On Domestic Servants

Discussions about domestic servants seem always to be marked by a highly modern and enlightened confusion on both sides. On the reforming side we have nothing but the extraordinary notion that you can only improve a family by making it more like a factory. On the conservative side we have very little except rather snobbish sneers at the bare idea of any poor person playing on the piano. The last symbol is significant, because it illustrates the one fundamental mistake of both reformers and conservatives: the notion that the social separation of mistresses and servants must be an old thing, and their association must be a new thing. The truth is that the ancient world was more familiar with its slaves than the modern world with its servants. When Christianity humanized the remains of slavery, the association grew less servile and more domestic j it was only in the industrial time that a new fastidiousness and shyness broke it up. It was an amusing irony. Victorian ladies and gentlemen sniffed over their fierce feudal ancestors whose servants dined below the salt, while their own servants dined below the floor. They would never have dreamed of tolerating a housemaid at the other end of their own table, but kept her in a kind of cavern under the pavement. To do them justice, the housemaid would probably have hated dining with them quite as much as they hated dining with her. A new social spirit had come, and the classes were really separated. But it was not always so, and the very case of the piano is enough to remind us of it. Why, Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Pepys had their servant girl in the drawing-room with them in the evening to sing glees with them at their own piano, or what corresponded to their piano. None of the three had a shadow of the modern embarrassment in the mattery there was no sneering and no snobbishness. Manners were rougher in those days, and Mrs. Pepys might very possibly have clouted the girl over the head 5 but she would never have been surprised to hear of her playing the piano.

Nevertheless, the worst mistake of all has been made by the reformers, and not the conservatives. For it is a mistake at the very root of all the modern mistakes. It is excellently illustrated in a single fact. It was argued at the inquiry that the chief trouble of servants was in preparing the evening meal for the family, and it was therefore innocently proposed to abolish the evening meal for the family. It was not proposed to abolish anything else, of all the fussy formalities of modern daily life. The servants would still, presumably, have to dust half-a-hundred objectless ornaments that the family never look at, and all sorts of odds and ends of furniture that the family never use. The one thing to be abolished is the one thing that does make the family feel like a family. It is the one thing that does really connect them with their feudal ancestors, and probably their prehistoric ancestors, as well as their most remote descendants — the ancient and immortal institution of the feast after work, of reunion and refreshment in the evening. Obviously, any reformer thinking in terms of reality would start with this as the unalterable reality. Then he would reform other things so as to save it — as, for instance, abolish other duties, give the servant other compensations, simplify conditions so that this might be done without a servant, and so on. Of course, he gets hold of the sow by the wrong ear, and starts making his silk purse of that.

The more I see of the world today the more I am certain that it suffers from a certain tail-foremost trick of thought. It does not so much allow the tail to wag the dog as dock the tail of its dog, instead of docking the dog of its tail. It takes the tail first, and then considers whether a quadruped is a suitable appendage to it. It takes the trivial thing first and tries to put it right, without caring whether it is putting the important thing wrong. And just as a gentleman would not really wish to walk down the street followed only by a fine bushy tail instead of a faithful hound, so it will generally be found that the trivial thing, when separated from the important thing, remains just as trivial when it is put right as if it were left wrong. If a man is so careful of his silk hat, and so afraid of its suffering a spot of rain, that he cuts out the whole of the crown and wears only the brim, he will suffer two inconveniences. First, he may get a cold in his head, which some mystics think more important than his hatj and second, he will also have the needless nuisance of wearing a stiff rim round his head which serves none of the purposes of a hat, though it have something of the appearance of a halo. He will not only have lost a convenience, but also gained an encumbrance. If a man is so much afraid of being thrown out of a hansom cab (as many a time I've been) that as soon as he has got into it he insists on the horse being taken out of it, he will find he has made a double mistake. He has not only lost a horse but he has found a cab — an object which in isolation and immobility is not a very useful trifle to possess or a very easy trifle to dispose of. He has taken away the whole motive force and meaning of a cabj but he still has a cab that is quite meaningless. He has sold a good horse to buy a white elephant. Now that little comedy is constantly being acted in the intellectual world. Men reform a thing by removing the reality from it, and then do not know what to do with the unreality that is left. Thus they would reform religious institutions by removing the religion. They do not seem to see that to take away the creed and leave the servants of the creed is simply to go on paying servants for nothing. To keep the temple without the god is to be hag-ridden with superstitious vigilance about a hollow temple — about a mere shell made of brick or stone. To support the palace and not support the king is simply to pay for an empty palace. Just as such philosophers would deal with the temple and the palace, so some of these other social philosophers would deal with the household or the home. They never think of asking with what object they maintain a house. They are quite ready to maintain the house so long as they can abandon the object. They never seem to reflect that, without that object, or with some other object, there never would have been any house at all. There would have been something else quite unlike a house and possibly more like a hive. This idea of going back to the beginning and considering the end, of thinking of the purpose of anything as a whole, seems to these people to be merely metaphysical and mystical, though it is obviously the only thing that is really material and practical. The course that seems to them practical will leave them loaded with a burden of antiquated shells and ruins. There is a case for using these things and a case for destroying them 5 but there is no case for the current fashion of preserving them and destroying their use. But reformers of this kind do not seem to care how many elaborate trifles they leave to trouble us, as long as they remove the purpose that once at least seemed to be worth the trouble.

The proposal to abolish the family feast in the evening is an excellent example of all this. There is a case for abolishing the family feast because there is a case for abolishing the family and the family homestead and the family name. There is no inevitable reason why these particular people should live together in one particular house at all 3 they could be kept in carefully numbered cells in some commodious State prison of the Utopia of the sociologists. But as there are people who like living in families, these are precisely the things that they like about it. They like things of the nature of the evening meal 3 if they were asked for what they valued the house they would probably think first of the evening meal. As it is, they are asked to give up the social reunion they value most, and still preserve the whole house and all the rest of the housework. The servant girl is still forced to dust the dining-room in which nobody will dine. She is still ordered to polish the dinner-table at which nobody will have dinner. A whole factory of futilities, a vast machinery of meaningless and petty duties will remain to be done, and nothing has been removed except the central social function that was the only excuse for any of them. But the strange part of this modern psychology is that it never thinks of beginning by altering the trivialities. It seems to imagine that French-polishing and vacuum-cleaning are more permanent than eating and drinking. Very few of the Utopian visions offered us today have really removed the small mechanical complexities and conventions of life. They mostly conceive the details of every day very much as they are at this moment in any villa in Surbiton. All that they do alter is the essential institution behind the convention, or the essential idea behind the essential institution. They do not imagine a man and a woman married, but renewing their honeymoon elsewhere than in the suburban villa — in a tent, or at the top of a tree. They are more likely to imagine them still living like married people in the suburban villa, only they are not married. They do not seem so much disposed to imagine some more popular figure than the policeman arresting or punishing people for their crimes, as rather to keep the policeman but abandon the whole idea of crime and punishment, substituting some more humane philosophy of putting all sorts of ordinary people in padded cells till they die. And so, in the case of the domestic dinner-party, they do not seem disposed to save the essentials of it by cutting it down to its essentials j they do not say it should be more simplified from luxury, or more equalized among all classes of society, or given everywhere more opportunity to return to its own original nature. They have no notion of the original nature of a feast, any more than of the original nature of a family. Just as they would alter the eternal family in the fashion of the temporary factory, so they would alter the eternal feast in the fashion of the temporary table reserved at a restaurant. It is queer topsy-turvydom to live inj but it will probably only last our time.