And Even Now
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 passage 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 cumulose clouds. It
was believed, however, that these would pass. ‘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 basements. 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 fictitious 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 pass 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 passing 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 passed 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 classes 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 classes, what
bribes, will be big enough hereafter to get that done?
Perhaps the governing classes will do it for themselves, eventually,
and their ceilings not fall. Or perhaps there will be no more governing
classes--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 assigned one female member of the community.
She would be twenty years old, having just finished her course of
general education at a municipal 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 wishing 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 title 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.
Assuredly, 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