Yet to show how hard it is to cla.s.sify actual cases in any formal way, let me here introduce what I wrote long ago about a couple whom I have visited many times. It is a husband and wife who are both geniuses--far above the ordinary in several lines. They have money--made by their own work--the wife"s as well as the husband"s, for she is an architect and builder of fine homes. While they have great affection one for another, there is a constant undertone of worry in their lives. Each is too critical of the other. They worry about trifles. Each is losing daily the sweetness of sympathetic and joyous comradeship because they do not see eye to eye in all things.
Where a mutual criticism of one"s work is agreed upon, and is mutually acceptable and unirritating, there is no objection to it. Rather should it be a source of congratulation that each is so desirous of improving that criticism is welcomed. But, in many cases, it is a positive and injurious irritant. One meets with criticism, neither kind nor gentle, out in the world. In the home, both man and woman need tenderness, sympathy, comradeship--and if there be weaknesses or failures that are openly or frankly confessed, there should be the added grace and virtue of compa.s.sion without any air of pitying condescension or superiority. By all means help each other to mend, to improve, to reach after higher, n.o.ble things, but don"t do it by the way of personal criticism, advice, remonstrance, fault-finding, worrying. If you do, you"ll do far more harm than good in ninety-nine cases out of every hundred. Every human being instinctively, in such position, consciously or unconsciously, places himself in the att.i.tude of saying: "I am what I am! Now recognize that, and leave me alone!
My life is mine to learn its lessons in my own way, just the same as yours is to learn your lessons in your way." This worrying about, and of each other has proven destructive of much domestic happiness, and has wrecked many a marital barque, that started out with sails set, fair wind, and excellent prospects.
Don"t worry about each other--_help_ each other by the loving sympathy that soothes and comforts. Example is worth a million times more than precept and criticism, no matter how lovingly and wisely applied, and few men and women are wise enough to criticise and advise _perpetually_, without giving the recipient the feeling that he is being "nagged."
Granted that, from the critic"s standpoint, every word said may be true, wise, and just. This does not, by any means, make it wise to say it. The mental and spiritual condition of the recipient _must_ be considered as of far more importance than the condition of the giver of the wise exhortations. The latter is all right, he doesn"t need such admonitions; the other does. The important question, therefore, should be: "Is he ready to receive them?" If not, if the time is unpropitious, the mental condition inauspicious, better do, say, nothing, than make matters worse. But, unfortunately, it generally happens that at such times the critic is far more concerned at unbosoming himself of his just and wise admonitions than he is as to whether the time is ripe, the conditions the best possible, for the word to be spoken. The sacred writer has something very wise and illuminating to say upon this subject. Solomon says: "A word spoken in due season, how good is it!" Note, however, that it must be spoken "in due season," to be good. The same word spoken out of season may be, and often is, exceedingly bad. Again he says: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver." But it must be _fitly_ spoken to be worthy to rank with apples of gold.
CHAPTER XII
THE WORRY OF THE SQUIRREL CAGE
Reference has already been made to _The Squirrel Cage_, by Dorothy Canfield. Better than any book I have read for a long time, it reveals the causes of much of the worry that curses our modern so-called civilized life. These causes are complex and various. They include _vanity, undue attention to what our neighbors think of us, a false appreciation of the values of things_, and they may all be summed up into what I propose to call--with due acknowledgement to Mrs.
Canfield--_the Worry of the Squirrel Cage_.
I will let the author express her own meaning of this latter term. If the story leading up seems to be long please seek to read it in the light of this expression:[A]
[Footnote A: Reprinted from "The Squirrel-Cage" by Dorothy Canfield ($1.35 net); published by Henry Holt and Company, New York City.]
When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio, they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home.
Every step in the long series of changes which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of wood work in every room that showed, with the latest, most un.o.btrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.
Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with effort, self-denial, and careful calculations, yet still without incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud of both their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children or Judge Emery"s honorable reputation at the bar.
The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early struggling days with as fresh an emotion as that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.
The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before.
Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amus.e.m.e.nt at their own highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks.
Marietta could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so intolerably did it spell humiliation.
In these quotations the reader has the key to the situation--worry to become as good as one"s neighbors, if not better. _This is the worry of the squirrel cage_.
Lydia is Mrs. Emery"s baby girl, her pet, her pa.s.sionate delight.
She has been away to a fine school. She knows nothing of the ancient struggles to attain position and a high place in society. Those struggles were practically over before she appeared on the scene.
On the occasion of her final home-coming her mother makes great preparations to please her, yet the worry and the anxiety, are revealed in her conversation with her older daughter:
"Oh, Marietta, how _do_ you suppose the house will seem to Lydia after she has seen so much? I hope she won"t be disappointed. I"ve done so much to it this last year, perhaps she won"t like it. And oh, I _was_ so tired because we weren"t able to get the new sideboard put up in the dining-room yesterday!"
"Really, Mother, you must draw the line about Lydia. She"s only human. I guess if the house is good enough for you and father it is good enough for her."
"That"s just it, Marietta--that"s just what came over me!
_Is_ what"s good enough for us good enough for Lydia? Won"t anything, even the best, in Endbury be a come-down for her?"
The attainments of Mrs. Emery both as to wealth and social position, however, were not reached by her daughter Marietta and her husband, but in the determination to make it appear as if they were, Marietta thus exposes her own life of worry in a talk with her father:
"Keeping up a two-maid and a man establishment on a one-maid income, and mostly not being able to hire the one maid. There aren"t _any_ girls to be had lately. It means that I have to be the other maid and the man all of the time, and all three, part of the time." She was starting down the step, but paused as though she could not resist the relief that came from expression. "And the cost of living--the necessities are bad enough, but the other things--the things you have to have not to be out of everything! I lie awake nights. I think of it in church. I can"t think of anything else but the way the expenses mount up. Everybody getting so reckless and extravagant and I _won"t_ go in debt! I"ll come to it, though.
Everybody else does. We"re the only people that haven"t oriental rugs now. Why, the Gilberts--and everybody knows how much they still owe Dr. Melton for Ellen"s appendicitis, and their grocer told Ralph they owe him several hundred dollars--well, they have just got an oriental rug that they paid a hundred and sixty dollars for. Mrs. Gilbert said they "just _had_ to have it, and you can always have what you have to have." It makes me sick! Our parlor looks so common! And the last dinner party we gave cost--"
Another phase of the _squirrel cage worry_ is expressed in this terse paragraph:
"Father keeps talking about getting one of those player-pianos, but Mother says they are so new you can"t tell what they are going to be. She says they may get to be too common."
Bye and bye it comes Lydia"s turn to decide what place she and her new husband are to take in Endbury society, and here is what one frank, sensible man says about it:
"It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have--a social position in Endbury"s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord"s sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the tree when Lydia"s got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that"s what _she_ wants? It"s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake."
And the following chapter is a graphic presentation as to how Lydia made her choice "in perfect freedom"--oh, the frightful sarcasm of the phrase--during the excitement of the wedding preparations and under the pressure of expensive gifts and the ideas of over enthusiastic "society" friends.
Lydia now began her own "squirrel-cage" existence, even her husband urges her into extravagance in spite of her protest by saying, "Nothing"s too good for you. And besides, it"s an a.s.set. The mortgage won"t be so very large. And if we"re in it, we"ll just have to live up to it. It"ll be a stimulus."
One of the sane characters of the book is dear, lovable, gruff Mr.
Melton, who is Lydia"s G.o.dfather, and her final awakening is largely due to him. One day he finds Lydia"s mother upstairs sick-a-bed, and thus breaks forth to his G.o.dchild:
"About your mother--I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of _social-ambitionitis_. But calm yourself. It"s not so bad as it seems when you"ve got the right doctor, I"ve practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies. They can"t spring anything new on me. I"ve taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from tablecloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through _art-nouveau_ prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity of having her maids wear caps. I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her."
And later in speaking of Lydia"s sister he affirms:
"Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman. She has too many of your father"s brains for the life she"s been shunted into. She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands. The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father. She does it; she"s a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her. She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won"t admit it."
Oh, the pity of it, the woe of it, the horror of it, for it is one of the curses of our present day society and is one of the causes of many a man"s and woman"s physical and mental ruin. In the words of our author elsewhere:
They are killing themselves to get what they really don"t want and don"t need, and are starving for things they could easily have by just putting out their hands.
Where life"s struggle is reduced to this kind of thing, there is little compensation, hence we are not surprised to read that:
Judge Emery was in the state in which of late the end of the day"s work found him--overwhelmingly fatigued. He had not an ounce of superfluous energy to answer his wife"s tocsin, while she was almost crying with nervous exhaustion. That Lydia"s course ran smooth through a thousand complications was not accomplished without an incalculable expenditure of nervous force on her mother"s part. Dr. Melton had several times of late predicted that he would have his old patient back under his care again. Judge Emery, remembering this prophecy, was now moved by his wife"s pale agitation to a heart-sickening mixture or apprehension for her and of recollection of his own extreme discomfort whenever she was sick.
Yet in spite of this intense tension, she was unable to stop--felt she must go on, until finally, a breakdown intervened and she was compelled to lay by.
On another page a friend tells of his great-aunt"s experience:
"She told me that all through her childhood her family was saving and pulling together to build a fine big house. They worked along for years until, when she was a young lady, they finally accomplished it; built a big three-story house that was the admiration of the countryside. Then they moved in. And it took the womenfolks every minute of their time, and more to keep it clean and in order; it cost as much to keep it up, heated, furnished, repaired, painted and everything the way a fine house should be, as their entire living used to cost. The fine big grounds they had laid out to go with the mansion took so much time to--"
Finally Lydia herself becomes awakened, startled as she sees what everybody is trying to make her life become and she bursts out to her sister:
"I"m just frightened of--everything--what everybody expects me to do, and to go on doing all my life, and never have any time but to just hurry faster and faster, so there"ll be more things to hurry about, and never talk about anything but _things!_" She began to tremble and look white, and stopped with a desperate effort to control herself, though she burst out at the sight of Mrs. Mortimer"s face of despairing bewilderment. "Oh, don"t tell me you don"t see at all what I mean. I can"t say it! But you _must_ understand. Can"t we somehow all stop--_now!_ And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to that party--that"s going to cost more than he can afford, Father says--it makes me _sick_ to be costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just so--and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it won"t be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean.
I would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that you _can"t_--you say yourself you can"t--and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we"d all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like.
And when her sister tried to comfort her she continued:
"You do see what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look forward to just that--being so desperately troubled over things that don"t really matter--and--and perhaps having children, and bringing them to the same thing--when there must be so many things that do matter!"
Then, to show how perfectly her sister understood, the author makes that wise and perceptive woman exclaim:
"Mercy! Dr. Melton"s right! She"s perfectly wild with nerves!