The Passing of the Parlor

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

SOME months ago there appeared in these columns of pleasant protest an honest masculine lament for the disappearance of the woodshed. It seems that it was in the woodshed, that darling chaos, that sacred solitude of muss, that the master best knew his soul his own, — his soul and his house. In the process of architectural atrophy that has removed our spare rooms, our woodsheds, and our woodshed chambers, and that threatens some day to unhome us all, there is another room being filched from us : that room wherein the heart of the mistress swelled fullest with sense of householdership, — I mean the parlor.

Our grandmothers had parlors. We had a parlor, too, when I was a little girl. The folding-doors by which it was separated from the rest of the house — from our home — moved jerkily, being not often opened. The shades were always drawn. It was not a room for children. We went there only to practice, and returned glad of escape from that dusk and great cleanliness into the dust-flecked sunshine of the sitting-room. We must not enter the parlor except with washen hands and well-wiped feet. Of all abominations, the utterest would have been to eat in the parlor; not even at Christmas when the folding-doors stood wide all day, and the mistletoe hung between, not even then; and not even sour-balls, surely of all possible messiness the most innocuous. The parlor was not for us; it was for company, and it belonged to the mother. I don’t know when we lost our parlor. The going must have been gradual. I fancy that as we turned our teens and needed more growing room, we spread and spread, until the parlor was pushed clean out of doors. I wonder if the mother misses it?

The grandmother parlors were never lost, never while the grandmothers lived in the houses that had grown about them, and expressed them as the dress does its wearer. In these parlors were carpets abloom with bouquets of green and vermilion, under the bell glass were the wax flowers wrought when grandmother’s fingers were white and soft, and there were the portraits and the slippery haircloth and the antimacassars and the faint mustiness of the straw under the carpet, — all so ugly, and so precious to grandmother! Our parlor was not like this, but it had chairs on which one must not sit, and table legs one must not kick, and curios one must not handle; it was not of our home at all. Yet was any room so cherished of the home-maker ? No matter how noisy or cluttered the rest of the house, there is one scrubbed and silent room, forever orderly, ready. Here husband and children do not corrupt, here household care does not break through. No matter that she enters it only to dust, — the blessed peace of it she feels always, — the parlor is there, the door-bell stirs not her heart-strings. Here you may enter, O Stranger, you Polite Impertinence who dare to tirl our pin and demand that we deliver up to you the privacy of our homes. Here we receive you, here is our best and our tidiest; we are not afraid of you.

But where are these parlors of yesterday? Who of us now confesses to a parlor? True they still have parlors in Philadelphia; they keep them done up in mosquito netting and gray linen ; but, even in Philadelphia, the parlor shall surely pass. It is going now, and the sign is this: so soon as Philadelphians accept you, even ever so little, just so soon as they believe that one day they may like you, they hurry you past the parlor door, first-floor front, upstairs to the second story back, into the room where they live. Fewer and fewer will be the guests entertained below, more and more they will be taken above, until, even in Philadelphia, the parlor of desuetude will have faded away.

Do not tell me that the change is anything so slight as mere nomenclature; it is the thing that is going from us. There is much magic in the names of rooms, but that is because they are little labels for places spiritual. Unhappy the home that holds not somewhere, by what name soever known, a “sittingroom,” place for the mother’s darningbasket, the father’s smoking-tray, the children’s pastepot and scrap-books; place to lounge, work, play, to be glad, sad, cross, for we are closest kin, and who cares ? Here in the sitting-room we have divine right to be we ; but you, the outsider? No, I am old-fashioned, I had rather there were a parlor for you,

— stay there!

Names do not make rooms: for instance, it is impossible to have a parlor in a flat. We cannot have the feeling of parlor in a room that can never be locked apart, — held sacred to guests; that can be, and frequently is, metamorphosed into sleeping-room at night. The sensation of parlor is impossible when we know that the couch on which we sit is a deceit, and that very likely you, O Caller, know this, too. The consciousness of our best, reserved for you alone,

— no, this is impossible in a flat. The flat — poor hybrid, poor no-home, that it is — has done much to drive out of our homes, out of our hearts, the peace of the parlor.

Names do not make rooms, and drawing-room is not the equivalent of parlor. Drawing-room has an official, unhomey sound. The picture suggested to my mind by the word is always a long stretch of velvet carpet, high gilded mirrors on every wall, ranged in front of them rows of squat, over-upholstered chairs, and in the centre of the room, under a great chandelier, a circular sofa. I never saw a drawing-room like this; I don’t know where the vision comes from, — probably from a picture, seen in childhood, of some dowdy English palace. There is to my mind something un-American in the word drawingroom. I speak as one obscure, one belonging to the Most. There is in the word parlor something agreeably American, pleasantly bourgeois, pleasantly Philistine. Besides, it is not only the name I plead for, it is the thing; I do not want you anywhere and everywhere in my house, you Stranger. For this is what the passing of the parlor means for us who belong to the Most. Architecture provides us now no place apart, no parlor. Why, half of us live in the hall, and receive you there, we, the little people who live in little houses.

Yet how many of us care? The parlor belongs to the things that are effete, to the days when children did not, without being pulled from behind the maternal crinoline, speak to grown-up visitors, when parsons golfed not, and old ladies wore caps, and company was spelled with seven capital letters.

What does it mean, this passing of the parlor ? Are we growing more indifferent to what people think, that we now do not fence them up, but let them in, where we live? Are we growing more gracious and more careless-friendly? Whither do these things tend? With the passing of the parlor will other things also some day pass away, Company and Calls, and all the religion of pasteboard ?

Yet I mourn for the parlor, that darkened and dustless room where we may be sure that all is tidy, and that no secret of soil or wear will be betrayed to eyes we do not quite trust. Is it entirely lost to us, that room where we may receive you with newly arranged hair, and fresh whiteness at the throat, where we may have the right to speak a little mincingly ? For,see, in this room we keep our best, — what we think our best; perhaps not our sweet and homey best at all.

Must we then take you straight into our living - rooms, our loving - rooms, where you stumble over the children’s blocks, and are rumpled and crumpled by the father’s dogs ? Must you see our homes and our hearts, O ye Strangers that break through our gates ?