It is absolutely necessary that, whether artistic or not, the hall should be scrupulously tidy and as scrupulously clean; and I do not know a more difficult thing than to insist on the former of these two axioms, and to see one’s orders are carried out, especially when there are boys and dogs—those two fatal elements to tidiness and cleanliness, but which are absolutely necessary to the making of a complete house. One may go out leaving a spotless place, with no débris to offend the eye, but one returns to find it scattered over with hats and caps, tennis rackets, bats and stumps, paw and footmarks, and a general air of distracting dirt all over, that is absolutely trying to the eye, that fondly hopes to see what it left; and the only way to cope with the human element is to make a species of pound, into which all is put, and from whence nothing can be extracted without the payment of some small fine. I have known a week’s pocket money go in one morning, but, as a rule, very few lessons are required; the unfailing exactment of a fine teaching even a boy that there is a place for everything and that everything must be put in that place. The dogs and footmarks have to be put up with, and I have known an unhappy kitchenmaid wash the front doorsteps five single times in one day, when the boys have been at home, and rain has, as is usual in Watford, been falling dismally. A back staircase is another thing no house should be built without. This spares the hall immensely, and saves the best stair-carpet, and prevents one meeting the servants as one goes up and down—a thing I personally very much object to. I don’t know why, but I resent hearing them go up to bed past the drawing-room door, and owe our present house yet another grudge, because, for the first time in our lives, we have here no second staircase. If there should be one, I again advise the oilcloth dado spoken of in my former book; nothing is so absolutely indestructible, or so clean, and with this dado a wall would remain tidy and spotless for an entire lifetime. A strong cocoanut matting should be put down on the stairs themselves, but the edges of the stairs should be carefully inspected, as back stairs, especially, are apt to be very roughly finished off; if this is the case, a carpenter should be called in, either to plane them smoothly, or mend them, or a wide, broad piece of brass should bind the edges; these, again, should have a pad of flock in a thin lining laid along them, finally covered with the cocoanut matting. These small precautions will not cost very much, but will certainly add immensely to the chances of the longevity of the carpets. It would be a good thing to have the ‘treads’ of the back stairs grained and varnished; but those in the principal staircase should always be painted white with Aspinall’s water-paint. This gives an indescribably clean and fresh look to the stairs, and the paint is so easily applied that the housemaid could do it herself yearly, or whenever an opportunity offers to re-paint the treads. Housekeepers should, in my opinion, raise a statue to Aspinall, for he certainly has removed the difficulties that lay in wait for the would-be artistic mistress of the household; for now she is rendered quite independent of the British workman, and can either paint her house herself, or give it to a man who can be trusted to apply the paint, albeit no amount of instruction will teach him to match a colour or produce anything save a hideous caricature of the paper we give him, and whose ‘heye’ is absolutely incapable of seeing what a ridiculous muddle he is making; and I, therefore, cannot too often impress upon my readers, especially on those who live far from really artistic workpeople, that if they want their houses to be really nice, they must indulge in Aspinall, and must insist on the unbroken, unpicked-out surface of paint that use of this most invaluable enamel produces most satisfactorily.
CHAPTER III.
NOOKS AND CORNERS.
I think so very much of the appearance of our rooms depends on how we arrange our corners that I have had two large drawings made from corners in my present house, which, at the risk of appearing egotistical, I am going to write about; not because I consider them perfect—no house can really be perfect unless far more money is spent upon it than I am able to spend—but because I consider they will in some measure assist those who, like myself, are very fond of pretty and comfortable things, but are not prepared to ruin themselves in order to obtain this most desirable combination. I wrote so fully in my former book on the arrangement of sitting-rooms that I am only going to touch lightly on the orthodox papering and painting of dining-, drawing-, and morning-rooms, reserving all my new ideas for the billiard-room and library, neither of which rooms were considered likely to be required for the modest young couple starting in life, for whom I more particularly designed that special volume.
As I said before, this book is intended for older folks, or for those who have more of this world’s goods than Edwin and Angelina were supposed to possess; and, therefore, it really supplements—it does not in any measure do away with—‘From Kitchen to Garret;’ and as I am most anxious to impress this upon my readers by not repeating any of the information I gave there, I intend especially in the present chapter to denote how, with a little care, the modest house can be expanded into a more artistic abode, or how a bigger house can be furnished, the while we do not set on one side the furniture with which we began life, and which we possessed ourselves of with so much gladness and with such a sense of importance—at least, I hope all my readers did, for the culture of home and of all that makes a home cannot, in my opinion, be too much developed. Therefore, from their earliest days children should be encouraged to think about their own special rooms, and should be taught to notice and have a voice in the arrangement of all the house. If the house is thoroughly appreciated and cultivated, if, above all, it is the prettiest and happiest place our children know of, we shall not have much difficulty with them when they cease to be children and begin to feel they have a separate existence to ours. They have this separate existence, and we should endeavour that, without in any measure relaxing the ties of duty and politeness, they should be able to feel they are themselves and not our bond-slaves; and this can only be done by consulting and talking with them freely about all we have and do, letting them, if they will, develop their own tastes gradually, but not in a manner that will oust us from our proper place or jar with any of our own pet ideas on the subject of home and its decoration and embellishment; for it is better to endure the ugliest place in the world cheerfully than to live in artistic completeness, if this same artistic completeness means sweeping away all the landmarks of our elders and betters, and leaving them stranded in an unfamiliar world of new tables and chairs, which are nothing to them, and but ill replace the furniture which reminds them of so much that we never knew about or have entirely forgotten. I have known a girl in her zeal for beauty make her mother so abjectly miserable by removing a round table, once the centre of the scattered houseful of boys and girls, and by ruthlessly disposing of clumsy and hideous furniture, made precious by memories of those who have gone into the land of shadows, that I am compelled at times to allow sentiment to sway me and to say, Consider first whether a thing has associations before, in one’s anxiety for beauty, one does away with it. If it have, let it remain, for nothing can ever replace it; but if it have not (and I sternly myself refuse to become sentimental over a chair or footstool), by all means get rid of it, and replace it with something lighter and more modern. As a rule, this will not last long enough for us to cling round it mentally or to deck it with any of the finer sentiment that is inseparable from much of the heavy mahogany and walnut under which so many of my disciples still groan, and which has been handed down from one generation to another, each generation becoming more and more discontented with it, until the present are in open revolt against that which gave our grandmothers and great-grandmothers the greatest possible gratification to possess.
The pretty corners in which we all delight, and the lightness and brightness that now characterise our houses, would have been the source of endless woe and trouble to the dear ladies of old. The corners would have meant dust and ‘gimcracks,’ and as the light colours in which we revel would and do soon become soiled, they, too, would have been deprecated because they showed the dirt, which was present equally in the darker rooms, but not being visible was not taken any notice of until the annual clean, when all was made aggressively shining and absolutely spotless, remaining so for about a week, when dust began to gather again, but it was unnoticed because the dark materials did not show the dirt, which, however, could be felt, did our finger come in contact with the rough moreen or dismal repps in which their souls delighted, and of which specimens still haunt us in the houses of those who are possessors of similar heirlooms with which they dare not part.
Then, too, the dear ladies were so fond of stuffing up their windows and darkening their rooms still more by the drawing down of blinds and the eliminating of every morsel of sunshine, for fear their precious carpets would become faded; and I am sorry to say that this affection for half-dark rooms yet lingers among many who ought to know better. But when I stumble into one of these rooms, where one cannonades against the furniture and falls over footstools in the half-light, I always feel convinced that the blinds are drawn to prevent the sun beating too warmly on the faded complexion of the owner of that house, or to hide the ravages of time, that the liberally applied pearl-powder and rouge and the sticky harsh dye are powerless to remove entirely, but that almost disappear in the rose-tinted chambers I so abhor and despise; and I therefore know what to expect when I am ushered into one of these stuffy, dismal rooms, and am thankful when I get out of it; for the mind that can delight in defying age with paint and dye is not likely to find me of the smallest use. I should say at once, Do away with the blinds and shorten the curtains, and let in some air; and as the owner of that house would sooner dye—I mean die—than accede to my request, I have nothing to say to her, and get away as soon as I can. Any amount of decoration for the house I like and appreciate, but I cannot appreciate or understand the ambition that makes one Aspinall one’s face and pretend to be five-and-twenty when one knows one will never see forty again.
Corners are especially appreciated, unfortunately, by the ladies who draw their blinds down and never face the eye of day save in a carriage, with a spotted veil over their features and a shading parasol, and no doubt some of these individuals will look at the pictures in this book and may see these words of wisdom; if they do, I hope they will consider them, wash their faces, and pull up their blinds. I can assure them they will be far happier and healthier, more especially if they realise that the time they spend in tiring their heads and painting their faces is absolutely wasted—it neither makes them younger nor more ornamental—and that it would be far better employed in working for others, or in making their homes as cheerful as unfailing sunshine and fresh air invariably do. Therefore, down with the curtains and up with the blinds, and let us have as much cheerful sunshine as this rather disappointing climate will allow us to possess, and the first corner I would make is the summer corner, for, that once made, dismal darkness and stuffiness would be an impossibility.
The special corner illustrated here is one of the windows in my present morning-room, which is at the end of the room, in a curious species of square nook to itself; there is an enormous species of bow-window beside, where I have my desk and other belongings, and beyond that again is a third window, below which I have a long book-case full of books; but though this window is to some extent unique, the seat illustrated here, which is an adaptation or rather an enlargement of Giles’ ‘Cosy Corner,’ could be put under any window and of course enlarged immensely; if desired, it could go across one side of the room, and the arm with a curtain could come out straight from the wall of the room, thus making a sheltered place in which to sit and read; and breaking up admirably the long straight look of the wall, which all too often makes an ordinary room the most uninteresting place in the world, and the most difficult to render artistic and pleasant. The right-hand side of the seat should be at least two feet longer than the left-hand side, or else the seat will look too much like a family pew, which cognomen one of my friends is rude enough to give to my present seat, but arranged with the ends of an uneven length, the seat looks like nothing save what it is—a remarkably comfortable lounge, where one can either sit and read or talk, and it forms an extremely pretty addition to any room.
The special seat illustrated here is enamelled Aspinall’s electric turquoise, and is upholstered in Colbourne’s yellow and white Louis XVI. damask, at 2s. 11½d. a yard, but I intend soon to replace this covering by dark yellow stamped