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"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered. But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the Americans. The war is over.
It involves so much labor and anxiety, its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of every-day family-life, it is such a formidable matter to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table, there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary operations, so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local universe, that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests' company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly express the true state of things.
A married woman has to work for her husband from youth to very old age: his demands on her are the Oriental ones of submission and labour. In consequence of this outlook women are strongly developed both physically and mentally, and though they are as everywhere in the East nominally in subjection, they possess far greater influence and importance in family-life than Western women.
In 1844 had appeared Jeanne, with its graceful dedication to Françoise Meillant, the unlettered peasant-girl who may have suggested the work she could not read one of a family of rural proprietors, spoken of by Madame Sand in a letter of 1843 as a fine survival of a type already then fast vanishing of patriarchally constituted family-life, embodying all that was grand and simple in the forms of the olden time.
First, an effort should be made towards the purificatior of family-life: a pretty hopeless task, wherein at last he was forced to banish his own daughter for notorious evil-living. He made laws; and it may be supposed that they had some effect in time. A literary impulse towards high dignified ideals, however, may be much more effective than laws. He had Maecenas with his circle of poets.
The Castle of Augustenburg is magnificent, with its garden full of flowers, extending down to the very shores of the serpentine bay. I met with the most cordial reception, and found the most amiable family-life in the ducal circle.
The proprietor of that soil should be the true New England gentleman. His house should be the home of hospitality, the embodiment of solid comfort and liberal taste, the theatre of an exalted family-life which shall be the master and not the servant of labor, and the central sun of a bright and happy social atmosphere.
It involves so much labor and anxiety, its spasmodic splendors are so violently contrasted with the homeliness of every-day family-life, it is such a formidable matter to break in the raw subordinates to the manege of the cloak-room and the table, there is such a terrible uncertainty in the results of unfamiliar culinary operations, so many feuds are involved in drawing that fatal line which divides the invited from the uninvited fraction of the local universe, that, if the notes requested the pleasure of the guests' company on "this solemn occasion," they would pretty nearly express the true state of things.
There is something wrong with anyone who, entering a house of any kind, makes it less of a home. The angel-stranger makes the children of a house more aware of their home; they delight in showing it to him, for he takes interest in all that belongs to the family-life the only blessed life in heaven or upon earth, and sees the things as the children see them.
It is also commonly said that all the communistic societies in this country oppose the family-life, and that in general they advocate some abnormal relation of the sexes, which they make a fundamental part of their communistic plan. This, too, is an error.
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