Whatever may be the reason, however, there is no doubt that the keen, clean chill of an English April day, especially when the wind is in the east (_pace_ Mr. Jarndyce), brings to us an exaltation of spirit that surpasses the exhilaration of wine, and at the same time renders us impatient with mustiness and fustiness, intolerant of domestic stuffiness, and frankly disgusted with the pungent, prickly vapours of intimate humanity in the mass. The wind on the hilltop is our aspiration, our ideal. Hence, maybe, the Public Health Acts, and also the national tub.
The use of the domestic bath is, we must not forget, a social revolution of our own day and generation. Our grandfathers ventured upon a bath only when it seemed to be called for—by others. Our grandmothers, with their clean, white cotton or linen undergarments, had, or thought they had, even less need for it. Besides, in their prim and bashful eyes the necessary denudation antecedent to total immersion would have amounted, even when they were alone, to something like gross indecency. Before their time, again, in the eighteenth century, matters were even worse, for the society ladies of that day painted their faces _instead_ of washing them, and mitigated the effects of seldom-changed underclothing by copiously drenching themselves with musk and other reliable perfumes. (I am told, however, that even to-day fashionable ladies refrain from washing their faces!)
The domestic bathroom is the direct offspring of the gravitation water-supply and the modern system of drainage. Buy an old house, and you will have to convert one of the bedrooms into your bathroom, and, to this day, you must carry your bath with you if you go to reside in certain of the Oxford colleges.
I can myself remember in my younger days in Scotland an old doctor having his first bath in the palatial surroundings of a modern bathroom. Not in his own house, needless to say! After a patient and particular inspection of all the glittering taps of “shower,” “spray,” “plunge,” and what not, he commended his spirit to the Higher Powers—or rather, I fear, according to his wont, for he was not of the Holy Willie persuasion, to the keeping of those of the Nether Regions. Then he proceeded gingerly to insert into the steaming water first of all his toes, then his feet, next his ankles, and so bit by bit, until, greatly daring, he had committed his entire body to the deep—to emerge as soon as possible! He was no coward, let me tell you, in the ordinary run of life. But this was his first bath in the altogether since his primal post-natal plunge. His first bath! And his last! It nearly killed him, he said; never in all his life had he felt so bad, and not for a thousand pounds would he repeat the experiment!