But however that may be, the fact remains. Since this queer old world of ours began, men and women have fallen in love with all sorts of strange things; but there is no record of any man or woman yet having really fallen in love with a roll of linoleum. Of everything else about the house you get very fond. I can understand a man shedding tears when his arm-chair has to go to the sale-room or the scrap-heap. Robert Louis Stevenson once told the story of his favourite chair until he moved his schoolboy audience to tears! And everybody knows how Dickens makes you laugh and cry at the drollery and pathos with which, in all his books, he invests chairs, tables, clocks, pictures, and every other article of furniture. I fancy I should feel life to be less worth living if I were deprived of some of the household odds and ends with which all my felicity [50] seems to be mysteriously associated. But I cannot conceive of myself as yielding to even a momentary sensation of tenderness over the sale, destruction, or exchange of any of the linoleums. I feel perfectly certain that neither Stevenson nor Dickens would ever have felt an atom of sentiment concerning linoleum. Yet why? Few things about the house are more serviceable. I could point offhand to a hundred things no one of which has earned its right to a place in the home one-hundredth part as nobly as has the linoleum. Yet I am very fond of each of those hundred things, whilst I am not at all fond of the linoleum. I appreciate it, but I do not love it. So there it is! Said I not truly that love is never utilitarian? We grow fond of things because we grow fond of things; we never grow fond of things simply because they are of use to us.
But we cannot in decency let the matter rest at that. There must be some reason for the failure of the linoleum to stir my affections. Why does it alone, among my household goods and chattels, kindle no warmth within my soul? The linoleum is both pretty and useful; what more can I want? Many things pretty, but not useful, have swept me off my feet. Many things useful, but not pretty, have captivated my heart. And more than once things neither pretty nor useful have completely enslaved me. Yet here is the linoleum, both pretty [51] and useful, and I feel for it no fondness whatsoever; I remain as cold as ice, and as hard as adamant. Why is it? To begin with, I fancy the pattern has something to do with it. I do not now refer to any particular pattern; but to all the linoleum patterns that were ever designed.
Those endless squares and circles and diamonds and stars! Could anything be more repelling? Here, for instance, on the linoleum, I find a star. I know at once that if I look I shall see hundreds of similar stars. They will all be in perfectly straight lines, not one a quarter of an inch out of its place. They will all be mathematically equidistant; they will be of exactly the same size, of identically the same colour, and their angles will all point in precisely the same direction. If the stars in the firmament above us were arranged on the same principle, they would drive us mad. The beauty of it is that, there, one star differeth from another star in glory. But on the linoleum they do nothing of the sort.
Or perhaps the pattern is a floral one. It thinks to coax me into a feeling that I am in the garden among the roses, the rhododendrons, or the chrysanthemums. But it is a hopeless failure. Whoever saw roses, rhododendrons, or chrysanthemums, all of exactly the same size, of precisely the same colour, and hanging in rows at mathematically identical levels? The beauty of the garden is [52] that having looked at this rose, I am the more eager to see that one; having admired this chrysanthemum, I am the more curious to mark the variety presented by the next. No two are precisely the same. And because this infinite diversity is the essential charm both of the heavens above and of the earth beneath, I am shocked and repelled by the monotony of the pattern on the linoleum. In the old days it was customary to plaster the walls, even of sick-rooms, with papers of patterns equally pronounced, and many a poor patient was tortured almost to death by the glaring geometrical abominations. The doctor said that the sufferer was to be kept perfectly quiet; yet the pattern on the wall is allowed to scream at him and shout at him from night until morning, and from morning until night. He has counted those awful stars or roses, perpendicularly, horizontally, diagonally, from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and from bottom to top, until the hideous monstrosities are reproduced in frightful duplicate upon the fevered tissues of his throbbing brain. He may close his eyes, but he sees them still. It was a form of torture worthy of an inquisitor-general. The pattern on the linoleum is happily not quite so bad. When we are ill we do not see it; and when we are well we may to some extent avoid it. Not altogether; for even if we do not look at it, we have an uncanny feeling [53] that it is there. Between the hearthrug and the table I catch sight of the bright flaunting head of a scarlet poppy, or of the tossing petals of a huge chrysanthemum, and my imagination instantly flashes to my mind the horrible impression of tantalizing rows of exactly similar blossoms running off with mathematical precision in every conceivable direction.
For some reason or other we instinctively recoil from these monotonous regularities. I once heard a friend observe that the average woman would rather marry a man whose life was painfully irregular than a man whose life was painfully regular. It may have been an over-statement of the case; but there is something in it. We fall in love with good people, and we fall in love with bad people; but with the man who is ‘too proper,’ and the woman who is ‘too straight-laced,’ we very, very rarely fall in love. It is the problem of Tennyson’s ‘Maud.’ As a girl Maud was irregular—and lovable.
Maud, with her venturous climbings and tumbles and childish escapes,
Maud, the delight of the village, the ringing joy of the Hall,
Maud, with her sweet purse-mouth when my father dangled the grapes,
Maud, the beloved of my mother, the moon-faced darling of all.
[54] But later on Maud was regular—and as unattractive as linoleum.