Letters to Young Married People

LETTER VII.

SOCIAL HOMES, AND BLESSINGS FOR DAILY USE.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is Solitude!
But grant mo still a friend in my retreat
‘Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet !

Cowper.

The good he scorned,
Stalked off reluctant, like an ill used ghost,
Not to return,

Robert Blair.

I HAVE talked to you of your duties to each other, to your relatives, and to your servants. It remains to me to speak of your duties to society, as heads of families and rulers of homes.

I have insisted on the thorough identification of husband and wife in feeling, pride of character and family, pursuit, and interest; yet I am aware that this identification may be perverted into a most senseless and selfish devotion to one another, and an exclusiveness of communication, which are destructive of social life. I am acquainted with too many husbands and wives who, though all the world to each other, are nothing to the world. Their whole life is within their home. They gather comforts about them, they bear dainties to each other’s lips; they live and move and have their whole being in each other’s love; and, shutting out all the world, live only for themselves. I say I know too many such pairs as these. They are far too plenty. They cannot bear to be torn from their homes for an afternoon. They take no interest in others. They never call friends and neighbors around their board, and they consider it a hardship to fulfil the common offices of social politeness — to say nothing of hospitality. It is not unjust to say that this is one of the most dangerous and most repulsive forms of married life. It is selfishness doubled, associated, instituted; and it deserves serious treatment.

Homes, like individuals, have their relations to each other; and, as no man liveth to himself alone, no home should live to itself alone. It is through the medium of homes that the social life-blood of America is kept in circulation — through this medium almost exclusively. Every home should be as a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid. Into it should flock friends and friendships, bringing the life of the world, the stimulus and the modifying power of contact with various natures, the fresh flowers of feeling gathered from wide fields. Out of it should flow benign charities, pleasant amenities, and all those influences which are the natural offspring of a high and harmonious home life. Intercommunication of minds and homes is the condition of individual and social development, and failing of this no married pair can be what they should be to each other. Exclusive devotion to business by day, and exclusive devotion to selfish home enjoyments at night, will dry up, harden, and depreciate the richest natures in the course of a few years; and, so soon as the man withdraws from the business of the world, the world has seen the last of him and his family for life. They have no outside associations. It is as if they did not live at all. When they die, nobody misses them, for they have been nothing to society. As many doors are open as before, and social life feels no ripple upon its surface when the sand is thrown upon their coffins.

There should glow in every house, throughout the land, the light ‘of a pleasant welcome for friends, On every hearth should leap the flame that irradiates the forms and faces of associates. Neighborhood should mean something more than a collection of dark and selfishly-closed hearts and houses. A community should be something better than an aggregation of individuals and homes governed by the same laws, and sustaining equal civil burdens. Neighborhood should be the name of a vital relationship. A community should be a community in fact — informed with a genial, social life, in which the influence of each nature, the power of each intellect, the wealth of every individual acquisition, the force of every well-directed will, and the inspiration of every high and pure character, should be felt by all. A neighborhood of homes like this, would be a neighborhood indeed ; and none other deserves the name.

The fact is, that selfishness is the bane of all life. It cannot enter into life — individual, family, or social — without cursing it. Therefore, if any married pair find themselves inclined to confine themselves to one another’s society, indisposed to go abroad and mingle with the life around them, disturbed and irritated by the collection of friends in their own dwelling, or in any way moved to regard their social duties as disagreeable, let them be alarmed at once. It is a bad symptom — an essentially morbid symptom. They should institute means at once for removing this feeling; and they can only remove it by persistently going into society, persistentiy gathering it into their own dwelling, and persistently endeavoring to learn to love, and feel an interest in, all with whom they meet. The process of regeneration will not be a tedious one, for the rewards of social life are immediate. The heart enlarges quickly with the practice of hospitality. The sympathies run and take root, from point to point, each root throwing up leaves and bearing flowers and fruit like strawberry vines, if they are only allowed to do so. It is only sympathies and strawberries that are cultivated in hills, which do otherwise. The human face is a thing which should be able to bring the heart into blossom with a moment’s shining, and it will be such with you, if you will meet it properly.

The penalties of family isolation will not, unhappily, fall entirely upon yourselves. They will be visited with double force upon your children. Children, reared in a home with few or no associations, will grow up either boorish or sensitively timid. It is a cruel wrong to children to rear them without bringing them into continued contact with polite social life. The ordeal through which children thus reared are obliged to pass, in gaining the ease and assurance which will make them at home elsewhere than under the paternal roof, is one of the severest ; while those who are constantly accustomed to a social life from their youth, are educated in all its forms and graces without knowing it.

Great multitudes of men and women, all over the country, are now living secluded from social contact, simply from their sensitive consciousness of ignorance of the forms of graceful intercourse. They feel that they cannot break through their reserve. There is, doubtless, much that is morbid in this feeling, and yet it is mainly natural. From all this mortification and this deprivation, every soul might have been saved by education in a home where social life was properly lived. It is cruel to deny to children the opportunity, not only to become accustomed from their first consciousness to the forms of society, but to enjoy its influence upon their developing life. Society is food to children, Contact with other minds is the means by which they are educated; and the difference in families of children will show at once to the accustomed eye, the different social character of their parents. But I have no space to follow this subject further; and I leave it with you, with the earnest wish that you will consider it, and profit by the suggestions I have given you.

I must talk to you in this letter (for I have but one more to write) in regard to your way of living, and your main objects of life. Are you stretching every nerve and straining every muscle to get gold? Have you associated respectability with wealth? Are you denying to yourself a free and generous life now in your youth, in order to enjoy such a life when youth shall have passed away? Are you scrimping yourselves and your families by mean economies which grudge every sixpence that escapes you, and make of your life a hard and homely thing? I know of many young married people who are living a life like this, and I pity them more than I blame them, because they are victims of false ideas, very probably inculcated by thrifty parents or by most thriftless philosophers. If you are an unsocial pair, the probabilities are that you are engaged in precisely this business.

Now I wish to tell you of something very much better than this. I am not going to advise you to adopt a luxurious style of living. I am not going to tell you to spend all you get, and to run in debt for that which you are unable to pay for. But I say that for every capable and healthy man, and every clever and sensible woman, both of whom are industrious, there is enough to be won in the work of life to afford a generous living, and leave a sufficient margin for independent competence. The years of your life will be few, at the most; and for you to throw away the enjoyment of their passing days for a good which may never come, to be enjoyed in a life that is uncertain, is to throw away for ever the blessings which God intends for your present food. God’s blessings are not cumulative. The manna that fell in the wilderness came every day, and spoiled with the keeping. You may lay up wealth for age, but age, with its teeth gone, its sensibilities killed, and with out employment, cannot enjoy it. So, I tell you to enjoy your wealth while you are earning it. I do not mean by this that you are to lay up nothing. I do not mean that you shall be imprudent or improvident. I only counsel that use of your money, from day to day, which will give you generous food, tasteful dress, and pleasant surroundings, and which will tend to make life comfortable and beautiful.

But some will read this who are in poverty, who do not hope to obtain even independence. I am not writing to you, my friends, but to your neighbors, less happy than you, who have taken it into their heads to get rich. Perhaps they may be your employers. At any rate, they are very unenviable people. I write to those who have the power to make money, and who ignore the present blessings of their lot — who enjoy no present blessings. I write to those who wait for wealth to make their first contributions to public charities, to aid in the support of social and religious institutions, to mingle in that neighborhood life which involves a genial hospitality, to fill their library with books and their halls with pictures, to resort to the concert and exhibition rooms for refining amusement, to give employment to the poor, to make their homes the embodiment of good taste and substantial comfort, and to provide for health and pleasant recreation.

I believe that twice as much may be enjoyed in this life, as is now enjoyed, if people would only take and use the blessings which Heaven confers on them for present use. We strive to accumulate beyond our wants, and beyond the wants of our families. In doing this, we deny to ourselves leisure, recreation, culture, and social relaxation, When wealth has been won, our power to enjoy it is past, and it goes into the hands of children whose industry and enterprise it kills and whose best life it spoils. It is not often that great accumulations of wealth do anybody good. They usually spoil the happiness of two generations — one in the getting, and one in the spending.

I love the man who earns his money with the special design of spending it — the man who regards money only as a means of procuring that which shall supply the passing wants of his nature — of his whole nature — and for securing education to his children, and comfort to his old age. It is to such that men go for subscriptions to worthy objects. It is by the fireside and at the board of such that I am happy. It is with the free and generous souls of such that I delight to come in contact. It is for such souls that life is made. Such men as these go on from year to year, building up their homes, making them abodes of beauty and plenty, and places of refreshment for five hundred cordial hearts. Wherever they go, hands of warm good fellows are held out to them. They have the blessing of the helpless, and the envy of no man. Sometimes, perhaps, their wives are envied by the wives of other men, but it is probaly out of the power of either party to help that.