I myself should like to see every beautiful thing common. I should love to know that all the world saw, possessed, and cared for art colours and art furniture, and had nice tastes, and I look forward to a time when even our poor brethren will appreciate all the inexpensive lovelinesses that are to be had now by those who know where to get them, and I trust that some day free art exhibitions and lectures may teach them what real beauty is, and so enlighten and enliven lives that at present are of the dullest and most sober description.
In stating that life itself may be changed by sunshine and by cheerful surroundings, and that even the bitter lot of the poor would be bettered by art, I am aware I lay myself open to the same jeers that greeted the Kyrle Society—that blessed society that, regardless of cold water, goes on its way, giving of its talents to the sick and needy; but I maintain my position for all that, and regardless of the ridicule levelled at them, anent sunflowers and dadoes taking the place of bread and clothes, I point to the hospital wards, transformed from bare whitewashed prisons into artistic, charming, home-like rooms, and I should like to have the statistics given me of all who have recovered there, and the time they took to recover in, in the two different aspects of the walls, being perfectly certain that there would be more and quicker recoveries in the reign of the Kyrle Society than when the wearied, suffering creatures had nothing to look at or think about save their own painful, cruel lot.
Or if you wish another example still, take the well-known famous description of the sour tempers and hard days possessed and lived by Thomas Carlyle and his wife, and then go and inspect the house in which they lived together for some thirty-eight years. The house itself is delightful—an old-world place, full of beautiful corners—and could be made charming with a little money and taste, but the hideous paper and paint still lingering behind them, the dark windows, in some cases half-filled with ground glass to keep out the view of a building that looks singularly like a workhouse—all accounted to me for a great deal of Mrs. Carlyle’s ill-health and low spirits, and for a vast quantity of Mr. Carlyle’s dyspepsia and ill-tempered behaviour; for he could be nothing else in sunless rooms and with walls papered in the ugly, depressing manner in which he doubtless considered them satisfactory, or, still more likely, thought that any paper did as long as the walls were covered.
Therefore, in selecting house and furniture, and choosing your rooms and appropriating them, remember the first thing is to be cheerful. Dark days will come in life to us all, but they will not be hopeless and too dreadful to be endured if we cultivate a cheerful, contented spirit, and insist on having cheerful surroundings.
Do you recollect, I wonder, the orthodox dining-rooms of twenty-five years ago?—the heavy, thick curtains of red or green cloth or moreen damask; the tremendous mahogany sideboard, generally with a cellarette underneath it, which, I recollect, made an admirable tomb in which to bury one’s dolls or obnoxious books, generally triumphantly taken from the schoolroom; the chairs that required two people to lift them; the carpet that seemed immovable, and that was too heavy to be shaken more than once a year; and the woolly-bear hearthrug that always smelt of dust, and that was a receptacle for all sorts of cinders, toy-bricks, leaden soldiers, and bones dragged in and buried there by a delinquent dog or cat? Why, the mere shaking of that rug once a week resulted in the discovery of all sorts of treasures that had been lost, and the dust that came out was enough to choke the neighbourhood, and doubtless would have done so had the other inhabitants not all been engaged with their own. Ah! if you do not all of you remember the dining-room of the past, I do; but never without a shudder, or a wonder how we managed to live in such a dark and dusty atmosphere, where work, reading, drawing, and writing all had to be hustled out of sight and out of the way of the parlour-maid, who came to ‘lay the cloth,’ and renew the foul odours, which had only just been exorcised, which breakfast had left behind it to poison the morning with. I should think that domestic furniture was at its very lowest depths of despair then; but that is thirty years ago, or perhaps forty, and nothing turned the tide for quite twenty years!
In the beginning of those evil days the graceful furniture of Chippendale and Sheraton was pushed away and consigned to attics, or sold cheaply at country auctions to fit up inn parlours or rooms behind shops; and the heavy ‘handsome’ furniture of mahogany and damask bore down upon us, and made us for a time the most depressed of people, heavy with our ugly furnishings, and the mock of all nations that had better taste and lighter hearts than we were possessed of.
It would take too long to trace the gradual development of taste and cheerfulness since then, neither do I know to whom is due our present state of emancipation and love of pretty things, but even sixteen years ago light was only just beginning to be vouchsafed to us. Now it is impossible to buy an ugly thing in good shops, and each person’s house is no longer the reflection of one particular upholsterer’s shop or of one particular style; but it is a carefully arranged shrine, cared for and looked after, and judiciously managed by the owner, who, if she have not taste herself, is now shamed into using some one else’s, by the contrast she cannot help seeing her home presents to all the others into which she enters; and one of the most hopeless people I know, who began life with gilt legs to her chairs and a collection of family plate (plated) on her sideboard, has become unobtrusive, even if she can never be tasteful, simply by seeing how different her own notions were to those of the cleverer people with whom circumstances brought her into contact!
However, this chapter will become too long if I relate any more ‘fearful examples,’ and, impressing on my readers the great necessity of sunshine and cheerfulness in their scheme of furnishing, I will pass on to the subject of the house itself, which must be most carefully chosen after long and deliberate inspection thereof, as I remarked before; one of the most necessary of all mottoes to be recollected in starting in life being, ‘Do nothing in a hurry. More haste, less speed.’