THE OPEN DOOR
Americans are forced by the restlessness of their nature to move about
frequently from house to house, but they have arranged that each
temporary abode is very comfortable. They are ahead of the English in
their domestic arrangements. I pay this tribute to them very
unwillingly, because I myself am more at my ease in an inconveniently
arranged house. That is because I am accustomed to inconvenience. The
English houses are greatly superior to the Irish, therefore to go
straight from an Irish house to an American, from Connaught to Chicago,
is to plunge oneself too suddenly into strangely civilized surroundings.
I admire, but I fear it would be years before I could enjoy, an American
house. I go to bed most contentedly in a bedroom in which a single
candle lights a little circle round it, leaving dim, fascinating spaces
in which anything may lurk. I like when the candle is extinguished to
see a faint glow of light from a fire reflected on the ceiling. I find
it pleasant to remember, after I have got into bed, that I do not know
in what part of the room I left the matches, that if I awake in the
night and want the light I must go on a dangerous and exciting quest,
feeling my way toward the dressing table, sweeping one thing after
another off it while I pass my hand along in search of the matchbox. The
glare of the electric light robs bed-going of its romance. The
convenient switch beside my hand cuts me off from all chance of midnight
adventure.
I like to get out of bed on a frosty morning and find myself in a
thoroughly cold room. The effort to do this very trying thing braces me
for the day. I slip a hand, an arm, a foot, from the blankets, feel the
nip of the air, draw them back again, go through a period of intense
mental struggle, make a gallant effort, fling all the bedclothes from me
and stand shivering on the floor. I feel then that I am a strong,
virtuous man, fit to go forth and conquer. The glow of righteousness
becomes even more delightful if I find a film of ice on the water of my
jug and break it with the handle of a toothbrush. All this is denied me
in an American house. Getting out of bed there is no real test of moral
courage. The room is pleasantly warm, a sponge is soft and pliable, not
a frozen stone.
I like, where this is still possible, to have my bath in a large tin
dish, shallow and flat, which stands in the middle of the bedroom floor
with a mat under it. There are fine old Irish houses in which this
delightful way of bathing still survives. Alas! they are, even in
Ireland, getting fewer every day. The next best thing is to wander down
chilly corridors in search of the single bathroom which the house
contains. This is, fortunately, still necessary in most English and
nearly all Irish houses. Any one who is fond of the amusement of reading
house agents' advertisements must have noticed the English economy in
bathrooms. "Handsome mansion, four reception rooms, lounge hall,
billiard room, fifteen bedrooms, bath, hot and cold." I do not believe
that there is a house like that in all America. Imagine the excitement
of living in it when all the fifteen bedrooms are full. It stimulates a
man to feel, as he sallies forth with his towel over his arm, that any
one of the other fourteen inhabitants may have reached the bath before
him, that thirteen people may possibly be waiting in a queue outside the
door. To get into the bathroom in a house of that kind at the first
attempt must be like holding a hand at bridge with four aces, four
kings, four queens and a knave in it, a thing worth living and waiting
for. In America all this is denied us. A bathroom, luxuriously arranged,
adjoins each bedroom. Washing is made so ridiculously easy that there
ceases to be any virtue in it. No one would say in America that
cleanliness is next to godliness. There is no connection between the two
things. It would be as sensible to say that breathing is a subordinate
kind of virtue. In England a dressing gown is well-nigh a necessity. I
know a thoughtful host who provides one for his guests; a warm
voluminous garment in which it is possible to go comfortably to the
bathroom. In America a dressing gown, for a man, is a useless
incumbrance. I dragged one with me, but I shall never take it again;
for, like many other things, it is misnamed. It is only when one has to
stop dressing that a dressing gown is any use.
In these matters of the heating of houses and the arrangement of baths I
prefer what I am accustomed to, but I know that I am little better than
a barbarian. I might, if I had lived in the days when matches were first
invented, have sighed for my flint and steel, but I hope I should have
recognized the superiority of matches. I might, in the early days of
railways, have wished to go on traveling in stage coaches, but I should
have known that steam engines are really better things than horses at
dragging heavy weights for long distances. Thus I cling to the romance
of icy bedrooms and inconvenient baths, but I acknowledge freely that
the Americans have found the better way and made a step forward along
the road of human progress.
I am not, however, so obstinately conservative as to fail in
appreciating some other points in the American mastery of the domestic
arts. I may long for chilly rooms and remote baths, but I thoroughly
enjoy clean towels. Never have I met so many clean towels as in America.
The English middle-class housekeeper is behind her French sister in the
provision of towels, but the American is ahead even of France. The
American towel is indeed small, the bath towel particularly small; but
that seems to me a trifling matter, hardly worth mentioning, when the
supply is abundant. I would rather any day have three small apples than
one large one, and my feeling about towels is the same. It is a real
pleasure to find a row of clean ones waiting every time it becomes
necessary to wash. It is certainly a mark of superior civilization to
realize the importance of house linen in daily life. On the other hand,
it must be admitted that the American fails in the matter of sheets.
What you get are good, very good, smooth and cool. You are constantly
given clean ones. But they are not long enough. In England the sheet on
your bed covers your feet completely and leaves a broad flap at the
other end which you can turn over the blankets and tuck under your chin.
In America you must either leave your feet sheetless or be content with
a mere ribbon of linen under your chin, a narrow strip which will
certainly wriggle away during the night. This may not be the fault of
the American housekeeper. There may be some kind of linen drapers' trust
which baffles the efforts of reformers. I have heard that in one of the
western states, where the suffrage has been granted to women, a law has
been passed that all sheets must be made eighteen inches longer than
they usually are in the other American states. That law is a strong
proof of the advantages to the community of allowing women to vote. It
also seems to show that the American woman, at all events, is alive to
the necessity of reform in this matter of sheets, and is determined to
do her best to remedy a defect in her household management.
The disuse of doors in those parts of the house which are inhabited
during the daytime is a very interesting feature of American domestic
life. The first action of an Englishman when he enters a room is to shut
the door. His first duty when leaving it, if any one remains inside, is
to shut the door. No well-trained servant ever leaves a door open unless
specially requested to do so. Children, from their very earliest years,
are taught to shut doors, and punished—it is one of the few things for
which a child is systematically punished now—for leaving doors open. An
English mother calls after her child as he leaves the room the single
word "door," or, if she is a very polite and affectionate mother, two
words, "door, dear," or "door, please." An American child would not
understand a request made in this elliptical form. It knows of course
what a door is, just as it knows what a wall is, but it would be puzzled
by the mere utterance of the word, just as an English child would be if
its mother suddenly called to it, "wall," or "wall, dear," or "wall,
please." The American child would wonder what its mother wanted to say
about a door. The English child understands thoroughly in the same way
as we all understand what a dentist means when he says, "Open, please."
It is never our favorite books, our tightly clenched hands, or our
screwed up eyes which he wants us to open, always our mouths. The word
"open" is enough for us. So the word "door" through a long association
of ideas at once suggests to the English child the idea of shutting it.
An Englishman is thoroughly uncomfortable in a room with the door open.
An American's feeling about shut doors was very well expressed to me by
a lady who had been paying a number of visits to friends in England.
"English houses," she said, "always seem to me like hotels. When you go
into them you see nothing except shut doors."
If, after due apologies, you ask why Americans have no doors between
their sitting-rooms, or why, when they have doors, they do not use them,
you always get the same answer.
"Doors," they say, "are necessary in England to keep out draughts,
because the English do not know how to heat their houses. In our houses
all rooms and passages are kept up to an even temperature and we do not
require doors."
This is an intelligible but not the real explanation of this curious
difference between the Americans and the English. There are some English
homes which are centrally heated and in which the temperature is as
even, though rarely as high, as in American houses; but the Englishmen
who live in them still shut doors. An Englishman would shut the door of
the inner chamber of a Turkish bath if there were a door to shut. In
summer, when the days are very warm, he opens all the windows he can,
but he does not sit with the door open. Temperature has nothing to do
with his fondness for doors. In the same way there are in America some
houses which are not centrally heated, very old-fashioned houses, but
they are as doorless as the others. The fact seems to be not that doors
were disused when central heating became common, but that central
heating was invented so that people who disliked doors could be warm
without them.
I think the lady who told me that the English houses seemed like hotels
to her hinted at the real explanation. The open door is a symbol of
hospitality. It is the expression of sociability of disposition. The
Americans are hospitable and marvelously sociable. They naturally like
to live among open doors or with no doors at all, so that any one can
walk up to him and speak to him without difficulty. The Englishman, on
the other hand, wants to keep other people away from him, even members
of his own family. His dearest desire is to have some room of his own
into which he can shut himself, where no one has a right to intrude. He
calls it his "den," which means the lurking place of a morose and
solitary animal. Rabbits, which are sociable creatures, live in burrows.
Bees, which have perfected the art of life in community, have hives. The
bear has its den. Every room in an old-fashioned English middle-class
house is really a den, though sometimes, as in the case of the
drawing-room, a den which is meant for the use of several beasts of the
same kind at once. A change is indeed coming slowly over English life in
this matter. The introduction into the middle classes of what is called
by house agents "the lounge hall" is a departure from the "den" theory
of domestic life. The "lounge hall" is properly speaking a public room.
It is available at all hours of the day and no one claims it specially
as his own. It is accessible at once to the stranger who comes into the
house from the street. It is still rare in England, but where it exists
it marks an approach toward American ideals. The term "living-room" only
lately introduced by architects into descriptions of English houses is
another sign that we are becoming more sociable than we were. It is not
simply another name for a drawing-room. It stands for a new idea, an
American idea. The drawing-room—properly the withdrawing-room—is for
the use of people who want to escape temporarily from family life. The
living-room for those who live it to the full.
In the American house there are no "dens." The American likes to feel
that he is in direct personal contact with the members of his family and
with his guest. It does not annoy him, even if he happen to be reading a
book on economics, to feel that his wife may sit down beside him or his
daughter walk past the back of his chair humming a tune without his
having had any warning that either of them was at hand. The noise made
by a servant collecting knives and plates after dinner, reaching him
through a drawn curtain, does not disturb his enjoyment of a cigar. The
servant is to him a fellow human being, and the sound of her activities
is a pleasant reminder of the comradeship of man. He too has had his
moments of activity during the day. A guest in an American house is for
the time being a member of the family, not a stranger who, however
welcome he may be, does not presume to intrude upon his host's privacy.
The "porch," as it is called, a striking feature of the American house,
is another evidence of the spirit of sociability. A "porch" is a
glorified and perfected veranda. In summer it is a large open-air
sitting-room. In winter it can, by a common arrangement, be made into a
kind of sun parlor. It has its roof, supported by wooden posts. When the
cold weather comes, frames, like very large window sashes, are fitted
between the posts and a glass-sided room is made. It is evident that the
life in these porches is of a very public kind. The passer-by, the
casual wanderer along the road outside, sees the American family in its
porch, can, if he cares to, note what each member of the family is
doing. The American has no objection to this publicity. He is not doing
anything of which he is the least ashamed. If other people can see him,
he can see them in return. The arrangement gratifies his instinct for
sociability. The Englishman, on the other hand, hates to be seen.
Nothing would induce him to make a habit of sitting in a veranda. Even
in the depths of the country, when his house is a long way from the
road, he fits thin muslin curtains across the lower part of his windows.
These keep out a good deal of light and in that way are annoying to him,
but he puts up with gloom rather than run any risk, however small, that
a stranger, glancing through the window, might actually see him. Yet the
Englishman commonly leads a blameless life in his own home. He seldom
employs his leisure in any shameful practices. His casement curtains are
simply evidences of an almost morbid love of privacy.
The first thing an Englishman does when he builds a house is to surround
it with a high wall. This, indeed, is not an English peculiarity. It
prevails all over western Europe. It is a most anti-social custom and
ought to be suppressed by law, because it robs many people of a great
deal of innocent pleasure. The suburbs of Dublin, to take an example,
ought to be very beautiful. There are mountains to the south and hills
to the west and north of the city, all of them lovely in outline and
coloring. There is a wide and beautiful bay on the east. But the casual
wayfarer cannot see either the mountains or the bay. He must walk
between high yellow walls, walls built, I suppose, round houses; but we
can only know this by hearsay. For the walls hide the houses as well as
the view. In Sorrento, which is even more exquisitely situated than
Dublin, you walk for miles and miles between high walls, white in this
case. The only difference between the view you see at Dublin and that
which you see at Sorrento is that the patch of sky you see in Dublin is
gray, at Sorrento generally blue. At Cintra, one of the world's most
famous beauty spots, the walls are gray, and there you cannot even see
the sky, because the owners of the houses inside the walls have planted
trees and the branches of the trees meet over the road. The Americans do
not build walls round their houses. The humblest pedestrian, going afoot
through the suburbs of Philadelphia, Indianapolis or any other city,
sees not only the houses but anything in the way of a view which lies
beyond them.
This is not because America is a republic and therefore democratic in
spirit. Portugal is a republic too, having very vigorously got rid of
its king, but the walls of Cintra are as high as ever. No one in the
world is more democratic than an English Liberal, but the most
uncompromising Liberals build walls round their houses as high as those
of any Tory. The absence of walls in America is simply another evidence
of the wonderful sociability of the people. Walls outside houses are
like doors inside. The European likes both because the desire of privacy
is in his blood. The American likes neither.
The "Country Club" is an institution which could flourish only among a
very sociable people. There are of course clubs of many sorts in
England. There is the club proper, the club without qualification, which
is found at its very best in London. In books like Whitaker's Almanac,
which classify clubs, it is described as "social," but this is only
intended to distinguish it from political or sporting clubs. There is no
suggestion that it is sociable, and in fact it is not. It is possible to
belong to a club in London for years without knowing a dozen of your
fellow members. It often seems as if the members of these clubs went to
them mainly for the purpose of not getting to know each other; a
misfortune which might happen to them anywhere else, but from which they
are secure in their clubs. There are also all over England clubs
specially devoted to particular objects, golf clubs, yacht clubs and so
forth. In these the members are drawn together by their interest in a
common pursuit, and are forced into some sort of acquaintanceship. But
these are very different in spirit and intention from the American
Country Club. It exists as a kind of center of the social life of the
neighborhood. There may be and often are golf links connected with it.
There are tennis courts, sometimes swimming baths. There is always a
ball-room. There are luncheon rooms, tea rooms, reading rooms. In
connection with one such club which I saw there are sailing matches for
a one design class of boats. But neither golf nor tennis, dancing nor
sailing, is the object of the club's existence. Sport is encouraged by
these clubs for the sake of general sociability. In England sociability
is a by-product of an interest in sport.
The Country Club at Tuxedo is not perhaps the oldest, but it is one of
the oldest institutions of the kind in America. In connection with it a
man can enjoy almost any kind of recreation from a Turkish bath to a
game of tennis, either the lawn or the far rarer original kind. At the
proper time of year there are dances, and a débutante acquires, I
believe, a certain prestige by "coming out" at one of them. But the club
exists primarily as the social center of Tuxedo. It is in one way the
ideal, the perfect country club. It not only fosters, it regulates and
governs the social life of the place.
Tuxedo has been spoken of as a millionaire's colony. It is a settlement,
if not of millionaires, at all events of wealthy people. The park, an
immense tract of land, is owned by the club. Ground for building can be
obtained only by those who are elected members of the club and who are
prepared to spend a certain sum as a minimum on the building of their
houses. In theory the place is reserved for people who either do or will
know each other socially, who are approximately on the same level as
regards wealth and who all want to meet each other frequently, for one
purpose or another, in the club. In practice, certain difficulties
necessarily arise. A man may be elected a member of the club and build a
house. He may be a thoroughly desirable person, but in course of time he
dies. His son may be very undesirable, or his son may sell the house to
some one whom the club is not willing to admit to membership. But Tuxedo
society, instead of becoming, as might have been expected, a very narrow
clique, seems to be singularly broad minded and tolerant. The difficulty
of preserving the character of the place and keeping a large society
together as, in all its essentials, a club, is very much less than might
be expected. The place is extremely interesting to any observer of
American social life. The club regulates everything. It runs a private
police force for the park. It keeps up roads. It supplies electric light
and, what is hardly less necessary in America, ice to all the houses. It
levies, though I suppose without any actual legal warrant, regular
rates. The fact that the experiment was not wrecked long ago on the
rocks of snobbery goes to show that society in America is singularly
fluid compared to that of any European country. That a considerable
number of people should want to live together in such a way is a witness
to the sociability of America. No other country club has realized its
ideal as the club at Tuxedo has, but every country club—and you find
them all over America—has something of the spirit of Tuxedo.
Tuxedo is immensely interesting in another way. Nowhere else in the
world, I suppose, is it possible to see so many different kinds of
domestic architecture gathered together in a comparatively small space.
A walk round the shores of the lake gives you an opportunity of seeing
houses built in the dignified and spacious colonial style, a happy
modification of the English Georgian. Beside one of these, close to it,
may be a house like that of a Mexican rancher, and the hill behind is
crowned with a French château. There are houses which must have had
Italian models, others which suggest memories of Tudor manor houses,
others built after the fashion of Queen Anne's time. There are houses
whose architects evidently had an eclectic appreciation of all the
houses built anywhere or at any time, who had tried to embody the most
desirable features of very various styles in one building. The general
effect of a view of Tuxedo is exceedingly bewildering at first, but
almost every house is the expression of some individual tastes, either
good or bad. An architect may start, apparently very often does start,
with the idea of building a house with twelve rooms in it at a cost of
four thousand pounds. Having thus settled size and price, he may go
ahead, trusting to luck about the appearance. Or an architect may start
with the idea of building a house in a certain style, or to express some
feeling, dignity, homeliness, grandeur, or anything else. The architects
who built the Tuxedo houses all seem to have gone to work on the latter
plan.
If the Tuxedo experiment in social life fails and the club goes into
liquidation, the United States Government might do worse than buy the
whole place as it stands and turn it into a college of domestic
architecture. The students could, without traveling more than a mile or
two, study every known kind of country house. But, indeed, a college of
this sort seems less needed in America than anywhere else. It is not
only the insides of the houses which are well planned. The outsides of
the newer houses are for the most part beautiful to look at. And one can
see them, there being no walls.