The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864
V >> Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864Here, as in all high art, the old motto is in force, "_Ars est celare
artem_." Children who are taught too plainly by every anxious look and
word of their parents, by every family-arrangement, by the impressment
of every chance guest into the service, that their parents consider
their education as the one important matter in creation, are apt to grow
up fantastical, artificial, and hopelessly self-conscious. The stars
cannot stop in their courses, even for our personal improvement, and the
sooner children learn this, the better. The great art is to organize a
home which shall move on with a strong, wide, generous movement, where
the little people shall act themselves out as freely and impulsively as
can consist with the comfort of the whole, and where the anxious
watching and planning for them shall be kept as secret from them as
possible.
It is well that one of the sunniest and airiest rooms in the house be
the children's nursery. It is good philosophy, too, to furnish it
attractively, even if the sum expended lower the standard of
parlor-luxuries. It is well that the children's chamber, which is to act
constantly on their impressible natures for years, should command a
better prospect, a sunnier aspect, than one which serves for a day's
occupancy of the transient guest. It is well that journeys should be
made or put off in view of the interests of the children,--that guests
should be invited with a view to their improvement,--that some
intimacies should be chosen and some rejected on their account. But it
is _not_ well that all this should, from infancy, be daily talked out
before the child, and he grow up in egotism from moving in a sphere
where everything from first to last is calculated and arranged with
reference to himself. A little appearance of wholesome neglect combined
with real care and never-ceasing watchfulness has often seemed to do
wonders in this work of setting human beings on their own feet for the
life-journey.
Education is the highest object of home, but education in the widest
sense,--education of the parents no less than of the children. In a true
home the man and the woman receive, through their cares, their
watchings, their hospitality, their charity, the last and highest finish
that earth can put upon them. From that they must pass upward, for earth
can teach them no more.
The home-education is incomplete, unless it include the idea of
hospitality and charity. Hospitality is a biblical and apostolic virtue,
and not so often recommended in Holy Writ without reason. Hospitality is
much neglected in America for the very reasons touched upon above. We
have received our ideas of propriety and elegance of living from old
countries, where labor is cheap, where domestic service is a
well-understood, permanent occupation, adopted cheerfully for life, and
where of course there is such a subdivision of labor as insures great
thoroughness in all its branches. We are ashamed or afraid to conform
honestly and hardily to a state of things purely American. We have not
yet accomplished what our friend the Doctor calls "our weaning," and
learned that dinners with circuitous courses and divers other
Continental and English refinements, well enough in their way, cannot be
accomplished in families with two or three untrained servants, without
an expense of care and anxiety which makes them heart-withering to the
delicate wife, and too severe a trial to occur often. America is the
land of subdivided fortunes, of a general average of wealth and comfort,
and there ought to be, therefore, an understanding in the social basis
far more simple than in the Old World.
Many families of small fortunes know this,--they are quietly living
so,--but they have not the steadiness to share their daily average
living with a friend, a traveller, or guest, just as the Arab shares his
tent and the Indian his bowl of succotash. They cannot have company,
they say. Why? Because it is such a fuss to get out the best things, and
then to put them back again. But why get out the best things? Why not
give your friend, what he would like a thousand times better, a bit of
your average home-life, a seat at any time at your board, a seat at your
fire? If he sees that there is a handle off your tea-cup, and that there
is a crack across one of your plates, he only thinks, with a sigh of
relief, "Well, mine a'n't the only things that meet with accidents," and
he feels nearer to you ever after; he will let you come to his table and
see the cracks in his tea-cups, and you will condole with each other on
the transient nature of earthly possessions. If it become apparent in
these entirely undressed rehearsals that your children are sometimes
disorderly, and that your cook sometimes overdoes the meat, and that
your second girl sometimes is awkward in waiting, or has forgotten a
table-propriety, your friend only feels, "Ah, well, other people have
trials as well as I," and he thinks, if you come to see him, he shall
feel easy with you.
"_Having company_" is an expense that may always be felt; but easy daily
hospitality, the plate always on your table for a friend, is an expense
that appears on no account-book, and a pleasure that is daily and
constant.
Under this head of hospitality, let us suppose a case. A traveller comes
from England; he comes in good faith and good feeling to see how
Americans live. He merely wants to penetrate into the interior of
domestic life, to see what there is genuinely and peculiarly American
about it. Now here is Smilax, who is living, in a small, neat way, on
his salary from the daily press. He remembers hospitalities received
from our traveller in England, and wants to return them. He remembers,
too, with dismay, a well-kept establishment, the well-served table, the
punctilious, orderly servants. Smilax keeps two, a cook and chambermaid,
who divide the functions of his establishment between them. What shall
he do? Let him say, in a fair, manly way, "My dear fellow, I'm delighted
to see you. I live in a small way, but I'll do my best for you, and Mrs.
Smilax will be delighted. Come and dine with us, so and so, and we'll
bring in one or two friends." So the man comes, and Mrs. Smilax serves
up such a dinner as lies within the limits of her knowledge and the
capacities of her servants. All plain, good of its kind, unpretending,
without an attempt to do anything English or French,--to do anything
more than if she were furnishing a gala-dinner for her father or
returned brother. Show him your house freely, just as it is, talk to him
freely of it, just as he in England showed you his finer things. If the
man is a true man, he will thank you for such unpretending, sincere
welcome; if he is a man of straw, then he is not worth wasting Mrs.
Smilax's health and spirits for, in unavailing efforts to get up a
foreign dinner-party.
A man who has any heart in him values a genuine little bit of home more
than anything else you can give him. He can get French cooking at a
restaurant; he can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if he
wants them; but the traveller, though ever so rich and ever so
well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but a man as you are, and he
is craving something that doesn't seem like a hotel,--some bit of real,
genuine heart-life. Perhaps he would like better than anything to show
you the last photograph of his wife, or to read to you the great,
round-hand letter of his ten-year-old which he has got to-day. He is
ready to cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes to see you,
hoping for something like home, and you first receive him in a parlor
opened only on state occasions, and that has been circumstantially and
exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures you, as every other parlor
of the kind in the city is furnished. You treat him to a dinner got up
for the occasion, with hired waiters,--a dinner which it has taken Mrs.
Smilax a week to prepare for, and will take her a week to recover
from,--for which the baby has been snubbed and turned off, to his loud
indignation, and your young four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your
traveller eats your dinner, and finds it inferior, as a work of art, to
other dinners,--a poor imitation. He goes away and criticizes; you hear
of it, and resolve never to invite a foreigner again. But if you had
given him a little of your heart, a little home-warmth and feeling,--if
you had shown him your baby, and let him romp with your four-year-old,
and eat a genuine dinner with you,--would he have been false to that?
Not so likely. He wanted something real and human,--you gave him a bad
dress-rehearsal, and dress-rehearsals always provoke criticism.
Besides hospitality, there is, in a true home, a mission of charity. It
is a just law which regulates the possession of great or beautiful works
of art in the Old World, that they shall in some sense be considered the
property of all who can appreciate. Fine grounds have hours when the
public may be admitted,--pictures and statues may be shown to visitors;
and this is a noble charity. In the same manner the fortunate
individuals who have achieved the greatest of all human works of art
should employ it as a sacred charity. How many, morally wearied,
wandering, disabled, are healed and comforted by the warmth of a true
home! When a mother has sent her son to the temptations of a distant
city, what news is so glad to her heart as that he has found some quiet
family where he visits often and is made to feel AT HOME? How
many young men have good women saved from temptation and shipwreck by
drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor
artist,--the wandering genius who has lost his way in this world, and
stumbles like a child among hard realities,--the many men and women who,
while they have houses, have no homes,--see from afar, in their distant,
bleak life-journey, the light of a true home-fire, and, if made welcome
there, warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their
pilgrimage. Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect
work of divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not seek to
bolt the doors and draw the curtains; for they know not, and will never
know till the future life, of the good they may do by the ministration
of this great charity of home.
We have heard much lately of the restricted sphere of woman. We have
been told how many spirits among women are of a wider, stronger, more
heroic mould than befits the mere routine of housekeeping. It may be
true that there are many women far too great, too wise, too high, for
mere housekeeping. But where is the woman in any way too great, or too
high, or too wise, to spend herself in creating a home? What can any
woman make diviner, higher, better? From such homes go forth all
heroisms, all inspirations, all great deeds. Such mothers and such homes
have made the heroes and martyrs, faithful unto death, who have given
their precious lives to us during these three years of our agony!
Homes are the work of art peculiar to the genius of woman. Man _helps_
in this work, but woman leads; the hive is always in confusion without
the _queen_-bee. But what a woman must she be who does this work
perfectly! She comprehends all, she balances and arranges all; all
different tastes and temperaments find in her their rest, and she can
unite at one hearthstone the most discordant elements. In her is order,
yet an order ever veiled and concealed by indulgence. None are checked,
reproved, abridged of privileges by her love of system; for she knows
that order was made for the family, and not the family for order.
Quietly she takes on herself what all others refuse or overlook. What
the unwary disarrange she silently rectifies. Everybody in her sphere
breathes easy, feels free; and the driest twig begins in her sunshine to
put out buds and blossoms. So quiet are her operations and movements,
that none sees that it is she who holds all things in harmony; only,
alas, when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear disordered,
inharmonious, neglected! All these threads have been smilingly held in
her weak hand. Alas, if that is no longer there!
Can any woman be such a housekeeper without inspiration? No. In the
words of the old church-service, "Her soul must ever have affiance in
God." The New Jerusalem of a perfect home cometh down from God out of
heaven. But to make such a home is ambition high and worthy enough for
_any_ woman, be she what she may.
One thing more. Right on the threshold of all perfection lies _the
cross_ to be taken up. No one can go over or around that cross in
science or in art. Without labor and self-denial neither Raphael nor
Michel Angelo nor Newton was made perfect. Nor can man or woman create a
true home who is not willing in the outset to embrace life heroically,
to encounter labor and sacrifice. Only to such shall this divinest power
be given to create on earth that which is the nearest image of heaven.
SONG.
We have been lovers now, my dear,
It matters nothing to say how long,
But still at the coming round o' th' year
I make for my pleasure a little song;
And thus of my love I sing, my dear,--
So much the more by a year, by a year.
And still as I see the day depart,
And hear the bat at my window flit,
I sing the little song to my heart,
With just a change at the close of it;
And thus of my love I sing alway,--
So much the more by a day, by a day.
When in the morning I see the skies
Breaking into a gracious glow,
I say you are not my sweetheart's eyes,
Your brightness cannot mislead me so;
And I sing of my love in the rising light,--
So much the more by a night, by a night.
Both at the year's sweet dawn and close,
When the moon is filling, or fading away,
Every day, as it comes and goes,
And every hour of every day,
My little song I repeat and repeat,--
So much the more by an hour, my sweet!
OUR SOLDIERS.
We entered gayly on our great contest. At the first sound from Sumter,
enthusiasm blazed high and bright. Bells rang out, flags waved, the
people rose as one man to cheer on our troops, and the practical
American nation, surveying itself with astonishment, pronounced
itself--finger on pulse--enthusiastic; and though, in the light of the
present steadily burning determination, it has been the fashion gently
to smile at that quick upspringing blaze, and at the times when it was
gravely noted how the privates of our army took daily baths and wore
Colt's revolvers, and pet regiments succumbed under showers of
Havelocks, in contrast with the grim official reports of to-day, I
cannot but think that enthusiasm healthful, and in itself a lesson, if
only that it proves beyond question that our patriotism was not simply a
dweller on the American tongue, but a thing of the American heart, so
vitalizing us, so woven every day into the most minute ramifications of
our living, so inner and recognized a part of our thinking, that there
have been found some to doubt its existence, just as we half forget the
gracious air, because no labored gasps, in place of our sure and even
breathing, ever by any chance announce to us that somewhere there have
been error and confusion in its vast workings.
Bitterer texts were ready all too soon. When we heard how one had
fallen, bayoneted at the guns, and another was struck, charging on the
foe, and a third had died after long lingering in hospital,--when we saw
our brave boys, whom we had sent out with huzzas, coming back to us with
the blood and grime of battle upon them, maimed, ghastly, dying,
dead,--we knew that we, whom God had hitherto so blessed that we were
compelled to look into the annals of other nations for misery and
strife, had now commenced a record of our own. Henceforth there was for
us a new literature, new grooves of thought, new interests. By all the
love of father, brother, husband, and children, we must learn more of
this tragic and tender lore; and our soldiers have been a thought not
far from the heart and lips of any one of us, and what is done, or
doing, or possible for them, held worthiest of our thought and time.
Respecting these, we have had all to learn. True, with us, satisfaction
has at all times followed close upon the announcement of a need; but
wisdom in planning and administering is not a marketable commodity, and
so we are educating ourselves up to the emergency,--the whole mighty
nation at school, and learning, we are bound to say, with Yankee
quickness. Love has been for us, also, a marvellous brain-prompter. Some
of our grandest charities--I mean charities in the broadest and sweetest
sense, for it is we who owe, not our soldiers--have been the inspiration
of a moment's need,--thoughts of the people, who, in crises and at
instance of the heart, think well and swiftly. Take this one example.
When New England's sons seized their arms, the first to answer the
trumpet-call that rang out over the land, and went in the spirit of
their fathers to the battle,--when these men passed through
Philadelphia, hungry and weary, the great heart of the city went out to
meet them. Citizens brought them into their houses, the neighboring
shops gave gladly what they could, women came running with food snatched
from their own tables, and even little squalid children toddled out of
by-lanes and alleys with loaves and half-loaves, all that they had to
give, so did the whole people yearn over their defenders; and then it
was seen how other regiments would come to them, ready for the fray, but
dusty and way-worn, and how the ambulances would bring them back parched
and fainting, and--it was hardly known how, only that, as in the old
times, "the people were of one mind and one accord," and brought of such
things as they had; but on that sad, yet proud day, that brought back to
them those who fell in Baltimore on the memorable nineteenth of
April,--the heroes in whom all claim a share, and the right to say, not
only Massachusetts's dead and wounded, but ours--there was ready for
them a shelter in the unpretending building famous since as the Cooper
Shop. There the people crowded about them, weeping, blessing, consoling;
and from that day there has no regiment from New England, New York, or
any other State, been suffered to pass through Philadelphia unrefreshed.
Water was supplied them, and tables ready spread, by the Volunteer Corps
always in attendance, within five minutes after the firing of the gun
that announced their arrival. There was shortly added, also, a volunteer
hospital for the more dangerously wounded when first brought from the
battle-field, and of it is told a story that Americans will like to
hear.
It is of a Wisconsin soldier, who, taken prisoner, effected his escape
from Richmond. Hiding by day, he forced his way at night through morass
and forest, snatched such sleep as he dared on the damp and sodden
earth, went without food whole days, reached our lines bruised, torn,
shivering, starving, and his wounds, which had never been properly cared
for, opened afresh. Let him tell the rest, straight from his heart.
"When I had my rubber blanket to wrap about me, I was comfortable, and,
snug and warm in the cars, I thought myself happy; and when I heard them
talk of the 'Cooper Shop,' I said to myself, 'A cooper's shop! that will
be the very place of all the earth, for there I shall have a roof over
me, and the shavings will be so warm and dry to lie upon!' but when they
carried me in, and I opened my eyes and saw what was the Cooper Shop,
and the long tables all loaded for the poor soldiers, and when they took
me to the hospital up-stairs, and placed me in a bed, and real ladies
and gentlemen, with tears in their eyes, came and waited on me, my
manliness left me."
A want of manliness, O honest heart, for which there need be no shame!
Precious tribute to our country's great love for her sons! For this is
no sectional charity, only one example culled from thousands; for the
land must, of a necessity, be overshadowed by the tree that has a root
under almost every Northern hearth-stone; and then see how we are all
bound together by the heart-strings!
Forty thousand men-at-arms are looking gravely at the height towering
above the valley in which they stand. "Impregnable" military science
pronounced it; but the men scaling it know nothing of this word
"impregnable." They have heard nothing of an order for retreat,--they
are filled with a divine wrath of battle, and each man is as mad as his
neighbor, and the officers are powerless to hold them back, and catch
the infection and are swept on with them, and climbing, jumping,
slipping, toiling on hands and knees, swinging from tree and bush, any
way, any how, but always onward, never backward, they surge up over the
mountain-top, deadly volleys crashing right in among them, and set on
the Rebels with a wild hurrah! and the hearts below beat faster, and
rough lips curse the blinding smoke and fog that veil all the crest, and
on a sudden a shout,--such a one as the children of Israel gave, when
the high-piled walls of water bent and swayed and came waving and
thundering down on Pharaoh's hopeless hosts,--for there, high up in
heaven, streaming out through parting smoke, is the flag, torn,
blood-stained, ball-riddled, but the dear old red, white, and blue,
waving over the enemy's works; and then the telegraph flashed out the
brave news over the exulting country, and the press took up the story,
and women said, with kindling faces, "My son, or my brother, or my
husband may be dead, but, oh, our boys have done glorious things at
Lookout Mountain!"--and History will tell how a grander charge was never
made, and calmly note the loss in dead and wounded,--so many
thousands,--and pass on.
But we are not History, and our dead,--well, we will give them graves
that shall be ever green with laurels, and their swords shall be our
most precious legacy to our children, and their memories shall be a part
of our household; but our wounded, for whom there is yet hope, who may
yet live,--the cry goes up from Wisconsin, and Maine, and Iowa, and New
York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Where are they, and how cared
for? We are all, as I said, bound by the heartstrings in a common
interest. The Boston woman with her boy in the Army of the Cumberland,
and the Maine mother with one in New Orleans or Texas, and the Kansas
father with a son in the Army of the Potomac, all clamor, "Is mine among
the wounded, and do care and science for him all that care and science
should?"
The Field Relief Corps of the Sanitary Commission are prompt on the
battle-field, reaching the groaning sufferers even before their own
surgeons. Said one man, lying there badly wounded,--
"And what do they pay yez for this? What do you get?"
"Pay! We ask nothing, only the soldier's 'God bless you.'"
"And is that all? Then sure here's plenty of the coin, fresh minted! God
bless you! God bless you! and the good Lord be good to you, and remember
yez as you have remembered us, and love yez and your children after you;
and sure, if that is all, it's plenty of that sort of pay the poor
soldier has for you!"
God bless such men! we echo; but after that, what then? Our beloved are
taken to the hospitals, and we know, in a general way, that hospitals
are buildings containing long rows of beds, and that science is doing
its utmost in their behalf; but when our friends write us from across
seas, they tell us, not only how they are, but where,--jotting down
little pen-and-ink pictures to show us how stands the writing-table, and
how hangs the picture, and where is the _fauteuil_, that we may see them
as they are daily; so we crave something more, we feel shut out, we want
to get at their daily living, to know something of hospital-life.
Hospitals have sprung up as if sown broadcast, and these, too, of no
mean order. True, in our first haste and inexperience, viciously planned
hospitals were erected; but these and the Crimean blunders have served
us as beacons, and the anxious care of the Government has been untiring,
the outlay of money and things more precious unbounded; and those who
have had this weighty matter in charge have no reason to fear an account
of their stewardship. The Boston Free Hospital in excellence of plan and
beauty of design can be excelled by none. Philadelphia boasts the two
largest military hospitals in the world. Of the twenty-three in and
about Washington many are worthy of all praise. The general hospital at
Fort Schuyler is admirable in plan and _locale_, and this latter
condition is found to be of vast importance. A Rebel battery, with an
incurable habit of using the hospital as a target, would scarcely be so
dangerous as a low, water-sogged, clayey soil, with its inevitable
results of fever, rheumatism, and bowel-complaints.
Spotless cleanliness is another indispensable characteristic,--not only
urged, but enforced; for there is no such notable housewife as the
Government. The vast "Mower" Hospital at Chestnut Hill, the largest in
the world, is as well kept as a lady's boudoir should be. It is built
around a square of seven acres, in which stand the surgeon's
lecture-room, the chapel, the platform for the band, etc. A long
corridor goes about this square, rounded at the corners, and lighted on
one side by numerous large windows, which, if removed in summer, must
leave it almost wholly open. From the opposite side radiate the
sick-wards, fifty in number, one story in height, one hundred and
seventy-five feet in length, and twenty feet farther apart at the
extremity than at the corridor, thus completely isolating them from each
other. A railway runs the length of the corridor, on which small cars
convey meals to the mess-rooms attached to each of the wards for those
who are unable to leave them, stores, and even the sick themselves; and
the corridor, closed in winter and warmed by stoves, forms a huge and
airy exercise-hall for the convalescent patients. As for the
cooking-facilities, they are something prodigious, at least in the sight
of ordinary kitchens, leaving nothing to be desired, unless it were that
discriminating kettle of the Erse king, that could cook for any given
number of men and apportion the share of each to his rank and needs.
Such a kettle might make the "extra-diet" kitchen unnecessary;
otherwise, I can hardly tell where improvement would be possible.