Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  “It is perfectly wonderful, to be sure, Mrs. Exact, to see all that you do; but don’t you get very tired sometimes?”

  “No, not often. I remember, though, the week before last Christmas, I made and baked eighteen pies and ten loaves of cake in one day, and I was really quite worn out; but I didn’t give way to it. I told Mr. Exact I thought it would rest me to take a drive into New York and attend the Sanitary Fair, and so we did. I suppose Mrs. Evans would have thought she must go to bed and coddle herself for a month.”

  “But, dear Mrs. Exact, when a woman is kept awake nights by crying babies — —”

  “There’s no need of having crying babies: my babies never cried; it’s just as you begin with children. I might have had to be up and down every hour of the night with mine, just as Mrs. Evans is; but I knew better. I used to take ’em up about ten o’clock, and feed and make ’em all comfortable; and that was the last of ‘em, till I was ready to get up in the morning. I never lost a night’s sleep with any of mine.”

  “Not when they were teething?”

  “No. I knew how to manage that. I used to lance their gums myself, and I never had any trouble: it’s all in management. I weaned ’em all myself, too; there’s no use in having any fuss in weaning children.”

  “Mrs. Exact, you are a wonderful manager; but it would be impossible to bring up all babies so.”

  “You’ll never make me believe that: people only need to begin right. I’m sure I’ve had a trial of eight.”

  “But there’s that one baby of Mrs. Evans’s makes more trouble than all your eight. It cries every night so that somebody has to be up walking with it; it wears out all the nurses, and keeps poor Mrs. Evans sick all the time.”

  “Not the least need of it; nothing but shiftless management. Suppose I had allowed my children to be walked with; I might have had terrible times, too; but I began right. I set down my foot that they should lie still, and they did; and if they cried, I never lighted a candle, or took ’em up, or took any kind of notice of it; and so, after a little, they went off to sleep. Babies very soon find out where they can take advantage, and where they can’t. It’s nothing but temper makes babies cry; and if I couldn’t hush ’em any other way, I should give ’em a few good smart slaps, and they would soon learn to behave themselves.”

  “But, dear Mrs. Exact, you were a strong healthy woman, and had strong healthy children.”

  “Well, isn’t that baby of Mrs. Evans’s healthy, I want to know? I’m sure it is a great creature, and thrives and grows fat as fast as ever I saw a child. You needn’t tell me anything is the matter with that child but temper, and its mother’s coddling management.”

  Now, in the neighbourhood where she lives, Mrs. Alexander Exact is the wonderful woman, the Lady Bountiful, the pattern female. Her cake never rises on one side, or has a heavy streak in it. Her furs never get a moth in them; her carpets never fade; her sweetmeats never ferment; her servants never neglect their work; her children never get things out of order; her babies never cry, never keep one awake o’nights; and her husband never in his life said, “My dear, there’s a button off my shirt.” Flies never infest her kitchen, cockroaches and red ants never invade her premises, a spider never had time to spin a web on one of her walls. Everything in her establishment is shining with neatness, crisp and bristling with absolute perfection, — and it is she, the ever-up-and dressed, unsleeping, wide-awake, omnipresent, never-tiring Mrs. Exact, that does it all.

  Besides keeping her household ways thus immaculate, Mrs. Exact is on all sorts of charitable committees, does all sorts of fancy-work for fairs; and whatever she does is done perfectly. She is a most available, most helpful, most benevolent woman, and general society has reason to rejoice in her existence.

  But, for all this, Mrs. Exact is as intolerant as Torquemada or a locomotive engine. She has her own track, straight and inevitable; her judgments and opinions cut through society in right lines, with all the force of her example and all the steam of her energy, turning out neither for the old nor the young, the weak nor the weary. She cannot, and she will not, conceive the possibility that there may be other sorts of natures than her own, and that other kinds of natures must have other ways of living and doing.

  Good and useful as she is, she is terrible as an army with banners to her poor, harassed, delicate, struggling neighbour, across the way, who, in addition to an aching, confused head, an aching back, sleepless, harassed nights, and weary, sinking days, is burdened everywhere and every hour with the thought that Mrs. Exact thinks all her troubles are nothing but poor management, and that she might do just like her, if she would. With very little self-confidence or self-assertion, she is withered and paralyzed with this discouraging thought. Is it, then, her fault that this never-sleeping baby cries all night, and that all her children never could and never would be brought up by those exact rules which she hears of as so efficacious in the household over the way? The thought of Mrs. Alexander Exact stands over her like a constable; the remembrance of her is grievous; the burden of her opinion is heavier than all her other burdens.

  Now the fact is, that Mrs. Exact comes of a long-lived, strong-backed, strong-stomached race, with “limbs of British oak and nerves of wire.” The shadow of a sensation of nervous pain or uneasiness never has been known in her family for generations, and her judgments of poor little Mrs. Evans are about as intelligent as those of a good stout Shanghai hen on a hummingbird. Most useful and comfortable, these Shanghai hens, — and very ornamental, and in a small way useful, these humming-birds; but let them not regulate each other’s diet, or lay down schemes for each other’s housekeeping. Has not one as much right to its nature as the other?

  This intolerance of other people’s natures is one of the greatest causes of domestic unhappiness. The perfect householders are they who make their household rule so flexible that all sorts of differing natures may find room to grow and expand and express themselves without infringing upon others.

  Some women are endowed with a tact for understanding human nature and guiding it. They give a sense of largeness and freedom; they find a place for every one, see at once what every one is good for, and are inspired by nature with the happy wisdom of not wishing or asking of any human being, more than that human being was made to give. They have the portion in due season for all: a bone for the dog; cat-nip for the cat; cuttle-fish and hemp-seed for the bird; a book or review for their bashful literary visitor; lively gossip for thoughtless Miss Seventeen; knitting for Grandmamma; fishing-rods, boats, and gunpowder for Young Restless, whose beard is just beginning to grow; — and they never fall into pets because the canary-bird won’t relish the dog’s bone, or the dog eat canary-seed, or young Miss Seventeen read old Mr. Sixty’s review, or young Master Restless take delight in knitting-work, or old Grandmamma feel complacency in guns and gunpowder.

  Again, there are others who lay the foundations of family life so narrow, straight, and strict, that there is room in them only for themselves and people exactly like themselves; and hence comes much misery.

  A man and woman come together out of different families and races, often united by only one or two sympathies, with many differences. Their first wisdom would be to find out each other’s nature, and accommodate to it as a fixed fact; instead of which, how many spend their lives in a blind fight with an opposite nature, as good as their own in its way, but not capable of meeting their requirements!

  A woman trained in an exact, thriving, business family, where her father and brothers carried on everything with true worldly skill and energy, falls in love with a literary man, who knows nothing of such affairs, whose life is in his library and his pen. Shall she vex and torment herself and him because he is not a business man? Shall she constantly hold up to him the example of her father and brothers, and how they would manage in this and that case? or shall she say cheerily and once for all to herself,—”My husband has no talent for business; that is not his forte; but then he has talents far more interesti
ng: I cannot have everything; let him go on undisturbed, and do what he can do well, and let me try to make up for what he cannot do; and if difficulties come on us in consequence of what we neither of us can do, let us both take them cheerfully?”

  In the same manner a man takes out of the bosom of an adoring family one of those delicate, petted singing-birds that seem to be created simply to adorn life and make it charming. Is it fair, after he has got her, to compare her housekeeping, and her efficiency and capability in the material part of life, with those of his mother and sisters, who are strong-limbed, practical women, that have never thought about anything but housekeeping from their cradle? Shall he all the while vex himself and her with the remembrance of how his mother used to get up at five o’clock and arrange all the business of the day, — how she kept all the accounts, — how she saw to everything and settled everything, — how there never were break-downs or irregularities in her system?

  This would be unfair. If a man wanted such a housekeeper, why did he not get one? There were plenty of single women who understood washing, ironing, clear-starching, cooking, and general housekeeping, better than the little canary-bird which he fell in love with, and wanted for her plumage and her song — for her merry tricks, for her bright eyes and pretty ways. Now he has got his bird, let him keep it as something fine and precious, to be cared for and watched over, and treated according to the laws of its frail and delicate nature; and so treating it, he may many years keep the charms which first won his heart. He may find, too, if he watches and is careful, that a humming-bird can, in its own small, dainty way, build a nest as efficiently as a turkey-gobbler, and hatch her eggs and bring up her young in humming-bird fashion; but to do it she must be left unfrightened and undisturbed.

  But the evils of domestic intolerance increase with the birth of children. As parents come together out of different families with ill-assorted peculiarities, so children are born to them with natures differing from their own and from each other.

  The parents seize on their first new child as a piece of special property which they are forthwith to turn to their own account. The poor little waif, just drifted on the shores of Time, has perhaps folded up in it a character as positive as that of either parent; but, for all that, its future course is marked out for it — all arranged and predetermined.

  John has a perfect mania for literary distinction. His own education was somewhat imperfect, but he is determined his children shall be prodigies. His first-born turns out a girl, who is to write like Madame de Staël, — to be an able, accomplished woman. He bores her with literature from her earliest years, reads extracts from Milton to her when she is only eight years old and is secretly longing to be playing with her doll’s wardrobe. He multiplies governesses, spares no expense, and when, after all, his daughter turns out to be only a very pretty, sensible, domestic girl, fond of cross-stitching embroidery, and with a more decided vocation for sponge-cake and pickles than for poetry and composition, he is disappointed and treats her coldly; and she is unhappy and feels that she has vexed her parents, because she cannot be what nature never meant her to be. If John had taken meekly the present that Mother Nature gave him, and humbly set himself to inquire what it was, and what it was good for, he might have had years of happiness with a modest, amiable, and domestic daughter, to whom had been given the instinct to study household good.

  But, again, a bustling, pickling, preserving, stocking-knitting, universal-housekeeping woman has a daughter who dreams over her knitting-work, and hides a book under her sampler, — whose thoughts are straying in Greece, Rome, Germany, — who is reading, studying, thinking, writing, without knowing why; and the mother sets herself to fight this nature, and to make the dreamy scholar into a driving, thorough-going, exact woman of business. How many tears are shed, how much temper wasted, how much time lost in such encounters!

  Each of these natures, under judicious training, might be made to complete itself by cultivation of that which it lacked. The born housekeeper can never be made a genius, but she may add to her household virtues some reasonable share of literary culture and appreciation, — and the born scholar may learn to come down out of her clouds, and see enough of this earth to walk its practical ways without stumbling; but this must be done by tolerance of their nature, — by giving it play and room, — first recognizing its existence and its rights, and then seeking to add to it the properties it wants.

  A driving Yankee housekeeper, fruitful of resources, can work with any tools or with no tools at all. If she absolutely cannot get a tack-hammer with a claw on one end, she can take up carpet-nails with an iron spoon, and drive them down with a flat-iron; and she has sense enough not to scold, though she does her work with them at considerable disadvantage. She knows that she is working with tools made to do something else, and never thinks of being angry at their unhandiness. She might have equal patience with a daughter unhandy in physical things, but acute and skilful in mental ones, if she once had the idea suggested to her.

  An ambitious man has a son whom he destines to a learned profession. He is to be the Daniel Webster of the family. The boy has a robust, muscular frame — great physical vigour and enterprise — a brain bright and active in all that may be acquired through the bodily senses, but which is dull and confused and wandering when put to abstract book-knowledge. He knows every ship at the wharf, her build, tonnage, and sailing qualities; he knows every railroad-engine, its power, speed, and hours of coming and going; he is always busy, sawing, hammering, planing, digging, driving, making bargains, with his head full of plans, all relating to something outward and physical. In all these matters his mind works strongly, his ideas are clear, his observation acute, his conversation sensible and worth listening to. But as to the distinction between common nouns and proper nouns, between the subject and the predicate of a sentence, between the relative pronoun and the demonstrative adjective pronoun, between the perfect and the preter-perfect tense, he is extremely dull and hazy. The region of abstract ideas is to him a region of ghosts and shadows. Yet his youth is mainly a dreary wilderness of uncomprehended, incomprehensible studies, of privations, tasks, punishments, with a sense of continual failure, disappointment, and disgrace, because his father is trying to make a scholar and a literary man out of a boy whom Nature made to till the soil or manage the material forces of the world. He might be a farmer, an engineer, a pioneer of a new settlement, a sailor, a soldier, a thriving man of business; but he grows up feeling that his nature is a crime, and that he is good for nothing, because he is not good for what he had been blindly predestined to before he was born.

  Another boy is a born mechanic: he understands machinery at a glance: he is always pondering and studying and experimenting. But his wheels and his axles and his pulleys are all swept away, as so much irrelevant lumber; he is doomed to go into the Latin School, and spend three or four years in trying to learn what he never can learn well, — disheartened by always being at the tail of his class, and seeing many a boy inferior to himself in general culture, who is rising to brilliant distinction simply because he can remember those hopeless, bewildering Greek quantities and accents which he is constantly forgetting, — as, for example, how properispomena become paroxytones when the ultimate becomes long, and proparoxytones become paroxytones when the ultimate becomes long, while paroxytones with a short penult remain paroxytones. Each of this class of rules, however, having about sixteen exceptions, which hold good except in three or four other exceptional cases under them, the labyrinth becomes delightfully wilder and wilder; and the crowning beauty of the whole is, that when the bewildered boy has swallowed the whole, — tail, scales, fins, and bones, — he then is allowed to read the classics in peace, without the slightest occasion to refer to them again during his college course.

  The great trouble with the so-called classical course of education is, that it is made strictly but for one class of minds, which it drills in respects for which they have by nature an aptitude, and to which it presents sca
rcely enough of difficulty to make it a mental discipline, while to another and equally valuable class of minds it presents difficulties so great as actually to crush and discourage. There are, we will venture to say, in every ten boys in Boston four, and those not the dullest or poorest in quality, who could never go through the discipline of the Boston Latin School without such a strain on the brain and nervous system as would leave them no power for anything else.

  A bright, intelligent boy, whose talents lay in the line of natural philosophy and mechanics, passed with brilliant success through the Boston English High School. He won the first medals, and felt all that pride and enthusiasm which belong to a successful student. He entered the Latin Classical School. With a large philosophic and reasoning brain, he had a very poor verbal and textual memory; and here he began to see himself distanced by boys who had hitherto looked up to him. They could rattle off catalogues of names; they could do so all the better from the habit of not thinking of what they studied. They could commit to memory the Latin Grammar, large print and small, and run through the interminable mazes of Greek accents and inflections. This boy of large mind and brain, always behind-hand, always incapable, utterly discouraged, no amount of study could place on an equality with his former inferiors. His health failed, and he dropped from school. Many a fine fellow has been lost to himself, and lost to an educated life, by just such a failure. The collegiate system is like a great coal-screen: every piece not of a certain size must fall through. This may do well enough for screening coal; but what if it were used indiscriminately for a mixture of coal and diamonds?