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.

II

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.

Nor can the athletic, æsthetic, or merely pleasurable needs of a growing or adolescent household be ignored. He must meet the steady and relentless drain from each of these sources, or be conscious that his flesh and blood have not the same advantages and opportunities which are enjoyed by their contemporaries. He must own a pew, a library share, a fancy dress costume, and a cemetery lot, and he must always have loose change on hand for the hotel waiter and the colored railway porter. The family man in a large city who meets these several demands to his entire satisfaction will have little of ten thousand dollars left for the purchase of a trotter, a fur overcoat, and a diamond pin.

The growing consciousness of the value of these complex demands of our modern civilization, when intelligently gratified, acts at the present day as a cogent incentive to make money, not for the mere sake of accumulation, but to spend. Gross accumulation with scant expenditure has always been sanctioned here; but to grow rich and yet be lavish has only within a comparatively recent period among us seemed reconcilable with religious or national principles. Even yet he who many times a millionaire still walks unkempt, or merely plain and honest, has not entirely lost the halo of hero worship. But, though the old man is permitted to do as he prefers, better things are demanded of his sons and daughters. Nor can the argument that some of the greatest men in our history have been nurtured and brought up in cabins and away from refining influences be soundly used against the advisability of making the most of income, even though we now and then ask ourselves whether modern living is producing statesmen of equally firm mould. But we thrill no longer at mention of a log cabin or rail splitting, and the very name of hard cider suggests rather unpleasantly the corner grocery store and the pie-permeated, hair-cloth suited New England parlor.

Merely because other nations have long been aware that it was wise and not immoral to try to live comfortably and beautifully our change of faith is no less absorbing to us. We confidently expect to win fresh laurels by our originality, intelligence, and unselfishness in this new old field. Already have we made such strides that our establishments on this side of the water make up in genuine comfort what they lack in ancient manorial picturesqueness and ghost-haunted grace. Each one of us who is in earnest is asking how he is to make the most of what he has or earns, so as to attain that charm of refined living which is civilization’s best flower – living which if merely material and unanimated by intelligence and noble aims is without charm, but which is made vastly more difficult of realization in case we are without means or refuse to spend them adequately.

The Dwelling

I

Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar, who, as you may remember, divide their income into parts with mathematical precision, were not as well off in this world’s goods at the time of their marriage as they are now. Neither Mr. Cæsar’s father nor Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother was then dead, and consequently the newly wedded pair, though set up by their respective families with a comfortable income, felt that it was incumbent upon them to practise strict economy. Then it was that Julius conceived what seemed to them both the happy idea of buying a house dirt cheap in a neighborhood which was not yet improved, and improving the neighborhood, instead of paying an exorbitant price for a residence in a street which was already all it should be.

“Why,” said Julius, “shouldn’t we buy one of those new houses in Sunset Terrace? They look very attractive, and if we can only induce two or three congenial couples to join forces with us we shall have the nucleus of a delightful colony.”

“Besides, everything will be nice and new,” said Mrs. Julius, or Dolly Cæsar, as her friends know her. “No cockroaches, no mice, no moths, no family skeletons to torment us. Julius, you are a genius. We can just as well set the fashion as follow meekly in fashion’s wake.”

So said, so done. Julius Cæsar bent his intellect upon the matter and soon found three congenial couples who were willing to join forces with him. Before another twelve months had passed, four baby-wagons – one of them double-seated – were to be seen on four sunny grass-plots in front of four attractive, artistic-looking villas on Sunset Terrace. Where lately sterility, mortar, and weeds had held carnival, there was now an air of tasteful gentility. Thanks to the example of Dolly Cæsar, who had an eye and an instinct for such matters, the four brass door-plates shone like the sun, the paint was spick and span, the four gravel paths were in apple-pie order, the four grass-plots were emerald from timely use of a revolving lawn sprinkler, and the four nurse-maids, who watched like dragons over the four baby-wagons, were neat-looking and comely. No wonder that by the end of the second year there was not a vacant house in the street, and that everybody who wished to live in a fashionable locality was eager for a chance to enter Sunset Terrace. No wonder, too, that Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar were able, by the end of the fourth year, to emerge from Sunset Terrace with a profit on the sale of their villa which made it rent free for the entire period, and left them with a neat little surplus to boot, and to settle down with calm minds on really fashionable Belport Avenue, in the stately mansion devised to them by Mrs. Cæsar’s grandmother.

Now, it must be borne in mind that a Mr. and Mrs. Julius Cæsar can sometimes do that which a Mr. and Mrs. George J. Spriggs find difficulty in accomplishing. Spriggs, at the time of his marriage to Miss Florence Green, the daughter of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green, conceived the happy idea of setting up his household gods in Locust Road, which lies about as far from Belport Avenue in one direction as Sunset Terrace in the other. Both are semi-suburban. It also occurred to him at the outset to join forces with three or four congenial couples, but at the last moment the engagement of one of the couples in question was broken, and the other three decided to live somewhere else. To have changed his mind then would have involved the sacrifice of one hundred dollars paid to bind the bargain to the landowner. So it seemed best to them on the whole to move in, as they had to live somewhere.

“It’s just a little bit dreary, isn’t it?” said Florence Spriggs, pathetically, as she looked out of her bow window at the newly finished street which was not finished, and at the grass-plot where there was no grass. “But I sha’n’t be a bit lonely with you, George.”

“I wonder if the color of this house has been changed,” said Spriggs, presently, as he glanced up at the façade and from that to the other houses in the block, each of which was vacant. He and Florence had gone out after dinner to take a stroll and survey the neighborhood which they hoped to improve.

“Of course it hasn’t! How could it be?” said Florence.

“Somehow it looks a more staring shade of yellow than it did the first time we saw it. And I don’t fancy altogether the filigree work on the door, or that Egyptian renaissance scroll set into the eastern wall, do you, dearest? However, we’re in now and can’t get out, for the title has passed. I wonder who will buy the other houses?”

They were soon to know. They were alone all winter, but in the early spring a family moved in on either side of them. The houses in Locust Road, like those in Sunset Terrace, were of the villa order, with grass-plots, which were almost lawns, appurtenant. Though less pleasing than those which had taken the more discerning eye of Mrs. Julius Cæsar, they were nevertheless comparatively inoffensive and sufficiently tasteful. Neighbor number one proved to be of an enterprising and imaginative turn. He changed the color of his villa from staring yellow to startling crushed strawberry, supplemented his Egyptian renaissance scroll and filigree with inlaid jewel and frost work, stationed a cast-iron stag in one corner of the grass-plot and a cast-iron Diana with a bow in another, and then rested on his laurels. Neighbor number two was shiftless and untidy. His grass-plot did not thrive, and the autumn leaves choked his gravel path. His windows were never washed, his blinds hung askew, and his one maid-of-all-work preferred the lawn to the laundry as a drying-room. His wife sunned herself in a wrapper, and he himself in his shirt sleeves. A big mongrel dog drooled perpetually on the piazza or tracked it with his muddy feet, and even the baby-wagon wore the appearance of dilapidation and halted because of a broken spring.

The Spriggses tried to be lenient and even genial with both these neighbors, but somehow the attempt was not successful. Neighbor number one became huffy because Spriggs took no notice of his advice that he embellish his grass-plot with a stone mastiff or an umbrella and cherub fountain, and neighbor number two took offence because Spriggs complained that the ventilator on his chimney kept Mrs. Spriggs awake by squeaking. Mrs. Spriggs did her best to set them both a good example by having everything as tasteful on the one hand and as tidy on the other as it should be. In the hope of improving them she even dropped suggestive hints as to how people ought to live, but the hints were not taken. What was worse none of the other houses were taken. As Spriggs pathetically expressed it, the iron stag on the one side and the weekly wash on the other kept purchasers at bay. He tried to buoy himself up by believing that a glut in the real estate market was the cause why the remaining villas in Locust Road hung fire, but this consolation was taken away from him the following spring when an active buying movement all along the line still left them without other neighbors. The unoccupied villas had begun to wear an air of dilapidation, in spite of their Egyptian renaissance scrolls and the presence of a cast-iron Diana.

To crown the situation the baby of neighbor number two caught diphtheria from being left in its halting wagon by the maid-of-all-work too near the cesspool on the lawn, and was kissed by the Spriggs baby before the fact was discovered. If there is one thing more irritating to the maternal mind than another, it is to have dear baby catch something from the child of people whom you reprobate. One feels that the original horrors of the disease are sure to be enhanced through such a medium. When the only child of the Julius Cæsars died of the same disease, contracted from a germ inhaled on Belport Avenue, the parents felt that only destiny was to blame. On the other hand, though the Spriggs baby recovered, Mrs. Spriggs never quite forgave herself for what had happened. Before the next autumn Spriggs parted with his estate on Locust Road for so much less than he had paid for it that he felt obliged to accept the hospitality of his wife’s father, ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Green, during the succeeding winter.

The moral of this double-jointed tale is twofold; firstly that the young householder cannot always count upon improving the neighborhood in which he sets up his goods and chattels after marriage, and secondly, that, in case the neighborhood fails to improve, a tenancy for a year or two is a less serious burden than absolute ownership. It is extremely pleasant, to be sure, to be able to declare that one has paid for one’s house, and I am aware that the consciousness of unencumbered ownership in the roof over one’s head affords one of the most affecting and effective opportunities for oratory which the free-born citizen can desire. The hand of many a husband and father has been stayed from the wine-cup or the gaming-table by the pathetic thought that he owned his house. As a rule, too, it is cheaper to pay the interest on a mortgage than to pay rent, and if one is perfectly sure of being able to improve the neighborhood, or at least save it from degeneration, it certainly seems desirable to be the landlord of one’s house, even though it be mortgaged so cleverly that the equity of redemption is merely a name. But in this age of semi-suburban development, when Roads and Terraces and Parks and Gates and other Anglo-European substitutes for streets serve as “springes to catch woodcocks,” a young couple on real estate ownership bent should have the discerning eye of a Mrs. Julius Cæsar in order not to fall a prey to the specious land and lot speculator. If you happen to hit on a Sunset Terrace, everything is rose color, but to find one’s self an owner in fee on a Locust Road, next door to crushed strawberry and a cast-iron stag, will palsy the hopes of the hopeful.

What attractive, roomy, tasteful affairs many of these semi-suburban villas, which are built nowadays on the new Roads, Terraces, Parks, Gates, and even Streets, are to be sure. There are plenty of homely ones too, but it is a simple matter to avoid the Egyptian renaissance scroll, and the inlaid jewel work and stained-glass bull’s eyes if one only will. They seem to be affording to many a happy solution of the ever new and ever old problem, which presents itself to every man who is about to take a wife, whether it is preferable to live in the city or the country. These new suburbs, or rather outlying wards of our large cities, which have been carved out of what, not many years ago, was real country where cows browsed and woods flourished, must be very alluring to people who would fain live out of town and still be in it. When, by stepping on an electric car or taking the train, you can, within a quarter of an hour, be on your own piazza inhaling fresh air and privileged to feast your eyes on a half acre or less of greensward belonging to yourself, there would seem to be strong inducements for refusing to settle down in a stuffy, smoky, dusty, wire-pestered city street, however fashionable. Rapid transit has made or is making the environs of our cities so accessible that the time-honored problem presents itself under different conditions than formerly. There is no such thing now as the real country for anybody who is not prepared to spend an hour in the train. Even then one is liable to encounter asphalt walks and a Soldier’s monument in the course of a sylvan stroll. But the intervening territory is ample and alluring.

For one-half the rent demanded for a town house of meagre dimensions in the middle of a block, with no outlook whatever, new, spacious, airy, ornamental homes with a plot of land and a pleasing view attached, are to be had for the seeking within easy living distance from nearly every large city. When I begin to rhapsodize, as I sometimes do, I am apt to ask myself why it is that anybody continues to live in town. It was only the other day that I happened, while driving with my wife in the suburbs, to call her attention, enthusiastically, to the new house which Perkins has secured for himself. You may remember that Perkins is the thin, nervous lawyer with four daughters, who is solicitous as to what will become of them when he is dead. We drove by just as he came up the avenue from the station, which is only a three minutes’ walk from the house. He looked tired – he always does – but there was already a fresh jauntiness in his tread as though he sniffed ozone. He looked up at the new house complacently, as well he might, for it is large enough even for four daughters, and has all the engaging impressiveness of a not too quaintly proportioned and not too abnormally stained modern villa, a highly evolved composite of an old colonial mansion, a Queen Anne cottage, and a French château. Before he reached the front door, two of his daughters ran out to embrace him and relieve him of his bag and bundles, and a half-hour later, as we drove back, he was playing lawn tennis with three of his girls, in a white blazer with pink stripes and knickerbockers, which gave his thin and eminently respectable figure a rather rakish air.

“Barbara,” I said to my wife, “why isn’t Perkins doing the sensible thing? That’s a charming house, double the size he could get for the same money in town – and the rent is eight hundred or a thousand dollars instead of fifteen hundred or two thousand. He needs fewer servants out here, for the parlor-maid isn’t kept on tenterhooks to answer the door-bell, and there is fresh air to come back to at night, and the means for outdoor exercise on his own or his neighbor’s lawn, which for a nervous, thin-chested, sedentary man like Perkins is better than cod-liver oil. Think what robust specimens those daughters should be with such opportunities for tennis, golf, skating, and bicycling.