When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their fellow-countrymen—even from those willing to go into domestic service—began to import servants. “The English servants are so much better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his master’s place. Whoever seeks to lower the master in the social scale seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy—does it not lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level; does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for foreigners, but not for an Englishman.
Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles a household staff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors. And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred” hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house, when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring. He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and “my lady”—and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity. And from striving to seem a truly “my lord” and a truly “my lady” before the “well-bred” butler and coachman and their henchmen, the man and the woman pass on naturally and by imperceptible stages to making the same ludicrous struggle in all seriousness before their associates, all of whom are doing precisely the same silly thing from precisely the same silly cause.
There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader of fashion, very “classy” indeed, most glib on the subject of the “traditions of people of our station.” Her father was an excellent peddler, her mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to “help out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so long as her sensible father and mother were alive and until the craze for English households arose. She fell in line. But the haughty servants were most trying at first. For instance, she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the butler once; his face told her what a hideous “break” she had made. She tried to conquer this low taste—never did weak woman fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. She was not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to add one low common habit to another until she was leading a double life. It had its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But before she had gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid caught her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in private, as well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”
This is no isolated case. For bread and molasses substitute any plain, natural human habit not tolerated in England, and you have a story in outline that would apply to hundreds. How contemptuously our fashionables would deny if accused! How indignantly the younger generations who have never known what it was to be free from the English strait-jacket would protest against such coarse insinuations about our aristocracy. But the laughable truth remains unshaken—and also the truth that our aristocracy is wofully servant-pecked.
Fully to realize what a tremendous pressure this servile aristocracy entrenched in the privacy of the home can exert, let us glance at the composition of a fashionable household in America to-day. Take a family of some aspiring money-lender or stock swindler or franchise grabber who has got together in one way and another—principally another—a fortune of a dozen millions or so. There are himself, his wife with the longing to be “in it” or to keep “in it” gnawing at her, the grown son and the grown daughter. Papa is willing to have the family show off, but he is not quite ready to go the limit. So the establishment is what other fashionable people call modest, and what his wife and two children tell him is “mean.” Here is the schedule:
General Staff—Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler, formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.
Housekeeper’s Staff—Two English parlor maids from the best English houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress, who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authority on “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.
Butler’s Staff—Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants, not at all times immaculate.
Coachman’s Staff—Four English grooms.
Chauffeur’s Staff—One assistant, learning the profession.