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his own belief with so vigorous a grasp that all argumentative devices for loosening it seem to be thrown away. As Boswell says, he is through your body in an instant without any preliminary parade; he gives a deadly lunge, but cares little for skill of fence. "We know we are free

and there's an end of it" is his characteristic summary of a perplexed bit of metaphysics; and he would evidently have no patience to wander through the labyrinths in which men like Jonathan Edwards delighted to perplex themselves. We should have been glad to see a fuller report of one of those conversations in which Burke "wound into a subject like a serpent," and contrast his method with Johnson's downright hitting. Boswell had not the power, even if he had the will, to give an adequate account of such a "wit combat."

That such a mind should express itself most forcibly in speech is intelligible enough. Conversation was to him not merely a contest, but a means of escape from himself. "I may be cracking my joke," he said to Boswell," and cursing the sun : Sun, how I hate thy beams!" The phrase sounds exaggerated, but it was apparently his settled conviction that the only remedy for melancholy, except indeed the religious remedy, was in hard work or in the rapture of conversational strife. His little circle of friends called forth his humour as the House of Commons excited Chatham's eloquence; and both of them were inclined to mouth too much when deprived of the necessary stimulus. Chatham's set speeches were as pompous as Johnson's deliberate writing. They resemble the chemical bodies which acquire entirely new properties when raised beyond a certain degree of temperature. Indeed, we frequently meet touches of the conversational Johnson in his controversial writing. Taxation no Tyranny is at moments almost as pithy as Swift, though the style is never so simple. The celebrated Letter to Chesterfield, and the letter in which he tells MacPherson that he will not be "deterred from detecting what he thinks a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian," are as good specimens of the smashing repartee as anything in Boswell's reports. Nor, indeed, dees his pomposity sink to mere verbiage so often as might be supposed. It is by no means easy to translate his ponderous phrases into simple words without losing some of their meaning. The structure of the sentences is compact, though they are too elaborately balanced and stuffed with superfluous antitheses. The language might be simpler, but it is not a mere sham aggregation of words. His written style, however faulty in other respects, is neither slipshod nor ambiguous, and passes into his conversational style by imperceptible degrees. The radical identity is intelligible, though the superficial context is certainly curious. We may perhaps say that his century, unfavourable to him as a writer, gave just what he required for talking. If, as is sometimes said, the art of conversation is disappearing, it is because society has become too large and diffuse. The good talker, as, indeed, the good artist of every kind, depends upon the tacit cooperation of the social medium. The chorus, as, indeed, Johnson has shown very well in one of the Ramblers, is

quite as essential as the main performer. Nobody talks well in London, because everybody has constantly to meet a fresh set of interlocutors, and is as much put out as a musician who has to be always learning a new instrument. A literary dictator has ceased to be a possibility, so far as direct personal influence is concerned. In the club Johnson knew how every blow would tell, and in the rapid thrust and parry dropped the heavy style which muffled his utterances in print. He had to deal with concrete illustrations, instead of expanding into platitudinous generalities. The obsolete theories which impair the value of his criticism and his polities, become amusing in the form of pithy sayings, though they weary us when asserted in new expositions. His greatest literary effort, the Dictionary, has of necessity become antiquated in use, and, in spite of the intellectual vigour indicated, can hardly be commended for popular reading. And thus but for the inimitable Boswell, it must be admitted that Johnson would probably have sunk very deeply into oblivion. A few good sayings would have been preserved by Mrs. Thrale and others, or have been handed down by tradition, and doubtless assigned in process of time to Sydney Smith and other conversational celebrities. A few couplets from the Vanity of Human Wishes would not yet have been submerged, and curious readers would have recognised the power of Rasselas, and been delighted with some shrewd touches in the Lives of the Poets. But with all desire to magnify critical insight, it must be admitted that that man would have shown singular penetration, and been regarded as an eccentric commentator, who had divined the humour and the fervour of mind which lay hid in the remains of the huge lexicographer. And yet when we have once recognised his power, we can see it everywhere indicated in his writings, though by an unfortunate fatality the style or the substance was always so deeply affected by the faults of the time, that the product is never thoroughly sound. His tenacious conservatism caused him to cling to decaying materials for the want of anything better, and he has suffered the natural penalty. He was a great force wasted, so far as literature was concerned, because the fashionable costume of the day hampered the free exercise of his powers, and because the only creeds to which he could attach himself were in the phase of decline and inanition. A century earlier or later he might have succeeded in expressing himself through books as well as through his talk; but it is not given to us to choose the time of our birth, and some very awkward consequences follow.

298

On the Side of the Maids.

If we grant that all laws and social conditions are the result of experiment and growth, and are therefore neither divine nor unelastic, we must regard certain class changes into which we are drifting as things to be accepted, not fought against, and hold it wiser to make the best of them rather than the worst. The subversion of present arrangements is not necessarily unrighteous because subversive; it may be just the contrary; and such an entire revolution in the relations, say as those between masters and servants, probable in the near future, may be the expression of a higher sense of justice and sincerity of living than anything we have hitherto put into practice. For the present at least we will suppose that it is.

No one is satisfied with things as they are. The masters resent the endeavour of servants to better their condition; the servants resent the endeavour of masters to keep them in the old inferior grooves; the first complain that servants are not what they were-forgetting to add that they themselves too are not what they were; the last regard their em ployers as their enemies ex officio, and their own position in the family as that of household Ishmaelites who must fight if they would not be oppressed. They also hold themselves as underpaid and generally illtreated; and right or wrong they have determined to make better terms for themselves than those to which they have been bound heretofore.

In this age of strikes it seems strange that they have not had a strike in the kitchen as well as in the workshops. Perhaps the individual character of the service, the isolated position of the servants, the diffi culties of meeting to combine-of fixing on a maximum of work and a minimum of wages-of arranging anything like arbitrary details-will always prevent an organized strike among them. This, however, may take place in a small community of level averages, or in large cities in houses of a certain calibre, where the servants are divided into superiors and subordinates, and where the work does not overlap in any department. The superior servants of such establishments as these can define their terms with more precision than is possible in small middle-class houses of two or three maids at most. It is in these very middle-class houses, however, where the sharpest pinch is felt, and where the greatest changes have to come.

The middle class is comparatively a modern invention, very faintly representing the old burghers from which it sprang, and in nothing more than in its treatment of servants. If we want to see anything

analogous to our own former state of things, we must go abroad, notably to France. There we find the bonne treated with a friendliness, a familiarity, and granted personal privileges, unknown to us in England; and there service has consequently retained much of that old-world closeness of attachment which we have almost entirely lost at home. Here in England we have risen above our servants in all the material appliances of life, and habits and manners have followed suit. So far from retaining anything like friendliness in our personal intercourse, a lady who "talks to her servants" is accounted wanting in propriety of feeling and false to the duty she owes her superior position. But we have sought to keep them in their old circumstance of inferiority while we have vacated our own of kindly companionship. The whole gist of the strife lies in this one fact. The home character of domestic service has gone, and it is now merely a business without personal affection or individual ties, wherein time and labour are carried to the best market and sold for the highest price they will fetch, like any other commodities. But employers still speak of their servants as "dependants on their bounty," and as "eating their bread all the same," as when the castle table fed its hordes of pauper serfs bound to render the service of their lives in return for the coarse means of living liberally tossed to them and the dogs alike; and, though they have abandoned the patriarchal protection of masterhood, they still demand the devoted fidelity which was its return. In other words, they desire to be free from the obligations of proprietorship while retaining the submissive service of slaves,

Remnants of the absolutism of slavery still linger in the conventional arrangements of domestic service. Only in quite exceptional houses are servants held to have any rights beyond the elemental ones of food, lodging, and wages. The mistress may of her own free grace grant privileges; that is another matter; but the kindest-hearted mistress treats it as an impertinence when her maids stipulate for rights, say in the matter of a fixed holiday, beyond their portion of each Sunday in rotation. Servants are assumed to have no right to a holiday save at rare, indeterminate intervals. Yet the confined and incessant nature of their work would seem to make frequent breaks almost necessary to their well-being. A servant's work is never done potentially, if even actually. She is liable to be rung up at all hours; her very meals are not secure from interruption; she has no time that is absolutely her own; and even her sleep is not sacred. In the dead of night something may be wanted, and she must get up to bring or to do it. Can there be a choice of agency between a delicate, consumptive maid, fatigued with her day's hard work, and a buxom, well-constituted lady, whose greatest exertion has been a drive in the park and the handing to her man a few cards to be left at friends' doors? The one is a servant, the other a lady; and physiological conditions stand nowhere in the face of such divine distinctions. Any one who should propose that the heaviest end of the domestic stick should be laid on the stoutest shoulders, irrespective of condition, would

be laughed at as an impossible dreamer, if not condemned as an unrighteous one; and we might as well talk to a high caste Hindoo of the common humanity of a Brahmin and a Pariah as to English gentlefolks of the common humanity of a mistress and her maid. Personal fitness and natural rights have no place in the artificial arrangements of society, and domestic service is no exception to the rule.

Let us consider for a moment what the life of a servant is, forgetting all that we have been taught of the sacredness of present conditions. She lives under ground, and she either sleeps underground or just below the roof. Damp, drains, want of efficient ventilation, with the constant presence of draughts, surround her in winter; in summer these are supplemented by a furious fire for many hours in the day. Up under the tiles she has the bleakest room in winter and the hottest in summer; but she is not allowed a fire to warm her chilly garret during the oneperhaps indeed her room has no fire-place-and she must gasp through the sweltering nights of the other as she best can. Her food is of poorer

quality and less appetizing than the family's; for if the bread and meat are the same, other things as important are not. She comes up from the country and is plunged at once from the fresh air and free expanse of her old surroundings into the dismal darkness of a London kitchen. But she has come to London, you say, of her own free will, and the bustle and brightness of the great city make amends for her dreary "place.” When does she see this bustle, this brightness? On her Sunday out the shops are shut; modern housekeeping has done away with personal marketing; and even when she gets the gift of an evening to herself she sees things only in the unnatural light of the flaring gas, and if there is more rollick in the street there is less amusement. She is not, like the French bonne, the companion of her mistress to the lively markets, down the gay boulevards, or for long sweet summer hours in the gardens of the Tuileries or the Luxembourg. Fresh air and the brisk circulation of out-of-door life do not count in England as necessary for our poor maids; as little as the fêtes, the sight-seeing, the friendly companionship of the mistress, which form the rule of middle-class life in France. We are a people of grim caste and stern work, and servants have to yield to the social powers above them and work like the rest; only they yield more, work harder, and enjoy less, and have infinitely less liberty than the rest.

In no other trade or profession is there such a want of personal freedom, such continuous command, such arbitrary denial as in this. Take the list of what is denied in an ordinary well-conducted house. No followers, no friends in the kitchen, no laughing to be heard above stairs, no romping for young girls to whom romping is an instinct all the same as with lambs and kittens, no cessation of work save at meal-times, no getting out for half an hour into the bright sunshine save "on the sly," or after the not always pleasant process of asking leave; and above all, no education for the fancy or the intellect beyond a dull magazine for Sunday

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