When I was a small boy at King's College School, I boarded with one of
the masters, at a corner house in Queen's Square. There was a long room
in which we boarders--there were some five-and-twenty of us--had our
meals, and prepared lessons for the morrow in the evening, under the
supervision of an usher.
One day at tea, the usher having been summoned out of the room, we
boys essayed who could throw up his piece of bread and butter highest.
Mine went against the ceiling, and, the butter being unusually thick,
adhered.
I was in great alarm; there was no getting it down: it stuck, and
neither the usher nor the master, when he entered for prayers, observed
it.
During preparation of lessons, during prayers, my eyes reverted to the
piece of bread and butter. It remained unnoticed. That it was also
unobserved by the servants, who were supposed to clean the room, is not
perhaps matter of surprise.
The next day passed--still the bread and butter hung suspended--but
on the third day, during prayers, flop!--down it came in front of the
master, and left behind it a nasty, greasy stain on the ceiling.
"Whose piece of bread and butter is that?" asked the master, when Amen
had been said.
I had to confess, and was whipped.
That stain in the ceiling grew darker daily. The dust of the room
adhered to the butter. It was not effaced all the while I remained a
boarder, and I involuntarily every day, and frequently daily, looked at
it, to see how much deeper the tinge was that the patch acquired.
[Illustration: THE DRAWING-ROOM, DUNSLAND, DEVON]
Years after, when I was a man, and the old master was dead, and the
house was in other hands, I ventured to ask the then tenants to be
allowed to look at my old school-haunt. And--actually--the bread and
butter stain was still there. Like murder--it could not be hid. The
ceiling had been repeatedly whitewashed, but ever through the coverings
that overlaid it, the butter mark reasserted itself.
I cannot say whether it was this which causes me always, on entering a
room, to direct my eyes to the ceiling--but I do, and observe it always
with much interest.
The ceiling of the world is not one blank space; it is sprinkled with
stars at night, and strewn with clouds by day. Why then should the
ceilings of our rooms be blank surfaces? We spread carpets of colour on
our floors. We decorate richly our walls. Why should the ceiling alone
be left in hideous baldness, in fact, absolutely plain? White ceilings
were a product of that worst period of art--save the mark! that age of
no art at all, the beginning of the present century.
The ceiling came in in the reign of Henry VIII., and reached its
greatest perfection in that of Elizabeth. At a later period the
ornamentation became richer, but not so tasteful.
The mouldings were worked with "putty lime," lime finely sifted and
mixed with some hair, the lines of the ornamentation were made with
ribbons of copper or lead, and the pattern was fashioned by hand over
this.
It is supposed that the drops one finds in Tudor ceilings, and which
are not of plaster, or plaster only, but of carved wood, are a mere
ornament, and purposeless.
This, however, is not the case. Such enriched ceilings are very heavy,
and their weight has a tendency to break down the laths to which they
adhere, but these pendents are bolted into the rafters, and serve to
form so many supports for the entire ceiling, which without them might
in time fall.
The Elizabethan ceiling was geometrical in design, but with bands of
flower-work, conventional in character, introduced, and sometimes
consisted in strap-work, studded with rosettes, wondrously interlacing.
Then came a simpler geometrical pattern, circles enclosing wreaths of
flowers copied from nature, exquisitely delicate and beautiful; but the
imitation was carried sometimes too far, as when the flower heads are
suspended on fine stalks of copper wire.
In a little squirarchical mansion in Cornwall, of no architectural
beauty, there was a marvellously beautiful ceiling of the date of
Charles II., the flowers and fruit infinitely varied, and wrought with
exquisite delicacy. The room was low, and for that reason the artist
had taken special pains in the modelling.
A "Brummagem" man bought up the land and the house--this latter was far
too small to suit his ideas, and it was left unoccupied.
One day the rector said to him: "I want to have my school treat next
Thursday--should rain fall, may I take the children into the old hall?"
"By all means," said the new squire; "but it will be stuffy: I will
have it ventilated."
He at once went down with two carpenters and ripped strips through
the lovely ceiling from one end of the room to the other, utterly
destroying this incomparable work, that must have occupied the artist
months of patient labour, and which had called forth the best efforts
of his genius.
That is how mulish stupidity is every day destroying the achievements
of genius. It is on a level with that of the chawbacon who, having got
hold of a Stradella violin, broke it up to light his fire with the
splinters.
There was, perhaps, a little heaviness in these ceilings--a little more
than there ought to be, and the perfection of plaster work was attained
in Germany at a somewhat later period, when the rococo ceilings came
in. These were superb--not heavy, but rich with fancy and exquisite
in delicacy. This never reached England, or if a foreign workman came
here and did a ceiling or two, the art did not take root. Instead it
died completely out, and we were left with quite plain ceilings or
such as had a centre-piece, cast, of no style--vulgar, tasteless, and
mechanical, and of plaster of Paris.
We have come now to recognize, tardily, the right of the ceiling to
decoration, and are either papering it or covering it with lincrusta,
or _papier mâché_, or asbestos "salamander" decoration, applied. This
is better than nothing, but, of course, is mechanical and monotonous,
and can never compete with the work that is the direct outcome of
mental effort and manual dexterity.
In connection with a ceiling I subjoin the following story from a
friend:
"In 1891 my head mason had an attack of influenza, and this fell on
his nerves, and convinced that he had been ill-wished he consulted a
white-witch at----, who informed him that he had been 'overlooked' by
one of his own profession, and that he had applied too late for a cure
to be effected. The man became terribly depressed; he wandered over the
country, disappearing for days, and keeping his family in alarm, lest
he should make away with himself.
"This went on for several years. He would do no work, he took no
interest in anything, and could speak of nothing but his ailments.
'His heart was broke,' such was his description of himself. Well, I was
about to rebuild a wing of my mansion, and to make of one large room
a ball-room. I went to my bewitched mason and said to him, 'Thomas,
I wish you would help me. I am very anxious to have a first-class
decorated ceiling to that ball-room, and you know what these Londoners
be: they do all by machinery, and you buy a ceiling by the yard--nasty,
vulgar stuff I would be ashamed to have seen here. I'll tell you what
it is, Thomas, those Londoners come out of town and sail about the
country in the holiday time picking up ideas. I think we must show
them how a thing in ceilings ought to be done, and let them understand
that we are not such fools as they take us to be. Try your hand at
my ball-room ceiling. Get it started at any rate.' The man was not a
plasterer by profession, but he had done some plaster work for me, and
took an interest in it.
"'Oh, sir!' said he, 'my heart is broke. I couldn't do it.'
"'What,' I answered, 'not to teach the Londoners a lesson?'
"'Well, I'll begin it, but never be able to finish it.'
"'Then begin it, man.'
"So he did. Between us we contrived to model roses and tulips, etc. And
then we set to work casting and finishing off. Then came the glorious
rainless summer of 1896. 'Thomas,' said I, 'we must get the walls of
the ball-room up and roofed over before winter. Do now lend a hand
with building. Then when bad weather comes on you can begin to set up
the ceiling.' So all the summer he was building--did not miss a day,
and this winter he is hard at work at his ceiling, full of interest
and delight, and has recovered his good looks, and to a large extent
forgotten his maladies, and by the time that the last rose is finished
off, I trust he will be a sound man again."
Now what my friend wrote me conveys a moral. Our country workmen,
masons, carpenters, smiths, are not fools. They need only to be
directed in the paths of good taste, to execute admirable work, as good
as anything produced in former days. Do not over-teach and direct
them, give them good examples, show them the principles of construction
and decoration, and then, as much as may be, leave them to work the
details out by themselves. They become intensely interested and proud
of their work, and take all their friends and fellow-tradesmen to see
it, whether it be in the church or the manor-house; and that this sort
of education, producing results in the place, attaches them to their
village home, goes without saying.
There was a grand old fellow, George Bevan by name, a mason, who worked
in this parish when I was a boy. And now, whenever in alteration or
in pulling down a bit of George Bevan's work is come upon, the masons
stand still, shake their heads, and say, "As well blast a rock as put a
pick into George Bevan's work." Then say I, "Aye, and a hundred years
hence folk will say, 'This has been done by the White family. There
were giants in those days.'"
Unhappily, many of our landed proprietors think it quite enough to
build "neat" farmhouses and cottages, and pay no regard to beauty. It
does not cost more to build what is beautiful than what is hideous;
if they took pains to educate their local artisans to do work that is
pleasing, they would be elevating them in culture, and, what is more,
attaching them to those old homes of theirs that they have helped to
make a delight to the eye; whereas, set them to build what is ugly, and
even though ignorant of the principles of art, they are dimly conscious
that the cottage they occupy is not a place pleasant to the eye, and
not one they can ever grow to love.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE PARISH CHURCH]