The Music of the Spheres. To AN oval moon floats low and pale The chorus of those conquering hosts- For us that music sounds no more. But for one witching, mortal strain. I hear it now! for Love's bright heaven Proud hopes and memories shine and roll On the Side of the Mistresses. "I ALSO am a woman;" though, on the whole, I ought simply to say "I am a woman," for only one of those whom old-fashioned grammarians describe as belonging to the worthier gender could have written as one lately did in this Magazine "On the Side of the Maids." I am sure it cannot be that one who is familiar with the woes of the gentler sex can have thus overlooked the sorrows of the mistresses of the day. The writer must be one of those inexperienced young men who go up and down the country, upsetting all that has been held sacred as to the duty of women to stay at home and manage their households, and avoid politics, and take care that their husbands are pleased in all things. We know to what lengths these theorists are now going in trying to turn women into what women can never be. Did not I read, the other day, in the columns of a respectable newspaper, an announcement that in a "College Chapel" in the East-end of London a certain "Reverend " would commence his ministry by preaching in the morning of a certain Sunday, and that in the evening his wife would preach? What a bouleversement of all one's old ideas of propriety and good sense! Conceive such an arrangement at Oxford or Cambridge-the head of the College preaching to the undergraduates in the morning and his wife in the evening! I read once in a book "by an ex-Quaker" a story about some person who remonstrated with a Quakeress on the permission given to Quakeresses to preach, on the ground that St. Paul had forbidden preaching to women. 'Ah," replied she, "but thee knows Paul was not par tial to females!" 66 But, leaving the Quakers alone, I will maintain that none but a mistress can know the sufferings of a mistress, or can realise what it is that women are now suffering at the hands of those who are technically called our servants. Men should not write about them, because they do not understand them, just as they should not write about babies. So I say about politics; they are a fit subject for men to have votes upon, because it is a subject which they understand. Of course I do not say that all men understand them. If they did, would they not all vote on the same side? But what I say is this, that men's interests lie in general matters, in public matters-that is, in things taken on a large scale. For instance, they can understand how we ought to legislate about butchers and bakers and fishmongers; that is, about the rearing of bullocks, and the corn-laws, and the protecting of rivers and fish. How thankful I am to that Mr. Frank Buckland for bringing down the price of salmon to what it is this year! But could they settle their actual butchers' and bakers' bills as women can? Could Mr. Frank Buckland himself buy a few pounds of salmon as economically as the mistress of a family? So, too, men can do pretty well about the police, and wars, and treaties, and affairs on á grand scale; it is only the King of Dahomey who makes women into soldiers; and I wonder that some of those gentlemen who wish to make us women think ourselves miserable when we don't feel so have not proposed that Queen Victoria should have a body-guard of pretty girl-soldiers. But could any man keep a nursery in proper discipline? To those who will have it that there is no ineradicable difference between men and women I put this plain question-Could men manage babies? And as they cannot manage nurseries, so they cannot manage households. Is there, as a rule, anything more deplorable than a bachelor's management of his women servants, when he pretends to keep a house of his own? Then I say that none but a woman can understand the case between maids and mistresses, or is to be accepted as an exponent of the sufferings of the mistresses of this year 1874. Men judge from what they call the à priori point of view, which appears to me to be very much like making their theories first, and then inventing a number of facts to suit those theories. This is particularly the case with the writer who has made this late onslaught upon the unfortunate mistresses of the period. He fancies that because the relations of masters and servants are no longer patriarchal, therefore mistresses have lost all fellow-feeling for their maids. Now what is all this that we occasionally hear about the patriarchal state of things in England long ago? When was there any relation between the master and the servant which did not make the servant perfectly well aware that he was the servant, and not his master's equal, and that a practically different life must be his lot as compared with his master's? There never was such a time of domestic bliss and equality, just as there never was a time when shepherds and shepherdesses wore the pretty little pink and blue and gilt clothes which they wear in Dresden China. I never could get at any proof of the actual existence of this happy state from any of our advanced young aristocratic democrats, or from the ultra-Tories who believe in the golden age, who come to my house or whom I meet elsewhere. They say that women always judge by their emotions, and that they dislike mathematics because it is impossible to extract any sentiment out of Euclid. But I find that men are just as unwilling to be brought to book about their favourite theories concerning the past and the future. Here, for instance, when I ask for facts from past history to prove that our maids are an ill-used race, and that I ought to let my cook have a pianoforte in the kitchen; or when I examine the historical incidents, or the plays, or the poems, of the real past, I find nothing but illustrations of the greater familiarity that existed between mistress and maid, and between master and man; but that there was any more truly human feeling between the two I can hear of no proofs whatsoever. They associated more freely, especially at meals, just as the negro slaves in America associated more freely with their masters and mistresses. But there was at the same time a hard element of serfdom in all the domestic relations of our ancestors which was rarely unfelt. They were familiar, also, because they were all more or less uneducated, up to a recent period. There is always more or less outward equality when mistress and maid are not separated by that culture which, to a certain extent, affects the tastes and feelings of everybody who can pretend to be what we mean by a lady. All this was natural enough, and so far as it is now changed, the change can no more be laid to the charge of the mistress as a fault, than rich folks can be blamed for having their kitchens under ground in town houses, where land is dear, while they are above ground in the country, where land is cheap. This same necessary position of the offices is, in truth, one of the sins which are brought against the unlucky mistress. But how is it to be helped? If you live in a town, where the houses are built in rows, there is no possibility of giving servants the same airy offices and bedrooms which are possible when the house stands on its good-sized plot of ground. Does our advocate of the down-trodden maids suppose that in patriarchal days town servants were better lodged than they are to-day? They always lived below the level of the soil, and slept in cramped little rooms immediately under the roof. I am not saying that offices might not be healthier than they are now, and that there is no room for improvement in the ventilation of the bedrooms, not only of the maids, but of the mistresses also. But to run away with the notion that it is only now that these uncommonly smart young women, who condescend to take our wages, are the victims of an inhuman tyranny in respect to the rooms they inhabit, and where they store their brilliant Sunday costumes, is to sacrifice facts to sensationalism. It must be remembered, too, what are the homes from which these miserable maids first come; what are the rooms in which they have been used to live ever since they were born. Has our censor the smallest knowledge of the bedrooms of the labourers' cottages; or of the living and bed rooms in cities in which our unfortunate servants have passed their days before they entered upon this degrading servitude? If he has, he must know that he is manufacturing sentimental sorrows of which the objects of his compassion have no knowledge themselves. When we contrast the condition of our maids with some ideal state, in which every detail of life shall be regulated by the dictates of an elevated humanity, we must not forget the details of that domestic life from which our servants emerge, or that in every possible respect, except that of freedom (which they are paid to give up), their personal comforts are greater than they have been accustomed to from their childhood. If the misery of their habitation was what I am here told that it is, why is it that maids never inquire as to the rooms they are to sleep in, or as to the comfort of the offices, when they inquire as to the conditions of the situation |