Modes and morals

My first caption was Democracy, Plumbing, and the War. That will hardly do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter; though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is perhaps as symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three, with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present problem of living, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness, democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William Haywood. All three have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity, turned moderate circumstances to actual poverty; but democracy and plumbing were already preparing the débâcle for this group. All of us--the educated classes as well as the uneducated--are guilty together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts; and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.

If America has led the world in labor-saving devices, it is because America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical appliances does not mean--as we have sometimes fatuously taken it to mean--that they are less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been, with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines and garbage incinerators, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of servants. The Englishman really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap. That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot explain it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America only the very rich could afford a personal servant whose duty it was to set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of the bath as soon as it was done with. Even a few years ago, I remember having great difficulty in a London hotel of the better sort (but very English and almost totally unfrequented by Americans) in getting the chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The hotel was much too British to run to numbers of private baths. Hence the crying need of a slop-jar. The maid finally stole one for me from a room across the corridor, and assured me that the gentleman from whom she stole would not miss it. Nothing would induce her to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I am informed, by friends who have more British social experience than I, that slop-jars are not in the best English tradition--because, theoretically, in the opulent old-fashioned household, as soon as you have washed your hands, the water in which you washed them, the towel on which you wiped them, mysteriously and gracefully disappear. Perfection of service lies in having plenty of dexterous servants lying in wait to discover your needs; so many servants, and such well-trained ones, that you cannot wash your hands without their becoming aware of it and, with the least possible impinging on your notice, removing the traces of your ablutions. Perfection of service does not involve your emptying your own wash-basin, even into a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar.

Now there are very few of us who would take the trouble to invent a tiled bathroom if our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if a hot-water can miraculously sprang into being as soon as the desire for hot water seized us. There is no labor-saving device so perfectly convenient as ringing a bell and having some one else do the thing for you with complete competence. It is by no means strange that well-to-do Europeans have been content to be supremely waited upon, instead of making practical tasks mechanically easier for themselves. The goddess of the labor-saving invention is the woman who does all, or a good share, of “her own work.” Old-fashioned English and French houses are cold; but (climate apart) nothing like so cold as American houses would be if Americans depended on open fires. For in England or France there are ten people to make the fires, to one in America. We simply dare not--again, climate apart--depend, as our British cousins have been wont to, on open fires. The average household cannot afford the servants to do incessant fire-making all over the house.

So we have multiplied devices, from the modest kitchen cabinet up; because that majority which advertisers and inventors are always trying to reach does a lot of things for itself. Even those Americans who always have had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of servants, have indulged in these devices. For pure philanthropy’s sake? Well, I am afraid not quite. Rather, because the standard having been set by the mistress who is also the servant, the standard must be lived up to, or professional servants would complain. The interesting point is that in America the standard is set by the woman who does her own work or a part of it, or who may, at any given moment, have to occupy herself thus. We are, you see, a democracy beyond the democracies of other lands. For it is not simply a question of money; it is a question of our all being in the same boat.

I am not going into the servant question, for that is a question as trite as it is tragic. But, as we all know, even before the war it was growing acute. The best servants we had in the old days came from the countries where personal service was a tradition--chiefly from the territories of Great Britain. But northern Europe is ceasing to enter domestic service; rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read the pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the “women’s magazines,” even sometimes in philanthropic periodicals. What they all say is that the only way you can keep your cook in your kitchen is to treat her as if she were the governess, or to give her factory hours and factory freedom--to put her on a level, that is, with the more independent worker. At that, they do not give us much hope of keeping her. But I fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall dispense with her and get our meals from co-operative kitchens.

I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the absurdity of having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only one reason: that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more service. If you have your meals in the “living-room,” you dispense with so much floor-and-wall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be lived in otherwise. All people may not have the prejudice known to some of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is not an absurdity, so long as you can by any means afford it. If the æsthetic and pseudo-æsthetic experts in domesticity are telling us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction of our comfort, an unavoidable mitigation of decency. The one most aristocratic element in life, physically speaking, is spaciousness; it has always been in the best tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we moved en masse out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for ourselves.

It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation, which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce (as in other colonies) with many of the inherited comforts. Our love of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of protective coloring. The enforced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we had to do certain things for ourselves, we developed a preference for doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South, some modification of the tradition must have been necessary, for the South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here and there a butler, a lady’s maid, may, after years of struggle, have been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But in many ways Southerners must have contended with the disheartening conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire, dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence only by sheer force of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic service there, because there was never the rounded conception of civilized domestic comfort in any slave’s mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incompetent in domestic service than the younger generation of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove our domestic salvation.

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought insensibly to an almost animal dependence on creature comforts. With all our theoretical glorification of simplicity, we have really prided ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, and most of all, it must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no æsthetic value. Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is for the most part not so “comfortable” as the American middle class; and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing so much as our electrical appliances and our skyscrapers. We have sinned, all of us together, as I said before; and now we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.