Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864




Before passing to the last and profoundest use of communication, I must
not omit to mention that which is most obvious, but not most
important,--the giving of ordinary informations and instructions. These
always consist in a suggestion to another of new combinations of his
notions, new societies in his mind. Thus, if I say, _Fire burns_, I
simply assert a connection between fire and burning,--the notion of both
these being assumed as existing in the mind of the person addressed. Or
if I say, _God is just_, I invite him to associate in his mind the
sentiment of justice and the sense of the infinite and omnipotent. Now
in respect to matters of mere external form we usually confide in the
representations of others, and picture to ourselves, so far as our
existing perceptions enable us, the combinations they affirm,--provided
always these have a certain undefined conformity with our own
experience. But in respect to association, not of mere notions, but _of
spiritual elements in the soul_,--of truths evolved by the spiritual
nature of man,--the case is quite different Thus, if the fool who once
said in his heart, "There is no God," should now say openly, (of course
by some disguising euphemism,) "God is an egotist," I may indeed shape
an opinion accordingly, and fall into great confusion in consequence;
but my spiritual nature does not consent to this representation; no
_real_ association takes place within me between the sense of the
divine and the conception of egotism. Such opinion may have immense
energy in history, but it has no efficiency in the eliciting and
outbuilding of our personal being; these representations, however we may
trust and base action upon them, serve us inwardly only to such degree
as our spiritual nature can ally itself with them and find expression in
them. It is simply impossible for any man to associate the idea of
divinity with the conception of selfishness; but he may associate the
notion of Zeus or Allah or the like with that or any other conception of
baseness, and out of the result may form a sort of crust over his
spiritual intelligence, which shall either imprison it utterly, or force
it to oblique and covert expression. And of this last, by the way,--and
we may deeply rejoice over the fact,--history is full.

Yet in this suggestion toward new societies in the soul, in this formal
introduction to each other of kindred elements in the consciousness,
there may be eminent service. It is only formal, it does not make
friendship, it leaves our spirits to their own action; but it may
prepare the way for inward unities and communities whose blessedness
neither speech nor silence can tell.

Finally, there is an effect of words profounder and more creative than
any of these. As a brand which burns powerfully may at last ignite even
green wood, so divine faiths, alive and awake in one soul, may appeal to
the mere elements, to mere possibilities, of such faiths in other souls,
and at length evoke them by that appeal. The process is slow; it
requires a celestial heat and persistency in the moving spirit; it is
one of the "all things" that are possible only with God: but it occurs,
and it is the most sacred and precious thing in history.

Every human soul has the absolute soul, has the whole truth,
significance, and virtue of the universe, as its lawful and native
resource. Therefore says Jesus, "The kingdom of heaven is within you";
therefore Antoninus, "Look inwards, within is the fountain of truth";
therefore Eckart, "Ye have all truth potentially within you." All ideas
of truth dwell in every soul, but in every soul they are at first
wrapped in deep sleep, in an infinite depth of sleep; while the base
incense of brutish lives is like chloroform, or the fumes of some
benumbing drug, to steep them ever more and more in oblivion. But to
awaken truth thus sleeping in the soul is the highest use of discipline,
the noblest aim of culture, and the most eminent service which man can
render to man. The scheme of our life is providentially arranged with
reference to that end; and the thousand shocks, agitations, and moving
influences of our experience, the supreme invitations of love, the venom
of calumny, and all toil, trial, sudden bereavement, doubt, danger,
vicissitude, joy, are hands that shake and voices that assail the
lethargy of our deepest powers. Now it is in the power of truth divinely
awakened in one soul to assist its awakening in another. For as nothing
so quickly arouses us from slumber as hearing ourselves called upon by
name, so is it with this celestial inhabitant: whoever by virtue of
elder brotherhood can rightly name him shall cause his spirit to be
stirred and his slumber to be broken.

Let him, therefore, in whom any great truth is alive and awake,
enunciate, proclaim it steadily, clearly, cheerily, with a serene and
cloudless passion; and wherever a soul less mature than his own lies
open to the access of his tones, there the eye-fast angels of belief and
knowledge shall hear that publication of their own hearts, and, hearing,
lift their lids, and rise into wakefulness and power.

Seldom, indeed, is any voice, though it be in its origin a genuine voice
of the soul, pure and impartial enough, enough delivered from the masks
of egotism and accident, to be greatly competent for these effects.
Besides which, there are not a few that have closed their ears, lest
they should hear, not a few that are even filled with base astonishment
and terror, and out of this with base wrath, to find their deafness
assailed. And still further, it must be freely owned that our natures
have mysterious elections, and though one desire openness of soul as
much as folly fears it, yet may it happen that some tint of peculiarity
in the tone of a worthy voice shall render it to him opaque and
unintelligible.

Yet let us not fear that the product of any sacred and spiritual
sincerity will fail of sufficient uses. If a deep, cordial, and
clarified nature will but give us his heart in a pure and boundless
bravery of confession,--if, like autumn plants, that cast forth their
seeds, winged with down, to the four winds of heaven, or like the
blossoms of spring and early summer, that yield up their preciousness of
pollen to the forage of bees, and even by being so robbed attain to the
hearts of neighbor-blossoms, and accomplish that mystery of
fructification which is to make glad the maturer year,--if so this
inflorescence of eternity that we name a Noble Man will yield up the
golden pollen of his soul, even to those that in visiting him seek but
their own ends, and if so he will intrust winged words, words that are
indeed spiritual _seeds_, purest, ripest, and most vital products of his
being, to the winds of time,--he will be sure to reach some, and they to
reach others, and there is no telling how far the seminal effect may go;
there is no telling what harvests may yellow in the limitless fields of
the future, what terrestrial and celestial reapers may go home
rejoicing, bearing their sheaves with them, what immortal hungers may be
fed at the feasts of earth and heaven, in final consequence of that
lonely and faithful sowing. As in the still mornings of summer the
earliest awakened bird hesitates to utter, yet utters, his solitary
pipe, timidly rippling the silence, but is not long alone, for quickly
the melodious throb begins to beat in every tree-top, and soon the whole
rapturous grove gushes and palpitates into song,--even so, thus to
appearance alone and unsupported, begins that chant of belief which is
destined to heave and roll in billows of melodious confession over a
continent, over a world. Thus does a faith that has lain long silent in
the hearts of nations suddenly answer to the note of its kind,
astonishing all bystanders, astonishing most of all the heart it
inhabits. For, lo! the tree-tops of human life are full of slumbering
melodies, and if a song-sparrow pipe sincerely on the hill-sides of
Judea, saying, after his own fashion of speech, "Behold, the divine dawn
hath visited my eyes," be sure that the forests of far-off America, then
unknown, will one day reply, and ten thousand thousand throats throbbing
with high response will make it mutually known all round the world that
this auroral beam is not for any single or private eye, but that the
broad amber beauty of spiritual morning belongs to man's being, and that
in man's heart, by virtue of its perennial nature, is prophesied the day
whose sun shall be God and its earth heaven.

* * * * *

HOUSE AND HOME PAPERS.

BY CHRISTOPHER CROWFIELD.

IX.


In the course of my papers various domestic revolutions have occurred.
Our Marianne has gone from us with a new name to a new life, and a
modest little establishment not many squares off claims about as much of
my wife's and Jennie's busy thoughts as those of the proper mistress.

Marianne, as I always foresaw, is a careful and somewhat anxious
housekeeper. Her tastes are fastidious; she is made for exactitude: the
smallest departures from the straight line appear to her shocking
deviations. She had always lived in a house where everything had been
formed to quiet and order under the ever-present care and touch of her
mother; nor had she ever participated in these cares more than to do a
little dusting of the parlor-ornaments, or wash the best china, or make
sponge-cake or chocolate-caramels. Certain conditions of life had always
appeared so certain that she had never conceived of a house without
them. It never occurred to her that such bread and biscuit as she saw at
the home-table would not always and of course appear at every
table,--that the silver would not always be as bright, the glass as
clear, the salt as fine and smooth, the plates and dishes as nicely
arranged as she had always seen them, apparently without the thought or
care of any one,--for my wife is one of those housekeepers whose touch
is so fine that no one feels it. She is never heard scolding or
reproving,--never entertains her company with her recipes for cookery or
the faults of her servants. She is so unconcerned about receiving her
own personal share of credit for the good appearance of her
establishment, that even the children of the house have not supposed
that there is any particular will of hers in the matter,--it all seems
the natural consequence of having very good servants.

One phenomenon they had never seriously reflected on,--that, under all
the changes of the domestic cabinet which are so apt to occur in
American households, the same coffee, the same bread and biscuit, the
same nicely prepared dishes and neatly laid table always gladdened their
eyes; and from this they inferred only that good servants were more
abundant than most people had supposed. They were somewhat surprised
when these marvels were wrought by professedly green hands, but were
given to suppose that these green hands must have had some remarkable
quickness or aptitude for acquiring. That sparkling jelly, well-flavored
ice-creams, clear soups, and delicate biscuits could be made by a raw
Irish girl, fresh from her native Erin, seemed to them a proof of the
genius of the race; and my wife, who never felt it important to attain
to the reputation of a cook, quietly let it pass.

For some time, therefore, after the inauguration of the new household,
there was trouble in the camp. Sour bread had appeared on the
table,--bitter, acrid coffee had shocked and astonished the
palate,--lint had been observed on tumblers, and the spoons had
sometimes dingy streaks on the brightness of their first bridal
polish,--beds were detected made shockingly awry,--and Marianne came
burning with indignation to her mother.

"Such a little family as we have, and two strong girls," said
she,--"everything ought to be perfect; there is really nothing to do.
Think of a whole batch of bread absolutely sour! and when I gave that
away, then this morning another exactly like it! and when I talked to
cook about it, she said she had lived in this and that family, and her
bread had always been praised as equal to the baker's!"

"I don't doubt she is right," said I. "Many families never have anything
but sour bread from one end of the year to the other, eating it
unperceiving, and with good cheer; and they buy also sour bread of the
baker, with like approbation,--lightness being in their estimation the
only virtue necessary in the article."

"Could you not correct her fault?" suggested my wife.

"I have done all I can. I told her we could not have such bread, that it
was dreadful; Bob says it would give him the dyspepsia in a week; and
then she went and made exactly the same;--it seems to me mere
wilfulness."

"But," said I, "suppose, instead of such general directions, you should
analyze her proceedings and find out just where she makes her
mistake,--is the root of the trouble in the yeast, or in the time she
begins it, letting it rise too long?--the time, you know, should vary so
much with the temperature of the weather."

"As to that," said Marianne, "I know nothing. I never noticed; it never
was my business to make bread; it always seemed quite a simple process,
mixing yeast and flour and kneading it; and our bread at home was always
good."

"It seems, then, my dear, that you have come to your profession without
even having studied it."

My wife smiled, and said,--

"You know, Marianne, I proposed to you to be our family bread-maker for
one month of the year before you married."

"Yes, mamma, I remember; but I was like other girls; I thought there was
no need of it. I never liked to do such things; perhaps I had better
have done it."

"You certainly had," said I; "for the first business of a housekeeper in
America is that of a teacher. She can have a good table only by having
practical knowledge, and tact in imparting it. If she understands her
business practically and experimentally, her eye detects at once the
weak spot; it requires only a little tact, some patience, some clearness
in giving directions, and all comes right. I venture to say that your
mother would have exactly such bread as always appears on our table, and
have it by the hands of your cook, because she could detect and explain
to her exactly her error."

"Do you know," said my wife, "what yeast she uses?"

"I believe," said Marianne, "it's a kind she makes herself. I think I
heard her say so. I know she makes a great fuss about it, and rather
values herself upon it. She is evidently accustomed to being praised for
her bread, and feels mortified and angry, and I don't know how to manage
her."

"Well," said I, "if you carry your watch to a watch-maker, and undertake
to show him how to regulate the machinery, he laughs and goes on his own
way; but if a brother-machinist makes suggestions, he listens
respectfully. So, when a woman who knows nothing of woman's work
undertakes to instruct one who knows more than she does, she makes no
impression; but a woman who has been trained experimentally, and shows
she understands the matter thoroughly, is listened to with respect."

"I think," said my wife, "that your Bridget is worth teaching. She is
honest, well-principled, and tidy. She has good recommendations from
excellent families, whose ideas of good bread it appears differ from
ours; and with a little good-nature, tact, and patience, she will come
into your ways."

"But the coffee, mamma,--you would not imagine it to be from the same
bag with your own, so dark and so bitter; what do you suppose she has
done to it?"

"Simply this," said my wife. "She has let the berries stay a few moments
too long over the fire,--they are burnt, instead of being roasted; and
there are people who think it essential to good coffee that it should
look black, and have a strong, bitter flavor. A very little change in
the preparing will alter this."

"Now," said I, "Marianne, if you want my advice, I'll give it to you
gratis:--Make your own bread for one month. Simple as the process seems,
I think it will take as long as that to give you a thorough knowledge of
all the possibilities in the case; but after that you will never need to
make any more,--you will be able to command good bread by the aid of all
sorts of servants; you will, in other words, be a thoroughly prepared
teacher."

"I did not think," said Marianne, "that so simple a thing required so
much attention."

"It is simple," said my wife, "and yet requires a delicate care and
watchfulness. There are fifty ways to spoil good bread; there are a
hundred little things to be considered and allowed for that require
accurate observation and experience. The same process that will raise
good bread in cold weather will make sour bread in the heat of summer;
different qualities of flour require variations in treatment, as also
different sorts and conditions of yeast; and when all is done, the
baking presents another series of possibilities which require exact
attention."

"So it appears," said Marianne, gayly, "that I must begin to study my
profession at the eleventh hour."

"Better late than never," said I. "But there is this advantage on your
side: a well-trained mind, accustomed to reflect, analyze, and
generalize, has an advantage over uncultured minds even of double
experience. Poor as your cook is, she now knows more of her business
than you do. After a very brief period of attention and experiment, you
will not only know more than she does, but you will convince her that
you do, which is quite as much to the purpose."

"In the same manner," said my wife, "you will have to give lessons to
your other girl on the washing of silver and the making of beds. Good
servants do not often come to us; they must be made by patience and
training; and if a girl has a good disposition and a reasonable degree
of handiness, and the housekeeper understands her profession, she may
make a good servant out of an indifferent one. Some of my best girls
have been those who came to me directly from the ship, with no
preparation but docility and some natural quickness. The hardest cases
to be managed are not of those who have been taught nothing, but of
those who have been taught wrongly,--who come to you self-opinionated,
with ways that are distasteful to you, and contrary to the genius of
your housekeeping. Such require that their mistress shall understand a
least so much of the actual conduct of affairs as to prove to the
servant that there are better ways than those in which she has hitherto
been trained."

"Don't you think, mamma," said Marianne, "that there has been a sort of
reaction against woman's work in our day? So much has been said of the
higher sphere of woman, and so much has been done to find some better
work for her, that insensibly, I think, almost everybody begins to feel
that it is rather degrading for a woman in good society to be much tied
down to family-affairs."

"Especially," said my wife, "since in these Woman's-Rights Conventions
there is so much indignation expressed at those who would confine her
ideas to the kitchen and nursery."

"There is reason in all things," said I. "Woman's-Rights Conventions are
a protest against many former absurd, unreasonable ideas,--the mere
physical and culinary idea of womanhood as connected only with puddings
and shirt-buttons, the unjust and unequal burdens which the laws of
harsher ages had cast upon the sex. Many of the women connected with
these movements are as superior in everything properly womanly as they
are in exceptional talent and culture. There is no manner of doubt that
the sphere of woman is properly to be enlarged, and that republican
governments in particular are to be saved from corruption and failure
only by allowing to woman this enlarged sphere. Every woman has rights
as a human being first, which belong to no sex, and ought to be as
freely conceded to her as if she were a man,--and first and foremost,
the great right of doing anything which God and Nature evidently have
fitted her to excel in. If she be made a natural orator, like Miss
Dickenson, or an astronomer, like Mrs. Somerville, or a singer, like
Grisi, let not the technical rules of womanhood be thrown in the way of
her free use of her powers. Nor can there be any reason shown why a
woman's vote in the State should not be received with as much respect as
in the family. A State is but an association of families, and laws
relate to the rights and immunities which touch woman's most private and
immediate wants and dearest hopes; and there is no reason why sister,
wife, and mother should be more powerless in the State than in the home.
Nor does it make a woman unwomanly to express an opinion by dropping a
slip of paper into a box, more than to express that same opinion by
conversation. In fact, there is no doubt, that, in all matters relating
to the interests of education, temperance, and religion, the State would
be a material gainer by receiving the votes of women.

"But, having said all this, I must admit, _per contra_, not only a great
deal of crude, disagreeable talk in these conventions, but a too great
tendency of the age to make the education of women anti-domestic. It
seems as if the world never could advance, except like ships under a
head-wind, tacking and going too far, now in this direction, and now in
the opposite. Our common-school system now rejects sewing from the
education of girls, which very properly used to occupy many hours daily
in school a generation ago. The daughters of laborers and artisans are
put through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and the higher mathematics,
to the entire neglect of that learning which belongs distinctively to
woman. A girl cannot keep pace with her class, if she gives any time to
domestic matters; and accordingly she is excused from them all during
the whole term of her education. The boy of a family, at an early age,
is put to a trade, or the labors of a farm; the father becomes impatient
of his support, and requires of him to care for himself. Hence an
interrupted education,--learning coming by snatches in the winter months
or in the intervals of work. As the result, the females in our
country-towns are commonly, in mental culture, vastly in advance of the
males of the same household; but with this comes a physical delicacy,
the result of an exclusive use of the brain and a neglect of the
muscular system, with great inefficiency in practical domestic duties.
The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in
country-places, and made the bright, neat, New-England kitchens of old
times,--the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, tackle a horse and
drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read
innumerable books,--this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily
lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily fatigued, languid
girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common
things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from
it, is that society by-and-by will turn as blindly against female
intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and, having worked
disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite
direction."

"The fact is," said my wife, "that domestic service is the great problem
of life here in America; the happiness of families, their thrift,
well-being, and comfort, are more affected by this than by any one thing
else. Our girls, as they have been brought up, cannot perform the labor
of their own families, as in those simpler, old-fashioned days you tell
of; and what is worse, they have no practical skill with which to
instruct servants, and servants come to us, as a class, raw and
untrained; so what is to be done? In the present state of prices, the
board of a domestic costs double her wages, and the waste she makes is a
more serious matter still. Suppose you give us an article upon this
subject in your 'House and Home Papers.' You could not have a better
one."

So I sat down, and wrote thus on


SERVANTS AND SERVICE.

Many of the domestic evils in America originate in the fact, that, while
society here is professedly based on new principles, which ought to make
social life in every respect different from the life of the Old World,
yet these principles have never been so thought out and applied as to
give consistency and harmony to our daily relations. America starts with
a political organization based on a declaration of the primitive freedom
and equality of all men. Every human being, according to this principle,
stands on the same natural level with every other, and has the same
chance to rise according to the degree of power or capacity given by the
Creator. All our civil institutions are designed to preserve this
equality, as far as possible, from generation to generation: there is no
entailed property, there are no hereditary titles, no monopolies, no
privileged classes,--all are to be as free to rise and fall as the waves
of the sea.

The condition of domestic service, however, still retains about it
something of the influences from feudal times, and from the near
presence of slavery in neighboring States. All English literature, all
the literature of the world, describes domestic service in the old
feudal spirit and with the old feudal language, which regarded the
master as belonging to a privileged class and the servant to an inferior
one. There is not a play, not a poem, not a novel, not a history, that
does not present this view. The master's rights, like the rights of
kings, were supposed to rest in his being born in a superior rank. The
good servant was one who, from childhood, had learned "to order himself
lowly and reverently to all his betters." When New England brought to
these shores the theory of democracy, she brought, in the persons of the
first pilgrims, the habits of thought and of action formed in
aristocratic communities, Winthrop's Journal, and all the old records of
the earlier colonists, show households where masters and mistresses
stood on the "right divine" of the privileged classes, howsoever they
might have risen up against authorities themselves.

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