DOMESTIC SERVICE.
THE recurring discussion on the relation of domestic servants to their employers, of which an example has lately been given us in the magazines, even when it elicits nothing much worth saying that has not been said already, is not wholly valueless. It brings home to the average mind the truth that there is no watertight division between domestic and political life. Political questions are only one aspect of problems that concern everybody. We are groping our way towards a new world, a world in which human beings stand face to face, with their varied characters of good and evil much less sheathed in definite relation than has ever been the case before. Differences of sex, of age, and of rank no longer colour the duties recognised by the average conscience; man and woman no longer confront each other as protector and protected; old and young, noble and simple, no longer meet as the object and (in the proper sense of the- word) subject of reverence. And yet everybody is, to a certain extent, under the influence of the traditional ways of feeling with reference to these relations; and when they consider that the great work to be done is to break them down, they are more than ever under their influence. We have nothing positive to oppose to the inherited code of a past age ; the relation of equality has no traditional background. If you look for one, you are obliged to betake yourself to the spirit of revolution, or what we may call feudalism inverted. Nothing is more unlike what you want. A protest against the code of the past supplies no real substitute for it ; it rather embodies, in this inverted form, a good many of its errors. The discussions, therefore, in which people attempt to formulate a moral code for the relation of equality are useful, even when they are not sensible. It is something that a contribution should be made toward the best mode of stating an important question ; indeed, all that can be done with many important questions is to ask them clearly. The answer is individual, and every one must find it for himself..
The most difficult of all relations are those between equals. No prejudice can lead any one to question this who has a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of sense.. A Tory may say : Yes ; the relations of equality are difficult,. and let us therefore avoid them as much as possible.' A Radical may say : ' Yes ; the relations of equality are difficult, and let as be on our guard against the spirit of laziness that shrinks from the natural evolution of duty calling us from the easy to the arduous.' They may draw opposite conclu- sions from the fact, but a sufficient amount of attention to the realities of life brings the fact home to both. When the Republic of 1848 was proclaimed in Paris, an English visitor entered a shoemaker's shop and began discussing the great event with his wife. " line Republique ! Ab, Madame," ex- claimed the latter, unconsciously echoing Montesquieu, "nous ne sommes pas assez vertueux pour cela !" The exclamation has returned to our mind again and again in circumstances which appear to have nothing to do with politics. When- ever we replace inequality with equality, we want more virtue. Let us bring this home to the reader by a trivial but undeniable illustration,—the change which comes over the behaviour of persons who, having previously known each other only as host or g-aczt, become fellow-travellers.. How much small selfishness leaps to light ; how curiously all the conventions of good breeding give way, and both parties appear to lose the moral advantages of education, not to say of Christianity ! Note a party of tourists choosing their bedrooms, for instance, and compare it with the way they would lodge their fellow-travellers if these latter were- their guests, and you will feel again and again that, in the words of our Parisian shoemakereas, they have chosen a set of duties for which they are insufficiently virtuous. As hosts, they took up, for the time, a position of voluntary inferiority. Their guest must have the best chair, the best seat in the carriage, the first attention at meals,— all the signs of deference which we think perfectly in- significant till we miss them. As fellow-tourists, we dis- cover which of us it is that prefers, when only one of a pair can have his own way, that he or his neighbour should be that one. And a very useful discovery it is in many ways, but it does not conduce to agreeable intercourse.
The change which is coming over the relations between different classes of society is in some respects analogous to this. We do not mean that in an old-fashioned househol& master and servant were like host and guest, that in a new- fashioned house they are like people who have settled to share the expenses of a common tour. But in average circum- stances, and with average characters, the duties of host and guest are clear and simple, and so were the duties of master and servant in an old-fashioned household. If Gray bad been the guest instead of the fellow-traveller of Horace Walpole, we may say with tolerable certainty that they would never have quarrelled. The man of genius might have despise& the man of fashion, the man of fashion might have disliked the man of genius ; but the conventions of good-breeding would have muffled their mutual hostility, and the public would
never have heard of it. When they went to Venice together, the arrogance of the Prime Minister's son met the intolerance of the sensitive poet, and both needed a kind of goodness that was possessed by neither. In former days, the conventions of social tradition arranged that the relations of master and servant should flow in certain definite channels, which simplify and facilitate intercourse for both sides. In proportion as these conventions are swept away, master and servant discover much more clearly whether they suit each other. Superiority or inferiority is a relation. Equality is only the preparation for a relation. And if, in saying that a relation is preferred to a preparation for one by servants as well as masters, we seem to ascribe over-subtle consideration to uneducated persons, that is only because our reader makes the common mistake of confusing a fact with its explanation. It might be difficult to make our statement understood in the servants' hall or the housekeeper's room ; but it is, for all that, an account of what is universal.
It is a curious thing that personal distaste, which is one of the most unforgettable facts of actual life, should be left out of account as much as it is in all speculations upon life. Have we a single reader so fortunate as never to have known the chill of feeling himself the object of temperate, benevolent, unalterable dislike P Or one—how far more fortunate i—who has never entertained the feeling towards another P "If such there be, go, mark him well," no favoured child of Fortune can for a moment be compared with him in happiness; he may know great disasters, crushing disappointments, heart- breaking bereavements, and yet remain a happy man, for he escapes all that gives life its gloom. But do not for a moment forget that he is an exception. Most of us know the feeling of distaste much better than its opposite. A trifling unkindness is remembered with wonderful vividness across the interval of eventful years ; you will find the least resentful of human beings remember in his old age the slights of his youth ; perhaps he cannot balance them by any gracious memories of the same persons, even when other evidence shows the latter to have been more common. Everybody has seen this ; most people have felt it ; and yet you find people writing and speaking as if real, hearty good-will were the only thing necessary to bring classes together. They know that hearty good-will has often only availed to bring out dislike between individuals, and they forget that classes are made up of in- dividuals,—that all we mean by a class, is a number of persons, resembling more or less those we have liked or dis- liked, and who have liked or disliked us in their turn.
An amusing writer in the last issue of the Universal Review, for instance, evidently thinks that in urging on the mistress of a household to "govern with a desire for progress and happiness
as well as for restriction and duty to make the life she has taken charge of real and vital, to allow its natural affections and natural imperfections to teach as well as order, and provide amusement as well as duty," he is pro- posing a change which, whatever its difficulties for one member of the relation, would at least be unquestionably acceptable to the other. It appears to him a hardship on the side of the servant, that he or she should not be a friend. He feels dis- tressed at the dry, short parenthesis in conversation which intercalates an order to the servant who answers the bell, and seems to think that if the order were woven in with the con- versation, so as to involve no change of key, the servant would at all events feel himself or herself in a much more genial atmosphere. It is a great mistake. A brief order may, of course, be given in a contemptuous or an inoffensive manner; but it is evident that what this writer objects to is the different manner of an address that does or does not invite a comment. He would find, if he tried to introduce any other style of intercourse (unless he has some peculiar qualities which do not appear), that such a change would be just as unpopular with his servants as with his friends. The conventional reserve of our present system filters out diffi- culties and annoyances on both sides. Servants like or dislike their employers and criticise them just as much as they are criticised by them,—or, rather, a great deal more. But they dislike and criticise as outsiders. They do not want to he invited to join in our conversation ; they want to be at liberty for their own ; to make room for them in educated dis- cussion would be to most of them nothing but an unwelcome embarrassment. Human relation, when it is not that of preference, is an arduous thing. We all want repose for the
part of our nature that suffers from friction. To propose to extend the surface liable to this, to include all relations within the circle where relations touch the sensitive parts of the nature,—this is a change of which we are not saying that it is in itself good or bad ; only that it would be felt arduous and oppressive by all classes.
The master or mistress who has never made a friend among his or her servants must, we should say, have some radical defect, or else have been placed in very unfortunate circum- stances. But the attempt to make the relation with all one of friendship would not add to the happiness of a household. It seems strange that we should have to insist upon this, for it is only one side of the truth, which one would not think needed urging nowadays, that servants are "our own flesh and blood." One class wants service, another class wants money ; it does not follow that among the individuals brought together by these mutual needs there is one who wants intimacy. And no harshness, no exacting claim, stirs so mach dislike as the proffer of friendship where it is not wanted. Nothing is so irksome as intimacy against the grain of taste. The ties of kindred have brought this truth home to every one. We have all reproached ourselves for feeling the mere neighbourhood of a fellow-man a trial to patience and temper, quite apart from any want of kindness on his part, perhaps all the more because of his kindness. We know that where kindred comes in, it is a part of duty to struggle with this feeling; every one does straggle with it who has any aspiration after a dutiful life, or any consideration for his fellows. But almost every one, we should suppose, has felt thankful that some parts of life are cut off from this influence. To insist that it should be infused into all relations is to add new and great difficulties to those existing already.
The proposed change of relation between servants and masters has, to a great extent, already taken place between old and young. There was a time when parents gave out their views with as little expectation of criticism on the part of their children as masters and mistresses now entertain with regard to their servants. There would be a great deal to say for one who should maintain that the change has been an improvement, and a great deal to say against that view. Human life is so complicated that, according to one's point of view, one may see evidence for both sides of such a question. But no observant person can deny that family life, since this change has come over it, is more difficult than it was. It is not that the elder generation has lost some privileges which it used to possess, and that the younger has gained them. It is that the ties of kindred afford a more arduous exercise of the moral faculties for all. It is not a change that affects either the very good or the very bad. Where parents and children do not love each other, the conventions of respect can do but little to bridge the chasm that divides them. Where they love each other with a deep and warm affection, these conventions can do nothing to keep them apart. But average human beings belong to neither class. Most people love their parents with an affection that is neither deep enough nor warm enough to be independent of such influences, and for most people that unsheathing of relation which comes of discarding conven- tional respect, has increased the difficulty of life. To listen to a distasteful opinion in silence, as a young man did in his father's presence a hundred years ago, is no difficult matter when that silence is understood as the duty of the young.
To answer a distasteful remark rightly is a very difficult matter indeed. And to hear it in silence, which in one
sense is as easy now as it was then, has now a different
effect, and actually means something different. We do not say that the change which has taken place between different ages should not be carried out between different classes. But to urge as the obvious duty of one class and the unques- tionable desire of another, an alteration which would in reality make life equally arduous to both,—this is an error which can farther no ideal of life, and tends to bring disappointment and confusion into all.
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