THE ETHICS OF HOUSEKEEPING.
The cry is everywhere the same—the badness of our modern servants. But who is really to blame—the mistresses or the maids? the masters or the employed? The one class are educated, the other are comparatively ignorant; and influence filters downwards—it does not permeate the social mass from below. We cast longing looks backward to the bygone times when servants were the humble friends of the family, ready to serve for love and bare maintenance if bad times came, and identifying themselves with the fortunes of their masters. But we forget that we ourselves have changed even more than they, since the days when mistresses overlooked the maids in closer companionship than is warranted now by the conditions of society—when daily details were ordered by the lady, and the execution of her orders was personally supervised—when housekeeping was at once an art and a pleasure, a science and a source of pride. Then young servants were trained immediately under the eye of the mistress and by her direct influence; as now they are trained under the head servant of their special department. And in this change of teachers alone, if no other cause were wanting, we could trace the source of the deterioration complained of.
The lady who, two generations ago, taught the still-room maid the mysteries of sirups and confections, of jams and jellies and dainty sweetmeats—who knew the prime joints, and the signs of good meat, tender poultry, and fresh fish, as well as the cook herself—who could go blindfold to her linen press and pick out the best sheets from the ordinary, and knew by place as well as by touch where the finer huckaback towels were to be found and where the coarser—who could check as well as instruct the housemaid at every turn—such a mistress as this, for her own part diligent, refined, truthful, God-fearing, was likely to give a higher tone, infuse a more faithful and dutiful spirit into her servants, than is possible now, when the thing is reduced to a profession like any other, and the teacher is only technically, not morally, in advance of the pupil. It is the mistresses who have let the reins slip from their hands, not the maids who have taken the bit between their teeth; or, rather, the latter has been in consequence of the former; and when we blame our servants for the ‘heartlessness’ of their service—for the ease with which they throw up their situations, on the sole plea of want of change, or of bettering themselves, to the infinite disturbance of things and trouble to the household—we must remember that we ourselves first broke the golden links, and that to expect devotion without giving affection is to expect simply slavishness. The advantage of the present system of mere professional and skilled technicality is to be found in the greater comfort and regularity of the household; in the more finished precision and perfection of the service; in the more complete systemisation of the whole art and practice of attendance. But these gains have been bought with a price—not only in the increased cost of housekeeping, but in the deterioration of the moral character of servants, and in the annihilation of the friendly and quasi-family feeling which once existed between the mistress and her domestics.
In large cities and in the houses of the rich, the upper men-servants are practically their own masters. They make their own stipulations as to hours, food, allowances, liberties; and compound for the nervous exhaustion of perpetual worry which does not include hard work, by a scale of feeding which is more savage than civilised, in the quantity of flesh-meat included. They can make the house pleasant or intolerable to a guest; and in a thousand sly mysterious ways they cause the mistress annoyances which cannot be brought home to them, and of which they enjoy the effect produced. In the kitchen, the cook is absolute mistress, and holds her lady as merely the superscriber of her own menu for the day, as well as the bank whence is drawn the money for the bills—which she pays. And in the payment of those bills, as well as in dealing with remnants—of which woe betide the mistress who should recommend the home consumption!—the cook doubles and trebles her wages, and feathers her own nest with the down plucked from her employers. Can we wonder at this? We put a half-educated person into a place of trust and temptation; we neither check nor overlook her; we trust all to her abstract honesty and sense of justice; there is no danger of discovery, still less of punishment; she has before her the additional temptation of pleasing her fellow-servants with whom she lives in hourly contact, rather than of saving the pockets of her rich employers whom she scarcely knows and rarely sees; and then we lift up our hands at the depravity of human nature, when we find that the tradesmen give back a percentage on their bills, and that whole pounds of wax candles swell the perquisite of the grease-pot handsomely. But next door, the rich merchant is a fraudulent bankrupt; the respectable family lawyer over the way absconds after having dealt with his clients’ securities; master’s friend, the banker, puts up the shutters to the ruin of thousands on thousands, while his wife has a secured jointure which enables them to live in princely style; and the stockjobber, who dines with us on Sundays, makes use of private information to sell to his best friend shares which, up to their highest point to-day, he knows will collapse like a burst balloon to-morrow. Are we not a little hard on the kitchen, seeing what is done in the parlour?
Go from the rich to the poor among our gentry—from the gilded upper stratum to the lower base and barren subsoil—and here again we find that mistresses are as much to blame as the maids, whose shortcomings they bewail and resent. In a household of this kind, the res angusta domi prevents the hiring, because rendering impossible the payment, of good and well-trained servants; and the mistress has to be content with young girls whom she must teach, and whose untutored services she buys at small cost. But here, again, the modern spirit of the age spoils what else might seem to be a return to old and wholesome conditions. Nine times out of ten, the mistress is as incapable of teaching as the maid is slow of learning; for we must remember that untrained girls of this sort are generally taken from the most humble class, and that they come into service with but little natural brightness of wit and less educational sharpening. The mistress expects too much from them. For the most part aching under her own burden, disliking her duties, and envying her richer sisters, she does the least she can in the house, and gives the heavy end of the stick to the hired help. And, forgetful of the maxim of ‘line upon line and precept upon precept,’ and of the necessity of reiteration, patient and continual, if a dull brain has to be impressed and a new method learned, she is impatient and angry when orders are forgotten—ways of doing things bungled—and chaos, disorder, and confusion are the result. Perhaps she herself is unpunctual and inexact; but she expects from her seventeen-old little Betty the punctuality of the sun and the regularity of the clock. Perhaps she herself is undutiful, and shirks all that she can transfer on to another’s hands; but she looks for devotion, self-sacrifice, the unfailing performance of her duty, from this comparative child, and feels entitled to sit in the seat of the judge, when these virtues run dry and the shallow stream of conscientiousness fails. From the nurse-girl, herself a mere child, hired to wheel the perambulator and look after the children, she expects such patience, forbearance, and understanding of child-nature, as she herself, mother as she is, cannot command. If Jacky is rude and Jenny is rebellious, if Tommy is unmanageable and Katie is defiant, she, the mother, whose temper would be in a blaze on the moment, demands that the nursemaid shall bear all with a calm and equable mind, and, without the power of punishing, be able to reduce to obedience these little rebels, whom she herself cannot always control with the help of the rod and the dark-closet to boot. Furthermore, she lays the blame of these naughty tempers on the girl, to excuse the children. They are always good with her, she says angrily, and it must be Mary’s fault that they are so often tiresome when she has them. And when she says this, she does not remember the old adage about the little pitchers and long ears, and never realises the fact that by her own words she gives the children their cue, and encourages them to be rude to one who, they know beforehand, will be made the scapegoat for their sins. That overpowering maternal love—that storgë, of which poets make so much account, and which is the primal necessity for the preservation of the race—is at times the cause of great injustice, especially when dealing with those unprotected young nursemaids to whom no authority can be given, from whom all controlling influence is expected, and who have neither moral force nor mental enlightenment enough to control themselves, still less others. If they stand in the attitude of accusers, the mother rejects them as traducers.
Sometimes, in small households, the master interferes like a woman, and adds to the confusion by putting his masculine fingers into the already over-stocked domestic pie. There are men who are simply maddening in a house. They watch behind the window-blind and count the number of seconds Betty gives to the baker’s boy, and how she smirks and smiles at the handsome young greengrocer or the smart Mr Butcher. That Betty should have any pleasure in the gallant words or flattering looks of one or all of these, seems to them a sin, a dereliction of duty, and, in some queer way, a wrong and a robbery done to them. For were they to be completely candid, most masters and mistresses would say that they expected the whole of a servant’s nature to be given to them—all her thoughts as well as her abilities—all her interests as well as all her time; and that to fall in love is a kind of petty treason and a quasi-dishonest transfer of energy. Put in this crude way, this theorem would be denied; and a dozen other reasons would be given for the confessed dislike felt by employers for a love-sick maid. Reduced to its elements, it would come to what we have said—impatience of the inevitable troubler of the conditions being one of the proofs on our side. In matters of this kind, the ‘molly-man,’ who stays at home, peeps from behind the blind and puts his fingers into all the pies aboard, is a harsher and less sympathetic person to deal with than is the average mistress, to whom a girl’s love affairs carry an echo that awakens old dreams in her own soul and gain a little compassion for the sufferer. For, after all, Betty’s love for the baker’s young man is very much the same kind of thing as Ada’s for the captain and Mabel’s for the curate; and neither the cut nor the material of the gown influences the beating of the heart which throbs beneath!
In all this, as we had occasion in a recent paper to observe, we do not excuse the faulty side of modern servants, but we should like to see inaugurated a better method of dealing with it. We should like to see the mistresses go back to the old friendly feeling and friendly intercourse with those who live under their roof, and make their happiness, by the conscientious discharge of duty—that old friendly feeling which made of the household one family, and brought the servants in line with the masters by the golden cord of human sympathy. People say that this is impossible; that the spirit of the age prevents it; that servants themselves refuse to recognise anything like personal interest from their employers; that the whole tone and character of service are changed, and that it is now only a profession, where the employed live under the roof of their employers, instead of out of the house, as with mill-hands and the like. It may be so; but if even so, we contend that the higher natures could influence the lower if they would; that knowledge could direct ignorance; and that it depends on the masters and mistresses to get good out of these changed conditions—human nature, on the whole, seeking the light, and society, like a broken crystal, mending its fractures with fresh material, to the maintenance of form and beauty.
IN ALL SHADES.
BY GRANT ALLEN,
Author of ‘Babylon,’ ‘Strange Stories,’ etc. etc.