THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY, by G K Chesterton
To reiterate my introduction to the last GKC article, the
Chesterton family were ever friends to the nationalist cause. Whatever
flaws they as individuals had were minor ones; their hearts were in the
right place. It gives me great pride that I wrote an article for the magazine founded by A K Chesterton, Candour, which itself was the successor to Cecil Chesterton's New Witness and which I advise everyone to support by purchasing their literature etc. They also publish many books worth reading. Perhaps G K Chesterton's biggest flaw was that he only made it half-way
to Paganism in adopting Roman Catholicism as his religion, in spite of
him acknowledging that the things he loved in life and culture were the
remnants of our Pagan past, and he often railed against the Puritan
wellspring of liberalism and capitalism. In this article, he highlights the reasons why marriage and the home are a boon for the British lower classes and, conversely, why the capitalist plutocrat, often in the guise of a socialist, who are of the same ilk, wishes to destroy them.
THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY
In the course of this crude study we shall have to touch on what is called
the problem of poverty, especially the dehumanized poverty of modern
industrialism. But in this primary matter of the ideal the difficulty is
not the problem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It is the special
psychology of leisure and luxury that falsifies life. Some experience of
modern movements of the sort called “advanced” has led me to the
conviction that they generally repose upon some experience peculiar to the
rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of which I have already
spoken; the idea of sexuality as a string of episodes. That implies a long
holiday in which to get tired of one woman, and a motor car in which to
wander looking for others; it also implies money for maintenances. An
omnibus conductor has hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other
people’s. And the success with which nuptial estrangements are depicted in
modern “problem plays” is due to the fact that there is only one thing
that a drama cannot depict—that is a hard day’s work. I could give
many other instances of this plutocratic assumption behind progressive
fads. For instance, there is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase
“Why should woman be economically dependent upon man?” The answer is that
among poor and practical people she isn’t; except in the sense in which he
is dependent upon her. A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must be
somebody to mend them. A fisher has to catch fish; there must be somebody
to cook them. It is surely quite clear that this modern notion that woman
is a mere “pretty clinging parasite,” “a plaything,” etc., arose through
the somber contemplation of some rich banking family, in which the banker,
at least, went to the city and pretended to do something, while the
banker’s wife went to the Park and did not pretend to do anything at all.
A poor man and his wife are a business partnership. If one partner in a
firm of publishers interviews the authors while the other interviews the
clerks, is one of them economically dependent? Was Hodder a pretty
parasite clinging to Stoughton? Was Marshall a mere plaything for
Snelgrove?
But of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst is this:
the notion that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say)
is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. This is
indeed a rich man’s opinion. The rich man knows that his own house moves
on vast and soundless wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of servants,
by a swift and silent ritual. On the other hand, every sort of vagabondage
of romance is open to him in the streets outside. He has plenty of money
and can afford to be a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in a
restaurant, while the yokel’s tamest adventure may end in a police-court.
If he smashes a window he can pay for it; if he smashes a man he can
pension him. He can (like the millionaire in the story) buy an hotel to
get a glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious man, dictates the tone
of nearly all “advanced” and “progressive” thought, we have almost
forgotten what a home really means to the overwhelming millions of
mankind.
For the truth is, that to the moderately poor the home is the only place
of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on
the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment
or indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes he must accept the strict
rules of the shop, inn, club, or museum that he happens to enter. He can
eat his meals on the floor in his own house if he likes. I often do it
myself; it gives a curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There would
be considerable trouble if I tried to do it in an A.B.C. tea-shop. A man
can wear a dressing gown and slippers in his house; while I am sure that
this would not be permitted at the Savoy, though I never actually tested
the point. If you go to a restaurant you must drink some of the wines on
the wine list, all of them if you insist, but certainly some of them. But
if you have a house and garden you can try to make hollyhock tea or
convolvulus wine if you like. For a plain, hard-working man the home is
not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place
in the world of rules and set tasks. The home is the one place where he
can put the carpet on the ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants
to. When a man spends every night staggering from bar to bar or from
music-hall to music-hall, we say that he is living an irregular life. But
he is not; he is living a highly regular life, under the dull, and often
oppressive, laws of such places. Some times he is not allowed even to sit
down in the bars; and frequently he is not allowed to sing in the
music-halls. Hotels may be defined as places where you are forced to
dress; and theaters may be defined as places where you are forbidden to
smoke. A man can only picnic at home.
Now I take, as I have said, this small human omnipotence, this possession
of a definite cell or chamber of liberty, as the working model for the
present inquiry. Whether we can give every English man a free home of his
own or not, at least we should desire it; and he desires it. For the
moment we speak of what he wants, not of what he expects to get. He wants,
for instance, a separate house; he does not want a semi-detached house. He
may be forced in the commercial race to share one wall with another man.
Similarly he might be forced in a three-legged race to share one leg with
another man; but it is not so that he pictures himself in his dreams of
elegance and liberty. Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat and
sleep and praise God in a flat; he can eat and sleep and praise God in a
railway train. But a railway train is not a house, because it is a house
on wheels. And a flat is not a house, because it is a house on stilts. An
idea of earthy contact and foundation, as well as an idea of separation
and independence, is a part of this instructive human picture.
I take, then, this one institution as a test. As every normal man desires
a woman, and children born of a woman, every normal man desires a house of
his own to put them into. He does not merely want a roof above him and a
chair below him; he wants an objective and visible kingdom; a fire at
which he can cook what food he likes, a door he can open to what friends
he chooses. This is the normal appetite of men; I do not say there are not
exceptions. There may be saints above the need and philanthropists below
it. Opalstein, now he is a duke, may have got used to more than this; and
when he was a convict may have got used to less. But the normality of the
thing is enormous. To give nearly everybody ordinary houses would please
nearly everybody; that is what I assert without apology. Now in modern
England (as you eagerly point out) it is very difficult to give nearly
everybody houses. Quite so; I merely set up the desideratum; and ask the
reader to leave it standing there while he turns with me to a
consideration of what really happens in the social wars of our time.
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