"Girls, one of these days, _I_ will write an article for the 'Atlantic,'
that your papa need not have _all_ the say to himself: however, I
believe he has hit the nail on the head this time."
"Of course he has," said Marianne. "But, mamma, I am afraid to begin to
depend much on plants for the beauty of my rooms, for fear I should not
have your gift,--and of all forlorn and hopeless things in a room,
ill-kept plants are the most so."
"I would not recommend," said I, "a young housekeeper, just beginning,
to rest much for her home-ornament on plant-keeping, unless she has an
experience of her own love and talent in this line, which makes her sure
of success; for plants will not thrive, if they are forgotten or
overlooked, and only tended in occasional intervals; and, as Marianne
says, neglected plants are the most forlorn of all things."
"But, papa," said Marianne, anxiously, "there, in those patent parlors
of John's that you wrote of, flowers acted a great part."
"The charm of those parlors of John's may be chemically analyzed," I
said. "In the first place, there is sunshine, a thing that always
affects the human nerves of happiness. Why else is it that people are
always so glad to see the sun after a long storm? why are bright days
matters of such congratulation? Sunshine fills a house with a thousand
beautiful and fanciful effects of light and shade,--with soft, luminous,
reflected radiances, that give picturesque effects to the pictures,
books, statuettes of an interior. John, happily, had no money to buy
brocatelle curtains,--and besides this, he loved sunshine too much to
buy them, if he could. He had been enough with artists to know that
heavy damask curtains darken precisely that part of the window where the
light proper for pictures and statuary should come in, namely, the upper
part. The fashionable system of curtains lights only the legs of the
chairs and the carpets, and leaves all the upper portion of the room in
shadow. John's windows have shades which can at pleasure be drawn down
from the top or up from the bottom, so that the best light to be had may
always be arranged for his little interior."
"Well, papa," said Marianne, "in your chemical analysis of John's rooms,
what is the next thing to the sunshine?"
"The next," said I, "is harmony of color. The wall-paper, the furniture,
the carpets, are of tints that harmonize with one another. This is a
grace in rooms always, and one often neglected. The French have an
expressive phrase with reference to articles which are out of
accord,--they say that they swear at each other. I have been in rooms
where I seemed to hear the wall-paper swearing at the carpet, and the
carpet swearing back at the wall-paper, and each article of furniture
swearing at the rest. These appointments may all of them be of the most
expensive kind, but with such disharmony no arrangement can ever produce
anything but a vulgar and disagreeable effect. On the other hand, I have
been in rooms where all the material was cheap, and the furniture poor,
but where, from some instinctive knowledge of the reciprocal effect of
Colors, everything was harmonious, and produced a sense of elegance.
"I recollect once travelling on a Western canal through a long stretch
of wilderness, and stopping to spend the night at an obscure settlement
of a dozen houses. We were directed to lodgings in a common frame-house
at a little distance, where, it seemed, the only hotel was kept. When we
entered the parlor, we were struck with utter amazement at its
prettiness, which affected us before we began to ask ourselves how it
came to be pretty. It was, in fact, only one of the miracles of
harmonious color working with very simple materials. Some woman had been
busy there, who had both eyes and fingers. The sofa, the common wooden
rocking-chairs, and some ottomans, probably made of old soap-boxes, were
all covered with American nankeen of a soft yellowish-brown, with a
bordering of blue print. The window-shades, the table-cover, and the
piano-cloth, all repeated the same colors, in the same cheap material. A
simple straw matting was laid over the floor, and, with a few books, a
vase of flowers, and one or two prints, the room had a home-like, and
even elegant air, that struck us all the more forcibly from its contrast
with the usual tawdry, slovenly style of such parlors.
"The means used for getting up this effect were the most inexpensive
possible,--simply the following-out, in cheap material, a law of
uniformity and harmony, which always will produce beauty. In the same
manner, I have seen a room furnished, whose effect was really gorgeous
in color, where the only materials used were Turkey-red cotton and a
simple ingrain carpet of corresponding color.
"Now, you girls have been busy lately in schemes for buying a velvet
carpet for the new parlor that is to be, and the only points that have
seemed to weigh in the council were that it was velvet, that it was
cheaper than velvets usually are, and that it was a genteel pattern."
"Now, papa," said Jennie, "what ears you have! We thought you were
reading all the time!"
"I see what you are going to say," said Marianne. "You think that we
have not once mentioned the consideration which should determine the
carpet,--whether it will harmonize with our other things. But, you see,
papa, we don't really know what our other things are to be." "Yes," said
Jennie, "and Aunt Easygo said it was an unusually good chance to get a
velvet carpet."
"Yet, good as the chance is, it costs just twice as much as an ingrain."
"Yes, papa, it does."
"And you are not sure that the effect of it, after you get it down, will
be as good as a well-chosen ingrain one."
"That's true," said Marianne, reflectively.
"But, then, papa," said Jennie, "Aunt Easygo said she never heard of
such a bargain; only think, two dollars a yard for a _velvet!_"
"And why is it two dollars a yard? Is the man a personal friend, that he
wishes to make you a present of a dollar on the yard? or is there some
reason why it is undesirable?" said I.
"Well, you know, papa, he said those large patterns were not so
salable."
"To tell the truth," said Marianne, "I never did like the pattern
exactly; as to uniformity of tint, it might match with anything, for
there's every color of the rainbow in it."
"You see, papa, it's a gorgeous flower-pattern," said Jennie.
"Well, Marianne, how many yards of this wonderfully cheap carpet do you
want?"
"We want sixty yards for both rooms," said Jennie, always primed with
statistics.
"That will be a hundred and twenty dollars," I said.
"Yes," said Jennie; "and we went over the figures together, and thought
we could make it out by economizing in other things. Aunt Easygo said
that the carpet was half the battle,--that it gave the air to everything
else."
"Well, Marianne, if you want a man's advice in the case, mine is at your
service."
"That is just what I want, papa."
"Well, then, my dear, choose your wall-papers and borderings, and, when
they are up, choose an ingrain carpet to harmonize with them, and adapt
your furniture to the same idea. The sixty dollars that you save on your
carpet spend on engravings, chromo-lithographs, or photographs of some
really _good_ works of Art, to adorn your walls."
"Papa, I'll do it," said Marianne.
"My little dear," said I, "your papa may seem to be a sleepy old
book-worm, yet he has his eyes open. Do you think I don't know why my
girls have the credit of being the best-dressed girls on the street?"
"Oh, papa!" cried out both girls in a breath.
"Fact, that!" said Bob, with energy, pulling at his moustache.
"Everybody talks about your dress, and wonders how you make it out."
"Well," said I, "I presume you do not go into a shop and buy a yard of
ribbon because it is selling at half-price, and put it on without
considering complexion, eyes, hair, and shade of the dress, do you?"
"Of course we don't!" chimed in the duo, with energy.
"Of course you don't. Haven't I seen you mincing down-stairs, with all
your colors harmonized, even to your gloves and gaiters? Now, a room
must be dressed as carefully as a lady."
"Well, I'm convinced," said Jennie, "that papa knows how to make rooms
prettier than Aunt Easygo; but then she said this was _cheap_, because
it would outlast two common carpets."
"But, as you pay double price," said I, "I don't see that. Besides, I
would rather, in the course of twenty years, have two nice, fresh
ingrain carpets, of just the color and pattern that suited my rooms,
than labor along with one ill-chosen velvet that harmonized with
nothing."
"I give it up," said Jennie; "I give it up."
"Now, understand me," said I; "I am not traducing velvet or Brussels or
Axminster. I admit that more beautiful effects can be found in those
goods than in the humbler fabrics of the carpet-rooms. Nothing would
delight me more than to put an unlimited credit to Marianne's account,
and let her work out the problems of harmonious color in velvet and
damask. All I have to say is, that certain unities of color, certain
general arrangements, will secure very nearly as good general effects in
either material. A library with a neat, mossy green carpet on the floor,
harmonizing with wall-paper and furniture, looks generally as well,
whether the mossy green is made in Brussels or in ingrain. In the
carpet-stores, these two materials stand side by side in the very same
pattern, and one is often as good for the purpose as the other. A lady
of my acquaintance, some years since, employed an artist to decorate her
parlors. The walls being frescoed and tinted to suit his ideal, he
immediately issued his decree that her splendid velvet carpets must be
sent to auction, and others bought of certain colors, harmonizing with
the walls. Unable to find exactly the color and pattern he wanted, he at
last had the carpets woven in a neighboring factory, where, as yet, they
had only the art of weaving ingrains. Thus was the material sacrificed
at once to the harmony."
I remarked, in passing, that this was before Bigelow's mechanical genius
had unlocked for America the higher secrets of carpet-weaving, and made
it possible to have one's desires accomplished in Brussels or velvet. In
those days, English carpet-weavers did not send to America for their
looms, as they now do.
"But now to return to my analysis of John's rooms.
"Another thing which goes a great way towards giving them their
agreeable air is the books in them. Some people are fond of treating
books as others do children. One room in the house is selected, and
every book driven into it and kept there. Yet nothing makes a room so
home-like, so companionable, and gives it such an air of refinement, as
the presence of books. They change the aspect of a parlor from that of a
mere reception-room, where visitors perch for a transient call, and give
it the air of a room where one feels like taking off one's things to
stay. It gives the appearance of permanence and repose and quiet
fellowship; and next to pictures on the walls, the many-colored bindings
and gildings of books are the most agreeable adornment of a room."
"Then, Marianne," said Bob, "we have something to start with, at all
events. There are my English Classics and English Poets, and my uniform
editions of Scott and Thackeray and Macaulay and Prescott and Irving and
Longfellow and Lowell and Hawthorne and Holmes and a host more. We
really have something pretty there."
"You are a lucky girl," I said, "to have so much secured. A girl brought
up in a house full of books, always able to turn to this or that author
and look for any passage or poem when she thinks of it, doesn't know
what a blank a house without books might be."
"Well," said Marianne, "mamma and I were counting over my treasures the
other day. Do you know, I have one really fine old engraving, that Bob
says is quite a genuine thing; and then there is that pencil-sketch that
poor Schöne made for me the month before he died,--it is truly
artistic."
"And I have a couple of capital things of Landseer's," said Bob.
"There's no danger that your rooms will not be pretty," said I, "now you
are fairly on the right track."
"But, papa," said Marianne, "I am troubled about one thing. My love of
beauty runs into everything. I want pretty things for my table,--and
yet, as you say, servants are so careless, one cannot use such things
freely without great waste."
"For my part," said my wife, "I believe in best china, to be kept
carefully on an upper-shelf, and taken down for high-days and holidays;
it may be a superstition, but I believe in it. It must never be taken
out except when the mistress herself can see that it is safely cared
for. My mother always washed her china herself; and it was a very pretty
social ceremony, after tea was over, while she sat among us washing her
pretty cups, and wiping them on a fine damask towel."
"With all my heart," said I; "have your best china, and venerate it,--it
is one of the loveliest of domestic superstitions; only do not make it a
bar to hospitality, and shrink from having a friend to tea with you,
unless you feel equal to getting up to the high shelf where you keep it,
getting it down, washing, and putting it up again.
"But in serving a table, I say, as I said of a house, beauty is a
necessity, and beauty is cheap. Because you cannot afford beauty in one
form, it does not follow that you cannot have it in another. Because one
cannot afford to keep up a perennial supply of delicate china and
crystal, subject to the accidents of raw, untrained servants, it does
not follow that the every-day table need present a sordid assortment of
articles chosen simply for cheapness, while the whole capacity of the
purse is given to the set forever locked away for state-occasions.
"A table-service, all of simple white, of graceful forms, even though
not of china, if arranged with care, with snowy, well-kept table-linen,
clear glasses, and bright American plate in place of solid silver, may
be made to look inviting; add a glass of flowers every day, and your
table may look pretty;--and it is far more important that it should look
pretty for the family every day than for company once in two weeks."
"I tell my girls," said my wife, "as the result of my experience, you
may have your pretty china and your lovely fanciful articles for the
table only so long as you can take all the care of them yourselves. As
soon as you get tired of doing this, and put them into the hands of the
trustiest servants, some good, well-meaning creature is sure to break
her heart and your own and your very pet, darling china pitcher all in
one and the same minute; and then her frantic despair leaves you not
even the relief of scolding."
"I have become perfectly sure," said I, "that there are spiteful little
brownies, intent on seducing good women to sin, who mount guard over the
special idols of the china-closet. If you hear a crash, and a loud Irish
wail from the inner depths, you never think of its being a yellow
pie-plate, or that dreadful one-handled tureen that you have been
wishing were broken these five years; no, indeed,--it is sure to be the
lovely painted china bowl, wreathed with morning-glories and sweet-peas,
or the engraved glass goblet, with quaint old-English initials. China
sacrificed must be a great means of saintship to women. Pope, I think,
puts it as the crowning grace of his perfect woman, that she is
'Mistress of herself, though china fall.'"
"I ought to be a saint by this time, then," said mamma; "for in the
course of my days I have lost so many idols by breakage, and peculiar
accidents that seemed by a special fatality to befall my prettiest and
most irreplaceable things, that in fact it has come to be a
superstitious feeling now with which I regard anything particularly
pretty of a breakable nature."
"Well," said Marianne, "unless one has a great deal of money, it seems
to me that the investment in these pretty fragilities is rather a poor
one."
"Yet," said I, "the principle of beauty is never so captivating as when
it presides over the hour of daily meals. I would have the room where
they are served one of the pleasantest and sunniest in the house. I
would have its coloring cheerful, and there should be companionable
pictures and engravings on the walls. Of all things, I dislike a room
that seems to be kept like a restaurant, merely to eat in. I like to see
in a dining-room something that betokens a pleasant sitting-room at
other hours. I like there some books, a comfortable sofa or lounge, and
all that should make it cozy and inviting. The custom in some families,
of adopting for the daily meals one of the two parlors which a
city-house furnishes, has often seemed to me a particularly happy one.
You take your meals, then, in an agreeable place, surrounded by the
little agreeable arrangements of your daily sitting-room; and after the
meal, if the lady of the house does the honors of her own pretty china
herself, the office may be a pleasant and social one.
"But in regard to your table-service I have my advice at hand. Invest in
pretty table-linen, in delicate napkins, have your vase of flowers, and
be guided by the eye of taste in the choice and arrangement of even the
every-day table-articles, and have no ugly things when you can have
pretty ones by taking a little thought. If you are sore tempted with
lovely china and crystal, too fragile to last, too expensive to be
renewed, turn away to a print-shop and comfort yourself by hanging
around the walls of your dining-room beauty that will not break or fade,
that will meet your eye from year to year, though plates, tumblers, and
tea-sets successively vanish. There is my advice for you, Marianne."
At the same time, let me say, in parenthesis, that my wife, whose
weakness is china, informed me that night, when we were by ourselves,
that she was ordering secretly a tea-set as a bridal gift for Marianne,
every cup of which was to be exquisitely painted with the wild-flowers
of America, from designs of her own,--a thing, by-the-by, that can now
be very nicely executed in our country. "It will last her all her life,"
she said, "and always be such a pleasure to look at,--and a pretty
tea-table is such a pretty sight!" So spoke Mrs. Crowfield, "unweaned
from china by a thousand falls." She spoke even with tears in her eyes.
Verily, these women are harps of a thousand strings!
But to return to my subject.
"Finally and lastly," I said, "in my analysis and explication of the
agreeableness of those same parlors, comes the crowning grace,--their
_homeliness_. By homeliness I mean not ugliness, as the word is apt to
be used, but the air that is given to a room by being _really_ at home
in it. Not the most skilful arrangement can impart this charm.
"It is said that a king of France once remarked,--'My son, you must seem
to love your people.'
"'Father, how shall I _seem_ to love them?'
"'My son, you _must_ love them.'
"So to make rooms _seem_ home-like you must be at home in them. Human
light and warmth are so wanting in some rooms, it is so evident that
they are never used, that you can never be at ease there. In vain the
house-maid is taught to wheel the sofa and turn chair towards chair; in
vain it is attempted to imitate a negligent arrangement of the
centre-table.
"Books that have really been read and laid down, chairs that have really
been moved here and there in the animation of social contact, have a
sort of human vitality in them; and a room in which people really live
and enjoy is as different from a shut-up apartment as a live woman from
a wax image.
"Even rooms furnished without taste often become charming from this one
grace, that they seem to let you into the home-life and home-current.
You seem to understand in a moment that you are taken into the family,
and are moving in its inner circles, and not revolving at a distance in
some outer court of the gentiles.
"How many people do we call on from year to year and know no more of
their feelings, habits, tastes, family ideas and ways, than if they
lived in Kamtschatka! And why? Because the room which they call a
front-parlor is made expressly so that you never shall know. They sit in
a back-room,--work, talk, read, perhaps. After the servant has let you
in and opened a crack of the shutters, and while you sit waiting for
them to change their dress and come in, you speculate as to what they
may be doing. From some distant region, the laugh of a child, the song
of a canary-bird, reaches you, and then a door claps hastily to. Do they
love plants? Do they write letters, sew, embroider, crochet? Do they
ever romp and frolic? What books do they read? Do they sketch or paint?
Of all these possibilities the mute and muffled room says nothing. A
sofa and six chairs, two ottomans fresh from the upholsterer's, a
Brussels carpet, a centre-table with four gilt Books of Beauty on it, a
mantel-clock from Paris, and two bronze vases,--all these tell you only
in frigid tones, 'This is the best room,'--only that, and nothing
more,--and soon _she_ trips in in her best clothes, and apologizes for
keeping you waiting, asks how your mother is, and you remark that it is
a pleasant day,--and thus the acquaintance progresses from year to year.
One hour in the little back-room, where the plants and canary-bird and
children are, might have made you fast friends for life; but as it is,
you care no more for them than for the gilt clock on the mantel.
"And now, girls," said I, pulling a paper out of my pocket, "you must
know that your father is getting to be famous by means of these 'House
and Home Papers.' Here is a letter I have just received:--
"'MOST EXCELLENT MR. CROWFIELD,--Your thoughts have lighted into
our family-circle, and echoed from our fireside. We all feel the
force of them, and are delighted with the felicity of your
treatment of the topic you have chosen. You have taken hold of a
subject that lies deep in our hearts, in a genial, temperate, and
convincing spirit. All must acknowledge the power of your
sentiments upon their imaginations;--if they could only trust to
them in actual life! There is the rub.
"'Omitting further upon these points, there is a special feature
of your articles upon which we wish to address you. You seem as
yet (we do not know, of course, what you may hereafter do) to
speak only of homes whose conduct depends upon the help of
servants. Now your principles apply, as some of us well conceive,
to nearly all classes of society; yet most people, to take an
impressive hint, must have their portraits drawn out more exactly.
We therefore hope that you will give a reasonable share of your
attention to us who do not employ servants, so that you may ease
us of some of _our_ burdens, which, in spite of common sense, we
dare not throw off. For instance, we have company,--a friend from
afar, (perhaps wealthy,) or a minister, or some other man of note.
What do we do? Sit down and receive our visitor with all good-will
and the freedom of a home? No; we (the lady of the house) flutter
about to clear up things, apologizing about this, that, and the
other condition of unpreparedness, and, having settled the visitor
in the parlor, set about marshalling the elements of a grand
dinner or supper, such as no person but a gourmand wants to sit
down to, when at home and comfortable; and in getting up this
meal, clearing away, and washing the dishes, we use up a good half
of the time which our guest spends with us. We have spread
ourselves, and shown him what we could do; but what a paltry,
heart-sickening achievement! Now, good Mr. Crowfield, thou friend
of the robbed and despairing, wilt thou not descend into our
purgatorial circle, and tell the world what thou hast seen there
of doleful remembrance? Tell us how we, who must do and desire to
do our own work, can show forth in our homes a homely, yet genial
hospitality, and entertain our guests without making a fuss and
hurly-burly, and seeming to be anxious for their sake about many
things, and spending too much time getting meals, as if eating
were the chief social pleasure. _Won't_ you do this, Mr.
Crowfield?
"'Yours beseechingly,
"'R.H.A.'"
"That's a good letter," said Jennie.
"To be sure it is," said I.
"And shall you answer it, papa?"
"In the very next 'Atlantic,' you may be sure I shall. The class that do
their own work are the strongest, the most numerous, and, taking one
thing with another, quite as well cultivated a class as any other. They
are the anomaly of our country,--the distinctive feature of the new
society that we are building up here; and if we are to accomplish our
national destiny, that class must increase rather than diminish. I shall
certainly do my best to answer the very sensible and pregnant questions
of that letter."
Here Marianne shivered and drew up a shawl, and Jennie gaped; my wife
folded up the garment in which she had set the last stitch, and the
clock struck twelve.