One can usually either begin or end with Mr. Chesterton, though one
can seldom do both. “It is simpler to eat caviare on impulse than to
eat grape-nuts on principle,” he says, in one of his intervals of
pure lucidity. I should like to make a Chestertonian transposition,
and pronounce that it is better (I do not say simpler) to eat caviare
on principle than to eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the
modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has ceased to be merely
ridiculous; it has become dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices
against it?
I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my own mind, socialists and
vegetarians. But I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if
he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the
answer is in the affirmative. I am sure that they, on their side,
confuse snobs with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, were they more
bitterly logical. For my own part, I should be quite willing to go
the length of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a soul. I can
even see myself joining a “movement” for giving the vote to violets
and disfranchising orchids. This, however, is not their desire. They
do not wish to make even the ox a citizen--only a brother; and I have
never discovered that vegetarians--even when they were “hygienic,”
not “sentimental,” ones--were anxious to reproduce the history of the
rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care of itself. My point is
really that socialists and vegetarians are banded together to fight for
the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, organizes as furiously
as Capital itself; and I leave it to any one if a nut-cutlet is not
complicated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly both sects are
on the side of Procrustes against human vagaries. Both would surely
consider caviare immoral; either because no one ought to eat it, or
because every one cannot. It does not much matter, I fancy, which point
you make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. My own plea for caviare
rests precisely on the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust into
every one’s mouth. It is not simple, no. The only really “simple”
food-stuff is manna. Imagine, for example, calling anything simple that
has to be shot out of a cannon by way of preparation. In point of fact,
very few people eat caviare save on impulse,--otherwise, they find it
too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of being dogmatized; of becoming
a principle.
Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively
complicates life. The hardest command to follow has always been that
which bids us take no thought for the morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr.
Chesterton means when he talks of the difficulty of eating grape-nuts
on principle. The real drawback to “the simple life” is that it is not
simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There
is not time. For the simple life demands virtually that there shall be
no specialization. The _Hausfrau_ who is living the simple life
must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. She must also cook;
from that, even Battle Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly
of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she pared apples; but in her
secret heart she knows that either Plato or the apples suffered. And
from what point of view is it simpler to have a maid-of-all-work than
to indulge one’s self in liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the
mistress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate second footman
than to be an adequate _bonne-à-tout-faire_. We should really
simplify life by having more servants rather than fewer; more luxury
instead of less. The smoothest machinery is the most complicated; and
which of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go back to Robert Fulton’s
steamboat? One would think that the decision would be made naturally
for one by one’s income. But it is the triumph of the new paradox that
this is not so. Thousands of people seem to be infected with the idea
that by doing more themselves they bestow leisure on others; that by
wearing shabby clothes they somehow make it possible for others to
dress better--though they thus admit tacitly that leisure and elegance
are not evil things. Or perhaps--though Heaven forbid they should be
right!--they merely think that by refusing nightingales’ tongues, they
make every one more content with porridge. Let us be gallant about
the porridge that we must eat, but let us never forget that there are
better things to eat than porridge.
And all time past, was it all for this?
Times unforgotten, and treasures of things?
What is the use of throwing great museums open to the people, if
you tell them at the same time that to possess the contents of the
museums would not make a private person happier? Why should there
be _cordons bleus_ in the world, if we ought to live on bread
and milk? Above all, why have we praised, through the centuries, all
the slow processes, the tardy consummations, of perfection, if raw
material, either in art or life, is really best? I recall at this
instant a friend of mine who expresses her democracy in her footwear.
Her frocks are as charming as money can induce Paquin to make them; but
if her frocks are an insult to the poor, her boots are an insult to the
rich. I have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real lace, and out at
heel. She fancied, I think, that her inadequate boots obliterated the
deplorable social distinction between herself and her cook. In point
of fact, her cook would not have condescended to them; would not have
considered herself a “lady” if she had.
I have other friends who feel strongly the ignominy of personal
service: who agree with many ignorant young women that it is more
dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid shop-girl with a
rhinestone sunburst, than a well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid
in a uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously deprive themselves of
the parlor-maid, and spend her wages in trying to get a vote for the
shop-girl. I do not understand their distinctions in liberty, or their
definition of degradation. The parlor-maid at least can choose the
mistress, but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor-walker.
I am, myself, essentially an undomestic woman, and I dislike the
parlor-maid’s tasks to the point of feeling excessive irritation
at having, occasionally, in this mad world, to perform them. But,
seriously speaking, apart from the temperamental quirk, I would don her
clothes and follow officially her career, rather than that parlor-maids
in uniforms should pass wholly from the world. It is as if these
people said, “Since those who are parlor-maids themselves cannot very
well employ parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor-maid.” Their
factitious altruism, with all its peril, might be forgiven them; but
the misguided creatures (who are human beings and egotists, after all,
and as such must “save their face”) go on to say that it is really much
nicer not to have parlor-maids. And that lie is unpardonable, for it
strikes at the root of human experience. Parlor-maids would never have
become a convention if they had not been found desirable.
Are we really, at this late day, going to be duped by the mid-century
fallacy that “plain living and high thinking” are a natural
combination? Even if Shakespeare at New Place teaches us nothing, we
cannot fail to be impressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing home
from Lake Walden by dark, to provide himself secretly with better fare
than the woods afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried plain
living did not know that high thinking was done, if at all, in spite
of it! “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” as
Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our own front doors, polish
our own shoes, dust our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing-dish
when the cook is out; and let us do it gallantly. But let us not
pretend that it is more civilized to do these things ourselves than to
have them skilfully done for us. The prince in disguise makes the most
charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because--as all
fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us--the prince wears
his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once
have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn.
And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I say, only
reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.
Until every one is too good to be a parlor-maid, let us open our own
doors, if we must--provided we do it according to the great tradition
of door-opening; but how can we do it according to the great tradition
if we abolish parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great tradition?
And, whatever the simplifiers say, there is no doubt that, as yet,
there are, to one person who is too good for door-opening, ten persons
who are by no means good enough for it. I have never been able to
imagine just how the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver the
aristocracy of earth into the democracy of Heaven. To be sure, it is
not my affair. But at least one can have, this side the grave, little
patience with the altruisms of the Procrusteans. They merely wish to
make each of us an incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had thought
the German universities, if they had done nothing else, had blown that
bubble!
A friend of mine asked me the other day if I did not feel degraded to
be at the mercy of servants; humiliated by knowing that they could
perform domestic tasks better than I, and could take advantage of that
fact. I confess it had never occurred to me. If my cook felt degraded
by being unable to talk French, I should think her a silly snob.
Are we not all, economically, at one another’s mercy? Of what does
enthusiastic living of the “simple” life make us independent, save
of a few hard-learned and precious lessons of taste? The successful
housewife is the one who has succeeded in imitating perfectly several
trained servants. But the criterion is still the trained servant. The
distinguished beggar is the one who wears his rags as if they were
purple. But, to appreciate him, we must know the look of purple rightly
worn. The admirable vegetarian eats his shredded wheat as if it were
caviare. But where would be the beauty of his performance were not
someone, somewhere, eating caviare as if it were shredded wheat?