The Art of Living

II

Whether we live in the city or the country, it must be apparent to all of us that a great wave of architectural activity in respect to dwelling-houses has been spreading over our land during the past twenty years. The American architect has been getting in his work and showing what he could do, with the result that the long, monotonous row of brick or freestone custom-made city houses, and the stereotyped white country farm-house with green blinds and an ell or lean-to attached, have given place to a vivid and heterogeneous display of individual effort. Much of this is fine and some deadly, for the display includes not merely the generally tasteful and artistic conceptions of our trained native architects, who have studied in Paris, but the raw notions of all the builders of custom-made houses who, recognizing the public desire for striking and original effects, are bent upon surpassing one another.

Therefore, while we have many examples, both urban and suburban, of beautiful and impressive house architecture, the new sections of our cities and suburbs fairly bristle with a multiplicity of individual experiments in which the salient features of every known type of architecture are blended fearlessly together. The native architect who has neither been to Paris nor been able to devote much time to study has not been limited in the expression of his genius by artistic codes or conventions. Consequently he has felt no hesitation in using extinguisher towers, mediæval walls, battlement effects, Queen Anne cottage lines, Old Colonial proportions, and Eastern imagery in the same design, and any one of them at any critical juncture when his work has seemed to him not sufficiently striking for his own or the owner’s taste.

Satisfactory as all this is as evidence of a progressive spirit, and admitting that many of even these lawless manifestations of talent are not without merit, it is nevertheless aggressively true that the smug complacency of the proprietor of the suburban villa, which is hedged about by a stone rampart of variegated rough stone on an ordinary building lot, has no justification whatever. Nor has the master of the castellated, gloomy, half-Moorish, half-mediæval mansion, which disfigures the fashionable quarter of many of our cities, occasion to congratulate himself on having paid for a thing of beauty. The number of our well-trained architects, though constantly increasing, is still small, especially as compared with the number of people of means who are eager to occupy a thing of beauty; then, too, even the trained architect is apt to try experiments for the sake of testing his genius, on a dog, so to speak – some confiding plutocrat with a love of splendor who has left everything to him.

The result is that grotesque and eye-distressing monsters of masonry stand side by side on many of our chief avenues with the most graceful and finished specimens of native architectural inspiration. As there is no law which prevents one from building or buying an ugly house, and as the architect, whose experiment on a dog tortures the public eye, suffers no penalty for his crime, our national house architecture may be said to be working out its own salvation at the public expense. It is the duty of a patriotic citizen to believe that in this, as in other matters of national welfare, the beautiful gradually will prevail; and assuredly the many very attractive private residences which one sees both in the city and the country should tend to make us hopeful.

Why is it that the rich man who would live wisely feels the necessity for so large a house in the city? Almost the first thing that one who has accumulated or inherited great possessions does nowadays is to leave the house where very likely he has been comfortable and move into a mammoth establishment suggesting rather a palace or an emporium than a house. Why is this? Some one answers that it is for the sake of abundant light and extra space. Surely in a handsome house of twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be light and space enough for the average family, however fastidious or exacting. In the country, where one needs many spare rooms for the accommodation of guests, there are some advantages in the possession of an abnormally large house. But how is the comfort of the city man enhanced by one, that is, if the attendant discomforts are weighed in the same scale? It has sometimes seemed to me that the wealthy or successful man invests in a prodigious mansion as a sort of testimonial; as though he felt it incumbent on him to erect a conventional monument to his own grandeur or success, in order to let the public entertain no doubt about it. But so many otherwise sensible men have deliberately built huge city houses that this can scarcely be the controlling motive in all cases. Perhaps, if asked, they would throw the responsibility on their wives. But it is even more difficult to understand why a sensible woman should wish one of the vast houses which our rising architects are naturally eager to receive orders to construct. A handsome house where she can entertain attractively, yes: an exquisitely furnished, sunny, corner house by all means; a house where each child may have a room apart and where there are plenty of spare rooms, if you like; but why a mammoth cave? She is the person who will suffer the discomforts to be weighed in the same scale, for the care will fall on her.

We have in this country neither trained servants nor the housekeeper system. The wife and mother who is the mistress of a huge establishment wishes it to be no less a home than her former residence, and her husband would be the first to demur were she to cast upon others the burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate-sized modern house is the cause of care enough, as we all know, and wherefore should any woman seek to multiply her domestic worries by duplicating or trebling the number of her servants? To become the manager of a hotel or to cater for an ocean steamship is perhaps a tempting ambition for one in search of fortune, but why should a woman, who can choose what she will have, elect to be the slave of a modern palace with extinguisher towers? Merely to be able to invite all her social acquaintance to her house once a year without crowding them? It would be simpler to hire one of the many halls now adapted for the purpose.

The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, and the worries consequent upon their inefficiency, is probably the chief cause of the rapid growth of the apartment-house among us. The contemporary architect has selected this class of building for some of his deadliest conceits. Great piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron tower up stories upon stories high, and frown upon us at the street-corners like so many Brobdingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nevertheless they contain the homes of many citizens, and the continuous appearance of new and larger specimens attests their increasing popularity. Twenty years ago there was scarcely an apartment-house to be seen in our cities. There was a certain number of hotels where families could and did live all the year round, but the ten-story monster, with a janitor, an elevator, steam heat, electric light, and all the alleged comforts of home, was practically unknown. We have always professed to be such a home-loving people, and the so-called domestic hearth has always been such a touchstone of sentiment among us that the exchange of the family roof for the community of a flat by so many well-to-do persons certainly seems to suggest either that living cheek by jowl with a number of other households is not so distasteful as it seems to the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeeping is so irksome that women are tempted to swallow sentiment and escape from their trammels to the comparatively easy conditions of an apartment. It does seem as though one’s identity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming a tenant in common, and as though the family circle could never be quite the same thing to one who was conscious that his was only a part of one tremendous whole. And yet, more and more people seem to be anxious to share a janitor and front door, and, though the more fastidious insist on their own cuisine, there are not a few content to entrust even their gastronomic welfare to a kitchen in common.

It must be admitted, even by those of us who rejoice in our homes, that there is much to be said in favor of the apartment-house as a solver of practical difficulties, and that our imaginations are largely responsible for our antipathy. When once inside a private apartment of the most desirable and highly evolved kind one cannot but admit that there is no real lack of privacy, and that the assertion that the owner has no domestic hearth is in the main incorrect. To be sure the domain belonging to each suite is comparatively circumscribed; there is no opportunity for roaming from garret to cellar; no private laundry; no private backyard; and no private front-door steps; but to all practical intents one is no less free from intrusion or inspection than in a private house, and it may also be said that reporters and other persevering visitors are kept at a more respectful distance by virtue of the janitor in common on the ground floor. The sentiment in favor of limited individual possession is difficult to eradicate from sensitive souls, and rightly, perhaps, many of us refuse to be convinced; but it remains true that the woman who has become the mistress of a commodious and well-managed apartment must have many agreeable quarters of an hour in congratulating herself that perplexities concerning chores, heating, lighting, flights of stairs, leaks, and a host of minor domestic matters no longer threaten her peace of mind, and – greatest boon of all – that she now can manage with two or three servants instead of five or six.

In this newly developed fondness for flats we are again guilty of imitating one of the effete civilizations – France this time – where it has long been the custom for families to content themselves with a story or two instead of a house; though we can claim the size and style of architecture of the modern apartment pile as our special brand upon the adopted institution. The introduction of the custom here seems to me to be the result of exhaustion of the female nervous system. The American housewife, weary of the struggle to obtain efficient servants, having oscillated from all Catholics to all Protestants, from all Irish to all Swedes and back again, having experimented with negroes and Chinamen, and returned to pure white, having tried native help and been insulted, and reverted to the Celtic race, she – the long-suffering – has sought the apartment-house as a haven of rest. She – the long-suffering – has assuredly been in a false position since the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, for she has been forced to cherish and preserve a domestic institution which popular sentiment has refused to recognize as consistent with the principles of Democracy. Our National creed, whether presented in the primer or from the platform, has ever repudiated the idea of service when accompanied by an abatement of personal independence or confession of social inferiority. Therefore the native American woman has persistently refused, in the face of high wages and of exquisite moral suasion, to enter domestic service, and has preferred the shop or factory to a comfortable home where she would have to crook the knee and say “Yes, ma’am.”

At the same time the native American woman, ever since “help” in the sense of social acquaintances willing to accommodate for hire and dine with the family has ceased to adorn her kitchen and parlor, has been steadily forced by the demands of complex modern living to have servants of her own. And where was she to obtain them? Excepting the negro, only among the emigrants of foreign countries, at first among the Irish, and presently among the English and Swedes, all of whom, unharassed by scruples as to a consequent loss of self-respect, have been prompt to recognize that this field of employment lay open to them and was undisputed. They have come, and they still come in herds to our shores, raw and undisciplined, the overflow from their own countries; and as fast as they arrive they are feverishly snapped up by the American housewife, who finds the need of servants more and more imperative; for some one must do the elaborate cooking, some one must do the fine washing, some one must polish the silver, rub the brasses, care for the lamps, and dust the bric-à-brac in her handsomest establishment. And no one but the emigrant, or the son and daughter of the emigrant, is willing to.

The consequence is that, though the native American woman is as resolute as ever in her own refusal to be a cook or waitress in a private family, domestic service exists as an institution no less completely than it exists in Europe, and practically under the same conditions, save that servants here receive considerably higher wages than abroad because the demand is greater than the supply. There is a perpetual wail in all our cities and suburbs that the supply of competent cooks, and skilled laundresses and maids is so limited, and well-trained servants can demand practically their own prices. The conditions of service, however, are the same. That is, the servant in the household of the free-born is still the servant; and still the servant in the household where the mistress, who has prospered, would originally have gone into service had she not been free-born. For there is no one more prompt than the American housewife to keep a servant when she can afford one, and the more she is obliged to keep the prouder is she, though her nervous system may give way under the strain. By this I do not mean that the servants here are ill-treated. On the contrary, the consideration shown them is greater, and the quarters provided for them are far more comfortable on this side of the water than abroad. Indeed, servants fare nowhere in the world so well as in the establishments of the well-to-do people of our large cities. Their bedrooms are suitable and often tasteful, they are attended by the family physician if ill, they are not overworked, and very slight checks are put on their liberty. But they are undeniably servants. The free-born American mistress does not regard her servants as social equals. She expects them to stand up if they are sitting down when she enters the room. She expects them to address her sons and daughters as Mr. Samuel and Miss Fanny, and to be called in turn Maggie or Albertine (or Thompson or Jones, à l’anglaise) without a prefix. She does her best, in short, to preserve all the forms and all the deference on the one hand, and the haughtiness or condescension on the other which govern the relations between servant and mistress abroad.

From the fact that we need so many more servants than formerly, to care properly for our establishments, the servant here is becoming more and more of a machine. That is, she is in nearly the same category with the electric light and the furnace. We expect him or her to be as unobtrusive as possible, to perform work without a hitch, and not to draw upon our sympathies unnecessarily. The mistress of one or two girls is sure to grow friendly and concerned as to their outside welfare, but when she has a staff of five or six, she is thankful if she is not obliged to know anything about them. The letter which appeared in a New York newspaper some years ago, from an American girl, in which she declared that she had left service because her master and his sons handed her their dripping umbrellas with the same air as they would have handed them to a graven image, was thoroughly in point. The reason the native American girl will not become a servant, in spite of the arguments of the rational and godly, is that service is the sole employment in this country in which she can be told with impunity that she is the social inferior of any one else. It is the telling which she cannot put up with. It is one thing to be conscious that the person you are constantly associated with is better educated, better mannered, and more attractive than yourself, and it is another to be told at every opportunity that this is so. In the shop, in the factory, and in other walks of life, whatever her real superiors may think of her, they must treat her as a social equal. Even that shrill-voiced, banged, bangled, impertinent, slangy, vulgar product of our mammoth retail drygoods system, who seems to believe herself a pattern of ladylike behavior, is aware in her heart that she does not know how to behave, and yearns to resemble the well-bred woman whom she daily insults. But the happiness of her life, and its main-spring, too, lies in the consciousness that she is free to become the first lady in the land, and that she herself is to be her sole critic and detractor. Why is she not right in refusing to sacrifice her independence? Why should she sell her birthright for a mess of pottage?