The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, No. 66, April, 1863

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and weariness and despondency come of themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch. A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward. She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's garden-plot, keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to work well to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must first say, "Here am I." But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them. It is the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their children's feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes, kind, considerate, and forbearing, but to each other hasty, careless, and cold. Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love. It ought not so to be. Husband and wife should each stand first in the other's estimation. They have no right to forget each other's comfort, convenience, sensitiveness, tastes, or happiness in those of their children. Nothing can discharge them from the obligations which they are under to each other. But if a woman lets herself become shabby, drudgy, and commonplace as a wife, in her efforts to be perfect as a mother, can she expect to retain the consideration that is due to the wife? Not a man in the world but would rather see his wife tidy, neat, and elegant in her attire, easy and assured in her bearing, intelligent and vivacious in her talk, than the contrary; and if she neglect these things, ought she to be surprised, if he turns to fresh woods and pastures new for the diversion and entertainment which he seeks in vain at home? This is quaky ground, but I know where I am, and I am not afraid. I don't expect men or women to say that they agree with me, but I am right for all that. Let us bring our common sense to bear on this point, and not be fooled by reiteration. Cause and effect obtain here as elsewhere. If you add two and two, the result is four, however much you may try to blink it. People do not always tell lies, when they are telling what is not the truth; but falsehood is still disastrous. Men and women think they believe a thousand things which they do not believe; but as long as they think so, it is just as bad as if it were so. Men talk—and women listen and echo—about the overpowering loveliness and charm of a young mother surrounded by her blooming family, ministering to their wants and absorbed in their welfare, self-denying and self-forgetful; and she is lovely and charming; but if this is all, it is little more than the charm and loveliness of a picture. It is not magnetic and irresistible. It has the semblance, but not the smell of life. It is pretty to look at, but it is not vigorous for command. Her husband will have a certain kind of admiration and love. Her wish will be law within a certain very limited sphere; but beyond that he will not take her into his counsels and confidence. A woman must make herself obvious to her husband, or he will drift out beyond her horizon. She will be to him very nearly what she wills and works to be. If she adapts herself to her children and does not adapt herself to her husband, he will fall into the arrangement, and the two will fall apart. I do not mean that they will quarrel, but they will lead separate lives. They will be no longer husband and wife. There will be a domestic alliance, but no marriage. A predominant interest in the same objects binds them together after a fashion; but marriage is something beyond that. If a woman wishes and purposes to be the friend of her husband,—if she would be valuable to him, not simply as the nurse of his children and the directress of his household, but as a woman fresh and fair and fascinating, to him intrinsically lovely and attractive, she should make an effort for it. It is not by any means a thing that comes of itself, or that can be left to itself. She must read, and observe, and think, and rest up to it. Men, as a general thing, will not tell you so. They talk about having the slippers ready, and enjoin women to be domestic. But men are blockheads,—dear, and affectionate, and generous blockheads,—benevolent, large-hearted, and chivalrous,—kind, and patient, and hard-working,—but stupid where women are concerned. Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life, pleasant and comfortable as women actually find them, not one in ten thousand but makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize about women. Besides, they have an axe to grind. The pretty things they inculcate—slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy—ought indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them naturally. A great many more women bore boorish husbands with fond little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large, comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have an appropriate niche, and not dwindle down to a narrow and servile one, over which those duties shall spread and occupy the whole space.

This mistake is the foundation of a world of wretchedness and ruin. I can see Satan standing at the mother's elbow. He follows her around into the nursery and the kitchen. He tosses up the babies and the omelets, delivers dutiful harangues about the inappropriateness of the piano and the library, and grins fiendishly in his sleeve at the wreck he is making,—a wreck not necessarily of character, but of happiness; for I suppose Satan has so bad a disposition, that, if he cannot do all the harm he would wish, he will still do all he can. It is true that there are thousands of noble men married to fond and foolish women, and they are both happy. Well, the fond and foolish women are very fortunate. They have fallen into hands that will entreat them tenderly, and they will not perceive that anything is kept back. Nor are the noble men wholly unfortunate, in that they have not taken to their hearths shrews. But this is not marriage.

There are women less foolish. They see their husbands attracted in other directions more often and more easily than in theirs. They have too much sterling worth and profound faith to be vulgarly jealous. They fear nothing like shame or crime; but they feel the fact that their own preoccupation with homely household duties precludes real companionship; the interchange of emotions, thoughts, sentiments, a living and palpable and vivid contact of mind with mind, of heart with heart. They see others whose leisure ministers to grace, accomplishments, piquancy, and attractiveness, and the moth flies towards the light by his own nature. Because he is a wise and virtuous and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame. He does not even scorch his wings. He never thinks of such a thing. He merely circles around the pleasant light, sunning himself in it without much thought one way or another, only feeling that it is pleasant; but meanwhile Mrs. Moth sits at home in darkness, mending the children's clothes, which is not exhilarating. Many a woman who feels that she possesses her husband's affection misses something. She does not secure his fervor, his admiration. His love is honest and solid, but a little dormant, and therefore dull. It does not brace, and tone, and stimulate. She wants not the love only, but the keenness and edge and flavor of the love; and she suffers untold pangs. I know it, for I have seen it. It is not a thing to be uttered. Most women do not admit it even to themselves; but it is revealed by a lift of the eyelash, by a quiver of the eye, by a tone of the voice, by a trick of the finger.

But what is the good of saying all this, if a woman cannot help herself? The children must be seen to, and the work must be done, and after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her "multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many children." She has neither time nor spirit for self-culture, beyond what she may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her that she will alienate her husband and injure her children by her course, when there is no other course for her to pursue? What can she do about it?

There is one thing that she need not do. She need not sit down and write a book, affirming that it is the most glorious and desirable condition imaginable. She need not lift up her voice and declare that "she lives above the ills and disquietudes of her condition, in an atmosphere of love and peace and pleasure far beyond the storms and conflicts of this material life." Who ever heard of the mother of a young and increasing family living in an atmosphere of peace, not to say pleasure, above conflicts and storms? Who does not know that the private history of every family with the ordinary allowance of brains is a record of incessant internecine warfare? If she said less, we might believe her. When she says so much, we cannot help suspecting. To make the best of anything, it is not necessary to declare that it is the best thing. Children must be taken care of, but it is altogether probable that there are too many of them. Some people think that opinion several times more atrocious than murder in the first degree; but I see no atrocity in it, and there is none. I think there is an immense quantity of nonsense about, regarding this thing. For my part, I don't credit half of it. I believe in Malthus,—a great deal more than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the places that I have seen would be much improved by being decimated, not to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious, stiff-necked and uncircumcised, in heart and ears, the fewer of them the better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a thousand times better than an overcrowded one with everything at loose ends. As with the village, so with the family. There ought to be no more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and their parents. All beyond this is wrong and disastrous. I know of no greater crime, than to give life to souls, and then degrade them, or suffer them to be degraded. Children are the poor man's blessing and Cornelia's jewels, just so long as Cornelia and the poor man can make adequate provision for them. But the ragged, filthy, squalid, unearthly little wretches that wallow before the poor man's shanty-door are the poor man's shame and curse. The sickly, sallow, sorrowful little ones, shadowed too early by life's cares, are something other than a blessing. When Cornelia finds her children too many for her, when her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle flats out of her wine of life and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian jewels. One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the unmeasured reprobation of our little book. Of course, if they can stand seven, very well. Seven and seventy times seven, if you like, only let them be buds, not blights. If we obeyed the laws of God, children would be like spring blossoms. They would impart as much freshness and strength as they abstract. They are a natural institution, and Nature is eminently healthy. But when they "come crowding into the home-nest," as our book daintily says, they are a nuisance. God never meant the home-nest to be crowded. There is room enough and elbow-room enough in this world for everything that ought to be in it. The moment there is crowding, you may be sure something wrong is going on. Either a bad thing is happening, or too much of a good thing, which counts up just the same. The parents begin to repair the evil by a greater one. They attempt to patch their own rents by dilapidating their children. They recruit their own exhausted energies by laying hold of the young energies around them, and older children are bored, and fretted, and deformed in figure and temper by the care of younger children. This is horrible. Some care and task and responsibility are good for a child's own development; but every care, every toil, every atom of labor that is laid upon children beyond what is solely the best for their own character is intolerable and inexcusable oppression. Parents have no right to lighten their own burdens by imposing them upon the children. The poor things had nothing to do with being born. They came into the world without any volition of their own. Their existence began only to serve the pleasure or the pride of others. It was a culpable cruelty, in the first place, to introduce them into a sphere where no adequate provision could be made for their comfort and culture; but to shoulder them, after they get here, with the load which belongs to their parents is outrageous. Earth is not a paradise at best, and at worst it is very near the other place. The least we can do is to make the way as smooth as possible for the new-comers. There is not the least danger that it will be too smooth. If you stagger under the weight which you have imprudently assumed, stagger. But don't be such an unutterable coward and brute as to illumine your own life by darkening the young lives which sprang from yours. I often wonder that children do not open their mouths and curse the father that begat and the mother that bore them. I often wonder that parents do not tremble lest the cry of the children whom they oppress go up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and bring down wrath upon their guilty heads. It was well that God planted filial affection and reverence as an instinct in the human breast. If it depended upon reason, it would have but a precarious existence.

I wish women would have the sense and courage—I will not say, to say what they think, for that is not always desirable—but to think according to the facts. They have a strong desire to please men, which is quite right and natural; but in their eagerness to do this, they sometimes forget what is due to themselves. To think namby-pambyism for the sake of pleasing men is running benevolence into the ground. Not that women consciously do this, but they do it. They don't mean to pander to false masculine notions, but they do. They don't know that they are pandering to them, but they are. Men say silly things, partly because they don't know any better, and partly because they don't want any better. They are strong, and can generally make shift to bear their end of the pole without being crushed. So they are tolerably content. They are not very much to blame. People cannot be expected to start on a crusade against ills of which they have but a vague and cloudy conception. The edge does not cut them, and so they think it is not much of a sword after all. But women have, or ought to have, a more subtile and intimate acquaintance with realities. They ought to know what is fact and what is fol-de-rol. They ought to distinguish between the really noble and the simply physical, not to say faulty. If men do not, it is women's duty to help them. I think, if women would only not be quite so afraid of being thought unwomanly, they would be a great deal more womanly than they are. To be brave, and single-minded, and discriminating, and judicious, and clear-sighted, and self-reliant, and decisive, that is pure womanly. To be womanish is not to be womanly. To be flabby, and plastic, and weak, and acquiescent, and insipid, is not womanly. And I could wish sometimes that women would not be quite so patient. They often exhibit a degree of long-suffering entirely unwarrantable. There is no use in suffering, unless you cannot help it; and a good, stout, resolute protest would often be a great deal more wise, and Christian, and beneficial on all sides, than so much patient endurance. A little spirit and "spunk" would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind, considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering them up in their bungling opinions, when a few sensible ideas, wisely administered, would do so much to enlighten them, and reveal the path which needs only to be revealed to secure their unhesitating entrance upon it. It is absurd to suppose that unvarying acquiescence is necessary to secure and retain their esteem, and that a frank avowal of differing opinions, even if they were wrong, would work its forfeiture. A respect held on so frail a tenure were little worth. But it is not so. I believe that manhood and womanhood are too truly harmonious to need iron bands, too truly noble to require the props of falsehood. Truth, simple and sincere, without partiality and without hypocrisy, is the best food for both. If any are to be found on either side too weak to administer or digest it, the remedy is not to mix it with folly or falsehood, for they are poisons, but to strengthen the organisms with wholesome tonics,—not undiluted, perhaps, but certainly unadulterated.

O Edmund Sparkler, you builded better than you knew, when you reared eulogiums upon the woman with no nonsense about her!

MY SHIP

  Mist on the shore, and dark on the sand,    The chilly gulls swept over my head,  When a stately ship drew near the land,—    Onward in silent grace she sped.  Lonely, I threw but a coward's glance    Upon the brave ship tall and free,  Joyfully dancing her mystic dance,    As if skies were blue and smooth the sea.  I breathed the forgotten odors of Spain,    Remembered my castles so far removed,  For they brought the distant faith again    That one who loves shall be beloved.  Then the goodly galleon suddenly    Dropped anchor close to the barren strand,  And various cargoes, all for me,    Laid on the bosom of my land.  O friend! her cargoes were thy love,    The stately ship thy presence fair;  Her pointed sails, like wings above,    Shall fill with praises and with prayer.* * * * *

BETROTHAL BY PROXY: A ROMANCE OF GENEALOGY

CHAPTER I

Ye who listen with impatience to the Reports of Historical Societies and have hitherto neglected to subscribe to an Antiquarian Journal, ye who imagine that there can be no intelligent and practical reply to the cui bono? shake of the head which declines to supply the funds for a genealogical investigation, attend to the history of my adventure in Foxden.

There!—I like to begin with the Moral; for no sensible man will leave the point and purpose of his testimony to the languid curiosity of a spent reader. Dr. Johnson never did so; and who am I to question his literary infallibility? So if you do not take kindly to the solemn rumble of the Johnsonese mail-coach of a sentence in which we set out, receive the purport of it thus: It is of advantage to be on good terms with one's ancestors: Also; men absorbed in this practical present may be all the better for a little counter irritation with the driest twigs of the family-tree.

And now, Why did I marry Miss Hurribattle? I am sure I had no intention of doing so. In the first place, when about eighteen years of age, I had firmly determined never to marry anybody. Then there were so many nice tea-ing families in the Atlantic city whose principal street was decorated by my modest counsellor's sign, that I really must excuse the rather unpleasant wonder of several friends at my out-of-the-way selection. That a somewhat experienced advocate, who had resisted for three years the fascinations of city belle-ship, should spend the legal vacation in a visit to an old gentleman he never saw before, and return affianced to a lady nobody had ever heard of,—I own there was something temptingly discussible in the circumstance; and knowing that fine relish for personal topics which distinguishes the American conversazione, how could I hope to escape? At first, it was a little awkward, when I went to a party, to see people who were talking together glance at me and murmur on with increased interest. Sometimes, when the wave of talk retreated a little, I would catch the prattle of some retiring rill to this effect: "But who are these Hurribattles? What an odd name! I wonder if that had anything to do with it."

The querist, whoever he or she might be, had unconsciously struck upon the explanation of the whole matter. Yes, it was the name: it had a great deal to do with it. And if you will allow me to step back a little into the past, and thence begin over again in good storyteller fashion, I will endeavor to make you understand how it all came about.

If I were obliged to designate in one word the profession and calling of Colonel Prowley of Foxden, I should say he was a Correspondent. Of course I do not mean a regular newspaper-correspondent, paid to concoct letters from Paris in the office of the "Foxden Regulator"; nor yet the amateur ditto, who is never tired of making family-tours to the White Mountains. But rather was he a gentleman, with an immense epistolary acquaintance all over the country, whose main business in life consisted in writing letters to all sorts of persons in a great variety of places. And this he did as his particular contribution towards the solution of this question: What in the world—or rather, what in the United States—is a man to do who accumulates sufficient property to relieve him from the necessities of active business? The answers offered to this inquiry of the Democratic Sphinx are, as we all know, various enough. Some men, of ready assurance and fluent speech, go into politics; some doze in libraries; some get up trotting-matches and yacht-races; while others dodge the difficulty altogether by going to disport themselves among the arts and letters of a foreign land. Colonel Prowley, with considerable originality, was moved to find employment in letter-writing, pursuing it with the same daily relish which many people find for gossip or small-talk. And this is the way in which I came to be favored with the good gentleman's communications. About three years ago a friend in England procured for me a book that I had long coveted,—Morton's "New English Canaan," printed at Amsterdam in the year 1637. This little volume, after the novelty of a fresh perusal was past, I happened to lend to a young gentleman of our boarding-house, who prepared short notices of books for one of the evening papers. He, it would appear, thought that some account of my acquisition might supply the matter for his diurnal paragraph. At all events, I received, some days after, a letter dated from Foxden, and bearing the signature of Elijah Prowley. It was couched in the old-fashioned style of compliment and excuses for the liberty taken,—which liberty consisted in requesting to have a fac-simile made of a certain page of a work that he had traced through a newspaper-article to my possession. The object, he said, was to supply the deficiency in a copy of the "Canaan" that had a place in his own library. Of course the request was complied with, and the correspondence begun.