The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864
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Various >> The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864
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There is a possibility that I received my innate distrust of things by
inheritance from my maternal grandmother, whose holy horror at the
profanity they once provoked from a bosom-friend in her childhood was
still vivid in her old age.
It was on this wise. When still a pretty Puritan maiden, my grandame was
tempted irresistibly by the spring sunshine to the tabooed indulgence of
a Sunday-walk. The temptation was probably intensified by the
presence of the British troops, giving unwonted fascination to
village-promenades. Her confederate in this guilty pleasure was a
like-minded little saint; so there was a tacit agreement between them
that their transgression should be sanctified by a strict adherence to
religious topics of conversation. Accordingly they launched boldly upon
the great subject which was just then agitating church-circles in New
England.
Fortune smiled upon these criminals against the Blue Laws, until they
encountered a wall surmounted by hickory rails. Without intermitting the
discussion, Susannah sprang agilely up. Quoth she, balancing herself for
one moment upon the summit,--"No, no, Betsey! _I_ believe God is the
author of sin!" The next she sprang toward the ground; but a salient
splinter, a chip of depravity, clutched her Sunday-gown, and converted
her incontinently, it seems, into a confessor of the opposing faith; for
history records, that, following the above-mentioned dogma, there came
from hitherto unstained lips,--"The Devil!"
Time and space would, of course, be inadequate to the enumeration of all
the demonstrations of the truth of the doctrine of the absolute
depravity of things. A few examples only can be cited.
There is melancholy pleasure in the knowledge that a great soul has gone
mourning before me in the path I am now pursuing. It was only to-day,
that, in glancing over the pages of Victor Hugo's greatest work, I
chanced upon the following:--"Every one will have noticed with what
skill a coin let fall upon the ground runs to hide itself, and what art
it has in rendering itself invisible; there are thoughts which play us
the same trick," etc., etc.
The similar tendency of pins and needles is universally understood and
execrated,--their base secretiveness when searched for, and their
incensing intrusion when one is off guard.
I know a man whose sense of their malignity is so keen, that, whenever
he catches a gleam of their treacherous lustre on the carpet, he
instantly draws his two and a quarter yards of length into the smallest
possible compass, and shrieks until the domestic police come to the
rescue, and apprehend the sharp little villains. Do not laugh at this.
Years ago he lost his choicest friend by the stab of just such a little
dastard lying in ambush.
So also every wielder of the needle is familiar with the propensity of
the several parts of a garment in the process of manufacture to turn
themselves wrong side out, and down side up; and the same viciousness
cleaves like leprosy to the completed garment so long as a thread
remains.
My blood still tingles with a horrible memory illustrative of this
truth.
Dressing hurriedly and in darkness for a concert one evening, I appealed
to the Dominie, as we passed under the hall-lamp, for a
toilet-inspection.
"How do I look, father?"
After a sweeping glance came the candid statement,--
"Beau-tifully!"
Oh, the blessed glamour which invests a child whose father views her
"with a critic's eye"!
"Yes, _of course_; but look carefully, please; how is my dress?"
Another examination of apparently severest scrutiny.
"All right, dear! That's the new cloak, is it? Never saw you look
better. Come, we shall be late."
Confidingly I went to the hall; confidingly I entered; since the
concert-room was crowded with rapt listeners to the Fifth Symphony, I,
gingerly, but still confidingly, followed the author of my days, and the
critic of my toilet, to the very uppermost seat, which I entered, barely
nodding to my finically fastidious friend, Guy Livingston, who was
seated near us with a stylish-looking stranger, who bent eyebrows and
glass upon me superciliously.
Seated, the Dominie was at once lifted into the midst of the massive
harmonies of the Adagio; I lingered outside a moment, in order to settle
my garments and--that woman's look. What! was that a partially
suppressed titter near me? Ah! she has no soul for music! How such
ill-timed merriment will jar upon my friend's exquisite sensibilities!
Shade of Beethoven! A hybrid cough and laugh, smothered decorously, but
still recognizable, from the courtly Guy himself! What can it mean?
In my perturbation, my eyes fell and rested upon the sack, whose newness
and glorifying effect had been already noticed by my lynx-eyed parent.
I here pause to remark that I had intended to request the compositor to
"set up" the coming sentence in explosive capitals, by way of emphasis,
but forbear, realizing that it already staggers under the weight of its
own significance.
That sack was wrong side out!
Stern necessity, proverbially known as "the mother of invention," and
practically the step-mother of ministers' daughters, had made me eke out
the silken facings of the front with cambric linings for the back and
sleeves. Accordingly, in the full blaze of the concert-room, there sat
I, "accoutred as I was," in motley attire,--my homely little economies
patent to admiring spectators: on either shoulder, budding wings
composed of unequal parts of sarcenet-cambric and cotton-batting; and in
my heart--_parricide_ I had almost said, but it was rather the more
filial sentiment of desire to operate for cataract upon my father's
eyes. But a moment's reflection sufficed to transfer my indignation to
its proper object,--the sinful sack itself, which, concerting with its
kindred darkness, had planned this cruel assault upon my innocent pride.
A constitutional obtuseness renders me delightfully insensible to one
fruitful source of provocation among inanimate things. I am so dull as
to regard all distinctions between "rights" and "lefts" as invidious;
but I have witnessed the agonized struggles of many a victim of
fractious boots, and been thankful that "I am not as other men are," in
ability to comprehend the difference between my right and left foot.
Still, as already intimated, I have seen wise men driven mad by a thing
of leather and waxed-ends.
A little innocent of three years, in all the pride of his first boots,
was aggravated, by the perversity of the right to thrust itself on to
the left leg, to the utterance of a contraband expletive.
When reproved by his horror-stricken mamma, he maintained a dogged
silence.
In order to pierce his apparently indurated conscience, his censor
finally said, solemnly,--
"Dugald! God knows that you said that wicked word."
"Does He?" cried the baby-victim of reral depravity, in a tone of
relief; "then _He_ knows it was a doke" (_Anglice_, joke).
But, mind you, the sin-tempting boot intended no "doke."
The toilet, with its multiform details and complicated machinery, is a
demon whose surname is Legion.
Time would fail me to speak of the elusiveness of soap, the knottiness
of strings, the transitory nature of buttons, the inclination of
suspenders to twist, and of hooks to forsake their lawful eyes, and
cleave only unto the hairs of their hapless owner's head. (It occurs to
me as barely possible, that, in the last case, the hooks may be
innocent, and the sinfulness may lie in _capillary_ attraction.)
And, O my brother or sister in sorrow, has it never befallen you, when
bending all your energies to the mighty task of "doing" your back-hair,
to find yourself gazing inanely at the opaque back of your brush, while
the hand-mirror, which had maliciously insinuated itself into your right
hand for this express purpose, came down upon your devoted head with a
resonant whack?
I have alluded, parenthetically, to the possible guilt of capillary
attraction, but I am prepared to maintain against the attraction of
gravitation the charge of total depravity. Indeed, I should say of it,
as did the worthy exhorter of the Dominie's old parish in regard to
slavery,--"It's the wickedest thing in the world, except sin!"
It was only the other day that I saw depicted upon the young divine's
countenance, from this cause, thoughts "too deep for tears," and,
perchance, too earthy for clerical utterance.
From a mingling of sanitary and economic considerations, he had cleared
his own sidewalk after a heavy snow-storm. As he stood, leaning upon his
shovel, surveying with smiling complacency his accomplished task, the
spite of the arch-fiend Gravitation was raised against him, and, finding
the impish slates (hadn't Luther something to say about "_as many devils
as tiles_"?) ready to cooeperate, an avalanche was the result, making the
last state of that sidewalk worse than the first, and sending the divine
into the house with a battered hat, and an article of faith
supplementary to the orthodox thirty-nine.
Prolonged reflection upon a certain class of grievances has convinced me
that mankind has generally ascribed them to a guiltless source. I refer
to the unspeakable aggravation of "typographical errors," rightly so
called,--for, in nine cases out of ten, I opine it is the types
themselves which err.
I appeal to fellow-sufferers, if the substitutions and interpolations
and false combinations of letters are not often altogether too absurd
for humanity.
Take, as one instance, the experience of a friend, who, in writing in
all innocency of a session of the Historical Society, affirmed mildly in
manuscript, "All went smoothly," but weeks after was made to declare in
blatant print, "All went _snoringly_!"
As among men, so in the alphabet, one sinner destroyeth much good.
The genial Senator from the Granite Hills told me of an early aspiration
of his own for literary distinction, which was beheaded remorselessly by
a villain of this type. By way of majestic peroration to a pathetic
article, he had exclaimed, "For what would we exchange the fame of
Washington?"--referring, I scarcely need say, to the man of fragrant
memory, and not to the odorous capital. The black-hearted little dies,
left to their own devices one night, struck dismay to the heart of the
aspirant author by propounding in black and white a prosaic inquiry as
to what would be considered a fair equivalent for the _farm_ of the
father of his country!
Among frequent instances of this depravity in my own experience, a
flagrant example still shows its ugly front on a page of a child's book.
In the latest edition of "Our Little Girls," (good Mr. Randolph, pray
read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest,) there occurs a description of a
christening, wherein a venerable divine is made to dip "his _head_" into
the consecrating water, and lay it upon the child.
Disembodied words are also sinners and the occasions of sin. Who has not
broken the Commandments in consequence of the provocation of some
miserable little monosyllabic eluding his grasp in the moment of his
direst need, or of some impertinent interloper thrusting itself in to
the utter demoralization of his well-organized sentences? Who has not
been covered with shame at tripping over the pronunciation of some
perfectly simple word like "statistics," "inalienable," "inextricable,"
etc., etc., etc.?
Whose experience will not empower him to sympathize with that
unfortunate invalid, who, on being interrogated by a pious visitor in
regard to her enjoyment of means of grace, informed the horror-stricken
inquisitor,--"I have not been to church for years, I have been such an
_infidel_,"--and then, moved by a dim impression of wrong somewhere, as
well as by the evident shock inflicted upon her worthy visitor, but
conscious of her own integrity, repeated still more emphatically,--"No;
I have been a confirmed infidel for years."
But a peremptory summons from an animated nursery forbids my lingering
longer in this fruitful field. I can only add an instance of
corroborating testimony from each member of the circle originating this
essay.
The Dominie _loq._--"Sha'n't have anything to do with it! It's a wicked
thing! To be sure, I do remember, when I was a little boy, I used to
throw stones at the chip-basket when it upset the cargo I had just
laded, and it was a great relief to my feelings too. Besides, you've
told stories about me which were anything but true. I don't remember
anything about that sack."
Lady-visitor _loq._--"The first time I was invited to Mr. ----'s, (the
Hon. ---- ----'s, you know,) I was somewhat anxious, but went home
flattering myself I had made a creditable impression. Imagine my
consternation, when I came to relieve the pocket of my gala-gown, donned
for the occasion, at discovering among its treasures a tea-napkin,
marked gorgeously with the Hon. ---- ----'s family-crest, which had
maliciously crept into its depths in order to bring me into disgrace! I
have never been able to bring myself to the point of confession, in
spite of my subsequent intimacy with the family. If it were not for
Joseph's positive assertion to the contrary, I should be of the opinion
that his cup of divination conjured itself deliberately and sinfully
into innocent Benjamin's sack."
Student _loq._ (Testimony open to criticism.)--"Met pretty girl on the
street yesterday. Sure I had on my 'Armstrong' hat when I left
home,--sure as fate; but when I went to pull it off,--by the crown, of
course,--to bow to pretty girl, I smashed in my beaver! How it got there
don't know. Knocked it off. Pretty girl picked it up and handed it to
me. Confounded things, any way!"
Young divine _loq._--"While I was in the army, I was in Washington on
'leave' for two or three days. One night, at a party, I became utterly
bewildered in an attempt to converse, after long desuetude, with a
fascinating woman. I went stumbling on, amazing her more and more, until
finally I covered myself with glory by the categorical statement that in
my opinion General McClellan could 'never get across the Peninsula
without a _fattle_; I beg pardon, Madam! what I mean to say is, without
a _bight_.'"
School-girl _loq._--"When Uncle ---- was President, I was at the White
House at a state-dinner one evening. Senator ---- came rushing in
frantically after we had been at table some time. No sooner was he
seated than he turned to Aunt to apologize for his delay; and, being
very much heated, and very much embarrassed, he tugged away desperately
at his pocket, and finally succeeded in extracting a huge blue stocking,
evidently of home-manufacture, with which he proceeded to wipe his
forehead very energetically and very conspicuously. I suppose the truth
was that the poor man's handkerchiefs were "on a strike," and thrust
forward this homespun stocking to bring him to terms."
School-girl, No. 2, _loq._--"My last term at F., I was expecting a box
of 'goodies' from home. So when the message came, 'An express-package
for you, Miss Fanny!' I invited all my specials to come and assist at
the opening. Instead of the expected box, there appeared a
misshapen-bundle, done up in yellow wrapping-paper. Four such
dejected-looking damsels were never seen before as we, standing around
the ugly old thing. Finally, Alice suggested,--
"'Open it!'
"'Oh, I know what it is,' I said; 'it is my old Thibet, that mother has
had made over for me.'
"'Let's see,' persisted Alice.
"So I opened the package. The first thing I drew out was too much for
me.
"'What a funny-looking basque!' exclaimed Alice. All the rest were
struck dumb with disappointment.
"No! not a basque at all, but a man's black satin waistcoat! and next
came objects about which there could be no doubt,--a pair of dingy old
trousers, and a swallow-tailed coat! Imagine the chorus of damsels!
"The secret was, that two packages lay in father's office,--one for me,
the other for those everlasting freedmen. John was to forward mine. He
had taken up the box to write my address on it, when the yellow bundle
tumbled off the desk at his feet and scared the wits out of his head.
So I came in for father's secondhand clothes, and the Ethiopians had the
'goodies'!"
Repentant Dominie _loq._--"I don't approve of it at all; but then, if
you must write the wicked thing, I heard a good story for you to-day.
Dr. ---- found himself in the pulpit of a Dutch Reformed Church the other
Sunday. You know he is one who prides himself on his adaptation to
places and times. Just at the close of the introductory services, a
black gown lying over the arm of the sofa caught his eye. He was rising
to deliver his sermon, when it forced itself on his attention again.
"'Sure enough,' thought he, 'Dutch Reformed clergymen do wear gowns. I
might as well put it on.'
"So he solemnly thrust himself into the malicious (as you would say)
garment, and went through the services as well as he could, considering
that his audience seemed singularly agitated, and indeed on the point of
bursting out into a general laugh, throughout the entire service. And no
wonder! The good Doctor, in his zeal for conformity, had attired himself
in the black cambric duster in which the pulpit was shrouded during
week-days, and had been gesticulating his eloquent homily with his arms
thrust through the holes left for the pulpit-lamps!"
WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?
I think I must be personally known to most of the readers of the
"Atlantic." I see them wherever I go, and they see me. Beneath a
shelter-tent by the Rapidan, in a striped railroad-station in Bavaria,
at the counter of Truebner's bookstore in London, and at Cordaville, in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, as we waited for the freight to get out
of the way, I have read the "Atlantic" over their shoulders, or they
over mine. The same thing has happened at six hundred and thirty-two
other improbable places. More than this, however, my words and works in
the great science of Domestic Economy have travelled everywhere before
me, not simply like the Connecticut of the poet,
"Bringing shad to South Hadley, and pleasure to man,"[35]
but extending all over the civilized world. Not that I am the author of
the clothes-wringing machine, or of the spring clothes-pin,--my
influence has been more subtile. I have propounded great central axioms
in housekeeping and the other economies, which have rushed over the
world with the inevitable momentum of truth. It was I, for instance, who
first discovered and proclaimed the great governing fact that the butter
of a family costs more than its bread. It was I who first announced that
you cannot economize in the quality of your paper. I am the discoverer
of the formula that a family consumes as many barrels of flour in a year
as it has adult members, reducing children to adults by the rule of
three. The morning after our marriage I raised the window-shade, so that
the rising sun of that auspicious day should shine full upon our
parlor-Brussels. I said to Lois, "Let us never be slaves to our
carpets!" The angel smiled assent; and on the wings of that smile my
whisper fluttered over the earth. It brooded in a thousand homes else
miserable. Light was where before was chaos. Sunshine drove scrofula
from ten thousand quivering frames, and millions of infant lips would
this day raise Lois's name and mine in their Kindergarten songs, did
they only know who were their benefactors.
Standing thus in the centre of the sphere of the domestic economies, I
have, of course, read with passionate interest the "House and Home
Papers" in the "Atlantic." It is I, as I am proud to confess, who have,
violated all copyright, have had them reprinted, as Tract No. 2237 of
the American Tract Society, No. 63 of the American Tract Society of
Boston, and No. 445 of the issues of the Sanitary Commission, and am now
about to introduce them surreptitiously into the bureaus of these
charities, so that the colporteurs, of every stripe, may at last be
certain that they are conferring the first of benefits upon their
homeless fellow-creatures. It is I who every night toil through long
streets that I may slide these little tracts, messengers of blessing,
under the front-doors of wretched friends, who are dying without homes
in the gilded miseries of their bowling-alley parlors. Where they have
introduced the patent weather-strip, I place the tract on the upper
door-step, with a brick-bat, which keeps it from blowing away. But I
observe that it is no part of the plan of those charming papers, more
than it was of the "Novum Organon" or of the "Principia," to descend
into the details of the economies. I suppose that the author left all
that to the "Domestic Economy" of her excellent sister, and, as far as
the details of practice go, well she might. But between that practical
detail by which one sister cooks to-day the dinners on a million tables,
and the aesthetic, moral, and religious considerations by which the other
sister elevates the life of the million homes in whose dining-rooms
those tables stand, there is room for a brief exposition of the
principles on which those dinners are to be selected.
It is that exposition which, as I sit superior, I am to give, _ex
cathedra_, after this long preface, now.
I shall illustrate the necessity of this exposition by an introduction
to follow the preface, after the manner of the Germans, before we arrive
at the substance of our work, which will be itself comprised in its
first chapter. This introduction will consist of two illustrations. The
first relates to the planting of potatoes. When I inherited my ancestral
estate, known as "Crusoe's Well," I resolved to devote it to potatoes
for the first summer. I summoned my vassals, and we fenced it. I bought
dung and manured it. I hired ploughmen and oxen, and they ploughed it. I
made a covenant with a Kelt, who became, _quoad hoc_, my slave, and gave
to him money, with which I directed him to buy seed-potatoes and plant
it.
And he,--"How many shall I buy?"
I retired to my study, consulted London, Lindley, and Linnaeus,--the
thick Gray, the middling Gray, and the child's Gray,--Worcester's
Dictionary, and Webster's, in both of which you can usually find almost
anything but what should be there,--Johnson's "Dictionary of Gardening,"
and Gardner's "Dictionary of Farming,"--and none of these treatises
mentioned the quantity of potatoes proper for planting a given space of
land. Even the Worcester and Webster failed. I was reduced to tell the
Kelt to ask the huckster of whom he bought. All the treatises went on
the principle--true, but inadequate--that "any fool would know." Any
fool might, probably does,--but I was not a fool.
The next year, having built my house and taken Lois home, the bluebirds
sang spring to us one fine morning, and we went out to plant our
radish-seeds. With fit forethought, the seed had been bought, the ground
manured and raked, the string, the dibble, the woman's trowel, the man's
trowel, the sticks for the seed-papers, and the papers were all there.
Lois was charming, in her sun-bonnet; I looked knowing in my Canadian
oat-straw. We marked out the bed,--as the robins, meadow-larks, and
bluebirds directed. Lois then looked up article "Radish" in the
"Farmer's Dictionary," and we found the lists of "Long White Naples,"
"White Spanish," "Black Spanish," "Long Scarlet," "White Turnip-Root,"
"Purple Turnip," and the rest, for two columns, which we should and
should not plant. All that was nothing to us. We were to plant
radish-seeds, which we had bought, as such, from Mr. Swett. How deep to
plant them, how far apart or how near together, the book was to tell.
But the book only said, "Everybody knows how to plant radishes."
Now this was not true. _We_ did not know.
These two illustrations, as the minister says, are sufficient to show
the character of the deficiency which I am now to supply,--which young
housekeepers of intelligence feel, when they have got their nests ready
and begin to bill and coo in-doors. There are many things which every
fool knows, which people of sense do not know. First among these things
is, "What will you have for dinner?"--a question not to be answered by
detailed answers,--on the principle of the imaginary Barmacide feasts of
the cook-books,--but by the results of deep principles, which underlie,
indeed, the whole superficial strata of civilized life. Did not the army
of the Punjaub perish, as it retreated from Ghizni to Jelalabad, not
because the enemy's lances were strong, but because one day it did not
dine?
I am not going to tell the old story of that "sweet pretty girl" who,
after a week of legs of mutton, ordered a "leg of beef." I sympathize
with her from the bottom of my heart. Her sister will be married
to-morrow. To her I dedicate this paper, that she may know, not what she
shall order,--that is left to her own sweet will, less fettered now that
her life is rounded by her welding it upon its other half than it was
when she wandered in maiden meditation fancy-free,--not, I say, what she
shall order for her dinner and for Leander's, but the principle on which
the order is to be given.
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