Part 25

“The next item in being a good husband is to be affectionate to your wife. Don’t expect her to take it for granted that you still love her because you haven’t applied for a divorce from her. You handed her a fine and convincing line of love talk while you were courting her, and there is no excuse for your cutting it off and becoming as dumb as an oyster just as soon as you’ve got her. No normal woman can live without love and be happy. It is just as necessary to her well-being as food and drink, and if she is deprived of it she suffers all of the agonies of soul starvation, which are worse than those of the body. When you marry a woman you isolate her from the love-making of other men, and so you are in honor bound to provide her with an ample supply of soft talk yourself.

“Therefore, make it a rule of your life to give your wife at least one kiss every day that has in it some thrill of love and passion, and that isn’t flavored with ham and eggs like the perfunctory peck on the cheek or the back of the ear which is all most men hand their wives in the osculation line. And, for heaven’s sake, don’t neglect to pay your wife compliments. When she has on a new dress tell her how pretty she looks and how becoming it is, instead of grunting or demanding to know how much it costs. If you have eyes enough to see other women’s pretty clothes and intelligence enough to say the right things about them, why not about your wife’s, when it will please her to death and make her think what a wonderful man she has married?

“The next point in being a good husband consists in doing something actively to make your wife happy and showing a human interest in her. Many men think they have done their whole duty as husbands when they furnish their wives with food and shelter and plenty of money. I have heard men excuse themselves for never remembering an anniversary or giving their wives a little present by saying that they didn’t know what Mary or Sally wanted, and that they had charge accounts at the best jewelers and department stores and could buy themselves whatever they wanted.

“That kind of thing doesn’t make a woman happy. There isn’t a wife in the world who wouldn’t get more thrill out of a dollar string of blue beads that her husband bought because they matched her eyes than she would out of a pearl necklace that she bought herself on her wedding anniversary because her husband had forgotten they were ever married. It is the personal touch that counts with women. The sentiment. The knowledge that her husband is concerned about her, that he notices when she is tired, that he appreciates all that she does, that he tries to make her happy and wants to give her every pleasure that he can.

“If you want to be a good husband, son, remember to do the little things, and the big things will do themselves. Be affectionate, be kind, be appreciative, jolly her instead of finding fault with her. Be liberal in the use of flattery and take her to some place of amusement at least once a week, and she will thank God on her knees for having given you to her for a husband.”

XXXIX

GIVING CHILDREN ADVANTAGES

Among my acquaintances is a woman who is always bemoaning the fact that she cannot give her children “advantages.” She sheds barrels of tears over their not having the “advantages” that the children of the rich have. She beats upon her breast and laments that she cannot send her boys to college, and give them high-powered motorcars, and when she thinks of not being able to dress her daughters like fashion plates and send them off to summer and winter resorts, she melts down into a perfect pulp of self-pity. After listening to this wail for a number of years, I grew exasperated, and said to her:

“What are the advantages that you cannot give your children? Let us sit down and consider them dispassionately, and see if your children really are so unfortunate, and so handicapped in life as you think they are. Let us begin with your not being able to send your boys off to college. I grant you that we would all like to give our children every possible opportunity to acquire a good education. But not all knowledge comes put up in school-book packages. Furthermore, the degree a man takes who graduates from the University of Hard Knocks has a lot of practical, available information, and a working knowledge of life that is worth a bushel of M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, and that it will take the college graduate ten or fifteen years to acquire. Many of the best-informed, best-read men that I know never saw the inside of a college. In these days of cheap books, and magazines, and newspapers, if a man wants an education he will get it.

“Nor is the lack of a college education any bar to success. The men who are running things in America to-day spent their formative years, from 18 to 24, in learning about mines, and railroads, and stores, and banking, instead of being grounded in Greek and Latin. And they are hiring college graduates to work for them. Moreover, while you can lead a boy to the Pierian spring, you cannot make him drink from it, and you know well enough that the great majority of boys who are sent off to college idle away their time, and come back with nothing but a college yell, the latest thing in Klassy Kut Kollege Klothes, and a maddening air of superiority. So comfort yourself with the knowledge that if your son has it in him to take an education he will get it. If he yearns for culture he will acquire it, but if he is just a boy who has good hard horse sense, and is not intellectual, the sooner he gets to work after his high-school days the better for him. Of course, mother-like, you want your children to have everything that multimillionaires have, but in your heart you must know that money is a curse to a boy instead of a blessing. To begin with, wealth paralyzes ambition. We are all poor, weak creatures who take the line of least resistance, and when we don’t have to do things we become slackers. We have to have necessity to spur us on to achievement.

“Call over the roll of the rich men of to-day, of the men who sit in high places, from the President down, of the men who are famous inventors, and writers, and artists. They were almost all poor boys. There is scarcely the name of a millionaire’s son in the whole list. And riches lead a boy into temptation from which the poor boy is safe. The boy who has to work for his daily bread has his mind and his hands occupied. He has something interesting and exciting always to do. The idle rich boy must make his own diversions, and find some way of killing time, and he does it only too often by the booze and the gambling route, and in the company of wild women. For adventuresses and grafters fasten themselves like leeches on the man with a fat pocketbook. There is nothing like lacking the price as a first aid to virtue.

“As for not being able to give your girls advantages, do you really think it is any advantage to a girl to be brought up to be nothing but a fashion plate, to have no duties and responsibilities, to have no object in life except amusing herself and to be taught merely to be a waster and a spender? Do you think that the woman who has a dozen homes in this country and Europe, between which she vibrates with no more local attachments than a transient guest has in a hotel, gets the pleasure out of them that the woman does out of her little bungalow, whose every plank has been paid for by some sacrifice and where every chair and plate is the result of weeks of saving and planning? Do you think the girl who buys herself a European title is as happy with the roué husband she has purchased as the girl who marries some clean, honest young chap she loves and works up with him to prosperity? Do you think that the woman who bears children and then turns them over to nurses and governesses gets the benediction out of motherhood that the woman does who cradles her children on her breast and rears them up at her knee?

“You lament that you cannot give your daughters the chance to make fine marriages. Why, the working girl has ten times as good chance to make a good marriage as the society girl has, because she is thrown with more men. She works side by side with the go-getters and the coming men, and she has the pick of them all. So,” I said to my lachrymose friend, “stop whining because you aren’t rich and can’t give your children ‘advantages.’ You are giving them the necessity of standing on their own feet and fighting their own battles, of developing all that is best in them, and that is the greatest advantage that you could possibly give them.”

SELL YOURSELF TO YOUR CHILDREN

Did you ever contemplate trying to “sell” your children, as the advertising experts say, the things you wish them to be and do? Did you ever try selling them yourself? Of course, the old idea is that the proper way to rear children is by forcing on them a system of do’s and don’ts. We tell our children that they must do this, and they mustn’t do that. We try to coerce them along the straight and narrow road because that is the proper path for them to travel, but we never take the trouble to artfully entice them into it and make them think that they have chosen it of their own free wills.

We want our children to love us, to admire us, to consider us their best friends; but we expect them to do this because we believe it the duty of children to honor their parents. Not ten fathers and mothers in a thousand ever deliberately try to make themselves attractive to their children or win their confidence. Perhaps this is why there are so many boys and girls hurtling down the broad highway to destruction; why parental influence amounts to so little, and why the average child feels that it has less in common with its own father and mother than it has with any other man and woman it knows.

We have just begun to realize that propaganda is one of the greatest and most insidious forces on earth. We have seen it lift men up to the skies and make gods of them, then turn and pull them down, and trample them into the dust. We have seen it exalt a nation into sainthood and turn it into a howling mob, crying for blood. And if it can thus sway and move grown-up people, what a weapon it is to use upon the plastic mind of a child! This being the case, why should we not “sell” our children the ideals we wish them to have? Why should we not feed them on the right propaganda from their cradle up? Why should we not advertise the good things of life until we make them so alluring that the child will want them?

Why should we not sell righteousness to our children? It is one thing to preach and nag at them about drink, and gambling, and associating with bad men and women until you bore them to tears and make them wonder what is the fascination of the evil that they are so warned against. And it is another thing to make clean living the symbol of health, and strength, and length of days; the respect of one’s fellow men and, above all, the thing that sets one right with one’s own soul.

Why not sell our children education? We scourge them to school, which most of them regard as a place of penance, and where, dull and bored, they sit in stolid indifference, while the dull and bored teachers go through the perfunctory routine of hearing them recite lessons in which they do not pretend to take the slightest interest. But suppose we could really sell these children the idea of education? Suppose we could get them as interested in history as they are in stories of adventure? Suppose we could make them see that spelling and arithmetic are not tasks; that they are the tools with which they will work when they get their first jobs as stenographers and bookkeepers, and that the better they spell and the quicker they are at figures the bigger their pay envelopes will be! Suppose we could make them see that knowledge is power, and that whether they stay at the foot of the ladder or climb to the top is going to depend on how well their brains are trained! Why, if we could make children see the advantages of an education we would not have to force them to go to school. They would be eager and anxious to go.

Suppose we sold our children good manners. We are always correcting Johnny at the table about the way he eats, and he is so used to our don’ts about walking in front of people and keeping his hat on that he has long since ceased to listen when we speak. But suppose, from his earliest infancy, Johnny had heard boors ridiculed, and knife swallowers, and cup cuddlers, and audible soup-eaters held up to scorn as figures of fun. Do you not know that Johnny would as soon think of committing murder as one of these offenses? And suppose Johnny has had it impressed on him by precept and example that good manners are a letter of credit that is honored the world over; that they will take you farther than anything else on earth. Don’t you know that Johnny would be incapable of loutishness, because good manners had simply been bred into him?

Why should we not sell our children industry and thrift? Propaganda again. You can make work the most thrilling of all games. You can make a child feel that his job is of great importance. You can form in childhood an unbreakable habit of industry. You can teach the child how to deny itself little things in order to save the money for big things. You can make it feel the independence of having its own little bank account. You can set a goal before it and light the fires of ambition in its soul.

Finally, why not sell yourself to your children? Why not make as much effort to ingratiate yourself with your children as you would with a stranger? Why not try to impress your children with your ability, your wisdom, your up-to-dateness, as you would any man or woman with whom you are trying to do business? If parents could only convince their children that they are not back-numbers and incarnate killjoys it would do more than any other one thing to improve the family relationship. Believe me, it pays to advertise—especially with your children.

XLI

TAKING HUSBANDS “AS IS”

I wish that I could make every young girl who gets married a present of a handsomely framed motto to hang on the wall above the mirror of her dressing table, where she would be compelled to see it every time she put on or took off her complexion, or repaired the Cupid’s bow of her lips. On this motto in gorgeously illumined letters would be these sapient words of Grover Cleveland: “It is a condition and not a theory that confronts you.” I can think of no other advice in the world that would be such a lamp to guide the feet of any young woman who is starting to blunder down the rough road of matrimony, as this cold, hard, unimaginative assertion of a simple fact. It brushes away with one gesture of common sense all the dreams and romances and fairy tales of courtship, and leaves a woman facing the reality of matrimony, which is never as she thought it would be. It just is as it is.

If women would only abandon their theories about what matrimony should be, and how husbands should act, and deal with them as they are, it would save floods of tears, innumerable broken hearts, hundreds of cases of nervous prostration, and put the divorce courts out of business. Furthermore, that women are mostly right in their contentions, and have logic and justice on their side, doesn’t alter this aspect of the situation at all. For instance, woman’s perpetual grievance against her husband is his indifference. She wails out that he inveigled her into matrimony under false pretenses because from the ardor with which he wooed her, he led her to believe and expect that he would be an eternal lover and would spend a large part of his time telling her how beautiful and wonderful she was, and how he adored her. Instead of making good on this antenuptial propaganda, however, he stopped all of his love-making at the altar with a suddenness that jarred her wisdom teeth loose, and in place of being a ladylove, she finds herself merely a household convenience.

Millions of women make themselves miserable because their husbands never make love to them, never pay them a compliment, never give them any sign of appreciation, never take them to any place of amusement, never give any indication that they still care for them and want them to be happy. These suffering sisters could save themselves nearly all of their woe if they would just throw their rosy dreams of how a husband should treat a wife into the discard, and accept the truth that very few men are sentimentalists. Most of them feel like fools when they are love-making, and so they get the ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They consider that when a man marries a woman, and undertakes her board bill and shopping ticket, that he has given a proof of devotion strong enough to draw money on at the bank, and there is no use in saying anything more about it. Also they feel that the fact that they selected the women they did for wives showed that they admired them above all other women, so why harp on that string? And, of course, they want their wives to be happy. What else do they toil for except to doll their wives up, and give them cars and houses and trips to Palm Beach?

So the wife may be very happy and contented who has philosophy enough to take her husband as he is, good, kind and generous, even if he is a dumb lover, apparently more interested in his business than he is in her. She realizes that he says it with checks instead of with flowery phrases, and that if she is starved emotionally she is sure of her daily roast beef and potatoes. Then there is the matter of adjustment between a man and a woman. Every bride dreams an impossible dream of a husband who is chilled steel to all the balance of the world, but putty in her hands. Experience blows this fair dream to the ends of the earth, and she finds that she can no more alter her husband’s habits and prejudices than she can the laws of the Medes and the Persians. He has his ways, and she can either give in to them or fight over them. He has his set opinions, and she can sidestep them or fight with him about them.