THE NEW NECESSARIES.
STRICTLY speaking, there are no new necessaries. It is only luxury which is new. The necessaries of life are the same as they always were this side of savagery. But a few new things are necessary to happiness, and a few, a very few, of the old necessaries of happiness can be easily forgone. The difference between a luxury and a necessary, in the sense in which we are using the terms, can, we think, be thus explained. Many luxuries become necessaries, and certain social pheno- mena always attend the transformation. When a luxury is only a luxury the average man wants it for himself. When it is becoming a necessary he wants it also for other people; that is, if he is fairly benevolent he does. Even if be is not benevolent, he modifies or abandons his opposition to their having it. To take a plain instance. Tea was once a luxury. It is now a necessary. Alcohol, on the other hand, which was a necessary, is becoming a luxury. Long ago, when the ascetic ideal prevailed, even a cloistered monk was not asked to go without wine. Nowadays an increasing number of men and women of the world forgo it without any special sense of virtuous abstention.
Of course, most of the new necessaries are far less tangible than tea. Fiction is fast becoming a necessary. Since the world began we have all hungered for news. The ablest politician and the simplest villager are the same, so far as that is concerned, and have been, we suppose, since St. Paul's day, and long before that. But now we want fiction as well as news. We always liked it, but it was a luxury. There were always fiction-mongers who offered it to the unlearned by word of mouth. Then a story was like a holiday—something which came to refresh the weary two or three times a year. Now we are beginning to want it every day. We cannot endure a journey or an indisposition without it, and an immense crowd take journeys every day. It is the young who seem most eager for it. For them the novelette should appear more important than the newspaper, if we may judge from the immense number of young people herded together in suburban trains. Lending libraries are almost as common as milk- shops. In this particular the grown-up world is becoming childish. We cannot sit still unless we have a story to pass the time. In anxiety we must have the anodyne of fiction; and in sorrow, when we cannot long face thought, it is the most desirable and the most harmless of the soporifics. Perhaps we may also say that the present craving for fiction looks as though art in some form or other were becoming a necessary to a larger and larger proportion of civilized human beings. Occasionally one finds oneself wondering whether music is also going to become a necessary to the mass of the popula- tion. There is a widespread notion that it is a compulsory subject in primary schools. Certain carping persons wax eloquent over this supposed misuse of public money. On the other hand, an increasing number of musical people are keenly anxious to foster musical talent among the uneducated, and these latter—not, as a rule, so anxious for instruction— make prompt response and show unexpected taste. Is it possible to argue an interest in pictorial art from the present toleration of pictorial advertisement and delight in the cine- matograph? Ornament in some form has become something like a necessary. A flowering front garden in the country, curtains, pictures, and china ornaments do now form part of every decent home. Another luxury fast becoming a necessary to happiness is a certain amount of change. All those who can get it take it A large proportion of the more successful professionals com- plain if they must pass a month on end in the scene of their work. If they do not live out of town, they must go out, if only for a Sunday. Change for no other object than the delight of variety is nowadays organized for those who do not take the
• trouble to organize it for themselves. The benevolent offer "change" to all whom they in any sense control, and no one grudges it. It is becoming necessary. Change of scene, change of food, change of habits, are prescribed for everyone. Even the modern dog will hunger-strike if the same diet is given him daily. Fashions in dress change for the factory girl as often as for the young lady of Mayfair.
Some amount of independence seems also to be becoming a necessary. This seems too obvious to need saying. However comfortable and well provided for children or dependents of any sort may be, they have a restless longing to be free. It shows most of all in the young. They are not satisfied to be given all they ask for. They want not to have to ask, and to get it for themselves. A positive dislike to the emotion of gratitude has arisen, and even children fear to feel it. All this is a truism. The strange thing is that, when once a new necessary arises, men withhold it at their peril. Children and young people were kept in the past generation without inde- pendence, and the absence of it did them no harm. They grew up happy, and strong mentally and morally. But to deny a necessary means partially to starve someone. They do not become strong nowadays without it. The same thing is true of education. Extraordinary shrewdness and judgment existed at one time among the illiterate. We do not think that this is true any longer. More people than is generally supposed slip through the educational sieve, but most of them turn out good for nothing. Women of all classes did very well with the minimum of education till lately. It is certainly an open question whether the highly taught woman of to-day is as charming as was her grandmother ; but her grandmother could not be reproduced by purposely bringing up a girl with as little education. Once a thing has become a necessary we must give in. The standard of mental and physical comfort rises as irresistibly as the tide. To resist it—and we can only resist it in our own little backwaters—is to destroy happiness.
-What, one wonders, will be the new necessaries sixty years hence ? Possibly some of the things we think necessary to-day will be again on the way to becoming luxuries—like alcohol. But it is not easy to guess which. Means of loco- motion may be less valued. At present they are valued above all things. A man returning to a remote English village after ten years' absence abroad remarked the other day that he saw no change in the place except that the labourers had bicycles. To take an abstract instead of a concrete instance, authority, which was considered an absolute necessary to the maintenance of religion, to the peace of mind of the world, is now of the nature of an intellectual luxury, a thought urged and defended by a subtle few. The ordinary thinking world manages to be religious without it. We may come, perhaps, to do without a good many notions which now seem indispensable—equality, perhaps.
There are undoubtedly certain new class necessaries which do not affect the whole of society. Opposite cravings, indeed, have taken possession lately of rich and poor. The well-to-do have developed a passion for Nature, the poor a passion for town life. It seems necessary for the educated man nowadays to get away from the monotony of bricks and mortar, and to watch the endless, ceaseless variety of the seasons, at least for part of the year, and he will make great sacrifices of time, money, and energy to watch them. On the other hand, it seems impossible to keep an able boy belonging to the lower classes away from a town. To be " on the railway " may perhaps satisfy his romantic craving to be away from where things stand still. Both these cravings will of course pass, and we shall all settle down again. Not many things are necessary even to happiness. They increase, no doubt, but not very fast. We are deceived about their increase because they change, and we take the change for multiplication.
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