My Garden of Peace has never been one of “peace at any price.” I have happily been compelled to give the most inflexible attention to the price of everything. I like those books on garden design which tell you how easily you can get leaden figures and magnificent chased vases of bronze if you wish, but perhaps you would prefer carved stone. You have only to go to a well-known importer with a cheque-book and a consciousness of a workable bank balance, and the thing is done. So you will find in the pre-war cookery books the recipe beginning: “Take two dozen new-laid eggs, a quart of cream, and a pint of old brandy,” etc. These bits of advice make very good reading, and doubtless may be read with composure by some people, but I am not among their number.
That table, with the twelve panels and a heavy pedestal set on castors, cost me exactly half a crown at an auction. When new it was probably bought for twelve or fourteen pounds: it is by no means a piece of work of the highest class; for a first-class inlaid table one would have to pay something like forty or fifty pounds: I have seen one fetch £150 at an auction. But my specimen happened to be the Lot 1 in the catalogue, and people had not begun to warm to their bidding, marble, as I have already said, is regarded as cold. Another accident that told against its chances of inspiring a buyer was the fact that the pedestal wanted a screw, without which the top would not be in its place, and this made people think it imperfect and incapable of being put right except at great expense. The chief reason for its not getting beyond the initial bid was, however, that no one wanted it. The mothers, particularly those of “the better class,” in Yardley, are lacking in imagination. If they want a deal table for a kitchen, they will pay fifteen shillings for one, and ten shillings for a slab of marble to make their pastry on; but they would not give half a crown for a marble table which would serve for kitchen purposes a great deal better than a wooden one, and make a baking slab—it usually gets broken within a month—unnecessary.
Why I make so free a use of marble and advise others to do so, is not merely because I admire it in every form and colour, but because it can be bought so very cheaply upon occasions—infinitely more so than Portland or Bath stone. These two rarely come into the second-hand market, and in the mason's yard a slab is worth so much a square foot or a cubic foot. But people are now constantly turning out their shapeless marble mantelpieces and getting wooden ones instead, and the only person who will buy the former is the general dealer, and the most that he will give for one that cost £10 or £12 fifty years ago is 10s. or 12s. I have bought from dealers or builders possibly two dozen of these, never paying more than 10s. each for the best—actually for the one which I know was beyond question the best, I paid 6s., the price at which it was offered to me. An exceptionally fine one of statuary marble with fluted columns and beautifully carved Corinthian capitals and panels cost me 10s. This mantelpiece was discarded through one of those funny blunders which enable one to get a bargain. The owner of the house fancied that it was a production of 1860, when it really was a hundred years earlier. There are marble mantelpieces and marble mantelpieces. Some fetch 10s. and others £175. I knew a dealer who bought a large house solely to acquire the five Bossi mantelpieces which it contained. Occasionally one may pick up an eighteenth century crystal chandelier which has been discarded on the supposition that it was one of those shapeless and tasteless gasaliers which delighted our grandmothers in the days of rep and Berlin wool.
But from these confessions I hope no one will be so ungenerous as to fancy that my prediction for marble is to be accounted for only because of the chances of buying it cheaply. While I admit that I prefer buying a beautiful thing for a tenth of its value, I would certainly refuse to have anything to do with an ugly thing if it were offered to me for nothing. But the beauty of marble is unassailable. It has been recognised in every quarter of the world for thousands of years. The only question upon which opinion is divided is in regard to its suitability to the English climate. In this connection I beg leave to record my experience. I take it for granted that when I allude to marble, it will not be supposed that I include that soft gypsum—sulphate of lime—which masquerades under the name of alabaster, and is carved with the tools of a woodcarver, supplemented by a drill and a file, in many forms by Italian craftsmen. This material will last in the open air very little longer than the plaster of Paris, by which its numerous component parts are held together. It is worth nothing. True alabaster is quite a different substance. It is carbonate of lime and disintegrates very slowly. The tomb of Machiavelli in the Santa Croce in Florence is of the true alabaster, as are all the fifteenth and sixteenth century sarcophagi in the same quarter of the church; but none can be said to have suffered materially. It was widely used in memorial tablets three hundred or four hundred years ago. Shakespeare makes Othello refer to the sleeping Desdemona,—
“That whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.”
We know that it was the musical word “alabaster” that found favour with Shakespeare, just as it was, according to Miss Ethel Smyth, Mus. Doc., the musical word “Tipperary,” that helped to make a song containing that word a favourite with Shakespeare's countrymen, who have never been found lacking in appreciation of a musical word or a rag-time inanity.