p626-020 THE HOUSEHOLD.

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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

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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,

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

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For who loves that, must first be wise and good.

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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

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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:—


Human nature's daily food—
Transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles;
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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

p626-033 A CHAPTER ON HOSPITALITY.

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Few of the good and pleasant things of this world will bear
analyzing. We must take them as they are, or we lose them
altogether. Even our own most fondly-cherished benevolences—the
things whereby in our secret souls, we hope to cover at least a part
of the multitude of sins—change color when we apply the severe
tests with which we are wont to try the good deeds of our neighbors.
It is not well to sift everything for the sake of detecting
earthiness; yet the world is so full of adulterations that something
is necessary in self-defence. We may inquire a little into some fair-seeming
shows, at least to draw lessons for our own practice.

No quality or habit is more popular, or more naturally popular,
than hospitality. It appeals so directly to the universal part of us—
the poor wants of poor human nature, in the first place, and that
other want no less urgent, that what contributes to the refreshment
of the body should be seasoned with love or kindness, or some show
of them. We love even the pretence so dearly that we praise an
inn—that abode of the mercenary demons—in proportion as there
is the outward semblance of this, though we know it will all be
`put down in the bill.' This may be one reason why some persons
who have sacrificed life's best blessing—spontaneous, disinterested

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affection—to the indulgence of certain anti-social uncongenialities,
find their only pleasure in advancing age, in places where the
appearance, at least, of `honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,'
may be purchased with money—the only means left these unfortunates.

Being popular, hospitality is, of course, a virtue which most people
wish to practise in some shape, and which many people try to
practise at the smallest possible expense. We do not mean expense
of money—though this is sometimes spared rather unnecessarily—
but of some other things not so cheap as money. Sad blunders are
made—blunders of various kinds; some which cover us with shame
upon reflection; some which cover us with ridicule while we are
happily unconscious; some which make enemies where we hoped to
have secured friends; some through means of which our pride
appears, while we flatter ourselves that we are conferring a highly
appreciated honor upon our guests. In primitive conditions of life,
where the daily wants become especially prominent, from the degree
of uncertainty which exists as to whether they will be satisfied and
how,—hospitality is often impulsive and sincere. Sympathy is necessarily
strong in such cases. It is in highly civilized and artificial
life that hospitality becomes an art, to be studied like other fine arts,
or neglected and contemned through pride and inveterate self-indulgence.
Poole—Paul Pry Poole—has an amusing sketch, `A
Christmas Visit to Dribble Hall,' an extract from which, in the
`Living Age,' gave rlse to this homily, by calling up to remembrance
certain amusing passages in our own experience, which set
us upon theorizing a little in the matter. `Squire Dribble' is a
person who chooses to invite people to his house, and when they are
there and fairly in his power, takes particular care to avoid perceiving
their wants, and especially cannot be made to understand that

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their habits may not be precisely similar to his own. Two gentlemen
arrive at his country-house too late for dinner; he regrets that
they did not come sooner, but promises to hurry supper by half an
hour. On their hinting pretty broadly that so considerable a delay
will be inconvenient after a long drive, he offers a slice of `something
cold' with tea. In the morning he insists upon their rising at
his hour, and allows them to dress in the bitter cold without fire,
and so come down blue and shivering to the breakfast-table, where
the eggs are counted out and the newspaper clutched by the squire,
who declares he would not give a farthing for the paper unless he
sees the first of it.

This is no fancy sketch—we are convinced of it. We have seen
American Dribbles who occasionally tried to be hospitable just in
the squire's manner. In houses where all below stairs was costly
and luxurious, we have seen the guest-chamber unfurnished even
with the requisite amount of chairs and tables; no attendance of a
servant offered, and no notice given of the time for rising, until the
bell rang for the early breakfast which was then on the table. We
have seen a lady who had visits and shopping on her hands, suffered
to sit still, when her time was very limited, because the walking was
too bad for her to venture out on foot, and delicacy prevented her
sending for a carriage while there was one quite at liberty,
though not offered. In this matter of carriages particularly, a
`Dribble' hospitality is but too common; for again and again have
we seen young ladies who were visiting where a coach was kept,
obliged to walk home after evening parties—attended by a servant
or by some woful beau—a mile or two in the cold, because, although
no carriage was sent, it was well understood that the family pride
forbade any inmate from using a hired one.

To be `treated like one of the family' is sometimes very

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agreeable, but this may be carried too far. We once knew a lady so
candid as to protest against this mark of affection. She declared
that when she visited, it made part of her pleasure to be treated
like company. Guests differ so much on this point that one must
have unusual tact if, in entertaining much, an occasional error be
not committed. Some are so painfully anxious to avoid giving
trouble that an additional dish makes them miserable, quite forgetting
that with many a good, kind-hearted entertainer, this very
trouble is a pleasure. Some again find their own habits so imperious
that they play `Dribble' in other people's houses, putting
everybody out as to time, place and circumstance, without a misgiving.
A noted lady traveling in this country some years ago,
required her bottle of Champagne every night on going to bed, and
that in the soberest of eastern families. This, too, was only an
item in the list of her rather onerous inamissibles. We have heard
more than one anecdote of popular clergymen, who, during occasional
visits to their greatest admirers, have construed the guest-right
so rigorously as to cause the entire household to heave a simultaneous
sigh of relief at their departure.

Conscientious people, whose habits are very strict, and who sincerely
believe certain practices and certain articles of diet to be
highly deleterious, are sometimes cruelly divided between the desire
to make their guests' time pass agreeably and to entertain them
with the best the house affords, and the fear of contributing to evil
habits or offering what is injurious to health. Since the temperance
reformation, many persons have learned to think every form of spirituous
liquors so injurious that they dare not set anything of the kind
before their friends; while, on the other hand, the old ideas of generous
conviviality and hearty welcome attached to this form of refreshment
are so potent, that they feel a species of regret—perhaps, also,

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of false shame—which makes an adherence to principle in this particular
extremely difficult. Others, on the contrary, after all that
has been said and written on the subject, seem still to fancy that
they show their hospitality by pressing the guest to drink whether
he will or not; and even in a case where it was well known that the
person so pressed had been saved on the brink of ruin only by the
resolution not to touch even a single glass, we have seen a lady
tempt and urge the unfortunate visitor, until she looked to us like
some fell Mœnad luring a hapless mortal to destruction.

Even in the matter of tea and coffee, some people have a conscience,
and offer with reluctance to their friends what seems to them
premature old age, depression of spirits, paralysis and early death.
Others again are so over-kind that they must make your coffee
strong enough to be sour and your tea to be bitter, reminding one
of the story of the good old Jersey lady who entertained General
Washington during the time of the war, when molasses was the
usual sweetener.

`Not quite so sweet, ma'am, if you please,' said the courteous
great man, when he handed his tea-cup to be filled a second time.

`Oh, dear!' said the hospitable dame, putting in rather an extra
share of the precious article, `if it was all molasses it wouldn't be
too good for General Washington!'

Pinching hospitality is bad enough, but ostentatious hospitality,
if possible, worse. To see in all your host's pompous offers, in all
his sedulous attentions and all his unwearied display of resources,
himself and not you the real object; to feel that, while you are géné
with his oppressive civilities, he considers himself laying you under
the greatest obligations; to find ceremonious observance taking the
place of welcome, and formality rendering ease impossible—this is
but too common in this country as well as elsewhere among those

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who lack nothing of this world's goods but the knowledge how to
enjoy. A visit under such circumstances is so odious that a guest
would need to be presented with a good part of the fine things he
sees—according to the practice of the worthy host in the Persian
Tales—to induce him to make a second attempt.

Sincerity is sometimes severely tried in cases where hospitality
appears to demand one course, while truth and nature cry out for its
opposite. To seem glad to see a visitor when, from whatever circumstance,
you wish he had chosen to stop anywhere else; to be
obliged to press him to stay when your affairs imperatively require
that you should be left alone; to feel constrained to be `in spirits'
with a heavy heart; to wear a hilarious aspect when mirth is `as
vinegar to the teeth and as smoke to the eyes;' that we should ever
do or even attempt such things, shows how deeply we feel the claims
of hospitality. They are done or attempted every day, not through
self-interest or any such unworthy motive, but simply from the
instinctive dread of seeming deficient in what mankind in all ages
have agreed to consider a sacred duty. Those who, through moroseness,
pride, or parsimony, decline these and kindred sacrifices, are
universally denounced as selfish churls or haughty egotists, and voted
inhuman by the general voice.

Like many other virtues, hospitality is practised in its perfection
by the poor. If the rich did their share, how would the woes of
this world be lightened! how would the diffusive blessing irradiate
a wider and a wider circle, until the vast confines of society would
bask in the reviving ray! If every forlorn widow whose heart bleeds
over the recollection of past happiness made bitter by contrast with
present poverty and sorrow, found a comfortable home in the ample
establishment of her rich kinsman; if every young man struggling
for a foothold on the slippery soil of life, were cheered and aided by

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the countenance of some neighbor whom fortune had endowed with
the power to confer happiness; if the lovely girls, shrinking and
delicate, whom we see every day toiling timidly for a mere pittance
to sustain frail life and guard the sacred remnant of gentility, were
taken by the hand, invited and encouraged, by ladies who pass them
by with a cold nod—but where shall we stop in enumerating the
cases in which true, genial hospitality, practised by the rich ungrudgingly,
without a selfish drawback—in short, practised as the poor
practise it—would prove a fountain of blessedness, almost an antidote
to half the keener miseries under which society groans!

Yes: the poor—and children—understand hospitality after the
pure model of Christ and his apostles. We can cite two instances,
both true.

In the western woods, a few years since, lived a very indigent
Irish family. Their log-cabin scarcely protected them from the weather,
and the potato field made but poor provision for the numerous
rosy cheeks that shone through the unstopped chinks when a stranger
was passing by. Yet when another Irish family, poorer still,
and way-worn and travel-soiled, stopped at their door—children,
household goods and all—they not only received and entertained
them for the night, but kept them many days, sharing with this
family, as numerous as their own, the one room and loft which made
up their poor dwelling, and treating them in all respects as if they
had been invited guests. And the mother of the same family, on
hearing of the death of a widowed sister who had lived in New York,
immediately set on foot an inquiry as to the residence of the children,
with a view to coming all the way to the city to take the
orphans home to her own house and bring them up with her own
children. We never heard whether the search was successful, for
the circumstance occurred about the time we were leaving that part

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of the country; but that the intention was sincere, and would be
carried into effect if possible, there was no shadow of doubt.

As to children and their sincere, generous little hearts, we were
going to say, that one asked his mother, in all seriousness, `Mamma,
why don't you ask the poor people when you have a party? Doesn't
it say so in the Bible?' A keen reproof, and unanswerable.

The nearest we recollect to have observed to this literal construction
of the sacred injunction, among those who may be called the
rich—in contradistinction to those whom we usually call the poor,
though our kind friends were far from being what the world considers
rich—was in the case of a city family, who lived well, and who
always on Christmas day, Thanksgiving, or other festival time, when
a dinner more generous than ordinary smoked upon the board, took
care to invite their homeless friends who lived somewhat poorly or
uncomfortably—the widow from her low-priced boarding house; the
young clerk, perhaps, far from his father's comfortable fireside; the
daily teacher, whose only deficiency lay in the purse—these were
the guests cheered at this truly hospitable board; and cheered
heartily—not with cold, half-reluctant civility, but with the warmest
welcome, and the pleasant appendix of the long, merry evening
with music and games, and the frolic dance after the piano. We
would not be understood to give this as a solitary instance, but we
wish we knew of many such.

The forms of society are in a high degree inimical to true hospitality.
Pride has crushed genuine social feeling out of too many
hearts, and the consequence is a cold sterility of intercourse, a soulstifling
ceremoniousness, a sleepless vigilance for self, totally incompatible
with that free, flowing, genial intercourse with humanity, so
nourishing to all the better feelings. The sacred love of home—
that panacea for many of life's ills—suffers with the rest. Few

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people have homes now a days. The fine, cheerful, every-day parlor,
with its table covered with the implements of real occupation
and real amusement; mamma on the sofa, with her needle; grand-mamma
in her great chair, knitting; pussy winking at the fire
between them, is gone. In its place we have two gorgeous rooms,
arranged for company but empty of human life; tables covered
with gaudy, ostentatious and useless articles—a very mockery of
anything like rational pastime—the light of heaven as cautiously
excluded as the delicious music of free, childish voices; every member
of the family wandering in forlorn loneliness, or huddled in
some `back room' or `basement,' in which are collected the only
means of comfort left them under this miserable arrangement.
This is the substitute which hundreds of people accept in place of
home! Shall we look in such places for hospitality? As
soon expect figs from thistles. Invitations there will be occasionally,
doubtless, for `society' expects it; but let a country cousin present
himself, and see whether he will be put into the state apartments.
Let no infirm and indigent relative expect a place under such roof.
Let not even the humble individual who placed the stepping-stone
which led to that fortune, ask a share in the abundance which
would never have had a beginning but for his timely aid. `We
have changed all that!'

But setting aside the hospitality which has any reference to duty
or obligation, it is to be feared that the other kind—that which is
exercised for the sake of the pleasure it brings—is becoming more
and more rare among us. The deadly strife of emulation, the mad
pursuit of wealth, the suspicion engendered by rivalry, leave little
chance for the spontaneity, the abandon, the hearty sympathy which
give the charm to social meetings and make the exercise of hospitality
one of the highest pleasures. We have attempted to dignify

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our simple republicanism by far-away, melancholy imitations of the
Old World; but the incongruity between these forms and the true
spirit of our institutions is such, that all we gain is a bald emptiness,
gilded over with vulgar show. Real dignity, such as that of
John Adams when he lived among his country neighbors as if he
had never seen a court, we are learning to despise. We persist in
making ourselves the laughing-stock of really refined people, by forsaking
our true ground and attempting to stand upon that which
shows our deficiences to the greatest disadvantage. When shall we
learn that the `spare feast—a radish and an egg,' if partaken by the
good and the cultivated, has a charm which no expense can purchase?
When shall we look at the spirit rather than the semblance
of things—when give up the shadow for the substance?

p626-043 THE MYSTERY OF VISITING.

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

There is something wonderfully primitive and simple in the fundamental
idea of visiting. You leave your own place and your
chosen employments, your slipshod ease and privileged plainness,
and sally forth, in special trim, with your mind emptied, as far as
possible, of whatever has been engrossing it, to make a descent upon
the domicile of another, under the idea that your presence will give
him pleasure, and, remotely, yourself. Can anything denote more
amiable simplicity? or, according to a certain favorite vocabulary,
can anything be more intensely green? What a confession of the
need of human sympathy! What bonhommie in the conviction that
you will be welcome! What reckless self-committal in the whole
affair! Let no one say this is not a good-natured world, since it
still keeps up a reverence for the fossil remains of what was once the
heart of its oyster.

Not to go back to the creation (some proof of self-denial, in these
days of research,) what occasioned the first visit, probably? Was
it the birth of a baby, or a wish to borrow somewhat for the simple
householdry, or a cause of complaint about some rural trespass; a
desire to share superabundant grapes with a neighbor who abounded
more in pomegranates; a twilight fancy for gossip about a stray kid,
or a wound from `the blindboy's butt-shaft?' Was the delight of

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

visiting, like the succulence of roast pig, discovered by chance; or
was it, like the talk which is its essence, an instinct? This last we
particularly doubt, from present manifestations. Instincts do not
wear out; they are as fresh as in the days when visiting began—but
where is visiting?

A curious semblance of the old rite now serves us, a mere Duessa—
a form of snow, impudently pretending to vitality. We are put
off with this congelation—a compound of formality, dissimulation,
weariness, and vanity, which it is not easy to subject to any test
without resolving it at once into its unwholesome elements. Yet
why must it be so? Would it require daring equal to that which
dashed into the enchanted wood of Ismeno, or that which exterminated
the Mamelukes, to fall back upon first principles, and let
inclination have something to do with offering and returning visits?

A coat of mail is, strangely enough, the first requisite when we
have a round of calls to make; not the `silver arms' of fair Clorinda,
but the unlovely, oyster-like coat of Pride, the helmet of Indifference,
the breastplate of Distrust, the barred visor of Self-esteem, the
shield of `gentle Dulness;' while over all floats the gaudy, tinsel
scarf of Fashion. Whatever else be present or lacking, Pride, defensive,
if not offensive, must clothe us all over. The eyes must be
guarded, lest they mete out too much consideration to those who
bear no stamp. The neck must be stiffened, lest it bend beyond
the haughty angle of self-reservation in the acknowledgment of
civilities. The mouth is bound to keep its portcullis ever ready to
fall on a word which implies unaffected pleasure or surprise. Each
motion must have its motive; every civility its well-weighed return
in prospect. Subjects of conversation must be any but those which
naturally present themselves to the mind. If a certain round is not
prescribed, we feel that all beyond it is proscribed. Oh! the

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unutterable weariness of this worse than dumbshow! No wonder we
groan in spirit when there are visits to be made!

But some fair, innocent face looks up at us, out of a forest home,
perhaps, or in a wide, unneighbored prairie, and asks what all this
means. `Is not a visit always a delightful thing—full of good
feeling—the cheerer of solitude—the lightener of labor—the healer
of differences—the antidote of life's bitterness?' Ah! primitive child!
it is so, indeed, to you. The thought of a visit makes your dear
little heart beat. If one is offered or expected at your father's, with
what cheerful readiness do you lend your aid to the preparations!
How your winged feet skim along the floor, or surmount the stairs;
your brain full of ingenious devices and substitutes, your slender
fingers loaded with plates and glasses, and a tidy apron depending
from your taper waist! Thoughts of dress give you but little
trouble, for your choice is limited to the pink ribbon and the blue
one. What the company will wear is of still less moment, so they
only come! It would be hard to make you believe that we invite
people and then hope they will not come! If you omit anybody,
it will be the friend who possesses too many acres, or he who has
been sent to the legislature from your district, lest dignity should
interfere with pleasure; we, on the contrary, think first of the magnates,
even though we know that the gloom of their grandeur will
overshadow the mirth of everybody else, and prove a wet blanket
to the social fire. You will, perhaps, be surprised to learn that we
keep a debtor and creditor account of visits, and talk of owing a
call, or owing an invitation, as your father does of owing a hundred
dollars at the store, for value received. When we have made a
visit and are about departing, we invite a return, in the choicest
terms of affectionate, or at least cordial interest; but if our friend is
new enough to take us at our word, and pay the debt too soon, we

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

complain, and say, `Oh dear! there's another call to make!” Our
whole system of morning visiting will amuse you, doubtless; we
will just give you a sketch of it.

A hint has already been dropt as to the grudging spirit of the
thing, how we give as little as we can, and get all possible credit
for it; and this is the way we do it. Having let the accounts
against us become as numerous as is prudent, we draw up a list of
our creditors, carefully districted as to residences, so as not to make
more cross-journeys than are necessary in going the rounds. Then
we array ourselves with all suitable splendor (this is a main point,
and we often defer a call upon dear friends for weeks, waiting till
the arrivals from Paris shall allow us to endue a new bonnet or
mantilla), and, getting into a carriage, card-case in hand, give our
list, corrected more anxiously than a price-current, into the keeping
of the coachman, with directions to drive as fast as dignity will
allow, in order that we may do as much execution as possible with
the stone thus carefully smoothed. Arrived at the first house (which
is always the one farthest off, for economy of time), we stop—the
servant inquires for the lady for whom our civility is intended, while
we take out a card and hold it prominent on the carriage door, that
not a moment may be lost in case a card is needed. `Not at
home?' Ah then, with what pleased alacrity we commit the scrap
of pasteboard to John, after having turned down a corner for each
lady, if there are several in this kind and propitious house. But if
the answer is, `At home,' all wears a different aspect. The card
slips sadly back again into its silver citadel; we sigh, and say `Oh
dear!' if nothing worse—and then, alighting with measured step,
enter the drawing-room, all smiles, and with polite words ready on
our lips. Ten minutes of the weather—the walking—the opera—
family illnesses—on dits, and a little spice of scandal, or at least a

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

shrug and a meaning look or two—and the duty is done. We
enter the carriage again—urge the coachman to new speed, and go
through the same ceremonies, hopes, regrets, and tittle-tattle, till
dinner-time, and then bless our stars that we have been able to
make twenty calls—`so many people were out!'

But this is only one side of the question. How is it with us when
we receive visits? We enter here upon a deep mystery. Dear
simple child of the woods and fields, did you ever hear of reception-days?
If not, let us enlighten you a little.

The original idea of a reception-day is a charmingly social and
friendly one. It is that the many engagements of city life, and the
distances which must be traversed in order to visit several friends in
one day, make it peculiarly desirable to know when we are sure to
find each at home. It may seem strange that this idea should have
occurred to people who are confessedly glad of the opportunity to
leave a card, because it allows them time to despatch a greater
number of visits at one round; but so it is. The very enormity of
our practice sometimes leads to spasmodic efforts at reform. Appointing
a reception-day is, therefore, or, rather, we should say, was
intended to make morning-calls something besides a mere form. To
say you will always be at home on such a day, is to insure to your
friends the pleasure of seeing you; and what a charming conversational
circle might thus be gathered, without ceremony or restraint!
No wonder the fashion took at once. But what has fashion made
of this plan, so simple, so rational, so in accordance with the best
uses of visiting? Something as vapid and senseless as a court-drawing-room,
or the eternal bowings and compliments of the
Chinese! You, artless blossom of the prairies, or belle of some
rural city a thousand miles inland, should thank us for putting you
on your guard against Utopian constructions of our social canons.

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When you come to town with your good father, and find that the
lady of one of his city correspondents sets apart one morning of
every week for the reception of her friends, do not imagine her to
be necessarily a `good soul,' who hates to disappoint those who call
on her, and therefore simply omits going out on that day lest she
should miss them. You will find her enshrined in all that is grand
and costly; her door guarded by servants, whose formal ushering
will kill within you all hope of unaffected and kindly intercourse;
her parlors glittering with all she can possibly accumulate that is
recherché (that is a favorite word of hers), aud her own person arrayed
with all the solicitude of splendor that morning dress allows,
and sometimes something more. She will receive you with practised
grace, and beg you to be seated, perhaps seat herself by you and
inquire after your health. Then a tall grave servant will hand you,
on a silver salver, a cup of chocolate, or some other permissible refreshment,
while your hostess glides over the carpet to show to a
new guest or group the identical civilities of which you have just had
the benefit. A lady sits at your right hand, as silent as yourself;
but you must neither hope for an introduction, nor dare to address
her without one, since both these things are forbidden by our code.
Another sits at your left, looking wistfully at the fire, or at the stand
of greenhouse plants, or, still more likely, at the splendid French
clock, but not speaking a word; for she, too, has not the happiness
of knowing anybody who chances to sit near her.

Presently she rises; the hostess hastens towards her, presses her
hand with great affection, and begs to see her often. She falls into
the custody of the footman at the parlor door, is by him committed
to his double at the hall door, and then trips lightly down the steps
to her carriage, to enact the same farce at the next house where
there may be a reception on the same day. You look at the clock

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too—rise—are smiled upon, and begged to come again; and passing
through the same tunnel of footmen, reach the door and the
street, with time and opportunity to muse on the mystery of
visiting.

Now you are not to go away with the idea that those who reduce
visiting to this frigid system, are, of necessity, heartless people.
That would be very unjust. They are often people of very good hearts
indeed; but they have somehow allowed their notions of social intercourse
to become sophisticated, so that visiting has ceased with them
to be even a symbol of friendly feeling, and they look upon it as
merely a mode of exhibiting wealth, style, and desirable acquaintances;
an assertion, as it were, of social position. Then they will
tell you of the great “waste of time” incurred by the old system
of receiving morning calls, and how much better it is to give up
one day to it than every day; though, by the way, they never did
scruple to be `engaged' or `out' when visits were not desirable.
Another thing is—but this, perhaps, they will not tell you,—that
the present is an excellent way of refining one's circle; for as the
footman has strict orders not to admit any one, or even receive a
card, on other than the regular days, all those who are enough
behind the age not to be aware of this, are gradually dropt, their
visits passing for nothing, and remaining unreturned. So fades
away the momentary dream of sociability with which some simplehearted
people pleased themselves when they first heard of reception-days.

But morning calls are not the only form of our social intercourse.
We do not forget the claims of `peaceful evening.' You have read
Cowper, my dear young friend?

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

And you have been at tea-parties too, where, besides the excellent
tea and coffee and cake, and warm biscuits and sliced tongue,
there was wealth of good-humored chat, and if not wit, plenty of
laughter, as the hours wore on towards ten o'clock, when cloaks and
hoods were brought, and the gentlemen asked to be allowed to see
the ladies home; and, after a brisk walk, everybody was in bed at
eleven o'clock, and felt not the worse but the better next morning.
Well! we have evening parties, too! A little different, however.

The simple people among whom you have been living really
enjoyed these parties. Those who gave them, and those who went
to them, had social pleasure as their object. The little bustle, or,
perhaps, labor of preparation was just enough to mark the occasion
pleasantly. People came together in good humor with themselves
and with each other. There may have been some little scandal
talked over the tea when it was too strong—but, on the whole, there
was a friendly result, and everybody concerned would have felt it a
loss to be deprived of such meetings. The very borrowings of certain
articles of which no ordinary, moderate household is expected
to have enough for extraordinary occasions, promoted good neighborhood
and sociability, and the deficiencies sometimes observable,
were in some sense an antidote to pride.

Now all this sounds like a sentimental Utopian, if not shabby
romance to us, so far have we departed from such primitiveness. To
begin, we all say we hate parties. When we go to them we groan
and declare them stupid, and when we give them we say still worse
things. When we are about to give, there is a close calculation
either as to the cheapest way, or as to the most recherché without

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

regard to expense. Of course these two views apply to different
extent of means, and the former is the more frequent. Where
money is no object, the anxiety is to do something that nobody else
can do; whether in splendor of decorations or costliness of supper.
If Mrs. A. had a thousand dollars worth of flowers in her rooms,
Mrs. B. will strain every nerve to have twice or three times as many,
though all the green-houses within ten miles of the city must be
stripped to obtain them. If Mrs. C. bought all the game in market
for her supper, Mrs. D.'s anxiety is to send to the prairies for hers,—
and so in other matters. Mrs. E. had the prima donna to sing at
her soirée, and Mrs. F. at once engages the whole opera troupe.
This is the principle, and its manifestations are infinite. But, perhaps,
these freaks are characteristic of circles into which wondering
eyes like yours are never likely to penetrate, so we will say something
of the other class of party-givers, those who feel themselves
under a sort of necessity to invite a great many people for whom
they care nothing, merely because these people have before invited
them. Obligations of this sort are of so exceedingly complicated a
character, that none but a metaphysician could be expected fully to
unravel them. The idea of paying one invitation by another is the
main one, and whether the invited choose to come or not, is very
little to the purpose. The invitation discharges the debt, and
places the party giver in the position of a creditor, necessitating of
course, another party, and so on, in endless series. It is to be
observed in passing, that both debtor and creditor in this shifting-scale
believe themselves `discharging a duty they owe society.'
This is another opportunity of getting rid of undesirable acquaintances,
since to leave one to whom we `owe' an invitation out of a
general party is equivalent to a final dismissal. This being the
case, it is, of course, highly necessary to see that everybody is asked,

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and only those omitted whom it is desirable to ignore, and for this
purpose, every lady must keep a `visiting list.' It is on these occasions
that we take care to invite our country friends, especially if
we have stayed a few weeks at their houses during the preceding
summer.

The next question is as to the entertainment; and this would be a
still more anxious affair than it is, if its form and extent were not in
good measure prescribed by fashion. There are certainly must-haves
and may-haves, here as elsewhere; but the liberty of choice is not very
extensive. If you do not provide the must-haves you are `mean,' of
course; but it is only by adding the may-haves that you can hope
to be elegant. The cost may seem formidable, perhaps; but it has
been made matter of accurate computation, that one large party,
even though it be a handsome one, costs less in the end than the
habit of hospitality for which it is the substitute; so it is not worth
while to flinch. We must do our `duty to society,' and this is the
cheapest way.

Do you ask me if there are among us no old-fashioned people,
who continue to invite their friends because they love them and
wish to see them, offering only such moderate entertainment as may
serve to promote social feeling? Yes, indeed? there are even some
who will ask you to dine, for the mere pleasure of your company,
and with no intention to astonish you or excite your envy! We
boast that it was a lady of our city, who declined giving a large
party to `return invitations,' saying she did not wish `to exhaust in
the prodigality of a night, the hospitality of a year.' Ten such
could be found among us, we may hope; leaven enough, perhaps,
to work out, in time, a change for the better in our social state.
Conversation is by no means despised, in some circles, even though
it turn on subjects of moral or literary interest; and parlor music,

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which aims at no eclat, is to be heard sometimes among people who
could afford to hire opera singers.

It must be confessed that the wholesale method of `doing up'
our social obligations is a convenient one on some accounts. It prevents
jealousy, by placing all alike on a footing of perfect indifference.
The apportionment of civilities is a very delicate matter. Really,
in some cases, it is walking among eggs to invite only a few of your
friends at a time. If you choose them as being acquainted with
each other, somebody will be offended at being included or excluded.
If intellectual sympathy be your touchstone, for every one gratified
there will be two miffed, and so on with all other classifications.
Attempts have been made to obviate this difficulty. One lady proposed
to consider as congenial all those who keep carriages, but the
circle proved so very dull, that she was obliged to exert her ingenuity
for another common quality by which to arrange her soirées.
Another tried the experiment of inviting her fashionable friends at
one time, her husband's political friends at another, and the religious
friends whom both were desirous to propitiate, at another; but
her task was as perplexing as that of the man who had the fox, the
goose, and the bag of oats to ferry over the river in a boat that
would hold but one of them at a time. So large parties have it;
and in the murky shadow of this simulacrum of sociability we are
likely to freeze for some time to come; certainly until all purely
mercantile calculation is banished from our civilities.

It is with visiting as with travelling; those who would make the
most of either must begin by learning to renounce. We cannot
do everything; and to enjoy our friends we must curtail our
acquaintances. When we would kindle a fire, we do not begin by
scattering the coals in every direction; so neither should we attempt
to promote social feeling by making formal calls one or twice a

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

year. If we give offence, so be it; it shows that there was nothing
to lose. If we find ourselves left out of what is called fashionable
society, let us bless our stars, and devote the time thus saved to
something that we really like. What a gain there would be if anything
drove us to living for ourselves and not for other people; for
our friends, rather than for a world, which, after all our sacrifices,
cares not a pin about us!

p626-055 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DRESS.

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A year or two ago, Blackwood, that `nest of spicery,' gave us a
series of brilliant papers on the Æsthetics of Dress, replete with such
valuable practical hints, that the bon ton should have given the
writer a statue, draped on his own principles of taste and fitness;
not classic, perhaps, but deserving to become so. We considered
him, at the time, a public benefactor, and hoped to see the truths
he rendered so obvious make their due impression on our beaux and
belles, `well-preserved' bachelors, and ladies of a certain age; guarding
them against some of the nameless but hideous errors which
disguise beauty and render ugliness conspicuous. The application
has not been as general as we could have desired. We still see
triple skirts on squab-figures; blush-roses on three-score; scarlet
flowers neighboring flaxen ringlets, and huge shawls enveloping forms
which, under the most favorable circumstances, would remind one
but too surely of Salmagundi's comparison of `a bed and bolster,
rolled up in a suit of curtains.' If we had our will, those papers
would be republished in pamphlet form, and scattered all over the
land, that our nascent gentility might be trained in the growing.
Dress may still be considered in a state of nature with us. Not
that it is original or inventive; far from these! but running wild, in
the direction of expense; as the pumpkin-vine darts out its

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disproportioned arms towards the brook, which will do nothing for it, after
all, since it cannot nourish its roots.

This beneficent Blackwoodian having said all that could be said of
dress as a concern of the eyes merely, we propose, in our sober way,
to take up the subject from a somewhat graver side, considering
dress as having a meaning, or as being an expression of sentiment.
Not to be frightfully serious, is all we can promise our youthful
readers. If they should feel a tap now and then, we must say to
them as the conscientious Quaker did to his wife when he was
administering domestic discipline,—`Why does thee cry so? It's
all for thy own good!”

Dress may serve as either a grave or a gay subject. For those
who relish satire, what can afford fairer game than the blunders of
some unfortunate people, who, having come into possession of plenty
of money, are more guided by costliness than taste in their choice of
costume? What overdoing and overlaying, what contradiction and
monotony, what frippery and furbelow, marks the trappings of such?
No militia adjutant on parade, no pet fire-engine in a procession, was
ever worse bedizened. Who has not seen a lady get into a dusty
omnibus with her pearl-colored skirts fluttering with flounces, her
crape bonnet tremulous with flowers, her white shawl lustrous with
embroidery, her wrists manacled with golden fetters and dangling
lockets; her laces, her delicate gloves, her silver card-case, her glittering
chains all point-de-vice—and—all shocking! We pity where
we are expected to admire—that is, we call by the amiable name of
pity a feeling which, more severely construed, would be found to
border closely on contempt. Each portion of the tout ensemble is
beautiful; perhaps even the whole might not be offensive for some
particular and private display; but for an omnibus! There is something
profane in the public eye, and therefore the outdoor costume

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of a well-bred woman should never be such as to attract and fix it,
at least in particulars, or by reason of costliness or show.

Moralizers sometimes say we should not judge of people by their
dress. But we may and ought, though without transgressing the
law which this wise saw is intended to imply, supposing it to mean
that we are not to despise those who are not dressed richly or with
elegance. It is true some good people dress badly, judged by the
common standard; yet dress must be characteristic where it is the
result of free choice; even the beggar may wear his rags `with
a difference.' The sentimental novelists, who have in general no
great insight, have discovered this; virtuous poverty is, with
them, always picturesque. We, however, who deal with common
facts rather than with uncommon fancies, should hardly think it fair
to judge the very poor by their dress. We speak only of those to
whom costume is a subject of reflection and of taste. This class is
quite numerous enough to afford matter for our paper.

People who live in a state of abstraction must of course be excused
for sins against taste in dress. Grave and reverend professors
have been known to do or leave undone strange things; the outward
man suffering in proportion as the inner soared to the depths sublime
of science or speculation. A letter-writer from Germany describes
the celebrated Neander as going one degree beyond Dominie
Sampson, in indifference to popular prejudice on this subject. And
Goethe tells a good story of Gottsched, a German savant whom he
visited at Leipzig, who entered the room, when summoned to receive
stranger guests, with his monstrous bald head totally uncovered; and
when his servant rushed in with a great full-bottomed peruque,
which was his head-gear of ceremony, dealt the unfortunate lackey a
sound box on the ear for not having put it on him before he had
exhibited himself in such a ridiculous plight; talking all the while

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with the most perfect coolness and self-possession. There used to be
an old scandal against literary ladies, charging them with carelessness
in respect of appearance. Pope, after he quarrelled with his
adored Lady Mary, was never tired of holding up her slatternly
habits as the consequence of bookish propensities; but this is exploded
now. Literary ladies are not easily distinguishable from other
women by any outward marks; and it would probably startle a
gentleman to be received, as tradition says an American bas-bleu of
the last century received a visiter of distinction—with her head tied
up in brown paper and vinegar, a folio resting on her lap, and her
feet immersed in hot water!

Grave occupations cannot be supposed to interfere with due attention
to dress in all cases, for the clergy are the best dressed men
among us; even the most dressed, if we except the small class of
fledgling exquisites, whose minds the tie of a cravat is sufficient to fill.
Although not bound to a particular costume, as in England, our
clergy may almost be said to dress in uniform, for the black suit
and the white cravat mark them unmistakeably. And the threadbare
appearance that we have read of, as sometimes characterizing the less
fortunate members of the profession in former days, would be a
phenomenon; nobody now living ever saw a shabby suit of clerical
black. One would think the whole class passed daily through the
hands of those ingenious persons who advertise to make worn cloth
“look equal to new.” We cannot deny that there is something
pleasant to us in this reminiscence of the day when a gentleman was
distinguishable by his dress. The plainness, approaching even to
neglect, observable in grave men of other professions, shocks our
cherished prejudices. We would have the scholar look like a
scholar; let him be “melancholy” if he will, so he be “gentleman-like.”
It is his right and duty. It is true.

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A heavenly mind
May be indifferent to its house of clay,
And slight the hovel as beneath its care—
but there is a fitness in the `customary suit of solemn black' for the
man who deals with grave matters. How should we like to see
Hamlet flaunting in buff and blue; or Dr. Primrose in plaid neckcloth
and corduroys?

Lockhart describes Mr. Crabbe, standing in the midst of half a
dozen stalwart Highlanders at Sir Walter Scott's, the Celts in full
costume on the occasion of the King's visit to Edinburgh; the poetclergyman,
dressed in the highest style of professional decorum, with
powdered head, buckles in his shoes, and whatever else was befitting
one of his years and station. The Highlanders mistook the churchman
for some foreign Abbé, or, as one account says, for a French
dancing-master, and began to talk French to him; while he, in his
turn, supposed them to be a parcel of wild and rather dangerous
savages. It was only after Sir Walter entered the room and introduced
his friends to each other, that they discovered themselves to
be all equally peaceable British gentlemen, made strangers to each
other only by being at the antipodes of dress.

It has been the well-motived atttempt of some moralists to represent
dress as a thing of no consequence; undeserving the attention of
a rational being. But truth and nature are too strong for this compulsive
pedantry of purism. Every man, woman, and child, knows
that dress is a thing of consequence to the wearer; and all the biographers
bear testimony to fact that it is also important to the
beholder; for they never fail to describe the habitual costume of
their subject where it can be ascertained, as at least one means of
insight into character. Could we have pardoned Mr. Boswell
if he had given us no hint of Dr. Johnson's `vest unbuttoned, and

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wig awry;' his shabby snuff-colored study suit, and the laced one
which he put on when great doings were on the carpet? Or could
we have believed him if he had described his hero prim and powdered,
silk-stockinged, and shining-shoed? Goldsmith, with his gnawing
desire to be liked, confessed the importance of dress, by going beyond
his means in finery, which he imagined would help to hide his
awkwardness, when he was to meet those whom he wished to please.
Madame Goethe, the poet's mother, when she prepared to receive a
visit of honor from Madame de Staël, arrayed herself so gorgeously
in dazzling silks, with nodding plumes of two or three colors, that
Bettina came near fainting with laughter; and the same Bettina,
who found the good lady's desire to strike so ridiculous, has lost the
respect of the world by a personal neglect far more offensive than
the most mistaken efforts to please. How many descriptions of
costume are to be found in Horace Walpole's acrid letters! One
would think his soul might once have inhabited the body of a court-milliner.
And with what gusto does Pepys dwell upon his purchases
of rich attire for himself and his wife—`a night-gown, a great
bargain at 24s.,' and `the very stuff for a cloak cost £6, and the
outside of a coat £8,' costume being, evidently, in his eyes, one of
the great engines of human life. Novelists of all classes confess the
significance of dress, when they devise expressive gowns and ornaments
for their heroines, and appropriate drapery for their terrible
and grotesque characters. Richardson understood this matter perfectly.
In order to set Sir Charles Grandison and Miss Byron
distinctly before us, every article they wore is described; color, form,
texture, and cost. Miss Burney showed her sympathy with her
sex, by confessing the temptations of dress to young ladies in society.
Part of Camilla Tyrold's terrible troubles, over which so many
youthful tears have been shed, arose from her having been led into

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extravagance by the example of Mrs. Berlinton, and the wiles of Mrs.
Mittin, and so running her father in debt until he was thrown into
jail on her account. Sir Walter Scott does not disdain to expatiate
largely on the costume of his figures, and to show that to him dress
was as truly part of the man or woman, as the more strictly natural
and indispensable envelopings of the soul. His own dress had a
suitable sturdiness, expressive of the true, manly, human side of his
character; that side which had withstood the conventional temptations
and delusions too potent with us all. `An old green shooting-jacket,
with a dog-whistle at the button-hole, brown linen pantaloons,
stout shoes that tied at the ankles, and a white hat that had
evidently seen service,' constituted the array in which the `mighty
minstrel' came limping down the gravel-walk at Abbotsford to meet
Washington Irving. When he dressed for dinner, he appeared in
black, as became the gentleman and the poet. Now, the broadbacked
coat, the heavy shoes, and the stout stick, are shown in the
hall closet at Abbotsford, sad and most characteristic memorials of
one to whose gifted eye trifles were instinct with meaning.

It is somewhat to be wondered at, that a people so notedly
shrewd as the Society of Friends, should have set themselves deliberately
at stemming a current which evidently takes its rise somewhere
deep in the foundations of our being; and still more that
they should have attempted to reduce the importance and seductiveness
of dress by making it an object of strenuous attention. There
is, however, much that is rational in a utilitarian point of view, as
well as much plausibility in a religious one, in their stringent rules
as to form, color, and expensiveness in costume. The form is
intended as a protest against the silly evanescence of the fashions,
which, not satisfied with changing as often as the moon, scarcely outlast
the lunar rainbow. The regulated cut is that which all the

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world wore when the sect first assumed a distinct existence. The
prevailing drab has an obvious intent, as excluding gay and attractive
colors, which are apt to beguile young eyes and thoughts. The
proscription of certain rich and costly materials respects the general
caution against conformity to the worldly standard, which is that of
cost, and also the duty of reserving our means for better objects than
mere outward beautifying. It needs no argument to show the
excellence of these latter reasons for plain dress; and society gives
them the assurance of its approval, by making it the most frequent
ground of sarcasm against the Quakers, that they indemnify themselves
for plain cut and color by wearing the most expensive fabrics,
an inconsistency too obvious for excuse. Whether this general
charge be just or not, it is certain that many conscientious Friends
would as soon wear scarlet gowns as silken ones, or dashing waistcoats
as fine broadcloth.

One advantage of the plain or Quaker dress is that it renders
neatness indispensable. What is partly dust-colored already,
becomes intolerable after it has contracted any soil; and the nature
of the soft neutral tints is such, that whatever is worn with them
must be pure, or it is shown up, inevitably. Lace may be yellow,
and rich ribands crumpled, with small offence; but a plain cap
depends for its beauty upon snowy whiteness and a perfect accuracy
and primness of outline. `The very garments of a Quaker,' says
Charles Lamb, `seem incapable of receiving a soil; and cleanliness
in them to be something more than the absence of its contrary.
Every Quakeress is a lily: and when they come up in bands to
their Whitsun conferences, whitening the easterly streets of the
metropolis, they show like troops of the Shining Ones.' Every one
is charmed with this dress in its perfection; we never hear any one
say it is not beautiful, at least on young women, whose fresh faces

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do not need the relief of undulating laces or rich colors. The
primness of the style, and the habitual or enforced placidity of the
countenances of those who use it, have given occasion for charges
of affectation or coquetry in the young sisters. But they may be
consoled: for the imputation of trying to be charming is, in this
case, only a confession that they are so.

The grace and beauty of the Quaker dress depends—as all that
is lovely in outward manifestation must—upon its being a true
expression of the spirit. Where it is simply formal, it is hard and
ungainly; where it is compulsory, it betrays the wearer's true
tastes and wishes by unconscious deviations from the standard, and
leanings towards the forbidden. Where it is worn on conviction, it
is exact and not unbecoming; but if the result of enthusiasm, it
becomes classic and elegant as Roman drapery. We have seen a
Friend who, without the least ostentation, refrained from wearing
anything that had been dyed, preferring garments of the natural
color, as being the extreme of simplicity. The world might laugh
at such a twilight-gray as this combination of soft browns produced,
but the painter would have found in it something congenial to his
eye, and a peculiar value in the power with which it set off a fresh,
ruddy complexion and silver hair. We remember a full-length picture
of Thorwaldsen, painted in Italy, which reminded us, in its
truly Quaker dress, of the undyed Friend we had seen years before.
It is noticeable that sculptors have no escape from the difficulties of
modern costume, except in a near approach to the simplicity of the
Quaker garb. If the marble man must have a coat on, the sculptor
perforce shaves off all lappels and finicalities, and comes as near a
seamless garment as possible—giving unconscious testimony to the
essential good taste of the followers of George Fox.

It is the compulsoriness of this dress that spoils it as an

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expression of taste or sentiment. If it had been left to every man's conscience
whether to adopt or to reject the uniform, it would have
continued to have a meaning. As convictions deepened, indifference
to worldly opinion would have become more and more evident, by the
gradual disuse of worldly fashion, and conformity to the standard
of denominational simplicity. But where no liberty is allowed,
there can be no merit or significancy of choice. The plain garb
becomes not a whit more dignified than any other uniform which
is worn at peril of cashiering. Thousands whose conscience
approve the tenets of the Friends, and whose taste and judgment
favor extreme plainness and inexpensiveness of dress in people who
profess serious aims in life, have been deterred from joining the
society by a feeling that, to renounce one's judgment in a matter so
personal as dress, is practically degrading. The garb is intended as
an expression of a certain religious condition, yet it is to be worn
with the strictest attention to arbitrary rules, the least deviation
from which subjects the wearer to the interference of his fellow-Christians!
This mistake towards bondage is one great reason why,
while the principles of the Quakers are daily influencing those of
the world more and more, the Society, as a society is on the
decline. Religious liberty is more precious to the heart than any
other; and the more sincere and ardent our desire to withstand the
bad example of worldly people, the less should we be disposed to
adopt any fixed outward symbol which might express a greater
degree of renunciation than we had been able to reach.

There is, no doubt, a reflex influence in dress. One of the best
ways of inspiring the degraded with self-respect is to supply them
with decent and suitable clothing. We are wholly unable, at any
stage of cultivation, to withstand this influence. No lady is the
same in a careless and untasteful morning envelope, and an elegant

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evening dress; the former lowers her tone—depreciates her to herself,
even though the latter may be quite incapable of inspiring her
with pride. No man feels quite at ease in a shining new coat; he
is conscious of an inequality between his present self and the old
friend whom he could have met so warmly yesterday. The friend
may not notice the coat or its influence, but the wearer never forgets
it. The Spectator, or some one of those cunning old observers, tells
of a young lady who carried herself with unusual hauteur, and
seemed to feel a new consciousness of power, upon no greater occasion
than the wearing of a new pair of elegant garters. This affords
an argument both for and against dress. We ought not to wear
what makes us proud and creates a secret contempt of others; but
neither should we neglect anything that aids our self-respect and
keeps our spirits at the proper pitch. Some parents, from the best
motives in the world, do their children serious injury by wilfully
denying them such dress as may put them on an outward equality
with their young companions, or make them feel equal. It is in
vain to be philosophical for other people; we must convince their
judgments and bring them over to our way of thinking, before we
can obtain true and healthy conformity. We submit with tolerable
grace to restraints rendered necessary by circumstances, but those
which appear to us capricious or arbitrary do not often make us
better, especially where they touch our pride—that tissue of irritable
nerves in which our moral being is enwrapt.

Every one must have noticed the effect of dress upon the character
and condition of servants. Those who have grown up in houses
where slatternly personal habits are allowed, never become really
respectable, even although they may have many good qualities.
They do not respect themselves, and their sympathy with their
employers is blunted by the great difference in outward appearance.

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

It is true that domestics sometimes act so earnestly upon this
principle, that they end in erring on the side of too much attention
to costume. We remember once, and once only, finding at a foreign
hotel a chambermaid dressed in silk, with artificial roses in her hair;
the feeling that she would not be of much use to us flashing across
the mind at once. English servants hit the happy medium oftener
than any other; their tidiness suggests alacrity, and we have a comfortable
assurance of being well served, as soon as we look upon
them. It is odd what a difference one feels in offering a gratuity to
a well or ill-dressed attendant in travelling. Shabbiness favors our
penuriousness, most remarkably! The eye scans the expectant
instinctively, and instead of the generous impulse to give most liberally
to those who need, we graduate our donation by the probable
expectation of one who has evidently not found the world very
generous. If the servant be well enough dressed to bespeak independence,
and especially if he be gifted with the modest assurance
which is often both cause and consequence of good fortune, pride
whispers us at once not to disgust so genteel a person by a shabby
gift, and we bestow on success what we should grudge to necessity.

Who can guess the influence of dress upon the soldier? What
would be the spirit of an army in plain clothes, patched at the
elbows, or even frosty at the seams? In this inquiry we bar the
American Revolution, and the `looped and windowed raggedness'
of its heroes, as not being in point. We are speaking of soldiers by
profession, not of men in arms for their altars and their fires. How
many of our young men would seek commissions if the Quaker garb
were prescribed? Sydney Smith speaks of the privilege of ornamenting
one's head with the tail of a belligerent bird, and covering
with gold lace the course of the ischiatic nerve, as among the strong
reasons for military ardor, and he was doubtless right. If bravery

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depended on the internal stock of solid, deliberate courage, there
would be fewer soldiers: `a swashing and a martial outside' inspires
the imagination, at least, if not the reason. But what has reason to
do with fighting, a matter in which cocks and bull-dogs are so far
superior to men?

The conventual dress has evidently no little power over the imagination,
and consequently over the character and feelings of the
wearer. No one can see a nun without being sensible of this.
There is such a careful significance about it, and it is so different in
principle from the dress of the world, that it would seem as if
worldly passions and affections could hardly live within it. The
Black and the Gray nuns, of certain orders, wear bands of starched
linen which entirely hide the forehead, cheeks, chin, and bust, while
the back of the head and person is equally concealed by a veil of
black serge, fastened at the crown and so arranged that a portion
can be drawn over the eyes. This is the nun of our youthful fancy,
and we cannot approach her without a degree of awe, while, on her
part, she seems to feel herself a sacred person. Turn her out into
the world and dress her like other women, and new cares and wishes
would roll in upon her like a flood, for she would lack one continual
memento, if not support, of her sanctity. Beads and breviaries
would soon seem out of place among jewels and laces; as embarrassing
as, per contra, were the flounces of a dashing dame whom
we saw painfully toiling up the Scala Santa on her knees, and
obliged to lift and manage her rebellious finery at every rise. The
nuns at the Béguinage, near Ghent, wear great wide-bordered caps,
like market-women, and so they seemed very much in place sitting
in the shade of the wall, shelling beans, and chattering among themselves,
with no great appearance or perhaps even feeling of dignity
although they are said to be mostly high-born. We may urge this

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reflex influence of dress against the indulgence of expensive or
showy tastes. The appetite grows with what it feeds on; our
standard rises with our habits. When we are used to the feeling
which accompanies rich and recherché costume, a lower style seems
to us mean and unworthy, especially on ourselves—it is well if the
influence go no further. What pitiable instances we see of a
depression that has no better source than the lack of means to dress
expensively, after the habit had been formed; what a craven spirit
is that which has nothing better to sustain it than the consciousness
of elegant clothing! Poor human nature! Few of us dare profess
to be free from this weakness. It is strange that literary efforts
should be sometimes dependent on dress, yet we are assured that
this is the case. One author can only write in dishabille, another in
full dress. Richardson required a laced suit, and a diamond on his
finger; Rousseau acknowledged a similar dependence at certain
periods of his life. We once knew a minister who never wrote a
good sermon unless he had his old study-gown on. Scott boasted
that he never learned any of the night-gown-and-slipper tricks that
literary men are apt to indulge in, but pursued his avocations in his
ordinary gear. Lady-authors do not let the world into the secrets
of their boudoir; but we suspect few of them write with arms
covered with bracelets, or waists compressed to French-print pattern,
however they may own subjection to these vanities in their ordinary
states. Literary pursuits have certainly some slight tendency to
preserve the mind from too exclusive devotion to appearance; let
this atone for some of the sins which they are supposed to favor.

One vice of dress literary ladies are accused of, and sometimes
justly, viz.: a predilection for the picturesque. We call this a vice
of dress, because it generally makes the wearer remarkable, and not
pleasantly so. Dress may be sometimes individual without offence;

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ordinarily, good taste and good breeding require that it should, in
its general aspect, conform to the common standard, not to an ideal
one peculiar to the wearer. It must be remembered that costume
which would serve admirably for a picture or a description, may be
quite unpresentable in a drawing-room. In the old satirical novel of
Cherubina, or the Heroine, the lady, impassioned for the picturesque,
takes `an entire piece of the finest cambric,' and disposes it most
statuesquely about her person. `A zone, a clasp, and a bodkin,' she
says, `completed all!' But the result was disastrous. Far short
of this extreme, we have seen imaginative ladies make the most
extraordinary figure in company, from the indulgence of an individual
taste in dress, instead of a modest acquiescence with the reigning
mode.

`What! be a slave to fashion!' `No, but make fashion your
servant, by using it just so far as it serves your purpose, i. e., enables
you to present a becoming and respectable appearance in society.'
We venture to say that it is hardly possible to respect anybody who
is fantastically dressed. To differ much from others in this matter,
bespeaks a degree of thought and plan on the part of the wearer,
which detracts from dignity of character. We all like the company
of even an ultra-fashionist, made up by tailors or milliners, better
than of one who forces us to notice trifles, by appearing in array so
peculiar as to strike the eye while it offends the habit, at least, if not
the judgment. To be passive under the hands of people who make
it their business to study the forms, effect, and harmony of dress is
surely wiser than to usurp their office, for which one's own habitual
employments are likely to do anything but prepare. A veto power
must be reserved, however, for people who live always in an atmosphere
of decoration are rather prone to overdress one, if they are not

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watched. Eyes accustomed to a furnace glare may learn to deem
the light of common day ineffectual.

Women generally have an intense dislike to the picturesque style
in female dress, and they are not at all apt to think favorably of the
stray sheep who adopt it. Some `ill-avis'd' persons fancy that ladies
dress for the eyes of gentlemen, but this opinion shows little knowledge
of the sex. Gentlemen dress for ladies, but ladies for each
other. The anxiety that is felt about the peculiarities of fashion, the
chase after novelty, the thirst for expense, all refer to women's judgment
and admiration, for of these particulars men know nothing.
Here we touch upon the point in question. Women who depart
from fashion in search of the picturesque are suspected of a special
desire to be charming to the other sex, a fault naturally unpardonable,
for ought we not all to start fair? Has any individual a right
to be weaving private nets, and using unauthorized charms? A
lady who values her character, had better not pretend to be independent
of the fashion. The extra admiration of a few of her more
poetical beaux will not compensate for the angry sarcasms she must
expect from her own sex. This is a matter in which we find it hard
to be merciful, or even candid.

Shall the becoming, then, be sacrificed to the caprices of fashion,
which consults neither complexion, shape, nor air, but considers the
female sex only as a sort of dough, which is to be moulded at pleasure,
and squeezed into all possible forms, at the waving of a wand?
We do not go so far. There are rules of taste—standards of grace
and beauty—boundaries of modesty and propriety—restraints of
Christian benevolence. Saving and excepting the claims of these,
we say follow the fashion enough to avoid singularity, and do not
set up to be an inventor in costume.

Of the artifices of dress, we might say a good deal, if we were not

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afraid of growing intolerably serious. Not so much the artifices by
which defects of person are rendered less noticeable, as those which
are intended to compass an appearance beyond our means. This
leads to mock jewelry, and various other meannesses, as well as to
that vicious habit of shopping which tempts the salesman to dishonesty,
by showing him it is vain to hope to sell good articles at
fair prices. `We've been cutting up several whole pieces of lace
into remnants,' said a shopman the other day, in our hearing,
`because ladies will not buy unless we have remnants for them.'
And the time that is spent in walking miles in chase of bargains,
which generally prove dear enough in the end, might be considered
worse than wasted, if it were not that there is some exercise for the
muscles in this sort of enterprise. It is true that the desire to get
what the English call your `pen'orth,' is a natural one, and that it
is not very easy to draw the line between a proper care of one's
money, and too great a solicitude to obtain `cheap things.' Nobody
knows with certainty, except the purchaser herself, what is the
motive, and what the merit or demerit of the labor she submits to
in shopping; but she knows very well, and to her must the decision
be referred. If a weak hankering after a style of dress more costly
than we can honestly afford, causes us to shop in a mean and grasping
way, we, at least know it, whether any one else discovers it or
not, and it is a matter very well worth an hour's thought and
sifting.

There is, perhaps, nothing more hardening to the heart, in a small
way, than the habit here alluded to. After we have once set our
mark too high, and are straining every nerve to approach it, no
spare dollar is ever at our command for a benevolent or friendly purpose.
The too-great toils of an anxious husband—painful contrasts
with less aspiring or less successful friends—the half-paid labors of

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the poor seamstress who contributes to further our selfish aims—the
sight of suffering which has just claims upon us—all are as nothing
and less than nothing. Conscience, pity, and affection are not more
surely blunted by any of the so-called minor offences, than by a pursuit
of dress in this temper. The competition is too keen for friendship,
too petty for generosity, almost too grasping for honesty. We
have high authority for believing that it has even been known to
lead to insanity, and, judging by some extreme cases within our
notice, we can well imagine it. A pursuit so futile, so inimical to all
that is serious and ennobling, can hardly be safe; for Nature will
revenge herself when we trample her best gifts under foot, and insist
on choosing for ourselves a position in the scale of being far lower
than that which she assigns us.

The practice of wearing mourning for departed friends, once universal
in this country, has fallen into disuse in no inconsiderable
degree. Many persons decline wearing it from a conscientious
scruple—saying, that although it is undoubtedly a gratification to
our feelings to discard all gay colors when the heart is oppressed
with grief, yet the practice among the richer classes of wearing
mourning, leads the poor—whose grief is equally sincere, and who
feel the same desire to show respect for the memory of the dead—
into expenses they cannot afford. Even among that large class
whose means barely suffice for a genteel appearance, it often happens
that to lay aside all the clothing already prepared for a family, and
buy a new outfit of expensive materials, is extremely inconvenient,
and leads to painful sacrifices for an inadequate cause.

This has always appeared to us rather a difficult point. To those
whose only law of conduct is implied in the inquiry, `What will
people say?' it is not a question at all; since the bare possibility
that their conduct will become the subject of remark, would operate

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

so powerfully with them as to exclude all consideration of the
intrinsic propriety of any action. Nor to that other kind of
mourners whose anxiety for “fashionable,' and `becoming,' and
`proper' mourning, often fills the house of death with bustle and
animation, even while the cold remains which gave the excuse for
new dresses, are lying almost forgotten in the next room. These
are the last to inquire into the meaning or effects of the custom.
Its poetry, its philosophy, its utility, its morality concerns them not.
But to those whose hearts really long for some means of expressing
their unavailing sorrow, who hate the sight of all that is gay, and
almost of the blessed sun himself, during the first paroxysm of
grief, there is often a doubt as to the propriety of indulging the
natural feeling; and many have, at a great sacrifice, given up the
wearing of mourning, from the consideration to which we allude—
the inconvenience resulting to the poor from attempting to follow a
fashion which their feelings prompt, as much as those of their more
fortunate neighbors.

We acknowledge the excellence of the motive, and the truth of
the objection; yet we confess an increasing reluctance to see a time-hallowed
custom falling into disuse among those whose true and
loving hearts would give it its real consecration. Besides the poetry
of a `garb of woe,' to give an outward shadow of the grief within
there is a mute appeal to human sympathy, not without its uses in
a world where every change is towards the cold individuality that
affects to scorn all acknowledgment of mutual dependence. There
is a touch of nature about it. The most afflicted man of old said,
`Pity me, oh my friends! for the hand of God has touched me!'
and from his day to ours, such is the true and natural language of
the heart unbardened by pride and conventional refinement. We
long for sympathy, however unavailing; and though there is a mad

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

and wilful sorrow that repels it with disdain, this is but the raving of
an unsubdued spirit, rebelling against the hand that smites, and
venting on the creature the anger whose real object is the Creator.
When the better moment comes, and reason and religion restore the
sufferer to himself, the deeper his affliction, the more sensible will he
be to the humblest expression of sympathy. Those who feel not
have not yet known grief.

In a certain class of society, the extreme punctiliousness with
which all the rules for a `proper' mourning costume are carried out,
is in strange contrast to the superiority to human sympathy which
is affected by the individuals concerned. So determined are they
to own nothing in common with ordinary clay, that they resent, as
an impertinent personalty, any particular inquiry after the health of
a member of the family who is evidently wasting with consumption,
or swollen with dropsy. They resolutely throw a veil over the
infirmities of nature, and affect not to believe that what they love,

`Like common earth can rot.'

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

A mourning garb is not without its utility, in reminding of our
loss, company who might otherwise forget that mirth would be distasteful;
and in accounting for a grave and sad countenance, which
might call forth remark or inquiry, which it would be painful to
answer. There may be cases, too, and we think we could point to
more than one, where bombazine and crape have served to keep in
the minds of the younger and more thoughtless members of a
family, that gaiety did not become those who had experienced a loss
that could never be repaired, or even those who had recently passed
through the sad scenes incident to a death in the house. But these
considerations referring merely to the outward, are of small consequence.

The conscientious scruple to which we referred, is one which we
owe to the Puritanic spirit, among many good things and some of
questionable advantage. The cultivation of an ever present regard
for the good of others is always commendable, but we must take the
wide and not the narrow view as to what is the best good of those
whom we would benefit. The domestic affections are among the best
safeguards of virtue; and whatever tends to keep these alive and
warm is of incalculable value. The utilitarian view, which would curtail
as much as possible the sorrow for the dead, is a chilling and injurious
one; and if mourning garments contribute in any degree to prolong
the tender impression, we should be willing that even the poor
should make considerable sacrifices to procure them. We should
be still better pleased to see the rich provide them for their poor
neighbors, making their own a little less costly, if necessary, in order
to gratify this natural feeling. Nothing valuable is gained by deadening
the sensibilities, yet it would seem to be the error of some
very good people to imagine that those in whom they take an interest,
are never quite in the right way until they subside into mere

[figure description] Page 069.[end figure description]

machines. The sacrifices which are made to procure something
much desired, are in themselves not without good effect; and when
that something is far removed from any gross or frivolous pleasure,
the very effort is enobling in a greater or less degree.

The practice of wearing some outward sign of mourning upon
the death of a relative is, we believe, as universal as sorrow itself.
It would seem to be a dictate of nature to signalize the departure
of a human soul from this busy scene of hopes and fears, by a
change in the outward appearance of those who survive. Philosophy
may teach that


The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom:
and that it is therefore absurd to bewail the adding of a unit to the
untold millions gone before. Religion may assure us, that in spite
of the dread outward change, and the removal of the earthly tabernacle
from our sight forever, the freed soul knows no interruption to
its life, but rejoices in continuous and unbroken existence, endowed
with powers unknown before, and new capacities for the comprehension
of eternal truth. Yet death is awful to all, and the veriest
savages make its occurrence the occasion of solemn rites and personal
humiliation. Let us beware then how we interfere to counteract an
obvious dictate of nature.

There seems a peculiar fitness in black as the color of mourning—
so much so, that it seems a litle remarkable that various colors
should have been chosen by different nations for this purpose. The
hue which absorbs and hides all the rays that brighten the face of
creation, typifies well the chastened state of mind in which one idea

[figure description] Page 070.[end figure description]

is of power sufficient to drink up, as it were, all the rest; so that
thoughts which are the source of comfort at other times, are either
indifferent or absolutely displeasing. Black is the color of the cloud
that hides the sun—of the gloomy cave—the shaded pool—the
cheerless midnight of the lonely watcher. It is the hue of decayed
nature—the image of the literal shadow which seems to rest upon
all outward objects when the delight of our eyes is removed at a
stroke. The black veil of the mourner enables her to weep unobserved—
no trifling boon, when even the most trivial occurrence or
ordinary object brings up the image of the loved and lost.

The punctilio of mourning—on which we set but little value—is
much more closely observed in Europe than in this country. There,
no person thinks of going to a funeral in any but a black dress—those
who are not in the habit of wearing it, keeping a suit for this purpose.
Every scrap of paper, card, fan, watch-ribbon, must bear some sign
of grief; and while etiquette is as closely consulted as ever, the
whole aspect of the household is changed. Not only do those in
mourning use black seals, but it is considered but polite for those
unconnected to seal with black in return. Some of these petty
observances are gaining ground among us, but we would not have
our observations respecting the uses of a mourning dress considered
as including them. They have little to do with the real meaning of
the custom.

In one respect we would gladly see our young countrywomen take
a lesson from the English, in the matter of mingling in the gayeties
of the world, while still shrouded in the dress which tells of a lost
friend. If we may believe Pope, the ladies of his time were sometimes
known


To bear about the mockery of wo,
To midnight dances and the public show;

[figure description] Page 071.[end figure description]

but a purer taste now prevails. Among us the anomaly is but too
common. We have seen even a widow, in all the excitement of a
dance, with a scarf of black crape floating behind her, and her black
dress looking like an ominous cloud in the midst of gauze and roses.
But we would hope such sights are rare.

Almost all ornaments are out of place in mourning. Flounces and
furbelows are a miserable solecism, and black flowers an odious
mockery. The moment we feel a desire for these things, we should
honestly throw aside the semblance of wo, and confess that we are
quite ready for the world again. Perhaps one of the objections to
mourning is, that it gives occasion to no little hypocrisy of this sort.

The practice of wearing mourning is one in which all the
world has seemed, until now, to be of one mind. The savage wears
knife-cuts, the Jew, a beard—the Oriental ashes—the Anglo-Saxon,
bombazine and weepers—and so on, through a strange variety,
among which must be counted the flame-robe of the Hindoo widow,
probably in many cases no whit more truly significant than the less
costly one of her white sister. An impulse thus universal must
needs be referred to no manufactured sentiment. In spite of the
Quaker and the rationalist—who find reasons quite conclusive, on
their principles, against the practice—we must consider the impulse
to put on a garb significant of grief, as a perfectly natural one. The
immediate presence of sorrow is absorbing and exclusive. Even the
affection of survivors is of little value to us while bereavement is
fresh. The mind, insanely devoted to one topic, can entertain other
thoughts only as they point to that. It would have the world and
its concerns at a stand, that nothing may hinder the indulgence and
fostering of its misery. Society is nothing to it—the customs of
life are empty or irksome—the living are vulgar—only the dead
precious and sublime. It is in this mood that mourning weeds

[figure description] Page 072.[end figure description]

originate—this is the theory of them. Practically—and here arise
the objections to them—they are quite another thing.

The peculiar dignity of grief is that it brings the sufferer into
immediate contact with the supernatural world. No matter how
hard or how world-spoiled the heart—no matter how vitiated the
imagination or the habits—when one that we love with our strong,
human, instinctive love, is stricken down before our eyes, we see the
Hand that deals the blow, and the occasion at once rises to the
grandeur of a divine visitation. To cherish sorrow becomes on this
account honorable; it individualizes us, and raises us above the
common, careless herd; we have had direct communication with
the mysterious Unknown; we have a right to be distinguished.
But this, being a passionate state, does not naturally endure. The
present resumes its hold upon us, and we feel that we are falling
into the line again, not willingly, but by an irresistible power—that
of habit. Mourning garments do something towards arresting this
tendency; they at least serve to remind ourselves and those about
us that we have been among high thoughts—that we have had
heart experiences which in some degree revealed us to ourselves,
and so raised us for the time, above demeaning daily influences.

This being the signification of grief and its symbols, counterfeits
become inevitable. While there is nothing which people repel
more indignantly than the imputation of insensibility under bereavement,
it must be that mourning is often worn as a mere form.
Instead of being a voluntary putting away of the vanity of dress—
a purposed disfiguring of ourselves to the living, out of devotion to
the idea of the dead—it becomes as finical and ostentatious as a
coronation robe, and sits as incongruously on the wearer. Whether
we ought, for the sake of such instances, to condemn the wearing of
mourning altogether, may still be a question. In discussing the

[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

significance of dress, we touch its morals only incidentally, reserving
what we may have to say on that topic, for another occasion.

The array of the body for the grave—everywhere a point of
sacred interest—has a meaning, of course, though at our stage of
civilization it is not always an obvious one. In countries more
under the acknowledged influence of primitive ideas than our own,
there are various picturesque and beautiful decorations of the lifeless
form, as flowers, ribbands, and even robes of ceremony. There is an
attempt to throw something like illusion over what is in itself revolting—
to withstand the death-chill as long as possible by suggestions
of life's sunshine. This attempt marks timid, poetical, and sensitive
races; to our sturdiness there is a sort of savage pleasure in facing
death in all his horrible distinctness. We banish whatever looks
like the garb of living men. We choose forms and tints that insure
a cadaverous aspect to the dead, and make him as unlike the
breathing, hopeful yesterday as possible. It would seem almost
sacrilegious to us to lay him in the earth `in his habit as he lived;'
to dress him in rich robes, as for solemn audience, would be so revolting
that we could hardly expect friends to be found adventurous
enough to countenance the last rites. Yet why should this be so?
Why should we put weapons into the hand of death, wherewith to
pierce our own souls, and help the grave to its too easy victory over
the imagination? Why not consent to greater simplicity of reception
of the last enemy? To figure death as a grinning skeleton has
not the moral effect we think it has; it is only a confession of weakness.
The poetical image of a beautiful female folding a sleeping
infant to her bosom, and bearing it softly away, amid the hush of
night, to the distant spheres, inspires loftier and more dutiful
thoughts of the change decreed alike to all, and necessarily beneficent.

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

We have hardly done more in this paper than express our
opinion that the expression of our dress is nearly as characteristic as
that of our faces; but if we have put our readers upon thinking the
matter out for themselves, we shall be content. We would fain
redeem them from the tyranny of French prints, which, made for
sale, and not faithful transcripts of the graceful and artistically
chaste costume of the Parisian élégante, have done much to introduce
a gaudy and vicious style among us—a style which, in very
many cases, would not bear interpreting on the principles here
advanced.

Note. In treating of the significance of dress, we might be expected to say
something of the so-called `Bloomer' costume, which has excited a good
deal of notice lately, and brought out many opinions pro and con. As to
the propriety of this dress, we never entertained any doubt; as to its grace
and beauty, we remain as yet unconvinced. We look upon it as entirely
modest, and not unfeminine, our prejudices in favor of more flowing drapery
to the contrary notwithstanding; but to cut the figure by a short skirt, is
contrary to all rules of art where dignity is to be expressed. Youthful
lightness and agility are well typified in this way; and accordingly, no one
objects to the `robe succinct' for our half-grown daughters. But when the
matron assumes a costume of similar character, we consider her as sacrificing
beauty to utility—very commendable sometimes, but not necessary
always. The reformers in dress fall into an error common with reformers—
of claiming too much for their plan. It is well to recommend a convenient
dress for its merits, but it is not well to attempt to show that all other
dresses are absurd. The prettiest name yet devised for the new costume is
the `Camilla.' For,


`Swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er th' unbending corn and skims along the main;'
and as the dress is especially advocated on account of allowing the free use
of the limbs, this classical designation is peculiarly appropriate.

p626-082 CONVERSATION.

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

Our best gifts are least praised, perhaps least prized. Whatever
outward good enters into the very texture of our life's life, has little
chance of being duly honored. Those pleasures, without which we
should be wretched, we treat as insignificant, because they are indispensable.
It is so with conversation, a pleasure for which all men
have a taste; one which is never relinquished except by compulsion,
or some motive almost as potent. Says Emerson, `Good as is
discourse, silence is better and shames it;' but the world is far from
understanding, or at least adopting this philosophy. The silence of
monastic life is the highest triumph of asceticism; that of prison
existence the utmost cruelty of the law. The sage loves conversation
better than the child, for the very desire of acquiring makes
him anxious to impart. Joy prattles; grief must talk or die; both
are eloquent, for passion is always so. A feeling too strong for
words is agony; if they be long withheld, it becomes madness.
The chattering of youth is the overflow of animal spirits by the
stimulus of new ideas; the garrulity of age seems an effort to excite
the fainting animal spirits, by recalling the ideas which once stimulated
them. Letter-writing is an effort at conversation; so indeed
is essay-writing. Let us then have a talk about talking. Our

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

object shall be to show that we do not give it a due share of attention,
or at least to inquire whether we do or not.

Goethe advises that we shall at least `speak every day a few good
words.' Do we concern ourselves about this when we are making
up the day's account? Did we begin the day with any resolves
about it, as if it were a thing of consequence, or have we maundered
on, dropping tinkling words about trifles, or evil words like firebrands,
or words of gloom and repining, insulting Providence, or
words of hatred, piercing hearts that love us? Each day's talk is
surely no trifle; we can hardly help sowing the germs of many
thoughts in a twelve hours' intercourse with our co-mates, in the
ordinary duties of life; and allowing our words only a negative
value, we rob our friends of all the good and pleasure that we might
bestow and do not. Young and old alike have claims upon us for
the cheap gift of our good thoughts; the young, because it is their
spring-time, and they must have good thoughts or bad ones, flowers
or weeds; the old, for that life's troubles have cast so many shadows
upon their minds, that it is cruel to let slip any chance of cheering
them by means of whatever advantage we possess. If they despond
habitually, a few rightly chosen words may present a new side of
affairs for their relief; if they are soured, words of affection are all-powerful
to neutralize such acids. Let us not dare to put them off
with silence; in such a case it is a confession of the weakness of our
virtue. Incommunicative households are only a step behind quarreling
households. Some people are taciturn only because they cannot
open their mouths without saying something disagreeable. They have
just goodness enough to be silent, not enough to reform the inward
sullenness of their temper.

There are those who have never even entertained the idea that
under certain circumstances it may become a duty to talk. They

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

talk when they like, and when not moved by inclination they sit
mum, leaving the trouble to others. That it is sometimes a trouble
to talk is very true; the French have a proverbial saying which
expresses this; they say of a talker, that he `bore the expense'
of the conversation. It is true too, that we feel as if we made a
stupid figure in making an effort to talk. This is what the mum
people of whom we are speaking think, and pride and selfishness
prompt them to leave the disagreeable to others. O the misery of
being obliged to ask one of these spirits to `spend the day;' that
trial of the soul to both hostess and guest! There is no use in
offering books to such visiters; if reading were their habitual amusement,
they would have some ideas. An Annual might do indeed;
but the best resource is usually some new pattern in worsteds or
crochet, and, if this does not do, to follow Miss Patty Proud's example—
take the lady up stairs, and show her your finery. We are
speaking of course of feminine bores, for happily gentlemen are never
asked to spend the day; and if they were, they would probably
soon get sound asleep upon the sofa. When you in despair propose
a nap to your silent lady-friend, she is sure to tell you that she
cannot sleep in the day-time; it is evidently her forte to be the
cause of sleep in others.

Two young girls together are said to be like the side-bones of a
chicken, “because they always have a merry-thought between them.”
And truly the giggling which generally ensues when a few young ladies
get together would seem to justify the old riddle. It is hard to say
whether what is said on these occasions is conversation or not. To
settle the point it would be necessary to go into an analysis of their
talk, which were foreign to our present purpose, as well as difficult
for want of material, since no one has ever reported what is said
under cover of so much laugh. To count the bubbles on the surface

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

of boiling water beneath a cloud of steam, were perhaps as easy, and
as useful. But every age has its pleasures, and we must not quarrel
with this. Sober days do not await our bidding.

Ball-room talk is equally beyond our pale. Its ineffable nothingness
defies us. Fortunately conversation is not the characteristic
pleasure of the ball-room. The West Indian lady understood this,
who exclaimed impatiently to a friend of ours who had wearied her
with trying to find a subject on which she would open her lips—
“Cha, cha! I no come here for chatter, I come here for dance!”
Happy were it if her notion were generally adopted. The harp and
violin discourse more excellent music than can be expected from
unhappy beaux, who, not very well furnished with ideas at the outset,
must belabor their beseeching brains for something to say to ten
young ladies in succession, all of different disposition, character, and
education, and probably no better fitted for extempore conversation
than their partners. The swain too often takes refuge in a silly
strain of compliment, which makes the lady feel silly and look silly;
and which, if she be silly enough to believe it sincere, may, to say
the least, not add to her wisdom. What a perversion, to call this
conversation, where no one word on either side is the sincere expression
of the inward thought!

The dulness of our social visits is one of the commonest subjects
of complaint. It is an evil not only recognised but guarded against,
indirectly; for we often see a good deal of ingenuity exerted to elude
an invitation without absolute falsehood or the certainty of giving
offence. Unless some special inducement is offered, people feel that
they will have a far better chance for enjoyment at home, with their
ordinary pursuits, or among their books, than in a talking circle, who
will hardly, by any chance, say a word that will either please or
instruct. Dulness becomes thus a formidable ally of dissipation; the

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

votaries of vicious pleasure point with scorn at our stupid circles and
affected coteries. “If your boasted morality,” say they, “can afford
nothing better than this, in the way of social enjoyment, you must
excuse us if we prefer a mode of life which affords pleasure, at least.
If excess is the bane of ours, inanity and hollowness are no less the
reproach of yours.” Can we reply to this taunt by an appeal to
matters of fact? Can we silence the scorner of our boasted sobriety
by assuring him that we enjoy the social intercourse he condemns?
Can we quote in refutation of his opinion passages of value from last
evening's conversation, or declare that our feelings of general benevolence
and charity are kept warm by our social habits?

We are always sensible of the pleasure of conversation when it is
what it should be; but we do not find it easy to prescribe rules for it.
There are, indeed, plenty of formal rules, but they are too formal.
We do not find that agreeable people talk by them, and we say such
as one has a gift for conversation, as if confessing that rules have
little to do with the matter. And indeed, how could we talk by
rule any more than we can breathe by rule? We never think of
counting or measuring the delicious inhalations of a rural walk, or
those which sustain the life of a year. Talking is quite as natural
and almost as necessary as breathing, for the few taciturn people we
meet are only enough to prove the universality of the impulse. Of
course we put out of the question those who are silent through sulkiness
or stupidity, or by design, and consider only people who
behave naturally. The deaf-mute, unprovided by nature with the
facility for it enjoyed by others, show by their strenuous efforts to
find a substitute, how dearly they prize the power of communicating
their sentiments to those about them. Even Laura Bridgman, says
Dr. Howe, to show the strength of the impulse to clothe our thoughts
in words, `often soliloquizes in the finger language, slow and tedious

[figure description] Page 080.[end figure description]

as it is.' It is only we who have free use of the excellent gift of
speech who treat it with neglect, not so much indeed by disuse, as
by abuse.

The impulse to impart our thoughts is so strong that it is proverbially
necessary to keep a guard over our lips lest we tell what
should not be told. To what a pitch then must our sophistication
by false notions of society have arisen, when we become able to talk
for hours the very thing we do not think, pouring out empty words,
while the under-current of our thoughts set in a quite different direction.
The `bald, disjointed chat' thus produced, is what we call
`conversation in company,' and no wonder we dread `company!'
A diet of stale crumbs and tepid water would be quite as agreeable.
Listen to the conversation of a morning call.

First the health branch.

`How do you do—and how is your mother—and is your sister
quite well—and has your aunt recovered?'—an unexceptionable strain
of talk in itself, but usually a mere form, from the fact that we have
had daily opportunities of ascertaining the condition of these good
people, and know that nothing of consequence can have befallen
them without our knowledge. It wears the semblance of friendly
feeling and human sympathy, however, so we must not condemn it
when it includes one grain of sincerity. But we proceed. `My own
health has been miserable. I have had—' And here follows a
train of symptoms minutely given, even as to days and hours, with
the fears of friends and the judgment of physicians, until the listener
yawns so perceptibly that it is impossible to proceed. The children's
cases come next, and it is well if their afflictions do not occupy the
remainder of the visit.

Next comes the weather branch, if there be time enough.

`What dreadful weather we have had! It is enough to kill any

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

body. The thermometer fell ten degrees on Saturday. My brother,
who has been all over the world, says that ours is the very worst
climate on the face of the globe. Nobody can be well in such a
climate,” &c., until it is made perfectly clear that Providence, either
through especial spite or general incapacity, is doing its worst for us
in the way of weather.

From this gracious topic we go perhaps to the last party.

`Were you there? Oh, certainly—don't you remember our talking
together for some time? Did you ever see any one look so
much like a fright as Mrs. A—? And what a fool Mr. G—
is! Oh, I do think going to parties such a bore! I never go when
I can decently refuse, but I have declined Mrs. B—'s invitations
so often that I thought I must go for once. The gentlemen have
the best of it; they are not obliged to appear before supper-time,'
&c. &c. If there be any more time, dress fills it to overflowing. The
fashions never fail to afford a multitude of remarks, criticisms, and
ecstasies, very advantageous to the milliners, but tiresome enough in
themselves to all but the initiated.

It may be remarked that the subjects here adverted to make up
the conversation of ladies only, but we were speaking of morning
calls, which gentlemen never make. The gentlemen have one staple
subject on all occasions—that of party politics; and this their chosen
theme doubtless appears to them far more dignified and worthy of
attention than those which occupy the thoughts of women.
Whether it be so in the manner in which it is ordinarily handled,
may admit of questions, but it is a question which we shall not
presume to touch here. If there be anything which is held sacred
in our country, it is the propensity of the men to talk politics. It is
difficult to obtain belief for the truth that one rarely hears anything
said of politics in good society abroad. “What other subjects can

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

men talk about?” One would think there were no intermediate
topics of interest between this most earthy one and the `celestial
colloquy sublime,” once held in Paradise: but in considering
what is or what is not the conversation which makes social gathering
delightful, which wakes up the best powers of the mind, calls
forth the half-formed thoughts that had else slumbered in a sort of
chaos for want of the vivifying influence, arouses all the most
generous instincts of the heart, and furnishes the most soul-stirring
pleasure that we are capable of enjoying—we cannot conscientiously
assign to party politics a much more dignified place in our list of
subjects than to the weather, or our bodily condition, though we
confess it to rank above dress, which must be allowed to be below
everything else that it is permissible to talk of in society.

The faults and follies of our neighbors and friends afford, perhaps,
the most fertile of all subjects for conversation, when it is at all
spontaneous. The study of character is one of the pleasures of life,
but we are not particularly fond of exercising it upon ourselves, or at
least of divulging the results of our practice. As surgeons choose
the lifeless body for their demonstrations, so we try our skill upon
the absent, and, as he can neither resist nor reply, that is very
pleasant and advantageous—to the operator, who, not being forced
to defend his positions, may expatiate at will, and having set out with
a general theory or proposition, may easily, by the aid of a little
imagination, make out a consistent view of the whole case. One
inconvenience attending the use of this class of material for conversation,
is the danger that the person dissected may not relish our
view of his case as reported to him by some good-natured friend. His
vanity may hinder his appreciating our discernment; he may mistake
for spite or envy or unkindliness the keen perception on which we
pride ourselves; he may not be able to consider himself as an

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abstraction, in which light, of course, we considered him when we
demonstrated upon him, and we may thus lose his friendship just as
we flattered ourselves we understood him thoroughly.

Then again the habit of discussing character in ordinary conversation
is apt to be a little chilling, all round. It is hardly possible
to feel quite at ease and to behave unconstrainedly, if we know that
as soon as we depart we shall be coolly analyzed for the benefit of
those who remain. We are not quite so confident of the impartiality
and discernment of others as of our own, and we would rather not
feel that every word and action of ours is being treasured up as
material for future sketches of character. So that this style of conversation,
while it exercises the intellect, is likely to harden the heart,
and instead of diffusing an affectionate confidence through social
intercourse, will probably end in putting each individual secretly on
the defensive. Some frigid soul devised the maxim, `Live always
with your friend as if he might one day be your enemy;” and those
must have kindred notions of the spirit of society, who consider the
peculiarities and shades of character of their friends matter for habitual
discussion.

There is indeed one way of avoiding the obvious danger of this
theme,—that of giving offence to the absent,—namely, by making
our discussion the vehicle of praise only. But is not this apt to become
a little tiresome? In some families most of the conversation
with visiters—we can judge of nothing further—consists in eulogies
upon absent members of the household or connexion. Unhappily
there is hardly enough disinterested sympathy in human nature to
make this agreeable to persons who have not the advantage of belonging
to those exemplary races. The perfections of those we love are
a most fascinating subject for private contemplation, but they are
hardly the topic for entertaining our guests withal. Nor are the

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individuals eulogized in all respects gainers by this enthusiastic enumeration
of their excellences. Being human, they have probably still
some remains of human imperfection, and these will be very apt to
come up in full size before the memory or imagination of the listener,
who is driven to seek a refuge for his self-love from the painful contrast
suggested by so much virtue. On the whole then, we conclude
that personal discussion, even in this honied phase, is not very advantageous
to the main end of conversation, as a sweetener of the
soul and a cultivator of the social affections.

Egotism may be reckoned a kindred vice of conversation, equally
tiresome, but not so bad in itself, because it is truer. Egotism is
either the pouring forth of a vanity too egregious to be politic; or the
effort of a desire to please to bring up its claims to notice; or the
mere morbid and painful action of an unhealthy mind, attempting
to share its troubles and vexations with others, or to enforce the attention
which such minds are apt to think wrongfully withheld. In
either of these cases, tediousness is its worst effect. We fly an
egotist, but we do not fear or hate him. If vanity prompt his fault,
we smile secretly at the weakness; if a desire to make an impression,
we revenge ourselves on his tiresomeness by contrasting in our own
minds his real with his imaginary claims. It is of such as he that
the common people say `I would like to buy him at my price
and sell him at his own,' and the saying arose from the frequency of
the appearance of such characters in society. Our daily intercourse
must be select indeed if it include not more than one unwise talker
of this class. The ardor of our social competition brings them forth
in Egyptian abundance, but as their numbers increase their object is
more and more difficult of attainment; since society is forced to invent
expedients for avoiding them or cutting them short, while its
appreciation of their claims is in inverse proportion to the pertinacity

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with which they are urged. Not that this form of egotism is always
so obvious as to be offensive to the casual observer. It has a thousand
degrees and disguises; and in its more subtle and less suspected
shape, enters more or less into conversation generally. One cannot
analyze one's own talk very faithfully without perceiving traces of
this tendency to self-recommendation. In that case we console ourselves
by thinking either that we desire to be valued, in order that
we may be in a position to do good to others, or that we seek merely
to do ourselves justice in the eyes of those whose discernment is
not keen enough to form a correct opinion of us for themselves; or
at least that to love to be loved is at any rate no very reprehensible
source of action. Let us have candor and kindliness enough to
make the same apologies for other people.

A still less agreeable class of talkers are they who seem to listen
for no other purpose than to entrap the speaker. They lie in wait
for petty errors and apparent discrepancies; things whose consistency
might be vindicated after a world of words, but which we have a
right to expect will be taken for granted as correct by those who
know us to have a regard for truth. These are minute and matter-of
fact people, in whose minds the main idea is of no more importance
than the most insignificant accessory. They would stop you
in the midst of a recital of harrowing interest to say, `But I thought
you said it was four o'clock!' and if you should not stop and explain
that although one portion of the occurrence took place at four
o'clock, another was necessarily deferred until half-past four, would
secretly result in the conviction that you were a person who allowed
the imagination full play at the expense of truth, or perhaps set you
down an absolute story-steller. To talk with such people is subjecting
one's self to the labor of proving a continual negative. This
caviling habit is completly contradictory of the genial and confiding

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spirit which is the life of conversation. It is insulting to the speaker,
whose flow of talk returns indignantly upon himself, to await listeners
who are too conscious of their own love of truth lightly to suspect
another of disregarding it. It is found generally either among
persons whose pursuits have led them into close investigation of
minute points; among hard and coarse business men or sharp lawyers;
among the self-righteous of either sex; among people who
being devoid of imagination, are habitually suspicious of those who
appear to possess any; and, finally, among those who, having very
little regard for truth, seek to bolster up a tottering reputation in
this respect by unusual keenness in sifting the words of others.
These last have naturally the advantage of all the rest, since there
is no pocket so hard to pick as a pickpocket's.

With these enemies of conversation we may rank such as frown
upon every little playful sally, snapping at each unconsidered word,
and pretending to be puzzled by every witticism, in the spirit of him
who asked, of a poem, `What does it prove? The truth is, folly is
almost as requisite to pleasant general conversation as wisdom.
Highly condensed aliment is healthful neither for mind nor body.
As a little bran left in our bread makes it more wholesome, so does
a little harmless folly in our talk. Those who despise it are very
apt to suffer and look glum under a mental dyspepsia, and they
deserve it. Until philosophers become predominant in society, wisdom
will not be best commended to popularity by showing it as the
antagonist of mirth; and when they are so, they will show how
cheerful wise men can be. Were our laughing muscles given us for
nothing? When Solomon compared the laughter of fools to `the
crackling of thorns under a pot,' he was thinking of wicked fools,
undoubtedly; there are many such, and their laughter is anything
but cheerful. But some gloomy people say, `There is too much

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sin and sorrow in the world for Christian people to be anything but
sad.' To this we would assent with all our hearts, if habitual sadness
were in itself likely to better the state of things. It is true
that, by the sadness of the countenance the heart is made better,
viz., that unmingled prosperity and happiness is apt to make our
poor humanity cold and unfeeling, leaving dormant those tender
sympathies with all human woe, which any heart-touching sorrow is
sure to awaken; but if this be construed into a disparagement of
innocent mirth at proper times, we must rebut it by another proverb
of the same teacher of wisdom—`A merry heart is a continual feast,'
a feast, we venture to add, quite as much to those about it as to
itself. We have no patience with those who despise mirth as mirth;
who fix a cold glance upon the vivacious talker of pleasant nothings,
as who should say, `Behold a zany!' One might almost be tempted
to remind these unhappy wise men that the most immovably grave
of all creatures is the ass. The best wisdom is humane and humble,
not stilted and self-glorifying. We would not recommend to a man
of sense to be `the fiddle of the company,' but there is at least
equal and less amiable folly in gathering one's self up solicitously,
lest any one in the melée of conversation should tread upon the
corns of our dignity. Wisdom that is rich and ample can afford
some derogation.

The French have furnished us—in return for the words Home,
Comfort, and others expressive of simple, tender, and healthy ideas—
with several words whose origin refers rather to the genius or
spirit of their own social life. Among these are Badinage and Persiflage;
the former meaning simply light, frivolous talk, the latter as
much and more, viz: the trick of making another say that which
renders himself ridiculous. From the former is derived our word
Banter, which Dr. Johnson calls `a barbarous word, without

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etymology,' unless it be so derived. Our word Raillery is defined as
`satirical merriment,' and To Rally, as `to treat with slight contempt.'

There is not one of these words which, closely defined, conveys an
agreeable idea; yet they are the only words by which to express a
certain style of conversation which seems to find favor with some
people. It is sometimes called `sharp shooting'—perhaps because it
occasions wincing, if not wounds; sometimes `sparring,' a term
which smacks of the noble science of which Hyer and Sullivan are
the prominent professors just now. `Sparring for love,' however,
requires the gloves, but this is apt to be forgotten in conversational
pugilistics.

We have sometimes wished we could discover—perhaps by some
Asmodean power of peering into the recesses of people's minds—
how large a proportion of the world really relish this amusement.
We speak not of those who have the advantage in the contest, for
they seem to enjoy it; but of the far greater class—those who simply
suffer it, or who are induced to retort, in self-defence. There is
seldom an equal match on these occasions; and when it does happen,
the game is up directly—showing pretty plainly what is at least one
of the elements of the pleasure it gives.

To express an opinion counter to this tone of conversation, is to
subject one's self to a charge of moroseness, touchiness, or want of
sympathy, so nearly has a habit of joking come to be confounded
with cheerfulness and good humor. This suppositious character it
owes to the fact that nobody likes to own he is hit; and thus pride
prevents the party who secretly feels personal joking to be any thing
but pleasant, from seeming to disapprove it. The victor, flushed
with his little triumph, is quite sure of his own good humor, and so
the thing goes on, unchallenged.

We must not omit to say that it is the habit of jesting, rather

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than the thing itself, that appears to us questionable on various
accounts. Conversation would lose as much, if an occasional joke
were made contraband, as it does by the ceaseless effort at sharpshooting
which sometimes spoils it. As well paralyze the laughing
muscles at once, as forbid all use of them not justifiable by sober
argument. On the other hand, as nothing makes a man seem so
much like a fool as to be always laughing, so nothing takes away so
completely the zest of all jokes as a continual or sustained fire of
them. In truth, a hearty relish for pleasantry is the very ground for
a remonstrance against being crammed with it.

Equally does the power of enjoying wit find itself aggrieved by
the amount of failures involved in a multitude of attempts. Where
the desire of saying what are called “good” things is become
chronic, these failures are usually at least as ten to one, while the
tolerable hits are in general of a grade no higher than punning, or
word-catching. Even in that line they are mostly inferior to the
manufactured jokes of the Sunday papers, and far below the smart
things in Burton's play-bills. “Rien ne fait dire—rien ne fait faire,
autant de sottises, que le desir de montrer de l'esprit,” says the
Abbé Du Bois. While an occasional scintillation, or, what is better,
a subdued infusion of wit, enlivens the social circle, gives life to the
heaviest subject, or may turn the edge of the most impracticable
temper, the sole effect of habitual joking, even putting aside the
personality into which it almost always runs, is to lower the tone of
conversation, and to throw away every advantage which belongs to
cultivation, taste, information, and judgment.

So completely is the ordinary play of this kind of smartness independent
of all cultivation and mental resources, that it seems
strange it can possess any fascination for superior people. Yet men
love contest, even where they are sure to come off losers—in cases

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where victory is as bad as defeat; and the keen sportsman will wade
through mud and mire in pursuit of game so small that his shot will
blow it to atoms.

Thus far we have spoken of raillery as a matter of taste; we must
go a little farther.

Raillery implies personality, of course, and as such is certainly
contrary to the canons of good society. But the canons of good
society are intended as a substitute for the exercise of Christian love.
We may ask, then, in pursuance of the subject under a more serious
aspect, whether the habit of exercising our wit at the expense of
others does not imply, when severely tested, a certain hardness, and
lack of that tender sympathy which pervades a heart penetrated and
subdued by religion? Religion, it is true, asks no mawkish insipidity
of talk, in which wit shall be forbidden, and humor disallowed, and
folly unsatirized, and wrong undenounced. But it does demand the
greatest and the minutest attention to the law of love; a resolute
forbearance of aught that can give an unnecessary pang, or even uneasiness,
to any human creature. The old saying “He would rather
lose his friend than his jest,” recognizes the wounding power of
raillery. It is true that “one ought to be able to take a joke,” but
it is equally true that the responsibility of the case rests with the
joker. It would perhaps be too severe to apply here the text which
has sometimes been brought to our mind by things which we have
heard said in conversation—“The fool scattereth about firebrands,
arrows and death, and saith, am I not in sport?” but since we know
not where our neighbor's quivering nerve may lie—and still more if
we do know—how shall we clear ourselves of the imputation of unfeeling
vanity, if we exercise our wit at his cost? Besides, as jests
are notoriously used to cover up reproofs, how can any one be
expected to know whether the “true word” lie at the bottom or not?

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This reminds us that some persons justify raillery on the ground
that one can say things in jest that it would not do to say in earnest,
so that one may wield a moral engine with the air of play. It cannot
be denied that truths sometimes flash upon us amid the keen glancings
of our friend's wit, but is it commended to us, under such circumstances?
We may use it, but are we made better by it? The
qualities which fit a man for telling unwelcome truths are, first, a deep
sense of duty, secondly, the truest love and sympathy, and thirdly,
the tender and watchful delicacy which these inspire. When we
feel disposed to tell a friend trying truths without these preparatives,
we may be pretty sure that we are not in a condition to do him
good. How many a friendship is cooled, how many an enmity
nourished, by mistakes on this point, none but the Searcher of hearts
can know, for pride forbids all confession of this description of
wounds.

The simple truth, too—that precious jewel of all conversation—is
often the sacrifice of this keen encounter of wits. Many an apology,
many a retraction, testifies to this. Rather than miss the opportunity
of the sharp repartee, we go on to say what we never thought, and,
induced by pride, maintain the wrong, till we surprise others into
expressions equally unjustifiable. Truth is hard to manage, after we
are once fairly within the gale of raillery.

We are far from believing that a shade of malicious intention belongs
to badinage, as ordinarily practised. It suggests itself as the
most innocent thing in the world, and only shows its real nature in
certain emergencies. Children often play at tapping one another—
love-taps, we call them—in great good humor, which lasts until one
unlucky tap smarts a little. The return to this is a little harder,
and—every parent can finish the story. This is precisely the course
with half the raillery of conversation. It begins in sport and ends in

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earnest, and the observer sometimes suffers quite as much uneasiness
as the worsted party. This as sport is about as rational and pleasant
as it would be to play at pulling hair—beginning with single hairs,
producing rather an agreeable titillation—and ending in whole handfulls.

Those who insist that to proscribe raillery is to legislate against fun
betray a sad paucity of resource. Surely the wide range of subjects
of harmless drollery will suffice, without calling in the aid of personality.
Even if satire be essential, folly is multiform; anomalies—
laughable blunders, matter of every day observation. But above
all, there is the boundless field of literary allusion, to give elegance
to wit and delicacy to satire. Conversation need never resort to
bitterness for the sake of piquancy, while such materials exist that
only the unfurnished mind can lack opportunity to be innocently
brilliant. Indeed a recourse to what is not innocent is a confession
of poverty.

When we consider the immense usefulness, as well as the inexhaustible
pleasure of conversation, perhaps the most serious objection
to a habit of badinage lies in its tendency to lower the
conversational tone and to deprive our talk of any possibility of
seriousness. Who has not felt the vexation of an interloping joke,
which sent all solid and sweet thoughts flying at once, and substituted
in their place a forced brood of puns, literally “tedious as a twicetold
tale,' since a new one has hardly been heard since Hook's and
Hood's days! Shakspeare knew the feeling right well, and
expresed it roundly—`Answer not to me with a fool-born jest!'
though, like other sinners, he knew the right in this respect better
than he did it. Who has courage to attempt the starting of a
serious thought after a feu d'artifice of popping wit? or if one had
courage, who has the power? Tone is everything in conversation;

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what right has any one to fix this, and overpower all choice in
others?

There is talk which sweetens the soul; there are conversations
which leave an odor in the memory as if an angel had been there.
Truths are elicited in the free and quiet interchange of thought,
which we would not part with for all the small wit ever struck out
of mercurial brains. The pleasure of conversation is one which
belongs to all circumstances, and lasts when all other pleasures have
lost their zest. It seems to us a thing too sacred to be wantonly
spoiled. Nobody loves `foolish talking and jesting' when his heart
is in its best state; the badin—the persifleur, who puts snuff into our
dish of chat, or sets all our moral teeth on edge with his saw-filing
smartness, is the last man to relish such things when he himself is
in another humor. He takes the liberty of breaking the chain of
your ideas, but he allows you no corresponding license. He is both
ways imperious.

Touchy people are to be dreaded in conversation. Their propensity
is to find out, in the discourse of those about them, points of
offence wholly impalpable to all but themselves, by a power like
that of the magnet, which will cover itself with particles of steel
where no other affinity could detect their presence. Woe to the
good-natured, unsuspicious sayer of nothings, in such company! It
will be hard to convince him that terrible insinuations have been
discovered by unwrapping his gentlest meanings. Does he speak
of somebody's kindness to the poor? Mrs. Sensitive is suddenly
beclouded, for she remembers (what he does not) that she has
just been inveighing against indiscriminate charity. Does he wish
for rain? It is because he knows Mrs. Sensitive is depending upon
fair weather for a party of pleasure. Does he express indignation
at some instance of dishonesty? Why need he go out of his way

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to bring to mind the defalcation of Mrs. Sensitive's cousin twenty
years ago? If he venture upon any subject of interest, he is sure
to touch upon a tender spot; if he carefully adhere to generalities,
he is reserving his better things until he has more agreeable society.
It is astonishing to hear with what bitterness some people will dwell
upon these constructive offences—crimes made by the law as it
were. A disposition of this sort is a fatal bar to the flow of conversation.
Our ordinary ideas will not endure such sifting and weighing.
By the time we have turned a thought round and round, to
be sure that it has no ridge or corner of offence, whatever point it had
is sure to have been worn off. We must leave the touchy person
out of our select conversational circle, and we do it with the less regret,
because he is almost sure to be found deficient in other requisites for
companionship besides good-humor. Intelligence, cultivation, and
acquaintance with society are sure antidotes of touchiness, which is
only one phase of egotism.

An overbearing manner is hard to describe, yet it is one
of the most intolerable in society, and so common a one that we
learn almost to dread meeting a person of any pretension, until we
have ascertained whether he is in the habit of allowing anybody to
have an opinion besides himself—that is to say, whether he is a
quack or a savant, for thoroughness is always modest. Overbearing
people are often unobserving enough to be gratified at the silence
in which, after a few efforts, we listen to their conversation; but if
vanity and insolence did not blind them, they would perceive that
the fool who walks through a garden, cutting off flowers with a
switch, that were far better applied to his own shoulders, has exactly
the same reason to be proud. Conscious merit will not condescend
to struggle against this species of arrogance; it rather waits quietly
until the nuisance be overpast.

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Your incessant talker is a migratory headache, possessing few
claims to our regard, unless it be as the discoverer of perpetual
motion. There is somewhere in his mind an invisible and endless
thread, about which all sorts of subjects crystalize—facts, theories,
opinions; sentiments, prognostics, and fancies—without the slightest
arrangement that the hearer can discover; yet, possessing as a whole
so wonderful a continuity, that although it might break in any given
spot just as well as in any other, it is impossible to break it anywhere
without force. Sometimes the thread may be loaded only
with “an infinite deal of nothing,” but we often find it rich with gems
of all hues, but so ill-assorted, so tastelessly huddled together, and
so rapidly flashed before our eyes, that we have no leisure to admire
or discriminate, and experience fatigue instead of delight. These are
the most provoking talkers in the world. They make us hate what
we love, and run away from what ought to delight us. The intellect
might bear the flood, but the nerves sink under it. The incessant
talker is in fact a mere talking machine, for if he had the tact, and
sympathy, and spiritual discernment that belongs to enlightened
humanity, he could not but perceive the weariness of his hearers.
And his foible is not usually nothing more than an incontinence of
words; it is more frequently an effect of self-conceit. He has a
secret opinion, not only that he has matter of more interest to communicate,
but that he can impart it better than anybody else, and
he never suspects why his audience drop away as fast as they can.
The more we love conversation, the sooner we tire of an unmerciful
talker; for he would substitute monologue, dramatic—it may be,
or instructive, but still monologue—for the free exchange of
thought.

These remarks apply only to the habitual talker—him who talks
only for his own pleasure, and not that of the company. There

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are people—though we do not often meet with them—in whose
presence we are involuntarily hushed, because we fear to lose a
word. These are not the men to overwhelm us unawares. The
flood gates of their minds ask some trouble in lifting, but fall back
easily into their place. Their discourse is only a better kind of conversation,
suggesting in the listeners' minds thoughts that bud,
blossom, and bear fruit in silence; thoughts for which our common
words would be but lumbering vehicles. The vanity must be resistless
indeed that finds such listening tiresome.

Blessing and bane are so closely coupled in all matters pertaining
to the good things of life, that we need not wonder that many ills
flow out of every abuse of the great gift of speech. Talk is spontaneous
as breathing, as we have said, but it is far from being always
as inoffensive. White-handed Brinvilliers poisoned a few people
who were soon out of their misery, and she has been for ages held
up to execration. Have we never seen a woman who has poisoned
twice as many, for life and death, and who yet passes for a good
sort of person? `apt to speak her mind, but meaning no harm,'—
with so little appearance of premeditation or evil intent do her
cruellest stabs come. She does but report what she has heard—or
she had it from good authority—or she did not say more than
other said! In the course of a morning visit she will skewer you
a whole street of her `friends' like a lunch of kibaubs, and all
peppered for the most fastidious palate. And it must not be thought
that women are the only sinners in this regard. There are men,
too, who, without the excuse of vacuity or idleness, take a dreadful
pleasure in stripping from their compeers the garb in which they
appear to the world, and this under a pretence of love of truth and
justice! These disinterested champions of truth and justice are the
last men to lay bare their own conscious secret faults to the public

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eye for the public good. Let us pray that the thing upon which we
value ourselves most may never be mentioned in their hearing! Be
it wit or wealth, beauty or good humor, humanity, steadfastness,
sincerity, or delicacy; pre-eminence in fashion or in learning, success
in literature, patience in sorrow, honest effort in adversity, or
what not—though it be the immediate jewel of our souls, no cardhouse
was ever demolished with greater coolness than will this
favorite wing or turret of our character be by the cool breath of the
habitual detractor. He `speaks daggers, and every word stabs.'

But our present purpose is to deal rather with the æsthetics of this
subject. To treat adequately the morals of conversation would
require more space than we can give to the present paper. Its
importance as a moral engine can hardly be overrated, while it may
be, and too often is, a caterer for the seven deadly sins. Let those
who are disposed to think conversation a matter of indifference, go
carefully through the Book of Proverbs alone, and see what place
the wise king assigns to it among the elements of social life, morals,
and religion. Good words, evil words, many words, few words,
words of cheer, of contention, of anger, of boasting, of deceit, of
impiety—these form almost the burden of his song. `A wholesome
tongue is a tree of life!' What language can be stronger? What
more encouraging to boldness of speech in the cause of goodness?
And the denunciations of those who dare profane the sacred gift are
equally powerful.

Among the minor morals of conversation we must not omit to
notice that much talking in mixed company is seldom safe. We
mean that excited strain of talking in which some people indulge,
without much reflection or any decided intention for good or ill.
The judgment is too often asleep at such times; we say things
under excitement which we would gladly disclaim afterwards,

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but through shame of inconsistency; for excitement gives things an
aspect foreign to reality, and while we are under its influence, we
are very liable to be mistaken in our company, and so commit
imprudences for which we suffer more severely than we deserve.
Vanity, too, takes advantage of these overflowing moments to
make us ridiculous. Mankind must become kinder and more
candidly indulgent before it will be safe to talk much in mixed
company, where humors and biases differ as much as complexions.

Idle people will hardly ever be found to converse tolerably.
They have no `hived honey of the soul' to bring out for the common
good. Give us rather `men of one idea,' though we confes
them to be often tiresome. They at least say something, which idlers
seldom do. Earnestness may not always be graceful, but it is inspiring.
Putting aside all charlatanry, the man whose whole soul is
in his subject will interest if he cannot convince us. Faith is more
potent than savoir faire. In conversation as in the pulpit, the man
who softly utters sleek and perfumed nothings would be gladly
exchanged, by all healthy-minded listeners, for a backwoodsman
without a coat, who has something to say and says it boldly.
Jemmy Jessamys are out of fashion, in every department.

How rich is the discourse of those who, after having taken an
active share in life, are inspired by sympathy and love to give forth
the result of store and fusion! We linger over their words as over
precious wine, or as before the gorgeous pomp of sunset, when
though masses of cloud be gathering, they have a given glory from
above, all the grander for the coming darkness. How we thank
them in our inmost souls for their wisdom, which we feel to have
been gathered `through much tribulation.' They have lived for us,
not for themselves; they are giving us gratuitously what cost them—
life! We do well to prize their great and good words,—

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

heart-drops they are if rightly valued; to carry our children to hear
them, that they may learn to aspire to old age and not dread it.
The extinguished torch in the hand of weeping love is indeed fitting
emblem for the tombs of such!

Travellers may be good talkers, if they have carried with them
or brought home a genial philosophy, and tact enough to know
when particulars become tedious. But the satires called forth by
travelled parrots—


The proud, conceited, talking spark
Returning from his finished tour,
Grown ten times perter than before,
as the old fable has it, have almost silenced travellers of every
degree. It is a point of pride, now, for those who have landed on
every shore and weathered every climate, to be conspicuously taciturn:
`nobody's a bit the wiser' for all their journeyings. This is
a sort of fraud, doubtless. We have a right to expect that those
who have seen what we shall never see will give us of their abundance,
without asking pride's leave on all occasions. Unfortunately
the knowledge of human nature acquired in travel leads us to be
very careful how we seem to fancy we can instruct, or even that we
possess any peculiar material for conversation. In order to talk
agreeably, it is necessary first that we should acquire knowledge,
secondly, that we should carefully conceal it—i. e., give only the
results of it. There must be economy in the dispensation of our
best things.

A habit of studying character and of classifying the specimens
we encounter, affords a good foundation for conversation. It is on
this account that clergymen are generally good talkers, perhaps in
general the best, at least in this country. They have commonly a

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certain tranquillity of manner, which is, in our judgment, one of the
essentials of an agreeable style of conversation; they pass a good
deal of time in private study, and are usually conversant with
literary subjects to a certain extent; their professional avocations
lead their thoughts among high things; and still more, as we have
said, the necessity for studying human life and character, fits them
in a peculiar degree for the quiet exercise of those faculties which
must act freely when we talk well. There must be patience for
pauses as well as fervor in speech; self-control under opposition as
well as earnestness in advocacy; indulgence for ignorance, indulgence
even for stolidity. And in this enumeration we are still adhering
to the æsthetics of the subject, for mere good breeding requires all
these. The best discourse (as to substance) is nullified or worse, if
all that goes to make up that undefinable, comprehensive, lovely,
indefinite word, good-humor, be not present.

The mention of a knowledge of human nature, as a requisite for
conversational power, might suggest the fitness of the law as a
school for talkers, but the very accuracy which ought to be an advantage,
is sometimes found inconvenient. The off-hand expression of
sentiment must necessarily be partial and imperfect. What we say
on the spur of the moment must be received in the spirit rather
than in the letter, and a habit of cross-examining or sifting, of special
pleading, or even of sarcastic comment, is anything but favorable
to the tone of equal conversation. Freedom of expression,
without which conversation becomes unworthy of its name, soon
leads to recrimination, unless a generous toleration give it room and
kindly atmosphere. Opposition gives life, for there is something in
perpetual assent that soon wearies us; yet the spirit arising from
the support of opposing sentiments must not betray us into acridity
or personality, as it is too apt to do. If our arrows be feathered

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with with they must be tipped with love, or at least benevolence. If
argument grow strenuous it must all the more be guarded against
venom, or we offend against all the social amenities.

Our appreciation of the pleasure of conversation is so high; it
forms so important an item in our list of the most desirable pleasures
of life; we are so impressed with its momentous value as a
moral engine, and so grieved to see it profaned every day by emptiness,
ignorance, and ill-nature, that we could find it in our hearts to
bestow all our tediousness upon our readers on this theme. But if
we should say much more, we should be transgressing one of our own
rules of talk, viz., that patience for pauses is as necessary as fervor
of speech.

p626-109 WHAT SHALL WE BE?

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It has been said, even by some of our friends, that we, as a
nation, have no manners of our own; and again, that the manners
of the roughest among our western settlers are the only natural and
simply expressive ones as yet developed among us. Those who
would disparage us and our republican theory and practice, insist
that these rough, negligent, uncivil manners are the proper growth
of our institutions, and must more and more characterize us as a
people, except so far as we imitate the over-polished nations of the
old world. It is argued that a state of things so fluctuating in the
matter of individual wealth—where the continual subdivision of property
must forever prevent the social ascendancy of any class which
might serve as a reservoir of elegance, and a standard for the general
manners—must tend towards a barbarous arrogance, and the lack
of those accomplishments and amenities which, in aristocratic countries,
being cultivated by the privileged classes who desire to dignify
their leisure, serve as an example to those immediately below those
classes, and so on, through the descending scale, as an incentive to
all.

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If we allow that such prognostics are well founded, it must be
after conceding that there is no standard of manners less fluctuating
than Fashion—that there are no rules of behavior of universal
application—that, in short, imitation is our only resort. This is too
weak and narrow, nay, too vulgar an idea to be entertained for a
moment. What! can we believe that the progress of society—the
approach of the human race in knowledge and goodness to the
Image in which it was made—is left at the mercy of a few persons—
not the wisest or best—who call themselves the World! Has this
class ever yet been selected by Providence as the immediate instrument
of any of its great designs for the good of the whole? Has
it not always rather been a merely tolerated excrescence on the body
politic, destined to be gradually absorbed as the great whole
advances to perfect health? We cannot grant that this soi-disant
world is empowered to give laws on any subject more important
than the tie of a cravat, the depth of a curtsey, or the dividing line
between two shades of the same color, one of which shall be
“exquisite,” while the other is “horrid.” We can allow its judgment
in a dispute among milliners, which can make her patient look most
unlike nature, or between two mantua-makers, who shall produce
the best resemblance to the inhuman figures in a French print of
the fashions. If a question arise as to what extent of arrogance in
a lady may be lawful, and how far she may go without being considered
an encroacher upon others' rights of haughtiness, we are
willing the “world” should decide, being the party interested; or
if we would know how to crush the young aspiring of some heart
heaven-directed toward the living Truth, we shall certainly ask its
advice. But in ascertaining the principles on which, if at all, the
great human family may be indeed a house of brothers, we must
look further and higher for authority. All the maxims of this same

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`world' are short sighted and ignoble, content with reference to the
single day that is passing, and that only as far as itself is concerned.
For the eternal Future and the undistinguished crowd it cares
nothing; its timidity and indolence shun the thought of the one,
its selfish feebleness cannot afford any recognition of the other.

It is strange that we Americans should bow as we do to any such
self-appointed tribunal. The foundations of this great country of
ours—of which we are, under certain circumstances, apt to boast a
little more than is becoming—were laid in professions of equality
and brotherhood, which it required a good deal of philosophy even
to adopt, still more to put in honest practice. But we did adopt
them, and not by the acclamations of a few demagogues, as so many
specious measures are adopted, but by the concurrent impulse of the
whole national mind, under the guidance of the wise and good men
sent by Heaven to our aid in that fateful moment. We adopted, as
a people, sentiments which derive their origin and their sanction
from Christianity, and this when we were suffering under the legitimate
effects of opposite ones. We had learned, by sad contrast,
what precious things were justice and humanity, and fellow-feeling,
and we chose them for our watchwords—a choice whose sincerity
many a vaunt since that day of trial and enthusiasm has attested.

Our nation, as a nation is less satisfied than formerly with the
wisdom of the original choice. Far from growing less democratic,
we become every year more so. No step backwards is considered
possible, even by the most anxious conservative. Every modification
of the law tends to a stricter and more literal equality of rights and
privileges. It requires all the power of the South, exerted with the
energy of a life-struggle, to keep even the blacks in a degraded caste,
so all pervasive is the influence of our political creed upon our social
practice. For the first time since the creation, is exhibited the
spectacle of an equality almost Christian. The servant is as his

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master, and in truth is sometimes not a little disposed to change
places with him; indeed if it were not for daily importations from
monarchial countries, we of the North should have no servants at
all. The continual subdivision of property by law, where primogeniture
has no privileges, obliges the sons or grandsons of the rich to
exert themselves for the acquisition of the means of life, and so puts
them at least on a level with the descendants of the poor—generally
rather below them in the capacity to acquire, since habits of frugality
and self-denial are much more likely to result in competence, than
the more indulgent ones which wealth begets.

This state of things has had a marked effect on our character and
manners as individuals. We are a good-natured and brotherly
people; we like to be closely bound together by ties of family, and
neighborhood, business, church, and politics. A man must be very
contemptible or odious, if, after he has once been respected or liked
among us, any misfortune happening to him is not felt with sympathy
by the public; and remedied as far as may be. I do not
mean that misfortunes happening to individuals are felt as they
ought to be in a community of Christians, who are bound by their
allegiance to their Master, to consider the suffering of one member
as the suffering of the whole body; but I have often thought that
there was more public sympathy and generous aid to the unfortunate
here than I had ever heard of or been able to discover any
where else. At the West, if a man's house burn down, his neighbors
immediately join and build him another; and not content with
this, scour the country for forty miles round, if necessary, to stock it
with comforts. If a poor woman die and leave helpless little ones,
somebody is sure to adopt them and bring them up, not on the cold
pittance of a grudging charity, but as sons and daughters. And in
spite of the keenness of business-competition, so inimical to some of

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the virtues, where is found so warm a mercantile sympathy as in our
great commercial cities?

Why then should there be any Americans who desire to return to
the hollow and unchristian tone of society which is the inevitable
result of unjust and unrighteous social distinctions? As a nation,
we have put our hand to the plough and cannot look back if we
would; we have chosen a path which our sons and daughters may
pursue with firmness and dignity, leading the great procession in
whose ranks all mankind are now so anxious to enrol themselves.
Wherever we go, we are looked upon as the representatives of the
principle of self-government. Our actions and even our manners,
are examined as tests both of the soundness of our political maxims,
and the sincerity and intelligence with which we adopt them. We
cannot persuade any body to consider our national ideas as a
separate thing from our national manners. We have voluntarily
placed all spurious dignity out of our reach by the most solemn acts
of renunciation; making it forever disgraceful in an American
citizen to claim for himself any honor which he has not earned.
Some foreigner has said that the only aristocracy of the United
States was to be found in the families of our revolutionary heroes,
civil and military; but the nation ignores even these claims, if the
descendant show in his own character no mark of the worthiness of
his ancestry. We have absolutely no sinecures, even of fame; every
man must earn whatever consideration he enjoys. The richest men
the country has ever possessed, have stood exactly where they
deserved to stand, in public estimation, their wealth passing for
nothing, or worse than nothing, in the account. Our Presidents,
after they have fulfilled their term of office as public servants, retire
into the ranks of common men, without the least vestige of their
kingly power clinging to them, even in the shape of the smallest

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provision for their wants, which might place them above the necessity
of exertion. If they or their families should claim any peculiar
position in society on account of past honors, the whole country
would deride their folly and inconsistency. Yet there are not wanting
those among us who, with no claim beyond a little wealth—and
that too, depending on a mercantile basis, proverbially fleeting,—
attempt to imitate on a small scale the aristocratic insolence which
they observe in the English; forsake the true and wholesome notions
of kindness and consideration for others in which their parents were
educated, and practice the coldness, the disregard, the egotism, which
have been the natural growth of society in which caste has been
recognized for thousands of years.

The true glory of the American character at home or abroad, is
simplicity, truth, kindness, and a strict regard to the rights and feelings
of others. Whenever the conventional standards of other
nations conflict with these, they should be repudiated by us, however
fascinating they may seem to our pride. An Englishman may
with less blame be self-inclosed, haughty and overbearing. He has
not only been taught pride, but he has been taught to be proud of
his pride; while if an American be mis-proud, he has but his own
perverse littleness of soul to blame. Not only do individual Englishmen
and Englishwomen indulge themselves in a lofty and self-forgetful
tone, but the oracles of the nation, the very pulpits, encourage
the unholy illusion. “Condescension” is preached as a virtue to
the rich, “submission” and “deference” to the poor. A late number
of the Quarterly Review, in a series of remarks on the subject of
governesses, which are intended to be highly humane and generous
in their tone, after describing a governess as “a being who is our
equal in birth, manners and education, but our inferior in worldly
wealth,” remarks—“The line which severs a governess from her

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employers is not one which will take care of itself, as in the case of
a servant. If she sits at table she does not shock you—if she opens
her mouth she does not distress you—her appearance and manner
are likely to be as good as your own—her education rather better
there is nothing upon the face of the thing to stamp her as having
been called to a different state of life from that in which it has
pleased God to place you, and therefore the distinction has to be
kept up by a factitious barrier.” “She is a burden and restraint
in society, as all must be who are placed ostensibly at the same
table, and yet are forbidden to help themselves or to be helped to
the same viands.”(!) “She must to all intents and purposes live
alone, or she transgresses that invisible but rigid line which alone
establishes the distance between herself and her employers.” This
state of things is so entirely according to the reviewer's view of right,
that he adds a protest against being suspected of “a hope, even a
wish” to see it remedied. “We must ever keep them in a sort of
isolation, for it is the only means for maintaining that distance which
the reserve of English manners, and the decorum of English families
exact.” If these be the teachers what are we to expect of the
taught! Can Americans adopt such sentiments and copy such
manners without belying their parentage and renouncing the principles
which made them what they are? Shall Christian men and
women among us be dazzled by English splendor into forgetfulness
of the odious and unfeeling worldliness implied in such views of life?
The account of wretchedness, insanity and death, which are the portion
of a dreadful percentage of English governesses from this one cause
of wounded feeling, should be read in connection with the reviewer's
cool speculations on the subject, in order to obtain a just idea of the
dreadful self-forgetfulness into which people may run who prefer the
pampering of their pride to the practice of justice and humanity.

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And after reading this, every American can draw his own conclusions
as to the desirableness of transplanting to our soil this root of
bitterness, sin and ruin.

A marked difference between the manners of Englishmen and
Americans, is shown in their respective behavior under provocation
or injury. An American is at least as quick to feel an intentional
insult as another man;—at least as prompt in resenting it as a Christian
man may lawfully be. But if a servant misbehave, or if some
dispute arise, it will not be natural to him to resort to his fist
or his boot; and if he should, in a momentary gust of passion,
so far forget himself, he will not boast of the feat afterwards, complacently
constituting himself judge, jury, and executioner in his own
case, without for a moment suspecting that the question of right and
wrong may have had two sides. But for an Englishman to act thus
is nothing remarkable, though he will take care that the abused person
is in a position to be silenced or bought off with a bribe, which
no American could be. The rights of others operate as a complete
restraint upon such outbursts of passion with us.

I would not be understood to mean that in England the law is
not made to protect the inferior in such cases, or that Englishmen
are worse natured than other men. I am speaking of manners, as
modified by certain social peculiarities. The injured party may
claim redress at the law, but the law, interpreted under the powerful
influence of social prejudice, is not a very safe resort for the poor
man, who is ruined if he fail to establish his charge; and, practically,
the superior in fortune does indulge his temper more freely, from
knowing that any ordinary injury can be compensated in money,
which could never be the case in the United States.

Female imitation of English aristocratic manners among us, is
generally confined to matters of dress, show, equipage and fashions

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of seeing company. We do not imitate our neighbors where they
are most worthy of imitation—in their solid and elegant cultivation;
in their national habit of ample exercise in the open air, or the excellently
simple and healthy treatment of children. Our ambition is
limited to matters connected with “style,” and whatever tends to
the establishment of distinctions in society. We go to the French
for dress, and to the English for manners—a wise choice if it were
necessary to ape any body; how much wiser would be a firm and
modest originality; a simplicity founded upon principle; moderation
in expense, for the express purpose of being liberal where
liberality is honorable; plainness of dress, resulting at once from
good taste and from religious self-denial, for the sake of others to
whom our flaunting array may be a mortification or a snare; plainness
of living, lest our splendor should separate between us and the
good to whom God has not seen fit to give riches; a direct truthfulness
of speech, as far from the language of unmeaning compliment
as from the rudeness which bespeaks want of sympathy. In short,
should we not, as a nation, be happier and more respectable, if we
carried out, heartily but quietly, in our habits and manners, the
grand and simple ideas to which our country owes her position
among the nations of the earth?

Can any one believe that we should sink in the world's estimation
by living consistently? Are our ambassadors treated with less consideration
than those of other powers, when they appear in republican
simplicity in the midst of stars and orders? They have the
reality of respect, however unwillingly rendered. Franklin appeared
at the most splendid court in Europe in his homely woollen hose;
was he the man of least consideration there? The notion of
republican equality was new then, and this outward plainness was
understood to be its proper interpretation; but the power of mind

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was never more fully recognized. Europe is attempting to follow us
to our own ground—why should we wish to go back to hers? She
has long ago reached what we seem to be striving after—the height
of luxurious and ungodly living—and proved its unsatisfactory emptiness.
When we compete with her here, we place ourselves at disadvantage;
for we cannot equal her, in centuries of effort. Artificial
manners were in her the natural growth of a thousand circumstances;
in us they are contrary to the natural course of things, and
a mere aping of what dazzles us. Would we might rather fall in
love with truth and heartiness!

The impossibility of equalling an old and highly refined nation in
the realities of splendor, is a reason which should operate on our
pride, at least. We may purchase a fac simile of the furniture and
equipage of an English Duke; we may buy his cook and give his
dinners; or we may provide scenery, dresses and decorations for his
duchess's soirée or reception—but what have we done towards reflecting
the style of his household? Where is the high breeding,
the self-poise, the at-home air, among these things? If we would
make a dinner party the expense of which should vie with the City
feast at a coronation, where shall we find the company? Among
worthy merchants and lawyers, or members of congress, or judges?
Have not some of our greatest men—I may say all our greatest men—
been of the simplest tastes and habits? Where can we find a
man whose conversation would be of the least value, who would not
prefer visiting where style was a secondary matter? And surely a
splendid feast without elegant conversation is a mortifying sight.
Even in England, where splendor is inbred, every body groans over
a grand dinner; in America the burthen is intolerable, both to
entertainers and sufferers.

Do not let us adopt any artificial and un-American customs with

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the desire to imitate, or the hope to rival, our English neighbors.
Our imitation will be crude and vapid; our rivalry ridiculous. They
could much more profitably imitate us in the simplicity which we
despise, and not a few of their best spirits desire to see some
approach to such a state of things, in the hope of averting the ills
which threaten their prosperity and grandeur. They feel that their
safety lies in lessening the gulf which lies between the privileged
classes and “the people.” Now we are “the people,” and we cannot
be any body else. To attempt it were as vain as for a soldier to
step out of the ranks in order to appear to better advantage. With
us, the good of one is the good of all. We have a grand position
as independent Americans; we sink at once into an inferior one,
when we imitate any body. The whole range of cultivation lies
before us; we can inform and refine our minds to any extent, and
spend our fortunes according to the tastes thus imbibed. We may
live liberally and even elegantly, without renouncing the dignified
simplicity which draws its maxims and habits from the proprieties
of things, and not from the conventionalisms of people in the Old
World; we may become the patrons of Art, because we love and
understand it, not because somebody else with money patronizes Art,
and we do not like to be behindhand; we may exercise hospitality
in the true spirit—that which excludes the idea of emulation, and
thinks only of social pleasure and kindness. And we can do all this
without even inquiring what will English or French Mrs. Grundy
say, or hampering ourselves with a set of rules and notions, which,
whatever may have been their propriety where they grew up, are to
us the very killers of healthy enjoyment, enemies of the poetry of
life. The tameness which is the result of imitation is dreadful.
Whoever among us speaks his honest sentiments always acknowledges
that our tone of society is dull and uninteresting; and this is

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partly owing to the incessant pursuit of money; partly to a disregard
of æsthetic cultivation; but principally to a want of naturalness—
a spirit of imitation, which prompts us to be always in the
rear of some model, without the least judgment or taste. We lack
individuality; and although the English possess it in a large measure,—
as from their great self-esteem they might be expected to do—yet
we can never acquire it by copying their manners.

Let us inquire for a moment what were the seeds of the fashionable
manners we are so fond of imitating—those which we please
ourselves with calling aristocratic. Mr. D'Israeli says of the days
of King James I.—`As a historian, it would be my duty to show
how incredibly gross were the domestic language and the domestic
familiarities of kings, queens, lords and ladies, which were much like
the lowest of our populace.' Sir John Harrington gives an account
of `a masque given during the visit of the king of Denmark in
England, at which the ladies who were to have performed could not
stand from intoxication, and their Majesties of Denmark and England,
were both carried to bed by their attendants.' The ladies of
the court of Charles I., drank, gamed and swore; enacted jokes of
which often the wit was as questionable as the propriety; rode in
the park; sailed on the Thames; visited the theatres in men's
attire; frequented masquerades, etc.' What was fashionable for
gentlemen, we learn from Ben Jonson; `Look you, sir, now you
are a gentleman, you must carry a more exalted presence; change
your mood and habit to a more austere form; be exceeding proud,
stand upon your gentility, and scorn every man.' `The fashion is,
when any stranger comes in amongst them, they all stand up and
stare at him, as if he were some unknown beast, brought out of
Africk. You must be impudent enough, sit down, and use no
respect; when any thing is propounded above your capacity, smile

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at it, make two or three faces at it, and it is excellent; though you
argue a whole day in silence thus, and discourse nothing but laughter,
'twill pass. Only, now and then give fire, discharge a good full
oath, and offer a great wager, and 'twill be admirable.' Lady Townley
enumerates among the delightful privileges of a married woman
of fashion, that she may `have men at her toilet, invite them to
dinner, appoint them a party in a stage-box at a play, engross the
conversation there, call 'em by their Christian names, talk louder than
the players, etc.' In later times, the Princess of Wales, mother of
George III., said, that `such was the universal profligacy, such the
character and conduct of the young people of distinction, that she
was really afraid to have them near her children.'

It is to be observed that, while the character of the `fashionable
world,' was thus unprincipled and degraded, examples of the highest
virtue were not wanting, elsewhere, in close proximity to these
beacons of folly and vice. Each age shows us splendid examples,
in both sexes, but they do not belong to the class which exalts
fashion into an aim of life. It requires no unjust severity to say, that
in that class there are no such examples. Why—if the pattern of
virtue be not lost—if it inspire compatriots and contemporaries—
why is one particular class beyond the reach of its influence, so completely
that by no accident is any one of its members ever found
eminent in the ranks of goodness? The question needs no answer,
but we may ask what worthy reason there can be for our ambition
to belong to a body thus inferior in aims and deficient in moral
power.

We might fill out these hints, and bring down a succession of
pictures even to the present day, but there is no occasion. Public
sentiment has made such advances that open grossness is not tolerated
in our day, in any rank of society. But the spirit of what is

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called fashionable life is the same; its foundation is the same in the
most important particular, viz: in maintaining that the whims and
foolish devices of a few idle wealthy people shall be the standard of
manners and customs—a principle which casts discredit upon all
that men have agreed in considering wise and good, even where it
does not lead to an open abrogation of the essentials of morality.
This is the true vice of Fashion—not that it is frivolous—not that
it sacrifices too much to mere beauty, or mere pleasure—not that it
leads to imprudent or even dishonest expenditure; but that it virtually
sets aside the ancient and only standards of right, in favor of
a code of laws as weak and mean as they are fluctuating.

It is a wonder that any considerable class of persons has ever
been found willing to become the humble imitators of mere folly
and arrogance; a still greater wonder that such a class should exist
among us. Let us hope that a better understanding of ourselves
and our position will bring us back, at no very distant day, to a
more sagacious estimate of ton. Our ton should be that of true and
honorable simplicity—the simplicity, not of ignorance, but of principle—
the ton of kindliness and universal consideration, of intelligence,
of industry, of respect for probity and delicacy, in whatever
station found.

It is the apparent refinement of fashionable people that tempts
many, who do not perceive that an appearance of refinement often
covers real coarseness. Refinement of soul is one thing; mere outward
delicacy quite another; but the young, the thoughtless and the
feeble-minded are apt to overlook the distinction. True delicacy
is often found in the humblest ranks of life, horrible coarseness in the
highest. Let us learn to judge of things as they are, disregarding
all false glare.

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Here, as in all other cases, we find in the Bible, a rule suited to
our needs: “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are
honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever
things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if
there be any virtue and any praise, think on these things.” Is this
the groundwork of the fashionable code?

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p626-128 FASTIDIOUSNESS.

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Who, that is not a botanist, likes to see one of that disenchanting
and unpoetical craft coolly pull into fragments—cut, maim, and
disfigure—discolor with pitiless acids and virulent alkalies, and
macerate to undistinguishable pulp—his favorite flower? Who
can bear to see petals pinched—anthers analyzed—pericarps pried
into—roots rummaged—by a utilitarian? How much pleasanter is
it to find sacred emblems in a certain peculiar arrangement of
stamens and pistils; read constancy of affection in


The sunflower that turns on her god when he sets
The same look that she turned when he rose—
and listen with believing ears to

Delicate things should be treated delicately; the golden beauty
of pollen is lost in the handling. It is one of the cherished

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evidences of ultra refinement to hold many things too nice to be
touched, and this thought brings us to our subject.

The fastidious are of right shocked at any examination into the
nature and essence of fastidiousness. They would be ready to forswear
it after its humiliating subjection to vulgar tests, if there were
anything else that could so well distinguish the ineffable few from
the intolerable many. It is their own—their chosen—their resource—
their defence—their hope—their glory;—to question with or
upon it is insolently coarse; to doubt its rightful supremacy, profane.
We remember reading somewhere of a simple rural lover
who had followed some Lady Clara Vere de Vere to town, there to
behold her waltzed and polka'd with by all manner of men, returning
to his shades in despairing disgust:

We have some fear that fastidiousness will be even so—contemptuously
left to the critics, if they once try their art upon it. But
we claim the privilege of science, which dissects without respect to
persons, and does not blush to be the sworn enemy of poetry.

To begin botanically then: Where shall we class this flower of
worldliness—among the roots of healing or the subtle poisons?

Shall it take rank with the favored Camellia in the bouquet of
beauty, or with


Thistles and nettles and darnels rank,
And the dock and the henbane and hemlock dank—
Prickly and pulpous and blistering and blue,
Livid, and starr'd with a lurid hue?
It is hard to characterize it, for it is full of anomalies; sometimes

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splendid and deadly, like the scarlet Lobelia, sometimes intoxicating
and delusive as Hellebore, and again harmless and insipid as some
`weed inane.' But let us not be led by these spiral figuratives to
a height of metaphor from which it may be difficult to slip down
gracefully.

In the plainest prose, then, what is fastidiousness?

Stern old Johnson, who confessed that it was difficult for him to
pity the choice sorrows of a fine lady, says, to be fastidious is to be
`insolently nice—delicate to a vice—squeamish—disdainful.' Do
these seem amiable adjectives? Impertinent dictionary-maker!
Unaccommodating, obdurate, Saxon tongue! Is there no unique
name for that fine essence—that impalpable sina qua non—which
is the life and soul of the genteel? No! none but itself can be its
parallel. Let us then not seek to define but to examine it.

Personal fastidiousness is said to be the characteristic of a condition
of high refinement. If refinement were a matter of physics, this might
be admitted. The Israelitish ladies `could not set the sole of their
foot to the ground for delicateness and tenderness,' but were they,
therefore, refined women? There is an implication even of impiety
in the scriptural notice of them. Poppæa must have a bath of
asses' milk; somebody of old wept because a rose-leaf was doubled
under him. Not to go beyond our own day and sphere for instances,
we have ourselves known a gentleman who would not sign his name
until he had put on his gloves, lest by any accident his fingers
should incur the contamination of ink; and a lady who objected to
joining in the Holy Communion, because the idea of drinking after
other people was so disgusting! Shall we then reckon among the
marks of true refinement a quality which is compatible with ignorance,
with vice, with inanity, vanity, and irreligion?

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Hans Christian Andersen has given us one of his shrewd little
stories in point.

There was once a prince of great honor and renown who wished
to marry a real princess. Many persons calling themselves princesses
had been offered for this dignity, but there was always something
about the ladies which made him doubtful of their claim to the title.
So not being able to satisfy his fastidiousness on this point, he
remained for a long time undecided.

One night during a tremendous storm, a young lady came to the
door and requested admittance, saying that she was a real princess.
She was in a most pitiable condition—draggled from head to foot,
with the rain pouring in torrents from her dishevelled locks, she
looked forlorn enough for a beggar. But the prince would not prejudge
her; he invited her to spend the night, and in the meantime
his mother devised a plan by which to ascertain whether her pretensions
were genuine. On the place where the princess was to sleep she
put three small peas, and on the top of them twenty mattresses,
covering these again with twenty feather beds. Upon this luxurious
couch the supposed princess retired to rest, and in the morning she
was asked how she had passed the night.

`Oh, most wretchedly,' she replied; `there was something hard
in my bed which distressed me extremely, and has bruised me all
over black and blue!'

Then they knew that her pretensions were not false, for none but
a real princess could have possessed sufficient delicacy of perception
to feel the three little peas under twenty mattresses and twenty
feather beds!

Is not then delicacy of personal habits desirable?

Beyond doubt, when it is held in subservience to higher things.
The man or woman to whom coarseness is not offensive, can never

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be agreeable as a companion, whatever the general excellence which
might be expected to counterbalance this defect of nature or education.
But to be naturally or habitually delicate is one thing, to be
systematically fastidious quite another. The quality or habit we
are considering has its root in the profoundest egotism, and its
branches are so numerous that it is impossible to consider them all
in detail. It is like the paper-mulberry tree, no two leaves of which
are alike. Let us pick a spring or two here and there as specimens.

Fastidiousness, when unaffected—which it is not always—is very
generally a mark of weakness. Persons of exalted virtue are never
reputed to be fastidious, and why? not because they are constituted
differently from other men, but because great objects—noble aims—
occupy the soul and thoughts to the exclusion of whatever might
interfere with them. If a man who has devoted himself to the
highest pursuits which can engage the attention of mortals, finds
fastidious habits in his way, they will be the first sacrifice he will
lay upon the altar of duty. But it may be questioned whether
these habits will not be often beforehand with us, effectually preventing
any hearty devotion to duty. Questioned, did we say?
Alas! does not every day's observation show us that they are the
hindrance, in too many cases, especially of feminine goodness? In
the care of the poor, and especially in any attempt to reform the
vicious, is not this conspicuously the difficulty, even to the extent of
subjecting a woman to the charge of coarseness if she is found able
to bear the presence of the squalid and the degraded? We have
heard ladies observe calmly and with obvious self-complacency, that
they could not endure the very atmosphere of the poor, and must
leave the care of them to those who could! And we could not
help feeling that the daring required for such an avowal might have
served an excellent purpose if turned in the right direction.

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Fastidiousness is a dreadful weapon of domestic tyranny. Many
a household can tell the grinding power of a selfishness which disguises
itself under the form of delicacy of tastes and habits. Many
are the tears of vexation, anxiety, mortification, and disappointment,
occasioned by the unfeeling temper and inconsiderate exactions
which are the legitimate fruit of undue attention to personal comfort.
One must be little observant of what is about him if he have
not sometimes been driven, by the ingenious requisitions of the self-indulgent,
to wish that the hair shirt, the pulse-and-water, and the
flinty bed of the anchorite could be tried for the reformation of
such. Providence seems often to discipline these people by increasing
the sensitiveness they have voluntarily induced or cherished,
until it becomes a tormenting want which nothing in nature is capable
of allaying. They are crushed by the gods their own hands
have set up.

But personal fastidiousness, although a hardener of the heart, a
traitor to the rights and feeling of those who depend on us, a bar to
improvement, a puller down of all the faculties of the soul, is not
the only form of this specious enemy. Its effects upon society are
quite as extensive and fatal in its other character of—what we may
call for want of a more expressive term—exclusiveness. In this
shape its office is to allow value and charm to all that is desirable,
only in proportion as others are shut out from its enjoyment. It
seems strange that this so obvious refuge of empty pride could
become a formidable moral evil, but it is one of the sorest of our
condition of society—a condition which, because it is artificial and
contrary to our better nature, we please ourselves with calling
refined. An anxious reaching after something which shall distinguish
us from others is one of the natural traits of mortal man; but
one of the most unlovely and ungenerous manifestations of this

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disposition is the attempt to undervalue a large part of all the things
and people that we see, in order that our taste and judgment may
be reckoned supreme by people as superficial as ourselves. It is
this which occasions the listlessness displayed by certain persons
when they are out of their own set; the chilling look, the dead
reply, the disclaiming air with which they decline to participate in
social pleasures which have not a certain conventional sanction.
They are so fastidious! They lament the fault, too, with an air
that says they would not be without it for the world; they evidently
feel that their chosen position depends upon an incapacity to enjoy
common pleasures, quite ignorant all the while that the highest
point and object of true cultivation is a universal human sympathy.
The eagle can look down from such a commanding altitude that the
difference in height of the objects on the plain is scarcely perceptible;
while the mole, blinking about a diameter of a few inches, is
quite sure there is nothing worth seeing beyond that circle. What
wounds, what heart-burnings, what stiflings of the sweet charities
of life, what `evil surmisings,' what an unchristian tone of
intercourse, what loss of a thousand advantages to be communicated
and received, result from the cultivation of a spirit of fastidious
exclusiveness! How much spontaneous kindness is prevented
by the intrusion of a cultivated and cherished distaste for certain
harmless peculiarities which we have chosen to consider intolerable!
We can pardon criminality in some shapes more easily than we can
overlook mere unpleasantness in others, so arbitrary is our fastidiousness,
so unamenable to right reason. `There are far worse sins than
sins against taste,' said a young clergyman once to a lady who was
inveighing against the coarseness of certain reformers; and the lesson
might well be repeated in many a so-called refined circle. One

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of the deep condemnations of this effeminate nicety is that it is
always exercised about trifles.

Like other things spurious, fastidiousness is often inconsistent
with itself; the coarsest things are done, the cruellest things said
by the most fastidious people. Horace Walpole was a proverb of
epicurean particularity of taste, yet none of the vulgarians whom he
vilified had a keener relish for a coarse allusion or a malicious falsehood.
Beckford, of Fonthill, demanded that life should be thrice
winnowed for his use, but what was his life? Louis XIV. was
“insolently nice” in some things, what was he in others? If we
observe a person proud of a reputation for fastidiousness, we shall
always find that the egotism which is its life will at times lead him
to say or do something disgusting. We need expect from such
people no delicate, silent self-sacrifice, no tender watching for others'
tastes or needs, no graceful yielding up of privileges in unconsidered
trifles, on which wait no “flowing thanks.” They may be kind and
obliging to a certain extent, but when the service required involves
anything disagreeable, anything offensive to the taste on which they
pride themselves, we must apply elsewhere. Their fineness of nature
sifts common duties, selecting for practice only those which will pass
the test; and conscience is not hurt, for unsuspected pride has given
her a bride.

One of the fruits of misplaced fastidiousness is the utter and intolerable
tameness which it induces in society. We ask for truth and
nature in poetry and painting, and find nothing so charming as
flashes of natural genius in literature; but in society everything is
crushed to a dead level, and by what? By a tyrannical something
which claims to be good taste, but which is in truth anything else.
This resolute frowning down or freezing up of whatever is spontaneous
is not the operation of good taste. but the cunning artifice of

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dull people, who, having secured certain physical advantages, use
them for the purpose of repressing in others whatever might
threaten to disturb their empire. It seems strange at first view that
this should have been practicable, and the reason why it is so is
rather a mortifying one. The power of wealth, even of wealth in
which we have no interest, is overwhelming. It has ever been so
since the world began; whoever becomes the envied possessor of a
few extra thousands, has a more obvious power on the surface of
society than the man of genius or learning can possibly have; and if
he would live in society he must submit to take the tone which has
been given to it by such people. We need not then wonder that
persons of high intellectual pretensions so often decline society. It
suits not the free mind, which finds its best pleasure in the exercise
of its highest powers, to spend its precious hours and energies where
every emotion of the soul must be suppressed, and every independent
thought is voted “bad taste,” if it do not happen to chime in with
the tone of the circle. If we would give our social intercourse the
charm whose absence we so often regret, we must learn to distinguish
between true delicacy and justness of taste,—a quality referable
to principles and not amenable to fantasy—and that fickle tyrant
fastidiousness, which claims despotic power, and wields its sceptre so
capriciously that we may as well ask a fool to “render a reason.”

The fastidiousness of society does not content itself with repressing
the natural expression of our feelings on subjects comparatively
indifferent; it carries its pretensions still further. Certain topics of
great importance, of the first moment, are prohibited altogether. It
is considered bad taste, and voted indubitable cant, to introduce the
subject of religion; one may talk of church affairs, discuss the
sermon ad libitum, pass the most sweeping judgment on the character
and manner of the pastor, the dress and behavior of his wife,

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and the management of his family; may point out the inconsistent
behavior of church members, and so confess by implication that
there is a standard somewhere; but to speak of religion itself,
seriously and practically; to make its experience or its duties the
theme of conversation, is to dare looks of cold dislike, and to make
one's company shunned like a pestilence. It used to be considered
mauvais ton to “mention hell to ears polite,” but in modern society
it will hardly do to allude to heaven. And this is not to be ascribed
so much to the irreligiousness of those who proscribe sacred subjects,
as to the general impression, the effect of false notions of civilization,
that only mediocrity of talk is safe; that whatever would quicken
the dull flow of the blood, bring color to the cheek and fire to the
eye, is dangerous in society. This is undoubtedly the great reason
why religion is so much left, even among people who would like to
be good if they could, for Sunday use and cultivation, and for times
of affliction, when emotion is not out of place, because the depths of
the soul are stirred by God himself, and man has no power to enforce
the ordinary chilling calm.

We would not be considered as pleading for what is sometimes
called religious conversation, too often as far from truth and nature
as the most inane talk of fashionable society; but for liberty to talk
on whatever subject really interests us. This excludes cant and all
prosing for effect. If it were allowable for all to talk on religious
subjects when so disposed, there would be the less field for those
who assume the right as if it were an exclusive merit. Perfect
liberty for all would leave no temptation to hypocritical pretenders
or weak devotees, for liberty induces a healthful action, which naturally
extinguishes whatever is spurious and forced. Conversation is
much impoverished by the exclusion of religion, for there is scarcely
a subject of human interest which can be fully treated without

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reference to it. This may seem to some a sweeping assertion, but those
who doubt may see an admirable exemplification of our meaning in
two modern works by one author, “Modern Painters,” and “The
Seven Lamps of Architecture,” by Mr. Ruskin, a writer who insists
on the connexion not only of art but of every gratification of our
higher nature with religion.

The exclusion of religious topics from conversation, includes, of
course, the exclusion of all discussion of morals deduced from religion.
Moral rules founded on social convenience and public order
are within the pale; it is only when we would contemplate a code
of morals which is somewhat stricter than the law of the land, that
we offend fastidious taste. Here is another cause of barrenness, for
who can dwell for ever in the merest externals, without becoming
distressingly cold and empty? How is it possible to take an intelligent
interest in human affairs, without contemplating them in their
moral bearings, whether obvious or remote? If it be contended
that to talk about these things is to do no good, we might refer to
the objector's own experience, and ask whether, on close examination
of the sources of some of his most important moral impressions, he
does not discover that a sentiment uttered in ordinary conversation
by some man of sense or piety lies at the very root of his convictions
of duty. The arrows of truth stick, whether shot from formally
prepared and authorized bows or not. The mind may be on
its guard against regular teachings, while it will receive unquestioned
an idea which, though presented by a seeming chance, is yet commended
by truth to the understanding or the conscience. How
important then is it to enjoy a free expression of sentiment on matters
of importance! The `word fitly spoken,' which is truly `like
apples of gold in pictures (baskets) of silver,' should never be lost,
in deference to a pretentious and stolid fastidiousness. It is as much

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our duty to bear our testimony to the truth when occasion offers,
as to act conscientiously in any other way. To suppress the good
word is a sin, and it is a sin to which society continually tempts the
unwary. It is not long since we ourselves heard an ingenuous young
person say, `I felt as if I ought to say what I thought, but I did
not dare.' `Why not?' `O, they would have thought me so disagreeable!
' It is in vain to expect most persons to have the courage
to be honest in the expression of unpopular sentiments at such cost,
and every instance of conscious disingenuousness takes something
from our self-respect and our courage in withstanding evil.

What is called fastidiousness in literature is, happily for literature,
nearly out of date. The first demand now-a-days, is that a writer
shall say something, and only the second that he shall say it well.
Mere style is but little esteemed, except so far as it has direct fitness
to convey ideas clearly. There is plenty of criticism of style, but
its grounds are more manly than they were a hundred years since.
There are hypercritics of course, but nobody minds them, and the
usual tone of remark on books is so general, that we are in danger
of falling into a neglectful habit of writing, through lack of that
sharp and carping spirit which was fashionable in the days of Warburton
and Ritson. The few who still attempt to be noted for
literary fastidiousness are usually heard to utter only sentences of
lofty and general disapprobation. They do not like the book!
But why? Oh, they do not know! They are unfortunately rather
fastidious! It is hard to extract anything like criticism from these
objectors. They do not like to commit themselves by specific
remarks which might be refuted. They prefer the safe dignity of
indefinite censure. There is no disputing about taste, and this saves
all trouble of argument and explanation. It may be suggested to
this class of fastidious people that not only good common sense,

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but taste, knowledge, sensibility, and sympathy are required to
make literary judgment worth anything, and they may, perhaps, be
profitably advised to read what Coleridge has said of critics who
decide without the aid of these qualities. We must know what a
work ought to be, before we are competent to say what it is.

Delicacy of taste in all things is one of the most charming and
desirable of qualities. It supposes in the first place great perfection
and sensitiveness of bodily organization, in the second, high cultivation,
and in the third, a moral tenderness which is tremblingly alive
to the most delicate test. Without the last of these requisites the
others are null or worse; with it they are indeed things to be
thankful for. It was our lot once to meet a gentleman who had
lost his sight and hearing, yet retained his taste in even increased
sensibility—a circumstance which occasioned the keenest mortification
to his high-strung and proud mind, because it assimilated him
with the beasts. Yet who has not known people who prided themselves
on this very quality, without reference to any other? True
delicacy is founded on principle; it selects and rejects for a reason.
Mere fastidiousness is often either conscious coarseness attempting a
redeeming and genteelifying trait, or ambitious vulgarity aping the
refined. Delicacy is consistent, because it is real; fastidiousness
forgets to be so when the inducement is absent. Delicacy is sensitive
for others; fastidiousness is too often mere self-indulgence
slightly veiled. Delicacy is always conciliated by what is intrinsically
good; fastidiousness is disgusted by any originality even of
virtue. Delicacy is at home even in a desert; fastidiousness can
exist only in the atmosphere of a pseudo-refinement. Delicacy
accompanied Catharine Vonder Wart, when she watched alone in
the open storm all night by her husband, wiping the foam of agony
from his lips, and bearing up his spirit as he lay stretched upon the

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rack; fastidiousness would have stayed at home, wringing her
hands and tearing her hair perhaps, but never thinking such service
possible.

But whither are we tending? We have been led to maiming
and macerating our flower indeed, to an extent which even botany
will hardly justify. Do we seem to have treated our subject harshly?
It is only seeming. The moment we begin to analyze we must
necessarily wear the appearance of severity. Is it—can it be—
needful to say that after all we have said about fastidiousness, there
are some fastidious people whom we love dearly, and who are full
of all good things? When we treat a subject of this nature, we
must be indulged in a complete abstraction, which allows us to call
everything by its plainest name, give it its true meaning, and trace
it out to its legitimate consequences. It is in applying our remarks,
that allowances are to be made and special circumstances and
balances considered. That is the business of the reader rather than
of the writer. Of the writer is to be required only the most rigorous
impartiality of research, and of course the most unflinching self-application!

p626-142 BUSH-LIFE.

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`Adieu, thou beautiful land! Canaan of the exile, and Ararat
to many a shattered ark. Fair cradle of a race for whom the
unbounded heritage of a future that no sage can conjecture, no
prophet divine, lies afar in the golden promise-light of Time.....
None can tell how dear the memory of that wild Bush-life becomes
to him who has tried it with a fitting spirit. How often it haunts
him in the commonplace of more civilized scenes! With what an
effort we reconcile ourselves to the trite cares and vexed pleasures,
`the quotidian ague of frigid impertinences,' to which we return!'

So sings, in mellifluous prose, the fastidious author of `Pelham',
in his healthiest work, `The Caxtons,' goodly fruit, it is said, of the
purifying influences of Water! When Wordsworth boasted of being
a water-drinker, Professor Wilson jocosely observed that he could well
believe it, from the lack of spirit in his poems. But Bulwer shows
no diminution of spirit in the new novel; he has only changed
from a wrong spirit to a right one. The book abounds in manly
sentiments, in place of the old, tedious, sentimental dandyism; and
one of the most striking things is the boldness which sends forth its
heroes to brave the hardships and trials of new-country life.

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England seems learning, in a new and unexpected way, to sympathize
with the United States. She has looked upon the rapid
settlement of our new, western country, as from a far height of civilization,
holding up dainty hands at the idea of such rudeness of
manners, and considering our whole country tinged—as indeed
it is—by certain results of the growth and activity of the West.
But lately her turn has come. She is now sending not only her
convicts, but her younger sons, her too-active reformers, her scapegraces,
and her youth of more nerve than fortune, to people her
distant islands; to hunt wild asses, and to tame kangaroos. Then,
like a good mother as she is, spreading her wings for the protection
of her brood, she begins to tell us what a fine manly thing emigration
is, how much better it is for young men—and young women,
too—to brave the disagreeables of Bush-life, than to remain idle and
effeminate and unprovided for at home. Two of the most striking
fictions of the day (not to speak of inferior specimens), the one to
which we have alluded, and another—a poem in hexameters—
called `The Bothy of Toper-na-Fuosich,'—send their heroes to Australia,
with a heartiness of approval which makes light of the roughness
of life in the wilderness, and seems for the time to find the
boasted civilization of the mother country rather sickly and feverish
by comparison. This is charming! it foretells some diminution of
national prejudice; for whatever may be the feelings cherished by
London and Liverpool towards New York and Boston, a brotherhood
will surely spring up between Australia and the wide West:
nor will home influence on either side be able to counteract the
sympathy which common toils, privations, customs, hopes, naturally
originate. The Bushman of Australia is essentially the same being
with the western settler. Anglo-Saxons both, and too strongly
characterized by that potent stock to show much subjection to the

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accidental traits which have been the consequence of the rending
of the race into two half-inimical portions in the old and new
worlds, the circumstances of Bush-life will restore the pristine unity,
and awaken a feeling of brotherhood too strong for the pride, prejudice,
and jealousy of either party to resist. Every book, therefore,
that depicts Bush-life, helps on this unity. In discovering how completely
the hopes, occupations, habits, labors, privations, and pleasures
of a new-country life are one and the same, whether the mild
skies of Van Diemen's Land, or the brilliant ones of Wisconsin
bend above the settler, we are brought at once to a mutual recognition
of the natural bonds that bind man to his fellow, and learn to
acknowledge gladly all our human ties, and with an especial warmth
those which unite us to brethren in a common fortune.

It is cheering to find the subjects of an ancient and over-ripe
civilization, which has already produced some ruinous as well as
some splendid fruits, beginning to recognize the dignity of labor—
at least beginning to own that labor and hard living are not necessarily
degrading. A character once familiar to English writers and
readers—that of a younger son, too proud to work, and too self-indulgent
to endure the privations attendant upon small means,
existing as a hanger-on in the family of the heir—will never come
within the cognizance of the next generation. The axiom once
accepted that a man, in whatever station, is exalted and not debased
by work, the class will disappear. Add to this new doctrine a
recognition of the benefits attending self denying and robust personal
habits, and the law of primogeniture will in part become its
own antidote, by supplying the out crops of the great Island with a
class of settlers at once hardy and generous, thrifty and noble-minded.
Leaving field sports to their elder brothers, these more
hopeful sons of Old England will make sport of earnest, and feel

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none the less proud of the antlers on their walls, because the venison
to which they belonged was a necessary of life instead of a luxury.

People who have only heard or read of life in the wilderness
have but crude notions of its actual characteristics. No way of life
more absolutely requires to be tried, in order to be understood.
The accepted idea perhaps includes wolf-hunts, and bear-fights, and
deer-shooting; sleeping in the woods, fording rivers, following
Indian trails, or wading streams in search of fish. This view of
things is a poor preparation for the reality of life in the wilderness.
It makes charming books, as witness the many of which it has
formed the staple; but for the plain truth of the matter, such as
forces itself upon every man's convictions after he has transferred his
domicile and his household gods to the woods, we might as well go
to the melancholy Jacques where he lies


`Weeping and commenting
Upon the sobbing deer'—
for a practical notion of forest life. It is, indeed a life of hardship,
but, `with a difference.'

Hardships are not always trials. There is a rousing power in
wild adventure, which makes hunger and cold and hard lodging
and press of danger only inspiring. These are not the things that
try the souls of those who exchange a condition of high civilization
for the privations of the woods. Far more wearisome, because
somewhat mortifying, are the petty circumstances attending the
daily cares for mere subsistence which form the staple of sober
existence in a new country; where a man goes not to hunt and fish,
but to repair his fortunes by industry and economy; to `buy and
sell and get gain;' to win the treasures of the soil with hands used
only to the pen; to fell primeval trees with an axe that has never

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cut anything larger than a fishing rod. Such an adventurer may
carry everything with him but the one thing needful,—habits
suited to the exigence. Even a stout frame and a stout heart will
not suffice at first. Time alone can accomplish the assimilating
process, and for time he cannot wait.

Emigrants are apt, at the outset, to feel somewhat of reforming
zeal. They have just left regions where life wears a smooth aspect;
where convention hides much that is coarse and unpleasant; where
the round of human business and duty is comprised in a few convenient
formulas, or seems to be so; and where each man, using, as it
were, the common sense and experience of the whole, naturally
fancies himself wiser than he really is, and where he is indeed practically
wiser than isolated man can easily be. So the emigrant feels
as if he had much to tell; something to teach, as well as something
to learn. If he must depend somewhat on his neighbors for an
insight into the peculiar needs of his new position, he is disposed to
return the favor by correcting, both by precept and example, some
of the awkward habits, the ear-wounding modes of speech, and
unnecessary coarseness which he sees about him. Above all does
he determine that the excellent treatise on farming which he has
studied and brought with him, shall aid him in introducing, before
very long, something like a rational system, instead of the shortsighted,
slovenly, losing, hand-to-mouth practices which are wasting
the riches of the land.

The waking-up is quite amusing. To find that nobody perceives
his own deficiencies, while everybody is taking great pains to make
yours apparent; that your knowledge is considered among your
chief disabilities; that you are, in short, looked upon as a pitiable
ignoramus, stuffed only with useless fancies, offensive pride, silly fastidiousness,
and childish love of trifles; that your grand farming

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theories are laughed at, and your social refinements viewed as indicating
a sad lack of common sense and good feeling;—the blank
and helpless sense of unfitness that comes over one under such circumstances
is indescribable. This is always supposing that you are
unequal to bodily labor. If you can chop or plough, there is confessed
to be something of you, even though your ideas be silly.
But if, coming from a land where head is all-powerful and hand
only subservient, your muscles are feeble and your brain active, you
must be content with the position of an inferior, and for awhile play
the part of a child in the hands of older and wiser people.

This aspect of Bush-life lacks the pleasant stimulants with which
the imagination is apt to invest it. Where are the hunting and
fishing which were to cheer your leisure hours? You have no
leisure hours; and if you had, to spend them in hunting and fishing
would set you down at once as a `loafer'—the last term of condemnation
where everybody works all the time; lives to work rather
than works to live. Your fine forest dreams give way before the
necessity for `clearing.' If you take a morning walk over the
breezy hills, it will probably be in search of a stray cow; and you
may find it necessary to prolong your stroll indefinitely, returning,
under the blazing sun of noon, to dinner instead of breakfast.
Your delightful, uninterrupted evenings, where so many books were
to be devoured, in order to maintain a counter-influence to the
homely toils of the day, must be sacrificed, perhaps, to sleep, in
order to be ready for an early start in the morning, in search of
additional `hands' at the threshing, or that most valuable and most
slippery of all earthly goods in the new country—a `hired girl.' If
you chance to have an old friend undergoing a similar probation ten
or twenty miles off, and feeling a yearning desire to seek counsel or
sympathy at his hands, be sure that after you have made up your

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mind to sacrifice everything to this coveted visit, which you feel will
set you up in courage for a month to come, you will find you `cannot
have the horses,' without such a derangement of the business at
home as would bespeak an insane disregard of your interest, and
lead your whole dependency to look upon you as a fool past praying
for.

Has new-country life, then, no pleasures? Many; but they are
not exactly those we anticipate. To recur to the testimony with
which our musings began. `None can tell how dear the memory
of that wild Bush-life becomes to him who has tried it with a fitting
spirit!' And it could hardly become dear to the cultivated, if it
were that mere dull, mechanical, animal, grubbing existence that
some suppose it to be. Wherein then consists the charm? It is
hard to specify; for, like other charms, it has something of inexplicable
magic in it. We spend our lives here in weaving nets for
ourselves, yet we delight to throw them off; even as the merchant
who prides himself on the well-fitted coat, the neat cravat, the spotless
gloves, the shining boots, in which he proceeds to his counting-house
in the morning, enjoys with all his heart the privilege of
exchanging them for the easy douillette, soft slippers, and general
negligé of a quiet evening at home. Dress, and ceremony, and
formal behavior seem necessary in the city—seem, not are—for
humanity is more truly dignified than convention, and more effective
in every way;—but in the woods we may follow nature—dress to be
warm or to be easy, or to be picturesque, if we like, without shocking
anybody. We have in town perhaps all the essentials of
liberty; we are more alone and independent in a crowd than in a
thinly settled neighborhood; but in the country we have the sense
of liberty; the free breezes suggest it; the wide expanse of prospect;
the unconstrained manners of those about us; the

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undisguised prominence of the common matters of daily life—so carefully
kept out of sight in our anxious refinement; all remind us and
seem to us symbolical of an ideal liberty. There are no fixed
`business hours' or `visiting hours;' we may work all day if we
like, or we may make a call at seven in the morning; and although
we shall never care to do these particular things, it is yet pleasant
to think we may do them. It is true, other people's large liberty
sometimes infringes a little on ours; but after all, there is a vast
surplus in our favor, since we have really more of it, with all chance
deductions, than we know what to do with. The idea—the feeling—
is the main thing. This is certainly the chief source of the fascination
of a wild western life.

The inspiring influence of progress is however very potent in its
way. To see everything about you constantly improving, is delightful.
There is an impression of young, joyous life in such a state of
society. As the breath and atmosphere of infancy is said to infuse
new animal spirits into the sluggish veins of age, so the fresh movement
of new-country life stirs the pulses of him who has long made
part of a social system which claims to have discovered everything
and settled everything, and to be resting on the result of past effort.
If it be happiness to have all one's faculties in constant and profitable
use, the dweller in the woods should be happy, for every day
brings new calls upon his powers; upon his ingenuity, his industry
his patience, his energy. Let him be `many-sided' or even `myriad-minded,
' he will find use for all his faculties; it is only one-sided
people—of whom there are, alas! so many—who find Bush-life
intolerable.

This calling out of one's powers certainly gives a new aspect to
many things that would seem intolerable if we were so placed as to
depend on the services of others. There is something in human

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nature which glories in performance, be the matter ever so humble.
We might stand by in irrepressible impatience to see another bungling
at some expedient, which appears very tolerable when it is our
own work, as we have seen a gentleman really vain-glorious of a
garden-gate of his own manufacture, which he would have discharged
a workman for making. We put a portion of our very
selves into these rude specimens of our handiwork, and we love
them with a most paternal affection as long as they last. Is not
some of the ennui of life referable to a disregard of this hint of
nature? Would not something of the vapidity of which the spoiled
children of refinement complain be remedied by the habit of doing
something for ourselves—even if it were imperfectly done—instead
of requiring the incessant intervention of servants and tradespeople?
It would perhaps not be easy to find a rich man who is odd enough
to keep an amateur work-bench, or a lady bold enough to perform
some of the lighter household duties, suffering from that disgust of
life which is the torture of some of the idle. It is at least certain
that dyspepsia is a complaint unknown in the woods!

The enjoyment of health is then another of the pleasant things of
true rustic life. (We talk not of agues! They must be caught and
let go again—endured and forgotten—before one can know how
truly healthy our western country and its out-door habits are.)
After one is acclimated, there is probably no more favorable climate
for health and longevity in the temperate zones. No skies—not the
boasted ones of Italy—are clearer; their transparency is even
remarked, not only by Englishmen, but by our own countrymen
from the Atlantic shores. The stars and the aurora seem brighter
there than elsewhere, and a long succession of brilliantly clear days
is too common an occurrence to be noticed. This naturally contributes
to good health and good spirits; and if people have sense

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enough to live with some attention to the laws of health, they may
defy the druggist, and live till they drain existence to the lees, enjoying
the draught more and more as years mellow its flavor.

Do our western population generally make as much of their
health-privilege as they are sure to do of a `water-privilege'?
Alas! where ague kills its units, hot bread, hot meat, pickles,
and strong tea—to say nothing of accursed whiskey—slay their
tens of thousands. No people live so insanely as our western
brethren; in truth, nothing but the kind and genial climate
saves them from the complication of horrid ills which beset the
gourmand in our old cities. Butter is considered rather more a
necessary of life than bread; in fact that which we call bread is
almost unknown in some regions, hot cakes supplying its place at
every meal. The “staff of life,” however, is tea—strong, green tea.
This is usually taken, unless poverty forbid, with breakfast, dinner,
and supper, and without milk or sugar. With this is eaten fried
meat, almost universally (we speak throughout exclusively of country
habits), fried and swimming in fat. Infants partake of all these
things; and if they are teething and fretful, they often have a peeled
cucumber given them to nibble, by way of quietus, which indeed it
may be supposed admirably calculated to become. That many young
children die is therefore less astonishing than that some live. Those
who do survive probably owe their chance of future years' hot
bread to their being allowed to creep about in the open air as soon
as they are old enough to be out of the mother's arms. The fine
climate does all it can for them, and it does everything for those
who will accept its kind ministering.

No inconsiderable variety and amusement are produced by the
unfettered agency of nature and natural objects. Where the earth
is hidden under piles of stone, nothing short of an earthquake can

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produce very striking occurrences of a natural kind; but in the
woods, hardly a day passes without something noticeable in earth,
air, or water, or among their denizens. Tom Stiles, in felling a
huge old oak, brings to light perhaps a hundred and fifty pounds
of honey, which turns the whole neighborhood into a bee-hive for
the nonce. John Nokes, mowing without boots, gets bitten by a
rattlesnake, and a thrill of sympathy runs through the settlement.
The road to his house is thronged with people from far and near,
coming to urge remedies—all infallible—and to offer aid as nurses
or watchers. Perhaps the musk-rats work so stealthily and so well
that the mill-dam will be completely riddled or undermined, and
the whole pond will run away in the night, leaving a huge scoop of
long grass and stumps instead of the fair expanse of water which
the setting sun delighted to dye with crimson and purple. Then
every hand that can be hired is in requisition, and everybody who
is not hirable thinks it necessary to spend nearly the whole time in
looking on, lamenting, suggesting, advising, and prognosticating.
Now the great business of the young men and boys is setting traps
for quails and prairie-hens, and again every fallow is bespread with
nets to catch pigeons; or perhaps Mr. A—, after sitting up all
night to watch for the fox that robs his henroost of late, comes very
near shooting that `loafer,' Sam B—, who, though he will not
work, unreasonably continues to eat, and of the fat of the land too.
Or poor John Smith's stick chimney takes fire and burns his house
and all that is in it, hardly excepting his wife and children. Then
somebody must take wagon and horses and thread the whole region
round about for aid in the shape of clothing, provisions, furniture`
farming utensils and stock, to set him up again; while the neighbors
fall to chopping and notching logs for a new house, and finish by
having a famous raising and installing the sufferers in their

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rejuvenated domicile, with perhaps more of worldly goods than the fire
found to consume, and hearts full of gratitude and joy.

Do these things and all that they typify seem trifles? Those
whose hearts quake at the rise and fall of stocks should be ashamed
to call them so. To the dweller in the woods they can never be
trifles. And this brings us to what is perhaps after all the secret
charm of a life far removed from pride and formality—the feeling
of brotherhood. There is in every human heart not totally sophisticated,
a capacity for this; but where men are crowded together in
large cities, or subjected to the friction of keen and pitiless competition,
it is well-nigh obliterated. Where all that each man gains
may be said in some sense to be so much abstracted from the common
stock, and where the brotherly feeling is not kept awake by
any obvious dependence upon others, individualism and selfishness
are too apt to prevail. But when, on the contrary, whatever each
man does for his own profit is sure to turn to the advantage of all
about him; when the means of life and comfort are drawn directly
from the bounteous bosom of earth, not impoverishing, but
enriching the source and fitting it the better to afford wealth
to a coming generation; when the circumstances of life are such
that each man is obliged to be personally indebted to his neighbor
for many of those offices which affect most nearly our business and
bosom, while common toils compel contact and consultation, and the
state of things is adverse to any separation by ceremony—all the
bonds of life are drawn closer; the heart is obliged to act, and the
tone of manners becomes freer and more genial; less polite perhaps,
but more humane; and after some little experience of this, a return
to the cold polish of city intercourse seems indeed a plunging into
frigid impertinences,'—a descent from the free mountain air which

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braces every nerve to health and pleasure, to the calmer but more
stagnant atmosphere of the plain.

The days of this fresh aspect of things are passing away. The
influence of wealth and of facilitated intercourse will before very
long produce a great equalization of manners. The West has
already tinged not a little, as we said before, the social intercourse
of the East in our country. We adopt her humorous expressions
and even her scorn of the cherished conventions of the Old World.
To be `manly' is more prized among us than to be `elegant,' even
while we are reaching after liveries and other antiquated remnants
of the pride of the dark ages. Our gentlemen print their cards
with names ungraced by even the commonest title, leaving the `Mr.'
which used to be felt essential, to chiropodists and other pretenders.
All this while the West is disposed to take up the politenesses we lay
down, and her ambition is such that it will not be wonderful if she
should in time devise some original ones of her own, so that to our
descendants at no very remote distance, it may perhaps be hardly
credible that the distinction between western manners and those of
the older settled parts of the country was ever as great as it has
really been up to our day.

But it is a state of things worth remembering. In an age and
country where everything is doing, some things run the risk of being
forgotten, for who can afford time for the `slow' business of chronicling,
in the very face of the lightning-flashes which are melting
into one the Present, Past, and Future? With so much to accomplish
for ourselves, can we be expected to think of the coming age,
whose wings already fan our faces? When golden splendors are
dawning, is it worth while to fix on the canvas, the sober hue of
twilight?

For the sake of contrast, at least, let us preserve a clear

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recollection of the great West in her dress of `hoddin gray,' by way of
æsthetic, not humiliating contrast; as the rough disguise thrown
off by the triumphant hero of the drama imparts new splendor to
the robes he has been only veiling beneath it; or, more nearly, as
the sun, in his might, turns the bars of purple cloud which for awhile
obscured his disk, into a glorious ladder for his ascent to the meridian.