control and the
easy opportunity for rectifying mistakes
that the decreasing disapproval of divorce
affords. If our fore runners disagreed,
they knew there was no outside help for
it, since divorce was not easy to be had,
and was shameful when obtained ; and
the only thing for them to do was to fight
it out on that line, and let the weaker go
to the wall. They fought it out, then,
those that came of a fighting strain ; and
the other sort reasoned it out, and one
submitted and made the best of it ; and
in either case they usually had self-re-
spect enough to keep their affairs to them-
Selves, and deny their neighbours the
delectation or the disgust of a free discus-
Sion of them ; and the children they
reared were as wholesome and virtuous as
the children that are reared to-day. Cer-
tainly the inheritance of the self-control
of that parent who in the last resort sub-
9
130 House and Hearth.
mitted is more strengthening and healthy
than the inheritance of that weakened
purpose, that curtailed power of resistance,
that anger and vindictiveness swollen by
indulgence, that preference of comfort to
duty, that forgetfulness of the effects of
action upon others, that renunciation of
obligations, which are too frequently the
necessary accompaniments of divorce, and
which with the continuance of the loose
severing of marriage ties will cause the
pitiable parents of each generation to be
rated on the moral Scale as Something
higher than their children.
It is not so remarkable that complaint
concerning the existing condition should
come from men, who find many restric-
tions possibly in marriage, as that it should
come from women, – from women who,
whatever be its faults, owe to it all the
Safety and honour that they possess. Not
that there is not reason for vast com-
plaint, nor that women are not those who
chiefly feel the yoke of the system ; for
that most foul and cruel wrongs exist
in marriage is evident, and law has yet
Bondage and Burden. 131
& Jo
much to do in giving women a right to
their property, their children, and their
persons. Yet the wrongs are to be righted
through the growth of the race, and al-
ways within marriage. The situation of
women without it would be so infinitely
worse than it is, that it is impossible to
justify their short-sightedness and wrong-
headedness in crying out against the whole
system, when it is their sole protection,
instead of against the folly or the barbar-
ity of certain features only, features that
shall be modified or abrogated.
Instead then of freer divorce laws, mak-
ing Oaths and promises of no account, and
leaving sin still sin but called by another
name, we need more stringent views con-
cerning the Sanctity of marriage and the
impregnability of its bonds and barriers.
People rush into marriage now almost as
lightly and inconsiderately as they dance
off to a picnic or a pleasure-party. Youth
thinks its instincts better guides than the
mature judgment of guardians; guardians
recoil from the responsibility of interpos-
ing obstacles; friends sympathize with
132 House and Hearth.
romance ; the present alone is thought of ;
the future is a thing of naught. It is all
the sunshiny present till that future slowly
rolls up above the horizon, and brings the
night and darkness with it. Then Op-
posing natures refuse to mingle ; oppos-
ing educations and tastes jar ; the sum-
mer-day love vanishes; each party to the
poor contract seeks only its own happi-
ness, regardless of the other's good ;
crimination and recrimination lead to
open warfare, and the solemn oath to
Heaven, that promised faithfulness for
better or for worse, proves to have been
nothing but idle breath ; while the two
foolish creatures who came together with-
out thought, as easily as if the wind blew
them, go apart as easily, to alight like the
butterflies among new roses, and having
no more idea that there should be any
inviolable quality in marriage than the
beasts of the field have.
Yet marriage is not only a simple con-
tract between two individuals; it is not
only a religious contract calling Heaven
to witness and take part ; it is a civil con-
Bondage and Burden. 133
tract into which Society at large enters, and
under which it has rights as well as the
two contracting individuals, — the right,
for instance, not to be stained by abuses,
the right not to be injured by paupers
and criminals and the ignorant, the right
to claim that what was begun according to
law shall be carried out according to law,
that the majesty of the law shall maintain
itself calm and even-handed and not give
way before vulgar clamour. And in this
view society will do well for itself by re-
membering that to call black white does
not make it white, that to legalize wrong
will not make it intrinsically right, and
that the passage of Ordinances saying that
the betrayal of marriage vows shall be
called free divorce will never make it
other than the original sin which they
were passed to prevent.
If the first condition of woman was
not that of a slave, it long since became.
SO. If she is a slave still, - for marriage,
says John Stuart Mill, “is the only actual
bondage known to our laws; there re-
main no legal slaves except the mistress
134 House and Hearth.
of every house,” — and if she will always
be a slave until she is made as much an
integer of society as man, and his peer
before justice and equity, yet her chains
have often been gilded with such pretty
jewelry that she is not always aware of
them. When life was a state of the same
daily warfare and prey as it is now with
the beasts of the jungle, her comparative
beauty, her weakness and tenderness,
caused her to be the thing in dispute or
one of the rewards of the struggle. At
first never safe, she may subsequently have
been made prize as a mark of prowess,
but later as an acquisition of booty, with
implements of strife, with cattle, and with
treasure. Astonishing as it sounds, never-
theless a great progress was made when
she became an object of sale, inasmuch
as Sale is nobler than rapine. But even
then her condition was only less deplor-
able than her previous one. She was the
property of an owner, liable to barter, to
blows, with no rights in herself or in her
children, with nothing in the world but
the poor breath she drew, nor even that
Bondage and Burden. 135
should she offend her lord ' What no-
bility in her at last became apparent, and
induced her master to legalize her as a
fixed and single wife with certain small
rights of her own P One might say, indeed,
that it was some nobility in him, with in-
creasing refinements grafted on his nature,
the sons nobler for the sorrows of the
mothers, that had made it possible for
him to experience a lasting affection for
one woman ; but it is more likely that af.
fection for his offspring, and civil con-
siderations of heirship widely recognized,
impelled him to this action. A man's
wife might endure much that his daughter
should not suffer for an instant ; and
property has all a sacredness of its own.
Certain it is that the advance was the
slow work of ages, and that it came out
of the loftier and less luxurious races.
That marriage is not yet an altogether
perfect relation is partly due, then, to the
fact that it is a thing of growth under gift
and sufferance rather than of absolute
and complete creation.
It is not claimed that women should be
136 House and Hearth.
rapturously happy in the present state of
marriage. All that is claimed is that it is
the best state she has yet enjoyed, and in
order to improve it very greatly both man
and woman must themselves improve,
and marriage itself must be improved
instead of abrogated. It does not mili-
tate against their right to happiness if
women are not the intellectual equals
of men; but few will seriously deny that
they are capable of developing into
equals, and that it is the fault of men
that they have not done so. When
women have had the intellectual training
for generations that men have had, so that
if education itself does not become in-
stinct, the habits of education do, - when
they have had for such time the same
freedom, the friction, and the scope,
equality will no longer be a matter of
question ; but it will be the equality in
which one star differs from another, one
flower from another, each after its kind
correspondingly near perfection. From
the marriages of that era a race must
doubtless succeed to which in power the
Bondage and Burden. 137
present race will be Scarcely more than
pygmies. But that is something in the
exceedingly remote future ; and we can
hope to lead up to it only by fighting
within the union, SO to Say, not by putting
ourselves outside of the present conven-
tion and compact, but keeping one hand
closely grasped over what we have at-
tained, and stretching up the other hand
for more.
Let women bethink themselves. Sup-
pose for a moment that legal marriage had
ceased in society, what would be the ul-
timate result? Human nature would re-
main the same. Passions and appetites
would be the same. The drama of love
would still go on, the race would still
continue, and children would be born.
What would become of the children?
In Some cases, of course, paternal feel-
ing would appear and maintain itself;
but in others it is possible that the in-
difference to offspring common to the
male animal in a state of nature would
Supervene ; in still others the father,
being free to choose, and finding one in-
138 House and Hearth.
clination stronger than another, would tire
of the sick or fading or uncongenial
mother, and at sight of a rosy face or a
pretty manner be off to fresh fields and
pastures new. All this would happen,
whetherit received any complication or not
from the mother's variety of choice, if of
fickle or capricious nature ; and we should
soon have a generation of children de-
pending chiefly upon their mothers for
support; and women would find them-
selves with burdens heavier than they
dream of bearing now. For the mother's
instinct is something that in all nature is
rarely known to fail except where bitter
poverty and bitter shame intervene. But
it is seldom that mothers can bear and
rear children and Support them too.
The natural consequence of their being
obliged to do so would be the succession
of a tribe of mothers bowed to the earth
with hard labour and want and care, for-
getting their own graces and having no
time to impart anything of the sort to
those who would be growing up paupers,
predatory, unlearned, and in scarcely
- Bondage and Burden. 139
more than a second generation relapsing
toward barbarism. Unless, indeed, the
State took all duties upon itself, and ex-
tinguished the name and nature of
mothers. Either way, the necessary end
for woman would be a return to the state
of Savage nature ; and the thing would
work like a two-edged blade, – for what
woman is, her children more or less must
be also ; and where she goes, sooner or
later, but inevitably, man himself must
follow.
None, then, can be more blind than
those women who denounce marriage.
Let them, rather, hold marriage, with what
faults it has and what reforms it needs, as
Something too holy to be meddled with
irreverently, and the only shield between
them and a horror of great darkness.

º
XIV.
A GREAT HIND RANCE.
HAT which has done much to pre-
vent both harmony in marriage and
its complete beneficence, is the perpetual
iteration concerning the inferiority of the
female sex, keeping the husband always
in a mood of tyranny, the wife in a mood
of revolt. Not of the brute female sex, —
Oh no that, it is acknowledged, is quite
the equal and often the superior of the
male. Add then to the female sex a fine
nervous system, intellect, moral sense,
warm emotions, and it becomes infe-
rior If one were not indignant, one
would sometimes be amused at this sort
of assumption from those whose sex did
not exist when the first mothers of all

A Grea; Hindrance. 141
things swam out into the watery world.
One does not feel so much amused, per-
haps, when women, either in the old slav-
ish desire to please the master, or in the
fear that they are about to be forced to
undergo some change in which they shall
be driven from the stronghold of irre-
sponsibility, take up the tune and play
the changes on it.
Since recorded time woman has been
an underling. That she was the weaker
in the beginning did not give her the sen-
timental advantage which is sometimes
claimed for her ; for chivalry is not in-
herent in the other sex; it is an outgrowth
of principle, the apotheosis of unselfishness.
The Savage saw only the physical question ;
that things should differ and yet be equal
was an idea too subtile for his apprecia-
tion. She could not perform his feats of
strength : it did not enter his mind, if he
had one, to ask if he could perform hers,
— if he could endure the throes and
agonies set down for her portion, and rise
elastic from them as well as before, or if
her vast and wonderful nervous strength
142 House and Hearth.
were not as valuable as his muscular
strength. She was his thrall, not his
equal. He made no demands upon her
other than animal. .
And up to the present day, saving ex-
ceptional cases, woman is still regarded by
man much as in the earlier day. It is not
a hundred years since cooking and sewing
were thought all that it was requisite a
woman should know, - the two things by
which she could serve her master. It is
not two generations ago that the woman
who knew anything but a smattering of
French and the accompanying Superficial
accomplishments, by which her master's
amusement was secured, was looked upon
with suspicion. . It is not more than fifty
years since the day of emancipation came,
and her first high-school was opened.
And she has had to fight every inch of the
way since, and never has gained anything
because she was a woman or a wife, but
because she was a daughter. Under such
circumstances it is idiotic to attempt to
draw a comparison between women and
those who have been free for centuries to
A Great Hindrance. 143
cultivate intelligence and follow a bent.
Womankind is a part of mankind ; and
though a part is not greater than a whole,
yet neither is the whole complete without
all its parts. If you dwarf one member
of your body, if you wither a finger or
fail to develop an arm, you fall short of
perfection.
Mankind in the mass is not exempt
from the conditions of mankind in the
individual ; and so long as woman is
dwarfed or withered he falls below his
proper standard. Greek civilization, with
all its art and beauty, failed, as much as
anything, from its total oblivion of woman,
— total, save for the few phenomenal
Aspasias, who nevertheless had to win
the senses before they could win anything
else. And since Gothic races, so to
speak, obtained the precedence, it is not
impossible to believe that the reverence
given to women among the rude Northern
tribes, though a mere superstitious rever-
ence in itself, begot a noble race of women
that bred noble sons. But Greek civili-
zation, which ignored women, did ſail,
144 House aſld Hearth.
and the Gothic still goes on from march
to march. -
Among the expounders of the inferiority
of women are those who advance the idea
that as food in its transmutation means
created energy and power, so he that has
the most food has the most of this energy
or power. Man with his larger appetites
has the most food, consequently the most
power, applying the word to thought as
much as action. Those who accept this
puerility forget that if man does take the
most food, he has the most physical frame,
the largest surface on which to spend its
effects; he takes what is necessary to its
support, and no more ; woman also takes
what is necessary to the Support of her
smaller physical frame and surface ; it is
demonstrable that the amount left over —
the amount, that is to say, of energy Or
power beyond the need of the body –
would be the same in both instances. This
is the most formidable and, at first sight,
the most unanswerable of all the argu-
ments that the detractors of women use ;
for it is a foregone conclusion that women
A Great Hindrance. 145
never will be able to eat as much as men.
Milton, who speaks with some authority of
“Spare Fast that oft with gods doth diet,”
would hardly agree with these thinkers,
despite the fact that he did not love
woman. But then Milton is not of much
import with them ; you cannot weigh
“L’Allegro; ” and the “Masque of Co-
mus” is but such and such a combination
of gases.
These philosophers who would relegate
women to their own place with the bear-
ing and producing clod, use their facts
perhaps with more cunning than skill.
All females, they say, are lower in the
scale of development than males, – that
is, not so well adapted to their conditions;
and all females are smaller. But when
they are obliged to remember that there
are certain animals where the male is the
smaller and lighter, and not the female,
then they say that that male is in a line
of existence where it is an advantage to
be smaller and lighter, and so there the
male is again the superior : the exception
IO
146 House and Hearth.
proves the rule. In either case women
are in the wrong.
It takes, however, considerable hardi-
hood to assert that females are not so well
adapted to their condition in nature as
males; that is, that males are “superior
in the sense of being better fitted for the
purpose.” We have yet to hear of want
of adaptation in the generic female animal
to bear her offspring and to feed it. The
generic male animal, with the exception of
birds and human beings, – and not always
with the exception of the latter, — is apt
to destroy his offspring when he can find
it. Be that as it may, to argue the ques-
tion as to the adaptability of the female
to her duty would be but answering a fool
according to his folly. Well, the enemy
then says in effect, if she is fitted for the
rearing of young, let her do it. Use her
brain P. The female brain? But that is
of no account. Let it pass. It is smaller
than the male. With these reasoners the
angle of incidence would not be equal to
the angle of reflection, and the diamond
would be of less worth than the pebble.
A Greaf Hindrance. 147
Yet no woman need be discouraged in
her aspirations because of them. Small
or great, it is to be doubted if the power
that made her, or the force that evolved
her, would have given her brain its struc-
ture, as complex as man's, if it were ne-
cessary for the Organ to be dormant or
semi-dormant, or if it were not to be con-
sidered as valuable in the work of the
world as any one or all of her other
Organs.
“Women,” say these conspirators,
“ are not intended for the higher forms
of intellectual work, but in all their activi-
ties to be the helpmates of men merely.”
Is it fair to assume then that the female
scholars and thinkers of Italy and of Eng-
land, great, though few, are monsters,
merely exceptional instances of intellect,
and not really examples of what the sex
might attain much more generally P. Have
we a right to judge of any fruit from its
poorest samples rather than from its best?
If you saw fifty blighted roses on a stem,
and but one perfect rose, should you not
regard that perfect one as the flower of
148 House and Hearth.
that tree, and not the fifty that failed P
You might possibly think the cruel shadow
of something that stood up before it and
took all the sunshine had something to
do with the blighting.
But what is one to say of the fairness
and ingenuousness of an illustrator of facts
and their philosophy who overlooks every
fact of a multitude that tell against his
theory and enlarges on any possibility that
tells in its favour? Yet such an illustrator
gives as an instance of the essential infe-
riority of women's work, and calls it most
significant, — the historic fact, as he calls it,
— that there has never been a great female
composer. And yet how few great male
composers have there been There have,
indeed, been countless female song-writers
and composers of Comic Operas and Oper-
ettas; and much of our music, it is well
known, has been furnished by Hebrews,
with whom it is so much a principle to
restrain and hide and veil the woman that
even Mendelssohn published his sister
Fanny's songs under his own name. But
is music the last and greatest and Only
A Great Hindrance. 149
expression of power? Do not let us forget.
the other expressions. Have there not
been in government as illustrious rulers
among women, from Semiramis to Vic-
toria, as among men? Who has led men
to victory more bravely than Jeanne d'Arc,
or planned a campaign better than Anna
Carroll P Have there, in science, been
more renowned names than those of Mary
Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Maria
Mitchell, to cite but a few P In poetry
will not Sappho rival any of the Greeks,
does not Elizabeth Browning sing in the
great choir where the first lift up their
voices? Is there a novelist of whom
Marian Evans is not the peer, and did any
other novel ever move heaven and earth
with its mighty engine as Mrs. Stowe's
“ Uncle Tom '' did P Did not Sarah Sid-
dons play upon all emotions as much as
Charles Kemble did? And do we need
to discuss the Sculptors, painters, orators,
physicians, and the bright host in belles
lettres, mounting quite to the level of their
brothers? Shall the thinking that ignores
all these women or treats them as abnor-
150 House and Hearth.
mal and merely monstrous be accepted as
warranted by evidence or reasoning?
A further specimen of this sort of thinking
is found in the statement of those learned
in comparative anatomy, but perhaps not
learned enough, that women's brains reach
physical maturity at the age of twenty, and
thus, by correlation, of intellectual devel-
opment too ; while the growth of man
goes on indefinitely. In this view is it
not singular that so many men are men of
brilliant youth and promise and no subse-
quent accomplishment? They may have
led their classes in the university with phe-
nomenal scholarship, to disappear later
with not a hand raised above the dead
level of the Sea of mediocity which has
swamped them, or to be known as men of
one book, one song, One play, one discov-
ery. What authority has any Savant to
say that the brain of such men goes on with
indefinite growth and development, other
than as we may hope all things do?
Harriet Martineau was thirty-seven
when her first novel was published, and
all her best work was done after that.
A Great Hindrance. 151
Mrs. Barbauld was thirty when her first
volume of poems was printed. George
Sand was twenty-eight when she wrote
“Indiane,” the first work in which she
had no coadjutor; and all her work of any
import was done in later years. Eliza-
beth Montague was forty when her first
work, the “Dialogues of the Dead,” was
printed. Anne Whitney, the sculptor of
Sam Adams and Leif Ericsson, was thirty-
eight when she first found that she could
model in clay. Mrs. Stowe was in her
thirty-eighth year when she began to write
“ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Frances Power
Cobbe was of the same age when writing
“Intuitive Morals.” Marian Evans had
arrived at middle age before she came
before the public, and was an old woman
when she was receiving its sweetest plau-
dits. Louisa Hopkins had passed forty
when she wrote her great cyclus of poems,
“Motherhood.” Of course this proves
nothing; there are as many instances of
youthful production ; all that there is to
maintain is that the statement either pro
or con shows nothing ; this one is early,
152 House and Hearth.
that one is late. The same is true of
the achievement of men : Milton writes
“Paradise Lost" at fifty, Shakspeare
writes “Midsummer Night's Dream ” at
thirty.
One is tempted to think with Alphonse
Karr that there is really nothing so igno-
rant as the savant. He discovers his one
little fact or group of facts; he holds them
up to the light from his one single point
of view, and they darken all the rest of
the universe. By what means the savants
in question arrive at their conclusion that
the brain of woman does not develop
after twenty, who shall say P The same
brain can hardly be examined at twenty
and again at forty ; and to the vulgar there
would seem to be no other way of finding
out the fact. Taking brains at hap-hazard
for examples is not a more accurate way
of arriving at correct results than using
them at hap-hazard is ; and it is unlikely
that our anatomists have drawn deduc-
tions from a sufficient number of brains
at relative ages to warrant their conclu-
sions. What the texture of certain brains
A Great Hindrance. 153
may be belongs only to certain cases; and
the theory that one brain is undeveloped
by years is offset by the fact that another
brain is developed.
As soon as man became, through his
irresponsibility, the stronger animal, he
placed woman in subjection, as he did the
Ox and the horse and his weaker or less
wary neighbour. He has kept her there
ever since, — an object of use or luxury,
and always of possession, — so that the
question of her intellectual power has had
no such trial as to make it decent to pro-
nounce judgment. It would be, other-
wise, a case of condemnation without a
jury of peers or the opportunity of a plea
of defence ; and even a woman has the
right to a fair trial before sentence.
Made of clay, and with much of the
imperfection of the original composition
still remaining, it is not to be expected
that man will be altogether purified of
the mould for generations to come ; and
of course a transcendent magnanimity is
Something not to be attained by a bound,
any more than other supernal virtues. We
154 House and Hearth.
speak of civilized and semi-civilized races
with a heedless self-complacency; but in
fact the most advanced people on earth,
with all the appliances of science and
luxury, should not yet be termed wholly
civilized. Man has made a great advance
in virtue : he has abandoned the right to
tie his enemy to the heels of four stallions
and tear him to pieces in the market-
place ; he no longer roasts his enemy to
death on a gridiron ; he no longer claims
the right, because he has the power, to
enter an unprotected land and tear fam-
ilies apart for his own interest ; he has
Surrendered also with almost general con-
sent the right to ravage the sea as he
has ravaged the land, and make every
merchantman his prey; and he has
grown to look with scorn, and even with
wonder, upon the practice of household
slavery. That he still maintains a feudal
system which is the remnant of a larger
sort of slavery is a governmental matter
that time will probably make right, while
the piratical deeds for which three hun-
dred years ago Such men as Drake and
A Greaf Hindrance. 155
Hawkins were honoured and rewarded
would to-day give them short shrift. Other
rights still claimed by man he will doubt-
less some day see to be preposterous and
monstrous as the rest. If it has taken
unknown ages to bring about such results,
by and by, with the rest, may come the
fair trial of women.
At present it hardly looks as if there
were much remembrance of the absence
of a fair trial when women are so con-
stantly the subjects of the satire of wit-
lings that they cease to observe it, as one
ceases to observe the ticking of a clock
after a while. Low as the order of
humour is, the examples of it are plentiful.
Nor is it confined to the present epoch.
It is a couple of hundred years since
Addison, that gentleman and Scholar,
thought that the insults of Simonides
were worthy of translation and application
in a shameful article. If nine tenths —
as Simonides and Addison put it — of
the women of the ancients were as there
painted, it is no wonder that old races
have dwindled from the face of the earth,
156 House and Hearth.
and have left only a remnant of base-
ness, for such women were the mothers
of all the men that came after them.
And if any author of prominence could
originate such thoughts, and if one of
the grace and gențillesse of the trans-
lator could promulgate them, it should
excite no surprise when smaller wits make
similar views their own. It would some-
times do these witlings good to remember
that poor and contemptible as these things
called women be, they themselves were
born of them | What they do remember
is that when Virgil and Dante encountered
Cerberus, and he showed his fangs and
shook in every limb from desire of their
flesh, Virgil silenced him by throwing
lumps of dirt into his mouth.
But when it comes to solicitude on the
part of the Savants and the witlings con-
cerning the health of women who use
what they dare to call their intellects, we
are reminded of the Greeks bearing gifts.
Look at the question a moment, and
recall but a few of the cases of the intel-
lectual exercise in women as they occur.

A Great Hindrance. 157
The pioneer of all our own literary women,
the gentle Anne Bradstreet, living in a
time full of hardship and exposure, died,
perhaps too early, at sixty-five ; but her
successor, Hannah Adams, lived to be
Seventy-six, and was a woman whose brain
had been vigorously exercised in all those
years. Hannah More, however, improved
on this, Securing eighty-eight years, and
leaving a large fortune acquired by her
pen. That hers was a strong intellect
strongly used no one will deny, in view of
her career, in which we see her as the
valued friend of the great men of her
time, requested by royalty to draw up a
plan for the education of the young heir
to the throne, and nourishing the begin-
nings of Macaulay's genius. Elizabeth
Carter, another friend of Dr. Johnson and
of all that great circle, the translator of
Epictetus, numbered a tale of eighty-three
years; Joanna Baillie, of eighty; Mrs.
Barbauld, a woman whose genius is far
from sufficiently appreciated in this self-
Sufficient day, Lucy Aikin, and Maria
Edgeworth, all lived into extreme old
158 Hol/Se and Hearth.
age. Had the exercise of their very su-
perior intellectual qualities at all affected
the health of these women, their lives, it
is to be presumed, would have been much
briefer affairs than they were.
Returning to our own shores, among
our early authors we shall see that Mrs.
Eliza Buckminster Lee reached the age
of seventy, Mrs. Farrar that of seventy-
nine ; that Mrs. Follen, Miss Leslie, and
Miss Hannah F. Gould all went on well in-
to the seventies, while Mrs. Hannah F. Lee
saw her eightieth summer. Many of these
names are half forgotten now, but the
work that they did was work suited to
their generation, applauded by it, and of
service to it.
Again, Mary Russell Mitford, whose
life was spent in literary occupations,
waited for her seventieth year to die;
and Harriet Martineau, of a more power-
ful and active mind, lived to an older
age. Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi was eighty-one
when the summons came ; Mrs. Sher-
wood, whose pen was the pleasure of the
childhood of so many who have passed
A Great Hindrance. 159
away in old age themselves, was seventy-
six ; Caroline Southey was seventy-one,
and Agnes Strickland was seventy-four.
Do intellectual men live much longer?
Mrs. S. C. Hall, whose intelligence was
restless and vivid, died only at eighty; Har-
riet Lee, the author of the “Canterbury
Tales,” which were the delight of her gen-
eration, lived to be ninety-five ; and pretty
Fanny Burney had some of her charm left
when she went away at eighty-eight. Poor
Mary Lamb should not be quoted, as al-
though she lived to be eighty-two, it was
but in fractions of life. But then there was
Mademoiselle De Scudéry, a different sort
of woman, who lived to be ninety-four, and
who, with all her rose-water tendencies,
was very useful in the terrors and harsh-
ness of her time, as any gentle influence
must needs have been ; there was Madame
De Sévigné, who lived to be seventy; Eliz-
abeth Montague, who laid down her pen
at eighty; George Sand, whose powerful
intellect rested only after seventy-two
years of brilliancy; Fredrika Bremer,
who, as compared with her contempora-
160 House and Hearth.
ries, died young at sixty-five, and would
still have been young at twice that age ;
while if Madame de Staël bade the world
good-by at sixty-one, and Angelica Kauff-
man had but a half-dozen years the
advantage of her, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu kept things lively into her
seventy-third year.
Nor have the women placed on thrones,
or near them, found swaying the sceptre
more wearing to the thread of life than
rust. We have the great Elizabeth dying
in her seventieth year; Catherine de Mé-
dicis in her seventy-second, and whether
she were bad or good, she had a mind, and
used it ; Catherine the Great of Russia
lived to be sixty-seven ; Marie de Médicis
died at sixty-nine ; Margaret of Parma, the
Regent of the Netherlands, and Christina,
the daughter of Gustavus Vasa, both num-
bered nearly as many years as Victoria
now numbers, which if it does not con-
stitute age, yet does not indicate premature
decay; Maria. Theresa was but a trifle
younger; Queen Hortense laid down her
Sceptre over men's hearts at Seventy-one ;
A Great Hindrance. 161
while Madame De Genlis, who reared a
king, died at eighty-four, having the same
age as Madame de Maintenon, who ruled
without being a queen. And most of
those women who have lived on thrones,
or in the “fierce light” that beats about
them, who have died at an earlier age
than these, have perished by the Sword
rather than by famine ; their genius was
not fed at the expense of their bodies,
but of course it aroused antagonisms that
were the means of their destruction ; yet,
nevertheless, these same women lasted a
longer period than those who, the favour-
ites of kings, lived luxurious lives and
never gave evidence of having any more
brains than their masters. -
Nor have the excitements and indus-
tries and strong heart-beats of the stage,
where great triumphs are achieved, as in
any other walk of life, only by genius and
labour, been fatal 'to women. Mrs. Sid-
dons was seventy-six when the curtain
fell between life and her forever ; Pasta
was sixty-seven on making her last
adieux; Catalani, sixty-four ; Mars was
II
162 House and Hearth.
sixty-eight; Fanny Kemble still lives at
past eighty, and Jenny Lind has but re-
cently died ten years her junior. It is
true that most of them ceased to play or
sing publicly at a little after middle life,
although not on account of any abnormal
physical deterioration, but only from that
to which all the race, men as well as
women, are subject with time ; yet, with-
out exception, they took their interests
and activities into private life with them.
Again we have women famous for their
religious powers and gifts and work. The
Countess of Huntingdon, who played a
most conspicuous and able part in the
religious life of the world, contributing
immensely to the success of evangeli-
cal methods, survived into her eighty-
fifth year; Madame Guyon, too, of an
exalted mystical nature, pursued her
dreams for sixty-nine years, and Madame
Swetchine followed her example for a large
part of her three-quarters of a century.
To what an age did the labours of Doro-
thea Dix extend And surely neither
Flizabeth Fry's health nor family came to
A Great Hindrance. 163
grief in any way because of her labours
for the suffering. And as if to show that
the exercise of one's wits in a very oppo-
site direction is not calculated to wear
out the body, it may be mentioned that
the years of Mademoiselle Lenormand,
the fortune-teller who enjoyed Napoleon's
friendship, amounted to seventy-One.
Science, also, has its own story to tell
in behalf of the good rather than ill
effects of the closest application possible
to the human, not merely the female,
mind. The age of Mary Somerville has
passed into a proverb, her mind still
clear when at ninety-two she solved the
great equation of life; the learned Anna
Comnena died, a comparative girl, at
sixty-five ; Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the
author of “Analytical Institutions,” who
at twelve conversed in Greek and Latin,
and but little later lectured, in the ab-
sence of her father (a mathematical pro-
fessor in the University of Bologna),
lived to be eighty-three ; and if Maria
Mitchell died on the edge of seventy,
her great predecessor, Caroline Herschel,
164 House and Hearth.
lived to be ninety-eight before finding
her way to the stars. Of course all these
women died ; and although occasionally
from mere senility, generally with some
form of disease ; but one may be cor-
rectly under the impression that even the
most intellectual of men have done the
Same. Looking still further among ac-
tively intelligent women, one is encour-
aged by the advanced age reached by
many still among us or but lately gone, –
as, for instance, by the Grimke sisters;
by our sweet Miss Sedgwick, who reached
the age of seventy-eight; by Emma
Willard, whose years were eighty-three ;
by Mrs. Sigourney, whose lyre was
unstrung only at seventy-four. Mary,
Howitt died not long since, more than
an Octogenarian ; Mary Cowden Clarke
still lives at eighty-two, with a clear mind.
Meta Heusser, the adored German song-
writer, lived to be seventy-nine ; and
Lady Nairn, the Flower of Strathearn,
who tore some of the loveliest of the old
Scotch tunes from coarse and common
words, and without letting her name be
A Greaf Hindrance. 165
known till her death, wrote political
ballads, the “Laird o’ Cockpen,” the
“Land O' the Leal,” and countless others
as well beloved, lived to be eighty-nine.
In affairs of more vigorous intellectual
life than song-writing, there is Frances
Power Cobbe, alive and alert to-day at
seventy, with a great following of those of
her own age behind her. There is Eliza-
beth Peabody, now past eighty. There
are Mrs. Stanton, and Miss Anthony, and
their contemporaries, also still looking for-
ward, unimpeded by the weight of years.
There was, not long ago, Mrs. Myra
Gaines, too, a woman who had known
as many intellectual cares and anxieties
through the intricacies of legal lore as any
lawyer in the country, and who still fought
her unequal battle, One woman against a
whole city-full, at seventy-nine. Mrs.
Oliphant, always delightful and always
indefatigable, a wise old woman, only
ripening with increasing Summers, is
still amusing the world at seventy ; Dinah
Maria Mulock died when well up in the
sixties; Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney has not
166 House and Hearth.
laid down her pen, although long past
sixty, and her children and grandchil-
dren show that her use of that pen has
never injured them, as it has never in-
jured her. Does any one suppose that
the exercise of her intellect ever affected
the health of that marvellous creature
of tradition, Margaret Fuller? Did
Lydia Maria Child die an octogenarian,
after making her first acquaintance with
ill-health, because of stimulation of her
brain? Have Marie Zakrzewski (among
the first, with Elizabeth Blackwell, to
open the medical profession to women),
Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone, Anne
Whitney, Margaret Sangster, Marian Har-
land, Amelia Edwards, been hampered by
illness? On the contrary, they are women
of robust health. Yet according to our
Scientific friends, they ought to be miser-
able invalids, every one. Among the
orators, also, we doubt if it was ever heard
that Mrs. Livermore or Antoinette Black-
well or Olympia Brown was hurt by her
public speaking to a greater degree than
male Orators and lecturers have been.
A Great Hindrance. 167
Where are there better examples of vigour
to be found than in Clara Louise Kellogg,
in Christine Nilsson, in Adelina Patti,
— women whose lives are far from
domestic quiet, and whose study of music
and histrionic art involves no common
degree of mental labour? And, to con-
clude, find us women whose work agrees
with them better than their work agrees
with Mary Mapes Dodge, with Blanche
Willis Howard, with Sarah Orne Jewett,
with Mary Wilkins. And if in any,
among our other writers and thinkers,
the flame burns too brightly for the
fragile clay, still there are left Mrs.
Thaxter, Mrs. Fields, Mrs. Moulton,
and in fact a shining host who live in
the midst of active thought and work,
and who, except for natural causes, have
hardly ever known a day's illness in
the whole course of their lives.
But in spite of all the array of names
with well-developed brains behind them,
there is every reason that the mascu-
line brain should be the superior up to
the present moment, whether it is or
168 House and Hearth.
not. Greater opportunity, in having at
first no one to provide for but himself,
and afterward the necessity for fighting
for what he would have, produced in
man greater physical strength. Greater
physical strength, then, made man mas-
ter when no one thought of brains;
the habit of mastery creates responsi-
bility and fosters intellect. Having
mastery, the man has placed himself
in every favourable condition. And
woman might catch what she could?
Not even that, nor hold what she hap-
pened to catch. Has there been money
to descend, it has descended to the son.
Many exercises of the intellect, many
studies, the culture of art and of philoso-
phy, need money for their pursuit; it is
the son and not the daughter that has
had it. Scholarship, too, in the begin-
ning was a matter for the priests; and
women were not priests ; men were.
When it ceased to be confined to priests,
it naturally remained with men.
The habit of receiving education has
been for centuries, then, a masculine
A Great Hindrance. 169
habit, almost as it were by Special grant,
in spite of the comparatively few in-
stances of scholarly women. And as
Some forms of training are so disciplinary
that what was education in sire becomes
like intuition in Son, sex itself might be
said to have exercised influence, and
made the masculine brain at this date
the superior. Yet that it should continue
so, and the feminine brain remain the
negative and abortive organ that ceases
development at twenty or is injured by
exercise, is not to be supposed. Sex
does not differentiate in the brain ; it
will be difficult to create a belief that
it is inherent there. Like the heart
and the lungs, the brain is a thing com-
mon to all animal life. Both heart and
lungs are larger in most men than in
any women, and so the brain may be.
But when we remember that Leigh
Hunt's hat shut down over the face and
the whole head of Byron and of Shelley,
shall we say that size has any advantage
Over fibre and texture and in the force
of Surplus energy? That the feminine
170 House and Hearth.
brain has been dwarfed is not impossible,
— the Chinese know how to dwarf oaks,
— but that it is incapable of develop-
ment after its second decade is out of
the course of nature ; the dwarfing has
not been sufficient to create a new
species. “Woman's place in nature,”
says the oracle, “is to ‘stand before '
man, to be his helpmeet, his counsellor.
. She cannot usurp his place, and
she is not his equal in stature of body or
mind.” How is it possible for woman
to become the counsellor of so superior
a being? “Who is this that darkeneth
Counsel by words without knowledge?”
he well might say, if all the rest is true.
Whether she is fit to be his counsellor
or not, it is only the idle tirader who will
affirm that woman wishes to usurp the
place of man. She wishes only the
right and opportunity to take her own
place. In the , mean time is there no
intellectual force, no working of the
brain at all, no intelligence, in the ex-
ercise of those virtues in which women
are allowed by all history to excel, -in
A Great Hindrance. 171
patience, in devotion, in industry, in
self-sacrifice? “No doubt but you are
the people,” said one older and wiser
than any of these creatures, – “no doubt
but you are the people, and wisdom
shall die with you. But I have under-
standing as well as you ; I am not in-
ferior to you.”
Yet, in the face of all detraction and
Opposition, women have already suc-
ceeded in attaining much that they have
wished, and doubtless they will finally
attain all. Their upward movement in
the last two generations is already seen
in its reaction on men, for it is impos-
sible that their continued aspiration and
Struggle and achievement should not have
had effect on their sons. Another cen-
tury may see yet greater marvels than the
present, since men only attain the whole
of their own rights and a possibility for
the whole of their growth when they
inherit from the side of their mothers as
well as from that of their fathers a com-
plete and trained intellectual force.
And of this the world may be sure,
172 House and Hearth.
that there will never come complete
happiness in marriage, complete Sur-
render by marriage to the race of all its
possibilities of good, till the fact of equal-
ity has been granted, and so far and
fully granted as to be forgotten. The
end is not yet. Woman has been par-
tially freed ; but her wider education is
yet to come, – the education that man
has always had, the best of his period, -
before a proper comparison can be in-
stituted between her and the one who
has never been in subjection. Man has
Some progress yet to make ; woman is
proverbially swift. Once unfettered, she
may overtake him as he goes ; and we do
not entertain a doubt that by the time
he has attained the topmost height, by
the time there is nothing more for him
to achieve, – here, at any rate, – Woman
will be ready to accompany him, an
equal, in a marriage perfect beyond
dreams, in his flight among the stars.
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XV.
POOR WORK.
IT is frequently the case that husbands
think, when they have provided a
home and the essentials in it, according to
the standard of their station, — splendour,
luxury, servants, equipage, if these be ex-
pected from the income ; simple comforts,
and the means to work with, if these be
all expected, - think when they have
provided so much as this, and do not in
any flagrant manner Outrage the decencies
of life, that there their duties end. And
many of them would be as surprised as
shocked if you assured them that there
their duties had only begun.
In fact, when a man has provided his
wife with a home, and its contingent of













174 House and Hearth.
comfort, he has done no more than the
law requires of him ; there is, moreover,
an authority which declares that he who
does not provide for his family is worse
than an infidel. But there is a great body
of unwritten law which demands more
than this, – which demands that a man
taking a wife under his care shall take her
happiness too, her health, and in Some
measure her moral welfare.
Many husbands would assert that all this
they do, and have not left the other undone.
If a woman is not happy, they would say,
when you give her all the clothes and finery
she wants, unlimited credit, unlimited
pin-money, diamonds, a box at the Opera,
if you are in the line of millionaires:
and if you are not in that line, if you find
that she is not happy when you put her in
a house the equal of her neighbours, when
you are what is called a good provider,
when she never has to ask you twice for
half a dollar, – why, then she would not be
happy under any circumstances. As for
her health, what has her husband to do
with her health, except to be sorry it is
Poor Work. 175
no better, and to stop on his way to busi-
ness and send up the doctor? And as for
her moral welfare, are husbands in the
habit of requiring their wives to commit
larceny and murder and to take false
oaths? he would say.
Softly, softly, good man To her food,
to her clothes, to her doctor, to her moral
liberty, your wife has an absolute right:
it is not in the least to your credit that
she has them, it is only to your discredit
when she has not. Even if she did not
earn clothes, food, and proper care by
her personal labour in the house, the
moral law gives them to her and makes
them hers. All the credit possibly to be
claimed by you proceeds from works of
Supererogation, as you consider them,
which imply kind consideration, anxious
forethought, a desire to please, and an ef-
fort to secure happiness, as in the old sea-
Son of courtship, when in the darkest day
the Sun seemed to be shining in blue skies,
and the world so blessed a place that there
was hardly need of heaven.
This wife — any wife on the broad aver-
176 House and Hearth.
age — had most probably her clothes,
her shelter, and small need of a doctor
when her husband wooed her to his home.
They were things taken for granted in her
life, like the general air, and she gave them
little thought. She went to her husband's
care for something more than all this, –
for the sake of an especial regard to be
given her above all others, for an ideal one-
ness in sympathy; in short, for happiness.
These things were in the bargain, and not
a mere contract for bread and butter.
Ah, the husband may say, there you are
on grounds of Sentiment, while marriage
brings us face to face with sterner realities
than the mere illusions of fancied happi-
ness. But we beg his pardon : marriage
itself, with all the obligations of its civil
and religious contract, is a matter founded
on sentiment ; if it were not, we should
be little more than in the condition of the
beasts of the field, reverting to a state
worse than Savagery; and there is no
shadow of sentiment too delicate to be
neglected by either party to it with
impunity. .
Poor Work. - 177
How much, then, taking one detail out
of many, does it conduce to the happiness
of a woman, when her husband has been
away all day at his usual occupation, for
him to be away all the evening too at his
usual pleasure? Or if it is only strict re-
gard for business that takes him off, is life
to be resolved into nothing but a struggle
to accumulate without enjoyment of the
moment as we go along? There is hardly.
a woman living who would not be content,
and glad too, to be by that much poorer, if
her husband would spend his evenings at
home, and let her harvest the joy of that
companionship every day. It is true that
after a hard day’s work a husband needs
some relaxation ; but it is also true that
it is his duty to find that relaxation, to a
large extent, in the Society of his family.
Does his wife, who also has been occu-
pied all day, need no relaxation? And
would she think of providing it for herself
and not for him P And should not the
thing be mutual? If his home is so
constituted that he does not find en-
joyment awaiting him there, then, doubt-
I 2
178 House and Hearth.
less, being the stronger mind, the
healthier body, the more energetic will,
the one with faculties most stimulated by
contact and friction with the world, it is
his place to furnish it there ; and the wife
would be a new specimen of womanhood
who, even though blameworthy in having
done nothing herself to insure such a
thing, yet, seeing the effort on her hus-
band’s part, would not feel her heart full
of appreciation, and do her best to second
the effort.
After all, it takes but little to secure
this happiness of which we speak, - little
beyond the renewed assurance now and
then of the old affection, the kind atten-
tions to appearance, the gentle expression
of solicitude. By these little things a
woman's soul is saved from starving. But
with many men the feeling is that they
have the wife now ; and they set her aside
on her shelf and reach forward for their
future. By and by, if she is not dead first,
they will enjoy that future together.
These men, the descendants of fighting
barbarians, who carried women captive
Poor Work. 179
and kept them slaves, have something of
their ancestors still working in their blood ;
to them the only important factors in the
world are men, and women are mere ad-
juncts. Each of them takes about as much
thought of his wife's happiness as he does
of that of the dog upon the hearth ; he
would be sorry to have his wife very ill,
although he does not mind her usual ail-
ing; he would be in distress — tempo-
rarily — should his wife die, although he
would announce the burial to take place
not from her late residence, but from her
husband's residence, and would find the
place she filled then so unbearably desolate
that he would make haste to fill it again.
It would seem as if it were a matter of
self-protection for husbands to do their
whole duty as well as their self-evident
duty, and make it their happiness to Se-
cure the happiness of those dependent
on them, thus giving contented homes,
healthy and cheery inmates, and a univer-
sally improved condition of life. The
husband who speaks insolently to his wife
in public injures himself as much as he
180 House and Hearth.
does her, not only in other people's es-
timation, but by positive rebound. A
woman likes to have the preference that
once selected her still quietly displayed;
likes the simple attentions of her husband,
—if not the admiring glance, at any rate
the regardful word. The man who de-
clares his white-haired wife is as lovely to
him as when her hair wore the gloss and
abundance of youth, has a happier wife,
and so a happier and better home, than
the one who says his wife Zwas a beauty
when he married her, as if that exonerated
him in the matter of taste just now con-
cerning an ogre. The first woman feels
she has saved the one thing she valued ;
the last has nothing left. It is love that
makes the world go round, according to
the song; it is happiness that keeps the
fire lighted on the hearth. The wives are
few who would not rather have such illu-
sory and sentimental delights as loving
deeds and intentions, as tender words in
private, and respectful consideration in
public, than all the tangible and material
comforts that their husbands' purses can
Poor Work. 181
buy. Most of us have seen homes where
the husbands, besides exercising ill-con-
sidered economies, petty brutalities, and
large tyrannies, had a way of driving
straight at a purpose, with, as George
Eliot says, “a strong determination to
have what was pleasant, with a total fear-
lessness in making themselves disagree-
able or dangerous when they did not get
it,” — homes where the husband's selfish-
ness made the keynote to the burden of
numberless women's lives, lives of repres-
sion and sadness in the midst of a slavish
devotion for which they never receive any
thanks. “Who is so much cajoled,” asks
the same great observer, “ and served with
trembling by the weak females of a house-
hold, as the unscrupulous male, – capable,
if he has not free way at home, of going
and doing worse elsewhere P’’
In seeing these homes —if they de-
serve the name — so utterly different from
those well-regulated homes where the
divine order seems to rule, where mutual
love and honour and forbearance obtain,
one may marvel how one individual should
182 House and Hearth.
be permitted to ruin the life of others
without upsetting the balance of the uni-
verse. But one knows that when the yoke
becomes utterly unbearable it will be
thrown off by death or revolt, and either
is freedom. Yet it is seldom that even
when the weight is severe, it cannot be
borne for some further reason, —— for the
sake of children, or of bringing the tor-
mentor to some better state; the back is
fitted to its burden by slow wear, and it is
doubtful, if freedom were offered to these
poor souls, if they would take it, as the ox
when unyoked still clings, the pasture
over, to the side of its yoke-fellow.
Yet what a weapon it is that in these
cases the “unscrupulous male " uses
He enforces obedience to his tyranny
through the very love that his “weak fe-
males’ bear to him, the love which is
constancy to an old ideal, to an old deli-
cious recollection, a remnant of the Sweet
courting days when these “weak females’
were the ones to be pleased, and which
has no relation to the usage of the pres-
ent. To seethe a kid in its mother's milk
Poor Work. 183
was an ancient and forbidden outrage, but
this seems as bad a thing in the same
kind; it is marching to the assault with
the enemy's gods in front. Are these
“unscrupulous males' crossed in any-
thing, are they refused their own way,
they have their revenge at hand. They
can leave the house for some resort where
nothing crosses them, and let those left
at home worry and pale with anxiety in
their absence over the wrong they are do-
ing themselves. The next time they will
hardly contradict the tyrant if he says
black is white ; if he abuse them with an
eloquence of evil words, they will reply
no syllable ; although their half-broken
hearts be divided between anger and de-
spair, they will drive back all utterance of
vexation, they will smile when their tears
are Scalding them, they will swallow the
Sob, choke down the retort, and presently
be kissing the hand that holds this rod,
and be doing their best to make home
delightful to the person who has a place
he likes as well on which to retreat. No
mother wishes to see her son a drunkard
184 House and Hearth.
or a more evil thing, no wife wishes to see
her husband degrade his nature by con-
tact with worse company than his own;
she will sacrifice all the trivial happiness
of her daily life to prevent it ; long after
the society of son or husband has ceased
to be a pleasure in itself, she will yet ex-
ert herself to the utmost to keep it; she
will endure disgust, Suppress indignation,
receive insult with a cheerful face, and go
down to her grave at last, having lived a
life of unappreciated crucifixion, with a .
smile upon her lips whenever the outside
world looked at her.
The righting of such a wrong as this is
a slow process. If as yet the germs and
parasites that produce physical disease
cannot be destroyed from the face of the
earth, much less can the counterpart of
such work take place in the moral world, .
till man brings the earth, till the Soul
brings the flesh, into subjection. Doubt-
less in the course of time these Small
tyrannies, which are great wrongs, will
redress themselves through the daily
greater diffusion of right feeling. The
Poor Work. 185
old couplet that speaks of the mills of the
gods as grinding slowly is true when
it declares, further, that they grind “ex-
ceeding small; ” and the brutal husband
or father is as sure one day to see and
recognize his brutality reflected in his son
as the enduring mother is to have her
heavenly patience comfort her age in her
daughter. For the son at first takes it for
granted that the nearest way to be a man
is to be exactly what his father is, and
soon thereafter sees that the only way to
have everything just as he wants it is to do
exactly as his father does. And while to a
worthy father there is no such friend as a
daughter, yet the daughter of this brutal
father sees and shares her mother's wrong,
and in Some sense, also, her mother's un-
spoken, unacknowledged contempt. There
are other punishments, moreover, awaiting
this taker of the sword, which perhaps
would be far more keenly felt could they
be openly inflicted, - for it is no punish-
ment to a coarse nature to be despised if
unaware of it; yet as the mother or wife
is defenceless in her family, her heart al-
186 House and Hearth.
ways open and warm to the hurt, her back
bare to the lash, so he who gives the
stinging blow of sharp rebuke and tortur-
ing sneer to her deserves, and receives if
he is seen or heard, the same contumely
which he would have if he struck her with
his hand. Some day, too, perhaps an-
other punishment arrives, – one that his
mere selfishness obliges him to feel : the
home is suddenly empty; where he has
been wont to lavish his abuse he is with-
out a victim ; the wife who bore every-
thing rather than resent, in order to keep
him out of mischief, is dead; no house-
keeper will stay and receive his treatment
for a week; he has lost the art of wooing,
of evoking love in a second wife sufficient
to meet the emergency; he has no longer
the beauty of youth, the aspirations and
nobilities of youth, to kindle a return of
passion; if he marries again, it is not to
be the master this time, and it becomes
his turn to suffer. He suffers doubly then,
it may be, because, liberal in causing suf-
fering for another, he has never learned
how to suffer for himself. That is all a
Poor Work. 187
suffering he can feel, and feel bitterly;
the greater suffering of absolute negation
in all the best blessing of home he never
feels, except by the increased and ac-
cented barrenness of his nature. He has
deprived himself of a greater joy at home
than any he can have by going out “ and
doing worse elsewhere.” He sometimes
sees this joy in other families, and wonders
why it is not in his own, – this confidence
and friendship, this admiration and reli-
ance, this mutual Solicitude, and all the
blossoms in the path of these sunbeams;
and when he wonders why it is not his as
well as other men's, he forgets that the
slave can never be a wife, and that no one
admires, confides, loves, and has the art
of making others happy with her happi-
ness, over whose head forever hangs a
sharper than the sword of Damocles.
But if husbands are sometimes remiss
in fulfilling the expectations regarding
them, wives, it must be confessed, too
often afford them ample excuse for their
shortcoming. Have you never heard a
wife, in her neglected toilette, slipshod,
188 House and Hearth.
unkempt, declare, “Oh, it’s no matter:
my market's made l’’ as if her marriage
had been a circumstance of bargain and
sale, and she had sold herself for, doubt-
less, all she was worth. With how much
honesty, we may ask, then, does she ful-
fil the conditions of the trade? How
faithful to the tacit understanding at the
time is she to-day? It was certainly no
slipshod, unkempt woman that was the
object offered in the market. It was a
girl in the bloom of her early years, and
with that bloom set off by all the adven-
titious aid of the prettiest toilette, the
daintiest frills and furbelows, the sweetest
tones, the sweetest smiles attainable. The
bloom of early years was not expected to
last, of course ; but the smiles, the tones,
the pretty toilettes, –it never was dreamed
by the buyer that they were not thrown in.
And yet in such a case as that of which
we speak they are the first to go. The
bloom lasts frequently long after the frills
and furbelows have flounced off the scene
to reappear only on Some gala occasion,
and tantalize the husband with the sight
Poor Work. 189
that he had hoped would be an every-
day vision; the hair is twisted in any way
that comes handiest in the morning, for
there is nobody but one's husband to see ;
a shabby dress is hung on the figure as it
might be on a scarecrow in the fields; a
dingy.wrap is folded round the shoulders to
hide the soiled array of the throat or the
absence of any array at all. The wife is
too miserable, finds it too much of an ex-
ertion, has not the time, to arrange a dif.
ferent dress, and so she is willing her
husband should go away to his day's work
with that picture of her before his mental
sight to hearten him in all his labours and
console him in all his disappointments.
She would open her eyes in amazement
if you told her that she was undoing her
domestic happiness and laying up for her-
self a wretched future by just such trifling
things as this tangled hair and soiled col-
lar ; and she would possibly say that if
her husband's love waited on curls and
Collars, it might go at once.
Nevertheless, it is of just such trifling
things, such airy nothings, that the sum
190 House and Hearth.
of life is made. Does she know what first
attracted her lover ? Can she tell whether
it was her colour, her manner, some trick
of voice or smile, some graciousness of air
or behaviour, some nicety of dress and
ornament? If she cares to preserve his
love, does she think it wise to drop any-
thing out of that personality which first
won him P
“Was it something said,
Something done,
Vexed him 2 Was it touch of hand,
Turn of head P
Strange | That very way
Love begun.
I as little understand
Love's decay !”
In fact, when one sees a woman going
about thus slipshod, and yet insisting on
her right to be loved and petted and per-
haps admired, we may believe that there
is something in her composition more
culpable than mere idleness or disincli-
nation to dress; we may suspect, if not a
defiance of decency, at least a curious
vanity, which allows her to think herself
Poop: Work. 191
just as potent in her simple identity as if
she made a picture of herself, and were
adorned with the accessories of beauty.
But she forgets that in her lover's thought
before marriage, as she ought to make
sure it should be in her husband's after
marriage, her simple identity meant some-
thing of the natural graces, – neatness,
since he would have felt it a profanity to
imagine otherwise once, Smooth hair,
shining teeth, light movement, attractive-
ness in general. Her simple identity in
a frowzy head and a dirty gown is the
identity of any Savage woman, to all out-
ward appearance. -
Moreover, if this carelessness be an ex-
pression of vanity in the wife, it certainly
is not conducive to any such emotion in
the husband. Is this the way she esteems
him P. It is no one but he, the bread-
winner. But let a stranger appear upon the
scene, and then what hurrying and scurry-
ing ! When madam enters at last, in her
fine clothes, in her fine manners, he would
hardly know her for his wife. Men are
mortal ; and it is not wonderful if the
192 House and Hearth.
wounded vanity finds a salve in the com-
pany of individuals who are not so care-
less of the impression they make upon
him, and allow him the pleasure of be-
lieving that their fine clothes and fine
manners are not too good to be thrown
away upon himself. -
For how much, then, is not a slipshod
wife responsible, provided she has no
Other reason than her own indolence or
self-indulgence? It is her indifference to
his pleasure at home that often urges him
to seek pleasure elsewhere, that makes
him invite a friend to the club rather
than to his own house, makes him think bar
and billiard rooms pleasanter places than
that home, painted women pleasanter
companions than a dowdy woman is
Home being the bulwark of the virtues,
and the hearth the central idea of the
family, if the tutelary genius of that hearth
fall into disrepair, how long will the fam-
ily cluster about the shrine? And what
shield but his own self-respect and his
conscience is there, then, between the hus-
band and the temptations of the outer
Poor Work. 193
world? True, his self-respect or his re-
ligious feeling should be sufficient to up-
hold him under either prosperous or
adverse circumstances; but that is not
the merit of the slovenly wife who has
failed to perform her part and fortify his
good principles by innocent pleasure at
home. For all that she has done to hin-
der it, he might be gnashing his teeth
in outer darkness |
It is by no means unusual, however,
that the offence should come first from
the husband's side, and with no fault, in
the beginning, of the wife's. Tired of
the novelty, the husband has ceased to
execute his portion of the contract, has
sought distractions, has despised and half
forsaken his home, has dissipated his en-
ergies, perhaps ruined his hopes and his
wife's together, perhaps disgraced their
name. And all ambition has been wrung
out of her, neglect has made her hopeless,
scanty means and the sense of impossi-
bilities have made her desperate ; con-
vinced of his indifference, or weary of his
cruelty, she has given up the effort to
I3
194 House and Hearth.
make either herself or her home admira-
ble. Yet, when all is said, the fact that
he fails in duty does not absolve her ; the
oath she took on her marriage-day was
not to do her duty so long as he did.
Only that woman can fold her hands and
possess her soul in peace who has wiped
out her own score with fate, whatever be
the score her husband tallies, by her con-
stant persistence in keeping her hearth
clean, her fire bright, herself in unison ; by
never letting her husband find a cinder-
wench in the place of the angel he once
called down from the skies; by deter-
mining that though the bloom of the flesh
depart the bloom of the soul remains.

XVI.
THE ALLOWANCE,
IN whatever degree it is a wife's duty
to maintain a good appearance, one
thing is plain: she cannot do it unless she
has something to do it with.
There are few ways in which wives are
made more uncomfortable than on the
question of their personal expenditures,
and few in which they have to suffer more
humiliation. If they want a new dress, a
new pair of shoes, a new pair of gloves, a
ribbon, they must enter an explanation
about it all with the husband, and very
possibly before their children, who cannot
but be injured by the lesson they thus
learn concerning the dependence of their

196 House and Hearth.
mother, not to mention her fallibility,
which is apt to be tolerably well exposed
in the course Of the conversation. -
A wife, it is true, has no reason to con-
sider herself a dependent. Equity and
justice, if not law, give her a precise right
to all she receives, and often to much
more than that, and declare that she ren-
ders her equivalent in becoming a wife.
It is understood that she spoils a career
to become a wife, – she might be ranging
herself with the great army of the self-
supporting, and be earning a much better
support than that her husband affords
her, might be living at her will, free to
come here and go there ; and the fact
that she chose what seemed to her to be
more desirable — Companionship, confi-
dence, love, and fireside pleasure — does
not invalidate her rights in return for the
self-surrender. As a wife, she should feel
herself an equal, and an equal partner.
She is not a dependent, — even if she
does not earn a fair livelihood as house-
keeper, were she paid as she would be in
the house of another; but as a mother,
The Allowance. 197
the shadow of an idea of dependence
must vanish with the assumption of all
her responsibility, Superintendence, care,
working, waiting, and watching.
Few husbands give this subject thought.
The greater number feel that their
wives are as much objects of bounty as
slaves could be ; and if they give them
a generous allowance, it is through their
own magnanimity rather than their ac-
knowledgment of a just debt ; and as a
general thing, either through forgetfulness,
masterliness, or inability to do otherwise,
they oblige them to ask for every cent
they spend, in a way that debases them
and their children with them.
In truth, whenever a husband has an
income, his wife should receive a stated
portion of it for her own use, and he
should feel, and she should feel, that it is
as much hers as if she had earned it out-
side, or as if her father had bequeathed
it to her with reservation from any hus-
band. Surely a man should not marry a
woman unless he can trust her with suffi-
cient money to keep herself in the array
198 House and Hearth.
proper for his wife ; and it is a singular
carefulness that refuses to trust her then
with the money she needs. Nothing can
So belittle a wife, and make her unfit to
be mate and helpmeet, as to dwarf and
crowd her into cowardly suppliance for
the things she can hardly do without. It
is not strange that one meets with women
whose proud spirits have been so hurt by
the ordeal that they have worn their shoes
to the ground, and have turned and scoured
and pieced and made over for years, look-
ing like shabby-genteel beggars, rather
than ask for their right and due, while
their husbands, hearing no complaint, gave
no thought, and for themselves wore the
best the tailor had ; or that one hears of
other women who, determined, after Sore
experience, neither to go without nor to
beg, lie in wait to rob their husband's
pockets of a half-dollar this week and a
dime the next, make false entries in the
housekeeping accounts, and even steal
and sell the hens' eggs, the milk, the
paper-rags, in order to swell the Secret
amount into a sum sufficient to keep
The Allowance. 199
themselves and their children simply de-
cent, becoming — in their own Con-
sciences, if not in fact — thieves in the
process, and the transmitters of dishonest
tendencies.
From primitive times the only recourse
of women has been to please ; their only
weapons beauty, concession, and Craft.
They would not have been made of flesh
and blood, and have been without desires,
and endeavours to attain the end of such
desires. Their sense of justice told them
they had a human right to attain these
ends. They had abuses and punishments,
too, to escape ; they had children to be
shielded from cruelty; they had faults to
be hidden from chiding masters; if fre-
quently they availed themselves of what
in commanders is called strategy, in states-
men diplomacy, but in ethics is called de-
ceit, it would not be a subject of wonder.
Weak in body, and timid by consequence,
a captive, a drudge for generations that
became ages, – the sentiment of the com-
munity, with all its later enlightenment,
thever to the present day quite relinquish-
200 House and Hearth.
ing the essence of the idea of subordina-
tion in connection with her, although
cherishing it perhaps unconsciously, -
woman has often had to resort to craft in
order to exist. With such acquired pre-
disposition from the ancestral bond-slave,
a man has needed only to be domineers
ing and autocratic in Order to develop
the quality in wife and daughters, brutality
bringing about shuffling, evasion, Conceal-
ment, and dissembling, and tyranny fol-
lowed by cunning. The man who will not
let his wife do as she innocently wishes,
without worrying peace out of the house,
without a storm, without more or less
abuse, without the withdrawal of his good-
will and a condign punishment of one
sort or another, forces her, unless she is
a spiritless shadow, into deception. Guilty
as she herself may be, yet if his children
are born liars, he has himself to thank for
it. The man who, able to meet expense,
denies his wife righteous money for her
needs, should not be surprised if the whis-
pering serpent supplies his deficiency,
and his wife debases herself, and her
The Allowance. 201
blood enough to filch money from his
pocket. If his children are born thieves,
the fault is, in the first instance, his.
The great majority of women, however,
are incapable of this conduct; their in
heritance of a superior moral nature hin-
dering it. Once in a while, to be sure,
there comes a Fredegonde, a Brinvilliers,
a Théroigne, to show us of what, under
fostering circumstances, women are ca-
pable, and where, in doing nothing but
what many men have already done, they
appear so much worse because So much
more is looked for from them. For, in-
deed, if their sins are generally less, their
virtues are generally greater than those of
the other half of humanity, by reason of
their nature, their education, and their
Seclusion. Nothing bends woman more
strongly to virtue than the duties and ten-
dernesses of motherhood; indeed, duty
and tenderness belong to all feminine
human nature that is true to the law of its
being. The baby does not go alone before
she is nursing and loving another baby in
her doll. Any two little girls in the street
202 House and Hearth.
will have their arms about each other's
shoulders. The boys of a family are off
at their play when the girls are at home
helping their mother. The son marries
when he will; the girl as frequently lets
love go by because the old parents need
her. And she is not praised for any of
it ; no one expects it to be otherwise ;
duty, kindness, love, and sacrifice are
recognized parts of her personality. And
when motherhood is called in question,
does not every child know to what the
mother is equal, save in those rare mon-
strous and mischievous cases where she
chances to be what gardeners call a freak?
It is not her virtue that she lives in her
child, that she would die for him : it is
her nature ; and it only shows how near
her nature is to virtue, – so near that, in
view of it, it is strange that when we think
of the creative and sustaining force of the
universe it is our habit to say father and
not mother.
Not that recognition of the strength
and care and generosity of the father is
at all impaired by rendering the mother
The Allowance. 203
her meed ; it does not follow that one is
not good because another is better; he
himself is the first to acknowledge it. It
is in approaching these virtues, and in
carrying them to a point beyond the cus-
tomary feminine experience, that men are
often finest; as in the missionary priest
who forgets himself for his race and who
dies for his faith, and in the physician
who equally forgets himself, encountering
loathliest disease, giving tireless days and
sleepless nights to the Suffering, and who
brings help and healing with him in such
wise that he seems to be the very vice-
gerent of God and of creation.
Yet it may be said that women are so
guarded from their cradles from knowl-
edge of evil and the contamination of
the worser world that anything other than
purity, temperance, and such positive
forms of goodness, becomes difficult for
them, and there has to be something in-
herently wrong in a woman for her to go
astray; while she learns in the home at-
mosphere the necessity of self-denial and
self-repression, and all her power for love
204 House and Hearth.
is daily strengthened there. Were she
out in the world as her brother is, she
might lose much that now seems hers by
right, although she might gain in breadth
of view. It is close upon large nobility,
indeed, that women touch their weakest
point; the narrow view hinders them from
the wide, as one's hand held up before
the eyes can obscure the sun. They do
not look at the good of the race so much
as at that of their own home ; and where
not themselves, but those they love, are
injured, they find it all but impossible to
forgive. If this is sin, all the concentrated
Sweetness of their being has gone to make
a crust round that sin.
But all this is because her home is so
much to woman ; it is her world ; and
while it is her sole world, it should be
made to her, by the controlling power,
as round and perfect as a star. Still,
other means failing, the wife who has
health has always the chance for inde-
pendence through her own exertion, if
she will. How many happy and honoured
wives are there who, feeling that some-
The Allowance. 205
thing more was needed in the household,
have won their husband’s approval, and
have created other than household busi-
ness and occupation for themselves, –
every one of them causing, through the
help thus rendered, their families to live
under advantages that they could by no
means have had otherwise, and every one
of them, while just as loving, gentle, and
cheerful a wife, and just as faultless a
housekeeper, glorying in the unspeakable
comfort of her independence.
But often this is quite impossible. The
wife, with all else that she has contributed
to the household stock, has perhaps con-
tributed her health, is unable to do even
what is expected of her in the daily rou-
time, and is forced back upon what she is
made to regard as her beggary, feeling
that there is neither right nor reason in
the abject attitude which she is com-
pelled to assume upon the subject of her
expenditures.
The wife not of the great and rich,
but of the middle class of somewhat
prosperous people, is usually as much a
206 House and Hearth.
worker in the family as her husband is
outside of it. The saying constantly
goes that it is he, the husband, who is
earning the bread and butter; but to a
rational way of thinking, that wife is also
earning, and in fit proportion. For
whom is she working and earning? For
herself? If she is, where are the pro-
ceeds? The law says that those pro-
ceeds are the husband's; she depends
on him for any part of them ; she can
do nothing with them during his life,
and on his death, she surviving, but a
small portion is allotted her by this law,
which, generous as it has grown, in com-
parison to its old favour, still stops short
of any point like equal rights. If, then,
she is not working for herself but for
another, she is entitled to some wages,
and to some other wages than the senti-
mental ones of love and kindness. For
what is it that she does? In many
houses the wife is the only servant; she
is Cook, maid-of-all-work, nurse, house-
keeper, and seamstress; she is tailoress
for the boys’ trousers, milliner for the
The Allowance. 207
girls’ bonnets; she makes, if she does
not cut and baste, their frocks. In any
one of these capacities, it is recognized,
for every other worker, that the labourer
is worthy of his hire. As mere cook's
assistant or charwoman, her wages would
be quite a hundred dollars a year with
board ; as nurse or seamstress, even
more ; while neither tailoress nor dress-
maker would have much less than a dol-
lar a day; and what price would pay
for her general managing, marketing,
Overseeing, mending, darning, and the
rest? Doubtless she deems the wages
of love sufficient for them all; and when
she wishes money, wishes it not half so
much for herself as for the sake of main-
taining the good name and good appear-
ance which it would be to the shame of
others if she did not have.
The husband who has any certainty
of income would do well to take this sub-
ject into account, and consider whether
his wife deserves nothing more than the
honour of his name, without the right of
a cent to that name, or the spending of
208 HollSe and Hearth.
f
One unquestioned dollar; and to make
some fixed allowance of money, be it
ever so small, on which the wife can rely,
and over which she will be absolute mis-
tress. Not one wife in ten thousand
will abuse the confidence. All but that
one would be likely to make her al-
lowance cover Some of the family ex-
penses, and add to the general pleasure
in unexpected ways. The receipt of
this allowance would give the balance to
a light head which comes with trust and
responsibility; and to the opposite char-
acter would give the additional strength
which comes with a sense of appreciation.
What relief from requests and bother and
advice concerning small things would
not the head of the house find in this
course, and what improvement in the
conduct and harmony of the family
And withal, he would be wise to remem-
ber that the wrongs done the mother
Nature avenges in the children; and
where, even in so small a matter as the
money for her clothes, that mother is
a slave and a beggar, the children are
The Allowance. 209
the children of a slave and a beggar, and
Sooner or later are sure to betray their
descent.
No wife will desire pocket-money when
aware that her husband's means are too
narrow to give it. If he does not let her
know the state of his affairs, and what he
can afford, and why, either he is a very
foolish man or she is too weak and light
a woman to be a wife. Unless she knows
the exact condition of his affairs, she is
not in the least responsible, and if he
goes into bankruptcy to-morrow it is no
fault of hers.
But under most circumstances, where
there is money to spend, the responsi-
bility for the spending is not with the
wife alone. If madame likes to set off
her beauty, master likes to have his
senses charmed by the sight of that
beauty So exalted, and his pride pleased
by its possession. If madame likes her
evening party and her admiring throng,
and her name in the papers, master
feels himself lifted thereby and magnifies
his office. If madame loves her airing in
I4.
210 House and Hearth.
a sumptuous coach, master loves his din-
ner of many courses, with a choice wine
for each, and brilliant guests around him.
It often happens, too, with a man, that
free expenditure is a means to an end,
and he is maintaining an appearance of
luxury, and dressing his wife and giving
his banquet and making display of wealth,
in order to keep his credit good and to
help him toward his goal of gathering
greater wealth. Few women could
greatly influence a husband there, or
would dare go counter to his wishes in
a strait so vital to his future.
As a rule, a woman in the least in-
formed as to her husband's affairs will
co-operate with him. To be sure, she
may influence her husband in the selec-
tion of doubtful means of progress; she
may urge him to remain in the vortex in
the hope of larger accumulation, when
it is time for rest and quiet ; she may
warp his moral sense by daily expression
of opinion and choice, so that he will
enter the devious paths of dishonour be-
fore he fairly knows it. A woman has
The Allowance. 211
but to make the incessant iteration of
her wishes, for her husband — if he
loves her, for love's sake and hers; if
he is indifferent to her, for his own
sake and peace — to endeavour to gratify
those wishes that he has by heart. She
has but perpetually to envy the woman
who has the things she has not, to dilate
on her admiring want, to show her long-
ing; and every sigh Stings like a gad-
fly as the worker hastens to bring about
the desired end. -
Yet, however it may be in the circles
of large social centres, throughout the
length and breadth of the land it is the
woman that urges to economy. The
husband, full of strength and energy,
cannot easily feel the time when he
shall be less able than now ; but the
wife knows it will come, and the wife
looks, too, to the future of the children.
The wife who knows how the bank-
account Stands, and just what it is lawful
to spend, and who spends no more, has,
if no other luxury, that of a clear con-
science. The only wives who are re-
212 House and Hearth.
sponsible for atmospheres of venality
and illegitimate luxury, for overworked
brains and ultimate ruin, are those who,
regardless of the consequence, urge their
husbands, with already heavy burdens,
to assume still greater ones, till dishonesty
and corruption become a hiding-place in
trouble, and with seared consciences they
find the way smooth again, or sink out of
Sight in bankruptcy or the grave.
But just as some men love beauty,
and Some love books, and some love
Sports, there are some who love money.
They love it, too, not for what it will
do or will procure, not for the power
it brings, but simply for itself alone.
The sight of a double-eagle that is theirs
warms the cockles of their heart as no
perfect face or lovely landscape can.
Most of us desire money for the comfort
it gives, the pleasure it allows us to be-
stow, the pain to relieve, the appreciation
it is apt to bring. But these people
love it simply as money; it hurts them
to part with it; every dollar added to
their store surpasses in value that of any
The Allowance. 213
good deed that might be added up in
heaven. Far beneath their love of
money sinks their love of their fellow-
men, and their desire for esteem ; they
would rather be thought rich than good or
noble or generous, and they frequently
do not care whether they are thought
rich or not, so long as they are rich,
Their wives lead dreadful lives, driven to
rebellion or reduced to idiocy; their
Sons run away as Soon as they are old
enough to know any road that leads from
home ; if their daughters, hating the
hand that compels them to unrighteous
drudgery, reared to labour through all
their heavy-hearted youth, do not also
forsake home, it is because of pity for
the mother ; and the likelihood is that
they will one day flaunt in vulgar su-
perabundance, rejoice in gross tables, and
marry husbands who will run through
the property as Soon as they come into
possession of what the father could not
take with him, do his best, though he
may, to make his heavy hand felt from
the grave.
214 House and Hearth.
Certainly these men must be destitute
of family affection in causing sensitive
children to suffer with shame, and a wife
to see the superiority of their love for
money over their love for herself. Yet
there are families who live on little but
oat-meal from year's end to year's end,
and sell half the milk of the cow at
that ; who never have so much as
the ears of the yearly pig that is sold
to the butcher; who, although they
work in the garden, have none of its
growth, and would as soon touch the
fruit of the tree of life as dare to pick
an apple ; yet the father sits in high
places, and is respected as a moneyed
man, with the vague aura Surrounding
him that seems to accompany the pos-
Session of money even in the hands of
the unworthy, instead of being execrated
for his cruelty to animals, if for nothing
else. “Too much luxury | too much
luxury !” he says when an ambitious
married daughter has earned with her
own hands a carpet for her little parlour,
and he cuts her off with a shilling.
The Allowance. 215
Nor can these men value the opinion
of those about them. “Give me back
the penny, little one,” said one who was
an authority in his town, two thirds of
which he owned, having given a child a
coin to keep it quiet during some tran-
saction ; “a cent spoils the face of a
dollar.” The result of this close-fisted
tyranny is always a deplorable family.
relation. Sometimes it begets in its vic-
tims a weakness of mind bordering upon
stupidity. “My dear,” said one of these
autocrats, “we are using a great deal of
light in these hard times. Two candles
are an extravagance. Considering the
high price of living, we must content our-
selves with one candle, no matter who
comes. They must take us as they find
us.” But on coming home what was
his amazement to find two candles burn-
ing ! “I don't know what you mean,”
answered the automaton to which he had
reduced his wife, on his expostulation.
“I am burning only one candle ; I took
one and cut it in two.”
Such people as this man are all but out-
216 House and Hearth.
side of the pale of humanity. They af-
ford only pain during their lives, and their
first praiseworthy act is their death. And
the pressure of public opinion should com-
pel from them a course toward their
wives and daughters that would allow the
latter at least to feel that they are of the
value of a sparrow, two of which are sold
for a penny.

XVII.
THE RELATIONS.
A T the opening of the new home, –
although, where possible, it is to be
hoped the young people will be alone in
it, and will not mar their lives by the per-
manent admission there of any but them-
selves, – there are two subjects which
force themselves on the attention. One,
on the part of the wife, is the husband's
people ; the other, on the part of the
husband, is his mother-in-law.
No one will fail in tender solicitude for
the young wife who leaves her own home
and goes into the world of her husband's
relations. She leaves a home where very
likely she has been the bright controlling
principle ; where much has bent to her

218 House and Hearth.
interest or her wishes; where her young
life was a precious and delightful thing;
where it was all a little kingdom into which
she was born ; where everything came to
her with love upon its wings; where she
never had to make an effort to win affec-
tion, since it was hers by right divine ;
where she was happy, and yet uncon-
Scious of it, — as unconscious, too, that
the world could ever be anything else,
as when she was a baby in her mother's
arms. She goes into a world, so far as
all these influences are concerned, where
all is unknown and untried and obscure.
It may be friendly, it may be hostile ; it
is certainly critical. While she was at
home, she had her lover's love with every-
thing else; that sunshine still surrounds
her, but all the rest is dark.
If now she wishes to keep that Sunshine,
the plain course before her is to make her
husband's people love her as her own
people do, not thinking, of course, –
with the old belief that blood is thicker
than water, — that the new love can be
quite the same as the old, but sure that,
The Relations. 219
unhampered by jealousy, it can be very
strong and fervent. She may, and prob-
ably will, keep the Sunshine without it;
but it will assist her, and make all her way
to do so easier.
Of one thing the young wife may be
sure, to begin with, – the new father is
ready to give his new daughter all the
homage of his heart, as a father should,
He feels for the father who has lost her ;
he sympathizes with his son who has won
her ; he remembers what all that bright
part of life was to himself; he experis
ences a warmth of protecting tenderness
toward the young being who makes his
boy happy; he likes to receive her affec-
tion himself; he looks forward to count-
less satisfactions she is to bring him ; he
does not mean to let his own strong-willed
or petted girls impose upon her or domi-
neer over her, or to have any favouritism
shown between them ; he knows how hard
it would be for him if one of these petted
girls going into a strange family met with
anything but genial welcome there. And
if there are no girls of his very own, strong-
220 House and Hearth,
willed or otherwise, then what a treasure
this daughter is . He is so grateful to the
son for bringing such a joy into his days
that the boy borrows of her radiance and
gains a new respect He opens his arms
to her ; he is ready to prostrate himself
before her and to let her walk, like a
young queen, over his life ; he is her
knight, her champion, her friend, her
father And if there are no daughters,
then the mother's heart, too, warms
toward her in an exceeding degree. That
mother is going to have what she has so
wanted all her life, – a daughter
But if, in any event, the new mother
Scans this young wife carefully, with a
woman's eye for the womanly, it is not
usually for her own sake, but with a jeal-
ous eye to her boy's happiness; and if
she sees that her boy has chosen wisely,
then there is nothing too good for his
choice. There are, it is to be admitted,
cases where the mother is not able to en-
dure the thought of any one's being before
herself in her son's heart, forgetful that
the love a son gives a mother who de-
The Relations. 221
serves it is of a different nature from that
which he gives the wife who becomes his
other self, and in no wise conflicts with
it, and that almost invariably, and unless
the mother be a selfish anomaly, the son
who best loves his wife best loves his
mother also.
But it is to be hoped that these cases
are few ; and, indeed, most frequently the
mother receives this new daughter, whether
she has daughters of her own or not, with
a peculiar affection, that if it is not just
what she gives her own, has a quality that
is very precious both to giver and receiver.
For her relation to her own daughters is
one of more or less authority ; the rever-
ence which is her due she would often
be willing to exchange for companionship
on terms of equality ; and here is some-
thing a little like that ; here is one to
whom she can give her confidence, and
who may fill the yearning of her heart for
an admiring friendship, with whom there
is the bond of a similar experience, and
all the time that other bond of their
mutual love for the best, the greatest, the
222 House and Hearth.
dearest being in the world to both of
them.
The young wife who leaves her own
family in a measure, that is, in its close
daily life, and enters largely, as she must
needs do, into the life and circumstances
of another family, will do well for herself
if she take with her a determination to
love and be loved there. It is an ill
adviser who cautions her to stand upon
her rights, and to let the others observe
in the beginning that there is to be no
interference. It is time enough to resent
interference, if it is of the unwarrantable
Sort, when it comes. To go bristling all
over with arms and armour is to invite
attack. She should remember, too, that
Sometimes parents have the right to in-
terfere. Even if the interference comes
at last, even if it be ill-judged, she will do
better to meet it gently than to repel it
forcibly. It will be wise for her to look
at the possibilities of her future, too, and
See the folly of weakening any of the an-
chorages, as one may say, of her husband's
life; to see the better part of increasing
The Relations. 223
his love and fealty to his own people, to
appreciate the help they should be eager
to give her in strengthening the good and
in repressing that which is not so good ;
the restraint they ought to be in case of
need, the wall of support to all her en-
deavours. That is, unless they are ab-
normal and unnatural people. And even
if she never require any help of the sort,
and the mere thought be a profanity, she
should convince herself that her husband's
people have, before anything is said, a
right to her affection. The father and
mother, at any rate, are those of whose
flesh and blood, of whose life and man-
ners, of whose thought and principles, was
born that which is most precious of all
the universe to her; they can hardly be
quite unworthy of some portion of that
which their son evokes; if they are, she
can at least give them pity, and recognize
her misfortune in finding them such as she
is unable to love, or in finding them par-
ents who have failed in their duty toward
their son and deserving of her reproach.
Yet sometimes she will find these people
224 House and Hearth.
aching for her love ; and whether they
are so eager as that or not, if she only
give it to them with a quick and tender
heart, taking theirs for granted, whatever
are her imperfections they will be for-
given, whatever, are her excellences they
will be exalted, and unless some dark and
evil spirit rules in the elder family, she
will thus make for herself and her husband
a contentment exceeding that to be had
by any other course.
But while the new wife is forming good
resolutions in this regard, there are one
or two for her husband to make of the
same nature ; and chief of them is one in
relation to the woman who brought into
the world the dearest thing he has. A
stranger from another planet might find
himself obliged to believe that all our
family discords, our Social troubles and
frequent divorces, if not our national em-
barrassments, proceeded from a fruitful
tree of all evil, the mother-in-law ; and
that in the face of the tradition that there
was no mother-in-law in Eden, and yet
Adam and Eve fell out. Had there been,
The Relations. 225
one may be confident that the forbidden
fruit would have been quietly tucked out
of sight and no words wasted. From the
pages of the first story-teller down to the
columns of the contemporary daily press,
our literature is full of slurs, innuendoes,
and accusations regarding the mother-in-
law, and she has been a subject for the
shallow and fatuous to fall back on when
their brains were empty. It amuses one
to read in the Prayer-Book that a man is
forbidden to marry her, as if there were a
case on record in which a man's mother-
in-law would marry him
But what atrocities are they that a
mother-in-law perpetrates which render
her an object of such wide male detesta-
tion ? She gave existence to her daughter;
that might make her sacred with the one
who loves her daughter: it seems to have
the Opposite effect. She loves the daugh-
ter too ; that might occasion a tender
Sympathy and community of interest: on
the contrary, it produces a bitter rivalry.
There is no sacrifice she would not make
for her daughter, to the point of health,
I 5
226 House and Hearth.
time, pleasure, comfort, and sometimes
life itself: so far from gratitude being
yielded for the sacrifice, it is claimed as a
duty owed, and instead of its existence
being called praiseworthy, its absence is
called criminal.
It is, indeed, possible that a mother,
conscious of wrongs received in her own
days, when her eyes were blinded by af.
fection and constraining circumstances,
looks at her daughter's husband with
eyes that now are open, and sees how the
world might be made to move onward so
far as he is concerned. But the mother
who, having such knowledge, acts upon
it, and opens her daughter's eyes as well,
and incites her to opposition, is as rare as
the mother who poisons her child. She
desires her child's happiness and peace ;
she knows that opposition ruins that
peace, and is, in fact, a mental and moral
poison that would destroy her. It is un-
likely that in the nature of things she
will administer such poison. In fact, one
is too often led to infer that a man objects
to his mother-in-law, because she knows the
The Relations. 227
world and is likely to infer the truth con-
cerning conduct in relation to which he
is able to cajole his wife ; and even if he
does not fear her betrayal of the truth,
the fact of her acquaintance with it, or
possible suspicion regarding it, makes her
an unpleasant Object.
There is, however, a singular inconsist-
ency in the emotions which men are
supposed to cherish toward their mothers-
in-law. Let the wife be ill, - and who so
necessary then as the mother-in-law P
Straightway she is summoned. She comes:
the house is in order, the children are clean
and happy, breakfast is punctual, coffee
is clear, the wife is cared for.
The wife is cared for : by the husband?
Is it he that wakes and watches all night
long, and directs the household all day,
or, when watching is past, starts from
sleep a dozen times to measure the drops,
beat the pillows, renew the fire, bathe the
aching head, Cool the parched mouth P
Rarely. He seldom dreams of such a
thing; and fortunately, for generally a
man is a nuisance in a sick-room. He
228 House and Hearth.
would do more mischief than good there ;
he is glad to have his night's rest freshen
him for his day's labour. No ; it is the
mother-in-law. Vize /a, Öe//e-mêre/ But
the wife recovers. She is up and about ;
the crisis is over ; she can drive out ;
she can visit theatres. And then? Why,
then, & &as the mother-in-law
No ; if you are in medium circumstan-
ces, where servants are poor and scarce,
the mother-in-law does very well to take
care of the baby when you want your wife
to go out with you ; to help get up the
Supper, with her Superior skill and expe-
rience, when you are going to give your
little whist-party; to take care of the
house when you carry your wife off on a
journey; she is invaluable on moving
days, on Occasions of measles and mumps,
and, in short, whenever and wherever an
upper servant is necessary, - an upper
servant whose faculty and knowledge are
not to be had for money, and which, if
they were, you have not the money to
command. But at all other times she is
to be a mere automaton, without feelings
The Relations. 229
or desires or observations or thoughts.
And we seldom see one of these faithful,
much reviled, and much enduring beings
that we do not think of that mother-
insect of which the entomologists tell us,
that, having laid her eggs, spreads her
poor body shield-wise over them, and as
one by one the wretched offspring are
hatched into the world, is slowly devoured
by them
Now and then we may see a man whose
own mother has been so unfaithful to her
duty regarding him that his heart turns to
his wife's mother with all the filial devo-
tion whose legitimate outflow was checked
by neglect and selfish indifference; and
Edgar Poe's beautiful and immortal son-
net to his mother-in-law expresses all that
he would say.
But since mothers-in-law are in ques-
tion, why is it always the man's P Why
is it that we never hear anything of the
woman’s mother-in-law P. The man whose
mother-in-law lives with him sees her but
Occasionally, and feels her influence on
but few subjects at most ; the woman
230 House and Hearth.
whose mother-in-law lives with her sees
her all the livelong day, and feels her
influence from her bed-chamber to her
sweetmeat closet. Usually the two wo-
men acknowledge their mutual interest ;
where they disagree, agree to differ. The
mother will not weaken the wife's influ-
ence with the son ; the wife would de-
spise the husband who did not reverence
his mother, unless she were totally unde-
serving of reverence. But should it hap-
pen to be otherwise, should the mother-
in-law chance to be taunting, tyrannical,
prying, and mischief-making, the wife's
life is capable of being a burden to her
past masculine comprehension. He can
escape the vexation when the door closes
behind him on his way to business or
pleasure. She never escapes it ; the clos-
ing door shuts her in with it, and it rides
her as the Old Man of the Sea rode Sind-
bad. Yet find if you can one shaft of the
sarcasm and insolence that is so freely
spent on the other mother-in-law directed
at this one Indeed, there are few wives
who do not love and respect their hus-
The Relations. 231.
bands too much to confess such annoy-
ance to their dearest bosom-friend until
it becomes unbearable.
Nor do we ever hear a word of that
other side of the medal, - of those cases
in which a man receives his father into his
family, and he is brought home, not for
the old man's own daughters, but for his
son's wife to take care of ; and we will
venture to pronounce the case not one
whit less vexatious than its reverse.
Travellers tell us that in many countries
and with nearly all savage tribes the wife
is not the carefully loved and sheltered
being that the Teutonic races are gener-
ally inclined to make her; for those
people, whose ancestors regarded all
women as inspired and near the gods,
have alone risen to any very lofty level in
regard to wives; with others they are
beasts of burden, abased before their mas-
ters, unaccustomed to anything but ill
treatment, save when they receive the no
more enviable treatment of toys. If it
were in reality the all but universal nature
of man to abuse the wife, the way of the
232 House and Hearth.
strong with the weak, we could account
for the all but universal detestation of
the wife's mother only in the light of the
fact that she stands between that wife and
the husband's abuse, when it would fol-
low, as the night the day, that the more a
man would neglect and outrage his wife,
the more he would abhor his mother-in-
law ... •

XVIII.
THE UNHAPPY WIFE.
OUBTLESS there have been more or
less unhappy wives ever since there
have been wives at all. It is certain that
the wife of Socrates had much to com-
plain of, that Fulvia had no reason to love
the Serpent of Old Nile, that the hapless
Josephine could see her own fate mirrored
in the story of Catharine of Aragon ; that
a chronological Category of much bearing,
much abused women might be as easily
had as of the heroes whose heroism has
decimated the race or of the criminals
who have degraded it. And it is not
strange that we should find unhappy wives
to-day recruited everywhere from the ranks

234 House and Hearth,
of the unoccupied and discontented, the
unappreciated and sentimental. -
They find one another out by instinct; or
possibly there are certain signs and catch-
words known to them, but blank of mean-
ing for the profane. They meet, they
confide, they indulge in invective against
heinous husbands; they endure, with the
air of martyrs, similar allusion to their
own ; they lunch together, and pour out
their tale of wrong boldly with Angelica or
five-o'clock tea ; they sup together, and
tell their sad histories by silent implica-
tion and renunciatory sighs. She who has
a positive wrong or outrage to boast is the
most fortunate ; and if among them all
one could be found whose husband actu-
ally and tactually beat her, would she not
be an object of envy to all the holders of
those visionary wrongs which, as they are
fond of declaring, are not much to tell, but
everything to suffer? --
Few of these &om/nes camarades are
under forty. They need a decade or two
of married life before, having been
stripped of their illusions, they become
The Unhappy Wife. 235
reckless enough to confess it. Some of
them are talented women who have mar-
ried business men and find no sympathy;
Some are extravagant women, who have
married prudent men and find no money ;
Some are bad women, who have married
stupid men and hope a fabricated tissue
of abuse may cloak an intrigue ; Some are
good, languishing, foolish women, who
might be happy if they had married good,
languishing, foolish men, but who, as they
have married brutal and hard-headed ones,
are members of this society. Sometimes
they are witty, and assert that a married
woman's name is her epitaph ; sometimes
they are bitter, and call their children
their early errors; sometimes they are
desperate, and pronounce themselves
Danaides, forever dipping up water with
sieves. It never occurs to them to be
sensible, and to confess that they are weak
and whining and wicked.
The Society is organized in a sufficiently
primitive way. Some wife whose hus-
band has unfortunately fallen into the
habit of forgetting to kiss her when he
236 House and Hearth.
goes out in the morning, bewails her neg-
lected lot to a friend, who assuages her by
admitting that her husband Swears at her
that is to say, he swears before her, —
whereon she accuses him of Swearing at
her, upon which he does swear at her.
Each thereafter, going her own way, re-
cites to another acquaintance the unhappy
condition of her friend. Both of the other
acquaintances, perhaps, not to be outdone
and have it considered that the first victim
is the only woman in the world bearing
injury with fortitude, has a little story of
her own to tell. Number Two, returning
to Number One, bids her take heart; they
are not the only unhappy wives, and in-
stances Number Four ; and Number One,
receiving Number Two, offers for similar
consolation the case of Number Three.
When the four meet it would be impos-
sible for them to conceal the fact that
their united woes are a common posses-
sion. Hearts burn and grievances rankle,
as they speak of them ; and of course the
members of the society thus established
multiply by natural impetus; and when
The Unhappy Wife. 237
their own wrongs pall somewhat on the
associated taste, they unite on the
rumoured wrongs of Some woman who
adores a husband notoriously unfaithful to
her. That really wretched woman, by the
way, never belongs to this Society; that
really wretched woman hides her hurt
till her husband’s behaviour blazons it,
and the first word never comes from her.
Sometimes a green little wife from else-
where happens in On the conventicle, –
which seldom has a full meeting, the un-
shaped and purposeless conspiracies be-
ing carried on by clusters of twos and threes
in various parlours provided by the hus-
bands, – and she is all at once strangely
enlightened. She learns for the first time
what brutes men are, and what fools these
mortals, meaning women, be ; that mar-
riage is a failure; that none who are truly
married can possibly differ or dispute
about anything, but their sympathies,
thoughts, wishes, pains, pleasures, and
very existence are one, their union a long
blissful ecstasy like the dream in which
for years the dervish hangs by a hook in
*
238 HollSe and Hearth.
his flesh while contemplating the beauty
and holiness of Divinity. Perhaps she
scouts the whole business for a pack of
nonsense ; perhaps she returns home with
her peace poisoned, and the enjoyment of
another household has been ruined. Of
one? Of twenty | For in the quiet vil-
lage there has been planted the germ of
a branch society of unhappy wives, – a
thing that shall replace forbearance with
recrimination, shall destroy domestic hap-
piness, shall veil the old innocent faith
in the incorruptible and immaculate head
of the house with darkening suspicions, and
shall give nothing better in return ; for
although happiness could afford to be lost
if the loss brought about any growth or
development heavenward, yet, unfortu-
nately, in the uprooted family all devel-
opment is downward.
And usually the whole thing was begun
to gratify a vanity craving to be a central
point of interest, a heroine of actual melo-
drama, or else to appease an uncurbed
and selfish temper. But oh, you unhappy
wives, you children playing with fire,
The Unhappy. Wife. 239
pause a moment If your husbands are
indifferent to you, talking about them to
your neighbours will not bring back their
affection. If they are unfit to live with,
leave them ; but till you do so maintain
your dignity and silence. The man who
went complaining of his wife would be an
object of contempt from every other man;
the woman who despises her husband and
rendering no equivalent yet feeds on his
bounty and spends his money on her per-
son, deserves no more. Admiration and
praise and sympathy from a husband are
all very well, very sweet and dear, but
they are not the whole of life; they are
not the only sources of happiness in the
world. If they fail, you can find happi-
ness in your children; if you have no
children, there are the poor and the chil-
dren of the poor. There are always
books, studies, friendships, and various
work, in which you can employ yourself
till you find contentment, your husbands'
respect, and possibly their love once more.
But as it is, remember that you took more
marriage vows than one, and your con-
240 House and Hearth.
duct and conversation break them every
day; while showing this morbid canker in
the soul, you are like nothing so much as
the beggar at the gate who shows his
Sores

XIX.
THE PLAIN WIFE.
BEAUTIFUL Woman will still be beau-
tiful at eighty, when a pretty woman
will possibly confront you with the wreck
and ruin of her prettiness, and when she
who was a plain woman in her youth still
keeps age at a distance. But the beauti-
ful woman is as rare as the pretty woman
is usual ; and what lover thinks of eighty
years, or of half as many, when the lovely
Thais sits beside him P
Who of us cares the less for the rose
because knowing it is soon to fall? The
lover is in the present ; the woman he
loves is the centre of its atmosphere ; she
is its life, its supreme expression ; all the

I6
242 House and Hearth.
ages have been only to produce her, and
now that she is here, shall the work of
the ages come to naught? She is to him
imperishable, so much alive that it is im-
possible to think of decay and death in
connection with her. He is not even
aware that any of this is in his inner con-
sciousness; he only knows that it is life
where she is, and death where she is not,
that she is indispensable to him, that he
cannot contemplate the future without
her, that he feels an ineffable sentiment
toward her, that even her mother and
her young brother share in her dearness,
and that her father is as awful a being as
the Homeric Jove. Her father may never .
lose all the aura of this awfulness; the
brother may fill the part of a nuisance;
the mother may develop into his bale-
star ; but the wife is a part of himself, and
it is largely in her own power to say .
whether it shall be a part of his higher or
of his lower self.
It is not with her beauty that the wife
establishes this fact. Although beauty
draws us with a single hair, the hair will
The Plain Wife. 243
break if all the weight is left upon it long.
Beauty is often, but not always, the deter-
mining point in the beginning ; , but even
the loveliness of Helen might become
wearisome if it were not informed with the
larger beauty of the soul, with the sparkle
of intelligence, with the glance of inno-
cence. These of themselves create a death-
less beauty, the beauty of expression, of
line, of gaze, the sweetness of the mouth
at rest, the gentleness of intonation, that
still delights the lover's heart when lustre
and colour and luxurious outline and all
the charm of youth and bounding life are
faded and fallen quite away. “Is she
kind as she is fair? For beauty lies with
kindness,” says he who searched human
nature with the strength of sympathetic
imagination. They who assure us that a
man of Sense so needs rest that compan-
ionship at home with an intellect that
keeps his own on the alert is burden-
Some, not only make the mistake of as-
Suming that he is a man of sense, but are
advising us to raise a race of fools, — un-
less they mean that mothers so utterly
244 House and Hearth.
count for nothing that they cannot even
deteriorate the race. But must women re-
main dunces that men may be pleased?
Alas, men must take women as they find
them now ; and they find them escaped
from that Oriental bondage which allowed
them, since they had no souls, to cultivate
only the body, and acknowledge no other
lord than the lord of the harem.
To the plain woman who is a wife, her
want of beauty is almost always a grief.
She fancies she might have secured a more
perfect allegiance if she had worn the red
and white of some more fortunate woman ;
she pities her husband among other men,
as Sir Gawain's wife may have done, that
his wife is uncomely ; she longs to fill his
eyes with pleasure ; she would be burned
alive if she might rise from her ashes fair
enough to take the reproach of her un-
comeliness away from him, - fair enough
to see his gaze follow her with rapture.
She does not realize that it is her identity
he loves, and not an evanescent bloom or
sparkle ; that if she has not beauty he
does not miss it ; that his eyes follow her
The Plain Wife. 245
now with rapture of another and better
sort; that fair or foul he loves her, and if
her eyes were crossed he would not have
them straightened and SO change her to
One fairer.
Yet no woman need be ugly. If there
is a soul in her body, it has but to begin
betimes to show through. From her
earliest girlhood the thoughts she thinks,
the feelings to which she gives way, the
tones she utters, the wishes she indulges,
are sculpturing lines in her face that are
capable of making a special beauty, -
lines whose writing will remain when bloom
fades and sparkle falls.
It is in the beginning of manhood and
in the beginning of old age that a man is
captivated simply by a pretty face, endows
its owner with imaginary graces of the
spirit, and is in breathless haste to make
her charms his own possession. The
maturer man is far less subject to a mis-
taken infatuation. The boy looks for
beauty, the glowing cheek, the melting
eye, the lovely lip ; he cannot endure the
notion, he will say, of an unlovely counte-
246 House and Hearth.
nance in perpetual evidence. The old
Lothario returns to his childhood in this
regard.
But if the youth waits a few years, wis-
dom has found him out, and the wife he
chooses is chosen for wear. Not that
such an element enters into his plans at
all, - he should despise himself if it did ;
he, too, is either taken by storm or drifts
gently into the current that, at first a
mere wave at his feet, is presently the all-
embracing tide; but he has become the
one not to be taken by storm by trifling
forces, the one not to be swept away by
shallow waters, the one to whom prettiness
alone has very insufficient attraction. It
is not that he has seen the havoc wrought
by this mere prettiness in the families of
his unwise friends, in the households of
those Matthews who ate the green apples
which, as Mr. Beecher once said, never
did agree with the human race, in the time
of Eden or afterward. It is not that he
has seen the pretty face lose all freshness
with the first illness or with a few years'
wear, while a sickly slovenly shape trailed
The Plain Wife. 247
round a house that was ordered into dis-
order; nor that he has seen the face still
as pretty, still as empty, unfilled by life's
experience with anything more than first
youth brought; it is not that he has seen
his friend, once of some promise, reduced'
to the unintelligent level of the wife, or
driven from home to seek some sort of
mental nutrition elsewhere; it is not that
he has seen his friend disappointed to the
verge of heart-break, and looking on the
wife has realized what Browning meant
when he said of a pretty woman, –
“May not liking be so simple sweet
If love grew there
'T would undo there
All that breaks the cheek to dimples sweet 2 °
It is none of this that secures him. It is
that he has become incapable of being
attracted by that which ravished his
friend.
Yet, after all, let him see what he will,
— a fool at the head of another's house,
an ignorant or heartless or unintelligent
woman, a virago, a Sloven, a fright, a
blue-stocking, a woman —
248 House and Hearth.
“Whose beauty did astonish the survey
Of richest eyes,”— -
whatever it may be, the circumstance will
not have great influence over his own
choice ; for it is to be doubted iſ any o
us ever learn much by the mistakes of
another. Each lover in the list thinks
that in his choice there is no mistake,
that his love is the one woman in whom
the race has come to perfect flower ; that
his home, at any rate, is to be happiness,
his future, heaven.
Perhaps it will be. Perhaps the glamour
of a fair face has not blinded his eyes to
things that last longer. Perhaps with the
fair face has come to him, too, the fair
soul, the clear mind, the warm heart, the
strong will, the gentle way, the sweet
temper. He may have found — why
not? — beauty and goodness together,
and wit as well. If he is really to have
the happiness he expects, he must have
Some measure of all three. The lover
who can see Helen's beauty in the brow
of Egypt will usually find what answers
to him for beauty in the one he loves.
The Plain Wife. 249
But beauty without the goodness will soon
pall and disgust him ; beauty without the
wit will tire him ; and goodness without
the others will serve small purpose be-
yond filling him with an uncomfortable
remorse for his own errantry and a pity
that is too painful to be indulged ; while
wit alone without the others will presently
discover itself in its loneliness and fill him
with dismay and shrinking. Beauty and
wit alone have made women the historical
sinners of the world ; and although they
have held their sway over many hearts, it
has been a brief sway, and the hearts have
never known happiness. But wit and
goodness alone have held kings in thrall,
have marshalled humble households to
gladness; and if their owners had not
Cleopatra's beauty, their lovers and their
husbands never knew it.
Aft
XX.
THE OLD WIFE.
ANY a man a little past the so-called
prime of life looking at his pretty
young daughter just blossoming into girlish
beauty, loves her all the better for the
thought that comes to him, like a thrilling
realization of his youth again, that she is
the very picture of what her mother was
at her age. And then an unconscious
sigh disturbs him as he glances at the
mother, and sees the havoc which has
been wrought in that once smooth, fair
face as the years have been slipping by,
taking many things with them besides
rosy bloom and dimples, bright teeth and
luxuriant locks. He is not so foolish as
to complain of the inevitable, to ask why

The Old Wife. 251
we cannot be always young, or to forget
that he himself has suffered a change, –
that his forehead is very much higher
than it used to be, and that his old wed-
ding-coat would not by any means meet
across his shoulders now. But neverthe-
less he feels it a subject of regret, even
if he does not acknowledge it to himself,
that when beauty dies, the love of beauty
does not die as well, or that some other
and more satisfactory and lasting beauty,
the beauty of the soul, which transfigures
the worn and weary flesh, does not always
and surely take its place. Perhaps he is
So fortunate, when gazing in his wife's face,
as to see this beauty of the soul that has
grown there, till now, illuminating and
irradiating, it shines like a flame burning
in an alabaster vase. Or, perhaps, as in
a very few extraordinary instances it has
happened, the original beauty is all that
it ever was, even after the lapse of many
years, and has only become enriched with
time. But neither of these possibilities is
a frequent or universal one.
If, however, he sees neither the original
252 House and Hearth.
beauty nor the spiritual beauty, that has
grown, under the discipline of life, to re-
place the other, there is some reason for
his sighing; and if any shade of Self-re- .
proach mingle with the sigh, there would
often again be reason. For how many
times has he paused, for all his love of
her, and thought, as their youth was deep-
ening into middle life, how best to save
that bloom on the cheek, to spare that
smooth forehead, to keep the old sweet-
ness that he loved round eye and lip P
Cares must come in spite of him, cares
and griefs and troubles, since the tale of
no one's life is made up without them.
But has he constantly remembered to
make himself the wall against which they
first should break, or to be personally the
means of bringing none of them upon
her? Has his pride, his ambition, his
love of pleasure, exceeded his means,
and required her, in the effort for re-
spectability, to do something like making
bricks without straw? Has he allowed
his unquiet temper to keep her nerves al-
ways at concert-pitch, with fretting and
The Old Wife. 253
fault-finding and exaction, till she has
become little but nerves? Has he de-
manded of her in all her departments a
perfection that he has not rendered in
any of his? Has he given her cause for
contempt of him, as for One caring more
for eating and drinking than for anything
else? Has he forgotten all the strain on
a delicate frame that the birth and bring-
ing up of children are, not to speak of
housework or the direction of servants, if
she has them P Has he taken care to re-
member that even if supplied with every
bodily comfort, and perhaps luxury, her
soul yearns far more after the old tender
assurances and words of admiration? Has
he, in fact, just so far as in his power
warded off trouble, brought home happi-
ness, taken pains to put on a smiling face
when coming in the door, and added to
her stock no unreasonable solicitudes?
Of course almost every wife knows that
she is indispensable to one phase of her
husband’s contentment, to the manage-
ment of his food just as the experience
of years has taught her his tastes, to the
254 House and Hearth.
care of his clothes, to the cheerfulness of
his home. But there is no wife living who
does not long to be made constantly aware
that she is indispensable to him for her-
self, and herself alone, as well as all the
rest; and there are too many wives dead
for no other reason than that the assur-
ances failed to come, and so life lost its
savour, and they slipped out of it unheed-
ing and unheeded.
That husband who wants to see the
beauty of youth on the old wife's face, or
as much of it as the positive laws of na-
ture can spare him, has loaded her with
no care that could be avoided, and if he
could not give her luxuries has seen to it
that he gave her no anxieties. Physical
burdens greater than the strength do much
toward undermining the good looks of
youth, but there are other destroying in-
fluences more potent yet. It is anxiety
and the wear and tear of tired-out nerves
that whiten and thin the hair, that en-
grave the lines upon the forehead and
about the mouth, and that, far Sooner
than time would do it, make the weary
The Old Wife. 255
muscles flaccid, and let down all the
plump roundness and lovely curves into
loose skin, and call the blood from the
cheek to the aching heart. “There is
much music, excellent voice, in this little
organ,” and all the more, then, it needs
to be kept in tune ; and the husband who
wants the old beauty of girlhood, or the
beauty of the sweet and contented spirit,
must take some heed to retaining the one
and creating the other ; and he will see
the result of such conduct by observing
the face of any thoroughly happy and not
overtasked wife.
To be sure, no woman with self-respect
or with regard for her marriage-vows will,
by reason of overtasking or of neglect,
pretermit the performance of any duty.
The one she knows, owing to various
household exigencies, may, after all, be
unavoidable ; the other may be fancied
and the consequence of preoccupation; .
but whether they are so or not, they would
not excuse her for failure in fulfilling her
part of the obligation, either to her own
conscience or to the eye of the world,
256 House and Hearth.
But the woman who is wise in her day
and generation will, irrespective of any
encouragement, do the best she can to
maintain and preserve the charms that
once pleased, and will not the less smooth
the hair and attend to the teeth, and add
grace and variety to the toilette, because
the one who doubtless loves them yet
does not every day think to praise them
and make old raptures new concerning
them.
There are, indeed, many people who
think that because a woman has passed
middle life and spent the heyday of youth,
she has done with all youthful things, –
love and its expression among the number.
One can pass lightly over the arrogance
which claims love and its expression as
the appurtenances of youth rather than of
the whole life, so much weightier than
any personal assumption is the notion that
any one can at any time, early or late, af-
ford to dispense with love and be happy,
so sad is the knowledge that there are
those that have to dispense with it whether
they can afford it or not, whether they
The Old Wife. 257
are happy or miserable. It is a notion
in very general vogue, as one may see
who observes ways and manners, the drift
of jest, or the bridling of the young girl to
whom the still attractive man of middle-
age chances to render some politeness, –
politeness perhaps so casual he hardly
knows he is giving it, and forgets it as
easily, but which the callow recipient
construes into far more than it is worth,
with some pity and some contempt for
the man tired of his old wife. .
It is that old wife who looks on all
these things with a jealous eye. Marry-
ing her husband for love, she lives only to
preserve his affection; the thought of los-
ing it makes the grave itself seem to her
by comparison a place of pleasant rest.
She watches her reflection in the glass, as
the years go on, with an Argus eye, and
every line she sees in the face, every
streak of lighter colour prophesying silver
in her hair, every relaxation of contour
threatening the wrinkle, cuts into her very
heart. Perhaps the husband bethinks
himself enough to assure her that all this
I7
258 House and Hearth.
makes no difference to him ; he never
sees it ; in his eyes she is still lovely as
on the day he married her ; and believ-
ing him, and receiving from him all the
little evidences of affection that she has
always been in the habit of receiving in
the days of her undoubted ascendancy, her
heart is untroubled by time and its perils;
fear at every moment does not add to the
painful lines and fading tints; she goes
on her Serene and gracious way, happy as
she ever was, and disturbed only by the
knowledge that some day heaven and
earth must pass away.
But it is quite the other way with the
woman who does not receive these blessed
evidences, whose husband may be thought-
lessly absorbed in his pursuits, or who may
in reality have become indifferent. To
her, this fading youth of hers is an object
of chief consideration ; she clings to every
fragment of it as the drowning cling to
straws. “Monsieur Saint-Évremond,” says
Mr. John Hughes, in a letter to Steele,
“has concluded one of his essays with
affirming that the last sighs of a handsome
The Old Wife. 259
woman are not so much for the loss of her
life as of her beauty.” This being the
Case, it is but natural that any woman
should use every effort to snatch back some
portion of the beauty which has been lost,
— the beauty that most probably she never
treasured for herself, but for love's sake,
— and to snatch back with it some of the
charm of youth again. Yet she knows it
is an idle quest; few are the eyes that
have lost so much of their primal strength
as to fail to pierce all the disguises she
may assume, and see the skeleton beneath
the roses.
Yet why should the woman who has
been the faithful wife of years need
other beautifying appliances than the
remembrance of all that she has been
and done in those years? She and her
husband are growing old together ; she
does not love him an iota the less for
his grayness, his baldness, his pallor, his
graven lines; under all of them she sees
the man who won her heart SO many
years ago. Is his taste for beauty, his
refinement and cultivated sense, so much
260 House and Hearth.
more acute than hers that he alone of
the two must needs see change, and feel
loss and dissatisfaction, and manifest the
feeling? Yet how many days there are,
whether it be from this feeling or from
simple indifference, that the old wife
wearies and her heart aches with longing
for one word of all the old words that
used to be poured in her ear, for one
caressing gesture of the hand, for One
action that has no other aim than the
evident promotion of her happiness? No
matter how old she is, be she even
all of her threescore years and ten,
the woman does not live who can live
happily without love, and if she has a
husband, without his love and Some
proof of it. She knows that there have
been old lovers long married ; she re-
members the ballad of “John Anderson
my jo, John,” which never moved her
when she was young, but now seems to
have been written for herself; and she
sighs for some expression from her hus-
band that shall make her State resem-
ble that of those old lovers. It is the
The Old Wife. 261
indifference which breaks her heart ; she
does not know how soon it may turn to
hate ; she does not know but she would
rather it were hate and done with.
Without that love which has been the
breath of her life she must fail and fall
or wither into self-centred calm ; with
it, she could still lift her atlantean por-
tion of the world. She is singularly un-
selfish if the want of it does not make
her review her life, and all its labours and
sacrifices, and arouse an indignation over
the injustice of her lot in which the
flame either of her life or her love must
burn out. It would cost the husband of
this old wife but little exertion to mani-
fest a love that may be warm beneath
its crust, with brief mentions of gratifica-
tion or of pain now and then, with smiles,
confidences, turning for sympathy when
together, movements of old-fashioned
courtesy when with others: all this would
not impair his superiority or his strength,
and it would raise her again to her proud
place among happy wives whose love
and whose receipt of love outlast their
262 House and Hearth.
very life. Fortunate it is that if there
are some who do differently, the greater
number of husbands see, under the
mask that age has bound about her, the
woman of their love, and would write
her epitaph at last, —
“ Underneath this stone cloth lie
As much virtue as could die,
Which, when alive, did vigour give
To as much beauty as could live.”

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XXI.
THE ANGEL IN THE CHILD.
NTERESTING as a bride's trousseau
is to feminine eyes and fancies, with
its ingenuities of needlework and its
fabrics a little richcr than those for or-
dinary wear, and with the thread of
romance sewed through all its seams,
even if it should turn out to be a mere
basting-thread, - interesting as all this
is, yet a baby's trousseau is the more
captivating; and all the waves of silk
and wonders of cashmere are not quite
so attractive as these “vests of pure bap-
tismal white,” the little snowy folds of
the layette, with the flutings like the
petals of a quill-daisy, with the edgings
like cobwebs of rime strung with dew,



264 House and Hearth.
with the tiny caps and shirts and frocks
where the threads have been counted to
the stitches, lest peradventure the child,
having nothing else by which to know
her mother who is dead, shall learn that
she was at any rate an exquisite needle-
woman, and one who worked “willingly
with her hands,” like the woman whose
price was far above rubies. What joys
have grown with the growth of the small
garment which so appeals to the mother
in every woman ; what fears have been
laid with the gathers; what courage,
what heroism, what hopes have been
hidden away in the frills | A man,
possibly, might look at it and see noth-
ing but a collection of delicate trifles;
but to every woman it represents, beyond
all its pathos and poetry, the issues of
life and death. Too often the hand that
laid it away is not the hand that puts it
to use. Too often the dainty gown
fashioned so lovingly for the christening
is smoothed away under fresh flowers in
the casket. And no one knows what
fate is going to do under all that quilling
The Angel in the Child. 265
and embroidering, that frost-wreathed
flannel, that silk-lined and lace-covered
robe, those bibs and Sacques like SO
many folded blossoms; and whether the
fondling, so sweetly cared for now, is to
live blessed or forlorn, to die in a state-
bed or on a scaffold.
Neither latitude nor outer custom
makes much difference with human
emotion here. In those lands where two
layettes are seemingly prepared, – one
with pink ribbons for the boy, and one
with blue ribbons for the girl, - the senti-
ment is still the same, and the unknown
still hangs its halo round the sacred lit-
tle store. Yet the general sentiment in
foreign countries is often mingled with a
strain of ruder sense than with us, and
the frippery of the layette is controlled
by fitness, except where noble and
princely babes are still condemned to
their dignities. But with those who
correspond to the general grade of the
body of our own people the layette is a
simple thing. The folly of fine lace in
use where so soon soiled, of the weight
266 House and Hearth.
of embroidery, of length of skirt over
tender ankles, has been comprehended,
together with the Superiority of cleanli-
ness to finery. Those meanwhile, among
Ourselves who have adopted the simpler
forms recognize that it makes no sort of
difference what the layette is ; whether
its cambrics are plain or tucked or
edged with rare old thread, the baby
who wears it is, under all conditions,
just the same sweet little morsel, and
asks no odds of its clothes. -
Yet, after all, it is not a little enigmati-
cal, while most of us welcome these little
beings with such warmth, cherish them
with such tenderness, and feel that if
taken away from us they are cruelly
wronged of all the joys of life, that few
pause to look at the other side, and con-
sider what a world of worriment it is to
which we are welcoming the darlings.
Think of it a moment . The first four
years, with the agony of teething, the
pains of pin-pricking and colic, the grief
of weaning, the tumbles, the gravel-
Scratches, the bumps, the horror of dogs
The Angel in the Child. 267
and cocks and Strange faces, the longing
for expression, the tight-rope terrors of
learning to walk, the innumerable depriva-
tions of Cannot-have-this and must-not-
have-that, the jealous misery of displace-
ment from dear arms by a new-comer, —
these first four years constitute a period
of what we are wont to consider unal-
loyed bliss.
But after the first four years, what is
there? Then the care of consciousness
begins, and drags its long chain of evils
after it. Torn pinafores and anticipated
reproaches; imprisoning closets ; Sud-
denly snatched-off slippers; birch rods;
cross nurses, and the ghosts they and
their grandmothers have seen, and all
the imaginative terrors that follow, -
giants upstairs and bears under the bed ;
banishment from table just as the tempt-
ing dish appears ; humiliation untold in
the reproof before folk; all sorts of in-
Sulting remarks, without the privilege of
reply ; arbitrary denial of desired favours
without any apparent reason ; perpetual
condemnation to bed just as the lamps
26S House and Hearth.
are lighted and downstairs seems an
anteroom of Paradise; green apples;
Colic ; medicine, – medicine in a spoon,
and the mind to be made up to the in-
stant task of Swallowing it or else the
nauseous stuff to be forced down the
throat, while the ignominious nose is
held by execrated fingers; and, worse
than all, school
For a few there are schools which are
delights, studies which are games, learning
which is turned into play, - and this is to
be yet more the case in the future, with
the kindergartens and manual train-
ing ; but to the greater number school
has meant and still means a harsh bell
striking on pleasure like a knell, a strait-
jacket, cruel tasks, headache, unslaked
thirst, mortifying punishments, and im-
prisonment when birds and Sunshine and
tossing boughs and blowing winds are free
outside the window. What misery is this
confronts the little wretch in the multipli-
cation-table . Its printed sheet and bod-
ily presence will be daubed with dirt and
smeared with tears; it will spoil the day,
The Angel in the Child. 269
and haunt the dreams, and rise like an
accusing phantom with the first waking
thought ; it will trouble the conscience
with the lies whose telling it causes in
such assertions as that eight times seven
are forty-five, when every one knows that
they are sixty-three ; and when it is
all committed to memory, the memory
will backslide, and the distress be all to
suffer over again, alleviated by nothing
but the possibility of singing the fifth
line to a tune in chorus, where mis-
takes cannot be detected. How many
heavenly half-holidays will that monstrous
shadow cover, blotting out all the sun-
shine of the sky as well; how many tanta-
lizing conditional promises will its impos-
sibilities prevent, and how many unarticu-
lated curses from lips that do not know
how to articulate them will follow the
hoary villain who invented the cunning
horrors of that tabulated statement But
that half conquered, there arises another
spectre. Its dreadful name is “Carrying
Ten.” Why should one carry ten instead
of nine, or instead of one hundred? Why
270 House and Hearth.
must one lose recess, and stand before
that grim blackboard trying in vain to
carry ten, while the happy voices of all
the frolicking boys and girls who have
carried their tens come in like the hum of
bees, till at last, recklessly setting down
the whole amount of each separate add-
ing, tens and all, in a long String across
the board, one makes for the ball-ground,
to be brought back again before the re-
lentless fate of that adding demon? The
class in grammar, too, - how the web of
its fine-spun threads twists round the cells
of the childish brain, and obscures all rea-
son | Why is “ Peter's '' in the possessive
case, when, as every sensible being in the
world knows, it is “cap ’’ that is in the
possessive case, very possessive, and pos-
sessed by Peter? And of what earthly
consequence is it, any way, that one should
be forced to shed tears over its determina-
tion P And then the wrestles with the al-
phabet in the long columns of the spell-
ing-book that must be mowed down, the
fearful struggles with “phthisis” and
“drachm’’ and “gherkin,” till “ dema-
The Angel in the Child. 271
goguery '' and “paralysis '' and “preju-
dice ’’ and “Mississippi" fall before the
conqueror, – a dear-bought victory that
no rewards of merit can ever compensate.
And no sooner is victory won, or even
while it yet hangs in the scale, long divi-
Sion marches to the attack, a Cossack
troop of fractions brings on its skir-
mishers, followed quickly by a cloud of
guerilla questions from “Colburn's ’’ hov-
ering on the rear ; then decimals come
to the front, flanked by interest and the
rule-of-three, reinforced by partial pay-
ments, by square root, by the devilish
cunning of miscellaneous problems in per-
centage, in cube root, in partnership ;
and with that the whole grand army sur-
rounds the little victim, and algebra,
geometry, trigonometry, conic sections,
chemistry, and logic, and the rest, roll
their thundering shot and shell into his
ranks, and he is lucky if they do not take
off his head entirely before he flies into
the soft and easy fields of pleasant mem-
orizing, full of the flowers of history, rhe-
toric, and the philosophies. And all this
272 House and Hearth.
if he is simply an Anglican. How much
worse if it is demanded that he shall speak
with the tongues of the dead as well as of
the living ! -
And launched into such a sea of trouble,
with all this work, perplexity, bewilder-
ment, and despair before them, we wel-
come the soft and rosy little things, and
make believe we have a right to do so by
talking about the bliss of childhood
Nor is the tale half told. There are
the pangs of jealous friendship ; and the
season that no more fails than the early
and the latter rain, in which one wishes to
die young, and the burial-lot undergoes se-
lection ; and then come the awful agonies
of first-love, in which one swings from fast
to loose, from moments in which the whole
earth and heavens are a balloon that
goes with one up, up, up, in everlasting
sunshine, to other moments in which one
falls down, down, down, through equally
everlasting darkness and desolation. And
that well over, the serious business of life
begins, before which all the labours, terrors,
longings, and struggles that seemed So
The Angel in the Child, 273
real and tremendous, in comparison to
the little strength and tender nature, are
found to be but trifles light as air.
And in spite of our knowledge of all this
we smile on the precious Creatures, Caress
them as if their mission were only to be
sweet to our kiss and dear in our arms,
and we enjoy them as if we could save
them every pain, and could go with them
every step of the way that lies wrapped in
impenetrable cloud before them, that may
ascend into Skyey heights of honour, may
go down into dark abysses of disgrace.
For every child is himself an unanswered
problem ; he is following his hyperbolic
line into infinity. We handle him lightly ;
we play with him as if he were a beautiful
flower, a thing for Our pleasure, unaware
that part of the time we commit sacrilege,
and part of the time amuse ourselves with
Something dangerous as dynamite, – this
mature being simple innocence that our
impure hands stain, and that one the poor
heir of a temperament that if it should go
through life safely, is just as likely to ex-
plode into sin and Sorrow. It is a curious
IS
274 House and Hearth.
and beneficent provision of Nature that
makes us oblivious of So much ; for, a
helpless fly caught in the mesh of others'
weaving, a child, the inheritor of all that
unrighteous ancestors can bequeath, in-
stead of being a delight might otherwise
be a terror to us. As it is, we must have
a silent faith in humanity, a trust in divine
purpose, a hope in the future, to upbuoy
us with the child in our arms; and usually
without consciously syllabling so much to
ourselves, we think that, whatever hap-
pens to the rest of the race, this child will
walk dry-shod through the sea of trouble.
Nevertheless, if there is a possibility of
ideal grace in any block of white marble,
the statue lying there in hiding and wait-
ing till the prison walls be knocked away,
there is also a possibility of angelhood in
every child, waiting to be carved out in
all its dazzling strength and lustre. And
if the marble, as Hawthorne had it, as-
Sumes a Sacred character, and no man
should dare to touch it unless he feel with-
in himself a consecration and priesthood,
we may have, as well, some trembling de-
The Angel in the Child. 275
gree of hesitation in meddling with the
ideal possibilities of the child's nature.
Yet while the statue will sleep forever in
the stone unless the chisel and mallet
come to its aid, the angel will of itself
Struggle to the light, but how much hin-
dered and undeveloped, if not dwarfed
and crippled, in the struggle, unless love
has given it a helping hand It is love,
then, that seals us with our consecration
and priesthood here ; and it is the love
that is in every mother's heart. It is true
that circumstance, heredity, and combi-
nations of events which look almost like
fate, interfere a great deal with the
mother's hand in the carving of this statue ;
but there is no heredity that environment
will not do much to counteract, no fate
So ill that at its sources it cannot be
shaped into good. Every mother, look-
ing on her young child, sees this angel in
him, and resolves to bring it out; she
Sees in his beautiful curves, his shell-like
tints, flesh and blood brought to perfec-
tion, the last fine flower of her race.
“What, and the soul alone deteriorates?”
276 House and Hearth.
Ah, no she sees not only the little crea-
ture of rosy loveliness like the baby em-
peror of whom she may have read, -
“And every day more beautiful he grew,
In shape, all said, in feature and in hue,
Till young Greek sculptors, gazing at the child,
Were so with old Greek sculpture reconciled,”—
but she sees, too, the Sparkling angel with-
in, trying his white wings, and she will set
him free, if her skill and her strength be
equal to her love and her will. She will
need to call upon all her aids, all her
sources of help in the work, and to open
her own heart widely to the spiritual world
above and around her, and bring its in-
fluences down into her daily life, as the
farmer opens his furrow to bring down the
quickening nitrogen of the atmosphere
into the earth. And she has not only to
put a heavenly temper on the steel of her
own tools as she works, and, no matter
upon what flint they trip and strike fire
and turn their edge, to let no fatigue or
failure dishearten her, but to remember
day by day how the sculptor rises in the
night to wet his clay or to keep his fires,
The Angel in the Child. 277
and how untiringly and eagle-eyed he
watches the strokes of his subordinates,
and how the ideal in his soul daily grows
in splendour till he is fain to see that no
earthly substance can reproduce it to him.
It is not to one mother of many that this
dream comes, this vision of the angel in
her child to be evolved, but to all mothers
alike, – the sad mother whose baby has
no father to help her in the work, or the
mother by all fortunate things of heave
and earth befriended. ..

XXII.
IN THE SIC K–1&OOM.
HAT a change there is from the
necessary sick-room of the past
to the possible one of the present All
the difference, indeed, that may exist be-
tween the black atmosphere of the oubli-
ette and the clear air blowing round the
turret-chamber, — the one a room into
which no one allowed a breath of air to
penetrate or a ray of light, a drop of cold
water or a natural sound ; the other a
room where now it is almost a luxury to
be ill.
Yet it is only the enlightened sick-room
that presents the evidence of this great
change, and the enlightened nurse that
effects it, — the nurse who not only brings

In the Sick—Room. 279
common-sense to her task, and dismisses
tradition, but who has received an educa-
tional training for her work.
As the poet is born, not made, so, one
might Say, is the perfect nurse ; and no
talent or learning can quite equal the
value of her genius for common-sense and
kindliness. But there are other nurses
who are made nearly perfect through love,
and by dint of will, of care and effort,
study and observation ; with them the
more talent they have, to the more use
will they put it, and they will despise no
hint that can help them along the path
into which an untoward ſate has thrust
those they love, but relentingly sent them
after, or in which they find the work of
their lives. -
There is nothing that requires more
strength of character, more general excel-
lence, aptitude, and deftness, than the
charge of a sick-room does ; and the very
first thing one must do, upon undertaking
it, is to forget one's self. You become,
from that moment, impersonal; you are to
have no sensation, no identity, no wishes,
280 HollSe and Hearth.
no fatigues; you are to be utterly out of
the question ; you are to be only a healing
force, a machine, a thought, an act ; there
is no one in that room but the patient.
You are to abandon yourself wholly to
determination, — to the one determination
that the sufferer shall recover, and that,
since you are there to insure it, you will
not leave a thing undone, any more than
if, in case you did, the death should lie
at your door. You are to do as the old
believer bade, – pray as if everything de-
pended on God, act as if everything de-
pended on you. Unless you can do all
this, – run, stand, sit untiringly, disre-
gard the pains of Cramped position, be SO
rapt in the work that fatigue has no name
or place in your thought, forget to sleep,
almost be ignorant of sleep, think of noth-
ing each moment but the thing to be done
in that moment, and let no single idea
escape from the combat with disease and
death, – unless you are capable of an
utter enthusiasm of self-denial, where love
does all this by its own motion, you
are not fit for the charge of that room
In the Sick-Room. 281
where the dark wrestle goes on, and are
only good as a temporary relief to others
when, after all, flesh fails. -
But if you are capable of that enthu-
siasm, it does not need that you should
be wise, witty, talented, brilliant. You
may be as simple and as destitute of
book-learning as you please ; provided you
are faithful to your enthusiasm, you will
have achieved all the triumph that it is
given to win over death. Yet it is not to
be denied, of course, that the keener the
intellect directed upon all this concentra-
tion and work, the more sure, the more
perfect will be the result.
Those who in sickness have ever ex-
perienced the unspeakable relief of a
trained nurse, – that best of all modern
inventions, – coming when the gloom
was darkest, taking at once all responsi-
bility, knowing precisely the right thing
to do and doing it calmly and perfectly,
her gracious presence like a cloud of bless-
ing in the house, distilling strength and
hope, her knowledge, her skill, her gentle-
ness, her assurance, giving comfort and
282 House and Hearth.
promise not only to the patient but to all
the household, - will appreciate all that
is concerned in giving the daughter of the
house some portion of the training that
affords one individual such heavenly
power, so that at least she shall learn
how to make up a sick-bed properly and
to change its linen afterward without dis-
turbing the inmate, how to bathe a patient
without moistening the clothes, how to
prepare the poultice, apply the plaster,
administer the enema, wind the bandage,
dress the wound, take the temperature,
and be ready for most emergencies. A
girl is not educated, accomplished, or pre-
pared for life, who cannot do all this ;
and six months of a training that shall
give her the information and skill required
for it is the best finishing school that any
girl can have.
Nevertheless, as the temporary relief,
not taking chief charge, but merely filling
up interstices, as it were, one can accom-
plish a great deal without this special
training if one chooses. One does not
need to be a marvel of natural or acquired
In the Sick-Room. 283
talent in this direction, in order to know
how for instance to keep a room well
ventilated, that the sick, who require twice
as much air as the well, may have all the
benefit that healing oxygenated breath
can give, especially if once shown how to
do it. As a transient person dropping
in to let another go and rest, one can
have learned how to walk across the room
without shaking it, and whether to wear a
rustling silk and Squeaking shoes or a dress
and chaussure that let you move sound-
less as a ghost ; one can have learned to
keep the fire alive without having it
enough to roast a holocaust, or So low as
to cause a bewildering racket in its re-
vival; one can learn whether it is best
to rasp the nerves of the patient by
whispered conversation whose sibillation
is heard too plainly, but whose burden
the ear is strained to catch, to the point
of fatigue and fever, or to say clearly
what it is necessary to say, and whether
it is best to have exchanged certain sen-
tences with the physician or others be-
fore entering the room, or, not having
284 House and Hearth.
done so, to forego the indulgence of say-
ing them at all ; one can have learned
how refreshing to a patient is the passing
of the soft wet sponge over the face and
hands, wiped at once with softest linen,
the turning of the heated pillow, the fan-
ning of the aching forehead, the re-ar-
rangement of the coverlets, the murmuring
of the tender or reassuring word, and
then again how refreshing it is to the
sufferer to be let alone, – for the nurse
who fusses forever over a sick person is
as bad as the nurse who neglects one.
And then one can have learned how to
endure with good-nature and without con-
tradiction all the caprices and whims and
exasperating vexatiousness of the sick,
knowing one is there to endure ; one can
have learned such simple things as the
natural course of most common illnesses,
what may be expected next, what one can
do to help ; one can have learned to ex-
press no consternation or surprise at un-
favourable symptoms, and by a cheerful
face and a calm word at any unfortunate
development to hinder the patient from
In the Sick-Room. 285
receiving alarm ; one can have learned to
set down the hour and moment when
medicines are to be given, and to check
off those already taken, to jot down the
minutes of the sick-room, so that the
physician may run his eye over the jotting
and know all that has occurred without
the necessity of a whispered consultation
arousing all the patient’s suspicions. And
if one has not learned all this and infinitely
more beyond, one should feel it quite as
much to one's shame as if it had been
omitted to learn to write one's name.
There is no physician who will not tell
you that as many cures are wrought by
good nursing as by medicine ; and al-
though it is impossible for all of us to reach
the eminence of a skilful administration
of medicine, yet we can all endeavour to
make those cures which are wrought by
faithful nursing. Not the least part of
faithful nursing is the night-watching, and
the number of us not called upon for more
or less of that in the course of our lives
is Small ; and it is by no means the least
difficult, for it demands all one's resources
286 House and Hearth.
in the hours when the tide of life runs
most feebly. Most of us can remember
the first night we ever sat up with the
sick, - the honour, the dignity, the
grown up importance, with which we were
indued, the delighted sense of rendering
help. It was probably away from home,
because when sickness needing watchers
comes at home, the very young are hardly
trusted with it, and when they must be
called in, it is not alone, or for a whole
night together. It was, also, most prob-
ably, at a house where the inmates were
in want, or else where all other watchers
had been worn out, and it was in the
country, where watchers are not to be
hired, and every one gives freely a night
of sleep to the sick. We had a sense of
virtue, the day before, which we felt went
far toward atoning for many sins; and
if, in the late evening, when our eyelids
were heavy in spite of us, we wished we
had not been so virtuous, then Pride and
Pity, strange companions, came to the
front and pinned the eyelids back. How
happy we were, as we entered the house
In the Sick-Room. 287
of the sick, to be hailed as a comforter,
and to see the tray of refreshments set
out for us; and with what a make-believe
of custom we swallowed the cup of bitter
tea that was to make assurance doubly
Sure and keep us wide awake ; and then
how vanity and virtue, pride and dignity
and honour, all vanished as we entered the
sick-room and the presence of Suffering,
and recognized the unworthiness and the
helplessness with which we had dared
take this charge upon us in the struggle
of death with life through the long dark
night ! And never was night so long and
So dark. For as we came into this awful
presence of what to-morrow might not be
at all, and had it left upon our hands, we
dared not rest a moment or abate one
heart-beat of effort. If we had felt the hor-
rid foe stealing silently on us, we could not
have been more alert and eager : we did
feel him there ; we would not suffer him
to gain an inch upon us ! Ours was no
holiday-night watching with a novel and
a nap, and now and then a glance at a
sleeping patient. It was rubbing, bath-
288 House and Hearth.
ing, smoothing pillows, dressing blisters,
heating lotions, brushing hair, dropping
medicines, giving broths; it was step here
and step there, with a dreadful fear of en-
countering death, a wild longing for home,
an impatient pulling aside of the window-
curtain at intervals and a shrinking back
from the darkness, with a new tremor at
the thought of sickness and ourselves be-
ing the only waking things on earth, with
a half-hinted horror at last, as the senses
grew utterly weary and almost beyond
control, that perhaps this was the night
without a dawn ; it was to be on our feet
for almost every minute of that long dark-
ness, to catch the first glimmer of the
gray, as if it were a year since Sun- .
set, to wonder why no one came to relieve
us long and long after it was light, to
run home at last, having possibly wor-
ried more than helped the patient with
all our good-will, and to be put to bed by
the mother who had her wise purpose in
letting us go, and to be regarded with
awe by all the children when we came
downstairs in the afternoon. That was
In fºe Sick-Room. 289
our first watching perhaps. But in the
after-years what a different and familiar
thing watching has grown to be ; and how
that which once seemed a heavy burden
in the loss of treasured rest has become
a light task, for which one hardly dreams
of making up the sleep by a nap in the
following daytime ! g
Few of us who have ever watched all
night, though, would give up the experi-
ence it has brought us in Soothing pain
and fighting back death, or in knowledge
and observation of outside nature and its
relation to human nature, as we see with
wonder that all pain increases as the Sun
withdraws, that the vital powers burn low,
and night seems to wrap the sick, as a
pall wraps the dead, in a horror of thick
darkness, and that at a certain hour, when
the Sun has been long gone, the lamp of
life flickers at its feeblest, and a rude mo-
tion would extinguish it. To many of
us, too, Our hours of watching have given
all we know of night, of the deep later
night, that time of mystery in which the
world is left to take care of itself; for at
19
290 House and Hearth.
intervals when the patient has not needed
us we have refreshed ourselves with long
draughts of the out-door sights. We look
out and see the great constellation hang-
ing in the Southeast like a sentinel ; we
busy ourselves; and as the hours move
On we look out again, and it hangs in the
Southwest; and we are conscious, in the
change, of a great procession of vast
powers moving by us as if they were
mighty spirits marching through the heav-
ens, and it was like a sight revealed to us
alone of all the world. And we always
feel as we did on our first night, as if no
one else in the world were awake at this
dead hour, and we had the hollow of the
night to ourselves with the weird and
waning moon and at length the strong
morning star, the presence of the sick
making it dread and awesome too, withal.
Perhaps it snows; and seen from the sick-
room, the snow borrows strange gleams
of cold and death. Or perhaps it storms;
and all the elements in confusion without
give strange emphasis to this little point of
pain within, and it seems to dilate at last
In the Sick-Room. 291
and increase to the proportions of the night,
and pain itself become an element. The
sailors on the coast then are up with us,
we know ; and although we may be miles
away from any Sea, their raking masts,
their slanting decks, seem close upon us,
and when the wind brings the muffled
stroke of some church tower's bell, it
seems like a ship's bell tolling its own
knell. And by and by it is gray, and the
light swells like a seed till it blossoms out
and fills the whole sky, and our over-
wrought and excited senses seem to see
the very glory of heaven in the burning
rose and gold of the east, and we feel as
if the splendour of the sun came to atone,
as far as Outer splendour can, for the gloom
and grief of sickness and pain. The day
is free to all of us; but, except for occa-
Sional glimpses, the dead waste and mid-
dle of the night is a sealed secret, and
there are few of us so interested in the
phases of nature that we will sit up to
observe them sleeplessly.
Still, if the satisfaction of relieving pain
and giving rest were incomplete and in-
292 House and Hearth.
sufficient in themselves, it would be well
worth while to undergo all the fatigues and
anxieties of watching and nursing for the
sake of the coming of the family physi-
cian, bringing in with him the light of day.
If anywhere there were to be found among
men a parallel to the Good Shepherd, how
instinctively should we all turn for it to
our family physician | Who is there that,
like him, seems to stand between us and
the Outer darkness? Who is there that,
like him, knows our frame and the dust of
which we are made P Who is there to
whom, as to him, we confess our defects,
and with whom we make capital out of
Our weaknesses P. He is to us the visible
representative of the dispenser of life and
death ; we hang upon his word for Sen-
tence or reprieve. When he comes in at
the door, we feel as though he brought
safety in with him ; when he goes by the
window, we send our blessing after him.
He is but a man, – our doctor; he
pursues a science founded on shifting
sands; his work is largely experimental,
and in many places he gropes in a more
In the Sick-Room. 293
than twilight gloom. But to our ignorant
helplessness his limited knowledge seems
to be the clear sight of a god, his slightest
averment a thing to treasure for its store
of truth, his decision an affair as immuta-
ble as the laws of the universe. If we
die, we cling to his hand as we step into
the dark river, while he is like the com-
forting rod and staff; if we live, we feel
as though it were through his determina-
tion and because of his effort. We feel
that the great Power behind him has put
into his hands, as it were, the issues of
birth and of the grave.
The physician, indeed, seems to us un-
like all other men. He is impersonal as a
spirit. We send for him in our troubles;
we go to him with our grievances; we
confess to him the ailments we would hide
from all the world ; we no more make a
pretence before him than if he were om-
niscient, for we are aware that unless he
sees us as we are he can afford us no aid.
There are no secrets kept from him. He
is acquainted with the inner recesses of
households, with the histories of tortured
294 House and Hearth.
lives; he knows over what home peace
broods; he knows where neglect and con-
tention and abuse work havoc, and where
the dark strains run in the blood from
generation to generation to reveal them-
selves some day in foul fungus or distraught
brain. To all he brings a consolation of
his own, a delicate sympathy, a promise
of the whole that he has, an assurance of
best effort, a sense that everything which
skill and science can do is being done,
and that the rest is only in the hands of
fate.
And when we are in the dreadful pres-
ence of some sickness whose unknown
issues touch upon the awful mysteries of
death, who is there that comes into the
room so like the commander of the forces
of light scattering those of darkness as the
family physician does? Who seems, like
him, to be the actual vicegerent of the
great spirit of good fighting the inroads of
evil? How he labours, how indefatigable
he is, how he suffers with us, and wrestles
with fate for us ! He rises in the dead of
night, perhaps to walk through furious
In the Sick-Room. 295
storm, perhaps to skate over frozen rivers,
perhaps to drive miles in biting wintry
winds. Light comes in with him then
out of the thick darkness. In the morn-
ing he brings in the outside vigour of the
healthy world. He is sure to come and
give us reassurance just when the sun is
departing and taking all our little cheer
with him as the dreadful night sets in
again. And when the balance hangs so
that a hair's weight may incline it either
way, up into the happy light or down into
the dark region where all abandon hope,
then he spends sleepless nights beside
us, discards less serious matters, is away
Only on flying visits, makes our woes his
own, and manifests on his errand of
mercy all the devotion of love.
And what motives are they that urge
him to this sublime unselfishness, this
work and suffering? Not money, or the
love of it; he is paid at best but a pit-
tance, and seldom collects half his dues.
Not fame ; for when his day is done, and
he lies down for his long and well-earned
rest, his name Soon follows him, or lives
296 House and Hearth.
only in the grateful recollection of the
generation he has served and saved. In
almost any other path in life he could
acquire far more of either of these perish-
able things with infinitely less cost to him-
self. It can, then, be only the love of
science and the love of his fellow-men
that spur him to this heroic duty, to this
unfailing self-sacrifice; and beyond his
success from day to day, the chief reward
he has is that his very work at once re-
fines and enlarges his nature, and gives
his soul all the time a stronger and nobler
existence. Never can we pay our family
physician the obligations of gratitude that
we owe him. His steady labour, his en-
thusiastic research, his utter self-forget-
fulness, his spontaneous sympathy, his
unfailing tenderness, – neither gold nor
gifts, neither words nor acts, can ever
make the account even with him for the
abnegation and surrender such things im-
ply ; and all that we can do is with our
whole hearts to acknowledge the debt,
XXIII.
THE FAMILY STRAIN.
HERE is an old saying that blood is
thicker than water, — a saying which
holds within itself an entire cosmogony.
The idea that, next to the great welding
of a perfect marriage, which makes two
beings one, natural affection is the
strongest bond between human beings,
is an almost universal one, necessarily SO
because of that inevitable selfishness
without which we should fail to preserve
our identity. *
The mother who looks at the baby on
her breast, and traces in the small face
here a trait of an ancestor and there a
trait of herself, and sees the father smil-
ing in its smile, and yearns above it with

298 House and Hearth.
an ineffable sensation, finds it impossible
to believe the time can ever come when
that baby who lives through her, who
covers her face with its little wet kisses,
to whom she is heaven and sunshine it-
self, shall cease to regard her as the
central point of existence, shall dis-
pute her opinions, renounce her author-
ity, and perhaps be severed from her
now by the lapse of indifference, or now
by a gulf of hate, – hate the more bitter
for the old love, as the sweetest wine
becomes the sharpest vinegar. The
young sisters whom she sees playing to-
gether, sharing together, studying to-
gether, shielding each other, strolling
with their arms about each other, their
bright heads bent in innocent conspiracy,
— she cannot believe that at some day
the attraction shall be changed into re-
pulsion or into forgetfulness. Nor can
she more easily believe that the brothers
who now hunt birds'-nests, go berrying,
play truant together, sleep in the same
bed, read from the same book, shall by
and by foster jealousy and envy, shall
The Family Strain. 299
quarrel about a homestead or a Sweet-
heart, and build between them an ugly
barrier of law-suit or love-suit. And the
child, on his side, could not understand
how the globe could continue to roll if
the parent no longer loved him. Nor,
discarding crime and cruelty and base-
ness, would any of these ever come to
pass without the interference of an ab-
normal love of self; abnormal selfishness
on the part of the parent, alienating love
and weakening ties ; abnormal self-ab-
Sorption, too, in the child ; abnormal
self-assertion on the part of the sister
or the brother.
Instances of this perversion of feeling
are every day to be met with, now and
then justifiable and not to be hindered ;
but in the main we are fain to regard
them as isolated cases of malformation
or of cankered growth like the fungus
that usurps the flower. And although
we may doubt whether in the natural
state natural affection be a thing any
more permanent with the human animal
than with the brute, with the mother and
child than with the lioness and whelp,
300 House and Hearth.
yet instinct and intuition fly to the rescue
and tell us that our own blood in other
veins calls to us as deep calls to deep,
or as the moon calls to all the deeps.
Man is, after all, but a sort of polyp
whose buds are never entirely detached
from it; and the race of to-day builds
its coral, on which perhaps the race of
to-morrow emerges into clearer water.
This girl is so stately and gentle because
her great-grandmother a hundred years
ago respected herself and reduced her
passions. This youth is so strong and
heroic because a sire, long since a hand-
ful of ashes, fortified his own youth and
health and eradicated the palsy of fear,
When we look askance on some cousin
twice removed, and, if the old portrait
on the wall speaks true, see our common
ancestress, to whom the bloom of the
earth has many a year been dust, gaze
wistfully at it again through her eyes, we
feel a new and nearer relationship with
her. And the child playing at our feet
becomes the more precious still when
we recognize that he is the last point
and expression of our race, a bond with
The Family Strain. 301
the past, a pledge with the future. Cer-
tainly blood always tells ; not alone in
the race for life as in the race for place,
where it becomes evident that what we
have made ourselves, that, by the force
of natural laws, will our children ap-
proach, – one degree higher if Our lives
went up, one degree lower if our lives
went down, - but in the occult tides
of relationship that swing constant to
one great law of cohesion.
The parent must regard the child as
one who shall carry on his own work to
completion, his character to perfection,
through whom his name and his stock
shall still have part in the warm and
noisy world when he himself is silent
and cold ; and he accentuates all the
intrinsic dearness of the child by an un-
Conscious love of self and love of life ;
while the child must correspondingly
look at the parent as one who has lived
his day and whose work is done. Yet
that very thing gives the parent a new
claim on the child's affections; for not
only is the parent dear to him from habit
and association, from ability to remember
302 House and Hearth.
nothing from which the parent is absent,
as much a part of his universe as the
stars and sky, but the fact that the world
is so sweet to youth, and age is about
to lose it, that the old eyes are soon to
close on its beauty and gladness, and all
the sunshine the dear old form shall
know will be that which falls upon the
grave, gives a fresh emotion as strong
with love and regret as the parents' emo-
tion is strong with love and hope. And
over and above all there is that mystical
tie of the flesh and blood which words
never can explain, and endeavour seldom
can destroy, - a tie before which the
fidelity of the lodestar to its pole dwin-
dles into nothingness.
There is no savant who has yet told
us what this mystical tie is. Philoso-
phers cannot illuminate it ; physiologists
cannot catch it. One must analyze the
Current of the veins as it bounds across
the heart, must seize the intelligence
that thrills along the nerve as it leaves
the brain, and then one has not laid
hold of it. The sympathy of mated
Snails for each other, of which Poe told
The Family Strain. 303
us, by which, though separated by Oceans,
one will respond to the other's hurt,
bears trivial likeness to the human Sym-
pathy in the righteous family. For the
searcher into the springs of natural affec-
tion must find it something to be weighed
only in that fine balance where the very
star-dust has been weighed and the
magnetism of the earth measured out to
its meridians, - a part of the awful
secrets of creation, of the great mystery
of marriage, of the connection between
heaven and earth, in the face of which
the fool has said there is no God. It is
an attraction, indeed, exceeding any in
the material cosmos, the attraction of
father to son, of husband to wife; for
though the Savants cipher out their vast
Schemes of gravitation and cohesion till
time shall be no more, yet here is some-
thing that if those mighty powers were
dead and done away with, could yet
hold their world together.
THE FNT).
JUN 1 l 1917
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