Now comes marriage, — and it turns out that Enthusius is very particular as to his coffee, that he is excessively disturbed if his meals are at all irregular, and that he cannot be comfortable with any table arrangements which do not resemble those of his notable mother, lately deceased in the odour of sanctity; he also wants his house in perfect order at all hours. Still he does not propose to provide a trained housekeeper; it is all to be effected by means of certain raw Irish girls, under the superintendence of this angel who was to tread on roses, sleep on clouds, and never know an earthly care. Neither has Enthusius ever considered it a part of a husband’s duty to bear personal inconveniences in silence. He would freely shed his blood for Hermione, — nay, has often frantically proposed the same in the hours of courtship, when of course nobody wanted it done, and it could answer no manner of use; and thus to the idyllic dialogues of that period succeed such as these: —
“My dear, this tea is smoked: can’t you get Jane into the way of making it better?”
“My dear, I have tried; but she will not do as I tell her.”
“Well, all I know is, other people can have good tea, and I should think we might.”
And again at dinner: —
“My dear, this mutton is overdone again; it is always overdone.”
“Not always, dear, because you recollect on Monday you said it was just right.”
“Well, almost always.”
“Well, my dear, the reason to-day was, I had company in the parlour, and could not go out to caution Bridget, as I generally do. It’s very difficult to get things done with such a girl.”
“My mother’s things were always well done, no matter what her girl was.”
Again: “My dear, you must speak to the servants about wasting the coal. I never saw such a consumption of fuel in a family of our size;” or, “My dear, how can you let Maggie tear the morning paper?” or, “My dear, I shall actually have to give up coming to dinner if my dinners cannot be regular;” or, “My dear, I wish you would look at the way my shirts are ironed, — it is perfectly scandalous;” or, “My dear, you must not let Johnnie finger the mirror in the parlour;” or, “My dear, you must stop the children from playing in the garret;” or, “My dear, you must see that Maggie doesn’t leave the mat out on the railing when she sweeps the front hall;” and so on, up-stairs and down-stairs, in the lady’s chamber, in attic, garret, and cellar, “my dear” is to see that nothing goes wrong, and she is found fault with when anything does.
Yet Enthusius, when occasionally he finds his sometime angel in tears, and she tells him he does not love her as he once did, repudiates the charge with all his heart, and declares he loves her more than ever, — and perhaps he does. The only thing is that she has passed out of the plane of moonshine and poetry into that of actualities. While she was considered an angel, a star, a bird, an evening cloud, of course there was nothing to be found fault with in her; but now that the angel has become chief business-partner in an earthly working firm, relations are different. Enthusius could say the same things over again under the same circumstances, but unfortunately now they never are in the same circumstances. Enthusius is simply a man who is in the habit of speaking from impulse, and saying a thing merely and only because he feels it. Before marriage he worshipped and adored his wife as an ideal being dwelling in the land of dreams and poetries, and did his very best to make her unpractical and unfitted to enjoy the life to which he was to introduce her after marriage. After marriage he still yields unreflectingly to present impulses, which are no longer to praise, but to criticize and condemn. The very sensibility to beauty and love of elegance, which made him admire her before marriage, now transferred to the arrangement of the domestic ménage, lead him daily to perceive a hundred defects and find a hundred annoyances.
Thus far we suppose an amiable, submissive wife, who is only grieved, not provoked, — who has no sense of injustice, and meekly strives to make good the hard conditions of her lot. Such poor, little, faded women have we seen, looking for all the world like plants that have been nursed and forced into bloom in the steam-heat of the conservatory, and are now sickly and yellow, dropping leaf by leaf, in the dry, dusty parlour.
But there is another side of the picture, — where the wife, provoked and indignant, takes up the fault-finding trade in return, and with the keen arrows of her woman’s wit, searches and penetrates every joint of the husband’s armour, showing herself full as unjust and far more culpable in this sort of conflict.
Saddest of all sad things is it to see two once very dear friends employing all that peculiar knowledge of each other which love had given them only to harass and provoke, — thrusting and piercing with a certainty of aim that only past habits of confidence and affection could have put in their power, wounding their own hearts with every deadly thrust they made at one another, and all for such inexpressibly miserable trifles as usually form the openings of fault-finding dramas.
For the contentions that loosen the very foundations of love, that crumble away all its fine traceries and carved work, about what miserable worthless things do they commonly begin! — a dinner underdone, too much oil consumed, a newspaper torn, a waste of coal or soap, a dish broken! — and for this miserable sort of trash, very good, very generous, very religious people will sometimes waste and throw away by double-handfuls the very thing for which houses are built, and coal burned, and all the paraphernalia of a home established, — their happiness. Better cold coffee, smoky tea, burnt meat, better any inconvenience, any loss, than a loss of love; and nothing so surely burns away love as constant fault-finding.
For fault-finding once allowed as a habit between two near and dear friends comes in time to establish a chronic soreness, so that the mildest, the most reasonable suggestion, the gentlest implied reproof, occasions burning irritation; and when this morbid state has once set in, the restoration of love seems well nigh impossible.
For example: Enthusius having got up this morning in the best of humours, in the most playful tones begs Hermione not to make the tails of her g’s quite so long; and Hermione fires up with —
“And, pray, what else wouldn’t you wish me to do? Perhaps you would be so good, when you have leisure, as to make out an alphabetical list of the things in me that need correcting.”
“My dear, you are unreasonable.”
“I don’t think so. I should like to get to the end of the requirements of my lord and master sometimes.”
“Now, my dear, you really are very silly.”
“Please say something original, my dear. I have heard that till it has lost the charm of novelty.”
“Come now, Hermione, don’t let’s quarrel.”
“My dear sir, who thinks of quarrelling? Not I; I’m sure I was only asking to be directed. I trust some time, if I live to be ninety, to suit your fastidious taste. I trust the coffee is right this morning, and the tea, and the toast, and the steak, and the servants, and the front-hall mat, and the upper-story hall door, and the basement premises; and now I suppose I am to be trained in respect to my general education. I shall set about the tails of my g’s at once, but trust you will prepare a list of any other little things that need emendation.”
Enthusius pushes away his coffee, and drums on the table.
“If I might be allowed one small criticism, my dear, I should observe that it is not good manners to drum on the table,” said his fair opposite.
“Hermione, you are enough to drive a man frantic!” exclaims Enthusius, rushing out with bitterness in his soul, and a determination to take his dinner at Delmonico’s.
Enthusius feels himself an abused man, and thinks there never was such a sprite of a woman, — the most utterly unreasonable, provoking human being he ever met with. What he does not think of is, that it is his own inconsiderate, constant fault-finding that has made every nerve so sensitive and sore, that the mildest suggestion of advice or reproof on the most indifferent subject is impossible. He has not, to be sure, been the guilty partne
r in this morning’s encounter; he has said only what is fair and proper, and she has been unreasonable and cross; but, after all, the fault is remotely his.
When Enthusius awoke, after marriage, to find in his Hermione in very deed only a bird, a star, a flower, but no housekeeper, why did he not face the matter like an honest man? Why did he not remember all the fine things about dependence and uselessness with which he had been filling her head for a year or two, and in common honesty exact no more from her than he had bargained for? Can a bird make a good business manager? Can a flower oversee Biddy and Mike, and impart to their uncircumcised ears the high crafts and mysteries of elegant housekeeping?
If his little wife has to learn her domestic rôle of household duty, as most girls do, by a thousand mortifications, a thousand perplexities, a thousand failures, let him, in ordinary fairness, make it as easy to her as possible. Let him remember with what admiring smiles, before marriage, he received her pretty professions of utter helplessness and incapacity in domestic matters, finding only poetry and grace in what, after marriage, proved an annoyance.
And if a man finds that he has a wife ill-adapted to wifely duties, does it follow that the best thing he can do is to blurt out, without form or ceremony, all the criticisms and corrections which may occur to him in the many details of household life? He would not dare to speak with as little preface, apology, or circumlocution, to his business manager, to his butcher, or his baker. When Enthusius was a bachelor, he never criticised the table at his boarding-house without some reflection, and studying to take unto himself acceptable words whereby to soften the asperity of the criticism. The laws of society require that a man should qualify, soften, and wisely time his admonitions to those he meets in the outer world, or they will turn again and rend him. But to his own wife, in his own house and home, he can find fault without ceremony or softening. So he can; and he can awake, in the course of a year or two, to find his wife a changed woman, and his home unendurable. He may find, too, that unceremonious fault-finding is a game that two can play at, and that a woman can shoot her arrows with far more precision and skill than a man.
But the fault lies not always on the side of the husband. Quite as often is a devoted, patient, good-tempered man harassed and hunted and baited by the inconsiderate fault-finding of a wife whose principal talent seems to lie in the ability at first glance to discover and make manifest the weak point in everything.
We have seen the most generous, the most warm-hearted and obliging of mortals, under this sort of training, made the most morose and disobliging of husbands. Sure to be found fault with, whatever they do, they have at last ceased doing. The disappointment of not pleasing they have abated by not trying to please.
We once knew a man who married a spoiled beauty, whose murmurs, exactions, and caprices were infinite. He had at last, as a refuge to his wearied nerves, settled down into a habit of utter disregard and neglect; he treated her wishes and her complaints with equal indifference, and went on with his life as nearly as possible as if she did not exist. He silently provided for her what he thought proper, without troubling himself to notice her requests or listen to her grievances. Sickness came, but the heart of her husband was cold and gone; there was no sympathy left to warm her. Death came, and he breathed freely as a man released. He married again, — a woman with no beauty, but much love and goodness, — a woman who asked little, blamed seldom, and then with all the tact and address which the utmost thoughtfulness could devise; and the passive, negligent husband became the attentive, devoted slave of her will. He was in her hands as clay in the hands of the potter; the least breath or suggestion of criticism from her lips, who criticised so little and so thought fully, weighed more with him than many outspoken words. So different is the same human being, according to the touch of the hand which plays upon him!
I have spoken hitherto of fault-finding as between husband and wife: its consequences are even worse as respects children. The habit once suffered to grow up between the two that constitute the head of the family descends and runs through all the branches. Children are more hurt by indiscriminate, thoughtless fault-finding than by any other one thing. Often a child has all the sensitiveness and all the susceptibility of a grown person, added to the faults of childhood. Nothing about him is right as yet; he is immature and faulty at all points, and everybody feels at perfect liberty to criticize him to right and left, above, below, and around, till he takes refuge either in callous hardness or irritable moroseness.
A bright, noisy boy rushes in from school, eager to tell his mother something he has on his heart, and Number One cries out, —
“Oh, you’ve left the door open! I do wish you wouldn’t always leave the door open! And do look at the mud on your shoes! How many times must I tell you to wipe your feet?”
“Now there you’ve thrown your cap on the sofa again! When will you learn to hang it up?”
“Don’t put your slate there; that isn’t the place for it.”
“How dirty your hands are! what have you been doing?”
“Don’t sit in that chair; you break the springs, jouncing.”
“Mercy! how your hair looks! Do go up-stairs and comb it.”
“There, if you haven’t torn the braid all off your coat! Dear me, what a boy!”
“Don’t speak so loud; your voice goes through my head.”
“I want to know, Jim, if it was you that broke up that barrel that I have been saving for brown flour.”
“I believe it was you, Jim, that hacked the edge of my razor.”
“Jim’s been writing at my desk, and blotted three sheets of the best paper.”
Now the question is, if any of the grown people of the family had to run the gauntlet of a string of criticisms on themselves equally true as those that salute unlucky Jim, would they be any better-natured about it than he is?
No; but they are grown-up people; they have rights that others are bound to respect. Everybody cannot tell them exactly what he thinks about everything they do. If every one could and did, would there not be terrible reactions?
Servants in general are only grown-up children, and the same considerations apply to them. A raw, untrained Irish girl introduced into an elegant house has her head bewildered in every direction. There are the gas-pipes, the water-pipes, the whole paraphernalia of elegant and delicate conveniences, about which a thousand little details are to be learned, the neglect of any one of which may flood the house, or poison it with foul air, of bring innumerable inconveniences. The setting of a genteel table and the waiting upon it involve fifty possibilities of mistake, each one of which will grate on the nerves of a whole family. There is no wonder, then, that the occasions of fault-finding in families are so constant and harassing; and there is no wonder that mistress and maid often meet each other on the terms of the bear and the man who fell together fifty feet down from the limb of a high tree, and lay at the bottom of it, looking each other in the face in helpless, growling despair. The mistress is rasped, irritated, despairing, and with good reason; the maid is the same, and with equally good reason. Yet let the mistress be suddenly introduced into a printing-office, and required, with what little teaching could be given her in a few rapid directions, to set up the editorial of a morning paper, and it is probable she would be as stupid and bewildered as Biddy in her beautifully-arranged house.
There are elegant houses which, from causes like these, are ever vexed like the troubled sea that cannot rest. Literally, their table has become a snare before them, and that which should have been for their welfare, a trap. Their gas, and their water, and their fire, and their elegancies and ornaments, all in unskilled, blundering hands, seem only so many guns in the hands of Satan, through which he fires at their Christian graces day and night, — so that, if their house is kept in order, their temper and religion are not.
I am speaking now to the consciousness of thousands of women who are, in will and purpose, real saints. Their souls go up to heaven — its love, its purity, its
rest — with every hymn and prayer and sacrament in church; and they come home to be mortified, disgraced, and made to despise themselves, for the unlovely tempers, the hasty words, the cross looks, the universal nervous irritability, that result from this constant jarring of finely toned chords under unskilled hands.
Talk of hair-cloth shirts, and scourgings, and sleeping on ashes, as means of saintship! there is no need of them in our country. Let a woman once look at her domestic trials as her hair-cloth, her ashes, her scourges, — accept them, — rejoice in them, — smile and be quiet, silent, patient, and loving under them, — and the convent can teach her no more; she is a victorious saint.
When the damper of the furnace is turned the wrong way by Paddy, after the five hundredth time of explanation, and the whole family awakes coughing, sneezing, strangling, — when the gas is blown out in the nursery by Biddy, who has been instructed every day for weeks in the danger of such a proceeding, — when the tumblers on the dinner-table are found dim and streaked, after weeks of training in the simple business of washing and wiping, — when the ivory-handled knives and forks are left soaking in hot dish-water, after incessant explanations of the consequences, — when four or five half-civilized beings, above, below, and all over the house, are constantly forgetting the most important things at the very moment it is most necessary they should remember them, — there is no hope for the mistress morally, unless she can in very deed and truth accept her trials religiously, and conquer by accepting. It is not apostles alone who can take pleasure in necessities and distresses; but mothers and housewives also, if they would learn of the apostle, might say, “When I am weak, then am I strong.”
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 517
