In detached houses it is worse, for they are now so close together that in certain architectural conditions preliminaries are required before one can take a private bath. The whole direction of domestic architecture is against the individual and for the group. The modern home takes away even the old stores; there are no more pickle cupboards and jam cupboards, and hardly linen cupboards. Why should there be when jam and pickles come from the grocer, and few men have more than twelve shirts? There is not even a store for coal. Some years ago I lived in a house that was built in 1820, and its coal cellar held eight tons; I now inhabit one, built in 1860, in which I can accommodate four tons; the house now being built in the suburbs cannot receive more than one ton.
The evolution of the coal cellar is a little the evolution of English society from the time when every man had to live a good deal for himself, until slightly better distribution made it possible for him to combine with his fellows. He need not now store coal, for there is a service of coal to his doorstep. Besides, the offspring of coal are expelling their ancestor; gas and electricity, both centrally supplied from a single source, are sapping the old hearthstone that was fed by one small family, and for that family alone glowed. A continual socialization has come about, and it is not going to stop. What is done in common is on the whole better done, more cheaply done. But what is done in common is hostile to the old home spirit, because the principle of the home spirit is that anything done in common is--well, common!
As for the old houses of fifteen to sixteen rooms, they have had to accommodate themselves to the new conditions. First they tried to maintain themselves by reducing their rents. I know of a case, in Courtfield Gardens, where a house leased twenty-six years ago at one thousand dollars a year, was leased again about ten years ago at seven hundred and fifty dollars a year, and is now being offered at five hundred dollars a year. The owner does not want his premises turned into a boarding house, but he cannot find a private tenant, because hardly anybody nowadays can manage five floors and a bas.e.m.e.nt. In my own district, where the houses tower up to heaven, I see the process at work,--rents falling, pitiful attempts of the landlords to prevent their houses from turning into maisonnettes and boarding houses, to prevent the general decay. But they are beaten. The vast Victorian houses within three miles of Charing Cross are, one by one, being cut up into flats; in the unfashionable districts they are being used for tenements; and there are splendid old houses in the neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where in the day of d.i.c.kens lived the fashionables, which now house half a dozen workingcla.s.s families and their lodgers. There is one of these old glories near Lamb"s Conduit Street, where a Polish furrier and his six unwashed a.s.sistants work under a ceiling sown with sprawling nymphs, while melancholic and chipped golden lions" heads look down from either side of a once splendid Georgian mantelpiece. It is very reactionary of me, I am afraid, but I cannot help feeling it a pity that this old house, where would suitably walk the ghost of Brinsley Sheridan, must be one of the eggs broken to make the omelette of the future.
But these old houses must go. Why should one preserve an old house? One does not preserve one"s old boots. The old houses have been seized by the current of revolt against the home; they have mostly become boarding and apartment houses. This is not only because their owners do not know what to do with them; one does not run a boarding house unless it pays, and so evidently there has been a growing demand for the boarding house.
Boarding houses fail, but for every one that fails two rise up, and there is hardly a street in London that has not its boarding house, or at least its apartment house. There are several in Park Lane itself; there is even one whose lodgers may look into the gardens of Buckingham Palace. I do not know how many boarding houses there are in London, for no statistics distinguish properly between the boarding house, the apartment house, the private hotel, the hotel, and the tavern. But, evidently, the increase is continuous, and part of the explanation is to be found elsewhere than in the traveler. Of course, the traveler has enormously increased, but he alone cannot account for the scores of thousands of people who pa.s.s their years in apartment and boarding houses. They live there for various reasons--because they cling to the old family idea and think to find "a home from home"; because they cannot afford to run separate establishments; and very many because they are tired of running them, tired of the plumber, tired of the housemaid.
There are thousands of families in London, quite well-to-do, who prefer to live in boarding houses; they hate the boarding house, but they hate it less than home. They feel less tied; they have less furniture; they like to feel that their furniture is in store where they can forget all about it. They have lost part of their old love for Aunt Maria"s magenta curtains--the home idea has become less significant to them. And this applies also to hotels. The increase of hotels in London, in every provincial city, all over the world, is not entirely explained by the traveler, though, by the way, the increase in traveling is a sign of the decay of the home. The old idea, "You"ve got a good home and you"ve got to stay there," suffers whenever a member of the home leaves it for any reason other than the virtuous pursuit of his business. All over the center of London, in Piccadilly, along Hyde Park, in Bloomsbury, hotels have risen--the Piccadilly, the new Ritz, the Park View, the Coburg, the Cadogan, the Waldorf, the Jermyn Court, the Marble Arch, so many that in some places they are beginning to form a row. And still they rise. An enormous hotel is being built opposite Green Park; another is projected at Hyde Park Corner; the Strand Palace is open, and at the Regent Palace there are, I understand, fourteen hundred bedrooms. The position is that a proportion of London"s population is beginning to live in these hotels without servants of their own, without furniture of their own, without houses of their own. A more detached, a freer spirit is invading them, and a desire to get all they can out of life while they can, instead of solemnly worshiping the Englishman"s castle.
It does not come easily, and it does not come quickly. During the last twenty-five years most of the blocks of flats to be found in London have risen, with their villainously convenient lifts for pa.s.sengers and their new-fangled lifts for dust bins and coal, with their electricity and their white paint, and other signs of emanc.i.p.ation. They were not popular when they came, and they are disliked by the older generation; it is still a little vicious to live in a West End flat. And when the younger generation points out that flats are so convenient because you can leave them, the older generation shakes its head and wonders why one should want to. In a future, which I glimpse clearly enough, I see many more causes of disquiet for the older generation, and I wonder with a certain fear whether I, too, shall not be dismayed when I become the older generation. For the destruction of the old home is extending now much farther than bricks and mortar. It is touching the center of human life, the kitchen. There are now in London quite a number of flats, such as, I think, Queen Anne"s Mansions, St. James"s Court, Artillery Mansions, where the tenants live in agreeable suites and either take their meals in the public restaurant or have them brought up to their flat. The difficulty of service is being reduced. The sixty households are beginning to do without the sixty cooks, and never use more than a few dozen at a time of their two hundred pieces of crockery. There are no more tradesmen, nor is there any ordering; there is a menu and a telephone. There are no more heated interviews with the cook, and no more notices given ten minutes before the party, but a chat with a manager who has the manners and the tact of an amba.s.sador. There is no more home work in these places.
I think these blocks of flats point the way to the future much more clearly than the hotels and the boarding houses, for those are only makeshifts. Generally speaking, boarding houses are bad and uncomfortable, for the landlady is sometimes drunk and generally ill-tempered, the servants are usually dirty and always overworked; the furniture clamors for destruction by the city council. The new system--blocks of flats with a central restaurant--will probably, in a more or less modified form, be the home of new British generations. I conceive the future homes of the people as separate communities, say blocks of a hundred flats or perhaps more, standing in a common garden which will be kept up by the estate. Each flat will probably have one room for each inhabitant, so as to secure the privacy which is very necessary even to those who no longer believe in the home idea; it will also have a common room where privacy can be dispensed with. Its furniture will be partly personal, but not very, for a movement which is developing in America will extend, and we too in England may be provided, as are to-day the more fortunate Americans, with an abundance of cupboards and dressers ready fixed to the walls. There will be no coal, but only electricity and gas, run from the central plant. There will be no kitchens, but one central kitchen, and a central dining room, run--and this is very important--_by a committee of tenants_.
That committee will appoint and control cooks and all servants; it will buy all provisions, and it will buy them cheaply, for it will purchase by the hundredweight. It will control the central laundry, and a paid laundry maid will check the lists--there will no longer be, as once upon a time on Sat.u.r.day evenings, a hundred persons checking a hundred lists.
It is even quite possible that the central organization may darn socks.
The servants will no longer be slaves, personally attached to a few persons, their chattel; they will be day workers, laboring eight hours, without any master save their duty. The whole system of the household will be grouped for the purpose of buying and distributing everything that is needed at any hour. There will be no more personal shopping; the wholesale cleaner will call on certain days without being told to; the communistic window cleaners will dispose of every window on a given day; there may even be in the garden a communistic system of dog kennels. I have no proposal for controlling cats, for I understand that no man can do that ... but then there will be no mice in those days.
I think I will close upon that phrase: There will be no mice in those days. For somehow the industrious mouse, scuffling behind the loose wainscoting over the rotten boards, is to me curiously significant of the old, hostile order, when every man jealously held what was his own and determined that it should so remain--dirty, insanitary, tiresome, labor-making, dull, inexpressibly ugly, inexpressibly inimical to anything fresh and free, providing that it was wholly and sacredly his own.
VI
THE BREAK-UP OF THE FAMILY
1
As with the home, so with the family. It would be strange indeed if a stained sh.e.l.l were to hold a sound nut. All the events of the last century--the development of the factory system, the Married Women"s Property Act, the birth of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the entry of woman into professions, the discovery of co-education and of education itself, eugenics, Christian Science, new music halls and halfpenny papers, the Russian ballet, cheap travel, woman suffrage, apartment houses--all this change and stress has lowered the status of one whom Pliny admired--the father of a family. The family itself tends to disappear, and it is many years since letters appeared in _The Times_ over the signature, "Mother of Six." The family is smaller, and, strangely enough, it is sweeter tempered: would it be fair to conclude, as might an Irishman, that it would agree perfectly if it disappeared?
I do not think that the family will completely disappear any more than scarlet fever or the tax collector. But certainly it will change in character, and its evolution already points toward its new form. The old-fashioned family sickened because it was a compulsory grouping. The wife cleaved unto her husband because he paid the bills; the children cleaved unto their parents because they must cleave unto something.
There was no chance of getting out, for there was nothing to get out to.
For the girl, especially, some fifty years ago, to escape from the family into the world was much the same thing as burgling a penitentiary; so she stayed, compulsorily grouped. Personally, I think all kinds of compulsory groupings bad. If one is compelled to do a thing, one hates it; possibly the dead warriors in the Elysian Fields have by this time taken a violent dislike to compulsory chariot races, and absolutely detest their endless rest on moss-grown banks and their diet of honey. I do not want to stress the idea too far, but I doubt whether the denizens of the Elysian Fields, after so many centuries, can tolerate one another any more, for they are compelled to live all together in this Paradise, and nothing conceivable will ever get them out.
Some groupings are worse than others, and I incline to think that difference of age has most to do with the chafe of family life. For man is a sociable animal; he loves his fellows, and so one wonders why he should so generally detest his relations. There are minor reasons.
Relationship amounts to a license to be rude, to the right to exact respect from the young and service from the old; there is the fact that, however high you may rise in the world, your aunt will never see it.
There is also the fact that if your aunt does see it, she brags of it behind your back and insults you about it to your face. There is all that, but still I believe that one could to a certain extent agree with one"s relations if one met only those who are of one"s own age, for compulsory groupings of people of the same age are not always unpleasant; boys are happiest at school, and there is fine fellowship and much merriment in armies. On the other hand, there often reigns a peculiar dislike in offices. I do not want to conclude too rashly, but I cannot help being struck by the fact that in a school or in an army the differences of age are very small, while in an office or a family they are considerable. Add on to the difference of age compulsory intercourse, and you have the seeds of hatred.
This applies particularly where the units of a family are adult. The child loves the grown-ups because he admires them; a little later he finds them out; still a little later, he lets them see that he has found them out, and then family life begins. In many cases it is a quite terrible life, and the more united the family is the more it resembles the union between the shirt of Nessus and Hercules"s back. But it must be endured because we have no alternative. I think of cases: of such a one as that of a father and mother, respectively sixty-five and sixty, who have two sons, one of whom ran away to Australia with a barmaid, while the other lived on his sisters" patrimony and regrettably stayed at home; they have four daughters, two of whom have revolted to the extent of earning their living, but spend the whole of their holidays with the old people; the other two are unmarried because the father, imbued with the view that _his_ daughters were too good for any man, refused to have any man in the house. There is another couple in my mind, who have five children, four of whom live at home. I think I will describe this family by quoting one of the father"s p.r.o.nouncements: "There"s only one opinion in this house, and that"s mine!" I think of other cases, of three sisters who have each an income of two hundred dollars a year on which they would, of course, find it very difficult to live separately. The total income of six hundred dollars a year enables them to live--but together. The eldest loves cats; the next hates cats, but loves dogs; this zoological quarrel is the chief occupation of the household; the third sister"s duty is to keep the cats and dogs apart.
Here we have the compulsory grouping; I believe that this lies at the root of disunion in that united family.
The age problem is twofold. It must not be thought that I hold a brief against old age, though, being myself young, I tend to dislike old age as I shall probably dislike youth by and by. On the whole, the att.i.tude of old age is tyrannical. I have heard dicta as interesting as the one which I quote a few lines above. I have heard say a mother to a young man, "You _ought_ to feel affection for me"; another, "It should be enough for you that this is my wish." That is natural enough. It is the tradition of the elders, the Biblical, Greek, Roman, savage hierarchies which, in their time, were sound because, lacking education of any kind, communities could resort only to the experience of the aged. But a thing that is natural is not always convenient, and, after all, the chief mission of the civilizer is to bottle up Nature until she is wanted.
This tyranny breeds in youth a quite horrible hatred, while it hardens the old, makes them incapable of seeing the point of view of youth because it is too long since they held it. They insist upon the society of the young; they take them out to call on old people; they drive them round and round the park in broughams, and then round again; they deprive them of entertainments because they themselves cannot bear noise and late hours, or because they have come to fear expense, or because they feel weak and are ill. It is tragic to think that so few of us can hope to die gracefully.
The trouble does not lie entirely with the old; indeed, I think it lies more with the young, who, crossed and irritated, are given to badgering the old people because they are slow, because they do not understand the problems of Lord Kitchener and are still thinking of the problems of Mr.
Gladstone. They are harsh because the old are forgetful, because their faded memories are sweet, because they will always prefer the late Sir Henry Irving to Mr. Charles Hawtrey. The young are cruel when the old people refuse to send a letter without sealing it, or when they insist upon buying their hats from the milliner who made them in 1890 and makes them still in the same fashion. They are even harsh to them when they are deaf or short-sighted and fumbling; they come to think that a wise child should learn from his sire"s errors.
It is a pity, but thus it is; so what is the use of thinking that the modern family must endure? It is no use to say that the old are right or that the young are right; they disagree. It is n.o.body"s fault, and it is everybody"s misfortune. They disagree largely because there is too much propinquity. It is propinquity that brings one to think there is something rather repulsive in blood relations. It is propinquity that brings one to love and then later to dislike. Mr. George Moore has put the case ideally in his _Memoirs of My Dead Life_, where Doris, the girl who has escaped from her family with the hero says: "This is the first time I have ever lived alone, that I have ever been free from questions.
It was a pleasure to remember suddenly, as I was dressing, that no one would ask me where I was going; that I was just like a bird myself, free to spring off the branch and to fly. At home there are always people round one; somebody is in the dining room, somebody is in the drawing-room; and if one goes down the pa.s.sage with one"s hat on, there is always somebody to ask where one is going, and if you say you don"t know, they say: "Are you going to the right or to the left? Because, if you are going to the left, I should like you to stop at the apothecary"s and to ask....""
Yes, that is what happens. That is the tragedy of the family; it lives on top of itself. The daughters go too much with their mothers to shop; there are too many joint holidays, too many compulsory rejoicings at Christmas or on birthdays. There are not enough private places in the house. I have heard one young suffragist, sentenced to fourteen days for breaking windows, say that, quite apart from having struck a blow for the Cause, it was the first peaceful fortnight she had ever known. This should not be confounded with the misunderstood offer of a wellknown leader of the suffrage cause who offered a pound to the funds of the movement for every day that his wife was kept in jail.
In a family, friendships are difficult, for Maude does not always like Arabella"s dearest friend; or, which is worse, Maude will stand Arabella"s dearest friend, whom she detests, so that next day she may have the privilege of forcing upon Arabella her own, whom Arabella cannot bear. That sort of thing is called tolerance and self-sacrifice; in reality it is mutual tyranny, and amounts to the pa.s.sing on of pinches, as it were, from boy to boy on the benches of schools. In a developing generation this cannot endure; youthful egotism will not forever tolerate youthful arrogance. As for the old, they cannot indefinitely remain with the young, for, after all, there are only two things to talk of with any intensity--the future and the past; they are the topics of different generations.
Still, for various reasons, this condition is endured. It is cheaper to live together; it is more convenient socially; it is customary, which, especially in England, is most important. But it demands an impossible and unwilling tolerance, sometimes fraudulent exhibitions of love, sometimes sham charity. It is not pleasant to hear Arabella, returning from a walk with her father, say to Maude: "Thank Heaven, that"s over!
Your turn to-morrow." Perhaps it would not be so if the father did not by threat or by prayer practically compel his daughters to "take duty."
There are alleviations--games, small social pleasures, dances--but there is no freedom. A little for the sons, perhaps, but even they are limited in their comings and goings if they live in their father"s house. As for the girls, they are driven to find the illusion of freedom in wage labor, unless they marry and develop, as they grow older, the same problem.
2
Fortunately, and this may save something of the family spirit, times are changing. It must not be imagined from the foregoing that I am a resolute enemy of any grouping between men and women, that I view with hatred the family in a box at the theater or round the Sunday joint. I am not attracted by the idea of family; a large family collected together makes me think a little of a rabbit hutch. But I recognize that couples will to the end want to live together, that they will be fond of their children, and that their children will be fond of them; also that it is not socially convenient for husband and wife to live in separate blocks of flats and to hand over their children to the county council.
There are a great many children to-day who would be happier in the workhouse than in their homes, but there exists in the human mind a prejudice against the workhouse, and social psychology must take it into account. All I ask is that members of a family should not scourge one another with whips and occasionally with scorpions, and I conceive that nothing could be more delightful than a group of people, not too far removed from one another by age, banded together for mutual recreation and support. So anything that tends to liberalize the family, to exorcise the ghost of the old patriarch, is agreeable.
Patriarch! What a word--the father as master! He will not be master very long, and I do not think that he will want to remain master, for his att.i.tude is changing, not as swiftly as that of his children, but still changing. He is not so sure of himself now when he doubts the advisability of pulling down the shed at the back of the garden, and his youngest daughter quotes from Nietzsche that to build a sanctuary you must first destroy a sanctuary. And, though he is rather uncomfortable, he does not say much when in the evening his wife appears dressed in a Russian ballet frock or even a little less. He is growing used to education, and he fears it less than he did. In fact, he is beginning to appreciate it.
His wife is more suspicious, for she belongs to a generation of women that was ignorant and reveled in its ignorance and called it charm, a generation when all women were fools except the spitfires and the wits.
She tends to think that she was "finished" as a lady; her daughters consider that she was done for. The grandmother is a little jealous, but the mother of to-day, the formed woman of about thirty-five, has made a great leap and resembles her children much more than she does her mother. Her offspring do not say: "What is home without a mother? Peace, perfect peace." She is a little too conscientious, perhaps; she has turned her back rather rudely upon her mother"s pursuits, such as tea and scandal, and has taken too virulently to lectures or evolution and proteid. She is too vivid, like a newly painted railing, but, like the railing, she will tone down. She pretends to be very socialistic or very fast; on the whole she affects rather the fast style. We must not complain. Is not brown paint in the dining room worse than pink paint on the face?
Whatever may be said about revolting daughters, I suspect that the change in the parent has been greater than that in the child, because the child in 1830 did not differ so much from the child of to-day as might appear. Youth then was restless and insurgent, just as it is to-day; only it was more effectively kept down. If to-day it is less kept down, this is partly for reasons I will indicate, but largely because the adult has changed. The patriarch is nearly dead; he is no longer the polygamous brute who ruled his wives with rods, murdered his infant sons, and sold his infant daughters; his successor, the knight of the Middle Ages, who locked up his wife in a tower for seven years while he crusaded in the Holy Land--he, too, has gone. And the merchant in broadcloth of Victorian days, who slept vigorously in the dining room on Sunday afternoon, has been replaced by a man who says he is sorry if told he snores. He is more liberal; he believes in reason now rather than in force, and generally would not contradict Milton"s lines--
"Who overcomes by force Hath overcome but half his foe."
He has come to desire love rather than power, and, little by little--thanks mainly to the "yellow" press--has acquired a chastened liking for new ideas. The spread of pleasure all round him, the vaudeville, the theaters, moving-picture shows, excursions to the seaside--all these have taught him that gaiety may not clash with respectability. Especially, he is more ready to argue, for a peaceful century has taught him that a word is better than a blow. There may be a change in his psychology after this war, for he is being educated by the million in the point of view that a loaded rifle is worth half a dozen sc.r.a.ps of paper; it is quite possible that he will carry this view into his social life. There may, therefore, be a reaction for thirty years or so, but thirty years is a trifle in questions such as these.
Naturally, women have in this direction developed further than men, for they had more leeway to make up. Man has so long been the educated animal that he did not need so much liberalizing. I do not refer to the Middle Ages, when learning was entirely preempted by the male (with the exception of poetry and music), for in those days there was no education save among the priests. I mean rather that the great development of elementary learning, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, affected men for about a generation before it affected women.
In England, at least, university education for women is very recent, for Girton was opened only in 1873, Newnham, at Cambridge, in 1875; Miss Beale made Cheltenham College a power only a little later, and indeed it may be said that formal education developed only about 1890. Both in England and in the United States women have not had much more than a generation to make up the leeway of sixty centuries. It has benefited them as mothers because they did not start with the prejudices left in the male mind by the slow evolution from one form of learning to another; women did not have to live down Plato, Descartes, or Adam Smith; they began on Haeckel and H. G. Wells. The mothers of to-day have been flung neck and crop into Paradise; they came in for the new times, which are always better than the old times and inferior only to to-morrow. They were made to understand a possible democracy in the nursery because all round them, even in Russia, even in Turkey, democracy was growing, some say as a rose, some say as a weed, but anyhow irrepressibly. Who could be a queen by the cradle when more august thrones were tottering? So woman quite suddenly became more than a pretty foil to the educated man, she became something like his superior and his elder; little by little she has begun to teach him who once was her master and still in fond delusion believes he is.
It cannot be said that the mother has until very recently liked education. She has suffered from the prejudice that afflicted her own mother, who thought that because she had worked samplers all girls must work samplers; the "old" woman"s daughter, because she went to Cheltenham, tends to think that her little girl ought to go to Cheltenham. It is human rather than feminine, for generations follow one another at Eton and at Harvard. But more than feminine, I think it is masculine because, until very recently, woman has disliked education, while man has treated it with respect; he has not loved it for its own sake, but because he thought that _nam et ipsa scientia potestas est_.
Not a very high motive, but still the future will preoccupy itself very little with the reasons for which we did things; it will be glad enough if we do them. Perhaps we may yet turn the edges of swords on the blasts of rhetoric.
An immediate consequence of the growth of education has been a change in the status of the child. It is no longer property, for how can one prevent a child from pulling down the window sash at night when it knows something of ventilation? Or give it an iron tonic when it realizes that full-blooded people cannot take iron? The child has changed; it is no longer the creature that, pointing to an animal in the field, said, "What"s that?" and the reply being, "A cow", asked "Why?" The child is perilously close to asking whether the animal is carnivorous or herbivorous. That makes coercion very difficult. But I do not think that the modern parent desires to coerce as much as did his forbear. Rather he desires to develop the child"s personality, and in its early years this leads to horrid results, to children being "taught to see the beautiful" or "being made to realize the duties of a citizen." We are in for a generation made up half of bulbous-headed, bespectacled precocities, and half of barbarians who are "realizing their personality" by the continual use of "shall" and "shan"t." This will pa.s.s as all things pa.s.s, the old child and the rude child, just like the weak parent after the brute parent, and it is enough that the new generation points to another generation, for there seldom was a time that was not better than its father and the herald of a finer son.
Generally the parent will help, for his new att.i.tude can be expressed in a phrase. He does not say, "I am master", but, "I am responsible." He has begun to realize that the child is not a regrettable accident or a little present from Providence; he is beginning to look upon the care of the child as a duty. He has extended the ideal of citizenship, born in the middle of the nineteenth century, which was "to leave the world a little better than he found it"; he has pa.s.sed on to wanting his son to be a little richer than he was, and a little more learned; he is coming to want his son to be a finer and bolder man; he will come in time to want his daughter to be a finer and bolder woman, which just now he bears pretty well. His wife is helping him a great deal because she is escaping from her home ties to the open trades and professions, to the entertainments of psychic, political, and artistic lectures which make of her head a waste paper basket of intellect, but still create in that head a disturbance far better than the ancient and cow-like placidity.
The modern mother is often too much inclined to weigh the baby four times a day, to feed it on ozoneid, or something equally funny, to expose as much of its person as possible, to make it gaze at Botticelli prints when in its bath. She will no doubt want it to mate eugenically, in which she will probably be disappointed, for love laughs at Galtons; but still, in her struggle against disease and wooden thinking, she will have helped the child by giving it something to discard better than the old respects and fears. The modern mother has begun to consider herself as a human being as well as a mother; she no longer thinks that
"A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive."
She is coming to look upon herself as a sort of aesthetic school inspector. She lives round her children rather than in them; she is less animal. Above all, she is more critical. Having more opportunity of mixing with people, she ceases to see her child as marvelous because it is her child. She is losing something of her conceit and has learned to say, "_the_ baby" instead of "_my_ baby." It is a revolutionary atmosphere, and the developing child has something to push against when it wants to earn its parents" approval, for modern parents are fair judges of excellence; they are educated. The old-time father was nonplussed by his son, and could not help him in his _delectus_, but the modern father is not so puzzled when his son wishes to converse of railway finance. The parent, more capable of comradeship, has come to want to be a comrade. He is no longer addressed as "sir"; he is often addressed as "old chap." That is fine, but it is in dead opposition to the close, hard family idea.
Likewise, man and wife have come to look upon each other rather differently; not differently enough, but then humanity never does anything enough; when it comes near to anything drastic it grows afraid.
Man still thinks that "whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing", but he is no longer finding the one he sought not so long ago. She is no longer his property, and it would not occur to the roughest among us to offer a wife for sale for five shillings in Smithfield market, as was done now and then as late as the early nineteenth century. Woman is no longer property; she has been freed; in England she has even been allowed, by the Married Women"s Property Act, to hold that which was her own. The Married Women"s Property Act has modified the att.i.tude of the mother to her child and to her husband. She is less linked when she has property, for she can go. If every woman had means, or a trade of her own, we should have achieved something like free alliance; woman would be in the position of the woman in "Pygmalion", whom her man could not beat because, she not being married to him, if he beat her she might leave him--in its way a very strong argument against marriage.
But most women have no property, and yet, somehow, by the slow loosening of family links, they have gained some independence. I am not talking of America, where men have deposited their liberty and their fortunes into the prettiest, the greediest, the most ruthless hands in the world; but rather of England, where for a long time a man set up in life with a dog as a friend, a wife to exercise it, and a cat to catch the mice. Until recently the householder kept a tight hand upon domestic expenditure; he paid all the bills, inspected the weekly accounts with a fierce air and an internal hope that he understood them; rent, taxes, heat, light, furniture, repairs, servants" wages, school fees--he saw to it that every penny was accounted for and then, when pleased, gave his wife a tip to go and buy herself a ribbon with. (There are still a great many men who cannot think of anything a woman may want except a ribbon; in 1860 it was a shawl.) When a woman had property, even for some time after the Act, she was not considered fit to administer it. She was not fit, but she should have been allowed to administer it so as to learn from experience how not to be swindled. Anyhow, the money was taken from her, and I know of three cases in a single large family where the wife meekly indorses her dividend warrant so that the husband may pay it into his banking account. That spirit survives, but every day it decays; man, finding his wife competent, tends to make her an allowance, to let her have her own banking account, and never to ask for the pa.s.s book. He has thrown upon her the responsibility for all the household and its finance; by realizing that she was capable he has made her capable.
Though she be educated, he loves her not less; perhaps he loves her more. It is no longer true to say with Lord Lyttleton that "the lover in the husband may be lost." Formerly the lover was generally lost, for after she had had six children before she was thirty the mother used to put on a cap and retire. Now she does not retire; indeed, she hides his bedroom slippers and puts out his pumps, for life is more vivid and exterior now; this is the cinema age.
Finding her responsible, amusing, capable of looking after herself, man is developing a still stranger liberalism; he has recognized that he may not be enough to fill a woman"s life, that she may care for pleasures other than his society, and indeed for that of other men. He has not abandoned his physical jealousy and will not so long as he is a man, but he is slowly beginning to view without dismay his wife"s companionship with other men. She may be seen with them; she may lunch with them; she may not, as a rule, dine with them, but that is an evolution to come. This springs from the deep realization that there are between men and women relations other than the pa.s.sionate. It is still true that between every man and every woman there is a flicker of love, just a shadow, perhaps; but not so long ago between men and women there was only "yes" or "no," and to-day there are also common tastes and common interests. This is fine, this is necessary, but it is not good for the old British household where husband and wife must cleave unto each other alone; where, as in the story books, they lived happy ever after. As with the home, so with the family; neither can survive when it suffers comparison, for it derives all its strength from its exclusivism. As soon as a woman begins to realize that there is charm in the society of men other than her uncles, her brothers, and her cousins, the solid, four-square att.i.tude of the family is menaced.
Welcome the stranger, and legal hymen is abashed.