Jerome Jerome - Tea-table Talk

"Myself," remarked the Minor Poet, "I find much comfort in the conviction that talk, as talk, is responsible for much less good and much less harm in the world than we who talk are apt to imagine. Words to grow and bear fruit must fall upon the earth of fact."

"But you hold it right to fight against folly?" demanded the Philosopher.

"Heavens, yes!" cried the Minor Poet. "That is how one knows it is Folly―if we can kill it. Against the Truth our arrows rattle harmlessly."

"But what is her reason?" demanded the Old Maid.

"Reason! I don't believe any of them have any reason." The Woman of the World showed sign of being short of temper, a condition of affairs startlingly unusual to her. "Says she hasn't enough work to do."

"She must be an extraordinary woman," commented the Old Maid.

"The trouble I have put myself to in order to keep that woman, just because George likes her savouries, no one would believe," continued indignantly the Woman of the World. "We have had a dinner party regularly once a week for the last six months, entirely for her benefit. Now she wants me to give two. I won't do it!"

"If I could be of any service?" offered the Minor Poet. "My digestion is not what it once was, but I could make up in quality―a recherche little banquet twice a week, say on Wednesdays and Saturdays, I would make a point of eating with you. If you think that would content her!"

"It is really thoughtful of you," replied the Woman of the World, "but I cannot permit it. Why should you be dragged from the simple repast suitable to a poet merely to oblige my cook? It is not reason."

"I was thinking rather of you," continued the Minor Poet.

"I've half a mind," said the Woman of the World, "to give up housekeeping altogether and go into an hotel. I don't like the idea, but really servants are becoming impossible."

"It is very interesting," said the Minor Poet.

"I am glad you find it so!" snapped the Woman of the World.

"What is interesting?" I asked the Minor Poet.

"That the tendency of the age," he replied, "should be slowly but surely driving us into the practical adoption of a social state that for years we have been denouncing the Socialists for merely suggesting. Everywhere the public-houses are multiplying, the private dwellings diminishing."

"Can you wonder at it?" commented the Woman of the World. "You men talk about 'the joys of home.' Some of you write poetry―generally speaking, one of you who lives in chambers, and spends two-thirds of his day at a club." We were sitting in the garden. The attention of the Minor Poet became riveted upon the sunset. "'Ethel and I by the fire.' Ethel never gets a chance of sitting by the fire. So long as you are there, comfortable, you do not notice that she has left the room to demand explanation why the drawing-room scuttle is always filled with slack, and the best coal burnt in the kitchen range. Home to us women is our place of business that we never get away from."

"I suppose," said the Girton Girl―to my surprise she spoke with entire absence of indignation. As a rule, the Girton Girl stands for what has been termed "divine discontent" with things in general. In the course of time she will outlive her surprise at finding the world so much less satisfactory an abode than she had been led to suppose―also her present firm conviction that, given a free hand, she could put the whole thing right in a quarter of an hour. There are times even now when her tone suggests less certainty of her being the first person who has ever thought seriously about the matter. "I suppose," said the Girton Girl, "it comes of education. Our grandmothers were content to fill their lives with these small household duties. They rose early, worked with their servants, saw to everything with their own eyes. Nowadays we demand time for self-development, for reading, for thinking, for pleasure. Household drudgery, instead of being the object of our life, has become an interference to it. We resent it."

"The present revolt of woman," continued the Minor Poet, "will be looked back upon by the historian of the future as one of the chief factors in our social evolution. The 'home'―the praises of which we still sing, but with gathering misgiving―depended on her willingness to live a life of practical slavery. When Adam delved and Eve span―Adam confining his delving to the space within his own fence, Eve staying her spinning-wheel the instant the family hosiery was complete―then the home rested upon the solid basis of an actual fact. Its foundations were shaken when the man became a citizen and his interests expanded beyond the domestic circle. Since that moment woman alone has supported the institution. Now she, in her turn, is claiming the right to enter the community, to escape from the solitary confinement of the lover's castle. The 'mansions,' with common dining-rooms, reading-rooms, their system of common service, are springing up in every quarter; the house, the villa, is disappearing. The story is the same in every country. The separate dwelling, where it remains, is being absorbed into a system. In America, the experimental laboratory of the future, the houses are warmed from a common furnace. You do not light the fire, you turn on the hot air. Your dinner is brought round to you in a travelling oven. You subscribe for your valet or your lady's maid. Very soon the private establishment, with its staff of unorganised, quarrelling servants, of necessity either over or underworked, will be as extinct as the lake dwelling or the sandstone cave."

"I hope," said the Woman of the World, "that I may live to see it."

"In all probability," replied the Minor Poet, "you will. I would I could feel as hopeful for myself."

"If your prophecy be likely of fulfilment," remarked the Philosopher, "I console myself with the reflection that I am the oldest of the party. Myself; I never read these full and exhaustive reports of the next century without revelling in the reflection that before they can be achieved I shall be dead and buried. It may be a selfish attitude, but I should be quite unable to face any of the machine-made futures our growing guild of seers prognosticate. You appear to me, most of you, to ignore a somewhat important consideration―namely, that mankind is alive. You work out your answers as if he were a sum in rule-of-three: 'If man in so many thousands of years has done so much in such a direction at this or that rate of speed, what will he be doing―?' and so on. You forget he is swayed by impulses that can enter into no calculation―drawn hither and thither by powers that can never be represented in your algebra. In one generation Christianity reduced Plato's republic to an absurdity. The printing-press has upset the unanswerable conclusions of Machiavelli."

"I disagree with you," said the Minor Poet.

"The fact does not convince me of my error," retorted the Philosopher.

"Christianity," continued the Minor Poet, "gave merely an added force to impulses the germs of which were present in the infant race. The printing-press, teaching us to think in communities, has nonplussed to a certain extent the aims of the individual as opposed to those of humanity. Without prejudice, without sentiment, cast your eye back over the panorama of the human race. What is the picture that presents itself? Scattered here and there over the wild, voiceless desert, first the holes and caves, next the rude-built huts, the wigwams, the lake dwellings of primitive man. Lonely, solitary, followed by his dam and brood, he creeps through the tall grass, ever with watchful, terror-haunted eyes; satisfies his few desires; communicates, by means of a few grunts and signs, his tiny store of knowledge to his offspring; then, crawling beneath a stone, or into some tangled corner of the jungle, dies and disappears. We look again. A thousand centuries have flashed and faded. The surface of the earth is flecked with strange quivering patches: here, where the sun shines on the wood and sea, close together, almost touching one another; there, among the shadows, far apart. The Tribe has formed itself. The whole tiny mass moves forward, halts, runs backwards, stirred always by one common impulse. Man has learnt the secret of combination, of mutual help. The City rises. From its stone centre spreads its power; the Nation leaps to life; civilisation springs from leisure; no longer is each man's life devoted to his mere animal necessities. The artificer, the thinker―his fellows shall protect him. Socrates dreams, Phidias carves the marble, while Pericles maintains the law and Leonidas holds the Barbarian at bay. Europe annexes piece by piece the dark places of the earth, gives to them her laws. The Empire swallows the small State; Russia stretches her arm round Asia. In London we toast the union of the English-speaking peoples; in Berlin and Vienna we rub a salamander to the deutscher Bund; in Paris we whisper of a communion of the Latin races. In great things so in small. The stores, the huge Emporium displaces the small shopkeeper; the Trust amalgamates a hundred firms; the Union speaks for the worker. The limits of country, of language, are found too narrow for the new Ideas. German, American, or English―let what yard of coloured cotton you choose float from the mizzenmast, the business of the human race is their captain. One hundred and fifty years ago old Sam Johnson waited in a patron's anteroom; today the entire world invites him to growl his table talk the while it takes its dish of tea. The poet, the novelist, speak in twenty languages. Nationality―it is the County Council of the future. The world's high roads run turnpike-free from pole to pole. One would be blind not to see the goal towards which we are rushing. At the outside it is but a generation or two off. It is one huge murmuring Hive―one universal Hive just the size of the round earth. The bees have been before us; they have solved the riddle towards which we in darkness have been groping.