Bits About Home Matters - Helen Hunt Jackson
The Ready-to-Halts are never ready for any thing else. They can walk as
well as anybody else, if they only would; but they are never quite sure on
which road they would better go. Great Hearts have to go back, and go
back, to look them up. They are found standing still, helpless and
bewildered, on all sorts of absurd side-paths, which lead nowhere; and
they never will confess, either, that they need help. They always think
they are doing what they call "making up their mind." But, whichever way
they make it, they wish they had made it the other; so they unmake it
directly. And by this time the crisis of the first hour which they lost
has become complicated with that of the second hour, for which they are in
no wise ready; and so the hours stumble on, one after another, and the day
is only a tangle of ineffective cross purposes. Hundreds of such days
drift on, with their sad burden of wasted time. Year after year their
lives fail of growth, of delight, of blessing to others. Opportunity's
great golden doors, which never stay long open for any man, have always
just closed when they reach the threshold of a deed; and it is hard, very
hard, to see why it would not have been better for them if they had never
been born.
After all, it is not right to be impatient with them; for, in nine cases
out of ten, they are no more responsible for their mental limp than the
poor Chinese woman is for her feeble feet. From their infancy up to what
in our comic caricature of words we call "maturity," they have been
bandaged. How should their muscles be good for any thing? From the day
when we give, and take, and arrange the baby's playthings for him, hour by
hour, without ever setting before him to choose one of two and give up the
other, to the day when we take it upon ourselves to decide whether he
shall be an engineer or a lawyer, we persist in doing for him the work
which he should do for himself. This is because we love him more than we
love our own lives. Oh! if love could but have its eyes opened and see!
If we were not blind, we should know that whenever a child decides for
himself deliberately, and without bias from others, any question, however
small, he has had just so many minutes of mental gymnastics,--just so much
strengthening of the one faculty on whose health and firmness his success
in life will depend more than upon any other thing.
So many people do not know the difference between obstinacy and
clear-headed firmness of will, that it is hardly safe to say much in
praise or blame of either without expressly stating that you do not mean
the other. They are as unlike as digestion and indigestion, and one would
suppose could not be much more easily confounded; but it is constantly
done. It has not yet ceased to be said among fathers and mothers that it
is necessary to "break the will" of children; and it has not yet ceased to
be seen in the land that men by virtue of simple obstinacy are called men
of strong character. The truth is that the stronger, better-trained will a
man has, the less obstinate he will be. Will is of reason; obstinacy, of
temper. What have they in common?
For want of strong will kingdoms and souls have been lost. Without it
there is no kingdom for any man,--no, not even in his own soul. It is the
one attribute of all we possess which is most God-like. By it, we say,
under his laws, as he says, enacting those laws, "So far and no further."
It is not enough that we do not "break" this grand power. It should be
strengthened, developed, trained. And, as the good teacher of gymnastics
gives his beginners light weights to lift and swing, so should we bring to
the children small points to decide; to the very little children, very
little points. "Will you have the apple, or the orange? You cannot have
both. Choose; but after you have chosen you cannot change." "Will you have
the horseback ride to-day, or the opera to-morrow night? You can have but
one."
Every day, many times a day, a child should decide for himself points
involving pros and cons,--substantial ones too. Let him even decide
unwisely, and take the consequences; that too is good for him. No amount
of Blackstone can give such an idea of law as a month of prison. Tell him
as much as you please of what you know on both sides; but compel him to
decide, and also compel him not to be too long about it. "Choose ye this
day whom ye will serve" is a text good for every morning.
If men and women had in their childhood such training of their wills as
this, we should not see so many putting their hands to the plough and
looking back, and "not fit for the kingdom of heaven." Nor for any kingdom
of earth, either, unless it be for the wicked little kingdom of the Prince
of Monaco, where there are but two things to be done,--gamble, or drown
yourself.
The Descendants of Nabal.
The line has never been broken, and they have married into respectable
families, right and left, until to-day there can hardly be found a
household which has not at least one to worry it.
They are not men and women of great passionate natures, who flame out now
and then in an outbreak like a volcano, from which everybody runs. This,
though terrible while it lasts, is soon over, and there are great
compensations in such souls. Their love is worth having. Their tenderness
is great. One can forgive them "seventy times seven," for the hasty words
and actions of which they repent immediately with tears.
But the Nabals are sullen; they are grumblers; they are never done. Such
sons of Belial are they to this day that no man can speak peaceably unto
them. They are as much worse than passionate people as a slow drizzle of
rain is than a thunder-storm. For the thunder-storm, you stay in-doors,
and you cannot help having pleasure in its sharp lights and darks and
echoes; and when it is over, what clear air, what a rainbow! But in the
drizzle, you go out; you think that with a waterproof, an umbrella, and
overshoes, you can manage to get about in spite of it, and attend to your
business. What a state you come home in,--muddy, limp, chilled,
disheartened! The house greets you, looking also muddy and cold,--for the
best of front halls gives up in despair and cannot look any thing but
forlorn in a long, drizzling rain; all the windows are bleared with
trickling, foggy wet on the outside, which there is no wiping off nor
seeing through, and if one could see through there is no gain. The street
is more gloomy than the house; black, slimy mud, inches deep on crossings;
the same black, slimy mud in footprints on side-walks; hopeless-looking
people hurrying by, so unhappy by reason of the drizzle that a weird sort
of family likeness is to be seen in all their faces. This is all that can
be seen outside. It is better not to look. For the inside is no redemption
except a wood-fire,--a good, generous wood-fire,--not in any of the modern
compromises called open stoves, but on a broad stone hearth, with a big
background of chimney, up which the sparks can go skipping and creeping.
This can redeem a drizzle; but this cannot redeem a grumbler. Plump he
sits down in the warmth of its very blaze, and complains that it snaps,
perhaps, or that it is oak and maple, when he paid for all hickory. You
can trust him to put out your wood-fire for you as effectually as a
water-spout. And, if even a wood-fire, bless it! cannot outshine the gloom
of his presence, what is to happen in the places where there is no
wood-fire, on the days when real miseries, big and little, are on hand, to
be made into mountains of torture by his grumbling? Oh, who can describe
him? There is no language which can do justice to him; no supernatural
foresight which can predict where his next thrust will fall, from what
unsuspected corner he will send his next arrow. Like death, he has all
seasons for his own; his ingenuity is infernal. Whoever tries to forestall
or appease him might better be at work in Augean stables; because, after
all, we must admit that the facts of life are on his side. It is not
intended that we shall be very comfortable. There is a terrible amount of
total depravity in animate and inanimate things. From morning till night
there is not an hour without its cross to carry. The weather thwarts us;
servants, landlords, drivers, washerwomen, and bosom friends misbehave;
clothes don't fit; teeth ache; stomachs get out of order; newspapers are
stupid; and children make too much noise. If there are not big troubles,
there are little ones. If they are not in sight, they are hiding. I have
wondered whether the happiest mortal could point to one single moment and
say, "At that moment there was nothing in my life which I would have had
changed." I think not.
In argument, therefore, the grumbler has the best of it. It is more than
probable that things are as he says. But why say it? Why make four
miseries out of three? If the three be already unbearable, so much the
worse. If he is uncomfortable, it is a pity; we are sorry, but we cannot
change the course of Nature. We shall soon have our own little turn of
torments, and we do not want to be worn out before it comes by having
listened to his; probably, too, the very things of which he complains are
pressing just as heavily on us as on him,--are just as unpleasant to
everybody as to him. Suppose everybody did as he does. Imagine, for
instance, a chorus of grumble from ten people at a breakfast-table, all
saying at once, or immediately after each other, "This coffee is not fit
to drink." "Really, the attendance in this house is insufferably poor." I
have sometimes wished to try this homoeopathic treatment in a bad case of
grumble. It sounds as if it might work a cure.
If you lose your temper with the grumbler, and turn upon him suddenly,
saying, "Oh, do not spoil all our pleasure. Do make the best of things:
or, at least, keep quiet!" then how aggrieved he is! how unjust he thinks
you are to "make a personal matter of it"! "You do not, surely, suppose I
think you are responsible for it, do you?" he says, with a lofty air of
astonishment at your unreasonable sensitiveness. Of course, we do not
suppose he thinks we are to blame; we do not take him to be a fool as well
as a grumbler. But he speaks to us, at us, before us, about the cause of
his discomfort, whatever it may be, precisely as he would if we were to
blame; and that is one thing which makes his grumbling so insufferable.
But this he can never be made to see. And the worst of it is that
grumbling is contagious. If we live with him, we shall, sooner or later,
in spite of our dislike of his ways, fall into them; even sinking so low,
perhaps, before the end of a single summer, as to be heard complaining of
butter at boarding-house tables, which is the lowest deep of vulgarity of
grumbling. There is no help for this; I have seen it again and again. I
have caught it myself. One grumbler in a family is as pestilent a thing as
a diseased animal in a herd: if he be not shut up or killed, the herd is
lost.
But the grumbler cannot be shut up or killed, since grumbling is not held
to be a proof of insanity, nor a capital offence,--more's the pity.
What, then, is to be done? Keep out of his way, at all costs, if he be
grown up. If it be a child, labor day and night, as you would with a
tendency to paralysis, or distortion of limb, to prevent this blight on
its life.
It sounds extreme to say that a child should never be allowed to express a
dislike of any thing which cannot be helped; but I think it is true. I do
not mean that it should be positively forbidden or punished, but that it
should never pass unnoticed; his attention should be invariably called to
its uselessness, and to the annoyance it gives to other people. Children
begin by being good-natured little grumblers at every thing which goes
wrong, simply from the outspokenness of their natures. All they think they
say and act. The rudiments of good behavior have to be chiefly negative at
the outset, like Punch's advice to those about to marry,--"Don't."
The race of grumblers would soon die out if all children were so trained
that never, between the ages of five and twelve, did they utter a needless
complaint without being gently reminded that it was foolish and
disagreeable. How easy for a good-natured and watchful mother to do this!
It takes but a word.
"Oh, dear! I wish it had not rained to-day. It is too bad!"
"You do not really mean what you say, my darling. It is of much more
consequence that the grass should grow than that you should go out to
play. And it is so silly to complain, when we cannot stop its raining."
"Mamma, I hate this pie."
"Oh! hush, dear! Don't say so, if you do. You can leave it. You need not
eat it. But think how disagreeable it sounds to hear you say such a
thing."
"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I am too cold."
"Yes, dear, I know you are. So is mamma. But we shall not feel any warmer
for saying so. We must wait till the fire burns better; and the time will
seem twice as long if we grumble."
"Oh, mamma! mamma! My steam-engine is all spoiled. It won't run. I hate
things that wind up!"
"But, my dear little boy, don't grumble so! What would you think if mamma
were to say, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My little boy's stockings are full of
holes. How I hate to mend stockings!' and, 'Oh, dear! oh, dear! My little
boy has upset my work-box! I hate little boys'?"
How they look steadily into your eyes for a minute,--the honest,
reasonable little souls!--when you say such things to them; and then run
off with a laugh, lifted up, for that time, by your fitly spoken words of
help.
Oh! if the world could only stop long enough for one generation of
mothers to be made all right, what a millennium could be begun in thirty
years!
"But, mamma, you are grumbling yourself at me because I grumbled!" says a
quick-witted darling not ten years old. Ah! never shall any weak spot in
our armor escape the keen eyes of these little ones.
"Yes, dear! And I shall grumble at you till I cure you of grumbling.
Grumblers are the only thing in this world that it is right to grumble
at."
"Boys Not Allowed."
It was a conspicuous signboard, at least four feet long, with large black
letters on a white ground: "Boys not allowed." I looked at it for some
moments in a sort of bewildered surprise: I did not quite comprehend the
meaning of the words. At last I understood it. I was waiting in a large
railway station, where many trains connect; and most of the passengers
from the train in which I was were eating dinner in a hotel near by. I was
entirely alone in the car, with the exception of one boy, who was perhaps
eleven years old. I made an involuntary ejaculation as I read the words on
the sign, and the boy looked around at me.
"Little boy," said I, solemnly, "do you see that sign?"
He turned his head, and, reading the ominous warning, nodded sullenly, but
said nothing.
"Boy, what does it mean?" said I. "Boys must be allowed to come into this
railway station. There are two now standing in the doorway directly under
the sign."
The latent sympathy in my tone touched his heart. He left his seat, and,
coming to mine, edged in past me; and, putting his head out of the window,
read the sentence aloud in a contemptuous tone. Then he offered me a
peanut, which I took; and he proceeded to tell me what he thought of the
sign.
"Boys not allowed!" said he. "That's just the way 'tis everywhere; but I
never saw the sign up before. It don't make any difference, though,
whether they put the sign up or not. Why, in New York (you live in New
York, don't you?) they won't even stop the horse-cars for a boy to get on.
Nobody thinks any thing'll hurt a boy; but they're glad enough to 'allow'
us when there's any errands to be done, and"--
"Do you live in New York?" interrupted I; for I did not wish to hear the
poor little fellow's list of miseries, which I knew by heart beforehand
without his telling me, having been hopeless knight-errant of oppressed
boyhood all my life.
Yes, he "lived in New York," and he "went to a grammar school," and he had
"two sisters." And so we talked on in that sweet, ready, trustful talk
which comes naturally only from children's lips, until the "twenty minutes
for refreshments" were over, and the choked and crammed passengers, who
had eaten big dinners in that breath of time, came hurrying back to their
seats. Among them came the father and mother of my little friend. In angry
surprise at not finding him in the seat where they left him, they
exclaimed,--
"Now, where _is_ that boy? Just like him! We might have lost every one of
these bags."
"Here I am, mamma," he called out, pleasantly. "I could see the bags all
the time. Nobody came into the car."
"I told you not to leave the seat, sir. What do you mean by such conduct?"
said the father.
"Oh, no, papa," said poor Boy, "you only told me to take care of the
bags." And an anxious look of terror came into his face, which told only
too well under how severe a _regime_ he lived. I interposed hastily with--
"I am afraid I am the cause of your little son's leaving his seat. He had
sat very still till I spoke to him; and I believe I ought to take all the
blame."
The parents were evidently uncultured, shallow people. Their irritation
with him was merely a surface vexation, which had no real foundation in a
deep principle. They became complaisant and smiling at my first word, and
Boy escaped with a look of great relief to another seat, where they gave
him a simple luncheon of saleratus gingerbread. "Boys not allowed" to go
in to dinner at the Massasoit, thought I to myself; and upon that text I
sat sadly meditating all the way from Springfield to Boston.
How true it was, as the little fellow had said, that "it don't make any
difference whether they put the sign up or not!" No one can watch
carefully any average household where there are boys, and not see that
there are a thousand little ways in which the boys' comfort, freedom,
preference will be disregarded, when the girls' will be considered. This
is partly intentional, partly unconscious. Something is to be said
undoubtedly on the advantage of making the boy realize early and keenly
that manhood is to bear and to work, and womanhood is to be helped and
sheltered. But this should be inculcated, not inflicted; asked, not
seized; shown and explained, not commanded. Nothing can be surer than the
growth in a boy of tender, chivalrous regard for his sisters and for all
women, if the seeds of it be rightly sown and gently nurtured. But the
common method is quite other than this. It begins too harshly and at once
with assertion or assumption.
"Mother never thinks I am of any consequence," said a dear boy to me, the
other day. "She's all for the girls."
This was not true; but there was truth in it. And I am very sure that the
selfishness, the lack of real courtesy, which we see so plainly and
pitiably in the behavior of the average young man to-day is the slow,
certain result of years of just such feelings as this child expressed. The
boy has to scramble for his rights. Naturally he is too busy to think much
about the rights of others. The man keeps up the habit, and is negatively
selfish without knowing it.
Take, for instance, the one point of the minor courtesies (if we can dare
to call any courtesies minor) of daily intercourse. How many people are
there who habitually speak to a boy of ten, twelve, or fourteen with the
same civility as to his sister, a little younger or older?
"I like Miss----," said this same dear boy to me, one day; "for she
always bids me good-morning."
Ah! never is one such word thrown away on a loving, open-hearted boy. Men
know that safe through all the wear and tear of life they keep far greener
the memory of some woman or some man who was kind to them in their boyhood
than of the friend who helped or cheered them yesterday.
Dear, blessed, noisy, rollicking, tormenting, comforting Boy! What should
we do without him? How much we like, without suspecting it, his breezy
presence in the house! Except for him, how would errands be done, chairs
brought, nails driven, cows stoned out of our way, letters carried, twine
and knives kept ready, lost things found, luncheon carried to picnics,
three-year-olds that cry led out of meeting, butterflies and birds' nests
and birch-bark got, the horse taken round to the stable, borrowed things
sent home,--and all with no charge for time?
Dear, patient, busy Boy! Shall we not sometimes answer his questions? Give
him a comfortable seat? Wait and not reprove him till after the company
has gone? Let him wear his best jacket, and buy him half as many neckties
as his sister has? Give him some honey, even if there is not enough to go
round? Listen tolerantly to his little bragging, and help him "do" his
sums?
With a sudden shrill scream the engine slipped off on a side-track, and
the cars glided into the great, grim city-station, looking all the grimmer
for its twinkling lights. The masses of people who were waiting and the
masses of people who had come surged toward each other like two great
waves, and mingled in a moment. I caught sight of my poor little friend,
Boy, following his father, struggling along in the crowd, carrying two
heavy carpet-bags, a strapped bundle, and two umbrellas, and being sharply
told to "Keep up close there."
"Ha!" said I, savagely, to myself, "doing porters' work is not one of the
things which 'boys' are 'not allowed.'"
Half an Hour in a Railway Station.
It was one of those bleak and rainy days which mark the coming of spring
on New England sea-shores. The rain felt and looked as if it might at any
minute become hail or snow; the air pricked like needles when it blew
against flesh. Yet the huge railway station was as full of people as ever.
One could see no difference between this dreariest of days and the
sunniest, so far as the crowd was concerned, except that fewer of the
people wore fine clothes; perhaps, also, that their faces looked a little
more sombre and weary than usual.
There is no place in the world where human nature shows to such sad
disadvantage as in waiting-rooms at railway stations, especially in the
"Ladies' Room." In the "Gentlemen's Room" there is less of that ghastly,
apathetic silence which seems only explainable as an interval between two
terrible catastrophes. Shall we go so far as to confess that even the
unsightly spittoons, and the uncleanly and loquacious fellowship resulting
from their common use, seem here, for the moment, redeemed from a little
of their abominableness,--simply because almost any action is better than
utter inaction, and any thing which makes the joyless, taciturn American
speak to his fellow whom he does not know, is for the time being a
blessing. But in the "Ladies' Room" there is not even a community of
interest in a single bad habit, to break the monotone of weary stillness.
Who has not felt the very soul writhe within her as she has first crossed
the threshold of one of these dismal antechambers of journey? Carpetless,
dingy, dusty; two or three low sarcophagi of greenish-gray iron in open
spaces, surrounded by blue-lipped women, in different angles and attitudes
of awkwardness, trying to keep the soles of their feet in a perpendicular
position, to be warmed at what they have been led to believe is a
steam-heating apparatus; a few more women, equally listless and
weary-looking, standing in equally difficult and awkward positions before
a counter, holding pie in one hand, and tea in a cup and saucer in the
other, taking alternate mouthfuls of each, and spilling both; the rest
wedged bolt upright against the wall in narrow partitioned seats, which
only need a length of perforated foot-board in front to make them fit to
be patented as the best method of putting whole communities of citizens
into the stocks at once. All, feet warmers, pie-eaters, and those who sit
in the red-velvet stocks, wear so exactly the same expression of vacuity
and fatigue that they might almost be taken for one gigantic and unhappy
family connection, on its way to what is called in newspapers "a sad
event." The only wonder is that this stiffened, desiccated crowd retains
vitality enough to remember the hours at which its several trains depart,
and to rise up and shake itself alive and go on board. One is haunted
sometimes by the fancy that some day, when the air in the room is
unusually bad and the trains are delayed, a curious phenomenon will be
seen. The petrifaction will be carried a little farther than usual, and,
when the bell rings and the official calls out, "Train made up for Babel,
Hinnom, and way stations?" no women will come forth from the "Ladies'
Room," no eye will move, no muscle will stir. Husbands and brothers will
wait and search vainly for those who should have met them at the station,
with bundles of the day's shopping to be carried out; homes will be
desolate; and the history of rare fossils and petrifactions will have a
novel addition. Or, again, that, if some sudden convulsion of Nature, like
those which before now have buried wicked cities and the dwellers in them,
were to-day to swallow up the great city of New Sodom in America, and keep
it under ground for a few thousand years, nothing in all its circuit would
so puzzle the learned archaeologists of A.D. 5873 as the position of the
skeletons in these same waiting-rooms of railway stations.