THE SOCIAL DEMANDS OF SERVANTS.
THE wail addressed to the Daily News on Tuesday concerning the impossibility of getting female servants to live in the country is by no means the isolated complaint of a crotchetty and exacting employer. The writer modestly exalts his own horn as a master, declares that he makes no difficulty about wages, that his kitchen is supplied with unlimited beer, that his wife is a model of sweetness and light, that he himself is even punctilious to his ser- vants in the courtesy with which he requests favours from them and the gratitude he expresses for the performance ; but that all these commendable circumstances are not even weighed in the scale by the young women who deign to accept a situation with him, and to give him the month's notice the next day. Their difficulty is not on points of detail of this kind, on which negotiation would be possible ; it is one of principle. They condition for a social circle, and where they can't secure a social circle, they do not even con- sider anything else. Thus the young woman whose notice to quit delivered the day after her arrival produced the letter to the Daily News, had actually advertised "country preferred," but then she had no intention of indicating by this that she was indifferent to the charms of a small but select society. She had no idea that " country " meant the horrid solitude of a place distant two miles and a half from the nearest country town and sixty miles from London. She spoke well of the situation in other respects, but "the loneness was too much for anythink ; " "she never seed such a place," and "wouldn't 'ave believed there was such a place in the hempire." And, according to the owner of this place, the difficulty is as great with his neighbours, even where they keep as many as fifteen servants. Nay, one of his lady neigh- bours talks of writing a book on the reasons assigned by her last quarter of a hundred for leaving ;—they have all left within the year.
Now, all this is doubtless very piteous, the more so that it is a very genuine embarrassment to people all over the country, and that there really does not seem to be any help for it. Nor, if we come to think a little about it, is there anything so very repre- hensible in the demands of the class who decline to go deeper into the country than suburban residences, or at worst, residences which have easy access to such poor equivalents for society as a country town affords. Grant that the mistress is gentleness itself, and the master affable to the point of politeness to all his
servants,--still it must be admitted, we think, that, at all events in modern days, the relations of master and servant, and of mistress and servant, are by no means rich in reciprocal interest, nor, in a human sense, satisfying. That young untrained girls who have no conception of their own market value as domestic assist- ants should be glad of the superior comfort and luxury of a well- to-do household, and should not insist on further conditions of social alleviation, is natural enough. But that trained servants,.
who know very well that they can command almost any reasonable conditions they please, in that position of partial exile from their own people, and of necessary deference to the will of others, which they contract to fill, should ask for a ready-made society in the immediate neighbourhood of their master's door, is really by no means portentous or horrible.
There is a disposition in every station of life to regard the comforts to which we have always been accustomed as so urgent and imperative that any serious difficulty in the way of satisfying them is thought of as a sort of half-in- credible and wholly unnatural and monstrous mischief, for which. the human race ought to reproach itself as a sort of crime. "Things are coming to a pretty pass," you hear people say,. "when a man has to consult his servant's tastes almost more than the servant has to consult his." "A pretty pass," no doubt, if the educated man his an inalienable right to get the menial de- tail of life taken off his hands without sacrificing anything more than a slight pecuniary payment to secure that advantage. But how could any such right be even stated? Judged by the well-known economical rule that wages are in inverse proportion to the agree- ableness of the work for which they are paid, domestic service, where both the independence and all the natural social relations of the individual servants are postponed to the will of the master, ought to. be, at least amongst an independent people, far more highly recom- pensed than any sort of labour equal in amount that is consistent with living in your own house. If, instead of putting it all on wages,. the servant makes it a condition sine qua non that there shall be some chance of a society for her in which, during her leisure hours, she can live as an equal, there is no greater anomaly at all in it than in the advertisements of a surgeon or a lawyer for a country business in some town "with a pleasant society." We have some of us a sort of feeling that society, in our sense of it, has only a. burlesque kind of meaning in relation to servants ;—we think of the " swarry with a boiled leg of mutton and the usual trim- mings," and rather regard the appetite of domestics for society as a sort of moral farce got up expressly for our amusement. In precisely the same spirit the people who don't drop their h's describe the social amusements of those retired tradesmen who do, as vulgar freaks, of which the final cause is the laughter of the delicately-educated classes above them. And were any of their own refined arrangements to be put out by the necessity of concession to the vulgarer circles, they would regard it as a monstrous and hideous breach of the laws of nature, well cal- culated to suggest the fatally downward tendency of things. The suppressed axiom, not any longer of English politics, but of English society, is that the life of the lower strata has its proper explanation and true significance only in a completely elastic adaptation to the needs of the upper. Yet there is nothing in itself in the least unreasonable,—quite the reverse,—in the growing feeling of domestic servants that as they give up their own natural sets of friends and acquaintances to follow their employer, they may at least insist that they will not go where it is impossible to obtain a substitute of sonic sort close enough to their adopted home to avail themselves of it during the few hours or days of holiday at their disposal. The vexation which those who need servants feel at this new limitation on their movements is of course natural, but there is no room for surprise. There is no intrinsic fitness of things in the great ease with which money has happened for a long time to command not merely the assistance of others for services which we dislike to be compelled to render to ourselves, but to command that assistance even under conditions which sepa- rate those who give it entirely from their own natural society, from their friends and equals. If we only consider the matter, the legitimate subject for surprise is rather the other way, that for so small a remuneration, not usually amounting altogether,—even including the more comfortable style of living which servants usually secure,—to much beyond the wages of a skilful factory-girl, young women should be willing to give up their independent home and all their friends, and devote their time to contributing to the ease and leisure of others. Directly you get to a new country where all are on an equality, this artificial facility for ridding yourself of the mechanical and least agreeable part of the routine of existence,—for being refined and thoughtful and perhaps stately, at the cost of those who undertake a double share of the wearisome and vulgar portion of human life,—
vanishes at once, and you find that every man must bear his own physical burdens as well as his own moral responsi- bilities. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to find some very small fragment of like inconveniences falling upon us in a settled and even ancient society like that of England. Bat it is not at all wonderful, and, for the community at large, it ought even to be a matter for anything but regret. It shows that the condition of the least fortunate class is in course of amelioration, in exact pro- portion as that of the most fortunate class is feeling the pressure of fresh embarrassments.
But, then, is this accessibility of appropriate society on which Cook and the Housemaids insist, really desirable for them or not? Surely that is a question which it is just as impossible to answer as it is to answer whether the society their mistress moves in is really -desirable for her or not. Probably a good deal of it would be just as well left alone,—which is quite as true in their mistress's case as their own. Probably a little more pleasure in Nature, and solitude, and books, and a little less in the talk of equals (which is usually gossip) would be good for both mistress and maid. But it is simply absurd to expect that any average servant will be satisfied with the society of those with whom she is not at her ease, and whose ways and manners are not her ways and manners. It is quite as reasonable to expect a lady to be content with the society of the housemaids of the neighbourhood, as to expect a cook or housemaid to be content with intercourse with the mistress and the rest of the family she serves. There is no real enjoyment of society except under conditions of equality, and the -constraint imposed by the sense of inferiority is even greater in its way than that due to the jar on refined tastes caused by vulgarities of thought, and speech, and manner. In Belgium, we are told, no servant will hire herself without conditioning for every second Sunday absolutely at her own disposal ; and if this condition is moderate and reasonable, there can be nothing that is immoderate or unreasonable in conditioning for a neighbourhood where half the holiday need not be spent in a journey in search of congenial society.
Well, but it will be perhaps said, to desire the vicinity of at least a village where the society of equals may be found, is 'reasonable, but that is not the only point with the domestics who flee the lonesomeness of their employers' houses ; what they want is not only occasional society in their own class, but the habitual entertainment of passing traffic, the gratification of seeing a butcher's boy overdriving his horse one minute, a baker flirting with a neighbouring cook another, a neighbour's ser- vant fetching the doctor to her sick master the third, in short, a tonstant small supply of trivial incidents that catch the eye and occupy the attention for a moment or two, and prevent the pain- ful sense of mental vacancy. Well, that is no doubt a very unculti- vated state of mind. To a moderately refined mind, the waving of the poplars, the flight of the starlings, the sweep of the clouds, the progress of the trees and flowers, the running of a stream, afford more to dwell upon and enjoy, more to soothe the mind and sug- gest that in which real rest is possible, than all the monotonous hum of daily existence. But though the preference of servants for minute suburban bustle to the quiet of the country, is certainly bad taste, it is bad taste they show in common with multitudes who are their superiors in rank, and bad taste which will hardly be cured by criticism. It is not what they ought to like, but what they do like, which they, like other people, will take into consideration; and probably the first step to better tastes in their class will be the growth of that independence of action which leads them to consult their own tastes before they make their contracts. Very consider- able concessions to our domestics' tastes are certainly before us, if we are to keep domestics for another century in this country ; and though all concession is of course unpleasant to the class that makes it, yet to the class to which it is made,—which is by far the larger,—these concessions must in the long run prove a very great gain, however little at first they may seem to be for the real benefit of those who ask them.
Previous page
