In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is
called the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty
of modern industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the
difficulty is not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth.
It is the special psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life.
Some experience of modern movements of the sort called “advanced” has
led me to the conviction that they generally repose upon some experience
peculiar to the rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I
have already spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That
implies a long holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor
car in which to wander looking for others; it also implies money for
maintenances. An omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own
wife, let alone other people’s. And the success with which nuptial
estrangements are depicted in modern “problem plays” is due to the fact
that there is only one thing that a drama cannot depict--that is a
hard day’s work. I could give many other instances of this plutocratic
assumption behind progressive fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic
assumption behind the phrase “Why should woman be economically dependent
upon man?” The answer is that among poor and practical people she isn’t;
except in the sense in which he is dependent upon her. A hunter has to
tear his clothes; there must be somebody to mend them. A fisher has
to catch fish; there must be somebody to cook them. It is surely quite
clear that this modern notion that woman is a mere “pretty clinging
parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through the somber contemplation
of some rich banking family, in which the banker, at least, went to the
city and pretended to do something, while the banker’s wife went to the
Park and did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor man and his
wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a firm of publishers
interviews the authors while the other interviews the clerks, is one of
them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to
Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snelgrove?
But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is
this: the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home
(they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and
variety. This is indeed a rich man’s opinion. The rich man knows that
his own house moves on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by
regiments of servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand,
every sort of vagabondage of romance is open to him in the streets
outside. He has plenty of money and can afford to be a tramp. His
wildest adventure will end in a restaurant, while the yokel’s tamest
adventure may end in a police-court. If he smashes a window he can
pay for it; if he smashes a man he can pension him. He can (like the
millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a glass of gin. And
because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone of nearly all
“advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost forgotten what a
home really means to the overwhelming millions of mankind.
For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot
on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an
experiment or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept
the strict rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to
enter. He can eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes.
I often do it myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic
feeling. There would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in
an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his
house; while I am sure that this would not be permitted at the Savoy,
though I never actually tested the point. If you go to a restaurant
you must drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of them if you
insist, but certainly some of them. But if you have a house and garden
you can try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine if you like. For a
plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world
of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set
tasks. The home is the one place where he can put the carpet on the
ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants to. When a man spends
every night staggering from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-hall,
we say that he is living an irregular life. But he is not; he is living
a highly regular life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws of
such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit down in the bars;
and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the music-halls. Hotels may
be defined as places where you are forced to dress; and theaters may
be defined as places where you are forbidden to smoke. A man can only
picnic at home.
Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this
possession of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working
model for the present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man
a free home of his own or not, at least we should desire it; and he
desires it. For the moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he
expects to get. He wants, for instance, a separate house; he does not
want a semi-detached house. He may be forced in the commercial race
to share one wall with another man. Similarly he might be forced in a
three-legged race to share one leg with another man; but it is not so
that he pictures himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty. Again,
he does not desire a flat. He can eat and sleep and praise God in a
flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a railway train. But a
railway train is not a house, because it is a house on wheels. And a
flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An idea of
earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation and
independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man
desires a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires
a house of his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof
above him and a chair below him; he wants an objective and visible
kingdom; a fire at which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can
open to what friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I
do not say there are not exceptions. There may be saints above the need
and philanthropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got
used to more than this; and when he was a convict may have got used
to less. But the normality of the thing is enormous. To give nearly
everybody ordinary houses would please nearly everybody; that is what I
assert without apology. Now in modern England (as you eagerly point out)
it is very difficult to give nearly everybody houses. Quite so; I merely
set up the desideratum; and ask the reader to leave it standing there
while he turns with me to a consideration of what really happens in the
social wars of our time.
*****