anti-domestic. Just men may seek to do justly in their homes, but it is
hard work. Intense, personal feeling, close ties of blood, are inimical
to the exercise of justice. Do we expect the judge upon the bench to do
justice, dispassionate, unswerving, on his own child--his own wife--in
the dock? If he does, we hail him as more than mortal. Do we expect a
common man--not a judge with all the training and experience of his
place, but a plain man--to do justice to his own wife and his own child
in the constant intimacy of the home? Do we expect the mother to do
justice to the child when the child is the offender and the mother the
offended? Where plaintiff, judge, and executioner are lodged in one
person; where there is no third party--no spectators even--only
absolute irresponsible power, why should we--how could we--expect
justice! We don't. We do not even think of it. No child cries for
"Justice!" to the deaf walls of the home--he never heard of it.
He gets love--endless love and indulgence. He gets anger and punishment
with no court of appeal. He gets care--neglect--discourtesy--affection--
indifference--cruelty--and sometimes wise and lovely training--but none
of these are justice. The home, as such, in no way promotes justice;
but, in its disproportionate and unbalanced position to-day, palpably
perverts and prevents it.
Allied to justice, following upon large equality and recognition of
others, comes that true estimate of one's self and one's own powers
which is an unnamed virtue. "Humility" is not it--to undervalue and
depreciate one's self may be the opposite of pride, but it is not a
virtue. A just estimate is not humility. But call it humility for
convenience' sake; and see how ill it flourishes at home. In that
circumscribed horizon small things look large. There is no general
measuring point, no healthy standard of comparison.
The passionate love of the wife, the mother, and equally of the
husband, the father, makes all geese swans. The parents idealise their
children; and the children, even more restricted by the home
atmosphere--_for they know no other_--idealise the parents. This
is sometimes to their advantage--often the other way. Constant study of
near objects, with no distant horizon to rest and change the focus,
makes us short-sighted; and, as we all know, the smallest object is
large if you hold it near enough. Constant association with one's
nearest and dearest necessarily tends to a disproportionate estimate of
their values.
There is no perspective--cannot be--in these close quarters. The
infant prodigy of talent, praised and petted, brings his production
into the cold light of the market, under the myriad facets of the
public eye, to the measurement of professional standards--and no most
swift return to the home atmosphere can counterbalance the effect of
that judgment day. A just estimate of one's self and one's work can
only be attained by the widest and most impersonal comparison. The
home estimate is essentially personal, essentially narrow. It
sometimes errs in underrating a world-talent; but nine times out of ten
it errs the other way--overrating a home-talent. Humility, in the
sense of an honest and accurate estimate of one's self, is not a
home-made product. A morbid modesty or an unfounded pride often is. The
intense self-consciousness, the prominent and sensitive personality
developed by home life, we are all familiar with in women.
The woman who has always been in close personal relation with
someone,--daughter, sister, wife, mother,--and so loved, valued, held
close, feels herself neglected and chilly when she comes into business
relations. She feels personal neglect in the broad indifference of
office or shop; and instantly seeks to establish personal relations
with all about her. As a business woman she outgrows it in time. It is
not a sex-quality, it is a home-quality; found in a boy brought up
entirely at home as well as in a girl. It tends to a disproportionate
estimate of self; it is a primitive quality, common to children and
savages; it is not conducive to justice and true social adjustment.
Closely allied to this branch of character is the power of
self-control. As an initial human virtue none lies deeper than this;
and here the home has credit for much help in developing some of the
earlier stages of this great faculty. Primitive man brought to his
dawning human relation a long-descended, highly-developed Ego. He had
been an individual animal "always and always," he had now to begin to
be a social animal, a collective animal, to develop the social
instincts and the social conduct in which lay further progress.
The training of the child shows us in little what history shows us in
the large. What the well-bred child has to learn to make him a
pleasing member of the family is self-control. To restrain and adjust
one's self to one's society--that is the line of courtesy--the line of
Christianity--the line of social evolution. The home life does indeed
teach the beginning of self-control; but no more. As compared with the
world, it represents unbridled license. "In company" one must wear so
and so, talk so and so, do so and so, look so and so. To "feel at home"
means relaxation of all this.
This is as it should be. The home is the place for personal relief and
rest from the higher plane of social contact. But social contact is
needed to develop social qualities, constant staying at home does not
do it.
The man, accustomed to meet all sorts of people in many ways, has a far
larger and easier adjustment. The woman, used only to the close contact
of a few people in a few relations, as child, parent, servant,
tradesman; or to the set code of "company manners," has no such healthy
human plane of contact.
"I never was so treated in my life!" she complains--and she never
was--at home. This limits the range of life, cuts off the widest
channels of growth, overdevelops the few deep ones; and does not
develop self-control. The dressing-gown-and-slippers home attitude is
temporarily changed for that of "shopping," or "visiting," but the
childish sensitiveness, the disproportionate personality, remain
dominant.
A too continuous home atmosphere checks in the woman the valuable
social faculties. It checks it in the man more insidiously, through his
position of easy mastery over these dependents, wife, children,
servants; and through the constant catering of the whole _ménage_
to his special tastes. If each man had a private tailor shop in his
back yard he would be far more whimsical and exacting in his personal
taste in clothes. Every natural tendency to self-indulgence is steadily
increased by the life service of an entire wife. This having one whole
woman devoted to one's direct personal service is about as far from the
cultivation of self-control as any process that could be devised.
The man loves the woman and serves her--but he serves her _through
his service of the world_--and she serves him direct. He can fuss
and dictate as to details, he can develop all manner of notions as to
bacon, or toast, or griddle cakes; the whole cuisine is his, he
supports it, it is meant to please him, and under its encompassing
temptation he increases in girth and weight; but not in self-control.
He may be a wise, temperate, judicious man, but the home, with its
disproportionate attention to personal desires, does not make him so.
No clearer instance could be given of the effect of domestic ethics. In
this one field may be shown the beneficent effects of the early home
upon early man, the continued beneficent effects of what is essential
in the home upon modern man; and the most evil effects of the domestic
rudiments upon modern man. The differing ages and sexes held together
by love, yet respecting one another's privacy, demand of one another
precisely this power of self-control. Children together, with no
adults, become boisterous and unruly; adults together, with no
children, become out of sympathy with childhood; the sexes, separated,
tend to injurious excesses; but the true home life checks excess,
develops what is lacking, harmonises all.
What does the morbid, disproportioned, overgrown home life do? It
tends to develop a domineering selfishness in man and a degrading
abnegation in woman--or sometimes reverses this effect. The smooth,
unconscious, all-absorbing greed which the unnaturally developed home
of to-day produces in some women, is as evil a thing as life shows.
Here is a human creature who has all her life been loved and cared for,
sheltered, protected, defended; everything provided for her and nothing
demanded of her except the exercise of her natural feminine functions,
and some proficiency in the playground regulations of "society."
The degree of sublimated selfishness thus produced by home life is
quite beyond the selfishness we so deplore in men. A man may be--often
is--deplorably selfish in his home life; but he does not expect all the
world to treat him with the same indulgence. He has to give as well as
take in the broad, healthy, growing life of the world.
The woman has her home-life to make her selfish, and has no world life
to offset it. Men are polite to her on account of her sex--not on
account of any power, any achievement, any distinctive human value, but
simply because she is a woman. Her guests are necessarily polite to
her. Her hosts are necessarily polite to her, and so are her
fellow-guests. Her servants are necessarily polite to her. Her
children also; if they are not she feels herself abused, denied a
right.
The home and its social tributaries steadily work to develop a
limitless personal selfishness in which the healthy power of
self-control is all unknown. One way or the other swings the pendulum;
here the woman pours out her life in devotion to her husband and
children; in which case she is developing selfishness in them with as
much speed and efficacy as if she were their worst enemy; and here
again the woman sits, plump and fair, in her padded cage, bedizening
its walls with every decoration; covering her own body with costly and
beautiful things; feeding herself, her family, her guests; running from
meal to meal as if eating were really the main business of a human
being. This is the extreme.
Our primitive scheme requires that the entire time of the
woman-who-does-her-own-work shall be spent in ministering to the
physical needs of her family; and in the small minority who have other
women to do it for them, that she shall still have this ministry her
main care--and shall have no others. It is this inordinate demand for
the life and time of a whole woman to keep half a dozen people fed,
cleaned, and waited on, which keeps up in us a degree of
self-indulgence we should, by every step of social development, have
long since outgrown.
The personal preparation of food by a loving wife and mother does not
ensure right nourishment--that we have shown at length; but it does
ensure that every human soul thus provided for shall give far too much
thought to what it eats and drinks and wherewithal it shall be clothed.
The yielding up of a woman's life to the service of these physical
needs of mankind does not develop self-control, nor its noble line of
ensuing virtues--temperance, chastity, courtesy, patience, endurance.
See the child growing up under this disproportionate attention; fussy,
critical, capricious, always thinking of what he wants and how he wants
it. The more his mother waits on him, the more she has to do so; he
knows no better than to help himself to the offered life. See the
husband, criticising the coffee and the steak; or so enjoying and
praising them that the happy wife eagerly spends more hours in
preparing more dishes that John will like. It is a pleasant, roseate
atmosphere. All are happy in it. Why is it not good? Because it is a
hotbed of self-indulgence. Because it constantly maintains a degree of
personal devotion to one's appetites which would disappear under a
system of living suited to our age.
Self-control is developed by true home life; by true family love.
Family, love, unmodified by social relation, gives also the family
feud; the unconscionably narrow pride of the clansman; the home life of
the first century, arbitrarily maintained in the twentieth, gives us
its constant contribution of first-century ethics.
As to honour--that delicate, deep-rooted, instinctive ethical sense;
applied so rigidly to this, so little to that; showing so variously;
"business honour," "military honour," "professional honour," "the
honour of a gentleman"--what is the standard of honour in the home?
The only "honour" asked of the woman is chastity; quite a special
sex-distinction, not as yet demanded in any great degree of the man.
If the home develops chastity, it seems to discriminate sharply in its
preferred exponent. But apart from that virtue, what sense of honour do
we find in the home-bound woman? Is it to keep her word inflexibly? A
woman's privilege is to change her mind. Is it to spare the weaker?
Would that some dream of this high grace could stand between the angry
woman and the defenceless child. Is it to respect privacy, to scorn
eavesdropping, to regard the letter of another person as inviolate?
The standard of honour in the home is not that of "an officer and a
gentleman." The things a decent and well-educated woman will sometimes
do to her own children, do cheerfully and unblushingly, are flatly
dishonourable; but she does not even know it. And the things she does
outside the home, with only her home-bred sense of honour to guide her,
are equally significant. To slip in front of others who are standing in
line; to make engagements and break them; to even engage rooms and
board, and then change her plans without letting the other party know;
thus entailing absolute money loss to a perfectly innocent person,
without a qualm; this is frequently done by women with a high standard
of chastity; but no other sense of honour whatever.
The home is the cradle of all the virtues, but we are in a stage of
social development where we need virtues beyond the cradle size. The
virtues begun at home need to come out and grow in the world as men
need to do--and as woman need to do, but do not know it. The ethics of
the home are good in degree. The ethics of human life are far larger
and more complex.
Our moral growth is to-day limited most seriously by the persistent
maintenance in half the world of a primitive standard of domestic
ethics.
X
DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
Long is the way from the primal home, with its simple child-_motif_, to
the large and expensive house of entertainment we call home to-day. The
innocent "guest-chamber" early added to the family accommodations has
spread its area and widened its demands, till we find the ultra-type of
millionaire mansion devoting its whole space, practically, to the
occupation of guests--for even the private rooms are keyed up to a
comparison with those frankly built and furnished for strangers. The
kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry, the table-furniture of all sorts,
are arranged in style and amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The
sitting-room becomes a "parlour," the parlour a "drawing-room" with
"reception-room" addition; and then comes the still more removed
"ballroom"--a remarkable apartment truly, to form part of a home. Some
even go so far as to add a theatre--that most essentially public of
chambers--in this culminating transformation of a home to a house of
entertainment.
From what once normal base sprang this abnormal growth? How did this
place of love and intimacy, the outward form of our most tender and
private relations, so change and swell to a place of artificial
politeness and most superficial contact? The point of departure is not
hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when hospitality was
one of our chief virtues.
Of all the evolving series of human virtues none is more easily studied
in its visible relation to condition and its rapid alterations than
hospitality. Moreover, though considered a virtue, it is not so
intermingled with our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to
discuss; we respect, but do not worship it.
Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which appears after a
certain capacity for altruism is developed; not a very high degree, for
we find a rigid code of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which
obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of
travelling.
We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs and the Scotch
Highlanders; we find it in our own land more in the country than the
city, more in the thinly settled and poorly roaded south than in the
more thickly settled and better roaded north; and most of all on the
western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between ranch and
ranch.
To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the traveller must be
weary (that means a long, hard road), and "distressed"--open to injury,
if not hospitably received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop
in after half an hour's pleasant stroll does not touch the springs of
hospitality. The genuine figure to call out this virtue is the
stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.
Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady visitor must be a
friend; and friendship is quite a different thing from hospitality.
That finds its typical instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the
hunted fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even when told
that his guest was the murderer of his son. As guest he was held
sacred; he had claimed the rights of hospitality and he received them.
Had he returned to make the same demand every few days, even without
renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality would have
held out.
A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its heights,
requiring intervals of relaxation. "Withdraw thy foot from thy
neighbour's house, lest he weary of thee and hate thee," says the
proverb of the very people where the laws of hospitality were sacred;
and "the stranger within thy gates" came under the regular provision of
household law.
Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under feudalism, as part
of the parental care of the Lord of the Land; and thus acquired its
elements of pride and ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land
about him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either directly or
through his dependents, and the castle was the only place big enough
for entertainment. The nobleman saw to it that no other person on his
domain should be able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the
Abbey had it all.
A little of this spirit gave character to the partly danger-based
southern hospitality. It was necessary to the occasional stranger on
the original and legitimate grounds; it became a steady custom to the
modern Lord of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens had
the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But hospitality, even in
that form, is not what issues cards and lays red carpet under awnings
from door to curb.
Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner--the
dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready
with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and
apologise--"I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for
dinner!" and "Why, of course! I forgot it was so late!--dear me! the
Jenkinses will have come before me if I don't hurry home!" On what
ground, then, is that dinner given--why are the Jenkinses asked that
night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still
sacred spirit of friendship?
Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain--and who so
carefully retaliate, card for card, _plat_ for _plat_ and dollar for
dollar--are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an
occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us
_when we are not entertaining_!
Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing
together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the
outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we
enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle
stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally,
spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual
propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships
are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business
life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer's camping, than
ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may
coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is
neither cause nor result of that strange process.
What, then, is "entertainment," to which the home is sacrificed so
utterly--which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of
hospitality or friendship?
On what line of social evolution may we trace the growth of this
amazing phenomenon; this constant gathering together of many people to
eat when they are not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when
they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their absurd
position that the hostess must needs hire all manner of paid performers
wherewith to "entertain" them?
Here is the explanation: humanity is a relation. It is not merely a
number of human beings, like a number of grains of sand. The human
being, to be really human, must be associated in various forms; grouped
together in the interchange of function. The family relation, as we
have seen, does not in itself constitute humanity; human relations are
larger.
Man, as a separate being, the personal man, must have his private house
to be separate in. Man, as a collective being, the social man, must
have his public house to be together in. This does not mean a drinking
place, but any form of building which shelters our common social
functions. A church is a public house--in it we meet together as human
beings; as individuals, not as families; to perform the common social
function of worship. All religions have this collective nature--people
come together as human beings, under a common impulse.
The home is a private house. That belongs to us separately for the
fulfilment of purely personal functions. Every other form of building
on earth is a public house, a house for people to come together in for
the fulfilment of social functions. Church, school, palace, mill, shop,
post office, railway station, museum, art gallery, library, every kind
of house except the home is a public house. These public houses are as
essential to our social life and development as the private house is to
our physical existence.
Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death; outside the home
are agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, transportation, art,
science, and religion. Every human--_i.e._, social--process goes
on outside the home, and has to have its appropriate building. In these
varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its true expression;
the contact and interchange, the stimulus and relief, without which the
human soul cannot live.
Humanity _must_ associate, that is the primal law of our being. This
association, so far in history, has been almost entirely confined to
men. They have associated in war, in work, in play. Men have always
been found in groups, on land and sea, doing things together;
developing comradeship, loyalty, justice; enjoying the full swing of
human faculties. But women, with the one partial exception of the
privileges of the church, have been denied this most vital necessity of
human life--association. Every woman was confined separately, in her
private house, to her most separate and private duties and pleasures;
and the duties and pleasures of social progress she was utterly denied.
The church alone gave her a partial outlet; gave her a common roof for
a common function, a place to come together in; and to the church she
has flocked continually, as her only ground of human association.