p. 84Unhappiness

Cato the Censor held that there was more merit in being a good husband than a great senator.

PLUTARCH.

To the farmer nothing is more important, than to have near his house an unfailing spring of water, ready to his hand during the longest heats of summer and the severest winter frosts. Hence, the first thing the settlers throughout our vast continent attend to, after they have found a tract of rich, arable soil, is to seek for a stream or a spring of wholesome water, near to which they may erect their homestead. To turn away the stream or to poison the spring would be to render the homestead uninhabitable; it would be the act of the worst of enemies.

What an enemy’s hand might do to render the family home intolerable, the head of the family himself but too often does to poison every spring of domestic happiness, and thereby to destroy or imperil the very existence of the family itself.

If the prosperous farmer, or the settler struggling with the first difficulties of the forest or the plains, must feel grateful when warned against criminal designs threatening the health and life of his family, have we not a right to expect attention, if not gratitude, when we warn heads of families against foes of their household no less to be dreaded?

Home is no home, and home-life at best but a long “purgatory,” if he who is its head and chief ruler, instead of being, by his devotion to its every interest, by his self-control and self-denying virtues, the main cause of comfort, peace, security, and happiness, becomes by his imperfections or his vices, the source of all unhappiness to his dear ones.

We wish, with all the delicacy and charity of a priestly heart and hand, to describe briefly the principal defects that lead to discomfort, discord, misery, and wretchedness in homes where God intended that all should be serenity, sunshine, joy, and bliss unalloyed.

The first of these,—one which it should be the struggle of a lifetime to overcome and eradicate, is infirmity of temper.

Infirmity of Temper—Irascibility

Its most troublesome forms are irritability and fault-finding. Of that headlong passionateness, which is properly anger, we do not wish to say much. Proneness to anger, when not checked in childhood, and allowed to grow up with a man’s growth, is almost as ruinous in its evil example and in its consequences to the professional or business man, as the worst forms of intemperance. For headlong anger is intoxication, depriving its unhappy subject of the use of his reason, rendering him incapable of using aright, for the time being, any of his mental faculties or bodily senses. Hence, it is classed by theologians and moralists among the Seven Capital Sins,—among those, namely, which are the fruitful parents of crime and disorder.

The irascibility or irritability we point out here, as a thing so much to be dreaded, avoided, and courageously put down, is only a milder form of the same dreadful distemper, but one scarcely less hurtful in its effects. As this is not a moral treatise, we can only point out the remedy,—early habits of self-control, and life-long watchfulness over this domestic foe and inseparable companion,—a watchfulness that can only be aptly compared to that kept over the movements of a chained mad dog. Loosen the chain but for a moment, and you feel the fangs of the rabid animal fixed in your flesh, and its poison coursing through the blood and maddening the brain itself.

There are men most generous in every other way, endowed with the noblest qualities of heart and mind,—whom this unrepressed infirmity render a burthen to themselves and an intolerable torture to all around them.

We have known a young husband who had conquered a most honorable social position and no less honorable wealth by hard labor and sterling integrity, who had won the admiration and warm esteem of a large circle of distinguished men, by his uncommon ability and a largeness of mind and heart still more uncommon. He also won the admiration and maiden love of a woman not less gifted than himself in mental and moral excellence. He had provided for her a home in which a princess might be proud to live, so elegant was it in its noble simplicity, so exquisitely adorned with all that could suit the most cultivated taste or charm the most poetical fancy. And with his home, his wealth, his position, and his name, he gave her a heart that no other love had ever filled.

Nevertheless, six months of wedded life had not elapsed, when the young wife’s love began to wane, and with her love her health declined. She had discovered that the man, whom she had chosen from among a crowd of admirers and suitors, and to whom in her inexperience she looked up as to one far above herself and above others, was one subject to that baneful and humiliating infirmity of an irascible and uncontrollable temper.

In her own father’s home, she had never once beheld either her parents or her brothers giving way to the sudden and unaccountable outbursts which seemed to upset, when she least expected it, the soul and the very nature of her husband. She cowered and shrank before these fierce exhibitions as she would before some wild beast that might have leaped suddenly into her room through the open window or doorway.

Too proud to resent by words, expressions or acts which degraded her and lowered her husband infinitely in her estimation, she could only weep in secret, and pray to God to give her strength. For she soon felt her great love slipping away from, her, like the dying reverence for an idol dethroned and shattered utterly.

Her husband would come home wearied from a day of professional exhausting toil, his whole soul frequently over-strung to its utmost tension by mental activity; and she, in the long hours of absence, would devise a thousand loving artifices to cheat him of his weariness, and to unbend by sweet distractions the mind that had been so long on the stretch.

He, who had disciplined himself to severe self-control in public and in the transaction of professional business, had never taught himself in the privacy of his hitherto solitary home, to keep a strong rein over his temper. He had not learned that the true gentleman is he who is every inch and in every word and gesture a gentleman, in his private chamber especially, and before his valet. How much more is this true of the Christian! And, in our case, how much more true of the husband!

A wife is not made happy or heart-satisfied by being made in public her husband’s honored companion, on whom he bestows, with evident affection and assiduity, all the marks of sincere esteem and respect. It is the atmosphere of their privacy, when no eye is on them but that of God and His angels, that must be unclouded, bright, warm, blissful, and undisturbed by one unseemly word or act;—this alone constitutes a wife’s perfect happiness. She must see nothing in the man she loves utterly, and who is all in all to her, that she cannot love, admire, respect. If the self-control assumed in public and kept on like a mask while beneath the public gaze, is cast aside when alone with his wife, and the countenance wears the distorted form of passion, and the soul, hitherto serene and unruffled, becomes all at once, like a storm-tossed sea, hideous with monstrous forms rising from the depths below,—then is love in imminent danger.

Six months of such disappointment, torture, and humiliation the young wife endured, without ever permitting one word of complaint or remonstrance to escape her, or without relaxing in aught her daily devices for her husband’s comfort and amusement, when an unusually violent outburst of irritability brought matters to a crisis.

They had been invited to a family anniversary in the evening, and were to be the very center of the happy circle. She had prepared everything for her husband with more than ordinary forethought, wishing him to rest sweetly on his return home and to wear his best looks afterward before the assembled family. His room had been made even brighter and pleasanter than usual, and a bunch of the flowers he loved best had been daintily gathered and arranged by his little wife, whose hand had placed a thought of love in every flower more fragrant than its own perfume.

He came in very much exhausted. It was an intensely hot day, and the heat told heavily on a nervous system that had endured great strain throughout the day. He was, however, not conscious of any predisposition to irritability; he met his wife with his wonted joyous smile and affectionate greeting; partook heartily of the refreshment which she had prepared, kissed the sweet and fragrant flowers on his dressing-case, and made all the currents in the young wife’s veins run on delightfully. They were truly, in their sweet rooms, as they presently began to dress for the evening, the very ideal of blissful connubial love. But, all at once, some shirt-buttons would not fit, and there were hurried words of impatience, a necktie did not suit, and there was a muttered oath which made the young wife start in the adjoining room, and then the shoes were too tight and hurt his feet: in tying the strings, one of them broke, and the shoe itself was torn off the foot by the now thoroughly enraged man, who flung it from him, striking with it his wife as she was coming unperceived to quiet and pacify him. There was a scream, and as he looked round he saw her put her hand to her face and sink fainting against the doorpost. The shoe-heel had struck her violently on the temple, cut her, and the blood was flowing copiously on the white dress of the insensible girl.

To seize her in his arms, with the tenderest words of grief and love, to bear her to her bed, summon the servants, and do all he could to restore her to consciousness, addressing her the while in the most affecting terms of self-accusation and reproach;—all that was the work of a few moments. The maid had witnessed the accident, and told the other members of the household exactly what had occurred. So that all blamed their irascible master as much as they sympathized with their fainting mistress.

She had opened her eyes for a few moments to see her husband kneeling in agony by her bedside, and had drawn his head toward her to kiss him tenderly but mutely; and then she sank into a second swoon longer, deadlier than the first. Why distress the reader? The young wife and mother had received a terrible shock, from the effects of which it required the utmost skill of her physicians to save herself and her babe.

But the danger to both caused a complete revolution in the husband and father. During the months that his wife lay helpless on her bed of sickness, he had vowed to God and promised his own soul to repress at once and forever that irascibility which had well-nigh proved fatal to her, whose worth he never knew so well as when she had well-nigh fallen a victim to his own ungoverned passion.

Not one unpleasant incident ever afterward dimmed the serenity or clouded the brightness of their most happy life. He was too firm a believer in the wonderful ways of Providence, not to feel that the dreadful consequences of his sin had been only averted by supreme human skill and God’s merciful kindness. Thenceforward he showed himself the meekest and most patient of men,—worshiped by his servants for his gentleness and many other virtues; while his grateful wife blessed the Heavenly Father for having made her suffering the occasion of such a blissful and lasting change in her loved husband.

A Great Life marred by Irritability

Another instance of the effects of this deplorable irritability, we are moved to mention here, because the man who was subject to it, marred thereby a life of magnificent promise. Splendidly gifted, carefully educated, placed from earliest manhood in a position of all the most favorable to the exercise of his great natural and acquired abilities, this man, whom we knew and loved well, disappointed the expectations of his family and the prophecies of his friends,—neutralizing all his marvelous gifts of head and heart by this single ungovernable passion, and ruining all the good he otherwise did by this excessive irritability, which made him pull down with one hand the fair structure he had reared with the other.

Painfully conscious of his own infirmity, his whole life was an unavailing, because a too feeble, struggle against his fell enemy. His shining qualities, and the continual occasion of using them imposed on him by his profession, only rendered his failing the more conspicuous to others,—like a great flaw in a vase of the most superior design and workmanship, or a fatal crack in a bell of extraordinary dimensions, and placed aloft in a cathedral tower to call a whole people to prayer and praise, and to sound abroad over a city on solemn festivals as the consecrated voice of Religion.

It is but a vain, we had almost said, a criminal, excuse for such wayward passionateness and unrepressed irritability, in any man, especially in educated and professional men, to say that it is a disease, inherited with one’s blood, and increasing in intensity with age. We are speaking of men,—held by their families, their neighbors, and the public, as responsible persons in all the ordinary transactions of life. Responsible to God they most assuredly are, for neglecting to repress in youth and early manhood, the enemy within the house of their soul,—whose subjection and annihilation every man of us knows he can achieve with His help who is always near us to bestow all the strength rendered needful by our own most extreme infirmity.

Fault-finding

Akin to this fiery disposition of the irascible, is that other of fault-finding, which would seem to attach itself, as rust does to iron, rather to cold than to ardent natures. It is even a more hateful infirmity than wrathfulness. For, without pretending to excuse or extenuate the guilt of the passionate and the irascible, we may remark, that it is the fault of souls generous, loving, devoted, and self-sacrificing in a great measure: it may even be said to be the excess or the defect of some of the most admirable qualities in human nature. Not so with the odious disposition toward fault-finding. It belongs to selfish, narrow, ungenerous natures, as cold as the cuttle-fish which seizes with its long arms upon all that comes within its reach, and mangles them without pity or discrimination. Fishermen on the coast of France, often haul in with the wholesome fish in their nets some of the young of this destructive species. If they happen to leave them together in the boat or on shore for a single night, it is ten to one but they will find on the morrow all their choicest fish utterly ruined and emptied of their substance by the merciless and voracious cuttle-fish.

The fault-finding husband, in like manner, wears out the life and destroys little by little the happiness of his wife and entire household. A wife may exert herself to the utmost to govern, regulate, and brighten the home, to make its interior the very picture of comfort, peace, and restfulness; she may call forth, as much through the promptings of true love, as from a deep and pure sense of duty, all her skill to please, to amuse, to cheer and charm her husband. She may be in heart and disposition, as well as in person and appearance, an angel welcoming her wearied companion to the joy and repose of her paradise: of what avail will her every grace and charm be against the icy manner, the cold sneer, and the cruel words of dispraise, which are the only answer to her warm welcome, the only return for the loving forethought and care and labor bestowed on making the home bright and sunny for his coming?

There are men who are indefatigable workers, clear-headed and successful business-men,—who take real pride and pleasure in providing for wife and children a home lacking no element of outward respectability and creature comfort;—men, too, who do not seek distraction, amusement, or distinction outside of their home. And yet these men have the talent of making their homes hateful to the children for whom they labor, hateful to wife and servants and friends,—because they pass over a thousand praiseworthy things in their wife’s management, in their children’s proficiency, in the conscientious labor of their servants, to seize upon the one little defect that appears to them blameworthy. Their wife’s warm greeting is sneered at as affectation and demonstrativeness, and her reserve as a want of proper affection. The soup on the table is always either too hot or too cold, the roast-beef overdone or too rare, the tea and coffee either too strong or too weak;—and these criticisms are all the more liberally indulged in that there are the more present at table. Indeed, friends or strangers dining there for the first time, would be induced to believe from their host’s liberal dispraise of everything, that the poor wife was the most careless or the most incapable of managers, the cook the most ignorant or stupid of kitchen-knaves, and the servants chosen from among the most unserviceable of the tribe.

In the drawing-room the music is treated in the same illiberal manner as the cooking. What is sung or played grates on the ear of paterfamilias; and the daughter is asked to play something she has never practiced, or the son to sing a melody he has never studied. So that all desire of improvement,—so far as the head of the house can do so,—is effectually quenched in the bosom of wife, and children, and servants.

Of what avail is the most devoted attention to business, the most encouraging and remunerative success in one’s profession, or the bestowal on one’s family of all the means of physical comfort and liberal education,—if the home is made, by constant and indiscriminate fault-finding, like a darksome ice-cave in which not one little bud of heartfelt joyousness will dare to unfold itself?

Nor is this the worst. Indeed, it is only a very softened picture of the home of the fault-finder. We know of one man, married in his first youth to one of the loveliest girls, and belonging to one of the very best families in a great State,—who made life so intolerable to his devoted and accomplished young wife, that it broke her heart, ruined her health, and sent her an incurable maniac to the insane asylum, while he still primes it at political meetings, or shines as a star of the first magnitude in the most fashionable circles.

Moodiness

A third form of ill temper is moodiness. For there are men who have succeeded in quelling the fierce outbreaks of anger and impatience, who have even gone so far as to set a strong guard upon their tongue, restraining the wrathful, censorious, or sarcastic utterances which caused so much pain to others, and so often wounded both justice and charity. But the very effort required to keep down the rebellious spirit within, or the desire of avoiding the occasion of giving way in word or deed to their effervescent feelings, would induce these mistaken souls to seek complete isolation, or to preserve a moody and obstinate silence, not a whit the less irksome to others than the open violence, or the bitter invective to which they were wont to yield.

Moody people thus only take refuge from one weakness in another, like the victims of Asiatic cholera, who only escape the fatal grip of the dire pestilence to succumb to typhus fever.

Moodiness takes several forms in different men, and not unfrequently in the same man. The moody husband will be all smiles and cheerfulness one day, like a sunbeam to the hearts of wife and children; but the very next day he will be all gloom, and silence, and storm. In the morning he will leave his home the pleasantest of men, but will return in the evening the most disagreeable and troublesome.

His moods come and go as unaccountably and as suddenly as the changes in an April sky. Just as the traveler never knows if he can trust the fair promise of a sunny morning at that uncertain season, and will, if he be wise, not go forth without waterproof or umbrella; even so those who live with a moody man can never trust to his present temper, though all smiles and serenity, but have to be always armed with patience and forbearance, so as not to be surprised and overwhelmed by the suddenness and violence of his change from sweet to sour, from mildness to the downpouring of wrath.

Nor is it easy to say when such a man is more unbearable,—when he suddenly gives way to successive or continuous spasms of ill humor, censoriousness, and impatience, keeping his whole household in a ferment for days, and communicating to wife and children and servants his own ague-fits of interior wretchedness,—or when he subsides into a gloomy silence lasting day after day, and making the atmosphere of his home as unendurable as the darkness and cold and oppressive stillness of a long night near the Pole.

Surely such moral and mental infirmity in a man often proud of his gifts, his position, and reputation,—is as baneful to the comfort and happiness of all around him as would be the frequent and persistent visitations of some odious disease, which would torture every outward and inward sense without destroying or endangering life.

A Notable Example of Moodiness

One memorable example may suffice to show such persons how fearful and utter is the ruin caused in the wealthiest and most refined home, as well as in the lowliest and poorest, by this unchecked moodiness.

Two of the most distinguished families in one of our Middle States had cemented, as they fondly thought, a deep and ancient friendship by marrying an only son to an only daughter, both the idols of their respective parents, and both to all appearance most worthy of their utmost affection. The young gentleman was a graduate of West Point, clever, accomplished, well mannered, of a handsome person, winning and courtly address,—such a man, indeed, as would most powerfully attract a young, innocent, and artless girl, who had never learned to fear the angry and fitful depths that may lie behind the bright sky of an open, handsome face.

Innocent, artless, in very truth, most beautiful and most graceful, was the bride which the handsome and wealthy West-Pointer had won;—and all who knew him not intimately, prophesied that the union would be most blissful. There were some, however, who knew well how uncertain was the calm self-possession the young bridegroom could assume, how changeful was the serenity of that brow, and how treacherous the bright smile which he had ever worn before his bride. His parents were but too painfully conscious of the fitful passionateness that lurked beneath that fascinating exterior. But their religion had not taught them the duty of acquainting the intended bride or her parents with the capital defects or vices that might imbitter the life and ruin the happiness of a wife. Alas! there are but too many parents who believe this to be their duty, and nevertheless neglect it, thereby making shipwreck of the lives and not seldom of the souls of the innocent and unsuspecting.

Not a week of the honeymoon had elapsed when the beautiful bride, so proud of her brilliant husband, and so wrapped up in his happiness, made the discovery of the moodiness that was to be her bane. In the very midst of the joyous festivities gotten up in their honor by devoted relatives and admiring friends,—the most trifling accident would call forth a fit of sullenness, gloom, and silence,—like a thunder-clap from a summer sky, or the instantaneous gathering of dark storm-clouds over the face of the brightest noonday.

The young wife had brought from her home and inherited from her mother that deep tenderness and patient love, which can perform miracles of devotion and self-sacrifice. She loved her husband with her whole heart, for she had clothed him with all the perfections of her cherished ideal. And she was very slow to admit that her husband’s long and distressing fits of alternate irritability and sullen moodiness, were not the consequences of some hidden distemper,—of a mind overtaxed by too close application, or of nerves disordered by the long and severe discipline of a military school,—instead of being the outgrowth of peevishness, waywardness, and ill temper, allowed to spring up unchecked in an only son by a mother’s fatal indulgence.

With the complete forgetfulness of self, and the unlimited devotion to the comfort and pleasure of the loved object, that are the very soul of wifely affection, she devised and exhausted, week after week, and month after month, all the sweet industries by which a woman can soothe the pangs of both body and spirit; but all were to no purpose. The hopes she fondly clung to, that the overstrained mind should soon recover its balance, that the endearments of her beautiful affection and the peace and quiet of her beautiful home, would calm the disordered nerves and soften every asperity of temper,—disappeared one by one; and the dreadful reality stared her in the face, that she was united to a man, whose moods were as sudden, as uncertain, as destructive of all happiness and home-life,—as those of a lunatic.

So with her hopes her love waned, constantly increasing dread and despair filling up their place in the young heart. She bore up against all her ills for years, however, without complaining to parent or friend. She had looked forward to the birth of her first babe, as to an event which might stimulate her wayward husband to serious efforts at self-amendment, or at least awaken in his soul new affections, a new sense of responsibility, and deep reflections on the pains he had caused the mother of his child, and on the clouds his temper had cast over the first stage of their wedded life.

Whatever regrets for the past may have visited him, or whatever transient resolves he may have formed, they did not outlive the rejoicings which welcomed the arrival of the son and heir. Three other children were sent to cheer the young mother; and with the birth of each the dying root of love and wifely trust would put forth a few timid leaves,—so fondly will a woman’s heart persist in hoping against hope itself!

At length she sank beneath the intolerable load of ills which she had borne so silently and uncomplainingly. Her father had watched her drooping form and spirit, and his intercourse with his son-in-law, as well as the indignation caused among their neighbors and acquaintances by the ill conduct of the latter, forced the parent to interfere and save the life of his child.

It was too late. All the tenderness of her mother, all the devoted care of brothers and sisters, all the caresses of her little daughters who would not be separated from her, were alike powerless to arrest the progress of a disease, the seat of which was in the heart. She pined away, and died broken-hearted.

Her husband retained his son with him in the now desolate and widowed home. But not even that desolation in all its utterness could change that proud spirit, or rouse it to repent of its selfishness, or to exorcise from his hearth the fiend that had changed all its joy into mourning and blighted all the fair blossoms of early connubial love.

The widowed husband wrapped closer around himself the dark and forbidding garment of his moodiness and sullen perverseness of temper. His daughters had chosen to cast their lot with their dead mother; thenceforward they were dead to him. His son had clung to the paternal roof with the hope of inheriting the paternal estate. He, too, grew up to be a young man of fair abilities, handsome presence, and engaging manners.

The father, growing wearied of the intolerable solitude and desolation which surrounded him, thought, in one of his softening moods, that, if his son married happily, the home might again be brightened by young faces and gladdened by pleasant sounds. Till then, although he had given his boy a good education, he had nevertheless afforded him no opportunity of turning it to any useful purpose. The allowance made to the young man barely sufficed to clothe him decently, without permitting him to indulge in any of the most innocent recreations of persons of his own age.

What then was his astonishment, when, one morning, at the breakfast table, his father asked him if he had never thought of marrying? “I should be happy to see you settled in life, my son,” he continued. “For the house is rather dull for one of your age, and has been a long time without pleasant company.” “But, father,” returned the other, “I have at present no means of my own, and am, therefore, entirely unable to support a wife. That I have not sought to enter on the active duties of any profession, is due to your own desire.”... “Let that be no obstacle to your marriage,” the father replied; “I shall gladly furnish you immediately with the money necessary for your equipment, and shall advance you, on your marriage, ten thousand dollars or more, to enable you to practice your profession independently. Have you found no young lady who could make you a good wife?” Yes, the son had been thrown into the company of a charming young person, belonging to a most honorable family, and there had sprung up a warm affection between them. Acting, therefore, on his father’s urgent advice, the young man asked his lady-love to become his wife, was accepted by her and her parents, and everything,—as his father had desired,—was arranged for their speedy marriage.

Returning home without a moment’s delay, his soul full of joy and triumph, he informed his parent of his success, and of the arrangement made for the nuptials. The latter received these tidings without any sign of pleasure or interest, acquiescing apparently in what his boy had done, but saying not one word about advancing any money for the necessary expenses of the wedding. He had relapsed into one of his blackest moods, and his son did not dare to press him by untoward questions or demands for money, while the cloud was on him.

So, with the aid of some generous relative he was able to meet the needful outlay, and was married, his father excusing himself, under some pretext or other, from being present at the nuptials. He could not bring his bride home at once, both because he was absolutely penniless, and because he was not sure of her getting a warm welcome from his capricious parent. When he appeared before the latter, however, he told his tale simply, and begged his father to execute the promise kindly made of advancing the money necessary to set him up in his profession.

“I have had nothing to do with your marriage,” was the startling reply; “and I mean to have nothing to do with providing for yourself or your wife. I owe you nothing, and shall give you nothing.” “But, dear father,” the other forced himself to say; “it was at your own solicitation that I sought a wife, and acting on your promise of a liberal settlement, I have taken the woman I loved, and with your express approval. What am I to do?” “Do what you like,” was the brutal rejoinder; “it is no concern of mine. No man has any business to marry who cannot support his wife.”

These words at first almost threw the wretched bridegroom into a fit of despair. He knew it to be useless to make any further representation to the heartless parent, who seemed only to have deceived his own child for the express purpose of torturing him. He left his father’s home that day, never again to return to it, and set himself manfully to work to support his young wife and create a home for themselves and their children. It was a hard and a long struggle; but he succeeded.

Meanwhile his moody and self-tormenting father was more wretched than ever in his cheerless abode. The same perverseness which steeled him against the most touching demonstrations of his young wife’s love, now prevented him from making,—much as he desired it,—any advances to his alienated children. He would have given his entire fortune and many years of his life to have them once more back in his loveless, comfortless home. As if, in very truth, an evil spirit possessed him, urging him to repel all show of affection from his friends and obliging him to withstand the yearnings of his own fatherly affection, he lived on unloved and unhonored, and died as he had lived,—the destroyer of his home.