The holidays passed away hilariously, and at NewYear’s-Day I, according to time-honoured custom, went forth to make my calls and see my fair friends, while my wife and daughters stayed at home to dispense the hospitalities of the day to their gentlemen friends. All was merry, cheerful, and it was agreed on all hands that a more joyous holiday season had never flown over us.
But, somehow, the week after, I began to be sensible of a running-down in the wheels. I had an article to write for the Atlantic, but felt mopish and could not write. My dinner had not its usual relish, and I had an indefinite sense everywhere of something going wrong. My coal-bill came in, and I felt sure we were being extravagant, and that our John Furnace wasted the coal. My grandsons and granddaughters came to see us, and I discovered that they had high-pitched voices, and burst in without wiping their shoes, and it suddenly occurred powerfully to my mind that they were not being well brought up, — evidently, they were growing up rude and noisy. I discovered several tumblers and plates with the edges chipped, and made bitter reflections on the carelessness of Irish servants; our crockery was going to destruction, along with the rest. Then, on opening one of my paper-drawers, I found that Jennie’s one drawer of worsted had overflowed into two or three; Jennie was growing careless; besides, worsted is dear, and girls knit away small fortunes without knowing it, on little duds that do nobody any good. Moreover, Maggie had three times put my slippers into the hall-closet, instead of leaving them where I wanted, under my study-table. Mrs. Crowfield ought to look after things more; every servant, from end to end of the house, was getting out of the traces; it was strange she did not see it.
All this I vented from time to time, in short, crusty sayings and doings, as freely as if I hadn’t just written an article on “Little Foxes” in the last Atlantic, till at length my eyes were opened on my own state and condition.
It was evening, and I had just laid up the fire in the most approved style of architecture, and projecting my feet into my slippers, sat spitefully cutting the leaves of a caustic review.
Mrs. Crowfield took the tongs and altered the disposition of a stick.
“My dear,” I said, “I do wish you’d let the fire alone, — you always put it out.”
“I was merely admitting a little air between the sticks,” said my wife.
“You always make matters worse when you touch the fire.”
As if in contradiction, a bright tongue of flame darted up between the sticks, and the fire began chattering and snapping defiance at me. Now, if there’s anything which would provoke a saint, it is to be jeered and snapped at in that way by a man’s own fire. It’s an unbearable impertinence. I threw out my leg impatiently, and hit Rover, who yelped a yelp that finished the upset of my nerves. I gave him a hearty kick, that he might have something to yelp for, and in the movement upset Jennie’s embroidery-basket.
“Oh, papa!”
“Confound your baskets and balls! they are everywhere, so that a man can’t move; useless, wasteful things, too.”
“Wasteful?” said Jennie, colouring indignantly; for if there’s anything Jennie piques herself upon, it’s economy.
“Yes, wasteful, — wasting time and money both. Here are hundreds of shivering poor to be clothed, and Christian females sit and do nothing but crochet worsted into useless knick-nacks. If they would be working for the poor there would be some sense in it; but it’s all just alike, no real Christianity in the world, — nothing but organized selfishness and self-indulgence.”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Crowfield, “you are not well tonight. Things are not quite so desperate as they appear. You haven’t got over Christmas-week.”
“I am well. Never was better. But I can see, I hope, what’s before my eyes; and the fact is, Mrs. Crow-field, things must not go on as they are going. There must be more care, more attention to details. There’s Maggie, — that girl never does what she is told. You are too slack with her, Ma’am. She will light the fire with the last paper, and she won’t put my slippers in the right place; and I can’t have my study made the general catch-all and menagerie for Rover and Jennie, and her baskets and balls, and for all the family litter.”
Just at this moment I overheard a sort of aside from Jennie, who was swelling with repressed indignation at my attack on her worsted. She sat with her back to me, knitting energetically, and said, in a low, but very decisive tone, as she twitched her yarn, —
“Now if I should talk in that way, people would call me cross, — and that’s the whole of it.”
I pretended to be looking into the fire in an absentminded state; but Jennie’s words had started a new idea. Was that it? Was it, then, a fact, that the house, the servants, Jennie and her worsteds, Rover and Mrs. Crowfield, were all going on pretty much as usual, and that the only difficulty was that I was cross? How many times had I encouraged Rover to lie just where he was lying when I kicked him! How many times, in better moods, had I complimented Jennie on her neat little fancy-works, and declared that I liked the social companionship of ladies’ work-baskets among my papers! Yes, it was clear. After all, things were much as they had been; only I was cross.
Cross. I put it to myself in that simple, old-fashioned word, instead of saying that I was out of spirits, or nervous, or using any of the other smooth phrases with which we good Christians cover up our little sins of temper. “Here you are, Christopher,” said I to myself, “a literary man, with a somewhat delicate nervous organization and a sensitive stomach, and you have been eating like a sailor or a ploughman; you have been gallivanting and merry-making and playing the boy for two weeks; up at all sorts of irregular hours, and into all sorts of boyish performances; and the consequence is, that, like a thoughtless young scapegrace, you have used up in ten days the capital of nervous energy that was meant to last you ten weeks. You can’t eat your cake and have it too, Christopher. When the nervous-fluid source of cheerfulness, giver of pleasant sensations and pleasant views, is all spent, you can’t feel cheerful; things cannot look as they did when you were full of life and vigour. When the tide is out, there is nothing but unsightly, ill-smelling tide-mud, and you can’t help it; but you can keep your senses, — you can know what is the matter with you, — you can keep from visiting your overdose of Christmas mince-pies and candies and jocularities on the heads of Mrs. Crowfield, Rover, and Jennie, whether in the form of virulent morality, pungent criticisms, or a free kick, such as you just gave the poor brute.”
“Come here, Rover, poor dog!” said I, extending my hand to Rover, who cowered at the farther corner of the room, eyeing me wistfully,—”come here, you poor doggie, and make up with your master. There, there! Was his master cross? Well, he knows it. We must forgive and forget, old boy, mustn’t we?” And Rover nearly broke his own back and tore me to pieces with his tumultuous tail-waggings.
“As for you, puss,” I said to Jennie, “I am much obliged to you for your free suggestion. You must take my cynical moralities for what they are worth, and put your little traps into as many of my drawers as you like.”
In short, I made it up handsomely all around, — even apologizing to Mrs. Crowfield, who, by-the-by, has summered and wintered me so many years, and knows all my airs and cuts and crinkles so well, that she took my irritable, unreasonable spirit as tranquilly as if I had been a baby cutting a new tooth.
“Of course, Chris, I knew what the matter was; don’t disturb yourself,” she said, as I began my apology; “we understand each other. But there is one thing I have to say; and that is, that your article ought to be ready.”
“Ah, well, then,” said I, “like other great writers, I shall make capital of my own sins, and treat of the second little family fox; and his name is —
IRRITABILITY.
IRRITABILITY is, more than most unlovely states, a sin of the flesh. It is not, like envy, malice, spite, revenge, a vice which we may suppose to belong equally to an embodied or a disembodied spirit: in fact, it comes nearer to being physical depravity than anything I know of. T
here are some bodily states, some conditions of the nerves, such that we could not conceive of even an angelic spirit, confined in a body thus disordered, as being able to do any more than simply endure. It is a state of nervous torture; and the attacks which the wretched victim makes on others are as much a result of disease as the snapping and biting of a patient convulsed with hydrophobia.
Then, again, there are other people who go through life loving and beloved, desired in every circle, held up in the church as examples of the power of religion, who, after all, deserve no credit for these things. Their spirits are lodged in an animal nature so tranquil, so cheerful, all the sensations which come to them are so fresh and vigorous and pleasant, that they cannot help viewing the world charitably, and seeing everything through a glorified medium. The ill-temper of others does not provoke them; perplexing business never sets their nerves to vibrating; and all their lives long they walk in the serene sunshine of perfect animal health.
Look at Rover there. He is never nervous, never cross, never snaps or snarls, and is ready, the moment after the grossest affront, to wag the tail of forgiveness, — all because kind Nature has put his dog’s body together so that it always works harmoniously. If every person in the world were gifted with a stomach and nerves like his, it would be a far better and happier world, no doubt. The man said a good thing who made the remark that the foundation of all intellectual and moral worth must be laid in a good healthy animal.
Now I think it is undeniable that the peace and happiness of the home-circle are very generally much invaded by the recurrence in its members of these states of bodily irritability. Every person, if he thinks the matter over, will see that his condition in life, the character of his friends, his estimate of their virtues and failings, his hopes and expectations, are all very much modified by these things. Cannot we all remember going to bed as very ill-used, persecuted individuals, all whose friends were unreasonable, whose life was full of trials and crosses, and waking up on a bright bird-singing morning to find all these illusions gone with the fogs of the night? Our friends are nice people, after all; the little things that annoyed us look ridiculous by bright sunshine; and we are fortunate individuals.
The philosophy of life, then, as far as this matter is concerned, must consist of two things: first, to keep ourselves out of irritable bodily states; and, second, to understand and control these states, when we cannot ward them off.
Of course, the first of these is the most important; and yet, of all things, it seems to be least looked into and understood. We find abundant rules for the government of the tongue and temper; it is a slough into which, John Bunyan hath it, cart-loads of wholesome instructions have been thrown; but how to get and keep that healthy state of brain, stomach, and nerves which takes away the temptation to ill-temper and anger is a subject which moral and religious teachers seem scarcely to touch upon.
Now, without running into technical, physiological language, it is evident, as regards us human beings, that there is a power by which we live and move and have Our being, — by which the brain thinks and wills, the stomach digests, the blood circulates, and all the different provinces of the little man-kingdom do their work. This something — call it nervous fluid, nervous power, vital energy, life-force, or anything else that you will — is a perfectly understood, if not a definable thing. It is plain, too, that people possess this force in very different degrees: some generating it as a high-pressure engine does steam, and using it constantly, with an apparently inexhaustible flow; and others who have little, and spend it quickly. We have a common saying, that this or that person is soon used up. Now most nervous, irritable states of temper are the mere physical result of a used-up condition. The person has overspent his nervous energy, — like a man who should eat up on Monday the whole food which was to keep him for a week, and go growling and faint through the other days; or the quantity of nervous force which was wanted to carry on the whole system in all its parts is seized on by some one monopolizing portion, and used up to the loss and detriment of the rest. Thus, with men of letters, an exorbitant brain expends on its own workings what belongs to the other offices of the body; the stomach has nothing to carry on digestion; the secretions are badly made; and the imperfectly assimilated nourishment that is conveyed to every little nerve and tissue, carries with it an acrid, irritating quality, producing general restlessness and discomfort. So men and women go struggling on through their threescore and ten years, scarcely one in a thousand knowing through life that perfect balance of parts, that appropriate harmony of energies, that make a healthy, kindly animal condition, predisposing to cheerfulness and good-will.
We Americans are, to begin with, a nervous, excitable people. Multitudes of children, probably the great majority in the upper walks of life, are born into the world with weaknesses of the nervous organization, or of the brain or stomach, which make them incapable of any strong excitement or prolonged exertion without some lesion or derangement; so that they are continually being checked, laid up, and invalided in the midst of their drugs. Life here in America is so fervid, so fast, our climate is so stimulating, with its clear, bright skies, its rapid and sudden changes of temperature, that the tendencies to nervous disease are constantly aggravated.
Under these circumstances, unless men and women make a conscience, a religion, of saving and sparing something of themselves expressly for home-life and home-consumption, it must follow that home will often be merely a sort of refuge for us to creep into when we are used up and irritable.
Papa is up and off, after a hasty breakfast, and drives all day in his business, putting into it all there is in him, letting it drink up brain and nerve and body and soul, and coming home jaded and exhausted, so that he cannot bear the cry of the baby, and the frolics and pattering of the nursery seem horrid and needless confusion. The little ones say, in their plain vernacular, “Papa is cross.”
Mamma goes out to a party that keeps her up till one or two in the morning, breathes bad air, eats indigestible food, and the next day is so nervous that every straw and thread in her domestic path is insufferable.
Papas that pursue business thus, day after day, and mammas that go into company, as it is called, night after night, what is there left in or of them to make an agreeable fireside with, to brighten their home and inspire their children?
True, the man says he cannot help himself, — business requires it. But what is the need of rolling up money at the rate at which he is seeking to do it? Why not have less, and take some time to enjoy his home, and cheer up his wife, and form the minds of his children? Why spend himself down to the last drop on the world, and give to the dearest friends he has only the bitter dregs?
Much of the preaching which the pulpit and the Church have levelled at fashionable amusements has failed of any effect at all, because wrongly put. A cannonade has been opened upon dancing, for example, and all for reasons that will not, in the least, bear looking into. It is vain to talk of dancing as a sin because practised in a dying world where souls are passing into eternity. If dancing is a sin for this reason, so is playing marbles, or frolicking with one’s children, or enjoying a good dinner, or doing fifty other things which nobody ever dreamed of objecting to.
If the preacher were to say that anything is a sin which uses up the strength we need for daily duties, and leaves us fagged out and irritable at just those times and in just those places when and where we need most to be healthy, cheerful, and self-possessed, he would say a thing that none of his hearers would dispute. If he should add, that dancing-parties, beginning at ten o’clock at night and ending at four o’clock in the morning, do use up the strength, weaken the nerves, and leave a person wholly unfit for any home duty, he would also be saying what very few people would deny; and then his case would be made out. If he should say that it is wrong to breathe bad air and fill the stomach with unwholesome dainties, so as to make one restless, ill-natured, and irritable for days after, he would also say what few would deny, and his preaching
might have some hope of success.
The true manner of judging of the worth of amusements is to try them by their effects on the nerves and spirits the day after. True amusement ought to be, as the word indicates, recreation, — something that refreshes, turns us out anew, rests the body and mind by change, and gives cheerfulness and alacrity to our return to duty.
The true objection to all stimulants, alcoholic and narcotic, consists simply in this, — that they are a form of overdraft on the nervous energy, which helps us to use up in one hour the strength of whole days.
A man uses up all the fair, legal interest of nervous power by too much business, too much care, or too much amusement. He has now a demand to meet. He has a complicate account to make up, an essay or a sermon to write, and he primes himself by a cup of coffee, a cigar, a glass of spirits. This is exactly the procedure of a man who, having used the interest of his money, begins to dip into the principal. The strength a man gets in this way is just so much taken out of his life-blood; it is borrowing of a merciless creditor, who will exact, in time, the pound of flesh nearest his heart.
Much of the irritability which spoils home happiness is the letting down from the over-excitement of stimulus. Some will drink coffee, when they own every day that it makes them nervous; some will drug themselves with tobacco, and some with alcohol, and, for a few hours of extra brightness, give themselves and their friends many hours when amiability or agreeableness is quite out of the question. There are people calling themselves Christians who live in miserable thraldom, for ever in debt to Nature, for ever overdrawing on their just resources, and using up their patrimony, because they have not the moral courage to break away from a miserable appetite.
The same may be said of numberless indulgences of the palate, which tax the stomach beyond its power, and bring on all the horrors of indigestion. It is almost impossible for a confirmed dyspeptic to act like a good Christian; but a good Christian ought not to become a confirmed dyspeptic. Reasonable self-control, abstaining from all unseasonable indulgence, may prevent or put an end to dyspepsia, and many suffer and make their friends suffer only because they will persist in eating what they know is hurtful to them.
Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe Page 519