attractive restaurant in a good place I have seen such a
breakfast--fruit, cereal, eggs, rolls, and coffee--offered for fifteen
cents. I have never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but
because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those who do not I should
still hold worthy of esteem if they ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I
have also seen placarded a 'business men's lunch' for fifteen cents,
which also I have not tried; I am not a business man. I make bold to
say, however, that I often go for my lunch or my dinner to a certain
Italian place on a good avenue, which I will not locate more definitely
lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and
sixty cents, '_vino compreso_.' The material is excellent, and the
treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful
domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers
of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not deny a Merry
Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though often fair and
young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look as kind and
harmless as the circle which I used to frequent farther down-town at a
fifty-cent French table d'hote, but with a _bouillabaisse_ added which I
should not, but for my actual experiences, have expected to buy for any
money. But there are plenty of Italian and French tables d'hote for the
same price all over town. If you venture outside of the Latin race, you
pay dearer and you fare worse, unless you go to those shining halls
which I have been praising. If you go to a German place, you get grosser
dishes and uncouth manners for more money; I do not know why that
amiable race should be so dear and rude in its feeding-places, but that
is my experience."
"You wander, you wander!" we exclaimed. "Why should we care for your
impressions of German cooking and waiting, unless they go to prove or
disprove that living in New York is cheaper than in the European
capitals?"
"Perhaps I was going to say that even those Germans are not so dear as
they are in the fatherland, though rude. They do not tend much if at all
to tables d'hote, but the Italians and the French who do, serve you a
better meal for a lower price than you would get in Paris, or Rome, or
Naples. There the prevalent ideal is five francs, with neither wine nor
coffee included. I'll allow that the cheap table d'hote is mainly the
affair of single men and women, and does not merit the consideration
I've given it. If it helps a young couple to do with one maid, or with
none, instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living. Service is
costly and it is greedy, and except in large households its diet is the
same as the family's, so that anything which reduces it is a great
saving. But the table d'hote which is cheap for one or two is not cheap
for more, and it is not available if there are children. Housing and
raw-provisioning and serving are the main questions, and in Europe the
first and last are apparently much less expensive. Marketing is
undoubtedly cheaper with us, and if you count in what you get with the
newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the rent
is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its elementary
bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the apartment
to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be supplied with
hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the
rest of it."
"But," we said, "you are showing that we are more comfortably housed
than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative
cheapness."
"I was coming to that even in the matter of housing--"
"It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three
thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least
another month."
"But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not
care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to
Europe by that time?"
"Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this
place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The
wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more."
XI
WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK
The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of
_Home as Found_, was prompt to the hour when his month's absence was up,
and he began without a moment's delay: "But of course the lion in the
way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the
rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle
tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap;
furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly
or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work
of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she
can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is
ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in
housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for
more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don't exist."
"Don't be so breathless," we interposed. "You will only be allowed to
talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might
as well take your ease."
"That is true," the Howadji reflected. "But I am full of my subject, and
I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can't get more
in, by talking fast. The rent question itself," he hurried on, "has
been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative
housing which you may have heard of."
We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of
more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.
"The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined
putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of land
was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful
plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every
modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The
characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and
lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so
gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may
have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and
the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which would
carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or no
cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted plan
worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being
near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving studio
which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward division,
and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of
one aesthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and now there are
eight or ten of these co-operative studio apartment-houses in different
parts of the town."
"With the same fortunate experience for the owners?" we queried, with
suppressed sarcasm.
"Not exactly," our friend assented to our intention. "The successive
groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more
fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for
that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods,
with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has
been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it
is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is
what happens with other beautiful things that the aesthetic invent. It
has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer
places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves
cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without
invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those
joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly
enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius of
the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some
humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial villas
equipped with men and maid servants, horses, carriages, motors, yachts;
and if the original settlers remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a
broken spirit, and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the
same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, and at Bar Harbor;
even at Newport itself; the co-operative housing of New York is making a
like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and
dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but
they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the
aesthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter
sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already
eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the
sole occupancy of the owners. But the cost of their housing then is such
that it puts them out of the range of our inquiry as their riches has
already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. It still remains for
any impecunious group to buy the cheaper lots, and build simpler houses
on the old studio principle, with rents enough to pay the cost of
operation, and leave the owners merely the interest and taxes, with the
eventual payment of these also by the tenants. Some of the studio
apartments are equipped with restaurants, and the dwellers need only do
such light housekeeping as ladies may attempt without disgrace, or too
much fatigue."
"Or distraction from their duties to society," we suggested.
"It depends upon what you mean by society; it's a very general and
inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions,
and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties
to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in
the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light
housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of
society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one
older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight
of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most
gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen
says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated,
travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting
themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in
others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is
such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if
there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something
attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The
sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence
in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general
health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which
science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse;
it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming,
that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself."
"But you do forbear," we interposed; "and do you imagine that their
example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious
American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?"
"No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to the
performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing
themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them
the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of
the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things
fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with
home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every
detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which
pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the
one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because
it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the
rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of
Europe."
We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend,
and we objected: "But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives
to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?"
"In the first place, they don't; and, if they do, what do the one-girl
or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the matter of
that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom I speak
have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen the
picture which people worth while are talking of; they know through that
best society which likes a cup of their tea all the aesthetic gossip of
the day; they are part of the intellectual movement, that part which
neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; they help to make
up the polite public whose opinions are the court of final appeal."
"They strike us," we said, stubbornly, "as rather romantic."
"Ah, there you are! Well, they _are_ romantic--romantic like a gentle
poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic.
Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as
the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life
costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare
fictions which never had any color of truth in this country. They are
trying to imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of the
European ideal which form the society-page's contribution to the history
of our contemporary civilization."
We were so far moved as to say, "We think we see what you mean," and our
friend went on.
"Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial change the tea-room
is working in our morals and manners? There are many interesting phases
of its progress among us, and not the least interesting of these is its
being so largely the enterprise of ladies who must not only save money,
but must earn money, in order to live, not cheaply, but at all. Their
fearlessness in going to work has often the charm of a patrician past,
for many of them are Southern women who have come to New York to repair
their broken fortunes. The tea-room has offered itself as a graceful
means to this end, and they have accepted its conditions, which are
mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery, with those personal and
racial touches in which Southern women are so expert. But there are
tea-rooms managed by Western women, if I may judge from the accents
involuntarily overheard in their talk at the telephone. The tea of the
tea-room means lunch, too, and in some places breakfast and dinner, or
rather supper, on much the plan of the several Women's Exchanges; but
these are mostly of New England inspiration and operation, and their
cooking has a Northern quality. They, as well as the tea-rooms, leave
something to be desired in cheapness, though they might be dearer; in
some you get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no better brew for
twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and when at the noon
hour they overflow with conversation, still there is a prevailing sense
of quiet, finely qualified by the feminine invention and influence. Mere
men are allowed to frequent these places, not only under the protection
of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and when one sees them gently
sipping their Souchong or Oolong, and respectfully munching their
toasted muffins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with tender
gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking their elbows at
deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls of cheese and shredded fish and
crackers to which their drink freed them, while it enslaved them to the
witchery of those lurid ladies contributed by art to the evil
attractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies depicted with so
little on, except in the Paris salon. The New York tea-rooms are not yet
nearly so frequent as in London, but I think they are on the average
cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are dearer. They really
cheapen the midday meal to many who would otherwise make it at hotels
and restaurants, and, so far as they contribute to the spread of the
afternoon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of living: many
guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must once have been asked to
lunch."
"But," we suggested, "isn't that cheapness at the cost of shabbiness,
which no one can really afford?"
"No, I don't think so. Whatever lightens hospitality of its cumbrousness
makes for civilization, which is really more compatible with a refined
frugality than with an unbridled luxury. If every a-la-carte restaurant,
in the hotels and out of them, could be replaced by tea-rooms, and for
the elaborate lunches and dinners of private life the informality and
simplicity of the afternoon tea were substituted, we should all be
healthier, wealthier, and wiser; and I should not be obliged to protract
this contention for the superior cheapness of New York."
"But, wait!" we said. "There is something just occurs to us. If you
proved New York the cheapest great city in the world, wouldn't it tend
to increase our population even beyond the present figure, which you
once found so deplorable?"
"No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only
those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We should
increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as now in
spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same for
civilization as if we shrank to the size of Boston."
"You will have to explain a little, Howadji," we said, "if you expect us
to understand your very interesting position."
"Why, you know," he answered, with easy superiority, "that now our
great influx is of opulent strangers who have made a good deal of money,
and of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. The last we
needn't take account of; they are common to all cities in all ages; but
the first are as new as any phenomenon can be in a world of such
tiresome tautologies as ours. They come up from our industrial
provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the commercial metropolis;
they throw down their purses as the heroes of old threw down their
gantlets for a gage of battle, and they challenge the local champions of
extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not want a seasonable
or a beautiful thing; they want a costly thing. If, for instance, they
are offered a house or an apartment at a rental of ten or fifteen
thousand, they will not have it; they require a rental of fifteen or
twenty thousand, so that it may be known, 'back home,' that they are
spending that much for rent in New York, and the provincial imagination
taxed to proportion the cost of their living otherwise to such a sum.
You may say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny that it is
also stupid."
"Stupid, no; but barbaric, yes," we formulated the case. "It is
splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are splendid."
"But you must allow that nothing could be more mischievous. When next we
go with our modest incomes against these landlords, they suppose that we
too want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would easily be
satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a thousand. The poor fellows'
fancy is crazed by those prodigals, and we must all suffer for their
madness. The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the price of
provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole population demands food and
raiment within the general means, however much it must exceed its means
in the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set the pace for such
expenditures, no matter how much they lavish on their backs and--"
"Forbear!" we cried. "Turning from the danger we have saved you from,
you will say, we suppose, that New York would be the cheapest of the
great cities if it were not for the cost of shelter."
"Something like that," he assented.
"But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved by co-operative,
or composite, housing?"
"Something like that," he said again, but there was a note of misgiving
in his voice.
"What is the 'out'?" we asked.
"There is no 'out,'" he said, with a deep, evasive sigh.
XII
THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK
Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him newly
returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will recall as
having so brashly offered his impressions of the national complexion and
temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair.
"Well," we said, "do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract? People
usually do after they have been at home as long as you."
"But I do not," he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on the
heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised
there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy curves
and hollows. "I wish to modify by adding the effect of further
observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I saw you I
have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from there."
We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could
better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice.
"To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the
typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic."
"You call that adding?" we satirized.
He ignored the poor sneer.
"My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of that
custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister continent in
summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to
those New-Englanders of the future dominantly represented by the Irish.
At the time of my second visit the exiles had returned, and there were
the faces again that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me and
held me guilty till I had proved myself innocent."
"Do you think," we suggested, "that you would find this sort of
indictment in them if you had a better conscience?"
"Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I
could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject
than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly
offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last
seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong
faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially in England; but I
have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of
a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as
far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely
visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple
portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at
Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of
tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now
express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence, at
Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent
parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism
absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their
limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical."
"Then why," we asked, not very relevantly, "don't you go and live in
Boston?"
"It wouldn't make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a
half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my
shortcomings less in New York."
"You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy here,
instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind which
you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our inferiority, since
you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being continually
reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can we reduce
ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one, and by
narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian verticality,
and go as deep and as high?"