Robert Grant - The Art of Living

“I suppose you mean that they might become teachers or physicians or hospital nurses or typewriters,” said Perkins. “Declined with thanks.”

“Don’t you think,” I inquired with a little irritation, “that they would be happier so than in doing nothing on a fixed income, in simply being mildly cultivated and philanthropic on dividends, in moving to the sea-side in summer and back again in the autumn, and in dying at the last of some fashionable ailment?”

“No, I don’t,” said Perkins. “Do you?”

Were I to repeat my answer to this inquiry I should be inviting a discussion on woman, which is not in place at this stage of our reflections. Let me say, though, that I am still of the opinion that Perkins ought to give his nervous system a chance and not worry so much about his daughters.

Seeing that there are so many things to have and that we cannot have everything, what are we to choose? I have sometimes, while trudging along in the sleighing season, noticed that many men, whose income I believe to be much smaller than mine, were able to ride behind fast trotters in fur overcoats. The reason upon reflection was obvious to me. Men of a certain class regard a diamond pin, a fur overcoat, and a fast horse as the first necessaries of existence after a bed, a hair-brush and one maid-of-all-work. In other words, they are willing to live in an inexpensive locality, with no regard to plumbing, society, or art, to have their food dropped upon the table, and to let their wives and daughters live with shopping as the one bright spot in the month’s horizon, if only they, the husbands and fathers, can satisfy the three-headed ruling ambition in question. The men to whom I am referring have not the moral or æsthetic tone of Rogers and myself, and belong to quite a distinct class of society from either of us. But among the friends of both of us there are people who act on precisely the same principle. A fine sense of selection ought to govern the expenditure of income, and the wise man will refrain from buying a steam-yacht for himself or a diamond crescent for his wife before he has secured a home with modern conveniences, an efficient staff of servants, a carefully chosen family physician, a summer home, or an ample margin wherewith to hire one, the best educational advantages for his children which the community will afford, and choice social surroundings. In order to have these comfortably and completely, and still not to be within sailing distance, so to speak, of a steam-yacht, one needs to have nowadays – certainly in large cities – an income of from seven thousand to eleven thousand dollars, according to where one lives.

I make this assertion in the face of the fact that our legislators all over the country annually decree that from four to five thousand dollars a year is a fat salary in reward for public service, and that an official with a family who is given twenty-five hundred or three thousand is to be envied. Envied by whom, pray? By the ploughman, the horse-car conductor, and the corner grocery man, may be, but not by the average business or professional man who is doing well. To be sure, five thousand dollars in a country town is affluence, if the beneficiary is content to stay there; but in a city the family man with only that income, provided he is ambitious, can only just live, and might fairly be described as the cousin german to a mendicant. And yet there are some worthy citizens still, who doubtless would be aghast at these statements, and would wish to know how one is to spend five thousand dollars a year without extravagance. We certainly did start in this country on a very different basis, and the doctrine of plain living was written between the lines of the Constitution. We were practically to do our own work, to be content with pie and doughnuts as the staple articles of nutrition, to abide in one locality all the year round, and to eschew color, ornament, and refined recreation. All this as an improvement over the civilization of Europe and a rebuke to it. Whatever the ethical value of this theory of existence in moulding the national character may have been, it has lost its hold to-day, and we as a nation have fallen into line with the once sneered-at older civilizations, though we honestly believe that we are giving and going to give a peculiar redeeming brand to the adopted, venerable customs which will purge them of dross and bale.

Take the servant question, for instance. We are perpetually discussing how we are to do away with the social reproach which keeps native American women out of domestic service; yet at the same time in actual practice the demand for servants grows more and more urgent and wide-spread, and they are consigned still more hopelessly, though kindly, to the kitchen and servants’ hall in imitation of English upper-class life. In the days when our Emerson sought to practise the social equality for which he yearned, by requiring his maids to sit at his own dinner-table, a domestic establishment was a modest affair of a cook and a second girl. Now, the people who are said to have too much for their own good, keep butlers, ladies’ maids, governesses, who like Mahomet’s coffin hover between the parlor and the kitchen, superfine laundresses, pages in buttons, and other housekeeping accessories, and domestic life grows bravely more and more complex. To be sure, too, I am quite aware that, as society is at present constituted, only a comparatively small number out of our millions of free-born American citizens have or are able to earn the seven to eleven thousand dollars a year requisite for thorough comfort, and that the most interesting and serious problem which confronts human society to-day is the annihilation or lessening of the terrible existing inequalities in estate and welfare.

This problem, absorbing as it is, can scarcely be solved in our time. But, whatever the solution, whether by socialism, government control, or brotherly love, is it not safe to assume that when every one shares alike, society is not going to be satisfied with humble, paltry, or ugly conditions as the universal weal? If the new dispensation does not provide a style and manner of living at least equal in comfort, luxury, and refinement to that which exists among the well-to-do to-day, it will be a failure. Humanity will never consent to be shut off from the best in order to be exempt from the worst. The millennium must supply not merely bread and butter, a house, a pig, a cow, and a sewing-machine for every one, but attractive homes, gardens, and galleries, literature and music, and all the range of æsthetic social adjuncts which tend to promote healthy bodies, delightful manners, fine sensibilities, and noble purposes, or it will be no millennium.

Therefore one who would live wisely and has the present means, though he may deplore existing misery and seek to relieve it, does not give away to others all his substance but spends it chiefly on himself and his family until he has satisfied certain needs. By way of a house he feels that he requires not merely a frail, unornamental shelter, but a carefully constructed, well ventilated, cosily and artistically furnished dwelling, where his family will neither be scrimped for space nor exposed to discomforts, and where he can entertain his friends tastefully if not with elegance. All this costs money and involves large and recurrent outlays for heating, lighting, upholstery, sanitary appliances, silver, china, and glass. It is not sufficient for him that his children should be sure of their own father; he is solicitous, besides, that they should grow up as free as possible from physical blemishes, and mentally and spiritually sound and attractive. To promote this he must needs consult or engage from time to time skilled specialists, dentists, oculists, dancing and drawing masters, private tutors, and music-teachers. To enable these same sons and daughters to make the most of themselves, he must, during their early manhood and womanhood, enable them to pursue professional or other studies, to travel, and to mingle in cultivated and well-bred society. He must live in a choice neighborhood that he may surround himself and his family with refining influences, and accordingly he must pay from twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred or three thousand dollars a year for rent, according to the size and desirability of the premises. Unless he would have his wife and daughters merely household factors and drudges, he must keep from three to five or six servants, whose wages vary from four to six or seven dollars a week, and feed them.