Kitabı oku: «The home: its work and influence», sayfa 9
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DOMESTIC ENTERTAINMENT
Long is the way from the primal home, with its simple child-motif, to the large and expensive house of entertainment we call home to-day. The innocent "guest-chamber" early added to the family accommodations has spread its area and widened its demands, till we find the ultra-type of millionaire mansion devoting its whole space, practically, to the occupation of guests – for even the private rooms are keyed up to a comparison with those frankly built and furnished for strangers. The kitchen, the dining-room, the pantry, the table-furniture of all sorts, are arranged in style and amplitude to meet the needs of guests. The sitting-room becomes a "parlour," the parlour a "drawing-room" with "reception-room" addition; and then comes the still more removed "ballroom" – a remarkable apartment truly, to form part of a home. Some even go so far as to add a theatre – that most essentially public of chambers – in this culminating transformation of a home to a house of entertainment.
From what once normal base sprang this abnormal growth? How did this place of love and intimacy, the outward form of our most tender and private relations, so change and swell to a place of artificial politeness and most superficial contact? The point of departure is not hard to find; it lies in that still visible period when hospitality was one of our chief virtues.
Of all the evolving series of human virtues none is more easily studied in its visible relation to condition and its rapid alterations than hospitality. Moreover, though considered a virtue, it is not so intermingled with our deepest religious sanction as to be painful to discuss; we respect, but do not worship it.
Hospitality is a quality of human life, a virtue which appears after a certain capacity for altruism is developed; not a very high degree, for we find a rigid code of hospitality among many savage tribes; and which obtains in exact proportion to the distance, difficulty, and danger of travelling.
We still find its best type among the Bedouin Arabs and the Scotch Highlanders; we find it in our own land more in the country than the city, more in the thinly settled and poorly roaded south than in the more thickly settled and better roaded north; and most of all on the western frontier, where mountain and desert lie between ranch and ranch.
To call out the most lively sense of hospitality the traveller must be weary (that means a long, hard road), and "distressed" – open to injury, if not hospitably received. To have a fresh, clean, rosy traveller drop in after half an hour's pleasant stroll does not touch the springs of hospitality. The genuine figure to call out this virtue is the stranger, the wanderer, the pilgrim.
Hospitality will not stand constant use. The steady visitor must be a friend; and friendship is quite a different thing from hospitality. That finds its typical instance in the old Scotch chief sheltering the hunted fugitive; and defending him against his pursuers even when told that his guest was the murderer of his son. As guest he was held sacred; he had claimed the rights of hospitality and he received them. Had he returned to make the same demand every few days, even without renewing his initial offence, it is doubtful if hospitality would have held out.
A somewhat thin, infrequent virtue is hospitality at its heights, requiring intervals of relaxation. "Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour's house, lest he weary of thee and hate thee," says the proverb of the very people where the laws of hospitality were sacred; and "the stranger within thy gates" came under the regular provision of household law.
Hospitality became a sort of standing custom under feudalism, as part of the parental care of the Lord of the Land; and thus acquired its elements of pride and ostentation. Each nobleman owned all the land about him; the traveller had to claim shelter of him either directly or through his dependents, and the castle was the only place big enough for entertainment. The nobleman saw to it that no other person on his domain should be able to offer much hospitality. So the Castle or the Abbey had it all.
A little of this spirit gave character to the partly danger-based southern hospitality. It was necessary to the occasional stranger on the original and legitimate grounds; it became a steady custom to the modern Lord of the Manor, none of whose subsidiary fellow-citizens had the wherewithal to feed and shelter guests. But hospitality, even in that form, is not what issues cards and lays red carpet under awnings from door to curb.
Here no free-handed cordial greeting keeps the visitor to dinner – the dinner where the plates are named and numbered and the caterer ready with due complement of each expensive dish. Hospitality must blush and apologise – "I'm sorry, but you must excuse me, I have to dress for dinner!" and "Why, of course! I forgot it was so late! – dear me! the Jenkinses will have come before me if I don't hurry home!" On what ground, then, is that dinner given – why are the Jenkinses asked that night? If not the once sacred spirit of hospitality, is it the still sacred spirit of friendship?
Are the people we so expensively and elaborately entertain – and who so carefully retaliate, card for card, plat for plat and dollar for dollar – are these the people whom we love? Among our many guests is an occasional friend. The occasional friend we entreat to come and see us when we are not entertaining!
Friendships are the fruit of true personal expression, the drawing together that follows recognition, the manifest kinships of the outspoken soul. In friendship we discriminate, we particularise, we enjoy the touch and interchange of like characteristics, the gentle stimulus of a degree of unlikeness. Friendship comes naturally, spontaneously, along lines of true expression in work, of a casual propinquity that gives rein to the unforced thought. More friendships are formed in the prolonged association of school-life or business life, in the intimacy of a journey together or a summer's camping, than ever grew in a lonely lifetime of crowded receptions. Friendship may coexist with entertainment, may even thrive in spite of it, but is neither cause nor result of that strange process.
What, then, is "entertainment," to which the home is sacrificed so utterly – which is no part of fatherhood, motherhood, or childhood, of hospitality or friendship?
On what line of social evolution may we trace the growth of this amazing phenomenon; this constant gathering together of many people to eat when they are not hungry, dance when they are not merry, talk when they have nothing to say, and sit about so bored by their absurd position that the hostess must needs hire all manner of paid performers wherewith to "entertain" them?
Here is the explanation: humanity is a relation. It is not merely a number of human beings, like a number of grains of sand. The human being, to be really human, must be associated in various forms; grouped together in the interchange of function. The family relation, as we have seen, does not in itself constitute humanity; human relations are larger.
Man, as a separate being, the personal man, must have his private house to be separate in. Man, as a collective being, the social man, must have his public house to be together in. This does not mean a drinking place, but any form of building which shelters our common social functions. A church is a public house – in it we meet together as human beings; as individuals, not as families; to perform the common social function of worship. All religions have this collective nature – people come together as human beings, under a common impulse.
The home is a private house. That belongs to us separately for the fulfilment of purely personal functions. Every other form of building on earth is a public house, a house for people to come together in for the fulfilment of social functions. Church, school, palace, mill, shop, post office, railway station, museum, art gallery, library, every kind of house except the home is a public house. These public houses are as essential to our social life and development as the private house is to our physical existence.
Inside the home are love, marriage, birth, and death; outside the home are agriculture, manufacture, trade, commerce, transportation, art, science, and religion. Every human —i. e., social – process goes on outside the home, and has to have its appropriate building. In these varied forms of social activity, humanity finds its true expression; the contact and interchange, the stimulus and relief, without which the human soul cannot live.
Humanity must associate, that is the primal law of our being. This association, so far in history, has been almost entirely confined to men. They have associated in war, in work, in play. Men have always been found in groups, on land and sea, doing things together; developing comradeship, loyalty, justice; enjoying the full swing of human faculties. But women, with the one partial exception of the privileges of the church, have been denied this most vital necessity of human life – association. Every woman was confined separately, in her private house, to her most separate and private duties and pleasures; and the duties and pleasures of social progress she was utterly denied. The church alone gave her a partial outlet; gave her a common roof for a common function, a place to come together in; and to the church she has flocked continually, as her only ground of human association.
But as society continued to evolve, reaching an ever-higher degree of interdependent complexity, developing in the human soul an ever-growing capacity and necessity for wide, free, general association, and transmitting that increasing social capacity to the daughter as well as the son, the enormous pressure had to find some outlet. "What will happen if an irresistible force meets an immovable body?" is the old question, and the answer is "The irresistible force will be resisted and the immovable body be moved." That is exactly what has happened. The irresistible force of the public spirit has met the immovable body of the private house – and that great, splendid, working social force has been frittered away in innumerable little processes of private amusement; the quiet, beautiful, private home has been bloated and coarsened in immeasurable distention as a place of public entertainment.
There is more than one line of tendency, good and bad, at work to bring about this peculiar phenomenon of domestic entertainment; but the major condition, without which it could not exist, is the home-bound woman; and the further essential, without which it could not develop to the degree found in what we call "society," is that the home-bound woman be exempt from the domestic industries, exempt from the direct cares of motherhood, exempt from any faintest hint of the great human responsibility of mutual labour; exempt from any legitimate connection with the real social body; and so, still inheriting the enormously increasing pressure of the social spirit, she pours out her energies in this simulacrum of social life we still call "social."
What is the effect, or rather what are some of the effects, of this artificial game of living upon the real course of life? And in particular how does it affect the home, and how does the home affect it? In the first place this form of human association, based upon the activities of otherwise idle women, and requiring the home as its vehicle of expression, tends to postpone marriage. The idle woman, contributing nothing to the household labours or expenses, requires to be wholly supported by her husband. This would be a check on marriage even if she stayed at home twirling her thumbs; for he would have to provide women to wait on her, on him, on the children, in default of her service as "house-wife." He could not marry as soon as the man whose wife, strong and skilled in house-service, held up her end of the business, as does the farmer's and mechanic's wife to-day.
But when to the expense of maintaining a useless woman is added the expense of entertaining her useless friends; when this entertainment takes the form, not of hospitality sharing the accommodations of the home, the food of the family, but of providing extra rooms, furniture, dishes, and servants; of special elaboration of costly food; and of a whole new gamut of expensive clothing wherein to entertain and be entertained – then indeed does marriage recede, and youth wither and blacken in awaiting it.
Current fiction, current jokes, current experience, and all the background of history and literature, show us this strong and vicious tendency at work; and ugly is the work it does. No personal necessities, no family necessities, call for the expenses lavished on entertainment. Once started, the process races on, limited by no law of nature, for it is an unnatural process; excess following excess, in nightmare profusion. Veblen in his great book "The Theory of the Leisure Class," treats of the general development of this form of "conspicuous waste," but this special avenue of its maintenance is open to further study.
Women who work in their homes may be ignorant, uncultured, narrow; they may act on man as a check to mental progress; they may retard the development of their remaining industries and be a heavy brake on the wheels of social progress; they may and they do have this effect; but they are at least honest workers, though primitive ones. Their homes are held back from full social development, but they are legitimate homes. Their husbands, if selfish and vicious, waste money and life in the saloons, finding the social contact they must have somewhere; but the wives, getting along as they can without social contact, meet the basic requirements of home life, and offer to the honest and self-controlled young man a chance to enjoy "the comforts of a home," and to save money if he will. I am by no means pointing out this grade of woman's labour as desirable; that is sufficiently clear in previous chapters; but it is in origin right, and, though restricted, not abnormal.
Domestic entertainment is abnormal. It is an effort to meet a natural craving in an unnatural way. It continually seeks to "bring people together" because they are unnaturally kept apart; and to furnish them with entertainment in lieu of occupation. Any person whose work is too hard, too long, too monotonous, or not in itself attractive, needs "relaxation," "amusement," "recreation"; but this does not account in the least for domestic entertainment. That is offered to people who do not work at all. Those of them who do, part of the time, as business men sufficiently wealthy to be "in society," and yet sufficiently human to keep on in real social activities, are not relaxed, amused, or recreated by the alleged entertainment.
Those who most conspicuously and entirely give themselves up to it are most wearied by it. They may develop a morbid taste for the game, which cannot be satisfied without it; but neither are they satisfied within it.
The proofs of this are so patent to the sociologist as to seem tedious in enumeration; one alone carries weight enough to satisfy any questioner – that is the ceaseless and rapid contortions of invention with which the "entertainment" varies.
If the happy denizens of the highest "social circles" sat serene and content like the gods upon Olympus, banqueting eternally in royal calm, argument and criticism would fall to the ground. If they rose from their eternal banqueting, refreshed and strong, recreated in vigour and enthusiasm, and able to plunge into the real activities of life, then we might well envy them, and strive, with reason, to attain their level. But this is in no wise the case. Look for your evidence at the requisites of entertainment in any age of sufficient wealth and peace to maintain idlers, and in no age more easily typical than our own, and see the convulsive and incessant throes of change, the torrent of excess, the license, the eccentricity, the sudden reaction to this and that extreme, with which the wearied entertainers seek to devise entertainment that will entertain.
The physiologist knows that where normal processes are arrested abnormal processes develop. The persistent energy of the multiplying cell finds expression in cyst and polypus as readily as in good muscle and gland; and, whereas the normal growth finds its natural limit and proportion in the necessary organic interchange with other working parts of the mechanism, no such healthy check acts upon the abnormal growth.
Legs and arms do not grow and stretch indefinitely, putting out wabbling, pendulous eccentricities here and there; but a tumour grows without limit and without proportion; without use, and, therefore, without beauty. It takes no part in the bodily functions, and, therefore, is a disease. Yet it is connected with the body, grows in it, and swells hugely upon stolen blood. Social life has this possibility of morbid growth as has the physical body.
All legitimate social functions check and limit each other, as do our physical functions. No true branch of the social service can wax great at the expense of the others. If there are more in any trade or profession than are needed, the less capable are dropped out – cannot maintain a place in that line of work. Our use to each other is the natural check and guide in normal social growth. This whole field of domestic entertainment is abnormal in its base and direction, and therefore has no check in its inordinate expansion. As long as money can be found and brains be trained to minister to its demands the stream pours on; and all industry and art are corrupted in the service.
True social intercourse, legitimate amusement, is quite another matter. Human beings must associate, in innumerable forms and degrees of intimacy. Perfect friendship is the most intense, the closest form, and our great national and international organisations the largest and loosest. Between lies every shade of combination, temporary and permanent, deep and shallow, all useful and pleasant in their place. A free human being, rightly placed in society, has first his work – or her work – the main line of organic relation. That means special development, and all affiliations, economic and personal, that rest on that specialisation.
Then come the still larger general human connections, religious, political, scientific, educational, in which we join and work with others in the great world-functions that include us all. Play is almost as distinctively a human function as work – perhaps quite as much so; and here again we group and re-group, in sports and games, by "eights," by "nines," by "elevens," and all progressive associations. Then, where the play is so subtle and elaborate as to require a life's work, as in the great social function of the drama, we have people devoting their time to that form of expression, though they may seek their own recreation in other lines.
All natural mingling to perform together – as in the harvest dances and celebrations of all peoples – or to enjoy together the performance of others, as when we gather in the theatre, this is legitimate human life; and, while any one form may be overdeveloped, by excessive use, as an unwise athlete may misuse his body, it is still in its nature right, and good, if not misused.
But the use of the home as a medium of entertainment is abnormal in itself, in its relation, or, rather, in its total lack of relation to the real purpose of the place. The happy privacy of married love is at once lost. The quiet wisdom, peace, and loving care which should surround the child are at once lost. The delicate sincerity of personal expression, which should so unerringly distinguish one's dress and house, is at once lost. The only shadow of excuse for cumbering the home with crude industries – our claim that we do this so as to more accurately meet the needs of the family – is at once lost. The whole household machinery, once so nobly useful, and still interesting, as a hand-loom or spinning wheel, is prostituted to uses of which the primal home had no conception.
In an ideal home we should find, first, the perfect companionship of lovers; then the happy, united life of father, mother, and child, of brother and sister; then all simple, genuine hospitality; then the spontaneous intercourse of valued friends – the freedom to meet and mingle, now more, now less, in which, as character develops, we slowly find our own, and our whole lives are enriched and strengthened by right companionship.
Right here is the point of departure from the legitimate to the illegitimate; from what is natural, true, and wholly good to this avenue of diseased growth. As we reach out more and more for a wider range of contact – a chance of more varied association – we should leave the home and find what we seek in its own place: the general functions of human life, the whole wide field of human activity. In school, in college, the growing soul finds at once possibilities of contact impossible at home.
True association is impossible without common action. We do not sit voiceless and motionless, shaking hands with each other's souls. True and long-established friends and lovers may do this for a season. "Silence is the test of friendship," someone has said; but friendship and love require something more than this for birth and maintenance. The "ties" of love and friendship are found in the common memories and common hopes, the things we have done, do, and will do, for and with each other.
The home is for the family, and at most, a few "familiar" friends. The wider range of friendship, actual and potential, that the human soul of to-day requires, is not possible at home. See the broad graded list of a man's school friends and college friends, classmates, and fellows in club and society, associates in games and sports, business friends of all degrees, friends and associates in politics; he has an enormous range of social contact, from every grade of which he gets some good, and, out of the whole, some personal friends he likes to have come freely to his home.
Contrast with this the woman's scale – the average woman, she whose "sphere" is wholly in the home. By nature – that is, by human nature – she has the same need and capacity for large association. Being pruned down to a few main branches, confined almost wholly to the basic lines of attachment known equally to the savage, she pours a passionate intensity of feeling into her narrow range. The life-long give-and-take with a friend of whose private life one knows nothing is impossible to her. She must monopolise, being herself monopolised from birth.
This intensity of feeling, finally worn down by the rebuff it must needs meet, gives place in the life of the woman who is able to "entertain," to the "dear five hundred friends" of that sterile atmosphere. It is no longer the free reaching out of the individual toward those who mean help and strength, breadth and change and progress, rest and relaxation. In the varied life of the world we are brought in contact with many kinds of people, in different lines of work, and are drawn to those who belong to us. In the monotonous life of "society" we are brought in contact with the same kind of people, or people whose life effort is to appear the same – all continually engaged in doing the same thing. If any new idea jars the monotony, off rushes the whole crowd after it – bicycle, golf, or ping-pong – till they have made it monotonous, too.
No true and invigorating social intercourse can take place among people who are cut off from real social activities, whose medium of contact is the utterly irrelevant and arbitrary performance of what they so exquisitely miscall "social functions." The foundation error lies in the confinement of a social being to a purely domestic scale of living. By bringing into the home people who have no real business there, they are instantly forced into an artificial position. The home is no place for strangers. They cannot work there, they cannot play there, so they must be "entertained." So starts the merry-go-round. The woman must have social contact, she cannot go where it is in the normal business of life, so she tries to drag it in where she is; forcing the social life into the domestic. The domestic life is crowded out by this foreign current, and, as there is no place for legitimate social activities, in any home or series of homes, however large and costly, the illegitimate social activities are at once set up.
The train of evils to the health of society we are all acquainted with, though not with their causes. Sociology is yet too new to us for practical application. We are too unfamiliar with normal social processes to distinguish the abnormal, even though suffering keenly under it. Yet this field is so within the reach of everyone that it would seem easy to understand.
The human being's best growth requires a happy, quiet, comfortable home; with peace and health, order and beauty in its essential relations. The human being also requires right social relation, the work he is best suited to, full range of expression in that work, and intercourse free and spontaneous with his kind. Women are human beings. They are allowed the first class of relations – the domestic; but denied the other – the social. Hence they are forced to meet a normal need in an abnormal way, with inevitable evil results.
We can see easily the more conspicuous evils of luxury and extravagance, of idleness, excitement, and ill health, of the defrauded home, the withering family life, the black shadows beyond that; but there are others we do not see. Large among these is our loneliness. The machinery of domestic entertainment is paradoxically in our way. We are for ever and for ever flocking together, being brought together, arranging to meet people, to be met by people, to have other people meet each other, and meanwhile life passes and we have not met.
"How I wish I could see more of you!" we sigh to the few real friends. Your friend may be at the same dinner – taking out someone else, or, even taking you out – in equal touch with neighbours at either side and eyes opposing. Your friend may be at the same dance – piously keeping step with many another; at the same reception, the same tea, the same luncheon – but you do not meet. As the "society" hand is gloved that there be no touching of real flesh and blood, so is the society soul dressed and defended for the fray in smooth phrase and glossy smile – a well-oiled system, without which the ceaseless press and friction would wear us raw, but within which we do anything but "meet."
For truth and health and honest friendliness, for the bringing out of the best there is in us, for the maintenance of a pure and restful home-life and the development of an inspiring and fruitful social life, we need some other medium of association than domestic entertainments. And we are rapidly finding it. The woman's club is a most healthy field of contact, and the woman's clubhouse offers a legitimate common ground for large gatherings.
The increasing number of women in regular business life alters the whole position. The business woman has her wider range of contact during the day, and is glad to rest and be alone with her family at night. If she desires to go out, it is to see real friends, or to some place of real amusement. When all women are honestly at work the "calling habit" will disappear perforce, with all its waste and dissimulation.
Given a healthy active life of true social usefulness for all women, and given a full accommodation of public rooms for public gatherings, and the whole thing takes care of itself. The enormous demand for association will be met legitimately, and the satisfied soul will gladly return from that vast field of social life to the restful quiet, the loving intimacy, the genuineness of home-life, with its constant possibilities of real hospitality and the blessings of true friendship.
