“You couldn’t have told me quietly, even if we had company, I suppose?”
“Why, child! how eager you are to find fault!”
“O, yes! of course I am the only one to blame.”
It is not necessary to multiply examples, though, we are sorry to say, they could be brought from every class and position. But such things are not pleasant to hear, and certainly do not look well on paper. It is to be feared that we all have some germs of this same malady,—enough, at least, to understand the symptoms, and warn us to vigorous efforts to eradicate them. If allowed to take root, they deface our own characters, and disturb, if not destroy, the comfort of home. When parents indulge in this sin of grumbling, they cannot wonder if their children follow their example, and even go beyond it. A whole family of grumblers! what can be more wretched?
Another class, whose behavior at home is unexceptionable, spare their families, reserving their grumbling for business hours, giving their servants or clerks the discomfort that the first class lay by for home consumption. There is hope for those. By and by some high-spirited sufferer from their waspishness and fault-finding, having endured their wearisome grumbling till patience is no longer a virtue, may teach them a lesson, through their self-interest, that will perhaps prove effectual.
But we have a few words to say of another class,—grumbling travelers. At some of our hotel tables, where travelers “most do congregate,” one can read a chapter of absurd and ridiculous weakness to be found nowhere else. We have known people to sit down to a table where we could find no occasion for complaint, and grumble loudly at every individual article. Coffee, “horrid”; tea, “an insult to set such stuff before any one”; soup, “too thick,” or “too thin”; and so on through the whole bill of fare. Nothing set before them that was not made a subject of criticism or rude comparison between the hotel fare and the wonderful perfections of their own table. This habit of fault-finding is, by a certain class, considered a certificate of superiority which cannot fail to convince the public that they are persons of wealth and high-standing at home. A mistaken idea. Even the waiters at public tables, who, in consequence of the variety of guests to whom they are called, are usually good judges of character, are not deceived by this vain pretense; but many sly glances, that can only be interpreted as contemptuous, may be detected; and as these complainers leave the table, the waiters whisper to each other, as they pass to and fro, “Shoddy,” with looks that cannot be misunderstood.
This class of travelers leave their homes, not for information and improvement, but for the opportunity of grumbling, on a new and more extensive scale than can be attained in their own families. They leave home in search of some yet untried cause for grumbling, and by a long stretch of conscience and imagination they contrive to find it, and return with a large store of freshly gathered material, over which to expatiate for some weeks, quite to the relief of their families.
All this kind of grumbling appears to us most unreasonable and ridiculous; but if not inclined to find fault in any of the ways mentioned, we are beginning to fear that every one meets some point in life where he imagines dissatisfaction and complaint to be perfectly justifiable. Something in their surroundings is out of joint. Their most carefully laid plans and well-grounded expectations fail; friends grow cold; where lies the fault? Is none of it with you? The foundations of our worldly prosperity seem built on solid rock, but they slide from under us. We take to our hearts one dearer than our own life, and in an hour when we think not the bond is severed. Time and again the cradle is left empty; or a sweet and loving spirit emerges from it, and step by step grows toward clear companionship, when, as in a moment, God calls, and we are left in sackcloth and ashes. We murmur and repine,—God’s dealings appear so unequally distributed. In the same vicinity one family grows up unbroken, from babyhood into vigorous manhood, while another home is left desolate, and they cry out in their anguish, “I do well to be angry.” They forget that God deals with his children as they deal with the rich but uncultivated lands committed to their care. What is more beautiful to the eye than a large grove of wild orange-trees?—but how useless if left unimproved! Who complains when their beauty, for the present, is destroyed, the trees cut back and pruned till they stand bare and unsightly? But the buds and grafts which have been introduced will soon start into new life, the branches begin to shoot upward, and the sweet, pure blossoms and golden fruit will clothe the tree, which a grumbler would have thought wholly destroyed, with new beauty. The old beauty was defaced only that the tree should, in the end, become fruitful, and thereby more gloriously perfect than at first.
Yet we murmur when our wild orange groves are cut back, pruned, and grafted, and the “seedlings” from our nurseries transplanted. We forget that
“Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood