from England; he comes in good faith and good feeling to see how
Americans live. He merely wants to penetrate into the interior of
domestic life, to see what there is genuinely and peculiarly American
about it. Now here is Smilax, who is living, in a small, neat way, on
his salary from the daily press. He remembers hospitalities received
from our traveller in England, and wants to return them. He remembers,
too, with dismay, a well-kept establishment, the well-served table, the
punctilious, orderly servants. Smilax keeps two, a cook and chambermaid,
who divide the functions of his establishment between them. What shall
he do? Let him say, in a fair, manly way, “My dear fellow, I’m delighted
to see you. I live in a small way, but I’ll do my best for you, and Mrs.
Smilax will be delighted. Come and dine with us, so and so, and we’ll
bring in one or two friends.” So the man comes, and Mrs. Smilax serves
up such a dinner as lies within the limits of her knowledge and the
capacities of her servants. All plain, good of its kind, unpretending,
without an attempt to do anything English or French,—to do anything more
than if she were furnishing a gala-dinner for her father or returned
brother. Show him your house freely, just as it is, talk to him freely
of it, just as he in England showed you his larger house and talked to
you of his finer things. If the man is a true man, he will thank you for
such unpretending, sincere welcome; if he is a man of straw, then he is
not worth wasting Mrs. Smilax’s health and spirits for, in unavailing
efforts to get up a foreign dinner-party.
A man who has any heart in him values a genuine, little bit of home more
than anything else you can give him. He can get French cooking at a
restaurant; he can buy expensive wines at first-class hotels, if he
wants them; but the traveller, though ever so rich and ever so
well-served at home, is, after all, nothing but a man as you are, and he
is craving something that doesn’t seem like an hotel,—some bit of real,
genuine heart-life. Perhaps he would like better than anything to show
you the last photograph of his wife, or to read to you the great,
round-hand letter of his ten-year-old which he has got to-day. He is
ready to cry when he thinks of it. In this mood he goes to see you,
hoping for something like home, and you first receive him in a parlor
opened only on state-occasions, and that has been circumstantially and
exactly furnished, as the upholsterer assures you, as every other parlor
of the kind in the city is furnished. You treat him to a dinner got up
for the occasion, with hired waiters,—a dinner which it has taken Mrs.
Smilax a week to prepare for, and will take her a week to recover
from,—for which the baby has been snubbed and turned off, to his loud
indignation, and your young four-year-old sent to his aunts. Your
traveller eats your dinner, and finds it inferior, as a work of art, to
other dinners,—a poor imitation. He goes away and criticises; you hear
of it, and resolve never to invite a foreigner again. But if you had
given him a little of your heart, a little home-warmth and feeling,—if
you had shown him your baby, and let him romp with your four-year-old,
and eat a genuine dinner with you,—would he have been false to that? Not
so likely. He wanted something real and human,—you gave him a bad
dress-rehearsal, and dress-rehearsals always provoke criticism.
Besides hospitality, there is, in a true home, a mission of charity. It
is a just law which regulates the possession of great or beautiful works
of art in the Old World, that they shall in some sense be considered the
property of all who can appreciate. Fine grounds have hours when the
public may be admitted,—pictures and statues may be shown to visitors;
and this is a noble charity. In the same manner the fortunate
individuals who have achieved the greatest of all human works of art
should employ it as a sacred charity. How many, morally wearied,
wandering, disabled, are healed and comforted by the warmth of a true
home! When a mother has sent her son to the temptations of a distant
city, what news is so glad to her heart as that he has found some quiet
family where he visits often and is made to feel AT HOME? How many young
men have good women saved from temptation and shipwreck by drawing them
often to the sheltered corner by the fireside! The poor artist,—the
wandering genius who has lost his way in this world, and stumbles like a
child among hard realities,—the many men and women who, while they have
houses, have no homes,—see from afar, in their distant, bleak
life-journey, the light of a true home-fire, and, if made welcome there,
warm their stiffened limbs, and go forth stronger to their pilgrimage.
Let those who have accomplished this beautiful and perfect work of
divine art be liberal of its influence. Let them not seek to bolt the
doors and draw the curtains; for they know not, and will never know till
the future life, of the good they may do by the ministration of this
great charity of home.
We have heard much lately of the restricted sphere of woman. We have
been told how many spirits among women are of a wider, stronger, more
heroic mould than befits the mere routine of housekeeping. It may be
true that there are many women far too great, too wise, too high, for
mere housekeeping. But where is the woman in any way too great or too
high, or too wise, to spend herself in creating a home? What can any
woman make diviner, higher, better? From such homes go forth all
heroisms, all inspirations, all great deeds. Such mothers and such homes
have made the heroes and martyrs, faithful unto death, who have given
their precious lives to us during these three years of our agony!
Homes are the work of art peculiar to the genius of woman. Man _helps_
in this work, but woman leads; the hive is always in confusion without
the _queen_-bee. But what a woman must she be who does this work
perfectly! She comprehends all, she balances and arranges all; all
different tastes and temperaments find in her their rest, and she can
unite at one hearthstone the most discordant elements. In her is order,
yet an order ever veiled and concealed by indulgence. None are checked,
reproved, abridged of privileges by her love of system; for she knows
that order was made for the family, and not the family for order.
Quietly she takes on herself what all others refuse or overlook. What
the unwary disarrange she silently rectifies. Everybody in her sphere
breathes easy, feels free; and the driest twig begins in her sunshine to
put out buds and blossoms. So quiet are her operations and movements,
that none sees that it is she who holds all things in harmony; only,
alas, when she is gone, how many things suddenly appear disordered,
inharmonious, neglected! All these threads have been smilingly held in
her weak hand. Alas, if that is no longer there!
Can any woman be such a housekeeper without inspiration? No. In the
words of the old church-service, “Her soul must ever have affiance in
God.” The New Jerusalem of a perfect home cometh down from God out of
heaven. But to make such a home is ambition high and worthy enough for
_any_ woman, be she what she may.
One thing more. Right on the threshold of all perfection lies _the
cross_ to be taken up. No one can go over or around that cross in
science or in art. Without labor and self-denial neither Raphael nor
Michel Angelo nor Newton was made perfect. Nor can man or woman create a
true home who is not willing in the outset to embrace life heroically,
to encounter labor and sacrifice. Only to such shall this divinest power
be given to create on earth that which is the nearest image of heaven.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
IV.
THE ECONOMY OF THE BEAUTIFUL.
TALKING to you in this way once a month, O my confidential reader, there
seems to be danger, as in all intervals of friendship, that we shall not
readily be able to take up our strain of conversation just where we left
off. Suffer me, therefore, to remind you that the month past left us
seated at the fireside, just as we had finished reading of what a home
was, and how to make one.
The fire had burned low, and great, solid hickory coals were winking
dreamily at us from out their fluffy coats of white ashes,—just as if
some household sprite there were opening now one eye and then the other,
and looking in a sleepy, comfortable way at us.
The close of my piece, about the good house mother, had seemed to tell
on my little audience. Marianne had nestled close to her mother, and
laid her head on her knee; and though Jenny sat up straight as a pin,
yet her ever-busy knitting was dropped in her lap, and I saw the glint
of a tear in her quick, sparkling eye,—yes, actually a little bright
bead fell upon her work; whereupon she started up actively, and declared
that the fire wanted just one more stick to make a blaze before bedtime;
and then there was such a raking among the coals, such an adjusting of
the andirons, such vigorous arrangement of the wood, and such a brisk
whisking of the hearth-brush, that it was evident Jenny had something on
her mind.
When all was done, she sat down again and looked straight into the
blaze, which went dancing and crackling up, casting glances and flecks
of light on our pictures and books, and making all the old, familiar
furniture seem full of life and motion.
“I think that’s a good piece,” she said, decisively. “I think those are
things that should be thought about.”
Now Jenny was the youngest of our flock, and therefore, in a certain
way, regarded by my wife and me as perennially “the baby”; and these
little, old-fashioned, decisive ways of announcing her opinions seemed
so much a part of her nature, so peculiarly “Jennyish,” as I used to
say, that my wife and I only exchanged amused glances over her head,
when they occurred.
In a general way, Jenny, standing in the full orb of her feminine
instincts like Diana in the moon, rather looked down on all masculine
views of women’s matters as “_tolerabiles ineptiæ_”; but towards her
papa she had gracious turns of being patronizing to the last degree; and
one of these turns was evidently at its flood-tide, as she proceeded to
say,—
“_I_ think papa is right,—that keeping house and having a home, and all
that, is a very serious thing, and that people go into it with very
little thought about it. I really think those things papa has been
saying there ought to be thought about.”
“Papa,” said Marianne, “I wish you would tell me exactly how _you_ would
spend that money you gave me for house-furnishing. I should like just
your views.”
“Precisely,” said Jenny, with eagerness; “because it is just as papa
says,—a sensible man, who has thought, and had experience, can’t help
having some ideas, even about women’s affairs, that are worth attending
to. I think so, decidedly.”
I acknowledged the compliment for my sex and myself with my best bow.
“But then, papa,” said Marianne, “I can’t help feeling sorry that one
can’t live in such a way as to have beautiful things around one. I’m
sorry they must cost so much, and take so much care, for I am made so
that I really want them. I do so like to see pretty things! I do like
rich carpets and elegant carved furniture, and fine china and cut-glass
and silver. I can’t bear mean, common-looking rooms. I should so like to
have my house look beautiful!”
“Your house ought not to look mean and common,—your house ought to look
beautiful,” I replied. “It would be a sin and a shame to have it
otherwise. No house ought to be fitted up for a future home without a
strong and a leading reference to beauty in all its arrangements. If I
were a Greek, I should say that the first household libation should be
made to beauty; but, being an old-fashioned Christian, I would say that
he who prepares a home with no eye to beauty neglects the example of the
great Father who has filled our earth-home with such elaborate
ornament.”
“But then, papa, there’s the money!” said Jenny, shaking her little head
wisely. “You men don’t think of that. You want us girls, for instance,
to be patterns of economy, but we must always be wearing fresh, nice
things; you abhor soiled gloves and worn shoes: and yet how is all this
to be done without money? And it’s just so in housekeeping. You sit in
your arm-chairs and conjure up visions of all sorts of impossible things
to be done; but when mamma there takes out that little account-book, and
figures away on the cost of things, where do the visions go?”
“You are mistaken, my little dear, and you talk just like a
woman,”—(this was _my_ only way of revenging myself,)—“that is to say,
you jump to conclusions, without sufficient knowledge. I maintain that
in house-furnishing, as well as woman-furnishing, there’s nothing so
economical as beauty.”
“There’s one of papa’s paradoxes!” said Jenny.
“Yes,” said I, “that is my thesis, which I shall nail up over the
mantel-piece there, as Luther nailed his to the church-door. It is time
to rake up the fire now; but to-morrow night I will give you a paper on
the Economy of the Beautiful.”
* * * * *
“Come, now we are to have papa’s paradox,” said Jenny, as soon as the
tea-things had been carried out.
_Entre nous_, I must tell you that insensibly we had fallen into the
habit of taking our tea by my study-fire. Tea, you know, is a mere
nothing in itself, its only merit being its social and poetic
associations, its warmth and fragrance,—and the more socially and
informally it can be dispensed, the more in keeping with its airy and
cheerful nature.
Our circle was enlightened this evening by the cheery visage of Bob
Stephens, seated, as of right, close to Marianne’s work-basket.
“You see, Bob,” said Jenny, “papa has undertaken to prove that the most
beautiful things are always the cheapest.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” said Bob,—“for there’s a carved antique
bookcase and study-table that I have my eye on, and if this can in any
way be made to appear—”
“O, it won’t be made to appear,” said Jenny, settling herself at her
knitting, “only in some transcendental, poetic sense, such as papa can
always make out. Papa is more than half a poet, and his truths turn out
to be figures of rhetoric, when one comes to apply them to matters of
fact.”
“Now, Miss Jenny, please remember my subject and thesis,” I
replied,—“that in house-furnishing there is nothing so economical as
beauty; and I will make it good against all comers, not by figures of
rhetoric, but by figures of arithmetic. I am going to be very
matter-of-fact and commonplace in my details, and keep ever in view the
addition-table. I will instance a case which has occurred under my own
observation.”
THE ECONOMY OF THE BEAUTIFUL.
Two of the houses lately built on the new land in Boston were bought by
two friends, Philip and John. Philip had plenty of money, and paid the
cash down for his house, without feeling the slightest vacancy in his
pocket. John, who was an active, rising young man, just entering on a
flourishing business, had expended all his moderate savings for years in
the purchase of his dwelling, and still had a mortgage remaining, which
he hoped to clear off by his future successes. Philip begins the work of
furnishing as people do with whom money is abundant, and who have simply
to go from shop to shop and order all that suits their fancy and is
considered ‘the thing’ in good society. John begins to furnish with very
little money. He has a wife and two little ones, and he wisely deems
that to insure to them a well-built house, in an open, airy situation,
with conveniences for warming, bathing, and healthy living, is a wise
beginning in life; but it leaves him little or nothing beyond.
Behold, then, Philip and his wife, well pleased, going the rounds of
shops and stores in fitting up their new dwelling, and let us follow
step by step. To begin with the wall-paper. Imagine a front and back
parlor, with folding-doors, with two south windows on the front, and two
looking on a back court, after the general manner of city houses. We
will suppose they require about thirty rolls of wall-paper. Philip buys
the heaviest French velvet, with gildings and traceries, at four dollars
a roll. This, by the time it has been put on, with gold mouldings,
according to the most established taste of the best paper-hangers, will
bring the wall-paper of the two rooms to a figure something like two
hundred dollars. Now they proceed to the carpet-stores, and there are
thrown at their feet by obsequious clerks velvets and Axminsters, with
flowery convolutions and medallion-centres, as if the flower-gardens of
the tropics were whirling in waltzes, with graceful lines of
arabesque,—roses, callas, lilies, knotted, wreathed, twined, with blue
and crimson and golden ribbons, dazzling marvels of color and tracery.
There is no restraint in price,—four or six dollars a yard, it is all
the same to them,—and soon a magic flower-garden blooms on the floors,
at a cost of five hundred dollars. A pair of elegant rugs, at fifty
dollars apiece, complete the inventory, and bring our rooms to the mark
of eight hundred dollars for papering and carpeting alone. Now come the
great mantel-mirrors for four hundred more, and our rooms progress. Then
comes the upholsterer, and measures our four windows, that he may
skilfully barricade them from air and sunshine. The fortifications
against heaven, thus prepared, cost, in the shape of damask, cord,
tassels, shades, laces, and cornices, about two hundred dollars per
window. To be sure, they make the rooms close and sombre as the grave;
but they are of the most splendid stuffs; and if the sun would only
reflect, he would see, himself, how foolish it was for him to try to
force himself into a window guarded by his betters. If there is anything
cheap and plebeian, it is sunshine and fresh air! Behold us, then, with
our two rooms papered, carpeted, and curtained for two thousand dollars;
and now are to be put in them sofas, lounges, étagères, centre-tables,
screens, chairs of every pattern and device, for which it is but
moderate to allow a thousand more. We have now two parlors furnished at
an outlay of three thousand dollars, without a single picture, a single
article of statuary, a single object of Art of any kind, and without any
light to see them by, if they were there. We must say for our Boston
upholsterers and furniture-makers that such good taste generally reigns
in their establishments that rooms furnished at hap-hazard from them
cannot fail of a certain air of good taste, so far as the individual
things are concerned. But the different articles we have supposed,
having been ordered without reference to one another or the rooms, have,
when brought together, no unity of effect, and the general result is
scattering and confused. If asked how Philip’s parlors look, your reply
is, “O, the usual way of such parlors,—everything that such people
usually get,—medallion-carpets, carved furniture, great mirrors, bronze
mantel-ornaments, and so on.” The only impression a stranger receives,
while waiting in the dim twilight of these rooms, is that their owner is
rich, and able to get good, handsome things, such as all other rich
people get.
Now our friend John, as often happens in America, is moving in the same
social circle with Philip, visiting the same people,—his house is the
twin of the one Philip has been furnishing, and how shall he, with a few
hundred dollars, make his rooms even presentable beside those which
Philip has fitted up elegantly at three thousand?
Now for the economy of beauty. Our friend must make his prayer to the
Graces,—for, if they cannot save him, nobody can. One thing John has to
begin with, that rare gift to man, a wife with the magic cestus of
Venus,—not around her waist, but, if such a thing could be, in her
finger-ends. All that she touches falls at once into harmony and
proportion. Her eye for color and form is intuitive: let her arrange a
garret, with nothing but boxes, barrels, and cast-off furniture in it,
and ten to one she makes it seem the most attractive place in the house.
It is a veritable “gift of good faërie,” this tact of beautifying and
arranging, that some women have,—and, on the present occasion, it has a
real, material value, that can be estimated in dollars and cents. Come
with us and you can see the pair taking their survey of the yet
unfurnished parlors, as busy and happy as a couple of bluebirds picking
up the first sticks and straws for their nest.
“There are two sunny windows to begin with,” says the good fairy, with
an appreciative glance. “That insures flowers all winter.”
“Yes,” says John; “I never would look at a house without a good sunny
exposure. Sunshine is the best ornament of a house, and worth an extra
thousand a year.”
“Now for our wall-paper,” says she. “Have you looked at wall-papers,
John?”
“Yes; we shall get very pretty ones for thirty-seven cents a roll; all
you want of a paper, you know, is to make a ground-tint to throw out
your pictures and other matters, and to reflect a pleasant tone of
light.”
“Well, John, you know Uncle James says that a stone-color is the
best,—but I can’t bear those cold blue grays.”
“Nor I,” says John. “If we must have gray, let it at least be a gray
suffused with gold or rose-color, such as you see at evening in the
clouds.”
“So I think,” responds she; “but, better, I should like a paper with a
tone of buff,—something that produces warm yellowish reflections, and
will almost make you think the sun is shining in cold gray weather; and
then there is nothing that lights up so cheerfully in the evening. In
short, John, I think the color of a _zafferano_ rose will be just about
the shade we want.”
“Well, I can find that, in good American paper, as I said before, at
from thirty-seven to forty cents a roll. Then, our bordering: there’s an
important question, for that must determine the carpet, the chairs, and
everything else. Now what shall be the ground-tint of our rooms?”
“There are only two to choose between,” says the lady,—“green and
marroon: which is the best for the picture?”
“I think,” says John, looking above the mantel-piece, as if he saw a
picture there,—“I think a border of marroon velvet, with marroon
furniture, is the best for the picture.”
“I think so too,” said she; “and then we will have that lovely marroon
and crimson carpet that I saw at Lowe’s;—it is an ingrain, to be sure,
but has a Brussels pattern, a mossy, mixed figure, of different shades
of crimson; it has a good warm, strong color, and when I come to cover
the lounges and our two old arm-chairs with marroon _rep_, it will make
such a pretty effect.”
“Yes,” said John; “and then, you know, our picture is so bright, it will
light up the whole. Everything depends on the picture.”
Now as to “the picture,” it has a story must be told. John, having been
all his life a worshipper and adorer of beauty and beautiful things, had
never passed to or from his business without stopping at the print-shop
windows, and seeing a little of what was there.
On one of these occasions he was smitten to the heart with the beauty of
an autumn landscape, where the red maples and sumachs, the purple and
crimson oaks, all stood swathed and harmonized together in the hazy
Indian-summer atmosphere. There was a great yellow chestnut-tree, on a
distant hill, which stood out so naturally that John instinctively felt
his fingers tingling for a basket, and his heels alive with a desire to
bound over on to the rustling hillside and pick up the glossy brown
nuts. Everything was there of autumn, even to the golden-rod and purple
asters and scarlet creepers in the foreground.
John went in and inquired. It was by an unknown French artist, without
name or patrons, who had just come to our shores to study our scenery,
and this was the first picture he had exposed for sale. John had just
been paid a quarter’s salary; he bethought him of board-bill and
washerwoman, sighed, and faintly offered fifty dollars.
To his surprise he was taken up at once, and the picture became his.
John thought himself dreaming. He examined his treasure over and over,
and felt sure that it was the work of no amateur beginner, but of a
trained hand and a true artist-soul. So he found his way to the studio
of the stranger, and apologized for having got such a gem for so much
less than its worth. “It was all I _could_ give, though,” he said; “and
one who paid four times as much could not value it more.” And so John
took one and another of his friends, with longer purses than his own, to
the studio of the modest stranger; and now his pieces command their full
worth in the market, and he works with orders far ahead of his ability
to execute, giving to the canvas the traits of American scenery as
appreciated and felt by the subtile delicacy of the French mind,—our
rural summer views, our autumn glories, and the dreamy, misty delicacy
of our snowy winter landscapes. Whoso would know the truth of the same,
let him inquire for the modest studio of Morvillier, at Maiden, scarce a
bow-shot from our Boston.