The Misses Garrett have made themselves competent decorators; they
undertake the wall decorations, upholstery, furniture, embroidery,
etc., as fully as any other firm.
There are many ladies employed in the new Kensington School of
Embroidery, which has a branch at Belgravia, in ornamenting with
needle-work stuffs for chairs, sofas, screens; and I have heard of a
scheme which includes art-work for ladies’ dresses. In the ancient
code of Manu it is said, “A wife being gayly adorned, her whole
house is embellished; but if she be destitute of ornament, all will
be deprived of decoration.” It is not a little curious to find the
remote descendants of those whom Manu thus instructed including
female dress among the concerns of decorative art. This is, indeed,
theoretically done in the lectures given at South Kensington, and
Charles Eastlake has interspersed some valuable hints concerning
ladies’ dress in his work on _Household Taste_. In this matter a
quiet revolution has been for some time going on in London. It is
said that the artists of England once thought of getting together
and making some designs for dresses, which they would recommend to
ladies; they did not do so formally, but they have certainly availed
to modify very materially the costumes visible in thousands of English
drawing-rooms. The “pre-Raphaelist lady,” with her creamy silk,
short-waisted and clinging--at once child-like and antique--was the
earliest revolutionary figure in evening companies. She was followed
by the Queen Anne dame, budding and great-grandmotherly, whose
raiment _Punch_ and theatrical Judies have been “taking off” just a
little after the dame herself had transformed it into its beautiful
variations. These pretty reformers have emancipated Fashion herself:
there is no uniform for ladies any more. At a fashionable party lately
I was unable to pick out any two ladies out of a hundred whose dresses
were cut alike, and the variety of colors suggested a fancy-dress ball.
Yet these colors were all of moderate shades, and Hippolyte Taine
himself must have admitted that very few of them were “loud.” It would
not at all surprise me if the world which has so long laughed at the
Englishwoman’s dress should some fine evening glance into one of these
modern interiors and feel as if the ladies are among the most agreeably
dressed of womankind. But I must return from this digression.
The Misses Garrett appear to have an aim of especial importance in
one particular. They tell me that they have recognized it as a want
that a beautiful decoration should be brought within the reach of the
middle-class families, who are not prepared or disposed to go to the
vast expense which the very wealthy are able and willing to defray,
thereby occupying the most eminent firms. They believe that with care
they are able to make beautiful interiors which shall not be too costly
for persons of moderate means. This can surely be done, but it can
only be through a co-operation between the owners of the house and the
decorators which shall make it certain that there shall be nothing
superfluous. If an individual wishes a beautiful home, especially in
dismal London, it is first of all necessary that he or she should
clearly understand what is beautiful, and why it is desired. The
decoration will then, in a sense, be put forth from within, like the
foliage of a tree. In each case the external beauty will respond to an
inward want, and be thus invariably an expression of a high utility.
Nowhere more than in the homes of the great middle classes is there
need of beauty. Their besetting fault is a conventionality which often
lapses into vulgarity, and their thoughts (so-called) are apt to be
commonplace. The eye is often starved for the paunch. The pressure
of business sends every man engaged in it home fatigued, and yet it
is only when he enters that home that his real life, his individual
and affectional life, comes into play. On the exchange, in the office
or shop, he has been what commerce and the world determine; he has
been but perfunctory; but now he shuts the door behind him, and his
_own_ bit of the day is reached. What is the real requirement for this
person? Does a house that furnishes him bed and board suffice him? or,
which is of greater importance, does so much alone suffice others who
dwell habitually in it?
Here I may mention a work of much importance by J. J. Stevenson, of the
Royal Institute of British Architects, entitled _House Architecture_.
It is in two volumes--the first devoted to Architecture, the second to
House-planning. The general aim of this work is stated by the author,
one of the ablest and most successful architects in England, in an
introductory chapter from which I quote. “To build a house for one’s
self is an excellent education in architecture. By the time it is
finished, and the owner has lived in it, he feels how much better a
house he could build with the experience he has acquired, if he had to
do it over again. While the work is going on his attention is called to
questions he had never thought of before, which are now of the greatest
interest to him. He examines the houses of his friends, and discovers
features in them which he wishes, when too late, he had introduced
in his own plans. The designs are altered and the cost increased.
His taste in architecture and his ideas about planning are changed
by his new experience; the building is too far advanced to adopt the
improvements, and the house which he had hoped would be perfect is
a source of trouble and disappointment. He could build another house
to his mind, but to go through the experience once in a lifetime is
enough for most people. To have, before commencing the building of a
new house, the knowledge which the experience of building gives in some
imperfect and fragmentary way at the end of the process, would save the
owner trouble, expense, and after-regret. To attempt to supply this is
the object of this book.” An admirable book it is! There are a hundred
and ninety excellent wood-cuts in it also. The entire science of
lighting, warming, ventilation, drainage, materials, and construction
is here clearly set forth. A man who has the means to build a house
for himself, and who really wishes it to be as genuinely related to
his human self as to the nautilus its shell, should study carefully
this work, unless he can get a better, in which case he will be more
fortunate than I have been.
But Mr. Stevenson’s book does not extend to the decoration of walls
after they are built. The house stands in native worth, but not yet
in honor clad. There ought not to be less reality and utility in the
ornamentation of a house than in its construction. In the ancient
Chinese Analects we read that Kih Tsze-Shing said, “In a superior man
it is only the substantial qualities which are wanted; why should we
seek for ornamental accomplishments?” Tsze-Kung replied, “Ornament is
as substance; substance is as ornament: the hide of a leopard stripped
of its hair is like the hide of a dog stripped of its hair.” It would
be difficult to find in literature a finer or more philosophical
statement of the deep basis of Beauty than thus comes to us from
a period of near three thousand years ago, and from a race whose
applications of decorative art to objects of every-day use are models
for Europe. The spots of the leopard are the sum of its history; its
hair is the physiognomy of its passion and power; it bears on its back
the tracery of the leaf and sunshine amid which it hides, and the
purpose of the universe hides with it. Transferred to floor or sofa in
a room, the coat of that cat is a bit of the wild art of nature, full
of warm life, purely pictorial; more beautiful than the skin of our
domesticated cats, because these have been adapted to other purposes,
and reduced to an environment of less grandeur. But strip the two of
their hair, and they are only larger and smaller pieces of leather,
and the depilated hide of a dog is the same. All of which confirms
Tsze-Kung’s dictum, that ornament is substance; and it at the same time
suggests the converse truth, that throughout the universe there must
be substance to insure true ornament. When we ascend to the region
of finer utilities--those, namely, which are intellectual, moral,
spiritual, social--we discover that household art is another name for
household culture. What germ in the child’s mind may that picture on
the wall be the appointed sunbeam to quicken? What graceful touch to
unfolding character may be added by the modest tint of a room? Who can
say how much falsehood and unreality have been shed through the life
and influence of individuals by tinsel in the drawing-room and rags
up-stairs?
Just now we are the victims of two reactions. Our ancestors made
external beauty everything, and the starved inner life of man rebelled.
Puritanism arose, with grim visage, turning all beautiful things to
stone. From it was bequeathed us a race of artisans who had lost the
sense of beauty. A reaction came, in which the passion for external
beauty displayed itself in an intemperate outbreak of gaudiness and
frivolity. We are sufficiently surrounded by the effects of the
reaction, sustained by wealth without knowledge or taste, to make
Charles Eastlake’s description appropriate to ninety-nine out of every
hundred English homes: “This vitiated taste pervades and infects the
judgment by which we are accustomed to select and approve the objects
of every-day life which we see around us. It crosses our path in the
Brussels carpet of our drawing-rooms; it is about our bed in the
shape of gaudy chintz; it compels us to rest on chairs and to sit at
tables which are designed in accordance with the worst principles of
construction, and invested with shapes confessedly unpicturesque. It
sends us metal-work from Birmingham which is as vulgar in form as it
is flimsy in execution. It decorates the finest possible porcelain
with the most objectionable character of ornament. It lines our walls
with silly representations of vegetable life, or with a mass of
uninteresting diaper. It bids us, in short, furnish our houses after
the same fashion as we dress ourselves, and that is with no more sense
of real beauty than if art were a dead letter. It is hardly necessary
to say that this is not the opinion of the general public. In the eyes
of materfamilias there is no upholstery which could possibly surpass
that which the most fashionable upholsterer supplies. She believes
in the elegance of window-curtains of which so many dozen yards were
sent to the Duchess of ----, and concludes that the dinner-service
must be perfect which is described as ‘quite a novelty.’” Mr. Eastlake
well says, also: “National art is not a thing which we may enclose in
a gilt frame and hang upon our walls, or which can be locked up in
the cabinet of a virtuoso. To be genuine and permanent, it ought to
animate with the same spirit the blacksmith’s forge and the sculptor’s
_atelier_, the painter’s studio and the haberdasher’s shop.” Under the
influence of such scornful words as these, persons of taste and culture
have risen in reaction against the reaction, and the result is that
there are now in London several thousands of homes which have filled
themselves with those old shreds of beauty which Puritanism cast to the
winds. Most of these are the homes of artists or virtuosi, and, as they
have thus set the fashion, a still larger number have tried to follow
them. A genuinely old thing is competed for furiously; and as it is
apt to go with the longest purse rather than the finest taste, we find
the past as often re-appearing in a domestic curiosity-shop as in a
beautiful interior.
Now, Puritanism in its day was one of the useful things, and if we do
not see the traces of beauty which it has left, the fault is in our
own eyes. The artists know very well that if it had spared the old
furniture for the main uses of our present society, the effect would be
as unlovely as if our homes were all buttressed and turreted in feudal
style. Feudalism and Puritanism have alike left to us just as much of
the styles of their ages as we need--enough to give, as it were, a
fair fringe to the appropriate vestment of to-day. A house made up of
antiquarian objects is a show-room, a museum, but not a home. We have
fallen upon an age when cultured people know that external beauty is
but one means to integral beauty, and when the prophets of that higher
end can see that the very flowers of the field are ugly, if they drink
up that which ought to turn to corn and wine. Much is to be said for
the antiquarian taste, if it does not run into an antiquarian passion.
It may safely be admitted that our churches need not be sombre nor our
services gloomy; that a few good pictures would not harm the one, nor
more poetry and music the other; but what is to be said of those who
find in albs and chasubles and incense-burners the regained Paradise of
man? Old lamps are not always better than new.
Much is said from time to time about the ugliness of London street
architecture. I have already quoted the London _Times’_ sentence
about “our ugly but not altogether uncomfortable old metropolis.” The
ugliness is mentioned at various points of this work. But there are
two kinds of it; as the famous Boston divine said there are two kinds
of fools--“the natural fool, and what the carnal mind, oblivious of
its duty, would call a d--fool.” When Temple Bar was removed from
Fleet Street because it was an impediment, the Corporation of London
devoted £10,000 to putting up in the centre of the street a columnar
monstrosity, carved with busts of royal personages, griffin-crowned.
This is the kind of London ugliness which suggests the definition of
the carnal mind. An effort was made in Parliament to get it removed;
but it was too large for Madame Tussaud’s “Chamber of Horrors;” and
perhaps it is as well that it should remain, as the monument of that
vast amount of wealth which is continually embodied in the ugliness
which Puritanism made a passion in the average middle-class Englishman.
But the other kind of London ugliness is represented in the miles on
miles of yellow-gray and sooty, brick houses, each as much like the
other as if so many miles of hollow block were chopped at regular
intervals. And yet there is something so pleasant to think of in
these interminable rows of brick blocks, that they are not altogether
unpleasant to the eye. For they are houses of good size, comfortable
houses; and their sameness, only noticeable through their vast number,
means that the average of well-to-do people in London is also vast.
It implies a distribution of wealth, an equality of conditions, which
make the best feature of a solid civilization. There is much beauty
inside these orange-tawny walls. Before any house in that league of
sooty brick you may pause and say with fair security: In that house
are industrious, educated people; there is good music there; and good
English, French, and German literature; pictures of noble men and
heroic events are on the walls; they have made there, within their mass
of burnt clay, a true cosmos, where love and thought dwell with them;
and between all that and a fine outside they have chosen the better
part.
But, while not forgetting that the body is more than raiment, we
need not forget that it can never be fairly expressed, in any but a
coarse way, save through the raiment related to it. On this we must
insist, that when individuality has been cultivated there should be
an harmonious and organic relation between the individual and his
dwelling-place. In a normal society each man would be able to build
his house around him as he builds his body, and to take the past, the
east, the west, for his materials as much as brick or stone. “Let us
understand,” says the wisest adviser of our time, “that a house should
bear witness in all its economy that human culture is the end to which
it is built and garnished. It stands there under the sun and moon to
ends analogous and not less noble than theirs. It is not for festivity,
it is not for sleep; but the pine and the oak shall gladly descend from
the mountains to uphold the roof of men as faithful and necessary as
themselves, to be the shelter always open to good and true persons--a
hall which shines with sincerity, brows ever tranquil, and a demeanor
impossible to disconcert; whose inmates know what they want; _who do
not ask your house how theirs shall be kept_.”
One residence particularly has connected itself in the course of my
observations with the high place given, in this extract from Emerson’s
chapter on _Domestic Life_, to the individuality so essential to a
home, and so difficult to obtain. Those who have found delight--as
who has not?--in the paintings which the American artist, Mr. George
S. Boughton, A.R.A., has given to the world will not be surprised to
learn that he has built up around him a home worthy of his refined
taste and his delicate perception of those laws of beauty which enable
it to harmonize with individual feeling without ever running into
eccentricity. Boughton was one of the first to make his home harmonious
with his art, and before he built West House, his present residence,
he made the interior of an ordinary house, Grove Lodge, Kensington,
into a residence as unique as one of those charming pictures of his
which so tenderly invest the human life of to-day with the sentiment
and romance of its own history. Passing once through that hall, touched
everywhere with the toned light of antique beauty, to his studio, the
picture just finished for the Royal Academy appeared as a natural
growth out of the aesthetic atmosphere by which he was surrounded--some
girls of Chaucer’s time beside an old well and a cross, filling the
water-bottles of pilgrims on their way, amid the spring blossoms, to
the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket, “the holy, blissful martyr,” at
Canterbury. The embowered English landscape closed as kindly around the
figures and costumes and symbols of the olden time as they do now about
the features of a new age; and no less harmoniously did the ornaments
and decorations of that home surround the cultured society which the
young host and hostess gather to their assemblies. Although Grove
Lodge is no longer the home of the Boughtons, its decorations were so
instructive as well as beautiful, that I insert here an account of them.
Entering the door, we find ourselves in a square vestibule, separated
from the main hall by rich and heavy curtains of greenish-blue
tapestry. The walls are here, for a distance of one-third of their
height from the floor, covered with a panelled wainscot, colored in
harmony with the hangings. For the rest, the walls are covered with a
stamped leather papering of large antique scrolls, outlined in gold.
A rich light fills this little apartment by reason of the quaint and
deep-hued glass of the door and side-window. In these both roundels and
quarries are used. In the door there are roundels above and quarries
beneath, furnishing a neat border to larger stainings, representing
marguerites and clover-blossoms on a blue ground. Above the door is a
curious horizontal glass mosaic, set in lead, as indeed are all the
squares and circlets of both window and door, with bees and butterflies
at the angles of the irregular lines. The zigzag flight of the little
winged symbols of industry and pleasure required that the pieces of
glass should be irregular, and this result was secured by an odd
device. The decorator having come with his oblong pane of precious
glass, asked how he should cut it up. The artist promptly ordered him
to let it fall through some feet on the door-step, and then gather up
the fragments. This was done, and as the pieces came of the fall so
were they put together, with the bees and butterflies at their angles.
The effect of this irregularity is very fine indeed, as setting off the
precision of the patterns in the rest of the door.
Passing through the curtains, we enter a hall running about two-thirds
of the depth of the house to the dining-room. The hall is lined with
fine old engravings and cabinets, with here and there an old round
convex mirror. The general color of the walls of the dining-room is
sage-green, thus setting off finely the beautiful pictures and the
many pieces of old china. There are several cabinets which have been
designed by Mr. Boughton himself, and a _buffet_ somewhat resembling
that drawn by Charles Eastlake (Fig. 12, _Hints on Household Taste_),
but improved, as I think, by being made somewhat higher, and having a
small ornamental balustrade on the top shelf. And I may here say that
Mr. Boughton’s art has enabled him to make his many beautiful cabinets,
the antique ones as well as those designed by himself, particularly
attractive by introducing small paintings on the panels of their doors
or drawers. These figures are generally allegorical and decorative,
and are painted upon golden backgrounds. They are of rich but sober
colors, and usually female figures, with flowing drapery, great care
being taken that their faces shall have dignity and expression. In some
cases an old cabinet has small open spaces here and there which will
admit of medallion busts and heads being painted; and if care be taken
that the colors shall not be too loud, and especially that the designs
are not realistic, the beauty and value of the cabinet are very much
enhanced. The _buffet_ to which I have referred has a curtain over the
arch beneath, and such an addition may be also made to a cabinet which
rests upon legs with good effect as well as utility, if care be taken
that the color of the curtain shall not be obtrusive.
This dining-room is lighted by a large window set back in a deep
recess, curtained off from the main room with hangings of red velvet,
and exquisitely environed by original designs. The window is composed
of the richest quarries, holding in their centres each its different
decorative flower or other natural form, and these being collectively
the frame of large medallions of stained glass, representing Van Eyck,
Van Orley, and the burgomaster’s wife, from Van Eyck’s picture in the
National Gallery.
It is a notable feature of the ideas of glass decoration, and, indeed,
of paper decoration, in houses where English artists have superintended
the ornamentation, that realism in design is severely avoided. In this
respect I cannot doubt that we are in London far more advanced in taste
than those decorators of Munich, and some other Continental cities, who
try to make the figures, in their glass at least, as commonplacely real
as if they were painting on canvas. Even if the material with which
the glass-stainer works admitted of a successful imitation of natural
forms, the result could not be beautiful. No one desires roses to
blossom on his window-panes, nor butterflies to settle on the glass as
if it were a flower. The real purpose of the glass can never be safely
forgotten in its decoration: it is to keep out the cold while admitting
the light; the color is to tone the light, and prevent its being
garish; and if, farther, any form is placed upon the glass, it is
merely to prevent monotony by presenting an agreeable variation from
mere color. But the form must be in mere outline, transparent, else it
suggests an opaque body, which were a denial of the main purpose of the
glass, _i.e._, to do away with opaqueness. Even when the ornaments on
the little panes are thinnest, they are hardly suited to the English
sky, which sends us little superfluous light.