People who know my house come to like it a little; people who merely
glance at it see nothing to call for comment, and so pass on....
My house not being a fine house, nor a costly house, nor what people
call an elegant house, what is there in it to describe?—O. B. BUNCE,
MY HOUSE.
I MAKE no claim that the house wherein I dwell is a perfect one; it is
my first house—a fledgling. One must build at least thrice, it has been
truly observed, to obtain the perfected dwelling, and still there will
remain room for improvement. So many things go to make up the ideal
house, it is beyond human possibility to combine them all; while even
during the process of construction one’s tastes are liable to change or
become subject to modification.
To the most of mankind a single venture is sufficient; only architects
build more than once for a pastime. For the sole office of the architect
is to plan; the province of the builder to delay. The asylums teem with
victims to the vexations of house-building. Having money to make and not
to disburse, with no further care than to complete the work in hand with
the utmost leisure, the architect and builder pass through the ordeal
unscathed, and remain to lure new victims. One exception I recall.
Picturesquely situated on the eastern coast, within hearing of the surge
and rising amid the forest-growth, stands an untenanted villa. The
imposing exterior is of massive stone, and all that unlimited wealth and
taste could contribute has been lavished upon the interior. The mansion
was completed within the specified time, but during its construction
architect and builder both died, the owner living only three days after
its completion. From the placing of the foundation-stone to the
prospective fire in the hearth—from commencement to completion—who may
foresee the possibilities? Ever man proposes while Fate disposes.
Plans look so feasible on paper, and building seems so delightfully
facile in theory—so much time, so much money, and your long-dreamed-of
castle in Spain is a reality. But, like the quest of a German professor
I once knew who was searching for a wife who must be rich, beautiful,
young, angelic, and not afraid of a mouse, the perfect house is
difficult to attain; while plans often resemble the summer excursions
one takes with the mind during winter, apparently so easy to carry out
and yet so unfrequently realized. We forget the toilsome climb up the
mountain where we arrive, perchance, to find the view shrouded in mist;
or a cold spell sets in when we reach the seashore; or heavy rains
render the long-contemplated angling trip a dismal failure.
If we leave the house to the architect, he builds merely for himself—he
builds _his_ house, not yours. You must be the idealist of your own
ideal. “Our so-called architects,” says Richard Jefferies, “are mere
surveyors, engineers, educated bricklayers, men of hard, straight ruler
and square, mathematically accurate, and utterly devoid of feeling. You
call in your practical architect, and he builds you a brick box. The
princes of Italy knew better; they called in the poet and the painter,
the dreamers, to dream for them.” How the penetrating insight of
Montaigne pierced the mask of the architect: “The Merchant thrives not
but by the licentiousness of youth; the Husbandman but by dearth of
corne; the Architect but by the ruine of houses!”
Perhaps the easiest way out of the difficulty is to secure a house
already constructed that will meet your requirements as nearly as may
be. But the mere building, the foundation, construction, architectural
details, and interior arrangement are only a small part of numerous
vital factors that should enter into the question of the house and home.
There are equally the considerations of situation, neighborhood,
accessibility, and a score of like important features to be seriously
meditated on. One can not afford to make mistakes in building or in
marrying. “In early manhood,” says Cato, “the master of a family must
study to plant his ground. As for building, he must think a long time
about it.” The external construction is, indeed, the least part of
building—there is still the decorating and the furnishing.
Wise is he who weighs and ponders ere he decides upon the location of
his house, especially if he would be near the town. For in the ideal
home I would unite many things, including pure air, sufficient
elevation, pleasant views, the most suitable exposure, good soil,
freedom from noise, and the natural protection from wind afforded by
trees. “Let our dwelling be lightsome, if possible; in a free air and
near a garden,” is the advice of the philosopher, Pierre du Moulin. Very
apposite are old Thomas Fuller’s directions for a site—“_Chiefly choose
a wholesome air_, for air is a dish one feeds on every minute, and
therefore it need be good.” And again: “Light (God’s eldest daughter) is
a principal beauty in a building, and a pleasant prospect is to be
respected.” In the chapter of the Essays, on Smells and Odors, the
author pertinently observes: “The principall care I take, wheresoever I
am lodged, is to avoid and be far from all manner of filthy, foggy,
ill-savouring, and unwholesome aires. These goodly Cities of strangely
seated Venice and huge-built Paris, by reason of the muddy, sharp, and
offending savours which they yield; the one by her fennie and marish
situation, the other by her durtie uncleannesse and continuall mire, doe
greatly alter and diminish the favor which I bear them.”
All these desiderata are well-nigh impossible to unite in the city.
There all manner of nuisances necessarily exist—manufactories which
discharge noxious smoke and soot, the clangor of bells and whistles, an
atmosphere more or less charged with unwholesome exhalations. This more
particularly in summer; in winter I grant the city has its charms and
advantages. Wealth may sometimes combine the delights of urban and rural
life, as when a large residence plot is retained in a pleasant
neighborhood of the town. But even unlimited means can rarely procure a
place of this description, which comes by inheritance rather than by
choosing, and in the end becomes too valuable to retain. Besides,
however fine the ancestral trees and endeared the homestead, it must
still lack the repose of the country, the free expanse of sky, the
unfettered breadth of the fields.
When I look about me I find the combination I would attain a difficult
one to secure in almost any city. If I build in the suburbs, upon the
most fashionable avenue, its approaches may be disagreeable and the
surrounding landscape flat and uninviting. The opposite quarter of the
suburbs, the main northern residence avenue, will be windy during
winter. If I locate westward there may be factories and car-shops to
constantly offend the ear; if I move eastward unsavory odors may assail,
and if I select a site in yet another neighborhood that commends itself
for its elevation and pleasant society, there may be the smoke and soot
of neighboring chimneys to defile the air and intrude themselves
unceasingly into my dwelling. The country-seat sufficiently removed from
town, and yet comparatively accessible, alone may yield, during the
greater portion of the year, all the desired qualifications of the ideal
home. Does not Béranger truly sing—
Cherchons loin du bruit de la ville
Pour le bonheur un sûr asile.
Seek we far from the city’s noise
A refuge safe for peaceful joys.
And have not all the poets before him apostrophized the delights of a
country life?
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.
The great thing in house planning is to think ahead, and still think
ahead. The hall which looks so spacious on paper is sure to contract,
and ordinary-sized rooms will shrink perceptibly when they come to be
furnished. It is important that the spaces between the doors and
windows, the proportionate height of the doors and windows, the many
little conveniences, and innumerable minor yet major details, like the
placing of mantels, registers, chandeliers and side-lights, be planned
by the occupant, and not left to the mercy of the architect. The latter
will place the mantel on the side of a long, narrow room, thereby
diminishing the width several feet, when it should go at the end. He
will hang the doors so they will bump together, or open on the side you
do not want them to open on. If he concede you a spacious hall and
library, he will clip on the vestibule, or be a miser when he doles out
the space for the stairway landing or the butler’s pantry. And what
architect will stop to think of that most important of household
institutions—a roomy, convenient, concealed catch-all, or rather a
series of catch-alls!
Even so simple a contrivance as an invisible small wardrobe in the wall
adjoining the entrance—a receptacle for hats, wraps, and waterproofs—he
has never yet devised. Every hall must of necessity be littered up with
that hideous contrivance, a hat-rack, in a more or less offensive form,
when at a touch a panel in the wainscot might fly open to joyfully
engulf the outer vesture of visitors. You must see your house planned
and furnished with the inward eye ere the foundation is laid, and
exercise the clairvoyant’s art if you would not be disappointed when it
is finally ready for habitation. The question of closet-room is best
left to the mistress of the house, otherwise it is certain to be
stinted; and it were economy in the end to secure the services of a
competent _chef_ to plan the kitchen and its accessories—that tributary
of the home through whose savory or unsavory channels so great a wave of
human enjoyment or dolor flows.
It is with houses very much as it is with gardens—no two are ever
precisely alike; so far at least as the interior of the former is
concerned. Both reflect, or should reflect, through a hundred different
ways and niceties of adjustment and arrangement, the individual tastes
of those who are instrumental in their creation. The ideal house must
first be conceived by those who are to dwell in it, modeled according to
their requirements, mirroring their ideas, their refinement, and their
conceptions of the useful and the beautiful. By different persons these
ends are approached by different ways. So long as we attain the desired
end, the route thereto is of little consequence. But in the ideal house,
it may be observed, a little money and a good deal of taste go a very
great way.
All the eyes of Argus and all the clubs of Hercules must need be yours,
would you see your house perfectly planned and perfectly constructed.
The terrible gauntlet one has to run! He who builds should have nothing
to divert his mind from the task. It is the work of a lifetime crowded
into a year.
And when all is done, and the lights are turned on and the house is
peopled with its guests, who is there that is fully content with the
result of his labor? who that finds in the fruition the full promise of
the bloom? The perfect house in itself exists no more than the perfect
man or woman. We can at best set up an exalted standard of excellence to
approximate as nearly as we may. It is very much in building as it is in
life, where content with what we have is, after all, the true source of
happiness. “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and
am still on their trail,” is the burden of Walden. How many of us are
not likewise in quest of the something that ever eludes? When we think
we have come up with the fox, it is but his shadow we seize; he himself
has already vanished round the ravine. We follow, but may not overtake,
at will, the siren that the poet beckoned for in vain:
Ah, sweet Content! where doth thine harbor hold?
Is it in churches with religious men
Which please the gods with prayers manifold,
And in their studies meditate it then?
Whether thou dost in heaven or earth appear,
Be where thou wilt, thou wilt not harbor here.[1]
Footnote 1:
Barnabe Barnes.
What philosopher among all who have moralized and analyzed has
discovered the sought-for stone? Amiel failed in the pursuit: “I am
always waiting for the woman and the work which shall be capable of
taking entire possession of my soul, and of becoming my end and aim.” “A
man’s happiness,” says Alphonse Karr, in an apothegm worthy of La
Bruyère, “consists in that which he has not got, or that which he no
longer has.” The coveted bauble palls when it is finally ours, the
“dove” escapes, and we all grow old. Absolute happiness flees when we
enter our ’teens. Methinks the French poet Chénier has resolved the
experience of most of us with reference to a certain phase of life as
felicitously as any of those who have endured and felt:
Tout homme a ses douleurs. Mais aux yeux de ses frères
Chacun d’un front serein déguise ses misères,
Chacun ne plaint que soi. Chacun dans son ennui
Envie un autre humain qui se plaint comme lui.
Nul des autres mortels ne mesure les peines,
Qu’ils savent tous cacher comme il cache les siennes,
Et chacun, l’œil en pleurs, en son cœur douloureux
Se dit: Excepté moi, tout le monde est heureux.
Each man his sorrows hath; but, in his brothers’ eyes,
Each one with brow serene his troubles doth disguise.
Each of himself complains; each one, in weariness,
Envies a fellow-man who mourns in like distress.
None measureth the pains that all as well conceal
As he himself doth hide the griefs that he doth feel;
And each, with tearful eye, says in his sorrowing heart,
Excepting me, the world with happiness hath part.
Yet, I like to think, and cherish the thought, when the cloud reveals no
silver lining, that however disappointing some phases of life may be,
some experiences of human character, there are bright days and pleasant
places ahead in the future, somewhere and sometime. Happiness is coy at
the best, fickle in bestowing her favors; and we find her the more
delightful, possibly, in that, like the sunshine, she comes and goes. We
awaken some morning to find her present, and the next morning she has
flown. “It sometimes seemeth that when we least think on her she is
pleased to sport with us.” So many she has to minister to that she has
necessarily but a brief period to remain. Still I see her ever laughing
with the children at play, and find her lingering where industry abides.
Beside the humble board of the laborer she is often found, while
frequently passing by the homes of the rich. Over gardens and fields she
hovers on pleasant days of spring, and on blustering winter nights I
hear the rustle of her wings above the poet’s page. The sunshine that
sifts through the window, warming and gilding all my surroundings, is
mine to-day; to-morrow it may stream elsewhere. It is all the brighter
when it comes; but to possess it I must open wide the casement to let in
the beams.
Climbing with the sunny Rector of Eversley to the lonely tarn amid the
hills—you have read and admired Chalk-Stream Studies; or, if not, you
have that enjoyment in store—I recall the moral that adorns this
delightful essay. “What matter,” he happily reasons, “if, after two
hours of such enjoyment, he (the angler) goes down again into the world
of man with empty creel or with a dozen pounders or two-pounders,
shorter, gamer, and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or
Kennet? What matter? If he has not caught them, he might have caught
them; he has been catching them in imagination all the way up; and if he
be a minute philosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than
that devil’s beatitude, ‘Blessèd is he who expecteth nothing, for he
shall not be disappointed.’ Say, rather: ‘Blessèd is he who expecteth
everything, for he enjoys everything once, at least; and, if it falls
out true, twice also.’”
And with this gentle spirit, despite his many trials, Charles Kingsley
lived on through life, shedding sunshine and cheer from the
vine-embowered rectory at Eversley. His house was large enough for his
personal comforts, for the entertainment of his chosen friends, and for
the satisfaction of his domestic requirements; and this sufficed.
Reflecting the “sweetness and light” of his own nature, it became the
perfect house to him for the reason that he was satisfied with his
surroundings. The ideal home is largely the handiwork of the contented
mind; and if before we build we learn to extract the finer essences of
things, we may then pluck the rose where others only find the thorn.
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