THE DAY OF A REALLY NICE ENGLISHWOMAN
8 A.M.—Early tea; rise; no bath. [The husband has the only bath, and the boiler cannot make another until ten.]
9 A.M.—Breakfast. [The husband takes the only newspaper away to the office.]
9.30 A.M.—Conversation with the cook: hardness of the butcher's meat; difficulty because there are only three eatable animals; degeneration of the butter; grocery and milk problems.
Telephone.—A social engagement is made.
Conversation with the cook resumed: report on a mysterious disease of the kitchen boiler; report on the oil-man; report on the plumber.
Correspondence begun and interrupted by the parlor-maid, who demands a new stock of glass.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the parlor-maid's demand for change with which to pay the cleaner.
Rush up-stairs to show which covers are to go.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the telephone: the green-grocer states that some of the vegetables she wants cannot be procured.
Correspondence resumed; interrupted by the nurse, who wishes to change the baby's milk.
Three telephone calls.
Correspondence resumed, and interrupted by the housemaid, who wants new brooms.
11 A.M.—The children have gone; the servants are at work. Therefore:
11-11.15 A.M.—Breathing space.
11.15-11.45 A.M.—Paying bills—electricity, gas, clothes; checking the weekly books, reading laundry circulars.
12 M.—Goes out. It is probably wet [this being England], so, not being very well off, she flounders through mud. Interview with the plumber as to the boiler; shoes for Gladys; glass for the parlor-maid; brooms for the housemaid; forgets various things she ought to have done; these worry her during lunch.
2.30 P.M.—Fagged out, lies down, but—
2.45 P.M.—The husband telephones to tell her to go to the library and get him a book.
3.15 P.M.—Is fitted by the dressmaker. Feels better.
4.30 P.M.—Charming at tea.
5.45 P.M.—Compulsory games with the children.
6.15 P.M.—Ultimatum from the servants: the puppy must be killed for reasons which cannot be specified in an American magazine.
6.30-6.35 P.M.—Literature, art, music, and science. Then dress for dinner.
7.30 P.M.—Charming at dinner. Grand fantasia to entertain the male after a strenuous day in the city. Conversation: golf, business, cutting remarks about other people, and no contradicting.
8.45-9.15 P.M.—Literature, art, music, and science.
Last post: Circulars, bills, invitations to be answered; request from a brother in India to send jam which can be bought only in a suburb fourteen miles distant.
10.30 P.M.—Attempted bath, but the plumber has not mended the boiler, after all.
11 P.M.—Sleep ... up to the beginning of another nice Englishwoman's day.
She may exaggerate, but I do not think so, for as I write these lines three stories of a house hang over my head, and I hear culinary noises below. Being a man, I am supposed to rule all this, but, fortunately, not to govern it. And I am moved to interest when I reflect that in this street of sixty houses, that which is going on in my house is probably multiplied by sixty. I have a vision of those sixty houses, each with its dining room and drawing-room, its four to eight bedrooms, and its basement. There are sixty drawing-rooms in this street, and at 11 A.M. there is not a single human being in them; and at 3 P.M. there is nobody in the sixty dining rooms, except on Sunday, when a few men are asleep in them. And I have horrid visions of our sixty kitchens, our sixty sculleries, our sixty pantries; of our one hundred and fifty servants, and our sixty cooks (and cooks so hard to get and to bear with when you've got them!). And I think of all our dinner sets, of the twelve thousand pieces of crockery which we need in our little street. To think of twelve thousand articles of crockery is to realize our remoteness from the monkey. And the nurses, as they pass, fill me with wonder, for some of them attend one child, some two, while sometimes three children have two nurses—until I wonder what percentage of nurse is really required to keep in order an obviously unruly generation.
Complex, enormous, it is not even cheap. Privacy, the purest jewel humanity can find, seems to be the dearest. This inflated individual home, it is marvelous how it has survived! Like most human institutions, it has probably survived because it was there. It has taken woman's time; it has taken much of her energy, much of her health and looks. Worst of all, it seems to have taken from her some of the consideration to which as a human being she was entitled. Let there be no mistake about that. In spite of proclamations as to the sacredness of the home and the dignity of labor, the fact remains that the domestic man, the kind that can hang a picture straight, is generally treated by male acquaintances with sorrowful tolerance; should he attempt to wash the baby, he becomes the kind of man about whom the comic songs are written. (I may seem rather violent, but I once tried to wash a baby.) So that apparently the dignified occupations of the household are not deemed dignified by man. This is evident enough, for office-cleaners, laundresses, step-girls, are never replaced by men. These are the feminine occupations, the coarse occupations, requiring no special intelligence.
The truth is that the status of domestic labor is low. An exception is made in favor of the cook, but only by people who know what cooking is, which excludes the majority of the world. It is true that of late years attempts have been made to raise the capacity of the domestic laborer by inducing her to attend classes on cooking, on child nurture, etc., but, in the main, in ninety-nine per cent of bourgeois marriages, it is assumed that any fool can run a house. It matters very little whether a fool can run a house or not; what does matter from the woman's point of view is that she is given no credit for efficient household management, and that is one reason why she has rebelled. It does not matter whether you are a solicitor, an archbishop, or a burglar, the savor goes out of your profession if it is not publicly esteemed at its true worth. We have heard of celebrated impostors, of celebrated politicians, but who has ever heard of a celebrated housekeeper?
The modern complaint of woman is that the care of the house has divorced her from growing interests, from literature and, what is more important, from the newspaper, partly from music, entirely from politics. It is a purely material question; there are only twenty-four hours in every day, and there are some things one cannot hustle. One can no more hustle the English joint than the decrees of the Supreme Court. Moreover, and this is a collateral fact, an emptiness has formed around woman; while on the one side she was being tempted by the professions that opened to her, by the interests ready to her hand, the old demands of less organized homes were falling away from her. Once upon a time she was a slave; now she is a half-timer, and the taste of liberty that has come to her has made her more intolerant of the old laws than she was in the ancient days of her serfdom. Not much more than seventy years ago it was still the custom in lower middle-class homes for the woman to sew and bake and brew. These occupations were relinquished, for the distribution of labor made it possible to have them better done at a lower cost.
In the 'fifties and the 'sixties the great shops began to grow, stores to rise of the type of Whiteley and Wanamaker. Woman ceased to be industrial, and became commercial; her chief occupation was now shopping, and if she were intelligent and painstaking she could make a better bargain with Jones, in Queen's Road, than with Smith, in Portchester Street. But of late years even that has begun to go; the great stores dominate the retail trade, and now, qualities being equal, there is hardly anything to pick between universal provider Number 1, at one end of the town, and Number 2, equally universal, at the other. Also the stores sell everything; they facilitate purchases; the housekeeper need not go to ten shops, for at a single one she can buy cheese, bicycles, and elephants. That is only an indication of the movement; the time will come, probably within our lifetime, when the great stores of the towns will have crushed the small traders and turned them into branch managers; when all the prices will be alike, all the goods alike; when food will be so graded that it will no longer be worth the housekeeper's while to try and discover a particularly good sirloin—instead she will telephone for seven pounds of quality AF, Number 14,692. Then, having less to do, woman will want to do still less, and the modern rebellion against house and home will find in her restlessness a greater impetus.
When did the rebellion begin? Almost, it might be said, it began in the beginning, and no doubt before the matriarchate period women were striving toward liberty, only to lose it after having for a while dominated man. In later years women such as Mary Wollstonecraft, but more obscure, strove to emancipate themselves from the thralldom of the household. The aspiration of woman, whether Greek courtesan, French worldling, or English factory inspector, has always been toward equality with man, perhaps toward mastery. And man has always stood in her path to restrict her, to arrest her development for his pleasure, as does to-day the Japanese to the little tree which he plants in a pot. The clamor of to-day against the emancipated woman is as old as the rebukes of St. Paul; Molière gave it tongue in Les Femmes Savantes, when he made the bourgeois say to his would-be learned wife:
"Former aux bonnes m[oe]urs l'esprit de ses enfants,
Faire aller son ménage, avoir l'[oe]il sur ses gens
Et régler la dépense avec économie
Doit être son étude et sa philosophie."
Man has laid down only three occupations: kirche, küche, kinder.
Hence the revolt. If man had not so much desired that woman should be housekeeper and courtesan, she would not so violently have rebelled against him, for why should one rebel until somebody says, "Thou shalt"! At the words "Thou shalt", rebellion becomes automatic, and, so long as woman has virility in her, so will it be. Still, leaving origins alone, and considering only the last fifty or sixty years of our history, it might be said that they are divided into three periods:
(a) The shiny nose and virtue period.
(b) The powder-puff and possible virtue period.
(c) The Russian ballet and leopard-skin period.
There are exceptions, qualifications, occasional retrogressions, but, taking it roughly, that is the history of English womanhood from wax fruit to Bakst designs. There were crises, such as the early 'eighties, when bloomers came in and women essayed cigarettes, and felt very advanced and sick; when they joined Ibsen clubs and took up Bernard Shaw, and wore eyeglasses and generally tried to be men without succeeding in being gentlemen. There was another crisis about 1906, when suffrage put forward in England its first violent claims. That, too, was abortive in a sense, as is ironically recorded in a comic song popular at the time:
"Back, back to the office she went:
The secretary was a perfect gent."
But still, in a rough and general way, there has been a continual and growing discontent with the heavy weight of the household, the complications of its administration. There has been a drive toward freedom which has affected even that most conservative of all animals, the male. There have been conscious rebellions as expressed, for instance, by Nora who "slammed the door"; by the many girls who decide to "live their own lives", as life was expounded in the yellow-backs of the 'nineties; by the growing demand for entry into the professions; for votes; for admission to the legislatures. There is nothing irrelevant in this; given that by the nature of her position in society and of the duties intrusted to her in the household, she was cut off from all other fields of human activity, it may be said that every attempt that woman has made to share in any activity that lay beyond her front door has been revolutionary and directed at the foundations of the English household system. Whether this has also been the case in America, where a curious type of woman has been evolved—pampered, selfish, intelligent, domineering, and wildly pleasure-loving—I cannot tell. Nor is it my business; like other men, the Americans have the wives they deserve.
But behind the conscious rebellions are the subtle and, in a way, infinitely more powerful unconscious rebellions, the dull discontents of overworked and over-preoccupied women; the weariness, the desire for pleasure and travel, for change, for time to play and to love, and—what is more pathetic—for time just to sit and rest. The epitaph of the charwoman—
"Weep for me not, weep for me never,
I'm going to do nothing, nothing forever—"
embodies pains deep-buried in millions of women's hearts. Most people do not know that, because women never smile so brightly as when they are unhappy. Sometimes I suspect that public pronouncements and suffrage manifestoes have had very much less to do with modern upheavals than these slumberous protests against the multiplicity of errands and the intricacies of the kitchen range.
Even man has been affected by the change, has begun to realize that it is quite impossible to alter custom while leaving custom unaltered, which, as anybody knows who reads parliamentary debates, is mankind's dearest desire. Changes in his habits and in his surroundings, such as the weekend, the servant problem, the restaurant, the hotel; all these have been separate disruptive factors, have begun to bring about the downfall of the English household. I do not know that one can assign a predominant place to any one of these factors; they are each one as the drop of water that, joined with its fellows, wears away stone. Moreover, in socio-psychologic investigation it is often found that what appears to be a cause is an effect, and vice versa. For instance, with regard to restaurant dining, it may be that people frequent restaurants because the home cooking is bad, and, on the other hand, it may be that home cooking has become bad because people have neglected it as they found it easier to go to the restaurant. This attitude of mind must qualify the conclusion at which I arrive, and it is an attitude which must be sedulously cultivated by any one who wants to know the truth instead of wishing merely to have his prejudices confirmed.
But, all allowances made, it is perfectly clear that the first group of disruptive factors, such as the restaurant dinner, the week-end, the long and frequent holidays, the motor car, the spread of golf, is inimical to the home idea and, therefore, to the house idea. (Home means house, and does not mean flat, for which see further on.) The home idea is complex; it embraces privacy, possession; it implies a place where one can retreat, be master, be powerful in a small sphere, take off one's boots, be sulky or pleasant, as one likes. It involves, above all, a place where one does not hear the neighbor's piano, or the neighbor's baby, or, with luck, the neighbor's cat; but where, on the other hand, one's own piano, one's own baby, and one's own cat are raised to a high and personal pitch of importance. It involves everything that is individual—one's own stationery block, one's crest, or, if one is not so fortunate, one's monogram upon the plate. If the S.P.C.A. did not intervene, I think one might often see in the front garden a cat branded with a hot iron: "Thomas Jones. His Cat." It is the rallying-point of domestic virtue, the origin of domestic tyranny. It is the place where public opinion cannot see you and where, therefore, you may behave badly. Most wife beaters live in houses; in flats they would be afraid of the opinion of the hall porter. And yet the home is not without its charm and its nobility, for its bricks and mortar enshrine a spirit that is worshiped and for which much may be sacrificed. Cigars have been given up so that the home might have a new coat of paint; amusements, holidays, food sometimes—all these have been sacrificed so that, well railed off from the outside world by a front garden, if possible by a back garden, too—or, still more delightful, far from the next house—a little social cosmos might be maintained. So far has this gone in the north of England that many people who could well afford servants will not have them because, as they say, they cannot bear strangers in the house. And very desirable houses in the suburbs of London, with old, walled gardens, have been given up because it was unbearable to take tea under the eyes of passengers on the top of the motor busses.
The home spirit, however, is not content merely with coats of paint and doilies; it demands mental as well as material worship. It demands importance; it insists that it is home, sweet home, and that there is no place like it (which is one comfort); that it is the last thought of the drowning sailor; that the trapper, lost in the deepest forests of Canada, sees rising in the smoke of his lonely camp fire a delicious vision of Aunt Maria's magenta curtains. It lays down that it is wrong to leave it, quite apart from the question of burglars; it has invented scores of phrases to justify otherwise unpleasant husbands who had "given a good home" to their wives; phrases to censure revolting daughters "who had good homes, and what more could they want?" It has frowned upon everything that was outside itself, for it could not see anything that was not itself. It has hated theaters, concerts, dances, lectures, every form of amusement; and, as it has to bear them, likes to refer to them archly as debauches, or going on the razzle-dazzle, or the ran-dan, according to period. It has powerfully allied itself with the pulpit and, in impious circles, with fancy work and crochet; it has enlisted a considerable portion of the Royal Academy to depict it in various scenes for which the recipe is: One tired man with a sunny smile returning to his home; one delighted wife; suitable number of ebullient children and, inevitably, a dog. The dog varies. In England they generally put in a terrier, in war time a bulldog; in Germany it may be a dachshund; and in other countries it is another kind of dog, but it is always the same idea.
And so it is not wonderful that the home has looked censoriously upon everything that took people away from its orbit. Likewise it is not wonderful that people have fled to anything available so as to escape the charmed circle. The week-end is in general a very over-rated amusement, for it consists mainly in packing and preparing to catch a train, then thinking of packing and catching a train, then packing and catching a train; but still the week-end amounts to a desertion, and hardly a month passes without a divine laying of savage hands upon the excursion. There was a time when holidays themselves were looked upon as audacious breaches of the conventions. In the early nineteenth century nobody went to Brighton except the Regent and the smart set; even in the Thackerayan period people did not think it necessary to leave London in August, and when they took the Grand Tour they were bent on improving their minds. The Kickleburys could not go up the Rhine without a powerful feeling of self-consciousness; I think they felt that they were outraging the Victorian virtues, so they had to make up for it by taking a guide, who for four or five weeks lectured them day and night upon the ruins of Godesberg. All this was opposed to the spirit of the home, just as anything which is outside the home is opposed to the spirit of the home, as was, for instance, every dance that has ever been known. In the Observer, in 1820, appeared a poem expressing horror and disgust of the waltz, and, curiously enough, very much in the same terms as the diatribes in the American papers of 1914 against the turkey trot and the bunny hug. When the polka came in, in the middle of the nineteenth century, good people clustered to see it danced, just like the more recent tango, and it was considered very fast. All this may appear somewhat irrelevant, but my case is mainly that the old attitude, now decaying, is that anything that happened outside the home, whether sport or amusement, was anything between faintly and violently evil. The old ideal of home was concentrated in Sunday: a long night; heavy breakfast; church; walk in the park; heavy dinner, including roast beef; profound sleep in the dining room; heavy tea; then nothing whatever; church; heavy supper; nothing whatever; then sleep. There is not much of this left, and from the moment when Sunday concerts began and the picture galleries were opened, when chess was played and the newspaper read, the old solidities of the home trembled, for the home was an edifice from which one could not take one stone.
In chorus with the cry for new pleasures, the reaction against the old discomfort, came a more powerful influence still, because it was direct—the servant problem. The Americans know this question, I think, better even than the British, for in their country a violent democracy rejects domestic service and compels, I believe, the use of recent emigrants from old enslaved Europe who have not yet breathed the aggressive and ambitious air that has touched the Stars and Stripes. In Great Britain the crisis is not yet, and it may never come, for this is not the English way. In England we are aware of a crisis only fifty years later, because for that half-century we have successfully pretended that there was no crisis. So we come in just in time for the reaction, and say: "There you are. I told you nothing was changed." Yet, so persistent is the servant problem that even England has had to take some notice of it. As Mr. Wells said, the supply of rough, hardworking girls began to shrink. It shrank because so many opportunities for the employment of women were offered by the factories which arose in England in the 'forties and the 'fifties, by the demand for waitresses, for shorthand writers, typists, shopgirls, elementary schoolmistresses, etc. The Education Act of 1870 gave the young English girls of that day a violent shock, for it informed them of the existence of Paris, assisted them toward the piano. And then came the development of the factory system, the spread of cheapness; with the rise in wages came a rising desire for pretty, cheap things almost as pretty as the dear ones; substitutes for costly stuffs were found; compositions replaced ivory, mercerized cotton rivaled silk, and little by little the young girl of the people discovered that with a little cleverness she could look quite as well as the one whom her mother called "Madam"; so she ceased to call her "Madam." Labor daily grows more truculent, so there is no knowing what she will call the ex-Madam next; but one thing is certain, and that is that she will not serve her. She will not, because she looks upon service as ignominious; she has her own pride; she will not tell you that she is in a shop, but that she is "in business"; if she is "in service", often she will say nothing about it at all, for the other girls, who work their eleven hours a day for a few shillings a week, despise her. They at least have fixed hours and they do not "live in"; when they have done their work they are free. They may have had less to eat that day than the comfortable parlor-maid, and maybe they have less in their pockets, but they are free, and they do not hesitate to show their contempt to the helot. I think that new pride has done as much as anything to crush the old, large, unwieldy home, for its four stories and its vast basement needed many steady, hardworking slaves, who only spoke when they were spoken to and always obeyed. It is not that mistresses were bad; some were and some were not, but from the modern girl's point of view they were all bad because they had power at any time of day or night to demand service, to impose tasks that were not contracted for, to forbid the house to the servant's friends, to make her loves difficult, to forbid her even to speak to a man. Whether the mistress so behaved did not matter; she had the power, and in a society growingly individual, growingly democratic, that was bound to become a heavy yoke.
And so, very slowly, the modern evolution began. The first to go were the immense houses of Kensington, Paddington, Bayswater, Bloomsbury,—those old houses within hail of Hyde Park,—which once held large families, all of them anxious to live not too far from the Court. They fell because it was almost impossible to afford enough servants to keep in order their three or four reception rooms, and their eight, ten, twelve bedrooms; they fell because the birth rate shrank, and the large families of the early nineteenth century became exceptional; they fell also because the old rigidity, or rather the stateliness, of the home was vanishing; because the lady of the house ventured to have tea in her drawing-room when there were no callers, and little by little came to leave newspapers about in it and to smoke in it. With the difficulties of the old houses came a demand for something smaller, requiring less labor. This accounts for the villas, of which some four hundred thousand have been built in the suburbs of London, in the villages London has absorbed. They are atrocious imitations of the most debased Elizabethan style; they show concrete where they should use stone, but, as their predecessors showed stucco, they are not much worse. They exhibit painted black stripes where there should be beams; they have sloping roofs, gables, dormer windows, everything cunningly arranged to make as many corners as possible where no chair can stand. They have horrid little gardens where the builder has buried many broken bricks, sardine tins, and old hats; they represent the taste of the twentieth century; they are quite abominable. But still the fact remains that they are infinitely smaller, more manageable, more intelligently planned than the spacious old houses of the past, where every black cupboard bred the cockroach and the mouse. They are easy to warm and easy to clean; their windows are not limited by the old window tax; they have bathrooms even when their rent is only one hundred and fifty dollars a year; and especially they have no basement. The disappearance of the basement is one of the most significant aspects of the downfall of the old household, for it was essentially the servants' floor, where they could be kept apart from their masters, maintaining their own sports and the mysterious customs of a strange people; when the door of the kitchen stairs was shut, one would keep out everything connected with the servants, except perhaps the smell of the roast leg of mutton. That did not matter, for that was homelike. The basement was a vestige of feudal English society; it was brother to the servants' quarters and the servants' hall. Now it is gone. In many places the tradesmen's entrance has vanished, and the cabbage comes to the front door. The sacred suppressions are no more, and in a developing democracy the master and mistress of the house stately dine, while on the other side of a wall about an inch thick Jane can be heard conversing with the policeman.
The growth of the small house has never stopped during the last forty or fifty years. A builder in the southwest of London, of whom I made inquiries, told me that he had erected four hundred and twenty houses, and that not one of them had a basement; this form of architecture had not even occurred to him. I have also visited very many homes in the suburbs of London, and I have looked in vain for the old precincts of the serving maid. The small house has powerfully affected the old individual attitude of home, for the hostile dignity of the past cannot survive when one man mows the lawn and the other clips the roses, each in his own garden, separated only by three sticks and some barbed wire. In detached houses it is worse, for they are now so close together that in certain architectural conditions preliminaries are required before one can take a private bath. The whole direction of domestic architecture is against the individual and for the group. The modern home takes away even the old stores; there are no more pickle cupboards and jam cupboards, and hardly linen cupboards. Why should there be when jam and pickles come from the grocer, and few men have more than twelve shirts? There is not even a store for coal. Some years ago I lived in a house that was built in 1820, and its coal cellar held eight tons; I now inhabit one, built in 1860, in which I can accommodate four tons; the house now being built in the suburbs cannot receive more than one ton. The evolution of the coal cellar is a little the evolution of English society from the time when every man had to live a good deal for himself, until slightly better distribution made it possible for him to combine with his fellows. He need not now store coal, for there is a service of coal to his doorstep. Besides, the offspring of coal are expelling their ancestor; gas and electricity, both centrally supplied from a single source, are sapping the old hearthstone that was fed by one small family, and for that family alone glowed. A continual socialization has come about, and it is not going to stop. What is done in common is on the whole better done, more cheaply done. But what is done in common is hostile to the old home spirit, because the principle of the home spirit is that anything done in common is—well, common!
As for the old houses of fifteen to sixteen rooms, they have had to accommodate themselves to the new conditions. First they tried to maintain themselves by reducing their rents. I know of a case, in Courtfield Gardens, where a house leased twenty-six years ago at one thousand dollars a year, was leased again about ten years ago at seven hundred and fifty dollars a year, and is now being offered at five hundred dollars a year. The owner does not want his premises turned into a boarding house, but he cannot find a private tenant, because hardly anybody nowadays can manage five floors and a basement. In my own district, where the houses tower up to heaven, I see the process at work,—rents falling, pitiful attempts of the landlords to prevent their houses from turning into maisonnettes and boarding houses, to prevent the general decay. But they are beaten. The vast Victorian houses within three miles of Charing Cross are, one by one, being cut up into flats; in the unfashionable districts they are being used for tenements; and there are splendid old houses in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where in the day of Dickens lived the fashionables, which now house half a dozen workingclass families and their lodgers. There is one of these old glories near Lamb's Conduit Street, where a Polish furrier and his six unwashed assistants work under a ceiling sown with sprawling nymphs, while melancholic and chipped golden lions' heads look down from either side of a once splendid Georgian mantelpiece. It is very reactionary of me, I am afraid, but I cannot help feeling it a pity that this old house, where would suitably walk the ghost of Brinsley Sheridan, must be one of the eggs broken to make the omelette of the future.
But these old houses must go. Why should one preserve an old house? One does not preserve one's old boots. The old houses have been seized by the current of revolt against the home; they have mostly become boarding and apartment houses. This is not only because their owners do not know what to do with them; one does not run a boarding house unless it pays, and so evidently there has been a growing demand for the boarding house. Boarding houses fail, but for every one that fails two rise up, and there is hardly a street in London that has not its boarding house, or at least its apartment house. There are several in Park Lane itself; there is even one whose lodgers may look into the gardens of Buckingham Palace. I do not know how many boarding houses there are in London, for no statistics distinguish properly between the boarding house, the apartment house, the private hotel, the hotel, and the tavern. But, evidently, the increase is continuous, and part of the explanation is to be found elsewhere than in the traveler. Of course, the traveler has enormously increased, but he alone cannot account for the scores of thousands of people who pass their years in apartment and boarding houses. They live there for various reasons—because they cling to the old family idea and think to find "a home from home"; because they cannot afford to run separate establishments; and very many because they are tired of running them, tired of the plumber, tired of the housemaid. There are thousands of families in London, quite well-to-do, who prefer to live in boarding houses; they hate the boarding house, but they hate it less than home. They feel less tied; they have less furniture; they like to feel that their furniture is in store where they can forget all about it. They have lost part of their old love for Aunt Maria's magenta curtains—the home idea has become less significant to them. And this applies also to hotels. The increase of hotels in London, in every provincial city, all over the world, is not entirely explained by the traveler, though, by the way, the increase in traveling is a sign of the decay of the home. The old idea, "You've got a good home and you've got to stay there," suffers whenever a member of the home leaves it for any reason other than the virtuous pursuit of his business. All over the center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels have risen—the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park; another is projected at Hyde Park Corner; the Strand Palace is open, and at the Regent Palace there are, I understand, fourteen hundred bedrooms. The position is that a proportion of London's population is beginning to live in these hotels without servants of their own, without furniture of their own, without houses of their own. A more detached, a freer spirit is invading them, and a desire to get all they can out of life while they can, instead of solemnly worshiping the Englishman's castle.
It does not come easily, and it does not come quickly. During the last twenty-five years most of the blocks of flats to be found in London have risen, with their villainously convenient lifts for passengers and their new-fangled lifts for dust bins and coal, with their electricity and their white paint, and other signs of emancipation. They were not popular when they came, and they are disliked by the older generation; it is still a little vicious to live in a West End flat. And when the younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enough, I see many more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human life, the kitchen. There are now in London quite a number of flats, such as, I think, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Court, Artillery Mansions, where the tenants live in agreeable suites and either take their meals in the public restaurant or have them brought up to their flat. The difficulty of service is being reduced. The sixty households are beginning to do without the sixty cooks, and never use more than a few dozen at a time of their two hundred pieces of crockery. There are no more tradesmen, nor is there any ordering; there is a menu and a telephone. There are no more heated interviews with the cook, and no more notices given ten minutes before the party, but a chat with a manager who has the manners and the tact of an ambassador. There is no more home work in these places.
I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new system—blocks of flats with a central restaurant—will probably, in a more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining room, run—and this is very important—by a committee of tenants.
That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid laundry maid will check the lists—there will no longer be, as once upon a time on Saturday evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists. It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks. The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours, without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day; there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.
I think I will close upon that phrase: There will be no mice in those days. For somehow the industrious mouse, scuffling behind the loose wainscoting over the rotten boards, is to me curiously significant of the old, hostile order, when every man jealously held what was his own and determined that it should so remain—dirty, insanitary, tiresome, labor-making, dull, inexpressibly ugly, inexpressibly inimical to anything fresh and free, providing that it was wholly and sacredly his own.
VI
THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY
1
As with the home, so with the family. It would be strange indeed if a stained shell were to hold a sound nut. All the events of the last century—the development of the factory system, the Married Women's Property Act, the birth of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the entry of woman into professions, the discovery of co-education and of education itself, eugenics, Christian Science, new music halls and halfpenny papers, the Russian ballet, cheap travel, woman suffrage, apartment houses—all this change and stress has lowered the status of one whom Pliny admired—the father of a family. The family itself tends to disappear, and it is many years since letters appeared in The Times over the signature, "Mother of Six." The family is smaller, and, strangely enough, it is sweeter tempered: would it be fair to conclude, as might an Irishman, that it would agree perfectly if it disappeared?
I do not think that the family will completely disappear any more than scarlet fever or the tax collector. But certainly it will change in character, and its evolution already points toward its new form. The old-fashioned family sickened because it was a compulsory grouping. The wife cleaved unto her husband because he paid the bills; the children cleaved unto their parents because they must cleave unto something. There was no chance of getting out, for there was nothing to get out to. For the girl, especially, some fifty years ago, to escape from the family into the world was much the same thing as burgling a penitentiary; so she stayed, compulsorily grouped. Personally, I think all kinds of compulsory groupings bad. If one is compelled to do a thing, one hates it; possibly the dead warriors in the Elysian Fields have by this time taken a violent dislike to compulsory chariot races, and absolutely detest their endless rest on moss-grown banks and their diet of honey. I do not want to stress the idea too far, but I doubt whether the denizens of the Elysian Fields, after so many centuries, can tolerate one another any more, for they are compelled to live all together in this Paradise, and nothing conceivable will ever get them out.
Some groupings are worse than others, and I incline to think that difference of age has most to do with the chafe of family life. For man is a sociable animal; he loves his fellows, and so one wonders why he should so generally detest his relations. There are minor reasons. Relationship amounts to a license to be rude, to the right to exact respect from the young and service from the old; there is the fact that, however high you may rise in the world, your aunt will never see it. There is also the fact that if your aunt does see it, she brags of it behind your back and insults you about it to your face. There is all that, but still I believe that one could to a certain extent agree with one's relations if one met only those who are of one's own age, for compulsory groupings of people of the same age are not always unpleasant; boys are happiest at school, and there is fine fellowship and much merriment in armies. On the other hand, there often reigns a peculiar dislike in offices. I do not want to conclude too rashly, but I cannot help being struck by the fact that in a school or in an army the differences of age are very small, while in an office or a family they are considerable. Add on to the difference of age compulsory intercourse, and you have the seeds of hatred.
This applies particularly where the units of a family are adult. The child loves the grown-ups because he admires them; a little later he finds them out; still a little later, he lets them see that he has found them out, and then family life begins. In many cases it is a quite terrible life, and the more united the family is the more it resembles the union between the shirt of Nessus and Hercules's back. But it must be endured because we have no alternative. I think of cases: of such a one as that of a father and mother, respectively sixty-five and sixty, who have two sons, one of whom ran away to Australia with a barmaid, while the other lived on his sisters' patrimony and regrettably stayed at home; they have four daughters, two of whom have revolted to the extent of earning their living, but spend the whole of their holidays with the old people; the other two are unmarried because the father, imbued with the view that his daughters were too good for any man, refused to have any man in the house. There is another couple in my mind, who have five children, four of whom live at home. I think I will describe this family by quoting one of the father's pronouncements: "There's only one opinion in this house, and that's mine!" I think of other cases, of three sisters who have each an income of two hundred dollars a year on which they would, of course, find it very difficult to live separately. The total income of six hundred dollars a year enables them to live—but together. The eldest loves cats; the next hates cats, but loves dogs; this zoölogical quarrel is the chief occupation of the household; the third sister's duty is to keep the cats and dogs apart. Here we have the compulsory grouping; I believe that this lies at the root of disunion in that united family.
The age problem is twofold. It must not be thought that I hold a brief against old age, though, being myself young, I tend to dislike old age as I shall probably dislike youth by and by. On the whole, the attitude of old age is tyrannical. I have heard dicta as interesting as the one which I quote a few lines above. I have heard say a mother to a young man, "You ought to feel affection for me"; another, "It should be enough for you that this is my wish." That is natural enough. It is the tradition of the elders, the Biblical, Greek, Roman, savage hierarchies which, in their time, were sound because, lacking education of any kind, communities could resort only to the experience of the aged. But a thing that is natural is not always convenient, and, after all, the chief mission of the civilizer is to bottle up Nature until she is wanted. This tyranny breeds in youth a quite horrible hatred, while it hardens the old, makes them incapable of seeing the point of view of youth because it is too long since they held it. They insist upon the society of the young; they take them out to call on old people; they drive them round and round the park in broughams, and then round again; they deprive them of entertainments because they themselves cannot bear noise and late hours, or because they have come to fear expense, or because they feel weak and are ill. It is tragic to think that so few of us can hope to die gracefully.
The trouble does not lie entirely with the old; indeed, I think it lies more with the young, who, crossed and irritated, are given to badgering the old people because they are slow, because they do not understand the problems of Lord Kitchener and are still thinking of the problems of Mr. Gladstone. They are harsh because the old are forgetful, because their faded memories are sweet, because they will always prefer the late Sir Henry Irving to Mr. Charles Hawtrey. The young are cruel when the old people refuse to send a letter without sealing it, or when they insist upon buying their hats from the milliner who made them in 1890 and makes them still in the same fashion. They are even harsh to them when they are deaf or short-sighted and fumbling; they come to think that a wise child should learn from his sire's errors.
It is a pity, but thus it is; so what is the use of thinking that the modern family must endure? It is no use to say that the old are right or that the young are right; they disagree. It is nobody's fault, and it is everybody's misfortune. They disagree largely because there is too much propinquity. It is propinquity that brings one to think there is something rather repulsive in blood relations. It is propinquity that brings one to love and then later to dislike. Mr. George Moore has put the case ideally in his Memoirs of My Dead Life, where Doris, the girl who has escaped from her family with the hero says: "This is the first time I have ever lived alone, that I have ever been free from questions. It was a pleasure to remember suddenly, as I was dressing, that no one would ask me where I was going; that I was just like a bird myself, free to spring off the branch and to fly. At home there are always people round one; somebody is in the dining room, somebody is in the drawing-room; and if one goes down the passage with one's hat on, there is always somebody to ask where one is going, and if you say you don't know, they say: 'Are you going to the right or to the left? Because, if you are going to the left, I should like you to stop at the apothecary's and to ask....'"
Yes, that is what happens. That is the tragedy of the family; it lives on top of itself. The daughters go too much with their mothers to shop; there are too many joint holidays, too many compulsory rejoicings at Christmas or on birthdays. There are not enough private places in the house. I have heard one young suffragist, sentenced to fourteen days for breaking windows, say that, quite apart from having struck a blow for the Cause, it was the first peaceful fortnight she had ever known. This should not be confounded with the misunderstood offer of a wellknown leader of the suffrage cause who offered a pound to the funds of the movement for every day that his wife was kept in jail.
In a family, friendships are difficult, for Maude does not always like Arabella's dearest friend; or, which is worse, Maude will stand Arabella's dearest friend, whom she detests, so that next day she may have the privilege of forcing upon Arabella her own, whom Arabella cannot bear. That sort of thing is called tolerance and self-sacrifice; in reality it is mutual tyranny, and amounts to the passing on of pinches, as it were, from boy to boy on the benches of schools. In a developing generation this cannot endure; youthful egotism will not forever tolerate youthful arrogance. As for the old, they cannot indefinitely remain with the young, for, after all, there are only two things to talk of with any intensity—the future and the past; they are the topics of different generations.
Still, for various reasons, this condition is endured. It is cheaper to live together; it is more convenient socially; it is customary, which, especially in England, is most important. But it demands an impossible and unwilling tolerance, sometimes fraudulent exhibitions of love, sometimes sham charity. It is not pleasant to hear Arabella, returning from a walk with her father, say to Maude: "Thank Heaven, that's over! Your turn to-morrow." Perhaps it would not be so if the father did not by threat or by prayer practically compel his daughters to "take duty." There are alleviations—games, small social pleasures, dances—but there is no freedom. A little for the sons, perhaps, but even they are limited in their comings and goings if they live in their father's house. As for the girls, they are driven to find the illusion of freedom in wage labor, unless they marry and develop, as they grow older, the same problem.