There has been a general improvement in student rooms, yet many rooms
to-day have altogether too much in them: too many pictures, too many
banners, too much furniture, too many hangings. The great fault of most
rooms is this overcrowding. If we were only heroic enough to make a
bonfire of nine-tenths of all they contain we should see suddenly
revealed possibilities for something like the ideal room.
One serious and obvious objection to the overcrowding of rooms is the
hygienic. I am tempted to say that this is the most important objection:
indeed, since health is more important than wealth, I will say so. A
girl has neither the time nor the ability to keep so many articles in a
room clean: and while she is busy attending to her studies, some
cherished ornaments are not only laying up dust for the future, as a
more regenerate life will lay up treasures, but also breeding germs,
perhaps collecting the very germs which will take this girl away from
school or college. Besides, bric-à-brac not only gathers dust and breeds
germs but also wearies the nerves. It makes one tired to see so many
things about, and tired to be held responsible for them. Without
realizing it, we resist the amount of space they occupy and in their
place want the air and sunshine. Subconsciously, most of us long to get
rid of our bric-à-brac and then pull down the draperies that keep out
the sunlight. The simpler the window draperies in a room, the more
easily washed, the better and more attractive. For wholesome
attractiveness there is no fabric that can excel a flood of warm
sunshine. Any girl or woman who has curtains which she must protect from
strong light by drawing down the shades is guilty of a household sin
whose greatness she cannot know. That same sunshine, freely admitted,
will do more to cleanse a house than all the soap, all the brooms, and
even all the vacuum cleaners ever invented.
The so-called beauty of a room should always give way before the hygiene
of a room. Not only should the room be sensibly furnished so that it may
have plenty of air and light, but closets should not contain articles of
furniture which belong where the air can reach them. There is a
difference between a room that is not orderly and one that is not clean.
A room that contains unclean articles in drawers or closets, unclean
floors, unclean rugs and hangings and unclean walls, should not be
tolerated for an instant. If a girl turns a combination bedroom and
study in school or college into a kitchen, if an ice-cream freezer
occupies all the foreground of this place she calls home, and
chafing-dishes with cream bottles, sardine tins, cracker boxes, paper
bags full of stale biscuits, fruit skins, dish-cloths and
grease-spotted walls, all the background, it is impossible to have a
clean room to live in.
The Golden Rule applies to rooms as well as to human beings and should
read, "Do unto a room as you would it should do unto you." And not only
for the sake of health should this Golden Rule for Rooms be observed but
also for the sake of the college or school. The room that belongs to us
only for a time should be as thoughtfully cared for as if it were our
own personal property. There is something inconsistent, isn't there, in
educating a girl in high thinking and fine ideals, if she is willing to
live in a room that for uncleanliness many a woman in some crowded
quarter of a city would consider a disgrace? Such contradiction in mind
and surrounding is out of harmony with all one's ideal for a
gentlewoman.
Not only beauty is restful, peace-giving and peace-bringing, but so,
also, are neatness and order. Orderliness helps to fit one for work.
There is undoubtedly some connection between surroundings and one's
mental state. In themselves disorder and confusion are irritating. The
sight of a dirty child crying in the doorway of an untidy house suggests
some connection between the wretchedness of the child and the squalor of
the home. I often think of William Morris, the great craftsman and
charming poet, who had much at heart the happiness of all people,
especially the poor, and his exclamation, "My eye, how I do love
tidiness!" To him, to the artist, it was, as it is, beautiful. George
Eliot had to put even the pins in her cushion into some neat arrangement
before she could sit down to write. Disorder wastes not only one's
feelings and health, it also wastes one's time, for a lot of this
commodity may be lost in looking for books, wraps, gloves and other
things which are not put away properly.
School ought to be a training for the life afterwards. That is why we go
to school, isn't it? Why should a girl indulge herself in habits which
will make against her usefulness in the life of the home or in whatever
circumstance she may be? There is a certain disciplinary value in order.
Every great military school has recognized this. Laxness in the care of
one's room may mean the habit of laxness in other and more important
ways. Disorderliness indicates a certain tendency in character, and if a
girl allows that sort of thing to go on she is very likely to show it in
other ways. Untidiness in any of one's personal habits--and what could
be more personal than a room?--should be taken up and corrected even as
one attempts to correct any weak point in one's character.
Do you know what is always--that is, if it is in it at all--the most
beautiful thing in a room? It is something which the Creator meant all
mankind should have, rich and poor, old and young alike; it is something
beyond the buying price of any wealth. It is the sunshine, more
beautiful, more valuable than expensive hangings that shut it out.
Perhaps it is partly because it is inexpensive, God-given to all people,
that housewives frequently draw their curtains against it. If they had
to pay more for it than for carpets and hangings, you may be very sure
that a great many husbands and fathers would be overworking in order
that their families might buy a whole display of sunshine instead of
tapestries.
Do you know what is the most helpful thing you can have in your room,
the article without which you cannot live in it at all, no matter how
fine the rugs and bric-à-brac may be? _Air!_ Air is the one thing which
is almost instantly and absolutely indispensable to human life, for we
breathe it in not only through our noses but also all over our skin.
Every hundredth fraction of an inch of our bodies is feeding upon air,
and the purer that air and the cooler the better and more invigorating
food it provides for the skin surface as well as for the lungs. The
mind, for it is housed in the body and its tenant, must depend for its
vigour or tone upon the fresh air in school or college study. Even a
very good head cannot work well set upon an anæmic body which is
suffocating for want of good clean air. If you wish to do your best work
and keep well, the first thing to do is not to open your books but to
open your windows. After that the books and a reasonable number of hours
of continuous study. American audience halls, pullmans, ordinary coaches
and public buildings of all sorts, especially libraries, are notoriously
overheated and unventilated. It is the intelligent American girl and
woman who, beginning with the home, will correct this evil. The schools
are, on the whole, in the forefront of the fresh air movement,
especially the public schools. As every one knows, the public schools
are establishing open air rooms for their children who need them.
Although there is much to be said about what a room should contain to
make it attractive, it should never be forgotten that sunshine and
fresh air are more beautiful and more priceless than anything else which
it can hold.
The first object in furnishing a bare room is to make it
habitable,--that is useful. Take the kitchen, for example, and
usefulness is practically the sole object in fitting it up. And the
curious thing about it all is that it cannot help being beautiful in a
homely, motherly way, for it exemplifies one of the strongest elements
of all beauty and that is _service_. The kitchen may be a very humble
place but if more women would make a study of their kitchens and then
take thought, it is likely that the rest of their houses would be in
much better taste. A thing that is useful, even as with some well-worn
homely old woman who has led a good and helpful life, always acquires a
beauty of its own. It may be hard for girls to see this but it is there,
and in time it will be seen. Just as it is essentially more beautiful to
have a clean, strong body rather than a pretty face and a body that is
not what it ought to be, so is it more truly beautiful to have articles
of furnishing in our rooms, in study or kitchen, that are of
indispensable genuine use.
Take the gaudy ambitious study one girl has made for herself. It is
defaced by the presence of articles of no value at all in the world of
needs; there is nothing in it that is genuinely beautiful and nothing
that is substantially useful. The furniture is almost too cheap to stand
on its own legs, and the colours would certainly never wash and not even
wear. This room is a junk-shop of new, useless, unattractive objects of
no virtue,--in short, a most unpleasant place in which to live. Have you
ever considered what gives even the simplest clothes for distinctive
occasions a beauty of their own? It is fitness. And it is this same
fitness which tells so much in furnishing a room. It might be said of
certain dresses that they "go together," that is, they are harmonious,
they belong together, they have, like some people, the beauty of
agreeing with themselves, and a very desirable sort of beauty it is.
Just as clothes are an expression of the people who wear them, so are
rooms an expression of the people who live in them. No well-bred girl
cares for tawdry, cheap, over-ornamented clothes. She is made
uncomfortable even at the very thought of having to wear such things.
She should suffer just as much discomfort on the score of a cheaply
furnished (and by "cheap" here I do not mean inexpensive--whitewash and
deal intelligently used may create a beautiful room), overcrowded and
over-ornamented study.
What is the meaning of the room which is your school centre for the time
being? It is an intimate place where a girl may have her friends and
good times; it is a retreat and it is a workshop. It is the girl's home
centre away from home, the place from which she will lead her life, in
its expression attractive or unattractive, like her or unlike her. To
intend that this room in beauty, in cleanliness, in order, shall be the
best expression possible of the girl's best self is the ideal to set for
the school study.
Get good materials and good colours. They need not be expensive.
Remember that colours have to go together just as furniture has to do
so. To have styles of furniture that clash or colours that do not
harmonize will negative any care which the student may have taken in the
selection of individual pieces or materials. To have too much with which
to fill the room is a good deal worse than not to have enough. Much
better it is to have a few things which are just what they should be
than to have too many and those undesirable. To get a desk, if a girl
can afford to do so, that she will be glad to keep her life long is a
good beginning, and a comfortable chair that will be made doubly
precious by all the school associations woven about it. And let her be
careful about pictures for her walls and not crowd them with cheap and
"fashionable" trash. Above all, let her remember that good taste,
simplicity, careful selection, will do more to assure her the possession
of an attractive room than all the money in the world can do.
V