And Even Now
room when the young man arrives.’ I assure 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-worship. 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 embarrassment. One’s whole attention
is focussed on the comer-in. One is the mere spectator, the passive 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 worshipper 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
glasses, 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 circumstances 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 classically 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 worship, so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising
from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must
have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced 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 assumption 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 Nobility 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 pass 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 tête-á-tête
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 Nobility had begun to feel that it had better be just
a little less noble 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.
Noblemen, 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 Nobleman 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 Noblemen 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 illustrious 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 attitude 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 class,
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