



Produced by David Widger





LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Standard Household-Effect Company

by William Dean Howells


THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY


My friend came in the other day, before we had left town, and looked
round at the appointments of the room in their summer shrouds, and said,
with a faint sigh, "I see you have had the eternal-womanly with you,
too."




I.

"Isn't the eternal-womanly everywhere? What has happened to you?"
I asked.

"I wish you would come to my house and see. Every rug has been up for a
month, and we have been living on bare floors. Everything that could be
tied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has been
sewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chests
has been moth-balled and put away. Everything that could be taken down
has been taken down. Bags with draw-strings at their necks have been
pulled over the chandeliers and tied. The pictures have been hidden in
cheese-cloth, and the mirrors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my own
miserable face anywhere."

"Come! That's something."

"Yes, it's something. But I have been thinking this matter over very
seriously, and I believe it is going from bad to worse. I have heard
praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the
housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense."

"Do you really believe that?" I asked. "And if you do, what of it?"

"Simply this, that if we don't put a stop to it, at the gait it's going,
it will put a stop to the eternal-womanly."

"I suppose we should hate that."

"Yes, it would be bad. It would be very bad; and I have been turning the
matter over in my mind, and studying out a remedy."

"The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over in his mind and lets
some one else study out a remedy."

"Yes, I know. I feel that I may be wrong in my processes, but I am sure
that I am right in my results. The reason why our grandmothers could be
such good housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the eternal-
womanly was that they had so few things to look after in their houses.
Life was indefinitely simpler with them. But the modern improvements,
as we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeeping without
subtracting its burdens, as they were expected to do. Every novel
convenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every means
of refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to the
burdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from the
grandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, which
will not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiest
of their superfluities."

"Yes, I see what you mean," I said. This is what one usually says when
one does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case I
really did know, or thought I did. "That survival of the conscience is a
very curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly. I suppose that
the North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental European
conscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more or
less religious and economical in its origin. But with the advance of
wealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simply
conscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social. The eternal-womanly
continues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse,
and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on. It
is something in the air, or something in the blood. Perhaps it is
something in both."

"Yes," said my friend, quite as I had said already, "I see what you mean.
But I think it is in the air more than in the blood. I was in Paris,
about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my
house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with
drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests. At any
rate, I was there. One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging
three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and
tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing
paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the
house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house
when she went into the country for the summer. 'Leave them just as they
are,' she said. 'But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and
the tarnish?' She said, 'Why, the things would have to be all gone over
when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself
double trouble?' I asked her if she didn't even roll anything up and put
it away in closets, and she said: 'Oh, you mean that old American horror
of getting ready to go away. I used to go through all that at home, too,
but I shouldn't dream of it here. In the first place, there are no
closets in the house, and I couldn't put anything away if I wanted to.
And really nothing happens. I scatter some Persian powder along the
edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and
I pull down the shades. When I come back in the fall I have the powder
swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again. Suppose a
little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and
there? The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting
everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of
discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness--I left
American housekeeping in America.' I asked her: 'But if you went back?'
and she gave a sigh, and said:

"'I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest. Everybody
does it there.' So you see," my friend concluded, "it's in the air,
rather than the blood."

"Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and live
in Paris?"

"Oh, dear, not" said my friend. "Nothing so drastic as all that. Merely
the extinction of household property."

"I see what you mean," I said. "But--what do you mean?"

"Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be
furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them,
and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. There
must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own
linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the
expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. It
must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case of
violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order
when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order when
the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to clean
it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests.
All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord
that it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to
close the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual
way that houses are now closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would be
measurably vitiated."

"I see what you mean," I murmured. "Well?"

"Some years ago," my friend went on, "when we came home from Europe, we
left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about,
and did not settle anywhere in particular. During that interval my wife
opened and closed five furnished houses in two years."

"And she has lived to tell the tale?"

"She has lived to tell it a great many times. She can hardly be kept
from telling it yet. But it is my belief that, although she brought to
the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence
of the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in
her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does
with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and
opens it for the winter. But if there had been a clause in the lease, as
there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when
she left them, life would have been simply a rapture. Why, in Europe
custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you come
and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind
taking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are very far behind in this
matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended
scale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, more
perfectly than any other people in the world. You see what I mean?"

"I am not sure that I do. But go on."

"I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax
personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would
necessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costly
that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the
very wicked, and ought to suffer."

"Oh, come, now!"

"I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all household property would
pass into the hands of the state."

"Aren't you getting worse and worse?"

"Oh, I'm not supposing there won't be a long interval when household
property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many
millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like
you and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I have no doubt that
there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its
relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world
into its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably
groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal
ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the
mothball. We shall suffer, but--"

"I see what you mean," I hastened to interrupt at this point, "but these
suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond--Do you think you could
defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?"

"Well, for not more than a week," said my friend, with an air of
discomfort in his arrest.




II.

--"We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system," said
my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week. By
this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the
veranda of a sea-side hotel. "As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her
salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her household
effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of
the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her
peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began
housekeeping."

"That may all very well be," I assented, though I did not believe it, and
I found something almost too fantastical in my friend's scheme. "But
when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to
become of our tender and sacred associations with them?"

"What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of
ancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living,
so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the
ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used
by their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell the
bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by,
when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of
the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the
tombs of one's forefathers could be sold without violence to their
spectres. I dare say it wouldn't be different in the case of our tender
and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and
bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a little
further. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that
troubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed their
domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paid
the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connected
with them. I don't suppose you would say that a man has no such
associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has them
with the stuff that has furnished it?"

"No, I shouldn't say that."

"If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at
each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards,
portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils,
and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to
part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated
stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff
house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing that
very thing now! Aren't you?"

"I am--in a certain degree," I assented.

"We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wife
and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and
slavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or
four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces we
had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and
decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of
rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We hadn't had such light
hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe
indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our
lives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one
had been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again."

"I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations
pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But the
things that we have in daily use?"

"It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us than
the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no
particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly
not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the
anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she
could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps
up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a
piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for
years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet
not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have
tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with
a thing we have hired?"

"I confess, I don't know. And do you really think we could liberate
ourselves from our belongings if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't the
eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them
out for winter?"

"At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it
would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the Standard
Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty
for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of
her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical,
whatever we say about the dressmaker's bills; and the very futilities of
putting away and taking