taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets,
whether of good or evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all.
It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian
Revolution, and the whole spirit of the age, have so worked on the
minds of Noblemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in
their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen
will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even
be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very illustrious
houses, will presently be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee.
Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were
going _on_, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally,
and in the attitude of servants particularly, the decades after the War
shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even
on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live
to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by
that term, as a curiosity of past days.
You have to look rather far behind you for the time when "the servant
question," as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find
servants collectively "knowing their place," as the phrase (not is,
but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's
reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards
still stood in the London parks to announce that "Ladies and Gentlemen
are requested, and Servants are commanded" not to do this and that.
But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land:
servants received commands, not requests, and were not "obliging" but
obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the
great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the
(comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of
the rapidly-increasing middle-class, were very much for use, having
to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem
nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving
much for little, or that the likes of _them_ had any natural right to
a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to
preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they
were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over
their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having
found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only
by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she
would not be cast out on the parish. She might marry meanwhile? The
chances were very much against that. That was an idea misbeseeming
her station in life. By the rules of all households, "followers" were
fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was
not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time,
after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at
all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and
elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of
money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had
no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a
tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl
and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her
restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour
from the second or third generation of her owners. As in ancient Rome
and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much
good feeling on either side. "Poor Anne remained very servile in soul
all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen
to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own." Thus
wrote Ruskin, in _Praeterita_, of one who had been his nurse, and his
father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But
Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when,
in 1885, he wrote _Praeterita_. Long before that date, moreover, others
than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.
Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulous clouds. It was
believed, however, that these would pass. _Punch_, our ever-quick
interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate
the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano!
_Punch_ and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very
merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite
ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her
soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature?
Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some
should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive
in basements. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were
many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian
Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It
is unlikely that no English ladies were so in 'sixties. Pity, after
all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the "some" a measure of the gulf
between themselves and the "others." Those others had now begun to show
signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.
Anthony Trollope was not, like _Punch_, a mere interpreter of what was
upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and
subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget
that I am reading about fictitious characters and careers; quite soon
do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer
conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must
often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given _Orley
Farm_? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir
Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? "As she slowly made her
way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had
now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I
trust but few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering"--and
here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he
seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon
be plain, ask you not to skip a word--"we call on the mountains to fall
and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with
an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these
moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for
their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept
silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pass down towards the
entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in
the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible
to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her
in. This was her burden, and she must," etc., etc.
You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't
any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when
_Orley Farm_ was published. Servants really were "most desolate" in
those days, and "their sufferings" were less acute only than those of
gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well,
it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust
Trollope.
Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to
be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a
servant girl passing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other
words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time
than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this
amelioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim
that it did. Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep
till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly
aroused, nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to
make themselves thoroughly disagreeable; and not even then will it be
up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience
at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am
afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I
am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to
decide in what year servants passed from wistfulness to resentment, or
from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it
is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping
through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering
all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I
should find in Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb's _History of Trade Unionism_
the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem
that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not
have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere
Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked
wonders. There has been no servant's campaign, no strategy, nothing
but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in
isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are
not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they
glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other
forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic
service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing
itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to
read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief.
Had the governing classes not forced those accomplishments on them in
1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On
the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone. Housework, for
example. What concessions by the governing classes, what bribes, will
be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing
classes--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers,
male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human
happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of
human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any
scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of
conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in
every flat (houses not legal) would be assigned one female member of
the community. She would be twenty years old, having just finished
her course of general education at a municipal college. Three years
would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet,
her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised,
but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her
own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct,
and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be
penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand,
made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred
to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their licence
to employ. There would always be chances of friction. But these chances
would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of
system which survives to-day.
Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain
tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all
their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not
knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wishing all the while
they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere.
Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock
to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their
demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems
almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said "Sarah,
your master wishes----" or Mr. Smith said "Sarah, go up and ask your
mistress whether----" I am well aware that the very title of this essay
jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more
explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the
survival of domestic service in its old form depends more and more on
our agreement not to mention it.
Assuredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all,
worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly
so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of
yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the
corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he
noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander
to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good.
But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle
cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well
enough, no doubt. I myself am old enough to have known two or three
servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them
there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never
wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long
years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness,
the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of
staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same
things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots,
and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great
wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no, personally I
admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but
I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin to be so now. For
a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public
worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to
stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout
old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the
hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort.
Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather
say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful
form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the
hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as indigenous as the pond
there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through
by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable
dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the
flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate.
It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on
Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted
to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal
to that village. In the course of his life he had "bin down to London
a matter o' three or four times," he would tell me, "an' slep' there
once." He knew me to be a native of that city, and (for he was the
most respectful of men) did not make any adverse criticism of it. But
clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities
were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of
men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some
pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when
he was a boy, "a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small
cart, takin' a pictur'." To me Ford Madox Brown's "Work" is of all
modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in
conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great
pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend
himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days
before he was "took on as stable-lad at the Castle." _His_ pride was in
the Castle, wholly.
Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at
finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to
districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there
an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to
butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them
that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it
is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger;
and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and
stout. At the close of the last century they had gradually relapsed
into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in the years that
followed they were passing back behind the prime of life, becoming
willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of the past decades
was undone: butlers were suddenly as old and stout as ever they were,
and so they still are. But this, I take it, was only a temporary
set-back. Since peace came, butlers have reappeared as they were in
1915, and maybe will soon be losing height and weight too, till they
shall have become bright-eyed children, with pattering feet. Or will
their childhood be of a less gracious kind than that? I fear so. I
have seen, from time to time, butlers who had shed all semblance of
grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a manifesto of contempt for
their calling and of devotion to the Spirit of the Age. I have seen
a butler in a well-established household strolling around the diners
without the slightest droop, and pouring out wine in an off-hand and
quite obviously hostile manner. I have seen him, towards the end of the
meal, yawning. I remember another whom, positively, I heard humming--a
faint sound indeed, but menacing as the roll of tumbrils.
These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers
observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless
as their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern
though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was
"a flame of old-world fealty all bright." Were these but the finer
comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost
dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch in
a merely æsthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his movements
were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control. Baldness at the
temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth face. It is more
than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a long period I saw
him often, both in town and country. Against the background of either
house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be that. Brett's supremacy
was in the sense he gave one that he was, after all, human--that he
had a heart, in which he had taken the liberty to reserve a corner
for any true friend of his master and mistress. I remember well the
first time he overstepped sheer formality in relation to myself. It
was one morning in the country, when my entertainers and my fellow
guests had gone out in pursuit of some sport at which I was no good.
I was in the smoking room, reading a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never
appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett appeared, paused at precisely the
right speaking distance, and said in a low voice, "I thought it might
interest you to know, sir, that there's a white-tailed magpie out on
the lawn. Very rare, as you know, sir. If you look out of the window
you will see the little fellow hopping about on the lawn." I thanked
him effusively as I darted to the window, and simulated an intense
interest in "the little fellow." I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett,
having done his to perfection.
What worries me is not that I showed so little self-command and so
much insincerity, but the doubt whether Brett's flawless technique
was the vehicle for an act of true good feeling or was used simply
for the pleasure of using it. Similar doubts abide in all my special
memories of him. There was an evening when he seemed to lose control
over himself--but did he _really_ lose it? There were only four people
at dinner: my host, his wife, their nephew (a young man famous for
drollery) and myself. Towards the end of dinner the conversation had
turned on early marriages. "I," said the young man presently, "shall
not marry till I am seventy. I shall then marry some charming girl of
seventeen." His aunt threw up her hands, exclaiming, "Oh, Tom, what a
perfectly horrible idea! Why, she isn't _born_ yet!" "No," said the
young man, "but I have my eye on her mother." At this, Brett, who was
holding a light for his master's cigarette, turned away convulsively,
with a sudden dip of the head, and vanished from the room. His
breakdown touched and pleased all four beholders. But--was it a genuine
lapse? Or merely a feint to thrill us?--the feint of an equilibrist so
secure that he can pretend to lose his balance?
If I knew why Brett ceased to be butler in that household, I might
be in less doubt as to the true inwardness of him. I knew only that
he was gone. That was fully ten years ago. Since then I have had one
glimpse of him. This was on a summer night in London. I had gone out
late to visit some relatives and assure myself that they were safe and
sound; for Zeppelins had just passed over London for the first time.
Not so much horror as a very deep disgust was the atmosphere in the
populous quiet streets and squares. One square was less quiet than
others, because somebody was steadily whistling for a taxi. Anon I
saw the whistler silhouetted in the light cast out on a wide doorstep
from an open door, and I saw that he was Brett. His attitude, as he
bent out into the dark night, was perfect in grace, but eloquent of a
great tensity--even of agony. Behind him stood a lady in an elaborate
evening cloak. Brett's back must have conveyed to her in every curve
his surprise, his shame, that she should be kept waiting. His chivalry
in her behalf was such as Burke's for Marie Antoinette--little had he
dreamed that he should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon
her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour, and of
cavaliers. He had thought ten thousand taxis must have leaped from
their stands, etc. The whistle that at first sounded merely mechanical
and ear-piercing had become heart-rending and human when I saw from
whom it proceeded--a very heart-cry that still haunts me. But _was_ it
a heart-cry? Was Brett, is Brett, more than a mere virtuoso?