'The floor should be painted or stained and varnished all over, so as to be easily cleaned and dusted, and everything that is likely to permanently hold dust should be avoided. On the floor, thus painted, a few cheap Indian or other rugs may be laid about in places where most necessary and useful.
'Too much trouble cannot be taken to make the library a pleasant room to live in; it should have everything arranged and adapted for use and comfort, and not be stiff and dreary with any set arrangement. The panels of the cupboard doors may be filled in with Japanese lacquer-work or painted decoration, and here and there, in the recesses, nests of shelves may be fitted with projecting brackets, designed as part of them, for pieces of china, vases of flowers, or busts, and not looking like bats stuck on to a barn door.
'I must not omit to say that in the lower portion of the bookcase should be arranged drawers—not carried down to the floor, for these are inconvenient—for use for prints and valuable photographs and sketches.
'The library should be essentially home-like, with the wall-space fitted up as conveniently as possible; on the top of the bookcases or nests of shelves, spring roller-blinds might be easily arranged in the cornices to draw down at night or other times, and fasten with clips to protect and preserve the books, &c., within them.
'I might offer many other suggestions for the decoration and furniture of the rooms I have specially referred to. I trust those I have made will be of some practical use, and that, above all, you will believe that my aim throughout has been to avoid all dogmatic and set rules of fashion or design, and to insist only that truth and beauty of form and colour, combined with fitness and common sense, are the main elements of all true artistic treatment in decoration and furniture of modern houses.'[58]
Munificent Book-buying.
Nordau has estimated that, in England alone, there are from eight hundred to a thousand millionaires, and in Europe altogether, there are at least a hundred thousand persons with fortunes of a million and even more. One could hope that it might be considered a kindness now and then to remind some of these millionaires of certain openings for their money which do not, so far, seem to have occurred to them. Mr. Bernard Shaw not long since pointed out in the Contemporary Review an opening whereby an Economic Library might be established, and do great lasting honour to a possible founder. Rich men can always be found to vie with one another in lavish expenditure over a ball or a wedding. Thousands of pounds go for a racehorse and for stable management generally, and the amount we spend upon sports annually is 38,000,000l., or about a pound per head of the population. One hardly likes to say that any sum spent upon sport and outdoor life is too much, but yet this sum is out of proportion. One is jealous of horses and sport, not so much perhaps for the amount spent upon them as much as because one sees that the man who hunts and has racehorses, cares and knows about these things to the extermination of all other interests. Life becomes ill balanced, whereas it is necessary to touch life at many points. 'The strenuous scholar pure and simple,' is becoming more rare, though the type of which the late Mark Pattison was one will never quite die out. But it is not the strenuous scholar that one is so anxious to perpetuate, as it is the strenuous and scholarly man of affairs and men of trained ability who have mental muscle for parliamentary work and social problems. Such a class ought to have many recruits from among the wealthier families.
It would assist very much towards this end if men of aptitude were properly trained to act as custodians of books in private houses. The art of knowing how to use books is one which must be learnt, and when properly learnt there is very little indeed that may not be readily found to hand in a library of but small dimensions.
There are, I believe, in England twenty-two packs of staghounds, and 182 packs of foxhounds. As every one of the masters of these packs must be a rich man, I should like to know that he at any rate had a sound copy of the History of the county where he hunts; that he had in his smoking room a good Encyclopædia, with fifty other good reference books, and a hundred good novels.