And Even Now

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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 te^te-a`-
te^te 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 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 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. At the close of the last century they had
gradually relapsed into middle age, losing weight all the time. And in
the years that followed they were passing back behind the prime of
life, becoming willowy juveniles. In 1915, it is true, the work of
past decades was undone butlers: were suddenly as old and stout as
ever they were, and so they still are. But this, I take it, is only a
temporary setback. At the restoration of peace butlers will reappear
among us as they were in 1915, and anon will be losing height and
weight too, till they shall have become bright-eyed children, with
pattering feet. Or will their childhood be of a less gracious kind
than that? I fear so. I have seen, from time to time, butlers who had
shed all semblance of grace, butlers whose whole demeanour was a
manifesto of contempt for their calling and of devotion to the Spirit
of the Age. I have seen a butler in a well-established household
strolling around the diners without the slightest droop, and pouring
out wine in an off-hand and quite obviously hostile manner. I have
seen him, towards the end of the meal, yawning. I remember another
whom, positively, I heard humming--a faint sound indeed, but menacing
as the roll of tumbrils.

These were exceptional cases, I grant. For the most part, the butlers
observed by me have had a manner as correctly smooth and colourless as
their very shirt-fronts. Aye, and in two or three of them, modern
though they were in date and aspect, I could have sworn there was `a
flame of old-world fealty all bright.' Were these but the finer
comedians? There was one (I will call him Brett) who had an almost
dog-like way of watching his master. Was this but a calculated touch
in a merely aesthetic whole? Brett was tall and slender, and his
movements were those of a greyhound under perfect self-control.
Baldness at the temples enhanced the solemnity of his thin smooth
face. It is more than twenty years since first I saw him; and for a
long period I saw him often, both in town and in country. Against the
background of either house he was impeccable. Many butlers might be
that. Brett's supremacy was in the sense he gave one that he was,
after all, human--that he had a heart, in which he had taken the
liberty to reserve a corner for any true friend of his master and
mistress. I remember well the first time he overstepped sheer
formality in relation to myself. It was one morning in the country,
when my entertainers and my fellow guests had gone out in pursuit of
some sport at which I was no good. I was in the smoking room, reading
a book. Suddenly--no, Brett never appeared anywhere suddenly. Brett
appeared, paused at precisely the right speaking distance, and said in
a low voice, `I thought it might interest you to know, sir, that
there's a white-tailed magpie out on the lawn. Very rare, as you know,
sir. If you look out of the window you will see the little fellow
hopping about on the lawn.' I thanked him effusively as I darted to
the window, and simulated an intense interest in `the little fellow.'
I greatly overdid my part. Exit Brett, having done his to perfection.

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