Mastership. 1865.
Experience. 1865.
Sonship and Slavery. 1865.
Modern Houses. 1865.

[Pg 92]
[Pg 93]

II.

SERVANTS AND HOUSES.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: You so seldom write nonsense, that you will, I am sure, pardon your friends for telling you when you do. Your article on servants to-day is nonsense. It is just as easy and as difficult now to get good servants as it ever was.[84] You may have them, as you may have pines and peaches, for the growing, or you may even buy them good, if you can persuade the good growers to spare you them off their walls; but you cannot get them by political economy and the law of supply and demand.

There are broadly two ways of making good servants; the first, a sound, wholesome, thoroughgoing slavery—which was the heathen way, and no bad one neither, provided you understand that to make real "slaves" you must make yourself a real "master" (which is not easy). The second is the Christian's way: "whoso delicately bringeth up his servant from a child, shall have him become his son at the last."[85] And as few people want their servants to become their sons, this is not a way to their liking. So that, neither having courage or self-discipline enough on the one hand to make themselves nobly dominant after the heathen fashion, nor tenderness or justice enough to make themselves nobly protective after the Christian, the present public thinks to manufacture servants bodily out of powder and hay-stuffing—mentally by early instillation of Catechism and other mechanico-religious appliances—and economically, as you helplessly suggest, by the law of supply and demand,[86] with such results as we all see, and most of us more or less feel, and shall feel daily more and more to our cost and selfish sorrow.

Sir, there is only one way to have good servants; that is, to be worthy of being well served. All nature and all humanity will serve a good master, and rebel against an ignoble one. And there is no surer test of the quality of a nation than the quality of its servants, for they are their masters' shadows, and distort their faults in a flattened mimicry. A wise nation will have philosophers in its servants' hall; a knavish nation will have knaves there; and a kindly nation will have friends there. Only let it be remembered that "kindness" means, as with your child, so with your servant, not indulgence, but care.—I am, Sir, seeing that you usually write good sense, and "serve" good causes, your servant to command.

J. Ruskin.[87]
Denmark Hill, Sept. 2.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: I thank you much for your kind insertion of my letter, and your courteous and graceful answer to it. Others will thank you also; for your suggestions are indeed much more ad rem than my mere assertions of principle; but both are necessary. Statements of practical difficulty, and the immediate means of conquering it, are precisely what the editor of a powerful daily journal is able to give; but he cannot give them justly if he ever allow himself to lose sight of the eternal laws which in their imperative bearings manifest themselves more clearly to the retired student of human life in the phases of its history. My own personal experience—if worth anything—has been simply that wherever I myself knew how a thing should be done, and was resolved to have it done, I could always get subordinates, if made of average good human material, to do it, and that, on the whole, cheerfully, thoroughly, and even affectionately; and my wonder is usually rather at the quantity of service they are willing to do for me, than at their occasional indolences, or fallings below the standard of seraphic wisdom and conscientiousness. That they shall be of average human material, it is, as you wisely point out, every householder's business to make sure. We cannot choose our relations, but we can our servants; and what sagacity we have and knowledge of human nature cannot be better employed. If your house is to be comfortable, your servants' hearts must be sound, as the timber and stones of its walls; and there must be discretion in the choice, and time allowed for the "settling" of both. The luxury of having pretty servants must be paid for, like all luxuries, in the penalty of their occasional loss; but I fancy the best sort of female servant is generally in aspect and general qualities like Sydney Smith's "Bunch,"[88] and a very retainable creature. And for the rest, the dearth of good service, if such there be, may perhaps wholesomely teach us that, if we were all a little more in the habit of serving ourselves in many matters, we should be none the worse or the less happy.

I am, Sir, yours, etc.,
J. Ruskin.
Denmark Hill, Sept. 6.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: I have been watching the domestic correspondence in your columns with much interest, and thought of offering you a short analysis of it when you saw good to bring it to a close,[89] and perhaps a note or two of my own experience, being somewhat conceited on the subject just now, because I have a gardener who lets me keep old-fashioned plants in the greenhouse, understands that my cherries are grown for the blackbirds, and sees me gather a bunch of my own grapes without making a wry face. But your admirable article of yesterday causes me to abandon my purpose; the more willingly, because among all the letters you have hitherto published there is not one from any head of a household which contains a complaint worth notice. All the masters or mistresses whose letters are thoughtful or well written say they get on well enough with their servants; no part has yet been taken in the discussion by the heads of old families. The servants' letters, hitherto, furnish the best data; but the better class of servants are also silent, and must remain so. Launce, Grumio, or Fairservice[90] may have something to say for themselves; but you will hear nothing from Old Adam nor from carefu' Mattie. One proverb from Sancho, if we could get it, would settle the whole business for us; but his master and he are indeed "no more." I would have walked down to Dulwich to hear what Sam Weller had to say; but the high-level railway went through Mr. Pickwick's parlor two months ago, and it is of no use writing to Sam, for, as you are well aware, he is no penman. And, indeed, Sir, little good will come of any writing on the matter. "The cat will mew, the dog will have his day." You yourself, excellent as is the greater part of what you have said, and to the point, speak but vainly when you talk of "probing the evil to the bottom." This is no sore that can be probed, no sword nor bullet wound. This is a plague spot. Small or great, it is in the significance of it, not in the depth, that you have to measure it. It is essentially bottomless, cancerous; a putrescence through the constitution of the people is indicated by this galled place. Because I know this thoroughly, I say so little, and that little, as your correspondents think, who know nothing of me, and as you say, who might have known more of me, unpractically. Pardon me, I am no seller of plasters, nor of ounces of civet. The patient's sickness is his own fault, and only years of discipline will work it out of him. That is the only really "practical" saying that can be uttered to him. The relation of master and servant involves every other—touches every condition of moral health through the State. Put that right, and you put all right; but you will find it can only come ultimately, not primarily, right; you cannot begin with it. Some of the evidence you have got together is valuable, many pieces of partial advice very good. You need hardly, I think, unless you wanted a type of British logic, have printed a letter in which the writer accused (or would have accused, if he had possessed Latinity enough) all London servants of being thieves because he had known one robbery to have been committed by a nice-looking girl.[91] But on the whole there is much common-sense in the letters; the singular point in them all, to my mind, being the in-apprehension of the breadth and connection of the question, and the general resistance to, and stubborn rejection of, the abstract ideas of sonship and slavery, which include whatever is possible in wise treatment of servants. It is very strange to see that, while everybody shrinks at abstract suggestions of there being possible error in a book of Scripture,[92] your sensible English housewife fearlessly rejects Solomon's opinion when it runs slightly counter to her own, and that not one of your many correspondents seems ever to have read the Epistle to Philemon. It is no less strange that while most English boys of ordinary position hammer through their Horace at one or other time of their school life, no word of his wit or his teaching seems to remain by them: for all the good they get out of them, the Satires need never have been written. The Roman gentleman's account of his childhood and of his domestic life possesses no charm for them: and even men of education would sometimes start to be reminded that his "noctes cÆnÆque Deum!" meant supping with his merry slaves on beans and bacon. Will you allow me, on this general question of liberty and slavery, to refer your correspondents to a paper of mine touching closely upon it, the leader in the Art-Journal for July last? and to ask them also to meditate a little over the two beautiful epitaphs on Epictetus and Zosima, quoted in the last paper of the Idler?[93]

How might we, over many an "independent" Englishman, reverse this last legend, and write—

I will not pass without notice—for it bears also on wide interests—your correspondent's question, how my principles differ from the ordinary economist's view of supply and demand.[94] Simply in that the economy I have taught, in opposition to the popular view, is the science which not merely ascertains the relations of existing demand and supply, but determines what ought to be demanded and what can be supplied. A child demands the moon, and, the supply not being in this case equal to the demand, is wisely accommodated with a rattle; a footpad demands your purse, and is supplied according to the less or more rational economy of the State, with that or a halter; a foolish nation, not able to get into its head that free trade does indeed mean the removal of taxation from its imports, but not of supervision from them, demands unlimited foreign beef, and is supplied with the cattle murrain and the like. There may be all manner of demands, all manner of supplies. The true political economist regulates these; the false political economist leaves them to be regulated by (not Divine) Providence. For, indeed, the largest final demand anywhere reported of, is that of hell; and the supply of it (by the broad-gauge line) would be very nearly equal to the demand at this day, unless there were here and there a swineherd or two who could keep his pigs out of sight of the lake.

Thus in this business of servants everything depends on what sort of servant you at heart wish for or "demand." If for nurses you want Charlotte Winsors, they are to be had for money; but by no means for money, such as that German girl who, the other day, on her own scarce-floating fragment of wreck, saved the abandoned child of another woman, keeping it alive by the moisture from her lips.[95] What kind of servant do you want? It is a momentous question for you yourself—for the nation itself. Are we to be a nation of shopkeepers, wanting only shop-boys; or of manufacturers, wanting only hands; or are there to be knights among us, who will need squires—captains among us, needing crews? Will you have clansmen for your candlesticks, or silver plate? Myrmidons at your tents, ant-born, or only a mob on the Gillies Hill? Are you resolved that you will never have any but your inferiors to serve you, or shall Enid ever lay your trencher with tender little thumb, and Cinderella sweep your hearth, and be cherished there? It might come to that in time, and plate and hearth be the brighter; but if your servants are to be held your inferiors, at least be sure they are so, and that you are indeed wiser, and better-tempered, and more useful than they. Determine what their education ought to be, and organize proper servants' schools, and there give it them. So they will be fit for their position, and will do honor to it, and stay in it: let the masters be as sure they do honor to theirs, and are as willing to stay in that. Remember that every people which gives itself to the pursuit of riches, invariably, and of necessity, gets the scum uppermost in time, and is set by the genii, like the ugly bridegroom in the Arabian Nights, at its own door with its heels in the air, showing its shoe-soles instead of a Face. And the reversal is a serious matter, if reversal be even possible, and it comes right end uppermost again, instead of to conclusive Wrong end.

I suppose I am getting unpractical again. Well, here is one practical morsel, and I have done. One or two of your correspondents have spoken of the facilities of servants for leaving their places. Drive that nail home, Sir. A large stray branch of the difficulty lies there. Many and many a time I have heard Mr. Carlyle speak of this, and too often I have felt it myself as one of the evils closely accompanying the fever of modern change in the habits and hopes of life. My own architectural work drives me to think of it continually. Round every railroad station, out of the once quiet fields, there bursts up first a blotch of brick-fields, and then of ghastly houses, washed over with slime into miserable fineries of cornice and portico. A gentleman would hew for himself a log hut, and thresh for himself a straw bed, before he would live in such; but the builders count safely on tenants—people who know no quietness nor simplicity of pleasure, who care only for the stucco, and lodge only in the portico, of human life—understanding not so much as the name of House or House-Hold. They and their servants are always "bettering themselves" divergently.

You will do good service at least in teaching any of these who will listen to you, that if they can once make up their minds to a fixed state of life, and a fixed income, and a fixed expenditure—if they can by any means get their servants to stay long enough with them to fit into their places and know the run of the furrows—then something like service and mastership, and fulfilment of understood and reciprocal duty, may become possible; no otherwise. I leave this matter to your better handling, and will trespass on your patience no more. Only, as I think you will get into some disgrace with your lady correspondents for your ungallant conclusions respecting them[96]—which I confess surprised me a little, though I might have been prepared for it if I had remembered what order the husband even of so good a housewife as Penelope was obliged to take with some of her female servants after prolonged absence,—I have translated a short passage of Xenophon's Economics[97] for you, which may make your peace if you will print it. I wish the whole book were well translated; meantime, your lady readers must be told that this is part of a Greek country gentleman's account of the conversation he had with his young wife (a girl of fifteen only), a little while after their marriage, when "she had got used to him," and was not frightened at being spoken gravely to. First they pray together; and then they have a long happy talk, of which this is the close:

"But there is one of the duties belonging to you," I said, "which, perhaps will be more painful to you than any other, namely, the care of your servants when they are ill." "Nay," answered my wife, "that will be the most pleasing of all my duties to me, if only my servants will be grateful when I minister rightly to them, and will love me better." And I, pleased with her answer, said, "Indeed, lady, it is in some such way as this that the queen of the hive is so regarded by her bees, that, if she leave the hive, none will quit her, but all will follow her." Then she answered, "I should wonder if this office of leader were not yours rather than mine, for truly my care and distribution of things would be but a jest were it not for your inbringing." "Yes," I said, "but what a jest would my inbringing be if there were no one to take care of what I brought. Do not you know how those are pitied of whom it is fabled that they have always to pour water into a pierced vessel?" "Yes; and they are unhappy, if in truth they do it," said she. "Then also," I said, "remember your other personal cares. Will all be sweet to you when, taking one of your maidens who knows not how to spin, you teach her, and make her twice the girl she was; or one who has no method nor habit of direction, and you teach her how to manage a house, and make her faithful and mistress-like and every way worthy, and when you have the power of benefiting those who are orderly and useful in the house, and of punishing any one who is manifestly disposed to evil? But what will be sweetest of all, if it may come to pass, will be that you should show yourself better even than me, and so make me your servant also: so that you need not fear in advancing age to be less honored in my house; but may have sure hope that in becoming old, by how much more you have become also a noble fellow-worker with me, and joint guardian of our children's possessions, by so much shall you be more honored in my household. For what is lovely and good increases for all men—not through fairness of the body, but through strength and virtue in things pertaining to life." And this is what I remember chiefly of what we said in our first talk together.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.
Denmark Hill, Sept. 16.

To the Editor of "The Daily Telegraph."

Sir: I trust you will hold the very able and interesting letter from "W. H. W.,"[98] which you publish to-day, excuse enough for my briefly trespassing on your space once more. Indeed, it has been a discomfort to me that I have not yet asked the pardon of your correspondent, "A Tenant, not at will" (Sept. 21),[99] for the apparent discourtesy of thought of which he accused me. He need not have done so: for although I said "a gentleman would hew for himself a log hut" rather than live in modern houses, I never said he would rather abandon his family and his business than live in them; and your correspondent himself, in his previously written letter, had used precisely the same words. And he must not suspect that I intend to be ironical in saying that the prolonged coincidence of thought and word in the two letters well deserves the notice of your readers, in the proof it gives of the strength and truth of the impression on both minds. "W. H. W.'s" graphic description of his house is also sorrowfully faithful to the facts of daily experience; and I doubt not that you will soon have other communications of the same tenor, and all too true.

I made no attempt to answer "A Tenant, not at will," because the subject is much too wide for any detailed treatment in a letter; and you do not care for generalizations of mine. But I am sure your two correspondents, and the large class of sufferers which they represent, would be very sincerely grateful for some generalizations of yours on this matter. For, Sir, surely of all questions for the political economist, this of putting good houses over people's heads is the closest and simplest. The first question in all economy, practically as well as etymologically, must be this, of lodging. The "Eco" must come before the "Nomy." You must have a house before you can put anything into it; and preparatorily to laying up treasure, at the least dig a hole for it. Well, Sir, here, as it seems to my poor thinking, is a beautiful and simple problem for you to illustrate the law of demand and supply upon. Here you have a considerable body of very deserving persons "demanding" a good and cheap article in the way of a house. Will you or any of your politico-economic correspondents explain to them and to me the Divinely Providential law by which, in due course, the supply of such cannot but be brought about for them?

There is another column in your impression of to-day to which, also, I would ask leave to direct your readers' attention—the 4th of the 3d page; and especially, at the bottom of it, Dr. Whitmore's account of Crawford Place,[100] and his following statement that it is "a kind of property constituting a most profitable investment;" and I do so in the hope that you will expand your interpretation of the laws of political economy so far as to teach us how, by their beneficent and inevitable operation, good houses must finally be provided for the classes who live in Crawford Place, and such other places; and, without necessity of eviction, also for the colliers of Cramlington (vide 2d column of the same 3d page).[101] I have, indeed, my own notions on the subject, but I do not trouble you with them, for they are unfortunately based an that wild notion of there being a "just" price for all things, which you say in your article of Oct. 10, on the Sheffield strikes, "has no existence but in the minds of theorists."[102] The Pall Mall Gazette, with which journal I have already held some discussion on the subject, eagerly quoted your authority on its side, in its impression of the same evening; nor do I care to pursue the debate until I can inform you of the continuous result of some direct results which I am making on my Utopian principles. I have bought a little bit of property of the Crawford Place description, and mending it somewhat according to my notions, I make my tenants pay me what I hold to be a "just" price for the lodging provided. That lodging I partly look after, partly teach the tenants to look after for themselves; and I look a little after them, as well as after the rents. I do not mean to make a highly profitable investment of their poor little rooms; but I do mean to sell a good article, in the way of house room, at a fair price; and hitherto my customers are satisfied, and so am I.[103]

In the mean time, being entirely busy in other directions, I must leave the discussion, if it is to proceed at all, wholly between you and your readers. I will write no word more till I see what they all have got to say, and until you yourself have explained to me, in its anticipated results, the working—as regards the keeping out of winter and rough weather—of the principles of Non-iquity (I presume that is the proper politico-economic form for the old and exploded word Iniquity); and so I remain, Sir, yours, etc.,

J. Ruskin.
Denmark Hill, Oct. 16.

MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS.