The common mistake in our houses is, that they are designed, as inexperienced persons choose their paper-hangings, to be something of themselves, and not as mere background, as they should be. Thus it is that people seek to beautify their houses by ornamenting them, as a vulgar person sticks himself over with jewelry. A man's house is only a wider kind of dress; and as we do not call a man well-dressed when we are forced to see his dress before we see him, so a house cannot be satisfactory when it isolates itself from its inmates and from the landscape. In such houses, the more effort the worse they are; they may cheat us for the moment, but the oftener we see them the less we like them. Does not the uncomfortable sensation with which fine houses so often oppress us arise from the vague feeling that the owner has built himself out of his house, and his house out of the landscape?
Hence it is mostly the novices that build the fine houses. A man of sense, I think, will generally build his second house plainer than his first. Not that he desires, perhaps, any the less what he desired before, but he is more alive to the difficulties and to the cost, and takes refuge in the safety of a lower scale. His experience has taught him that where he succeeded best he was really farthest from the end he sought. The fine house requires that its accessories should be in kind. All things within and without, the approach, the grounds, the furniture, must be brought up to the same pitch, and kept there. And when all is done, it is not done, but forever demands retouching. What is got in this kind cannot be paid for with money, nor finished once for all, but is a never-sated absorbent of time, thought, life. And it attacks the owner, too; he must conform, in his dress, his equipage, and his habits generally; he must be as fine as his house. The nicer his taste the more any incongruity will offend him, and the greater the danger of his becoming more or less an appendage to his house.
Much of that chronic ailment of our society, the "trials of housekeeping," is traceable to this source. This is a complicated trouble, and probably other causes have their share in it. But we cannot fail to recognize in these seemingly accidental obstructions a stern, but beneficent adjustment of our circumstances to enforce a simplicity which we should else neglect. One cannot greatly deprecate the terrors of high rents and long bills, and the sufferings from clumsy and careless domestics, if they help to keep down senseless profusion and display.
Our problem is, in truth, one of greater difficulty than at first appears. For we are each of us striving to do, by the skill and forethought of one man, what naturally accomplishes itself in a succession of generations and with the aid of circumstances. It is from our freedom that the trouble arises. Were our society composed of few classes, widely and permanently distinct, a fitting style for each would naturally arise and become established and perfected. There would be fewer occasions for new houses, and the new house would be less novel in style, and so two difficulties would be overcome. For novelty of style is a drawback to effect, as tending to isolate the house; and a new house is always at a disadvantage. Nature, in any case, is slow to adopt our handiwork into the landscape; sometimes the assimilation is so difficult that it must be ruined for its original purpose before it will be accepted. Sooner or later, indeed, it will be accepted. For though most of our buildings seem even in decay to resist the harmonizing hand of Nature, and to grow only ghastly and not venerable in dilapidation, yet leave them long enough and what of beauty was possible to them will appear, though it be only a crumbling heap of bricks where the chimney stood, or the grassy slope where the cellar-wall has fallen in.
It is for this reason that persons of taste have taken pains to face their houses with weather-stained and lichen-crusted stone, or invent proper names for them, in imitation of the English manor-houses. But Nature is jealous of this helping, and neither the lichens nor the names will stick, for the reason that they never grew there. They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their conditions. The gray ancestral houses of England are the beautiful symbols of the permanence of family and of caste. They are the embodiments of traditional institutions and culture. When we speak of the House of Stanley or of Howard, the expression is not wholly figurative. We do not mean simply the men and women of these families, but the whole complex of this manifold environment which has descended to them and in the midst of which they have grown up,—no more to be separated from it than the polyp from the coral stem. All this is centralized and has its expression in the House.
Now as these conditions are not our conditions, the attempt to build fine houses is an attempt to import an effect where the cause has not existed. Our position is that of a perpetually shifting population,—the mass shifting and the individuals shifting, in place, circumstances, requirements. The movement is inevitable, and, whether desirable or not, we must conform to it. So we naturally build cheaply and slightly, that the house be not an incumbrance rather than a furtherance to our life. It is agreeable to the feelings to be well rooted and established, and the results in outward appearance are agreeable. But it is not desirable to be so niched into the rock, that a change of fortune, or even a change in the direction of a town-road, shall leave us high and dry, like the fossils of the Norwegian cliffs, but rather, like the shell-fish of our beaches, free to travel up and down with the tide.
The imitating of foreign examples comes from no real, heart-felt demand, but only from a fancied or simulated demand,—from tradition, association; at second-hand in one shape or another. It is at bottom something of the same flunkeyism that in a more exaggerated form assumes heraldic bearings and puts its servants into livery.
It may well reconcile us to our deprivation to remember at what cost these things we admire are established and kept up. The imagination is pleased with this stability; but it is bought too dear, if progress is to be sacrificed to it, if the freedom and the true lives of the members are to be merged in the family, and if they are to be the stones of which the house is built. It is not desirable to be adscriptus glebes, whether the bonds be physical or only moral ones. We may well be content to have our limits free, even though our architecture suffer for it. It is better that houses should belong to men, and not men to houses.
But whether we are content or not, it is evident that all hope of improvement lies in the tendency, somewhat noticeable of late, to the abnegation of exotic styles and graces. We have survived the Parthenon pattern, and there seems to be a prospect that we shall outlive the Gothic cottage. Even the Anglo-Italian bracketed villa has seen its palmiest days apparently, and exhausted most of its variations. We are in an extremely chaotic state just now; but there seems to be an inclination towards more rational ways, at least in the plans and general arrangement of houses.
Of course mere negation cannot carry us far. We sometimes hear it said that it is as easy for a house to look well as to look ill, and those who say this seem to think that the failure is due solely to want of due consideration of the problem on the part of our builders, and that we have but to leave out their blunders to get at a satisfactory result. But if we look at the facts of the case, we find the builders have some reason on their side.