The Philosophy of Attics

And of the Lucky Painters, Poets, and Philosophers Who Inhabit Them

ARTHUR DAVISON FICKE

HE who is master of a whole house, from cellar to roof, is committed to the complicated pomp and vanity of the world—to its fetes, furnaces, plumbing, and taxes. But he who is master of only an attic moves on an obviously higher and more frivolous plane.

I have a friend who lives in an attic; and since I go there often, for long talks or long silences, I know something of this subject. I could say much about attics. But the philosophical aspect of the matter is the only one I want to dwell on at present, for it would be unnecessarily unkind of me to bring the purely physical charm of attics to the attention of serious householders. How could the unhappy proprietor of a marble mansion endure my impassioned recital of the miracle that happens when a storm breaks over the city, and my friend's roof quivers and echoes as the quick gusts of rain beat across it in swaying saraband; and then the gusts subside into" a steady pattering of drops, with a soimd so beautiful that even the most charming book lies neglected on one's lap, or even the most charming girl forgets to go on talking?

Nor should I like to speak much of the sunsets that stream across the roofs of the houses' to the west of my friend's attic; if I spoke at all eloquently, the people who live in the reputable portions of those houses would perhaps realize what they are missing, and commit suicide.

Obviously, it is impossible that everyone should be able to live in an attic. There must be lower stories to support the attics, if we are to have attics at all; and some one must live in the inferior part of the building, if only that the floor of the attic may be kept warm. Some visionary addict of attics might allege that modern engineering ingenuity can erect houses that consist of nothing except attics; but this theory seems to me a mere sophistry. To attempt to carry it out practically would mean either building a house of only one story, or else putting up tall, steel skeletons, with an attic perched high on the spidery top.

The first of these alternatives I reject at once, on philological grounds; for I maintain that a one-story house, while perhaps an agreeable residence, is not in the true sense of the word an attic, any more than it is a cellar. The second of the alternatives—an attic on long, steel stilts—I am obliged to reject, also; and I have in this case two reasons for the objection—one aesthetic, and the other practical. Aesthetically, such a structure could hardly be very nice to look at from the outside, no matter how commodious internally it might be; and practically, the plumbing would certainly freeze in cold weather.

NO; there is simply no way of having an attic, unless you grant the existence of a house to support it. It is precisely like the case of the social system of our age, or of any other age. If you want a superstructure of freedom, art, intelligence, and civilization, then you have to grant the existence of a horrid substructure of slavery, commercialism, stupidity, and pseudo-civilization.

Take the social system of the Greeks. At the bottom of it was that part of the system which corresponds to the cellar of a house: this was the class of Helots, the unhappy serfs who did all the hard labour. Above them came the free citizens, the master-butchers and masterbakers and master-candlestick-makers, who ran the economic and political affairs of the city. And highest of all came the lucky class, the sculptors and orators, the poets, and philosophers, and playboys, for whose sole benefit all the labours of the rest of the state were, in the long run, unconsciously contrived.

Our own social system is fundamentally the same as that of the Greeks. In the cellar, amid grime and damp, work those who stoke the furnaces and wash the clothes of modern civilization. In the three or four stories above, in apartments clean, comfortable, orderly, and of good report, live the people who waste their lives in running our intricate social machinery—the people who advertise tooth paste, and manage railroads, and sell automobiles, and assist one man to lose his money to another—all the useful, practical people: the people without whose efforts the handsome profusion of unnecessary gimcracks in our department stores could not be manufactured or marketed.

EVENTUALLY, then, in the attic, we encounter the disreputable lord of all this creation, the person for whom all the others are working as unconscious slaves. He is certain to be some poor devil of a painter, poet, or philosopher. But he, alone of all the household, is having a little fun and a little freedom. All the others are wasting their lives in merely holding up the house for him. It is their downstairs dullness that makes possible the existence of the high-perched, rain-echoing attic.

Little can be said in favour of the typical attic-dweller. Since he is, in most cases, a painter, a poet, or a philosopher, he is likely to disbelieve in the creed of evangelical democracy and modern progress. He can definitely be called anti-social. Mr. Henry Ford and Mr. William Jennings Bryan, as a jury of two, would instantly find him guilty on any charge whatever; and Mr. Calvin Coolidge, as presiding magistrate, would properly order his immediate hanging by the enthusiastic multitude.

Yet this effort would really be wasted. Probably some other man would come along to take his place in the attic. The attic dweller is a recurrent type, and one which, for better or for worse, it is impossible to dispense with. For it is clear that every house must have a roof, if only to keep off the wrath of God; and under every roof there must be an attic; and so long as attics exist, there will be delightful people who will choose to live in them.