be easily removable from our list by a more economical method of buying and
cooking it. The other element of insufficiency--ignorance,--would go also,
if we had skilful and learned cooks and caterers instead of unskilled and
unlearned amateurs, who know only how to cater to the demands of hungry
children and injudicious men at home. Wise temperance workers know that
many men drink because they are not properly fed; and women, too,
consume tea and coffee to make up in stimulants for the lack of
nutrition about which they know nothing. Under this same head comes the
rest of that list, the over-sufficient, ill-chosen, and ill-prepared
food. It is not simply that the two hundred amateur cooks (whether they
be permanent wife or transient servant, they are all, in a business
sense, amateurs,--ask a real cook!) waste money by their sporadic
efforts, but their incapacity wastes our blood in our veins. We do not
die, swift and screaming, from some sharp poison administered through
malice; but our poor stomachs are slowly fretted by grease-hardened
particles, and wearied out by heavy doses of hot dough. Only iron
vigour can survive such things.
"It is ill-chosen," is one charge against home-cooking. What governs
our choice? Why does a German eat decaying cabbage and mite-infested
cheese, an American revel in fat-soaked steak and griddle-cakes, a
Frenchman disguise questionable meats with subtly-blended spices, and
so on, through the tastes of all the nations and localities? It is
environment and heredity that governs us--that's all. It is not
knowledge, not culture and experience, not an enlightened taste, or the
real choice of a trained mind capable of choosing.
A child is fed by his mother, who transmits remote ancestral customs,
unchanged by time. Children are hungry and like to eat. The young
stomach is adapted to its food supply; it grows accustomed to it and
"likes" it,--and the man continues to demand the doughnuts, the
sauerkraut, the saleratus biscuit, which he "likes." One ghastly
exception should be taken to this smooth statement. I have said that
"the young stomach is adapted to its food supply." Alas, alas! This is
true of those who survive; but think of the buried babies,--of the
dear, dead children, of the "diseases incidental to childhood,"--and
question if some part of that awful death-list is not due to our
criminal ignorance of what is proper food! There is no knowledge, save
the filtering down of ancient customs and what the private cook can
pick up from house to house; no experience, save that gained by
practising on one's own family or the family of one's employer--and I
never heard of either wife or servant gathering statistics as to who
lived and who died under her cooking--no special training; and no room
or time or means to learn! It would be a miracle if all should survive.
The ignorance which keeps us so ill-fed _is an essential condition of
home-cooking_. If we had only home-shoe-making, or home-doctoring,
or home-tailoring--barbering--what you please--we should show the same
wide-spread ignorance and lack of taste. What we have learned in
cooking comes from the advance of that great branch of human industry
in its free social field, and that advance has reacted to some degree
on the immovable home.
Next consider self-control, the lack of which is so large a factor in
our food diseases. We have attained some refinement of feeling in
painting, music, and other arts; why are we still so frankly barbaric
in our attitude toward food? Why does modern man, civilised, educated,
cultured, still keep his body in a loathsome condition, still suffer,
weaken, and die, from foul food habits? It is not alone the huge evil
of intemperance in drink, or simple gluttony; but the common habits of
our young girls, serenely indulging in unlimited candy, with its
attendant internal consequences; or of our cultured women, providing at
their entertainments a gross accumulation of unwholesome delicacies,
with scarcely more discrimination than was shown by Heliogabalus. We
eat what we like, and our liking is most crude and low.
The position of the woman who feeds us--the wife and mother--is
responsible for this arrest of development. She is not a free cook, a
trained cook, a scientific cook; she belongs to the family. She must
cook for the man because he pays for it. He maintains the home--and
her--largely for that very purpose. It is his home, his table, his
market bill; and, if John does not like onions, or pork, or cereals,
they do not appear. If Mrs. Peterkin paid for it, and John was cook,
why John would cook to please her! In two ways is Mrs. Peterkin forced
to cater to John's appetite; by this plain, economic fact, that it is
his food she is cooking, and by the sexuo-economic fact that "the way
to a man's heart is through his stomach." For profit and for love--to
do her duty and to gain her ends--in all ways, the home cook is forced
to do her home cooking to please John. It is no wonder John clings so
ardently to the custom. Never again on earth will he have a whole live
private cook to himself, to consider, before anything else, his special
tastes and preferences. He will get better food, and he will have to
get used to it. His tastes will be elevated by the quality of the food,
instead of the quality of the food being adapted solely to his tastes.
To the children, again, the mother caters under direct pressure of
personal affection. It is very, very hard to resist the daily, yea,
tri-daily, demands of those we love.
It is this steady, alluring effort of subservient love which keeps us
still so primitively self-indulgent in our food habits. The mother-love
of a dumb animal may teach her what is right for her young to eat, but
it does not teach the human mother. Ask any doctor, any trained nurse,
anyone who has watched the children of the poor. If the children of the
rich are more wisely fed, it is not because of any greater amount of
mother-love, but of some degree of mother-education. Motherhood and
wifehood do not teach cooking.
What we need in our system of feeding the world is not instinct,
affection, and duty, but knowledge, practice, and business methods.
Those who are fitted by natural skill and liking to be cooks should
cook, and many should profit by their improved products. Scientific
training, free from the tender pressure of home habits, would soon
eliminate our worst viands; and, from the wide choice offered by a
general field of patronage, there would appear in time a cultivated
taste. Greater freedom for personal idiosyncrasy would be given in this
general field of choice, yet a simpler average would undoubtedly be
formed. Great literature and great music were never developed when the
bard performed for his master only.
We, keeping our food system still on this miserable basis of private
catering to appetite, are thereby prevented from studying it with a
view to race improvement. The discoveries of the food specialist and
scientific dietist are lost in the dark recesses of a million homes, in
the futile, half-hearted efforts of unskilled labour. What the
immediate family "likes" is the governing law; no matter how wise may
be the purpose of the mother-cook. With most of us food is scarcely
thought of in its real main use--to supply bodily waste with
judiciously combined materials.
The home-bred appetite cries out for "mother's cooking," with no more
idea of its nutritive values than has a child. This is most remarkable
among our enormous farming population, yet there most absolutely the
case. The mechanic or business man has no dealings whatever with his
food except to eat it. He gives over his life's health, his daily
strength, into the hands of his beloved female domestic; and asks
nothing whatever of her production except that it "taste good."
But the farmer has a different trade. With him the whole business of
his life is to feed things that they may grow. He has to replenish the
soil with the elements his crops exhaust, in order to reap the best
crops, the most profit. And even more directly with his live-stock;
from hen to horse, with pigs, sheep, and cattle, he has constantly to
consider what to put into them in order to be sure of the product, not
too much grain for the horse, not too much hay; enough "green feed" in
season; the value of the silo, the amount of salt necessary; the effect
of beets, of wild onions, in the grass and in the butter; what to give
hens in winter to make them lay; how to regulate the diet for more milk
and less cream, or for less milk and more cream; how to fatten, how to
strengthen, how to improve--in all ways the farmer has to realise the
importance of food values in his business.
Yet that same man, day after day, consumes his own food and sees his
children fed, to say nothing of the mother of his children, without
ever giving one thought to the nutritive values of that food. There
must be enough to satisfy hunger, and it must "taste good," according
to his particular brand of ancestry, his race habits, and early
environment; but, beyond that, nothing is required.
The farmer has assistance in his business. He shares in the accumulated
experience of many farmers, before him and about him. There are
valuable experiments being made in his behalf by the Bureau of
Agriculture. He has trade papers to bring him the fruits of the world's
progress in this line. Agriculture is one of the world's great
functions, and has made magnificent progress. But humaniculture has no
Bureau, no Secretary, no Experiment Stations; unless we count the
recent experiments in boric-acid diet. The most valuable livestock on
earth are casually fed by the haphazard efforts of any and every kind
of ignorant woman; hired servants or married servants, as the case may
be; dull, shortsighted, overworked women, far too busy in "doing the
cooking" ever to study the science of feeding humanity. No science
could ever make progress in such hands. Science must rest on broad
observation, on the widest generalisation and deduction, on careful
experiment and reconsideration.
This is forever impossible at home. Until the food laboratory entirely
supersedes the kitchen there can be no growth. Many of us, struggling
to sit fast between two stools, seeing the imperative need of
scientific feeding for humanity, yet blindly clinging to the separate
wife-mother-cook functionary, exhort "the woman" to study all this
matter, and cheerfully to devote her life to scientifically feeding her
beloved family.
"The woman"--that is, a woman, any woman, every woman, and that means
the deadly Average, the hopelessly Isolated, the handicapped Maternal,
with the Lack of Specialisation, the Confusion of other Trades, and the
Lack of Incentive. Not until "The woman" in "the home" can everywhere
manifest a high degree of skill as a doctor, as an architect, as a
barber, as anything, can she manifest that high degree as a cook.
Cooking is an art; cooking is a science; cooking is a handicraft;
cooking is a business. None of these can ever grow without following
the laws of all industrial progress--specialisation, contact and
exchange, legitimate competition, and the stimulus of large
world-incentives. When we have these we shall be able to improve our
kind of animal as much as we do other kinds. We cannot arbitrarily by
breeding, but we can by nutrition and education--to an unknown extent.
Nutrition, properly adjusted, nutrition for the human animal, has
hardly been thought of by the home cook. The inexorable limit of our
Home-cooking is the Home.
VIII
DOMESTIC ART
One of the undying efforts of our lives, of the lives of half the
world, is "to make home beautiful." We love beauty, we love home, we
naturally wish to combine the two. The rich spare no expense, the
æsthetic no care and pains, in this continuous attempt; and the "home"
papers, or "home departments" in other papers, teem with instruction on
the subject for the eager, but untutored many.
In varying fields of work there is a strong current of improvement, in
household construction, furnishing, and decoration; and new employments
continually appear wherein the more cultured few apply their talents to
the selection and arrangement of "artistic interiors" ready-made for
the purchaser. Whole magazines are devoted to this end, articles
unnumbered, books not a few, and courses of lectures. People who know
beauty and love it are trying to teach it to those who do not, trying
to introduce it where it is so painfully needed--in the home.
Why does it not originate there? Why did the people who cared most for
beauty and art, the Greeks, care so little for the home? And why do the
people who care most for the home--our Anglo-Saxons--care so little for
beauty and art? And, in such art-knowledge and art-growth as we have,
why is it least manifested at home? What is there in home-life, as we
know it, which proves inimical to the development of true beauty? If
there is some condition in home life which is inimical to art, is that
condition essential and permanent, or may it be removed without loss to
what is essential and permanent?
Here are questions serious and practical; practical because beauty is
an element of highest use as well as joy. Our love of it lies deep, and
rests on truest instinct; the child feels it passionately; the savage
feels it, we all feel it, but few understand it; and whether we
understand it or not we long for it in vain. We often make our churches
beautiful, our libraries and museums, but our domestic efforts are not
crowned with the same relative success.
The reasons for this innate lack of beauty in the home are not far to
seek. The laws of applied beauty reach deep, spread wide, and are
inexorable: Truth; first, last, and always--no falsehood, imitation, or
pretence: Simplicity; no devious meandering, but the direct clear
purpose and result: Unity, Harmony, that unerring law of relation which
keeps the past true to the whole--never too much here or there--all
balanced and at rest: Restraint; no riotous excess, no rush from
inadequacy to profusion.
If the student of art rightly apprehends these laws, his whole life is
richer and sounder as well as his art. If the art he studies is one
under definite laws of construction, he has to learn them, too; as in
architecture, where the laws of mechanics operate with those of
æsthetics, and there is no beauty if the mechanical laws are defied.
Architecture is the most prominent form of domestic art. Why is not
domestic architecture as good as public architecture? If the home is a
temple, why should not our hills be dotted with fair shrines worthy of
worship?
We may talk as we will of "the domestic shrine," but the architect does
not find the kitchen stove an inspiring altar. If it did inspire him,
if he began to develop the idea of a kitchen--a temple to Hygeia and
Epicurus, a great central altar for the libations and sacrifices, with
all appropriate accessories for the contributory labour of the
place--he could not make a pocket-edition of this temple, and stick it
on to every house in forced connection with the other domestic
necessities.
The eating-room then confronts him, a totally different _motif_.
We do not wish to eat in the kitchen. We do not wish to see, smell,
hear, or think of the kitchen while we eat. So the domestic architect
is under the necessity of separating as far as possible these
discordant purposes, while obliged still to confine them to the same
walls and roof.
Then come the bedrooms. We do not wish to sleep in the kitchen--or in
the dining-room. Nothing is further from our ideals than to confound
the sheets with the tablecloths, the bed with the stove, the dressing
table with the sink. So again the architect, whose kitchen-tendency was
so rudely checked by the dining-room tendency, is brought up standing
by the bedroom tendency, its demand for absolute detachment and
remoteness, and the necessity for keeping its structural limits within
those same walls and roof.
Then follows the reception-room tendency--we do not wish to receive our
visitors in the kitchen--or the bedroom--or exclusively in the
dining-room. So the parlour theme is developed as far as may be,
connected with the dining-room, and disconnected as far as possible
from all the other life-themes going on under that roof.
When we add to these the limits of space, especially in our cities, the
limits of money, so almost universal, and the limits of personal taste,
we may have clearly before us the reasons why domestic architecture
does not thrill the soul with its beauty.
Whenever it does, to any extent, the reason is as clear. The feudal
castle was beautiful because it had one predominant idea--defence; and
was a stone monument to that idea. Here you could have truth, and did
have it. Defence was imperative, absolute; every other need was
subsidiary; a fine type of castle could give room for unity,
simplicity, harmony, and restraint; and stirs us yet to delighted
admiration. But it was not a comfortable dwelling-house.
A cottage is also capable of giving the sense of beauty; especially an
old thatch-roofed cottage; mossy, mouldy, leaky, damp. The cottage is
an undifferentiated home; it is primarily a kitchen--with a bedroom or
two added--or included! Small primitive houses, like the white, square,
flat-roofed dwellings of Algiers, group beautifully, or, taken singly,
give a good bit of white against blue fire, behind green foliage.
But as a theme in itself, a thing to study and make pictures of, the
castle, the temple of war, is the most beautiful type of dwelling
place--and the least inhabitable. In our really comfortable homes we
have lost beauty, though we have gained in comfort. Would it be
possible to have comfort and beauty too; beauty which would thrill and
exalt us, delight and satisfy us, and which the art critic would dwell
upon as he now does on temple, hall, and church?
Let us here take up the other domestic arts; surrendering architecture
as apparently hopeless. We cannot expect our composers in wood and
stone to take a number of absolutely contradictory themes and produce
an effect of truth, unity, harmony, simplicity, and restraint; but may
we not furnish and decorate our homes beautifully? Perhaps we might;
but do we? What do we know, what do we care, for the elementary laws
which make this thing beautiful, that thing ugly, and the same things
vary as they are combined with others!
In the furnishing and decoration of a home we have room for more
harmony than in the exterior, because each room may be treated
separately according to its especial purpose, and we can accustom
ourselves to the æsthetic jar of stepping from one to another, or even
bring them all under some main scheme.
But here we are confronted by the enormous unrestricted weight of the
limitation which is felt least by the architect--personal taste. We do
not dictate much to our builders, most of us; but we do dictate as to
the inside of the house and all that is in it. The dominating influence
in home decoration is of course the woman. She is the final arbiter of
the textures, colours, proportions, sizes, shapes, and relations of
human production. How does she effect our output? What is her influence
upon art--the applied art that is found, or should be found, in
everything we make and use?
We may buy, if we can afford it, specimens of art, pictorial or
sculptural art, or any other, and place them in our houses; but the
mere accumulation of beautiful objects is not decoration; often quite
the contrary. There are many beautiful vases in the shop where you
bought yours; there is but one in the Japanese room--and there is
beauty.
The magpie instinct of the collector has no part in a genuine sense of
beauty. An ostentatious exhibit of one's valuable possessions does not
show the sense of beauty. A beautiful chamber is neither show-room nor
museum. That personal "taste" in itself is no guide to beauty needs but
little proof. The "taste" of the Flathead Indian, of the tattooed
Islander, of all the grades of physical deformity which mankind has
admired, is sufficient to show that a personal preference is no ground
for judgment in beauty.
Beauty has laws, and an appreciation of them is not possessed equally
by all. The more primitive and ignorant a race, or class, the less it
knows of true beauty.
The Indian basket-makers wove beautiful things, but they did not know
it; give them the cheap and ugly productions of our greedy "market" and
they like them better. They may unconsciously produce beauty, but they
do not consciously select it.
Our women are far removed from the primitive simplicity that produces
unconscious beauty; and they are also far removed from that broad
culture and wide view of life which can intellectually grasp it. They
have neither the natural instinct nor the acquired knowledge of beauty;
but they do have, in million-fold accumulation, a "personal taste." The
life of the woman in the home is absolutely confined to personal
details. Her field of study and of work is not calculated to develop
large judgment, but is calculated to develop intense feeling; and
feeling on a comparatively low plane. She is forced continually to
contemplate and minister to the last details of the physical wants of
humanity in ceaseless daily repetition. Whatever tendency to develop
artistic feeling and judgment she might have in one line of her work,
is ruthlessly contradicted by the next, and the next; and her range of
expression in each line is too small to allow of any satisfying growth.
The very rich woman who can purchase others' things and others'
judgment, or the exceptional woman who does work and study in some one
line, may show development in the sense of beauty; but it is not
produced at home. The love of it is there, the desire for it, most
cruelly aborted; and the result of that starved beauty-sense is what we
see in our familiar rooms.
Being familiar, we bear with our surroundings; perhaps even love them;
when we go into each other's homes we do not think their things to be
beautiful; we think ours are because we are used to them; we have no
appreciation of an object in its relation to the rest, or its lack of
relation.
The bottled discord of the woman's daily occupations if quite
sufficient to account for the explosions of discord on her walls and
floors. She continually has to do utterly inharmonious things, she
lives in incessant effort to perform all at once and in the same place
the most irreconcilable processes.
She has to adjust, disadjust, and readjust her mental focus a thousand
times a day; not only to things, but to actions; not only to actions,
but to persons; and so, to live at all, she must develop a kind of mind
that does _not object to discord_. Unity, harmony, simplicity, truth,
restraint--these are not applicable in a patchwork life, however
hallowed by high devotion and tender love. This is why domestic art is
so low--so indistinguishable.
When our great Centennial Exhibition was given us, a wave of beauty
spread into thousands of homes, but it did not originate there. The
White City by the lake was an inspiration to myriad lives, and wrought
a lovely change in her architecture and many other arts; but the Black
City by the Lake is there yet, waiting for another extra-domestic
uplifting.
The currents of home-life are so many, so diverse, so contradictory,
that they are only maintained by using the woman as a sort of universal
solvent; and this position of holding many diverse elements in solution
is not compatible with the orderly crystallisation of any of them, or
with much peace of mind to the unhappy solvent.
The most conspicuous field for the display of the beauty sense--or the
lack of it--in our home life, is in textile fabrics and their
application to the body. The House is the foundation of textile art.
People who live out of doors wear hides, if they wear anything. In the
shelter and peace of the house, developed by ever-widening commerce,
grew these wonderful textile arts, the evolution of a new plane for
beauty. We find in nature nothing approaching it, save in the limited
and passing form of spreading leaf and petal. To make a continuous
substance soft as flowers, warm as furs, brilliant as the sunset--this
was a great step in art.