'You would go distracted in two weeks in a place that was "sheer, luxurious comfort" and nothing else,' returned Honoria decidedly. 'You would hate it as you hate everything smug and fat and complacent. I have known you too long, Martha, not to know the ways of you with a house. To satisfy you, a domicile has to be livable. If you consider all the houses, little and big, of your friends, you will see that there are fixed limits to the amount of space in them that is truly and pleasantly habitable. You can't get the lovable "lived-in look" in rooms where you do not actually live, and you can't live all over a house that is bigger than your needs. Why! life isn't long enough, especially if you seldom stay at home! Think how dreary are most of the great houses we know. Consider Mrs. King's new marble palace with its commanding site and its ninety rooms. There isn't a single spot in it except her own bed-room and sitting-room that wouldn't give your spirit a congestive chill if you sat there for an hour. I know a woman in Colorado who so loathed her big new house as it left the hands of a New York decorator, that she would have moved back into the old one if she hadn't been afraid of her friends' laughter. And, Grace, even inherited homesteads are sometimes as difficult as uncongenial kin. Old houses have ways and wills of their own.'
'Houses are curious things,' said Grace. 'We take a morsel of illimitable space and wall it in and roof it over. Suddenly it ceases to be part of God's out-of-doors and becomes an entity with an atmosphere of its own. We warm it with our fires, we animate it with our affections, we furnish it with such things as seem good in our eyes. We do this to get shelter for our bodies, but we acquire as well an instrument for our spirits that reacts on us in its turn.'
'In other words,' returned Honoria, warming to her subject, 'as we live our way into a house, adapting it to our need, the bricks and mortar, the paint and plaster, cease to be inert matter and become alive. Superficial sociologists have taunted woman with being "more anabolic or plant-like" than man, but I count it her second glory. The plant is an organism that "slowly turns lifeless into living matter," and this is the thing that woman has done from the beginning with her shelter! In our houses we achieve almost an organic extension of our very selves. That is part of what I was trying to say. But, obviously, there should exist some reasonable ratio between the self and its extensions. I take it, the modern multitude of overgrown mansions, like the Kings' or the Clays' or even Adelaide's smaller dwelling,—all these places whose owners never find out why they are not at home in them,—are symptoms of our modern disease of materialism. The essence of that disease is the desire to grasp more matter than the spirit can fully animate. That the infection can lay hold on Adelaide shows how all-pervading it is, gripping the just as well as the unjust. When I saw her tired and dissatisfied; when I felt the lack of charm and quality in the house, and remembered how full of both her old house and garden had been, I tried to think it out. It all works around to just this: you can't have quality, you can't have charm in your material environment unless you put them into it yourself. It is a plain question of your ability to choose, arrange and vitalize things. And the latter requisite is by far the most important of the three. For I have really seen, with these eyes, poor, mean rooms where absolutely nothing was beautiful or noteworthy, so charged with a gracious and comforting personality that you forgot their shabbiness and said, "What a home-like place!" Please note that that is the adjective we always use of places that draw us by their personality—as if personality and nothing else were the essence of home.
'Now Adelaide's old house had personality; it was completely vitalized. It was all under her hand, and as high as her heart. But Adelaide's big new house is as yet barren and chilly, for it is not vitalized at all. Of course I know that after she has lived in it longer, it is bound to improve, because it is her nature to humanize and modify all her surroundings. But the crucial question is—how big a house can she humanize? Something bigger than a cottage probably—but certainly something much smaller than a hotel. The longer I looked at this question, the more it seemed to me that unconsciously I had put my finger on the vital query that, in the ideal state, should underlie all property, all education, all privilege.
'I have been talking about houses,—they are the most intimate, the most organic of a woman's possessions,—but the argument applies to all we own. It is the mark of our era to want more of everything than we can use, yet when we get the Too-Much we demand, we are crushed by it, as Tarpeia was crushed by the shields.'
'I have often thought' said Grace, 'that the sheer, brute mass of life—of people to know, of books to read, of plays to hear, of pictures to see, of things to do, buy, learn, enjoy—within reach of the well-to-do person in the modern world, far outruns the capacity of any human being to take it in and make of it the sane whole that a life should be.'
'Yes—yet we go crazily on, trying to expand to illimitable possibilities, thinking we shall be happier so soon as we have discarded all our present belongings and opportunities for bigger, newer, richer ones. How many people do you know who have not met a substantial increase of income with a corresponding enlargement of their whole scale of living, a senseless expansion sometimes out-running their increased ability to provide for it? There is no future but chaos for a society with such ambitions. They are centrifugal and can only lead to disintegration.
'The truth is, we have no notion of the value and necessity of a doctrine of limitations. Just as an illustration—not once in all the mass of matter printed in the last twenty years about the gyro-car, the aeroplane or other inventions capable of enormous swiftness, have I seen the faintest intimation that human beings could not intelligently direct a speed of two hundred miles an hour—yet the railroads are now tardily discovering that the capacity of engineers is seriously taxed by sixty miles!
'Don't mistake my meaning. I am not preaching the moral value of poverty. I am no convert to asceticism. That method of ridding one's self of the overweight of the material life is too extreme to the correct solution. I am simply calling attention with all my might to the æsthetic and vital value of Not-Too-Much. I am not afraid of Enough. I am greatly afraid of Too-Much. And the reason I am afraid is this:—
'Just as the capacity of the human stomach is limited to a certain quantity of food, so also is limited the capacity of the human spirit for appropriating and assimilating property in its different forms. Beyond a certain somewhat variable point, material possessions do the holder no more good. The common saying, "All you get in this world is your board and clothes," is the popular acknowledgment of this restricted capacity. The affirmation of bounds to our capacity holds good as regards the property of the mind—education, cultivation, æsthetic satisfactions—just as it does of material goods. There is a definite limit to what we can effectively make our own. Beyond that limit, possession is a detriment.'