University of Virginia Library

THE HOUSEHOLD.

What an old-fashioned word! Yes—and it means an old-fashioned
thing too. A “post-coach” of twenty years ago in
comparison with a rail-car of the present day, is as the “household”
of our great-grandfathers to the “menage” or our time. The keep
of a feudal castle would look rather out of place among the conservatories,
artificial waterworks, and Chinese bridges of a modern
garden; perhaps the household, or citadel of home, has as little
claim to a position of honor among the “refinements” of fashionable
society. What need of walls or intrenchments when we live
for the public? Privacy is but another word for ennui; retirement
has but one meaning or value—that of affording opportunity of
preparation for display. If we would shut out the world, it is only
when nature imperiously demands a moment's respite from its glare.
Happy they whose nerves, like iron, grow the tougher by hammering!
They need lose no time.

Yet there was something pleasant in the antiquated idea of the
home citadel. The old-fashioned parlor—what a nice place it was!
It had no twin, and could have none, for its best ornaments were

such as no skill of upholstery could match. Where could we get
another grandmamma for the warm corner? Dear old lady, with
her well-starched laces, her spotless white satin cap-riband, her
shining black silk gown and shawl, her knitting, and her foot-stove—
who can replace her? And in the corner next the window, where
the light can fall on her left hand, so that the flitting shadow of the
ever busy right may not confuse the stitches, there is mamma, with
her capacious work-basket before her; a whole array of, not spools,
but cotton-balls or thread-papers; pin-cushions, emery-bags, thimbles,
needle-books, on the table at her side; not to mention the piece of
wax gashed and criss-crossed in every direction by whistling threads,
the very emblem of seamstress-thrift in the good days of old. A
clear light comes in at the window, for rooms where sewing is to be
done must not be dimmed, let the carpets fade as they will; no
becoming twilight, therefore, can be among the attractions of our
household parlor. When papa sits down to his paper, he must have
sunshine, or the next best thing that is to be had; his eyes will not
serve him for light made gray or milky by struggling through thick
linen, and he has never been used to sitting in the basement to “save
the parlors.” What a cheerful rendezvous this makes for the children
when they come from school; no seeking mamma in bed-rooms,
nurseries, or odd, out-of-the-way nooks and corners, to which it would
require a terrier's instinct to trace her with any precision. A radiating
centre of light and love is easily found, and young hearts thrill
with a pleasure all the sweeter for being undefined, as they approach
it. Affection melts and flows around in this genial atmosphere, till
it fills the whole mould, giving out smiles and kisses as it goes.

Such a parlor as we are describing—large, square, light, cheerful
and intensely human in its aspect, admits no furniture too rich or
too fragile for daily use. Any brown-hollanding of chairs and sofas,

or gauzing of lamps and candelabra would be out of character. A
drugget is admissible, for a great deal of eating is done in this room,
and little feet might tread bread-and-butter and potato into the carpet
unhandsomely. A sideboard is essential, for it gives a hint of
hospitality; and a plate-warmer may stand near it without a blush.
A nest of salvers graces a recess—old social friends now banished to
the china-closet. The mantelpiece shows lamps and candlesticks; a
three-minute glass for boiling eggs by; a small marble bust of
Washington for a centre-piece, and china flower-pots at the ends;
besides a pair of card-racks, in which are displayed a dozen or so of
cards somewhat yellowed by time and good fires. A picture hangs
above; perhaps a colored engraving from Morland, in which cows,
pigs, and chickens remind the young folk of that delightful summer
when they were in the country, romping in haymows, and chasing
Uncle John's old horse round the field, hoping to inveigle his senile
sagacity to the bridle cunningly hidden behind Charlie's back.
Crimson curtains there are, but not too close, and a few geraniums
and monthly roses stand just where they can catch the morning
sun, which shines through their leaves, producing another summer
illusion. The tables have newspapers, pamphlets, and books on
them; for conversation is a chief amusement of the true household
parlor, and all the topics of the day are in place, from the congressional
debates to the new novel, or the theatrical prodigy. The
pianoforte is conspicuous at one side of the room, and plenty of
music lies about it; and a flute is there—for fluting is almost a
domestic duty.

But we need not further particularize, for the main point in a
household parlor is the air of life, freedom, affection, and intelligence;
the unmistakeable signs of a common interest; the nestling
and home-like look of mother's corner, and the severer dignity of

grand-mamma's; the all-day tone, as if a pleasant call was always
acceptable, and was accounted among the proper belongings of the
social area. There may be shreds on the carpet and a litter of playthings
under the table, but no cold look will remind the visitor that
the proper hour has not been hit. Mamma may be washing up the
breakfast things, but she will not run away, or even hide her towel,
if one of papa's good friends stops in on his way down town. She
will, more probably, defer a little her daily visit to the kitchen,
rather than lose the talk of the grave men about politics or
business.

Wherein consists the difference between such a parlor as we have
sketched, and the morning room of fashionable houses? Our little
picture doubtless seems a mere vagary of the imagination, like
impossible Swiss scenery; our young readers can hardly believe
such things ever were, and they are far from desiring that they
should come back again; so different is the whole course and current
of their ideas of domestic life. In what consists the difference?
Is it in particulars only, or in the spirit of the household?

There is hardly a town in all this glorious and blessed Union of
ours, where we do not, or may not hear lamentations over the old
times of sociability, and free, neighborly intercourse. In some
places it is `Before our society became so large,' in others, `Before
we had a few rich people among us, who set expensive fashions, and
encouraged ceremony and show.' In the cities it may perhaps be,
`It is in vain to attempt social visiting here. The gentlemen are
so late at their business, and come home so tired, that they want
nothing but rest;' or `The ladies have become so fashionable that
nothing but a morning call is permissible without special invitation.'
So we are to suppose there is but little beside formal or showy visiting.
And does this bespeak greater privacy and comfort at home?

All experience says no! Social feeling is an element of home;
pride is the enemy of both. A home pervaded by the true spirit is
gladdened by the voice of a friend. A home in which the education
of children is a sacred object, covets the conversation of intelligent
and various guests. A home of whose harmony religion is the
diapason, breathes a spirit of hospitality. In none of these will the
alternation be between seclusion and display—two extremes equally
inimical to joyous domesticity. Common life will be allowed to
flow through them, for the sake of its healthy current, its fertilizing
clouds and dews, and the rainbow gleams that flit across its surface,
wherein the eternal stars are mirrored. Life! how mad to shut it
out for pride's sake!

But we must yield to circumstances! Ah indeed! were circumstances
made for man, or man for circumstances? What compelling
power binds us in the traces of fashion? Whose folly is it that
makes us ashamed of domestic employments, in such sort that we
sedulously banish every symptom of them from the seen part of
our life? Who is it that measures out the forms with which a
neighbor must be received, or the degree of dress necessary to make
an unexpected visit agreeable? It is in vain to talk of `Society,'
as if society were a huge, irresistible Morgante, using us as tools or
servants, or a tremendous cylinder flatting us out, in spite of ourselves,
like mere dough. We, and such as we, make society, and it
is our individual cowardice, or mean ambition, that keeps it from
improving. Every virtuous family has the seeds of rational and
happy society within itself. There is the community of interest, and
the consciousness of this community, which is the first requisite for
justice and harmony. There is the instinctive and habitual affection,
which is the only omnipotent antidote against those paroxysms
of selfishness or ill humor to which we are all liable, and must be

so while we are in a condition in which mind and body contend for
mastery with alternate success. There are the various tastes of age
and youth, sex, genius, and idiosyncrasy, which are necessary to an
exciting and profitable variety of interest. There is the felt necessity
for a common and inflexible standard of duty, to which all may
refer without fear of contradiction. There are the antagonist circumstances
of joy and sorrow, misfortune and success, transgression
aud repentance, authority, restraint, and struggling will, demanding
that sympathy without which we should all become intolerable and
hard-hearted egotists, in the course of our threescore and ten years'
intercourse with the world at large. In short, home is indeed a
little world; and in each household we see in some sense a resemblance
to the society of which it forms a part. If love and truth,
justice and religion, reigned within our homes, so would they in
social life; if pride, desire of display, and of appearing what we are
not; if a longing for excitement, a secret indulgence of vicious
inclinations, and the selfish forgetfulness of the oneness of family
interests characterize our household life, so will they form the staple
of that `Society' which we are fond of making a scape-goat of.
The decay of the household fire is the cause of our social coldness;
if we would have our outer intercourse rational, unaffected, sympathetic,
improving, and beneficent, we must reform onr domestic
maxims.

One theme of conservative satire against our newfangled republic,
—satire hissed abroad, and cautiously echoed at home,—is the want
of reverence and subordination observable in our young people, as
if it were, as indeed we have heard it gravely asserted to be, a
natural consequence of our institutions. But surely this is a misunderstanding
of the very nature of liberty, which is to be esteemed
only as the handmaid of obedience.

and there is no goodness where there is no reverence. Our own
thought, as to this confessed want in the rising generation is, that in
the wild chase after wealth and social distinction, the old-fashioned,
fundamental, patriarchal, God-given idea of the household is merged
into a sort of domestic republic, in which all are free and equal, and
the very notion of natural headship is repudiated, the prominent
object being not the family but the world; not the ark of shelter,
but the struggling waves around it, and the floating, slippery treasures
upon them. For these we venture all; for these we are
content to dive, to dwell on rafts, or cling to pieces of wreck; to
dare the unknown monsters of the deep; to go down with both
hands clutched full of the spoils with which we thought to return
home at evening. Our thoughts may revert to the light which we
know is shining there, but the glare about us makes it seem tame,
if not contemptible. But are the young people alone to blame for
these false and foolish notions? Alas, no! Have we not taught
them that the time spent under the paternal roof is only a time of
training for the great arena? Has the happiness of home been an
important end with us, or have we let it slip into the class of accidents,
not worth considering in comparison with life's great object?
The weariness of this grinding, unsatisfactory life of ours makes our
children necessary as playthings, so long as they can amuse us; and
the moment they pass this age their preparation for grinding on
their own account commences, and we hasten to throw them on their
individual responsibility. Authority, that soul and sun of the
household, is unknown. We try a little government or control of
actions; but we make but slender effort towards producing the
state of mind which makes it natural to obey. Our children are
therefore satisfied if they fulfill a certain specified round of duty or
observance towards us. Filial piety is really and truly an obsolete
expression in the nineteenth century; it smacks of feudality, even.
It is the tendency of an analytic and utilitarian age to strip common
life of its poetry, and the household suffers with the rest. We
live for the future—whether in a wise sense or not is the question.
To live truly for the future we must live in the present. “The life
that now is” is the key of the future. Certainly at some period of
our existence we must undergo a moral and spiritual probation with
express reference to our ultimate moral and spiritual state. Nature
seems to have appointed the domestic circle, in all its closeness of
relation, openness of vision, and emotional incident, as the infant
school for eternity. Later we are transferred to a more advanced or
enlarged seminary on the same plan, where, in due time, we take
the place of teachers, though we are still learners, too, repeating on
a larger scale the lessons of the household. What a beneficent
arrangement, if we would but enter into it heartily! What training
in love, in patience, in fellow-feeling, in pity, in self-control, and
self-denial! What strength in union, what comfort in mutual reliance,
and the unwavering confidence of sympathy!

The unsophisticated imagination delights in the notion of the
household, its seclusion which is not solitude—its exclusion which
is not inhospitality—its unity which implies variety. Children know
this, as, when two of them will sit down under a great basket, and
look round with a feeling of delicious snugness, saying, “This is our
house;” or with even less to aid the fancy, set a circle of chairs to
personate a home, supplying the enclosing walls out of “the stuff
that dreams are made of,” and pretending to go through the daily
routine of significant nothings which to their minds constitute home.
The little girl takes small pleasure with her dolls till she can establish
them in something that seems like a domestic state, and have

dressing and undressing, going to bed and getting up, sitting on
sofas, entertaining company, and handing tea. We have seen
children in the country that would make a drawing-room out of an
old decayed stump, hanging the little hollows with mosses for curtains;
placing bits of broken china for ornaments and table furniture;
and pretty little piles of red leaves or flowers for fires, with thimbles
ingeniously hung on threads, suspended over the mock blaze with
mock dinners in them. The talk that accompanied all this was
household talk:—
a very reflex of the home scenes. It is for this that a family of dolls
should always be allowed an important place in the nursery; not
wax dolls that must be laid away, and only taken out to have their
eyes pulled open and shut by means of a string, like nothing on earth
or under the earth; but good, serviceable babies, that can be dressed
and undressed, have their faces washed occasionally, and even be
whipped, when the little mamma is in the mood for domestic discipline.
The fashion of sending children to school at a very early
age shortens the doll period too much for our ideas; we would prolong
it almost indefinitely, for the sake of the home element. Girls
cannot have the details of domestic life too firmly fixed in their
minds. We cannot help feeling a pity, not wholly untinged with
contempt, when we hear young ladies publishing their total ignorance
of household minutiæ. They seem to us shorn of one of the
modest glories of womanhood. If we were entrusted with the
making up of a bride's trousseau, we should be sure to put in a
couple of real (not make-believe) aprons, for making cake and custards
in, even if there were a point-lace veil. To us there is no incongruity
in these things. There is no domestic office, however trivial
or toilsome, that is not capable of being exalted to some degree of
dignity by the sentiment or spirit in which it is performed, as there
is none which may not be degraded by sordid thoughts. Thus,
`ordering a supper,' says Lady M. W. Montague, and we would
add, under certain imaginable circumstances, cooking one, `is not
merely ordering a supper, but preparing for the refreshment and
pleasure of those we love;' while the rites of hospitality in their
most graceful and imposing form are every day profaned by the
mean, ostentatious, or trafficking spirit which prompts them.

We touched on authority as the basis of household happiness—
a proof how antiquated are our notions. But if the very mention
of authority, even in connection with the training of children, give
an air of mustiness to our page, how shall we face the reader of
to-day, when we avow that we judge no family to be truly and
rationally happy, unless the head of it possess absolute authority, in
such sense that his known wish is law—his expressed will imperative.
Is this an anti-democratic sentiment? By no means. The
ideal family supposes a head who is himself under law, and that of
the most stringent and inevitable kind. It supposes him to hold
and exercise authority under a deep sense of duty, as being something
with which God clothed him when he made him husband and
father, and which he is, therefore, on no occasion or account, at
liberty to put off or set aside as a thing indifferent. This power is
necessary to the full development and exercise of that beautiful
virtue of obedience, without which the human will must struggle on
hopelessly for ever, being forbidden by its very constitution to know
happiness on any other terms. It is an ill sign of the times, that
the old-fashioned promise of obedience in the marriage ceremony is
now only a theme for small wit. Those wise fathers who placed it

there knew the human heart better than we suppose. They knew
that, as surely as man and wife are one, so surely do they thus
united become a Cerberus-like monster, if they retain more than one
head. The old song says,

A house in which this question remains undecided, is always a
pitiable spectacle, for both nature and religion are set aside there.

We had not dared to touch on this incendiary topic if we had
not been sure of such support as admits not of gainsaying. Shakspeare's
shrewdness, his knowledge of the human heart, his high
ideal of woman as wife and mother, not to speak of his poetic appreciation
of the beauty of fitness, render his opinion peculiarly valuable
on this ticklish point. Hear him:—

If now we should in turn read a homily to this supreme head
(which is bound to have ears), we might perhaps forfeit all the
gratitude we suppose ourselves to have earned from him. We
should show him such a list of the duties which true headship
imposes, that he would be glad to be diminished, and perhaps
change places with the least important of his subjects. The possession
of unquestionable authority almost makes him responsible for

the happiness of the household. No sunshine is so cheering as the
countenance of a father who is feared as well as loved. A brow
clouded with care, a mind too much absorbed by schemes of gain or
ambition to be able to unbend itself in the domestic circle, a temper
which vacillates between impatience under annoyance, and the decision
which puts an end to it, a disposition to indulgence which has
no better foundation than mere indolence, and which is, therefore,
sure to be unequal—these are all forbidden to him whose right it is
to rule. In short, unless he rule himself, he is obviously unfit to
rule anybody else; so that, to assume this high position under law
and gospel, is to enter into bonds to be good! which appears to us a
fair offset against the duty of obedience on the other side.

One reason, certainly, why there is less household feeling than
formerly, is that young married people, at present, think it necessary
to begin life where their fathers left off—with a complete establishment,
and not a loop-hole left for those little plans of future addition
to domestic comforts or luxuries which give such a pleasant stimulus
to economy, and confer so tender a value on the things purchased
by means of an especial self-denial in another quarter. Charles
Lamb, who was an adept in these gentle philosophies, said that after
he had the ability to buy a choice book when he chose, the indulgence
had, somehow, lost its sweetness, and brought nothing of the
relish that used to attend a purchase after he and Mary had been
looking and longing, and at last only dared buy upon the strength
of days' or weeks' economizing. This is a secret worth learning by
those who would get the full flavor of life, and make home the centre
of a thousand delightful interests and memories.

But all this is supposing that to please ourselves, and not the
world, is the object. The world begs leave to order matters more
rationally for us. Scorning nature's plan of pushing the fledgling

from the parental nest before his wings are full grown, in order that
he may strengthen and enjoy them the better through the necessity
of effort. It demands at least the appearance of independent maturity,
and scouts any idea of growth in the great matter of feathers.
And, what is worse, this regulation plumage often leaves the wearers
chilled and uncomfortable, though perhaps unconscious why. We
might learn better notions as to our début from the sportsman, for he
knows that the pleasure is in the chase, not the dinner.

In thus attempting faintly to shadow forth the difference between
house and home, we have unavoidably broached some unpopular
subjects, and must expect to be reckoned behind the age. But we
pray our readers to remember that, in preferring the household
warmth and sacredness of simple times to the less carefully impropriated
splendors of this, we are but following—so far as the question
is an æsthetic one, at least—the example of the artist, who
chooses for his canvas rather the sun-stained Italian damsel, with
her trim, yet fantastic bodice, square head-dress of coarse linen, and
quaint distaff and spindle, than the most faultlessly furbelowed
modern belle, though her complexion be like blanc-mange, and her
form like an hour-glass. These are matters of taste, and, perhaps,
if we cannot quite agree, we may agree to differ.