FullReads

And so, very slowly, the modern evolution began. The first to go were the immense houses of Kensington, Paddington, Bayswater, Bloomsbury,–those old houses within hail of Hyde Park,–which once held large families, all of them anxious to live not too far from the Court. They fell because it was almost impossible to afford enough servants to keep in order their three or four reception rooms, and their eight, ten, twelve bedrooms; they fell because the birth rate shrank, and the large families of the early nineteenth century became exceptional; they fell also because the old rigidity, or rather the stateliness, of the home was vanishing; because the lady of the house ventured to have tea in her drawing-room when there were no callers, and little by little came to leave newspapers about in it and to smoke in it. With the difficulties of the old houses came a demand for something smaller, requiring less labor. This accounts for the villas, of which some four hundred thousand have been built in the suburbs of London, in the villages London has absorbed. They are atrocious imitations of the most debased Elizabethan style; they show concrete where they should use stone, but, as their predecessors showed stucco, they are not much worse. They exhibit painted black stripes where there should be beams; they have sloping roofs, gables, dormer windows, everything cunningly arranged to make as many corners as possible where no chair can stand. They have horrid little gardens where the builder has buried many broken bricks, sardine tins, and old hats; they represent the taste of the twentieth century; they are quite abominable. But still the fact remains that they are infinitely smaller, more manageable, more intelligently planned than the spacious old houses of the past, where every black cupboard bred the cockroach and the mouse. They are easy to warm and easy to clean; their windows are not limited by the old window tax; they have bathrooms even when their rent is only one hundred and fifty dollars a year; and especially they have no basement. The disappearance of the basement is one of the most significant aspects of the downfall of the old household, for it was essentially the servants’ floor, where they could be kept apart from their masters, maintaining their own sports and the mysterious customs of a strange people; when the door of the kitchen stairs was shut, one would keep out everything connected with the servants, except perhaps the smell of the roast leg of mutton. That did not matter, for that was homelike. The basement was a vestige of feudal English society; it was brother to the servants’ quarters and the servants’ hall. Now it is gone. In many places the tradesmen’s entrance has vanished, and the cabbage comes to the front door. The sacred suppressions are no more, and in a developing democracy the master and mistress of the house stately dine, while on the other side of a wall about an inch thick Jane can be heard conversing with the policeman.

The growth of the small house has never stopped during the last forty or fifty years. A builder in the southwest of London, of whom I made inquiries, told me that he had erected four hundred and twenty houses, and that not one of them had a basement; this form of architecture had not even occurred to him. I have also visited very many homes in the suburbs of London, and I have looked in vain for the old precincts of the serving maid. The small house has powerfully affected the old individual attitude of home, for the hostile dignity of the past cannot survive when one man mows the lawn and the other clips the roses, each in his own garden, separated only by three sticks and some barbed wire. In detached houses it is worse, for they are now so close together that in certain architectural conditions preliminaries are required before one can take a private bath. The whole direction of domestic architecture is against the individual and for the group. The modern home takes away even the old stores; there are no more pickle cupboards and jam cupboards, and hardly linen cupboards. Why should there be when jam and pickles come from the grocer, and few men have more than twelve shirts? There is not even a store for coal. Some years ago I lived in a house that was built in 1820, and its coal cellar held eight tons; I now inhabit one, built in 1860, in which I can accommodate four tons; the house now being built in the suburbs cannot receive more than one ton. The evolution of the coal cellar is a little the evolution of English society from the time when every man had to live a good deal for himself, until slightly better distribution made it possible for him to combine with his fellows. He need not now store coal, for there is a service of coal to his doorstep. Besides, the offspring of coal are expelling their ancestor; gas and electricity, both centrally supplied from a single source, are sapping the old hearthstone that was fed by one small family, and for that family alone glowed. A continual socialization has come about, and it is not going to stop. What is done in common is on the whole better done, more cheaply done. But what is done in common is hostile to the old home spirit, because the principle of the home spirit is that anything done in common is–well, common!