Caviare on Principle

ONE can usually either begin or end with Mr. Chesterton, though one can seldom do both. ‘It is simpler to eat caviare on impulse than to eat grape-nuts on principle,’ he says, in one of his intervals of pure lucidity. I should like to make a Chestertonian transposition, and pronounce that it is better (I do not say simpler) to eat caviare on principle than to eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the modern fad for simplicity has ceased to be merely ridiculous; it has become dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices against it?

I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my own mind, socialists and vegetarians. But I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative. I am sure that they, on their side, confuse snobs with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, were they more bitterly logical. For my own part, I should be quite willing to go the length of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a soul. I can even see myself joining a ‘movement’ for giving the vote to violets and disfranchising orchids. This, however, is not their desire. They do not wish to make even the ox a citizen — only a brother; and I have never discovered that vegetarians — even when they were ‘hygienic,’ not ‘sentimental,’ ones — were anxious to reproduce the history of the rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care of itself. My point is really that socialists and vegetarians are banded together to fight for the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, organizes as furiously as Capital itself; and I leave it to anyone if a nut-cutlet is not complicated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly both sects are on the side of Procrustes against human vagaries. Both would surely consider caviare immoral; either because no one ought to eat it, or because every one cannot. It does not much matter, I fancy, which point you make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. My own plea for caviare rests precisely on the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust into every one’s mouth. It is not simple, no. The only really ‘simple’ food-stuff is manna. Imagine, for example, calling anything simple that has to be shot out of a cannon by way of preparation. In point of fact, very few people eat caviare save on impulse, — otherwise, they find it too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of being dogmatized; of becoming a principle.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life. The hardest command to follow has always been that which bids us take no thought for the morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr. Chesterton means when he talks of the difficulty of eating grape-nuts on principle. The real drawback to ‘the simple life’ is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time. For the simple life demands virtually that there shall be no specialization. The Hausfrau who is living the simple life must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. She must also cook; from that, even Battle Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she pared apples; but in her secret heart she knows that either Plato or the apples suffered. And from what point of view is it simpler to have a maid-of-all-work than to indulge one’s self in liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the mistress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate second footman than to be an adequate bonne-à-tout-faire. We should really simplify life by having more servants rather than fewer; more luxury instead of less. The smoothest machinery is the most complicated; and which of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go back to Robert Fulton’s steamboat? One would think that the decision would be made naturally for one by one’s income. But it is the triumph of the new paradox that this is not so. Thousands of people seem to be infected with the idea that by doing more themselves they bestow leisure on others; that by wearing shabby clothes they somehow make it possible for others to dress better — though they thus admit tacitly that leisure and elegance are not evil things. Or perhaps — though Heaven forbid they should be right! — they merely think that by refusing nightingales’ tongues, they make every one more content with porridge. Let us be gallant about the porridge that we must eat; but let us never forget that there are better things to eat than porridge.

What is the use of throwing great museums open to the people, if you tell them at the same time that to possess the contents of the museums would not make a private person happier? Why should there be cordons bleus in the world, if we ought to live on bread and milk? Above all, why have we praised, through the centuries, all the slow processes, the tardy consummations, of perfection, if raw material, either in art or life, is really best? I recall at this instant a friend of mine who expresses her democracy in her footwear. Her frocks are as charming as money can induce Paquin to make them; but if her frocks are an insult to the poor, her boots are an insult to the rich. I have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real lace, and out at heel. She fancied, I think, that her inadequate boots obliterated the deplorable social distinction between herself and her cook. In point of fact, her cook would not have condescended to them; would not have considered herself a ‘lady’ if she had.

I have other friends who feel strongly the ignominy of personal service: who agree with many ignorant young women that it is more dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid shop-girl with a rhinestone sunburst, than a well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid in a uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously deprive themselves of the parlormaid, and spend her wages in trying to get a vote for the shop-girl. I do not understand their distinctions in liberty, or their definition of degradation. The parlor-maid at least can choose the mistress, but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor-walker.

I am, myself, essentially an undomestic woman, and I dislike the parlor-maid’s tasks to the point of feeling excessive irritation at having, occasionally, in this mad world, to perform them. But, seriously speaking, apart from the temperamental quirk, I would don her clothes and follow officially her career, rather than that parlor-maids in uniforms should pass wholly from the world. It is as if these people said, ‘Since those who are parlor-maids themselves cannot very well employ parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor-maid.’ Their factitious altruism, with all its peril, might be forgiven them; but the misguided creatures (who are human beings and egotists, after all, and as such must ‘save their face’) go on to say that it is really much nicer not to have parlormaids. And that lie is unpardonable, for it strikes at the root of human experience. Parlor-maids would never have become a convention if they had not been found desirable.

Are we really, at this late day, going to be duped by the mid-century fallacy of ‘plain living and high thinking’? Even if Shakespeare at New Place teaches us nothing, we cannot fail to be impressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing home from Lake Walden by dark, to provide himself secretly with better fare than the woods afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried plain living did not know that high thinking was done, if at all, in spite of it! ‘The hand of less employment hath the daintier sense,’ as Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our own front doors, polish our own shoes, dust our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing-dish when the cook is out; and let us do it gallantly. But let us not pretend that it is more civilized to do these things ourselves than to have them skillfully done for us. The prince in disguise makes the most charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because — as all fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us — the prince wears his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn. And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I say, only reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.

Until every one is too good to be a parlor-maid, let us open our own doors, if we must, — provided we do it according to the great tradition of dooropening; but how can we do it according to the great tradition if we abolish parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great tradition? And, whatever the simplifiers say, there is no doubt that, as yet, there are, to one person who is too good for door-opening, ten persons who are by no means good enough for it. I have never been able to imagine just how the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver the aristocracy of earth into the democracy of Heaven. To be sure, it is not my affair. But at least one can have, this side the grave, little patience with the altruism of the Procrusteans. They merely wish to make each of us an incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had thought the German universities, if they had done nothing else, had blown that bubble!

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I did not feel degraded to be at the mercy of servants; humiliated by knowing that they could perform domestic tasks better than I, and could take advantage of that fact. I confess it had never occurred to me. If my cook felt degraded by being unable to talk French, I should think her a silly snob. Are we not all, economically, at one another’s mercy? Of what does enthusiastic living of the ‘simple’ life make us independent, save of a few hardlearned and precious lessons of taste? The successful housewife is the one who has succeeded in imitating perfectly several trained servants. But the criterion is still the trained servant. The distinguished beggar is the one who wears his rags as if they were purple. But, to appreciate him, we must know the look of purple rightly worn. The admirable vegetarian eats his shredded wheat as if it were caviare. But where would be the beauty of his performance were not someone, somewhere, eating caviare as if it were shredded wheat?