Bits about Home Matters Part 11

If meat is desired, it can be added. That is another excellence about our bill of fare. It has nothing in it which makes it incongruous with the richest or the plainest tables. It is not overcrowded by the addition of roast goose and plum-pudding; it is not harmed by the addition of herring and potatoes. Nay, it can give flavor and richness to broken bits of stale bread served on a doorstep and eaten by beggars.

We might say much more about this bill of fare. We might, perhaps, confess that it has an element of the supernatural; that its origin is lost in obscurity; that, although, as we said, it has never been printed before, it has been known in all ages; that the martyrs feasted upon it; that generations of the poor, called blessed by Christ, have laid out banquets by it; that exiles and prisoners have lived on it; and the despised and forsaken and rejected in all countries have tasted it. It is also true that when any great king ate well and throve on his dinner, it was by the same magic food. The young and the free and the glad, and all rich men in costly houses, even they have not been well fed without it.

And though we have called it a Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner, that is only that men's eyes may be caught by its name, and that they, thinking it a specialty for festival, may learn and understand its secret, and henceforth, laying all their dinners according to its magic order, may "eat unto the Lord."

Children's Parties.

"From six till half-past eleven."

"German at seven, precisely."

These were the terms of an invitation which we saw last week. It was sent to forty children, between the ages of ten and sixteen.

"Will you allow your children to stay at this party until half-past eleven?" we said to a mother whose children were invited. "What can I do?"

she replied. "If I send the carriage for them at half-past ten, the chances are that they will not be allowed to come away. It is impossible to break up a set. And as for that matter, half-past ten is two hours and a half past their bed-time; they might as well stay an hour longer. I wish n.o.body would ever ask my children to a party. I cannot keep them at home, if they are asked. Of course, I _might_; but I have not the moral courage to see them so unhappy. All the other children go; and what can I do?"

This is a tender, loving mother, whose sweet, gentle, natural methods with her children have made them sweet, gentle, natural little girls, whom it is a delight to know. But "what can she do?" The question is by no means one which can be readily answered. It is very easy for off-hand severity, sweeping condemnation, to say, "Do! Why, nothing is plainer. Keep her children away from such places. Never let them go to any parties which will last later than nine o'clock." This is the same thing as saying, "Never let them go to parties at all." There are no parties which break up at nine o'clock; that is, there are not in our cities. We hope there are such parties still in country towns and villages,--such parties as we remember to this day with a vividness which no social enjoyments since then have dimmed; Sat.u.r.day-afternoon parties,--_matinees_ they would have been called if the village people had known enough; parties which began at three in the afternoon and ended in the early dusk, while little ones could see their way home; parties at which there was no "German," only the simplest of dancing, if any, and much more of blind-man's-buff; parties at which "mottoes" in sugar horns were the luxurious novelty, caraway cookies the staple, and lemonade the only drink besides pure water. Fancy offering to the creature called child in cities to-day, lemonade and a caraway cooky and a few pink sugar horns and some walnuts and raisins to carry home in its pocket! One blushes at thought of the scornful contempt with which such simples would be received,--we mean rejected!

From the party whose invitation we have quoted above the little girls came home at midnight, radiant, flushed, joyous, looking in their floating white muslin dresses like fairies, their hands loaded with bouquets of hot-house flowers and dainty little "favors" from the German. At eleven they had had for supper champagne and chicken salad, and all the other unwholesome abominations which are set out and eaten in American evening entertainments.

Next morning there were no languid eyes, pale cheeks. Each little face was eager, bright, rosy, though the excited brain had had only five or six hours of sleep.

"If they only would feel tired the next day, that would be something of an argument to bring up with them," said the poor mother. "But they always declare that they feel better than ever."

And so they do. But the "better" is only a deceitful sham, kept up by excited and overwrought nerves,--the same thing that we see over and over and over again in all lives which are temporarily kindled and stimulated by excitement of any kind.

This is the worst thing, this is the most fatal thing in all our mismanagements and perversions of the physical life of our children. Their beautiful elasticity and strength rebound instantly to an apparently uninjured fulness; and so we go on, undermining, undermining at point after point, until suddenly some day there comes a tragedy, a catastrophe, for which we are as unprepared as if we had been working to avert, instead of to hasten it. Who shall say when our boys die at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, our girls either in their girlhood or in the first strain of their womanhood,--who shall say that they might not have pa.s.sed safely through the dangers, had no vital force been unnecessarily wasted in their childhood, their infancy?

Every hour that a child sleeps is just so much investment of physical capital for years to come. Every hour after dark that a child is awake is just so much capital withdrawn. Every hour that a child lives a quiet, tranquil, joyous life of such sort as kittens live on hearths, squirrels in sunshine, is just so much investment in strength and steadiness and growth of the nervous system. Every hour that a child lives a life of excited brain-working, either in a school-room or in a ball-room, is just so much taken away from the reserved force which enables nerves to triumph through the sorrows, through the labors, through the diseases of later life. Every mouthful of wholesome food that a child eats, at seasonable hours, may be said to tell on every moment of his whole life, no matter how long it may be. Victor Hugo, the benevolent exile, has found out that to be well fed once in seven days at one meal has been enough to transform the apparent health of all the poor children in Guernsey. Who shall say that to take once in seven days, or even once in thirty days, an unwholesome supper of chicken salad and champagne may not leave as lasting effects on the const.i.tution of a child?

If Nature would only "execute" her "sentences against evil works" more "speedily," evil works would not so thrive. The law of continuity is the hardest one for average men and women to comprehend,--or, at any rate, to obey. Seed-time and harvest in gardens and fields they have learned to understand and profit by. When we learn, also, that in the precious lives of these little ones we cannot reap what we do not sow, and we must reap all which we do sow, and that the emptiness or the richness of the harvest is not so much for us as for them, one of the first among the many things which we shall reform will be "children's parties."

After-Supper Talk.

"After-dinner talk" has been thought of great importance. The expression has pa.s.sed into literature, with many records of the good sayings it included. Kings and ministers condescend to make efforts at it; poets and philosophers--greater than kings and ministers--do not disdain to attempt to shine in it.

But n.o.body has yet shown what "after-supper talk" ought to be. We are not speaking now of the formal entertainment known as "a supper;" we mean the every-day evening meal in the every-day home,--the meal known heartily and commonly as "supper," among people who are neither so fashionable nor so foolish as to take still a fourth meal at hours when they ought to be asleep in bed.

This ought to be the sweetest and most precious hour of the day. It is too often neglected and lost in families. It ought to be the mother's hour; the mother's opportunity to undo any mischief the day may have done, to forestall any mischief the morrow may threaten. There is an instinctive disposition in most families to linger about the supper-table, quite unlike the eager haste which is seen at breakfast and at dinner. Work is over for the day; everybody is tired, even the little ones who have done nothing but play. The father is ready for slippers and a comfortable chair; the children are ready and eager to recount the incidents of the day. This is the time when all should be cheered, rested, and also stimulated by just the right sort of conversation, just the right sort of amus.e.m.e.nt.

The wife and mother must supply this need, must create this atmosphere. We do not mean that the father does not share the responsibility of this, as of every other hour. But this particular duty is one requiring qualities which are more essentially feminine than masculine. It wants a light touch and an _undertone_ to bring out the full harmony of the ideal home evening. It must not be a bore. It must not be empty; it must not be too much like preaching; it must not be wholly like play; more than all things, it must not be always--no, not if it could be helped, not even twice--the same! It must be that most indefinable, most recognizable thing, "a good time." Bless the children for inventing the phrase! It has, like all their phrases, an unconscious touch of sacred inspiration in it, in the selection of the good word "good," which lays peculiar benediction on all things to which it is set.

If there were no other reason against children's having lessons a.s.signed them to study at home, we should consider this a sufficient one, that it robs them of the after-supper hour with their parents. Even if their brains could bear without injury the sixth, seventh, or eighth hour, as it may be, of study, their hearts cannot bear the being starved.

In the average family, this is the one only hour of the day when father, mother, and children can be together, free of cares and unhurried. Even to the poorest laborer's family comes now something like peace and rest forerunning the intermission of the night.

Everybody who has any artistic sense recognizes this instinctively when they see through the open doors of humble houses the father and mother and children gathered around their simple supper. Its mention has already pa.s.sed into triteness in verse, so inevitably have poets felt the sacred charm of the hour.

Perhaps there is something deeper than on first thoughts would appear in the instant sense of pleasure one has in this sight; also, in the universal feeling that the evening gathering of the family is the most sacred one. Perhaps there is unconscious recognition that dangers are near at hand when night falls, and that in this hour lies, or should lie, the spell to drive them all away.

There is something almost terrible in the mingling of danger and protection, of harm and help, of good and bad, in that one thing, darkness. G.o.d "giveth his beloved sleep" in it; and in it the devil sets his worst lures, by help of it gaining many a soul which he could never get possession of in sunlight.

Mothers, fathers! cultivate "after-supper talk;" play "after-supper games;" keep "after-supper books;" take all the good newspapers and magazines you can afford, and read them aloud "after supper." Let boys and girls bring their friends home with them at twilight, sure of a pleasant and hospitable welcome and of a good time "after supper," and parents may laugh to scorn all the temptations which town or village can set before them to draw them away from home for their evenings.

These are but hasty hints, bare suggestions. But if they rouse one heart to a new realization of what evenings at home _ought_ to be, and what evenings at home too often are, they have not been spoken in vain nor out of season.

Hysteria In Literature.

Physicians tell us that there is no known disease, no known symptom of disease, which hysteria cannot and does not counterfeit. Most skilful surgeons are misled by its cunning into believing and p.r.o.nouncing able-bodied young women to be victims of spinal disease, "stricture of the oesophagus," "gastrodynia," "paraplegia," "hemiplegia," and hundreds of other affections, with longer or shorter names. Families are thrown into disorder and distress; friends suffer untold pains of anxiety and sympathy; doctors are summoned from far and near; and all this while the vertebra, or the membrane, or the muscle, as it may be, which is so honestly believed to be diseased, and which shows every symptom of diseased action or inaction, is sound and strong, and as well able as ever it was to perform its function.

The common symptoms of hysteria everybody is familiar with,--the crying and laughing in inappropriate places, the fancied impossibility of breathing, and so forth,--which make such trouble and mortification for the embarra.s.sed companions of hysterical persons; and which, moreover, can be very easily suppressed by a little wholesome severity, accompanied by judicious threats or sudden use of cold water. But few people know or suspect the number of diseases and conditions, supposed to be real, serious, often incurable, which are simply and solely, or in a great part, undetected hysteria. This very ignorance on the part of friends and relatives makes it almost impossible for surgeons and physicians to treat such cases properly. The probabilities are, in nine cases out of ten, that the indignant family will dismiss, as ignorant or hard-hearted, any pract.i.tioner who tells them the unvarnished truth, and proposes to treat the sufferer in accordance with it.

In the field of literature we find a hysteria as widespread, as undetected, as unmanageable as the hysteria which skulks and conquers in the field of disease.

Its commoner outbreaks everybody knows by sight and sound, and everybody except the miserably ignorant and silly despises. Yet there are to be found circles which thrill and weep in sympathetic unison with the ridiculous joys and sorrows, grotesque sentiments, and preposterous adventures of the heroes and heroines of the "Dime Novels" and novelettes, and the "Flags" and "Blades" and "Gazettes" among the lowest newspapers.

But in well-regulated and intelligent households, this sort of writing is not tolerated, any more than the correlative sort of physical phenomenon would be,--the gasping, shrieking, sobbing, giggling kind of behavior in a man or woman.

But there is another and more dangerous working of the same thing; deep, unsuspected, clothing itself with symptoms of the most defiant genuineness, it lurks and does its business in every known field of composition. Men and women are alike p.r.o.ne to it, though its shape is somewhat affected by s.e.x.

Among men it breaks out often, perhaps oftenest, in violent illusions on the subject of love. They a.s.sert, declare, shout, sing, scream that they love, have loved, are loved, do and for ever will love, after methods and in manners which no decent love ever thought of mentioning. And yet, so does their weak violence ape the bearing of strength, so much does their cheat look like truth, that scores, nay, shoals of human beings go about repeating and echoing their noise, and saying, gratefully, "Yes, this is love; this is, indeed, what all true lovers must know."

These are they who proclaim names of beloved on house-tops; who strip off veils from sacred secrets and secret sacrednesses, and set them up naked for the mult.i.tude to weigh and compare. What punishment is for such beloved, Love himself only knows. It must be in store for them somewhere.

Dimly one can suspect what it might be; but it will be like all Love's true secrets,--secret for ever.

These men of hysteria also take up specialties of art or science; and in their behoof rant, and exaggerate, and fabricate, and twist, and lie in such stentorian voices that reasonable people are deafened and bewildered.

They also tell common tales in such enormous phrases, with such gigantic structure of rhetorical flourish, that the mere disproportion amounts to false-hood; and, the diseased appet.i.te in listeners growing more and more diseased, feeding on such diseased food, it is impossible to predict what it will not be necessary for story-mongers to invent at the end of a century or so more of this.

But the worst manifestations of this disease are found in so-called religious writing. Theology, biography, especially autobiography, didactic essays, tales with a moral,--under every one of these t.i.tles it lifts up its hateful head. It takes so successfully the guise of genuine religious emotion, religious experience, religious zeal, that good people on all hands weep grateful tears as they read its morbid and unwholesome utterances. Of these are many of the long and short stories setting forth in melodramatic pictures exceptionally good or exceptionally bad children; or exceptionally pathetic and romantic careers of sweet and refined Magdalens; minute and prolonged dissections of the processes of spiritual growth; equally minute and authoritative formulas for spiritual exercises of all sorts,--"manuals of drill," so to speak, or "field tactics" for souls. Of these sorts of books, the good and the bad are almost indistinguishable from each other, except by the carefulest attention and the finest insight; overwrought, unnatural atmosphere and meaningless, shallow routine so nearly counterfeit the sound and shape of warm, true enthusiasm and wise precepts.

Where may be the remedy for this widespread and widely spreading disease among writers we do not know. It is not easy to keep up courageous faith that there is any remedy. Still Nature abhors noise and haste, and shams of all sorts. Quiet and patience are the great secrets of her force, whether it be a mountain or a soul that she would fashion. We must believe that sooner or later there will come a time in which silence shall have its dues, moderation be crowned king of speech, and melodramatic, spectacular, hysterical language be considered as disreputable as it is silly. But the most discouraging feature of the disease is its extreme contagiousness. All physicians know what a disastrous effect one hysterical patient will produce upon a whole ward in a hospital. We remember hearing a young physician once give a most amusing account of a woman who was taken to Bellevue Hospital for a hysterical cough. Her lungs, bronchia, throat, were all in perfect condition; but she coughed almost incessantly, especially on the approach of the hour for the doctor's visit to the ward. In less than one week half the women in the ward had similar coughs. A single--though it must be confessed rather terrific--application of cold water to the original offender worked a simultaneous cure upon her and all of her imitators.

Not long ago a very parallel thing was to be observed in the field of story-writing. A clever, though morbid and melodramatic writer published a novel, whose heroine, having once been an inmate of a house of ill-fame, escaped, and, finding shelter and Christian training in the home of a benevolent woman, became a model of womanly delicacy, and led a life of exquisite and artistic refinement. As to the animus and intent of this story there could be no doubt; both were good, but in atmosphere and execution it was essentially unreal, overwrought, and melodramatic. For three or four months after its publication there was a perfect outburst and overflow in newspapers and magazines of the lower order of stories, all more or less bad, some simply outrageous, and all treating, or rather pretending to treat, the same problem which had furnished theme for that novel.

Probably a close observation and collecting of the dreary statistics would bring to light a curious proof of the extent and certainty of this sort of contagion.