Why not the town-house, and also the country-seat—a hibernaculum for the winter, and a villeggiatura for the summer? Unfortunately, this would involve constructing two houses, meeting a double building liability, harboring two sets of worries; and, moreover, one’s library, however modest, can not well be disarranged or periodically shifted from one place to another.
The old Latins were distinguished as we well know for their love of the country. Virgil, Ovid, Tibullus, and Terence all had their country-seats. Horace, in addition to the Sabine farm, possessed his cottage at Tivoli, and longed for a third resort at Sorrento. Pliny the Younger, and Cicero rode seventeen miles from Rome to Tusculum daily to gain repose. Pliny’s letters attest his intense fondness for rural surroundings. The holder of numerous country-houses, he has described two of them very minutely, his descriptions giving to posterity the most reliable and truthful account of the old Roman villas. Of all his villas, including those at Tusculum, Præneste, Tibur, several on Lake Como, and his Laurentine and Tuscan resorts, the two latter were his especial favorites, whose fascinations he never tires of recounting. Especially attractive is his account of Laurentium: the apartments so planned as to command the most pleasing views; the dining-room built out into the sea, ever washed by the advancing wave; the terrace before the gallery redolent with the scent of violets; the gallery itself so placed that the shadow of the building was thrown on the terrace in the forenoon; and at the end of the gallery “the little garden apartment” looking on one side to the terrace, on the other to the sea; his elaborate bath-rooms and dressing-rooms, his tennis-court and tower, and his own sleeping-room carefully constructed for the exclusion of noise. “My house is for use, and not for show,” he exclaims; “I retire to it for a little quiet reading and writing, and for the bodily rest which freshens the mind.” One side of the spacious sitting-room invited the morning, the other the afternoon sun. One room focused the sunlight the entire day. In the walls of this his study was “a book-case for such works as can never be read too often.”
The Tuscan villa was on a still more extensive scale, the house facing the south, and adorned with a broad, long colonnade, in front of which reposed a terrace embellished with numerous figures and bounded with a hedge of box from whence one descended to the lawn inclosed with evergreens shaped into a variety of forms. This, in turn, he states, was fenced in by a box-covered wall rising by step-like ranges to the top, beyond which extended the green meads, fields, and thickets of the Tuscan plain, tempered on the calmest days by the breeze from the neighboring Apennines. The dining-room on one extremity of the terrace commanded the magnificent prospect, and almost cooled the Falernian. There, too, are luxurious summer and winter rooms, a tennis-court, a hippodrome for horse exercise, shaded marble alcoves in the gardens, and the play of fountain and ripple of running water. The long epistle to Domitius Apollinaris, descriptive of the Tuscan retreat, he concludes by saying: “You will hardly think it a trouble to read the description of a place which I am persuaded would charm you were you to see it.”
It was the delightful situation and the well cared for gardens of Pliny’s country-seats, it will be seen, no less than the refined elegance and the conveniences of the splendid houses themselves, of which Pliny was mainly his own architect, that rendered them so attractive. Assuredly he must have been a most accomplished house-builder and artist-architect; for, in addition to the many practical and artistic features he has enumerated with such precision, he specifies a room so contrived that when he was in it he seemed to be at a distance from his own house. But even Pliny’s wealth and inventive resources, much as they contributed to his comfort, could not combine everything. He could not bring Laurentium to him; he must needs go to her. The daily ride of seventeen miles and back to the city must have been irksome during bad weather; and even amid all his luxury and beauty of scenery he bewails the lack of running water at Laurentium. Luxurious and convenient as were the old Roman villas, they were built with only one story, in which respect at least the modern house is an improvement upon the house of the ancients; and there yet remain other beautiful sites than those along the Tyrrhenian sea or in the vale of Ustica.
Whether the house be situated in the country or in the town, whether it be large or small, it is apparent that the site and the exposure are of primary importance. So far as situation is concerned, a rise of ground and an easterly exposure, with the living-rooms on the south side, is undoubtedly the pleasantest. During the summer the prevailing west wind blows the dust of the street in the opposite direction; during winter the living-rooms are open to the light and sun. The comfort of the house during summer, and the outer prospect from within during winter, will depend in no small degree upon the proper planting of the grounds.
Deciduous trees, and here the variety is great, will shade and cool it in summer, evergreens will furnish and warm its surroundings in winter; while for a great portion of the year the hardy flower-garden, including the shrubberies that screen the grounds from the highway, and the climbers which disburse their bloom and fragrance over its verandas and porches, will contribute largely to its beauty and attractiveness.
Somehow I can not look upon my house by itself, without including as accessories, nay, as essential parts of it, its outward surroundings and external Nature—the woods whence its joists and rafters were hewed, the earth that supplied its mortar, brick, and stone, the coal whence it derives its light and heat, the trees that ward off the wind in winter and shield it from the sun in summer, the garden which contributes its flowers, the orchards and vineyards that supply its fruits, the teeming fields and pastures that continuously yield the largess of their corn, and flocks, and herds. From each of these my house and I receive a tithe.
My purpose, however, even were I able to do the subject justice, is not to treat of the adornment of gardens, of architectural styles, expression of purpose in building, or the proper exterior form for the American town-house and country villa. There remain, nevertheless, some features of the interior of the home to which I would fain call attention, though even here, more than in the matter of the exterior, opinions necessarily differ. Every house, methinks, should possess its distinctive character, its individual sentiment or expression; and this depends less upon the architect and the professional decorator than upon the taste reflected by the occupants. And yet there is nothing so bizarre or atrocious that it will not please some; there exists nothing so perfect as to please all.
Shall the ideal house be large or small? Excellent results may follow in either case in intelligent, thoughtful hands. Where money is merely a secondary object, then the great luxuriously furnished rooms, the lofty ceilings, the grand halls and staircases, the picture gallery, the music, billiard, and ball rooms, the house of magnificent distances and perspectives. Still man is not content; for such a house, to be beautiful, calls for constant care, a retinue of servants, a blaze of light, a round of visitors and entertainments to populate its vast apartments and render it companionable. The house to entertain in and the house to live in are generally two separate things; but, of the two, you want to live in your house more than to entertain in it.
Doubtless, even to those possessed of abundant means, the medium-sized house, sufficiently roomy for all ordinary purposes and yet cosy enough for family comfort, is the most satisfactory. In daily domestic life you do not become lost and absorbed in its magnitude; and for the matter of entertainments, on a large scale, you always have the resource of a “hall,” with no further trouble beyond that of issuing the invitations and liquidating the bills. In the ideal dwelling-house of medium size even this will be dispensed with, while still preserving the charm of privacy—one has simply to add a supplementary supper-room and an ample ball-room, to be thrown open only on special occasions for the accommodation of the overflow. Thus it would be possible to avoid a barn to live in, and a cote to entertain in.