CASTE IN THE KITCHEN.
THE ladies who are attacking and defending the housewifely character of Englishwomen seem to us to miss, purposely, one grand element in the question, and that is the extreme dis- like felt by English servants for notable housewives. They can hardly be induced to endure them. The Frenchwoman of the middle-class, whose economical skill is held up to such admiration, exerts it in no slight degree at the expense of her domestics, who are well treated in some ways—talked to, for example, as if they were human beings like their employers—but are governed, not to say driven, in a style which English servants in the more civilized districts have decided not to endure. French servants do not mind it, or at least do not rebel against it, think scolding part of the bargain, expect or rather enjoy an incessant inter- ference, which is compensated by their consequent position as humble friends, look upon meanness as rather a virtue than a vice, and are, if not eager to learn, at least penetrated with the idea that they ought to be. English servants are of a different type. Their pride is their knowledge of their work, their foible im- patience of interference, and their most confirmed habit a re- ticence or artificiality in the presence of superiors which of itself almost prohibits the humble-friend relation so frequently met with in France, and in Italy almost universal. An Italian manservant in particular is the best servant in the world, provided he is treated as a sort of child of the house, and one of the worst if he is not. English housewives in almost every grade of the middle-class purchase household peace at the cost of abstaining from any personal share in the executive details of the household economy. The better the cook, the less will she tolerate her mis- tress being constantly in the kitchen ; the more active the house- maid, the less will she bear to be " follered about and drove." Many excellent servants dislike even to be much talked to, the restraint which English manners compel them to put upon their speech, voices, and manner speedily becoming irksome. It is one of the strangest facts in our civilization, and one which throws a great light on many educational failures, that the British servant never adopts the conventional manner permanently ; never sees that the low voice, and the civil " way," and the restrained temper are distinctly in themselves better things than the clang- ing tongue and rough manner and habit of unrestraint universal among our semi-civilized population. The low voice of the dining-room is laid aside in the kitchen, the civil way becomes brutal frankness at home, and once out of doors, the restrained temper gives way to a chronic fury. We back a servant, educated, trained, disciplined to mildness as no gentleman or lady is disci- plined, to be more outrageously violent than any other human being. This dislike of interference, which has its good side, being as it is
a form of the English desire for personal independence, is con- stantly, as all our comic literature bears witness, pushed to most ridiculous lengths, till the mistress is almost asked what she does out of her own apartments, and the struggle always ends in one of two alternatives. The mistress may have bad servants, and make herself and everybody else miserable by licking them into shape— losing them at the end of the process—or she may search for good servants, and having found them, let them pretty much alone, con- tent to give the machine a touch when it seems to be getting out of gear. The latter alternative is adopted by all who understand England and are not too closely pressed for money ; details are let alone ; the kitchen is visited once a day ; and the mis- tress, instead of presenting herself till dinner-flaw in the guise of a slatternly nurse, as so many Frenchwomen and Italians do, is as neat through the day as if she expected a host of admirers to call. She pays a good deal for her compara- tive leisure, it is true, sometimes in money, sometimes in a kind of orderly discomfort—the slightest break in the routine putting everybody out—very often in a badly supplied table. This last constant complaint of Englishmen, who write to the papers about it whenever they get a chance in the most downright, earnest, must have some foundation ; but it does not, we imagine, proceed from the housewife's inability to cook or teach cooking. There is no conceivable reason why a lady should cook a bit better than a tolerably attentive servant, and it is not teach- ing so much as careful direction that a decent servant wants, and very often does not get, not because her mistress does not know how to direct, but because she does not care. Women, as a rule, do not care about eating, rather deride individual peculiarities of taste in eating ; and men, who, as a rule, do care a little too much, are, by the English system of independence, precluded from direct interference with the kitchen. They must either put up with food they dislike, or improve it through lectures to their wives, which, if they have any sense or geniality, they will try to avoid.
It is not a knowledge of cookery, or of dressmaking, which is wanted of Englishwomen, but administrative skill ; and this English society takes the most elaborate pains to destroy. The habit of economy, that is, of fitting ends to pecuniary meaus, is hardly possible to those who can possess no property ; and were not the instinct corrected by the thrift peculiar to the sex, the ten- dency to regard all things that interest them as important things, all Englishwomen would be wasteful. Dressmaking, the easiest of all acquirements, is rarely learned except under pecuniary pressure, and the art is for that reason shirked, lest people should think that the women who have acquired it had no money to buy dresses. The independence of the kitchen, again, prevents girls from acquiring household knowledge, servants objecting strongly to " too many mistresses," while the peculiar caste pride of the country, a pride which, bad as it often is and deeply as it injures society, has its justifications, rebels against placing girls in habitual contact with the kitchen. English girls are really, though not formally, as com- pletely secluded as if they were bred in convents, and the attempt to teach them practical housekeeping interferes, or is supposed to interfere, with that seclusion. All that can be taught them is a certain theory of administration, and this is taught, and in, we should say, the majority of instances is taught exceedingly well. The celerity with which "young housekeepers," as ignorant as rabbits, learn to wield the modest sceptre of an ordinary house is almost a marvel, more especially where, as in thousands of the best governed houses in England—say, for one example, the majority of parsonages—the means to be expended are so very limited. No Frenchwoman can surpass the clergyman's wife, who on three hundred a year keeps up an establishment in which nothing offends through want of refinement, and in which, though there may be half-a-dozen children, there is never a symptom of scurry or confusion. Where the deficiencies of which "A French Lady" complained exist, they are usually due far more to want of will than want of power, and would not be corrected by any change in our system of education. There are extravagant women, and careless women, and slatternly women all over the world ; but in England the tendency is always to- wards decent, regular, though somewhat expensive, household administration.
The real evil with which in this, as in every other matter, we in this country have to contend, is not the ignorance of the middle- class, whether of cooking or of dress, so much as the depth of the chasm between classes which every day and every step in culture seems only to increase. The old familiarity of intercourse be- tween employers and servants which the reformers want to revive was based upon a substantial equality of deficiencies which has long since disappeared. The cook in a moderate house was, as far as education, and ideas, and refinement went, little more than an edition of her mistress on thicker paper, the maid was a slightly more flaunty repetition of the daughter of the house. Now, while cook and maid have scarcely improved except in a few departments of positive knowledge, such as reading and writing, mother and daughter have begun to experience that refining effect of here- ditary culture, which in England, more than in any country in the world, walls off those who obtain it. Our people are neither ladies nor gentlemen by nature, are in that respect far below the French, the Italians, or the Irish, and the depth of the impression made by culture, the change it creates even in external attributes, in voice, temper, manners, and daily habits, is therefore marked to exaggeration, so marked as to produce between the cultivated and the uncultivated a mutual recoil so excessive as to involve very often suspicion and even hostility. The kindly intercourse which would make it possible for educated women to be the imme- diate and constant instructors of those they employ has become impossible without an unendurable restraint on both sides, and will remain impossible until years of education, perhaps gene- rations of educations, have exercised their civilizing influence upon the masses. It is a bad thing that it should be so, but we must pay the penalty of ages of neglect ; and one of them is that English wives and daughters cannot live among, and therefore educate, servants, as can the women of lands where the social chasms are less deep.
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