disruptive factors, such as the restaurant dinner, the week-end, the
long and frequent holidays, the motor car, the spread of golf, is
inimical to the home idea and, therefore, to the house idea. (Home means
house, and does not mean flat, for which see further on.) The home idea
is complex; it embraces privacy, possession; it implies a place where
one can retreat, be master, be powerful in a small sphere, take off
one's boots, be sulky or pleasant, as one likes. It involves, above all,
a place where one does not hear the neighbor's piano, or the neighbor's
baby, or, with luck, the neighbor's cat; but where, on the other hand,
one's own piano, one's own baby, and one's own cat are raised to a high
and personal pitch of importance. It involves everything that is
individual--one's own stationery block, one's crest, or, if one is not
so fortunate, one's monogram upon the plate. If the S.P.C.A. did not
intervene, I think one might often see in the front garden a cat branded
with a hot iron: "Thomas Jones. His Cat." It is the rallying-point of
domestic virtue, the origin of domestic tyranny. It is the place where
public opinion cannot see you and where, therefore, you may behave
badly. Most wife beaters live in houses; in flats they would be afraid
of the opinion of the hall porter. And yet the home is not without its
charm and its nobility, for its bricks and mortar enshrine a spirit that
is worshiped and for which much may be sacrificed. Cigars have been
given up so that the home might have a new coat of paint; amusements,
holidays, food sometimes--all these have been sacrificed so that, well
railed off from the outside world by a front garden, if possible by a
back garden, too--or, still more delightful, far from the next house--a
little social cosmos might be maintained. So far has this gone in the
north of England that many people who could well afford servants will
not have them because, as they say, they cannot bear strangers in the
house. And very desirable houses in the suburbs of London, with old,
walled gardens, have been given up because it was unbearable to take tea
under the eyes of passengers on the top of the motor busses.
The home spirit, however, is not content merely with coats of paint and
doilies; it demands mental as well as material worship. It demands
importance; it insists that it is home, sweet home, and that there is no
place like it (which is one comfort); that it is the last thought of the
drowning sailor; that the trapper, lost in the deepest forests of
Canada, sees rising in the smoke of his lonely camp fire a delicious
vision of Aunt Maria's magenta curtains. It lays down that it is wrong
to leave it, quite apart from the question of burglars; it has invented
scores of phrases to justify otherwise unpleasant husbands who had
"given a good home" to their wives; phrases to censure revolting
daughters "who had good homes, and what more could they want?" It has
frowned upon everything that was outside itself, for it could not see
anything that was not itself. It has hated theaters, concerts, dances,
lectures, every form of amusement; and, as it has to bear them, likes to
refer to them archly as debauches, or going on the razzle-dazzle, or the
ran-dan, according to period. It has powerfully allied itself with the
pulpit and, in impious circles, with fancy work and crochet; it has
enlisted a considerable portion of the Royal Academy to depict it in
various scenes for which the recipe is: One tired man with a sunny smile
returning to his home; one delighted wife; suitable number of ebullient
children and, inevitably, a dog. The dog varies. In England they
generally put in a terrier, in war time a bulldog; in Germany it may be
a dachshund; and in other countries it is another kind of dog, but it is
always the same idea.
And so it is not wonderful that the home has looked censoriously upon
everything that took people away from its orbit. Likewise it is not
wonderful that people have fled to anything available so as to escape
the charmed circle. The week-end is in general a very over-rated
amusement, for it consists mainly in packing and preparing to catch a
train, then thinking of packing and catching a train, then packing and
catching a train; but still the week-end amounts to a desertion, and
hardly a month passes without a divine laying of savage hands upon the
excursion. There was a time when holidays themselves were looked upon as
audacious breaches of the conventions. In the early nineteenth century
nobody went to Brighton except the Regent and the smart set; even in the
Thackerayan period people did not think it necessary to leave London in
August, and when they took the Grand Tour they were bent on improving
their minds. The Kickleburys could not go up the Rhine without a
powerful feeling of self-consciousness; I think they felt that they were
outraging the Victorian virtues, so they had to make up for it by taking
a guide, who for four or five weeks lectured them day and night upon the
ruins of Godesberg. All this was opposed to the spirit of the home, just
as anything which is outside the home is opposed to the spirit of the
home, as was, for instance, every dance that has ever been known. In the
_Observer_, in 1820, appeared a poem expressing horror and disgust of
the waltz, and, curiously enough, very much in the same terms as the
diatribes in the American papers of 1914 against the turkey trot and
the bunny hug. When the polka came in, in the middle of the nineteenth
century, good people clustered to see it danced, just like the more
recent tango, and it was considered very fast. All this may appear
somewhat irrelevant, but my case is mainly that the old attitude, now
decaying, is that anything that happened outside the home, whether sport
or amusement, was anything between faintly and violently evil. The old
ideal of home was concentrated in Sunday: a long night; heavy breakfast;
church; walk in the park; heavy dinner, including roast beef; profound
sleep in the dining room; heavy tea; then nothing whatever; church;
heavy supper; nothing whatever; then sleep. There is not much of this
left, and from the moment when Sunday concerts began and the picture
galleries were opened, when chess was played and the newspaper read, the
old solidities of the home trembled, for the home was an edifice from
which one could not take one stone.
In chorus with the cry for new pleasures, the reaction against the old
discomfort, came a more powerful influence still, because it was
direct--the servant problem. The Americans know this question, I think,
better even than the British, for in their country a violent democracy
rejects domestic service and compels, I believe, the use of recent
emigrants from old enslaved Europe who have not yet breathed the
aggressive and ambitious air that has touched the Stars and Stripes. In
Great Britain the crisis is not yet, and it may never come, for this is
not the English way. In England we are aware of a crisis only fifty
years later, because for that half-century we have successfully
pretended that there was no crisis. So we come in just in time for the
reaction, and say: "There you are. I told you nothing was changed." Yet,
so persistent is the servant problem that even England has had to take
some notice of it. As Mr. Wells said, the supply of rough, hardworking
girls began to shrink. It shrank because so many opportunities for the
employment of women were offered by the factories which arose in England
in the 'forties and the 'fifties, by the demand for waitresses, for
shorthand writers, typists, shopgirls, elementary schoolmistresses, etc.
The Education Act of 1870 gave the young English girls of that day a
violent shock, for it informed them of the existence of Paris, assisted
them toward the piano. And then came the development of the factory
system, the spread of cheapness; with the rise in wages came a rising
desire for pretty, cheap things almost as pretty as the dear ones;
substitutes for costly stuffs were found; compositions replaced ivory,
mercerized cotton rivaled silk, and little by little the young girl of
the people discovered that with a little cleverness she could look quite
as well as the one whom her mother called "Madam"; so she ceased to call
her "Madam." Labor daily grows more truculent, so there is no knowing
what she will call the ex-Madam next; but one thing is certain, and that
is that she will not serve her. She will not, because she looks upon
service as ignominious; she has her own pride; she will not tell you
that she is in a shop, but that she is "in business"; if she is "in
service", often she will say nothing about it at all, for the other
girls, who work their eleven hours a day for a few shillings a week,
despise her. They at least have fixed hours and they do not "live in";
when they have done their work they are free. They may have had less to
eat that day than the comfortable parlor-maid, and maybe they have less
in their pockets, but they are free, and they do not hesitate to show
their contempt to the helot. I think that new pride has done as much as
anything to crush the old, large, unwieldy home, for its four stories
and its vast basement needed many steady, hardworking slaves, who only
spoke when they were spoken to and always obeyed. It is not that
mistresses were bad; some were and some were not, but from the modern
girl's point of view they were all bad because they had power at any
time of day or night to demand service, to impose tasks that were not
contracted for, to forbid the house to the servant's friends, to make
her loves difficult, to forbid her even to speak to a man. Whether the
mistress so behaved did not matter; she had the power, and in a society
growingly individual, growingly democratic, that was bound to become a
heavy yoke.
And so, very slowly, the modern evolution began. The first to go were
the immense houses of Kensington, Paddington, Bayswater,
Bloomsbury,--those old houses within hail of Hyde Park,--which once held
large families, all of them anxious to live not too far from the Court.
They fell because it was almost impossible to afford enough servants to
keep in order their three or four reception rooms, and their eight, ten,
twelve bedrooms; they fell because the birth rate shrank, and the large
families of the early nineteenth century became exceptional; they fell
also because the old rigidity, or rather the stateliness, of the home
was vanishing; because the lady of the house ventured to have tea in her
drawing-room when there were no callers, and little by little came to
leave newspapers about in it and to smoke in it. With the difficulties
of the old houses came a demand for something smaller, requiring less
labor. This accounts for the villas, of which some four hundred thousand
have been built in the suburbs of London, in the villages London has
absorbed. They are atrocious imitations of the most debased Elizabethan
style; they show concrete where they should use stone, but, as their
predecessors showed stucco, they are not much worse. They exhibit
painted black stripes where there should be beams; they have sloping
roofs, gables, dormer windows, everything cunningly arranged to make as
many corners as possible where no chair can stand. They have horrid
little gardens where the builder has buried many broken bricks, sardine
tins, and old hats; they represent the taste of the twentieth century;
they are quite abominable. But still the fact remains that they are
infinitely smaller, more manageable, more intelligently planned than
the spacious old houses of the past, where every black cupboard bred
the cockroach and the mouse. They are easy to warm and easy to clean;
their windows are not limited by the old window tax; they have bathrooms
even when their rent is only one hundred and fifty dollars a year; and
especially they have no basement. The disappearance of the basement is
one of the most significant aspects of the downfall of the old
household, for it was essentially the servants' floor, where they could
be kept apart from their masters, maintaining their own sports and the
mysterious customs of a strange people; when the door of the kitchen
stairs was shut, one would keep out everything connected with the
servants, except perhaps the smell of the roast leg of mutton. That did
not matter, for that was homelike. The basement was a vestige of feudal
English society; it was brother to the servants' quarters and the
servants' hall. Now it is gone. In many places the tradesmen's entrance
has vanished, and the cabbage comes to the front door. The sacred
suppressions are no more, and in a developing democracy the master and
mistress of the house stately dine, while on the other side of a wall
about an inch thick Jane can be heard conversing with the policeman.
The growth of the small house has never stopped during the last forty or
fifty years. A builder in the southwest of London, of whom I made
inquiries, told me that he had erected four hundred and twenty houses,
and that not one of them had a basement; this form of architecture had
not even occurred to him. I have also visited very many homes in the
suburbs of London, and I have looked in vain for the old precincts of
the serving maid. The small house has powerfully affected the old
individual attitude of home, for the hostile dignity of the past cannot
survive when one man mows the lawn and the other clips the roses, each
in his own garden, separated only by three sticks and some barbed wire.
In detached houses it is worse, for they are now so close together that
in certain architectural conditions preliminaries are required before
one can take a private bath. The whole direction of domestic
architecture is against the individual and for the group. The modern
home takes away even the old stores; there are no more pickle cupboards
and jam cupboards, and hardly linen cupboards. Why should there be when
jam and pickles come from the grocer, and few men have more than twelve
shirts? There is not even a store for coal. Some years ago I lived in a
house that was built in 1820, and its coal cellar held eight tons; I now
inhabit one, built in 1860, in which I can accommodate four tons; the
house now being built in the suburbs cannot receive more than one ton.
The evolution of the coal cellar is a little the evolution of English
society from the time when every man had to live a good deal for
himself, until slightly better distribution made it possible for him to
combine with his fellows. He need not now store coal, for there is a
service of coal to his doorstep. Besides, the offspring of coal are
expelling their ancestor; gas and electricity, both centrally supplied
from a single source, are sapping the old hearthstone that was fed by
one small family, and for that family alone glowed. A continual
socialization has come about, and it is not going to stop. What is done
in common is on the whole better done, more cheaply done. But what is
done in common is hostile to the old home spirit, because the principle
of the home spirit is that anything done in common is--well, common!
As for the old houses of fifteen to sixteen rooms, they have had to
accommodate themselves to the new conditions. First they tried to
maintain themselves by reducing their rents. I know of a case, in
Courtfield Gardens, where a house leased twenty-six years ago at one
thousand dollars a year, was leased again about ten years ago at seven
hundred and fifty dollars a year, and is now being offered at five
hundred dollars a year. The owner does not want his premises turned into
a boarding house, but he cannot find a private tenant, because hardly
anybody nowadays can manage five floors and a basement. In my own
district, where the houses tower up to heaven, I see the process at
work,--rents falling, pitiful attempts of the landlords to prevent their
houses from turning into maisonnettes and boarding houses, to prevent
the general decay. But they are beaten. The vast Victorian houses within
three miles of Charing Cross are, one by one, being cut up into flats;
in the unfashionable districts they are being used for tenements; and
there are splendid old houses in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where
in the day of Dickens lived the fashionables, which now house half a
dozen workingclass families and their lodgers. There is one of these old
glories near Lamb's Conduit Street, where a Polish furrier and his six
unwashed assistants work under a ceiling sown with sprawling nymphs,
while melancholic and chipped golden lions' heads look down from either
side of a once splendid Georgian mantelpiece. It is very reactionary of
me, I am afraid, but I cannot help feeling it a pity that this old
house, where would suitably walk the ghost of Brinsley Sheridan, must be
one of the eggs broken to make the omelette of the future.
But these old houses must go. Why should one preserve an old house? One
does not preserve one's old boots. The old houses have been seized by
the current of revolt against the home; they have mostly become boarding
and apartment houses. This is not only because their owners do not know
what to do with them; one does not run a boarding house unless it pays,
and so evidently there has been a growing demand for the boarding house.
Boarding houses fail, but for every one that fails two rise up, and
there is hardly a street in London that has not its boarding house, or
at least its apartment house. There are several in Park Lane itself;
there is even one whose lodgers may look into the gardens of Buckingham
Palace. I do not know how many boarding houses there are in London, for
no statistics distinguish properly between the boarding house, the
apartment house, the private hotel, the hotel, and the tavern. But,
evidently, the increase is continuous, and part of the explanation is to
be found elsewhere than in the traveler. Of course, the traveler has
enormously increased, but he alone cannot account for the scores of
thousands of people who pass their years in apartment and boarding
houses. They live there for various reasons--because they cling to the
old family idea and think to find "a home from home"; because they
cannot afford to run separate establishments; and very many because they
are tired of running them, tired of the plumber, tired of the housemaid.
There are thousands of families in London, quite well-to-do, who prefer
to live in boarding houses; they hate the boarding house, but they hate
it less than home. They feel less tied; they have less furniture; they
like to feel that their furniture is in store where they can forget all
about it. They have lost part of their old love for Aunt Maria's magenta
curtains--the home idea has become less significant to them. And this
applies also to hotels. The increase of hotels in London, in every
provincial city, all over the world, is not entirely explained by the
traveler, though, by the way, the increase in traveling is a sign of the
decay of the home. The old idea, "You've got a good home and you've got
to stay there," suffers whenever a member of the home leaves it for any
reason other than the virtuous pursuit of his business. All over the
center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels
have risen--the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the
Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in
some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An
enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park; another is projected
at Hyde Park Corner; the Strand Palace is open, and at the Regent Palace
there are, I understand, fourteen hundred bedrooms. The position is that
a proportion of London's population is beginning to live in these hotels
without servants of their own, without furniture of their own, without
houses of their own. A more detached, a freer spirit is invading them,
and a desire to get all they can out of life while they can, instead of
solemnly worshiping the Englishman's castle.
It does not come easily, and it does not come quickly. During the last
twenty-five years most of the blocks of flats to be found in London have
risen, with their villainously convenient lifts for passengers and
their new-fangled lifts for dust bins and coal, with their electricity
and their white paint, and other signs of emancipation. They were not
popular when they came, and they are disliked by the older generation;
it is still a little vicious to live in a West End flat. And when the
younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you
can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one
should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enough, I see many
more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a
certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the
older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now
much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human
life, the kitchen. There are now in London quite a number of flats, such
as, I think, Queen Anne's Mansions, St. James's Court, Artillery
Mansions, where the tenants live in agreeable suites and either take
their meals in the public restaurant or have them brought up to their
flat. The difficulty of service is being reduced. The sixty households
are beginning to do without the sixty cooks, and never use more than a
few dozen at a time of their two hundred pieces of crockery. There are
no more tradesmen, nor is there any ordering; there is a menu and a
telephone. There are no more heated interviews with the cook, and no
more notices given ten minutes before the party, but a chat with a
manager who has the manners and the tact of an ambassador. There is no
more home work in these places.
I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more
clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only
makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and
uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally
ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the
furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new
system--blocks of flats with a central restaurant--will probably, in a
more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I
conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say
blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden
which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one
room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very
necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will
also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its
furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is
developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be
provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance
of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no
coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There
will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining room,
run--and this is very important--_by a committee of tenants_.
That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will
buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase
by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid
laundry maid will check the lists--there will no longer be, as once upon
a time on Saturday evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists.
It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks.
The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few
persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours,
without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household
will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything
that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the
wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the
communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day;
there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I
have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can
do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.
I think I will close upon that phrase: There will be no mice in those
days. For somehow the industrious mouse, scuffling behind the loose
wainscoting over the rotten boards, is to me curiously significant of
the old, hostile order, when every man jealously held what was his own
and determined that it should so remain--dirty, insanitary, tiresome,
labor-making, dull, inexpressibly ugly, inexpressibly inimical to
anything fresh and free, providing that it was wholly and sacredly his
own.
VI
THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY
1