A New Atmosphere Part 2

This it is that I denounce,--not the use, but the abuse, of sacred things. I want girls to be saved from sacrilege. I do not want them to lay open their lives to spoliation. I want every woman to fill her heart with hopes and plans and purposes; and if a man will marry her, let him be so strong as to break down all barriers, check the whole flood-tide of her life, and sweep it around himself. If a woman is worth having, she is worth winning. Jacob served seven years for Rachel and seven more, and they seemed unto him but a few days for the love he had to her. s.h.i.+ver and scatter the wan, weak attachments that dare to call themselves _love_. Scorn for this frothy, green whey that stands for the wine of life! Better that girls should be pirated away as the rough-handed Romans won their Sabine wives, than that a man should have but to touch the tree with his cane as he walks through the orchard, and down comes the ready-ripe fruit. In Von Fink's fiery wooing of Lenore, I hear the right trumpet-ring: "With rifle and bullet I have bought your stormy heart." I would have a woman marry, not because it is the only thing that offers, but because a magnificence sweeps by, in whose glorious sun her pale stars faint and fade. Her soul shall be filled and fired with the heavenly radiance.

All her dross shall be consumed, and all her gold refined. She shall go to her marriage-feast as Zen.o.bia went to Rome, crowned with flowers, but bound with golden chains, a conquered captive, and the banner over her shall be love. I would have her go obedient, not to the requirements of a false and fatal materialism, naming itself with the names of morality and womanhood, but to the unerring instincts of her own nature. She shall not fly to the only refuge from the vacuum and despair of her life; but her great heart and her strong hands shall be wrenched from their bent by the mysterious force of an irresistible magnetism. When you have a character that can so command, a love that can so control, you have set up on earth the pillars of Heaven, and redemption draweth nigh.

V.

But if the pursuit of a separate and independent career should not disincline girls to marriage, you think it would unfit them for its duties; that an education, an occupation, and an interest in any other than a domestic direction would produce an indifferent housewife. Is this necessary? Is it even probable? Is there any sufficient reason why a woman who has trained her judgment in a medical school, shall not go into life, not only with no disadvantage, but with positive advantage from such training? If her mind have acquired power of observation, and her fingers skill in execution, will she not be so much the better prepared for the duties of her situation, whatever they may be? The ordering of a family is not like a trade,--a thing to be learned. It is multifarious and distracting. The mistress of a household is like the sovereign of a free empire. She does not need, and cannot serve, an apprentices.h.i.+p. The only way to prepare her for its duties is to enlarge her capacity to discharge them. She needs a thorough education. Everything that helps to build up mind and body,--everything that makes her healthful, hopeful, cheerful, spirited, self-reliant, energetic, strong, helps her to administer her affairs successfully. A woman who can do one thing can do another thing, and she can do it all the better for having done the other one first; so that the pursuit of a profession, instead of incapacitating her for a domestic life, makes her better fitted for it. If for a year, or two or three, she has been studying the human system, or the stars, or the flowers, or the mysteries of cloak, or bonnet, or counter, or mint, she can turn aside at the beck of the master just as well as if she had been all the while frittering herself away, and she will also be a great deal better worth beckoning to. The entrance upon a "career" does not, as many seem to think and fear, prescribe perpetual adherence to it.

A girl may have a certain end in view, and design most clearly to follow it, and she does follow it--G.o.d bless her! But Nature also has her ends, and when her unerring finger points in another quarter, "This is the way, walk ye in it," be sure the girl will go. Activity will never keep her from happiness, but it will keep her from byways and stumbling-blocks, from the traps which Nature never set, but which a sentimentalism, born of selfishness, has put in her path. And be doubly sure of this: if one or two or a dozen years of industry and resolution unfit a girl to be a wife, she would never have been a prize. Any intelligent girl can learn household science in six months, and every girl ought to have, and generally does have, at least six months' warning. Experience will do the rest for her, and do it well, if she is a girl of sense; and if not, nothing would have helped the matter. One of the best cooks I know started in life with only a cabbage for capital; and with sense and spirit, out of that solitary cabbage, with whose proper management she chanced to be acquainted, sprang pies, puddings, preserves, such as it is not well even to think of in war-times.

So much for that portion of the objection which is put forward and has a just foundation. But the main part of it is under ground. In my opinion, the real danger lies in quite the opposite quarter from the one that is sought to be defended. The trouble is not that women do not think enough about household affairs. It is that they think too much. But if one might judge from the tenor of public and private talk, one would suppose that cooking was the chief end of woman and the chief solace of man. I distinguish cooking above all the other items of the domestic establishment, because I find it so distinguished before me. Four hundred volumes of papyrus, recovered from Herculaneum, related chiefly to music, rhetoric, and cookery. The G.o.d of whom Paul told the Philippians, even weeping, is wors.h.i.+pped to-day. Isaac acted after his kind when he loved Esau because he did eat of his venison! To know how to cook, to keep the husband in good humor with tempting viands, to prevent his being annoyed with burnt meat, soured with heavy bread, or vexed by late dinners, is the burden of a thousand ditties besides that of our sarcastic sonneteer. Printed "Advice to Marriageable Young Ladies" informs them that "a man is better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table, than when his wife talks good French." I should like to be absolute monarch of America long enough to enact a decree that every man who opens his mouth to tell girls to learn to make bread, shall live a week on putty and water. What! are girls then to neglect to learn to make bread? By no means. Nor to roast beef, nor to boil potatoes. But suppose General Hooker should lead out his whole army against a detachment of the Rebels, and, neglecting Lee and Jackson with their myrmidons, should expend all his ammunition and skill on a handful of the foe, would you not adjudge him worthy of court-martial? But the detachment ought to be captured. Perhaps it ought. Send out a detachment and capture it.

But do not waste your whole strength on an awkward squad, and leave the main body of the enemy to ravage at will. Defeat the latter, and the former will disappear of themselves.

Now when you bring out your drums and beat your dismal tattoo about learning to cook, you are doing just this; you are devoting all your strength to the destruction of an outwork whose fall will but very remotely affect the citadel. The remedy for an ignorance of cookery is not necessarily a knowledge of cookery. What is the reason that a man has cause to complain that his wife does not know how to cook? Is it that she devoted too much of her maiden time to teaching, preaching, doctoring, and dressmaking? Ten thousand to one, no. It is because she is ignorant or because she is silly. Treat girls sensibly. Educate their observation, their perception, their judgment. Give them a knowledge of human nature: and then be yourself so n.o.ble as to command their respect, and so amiable as to secure their affection, and you will have no trouble with heavy bread. If you insist on making women ignorant and silly, be sure their ignorance and silliness will crop out. Thrust them down in one place, and they will immediately rise in another. Sooner or later, you will prove the truth of Lord Burleigh's a.s.surance to his son, and "find to your regret that there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool."

But the general direction of your counsel is wrong, even supposing the immediate object at which it is aimed to be right. Its tendency is to induce women to give more attention to cookery than they now do; and they already devote to it a great deal more than they ought. They do not cook too well, but too much. A few mixtures should be better arranged than now, but a great many should be left alone. Cooking is the chief concern of a very large number of New England wives and mothers. They spend the larger part of their ingenuity in devising, and the larger part of their strength and skill and time in preparing, food which is unnecessary and often hurtful. It never occurs to them to alter their course. They do not think of it as an unjust conjugal exaction, but as a Divine allotment. It is not always the one, and seldom if ever the other; but it is a custom. We are pre-eminently an eating people. Our women are cooking themselves to death, and cooking the nation into a materialism worse than death. Suppose you have been boarding or visiting for a month or two in a stranger family, and some one asks you if they live well, what do you understand him to mean? Is he inquiring if they are honorable, if they conduct their lives on Christian principles, if they are courteous, and self-respectful and self-controlled? Are they just in their dealings, disinterested in their motives, pure in word and work? Nothing is further from his thoughts. He means--and you at once understand him--Do they have highly-spiced and numerous meats, much cake and pie, many sauces and preserves? To what degradation have we descended! To live well is to eat rich food! Honor, integrity, refinement, culture, are all chopped up into mince-pie. Heart and soul are left to s.h.i.+ft for themselves, and the guaranty of right and righteous living is

"A fair round belly with good capon lined."

In the olden times there lived, we are told, a race of men called Bisclaverets, who were half man and half wolf; or, to speak more accurately, were half the time man and half the time wolf. Some indications in our own day lead us to believe that the race of the Bisclaverets is not wholly extinct. Some stragglers must have found their way from the sh.o.r.es of Bretagne to our Western wilds, and left a posterity whose name is Legion. I copy from one of the most prominent and liberal of our religious newspapers the following "elegant extract," not original in its columns, but adopted from some other paper, with such undoubted indors.e.m.e.nt and commendation as an insertion without comment implies:--

"The business man who has been at work hard all day, will enter his house for dinner as crabbed as a hungry bear,--crabbed because he is as hungry as a hungry bear. The wife understands the mood, and, while she says little to him, is careful not to have the dinner delayed. In the mean time, the children watch him cautiously, and do not tease him with questions. When the soup is gulped, and he leans back and wipes his mouth, there is an evident relaxation, and his wife ventures to ask for the news. When the roast beef is disposed of, she presumes upon gossip, and possibly upon a jest; and when, at last, the dessert is spread upon the table, all hands are merry, and the face of the husband and father, which entered the house so pinched, and savage, and sharp, becomes soft, and full, and beaming as the face of the round summer moon."

Are we talking about a man or a wild beast? Is it wife or female? Are they children or cubs? Does he wipe his mouth or lick his chops?

"_Ventures_ to ask the news"! "_Presumes_ upon a jest"! The whole picture is disgusting from beginning to end. It is the portraiture of sensuality and despotism. Hunger is not a sublime sensation, nor is eating a graceful act; but both are ordained of G.o.d, and are given us with that broad blank margin which almost invariably accompanies His gifts. Religion and culture can take up the necessity, and work so deftly that it shall become an adornment; and the ordinance of eating stand for the sunniest part of life. The grossness of the act, the mere animal and mechanical function of furnis.h.i.+ng supplies, can be so larded with wit and wisdom, with love and good-will, with pleasant talk, interchange of civilities and courtesies, and all the light, sweet, gentle amenities of life, that a bare act becomes almost a rite. The rough structure is veiled into beauty with roses and lilies and the soft play of lights and shadows. But this paragraph portrays gobbling. A woman, instead of pandering to it by service and silence, ought to lift up her voice and repress it in its earliest stages. Make a man understand that he shall eat his dinner like a gentleman or he shall have no dinner to eat. If he will be crabbed and gulp, let him go down into the coal-bin and have it out alone; but do not let him bring his Feejeeism into the dining-room to defile the presence of his wife and corrupt the manners of his children.

If you think the picture is overdrawn, I pray you to remember that I did not draw it. It is a published, and, I think, a man's sketch of manhood. I only take it as I find it. I do not myself think that materialism has attained quite that degree of repulsiveness, but it is too near it. Eating is not perpetrated, but the appet.i.te is pampered.

If a man is able to hire a cook, very well. Cooking is the cook's profession; she ought to attain skill, and her employer has a right to require it, and as great a variety and profusion of dishes as he can furnish material for. But if he is not able to hire a cook, and must depend entirely upon his wife, the case is different. Cooking is not her profession. It is only one of the duties incident to her station.

It is inc.u.mbent upon her to spread a plentiful and wholesome table. It is culpable inefficiency to do less than this. It is palpable immorality to do more. No matter how fond of cooking, or how skilful or alert a woman may be, she has only twenty-four hours in her day, and two hands for her work; and one woman who has the sole care of a family cannot, if she has any rational and Christian idea of life, of personal, household, and social duties, have any more time and strength than is sufficient for their simple discharge. Overdoing in one direction must be compensated by underdoing in another. She cannot pamper Peter without pinching Paul. Much that you laud as a virtue I lament as a vice. You revel in the cakes and the pastries and the dainties, and boast the skill of the housewife; and indeed her marvels are featly wrought, sweet to the taste, and to be desired if honestly come by; but if there has been plunder and extortion, if it is a soul that flakes in the pastry, if it is a heart that is embrowned in the gravies; if leisure and freshness and breadth of sympathy and keen enjoyment have been frittered away on the fritters, and simmered away in the sweetmeats, and battered away in the puddings, give me, I pray you, a dinner of herbs. Johnny-cake was royal fare in Walden woods when a king prepared the banquet and presided at the board. Peac.o.c.ks'

tongues are but common meat to peac.o.c.ks.

The _pate de foie gras_ is a monstrous dish. A goose is kept in some warm, confined place that precludes any extended motion, and fed with fattening food, so that his liver enlarges through disease till it is considered fit to be made into a pie,--a luxury to epicures, but a horror to any healthful person. Just such a goose is many a woman, confined by custom and her consenting will in a warm, narrow kitchen, only instead of her liver it is her life which she herself makes up into pies; but the pastry which you find so delicious seems to me disease.

The ancients buried in urns the ashes of their bodies: we deposit in urns the ashes of our souls, and pa.s.s them around at the tea-table.

Women not only injure themselves by what they neglect, but injure others by what they perform. Such stress is laid upon the commissary department, that they lose discrimination, and come to think that dainty morsels are a panacea for all the ills of the flesh, instead of being the chief cause of most of them. I knew a young wife whose husband used to come down from his study worn and weary with much brain-work, his muscles flaccid, his eyes heavy, his circulation sluggish, and she would come up from the kitchen her face all aglow with eagerness and love and cooking-stove heat, her hands full of abominable little messes which she had been plotting against him, reeking with b.u.t.ter and sugar, and all manner of glorified greasiness,--I am happy to say I do not know by what name she called her machinations, but I call them broiled dyspepsia, toasted indigestions, frica.s.seed nightmare,--and the poor husband would nibble here and nibble there, sure of grim consequences, but loath to seem a churl by indifference, and neither give nor take satisfaction. I could bear his suffering with great equanimity, for there was a poetic justice in it, though he himself was not a sinner above others, nor yet so much as many. If only those men who are continually preaching the larder could be forced, sick or well, to swallow every combination which the fertile feminine brain can devise, and the nimble feminine fingers accomplish, I should listen to their exhortations with the most lively satisfaction. But even that would not atone for the female suffering. With what disconsolate countenance would my tender, anxious young wife ring the bell and send away the scarcely-diminished dish-lings, and wonder in her fond tortured heart what next she could do to smooth the wrinkled brow and light up the dull eyes, and so revolve perpetually in her troubled mind the mysterious question that loomed up mystically before us all in our Mother Goose days, "Why didn't Jack eat his supper?"

Why? O sweet and silly little wife? Because he wanted a thorough shaking-up. Because mind and body were flabby from too long poring over his books. If you could but have performed the impossible; if you could but have parted with the feeble cant which you had learned from infancy; if you would but have driven him out alike from his study and your sitting-room, going with him, if such inducement became necessary, into the fresh air; if you would but have walked him, or worked him, or in some way kneaded him into firm, hard thew and sinew, and kept him out and active till he should have got such an appet.i.te that cold brown bread and mola.s.ses would have seemed to him a dish fit to set before a king, you would have done him true wifely service.

Then you might have come home and fed him with b.u.t.ter and sugar to your heart's content,--and not to the perpetual discontent and rebellion of his body.

But among all the lectures to young wives or old wives or no wives at all, I never heard or read one that counselled a woman to take her husband out walking, or rowing, or riding, or driving, or bowling, or do any other sensible thing. I have dived into oceans of nonsense, but never found the pearl.

Our New England people considers itself to have advanced much further in civilization than the aborigines, whose chief occupation, according to the histories, is hunting and fis.h.i.+ng. But why is it barbarous to devote your life to procuring food, and civilized to devote your life to cooking it? Of the two, I think I should prefer the former. The Savage may not present an inviting bill of fare; but the excitement of the chase, the close contact with nature, the wide freedom of sea and sky, the grand play of all the powers, the mighty strengthening of all the organs, the fine culture of the senses, the health and vigor of every nerve and tissue, the leap and sparkle of all the springs of life, this, surely, would be no insignificant compensation: but a continual pottering over gridirons and frying-pans is good for neither brain nor brawn. Civilization may quick upfly and kick the beam: I would much rather be a good Sioux Indian than most New England housewives.

VI.

The much talk of fitness for marriage leads one to reflect on the advantages of living in the nineteenth century. With all the sewing-machines, was.h.i.+ng-machines, wringing-machines, carpet-sweepers, cooking-ranges, and the innumerable devices by which labor is sought and is supposed to be saved, I do not see that there is any great gain. The requirements of civilized society rather more than keep abreast with the inventions of civilized ingenuity. Fifty years ago a bonnet cost twenty dollars. Now a comely bonnet can be bought for one dollar. But the twenty-dollar bonnet lasted ten years, and the one-dollar bonnet three months, so that, notwithstanding the superior cheapness of the material, the item bonnet costs more money than it used, and vastly more time and thought. A calico dress was not deemed unreasonable at seventy cents a yard. Lately it could be had for twelve and a half: but at seventy-five cents it was an heirloom, while at twelve and a half it stands over the wash-tub by the second year, and by the third goes into the rag-bag. The lively sewing-machine runs up a seam twenty times as swiftly as the most lively fingers: but there are twenty times as many seams to run up. Just as fast as skill "turns off" work, just so fast fas.h.i.+on turns it on. Nay, fas.h.i.+on in heaping up entirely outstrips ingenuity in lowering the pile of work; so that we do not get the benefit of our skill. The day now is no longer than the day of fifty years ago. The mother of five children seems to have no more time for educating her five children, for enjoying and training their opening lives, for studying their characters, for a.s.sociating with them and acquiring their confidence, for planting unexpected roses in the little flower-plats of their years, for sitting a whole summer day with them among the beauties and wonders and delights of the woods, for spending a whole winter evening with them in games and reading, for informing her own mind and disciplining her own heart and strengthening and beautifying her own body, for cultivating the possible beneficences of society, for genial and growing acquaintance and sympathy with the poets, the philosophers, the historians, and the sages, than the mother of five children had fifty years ago. I suppose more women now-a-days know how to read and write; but do they read and write? Of the people in your village, your street, your sewing-society: how many do you find who spend as much as an hour a day in reading Milton, or Chaucer, or Spenser, or Tennyson, or Mrs. Browning? How many are there who are familiar with Hume, or Robertson, or Macaulay, or Motley, or Palfrey?

How many have lingered with delight over the pages of Lord Bacon, or Jeremy Taylor, or John Stuart Mill? How many know the relation between a cat and a tiger, or what are the ingredients of b.u.t.termilk, or why yeast makes bread rise, or how the heat of the oven works, or whether a cloverhead has anything to do with a marrowfat pea? How many are interested to peer into the mysteries of the heavens above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth? How many ever heard of the Areopigitica or the Witena-gemot, or discern any connection between Runnymede and Fort Sumter, or have the faintest opinion as to whether Runnymede is a man or a mouse? How many can tell you whether the Reformation was a revelation confronting a superst.i.tion or a fruitful branch grafted upon a barren olive-tree, or an old religion throwing off the layers of acquired corruption? How many understand the origin and bearings of Calvinism or the Nicene Creed or the Pauline Epistles? I speak, you see, not of things which have pa.s.sed away leaving only a slender and hidden thread of connection, but of those which still touch life at many points. The great boast of the present day is the dissemination of knowledge: but knowledge is trash if it is not a.s.similated into wisdom. Knowledge which is simply plastered on to the outside of the soul and does not chemically combine to become part and parcel of the soul's substance, produces an effect little better than grotesque. Names and dates may store the memory; but why have the memory stored if you do not use its treasures? What better off am I for having a heap of isolated facts in my lumber-room if I have nothing for those facts to do? I may know in what year the battle of Hastings was fought, but unless I can locate that battle otherwhere than in geography and chronology, I might as well have committed to the charge of my memory the youthful facts of

"Onery Twoery ickery see, Halibut crackibut pendalee.

Pin pon musket John, Triddle traddlecome Twenty-one."

Bricks and boards are neither shelter from wind nor shade from sun. It is only when all are fitly framed together into the strength and sweetness of spirit that they become the temple of the living G.o.d, whereinto Shekinah shall come. We talk about the universal circulation of newspapers, but sometimes it seems to me that newspapers are only an enormous expansion of village gossip. Now if a murder is committed in New York we hear of it, whereas formerly we did not know it unless it were committed in the next town. But such knowledge we could very readily dispense with. Is anything added to the worth of life by learning that Bridget McArthy has been fined five dollars and costs for breaking Ellen Maloney's windows. In the old wars, it was three weeks after a victory was gained before you heard of it; now you hear of it six months before the battle is fought, and after all it turns out to be no victory, but a masterpiece of strategy.[2] What I wish to know is this: does the constant interflow of currents really deepen and broaden the channel of life? Are women any stronger of will, firmer of purpose, broader of view, sounder of judgment, than they used to be? Can they front fortune with serener brow, unawed by her malice, unflattered by her promise, unmoved by her caprice? Are they any more independent of the circ.u.mstances of life, any more concentrated in its essence? Do they think more deeply, love more n.o.bly, live more spiritually? Are they any more divorced from the l.u.s.t of the flesh, the l.u.s.t of the eyes, and the pride of life; any more wedded to whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report?

[2] Heaven be praised that the course of events has blunted the point of this sentence.

I think we are in a transition-state. The increased facilities of labor are improvements, and we shall by and by reap the fruits of them; but we have hardly yet done so. We have la.s.soed our wild horse, but we have not harnessed him. He shows us wonderful freaks of strength, but he drags us quite as often as we drive him. "Sweet Puck"

has been caught, and made to put his girdle round about the earth in forty minutes; in

"one night, ere glimpse of morn, His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn, That ten day-laborers could not end."

But he is not yet tamed down into a trustworthy domestic drudge. If he does not actually trans.m.u.te himself into a Robin Goodfellow, that bootless makes the breathless housewife churn, and the drink to bear no barm, and mislead night-wanderers, he yet annuls his work, shutting the eyes of the ten day-laborers so that they do not gain rest for his interference; his earth-girdle binds no bundle of myrrh for the well-beloved. Our great diffusion of knowledge has not given us corresponding mastery. Our knives are sharper, but we only whittle.

Knowledge is poured abroad, but it is not absorbed. Yet the hour approaches. By and by, out of this wishy-washy chaos, slowly shall arise the coast-line of a new continent whereon the redeemed shall walk: meanwhile, do not let us deceive ourselves. The millennium is not yet come. We are scarcely beyond the multiplication-table of our mathematics. We are blind and blundering, and for all our skill and science, we stumble through life but little wiser than our fathers. We have the swift, clean stove-oven for the c.u.mbrous old bake-kettle, but meanwhile we have lost the fireside, and have found no subst.i.tute; and a man's life lies not in ovens or bake-kettles, but in firesides.

This truth needs to be engraven on our brains and hearts with a pen of iron and the point of a diamond. The soul is the king and not the servant of the body. Every device, every invention, every measure, that does not subserve the interests of the soul, is worthless. Every invention that may subserve those interests, but stops short of such subserviency, stops so far short of its goal. If the cooking-range only makes that mince-pie be eaten once a day instead of once a year; if steam-power only causes that fine wheat-bread shall take the place of coa.r.s.e corn-bread; if sewing-machines are going to give women more tucks to their skirts, more flounces to their gowns, more dresses to their wardrobes, and not more hours to their day, we might just as well be without the sewing-machines and the cooking-ranges and the steam-power. Is a woman any better, or any better off, for having six gowns where her mother had three? Is she not worse off? She can wear but one at a time, and she is expending brain-power and heart-power, and lifting the incidents of life into the sphere of its essentials.

There are women who buy dresses, and make them, and hang them up in their closets, there to remain till the fas.h.i.+on changes, and the dress has to be re-made without having been once worn. O terrible emptiness of life which this signalizes! O wanton and wicked waste of priceless treasures! What shall be said in the day when G.o.d maketh inquisition?

I wage no war against the aesthetics of life; but I do protest that they shall be means and not ends. Let richness drape the form, and variety crown the board, and luxury fill the house, if so be you do not wrong the king, the Master. There need be no other limitation.

Wrong to one's self involves and implies all other wrong. Nothing human is foreign to any man. Nothing personal is foreign to humanity.

You cannot defraud yourself of your birthright without defrauding all those to whom your birthright might bring blessings. The keenest barb of your injustice to another pierces your own breast.

But the larger number of New England families earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, and must sacrifice the one or the other,--the soul or the body. They cannot command both luxury and life; and they choose--which? Look around and answer. How many houses do you know that have no carpets on the floors, no cus.h.i.+ons in the chairs, no paper on the walls, no silks in the wardrobes, no china in the closets, but plenty of books in the library; a harp, a piano, a violin, in one corner, an easel, a box of crayons in another; an aquarium by the window, a camp-stool in the cupboard, a fis.h.i.+ng-rod on the shelf, a portfolio on the table; where pies and fries and cakes and preserves and pickles and puddings seldom come; where flounces and velvets and feathers and embroideries are unseen, but where the walls are adorned with drawings from the mother's own hands, with bouquets, finely selected, pressed and arranged by the daughters; with cabinets of minerals gathered, cla.s.sified, and labelled by the sons; and fresh flowers from the garden, cultivated and culled by the father; where the homely fare is seasoned with Attic salt; where wit and wisdom and sprightliness and fun and heart's-ease make the simple, wholesome, and plentiful meal a fit banquet for G.o.ds; where work is work, and not simply labor; where rest is change, and not simply torpidity; where the heart is rich in love, and the head rich in lore, and intellect and affection go hand in hand; where the inmates are not the creatures of the house, but the house is the dear handiwork of the inmates; where they derive no l.u.s.tre from their dwelling, but s.h.i.+ne all through it with such sweet, soft lights, that elegance waits upon their footsteps, beauty lingers upon their brows, every spot which they tread is enchanted ground, every room which they enter is the audience-chamber of a king. On the other hand, how many houses do you know where everything is in abundance except that which alone gives abundance its value? Where moss-soft carpets and heavy curtains and gilded cornices and silver and china and sumptuous fare make a glittering pageant, but work and worry and weariness, or frivolous pleasures and frivolous interests, empty life of all its priceless possessions. How many do you know where neither wealth nor worth reigns? Where hard, grinding, pinching toil is all that the evening and the morning have to give, and everything lovely to the eye and pleasant to the soul is crushed between the upper and the nether millstones? How many young couples think they could begin housekeeping without a carpet for the parlor floor? How many think of providing that parlor with a score of the rich, ripe, mellow English cla.s.sics?

But to the end of the days, the authors will be a joy and strength and consolation, and the carpet will be only a dusty woollen rag. No, no; we cannot give up our trappings. Such is the poverty of our life, and we may not uncover its nakedness. We must have jewels and gold to hide our squalor and our leanness. It is tinsel or nothing. Take away our fine clothes, our fine furniture, our much eating and drinking, and what is left? True,--what is left? Vacancy and desolation. Suppose the work and worry to be suddenly abrogated to the degree that the thousands of hara.s.sed women who toil with broom or needle or dish-cloth or kneading-trough from morning till night should suddenly find on their hands four hours every day of leisure,--leisure that absolutely need be filled up by no family knitting, mending, or oversight,--would it be a boon? In many cases I greatly fear not.

After the first luxury of utter rest from strenuous work, I greatly fear that that four hours would be the dullest and dreariest part of the day, and its close more gladly welcomed than its commencement. But this only shows the need, not the impossibility, of reformation. If it has come to this, that we know not what to do with ourselves, shall we go on providing toys, or shall we turn about and straightway learn self-direction? Is it so that we must fill our lives with husks, because we have fed on them so long that we have no relish for nouris.h.i.+ng food? Have we so held in abeyance our spiritual forces that they have lost their life? Have we so given ourselves to our grosser uses, that they have usurped the throne, and shall we now make no effort to depose them and restore the rightful lord? Shall we go on forming and frocking our wax dolls, and give no heed to the marble which it is our life-work to fas.h.i.+on into the image and likeness of G.o.d? Better Romulus and Remus, suckled by a wolf, than our puny nurslings of conventionality! O for men and women with blood in their veins, and muscles in their bodies, and brains in their skulls,--men and women who believe in their manhood and their womanhood! who will be as valiant, as aggressive, as enduring in peace as they are showing themselves in war, who dare stand erect, who will walk their own paths, who brave solitudes, who see things and not the traditions of things, who will blow away, with one honest breath, our shabby gew-gaw finery! America was founded on the rights of man: why do we set our affections on silks and satins? Why entangle our young limbs with the fetters of an old civilization, golden though they be? Never had any nation such opportunity as ours. Here is the race-course ready, the battle-ground prepared. It needs only that we be swift and strong.

There are no mora.s.ses of old prejudice to beguile our feet, no tangle of old growths to r.e.t.a.r.d our progress. We have no inst.i.tutions to fight against: all our inst.i.tutions fight with us. No garter, no ribbon, no courtly presentation, is demanded as our stamp of rank; the badge of each man's order is set on his brow and breast. Worth needs not to have flowed down through musty ages if it would receive its meed; every man bears his seal direct from G.o.d. Humanity is more accounted of than a coat of arms. We have only to be n.o.ble, and we belong at once to the n.o.bility. It is ourselves alone that will fail if there be failure; not opportunity. It is for us to rise to the height of the great argument. It is only that we reverence ourselves, that we esteem man as of greater mark than his meat or his raiment.

Give us full and free development. Tear away these gilded fetters, and let the children of G.o.d have free course to run and be glorified.

Throw off allegiance to trifles, and with the heart believe, and with the mouth make confession, and with the upright life attest: There is no G.o.d but G.o.d.

This can be done only when women and men will work together to the same end. It is not to be done by stripping away the restraints of fas.h.i.+on and society and leaving life bare of its proprieties.

Deformity is not lovely by being exposed. What we are to do is to supplant those restraints by the gentle growths of a larger and finer culture; to replace meagreness with rounded beauty; to make the life so rich and full that all else shall seem poor in comparison; to show it so fair and fertile that every luxury shall seem but its natural outgrowth, its proper adornment; to make the soul so simply dominant as to give their laws to fas.h.i.+on and society instead of receiving laws from them, and so have fas.h.i.+on and society for its nimble servitors instead of being itself their creature and slave. Is it not so now?

Who dares bend social life to his uses? Who dares run counter to its caprices? Who dares stand on his own dignity and defy its frown or sneer? But, you say, this adaptation of one's self to others is what Christianity requires. This self-seeking, this self-elevation, is directly opposed to the spirit of the Gospel, which demands that every one seek not his own, but the things which are another's. Not at all.

You can in no other way benefit your generation than through your own heart and life. Can a stream rise higher than its fountain? Can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruits? The Apostle says: Let no man seek his own, but every man another's wealth. Does that mean that a farmer must not plough his own field, or plant his own corn, or hoe his own potatoes, but go over to till his neighbor's farm and leave his own fallow? But it is written, "He that provideth not for his own house hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel," and common sense need not be propped up by revelation, for it stands firmly on the same ground. You say a woman must not be thinking of herself, her own growth, and good all the time. So do I. But is she to obtain and exhibit self-forgetfulness by self-culture, or self-neglect? Will you be most likely to forget your head by thoroughly combing and brus.h.i.+ng your hair every morning, or by brus.h.i.+ng it not at all? Does not health consist in having your organs in such a condition that you do not know you have organs? A dyspeptic man is the most subjective person in the world. He thinks more about himself in a week than a well person does in a year. The true way for women and men to be thoroughly self-forgetful, is to be so thoroughly self-cultured, so healthy, so normal, so perfect, that all they have to do is their work. Themselves are perfectly transparent. No headaches and heartaches interpose between themselves and their duties. They are not forced back to concentrate their interest on a torpid liver, or tubercled lungs. They are not wasting their power by working in constant jar and clash. They are at full liberty to bring means to bear on ends. And just in proportion as sound minds have sound bodies, will people be able to forget themselves and do good to others.

Now--the connection between some of my paragraphs may be a little underground, but it is always there. If you don't quite see it, you must jump. If I should stop to say everything, I should never get through. I am not sure I shall, as it is--now, such has been the amount of gluttony, and all manner of frivolity and materialism, indirectly but strenuously inculcated by literature, that we are arrived at a point where they are almost the strongest grappling-hooks between the s.e.xes. Understand: I am not saying that dress is frivolity. Dress is development. A woman's dress is not her first duty, but it follows closely on first duty's heels. She should dress so as to be grateful to her husband's eye, I grant, nay, I enjoin: and he is under equally strong obligations to dress so as to be grateful to her eye. But this is scarcely a matter of expense. It need not cost, appreciably, more to be neat and tasteful than it does to be dowdy and slouching. But, I have heard women say, variety in dress is necessary in order that a husband may not be wearied. But does a man ever think of having several winter coats or summer waistcoats, so that his wife may not weary of him? Does she ever think of being tired of seeing one hat till it begins to look shabby? And if a man buys his clothes and wears them according to his needs,--which is quite right,--why shall not a woman do the same? Is there any law or gospel for forcing a woman to be pleasing to her husband, while the husband is left to do that which is right in his own eyes? Or are the visual organs of a man so much more exquisitely arranged than those of a woman, that special adaptations must be made to them, while a woman may see whatever happens to be _a la mode_? Or has a man's dress intrinsically so much more beauty and character than a woman's, that less pains need be taken to make it charming?

But granting to variety all the importance that is claimed for it, are we using the lever to advantage? Suppose the gown is changed every day, while the face above it never varies, or varies only from one vapidity to another, and what is gained? If variety is the desideratum, why not attempt it in the direction in which variety is spontaneous, resultant, and always delightful? You may flit from brown merino to blue poplin, and from blue poplin to black alpaca, and be queen of all that is tiresome still. But enlarge every day the horizon of your heart: be tuneful on Monday with the birds; be fragrant on Tuesday among your roses; be thoughtful on Wednesday with the sages; be chemical on Thursday over your bread-trough; be prophetic on Friday with history; be aspiring on Sat.u.r.day in spite of broom and duster; be liberal and catholic on Sunday: be fresh and genial and natural and blooming with the dews that are ready to gather on every smallest gra.s.s-blade of life, and a pink-sprigged muslin will be new for a whole season, yes, and half a dozen of them. Take example from the toad: swallow your dress; not precisely in the same sense, but as effectually. Overpower, subordinate your dress, till it shall be only a second cuticle, not to be distinguished from yourself, but a natural element of your universal harmony.

What are you going to wear to church this summer? I say church, because I am speaking now to people whose best dress is their Sunday dress. I am not writing for the Newport and Niagara frequenters, who know no currency smaller than gold eagles. You will not have many new clothes because it is "war-times," but you must have a silk mantle; that will cost fifteen dollars. You could have bought one last summer for ten dollars, but silk is now higher. You will have a barege dress, which, with the increased price of linings and tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs and making, will cost before it is ready to be worn fifteen more. Your gloves will be a dollar and a half, and your bonnet, whitened and newly trimmed with last summer's ribbon, will be three dollars or so. The whole cost will be about thirty-five dollars. But suppose, instead of a barege gown and silk shawl, you had bought a pretty gingham and had it made in the same way, dress and mantle alike, and had taken that for your summer outfit; and had subst.i.tuted for your kid gloves a pair of Lisle-thread at sixty-two cents. The gingham will last longer than the barege, and will be good for more uses after it is outworn as a dress.

It will last as long in the mantle as the shape of the mantle will be fas.h.i.+onable, and then it will make over as economically, and into a larger number of articles. The Lisle-thread gloves will last as long as the kid, and will be much better on the whole, because they will wash. "But I should make a figure, walking up the broad aisle in a gingham mantilla!" Be sure you would, and a very pretty figure too.

For you look, in it, perfectly fresh and tidy; and because you have not been f.a.gged and fretted with its great cost you will be quite happy and pleased, and that pleasure will beam out in your face and figure, and your young, elastic tread; and there is not a man in church who will suspect that everything is not precisely as it should be. Men judge in generals, not in particulars; and the few who are conversant with minutiae, and look beyond the facts of becomingness or unbecomingness into the question of texture and fabric, are such microscopic sort of men that you do not value their opinion one way or the other. You are triumphant so far as the men are concerned.

The women will not let you off so easily. Mrs. Judkins will think you are "very odd"; but how much better to be oddly right than evenly wrong! Mrs. Jenkins will call it _real mean_, when you are as well able to dress decently as she is! But you are the very plant and flower of decency. Mrs. Perkins will hate to see people try to be different from other folks. Ah! Mrs. Perkins, when the vapor from your heated face goes down to-morrow meeting the vapor that comes steaming up from your foaming tub, will you find it any consolation for your heat and fatigue that you went to church yesterday and are broiling over your wash-tub to-day "like other folks." Meanwhile you, by your gingham, have saved ten dollars. Ten dollars! I am lost in amazement when I think of the good that may be accomplished with ten dollars!

For ten dollars you can hire a washerwoman all summer and save--absolutely add to your life six hours every Monday for three months; look at the reading, the writing, the conversation, the enjoyment that can be crowded into an hour, and then multiply it by seventy-five, and say whether your gingham dress be not a very robe of royalty. And besides the good you do yourself, and the good that will s.h.i.+ne from you upon all around you, you will be helping to solve the great problem of the age: you will be helping to give employment to the thousands of women who are peris.h.i.+ng for lack of something to do, and dragging society down with them. You will be setting supply and demand face to face. If you could but induce a few of your neighbors to join you,--which they will be glad to do when they see how happy and fresh it makes you,--the employment you would furnish would comfortably support some dest.i.tute unmarried woman, or some childless widow, and go far towards providing bread and b.u.t.ter, perhaps shoes and stockings, possibly spelling-books, to a family of children. There are, possibly, as many women who need to do more than they are doing as there are who need to do less, and you will be helping to restore or create the desired equilibrium. Or, if you choose instead, ten dollars will take your rustic little ones into the city to stock and startle their minds with ideas from the navy-yard, the museum, the aquarial gardens, the picture-galleries; or it will take your civic little ones into the country and set them down in the midst of orchards and blooms and birds, and all the pure sweet influences of long summer days. It will give you four or five drives with your husband and children,--drives that involve fascinating white baskets; napkins spread out on the gra.s.s, hungry mouths, chattering tongues, and oh! such happy hearts. Or you can go to the beach and hear the little monkeys scream for joy and terror in the rus.h.i.+ng, lapping, embracing waves, and see them roll over and over in the soft sand, and gather untold wealth of worthless sh.e.l.ls and heaps of s.h.i.+ning sand for back-yard gardens. For ten dollars you can buy picture-books, long-desired toys, flowers and flower-stands for winter, roots for bedding in summer, and still have enough left to give an extra lemon to a score of wounded soldiers in a hospital ward. You can buy yourself leisure to become acquainted with your children and to make them acquainted with the brightest phases of yourself. You can put into their lives such sunny memories as no after bitterness can efface; such sunny memories as shall wreathe you with a glory in the coming years when your head is laid low in the grave. O my friend, I can almost see the light of the celestial city s.h.i.+ning through that ten dollars,--and you talk about a silk cape!