The Art of Living. Grant Robert
are put on their liberty. But they are undeniably servants. The free-born American mistress does not regard her servants as social equals. She expects them to stand up if they are sitting down when she enters the room. She expects them to address her sons and daughters as Mr. Samuel and Miss Fanny, and to be called in turn Maggie or Albertine (or Thompson or Jones, à l’anglaise) without a prefix. She does her best, in short, to preserve all the forms and all the deference on the one hand, and the haughtiness or condescension on the other which govern the relations between servant and mistress abroad.
From the fact that we need so many more servants than formerly, to care properly for our establishments, the servant here is becoming more and more of a machine. That is, she is in nearly the same category with the electric light and the furnace. We expect him or her to be as unobtrusive as possible, to perform work without a hitch, and not to draw upon our sympathies unnecessarily. The mistress of one or two girls is sure to grow friendly and concerned as to their outside welfare, but when she has a staff of five or six, she is thankful if she is not obliged to know anything about them. The letter which appeared in a New York newspaper some years ago, from an American girl, in which she declared that she had left service because her master and his sons handed her their dripping umbrellas with the same air as they would have handed them to a graven image, was thoroughly in point. The reason the native American girl will not become a servant, in spite of the arguments of the rational and godly, is that service is the sole employment in this country in which she can be told with impunity that she is the social inferior of any one else. It is the telling which she cannot put up with. It is one thing to be conscious that the person you are constantly associated with is better educated, better mannered, and more attractive than yourself, and it is another to be told at every opportunity that this is so. In the shop, in the factory, and in other walks of life, whatever her real superiors may think of her, they must treat her as a social equal. Even that shrill-voiced, banged, bangled, impertinent, slangy, vulgar product of our mammoth retail drygoods system, who seems to believe herself a pattern of ladylike behavior, is aware in her heart that she does not know how to behave, and yearns to resemble the well-bred woman whom she daily insults. But the happiness of her life, and its main-spring, too, lies in the consciousness that she is free to become the first lady in the land, and that she herself is to be her sole critic and detractor. Why is she not right in refusing to sacrifice her independence? Why should she sell her birthright for a mess of pottage?
An anomalous condition of affairs is presented by this contrast between the free-born American woman as a mistress and as a revolter against domestic service, and it seems to me that one of two things must come to pass. Necessarily we shall continue to have cooks, waiting-maids, and laundresses; at least our food must be prepared, our drawing-rooms dusted, and our linen ironed by some one. But either we shall have to accept and acknowledge the existence among us of a class, recruited from foreign emigrants and their descendants, which is tarred with the brush of social proscription in direct violation of democratic principles, or we must change the conditions of domestic service – change them so that condescension and servility vanish, and the contract of service becomes like the other contracts of employment between man and man, and man and woman.
It is fruitless now to inquire what the free-born American woman would have done without the foreign emigrant to cook and wash for her. The question is whether, now that she has her, she is going to keep her, and keep her in the same comfortable and well-paid but palpable thraldom as at present. If so, she will be merely imitating the housewives of the effete civilizations; she will be doing simply what every English, French, and German woman does and has done ever since class distinctions began. But in that case, surely, we shall be no longer able to proclaim our immunity from caste, and our Fourth of July orators will find some difficulty in showing that other nations are more effete in this respect than ourselves. Twenty-five years more of development in our houses, hotels, and restaurants, if conducted on present lines, will produce an enormous ducking and scraping, fee-seeking, livery-wearing servant class, which will go far to establish the claim put forth by some of our critics, that equality on this side of the water means only political equality, and that our class distinctions, though not so obvious, are no less genuine than elsewhere. In this event the only logical note of explanation to send to the Powers will be that social equality was never contemplated by the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and that, though it is true that any man may become President of the United States, there are as great inequalities in morals, intellect, and manners among sons of liberty as among the subjects of the Czar. To this the Powers will be justified in uttering a disappointed and slightly ironical “Oh!” But perhaps the foreign emigrant will have something to say on the subject. Perhaps the horde from across the seas, now lured by high wages, will decrease in numbers, or it may be that their descendants here will learn through contact with the free-born revolter against domestic service to revolt too.
What would the free-born American mistress do then? With the free-born revolter still obdurate, and the foreign emigrant ceasing to emigrate or recalcitrant, she would be in an unpleasant fix in her elaborate establishment conducted on effete principles. In this practical dilemma, rather than in an awakened moral sense, seems to lie our best hope of regeneration, for it cannot be denied that the free-born American mistress is doing all she can at present to perpetuate the foreign idea of domestic service, and it seems probable that so long as the foreign emigrant is willing to be bribed the true principles of democracy will be violated. Already the difficulty of obtaining servants is inducing home-loving families to seek the apartment-house. A more distinct dearth would speedily change the relations between mistress and servant into that of contractor and contractee, as in other employments in this country. It may be that the descendants of the emigrant will be unable to resist the lure offered them, and that the free-born mistress will triumph. If so, we shall become no better and possibly no worse than the effete civilizations we promised to make blush by the worth of our institutions.
House-Furnishing and the Commissariat
I
After a man and his wife have made up their minds whether to live in a town house or suburban villa, they are obliged to consider next what they will have in the way of furniture, and presently what they will have for dinner. The consciousness that a house has nothing in it but the barest fixtures – the gasometer, the water-tanks, and the electric wires – and that it is for you and your wife to decide exactly what shall go into it in the way of wall-papers, carpets, upholstery, and objects of virtu, is inspiring, even though your purse be not plethoric and your knowledge of æsthetics limited. The thought at once presents itself that here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you set eagerly to work to surpass your predecessors of equal means. It is a worthy ambition to endeavor to make the matrimonial nest or the home of maturer years attractive, and if we were to peer back far enough into the past of even this country, to the time when our great great-grandmothers set up housekeeping with our great great-grandfathers, we should find that furnishing was considered a seriously delightful matter, though not perhaps the almost sacred trust we regard it to-day. I mean our great great-grandparents who used to live in those charming old colonial houses, and who owned the mahogany desks with brass handles and claw feet, the tall clocks, the ravishing andirons, and all the other old-fashioned furniture which is now so precious and difficult to find. Distance may lend such enchantment to a spinning-wheel, a warming-pan, or a spinnet, that one is liable to become hysterical in praise of them, and a calm, æsthetic mind, outside the limits of an antique furniture dealer’s store, would be justified in stigmatizing many of the now cherished effects of our great great-grandparents as truck; but, on the other hand, who will dispute that they possessed very many lovely things? They had an eye for graceful shapes in their sideboards and tables; somehow the curves they imparted to the backs of their chairs cannot be duplicated now so as to look the same; and the patterns of the satins, flowered chintzes, and other stuffs which they used for covers and curtains, exercise a witchery upon us, even as we see them now frayed and faded, which cannot proceed wholly from the imagination.
They had no modern comforts, poor things; no furnaces, no ice-chests, no set bath-tubs, no running water, no sanitary improvements, no gas or electric light; and their picturesque kitchen hearths, with great caldrons and cranes and leather blowers, must have been exceedingly inconvenient to cook in; but even their most incommodious appliances were not