Folly as It Flies Part 11

Since the world began, there probably never was a marriage of which somebody did not "disapprove." That somebody, and everybody, including relatives, have a perfect right to an opinion on such a subject, n.o.body doubts. But how far you prove your greater love for "Tom," by whispering round "confidentially" your foreordained determination not to believe that "that woman" can ever make him happy, is a question.

Poor fellow! and _she_ of all people in the world; the very last woman _you_ would have selected; which of course is sure to get to Tom's wife's ears, and produce a fine foundation for belief in the reality of your regard for him, and your good nature generally.

Now as there were seldom, or never, two parties bound together in _any_ relation of life, whether as business partners, pastor and people, teacher and pupil, master and subordinate, mistress and maid, who always moved along with perfect unanimity, it is hardly to be expected that the marriage of "Tom" and his wife will effect a total revolution for the better in human nature, any more than did your own marriage. Perhaps even Tom and his wife, though loving each other very much, may have a difference of opinion on some subject; but what is that to you? They don't need your guardianship or supervision in the matter. It is very curious that those persons who clamor most loudly when "Tom" marries without their consent and approbation, are, ten to one, those who have themselves married clandestinely, or otherwise offended against the rigid rule which they would apply in his particular case.

Broad philanthropists! Tom can surely be happy in no way but theirs.

They love him so much better than "that woman" possibly can. Poor "Tom!" He looked so poorly last time they saw him. _Her_ fault, of course. They knew it would be just so. Didn't they say so from the first? Poor Tom! such a sacrifice! It is unaccountable how he can like her. For the matter of that, they never _will_ believe he does, (and they might add, he shan't if we can help it.) And so, when they see him, they inquire with a churchyard air, "Is he well?" "Is anything the matter?" "Ah, you needn't tell us; _we_ know how it is; poor Tom--we know you _try_ to bear up under it. Come and see _us_. We will love you. You never will find _us_ changed."

No. That's the worst of it! No hope of their changing. Bless their souls! How lucky "Tom" has somebody to tell him what a "sacrifice he has made," or he never would find it out! Well, it is astonishing that such people don't see that this is the last way to convince any person with common sense, that they are better qualified to be installed guardians of "Tom's" happiness than "_that woman_."

It is very strange that men, as a general thing, should be proud of that, of which they should be ashamed, and ashamed of that, which enn.o.bles them. Now, to my eye, a man never looks so grand, as when he bends his ear patiently and lovingly, to the lisping of a little child. I admire that man whom I see with a baby in his arms. I delight, on Sunday, when the nurses are set free, to see the fathers leading out their little ones in their best attire, and setting them right end up, about fifty times a minute. It is as good a means of grace as I am acquainted with. Now that a man should feel ashamed to be seen doing this, or think it necessary to apologize, even jocularly, when he meets a male friend, is to me one of the unaccountable things. It seems to me every way such a lovely, and good, and proper action in a father, that I can't help thinking that he who would feel otherwise, is of so coa.r.s.e and ign.o.ble a nature, as to be quite unworthy of respect. How many times I have turned to look at the clumsy smoothing of a child's dress, or settling of its hat, or bonnet, by the unpractised fingers of a proud father. And the clumsier he was about it, the better I have loved him for the pains he took. It is very beautiful to me, this self-abnegation, which creeps so gradually over a young father. He is himself so unconscious that he, who had for many years thought first and only of his own selfish ease and wants, is forgetting himself entirely whenever that little creature, with _his_ eyes and _its mother's lips_, reaches out coaxing hands to go here or there, or to look at this or that pretty object.

Ah, what but this heavenly love, could bridge over the anxious days and nights, of care and sickness, that these twain of one flesh are called to bear? _My_ boy! _My_ girl! There it is! _Mine!_ Something to live for--something to work for--_something to come home to_; and that last is the summing up of the whole matter. "Now let us have a good love," said a little three-year older, as she clasped her chubby arms about her father's neck when he came in at night "Now let us have a good love." Do you suppose that man walked with slow and laggard steps from his store toward that bright face that had been peeping for an hour from the nursery window to watch his coming? Do you suppose when he got on all fours to "play elephant" with the child, that it even crossed his mind that he had worked very hard all that day, or that he was not at that minute "looking dignified?" Did he wish he had a "club" where he could get away from home evenings, or was that "_good love_" of the little creature on his back, with the laughing eyes and the pearly teeth, and the warm clasp about his neck, which she was squeezing to suffocation, sweeter and better than anything that this world could give?

_Something to come home to!_ That is what saves a man. Somebody there to grieve if he is not true to himself. Somebody there to be sorry if he is troubled or sick. Somebody there, with fingers like sunbeams, gliding and brightening whatever they touch; and all for him. I look at the business men of New York, at nightfall, coming swarming "up town" from their stores and counting-rooms; and when I see them, as I often do, stop and buy one of those tiny bouquets as they go, I smile to myself; for although it is a little attention toward a wife, I know how happy that rose with its two geranium leaves, and its sprig of mignonette will make her. He thought of _her_ coming home! Foolish, do you call it? Such folly makes all the difference between stepping off, scarcely conscious of the cares a woman carries, or staggering wearily along till she faints disheartened under their burthen. _Something to go home to!_ That man felt it, and by ever so slight a token wished to recognize it. G.o.d bless him, I say, and all like him, who do not take home-comforts as stereotyped matters of course, and G.o.d bless the family estate; I can't see that anything better has been devised by the wiseacres who have experimented on the Almighty's plans. "There comes _my_ father!" exclaims Johnny, bounding from out a group of "fellows" with whom he was playing ball; and sliding his little soiled fist in his, they go up the steps and into the house together; and again G.o.d bless them! I say there's one man who is all right at least.

That boy has got him, safer than Fort Lafeyette.

If there is an experiment which is worse than any other for a young married couple to make, we believe it to be that of trying to make a home in a hotel. What possible chance has a young wife there to acquire domestic habits? To do anything, in short, but dress half a dozen times a day, and sit in the public parlor, or her own, to gossip with idle women or bandy compliments with idle men. And how--I ask any thinking person--can a young married woman be fitted for quiet home-cares and duties, after a year or two of such idleness and vacuity; Let no young husband expect any favorable result from such an experiment. Better a house with only _one_ room, in a quiet place by yourselves--than such a hollow, shallow life as this. Many a husband has dated from it the loss of all quiet, home happiness; lucky for him, if no more. _Go to housekeeping_; unambitiously if need be--as the old folks did before you. But have a place sacred to yourselves--have a place which your children in after years will love to think of as home. Do it for their sakes if not for your own. No sight is sadder than that of a weary little one--wandering up and down the entries and halls of a large hotel, peeping into parlors, offices and bar-rooms--listening to what childhood should never hear, and with no alternative but the small, dreary nursery, whose only-window prospect, nine times in ten, is a stack of brick chimneys or a back-shed full of flapping clothes hung out to dry. A father should hesitate long before he dooms a young child to such a "home" as this.

As to women, men are apt to think, and fall into innumerable blunders by so thinking, that because they know one woman they know all; when, in fact, each woman is as much of a study as if he had never seen one of the s.e.x. Bulwer doubts whether man _ever_ thoroughly understood woman. Truly, how should he? when woman does not understand herself; nor can tell why she lives on patiently, hopefully, year after year, with a brute, whose favorite pastime consists in attempts to break her neck every time things go wrong with him, indoors or out. That the better educated husband murders with sharp words instead of sharp blows, makes it none the less murder. The only difference is in the duration of the misery, one being as deadly as the other. Who cares to understand how a woman with bruised heart and flesh can throw over both the charitable mantle that, "he wasn't himself;" and beg off the offender from merited punishment, public or private. Let us rather seek to understand how man, who should be so strong, should fall so immeasurably below his "weaker" self, in the difficult lesson of self-control and forgiveness of injuries.

Some men profess to dislike coquetry; if so, why do they encourage it?

Why do they often leave a sensible, well-informed woman to play "wall-flower," while they talk nonsense to some brainless doll, who can only ogle, sigh and simper? It appears to us that men are to blame for most of the faults of women. We always regret to hear a man who has matrimonial views say of a girl, she don't know much, but she is amiable, has a pretty face, and after all, if I need society, it is easy enough to find it elsewhere. A man has no right to marry a woman with intentions so widely diverse from those he professes to entertain, when he vows to be a husband; he is responsibly blameworthy for the consequences that result from such an act; besides, it is a very mistaken notion some men seem to have, that a fool is easily managed; there is no description of animal so difficult to govern; what they lack in brains they are sure to make up in obstinacy, or a low kind of cunning. Then a pretty face cannot last forever, and the old age of a brainless beauty, we shudder to contemplate, even at a distance. Women aim to be what men oftenest like to see them; you may, therefore, easily gauge the masculine standard by the majority of women one daily meets. Heaven pity the exceptions! they must find _their_ mates in another world than this.

One of the meanest things a young man can do, and it is not at all of uncommon occurrence, is to monopolize the time, and attention, of a young girl for a year, or more, without any definite object, and to the exclusion of other gentlemen, who, supposing him to have matrimonial intentions, absent themselves from her society. This selfish "dog-in-the-manger" way of proceeding should be discountenanced and forbidden, by all parents and guardians.

It prevents the reception of eligible offers of marriage, and fastens upon the young lady, when the acquaintance is finally dissolved, the unenviable and _unmerited_ appellation of "flirt." Young man, let all your dealings with women, be frank, honest and n.o.ble. That many whose education and position in life are culpably criminal on these points, is no excuse for your short-comings. It adds a blacker dye to your meanness, that woman is often wronged through her holiest feelings.

One rule is always safe: _Treat every woman you meet, as you would wish another man to treat your innocent, confiding sister._

After all, how any young fellow can have the face to walk into your family, and deliberately ask for one of your daughters, astonishes me. That it is done every day, does not lessen my amazement at the sublime impudence of the thing. There you have been, sixteen, or seventeen, or eighteen years of her life, combing her hair, and washing her face for----_him_. It is lucky the thought never strikes you while you are doing it, that this is to be the end of it all. What if you _were_ married yourself? that is no reason why she should be bewitched away into a separate establishment, just as you begin to lean upon her, and be proud of her; or, at least, it stands to reason, that after you have worried her through the measles, and chicken-pox, and scarlet-fever, and whooping-cough, and had her properly baptized and vaccinated, this young man might give you a short breathing-spell before she goes.

_He_ seems to be of a different opinion; _he_ not only insists upon taking her, but upon taking her immediately. He talks well about it--very well; you have no objection to him, not the least in the world except that. When the world is full of girls, why couldn't he have fixed his eye on the daughter of somebody else? There are some parents who are glad to be rid of their daughters. Blue eyes are as plenty as blueberries; why need it be this particular pair? Isn't she happy enough as she is? Don't she have meat and bread and clothes enough, to say nothing of love? What is the use of leaving a certainty for an uncertainty, when that certainty is a mother, and you can never have but one? You put all these questions to her, and she has the sauciness to ask, if that is the way you reasoned, when her father came for you. You disdain to answer, of course; it is a mean dodging of the question. But she gets round you for all that, and so does he too, though you try your best not to like him; and with a--"well, if I must, I must," you just order her wedding-clothes, muttering to yourself the while,--"dear--dear--what sort of a fist will that child make at the head of a house? how will she ever know what to do in this, that, or the other emergency"--she who is calling on "mother"

fifty times a day to settle every trifling question? What folly for her to set up house for herself! How many mothers have had these foreboding thoughts over a daughter's wedding-clothes; and yet that daughter has met life, and its unexpected reverses, with a heroism and courage as undaunted as if every girlish tear had not been kissed away by lips, that alas! may be dust, when this baptism of womanhood comes upon her.

In my opinion, the "coming" woman's Alpha and Omega will not be matrimony. She will not of necessity sour into a pink-nosed old maid, or throw herself at any rickety old sh.e.l.l of humanity, whose clothes are as much out of repair as his morals. No, the future man will have to "step lively;" this wife is not to be had for the whistling. He will have a long canter round the pasture for her, and then she will leap the fence and leave him limping on the ground. Thick-soled boots and skating are coming in, and "nerves," novels and sentiment (by consequence) are going out. The coming woman, as I see her, is not to throw aside her needle; neither is she to sit embroidering worsted dogs and cats, or singing doubtful love ditties, and rolling up her eyes to "the chaste moon."

Heaven forbid she should stamp round with a cigar in her mouth, elbowing her neighbors, and puffing smoke in their faces; or stand on the free-love platform, _public or private_--_call it by what specious name you will_--wooing men who, low as they may have sunk in their own self-respect, would die before they would introduce her to the unsullied sister who shared their cradle.

Heaven forbid the coming woman should not have warm blood in her veins, quick to rush to her cheek, or tingle at her fingers' ends when her heart is astir. No, the coming woman shall be no cold, angular, flat-chested, narrow-shouldered, sharp-visaged Betsey, but she shall be a bright-eyed, full-chested, broad-shouldered, large-souled, intellectual being; able to walk, able to eat, able to fulfill her maternal destiny, and able--if it so please G.o.d--to go to her grave happy, self-poised and serene, though unwedded.

We often think of the solitariness and isolation of the young man--a stranger in a crowded city; suddenly cut adrift, perhaps from loving home influences--finding an inexorable necessity in his nature for sympathy and companionship--returning at night, when his day's toil is done, to his dreary, cell-like room, or, if he go out, solicited by myriad treacherous voices to unlearn the holy lessons taught at his mother's knee--solicited to show his "manliness" by drinking with every acquaintance that chance or the devil may send. That youth must needs be strongly intrenched in the _true_ idea of "manliness" not to waver and turn aside from his own independent course of well-doing.

Alas! that to so many the fear of ridicule, or dread of "oddity,"

should have power to draw a veil over the swift and sure downfall of the drunkard or profligate. Alas! that the little word _No_ should be so impossible of articulation--in a circle, too, whose sneering condemnation of it were not worth a thought, no matter how brilliantly the jest or the song may issue from lips foul with the sophistry of "free-love;" than which _freedom_ nothing is more shackled with disgust and pain; for try as we will, G.o.d's image, though marred, shall never be wholly effaced: enough shall be left in every man's and woman's soul to protest against such desecration, though it voice itself, as it often does, in bitter denunciation of what the soul knows to be its only true happiness. The holy stars make no record of the gasping sigh, brief but intense, that their purity has evoked.

The little bird trills out its matins, and vespers, all unconscious that their sweetness forces the unwelcome tear from some world-sated eye. Bless G.o.d, these moments will and do come to the most reckless--these swift heralds of our immortality--to be silenced never in this world; if disregarded, to be mourned over forever in the next; for the fiercest theologian's idea of "h.e.l.l" can never, it seems to me, go beyond the consciousness of G.o.d-like powers wasted and debased--n.o.ble opportunities of benefiting our race defiling past the memory in mournful procession, and the sorrowing soul nerveless, powerless to bid them stay.

To every young man entering the lists against the vices of a crowded city, at such fearful odds, we would say: cultivate an acquaintance, as soon as possible, with some family, or families, whose healthful influence may be your talisman against evil a.s.sociations, whose good opinion may give an impetus to your self-respect, and whose cheerful fireside may outshine the ignis-fatuus lights which dazzle but to mislead. To those who see difficulties or impossibilities in this, we would suggest the cultivation of a taste for reading, which surely may be compa.s.sed in a city, even by a young person of slender means. Good books are safe, pleasant and economical company. The time spent with them is an investment which will not fail to yield a satisfying interest for all future time. Let those who will--and their name, we fear, is legion--wreck health and reputation, for the lack of courage or desire to be true to their better feelings; let those who will, cover their inclination to do evil with the transparent excuse "that it is well to see life in all its phases." As well might a perfectly healthy person _from mere curiosity_ breathe the tainted air of every pest-house in the country. No thanks are due to his fool-hardy temerity if he escape; "served him right!" would be the unanimous verdict of common sense if he should not.

To him who, eschewing such unwisdom, chooses to breathe a healthful, moral atmosphere, it may be a reflection worth having, that he will bring to his future home a const.i.tution and principles as sound as those he so properly requires in the wife of his choice and the mother of his children; and I confess myself unable to see why this should be more necessary in the case of one parent than in that of the other.

_Such men, and such only, have a call to be husbands._

_A CHAPTER ON MEN._

What const.i.tutes a handsome man? Well--there must be enough of him; or, failing in that, but, come to think of it, he _mustn't_ fail in that, because there can be no beauty without health, or at least, according to my way of thinking. In the second place, he must have a beard; whiskers--as the G.o.ds please, but a beard I insist upon, else one might as well look at a girl. Let his voice have a dash of Niagara, with the music of a baby's laugh in it. Let his smile be like the breaking forth of the sunshine on a spring morning. As to his figure, it should be strong enough to contend with a man, and slight enough to tremble in the presence of the woman he loves. Of course, if he is a well made man, it follows that he must be graceful, on the principle that perfect machinery always moves harmoniously; therefore you and himself and the milk pitcher, are safe elbow neighbors at the tea-table. _This_ style of handsome man would no more think of carrying a cane, than he would use a parasol to keep the sun out of his eyes. He can wear gloves, or warm his hands in his breast pockets, as he pleases. He can even commit the suicidal-beauty-act of turning his outside coat-collar up over his ears of a stormy day, with perfect impunity;--_the tailor didn't make him_, and as to his hatter, if he depended on this handsome man's patronage of the "latest spring style," I fear he would die of hope deferred; and yet--by Apollo! what a bow he makes, and what an expressive adieu he can wave with his head! For all this he is not conceited--for he hath _brains_.

But your conventional "handsome man," of the barber's-window-wax-figure-head-pattern; with a pet lock in the middle of his forehead, an apple-sized head, and a raspberry moustache with six hairs in it; a pink spot in its cheek, and a little dot of a "goatee" on its cunning little chin; with pretty blinking little studs in its shirt bosom, and a neck-tie that looks as if he would faint were it tumbled, I'd as lief look at a poodle. I always feel a desire to nip it up with a pair of sugar-tongs, drop it gently into a bowl of cream, and strew pink rose-leaves over its little remains.

After all, when _soul_ magnetizes _soul_, the question of beauty is a dead letter. _Whom one loves is always handsome_, the world's arbitrary rules notwithstanding; therefore when you say "what _can_ the handsome Mr. Smith see to admire in that stick of a Miss Jones?"

or, "what _can_ the pretty Miss T. see to like in that homely Mr.

Johns?" you simply talk nonsense--as you generally do, on such subjects. Still the parson gets his fees, and the census goes on all the same.

I wonder why people decry a masculine blush: I don't know. I immediately love the man who blushes. I am sure that he is unhackneyed; that he has not a set of meaningless, cut and dried compliments on hand, for every woman he meets; that he has not learned to sniff at sacred things, or prate transcendentally about "affinities" or any other corruption under a new-fangled name. I know that his love will be worth a pure woman's having; that he will not be ashamed of liking home, or his baby, or laughed out of staying in it in preference to any other place. I know that when he stops at a hotel, his _first_ business will not be to hold a private conference with the cook, to tell him how he likes an omelette made. I know that in his conversation he will not pride himself upon the small fopperies of talk, in the way of p.r.o.nunciation and newly coined words, to show how well he is posted up in dictionary matters. I know that he will not be closeted two thirds of his time with his tailor; or think it fine to be continually quoting some dead-and-gone book, known only to some resurrectionist of scarce authors. I know he will not sit in grimstarched statuesqueness in a car, when a woman old enough to be his mother, is standing wearily in front of him, swaying to and fro with the motion of the vehicle. In short, I know that he is not a petrifaction; that there's human nature in him, _and plenty of it_; that he is not like an animal under an exhausted receiver, having form only--in whom there is no spring, nor elasticity, nor breath of life.

A fool, hey? No, sir--not necessarily a fool neither. _The fool is he who, not yet at life's meridian, has exhausted it and himself_; who thinks every man "green" who has not taken his diploma in wickedness.

For whom existence is as weary as a thrice-told tale. Who has crowded four-score years into twenty, or less; and has nothing left for it but to sneer at the healthy, simple, pure, fresh joys which may never come again to his vitiated palate.

Very likely you have met him: this _blase_ man, who, though yet at life's meridian, has squeezed life as dry as an orange. Who has seen everything, heard everything, ate everything, drank everything, traveled everywhere, but into his own heart, to see its utter selfishness. Who is willing, upon the whole, to tolerate his fellow-creatures, provided they don't speak to him when he wants to be silent, or annoy him by peculiarities of dress, manner and conversation. Who remains immovably grave when everybody else laughs, and smiles when everybody else looks grave; who lifts his eyebrows and shrugs his shoulders dissentingly, when people who have not like him "been abroad," applaud. Who talks knowingly and mystically of "art,"

and thinks it fine to showerbath everybody's enthusiasm with "to-l-e-r-a-b-l-e." Who goes to church occasionally, but owing to the prevalence of badly-fitting coats and vests in the a.s.sembly, is unable to attend to the service; who don't care much what a man's creed is, provided he only takes it mild. He likes to see a woman plump and well-made, but abhors the idea of her eating; likes to see her rosy, but can't abide an india-rubber on her foot, even in the most consumptive-breeding weather; thinks it would be well were she domestic when he considers his tea and coffee, but don't believe in ap.r.o.ns and calico. Thinks she should be religious, because it would be a check-rein upon her tongue when his liver is out of order; and keep her true to him when he leaves her with all her yearning affections, to take care of herself.

And so our _blase_ man yawns away existence, everything outward and inward tending only to the great central I, when life might be _so_ glorious, _so_ bright, would he only recognize the existence of others. For how much is that education valuable, the result of which is only this? For how much that refinement which lifts a man so high in the clouds, that no cry of humanity, be it ever so sharp and piercing, can reach him? I turn away from his face, on which ennui and selfishness have ploughed such furrows of discontent, to the laborer in his red flannel shirt-sleeves, who, returning at sunset, dinner-pail in hand, has well earned the right to clasp in his arms the little child who runs to meet him. He may be illiterate, he may be uneducated, but he is a _man_; and by that beautiful retributive law of our being, by which the most useful and unselfish shall be the healthiest, and happiest, he has his reward.

_LITERARY PEOPLE._

The verdant have an idea, that literary people are always under the influence of "the divine afflatus;" but, like the curious female who gazed through the bars of the doomed man's cell to gloat over his situation, and was told by her victim, that, although the gallows was impending, "he couldn't cry all the time," they are doomed to disappointment.

When a literary person's exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to _talk book_. The last person he wishes to meet is another unfortunate, who also has been cudgelling his brains for ideas. The person whom he wishes to see most, if, indeed, he desire to see anybody, is one who will stir up his mentality least. The laurel-wreath, which the verdant suppose he settles carefully and becomingly on his head, before the looking-gla.s.s, ere he goes forth, he would be glad to toss into the first ash-barrel; and, so far from desiring to regulate his personal appearance, according to the programme marked out by the sentimental, he feels only an insane desire to be let severely alone, and "let _Natur_ caper," if, indeed, she has not forgotten how.