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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Standard Household-Effect Company
+by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Standard Household-Effect Company
+       From "Literature and Life"
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3381]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STANDARD ***
+
+
+
+
+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 out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
+are founded in the instinct of saving."
+
+"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
+character if they didn't belong to us? Wouldn't our domestic interiors
+become dreadfully impersonal?"
+
+"How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let the
+different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard
+Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either
+would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
+few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most
+interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
+the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
+they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by
+character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that let
+itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
+since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanly
+was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift
+for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp
+herself upon our interiors. One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle
+with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;
+another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the
+scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a
+chair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment,
+the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the
+sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in
+slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius. The walls
+became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified
+ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a
+hysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had their doors painted
+black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with
+morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day,
+thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black door and its morning-
+glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt
+Whitman says. No, the less we try to get personality and character into
+our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be.
+As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and
+render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect
+and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a
+new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly
+concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she
+will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a
+thing she wants, begins to hate it. The company's agents will begin by
+convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up
+her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in
+the region of pure aesthetics. I once asked an Italian painter if he did
+not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said
+'SI. Ma troppa roba.' There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas,
+pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers. 'Troppa roba' is the vice of all
+our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly
+if it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will
+teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South,
+and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails
+among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with.
+What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?"
+
+"That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains
+are concerned," I said, "but surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures and
+objects of art?"
+
+"I would apply it to them first of all and above all," rejoined my
+friend, hardily. "Among all the people who buy and own such things there
+is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and
+the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and
+degrade them further. The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the
+Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real
+sense of art, and a knowledge of it. When the house-letting and house-
+furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would
+be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for
+the purpose."
+
+"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
+other pictures?" I sneered.
+
+"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, with unruffled temper.
+"So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
+have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
+company or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of the
+other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
+ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
+agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
+family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
+be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
+now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme," my friend
+concluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome. We must
+alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
+exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
+I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
+sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
+punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, will
+be the salvation of the eternal-womanly."
+
+"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"
+
+"What can be more precious?"
+
+"Individuality."
+
+"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
+gradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is any
+individuality in such things now? What have we been saying about
+character?"
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," I said.
+
+
+
+
+PG EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+    As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it
+    Heard praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers
+    Yes, I see what you mean
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Standard Household-Effect Company
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+This etext was produced by David Widger  <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+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 moth-
+ball.  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 out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
+are founded in the instinct of saving."
+
+"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
+character if they didn't belong to us?  Wouldn't our domestic interiors
+become dreadfully impersonal?"
+
+"How many houses now have character-personality?  Most people let the
+different dealers choose for them, as it is.  Why not let the Standard
+Household-Effect Company, and finally the state?  I am sure that either
+would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
+few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves.  In most
+interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
+the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
+they are the result of design, they are worse.  I see what you mean by
+character and personality in them.  You mean the sort of madness that let
+itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
+since gone to make the junk-shops hideous.  Each of the eternal-womanly
+was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift
+for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp
+herself upon our interiors.  One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle
+with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;
+another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the
+scarf through its handle.  One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a
+chair; another knotted it around the leg.  In a day, an hour, a moment,
+the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the
+sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in
+slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius.  The walls
+became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified
+ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a
+hysterical chaos, full of character.  Some people had their doors painted
+black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with
+morning-glories.  I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day,
+thinking I might hire it.  The sight of that black door and its morning-
+glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt
+Whitman says.  No, the less we try to get personality and character into
+our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be.
+As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and
+render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect
+and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a
+new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly
+concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she
+will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a
+thing she wants, begins to hate it.  The company's agents will begin by
+convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up
+her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in
+the region of pure aesthetics.  I once asked an Italian painter if he did
+not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said
+'SI.  Ma troppa roba.'  There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas,
+pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers.  'Troppa roba' is the vice of all
+our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly
+if it is not stopped.  But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will
+teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South,
+and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails
+among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with.
+What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?"
+
+"That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains
+are concerned," I said, "but surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures and
+objects of art?"
+
+"I would apply it to them first of all and above all," rejoined my
+friend, hardily.  "Among all the people who buy and own such things there
+is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and
+the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and
+degrade them further.  The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the
+Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real
+sense of art, and a knowledge of it.  When the house-letting and house-
+furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would
+be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for
+the purpose."
+
+"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
+other pictures?"  I sneered.
+
+"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, with unruffled temper.
+"So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
+have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
+company or the state.  The agents of the one, or the officers of the
+other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
+ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
+agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
+family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
+be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
+now have in many cases.  Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme," my friend
+concluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome.  We must
+alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
+exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
+I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
+sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
+punishable by fine or imprisonment.  This, and nothing short of it, will
+be the salvation of the eternal-womanly."
+
+"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"
+
+"What can be more precious?"
+
+"Individuality."
+
+"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
+gradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is any
+individuality in such things now?  What have we been saying about
+character?"
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," I said.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
+
+As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Standard Household Effect Co.,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Standard Household Effect Co., by Howells
+#28 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Standard Household Effect Co.
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3381]
+[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule]
+[The actual date this file first posted = 04/01/01]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Standard Household Effect Co., by Howells
+**********This file should be named whshe11.txt or whshe11.zip**********
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+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+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 moth-
+ball.  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 out, that she now wears herself to a thread with,
+are founded in the instinct of saving."
+
+"But," I asked, "wouldn't our household belongings lose a good deal of
+character if they didn't belong to us?  Wouldn't our domestic interiors
+become dreadfully impersonal?"
+
+"How many houses now have character-personality?  Most people let the
+different dealers choose for them, as it is.  Why not let the Standard
+Household-Effect Company, and finally the state?  I am sure that either
+would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the
+few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves.  In most
+interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are
+the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where
+they are the result of design, they are worse.  I see what you mean by
+character and personality in them.  You mean the sort of madness that let
+itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has
+since gone to make the junk-shops hideous.  Each of the eternal-womanly
+was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift
+for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp
+herself upon our interiors.  One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle
+with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf;
+another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the
+scarf through its handle.  One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a
+chair; another knotted it around the leg.  In a day, an hour, a moment,
+the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the
+sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in
+slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius.  The walls
+became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified
+ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a
+hysterical chaos, full of character.  Some people had their doors painted
+black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with
+morning-glories.  I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day,
+thinking I might hire it.  The sight of that black door and its morning-
+glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt
+Whitman says.  No, the less we try to get personality and character into
+our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be.
+As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and
+render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect
+and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a
+new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly
+concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she
+will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a
+thing she wants, begins to hate it.  The company's agents will begin by
+convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up
+her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in
+the region of pure aesthetics.  I once asked an Italian painter if he did
+not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said
+'SI.  Ma troppa roba.'  There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas,
+pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers.  'Troppa roba' is the vice of all
+our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly
+if it is not stopped.  But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will
+teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South,
+and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails
+among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with.
+What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?"
+
+"That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains
+are concerned," I said, "but surely you wouldn't apply it to pictures and
+objects of art?"
+
+"I would apply it to them first of all and above all," rejoined my
+friend, hardily.  "Among all the people who buy and own such things there
+is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and
+the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and
+degrade them further.  The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the
+Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real
+sense of art, and a knowledge of it.  When the house-letting and house-
+furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would
+be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for
+the purpose."
+
+"And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the
+other pictures?"  I sneered.
+
+"Ancestral portraits, of course," said my friend, with unruffled temper.
+"So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to
+have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the
+company or the state.  The agents of the one, or the officers of the
+other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select
+ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression
+agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the
+family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall
+be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits
+now have in many cases.  Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme," my friend
+concluded, "and no difficulty that can't be easily overcome.  We must
+alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and
+exclusively the property of some impersonal agency--company or community,
+I don't care which--that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any
+sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism
+punishable by fine or imprisonment.  This, and nothing short of it, will
+be the salvation of the eternal-womanly."
+
+"And the perdition of something even more precious than that!"
+
+"What can be more precious?"
+
+"Individuality."
+
+"My dear friend," demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was
+gradually edging to the door, "do you mean to say there is any
+individuality in such things now?  What have we been saying about
+character?"
+
+"Ah, I see what you mean," I said.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARK:
+
+As soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it
+Heard praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers
+Yes, I see what you mean
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Standard Household Effect Co.
+by William Dean Howells
+
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