Chapter 8
Others of these girls are too intolerant of everybody outside their own particular set to be allowed to do any work for the poor except to give money, and even then there is danger they may be so lifted up by a sense of their own goodness that perhaps it would be better for them personally to spend the money extravagantly, for then they would certainly be ashamed of themselves. Nevertheless, the poor need their money, so perhaps it is better they should give it.
This brings me to another point. In the country it is still possible to keep to the ideal neighborly charity, but in the city there are quarters where the misery is wholesale, and wholesale scientific methods must be applied to relieve it. The Associated Charities in Boston, for instance, do a kind of work which must be done unless we are willing to sit down and let all the innocent suffer with the guilty. And many of the leaders have the ideal spirit, and they hold up ideal standards for the visitors of the poor, that is, they ask us to visit the poor with love in our hearts. The work to be done in cities is so enormous that every woman of leisure who feels the desire to help should certainly be encouraged to do so, and I am even inclined to think that where so well-organized a system exists as in the Associated Charities, it is a saving of energy for her to put herself under its direction though not so wholly as to allow her no means or leisure for her personal sphere of action to expand naturally.
As long as we try to do the nearest duties there will always be failure enough to keep us humble and to make it safe for us spiritually to undertake something beyond. A girl tries to help her brothers, and instead of admiring her for it they frankly tell her how far she fulls short. But if she does a tithe as much for the poor she is likely to get some thanks, more or less sincere, and all her circle of friends admire her. This pleasant encouragement does her no harm as long as she has the antidote of the family criticism, so I would let every ardent woman have some outside work, and the Associated Charities will find room for every worker. Some women can help children by teaching them and amusing them, and this is the most efficient kind of work, for it prevents crime and misery. Some can sew for the poor, some can cook, some can manage tenement houses as Octavia Hill has done.
To give what we call practical help we must be practical ourselves. I think if the busy housekeepers who do their own work have time to visit the poor, their suggestions are of infinitely more value than any given by rich ladies who are making a business of charity; but such women have little time, so the rich must humbly try to take their place.
I know a charming girl whose mother does not allow her to go into the kitchen. She found great difficulty at school in learning the weights and measures, and at last her teacher asked her if she had ever seen a quart measure, to which she replied doubtfully that she was not quite sure. A few years hence she is certain to be what is called a "friendly visitor." I have no question about her friendliness, and the poor will bless her sweet face, especially when she gives them money freely, as she can easily do, but I should not expect her to be able to give them very useful advice about spending money--which they need still more. It must not be supposed, however, that I scorn the kind of work she can do. There is something better to be done for the poor than to teach them economy--even a wise economy--it is to rouse their higher nature. I should think that no one could be an hour with this young girl without having some aspiration to be noble.
A beautiful and graceful woman has a unique work to do for the poor. It is on the same principle that the Princess of Wales can give pleasure by simply distributing the flowers in a hospital with her own hands. It is possible for beauty to condescend without wounding. A woman who is not outwardly attractive must do a different kind of work. The first brings a poetic element into a dreary life, and may even in this way arouse the aspiration for an unattainable ideal. But a plain and awkward woman may be the inspiration of a still higher ideal by the radiance of her goodness.
When girls ask me, as they often do, _what_ they shall do for others, I find it impossible to answer. Their talents and their opportunities must decide the particular form of work. But its real value will depend entirely on what they are. I can only say that there is so much work to be done that each must do all she can; that she must choose the thing she can do best and persevere with that quietly, not trying to do many kinds of work at once; that all she does must be done with love; and that above all things she must not forget that her own circle of family and friends shows plainly the centre from which God wishes her to begin to work.
To the women who live in the country the circle widens naturally and beautifully. If a neighbor is ill, one sends in delicacies to the invalid, another offers to take care of the children, and a third acts as watcher. When a drunkard reduces his family to destitution, one neighbor sends a breakfast to them, another flannel for the baby, another finds work for the oldest girl, and another pays the boys a trifle for bringing wood and water. The cases of actual destitution are so few that they can all be met in this way unless the sufferers are too proud to let their wants be known; and even then there is sure to be some real friend who goes to see them naturally without any thought of being a friendly visitor, and thus comes to the rescue.
Charity in the country is the natural flower of a loving heart. If a woman has a beautiful home in the country, it stands for a refining influence for the whole village, for she usually opens it to those of her neighbors who can appreciate it, since in the country there are not too many people, and those of like tastes meet without regard to differences of fortune.
A woman in the country who has even a collection of photographs of beautiful pictures can easily make them a real blessing to many who have no other avenue open to art. And so with books. One owns a copy of Plato, another of Dante, another of Goethe, and these books circulate freely among all who care to read them. They are better than a public library where the books must be hurried back at a given date. They are sometimes even better than large private libraries where the number of books is distracting.
I know a young lady who is the only highly educated musician in a little country village. She sings in the choir and makes the church service a new thing. She good-naturedly steps in and trains the children in their choruses for festival occasions. She has invited half a dozen young fellows to form a glee club and sing one evening a week in her parlor. They all have musical talent, and they are capable of appreciating her attractive manners, but they had not before thought of any better way of spending their evenings than in screaming about the streets. If a poor girl has a good voice, this young lady finds time to teach her to sing. I do not think it ever entered her mind that she was doing charitable work. The work was directly in her pathway. She could do it, and having a large, loving heart, she has done it. But there is no one in the village who has done so much to raise the tone of life there.
So the improvement of a country town goes on exactly in proportion to the loving-kindness of the people and their willingness to share whatever material and mental treasures they may have. Perhaps the same is true in the city; but the number of treasures to be shared, as well as the number of people to share them, is so bewildering that it is next to impossible to bring form out of the chaos without employing scientific middlemen, and the fascination about helping others almost vanishes.
Nevertheless, let us cling to the doctrine that
"'T is love, 't is love, 't is love that makes the world go round,"
and even in the city we may all have hope.
X.
THE ESSENTIALS OF A HOME.
Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
That is, it is the family which makes the home, and this is even truer of the mother and her daughters than of the father and his sons. Sometimes even one sunshiny spirit in a house transforms it, and where all the family are in harmony there cannot fail to be a home in the best sense.
But there are virtues and virtues. "I admire Miss Strong, indeed I love her," I heard a lady say not long ago, "but I can't imagine her making a beautiful home under any circumstances." Yet Miss Strong is gentle, sweet-tempered, thoroughly unselfish and high-minded, quiet and unobtrusive, neat and well-bred. Then what is wanting in Miss Strong?
"I think it will be best for Jenny to teach," wrote another lady in regard to a young girl in whom she was deeply interested, and whose gifts and graces she had been cataloguing at great length. "At least, what else is there for a woman to do who is thoroughly feminine but not at all domestic?"
We think of unselfishness as the first need of a woman who is to be the presiding genius of a home; but both Miss Strong and Jenny are conspicuously unselfish.
It seems that though a fine character, and particularly a loving one, must be the foundation of the home, yet certain special qualities are necessary. Among the thousands who have read "Robert Elsmere" does any one feel that Catherine, with all her earnestness and deep love of others, made her girlhood's home a pleasant place? She was ready to give up a home of her own, thinking her mother and sisters needed her, and yet her sister Rose, at least, was secretly longing to be free from the constant influence of such severe moral standards. In short, Catherine did not make her home comfortable.
Comfort, I think, enters into every idea of a home. We wish to be unrestrained there. That, however, is a different thing from being lawless. There must be moral restraints, even for the sake of the comfort itself. Otherwise, the freedom of one interferes with the freedom of another, and finally the reaction tells in the discomfort of all.
Physical comfort is necessary in a home. Some of the best women do not understand this. They are disgusted with the sarcasm that "The road to a man's heart is through his dinner." That would be disgusting if it were the whole truth. But we must all eat every day of our lives, and appetizing food prettily served adds much to the comfort of the day. Indeed, without it only a boor or a saint can be really comfortable.
Women who are good cooks are sometimes ill-tempered and refuse to exercise their art. But discomfort in the matter of dinner usually comes from a different kind of housekeeper. There are some women who think it is a weakness to care about food. Their rule is, "Eat what is set before you, asking no questions," a sufficiently good rule for those who are dining, but a miserable one for the housekeeper to force upon others. There are still other women who have a definite opinion as to diet. They have studied food from a hygienic point of view, and they watch the effect of every mouthful. Such a study ought to be useful, but in point of fact it is a frequent source of discomfort. Nothing ever digests well when our mind is concentrated on our digestion. One difficulty may be this. The women who have turned their attention to this subject have often done so because they were invalids. They find certain food injurious to them and decide it is injurious to everybody. So a whole healthy household is restricted to the invalid's bill of fare. The housekeeper is so certain she is doing her duty, that she easily steels her heart against the murmurs of her family, and the discomfort continues. A thoroughly healthy woman, however, will provide all the better for her family if she understands the effect of different articles of diet.
To be comfortable, a house should be warm enough. Of course, I do not mean that we need to breathe the superheated atmosphere which foreigners criticise in most American houses. It is the mother of the family who must correct this. She can easily do so, because she has it entirely in her power to form the habits of her children in this particular, and it is rarely the case that a man likes an overheated room until he has been trained by his more sensitive wife to bear it.
But I mean that nothing physical takes from the comfort of a home so much as chilliness. So long as we are warm enough we may relish a very frugal dinner, but a feast is unappetizing in a cold room. Indeed, I believe we may economize in anything better than in fuel. It gives a great sense of comfort in going into a house to find it warm all through. Many people, however, cannot afford such luxury. But if you can only have one fire in the house, see that that is always burning; and if it must be in the kitchen in the cooking-stove, keep the stove so bright that its black ugliness is a centre radiating cheerfulness. There are plenty of homes in which there is no need of stint, where through carelessness and neglect there are times when everybody in the house is shivering, while perhaps at other times half the rooms are at a red heat.
I remember one of Charles Reade's heroes who was wavering between the attractions of two women, and the novelist represents the simpler of the two as being careful that there should always be a blazing hearth when the lover came. This innocent device gave him a sense of comfort which almost won his heart. It seemed to me a touch of truth.
We cannot all afford open wood fires, though their beauty and healthfulness make us wish we could; but most of us can keep the "clear fire" and the "clean hearth," which Mrs. Battle wisely considered the proper preliminaries to the "rigor of the game."
Though we want warm homes, we do not want close ones. Most houses are not very well ventilated, and if we keep our windows open in winter weather, we must expect our bill for fuel to be a large one. Some of us are too poor to disregard this fact, but most of us could probably afford to save enough in our dress to meet what I may call this necessary extravagance. I have seen a great many landladies who looked so severe on seeing a window open in a room where the register was also open, that the unhappy boarder felt at once like a culprit for even desiring both warmth and fresh air at the same time. Once, however, I had the good fortune to know a woman of different views. She bought a house expressly with the intention of letting it to transient lodgers. She found, as is common, that the furnace-heated air which passed through the registers into the rooms came from the cellar. She immediately made alterations, so that the fresh outside air should be heated and carried over the house. "It costs more," she said, "but dear me! what is expense to fresh air?" Moreover she said so much to her lodgers about the necessity of fresh air, that all the windows in the house were always streaming open. "I once knew a lady who died of pneumonia from airing her room too much," said the landlady, "but that was a beautiful death!"
I doubt whether there is comfort under a system of ventilation which induces pneumonia, but it certainly is luxury as well as comfort to let in all the fresh air we want and not to stint fuel.
Plenty of light is another essential in a home. Most city houses are deficient in sunlight, and most of them, however richly furnished, are accordingly depressing. Whether or not the dreams of socialists can ever be realized we do not know, but none is more alluring than that of the disappearance of blocks of houses. If every house could stand in the midst of its own garden, the gain would be as great in inner comfort as in outward beauty.
No one can tell the amount of near-sightedness caused by the effort to read and write in our dark city houses. Rich people ought to be extravagant in the matter of light. Corner lots are worth buying, and it is worth while to live on "streets with only one side."
And when natural light fails let us have enough of the artificial. Even the poor who cannot have electricity or gas hardly need economize here with kerosene at its present rates. A kerosene lamp, to be sure, is not often a beautiful or poetical object, but with the right kind of care the vile odor may be suppressed, and though this involves an additional burden for the housekeeper, light is too essential for the work to be grudged. A sufficient number of _clean_ kerosene lamps will make a house cheerful from one end to the other. Now I have often noticed that women who are compelled to economize in little things are inclined to economize in all things. They will strain their eyes for fifteen minutes after it is too dark to sew, they will sit in a room dimly lighted by one lamp when two are necessary to make it attractive, without stopping to think that twelve or fifteen cents worth of oil would supply three large lamps for a week! And in this way they sacrifice not only cheerfulness, but opportunities for all the family to do easy and comfortable work.
Cleanliness is as essential in a home as over-neatness is destructive to it. There is nothing homelike in any room that is in perfect order; but, on the other hand, there is little of the home feeling in a room that is not bright and fresh with cleanliness. Tables littered with books, chairs and sofas strewn with gloves and ribbons, and even a floor encumbered with a prostrate doll or two, are cheerful; a trail of leaves and mosses from a basket of woodland treasures is endurable dirt. But dust in the corners which shows the dirt to be chronic and not accidental, unwashed windows, dingy mirrors, etc., etc., have no redeeming quality. It is a good thing for the mother of the family to love order, but there is ample scope for that in keeping every closet and drawer and box and basket in a dainty condition. However neat a room may be, it is odious the moment an open drawer or closet reveals disorder. The meaning of this is that the disorder which comes from daily happy living is delightful, and that is what we see in the large confusion of a room when in use; but the disorder which comes from carelessness about finding a convenient place for everything, and from laziness about putting things in their places when we have done using them, is not beautiful.
For the kind of neatness which makes a home homelike we must have room enough, but not too much room. This is rather a vague statement, I know, but the actual measurements of a house should vary with circumstances; for example, a large room with few people in it will always be stiff, even if it is splendid; while a small room filled with useless _bric-à-brac_ will be uncomfortable even with a solitary occupant. On the subject of _bric-à-brac_ I feel strongly, and I will speak of it more fully elsewhere.
But I do not include pictures in the term _bric-à-brac._ There ought to be pictures in every home for their intrinsic value. Fortunately they take up little room and are easily kept in order. Many of us do not agree about pictures. Most Americans who buy oil paintings advertise their want of cultivation in their choice, and even those who rigidly confine themselves to engravings and photographs of the old masters do not succeed much better. I remember a man, the son of a country minister, who knew pictures only from the literary side. He was a great reader, and had been familiar with the names of Raphael and Da Vinci and Dürer from childhood. He knew well what were their masterpieces, and when he went abroad he bought hundreds of photographs of these works. His house was full of pictures; there was not one among them which was not a copy of something really beautiful, and not one copy which had any beauty in itself. This man had not the sense of beauty, though he had the moral sense which led him always to wish for the best.
But all any of us can do is to express the best we know. The essential quality in pictures in our own homes is that they should express the best we ourselves have reached. Still, many pictures of high artistic merit are wanting in the real home charm. I believe most of those which hang on our walls and are always before our eyes should be cheerful in character. I sympathize with the old abbess who chose to have her rooms frescoed with Correggio's happy cherubs, and who liked to have constantly before her, though in a convent, his goddess Diana, whose smile some one has said is full of "resolute sweetness."
I remember once having to pass a bitter hour of waiting in the drawing-room of a physician well known for his high culture. Every picture in the room was a work of art, but every one was solemn and even severe. Dante, Savonarola, the tombs of the Medici, etc., etc., afforded no escape from sad thoughts. The only relief was in the sweet serenity of Emerson's face, and even in this instance the most severe of all the portraits had been chosen. There was not one point of color in any of the pictures, but indeed most of us cannot afford paintings that are good for anything, so I could not quarrel with that.
For a daily companion I would rather have a Raphael than a Michael Angelo, and though for love I would slip in a Millet or two, I should not want a room full of Millets.
The heavy furniture of a home should be comfortable first of all. The chairs should not all be of the same size and height any more than the people. Arm-chairs are better than rocking-chairs, as they are less in the way. The furniture should not be light enough to be easily overturned, but the castors should always run easily. A lounge is a homelike piece of furniture, but let us hope it need not be much used.
A word more to the young woman who is choosing furniture for half a life-time. Fancy you have it to dust! You may have an army of servants, but certain patterns of furniture can never be kept clean. I remember two friends who chose furniture at the same time. It was the era of black walnut and green rep, and they chose sets looking much alike. But in one case the walnut was elaborately carved,--by machinery, which made it all the rougher,--and there were many little grooves to invite the dust in the upholstery; while in the other case the wood was simply moulded and polished, and the cloth was so put on that one or two vigorous strokes of a brush would cleanse it. It is true that heavy wood carved by hand is beautiful enough to repay us for its care, but that being smoothly finished does not catch very much dust.