Chit-Chat With Some of My Correspondents
The epistles which public persons receive, if published, would not be credible. Begging letters are a matter of course; often in the highwayman style of, “hand over and deliver.” I had one recently from a perfect stranger, who wished a cool hundred or so, and mapped out the circuitous way in which it was to be sent, so that “his folks needn’t know it,” with a belief in my spooniness, which an acquaintance with me would scarcely have warranted. Following close on the heels of this, came another from a woman, whose ideas of my spare time and common-sense were about equally balanced. This stranger of the female persuasion, being hard-up for amusement, wished “a long, racy letter from me, such as I alone could write, with no religion in it, because she got enough of that from the minister’s wife.” It is unnecessary to add that both these missives found a home in my waste-paper basket. Autograph letters I do not object to, as they keep me in postage stamps, and my little “Bright Eyes” in cards to draw dogs and horses upon.
A friend of mine has been delivered from manuscripts sent for perusal, with the modest accompanying request to find a publisher for the same, by stating her price to be $200. She has received no request of the kind since this announcement.
These are some of the annoyances of authors; but, verily, they have their rewards too. Here comes a letter from my native State, Maine, with a box of wood mosses and berries to place round the roots of my house-plants; and as an expression of affection from a stranger who knows from my writings how well I love such things. She says, in closing, that she hopes that myself and Mr. Beecher will continue to write so long as she lives to read. Mr. Beecher may step up and take his half of this sugar-plum, since he has announced himself a champion of “candy.”
Then before me on my desk is a smiling baby face sent by its parents, who are strangers to me, if those can be strangers whose hearts warm toward each other; sent me, they add, “not for a silver cup, but because some chance words of mine touched their hearts, and so this little one was named Fanny Fern.”
She smiles down upon me whether my sky be cloudy or clear, and in the light of that smile I will try to write worthily; for “their angels do always behold the face of my Father.”
Here lie two letters on my desk from strangers regarding an article of mine. One warmly indorses the sentiments therein expressed, and calls upon “God to bless me” for their expression. The other dissents entirely, and commends me to the notice of a far different Power, for disseminating such wrong-headed notions. Thank you both! I am used to both styles of epistles. There’s nothing I contend for more than individuality of opinion; this would be a stupid world enough if we all thought, felt, and acted after one universal programme; everybody must see things from their own standpoint and through their own spectacles; and, provided they use civil language, should “have the floor” in turn to air their ideas. It might be well to suggest that, in commenting on a newspaper article, care should be taken that it be first thoroughly read, that the writer’s meaning be not misinterpreted; if this were done in many cases, the foundation for an adverse opinion would be quite knocked from under. Authors must expect the penalties as well as the rewards of their labors; but one of the most trying is to be accused of sentiments and feelings which they hold in utter abhorrence. Still, he would make small progress on a journey, who should stop to hurl a stone at every barking creature at his heels; therefore, in such cases, let patience have her perfect work, and let the victim keep steadily moving on, with an eye fixed upon the goal in the distance. But when you have unintentionally wounded a gentle spirit, which grieves all the more because it conscientiously believes that you have done harm, ah! then, none would be sorrier than the present writer; none would go farther to soothe the hurt; none would try harder to agree in opinion, consistently with self-respect. But if every writer stopped to consider whether his readers would be pleased, or the contrary, with his sentiments, instead of busying himself with the subject on hand for the moment, it would be like the clouding in of the sun on a clear morning. Everything would be reduced to one colorless level. The bright tints taken away, made brighter by the sometime shadows, could give a landscape tame enough, spiritless enough, to engender hypochondria. Surely the world of to-day is more liberal than this. Surely it is learning “to agree to differ.” Surely it knows by this time that a good life is of more importance than creeds or beliefs. Surely in this year of our Lord, 1867, the days of the Inquisition are past both for editors and writers, and the watchword of to-day—and, thank God, for to-morrow, and the day after—is progress, not paralysis.
Having said this, I consider that I have cleared the deck for action, as far as my own ship is concerned. A stray shot won’t frighten or discourage me; on the contrary, it only makes me step round the livelier, to see that my guns are in working order. Then, again, any one who wishes to hail me, and haul alongside in a friendly manner, shall be always certain of a kind salute from me.
A lady whose life, like that of many others, has not run smoothly through a bed of flowers, writes me “to tell her the secret of courage, which she is sure I know.”
I do not profess to speak for others, but the secret of all the courage I ever had is a firm belief in immortality, and in its satisfactory unriddling of this life of seeming cross-purposes. Without this I can never tell how either man or woman can learn to look their dead in the face, or what is oftener much harder to do, to look their living in the face. I can never tell how they can lay their distracted heads upon their pillows at night, without praying that they may never wake to another sunrise, or how they can stagger to their feet seventy times seven, after prostrations of body and spirit, which come one after another, like the blows of some avenging fiend. I cannot tell else how they can see the good crushed and defeated and apparently extinguished, and the unscrupulous and bad receiving all homage, and sitting triumphant in high places. I cannot tell else how the wretched mother can take, lovingly and patiently, to her heart another little one, when her failing strength is already tasked to the utmost to care for little brothers and sisters, who, having a father, are yet fatherless. It must be only because her eyes can see clearly “Our Father who art in heaven.” I look with sorrowing wonder upon those who, passing in and out of their pleasant, and as yet unbroken, homes, refuse to see the marks of blood upon their door-post, betokening the death of the first-born. I marvel that these steppers upon flowers childishly make no provision for the pitfalls concealed beneath them. I wonder at those who, laying their treasure all up in one place, never think, in this world of change, of the day of bankruptcy.
I do not wonder, when their household gods are shivered, that such exclaim, “Ye have taken away my idols, and what have I left?” or that suicide or lunacy are often the results.
It is only they who, in such crises, believe in “Him who doeth all things well,” that have anything “left.” It is only such who have courage for what sorrow soever is yet in store for them, in a life which for the moment seems robbed of all its sunshine. It is only they who have learned to live out of themselves, and who can yield—tearfully it may be, but unrepiningly—their earthly hopes and treasures up.
This is all the “courage” I know which will help us to look upon the dear dead face with patient resignation, or take up again the next morning the weary, vexed burden of life, until we are summoned to lay it down.
Lucia:—I am sorry that in your innocence you should have placed any dependence upon the statements of “a New York Correspondent.” It is a pity to pull down any of the fine air-castles they are in the habit of building; still it is my duty to inform you that these gentry often describe, with the greatest minuteness, authors and authoresses whom they have never seen, manufacturing at the same time little personal histories concerning these celebrities, valuable only as ingenious specimen “bricks, made without straw.” It matters little to the writers whether nature has furnished the authoress about whom they romance with black eyes or blue, brown hair or flaxen; whether nature made her a six-foot grenadier, or a symmetrical pocket edition of womanhood; the description answers all the same for the provincial paper for which it was intended, and these Ananias and Sapphira gentry find that a spicy lie pays as well as the truth—at least till they are found out. No, madam; notwithstanding the statements of your valuable “New York Correspondent” for the ——, I have no “daughters married;” I never “wear a black stocking on one foot and a white one on the other, at the same time, to attract attention;” I never “rode on the top of an omnibus;” I don’t “smoke cigarettes or chew opium;” I have no personal knowledge concerning the “mud-scow,” “handcart,” “cooking stove,” and “hotel,” that you have his authority for saying have been severally “named for me.” I am not “married to Mr. Bonner,” who has a most estimable wife of his own. I “never delivered an address in public;” and with regard to “the amount I have made by my pen,” you and the special “New York Correspondent” are quite at liberty to speculate about it, without any assistance from me. As to my “religious creed,” the first article in it is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
A gentleman writes me to know “if it is true that I boldly, and unwinkingly, and unblushingly stated, over my own signature, and contrary to the usual custom of my sex, that I was fifty-eight years old.”
Well, sir, I did. Why not? I feel prouder of that fact, and of my being the grandmother of the handsomest and smartest grandchild in this or any other country, than of any other two facts I have knowledge of. I can’t conceive why men, or women either—for this squeamishness about one’s age, I find, is not at all a thing of sex—should care one penny about it. I say again, I am “fifty-eight,” and I am glad of it. I have had my day, and I am quite willing that every other woman should have hers.
Will Parents Take Heed?—On all hands complaints are made of the increasing ill-health of our school-children. Now who is to take this matter in hand? Who is to say there shall be absolutely no lessons learned out of school, unless the present duration of school hours shall be shortened? It needs, we think, only that the parents shall themselves insist upon this to effect it. Why wait till brain-fever has set in? Why wait till little spines are irretrievably crooked? And of what mortal use is it to keep on pouring anything into a vessel when it is incapable of holding any more, and is only wasted upon the ground?