And Even Now Part 5

But--I constrain you in the act of rus.h.i.+ng off to pack your things--one moment: this essay has yet to be finished. We have yet to glance at those two extremes between which the mean is good guests.h.i.+p. Far to the right of the good guest, we descry the parasite; far to the left, the churl again. Not the same churl, perhaps. We do not know that Corin's master was ever sampled as a guest. I am inclined to call yonder speck Dante--Dante Alighieri, of whom we do know that he received during his exile much hospitality from many hosts and repaid them by writing how bitter was the bread in their houses, and how steep the stairs were. To think of dour Dante as a guest is less dispiriting only than to think what he would have been as a host had it ever occurred to him to entertain any one or anything except a deep regard for Beatrice; and one turns with positive relief to have a glimpse of the parasite--Mr.

Smurge, I presume, 'whose grat.i.tude was as boundless as his appet.i.te, and his presence as unsought as it appeared to be inevitable.' But now, how gracious and admirable is the central figure--radiating grat.i.tude, but not too much of it; never intrusive, ever within call; full of dignity, yet all amenable; quiet, yet lively; never echoing, ever amplifying; never contradicting, but often lighting the way to truth; an ornament, an inspiration, anywhere.

Such is he. But who is he? It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality. I have told you that when I lived in London I was nothing as a host; but I will not claim to have been a perfect guest.

Nor indeed was I. I was a good one, but, looking back, I see myself not quite in the centre--slightly to the left, slightly to the churlish side. I was rather too quiet, and I did sometimes contradict. And, though I always liked to be invited anywhere, I very often preferred to stay at home. If any one hereafter shall form a collection of the notes written by me in reply to invitations, I am afraid he will gradually suppose me to have been more in request than ever I really was, and to have been also a great invalid, and a great traveller.

A POINT TO BE REMEMBERED BY VERY EMINENT MEN 1918.

One of the things a man best remembers in later years is the first time he set eyes on some ill.u.s.trious elder whose achievements had already inflamed him to special reverence. In almost every autobiography you will find recorded the thrill of that first sight. With the thrill, perhaps, there was a slight shock. Great men are but life-sized. Most of them, indeed, are rather short. No matter to hero-wors.h.i.+pping youth.

The shock did but swell the thrill. It did but enlarge the wonder that this was the man himself, the man who--

I was about to say 'who had written those inspired books.' You see, the autobiographists are usually people with an innate twist towards writing, people whose heroes, therefore, were men of letters; and thus (especially as I myself have that twist) I am apt to think of literary hero-wors.h.i.+p as flouris.h.i.+ng more than could any other kind. I must try to be less narrow. At first sight of the Lord Chancellor, doubtless, unforgettable emotions rise in the breast of a young man who has felt from his earliest years the pa.s.sionate desire to be a lawyer. One whose dream it is to excel in trade will have been profoundly stirred at finding himself face to face with Sir Thomas Lipton. At least, I suppose so. I speak without conviction. I am inclined, after all, to think that there is in the literary temperament a special sensibility, whereby these great first envisagements mean more to it than to natures of a more practical kind. So it is primarily to men very eminent in literature that I venture to offer a hint for making those envisagements as great as possible.

The hint will serve only in certain cases. There are various ways in which a young man may chance to see his hero for the first time. 'One wintry afternoon, not long after I came to London,' the autobiographist will tell you, 'I happened to be in Cheyne Walk, bent on I know not what errand, when I saw coming slowly along the pavement an old grey-bearded man. He wore a hat of the kind that was called in those days a "wide-awake," and he leaned heavily on a stick which he carried in his right hand. I stood reverently aside to let him pa.s.s--the man who had first taught me to see, to feel, to think. Yes, it was Thomas Carlyle; and as he went by, looking neither to the right nor to the left, my heart stood still within me. What struck me most in that thought-furrowed face was the eyes. I had never, I have never since, seen a pair of eyes which,' etc., etc. This is well enough, and I don't say that the writer has exaggerated the force of the impression he received. I say merely that the impression would have been stronger still if he had seen Carlyle in a room. The open air is not really a good setting for a hero. It is too diffuse. It is too impersonal. Four walls, a ceiling, and a floor--these things are needed to concentrate for the wors.h.i.+pper the vision vouchsafed. Even if the room be a public one--a waiting-room, say, at Clapham Junction--it is very helpful. Far more so if it be a room in a private house, where, besides the vision itself, is thrust on the wors.h.i.+pper the dizzy sense of a personal relations.h.i.+p.

Dip with me, for an example, into some other autobiography... Here: 'Shortly after I came to London'--it is odd that autobiographists never are born or bred there--'one of the houses I found open to me was that of Mrs. T--, a woman whom (so it seemed to me when in later years I studied Italian) the word simpatica described exactly, and who, as the phrase is, "knew everybody." Calling on her one Sunday afternoon, I noticed among the guests, as I came in, a short, stalwart man with a grey beard. "I particularly," my hostess whispered to me, "want you to know Mr. Robert Browning." Everything in the room seemed to swim round me, and I had the sensation of literally sinking through the carpet when presently I found my hand held for a moment--it was only a moment, but it seemed to me an eternity--by the hand that had written "Paracelsus."

I had a confused impression of something G.o.dlike about the man. His brow was magnificent. But the eyes were what stood out. Not that they were prominent eyes, but they seemed to look you through and through, and had a l.u.s.tre--there is no other word for it--which,' I maintain, would have been far less dazzling out in the street, just as the world-sadness of Carlyle's eyes would have been twice as harrowing in Mrs. T--'s drawing-room.

But even there neither of those pairs of eyes could have made its fullest effect. The most terrifically gratifying way of seeing one's hero and his eyes for the first time is to see them in his own home.

Anywhere else, believe me, something of his essence is forfeit. 'The rose of roses' loses more or less of its beauty in any vase, and rather more than less there in a nosegay of ordinary little blossoms (to which I rather rudely liken Mrs. T--'s other friends). The supreme flower should be first seen growing from its own Sharonian soil.

The wors.h.i.+pper should have, therefore, a letter of introduction.

Failing that, he should write a letter introducing himself--a fervid, an idolatrous letter, not without some excuse for the writing of it: the hero's seventieth birthday, for instance, or a desire for light on some obscure point in one of his earlier works. Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise. Some of them, however, are bad at answering letters. The wors.h.i.+pper must not scruple to write repeatedly, if need be. Sooner or later he will be summoned to the presence. This, perhaps, will entail a railway journey. Heroes tend to live a little way out of London. So much the better. The adventure should smack of pilgrimage. Consider also that a house in a London street cannot seem so signally its owner's own as can a house in a village or among fields. The one kind contains him, the other enshrines him, breathes of him. The sight of it, after a walk (there should be a longish walk) from the railway station, strikes great initial chords in the wors.h.i.+pper; and the smaller the house, the greater the chords. The wors.h.i.+pper pauses at the gate of the little front-garden, and when he writes his autobiography those chords will be reverberating yet. 'Here it was that the greatest of modern spirits had lived and wrought.

Here in the fullness of years he abode. With I know not what tumult of thoughts I pa.s.sed up the path and rang the bell. A bright-faced parlourmaid showed me into a room on the ground-floor, and said she would tell the master I was here. It was a wonderfully simple room; and something, perhaps the writing-table, told me it was his work-room, the very room from which, in the teeth of the world's neglect and misunderstanding, he had cast his spell over the minds of all thinking men and women. When I had waited a few minutes, the door opened and'

after that the deluge of what was felt when the very eminent man came in.

Came in, mark you. That is a vastly important point. Had the very eminent man been there at the outset, the wors.h.i.+pper's first sight of him would have been a very great moment, certainly; but not nearly so great as in fact it was. Very eminent men should always, on these occasions, come in. That is the point I ask them to remember.

Honourably concerned with large high issues, they are not students of personal effect. I must therefore explain to them why it is more impressive to come into a room than to be found there.

Let those of them who have been playgoers cast their minds back to their experience of theatres. Can they recall a single play in which the princ.i.p.al actor was 'discovered' sitting or standing on the stage when the curtain rose? No. The actor, by the very nature of his calling, does, must, study personal effect. No playwright would dare to dump down his princ.i.p.al actor at the outset of a play. No sensible playwright would wish to do so. That actor's personality is a part of the playwright's material. Playwriting, it has been well said, is an art of preparing. The princ.i.p.al actor is one of the things for which we must be artfully prepared. Note Shakespeare's carefulness in this matter. In his day, the stage had no curtain, so that even the obscure actor who spoke the first lines (Shakespeare himself sometimes, maybe) was not ignominiously 'discovered.' But an unprepared entry is no good. The audience must first be wrought on, wrought up. Had Shakespeare been also Burbage, it is possible that he would have been even more painstaking than he was in leading up to the leading man. a.s.suredly, by far the most tremendous stage entries I ever saw were those of Mr. Wilson Barrett in his later days, the days when he had become his own dramatist. I remember particularly a first night of his at which I happened to be sitting next to a clever but not very successful and rather sardonic old actor. I forget just what great historic or mythic personage Mr.

Barrett was to represent, but I know that the earlier scenes of the play resounded with rumours of him--accounts of the great deeds he had done, and of the yet greater deeds that were expected of him. And at length there was a procession: white-bearded priests bearing wands; maidens playing upon the sackbut; guards in full armour; a pell-mell of unofficial citizens ever prancing along the edge of the pageant, huzza-ing and hosanna-ing, mostly looking back over their shoulders and shading their eyes; maidens strewing rose-leaves; and at last the orchestra cras.h.i.+ng to a climax in the nick of which my neighbour turned to me and, with an a.s.sumption of innocent enthusiasm, whispered, I shouldn't wonder if this were Barrett.' I suppose (Mr. Barrett at that instant amply appearing) I gave way to laughter; but this didn't matter; the applause would have drowned a thunderstorm, and lasted for several minutes.

My very eminent reader begins to look uncomfortable. Let him take heart. I do not want him to tamper with the simplicity of his household arrangements. Not even the one bright-faced parlourmaid need precede him with strewn petals. All the necessary preparation will have been done by the bare fact that this is his room, and that he will presently appear.

'But,' he may say, with a toss of his grey beard, 'I am not going to practise any device whatsoever. I am above devices. I shall be in the room when the young man arrives.' I a.s.sure him that I am not appealing to his vanity, merely to his good-nature. Let him remember that he too was young once, he too thrilled in harmless hero-wors.h.i.+p. Let him not grudge the young man an utmost emotion.

Coming into a room that contains a stranger is a definite performance, a deed of which one is conscious--if one be young, and if that stranger be august. Not to come in awkwardly, not to make a bad impression, is here the paramount concern. The mind of the young man as he comes in is clogged with thoughts of self. It is free of these impediments if he shall have been waiting alone in the room. To be come in to is a thing that needs no art and induces no embarra.s.sment. One's whole attention is focussed on the comer-in. One is the mere spectator, the pa.s.sive and receptive receiver. And even supposing that the young man could come in under his hero's gaze without a thought of self, his first vision would yet lack the right intensity. A person found in a room, if it be a room strange to the arriver, does not instantly detach himself from his surroundings. He is but a feature of the scene. He does not stand out as against a background, in the grand manner of portraiture, but is fused as in an elaborately rendered 'interior.' It is all the more essential, therefore, that the wors.h.i.+pper shall not have his first sight of hero and room simultaneously. The room must, as it were, be an anteroom, anon converted into a presence-chamber by the hero's entry. And let not the hero be in any fear that he will bungle his entry. He has but to make it. The effect is automatic. He will stand out by merely coming in.

I would but suggest that he must not, be he never so hale and hearty, bounce in. The young man must not be startled. If the mountain had come to Mahomet, it would, we may be sure, have come slowly, that the prophet should have time to realise the grandeur of the miracle. Let the hero remember that his coming, too, will seem supernatural to the young man.

Let him be framed for an instant or so in the doorway--time for his eyes to produce their peculiar effect. And by the way: if he be a wearer of gla.s.ses, he should certainly remove these before coming in. He can put them on again almost immediately. It is the first moment that matters.

As to how long an interval the hero should let elapse between the young man's arrival and his own entry, I cannot offer any very exact advice.

I should say, roughly, that in ten minutes the young man would be strung up to the right pitch, and that more than twenty minutes would be too much. It is important that expectancy shall have worked on him to the full, but it is still more important that his mood shall not have been chafed to impatience. The danger of over-long delay is well exemplified in the sad case of young Coventry Patmore. In his old age Patmore wrote to Mr. Gosse a description of a visit he had paid, at the age of eighteen, to Leigh Hunt; and you will find the letter on page 32, vol.

I, of Mr. Basil Champneys' biography of him. The circ.u.mstances had been most propitious. The eager and sensitive spirit of the young man, his intense admiration for 'The Story of Rimini,' the letter of introduction from his father to the venerable poet and friend of greater bygone poets, the long walk to Hammersmith, the small house in a square there--all was cla.s.sically in order. The poet was at home. The visitor as shown in.... 'I had,' he was destined to tell Mr. Gosse, 'waited in the little parlour at least two hours, when the door was opened and a most picturesque gentleman, with hair flowing nearly or quite to his shoulders, a beautiful velvet coat and a Vandyck collar of lace about a foot deep, appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling ethereally, and saying, without a word of preface or notice of my having waited so long, "This is a beautiful world, Mr. Patmore!"' The young man was so taken aback by these words that they 'eclipsed all memory of what occurred during the remainder of the visit.'

Yet there was nothing wrong about the words themselves. Indeed, to any one with any sense of character and any knowledge of Leigh Hunt, they must seem to have been exactly, exquisitely, inevitably the right words.

But they should have been said sooner.

SERVANTS 1918.

It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his arise from their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they wors.h.i.+p, so that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising from the table and rus.h.i.+ng out into the night. Nevertheless, they must have been shocked.

The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in, must be p.r.o.nounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example, ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it; and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as well as in France.

But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, ''Tis a matter easy to settle.

Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches shall powder their hair henceforth.' Whereat his Lady exclaimed in wrath, 'Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!' Whereat Sir John exclaimed 'Zounds!'

and hotly demonstrated that since his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its a.s.sumption by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper) went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, 'Let powder be taxed.' And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine, and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath many lives. Nor was there an end of those things which the n.o.bility and Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as, laced coats and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder could not aptly be. And it came to pa.s.s that there was a great War. And there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, 'My dear, I have decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery, any more,' and that his Lady will say 'Oh, all right.' Then at length will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the earth.

Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining tete-a-tete with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high figure--higher than in Rogers'

day, and higher far, I doubt not, than in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by that Revolution on their employers. The n.o.bility had begun to feel that it had better be just a little less n.o.ble than heretofore. When the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his study, lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some fifteen years later, he said to his heir, 'Discharge two more.' Such enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age, hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing just that if the Bastille had been less brittle.

n.o.blemen, becoming less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any n.o.bleman not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.

Even if the War shall have taught us nothing else, this it will have taught us almost from its very outset: to mistrust all prophets, whether of good or of evil. Pray stone me if I predict anything at all. It may be that the War, and that remarkable by-product, the Russian Revolution, will have so worked on the minds of n.o.blemen that they will prefer to have not one footman in their service. Or it may be that all those men who might be footmen will prefer to earn their livelihood in other ways of life. It may even be that no more parlourmaids and housemaids, even for very ill.u.s.trious houses, will be forthcoming. I do not profess to foresee. Perhaps things will go on just as before. But remember: things were going on, even then. Suppose that in the social organism generally, and in the att.i.tude of servants particularly, the decades after the War shall bring but a gradual evolution of what was previously afoot. Even on this mild supposition must it seem likely that some of us will live to look back on domestic service, or at least on what we now mean by that term, as a curiosity of past days.

You have to look rather far behind you for the time when 'the servant question,' as it is called, had not yet begun to arise. To find servants collectively 'knowing their place,' as the phrase (not is, but) was, you have to look right back to the dawn of Queen Victoria's reign. I am not sure whether even then those Georgian notice-boards still stood in the London parks to announce that 'Ladies and Gentlemen are requested, and Servants are commanded' not to do this and that. But the spirit of those boards did still brood over the land: servants received commands, not requests, and were not 'obliging' but obedient. As for the tasks set them, I daresay the footmen in the great houses had an easy time: they were there for ornament; but the (comparatively few) maids there, and the maid or two in every home of the rapidly-increasing middle cla.s.s, were very much for use, having to do an immense amount of work for a wage which would nowadays seem nominal. And they did it gladly, with no notion that they were giving much for little, or that the likes of them had any natural right to a glimpse of liberty or to a moment's more leisure than was needed to preserve their health for the benefit of their employers, or that they were not in duty bound to be truly thankful for having a roof over their devoted heads. Rare and reprehensible was the maid who, having found one roof, hankered after another. Improvident, too; for only by long and exclusive service could she hope that in her old age she would not be cast out on the parish.

She might marry meanwhile? The chances were very much against that.

That was an idea misbeseeming her station in life. By the rules of all households, 'followers' were fended ruthlessly away. Her state was sheer slavery? Well, she was not technically a chattel. The Law allowed her to escape at any time, after giving a month's notice; and she did not work for no wages at all, remember. This was hard on her owners? Well, in ancient Rome and elsewhere, her employers would have had to pay a large-ish sum of money for her, down, to a merchant. Economically, her employers had no genuine grievance. Her parents had handed her over to them, at a tender age, for nothing. There she was; and if she was a good girl and gave satisfaction, and if she had no gipsy strain, to make her restless for the unknown, there she ended her days, not without honour from the second or third generation of her owners. As in Ancient Rome and elsewhere, the system was, in the long run, conducive to much good feeling on either side. 'Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own.' Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's.

Perhaps the pa.s.sage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects. Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over.

Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and c.u.mulose clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pa.s.s. 'Punch,' our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them. Absurd that Jemima Jane should imitate the bonnets of her mistress and secretly aspire to play the piano!

'Punch' and his artists, as you will find in his old volumes, were very merry about her, and no doubt his readers believed that his exquisite ridicule would kill, or his sound good sense cure, the malady in her soul. Poor misguided girl!--why was she flying in the face of Nature?

Nature had decreed that some should command, others obey; that some should sit imperative all day in airy parlours, and others be executive in bas.e.m.e.nts. I daresay that among the sitters aloft there were many whose indignation had a softer side to it. Under the Christian Emperors, Roman ladies were really very sorry for their slaves. It is unlikely that no English ladies were so in the 'sixties. Pity, after all, is in itself a luxury. It is for the 'some' a measure of the gulf between themselves and the 'others.' Those others had now begun to show signs of restiveness; but the gulf was as wide as ever.

Anthony Trollope was not, like 'Punch,' a mere interpreter of what was upmost in the average English mind: he was a beautifully patient and subtle demonstrator of all that was therein. Reading him, I soon forget that I am reading about fict.i.tious characters and careers; quite soon do I feel that I am collating intimate memoirs and diaries. For sheer conviction of truth, give me Trollope. You, too, if you know him, must often have uttered this appeal. Very well. Have you been given 'Orley Farm'? And do you remember how Lady Mason felt after confessing to Sir Peregrine Orme that she had forged the will? 'As she slowly made her way across the hall, she felt that all of evil, all of punishment, had now fallen upon her. There are periods in the lives of some of us--I trust but of few--when with the silent inner voice of suffering'--and here, in justice to Trollope, I must interrupt him by saying that he seldom writes like this; and I must also, for a reason which will soon be plain, ask you not to skip a word--'we call on the mountains to fall and crush us, and on the earth to gape open and take us in--when with an agony of intensity, we wish our mothers had been barren. In these moments the poorest and most desolate are objects to us of envy, for their sufferings can be as nothing to our own. Lady Mason, as she crept silently across the hall, saw a servant girl pa.s.s down towards the entrance to the kitchen, and would have given all, all that she had in the world, to change places with that girl. But no change was possible to her. Neither would the mountains crush her, nor the earth take her in. This was her burden, and she must,' etc., etc.

You enjoyed the wondrous bathos? Of course. And yet there wasn't any bathos at all, really. At least, there wasn't any in 1862, when 'Orley Farm' was published. Servants really were 'most desolate' in those days, and 'their sufferings' were less acute only than those of gentlewomen who had forged wills. This is an exaggerated view? Well it was the view held by gentlewomen at large, in the 'sixties. Trust Trollope.

Why to a modern gentlewoman would it seem so much more dreadful to be crushed by mountains and swallowed by earthquakes than to be a servant girl pa.s.sing down towards the entrance to the kitchen? In other words, how is it that servants have so much less unpleasant a time than they were having half-a-century ago? I should like to think this melioration came through our sense of justice, but I cannot claim that it did.

Somehow, our sense of justice never turns in its sleep till long after the sense of injustice in others has been thoroughly aroused; nor is it ever up and doing till those others have begun to make themselves thoroughly disagreeable, and not even then will it be up and doing more than is urgently required of it by our convenience at the moment. For the improvement in their lot, servants must, I am afraid, be allowed to thank themselves rather than their employers. I am not going to trace the stages of that improvement. I will not try to decide in what year servants pa.s.sed from wistfulness to resentment, or from resentment to exaction. This is not a sociological treatise, it is just an essay; and I claim an essayist's privilege of not groping through the library of the British Museum on the chance of mastering all the details. I confess that I did go there yesterday, thinking I should find in Mr. and Mrs.

Sidney Webb's 'History of Trade Unionism' the means of appearing to know much. But I drew blank. It would seem that servants have no trade union. This is strange. One would not have thought so much could be done without organisation. The mere Spirit of the Time, sneaking down the steps of areas, has worked wonders. There has been no servants'

campaign, no strategy, nothing but an infinite series of spontaneous and sporadic little risings in isolated households. Wonders have been worked, yes. But servants are not yet satiated with triumph. More and more, on the contrary, do they glide--long before the War they had begun gliding--away into other forms of employment. Not merely are the changed conditions of domestic service not changed enough for them: they seem to despise the thing itself. It was all very well so long as they had not been taught to read and write, but--There, no doubt, is the root of the mischief. Had the governing cla.s.ses not forced those accomplishments on them in 1872--But there is no use in repining. What's done can't be undone. On the other hand, what must be done can't be left undone.

Housework, for example. What concessions by the governing cla.s.ses, what bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?

Perhaps the governing cla.s.ses will do it for themselves, eventually, and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing cla.s.ses--merely the State and its swarms of neat little overseers, male and female. I know not whether in this case the sum of human happiness will be greater, but it will certainly--it and the sum of human dullness--be more evenly distributed. I take it that under any scheme of industrial compulsion for the young a certain number of the conscripts would be told off for domestic service. To every family in every flat (houses not legal) would be a.s.signed one female member of the community.

She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of general education at a munic.i.p.al college. Three years would be her term of industrial (sub-sect. domestic) service. Her diet, her costume, her hours of work and leisure, would be standardised, but the lenses of her pince-nez would be in strict accordance to her own eyesight. If her employers found her faulty in work or conduct, and proved to the visiting inspector that she was so, she would be penalised by an additional term of service. If she, on the other hand, made good any complaint against her employers, she would be transferred to another flat, and they be penalised by suspension of their license to employ.

There would always be chances of friction. But these chances would not be so numerous nor so great as they are under that lack of system which survives to-day.

Servants would be persons knowing that for a certain period certain tasks were imposed on them, tasks tantamount to those in which all their coevals were simultaneously engaged. To-day they are persons not knowing, as who should say, where they are, and wis.h.i.+ng all the while they were elsewhere--and mostly, as I have said, going elsewhere. Those who remain grow more and more touchy, knowing themselves a mock to the rest; and their qualms, even more uncomfortably than their demands and defects, are always haunting their employers. It seems almost incredible that there was a time when Mrs. Smith said 'Sarah, your master wishes--'

or Mr. Smith said 'Sarah, go up and ask your mistress whether--' I am well aware that the very t.i.tle of this essay jars. I wish I could find another; but in writing one must be more explicit than one need be by word of mouth. I am well aware that the survival of domestic service, in its old form, depends more and more on our agreement not to mention it.

a.s.suredly, a most uncomfortable state of things. Is it, after all, worth saving?--a form so depleted of right human substance, an anomaly so ticklish. Consider, in your friend's house, the cheerful smile of yonder parlourmaid; hark to the housemaid's light brisk tread in the corridor; note well the slight droop of the footman's shoulders as he noiselessly draws near. Such things, as being traditional, may pander to your sense of the great past. Histrionically, too, they are good. But do you really like them? Do they not make your blood run a trifle cold? In the thick of the great past, you would have liked them well enough, no doubt.

I myself am old enough to have known two or three servants of the old school--later editions of Ruskin's Anne. With them there was no discomfort, for they had no misgiving. They had never wished (heaven help them!) for more, and in the process of the long years had acquired, for inspiration of others, much--a fine mellowness, the peculiar sort of dignity, even of wisdom, that comes only of staying always in the same place, among the same people, doing the same things perpetually. Theirs was the sap that rises only from deep roots, and where they were you had always the sense of standing under great wide branches. One especially would I recall, who--no, personally I admire the plungingly intimate kind of essayist very much indeed, but I never was of that kind, and it's too late to begin now. For a type of old-world servant I would recall rather some more public worthy, such as that stout old hostler whom, whenever you went up to stay in Hampstead, you would see standing planted outside that stout old hostelry, Jack Straw's Castle. He stands there no more, and the hostelry can never again be to me all that it was of solid comfort. Or perhaps, as he was so entirely an outside figure, I might rather say that Hampstead itself is not what it was. His robust but restful form, topped with that weather-beaten and chin-bearded face, was the hub of the summit of Hampstead. He was as richly local as the pond there--that famous pond which in hot weather is so much waded through by cart-horses and is at all seasons so much barked around by excitable dogs and cruised on by toy boats. He was as essential as it and the flag-staff and the gorse and the view over the valley away to Highgate. It was always to Highgate that his big blue eyes were looking, and on Highgate that he seemed to be ruminating. Not that I think he wanted to go there. He was Hampstead-born and Hampstead-bred, and very loyal to that village. In the course of his life he had 'bin down to London a matter o' three or four times,' he would tell me, 'an' slep'

there once.' He knew me to be a native of that city, and, for he was the most respectful of men, did not make any adverse criticism of it. But clearly it had not prepossessed him. Men and--horses rather than cities were what he knew. And his memory was more retentive of horses than of men. But he did--and this was a great thrill for me--did, after some pondering at my behest, remember to have seen in Heath Street, when he was a boy, 'a gen'leman with summut long hair, settin' in a small cart, takin' a pictur'.' To me Ford Madox Brown's 'Work' is of all modern pictur's the most delightful in composition and strongest in conception, the most alive and the most worth-while; and I take great pride in having known some one who saw it in the making. But my friend himself set little store on anything that had befallen him in days before he was 'took on as stable-lad at the Castle.' His pride was in the Castle, wholly.

Part of his charm, like Hampstead's, was in the surprise one had at finding anything like it so near to London. Even now, if you go to districts near which no great towns are, you will find here and there an inn that has a devoted waiter, a house with a fond butler. As to butlers elsewhere, butlers in general, there is one thing about them that I do not at all understand. It seems to be against nature, yet it is a fact, that in the past forty years they have been growing younger; and slimmer. In my childhood they were old, without exception; and stout.