Yet, in spite of all her virtues as a housekeeper, a philanthropist, and a Christian, Mrs. Grundy had her enemies. Some people were uncharitable enough to say that she was the cause of more trouble than all the rest of the female population of the town. They accused her of setting herself up as a censor, and giving judgments founded upon hearsay testimony rather than sound legal evidence. They even said that she made her visits among the poor a cloak for the gratification of her inquisitiveness; and, if it is ever pardonable to judge of the motives of a fellow-being, I think that, in consideration of their exasperation, they must be excused for making so unkind a charge, it seemed to be so well founded. Far be it from me to say that Mrs. Grundy ever wilfully misrepresented. She would have shrunk instinctively from a falsehood. But she delighted to draw inferences; and no fact or rumour ever came to her without being classified properly in her mental history of her neighbours, and being made to shed its full influence upon her next conversation. It is astonishing how much one pair of eyes and ears will do in the collection of information when a person is devoted to it in earnest. In her younger days, Mrs. Grundy had taken pleasure in watching her neighbours and keeping up a running commentary on their movements; as she advanced in life, it became her business. Her efforts in that way were rather in the style of an amateur up to the time of her marriage; afterwards she adopted a professional air. She placed herself at her favourite window, ornamenting its seat with her spools, and though she stitched away with commendable industry, nothing escaped her that came within range of her keen powers of observation.
If Mr. Brown called on Mrs. White over the way, Mrs. Grundy set it down as a remarkable occurrence: if he repeated his visit a week later, she would not declare it positively scandalous, but it was evident that her nicer sense of propriety was deeply wounded: if he passed by the door without calling, it was clear that there had been a falling out—that Mrs. White had seen the error of her ways, or that her husband had, and had given Brown a warning. If a stranger was seen exercising Jones's bell-pull on two consecutive days, this indefatigable woman allowed not her eyes to sleep nor her eyelids to slumber until she had satisfied herself concerning his name and purpose. If Mr. Thompson waited upon pretty Miss Jenkins home in a shower, and treated her kindly and politely, (and who could do otherwise with a young angel in blue and drab, who might charm a Kaffir or a Sepoy into urbanity?) Mrs. Grundy straightway instituted inquiries among all the neighbours as to whether it was true that they were engaged. After this fashion did Mrs. Grundy live. Her words have been known to blast a reputation which under the sunshine of prosperity and the storms of misfortune had sustained itself with equal grace and honour. It was useless to bring up proofs of a life of integrity against her sentence or her knowing smile. There was no appeal from her decision. Not that she was uncharitable,—only it did seem as if she were rather more willing to believe evil of her neighbours than good; and she appeared slow to trust in the repentance of any one who had ever fallen into sin, especially if the person were of her own sex. I am not complaining of this peculiarity; we must be circumspect and strict, and mercy is a quality too rare and divine to be wasted on every trivial occasion. But I cannot help thinking that, if the penitent found it as hard to gain the absolving smile of that Power to which alone we are answerable for our misdeeds as to reinstate himself in the good graces of Mrs. Grundy, how few of us could have any hope of the beatific vision!
Mrs. Grundy had great influence; she was respected and feared. People found that she would give her opinion ex cathedra, and that, however unfounded that opinion might be, there were those who would reëcho it until common repetition gave it the force of truth; so they tried to conciliate her by graduating their actions according to what they supposed would be her judgment. When this was seen, she began to be envied by some who had once hated her, and her idiosyncrasies were made the study of many of her sex who longed to share her empire over the thoughts and actions of their fellow-creatures. Thus, by a sort of multiplex metempsychosis, were Mrs. Grundy's virtues perpetuated, and she was endowed with a species of omnipresence. In this country Mrs. Grundy is a power. She is the absolute sovereign of America. Her reign there is none to dispute. Our national motto ought to be, instead of E pluribus unum, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" There is no class in our community over which she does not exercise more or less power. Our politicians, when they cease to regard their influence as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, act, not from any fixed principles, but with a single eye to the good will of Mrs. Grundy. If a man is buying a house, it is ten chances to one that Mrs. Grundy's opinion concerning gentility of situation will carry the day against cosiness and real comfort. If your wife or daughter goes to buy a dress, Mrs. Grundy's taste will be consulted in preference to the durability of the fabric or the condition of your purse. Mrs. Grundy dictates to us how we shall furnish our houses, and prescribes to us our whole rule of life. Under her stern sway, multitudes are living beyond their means, and trying to avert the bankruptcy and unhappiness that inevitably await them. It is not merely in the management of temporal affairs that Mrs. Grundy makes her power felt. Her vigilance checks many a generous impulse, stands between the resolution to do justice and its execution, and is a fruitful source of hypocrisy. She presides over the pulpit; the power of wardens and vestrymen is swallowed up by her; and the minister who can dress up his weekly dish of moral commonplaces so as not to offend her discriminating taste deserves to retain his place, and merits the unanimous admiration of the whole sewing circle. She is to be found in courts of law, animating the opposing parties, and enjoying the contest; actions of slander are an agreeable recreation to her; petitions for divorce give her unmixed joy. Like the fury, Alecto, so finely described by Virgil, Mrs. Grundy can arm brothers to deadly strife against each other, and stir up the happiest homes with infernal hatred; to her belong a thousand woful arts—Sibi nomina mille, mille nocendi artes. Mrs. Grundy's philanthropy confines itself to no particular class; it is universal. Nothing that relates to human kind is alien to her. There is nothing earthly so high that she does not aspire to control it, nor any thing too contemptible for her not to wish to know all about it.
Mrs. Grundy is omnipresent. Go where you will, you cannot escape from her presence. She stands guard unceasingly over your front door and back windows. Her watchful eye follows you whene'er you take your walks abroad. Your name is never mentioned that she is not by, and seriously inclined to hear aught that may increase her baleful stock of knowledge. It is all the same to her whether you have lived uprightly or viciously; beneath her Gorgon glance all human actions are petrified alike. And if she does not succeed in sowing discord around your hearthstone, and in driving you to despair and self-murder, as she did poor Henry Herbert the other day, it will be because you are not cursed with his fiery sensitiveness, and not because she lacks the will to do it.
There is but one way in which the Grundian yoke can be thrown off. We must treat her as the English wit treated an insignificant person who had insulted him; we must "let her alone severely." We pay a certain kind of allegiance to her if we take notice of her for the purpose of running counter to her notions. We must ignore her altogether. It is true, this requires a great deal of moral courage, particularly in a country where every body knows every body else's business; but it is an easier task to acquire that courage than to submit patiently to Mrs. Grundy's dictation and interference. Who shall estimate the happiness of that millennial period when we shall cease to ask ourselves before our every action, "What will Mrs. Grundy say?" and shall begin in earnest to live up to the golden rule that counsels us to mind our own business? When that day comes, what a world this will be! How will superficial morality and skin-deep propriety, envy and uncharitableness, be diminished! How will contentment, and mutual good will, and domestic peace be augmented! Think on these things, O beloved reader; mind your own business, and the day is not far distant when, for you at least, the iron sceptre of Dame Grundy shall be powerless, and the spell broken that held you in so humiliating a thraldom.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE
Life is what we make it. The same scenes wear a very different appearance to an ingenuous youth "in the bright morning of his virtues, in the full spring blossom of his hopes," and to the disappointed wretch who gazes on them "with the eyes of sour misanthropy." The horse that was turned by his benevolent owner into a carpenter's shop, with a pair of green spectacles prefixed to his nose, and mistook the dry pine shavings for his legitimate fodder, was very much in the condition of a youth looking upon life and yielding to the natural enthusiasm of his unwarped spirit. Like the noble brute, however, the young man is undeceived as soon as he tries to sustain himself with the vanities which look so tempting and nutritious. He may, like a Wolsey, a Charles V., or a Napoleon, attain to the heights of power before the delusive glasses drop off; but even though the moment be delayed until he lies gasping in the clutch of that monarch to whom the most absolute of sovereigns and the most radical of republicans alike must yield allegiance, it is sure to come, and show him the ashes that lay hid beneath the fair, ripe-looking rind of the fruit he climbed so high to obtain. Life passes before us like a vast panorama, day by day and year by year unrolling and disclosing new scenes to charm us into self-forgetfulness. At one time, we breathe the bracing air of the mountains; at another, our eyes are gladdened by the sight of sunshiny meadows, or of fertile and far-reaching prairies; and then the towered city, with its grove of masts and its busy wharves, makes all mere natural beauty seem insignificant in comparison with the enterprise and ambition of man; until, at last, the canvas is rolled away, the music ceases, the lights are put out, and we are left to realize that all in which we delighted was but an illusion and a "fleeting show."
Nevertheless, in spite of the vanities that surround us,—in spite of the sublime world-sickness of Solomon and the Preacher, and the fierce satire of Juvenal, (who was as anxious to ascertain the precise weight of Hannibal as if that illustrious dux had been a prize-fighter,)—there is considerable reality in life. The existence of so much sham and make-believe implies the existence of the real and true. Sir Thomas Browne tells us that "in seventy or eighty years a man may have a deep gust of the world"; and it were indeed melancholy if any one with hair as gray as mine should look despairingly over the field of human existence and effort, and cry, "All is barren."
Life, as I have before said, is whatever we choose to make it. Its true philosophy is that divine art which enables us to transmute its every moment into the pure gold of heroic and changeless immortality. Without that philosophy, it is impossible for the world not to seem at times as it did to the desponding Danish prince, "a sterile promontory," and a "foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." Without it, life is like an elaborate piece of embroidery, looked at from the wrong side; we cannot but acknowledge the brilliancy of some of its threads, and the delicate texture of the work, but its lack of system, and of any appearance of utility, fatigues the mind that hungers after perfection, and tempts it to doubt the divine wisdom and goodness from which it originated. With it, however, we gaze with admiration and awe upon the front of the same marvellous work. Our sense is no longer puzzled by any straggling threads, or loose ends; the exquisite colours, the contrast of light and shade, and the perfect symmetry and harmony of the design, fill the heart of the beholder with wonder and delight, and draw him nearer to the source of those ineffable perfections which are but imperfectly symbolized in the marvels of the visible universe.
The philosophy which can do all this is sincerity. "I think sincerity is better than grace," says Mr. T. Carlyle; and the Scotch savage is right. All the amenities of life that spring from any other source than a true heart, are but gratuitous hypocrisy. The kind-hearted knight whom I have already quoted showed how highly he esteemed this virtue when he said, "Swim smoothly in the stream of nature, and live but one man." This double existence, that most of us support,—that is, what we really are, and what we wish to be considered,—is the source of many of our faults, and most of our vexation and wretchedness. He is the truly happy man who forgets that "appearances must be kept up," and remembers only that "each of us is as great as he appears in the sight of his Creator, and no greater." A great French philosopher has truly said, "How many controversies would be terminated, if the disputants were obliged to speak out exactly what they thought!" And surely he might have gone farther in the same line of thought; for how much heartburning, domestic unhappiness, dishonesty, and shameful poverty might be prevented, if my neighbour Jinkins and his wife were content to pass in the world for what they are, instead of assuming a princely style of living that only makes their want of true refinement more apparent, and if Johnson and his wife could be induced not to imitate the vulgar follies of the Jinkinses! Believe me, incredulous reader, there is more wisdom in old Sir Thomas's exhortation to "live but one man" than appears at first sight.