Household Papers and Stories

“But I’m not clear yet,” said Mary, “what is coming of this rhetoric.”

“Well, then, Mary, I’ll tell you. A suit of new carved black-walnut furniture, severe in taste and perfect in style, such as I should choose at David & Saul’s, could not be got under three hundred dollars, and I haven’t the three hundred to give. What, then, shall we do? We must fall back on our resources; we must look over our treasures. We have our proof cast of the great glorious head of the Venus di Milo; we have those six beautiful photographs of Rome, that Brown brought to us; we have the great German lithograph of the San Sisto Mother and Child, and we have the two angel heads, from the same; we have that lovely golden twilight sketch of Heade’s; we have some sea photographs of Bradford’s; we have an original pen-and-ink sketch by Billings; and then, as before, we have ‘our picture.’ What has been the use of our watching at the gates and waiting at the doors of Beauty all our lives, if she hasn’t thrown us out a crust now and then, so that we might have it for time of need? Now, you see, Mary, we must make the toilet of our rooms just as a pretty woman makes hers when money runs low, and she sorts and freshens her ribbons, and matches them to her hair and eyes, and, with a bow here and a bit of fringe there, and a button somewhere else, dazzles us into thinking that she has an infinity of beautiful attire. Our rooms are new and pretty of themselves, to begin with; the tint of the paper, and the rich coloring of the border, corresponding with the furniture and carpets, will make them seem prettier. And now for arrangement. Take this front room. I propose to fill those two recesses each side of the fireplace with my books, in their plain pine cases, just breast-high from the floor: they are stained a good dark color, and nobody need stick a pin in them to find out that they are not rosewood. The top of these shelves on either side to be covered with the same stuff as the furniture, finished with a crimson fringe. On top of the shelves on one side of the fireplace I shall set our noble Venus di Milo, and I shall buy at Cicci’s the lovely Clytie, and put it the other side. Then I shall get of Williams & Everett two of their chromo lithographs, which give you all the style and charm of the best English watercolor school. I will have the lovely Bay of Amalfi over my Venus, because she came from those suns and skies of southern Italy, and I will hang Lake Como over my Clytie. Then, in the middle, over the fireplace, shall be ‘our picture.’ Over each door shall hang one of the lithographed angel heads of the San Sisto, to watch our going out and coming in; and the glorious Mother and Child shall hang opposite the Venus di Milo, to show how Greek and Christian unite in giving the noblest type to womanhood. And then, when we have all our sketches and lithographs framed and hung here and there, and your flowers blooming as they always do, and your ivies wandering and rambling as they used to, and hanging in the most graceful ways and places, and all those little shells and ferns and vases, which you are always conjuring with, tastefully arranged, I’ll venture to say that our rooms will be not only pleasant, but beautiful, and that people will oftener say, ‘How beautiful!’ when they enter, than if we spent three times the money on new furniture.”

In the course of a year after this conversation, one and another of my acquaintances were often heard speaking of John Morton’s house. “Such beautiful rooms, – so charmingly furnished, – you must go and see them. What does make them so much pleasanter than those rooms in the other house, which have everything in them that money can buy?” So said the folk; for nine people out of ten only feel the effect of a room, and never analyze the causes from which it flows: they know that certain rooms seem dull and heavy and confused, but they don’t know why; that certain others seem cheerful, airy, and beautiful, but they know not why. The first exclamation, on entering John’s parlors, was so often “How beautiful!” that it became rather a byword in the family. Estimated by their mere money value, the articles in the rooms were of very trifling worth; but, as they stood arranged and combined, they had all the effect of a lovely picture. Although the statuary was only plaster, and the photographs and lithographs such as were all within the compass of limited means, yet every one of them was a good thing of its own kind, or a good reminder of some of the greatest works of art. A good plaster cast is a daguerreotype, so to speak, of a great statue, though it may be bought for five or six dollars, while its original is not to be had for any namable sum. A chromo lithograph of the best sort gives all the style and manner and effect of Turner or Stanfield, or any of the best of modern artists, though you buy it for five or ten dollars, and though the original would command a thousand guineas. The lithographs from Raphael’s immortal picture give you the results of a whole age of artistic culture, in a form within the compass of very humble means. There is now selling for five dollars at Williams & Everett’s a photograph of Cheney’s crayon drawing of the San Sisto Madonna and Child, which has the very spirit of the glorious original. Such a picture, hung against the wall of a child’s room, would train its eye from infancy; and yet how many will freely spend five dollars in embroidery on its dress, that say they cannot afford works of art!

There was one advantage which John and his wife found, in the way in which they furnished their house, that I have hinted at before: it gave freedom to their children. Though their rooms were beautiful, it was not with the tantalizing beauty of expensive and frail knick-knacks. Pictures hung against the wall, and statuary safely lodged on brackets, speak constantly to the childish eye, but are out of the reach of childish fingers, and are not upset by childish romps. They are not, like china and crystal, liable to be used and abused by servants; they do not wear out; they are not spoiled by dust, nor consumed by moths. The beauty once there is always there; though the mother be ill and in her chamber, she has no fears that she shall find it all wrecked and shattered. And this style of beauty, inexpensive as it is, compared with luxurious furniture, is a means of cultivation. No child is ever stimulated to draw or to read by an Axminster carpet or a carved centre-table; but a room surrounded with photographs and pictures and fine casts suggests a thousand inquiries, stimulates the little eye and hand. The child is found with its pencil, drawing, or he asks for a book on Venice, or wants to hear the history of the Roman Forum.

But I have made my article too long. I will write another on the moral and intellectual effects of house-furnishing.

“I have proved my point, Miss Jenny, have I not? In house-furnishing nothing is more economical than beauty.”

“Yes, papa,” said Jenny; “I give it up.”

V

RAKING UP THE FIRE

We have a custom at our house which we call raking up the fire. That is to say, the last half hour before bedtime, we draw in, shoulder to shoulder, around the last brands and embers of our hearth, which we prick up and brighten, and dispose for a few farewell flickers and glimmers. This is a grand time for discussion. Then we talk over parties, if the young people have been out of an evening, – a book, if we have been reading one; we discuss and analyze characters, – give our views on all subjects, æsthetic, theological, and scientific, in a way most wonderful to hear; and, in fact, we sometimes get so engaged in our discussions that every spark of the fire burns out, and we begin to feel ourselves shivering around the shoulders, before we can remember that it is bedtime.

So, after the reading of my last article, we had a “raking-up talk,” – to wit, Jenny, Marianne, and I, with Bob Stephens: my wife, still busy at her work-basket, sat at the table a little behind us. Jenny, of course, opened the ball in her usual incisive manner.

“But now, papa, after all you say in your piece there, I cannot help feeling that, if I had the taste and the money too, it would be better than the taste alone with no money. I like the nice arrangements and the books and the drawings, but I think all these would appear better still with really elegant furniture.”

“Who doubts that?” said I. “Give me a large tub of gold coin to dip into, and the furnishing and beautifying of a house is a simple affair. The same taste that could make beauty out of cents and dimes could make it more abundantly out of dollars and eagles. But I have been speaking for those who have not and cannot get riches, and who wish to have agreeable houses; and I begin in the outset by saying that beauty is a thing to be respected, reverenced, and devoutly cared for, and then I say that BEAUTY IS CHEAP, – nay, to put it so that the shrewdest Yankee will understand it, – BEAUTY IS THE CHEAPEST THING YOU CAN HAVE, because in many ways it is a substitute for expense. A few vases of flowers in a room, a few blooming, well-kept plants, a few prints framed in fanciful frames of cheap domestic fabric, a statuette, a bracket, an engraving, a pencil-sketch, – above all, a few choice books, – all these arranged by a woman who has the gift in her finger-ends, often produce such an illusion on the mind’s eye that one goes away without once having noticed that the cushion of the armchair was worn out, and that some veneering had fallen off the centre-table.

“I have a friend, a schoolmistress, who lives in a poor little cottage enough, which, let alone of the Graces, might seem mean and sordid, but a few flower-seeds and a little weeding in the spring make it, all summer, an object which everybody stops to look at. Her æsthetic soul was at first greatly tried with the water-barrel which stood under the eaves spout, – a most necessary evil, since only thus could her scanty supply of soft water for domestic purposes be secured. One of the Graces, however, suggested to her a happy thought. She planted a row of morning-glories round the bottom of her barrel, and drove a row of tacks around the top, and strung her water-butt with twine, like a great harpsichord. A few weeks covered the twine with blossoming plants, which every morning were a mass of many-colored airy blooms, waving in graceful sprays, and looking at themselves in the water. The water-barrel, in fact, became a celebrated stroke of ornamental gardening, which the neighbors came to look at.”

“Well, but,” said Jenny, “everybody hasn’t mamma’s faculty with flowers. Flowers will grow for some people, and for some they won’t. Nobody can see what mamma does so very much, but her plants always look fresh and thriving and healthy, – her things blossom just when she wants them, and do anything else she wishes them to; and there are other people that fume and fuss and try, and their things won’t do anything at all. There’s Aunt Easygo has plant after plant brought from the greenhouse, and hanging-baskets, and all sorts of things; but her plants grow yellow and drop their leaves, and her hanging-baskets get dusty and poverty-stricken, while mamma’s go on flourishing as heart could desire.”

“I can tell you what your mother puts into her plants,” said I, – “just what she has put into her children, and all her other home-things, – her heart. She loves them; she lives in them; she has in herself a plant-life and a plant-sympathy. She feels for them as if she herself were a plant; she anticipates their wants, – always remembers them without an effort, and so the care flows to them daily and hourly. She hardly knows when she does the things that make them grow, but she gives them a minute a hundred times a day. She moves this nearer the glass, – draws that back, – detects some thief of a worm on one, – digs at the root of another, to see why it droops, – washes these leaves and sprinkles those, – waters, and refrains from watering, all with the habitual care of love. Your mother herself doesn’t know why her plants grow; it takes a philosopher and a writer for the ‘Atlantic’ to tell her what the cause is.”

Here I saw my wife laughing over her work-basket as she answered, —

“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 dis-harmony 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 traveling 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 Jenny, “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 Jenny, “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 Jenny, “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 Jenny.

“Well, Marianne, how many yards of this wonderfully cheap carpet do you want?”

“We want sixty yards for both rooms,” said Jenny, always primed with statistics.

“That will be a hundred and twenty dollars,” I said.

“Yes,” said Jenny; “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 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 mustache. “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 downstairs, 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 Jenny, “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 Jenny; “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.”