Chapter I: Part 1

Transcriber’s Note

1. Certain typographic errors & hyphenation inconsistencies were
silently corrected.

2. The text version is marked up as follows:

(a) italics are indicated thus _italic_;

(b) small-caps are indicated thus +Small-Caps+;

3. Footnotes added to the CONTENTS and moved to the end of the file.

_MODES AND MORALS_

_BY_

_KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD_

_MODES AND MORALS_
_A CHANGE OF AIR_
_HAWAII: +SCENES AND IMPRESSIONS+_
_VAIN OBLATIONS_
_THE GREAT TRADITION_

_CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS_

_MODES AND MORALS_

_MODES AND MORALS_

_BY
KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD_

[publisher-logo]

_NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1920_

_Copyright, 1920, by
Charles Scribner’s Sons_

_Published February, 1920_
_Reprinted March, 1920_

+COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY+ HARPER & BROTHERS
+COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY+ HENRY HOLT & COMPANY
+COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1918, 1919, BY+
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
+COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY+ THE YALE PUBLISHING ASSOCIATION

THE SCRIBNER PRESS

_CONTENTS_

PAGE

_The New Simplicity_ 3

_Dress and the Woman_ 37

_Caviare on Principle_ 58

_The Extirpation of Culture_ 66

_Fashions in Men_ 94

_The Newest Woman_ 118

_Tabu and Temperament_ 134

_The Boundaries of Truth_ 164

_Miss Alcott’s New England_ 182

_The Sensual Ear_ 199

_British Novelists, Ltd._ 218

_The Remarkable Rightness of Rudyard Kipling_ 254

Footnotes 278

MODES AND MORALS

THE NEW SIMPLICITY

My first caption was _Democracy, Plumbing, and the War_. That will hardly do as a title, for it does not hint the heart of the matter; though the war has precipitated conditions which our special form of democracy has long been preparing us for, and plumbing is perhaps as symbolic as it is ubiquitous in the American domestic scene. All three, with all their implications, are factors, certainly, in our present problem of living, and if war has brought that problem to acuteness, democracy and plumbing (and what they may be taken to stand for) have made us ripe for upheaval. Edison and his like are as responsible, in their way, as Thomas Jefferson or William Haywood. All three have, without doubt, contributed to the present and future dilemma of educated people in moderate circumstances. War has, of necessity, turned moderate circumstances to actual poverty; but democracy and plumbing were already preparing the _débâcle_ for this group. All of us--the educated classes as well as the uneducated--are guilty together, that is, of pampering ourselves with physical comforts; and democracy always makes for materialism, because the only kind of equality that you can guarantee to a whole people is, broadly speaking, physical. Democracy and plumbing, as well as war, make the problem of our immediate future a rather special one. We do not share all phases of it with our Allies. Let me explain, a little, what I mean.

If America has led the world in labor-saving devices, it is because America is democratic on a bigger scale than any other country. The person who profits by the labor-saving device is the person who does the work. The fact that France and England have not kept pace with us in plumbing and tiled kitchens and electrical appliances does not mean--as we have sometimes fatuously taken it to mean--that they are less civilized than we. It means only that personal service has been, with them, cheaper and more a matter of course. Where prosperous Americans multiply vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines and garbage incinerators, prosperous Europeans multiply their number of servants. The Englishman really prefers a huge tin tub in his bedroom of a morning. We prefer to walk into the bathroom and turn on the tap. That preference may well have become so natural that we cannot explain it. But the origin of the American preference is surely that in America only the very rich could afford a personal servant whose duty it was to set up the tub, fetch in huge cans of water, and remove all traces of the bath as soon as it was done with. Even a few years ago, I remember having great difficulty in a London hotel of the better sort (but very English and almost totally unfrequented by Americans) in getting the chambermaid to procure me a slop-jar. The hotel was much too British to run to numbers of private baths. Hence the crying need of a slop-jar. The maid finally stole one for me from a room across the corridor, and assured me that the gentleman from whom she stole would not miss it. Nothing would induce her to resume, in his behalf, the treasure. I am informed, by friends who have more British social experience than I, that slop-jars are not in the best English tradition--because, theoretically, in the opulent old-fashioned household, as soon as you have washed your hands, the water in which you washed them, the towel on which you wiped them, mysteriously and gracefully disappear. Perfection of service lies in having plenty of dexterous servants lying in wait to discover your needs; so many servants, and such well-trained ones, that you cannot wash your hands without their becoming aware of it and, with the least possible impinging on your notice, removing the traces of your ablutions. Perfection of service does not involve your emptying your own wash-basin, even into a slop-jar. Hence, no slop-jar.

Now there are very few of us who would take the trouble to invent a tiled bathroom if our tubs were automatically fetched, filled, and removed for us, all at the proper instant; or if a hot-water can miraculously sprang into being as soon as the desire for hot water seized us. There is no labor-saving device so perfectly convenient as ringing a bell and having some one else do the thing for you with complete competence. It is by no means strange that well-to-do Europeans have been content to be supremely waited upon, instead of making practical tasks mechanically easier for themselves. The goddess of the labor-saving invention is the woman who does all, or a good share, of “her own work.” Old-fashioned English and French houses are cold; but (climate apart) nothing like so cold as American houses would be if Americans depended on open fires. For in England or France there are ten people to make the fires, to one in America. We simply dare not--again, climate apart--depend, as our British cousins have been wont to, on open fires. The average household cannot afford the servants to do incessant fire-making all over the house.

So we have multiplied devices, from the modest kitchen cabinet up; because that majority which advertisers and inventors are always trying to reach does a lot of things for itself. Even those Americans who always have had, and perhaps still will have, plenty of servants, have indulged in these devices. For pure philanthropy’s sake? Well, I am afraid not quite. Rather, because the standard having been set by the mistress who is also the servant, the standard must be lived up to, or professional servants would complain. The interesting point is that in America the standard is set by the woman who does her own work or a part of it, or who may, at any given moment, have to occupy herself thus. We are, you see, a democracy beyond the democracies of other lands. For it is not simply a question of money; it is a question of our all being in the same boat.

I am not going into the servant question, for that is a question as trite as it is tragic. But, as we all know, even before the war it was growing acute. The best servants we had in the old days came from the countries where personal service was a tradition--chiefly from the territories of Great Britain. But northern Europe is ceasing to enter domestic service; rather, it seeks to employ. One has only to read the pathetic testimony in the daily press, in the “women’s magazines,” even sometimes in philanthropic periodicals. What they all say is that the only way you can keep your cook in your kitchen is to treat her as if she were the governess, or to give her factory hours and factory freedom--to put her on a level, that is, with the more independent worker. At that, they do not give us much hope of keeping her. But I fancy that, before we turn the whole house over to the cook, we shall dispense with her and get our meals from co-operative kitchens.

I have noticed of late years in the magazines that deal with architectural and decorative problems increasing stress on the absurdity of having a dining-room. Why absurd? For only one reason: that here is a room which must be cleaned, which, therefore, means more service. If you have your meals in the “living-room,” you dispense with so much floor-and-wall space to be gone over. In only that sense is it absurd. For most of us will agree that while English lodgings are all very well, especially for a solitary creature, it is a painful business for a large family to eat three meals a day in a room which has to be lived in otherwise. All people may not have the prejudice known to some of us against social consumption of food; but any one will agree that the best dinner in the world leaves a smell behind it. A dining-room may be a luxury, but it is not an absurdity, so long as you can by any means afford it. If the æsthetic and pseudo-æsthetic experts in domesticity are telling us that a dining-room is ridiculous, it is only because they wish to prepare us for an inevitable contraction of our comfort, an unavoidable mitigation of decency. The one most aristocratic element in life, physically speaking, is spaciousness; it has always been in the best tradition to be frugal to starvation in a corner of a palace. But we have come nowadays to care more for what we eat (I fear) than for how or where we eat it. The abolition of the dining-room is only a further step on the road we entered when we moved _en masse_ out of houses into flats. It has been hard to get service; and meanwhile we have grown soft and would rather do without those amenities which are not conveniences than to furnish them for ourselves.

It must in fairness be admitted that two things have combined to bring us to this pass. The most obvious fact is this of the labor situation, which is now immensely accentuated by the war. But another force has always been at work. Except in that part of the country which imported slaves early and kept them as long as it could, more or less pioneer standards prevailed. We were a new country; we dispensed perforce (as in other colonies) with many of the inherited comforts. Our love of personal (I do not mean political) independence was a kind of protective coloring. The enforced simplicity of the pioneer scene bred in us a distaste for being waited on too importunately. Because we had to do certain things for ourselves, we developed a preference for doing them, a distaste for the constant interposition of another human being among the more private processes of existence. Even in the South, some modification of the tradition must have been necessary, for the South must always have been badly, though exuberantly, served. Here and there a butler, a lady’s maid, may, after years of struggle, have been highly trained; and the colored race has a gift for cooking. But in many ways Southerners must have contended with the disheartening conditions faced by all English households in the outposts of empire, dependent on another and a stupid race for the satisfaction of their needs. Southern luxury lay in having a score of inadequate menials to keep the masters as comfortable as three or four really good servants would have done. It was slave labor, and slave labor reaches competence only by sheer force of numbers. There was never an ideal of domestic service there, because there was never the rounded conception of civilized domestic comfort in any slave’s mind. And nothing is more slovenly or incompetent in domestic service than the younger generation of free-born negroes. I do not think the colored race is going to prove our domestic salvation.

We welcomed the labor-saving device, in the first place, for the reasons I have given. By the labor-saving device we have been brought insensibly to an almost animal dependence on creature comforts. With all our theoretical glorification of simplicity, we have really prided ourselves supremely on our physical luxuries, and most of all, it must be said, on those physical luxuries which have no æsthetic value. Our plumbing has been our civilization. The European aristocracy is for the most part not so “comfortable” as the American middle class; and therefore we have considered ourselves the greatest nation in the world. We have been snobbish about many things, but about nothing so much as our electrical appliances and our skyscrapers. We have sinned, all of us together, as I said before; and now we are paying. Simplicity, austerity, even, are forced upon us; and it behooves those of us who really care, in spite of temporary apostasies, about real values, to take thought and to plan. The vital question is not whether we shall simplify, but how. On that depends our civilization.

Neither the new war millionaires nor skilled labor can teach us that. We shall have need of all our trained perceptions, of all our first-hand and all our book knowledge, of what money has been most wisely spent for in the past, to make our choice intelligently. The new millionaire and the enriched laboring man will not, for the most part, be able to help us; for, by and large, having no experience of the finer things of civilization, they will not know. For ourselves, it does not much matter--for us who have seen a world in ruin and can never “care” for anything in the same way again--but this is perhaps our first duty to our children. They cannot have all the things we were brought up to crave and expect; but they must have the essentials. What, in a practical sense, are those going to be?

The Pennsylvania miner, making from forty to seventy-five dollars a day, buys an automobile--not necessarily a Ford--which waits for him at the entrance to the mine. His wife buys finery. Both buy the best food they can get. It has been publicly said, I understand, by a distinguished representative of the Food Administration, that almost every class of the community was doing its duty in the way of food conservation, except skilled labor. That is the class which cannot be reached by appeal. The very poorest are still very poor, and they have neither the money nor the knowledge to enable them to indulge in forbidden gastronomic luxuries. The rich are apparently--in most cases--making it a point of honor to help out. But skilled labor, which is so necessary to the prosecution of war, which has never in its life been so pampered, so flattered, so kow-towed to, so overpaid (yes, I mean that; it is overpaid, and I will explain what I mean presently), has lost its head. It probably believes the things the politicians and its own leaders have been saying to it. It will work, and consider itself patriotic for working--but it will exact from the rest of us, the public, a price it has no right to, and, lest the honor of our country and the ideals we fight for be lost, we shall pay it. It may be that the reckoning will come later; or it may be that we are so sunk in materialism that skilled labor will continue to rule the earth. Just so long as we feel our greatest need to be of the things it furnishes us with, and its greatest need is for the things we cannot furnish it with, our necks will be bowed under labor’s yoke. Our only chance of emancipation lies in finding some of our greatest goods in fields not under labor’s control. In other words, to live at all, in any peace, in any equanimity and longanimity, we must be as little materialistic in temper and desire as possible. We must teach our children that the greatest goods are not the things that skilled labor produces. That is not only truth; it is self-preservation. Labor will have the motor-cars and the delicacies of the table, the jewels and the joy-rides; we must see to it that we keep something else, and learn to feel the importance of our treasure. If we can maintain a prestige value for the things of our choice (frankly, I doubt if we can) “the lords of their hands” may come to desire the things we have chosen, and help to make them accessible. But we must be careful to make no concessions; we must not take one step, ourselves, in the materialistic direction.

This is not snobbishness; it is a matter of life and death. No one is going to have leisure, any more, to be a snob or any such non-essential thing. At least, if any one has the time, it will not be the educated classes. We shall have to work as we have never worked before, physically as well as mentally. We shall have to learn to co-operate with one another, too; to make an almost religious brotherhood. For it is our children who matter, and we cannot begin too soon to prepare them for a world which has nothing in common with the world we knew. Only by joining in utmost effort with the like-minded can we hope to protect them.

I know there are Utopians who see in the socialization of Anglo-Saxon governments hope, along Marxian lines, for Anglo-Saxondom. They foresee, I suppose, the kind of Paradise that the Admirable Crichton (in Barrie’s immoral and delightful play) must have experienced on the desert island. There is going to be only one party in England, Mr. Arthur Henderson has recently said--the Labor party. It may be. Let us hope that some of the “unattached leaders” will at least preserve logic if they do not preserve majorities. Mr. Henderson’s own argument is about as convincing as though one should say: in certain abnormal conditions martial law is the only régime that will work; therefore, since civil law has been found inadequate to conditions of riot and pestilence and famine, we must give it up altogether, and make martial law perpetual.

The real arguments against private, and for public, ownership are, of course, quite other than those Mr. Henderson offers. The point is that Mr. Henderson evidently does not know bad logic when he sees it. Let Mr. Henderson and his followers keep the motor-cars, one is inclined to say, and we will keep the logic he discards. Private perception of the laws of logic is something we shall not be taxed for; though--let us not deceive ourselves--we shall have to make sacrifices to keep it. If we can acquire logic, we may have it. It may be increasingly difficult to maintain the methods of acquiring it: the best education, moral and intellectual, was becoming endangered before the war, and there is no telling what may become of it afterward.

I seem to have wandered far afield from plumbing; and yet plumbing (as a symbol of materialistic comfort) is more than germane to the question. The group whose problem I am concerned with is a very large one, though always, anywhere, a minority: the professional man, the man in the smaller business position, the man on a salary, who has been decently bred, and who can never look forward to any real financial fortune. I do not include every one who has to economize strictly, for a large proportion of the people who have to economize strictly are totally uneducated as to real values. But distinctly I include any of the last mentioned who are alive to something besides materialistic needs. I do not include the people who want intellectual and æsthetic goods only for social and snobbish reasons or out of blind jealousy. That group, in any case, will cease to exist if intellectual and æsthetic goods cease to have a social value--as is more and more definitely coming to be the case. They were never anything but paid mercenaries in the struggle.

How are we going to save, for our children and our children’s children, the real amenities of life? Hitherto the new millionaires, for reasons of social prestige, have tended to link themselves to the group of the civilized. But the new millionaire has always been an individual case, and has, therefore, had to make concessions to the group already established. What we have never had before is the proletariat suddenly becoming, overnight, in its vast numbers, at once richer and more powerful politically than the little “educated” aristocracy. We all know what happens when that happens; if we have forgotten the French Revolution (and since 1914 a good many of us have) we have the Russian Revolution to remind us. In this morning’s newspaper I saw that the daily bread ration in Petrograd was one-half a pound for the proletariat, one-eighth of a pound for the bourgeoisie. That may or may not be true, but there is nothing in known facts to make it incredible. Even granting that skilled labor is not going to Bolshevize itself completely, there is no doubt that the minority of which I speak is going to be virtually, if not theoretically, discriminated against. Labor is not going to draw distinctions between employers of labor; the college professor is going to have to pay the plumber, the carpenter, at as exorbitant rates as the great manufacturer. Any one who employs labor at all--even if it is only to repair a leak--is going to be gouged. All along the line, the producers of every necessary element in civilized physical existence are going to rob the ultimate consumer. It is labor that is responsible for the high cost of living. Labor may say that the high cost of living is responsible for its increased demands. In point of fact, there is every evidence that labor at present is demanding money, not for the necessities of life, but for the luxuries--just like the capitalists they have so inveighed against. One would have to be a professional reformer to be shocked. Any knowledge of human nature leaves one perfectly unsurprised by this phenomenon. Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism. That is what labor has always said about the employers of labor; and the employers can say it quite as truly of the employed. So long as you make the basis of life materialistic, this law will prevail.

What, then, are we going to do about it? We shall not be able to afford many of the luxuries we once thought necessities, and we must decide, with the utmost possible wisdom, what are necessities and what are not. We had better make our list as short as possible, at that. Obvious luxuries we shall not have: motor-cars, fine clothing, plenty of domestic service, the joys of travel. It is costing us more, all the time, to provide the hygienic necessities for our children: pure milk, nourishing food, good air, healthful recreation, seasonable clothing. I do not mean complicated food, or extravagant amusements, or elaborate clothing; I mean the irreducible minimum required for health and simple comfort and decency. And we cannot all--especially the professional people--go back to the farm and live on our own produce. We have to struggle along as best we can in the communities to which our work has called us.

In some ways the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect have always been expensive. The more obvious material comforts--rich food, for example--have not been necessary to either. Neither, in a sense, has fine clothing or expensive furniture. Yet it must be remembered that both the life of the spirit and the life of the intellect tend, in most cases, to develop the sense of beauty; and that too much ugliness can become a pain and an obstacle to calm. There is a simplicity that is pleasing, and a simplicity that is hideous. Leaving aside the social importance of good clothes and good furniture, there is, in downright ugliness, a power to fret the soul, a power to lessen the power to work. But we will neglect, for the moment, the æsthetic side of it. In the matter of food we will willingly simplify. In the matter of adornment, whether of our persons or of our houses, we shall have to simplify, and we can only hope that our simplification can be conducted more along quantitative than along qualitative lines. We shall try to omit rather than commit; to be austere rather than cheap.

The matter of servants is going to hit us harder; for only with “help”--in the quite literal sense--can we manage to get any peace or any time, in the hours left free by our wage-earning, for reading, for contemplation, for conversation. The “general houseworker” has tended to disappear; which is an acknowledgment that when a great many different things have to be done, one human being cannot stand the strain. Only by her being helped out by the family, only by some features of household service being scanted or ill done, could the general houseworker ever manage to keep outside her job. The good cook could not also be the perfect parlor-maid and the perfect child’s nurse. Neither can the good physician, the good lawyer, the good clergyman, also be the perfect choreman, the perfect gardener, and the perfect butler--with hours of casual bookkeeping, plumbing, and carpentering. Even if he had the talent, he would not have the time; for the physician, the lawyer, and the clergyman are not safeguarded by an “eight-hour day.” His wife, moreover, even if she has no private intellectual interests, cannot suffice to all the modern domestic tasks any more than can the general houseworker, who has faded out of existence precisely because she could not. We shall modify as we can; shall have our food sent in from outside where that is possible; shall buy vacuum cleaners (on the instalment plan); shall win occasional hours of freedom by hiring some safe person to come in and watch over the children while they sleep. Hospitality will, of necessity, be much curtailed. Our personal freedom--in any familiar sense of the term--will be almost _nil_. We might defy our house, our garden, our table, our door-bell, to shackle us; but we cannot defy our children to shackle us.

In these ways, we shall probably intrigue for the life of the spirit, the life of the intellect. But, still, they are expensive. Education--good education--is, in the first place, expensive. I do not know how much it costs to make a man a good plumber or a good coal-miner or a good carpenter; but I am sure it does not cost so much as it does to make him a good doctor or a good clergyman. It takes seven years after the “prep” school or the high school to start the professional man on his road, costing fairly heavily all the time. That is why I said that skilled labor is overpaid--it gets an exorbitant return for its expenditure. Most of us hope to have college for our boys, even if they do not take up a profession--just because we think that education is going to matter to a man, all his life, no matter in what field he works. The joys of travel, as I intimated, are going to be cut out for most of us; the opera and the play will become infrequent blessings. But we shall have to have some books--even if we do not start the furnace until December. Indeed, the books we have ourselves are perhaps going to be our best guarantee of our children’s being educated at all. To be sure, we shall be taxed on them, with increasing heaviness; but then, the coal-miner will (let us hope) be taxed on his motor-car.

It may be that we shall come to state-endowed motherhood, and all the rest. But the trouble is that all these socialistic schemes are based on a lower-class demand on life. State endowment of motherhood will perhaps have to come; but what does it guarantee except the child born under decent conditions? The health of the mother, and through her of the child, is to be safeguarded. Very well. _Et après?_ Pure milk may be provided at municipal stations; there will be a day nursery and then a public kindergarten. There will follow--if modern “educators” have their way--the whole desolating career in the public schools, where real education is reduced to a minimum, and “vocational” training is substituted. The child will, in time, be graduated into the ranks of skilled labor, and perhaps will eventually have his motor-car and his tiled bathroom and his “movie” every night.

Yet for some of us this is not a supremely cheering prospect, because it is a wholly materialistic vision. Certainly it is a good thing to start with health as a requisite. Certainly everything that can be done to insure a healthy childhood, in every case where it is physically possible, should be done. But the great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind. It may be that the enormous expense of guaranteeing health to all children born in our vast American community will take all the money that the community has. It may be that no one will ever be free to devote his health to pursuing the life of the mind and the spirit--to the purposes, that is, of civilization not purely physical. But we have not come to that yet; and the war is there to remind us that we really do not know precisely what will come. If real socialism--as distinguished from our temporary utilization of certain socialistic methods--comes, we shall inevitably turn our backs on civilization for a time. Successful socialism depends on the perfectibility of man. Unless all, or nearly all, men are high-minded and clear-sighted, it is bound to be a rotten failure in any but a physical sense. Even though it is altruism, socialism means materialism. You can guarantee the things of the body to every one, but you cannot guarantee the things of the spirit to every one; you can guarantee only that the opportunity to seek them shall not be denied to any one who chooses to seek them. And socialism, believing as it must (to hold its head high) in the spiritual as well as the political equality of men, is not going to create special opportunities for the special case. “To hell with the special case” is implicit in the socialist slogan. Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious? Is there any evidence whatever that the socialist is less avid of personal political power, less averse to demagogic methods, than the other person? Does he himself go far to prove his perfectionism? A good many socialists are calling other socialists names because they put nationality before internationality; though any one with any sense could have told them beforehand that they would, because human beings are--fortunately or unfortunately--like that. Lenin and Trotzky are disappointed because the German socialists do not rise to betray their rulers; and some socialists are disappointed because Lenin and Trotzky appear to be selling Russia out to Germany in order to keep themselves--two individuals--in places of power. Every one is calling names all round; and if socialism were anything in particular, it would (one would think) be very sorry for itself.

What is clear is this: that the socialization of governments places vast power in the hands of the skilled laborer. It is only in order that labor shall produce as fast and as furiously as possible that we have socialized our national organization. We need, chiefly for war’s sake, certain physical things--food, munitions, coal, khaki clothing, and transportation for the same. We are calling for Y. M. C. A. men, and K. of C., and chaplains; but what we really expect of them, more than anything else, is to go under fire, if necessary, to give the soldiers tobacco and hot chocolate. The newspapers lay eager and delighted stress on the unclerical nature of the services these gentlemen find themselves cheerfully performing. War, you see, is a physical business. Of the spiritual side of it I am not going to speak. No one really can speak of it in terms of actual achievement until the armies have come home and we see what manner of men they are. You cannot tell from the straws you see which way the great last wind of all is going to blow. Some wise people doubt whether the veterans of this war are going to spiritualize the world. Many of them will have had, at this or that supreme moment, something akin to a spiritual revelation. But the spiritual adventure is a desperately and exclusively personal thing; you cannot socialize it. It is incommunicable, and for the most part inexpressible. The attempt to socialize a spiritual experience ends in the camp-meeting; it goes no farther. Like all mental ecstasies, it cannot be felt simultaneously by millions of people. I fancy that the opinions the veterans are going to express at the polls are quite unforeknowable. We are all willingly kow-towing to the materialists for the sake of the armies. Whether the armies will wish to kow-tow to them when the war is over is a question more difficult of present solution than the Balkan boundaries. Certainly, if the armies have developed an _esprit de corps_ and a philosophy of their own, they will be listened to. We shall inevitably be very sentimental about them. Whether we shall continue to be sentimental about the man who selected this moment to hold up his country and his compatriots for exorbitant pay, and demonstrated his patriotism by earning it, I do not know. We can deal only with the present situation.

What, the present outlook being what it is, can we count on for our children? We shall be practically aided, in time, as I have said, by all sorts of co-operative schemes--invented for the use of the very poor, and adapted and expanded, of necessity, for the not quite so poor. Some of the amenities of life, some of the space and the privacy, will have gone irretrievably. After considerations of health come considerations of education. We shall not be able, probably, to afford private schools for our children; and our sole comfort must be that most private schools are not much good, anyhow. They are a little safer gamble, in most communities, than the public schools. That is all. We, the parents, must supplement the bad teaching as best we can, must keep at least some spark of intelligent interest in the universe alive by the gas-log. It may well become our painful and subversive duty to inform our children, from the beginning, that what is being offered them by the state as education is not really education at all; and that teaching a boy how to make bookshelves is in no sense a substitute for teaching him to read and appreciate Latin. (Better not mention Greek!) It is very desirable, if not absolutely necessary, for our daughter to know how to cook; but we must not permit her to consider that domestic science is education, in the proper sense. We must keep the fact before ourselves and before the next generation that the training of the mind does not mean quite the same thing as the training of the muscles. Time was when a cobbler--and I do not mean anything so remote and legendary as Hans Sachs--found philosophy a very natural complement to cobbling. I knew a cobbler in my childhood who was much in demand among the intellectuals, as being one of the few people who could expound Emerson’s transcendentalism in a completely satisfactory way. He went about--I can still recall the spun snow of his hair, the canny saintliness of his much-modelled face, the thin figure under the long black cloak--to philosophical conferences, to discuss metaphysics with the metaphysicians; and returned to sit in his little shop and cobble shoes. But one has yet to hear of philosophy’s coming from a member of the lasters’ union. Machinery means specialization; and it is an old story that there is no mental comfort or development in repeating the same gesture for eight hours a day, even if one has time and a half for overtime. The single gesture is not educative. When you saw the shoe as an entity, when it grew under your hands and you built up the whole consciously from the related parts; even when you were a mere cobbler, a physician to sick shoes, and had to know the whole shoe-organism--there was something in that humblest, most physical of tasks which demanded a conception in the brain. That time is gone, and if William Morris in the flesh could not bring it back, certainly his ghost will not. But if you think for a moment of the difference in mental attitude and mental grasp, it shows up skilled labor for what it is.

I am far from saying that, in this much simpler world which the increasing complication of life is going, paradoxically, to create for some of us, it is a bad thing that children should be “vocationally” trained. (You cannot say “vocationally educated,” for that is virtually a contradiction in terms.) Even so, it is only to a very limited degree that our sons can be, in the intervals, their own plumbers or their own carpenters or their own masons, for the unions will never allow it. It is a very minor tinkering that is permitted to the private person. You cannot help to paint your own woodwork in your own house, for the union painter will leave his job if you touch your private paint-brush in his presence. What good, after all, is this famous vocational training, except as you definitely choose to follow through life some one of the trades they teach you? It will not really make the whole man more efficient; for he will not be allowed to use his potential efficiency. It may teach him whether he prefers to be a steamfitter or a bricklayer; but it cannot guarantee him any power to practise either steamfitting or brick-laying, unless he is willing to forsake all else and cling only to that. Never was such nonsense talked by any one as by the new “educators.” Labor frankly uses the argument of might and the big stick; but labor, as far as I know, does not pretend that it is something else. It rests its case cynically on our own pampered inability to get on without it.

“Philosophy can bake no bread,” replied some philosopher to his critics, “but it can give us God, freedom, and immortality.” Those are the last things, I take it, that modern philosophy is really concerned with giving us; but the perversity of one generation need not obscure all history. It is possible for the contemplation of great ideas, of great art, of great poetry, of the epic motions of the human race as revealed in history, to mitigate physical deprivation. It is possible to have plain living and high thinking together--though it is not easy, and never has been, and some of the best-known exponents of that theory have been pitiful failures. Certainly we of the minority must accept for ourselves austerities we were not bred to in our easy-going, materialistic generation. Without taking, like St. Simeon, to the wilful discomfort of a pillar, we must learn to do without a hundred “necessities” that Dante and Shakespeare never dreamed of. We must keep it possible for our children to delight in Dante and Shakespeare; we must not let the authentic intellectual thrill disappear from the world. And, for that, we must insist that the past be not closed to them, and that learning shall not be an unknown good. They will have to do it on bread and milk, not on caviare; but it can be done on bread and milk. That is the point.

I confess that as I look forth in these distressed times on the vast American scene, I find myself pinning my hope to two things--the self-consciousness of this minority, and the older Eastern universities. For unless we plan our simplicities cannily, the other people will have won out; and unless the older universities keep up a standard of learning, hold the door open, by main force, to the past, the garnered lore of the world will fail us. We shall progress--but blindly, as the brute creation. The fact is that we are living in an obscurantist epoch. For surely it is obscurantism to deny the legitimacy of any field of knowledge or of virtue, and those folk who would reduce everything to a physical basis are as deadly foes of light as their ancestors who saw in physical experiments nothing but the black art. Every sane person wants science left free to accomplish its marvellous work; but no sane person past early youth would say, as a young woman fresh from her college laboratories said to me a few days since, that chemistry is the root of all knowledge. The Protestants, when they were on top, were as given to obscurantism, and its accompaniment of persecution, as the Catholics.

In the matter of education, as I have suggested, we shall have to rely on the older colleges of the East. We cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with state universities. It is by no means my intention or my private inclination to minimize the value of the state universities. The point is that they are uncertain; they are not free; they are dependent, in the last analysis, on public favor, which means public funds, on a kind of initiative and referendum. They may have good luck and become great schools of learning; they may have bad luck and become indifferent and negligible places. They are not really allowed to set their own standards; they must ever be compromising with the personnel of state legislatures. The private colleges and universities of the East at least are not dependent on politics. Their funds are for the most part inadequate, but they do not have to change their curricula to please people who know nothing about what a curriculum should be. As long as their private fortunes last, they can afford to say the thing which they believe to be true. One of the most heartening things that have happened since 1914 is the acquisition of great wealth by Yale University. It means--one hopes--that one at least of our old academic foundations can snap its fingers at ignorance enthroned; that it can send out its thousands endowed with some sense of intellectual values. Intellectual values are not the only ones; but most sane people believe that only by the rigid training of the mind can human beings be taught wise living and moral values. There is no morality by instinct, though there can be morality by inherited inhibitions. There is no social salvation--in the end--without taking thought; without mastery of logic and application of logic to human experience. These things, because they are not the natural man, are not carelessly come by; they must be deliberately achieved. You will not learn them from the Bolsheviki, or from the I. W. W., or even from Mr. Arthur Henderson. A great deal is said nowadays about practical politics and the rôle of the practical man in building the social structure. Before you can carry out an idea you must have the idea. You cannot get rid of the world of abstract thought. One after the other, leaders of the Church are laying more and more stress on religion’s being a strictly social matter. Perhaps it is, though I do not believe it. I should have said that social regeneration was a by-product of religion, not religion itself. But even the folk who think that Christianity means no slums, and means little else, derive their sanction--or think they do--from Christ, who dealt in abstract ideas more exclusively than any other religious teacher the world has had.

We must, then, seriously facing the moral, political, and physical conditions of our time, be frankly ascetic. We must make our children healthy, first of all--if only because specialists will be beyond our pocketbooks. I have implied that the combination of plain living and high thinking is a difficult one; I fancy it is the most difficult in the world. “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense.” We shall obliterate the coarser contacts, as far as possible, not by engaging other people to take the burden of those coarser contacts, but by buying, as we can, the machinery that will suffice to them impersonally. We shall “co-operate” to the limit of our incomes, losing thereby, I repeat, many of the amenities which tend to civilize. We shall not sleep soft, we shall not live high, and we shall do without external beauty to a painful extent. We shall exist in cramped quarters, and if we achieve the dignity of one spacious room, that will be a great deal. We cannot hope to furnish it fittingly. But if we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season. If we have a holiday, we shall not go to Europe or Asia, which would be beyond our means; but we shall find some quiet spot where there will at least be trees and sky and no motor-cars or aeroplanes. We shall, I hope, ameliorate our lack of space and privacy by a very perfectly developed courtesy and by the capacity for silence. It sounds monastic, and, at its best, monastic it will be. Certain things we shall have given up at the start; certain ambitions will have been erased from our tablets. We shall not compete with, or interfere with, the lords of this world. We shall do our modest work, and receive our modest pay, and by a corresponding modesty of life and temper we shall disarm, we hope, the unsympathetic and uncomprehending. Our kingdom cannot be of this world; and instead of complaining and criticizing, we must apply ourselves to realizing that our compensations can be made greater than our losses. We shall be passionately concerned with humanity; the more so, that we shall endeavor to be aware of the voice of God as well as of the voice of the people. We shall not be snobs in any sense; for we shall have the same charity for other people’s choices that we beg them to have for ours. Besides, snobbishness dies out quickly--in America, at least--among the impoverished.

Even those who find all this an intolerable idea will dub it Utopian. A counsel of perfection it certainly is. But the higher the standard we set for ourselves the less likely we are to put up with a low one. And if we merely drift, I fear we shall find ourselves getting nothing--wearing ourselves out in the unequal, familiar race for physical privileges, and leaving to one side the intangible goods. We can guarantee our children nothing except that they shall be armored against certain kinds of suffering; the lust of non-essentials, for example. I do not say that we shall not lose much that our best interest would suggest our having; but we shall not lose everything. And with the new simplicity will come some of the compensations of earlier simplicity. The man who has three things gets more pleasure out of one than does the man who has a hundred. Perhaps we shall capture the “joy in widest commonalty spread.” A rose will always be cheaper than an alligator pear, and it is quite possible to enjoy it as much and as vividly. We shall be very grateful, I have no doubt, to Thomas Edison and the other genii of democracy. In some ways we shall fare better than folk of our clan in Europe. We must thank our stars for plumbing--itself a “joy in widest commonalty spread.” But we shall value it chiefly as it releases time for better things, and those better things not physical pleasures.

Not only shall we not glorify our plumbing with marble; we shall see that there is really no sense in marble when porcelain will do as well--that marble has better uses and should be kept for them. Not only shall we have no ermine to shield us from the cold; we shall see that ermine was more beautiful when rarely and ritually worn. We shall learn to take pleasure in beautiful things that do not and never can belong to us; and we shall purge ourselves of the ignoble passion of envy. But the power to discriminate between the truth and a lie--which is the foundation of all moral and intellectual enjoyment--we shall cling to with greed. For in keeping that we rob no one, and insult no law. I am far from believing that any group of people can achieve all this with completeness. But I believe we shall do well to set it before us as a goal.

DRESS AND THE WOMAN

The creed and the fallacy of fashion, it seems to me, have seldom been better expressed than in the retort once made to a friend of mine, in one of our more conservative New England towns. Sojourning there for a time, she had reason to order a hat from a local milliner. When she tried it on, it did not resemble in the least the headgear of the metropolis. “They are wearing hats very low, this year, you know,” she protested. “Ah,” was the unperturbed reply, “they are wearing them high in Newburyport.” I do not remember the fate of the hat--which is unimportant; but the statement has remained with me for years as one of the most significant imaginable. It was at once the glorification and the _reductio ad absurdum_ of modishness. My friend and the milliner spoke in the same spirit. For provincialism in dress consists merely in adhering rigidly to the _avant-dernier cri_. The object of allegiance may be, in the provinces, a little tardily come up with; but the rigidity is precisely the rigidity of the rue de la Paix. Fashion is not simply a question of longitude.

The sense of mode might be considered, as so many other things have been, the possession that distinguishes man from the beasts. The peacock is no proof to the contrary; for if, as scientists suggest to us, all radiant plumage has been developed as a means of attraction, at least the ideal of adornment has been, in the case of the birds, consistently æsthetic. The feathery fashions have always been intrinsically good. Whereas (to be flippant) the attraction exercised by the latest mode would seem usually to point to some principle of unnatural selection. The bird of Paradise, who is probably irresistible in his native forest, can be positively repellent on a hat. Yes; the sense of mode is curiously different from the sense of beauty. Let us, however, be serious.

Preachers of all time--and satirists, who are lay-preachers--have declaimed against female extravagance in dress. It must be confessed that the sex of the more peaceful pursuits has been the more exuberantly adorned. The male costume worn, say, at the court of Henri III, was every bit as bad as anything that contemporary ladies could have boasted; but even in the time of Henri III, a man had to hold himself ready for the saddle and the tented field. Some part of his life was bound to be spent in garments as rational as he could conceive them. It was the female sex that could expand, unchecked and unpruned, into such wild tendrils, such orchid-like incontinent bloom, of “changeable apparel.”

From the earliest times, it is the woman who has been designated as the sinner in this respect. On this point, the Old and New Testaments are, for once, agreed; Isaiah and St. Paul are at one. “The chains, and the bracelets, and the mufflers, the bonnets ... and the earrings ... the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins ... the fine linen, and the hoods and the veils,” the one accuses; “broidered hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array,” complains the other. Ezekiel thunders against “the women that sew pillows to the armholes” (the _gigot_ sleeve in the reign of Zedekiah!) “and make kerchiefs for the head of persons of every stature, to hunt souls.” And the tradition has remained. It is perhaps the only subject on which St. Ignatius Loyola and John Knox would have been thoroughly sympathetic. One is certainly at liberty to infer from the chorus that it is easier for a camel to pass through the needle’s eye than for anything really _chic_ to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.