--“We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system,” said
my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week. By
this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the
veranda of a sea-side hotel. “As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her
salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her household
effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of
the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her
peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began
housekeeping.”
“That may all very well be,” I assented, though I did not believe it, and
I found something almost too fantastical in my friend’s scheme. “But
when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to
become of our tender and sacred associations with them?”
“What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of
ancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living,
so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the
ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used
by their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell the
bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by,
when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of
the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the
tombs of one’s forefathers could be sold without violence to their
spectres. I dare say it wouldn’t be different in the case of our tender
and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and
bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a little
further. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that
troubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed their
domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paid
the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connected
with them. I don’t suppose you would say that a man has no such
associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has them
with the stuff that has furnished it?”
“No, I shouldn’t say that.”
“If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at
each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards,
portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils,
and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to
part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated
stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff
house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing that
very thing now! Aren’t you?”
“I am--in a certain degree,” I assented.
“We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wife
and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and
slavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or
four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces we
had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and
decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of
rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We hadn’t had such light
hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe
indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our
lives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one
had been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again.”
“I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations
pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But the
things that we have in daily use?”
“It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us than
the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no
particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly
not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the
anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she
could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps
up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a
piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for
years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet
not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have
tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with
a thing we have hired?”
“I confess, I don’t know. And do you really think we could liberate
ourselves from our belongings if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t the
eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them
out for winter?”
“At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it
would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the Standard
Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty
for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of
her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical,
whatever we say about the dressmaker’s bills; and the very futilities of
putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
are founded in the instinct of saving.”
“But,” I asked, “wouldn’t our household belongings lose a good deal of
character if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t our domestic interiors
become dreadfully impersonal?”
“How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let the
different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard
Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either
would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most
interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by
character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that let
itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanly
was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift
for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp
herself upon our interiors. One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle
with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;
another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the
scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a
chair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment,
the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the
sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in
slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius. The walls
became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified
ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a
hysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had their doors painted
black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with
morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day,
thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black door and its morning-
glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt
Whitman says. No, the less we try to get personality and character into
our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be.
As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and
render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect
and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a
new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly
concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she
will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a
thing she wants, begins to hate it. The company’s agents will begin by
convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up
her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in
the region of pure aesthetics. I once asked an Italian painter if he did
not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said
‘SI. Ma troppa roba.’ There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas,
pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers. ‘Troppa roba’ is the vice of all
our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly
if it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will
teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South,
and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails
among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with.
What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?”
“That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains
are concerned,” I said, “but surely you wouldn’t apply it to pictures and
objects of art?”
“I would apply it to them first of all and above all,” rejoined my
friend, hardily. “Among all the people who buy and own such things there
is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and
the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and
degrade them further. The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the
Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real
sense of art, and a knowledge of it. When the house-letting and house-
furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would
be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for
the purpose.”
“And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
other pictures?” I sneered.
“Ancestral portraits, of course,” said my friend, with unruffled temper.
“So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
company or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of the
other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme,” my friend
concluded, “and no difficulty that can’t be easily overcome. We must
alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
I don’t care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, will
be the salvation of the eternal-womanly.”
“And the perdition of something even more precious than that!”
“What can be more precious?”
“Individuality.”
“My dear friend,” demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
gradually edging to the door, “do you mean to say there is any
individuality in such things now? What have we been saying about
character?”
“Ah, I see what you mean,” I said.