But note further: there is another relation between us than that of idler and labourer; the much more direct one of Master and Servant. I can set you to any kind of work I like, whether it be good for you or bad, pleasant to you or painful. Consider, for instance, what I am doing at this very instant—half-past seven, morning, 25th February, 1873. It is a bitter black frost, the ground deep in snow, and more falling. I am writing comfortably in a perfectly warm room; some of my servants were up in the cold at half-past five to get it ready for me; others, a few days ago, were digging my coals near Durham, at the risk of their lives; an old woman brought me my watercresses through the snow for breakfast yesterday; another old woman is going two miles through it to-day to fetch me my letters at ten o’clock. Half a dozen men are building a wall for me to keep the sheep out of my garden, and a railroad stoker is holding his own against the north wind, to fetch me some Brobdignag raspberry plants[3] to put in it. Somebody in the east end of London is making boots for me, for I can’t wear those I have much longer; a washerwoman is in suds, somewhere, to get me a clean shirt for to-morrow; a fisherman is in dangerous weather somewhere, catching me some fish for Lent; and my cook will soon be making me pancakes, for it is Shrove Tuesday. Having written this sentence, I go to the fire, warm my fingers, saunter a little, listlessly, about the room, and grumble because I can’t see to the other side of the lake.
And all these people, my serfs or menials, who are undergoing any quantity or kind of hardship I choose to put on them,—all these people, nevertheless, are more contented than I am: I can’t be happy, not I,—for one thing, because I haven’t got the MS. Additional, (never mind what number,) in the British Museum, which they bought in 1848, for two hundred pounds, and I never saw it! And have never been easy in my mind, since.
But perhaps it is not the purpose of Heaven to make refined personages, like me, easy in our minds; we are supposed to be too grand for that. Happy, or easy, or otherwise, am I in my place, think you; and you, my serfs, in yours?
‘You are not serfs,’ say you, ‘but free-born Britons’? Much good may your birth do you. What does your birth matter to me, since, now that you are grown men, you must do whatever I like, or die by starvation? ‘Strike!’—will you? Can you live by striking? And when you are forced to work again, will not your masters choose again, as they have chosen hitherto, what work you are to do? Not serfs!—it is well if you are so much as that; a serf would know what o’clock he had to go to his work at; but I find that clocks are now no more comprehensible in England than in Italy, and you also have to be “whistled for like dogs,” all over Yorkshire—or rather buzzed for, that being the appropriate call to business, of due honey-making kind. “Hark,” says an old Athenian, according to Aristophanes, “how the nightingale has filled the thickets with honey” (meaning, with music as sweet). In Yorkshire, your steam-nightingales fill the woods with—Buzz; and for four miles round are audible, summoning you—to your pleasure, I suppose, my free-born?
It is well, I repeat, if you are so much as serfs. A serf means a ‘saved person’—the word comes first from a Greek one, meaning to drag, or drag away into safety, (though captive safety), out of the slaughter of war. But alas, the trades most of you are set to now-a-days have no element of safety in them, either for body or soul. They take thirty years from your lives here;—what they take from your lives hereafter, ask your clergy. I have no opinion on that matter.
But I used another terrible word just now—‘menial.’ The modern English vulgar mind has a wonderful dread of doing anything of that sort!
I suppose there is scarcely another word in the language which people more dislike having applied to them, or of which they less understand the application. It comes from a beautiful old Chaucerian word, ‘meinie,’ or many, signifying the attendant company of any one worth attending to; the disciples of a master, scholars of a teacher, soldiers of a leader, lords of a King. Chaucer says the God of Love came, in the garden of the Rose with ‘his many’;—in the court of the King of Persia spoke a Lord, one ‘of his many.’ Therefore there is nothing in itself dishonourable in being menial: the only question is—whose many you belong to, and whether he is a person worth belonging to, or even safe to be belonged to; also, there is somewhat in the cause of your following: if you follow for love, it is good to be menial—if for honour, good also;—if for ten per cent.—as a railroad company follows its Director, it is not good to be menial. Also there is somewhat in the manner of following: if you obey your Taskmaster’s eye, it is well;—if only his whip, still, well; but not so well:—but, above all, or below all, if you have to obey the whip as a bad hound, because you have no nose, like the members of the present House of Commons, it is a very humble form of menial service indeed.
But even as to the quite literal form of it, in house or domestic service, are you sure it is so very disgraceful a state to live in?
Among the people whom one must miss out of one’s life, dead, or worse than dead, by the time one is fifty-four, I can only say, for my own part, that the one I practically and truly miss most, next to father and mother, (and putting losses of imaginary good out of the question,) was a ‘menial,’ my father’s nurse, and mine. She was one of our many—(our many being always but few), and, from her girlhood to her old age, the entire ability of her life was given to serving us. She had a natural gift and specialty for doing disagreeable things; above all, the service of a sick room; so that she was never quite in her glory unless some of us were ill. She had also some parallel specialty for saying disagreeable things; and might be relied upon to give the extremely darkest view of any subject, before proceeding to ameliorative action upon it. And she had a very creditable and republican aversion to doing immediately, or in set terms, as she was bid; so that when my mother and she got old together, and my mother became very imperative and particular about having her teacup set on one side of her little round table, Anne would observantly and punctiliously put it always on the other; which caused my mother to state to me, every morning after breakfast, gravely, that, if ever a woman in this world was possessed by the Devil, Anne was that woman. But in spite of these momentary and petulant aspirations to liberality and independence of character, poor Anne remained verily servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people’s wills instead of her own, and seeking other people’s good instead of her own: nor did I ever hear on any occasion of her doing harm to a human being, except by saving two hundred and some odd pounds for her relations; in consequence of which some of them, after her funeral, did not speak to the rest for several months.
Two hundred and odd pounds;—it might have been more; but I used to hear of little loans to the relations occasionally; and besides, Anne would sometimes buy a quite unjustifiably expensive silk gown. People in her station of life are always so improvident. Two hundred odd pounds at all events she had laid by, in her fifty-seven years of unselfish labour. Actually twenty ten-pound notes. I heard the other day, to my great satisfaction, of the approaching marriage of a charming girl;—but to my dissatisfaction, that the approach was slow. “We can’t marry yet”—said she;—“you know, we can’t possibly marry on five hundred a year.” People in that station of life are always so provident.