The Art of Living. Grant Robert

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СКАЧАТЬ and finished specimens of native architectural inspiration. As there is no law which prevents one from building or buying an ugly house, and as the architect, whose experiment on a dog tortures the public eye, suffers no penalty for his crime, our national house architecture may be said to be working out its own salvation at the public expense. It is the duty of a patriotic citizen to believe that in this, as in other matters of national welfare, the beautiful gradually will prevail; and assuredly the many very attractive private residences which one sees both in the city and the country should tend to make us hopeful.

      Why is it that the rich man who would live wisely feels the necessity for so large a house in the city? Almost the first thing that one who has accumulated or inherited great possessions does nowadays is to leave the house where very likely he has been comfortable and move into a mammoth establishment suggesting rather a palace or an emporium than a house. Why is this? Some one answers that it is for the sake of abundant light and extra space. Surely in a handsome house of twenty-five or thirty feet front there should be light and space enough for the average family, however fastidious or exacting. In the country, where one needs many spare rooms for the accommodation of guests, there are some advantages in the possession of an abnormally large house. But how is the comfort of the city man enhanced by one, that is, if the attendant discomforts are weighed in the same scale? It has sometimes seemed to me that the wealthy or successful man invests in a prodigious mansion as a sort of testimonial; as though he felt it incumbent on him to erect a conventional monument to his own grandeur or success, in order to let the public entertain no doubt about it. But so many otherwise sensible men have deliberately built huge city houses that this can scarcely be the controlling motive in all cases. Perhaps, if asked, they would throw the responsibility on their wives. But it is even more difficult to understand why a sensible woman should wish one of the vast houses which our rising architects are naturally eager to receive orders to construct. A handsome house where she can entertain attractively, yes: an exquisitely furnished, sunny, corner house by all means; a house where each child may have a room apart and where there are plenty of spare rooms, if you like; but why a mammoth cave? She is the person who will suffer the discomforts to be weighed in the same scale, for the care will fall on her.

      We have in this country neither trained servants nor the housekeeper system. The wife and mother who is the mistress of a huge establishment wishes it to be no less a home than her former residence, and her husband would be the first to demur were she to cast upon others the burdens of immediate supervision. A moderate-sized modern house is the cause of care enough, as we all know, and wherefore should any woman seek to multiply her domestic worries by duplicating or trebling the number of her servants? To become the manager of a hotel or to cater for an ocean steamship is perhaps a tempting ambition for one in search of fortune, but why should a woman, who can choose what she will have, elect to be the slave of a modern palace with extinguisher towers? Merely to be able to invite all her social acquaintance to her house once a year without crowding them? It would be simpler to hire one of the many halls now adapted for the purpose.

      The difficulty of obtaining efficient servants, and the worries consequent upon their inefficiency, is probably the chief cause of the rapid growth of the apartment-house among us. The contemporary architect has selected this class of building for some of his deadliest conceits. Great piles of fantastically disposed stone and iron tower up stories upon stories high, and frown upon us at the street-corners like so many Brobdingnagians. Most of them are very ugly; nevertheless they contain the homes of many citizens, and the continuous appearance of new and larger specimens attests their increasing popularity. Twenty years ago there was scarcely an apartment-house to be seen in our cities. There was a certain number of hotels where families could and did live all the year round, but the ten-story monster, with a janitor, an elevator, steam heat, electric light, and all the alleged comforts of home, was practically unknown. We have always professed to be such a home-loving people, and the so-called domestic hearth has always been such a touchstone of sentiment among us that the exchange of the family roof for the community of a flat by so many well-to-do persons certainly seems to suggest either that living cheek by jowl with a number of other households is not so distasteful as it seems to the uninitiated, or else that modern housekeeping is so irksome that women are tempted to swallow sentiment and escape from their trammels to the comparatively easy conditions of an apartment. It does seem as though one’s identity would be sacrificed or dimmed by becoming a tenant in common, and as though the family circle could never be quite the same thing to one who was conscious that his was only a part of one tremendous whole. And yet, more and more people seem to be anxious to share a janitor and front door, and, though the more fastidious insist on their own cuisine, there are not a few content to entrust even their gastronomic welfare to a kitchen in common.

      It must be admitted, even by those of us who rejoice in our homes, that there is much to be said in favor of the apartment-house as a solver of practical difficulties, and that our imaginations are largely responsible for our antipathy. When once inside a private apartment of the most desirable and highly evolved kind one cannot but admit that there is no real lack of privacy, and that the assertion that the owner has no domestic hearth is in the main incorrect. To be sure the domain belonging to each suite is comparatively circumscribed; there is no opportunity for roaming from garret to cellar; no private laundry; no private backyard; and no private front-door steps; but to all practical intents one is no less free from intrusion or inspection than in a private house, and it may also be said that reporters and other persevering visitors are kept at a more respectful distance by virtue of the janitor in common on the ground floor. The sentiment in favor of limited individual possession is difficult to eradicate from sensitive souls, and rightly, perhaps, many of us refuse to be convinced; but it remains true that the woman who has become the mistress of a commodious and well-managed apartment must have many agreeable quarters of an hour in congratulating herself that perplexities concerning chores, heating, lighting, flights of stairs, leaks, and a host of minor domestic matters no longer threaten her peace of mind, and – greatest boon of all – that she now can manage with two or three servants instead of five or six.

      In this newly developed fondness for flats we are again guilty of imitating one of the effete civilizations – France this time – where it has long been the custom for families to content themselves with a story or two instead of a house; though we can claim the size and style of architecture of the modern apartment pile as our special brand upon the adopted institution. The introduction of the custom here seems to me to be the result of exhaustion of the female nervous system. The American housewife, weary of the struggle to obtain efficient servants, having oscillated from all Catholics to all Protestants, from all Irish to all Swedes and back again, having experimented with negroes and Chinamen, and returned to pure white, having tried native help and been insulted, and reverted to the Celtic race, she – the long-suffering – has sought the apartment-house as a haven of rest. She – the long-suffering – has assuredly been in a false position since the Declaration of Independence declared that all men are created equal, for she has been forced to cherish and preserve a domestic institution which popular sentiment has refused to recognize as consistent with the principles of Democracy. Our National creed, whether presented in the primer or from the platform, has ever repudiated the idea of service when accompanied by an abatement of personal independence or confession of social inferiority. Therefore the native American woman has persistently refused, in the face of high wages and of exquisite moral suasion, to enter domestic service, and has preferred the shop or factory to a comfortable home where she would have to crook the knee and say “Yes, ma’am.”

      At the same time the native American woman, ever since “help” in the sense of social acquaintances willing to accommodate for hire and dine with the family has ceased to adorn her kitchen and parlor, has been steadily forced by the demands of complex modern living to have servants of her own. And where was she to obtain them? Excepting the negro, only among the emigrants of foreign countries, at first among the Irish, and presently among the English and Swedes, all of whom, unharassed by scruples as to a consequent loss of self-respect, have been prompt to recognize that this field of employment lay open to them and was undisputed. They have come, and they still come in herds to our shores, raw and undisciplined, the overflow from their own countries; and as fast as they arrive they are feverishly snapped up by the American СКАЧАТЬ