HOME LIFE IN AMERICA.
THE home life of what we may call middle-class America is very pleasant, at any rate for the young, judging by Mrs. Katherine G. Busbey's charming new book, "Home Life in America " (Methuen and Co., 10s. 6d. net). We hear about marriage and children, and the expenses of living and enter- taining on large or small scales, and about life in the cities and in the wilds. Our author begins with the children. American children have a bad name abroad; but evidently they are fascinating at home, in spite of what seems to us the oddest of upbringings. We all knew that better-class children outside the circle of the very rich go to the free schools. Mrs. Bushey makes us see them setting off : "the twinkling by of black and brown stockings on the many sturdy legs, or the bobbling of a long line of umbrellas held over the many independent little heads of these hardy youngsters as they make their transit from comfortable homes to the public schools." But though we were aware that they all learned together, we did not know that the thildren of the professional class in America, both boys and girls, play in the streets. "Nurse guardianship" is very rare, is limited, indeed, to the very rich. Well-dressed and well-eared-for little boys and girls take care of them- selves or of each other and play on the "side-walks." "It is amusing, after reading some incontrovertibly statistical article on the decline of the birth-rate, to walk, or try to make a continuous progress along, a residence street in any large American city, for you are surrounded by a continual swirl of children." These well-fed little Yankees are bursting with energy. "They dodge about you as a post in chasing each other; you have to circumnavigate games of hop-scotch and jack-stones, until it seems as if Uncle Sam's miscalculations must be solely because of his inability to count his children." No more harm apparently comes of the common games than of the common teaching. It gives the children independence. Indoors the American mother is able to counteract any roughening effect which this liberty might have. "In their homes to-day the American children of well-to-do parents—children whose mothers are American gentlewomen, and whose fathers are prosperous business and professional men—are gentle mannered, perfectly obedient, outwardly civil, quick to take a hint, and not at all disagreeable companions." A pretty picture of unimpeachable domesticity is put before us of an American evening at home. Both parents devote themselves to their children, reading to them, helping them with their lessons, lac., Sta. The boys are taught chivalry to their mothers and sisters from their infancy. Mrs. Bushey tells the following story as illustra- tive of the desired relation between American parents and their children :—" In the home of a man who would describe himself as just a plain business man' I discovered, pinned up in each of his four boys' rooms, a typewritten slip of paper, put there by the father, with these rules of life thereon
Rule Don't be saucy to your mother; she's the Queen. Rule II.: When you get in trouble come to your dad; he's your best friend. Rule III.: Play the game straight.'" The worst thing in American education appears to us to be the exciting nature of their " treats." "The foyers of so-called high-class vaudeville' theatres are thronged on Saturday after- noons with children—well-dressed, well-groomed youngsters— generally unattended." Children's parties seem to be designed to destroy their nerves. "At a lawn fête planned for a children's charity, one of the features was a real life-sized house put up for the occasion, to be set on fire and extinguished by a relay from the city fire department. As the flames shot up the children danced about in nervous joy, and as the fire-engines dashed in they screamed in nervous ecstasy."
When boys get to be about fifteen they go, if they are destined for the University, to what are called "prep. schools." "Prep." means preparation. An amount of bully- ing goes on at these institutions which would, indeed, alarm English parents, accustomed to trust their boys to the sterner but far less rough discipline of our public-school life. The newcomer at a "prep." school is liable to be thrown out of a rowing-boat on cold dark nights, or to find himself with a bag tied over his head astride the bronze horse of a public statue in the neighbouring town. Unless pneumonia or broken limbs ensue, the masters shut their eyes.
We do not get from this book a pleasing impression of American social life ; indeed, for ordinary people who are not rich enough to indulge in display there may be said to be none. It is not, we are assured, the fashion in the States to ask one's friends into one's house unless one can offer them a feast or an entertainment. The exchanging of ideas and cutlets which takes place at such short intervals among ordinary English folk is unknown in America, according to Mrs. Bushey. Emerson says that friendship requires leisure, and it is evident that after their earliest youth American men have no leisure. They live in and for their work, and an agreeable social life cannot be engendered by women alone. At the bottom of their hearts, too, ordinary Americans still hold to the old Puritan theory that society means amusement for the young, and the middle-aged have no concern in it. Social life means there the arranging by the mother of a "good time" for girls and boys, and the paying for it by the father. It is amazing to read what a proportion of a professional man's income is spent upon his daughters. The "coming out" of a girl in America is a serious business indeed. A ball must be given at which all that the family can possibly afford must be spent, and no one, neither father, mother, nor brothers, is unwilling to pinch and sacrifice for the girl's amusement. Her "good time," nevertheless, is probably short. After marriage the difficulty of maintaining a high standard of life without adequate servants will weigh upon her as long as she lives. Of course certain advantages for women arise out of this—to English minds—defect in American life. Servants are expensive. The money saved through their absence allows the American wife to have a great deal more pin-money than her sister of like position across the Atlantic. Too often, though, her life must be very bard. "In what other country would you find a college-education woman doing all of her housework, including washing and ironing, and often turning from pre- siding over the washtub to go into the parlour to help one child in its practice of a difficult passage of Beethoven or Chopin, or who, after ten hours of cooking and cleaning, sits down to tutor her boys in Latin and Greek for their college preparation P Yet this is no sporadic instance, but a type of wide representation, particularly throughout the West." Home life in the West, however, appears to be very happy, and to be thought very desirable in America to-day. It has even, absurd as it sounds, become the fashion. "More and more summer travel sends its tide into the West. Indeed, the running of ranches as health retreats or summer
resorts is becoming a very profitable feature of life in the West. The owners of these ranches get out prospectuses like the seashore hotel leaflet, assuring you of all the comfort under heaven, and still they are very assiduous in preserving the picturesque effect of the crudeness of early frontier life. For the Easterner wants to find the cowboys dressed as they do on the stage, and wants to boast on his return to the East that be has been ' roughing it? So there are the best hair mattresses and springs but rough-hewn log bed- steads, and the men about the place wear elaborate 'chaps (leather breeches with the outer seams decorated with slashed leather fringe) and most ostentatious spurs, and the perennial ' six-shooter ' protruding from a rear pocket with calculated carelessness."
• The tide of work and play has set West; the East is being abandoned ; and the description we find here of latter-day New England is the only depressing thing in the book. The scattered population has become too poor. Abandoned farms lower the spirits of the traveller. "The effects of meagre living, hard work, and suppressed emotion are visible especially in the women." Nerves are weakened too often by poverty and hard work. "The bother with the Yankee is he rubs badly at the juncture of the soul and body." Deformed and idiot children, Mrs. Bushey declares, are nowhere so common as in New England, for the villagers marry among themselves and everybody is related. We spare our readers the almost revolting details of this perverted heredity which our author quotes on p. 318. The women, Mrs. Bushey says, have neither charm nor vivacity; many of them degenerate into conscientious drudges. The men would appear to be industrious, dutiful, bitter, humorists. If one accepts Mrs. Bushey's statements as accurate, which the present writer is far from doing, one cannot help asking oneself whether the American is not a creature who requires a money diet. He may no doubt be overfed upon it and become gross and secular; without it he would seem unable to flourish at alL
As we put down this book we have a strange impression that we have been reading about two distinct, and separate races, one called women and the other men. Mrs. Bushey does not dilate upon divorce, she turns from it, though she alludes to it as the great blot upon the social life of the States. Nevertheless, notwithstanding co-education, we have all through an extraordinary sense of cleavage between the sexes. An American woman, we are assured, never enters into her husband's business life—which appears to be the life by which he is always more or less pre- occupied—neither does she ever take the remotest interest in politics. On the other hand, she alone is what we call cultivated. For her the writers write and all the arts are carried on. At the same time, though the American woman may be artistic, she is not in her teens romantic, and Mrs. Busbey assures us that she never met an American girl who read poetry except as a school task. Again, what Mrs. Bushey says of religion in America is remarkable. Religion, like poetry, would seem to be a school task. Parents have, she says, some extraordinary shyness about speaking of religion to their children. The latter all go to Sunday-school, and are all instructed in the various faiths of the nation. We do not gather for an instant that no thought is given to the subject. The immense output of theological books and human nature itself, as well as the evidence of the Sunday-schools, are against such an inference ; but the religion of the children, like the business of the father, is not talked of in the home. Art, business, religion, the different ages, and the different sexes are all kept separate by some indefinable, invisible, and, as it seems to us, disintegrating, power which threatens, though it has not yet seriously injured, the happiness of life. What is it ? This book nowhere definitely puts the question, but everywhere suggests it,—and suggests no answer. It leaves. however, on the mind a vague sense of an all-pervading incompatibility.
We shall no doubt be told that Mrs. Ensbere picture of American home life is greatly exaggerated, or rather completely out of drawing, and also wanting in perspective. Very likely; but on this point the present writer cannot attempt to judge. All he has essayed to do is to summarise Mrs. Busboy's descrIption, and, assuming the correctness of her faetsa very large assumption, he admits—to draw certain conclusions therefrom.
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