Part 14 (1/2)

But lonely people, and people whose kin are not kind or wise in these things, must learn to minister even in such ways to themselves. It is not selfish. It is not foolish. It is wise. It is generous. Each contented look on a human face is reflected in every other human face which sees it; each growth in a human soul is a blessing to every other human soul which comes in contact with it.

Here will come in, for many people, the bitter restrictions of poverty.

There are so many men and women to whom it would seem simply a taunt to advise them to spend, now and then, a dollar for a pleasure. That the poor must go cold and hungry has never seemed to me the hardest feature in their lot; there are worse deprivations than that of food or raiment, and this very thing is one of them. This is a point for charitable people to remember, even more than they do.

We appreciate this when we give some plum-pudding and turkey at Christmas, instead of all coal and flannel. But, any day in the year, a picture on the wall might perhaps be as comforting as a blanket on the bed; and, at any rate, would be good for twelve months, while the blanket would help but six. I have seen an Irish mother, in a mud hovel, turn red with delight at a rattle for her baby, when I am quite sure she would have been indifferently grateful for a pair of socks.

Food and physicians and money are and always will be on the earth. But a ”merry heart” is a ”continual feast,” and ”doeth good like-a medicine;”

and ”loving favor” is ”chosen,” ”rather than gold and silver.”

Wanted.--A Home.

Nothing can be meaner than that ”Misery should love company.” But the proverb is founded on an original principle in human nature, which it is no use to deny and hard work to conquer. I have been uneasily conscious of this sneaking sin in my own soul, as I have read article after article in the English newspapers and magazines on the ”decadence of the home spirit in English family life, as seen in the large towns and the metropolis.” It seems that the English are as badly off as we. There, also, men are wide-awake and gay at clubs and races, and sleepy and morose in their own houses; ”sons lead lives independent of their fathers and apart from their sisters and mothers;” ”girls run about as they please, without care or guidance.” This state of things is ”a spreading social evil,” and men are at their wit's end to know what is to be done about it. They are ransacking ”national character and customs, religion, and the particular tendency of the present literary and scientific thought, and the teaching and preaching of the public press,” to find out the root of the trouble.

One writer ascribes it to the ”exceeding restlessness and the desire to be doing something which are predominant and indomitable in the Anglo-Saxon race;” another to the pa.s.sion which almost all families have for seeming richer and more fas.h.i.+onable than their means will allow. In these, and in most of their other theories, they are only working round and round, as doctors so often do, in the dreary circle of symptomatic results, without so much as touching or perhaps suspecting their real centre. How many people are blistered for spinal disease, or blanketed for rheumatism, when the real trouble is a little fiery spot of inflammation in the lining of the stomach! and all these difficulties in the outworks are merely the creaking of the machinery, because the central engine does not work properly. Blisters and blankets may go on for seventy years coddling the poor victim; but he will stay ill to the last if his stomach be not set right.

There is a close likeness between the doctor's high-sounding list of remote symptoms, which he is treating as primary diseases, and the hue and outcry about the decadence of the home spirit, the prevalence of excessive and improper amus.e.m.e.nts, club-houses, billiard-rooms, theatres, and so forth, which are ”the banes of homes.”

The trouble is in the homes. Homes are stupid, homes are dreary, homes are insufferable. If one can be pardoned for the Iris.h.i.+sm of such a saying, homes are their own worst ”banes.” If homes were what they should be, nothing under heaven could be invented which could be bane to them, which would do more than serve as useful foil to set off their better cheer, their pleasanter ways, their wholesomer joys.

Whose fault is it that they are not so? Fault is a heavy word. It includes generations in its pitiless entail. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof is but one side of the truth. No day is sufficient unto the evil thereof is the other. Each day has to bear burdens pa.s.sed down from so many other days; each person has to bear burdens so complicated, so interwoven with the burdens of others; each person's fault is so fevered and swollen by faults of others, that there is no disentangling the question of responsibility. Every thing is everybody's fault is the simplest and fairest way of putting it. It is everybody's fault that the average home is stupid, dreary, insufferable,--a place from which fathers fly to clubs, boys and girls to streets. But when we ask who can do most to remedy this,--in whose hands it most lies to fight the fight against the tendencies to monotony, stupidity, and instability which are inherent in human nature,--then the answer is clear and loud. It is the work of women; this is the true mission of women, their ”right” divine and unquestionable, and including most emphatically the ”right to labor.”

To create and sustain the atmosphere of a home,--it is easily said in a very few words; but how many women have done it? How many women can say to themselves or others that this is their aim? To keep house well women often say they desire. But keeping house well is another affair,--I had almost said it has nothing to do with creating a home. That is not true, of course; comfortable living, as regards food and fire and clothes, can do much to help on a home. Nevertheless, with one exception, the best homes I have ever seen were in houses which were not especially well kept; and the very worst I have ever known were presided (I mean tyrannized) over by ”perfect housekeepers.”

All creators are single-aimed. Never will the painter, sculptor, writer lose sight of his art. Even in the intervals of rest and diversion which are necessary to his health and growth, every thing he sees ministers to his pa.s.sion. Consciously or unconsciously, he makes each shape, color, incident his own; sooner or later it will enter into his work.