Chapter III: Conspicuous Leisure
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If its working
were not disturbed by other economic forces or other features of the
emulative process, the immediate effect of such a pecuniary struggle
as has just been described in outline would be to make men
industrious and frugal. This result actually follows, in some
measure, so far as regards the lower classes, whose ordinary means
of acquiring goods is productive labour. This is more especially
true of the labouring classes in a sedentary community which is at
an agricultural stage of industry, in which there is a considerable
subdivision of industry, and whose laws and customs secure to these
classes a more or less definite share of the product of their
industry. These lower classes can in any case not avoid labour, and
the imputation of labour is therefore not greatly derogatory to
them, at least not within their class. Rather, since labour is their
recognised and accepted mode of life, they take some emulative pride
in a reputation for efficiency in their work, this being often the
only line of emulation that is open to them. For those for whom
acquisition and emulation is possible only within the field of
productive efficiency and thrift, the struggle for pecuniary
reputability will in some measure work out in an increase of
diligence and parsimony. But certain secondary features of the
emulative process, yet to be spoken of, come in to very materially
circumscribe and modify emulation in these directions among the
pecuniary inferior classes as well as among the superior class.
But it is otherwise with the superior pecuniary class, with which we
are here immediately concerned. For this class also the incentive to
diligence and thrift is not absent; but its action is so greatly
qualified by the secondary demands of pecuniary emulation, that any
inclination in this direction is practically overborne and any
incentive to diligence tends to be of no effect. The most imperative
of these secondary demands of emulation, as well as the one of
widest scope, is the requirement of abstention from productive work.
This is true in an especial degree for the barbarian stage of
culture. During the predatory culture labour comes to be associated
in men's habits of thought with weakness and subjection to a master.
It is therefore a mark of inferiority, and therefore comes to be
accounted unworthy of man in his best estate. By virtue of this
tradition labour is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has
never died out. On the contrary, with the advance of social
differentiation it has acquired the axiomatic force due to ancient
and unquestioned prescription.
In order to gain and to hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient
merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put
in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence. And not only
does the evidence of wealth serve to impress one's importance on
others and to keep their sense of his importance alive and alert,
but it is of scarcely less use in building up and preserving one's
self-complacency. In all but the lowest stages of culture the
normally constituted man is comforted and upheld in his self-respect
by "decent surroundings" and by exemption from "menial offices".
Enforced departure from his habitual standard of decency, either in
the paraphernalia of life or in the kind and amount of his everyday
activity, is felt to be a slight upon his human dignity, even apart
from all conscious consideration of the approval or disapproval of
his fellows.
The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the
honourable in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its
ancient force even today. So much so that there are few of the
better class who are no possessed of an instinctive repugnance for
the vulgar forms of labour. We have a realising sense of ceremonial
uncleanness attaching in an especial degree to the occupations which
are associated in our habits of thought with menial service. It is
felt by all persons of refined taste that a spiritual contamination
is inseparable from certain offices that are conventionally required
of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that is to say, inexpensive)
habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations are unhesitatingly
condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with life on a
satisfactory spiritual plane __ with "high thinking". From the days
of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and of
exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the
immediate everyday purposes of human life has ever been recognised
by thoughtful men as a prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or
even a blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the
life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men's
eyes.
This direct, subjective value of leisure and of other evidences of
wealth is no doubt in great part secondary and derivative. It is in
part a reflex of the utility of leisure as a means of gaining the
respect of others, and in part it is the result of a mental
substitution. The performance of labour has been accepted as a
conventional evidence of inferior force; therefore it comes itself,
by a mental short-cut, to be regarded as intrinsically base.
During the predatory stage proper, and especially during the earlier
stages of the quasi-peaceable development of industry that follows
the predatory stage, a life of leisure is the readiest and most
conclusive evidence of pecuniary strength, and therefore of superior
force; provided always that the gentleman of leisure can live in
manifest ease and comfort. At this stage wealth consists chiefly of
slaves, and the benefits accruing from the possession of riches and
power take the form chiefly of personal service and the immediate
products of personal service. Conspicuous abstention from labour
therefore becomes the conventional mark of superior pecuniary
achievement and the conventional index of reputability; and
conversely, since application to productive labour is a mark of
poverty and subjection, it becomes inconsistent with a reputable
standing in the community. Habits of industry and thrift, therefore,
are not uniformly furthered by a prevailing pecuniary emulation. On
the contrary, this kind of emulation indirectly discountenances
participation in productive labour. Labour would unavoidably become
dishonourable, as being an evidence indecorous under the ancient
tradition handed down from an earlier cultural stage. The ancient
tradition of the predatory culture is that productive effort is to
be shunned as being unworthy of able-bodied men. and this tradition
is reinforced rather than set aside in the passage from the
predatory to the quasi-peaceable manner of life.
Even if the institution of a leisure class had not come in with the
first emergence of individual ownership, by force of the dishonour
attaching to productive employment, it would in any case have come
in as one of the early consequences of ownership. And it is to be
remarked that while the leisure class existed in theory from the
beginning of predatory culture, the institution takes on a new and
fuller meaning with the transition from the predatory to the next
succeeding pecuniary stage of culture. It is from this time forth a
"leisure class" in fact as well as in theory. From this point dates
the institution of the leisure class in its consummate form.
During the predatory stage proper the distinction between the
leisure and the labouring class is in some degree a ceremonial
distinction only. The able bodied men jealously stand aloof from
whatever is in their apprehension, menial drudgery; but their
activity in fact contributes appreciably to the sustenance of the
group. The subsequent stage of quasi-peaceable industry is usually
characterised by an established chattel slavery, herds of cattle,
and a servile class of herdsmen and shepherds; industry has advanced
so far that the community is no longer dependent for its livelihood
on the chase or on any other form of activity that can fairly be
classed as exploit. From this point on, the characteristic feature
of leisure class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful
employment.
The normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this
mature phase of its life history are in form very much the same as
in its earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports,
and devout observances. Persons unduly given to difficult
theoretical niceties may hold that these occupations are still
incidentally and indirectly "productive"; but it is to be noted as
decisive of the question in hand that the ordinary and ostensible
motive of the leisure class in engaging in these occupations is
assuredly not an increase of wealth by productive effort. At this as
at any other cultural stage, government and war are, at least in
part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of those who engage in them;
but it is gain obtained by the honourable method of seizure and
conversion. These occupations are of the nature of predatory, not of
productive, employment. Something similar may be said of the chase,
but with a difference. As the community passes out of the hunting
stage proper, hunting gradually becomes differentiated into two
distinct employments. On the one hand it is a trade, carried on
chiefly for gain; and from this the element of exploit is virtually
absent, or it is at any rate not present in a sufficient degree to
clear the pursuit of the imputation of gainful industry. On the
other hand, the chase is also a sport --an exercise of the predatory
impulse simply. As such it does not afford any appreciable pecuniary
incentive, but it contains a more or less obvious element of
exploit. It is this latter development of the chase -- purged of all
imputation of handicraft -- that alone is meritorious and fairly
belongs in the scheme of life of the developed leisure class.
Abstention from labour is not only a honorific or meritorious act,
but it presently comes to be a requisite of decency. The insistence
on property as the basis of reputability is very naive and very
imperious during the early stages of the accumulation of wealth.
Abstention from labour is the convenient evidence of wealth and is
therefore the conventional mark of social standing; and this
insistence on the meritoriousness of wealth leads to a more
strenuous insistence on leisure. Nota notae est nota rei ipsius.
According to well established laws of human nature, prescription
presently seizes upon this conventional evidence of wealth and fixes
it in men's habits of thought as something that is in itself
substantially meritorious and ennobling; while productive labour at
the same time and by a like process becomes in a double sense
intrinsically unworthy. Prescription ends by making labour not only
disreputable in the eyes of the community, but morally impossible to
the noble, freeborn man, and incompatible with a worthy life.
This tabu on labour has a further consequence in the industrial
differentiation of classes. As the population increases in density
and the predatory group grows into a settled industrial community,
the constituted authorities and the customs governing ownership gain
in scope and consistency. It then presently becomes impracticable to
accumulate wealth by simple seizure, and, in logical consistency,
acquisition by industry is equally impossible for high minded and
impecunious men. The alternative open to them is beggary or
privation. Wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has a chance
undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a
secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class -- abjectly poor
and living in a precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally
unable to stoop to gainful pursuits. The decayed gentleman and the
lady who has seen better days are by no means unfamiliar phenomena
even now. This pervading sense of the indignity of the slightest
manual labour is familiar to all civilized peoples, as well as to
peoples of a less advanced pecuniary culture. In persons of a
delicate sensibility who have long been habituated to gentle
manners, the sense of the shamefulness of manual labour may become
so strong that, at a critical juncture, it will even set aside the
instinct of self-preservation. So, for instance, we are told of
certain Polynesian chiefs, who, under the stress of good form,
preferred to starve rather than carry their food to their mouths
with their own hands. It is true, this conduct may have been due, at
least in part, to an excessive sanctity or tabu attaching to the
chief's person. The tabu would have been communicated by the contact
of his hands, and so would have made anything touched by him unfit
for human food. But the tabu is itself a derivative of the
unworthiness or moral incompatibility of labour; so that even when
construed in this sense the conduct of the Polynesian chiefs is
truer to the canon of honorific leisure than would at first appear.
A better illustration, or at least a more unmistakable one, is
afforded by a certain king of France, who is said to have lost his
life through an excess of moral stamina in the observance of good
form. In the absence of the functionary whose office it was to shift
his master's seat, the king sat uncomplaining before the fire and
suffered his royal person to be toasted beyond recovery. But in so
doing he saved his Most Christian Majesty from menial contamination.
Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori, Et propter vitam vivendi
perdere causas.
It has already been remarked that the term "leisure", as here used,
does not connote indolence or quiescence. What it connotes is
non-productive consumption of time. Time is consumed
non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive
work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life
of idleness. But the whole of the life of the gentleman of leisure
is not spent before the eyes of the spectators who are to be
impressed with that spectacle of honorific leisure which in the
ideal scheme makes up his life. For some part of the time his life
is perforce withdrawn from the public eye, and of this portion which
is spent in private the gentleman of leisure should, for the sake of
his good name, be able to give a convincing account. He should find
some means of putting in evidence the leisure that is not spent in
the sight of the spectators. This can be done only indirectly,
through the exhibition of some tangible, lasting results of the
leisure so spent -- in a manner analogous to the familiar exhibition
of tangible, lasting products of the labour performed for the
gentleman of leisure by handicraftsmen and servants in his employ.
The lasting evidence of productive labour is its material product --
commonly some article of consumption. In the case of exploit it is
similarly possible and usual to procure some tangible result that
may serve for exhibition in the way of trophy or booty. at a later
phase of the development it is customary to assume some badge of
insignia of honour that will serve as a conventionally accepted mark
of exploit, and which at the same time indicates the quantity or
degree of exploit of which it is the symbol. As the population
increases in density, and as human relations grow more complex and
numerous, all the details of life undergo a process of elaboration
and selection; and in this process of elaboration the use of
trophies develops into a system of rank, titles, degrees and
insignia, typical examples of which are heraldic devices, medals,
and honorary decorations.
As seen from the economic point of view, leisure, considered as an
employment, is closely allied in kind with the life of exploit; and
the achievements which characterise a life of leisure, and which
remain as its decorous criteria, have much in common with the
trophies of exploit. But leisure in the narrower sense, as distinct
from exploit and from any ostensibly productive employment of effort
on objects which are of no intrinsic use, does not commonly leave a
material product. The criteria of a past performance of leisure
therefore commonly take the form of "immaterial" goods. Such
immaterial evidences of past leisure are quasi-scholarly or
quasi-artistic accomplishments and a knowledge of processes and
incidents which do not conduce directly to the furtherance of human
life. So, for instance, in our time there is the knowledge of the
dead languages and the occult sciences; of correct spelling; of
syntax and prosody; of the various forms of domestic music and other
household art; of the latest properties of dress, furniture, and
equipage; of games, sports, and fancy-bred animals, such as dogs and
race-horses. In all these branches of knowledge the initial motive
from which their acquisition proceeded at the outset, and through
which they first came into vogue, may have been something quite
different from the wish to show that one's time had not been spent
in industrial employment; but unless these accomplishments had
approved themselves as serviceable evidence of an unproductive
expenditure of time, they would not have survived and held their
place as conventional accomplishments of the leisure class.
These accomplishments may, in some sense, be classed as branches of
learning. Beside and beyond these there is a further range of social
facts which shade off from the region of learning into that of
physical habit and dexterity. Such are what is known as manners and
breeding, polite usage, decorum, and formal and ceremonial
observances generally. This class of facts are even more immediately
and obtrusively presented to the observation, and they therefore
more widely and more imperatively insisted on as required evidences
of a reputable degree of leisure. It is worth while to remark that
all that class of ceremonial observances which are classed under the
general head of manners hold a more important place in the esteem of
men during the stage of culture at which conspicuous leisure has the
greatest vogue as a mark of reputability, than at later stages of
the cultural development. The barbarian of the quasi-peaceable stage
of industry is notoriously a more high-bred gentleman, in all that
concerns decorum, than any but the very exquisite among the men of a
later age. Indeed, it is well known, or at least it is currently
believed, that manners have progressively deteriorated as society
has receded from the patriarchal stage. Many a gentleman of the old
school has been provoked to remark regretfully upon the under-bred
manners and bearing of even the better classes in the modern
industrial communities; and the decay of the ceremonial code -- or
as it is otherwise called, the vulgarisation of life -- among the
industrial classes proper has become one of the chief enormities of
latter-day civilisation in the eyes of all persons of delicate
sensibilities. The decay which the code has suffered at the hands of
a busy people testifies -- all depreciation apart -- to the fact
that decorum is a product and an exponent of leisure class life and
thrives in full measure only under a regime of status.
The origin, or better the derivation, of manners is no doubt, to be
sought elsewhere than in a conscious effort on the part of the
well-mannered to show that much time has been spent in acquiring
them. The proximate end of innovation and elaboration has been the
higher effectiveness of the new departure in point of beauty or of
expressiveness. In great part the ceremonial code of decorous usages
owes its beginning and its growth to the desire to conciliate or to
show goodwill, as anthropologists and sociologists are in the habit
of assuming, and this initial motive is rarely if ever absent from
the conduct of well-mannered persons at any stage of the later
development. Manners, we are told, are in part an elaboration of
gesture, and in part they are symbolical and conventionalised
survivals representing former acts of dominance or of personal
service or of personal contact. In large part they are an expression
of the relation of status, -- a symbolic pantomime of mastery on the
one hand and of subservience on the other. Wherever at the present
time the predatory habit of mind, and the consequent attitude of
mastery and of subservience, gives its character to the accredited
scheme of life, there the importance of all punctilios of conduct is
extreme, and the assiduity with which the ceremonial observance of
rank and titles is attended to approaches closely to the ideal set
by the barbarian of the quasi-peaceable nomadic culture. Some of the
Continental countries afford good illustrations of this spiritual
survival. In these communities the archaic ideal is similarly
approached as regards the esteem accorded to manners as a fact of
intrinsic worth.
Decorum set out with being symbol and pantomime and with having
utility only as an exponent of the facts and qualities symbolised;
but it presently suffered the transmutation which commonly passes
over symbolical facts in human intercourse. Manners presently came,
in popular apprehension, to be possessed of a substantial utility in
themselves; they acquired a sacramental character, in great measure
independent of the facts which they originally prefigured.
Deviations from the code of decorum have become intrinsically odious
to all men, and good breeding is, in everyday apprehension, not
simply an adventitious mark of human excellence, but an integral
feature of the worthy human soul. There are few things that so touch
us with instinctive revulsion as a breach of decorum; and so far
have we progressed in the direction of imputing intrinsic utility to
the ceremonial observances of etiquette that few of us, if any, can
dissociate an offence against etiquette from a sense of the
substantial unworthiness of the offender. A breach of faith may be
condoned, but a breach of decorum can not. "Manners maketh man."
None the less, while manners have this intrinsic utility, in the
apprehension of the performer and the beholder alike, this sense of
the intrinsic rightness of decorum is only the proximate ground of
the vogue of manners and breeding. Their ulterior, economic ground
is to be sought in the honorific character of that leisure or
non-productive employment of time and effort without which good
manners are not acquired. The knowledge and habit of good form come
only by long-continued use. Refined tastes, manners, habits of life
are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires
time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by
those whose time and energy are taken up with work. A knowledge of
good form is prima facie evidence that that portion of the well-bred
person's life which is not spent under the observation of the
spectator has been worthily spent in acquiring accomplishments that
are of no lucrative effect. In the last analysis the value of
manners lies in the fact that they are the voucher of a life of
leisure. Therefore, conversely, since leisure is the conventional
means of pecuniary repute, the acquisition of some proficiency in
decorum is incumbent on all who aspire to a modicum of pecuniary
decency.
So much of the honourable life of leisure as is not spent in the
sight of spectators can serve the purposes of reputability only in
so far as it leaves a tangible, visible result that can be put in
evidence and can be measured and compared with products of the same
class exhibited by competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect,
in the way of leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from
simple persistent abstention from work, even where the subject does
not take thought of the matter and studiously acquire an air of
leisurely opulence and mastery. Especially does it seem to be true
that a life of leisure in this way persisted in through several
generations will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect in the
conformation of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing
and demeanour. But all the suggestions of a cumulative life of
leisure, and all the proficiency in decorum that comes by the way of
passive habituation, may be further improved upon by taking thought
and assiduously acquiring the marks of honourable leisure, and then
carrying the exhibition of these adventitious marks of exemption
from employment out in a strenuous and systematic discipline.
Plainly, this is a point at which a diligent application of effort
and expenditure may materially further the attainment of a decent
proficiency in the leisure-class properties. Conversely, the greater
the degree of proficiency and the more patent the evidence of a high
degree of habituation to observances which serve no lucrative or
other directly useful purpose, the greater the consumption of time
and substance impliedly involved in their acquisition, and the
greater the resultant good repute. Hence under the competitive
struggle for proficiency in good manners, it comes about that much
pains in taken with the cultivation of habits of decorum; and hence
the details of decorum develop into a comprehensive discipline,
conformity to which is required of all who would be held blameless
in point of repute. And hence, on the other hand, this conspicuous
leisure of which decorum is a ramification grows gradually into a
laborious drill in deportment and an education in taste and
discrimination as to what articles of consumption are decorous and
what are the decorous methods of consuming them.
In this connection it is worthy of notice that the possibility of
producing pathological and other idiosyncrasies of person and manner
by shrewd mimicry and a systematic drill have been turned to account
in the deliberate production of a cultured class -- often with a
very happy effect. In this way, by the process vulgarly known as
snobbery, a syncopated evolution of gentle birth and breeding is
achieved in the case of a goodly number of families and lines of
descent. This syncopated gentle birth gives results which, in point
of serviceability as a leisure-class factor in the population, are
in no wise substantially inferior to others who may have had a
longer but less arduous training in the pecuniary properties.
There are, moreover, measureable degrees of conformity to the latest
accredited code of the punctilios as regards decorous means and
methods of consumption. Differences between one person and another
in the degree of conformity to the ideal in these respects can be
compared, and persons may be graded and scheduled with some accuracy
and effect according to a progressive scale of manners and breeding.
The award of reputability in this regard is commonly made in good
faith, on the ground of conformity to accepted canons of taste in
the matters concerned, and without conscious regard to the pecuniary
standing or the degree of leisure practised by any given candidate
for reputability; but the canons of taste according to which the
award is made are constantly under the surveillance of the law of
conspicuous leisure, and are indeed constantly undergoing change and
revision to bring them into closer conformity with its requirements.
So that while the proximate ground of discrimination may be of
another kind, still the pervading principle and abiding test of good
breeding is the requirement of a substantial and patent waste of
time. There may be some considerable range of variation in detail
within the scope of this principle, but they are variations of form
and expression, not of substance.
Much of the courtesy of everyday intercourse is of course a direct
expression of consideration and kindly good-will, and this element
of conduct has for the most part no need of being traced back to any
underlying ground of reputability to explain either its presence or
the approval with which it is regarded; but the same is not true of
the code of properties. These latter are expressions of status. It
is of course sufficiently plain, to any one who cares to see, that
our bearing towards menials and other pecuniary dependent inferiors
is the bearing of the superior member in a relation of status,
though its manifestation is often greatly modified and softened from
the original expression of crude dominance. Similarly, our bearing
towards superiors, and in great measure towards equals, expresses a
more or less conventionalised attitude of subservience. Witness the
masterful presence of the high-minded gentleman or lady, which
testifies to so much of dominance and independence of economic
circumstances, and which at the same time appeals with such
convincing force to our sense of what is right and gracious. It is
among this highest leisure class, who have no superiors and few
peers, that decorum finds its fullest and maturest expression; and
it is this highest class also that gives decorum that definite
formulation which serves as a canon of conduct for the classes
beneath. And there also the code is most obviously a code of status
and shows most plainly its incompatibility with all vulgarly
productive work. A divine assurance and an imperious complaisance,
as of one habituated to require subservience and to take no thought
for the morrow, is the birthright and the criterion of the gentleman
at his best; and it is in popular apprehension even more than that,
for this demeanour is accepted as an intrinsic attribute of superior
worth, before which the base-born commoner delights to stoop and
yield.
As has been indicated in an earlier chapter, there is reason to
believe that the institution of ownership has begun with the
ownership of persons, primarily women. The incentives to acquiring
such property have apparently been: (1) a propensity for dominance
and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as evidence of the
prowess of the owner; (3) the utility of their services.
Personal service holds a peculiar place in the economic development.
During the stage of quasi-peaceable industry, and especially during
the earlier development of industry within the limits of this
general stage, the utility of their services seems commonly to be
the dominant motive to the acquisition of property in persons.
Servants are valued for their services. But the dominance of this
motive is not due to a decline in the absolute importance of the
other two utilities possessed by servants. It is rather that the
altered circumstance of life accentuate the utility of servants for
this last-named purpose. Women and other slaves are highly valued,
both as an evidence of wealth and as a means of accumulating wealth.
Together with cattle, if the tribe is a pastoral one, they are the
usual form of investment for a profit. To such an extent may female
slavery give its character to the economic life under the
quasi-peaceable culture that the women even comes to serve as a unit
of value among peoples occupying this cultural stage -- as for
instance in Homeric times. Where this is the case there need be
little question but that the basis of the industrial system is
chattel slavery and that the women are commonly slaves. The great,
pervading human relation in such a system is that of master and
servant. The accepted evidence of wealth is the possession of many
women, and presently also of other slaves engaged in attendance on
their master's person and in producing goods for him.
A division of labour presently sets in, whereby personal service and
attendance on the master becomes the special office of a portion of
the servants, while those who are wholly employed in industrial
occupations proper are removed more and more from all immediate
relation to the person of their owner. At the same time those
servants whose office is personal service, including domestic
duties, come gradually to be exempted from productive industry
carried on for gain.
This process of progressive exemption from the common run of
industrial employment will commonly begin with the exemption of the
wife, or the chief wife. After the community has advanced to settled
habits of life, wife-capture from hostile tribes becomes
impracticable as a customary source of supply. Where this cultural
advance has been achieved, the chief wife is ordinarily of gentle
blood, and the fact of her being so will hasten her exemption from
vulgar employment. The manner in which the concept of gentle blood
originates, as well as the place which it occupies in the
development of marriage, cannot be discussed in this place. For the
purpose in hand it will be sufficient to say that gentle blood is
blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with accumulated
wealth or unbroken prerogative. The women with these antecedents is
preferred in marriage, both for the sake of a resulting alliance
with her powerful relatives and because a superior worth is felt to
inhere in blood which has been associated with many goods and great
power. She will still be her husband's chattel, as she was her
father's chattel before her purchase, but she is at the same time of
her father's gentle blood; and hence there is a moral incongruity in
her occupying herself with the debasing employments of her
fellow-servants. However completely she may be subject to her
master, and however inferior to the male members of the social
stratum in which her birth has placed her, the principle that
gentility is transmissible will act to place her above the common
slave; and so soon as this principle has acquired a prescriptive
authority it will act to invest her in some measure with that
prerogative of leisure which is the chief mark of gentility.
Furthered by this principle of transmissible gentility the wife's
exemption gains in scope, if the wealth of her owner permits it,
until it includes exemption from debasing menial service as well as
from handicraft. As the industrial development goes on and property
becomes massed in relatively fewer hands, the conventional standard
of wealth of the upper class rises. The same tendency to exemption
from handicraft, and in the course of time from menial domestic
employments, will then assert itself as regards the other wives, if
such there are, and also as regards other servants in immediate
attendance upon the person of their master. The exemption comes more
tardily the remoter the relation in which the servant stands to the
person of the master.
If the pecuniary situation of the master permits it, the development
of a special class of personal or body servants is also furthered by
the very grave importance which comes to attach to this personal
service. The master's person, being the embodiment of worth and
honour, is of the most serious consequence. Both for his reputable
standing in the community and for his self-respect, it is a matter
of moment that he should have at his call efficient specialised
servants, whose attendance upon his person is not diverted from this
their chief office by any by-occupation. These specialised servants
are useful more for show than for service actually performed. In so
far as they are not kept for exhibition simply, they afford
gratification to their master chiefly in allowing scope to his
propensity for dominance. It is true, the care of the continually
increasing household apparatus may require added labour; but since
the apparatus is commonly increased in order to serve as a means of
good repute rather than as a means of comfort, this qualification is
not of great weight. All these lines of utility are better served by
a larger number of more highly specialised servants. There results,
therefore, a constantly increasing differentiation and
multiplication of domestic and body servants, along with a
concomitant progressive exemption of such servants from productive
labour. By virtue of their serving as evidence of ability to pay,
the office of such domestics regularly tends to include continually
fewer duties, and their service tends in the end to become nominal
only. This is especially true of those servants who are in most
immediate and obvious attendance upon their master. So that the
utility of these comes to consist, in great part, in their
conspicuous exemption from productive labour and in the evidence
which this exemption affords of their master's wealth and power.
After some considerable advance has been made in the practice of
employing a special corps of servants for the performance of a
conspicuous leisure in this manner, men begin to be preferred above
women for services that bring them obtrusively into view. Men,
especially lusty, personable fellows, such as footmen and other
menials should be, are obviously more powerful and more expensive
than women. They are better fitted for this work, as showing a
larger waste of time and of human energy. Hence it comes about that
in the economy of the leisure class the busy housewife of the early
patriarchal days, with her retinue of hard-working handmaidens,
presently gives place to the lady and the lackey.
In all grades and walks of life, and at any stage of the economic
development, the leisure of the lady and of the lackey differs from
the leisure of the gentleman in his own right in that it is an
occupation of an ostensibly laborious kind. It takes the form, in
large measure, of a painstaking attention to the service of the
master, or to the maintenance and elaboration of the household
paraphernalia; so that it is leisure only in the sense that little
or no productive work is performed by this class, not in the sense
that all appearance of labour is avoided by them. The duties
performed by the lady, or by the household or domestic servants, are
frequently arduous enough, and they are also frequently directed to
ends which are considered extremely necessary to the comfort of the
entire household. So far as these services conduce to the physical
efficiency or comfort of the master or the rest of the household,
they are to be accounted productive work. Only the residue of
employment left after deduction of this effective work is to be
classed as a performance of leisure.
But much of the services classed as household cares in modern
everyday life, and many of the "utilities" required for a
comfortable existence by civilised man, are of a ceremonial
character. They are, therefore, properly to be classed as a
performance of leisure in the sense in which the term is here used.
They may be none the less imperatively necessary from the point of
view of decent existence: they may be none the less requisite for
personal comfort even, although they may be chiefly or wholly of a
ceremonial character. But in so far as they partake of this
character they are imperative and requisite because we have been
taught to require them under pain of ceremonial uncleanness or
unworthiness. We feel discomfort in their absence, but not because
their absence results directly in physical discomfort; nor would a
taste not trained to discriminate between the conventionally good
and the conventionally bad take offence at their omission. In so far
as this is true the labour spent in these services is to be classed
as leisure; and when performed by others than the economically free
and self-directed head of the establishment, they are to be classed
as vicarious leisure.
The vicarious leisure performed by housewives and menials, under the
head of household cares, may frequently develop into drudgery,
especially where the competition for reputability is close and
strenuous. This is frequently the case in modern life. Where this
happens, the domestic service which comprises the duties of this
servant class might aptly be designated as wasted effort, rather
than as vicarious leisure. But the latter term has the advantage of
indicating the line of derivation of these domestic offices, as well
as of neatly suggesting the substantial economic ground of their
utility; for these occupations are chiefly useful as a method of
imputing pecuniary reputability to the master or to the household on
the ground that a given amount of time and effort is conspicuously
wasted in that behalf.
In this way, then, there arises a subsidiary or derivative leisure
class, whose office is the performance of a vicarious leisure for
the behoof of the reputability of the primary or legitimate leisure
class. This vicarious leisure class is distinguished from the
leisure class proper by a characteristic feature of its habitual
mode of life. The leisure of the master class is, at least
ostensibly, an indulgence of a proclivity for the avoidance of
labour and is presumed to enhance the master's own well-being and
fulness of life; but the leisure of the servant class exempt from
productive labour is in some sort a performance exacted from them,
and is not normally or primarily directed to their own comfort. The
leisure of the servant is not his own leisure. So far as he is a
servant in the full sense, and not at the same time a member of a
lower order of the leisure class proper, his leisure normally passes
under the guise of specialised service directed to the furtherance
of his master's fulness of life. Evidence of this relation of
subservience is obviously present in the servant's carriage and
manner of life. The like is often true of the wife throughout the
protracted economic stage during which she is still primarily a
servant -- that is to say, so long as the household with a male head
remains in force. In order to satisfy the requirements of the
leisure class scheme of life, the servant should show not only an
attitude of subservience, but also the effects of special training
and practice in subservience. The servant or wife should not only
perform certain offices and show a servile disposition, but it is
quite as imperative that they should show an acquired facility in
the tactics of subservience -- a trained conformity to the canons of
effectual and conspicuous subservience. Even today it is this
aptitude and acquired skill in the formal manifestation of the
servile relation that constitutes the chief element of utility in
our highly paid servants, as well as one of the chief ornaments of
the well-bred housewife.
The first requisite of a good servant is that he should
conspicuously know his place. It is not enough that he knows how to
effect certain desired mechanical results; he must above all, know
how to effect these results in due form. Domestic service might be
said to be a spiritual rather than a mechanical function. Gradually
there grows up an elaborate system of good form, specifically
regulating the manner in which this vicarious leisure of the servant
class is to be performed. Any departure from these canons of form is
to be depreciated, not so much because it evinces a shortcoming in
mechanical efficiency, or even that it shows an absence of the
servile attitude and temperament, but because, in the last analysis,
it shows the absence of special training. Special training in
personal service costs time and effort, and where it is obviously
present in a high degree, it argues that the servant who possesses
it, neither is nor has been habitually engaged in any productive
occupation. It is prima facie evidence of a vicarious leisure
extending far back in the past. So that trained service has utility,
not only as gratifying the master's instinctive liking for good and
skilful workmanship and his propensity for conspicuous dominance
over those whose lives are subservient to his own, but it has
utility also as putting in evidence a much larger consumption of
human service than would be shown by the mere present conspicuous
leisure performed by an untrained person. It is a serious grievance
if a gentleman's butler or footman performs his duties about his
master's table or carriage in such unformed style as to suggest that
his habitual occupation may be ploughing or sheepherding. Such
bungling work would imply inability on the master's part to procure
the service of specially trained servants; that is to say, it would
imply inability to pay for the consumption of time, effort, and
instruction required to fit a trained servant for special service
under the exacting code of forms. If the performance of the servant
argues lack of means on the part of his master, it defeats its chief
substantial end; for the chief use of servants is the evidence they
afford of the master's ability to pay.
What has just been said might be taken to imply that the offence of
an under-trained servant lies in a direct suggestion of
inexpensiveness or of usefulness. Such, of course, is not the case.
The connection is much less immediate. What happens here is what
happens generally. Whatever approves itself to us on any ground at
the outset, presently comes to appeal to us as a gratifying thing in
itself; it comes to rest in our habits of though as substantially
right. But in order that any specific canon of deportment shall
maintain itself in favour, it must continue to have the support of,
or at least not be incompatible with, the habit or aptitude which
constitutes the norm of its development. The need of vicarious
leisure, or conspicuous consumption of service, is a dominant
incentive to the keeping of servants. So long as this remains true
it may be set down without much discussion that any such departure
from accepted usage as would suggest an abridged apprenticeship in
service would presently be found insufferable. The requirement of an
expensive vicarious leisure acts indirectly, selectively, by guiding
the formation of our taste, -- of our sense of what is right in
these matters, -- and so weeds out unconformable departures by
withholding approval of them.
As the standard of wealth recognized by common consent advances, the
possession and exploitation of servants as a means of showing
superfluity undergoes a refinement. The possession and maintenance
of slaves employed in the production of goods argues wealth and
prowess, but the maintenance of servants who produce nothing argues
still higher wealth and position. Under this principle there arises
a class of servants, the more numerous the better, whose sole office
is fatuously to wait upon the person of their owner, and so to put
in evidence his ability unproductively to consume a large amount of
service. There supervenes a division of labour among the servants or
dependents whose life is spent in maintaining the honour of the
gentleman of leisure. So that, while one group produces goods for
him, another group, usually headed by the wife, or chief, consumes
for him in conspicuous leisure; thereby putting in evidence his
ability to sustain large pecuniary damage without impairing his
superior opulence.
This somewhat idealized and diagrammatic outline of the development
and nature of domestic service comes nearest being true for that
cultural stage which was here been named the "quasi-peaceable" stage
of industry. At this stage personal service first rises to the
position of an economic institution, and it is at this stage that it
occupies the largest place in the community's scheme of life. In the
cultural sequence, the quasi-peaceable stage follows the predatory
stage proper, the two being successive phases of barbarian life. Its
characteristic feature is a formal observance of peace and order, at
the same time that life at this stage still has too much of coercion
and class antagonism to be called peaceable in the full sense of the
word. For many purposes, and from another point of view than the
economic one, it might as well be named the stage of status. The
method of human relation during this stage, and the spiritual
attitude of men at this level of culture, is well summed up under
the term. But as a descriptive term to characterise the prevailing
methods of industry, as well as to indicate the trend of industrial
development at this point in economic evolution, the term
"quasi-peaceable" seems preferable. So far as concerns the
communities of the Western culture, this phase of economic
development probably lies in the past; except for a numerically
small though very conspicuous fraction of the community in whom the
habits of thought peculiar to the barbarian culture have suffered
but a relatively slight disintegration.
Personal service is still an element of great economic importance,
especially as regards the distribution and consumption of goods; but
its relative importance even in this direction is no doubt less than
it once was. The best development of this vicarious leisure lies in
the past rather than in the present; and its best expression in the
present is to be found in the scheme of life of the upper leisure
class. To this class the modern culture owes much in the way of the
conservation of traditions, usages, and habits of thought which
belong on a more archaic cultural plane, so far as regards their
widest acceptance and their most effective development.
In the modern industrial communities the mechanical contrivances
available for the comfort and convenience of everyday life are
highly developed. So much so that body servants, or, indeed,
domestic servants of any kind, would now scarcely be employed by
anybody except on the ground of a canon of reputability carried over
by tradition from earlier usage. The only exception would be
servants employed to attend on the persons of the infirm and the
feeble-minded. But such servants properly come under the head of
trained nurses rather than under that of domestic servants, and they
are, therefore, an apparent rather than a real exception to the
rule.
The proximate reason for keeping domestic servants, for instance, in
the moderately well-to-do household of to-day, is (ostensibly) that
the members of the household are unable without discomfort to
compass the work required by such a modern establishment. And the
reason for their being unable to accomplish it is (1) that they have
too many "social duties", and (2) that the work to be done is too
severe and that there is too much of it. These two reasons may be
restated as follows: (1) Under the mandatory code of decency, the
time and effort of the members of such a household are required to
be ostensibly all spent in a performance of conspicuous leisure, in
the way of calls, drives, clubs, sewing-circles, sports, charity
organisations, and other like social functions. Those persons whose
time and energy are employed in these matters privately avow that
all these observances, as well as the incidental attention to dress
and other conspicuous consumption, are very irksome but altogether
unavoidable. (2) Under the requirement of conspicuous consumption of
goods, the apparatus of living has grown so elaborate and cumbrous,
in the way of dwellings, furniture, bric-a-brac, wardrobe and meals,
that the consumers of these things cannot make way with them in the
required manner without help. Personal contact with the hired
persons whose aid is called in to fulfil the routine of decency is
commonly distasteful to the occupants of the house, but their
presence is endured and paid for, in order to delegate to them a
share in this onerous consumption of household goods. The presence
of domestic servants, and of the special class of body servants in
an eminent degree, is a concession of physical comfort to the moral
need of pecuniary decency.
The largest manifestation of vicarious leisure in modern life is
made up of what are called domestic duties. These duties are fast
becoming a species of services performed, not so much for the
individual behoof of the head of the household as for the
reputability of the household taken as a corporate unit -- a group
of which the housewife is a member on a footing of ostensible
equality. As fast as the household for which they are performed
departs from its archaic basis of ownership-marriage, these
household duties of course tend to fall out of the category of
vicarious leisure in the original sense; except so far as they are
performed by hired servants. That is to say, since vicarious leisure
is possible only on a basis of status or of hired service, the
disappearance of the relation of status from human intercourse at
any point carries with it the disappearance of vicarious leisure so
far as regards that much of life. But it is to be added, in
qualification of this qualification, that so long as the household
subsists, even with a divided head, this class of non-productive
labour performed for the sake of the household reputability must
still be classed as vicarious leisure, although in a slightly
altered sense. It is now leisure performed for the quasi-personal
corporate household, instead of, as formerly, for the proprietary
head of the household.
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