From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

If, after due apologies, you ask why Americans have no doors between their sitting-rooms, or why, when they have doors, they do not use them, you always get the same answer.

"Doors," they say, "are necessary in England to keep out draughts, because the English do not know how to heat their houses. In our houses all rooms and passages are kept up to an even temperature and we do not require doors."

This is an intelligible but not the real explanation of this curious difference between the Americans and the English. There are some English homes which are centrally heated and in which the temperature is as even, though rarely as high, as in American houses; but the Englishmen who live in them still shut doors. An Englishman would shut the door of the inner chamber of a Turkish bath if there were a door to shut. In summer, when the days are very warm, he opens all the windows he can, but he does not sit with the door open. Temperature has nothing to do with his fondness for doors. In the same way there are in America some houses which are not centrally heated, very old-fashioned houses, but they are as doorless as the others. The fact seems to be not that doors were disused when central heating became common, but that central heating was invented so that people who disliked doors could be warm without them.

I think the lady who told me that the English houses seemed like hotels to her hinted at the real explanation. The open door is a symbol of hospitality. It is the expression of sociability of disposition. The Americans are hospitable and marvelously sociable. They naturally like to live among open doors or with no doors at all, so that any one can walk up to him and speak to him without difficulty. The Englishman, on the other hand, wants to keep other people away from him, even members of his own family. His dearest desire is to have some room of his own into which he can shut himself, where no one has a right to intrude. He calls it his "den," which means the lurking place of a morose and solitary animal. Rabbits, which are sociable creatures, live in burrows. Bees, which have perfected the art of life in community, have hives. The bear has its den. Every room in an old-fashioned English middle-class house is really a den, though sometimes, as in the case of the drawing-room, a den which is meant for the use of several beasts of the same kind at once. A change is indeed coming slowly over English life in this matter. The introduction into the middle classes of what is called by house agents "the lounge hall" is a departure from the "den" theory of domestic life. The "lounge hall" is properly speaking a public room. It is available at all hours of the day and no one claims it specially as his own. It is accessible at once to the stranger who comes into the house from the street. It is still rare in England, but where it exists it marks an approach toward American ideals. The term "living-room" only lately introduced by architects into descriptions of English houses is another sign that we are becoming more sociable than we were. It is not simply another name for a drawing-room. It stands for a new idea, an American idea. The drawing-room—properly the withdrawing-room—is for the use of people who want to escape temporarily from family life. The living-room for those who live it to the full.

In the American house there are no "dens." The American likes to feel that he is in direct personal contact with the members of his family and with his guest. It does not annoy him, even if he happen to be reading a book on economics, to feel that his wife may sit down beside him or his daughter walk past the back of his chair humming a tune without his having had any warning that either of them was at hand. The noise made by a servant collecting knives and plates after dinner, reaching him through a drawn curtain, does not disturb his enjoyment of a cigar. The servant is to him a fellow human being, and the sound of her activities is a pleasant reminder of the comradeship of man. He too has had his moments of activity during the day. A guest in an American house is for the time being a member of the family, not a stranger who, however welcome he may be, does not presume to intrude upon his host's privacy.

The "porch," as it is called, a striking feature of the American house, is another evidence of the spirit of sociability. A "porch" is a glorified and perfected veranda. In summer it is a large open-air sitting-room. In winter it can, by a common arrangement, be made into a kind of sun parlor. It has its roof, supported by wooden posts. When the cold weather comes, frames, like very large window sashes, are fitted between the posts and a glass-sided room is made. It is evident that the life in these porches is of a very public kind. The passer-by, the casual wanderer along the road outside, sees the American family in its porch, can, if he cares to, note what each member of the family is doing. The American has no objection to this publicity. He is not doing anything of which he is the least ashamed. If other people can see him, he can see them in return. The arrangement gratifies his instinct for sociability. The Englishman, on the other hand, hates to be seen. Nothing would induce him to make a habit of sitting in a veranda. Even in the depths of the country, when his house is a long way from the road, he fits thin muslin curtains across the lower part of his windows. These keep out a good deal of light and in that way are annoying to him, but he puts up with gloom rather than run any risk, however small, that a stranger, glancing through the window, might actually see him. Yet the Englishman commonly leads a blameless life in his own home. He seldom employs his leisure in any shameful practices. His casement curtains are simply evidences of an almost morbid love of privacy.

The first thing an Englishman does when he builds a house is to surround it with a high wall. This, indeed, is not an English peculiarity. It prevails all over western Europe. It is a most anti-social custom and ought to be suppressed by law, because it robs many people of a great deal of innocent pleasure. The suburbs of Dublin, to take an example, ought to be very beautiful. There are mountains to the south and hills to the west and north of the city, all of them lovely in outline and coloring. There is a wide and beautiful bay on the east. But the casual wayfarer cannot see either the mountains or the bay. He must walk between high yellow walls, walls built, I suppose, round houses; but we can only know this by hearsay. For the walls hide the houses as well as the view. In Sorrento, which is even more exquisitely situated than Dublin, you walk for miles and miles between high walls, white in this case. The only difference between the view you see at Dublin and that which you see at Sorrento is that the patch of sky you see in Dublin is gray, at Sorrento generally blue. At Cintra, one of the world's most famous beauty spots, the walls are gray, and there you cannot even see the sky, because the owners of the houses inside the walls have planted trees and the branches of the trees meet over the road. The Americans do not build walls round their houses. The humblest pedestrian, going afoot through the suburbs of Philadelphia, Indianapolis or any other city, sees not only the houses but anything in the way of a view which lies beyond them.

This is not because America is a republic and therefore democratic in spirit. Portugal is a republic too, having very vigorously got rid of its king, but the walls of Cintra are as high as ever. No one in the world is more democratic than an English Liberal, but the most uncompromising Liberals build walls round their houses as high as those of any Tory. The absence of walls in America is simply another evidence of the wonderful sociability of the people. Walls outside houses are like doors inside. The European likes both because the desire of privacy is in his blood. The American likes neither.

The "Country Club" is an institution which could flourish only among a very sociable people. There are of course clubs of many sorts in England. There is the club proper, the club without qualification, which is found at its very best in London. In books like Whitaker's Almanac, which classify clubs, it is described as "social," but this is only intended to distinguish it from political or sporting clubs. There is no suggestion that it is sociable, and in fact it is not. It is possible to belong to a club in London for years without knowing a dozen of your fellow members. It often seems as if the members of these clubs went to them mainly for the purpose of not getting to know each other; a misfortune which might happen to them anywhere else, but from which they are secure in their clubs. There are also all over England clubs specially devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht clubs and so forth. In these the members are drawn together by their interest in a common pursuit, and are forced into some sort of acquaintanceship. But these are very different in spirit and intention from the American Country Club. It exists as a kind of center of the social life of the neighborhood. There may be and often are golf links connected with it. There are tennis courts, sometimes swimming baths. There is always a ball-room. There are luncheon rooms, tea rooms, reading rooms. In connection with one such club which I saw there are sailing matches for a one design class of boats. But neither golf nor tennis, dancing nor sailing, is the object of the club's existence. Sport is encouraged by these clubs for the sake of general sociability. In England sociability is a by-product of an interest in sport.

The Country Club at Tuxedo is not perhaps the oldest, but it is one of the oldest institutions of the kind in America. In connection with it a man can enjoy almost any kind of recreation from a Turkish bath to a game of tennis, either the lawn or the far rarer original kind. At the proper time of year there are dances, and a débutante acquires, I believe, a certain prestige by "coming out" at one of them. But the club exists primarily as the social center of Tuxedo. It is in one way the ideal, the perfect country club. It not only fosters, it regulates and governs the social life of the place.