Bits about Home Matters Part 12

Reflecting on it, having it thrust in one's face at every book-counter, railway-stand, Sunday-school library, and parlor centre-table, it is hard not to wish for some supernatural authority to come sweeping through the wards, and prescribe sharp cold-water treatment all around to half drown all such writers and quite drown all their books!

Jog Trot.

There is etymological uncertainty about the phrase. But there is no doubt about its meaning; no doubt that it represents a good, comfortable gait, at which n.o.body goes nowadays.

A hundred years ago it was the fashion: in the days when railroads were not, nor telegraphs; when citizens journeyed in stages, putting up prayers in church if their journey were to be so long as from Ma.s.sachusetts into Connecticut; when evil news travelled slowly by letter, and good news was carried about by men on horses; when maidens spun and wove for long, quiet, silent years at their wedding _trousseaux_, and mothers spun and wove all which sons and husbands wore; when newspapers were small and infrequent, dingy-typed and wholesomely stupid, so that no man could or would learn from them more about other men's opinions, affairs, or occupations than it concerned his practical convenience to know; when even wars were waged at slow pace,--armies sailing great distances by chance winds, or plodding on foot for thousands of miles, and fighting doggedly hand to hand at sight; when fortunes also were slowly made by simple, honest growths,--no men excepting freebooters and pirates becoming rich in a day.

It would seem treason or idiocy to sigh for these old days,--treason to ideas of progress, stupid idiocy unaware that it is well off. Is not to-day brilliant, marvellous, beautiful? Has not living become subject to a magician's "presto"? Are we not decked in the whole of color, feasted on all that shape and sound and flavor can give? Are we not wiser each moment than we were the moment before? Do not the blind see, the deaf hear, and the crippled dance? Has not Nature surrendered to us? Art and science, are they not our slaves,--coining money and running mills? Have we not built and multiplied religions, till each man, even the most irreligious, can have his own? Is not what is called the "movement of the age" going on at the highest rate of speed and of sound? Shall we complain that we are maddened by the racket, out of breath with the spinning and whirling, and dying of the strain of it all? What is a man, more or less? What are one hundred and twenty millions of men, more or less? What is quiet in comparison with riches? or digestion and long life in comparison with knowledge? When we are added up in the universal reckoning of races, there will be small mention of individuals. Let us be disinterested. Let us sacrifice ourselves, and, above all, our children, to raise the general average of human invention and attainment to the highest possible mark. To be sure, we are working in the dark. We do not know, not even if we are Huxley do we know, at what point in the grand, universal scale we shall ultimately come in. We know, or think we know, about how far below us stand the gorilla and the seal. We patronize them kindly for learning to turn hand-organs or eat from porringers. Let us hope that, if we have brethren of higher races on other planets, they will be as generously appreciative of our little all when we have done it; but, meanwhile, let us never be deterred from our utmost endeavor by any base and envious misgivings that possibly we may not be the last and highest work of the Creator, and in a fair way to reach very soon the final climax of all which created intelligences can be or become. Let us make the best of dyspepsia, paralysis, insanity, and the death of our children. Perhaps we can do as much in forty years, working night and day, as we could in seventy, working only by day; and the five out of twelve children that live to grow up can perpetuate the names and the methods of their fathers.

It is a comfort to believe, as we are told, that the world can never lose an iota that it has gained; that progress is the great law of the universe. It is consoling to verify this truth by looking backward, and seeing how each age has made use of the wrecks of the preceding one as material for new structures on different plans. What are we that we should mention our preference for being put to some other use, more immediately remunerative to ourselves!

We must be all wrong if we are not in sympathy with the age in which we live. We might as well be dead as not keep up with it. But which of us does not sometimes wish in his heart of hearts, that he had been born long enough ago to have been boon companion of his great-grandfather, and have gone respectably and in due season to his grave at a good jog trot?

The Joyless American.

It is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching these sh.o.r.es, might suppose that he had chanced to arrive upon a day when some great public calamity had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be quite safe to a.s.sume that out of the first five hundred faces which he sees there will not be ten wearing a smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if they ever could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to any man, let him try the experiment, for one week, of noting down, in his walks about town, every face he sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The chances are that at the end of his seven days he will not have entered seven faces in his note-book without being aware at the moment of some conscientious difficulty in permitting himself to call them positively and unmistakably cheerful.

The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression on the American face is so common that we are hardened to seeing it, and look for nothing better.

Only when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy or girl or man or woman flashes the beam of a laughing countenance into the level gloom do we even know that we are in the dark. Witness the instant effect of the entrance of such a person into an omnibus or a car. Who has not observed it? Even the most stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. The unconscious intruder, simply by smiling, has set the blood moving more quickly in the veins of every human being who sees him. He is, for the moment, the personal benefactor of every one; if he had handed about money or bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less value.

What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of misery from becoming an organic characteristic of our people? "Make them play more," says one philosophy. No doubt they need to "play more;" but, when one looks at the average expression of a Fourth of July crowd, one doubts if ever so much multiplication of that kind of holiday would mend the matter. No doubt we work for too many days in the year, and play for too few; but, after all, it is the heart and the spirit and the expression that we bring to our work, and not those that we bring to our play, by which our real vitality must be tested and by which our faces will be stamped. If we do not work healthfully, reasoningly, moderately, thankfully, joyously, we shall have neither moderation nor grat.i.tude nor joy in our play. And here is the hopelessness, here is the root of the trouble, of the joyless American face. The worst of all demons, the demon of unrest and overwork, broods in the very sky of this land. Blue and clear and crisp and sparkling as our atmosphere is, it cannot or does not exorcise the spell. Any old man can count on the fingers of one hand the persons he has known who led lives of serene, unhurried content, made for themselves occupations and not tasks, and died at last what might be called natural deaths.

"What, then?" says the congressional candidate from Mettibemps; the "new contributor" to the oceanic magazine; Mrs. Potiphar, from behind her liveries; and poor Dives, senior, from Wall Street; "Are we to give up all ambition?" G.o.d forbid. But, because one has a goal, must one be torn by poisoned spurs? We see on the Corso, in the days of the Carnival, what speed can be made by horses under torture. Shall we try those methods and that pace on our journeys?

So long as the American is resolved to do in one day the work of two, to make in one year the fortune of his whole life and his children's, to earn before he is forty the reputation which belongs to threescore and ten, so long he will go about the streets wearing his present abject, pitiable, overwrought, joyless look. But, even without a change of heart or a reform of habits, he might better his countenance a little, if he would. Even if he does not feel like smiling, he might smile, if he tried; and that would be something. The muscles are all there; they count the same in the American as in the French or the Irish face; they relax easily in youth; the trick can be learned. And even a trick of it is better than none of it. Laughing masters might be as well paid as dancing masters to help on society! "Smiling made Easy" or the "Complete Art of Looking Good-natured" would be as taking t.i.tles on book-sellers' shelves as "The Complete Letter-writer" or "Handbook of Behavior." And n.o.body can calculate what might be the moral and spiritual results if it could only become the fashion to pursue this branch of the fine arts. Surliness of heart must melt a little under the simple effort to smile. A man will inevitably be a little less of a bear for trying to wear the face of a Christian.

"He who laughs can commit no deadly sin," said the wise and sweet-hearted woman who was mother of Goethe.

Spiritual Teething

Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teeth must be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but the processes are wonderfully parallel,--the results too, alas! If clergymen knew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do of disease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of each year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality in Brooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th." We are so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eye glances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens and by scores they have gone,--the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds new mourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiar with black as with scarlet, with the hea.r.s.e as with the pleasure-carriage; and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can be merry.

But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, our hearts would break. The air would be dark and stifling. We should be afraid to move,--lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor's spiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously spoken the one word which was poison to his fever!

Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than half take place in the period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which knows but three things,--hunger and food and sleep! There is only a little s.p.a.ce for this delight. In our seventh month we begin to be wretched. We drink our milk, but we are aware of a constant desire to bite; doubts which we do not know by name, needs for which there is no ready supply, make us restless. Now comes the old-school doctor, and thrusts in his lancet too soon. We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved. The tooth is said to be "through."

Through! Oh, yes; through before its time. Through to no purpose. In a week, or a year, the wounded flesh, or soul, has rea.s.serted its right, shut down on the tooth, making a harder surface than ever, a cicatrized crust, out of which it will take double time and double strength for the tooth to break.

The gentle doctor gives us a rubber ring, it has a bad taste; or an ivory one, it is too hard and hurts us. But we gnaw and gnaw, and fancy the new pain a little easier to bear than the old. Probably it is; probably the tooth gets through a little quicker for the days and nights of gnawing.

But what a picture of patient misery is a baby with its rubber ring!

Really one sees sometimes in the little puckered, twisting face such grotesque prophecy of future conflicts, such likeness to the soul's processes of grappling with problems, that it is uncanny.

When we come to the a.n.a.lysis of the diseases incident to the teething period, and the treatment of them, the similitude is as close.

We have sharp, sudden inflammations; we have subtle and more deadly things, which men do not detect till it is, in nine cases out of ten, too late to cure them,--like water on the brain; and we have slow wastings away; atrophies, which are worse than death, leaving life enough to prolong death indefinitely, being as it were living deaths.

Who does not know poor souls in all stages of all these,--outbreaks of rebellion against all forms, all creeds, all proprieties; secret adoptions of perilous delusions, fatal errors; and slow settling down into indifferentism or narrow dogmatism, the two worst living deaths?

These are they who live. Shall we say any thing of those of us who die between our seventh and eighteenth spiritual month? They never put on babies' tombstones "Died of teething." There is always a special name for the special symptom or set of symptoms which characterized the last days.

But the mother believes and the doctor knows that, if it had not been for the teeth that were coming just at that time, the fever or the croup would not have killed the child.

Now we come to the treatments; and here again the parallelism is so close as to be ludicrous. The lancet and the rubber ring fail. We are still restless, and scream and cry. Then our self-sacrificing nurses walk with us; they rock us, they swing us, they toss us up and down, they jounce us from top to bottom, till the wonder is that every organ in our bodies is not displaced. They beat on gla.s.s and tin and iron to distract our attention and drown out our noise by a bigger one; they shake back and forth before our eyes all things that glitter and blaze; they shout and sing songs; the house and the neighborhood are searched and racked for something which will "amuse" the baby. Then, when we will no longer be "amused," and when all this restlessness outside and around us, added to the restlessness inside us, has driven us more than frantic, and the day or the night of their well-meant clamor is nearly over, their strength worn out, and their wits at end,--then comes the "soothing syrup,"

deadliest weapon of all. This we cannot resist. If there be they who are mighty enough to pour it down our throats, physically or spiritually, to sleep we must go, and asleep we must stay so long as the effect of the dose lasts.

It is of this, we oftenest die,--not in a day or a year, but after many days and many years; when in some sharp crisis we need for our salvation the force which should have been developing in our infancy, the muscle or the nerve which should have been steadily growing strong till that moment.

But the force is not there; the muscle is weak; the nerve paralyzed; and we die at twenty of a light fever, we fall down at twenty, under sudden grief or temptation, because of our long sleeps under soothing syrups when we were babies.

Oh, good nurses and doctors of souls, let them cut their own teeth, in the natural ways. Let them scream if they must, but keep you still on one side; give them no false helps; let them alone so far as it is possible for love and sympathy to do so. Man is the only animal that has trouble from the growing of the teeth in his body. It must be his own fault somehow that he has that; and he has evidently been always conscious of a likeness between this difficulty and perversion of a process natural to his body, and the difficulty and perversion of his getting sensible and just opinions; for it has pa.s.sed into the immortality of a proverb that a shrewd man is a man who has "cut his eye-teeth;" and the four last teeth, which we get late in life, and which cost many people days of real illness, are called in all tongues, all countries, "wisdom teeth!"

Gla.s.s Houses.

Who would live in one, if he could help it? And who wants to throw stones?

But who lives in any thing else, nowadays? And how much better off are they who never threw a stone in their lives than the rude mob who throw them all the time?

Really, the proverb might as well be blotted out from our books and dropped from our speech. It has no longer use or meaning.

It is becoming a serious question what shall be done, or rather what can be done, to secure to fastidious people some show and shadow of privacy in their homes. The silly and vulgar pa.s.sion of people for knowing all about their neighbors' affairs, which is bad enough while it takes shape merely in idle gossip of mouth, is something terrible when it is exalted into a regular market demand of the community, and fed by a regular market supply from all who wish to print what the community will read.

We do not know which is worse in this traffic, the buyer or the seller; we think, on the whole, the buyer. But then he is again a seller; and so there it is,--wheel within wheel, cog upon cog. And, since all these sellers must earn their bread and b.u.t.ter, the more one searches for a fair point of attacking the evil, the more he is perplexed.

The man who writes must, if he needs pay for his work, write what the man who prints will buy. The man who prints must print what the people who read will buy. Upon whom, then, shall we lay earnest hands? Clearly, upon the last buyer,--upon him who reads. But things have come to such a pa.s.s already that to point out to the average American that it is vulgar and also unwholesome to devour with greedy delight all sorts of details about his neighbors' business seems as hopeless and useless as to point out to the currie-eater or the whiskey-drinker the bad effects of fire and strychnine upon mucous membranes. The diseased palate craves what has made it diseased,--craves it more, and more, and more. In case of stomachs, Nature has a few simple inventions of her own for bringing reckless abuses to a stand-still,--dyspepsia, and delirium-tremens, and so on.

But she takes no account, apparently, of the diseased conditions of brains incident to the long use of unwholesome or poisonous intellectual food.

Perhaps she never antic.i.p.ated this cla.s.s of excesses. And, if there were to be a precisely correlative punishment, it is to be feared it would fall more heavily on the least guilty offender. It is not hard to fancy a poor soul who, having been condemned to do reporters' duty for some years, and having been forced to dwell and dilate upon scenes and details which his very soul revolted from mentioning,--it is not hard to fancy such a soul visited at last by a species of delirium-tremens, in which the speeches of men who had spoken, the gowns of women who had danced, the faces, the figures, the furniture of celebrities, should all be mixed up in a grotesque phantasmagoria of torture, before which he should writhe as helplessly and agonizingly as the poor whiskey-drinker before his snakes.

But it would be a cruel misplacement of punishment. All the while the true guilty would be placidly sitting down at still further unsavory banquets, which equally helpless providers were driven to furnish!

The evil is all the harder to deal with, also, because it is like so many evils,--all, perhaps,--only a diseased outgrowth, from a legitimate and justifiable thing. It is our duty to sympathize; it is our privilege and pleasure to admire. No man lives to himself alone; no man can; no man ought. It is right that we should know about our neighbors all which will help us to help them, to be just to them, to avoid them, if need be; in short, all which we need to know for their or our reasonable and fair advantage. It is right, also, that we should know about men who are or have been great all which can enable us to understand their greatness; to profit, to imitate, to revere; all that will help us to remember whatever is worth remembering. There is education in this; it is experience, it is history.

But how much of what is written, printed, and read to-day about the men and women of to-day comes under these heads? It is unnecessary to do more than ask the question. It is still more unnecessary to do more than ask how many of the men and women of to-day, whose names have become almost as stereotyped a part of public journals as the very t.i.tles of the journals themselves, have any claim to such prominence. But all these considerations seem insignificant by side of the intrinsic one of the vulgarity of the thing, and its impudent ignoring of the most sacred rights of individuals. That there are here and there weak fools who like to see their names and most trivial movements chronicled in newspapers cannot be denied. But they are few. And their silly pleasure is very small in the aggregate compared with the annoyance and pain suffered by sensitive and refined people from these merciless invasions of their privacy. No precautions can forestall them, no reticence prevent; nothing, apparently, short of dying outright, can set one free. And even then it is merely leaving the torture behind, a harrowing legacy to one's friends; for tombs are even less sacred than houses. Memory, friendship, obligation,--all are lost sight of in the greed of desire to make an effective sketch, a surprising revelation, a neat a.n.a.lysis, or perhaps an adroit implication of honor to one's self by reason of an old a.s.sociation with greatness. Private letters and private conversations, which may touch living hearts in a thousand sore spots, are hawked about as coolly as if they had been old clothes, left too long unredeemed in the hands of the p.a.w.n-broker! "Dead men tell no tales," says the proverb. One wishes they could! We should miss some spicy contributions to magazine and newspaper literature; and a sudden silence would fall upon some loud-mouthed living.

But we despair of any cure for this evil. No ridicule, no indignation seems to touch it. People must make the best they can of their gla.s.s houses; and, if the stones come too fast, take refuge in the cellars.