Bits about Home Matters

by Helen Hunt Jackson

It is easy to fancy that a European, on first reaching these shores, might suppose that he had chanced to arrive upon a day when some great public calamity had saddened the heart of the nation. It would be quite safe to assume that out of the first five hundred faces which he sees there will not be ten wearing a smile, and not fifty, all told, looking as if they ever could smile. If this statement sounds extravagant to any man, let him try the experiment, for one week, of noting down, in his walks about town, every face he sees which has a radiantly cheerful expression. The chances are that at the end of his seven days he will not have entered seven faces in his note-book without being aware at the moment of some conscientious difficulty in permitting himself to call them positively and unmistakably cheerful.

The truth is, this wretched and joyless expression on the American face is so common that we are hardened to seeing it, and look for nothing better. Only when by chance some blessed, rollicking, sunshiny boy or girl or man or woman flashes the beam of a laughing countenance into the level gloom do we even know that we are in the dark. Witness the instant effect of the entrance of such a person into an omnibus or a car. Who has not observed it? Even the most stolid and apathetic soul relaxes a little. The unconscious intruder, simply by smiling, has set the blood moving more quickly in the veins of every human being who sees him. He is, for the moment, the personal benefactor of every one; if he had handed about money or bread, it would have been a philanthropy of less value.

What is to be done to prevent this acrid look of misery from becoming an organic characteristic of our people? "Make them play more," says one philosophy. No doubt they need to "play more;" but, when one looks at the average expression of a Fourth of July crowd, one doubts if ever so much multiplication of that kind of holiday would mend the matter. No doubt we work for too many days in the year, and play for too few; but, after all, it is the heart and the spirit and the expression that we bring to our work, and not those that we bring to our play, by which our real vitality must be tested and by which our faces will be stamped. If we do not work healthfully, reasoningly, moderately, thankfully, joyously, we shall have neither moderation nor gratitude nor joy in our play. And here is the hopelessness, here is the root of the trouble, of the joyless American face. The worst of all demons, the demon of unrest and overwork, broods in the very sky of this land. Blue and clear and crisp and sparkling as our atmosphere is, it cannot or does not exorcise the spell. Any old man can count on the fingers of one hand the persons he has known who led lives of serene, unhurried content, made for themselves occupations and not tasks, and died at last what might be called natural deaths.

"What, then?" says the congressional candidate from Mettibemps; the "new contributor" to the oceanic magazine; Mrs. Potiphar, from behind her liveries; and poor Dives, senior, from Wall Street; "Are we to give up all ambition?" God forbid. But, because one has a goal, must one be torn by poisoned spurs? We see on the Corso, in the days of the Carnival, what speed can be made by horses under torture. Shall we try those methods and that pace on our journeys?

So long as the American is resolved to do in one day the work of two, to make in one year the fortune of his whole life and his children's, to earn before he is forty the reputation which belongs to threescore and ten, so long he will go about the streets wearing his present abject, pitiable, overwrought, joyless look. But, even without a change of heart or a reform of habits, he might better his countenance a little, if he would. Even if he does not feel like smiling, he might smile, if he tried; and that would be something. The muscles are all there; they count the same in the American as in the French or the Irish face; they relax easily in youth; the trick can be learned. And even a trick of it is better than none of it. Laughing masters might be as well paid as dancing masters to help on society! "Smiling made Easy" or the "Complete Art of Looking Good-natured" would be as taking titles on book-sellers' shelves as "The Complete Letter-writer" or "Handbook of Behavior." And nobody can calculate what might be the moral and spiritual results if it could only become the fashion to pursue this branch of the fine arts. Surliness of heart must melt a little under the simple effort to smile. A man will inevitably be a little less of a bear for trying to wear the face of a Christian.

"He who laughs can commit no deadly sin," said the wise and sweet-hearted woman who was mother of Goethe.

Spiritual Teething

Milk for babes; but, when they come to the age for meat of doctrine, teeth must be cut. It is harder work for souls than for bodies; but the processes are wonderfully parallel,--the results too, alas! If clergymen knew the symptoms of spiritual disease and death, as well as doctors do of disease and death of the flesh, and if the lists were published at end of each year and month and week, what a record would be shown! "Mortality in Brooklyn, or New York, or Philadelphia for the week ending July 7th." We are so used to the curt heading of the little paragraph that our eye glances idly away from it, and we do not realize its sadness. By tens and by scores they have gone,--the men, the women, the babies; in hundreds new mourners are going about the streets, week by week. We are as familiar with black as with scarlet, with the hearse as with the pleasure-carriage; and yet "so dies in human hearts the thought of death" that we can be merry.

But, if we knew as well the record of sick and dying and dead souls, our hearts would break. The air would be dark and stifling. We should be afraid to move,--lest we might hasten the last hour of some neighbor's spiritual breath. Ah, how often have we unconsciously spoken the one word which was poison to his fever!

Of the spiritual deaths, as of the physical, more than half take place in the period of teething. The more one thinks of the parallelism, the closer it looks, until the likeness seems as droll as dismal. Oh, the sweet, unquestioning infancy which takes its food from the nearest breast; which knows but three things,--hunger and food and sleep! There is only a little space for this delight. In our seventh month we begin to be wretched. We drink our milk, but we are aware of a constant desire to bite; doubts which we do not know by name, needs for which there is no ready supply, make us restless. Now comes the old-school doctor, and thrusts in his lancet too soon. We suffer, we bleed; we are supposed to be relieved. The tooth is said to be "through."