Kitabı oku: «The Art of Living», sayfa 4

House-Furnishing and the Commissariat

I

After a man and his wife have made up their minds whether to live in a town house or suburban villa, they are obliged to consider next what they will have in the way of furniture, and presently what they will have for dinner. The consciousness that a house has nothing in it but the barest fixtures – the gasometer, the water-tanks, and the electric wires – and that it is for you and your wife to decide exactly what shall go into it in the way of wall-papers, carpets, upholstery, and objects of virtu, is inspiring, even though your purse be not plethoric and your knowledge of æsthetics limited. The thought at once presents itself that here is the chance of your lifetime to demonstrate how beautiful and cosy a home may be, and you set eagerly to work to surpass your predecessors of equal means. It is a worthy ambition to endeavor to make the matrimonial nest or the home of maturer years attractive, and if we were to peer back far enough into the past of even this country, to the time when our great great-grandmothers set up housekeeping with our great great-grandfathers, we should find that furnishing was considered a seriously delightful matter, though not perhaps the almost sacred trust we regard it to-day. I mean our great great-grandparents who used to live in those charming old colonial houses, and who owned the mahogany desks with brass handles and claw feet, the tall clocks, the ravishing andirons, and all the other old-fashioned furniture which is now so precious and difficult to find. Distance may lend such enchantment to a spinning-wheel, a warming-pan, or a spinnet, that one is liable to become hysterical in praise of them, and a calm, æsthetic mind, outside the limits of an antique furniture dealer’s store, would be justified in stigmatizing many of the now cherished effects of our great great-grandparents as truck; but, on the other hand, who will dispute that they possessed very many lovely things? They had an eye for graceful shapes in their sideboards and tables; somehow the curves they imparted to the backs of their chairs cannot be duplicated now so as to look the same; and the patterns of the satins, flowered chintzes, and other stuffs which they used for covers and curtains, exercise a witchery upon us, even as we see them now frayed and faded, which cannot proceed wholly from the imagination.

They had no modern comforts, poor things; no furnaces, no ice-chests, no set bath-tubs, no running water, no sanitary improvements, no gas or electric light; and their picturesque kitchen hearths, with great caldrons and cranes and leather blowers, must have been exceedingly inconvenient to cook in; but even their most incommodious appliances were not without artistic charm.

After them came the deluge – the era of horse-hair, the Sahara of democratic unloveliness, when in every house, in every country town, the set best room, which was never used by the family, stood like a mortuary chapel solely for the reception of guests. In the cities, in the households of the then enlightened, rep – generally green – was frequently substituted for the sable horse-hair. Then came the days when a dining-room or drawing-room was furnished in one pervasive hue – a suit of sables, a brick red, a dark green, or a deep maroon. Everything matched; the chairs and tables, desks and book-cases were bought in sets at one fell swoop by the householder of the period who desired to produce artistic effects. For forty years or so this was the prevailing fashion, and the limit of purely indigenous expression.

To it presently succeeded the æsthetic phase, borrowed from England. Then, instead of selecting everything to match, a young or old couple bought so as just not to match, but to harmonize. All sorts of queer and subtle shades and tints in wall-papers and fabrics appeared, principally dallyings with and improvisings upon green, brown, and yellow; frescos and dados were the rage; and a wave of interest in the scope and mission of eccentric color spread over the land. Valuable as this movement was as an educational factor, there was nothing American in it; or in other words, we were again simply imitative. The very fact, however, that we were ready to imitate, betokened that horse-hair and rep had ceased to satisfy national aspiration, and that we were willing to accept suggestions from without, inasmuch as no native prophet had arisen. But though the impetus came from abroad, the awakening was genuine. Since then the desire to furnish tastefully has been steadily waxing among the more well-to-do portion of the population. As in the case of architecture, the increasing interest has called into existence a professional class, which, though still small and less generally employed than their house-designing brethren, is beginning to play an important part in the education of the public taste in internal house decoration and equipment. The idea that any man or woman may be more fitted than his or her neighbor to choose a carpet or a wall-paper has been grudgingly admitted, and still irritates the average house-owner who is ready to furnish. But the masters, and more conspicuously the mistresses, of the competing superb establishments in our cities, have learned, from the sad experience of some of their predecessors, to swallow their individual trust in their own powers of selection, and to put themselves unreservedly into the clutches of a professional house decorator.

Furnishing a mammoth establishment from top to bottom with somebody else’s money, and plenty of it, must be a delightful occupation. There can be no carking consciousness of price to act as a drag on genius, and it would seem as though the house decorator who was not interfered with under these circumstances had a rare chance to show what is what. When he fails, which is by no means out of the question, he can ordinarily shift the responsibility on to his employer, for an employer can rarely resist the temptation of insisting on some one touch to prove his or her own capacity, and of course it is a simple matter for the man of art to demonstrate that this one touch has spoiled everything. The temptation to try to be as original and captivating in results as possible must be almost irresistible, especially when one’s elbow is constantly jogged by furniture and other dealers, who are only too eager to reproduce a Directory drawing-room or any other old-time splendor. But there is no denying that, whatever his limitations, the house decorator is becoming the best of educators on this side of the water, for though we cannot afford or have too much confidence in our own taste to employ him, our wives watch him like cats and are taking in his ideas through the pores, if not directly.

There are, it is true, almost as many diverse styles of internal ornamentation as of external architecture in our modern residences, for everyone who has, or thinks he has, an aptitude for furnishing is trying his professional or ’prentice hand, sometimes with startling results; yet the diversities seem less significant than in the case of external architecture, or perhaps it may be said that the sum total of effect is much nearer to finality or perfection. If as a nation we are deriving the inspiration for the furniture and upholsteries of our drawing-rooms and libraries from the best French and Dutch models of a century or more ago, we certainly can boast that the comfortable features which distinguish our apartments from their prototypes are a native growth. If as a people we cannot yet point to great original artistic triumphs, may we not claim the spacious and dignified contemporary refrigerator, the convenient laundry, the frequently occurring and palatial bath-room, the health-conducing ventilator-pipe and sanitary fixtures, and the various electrical and other pipes, tubes, and appliances which have become a part of every well-ordered house, as a national cult? To be genuinely comfortable in every-day life seems to have become the aim all the world over of the individual seeking to live wisely, and the rest of the world is in our debt for the many valuable mechanical aids to comfort in the home which have been invented on this side of the water.

This quest for comfort is being constantly borne in mind also in the æsthetic sense. We fit our drawing-rooms now to live in as well as to look at. We expect to sit on our sofas and in our easy chairs; hence we try to make them attractive to the back as well as to the eye. Though our wives may still occasionally pull down the window-shades to exclude a too dangerous sun, they no longer compel us to view our best rooms from the threshold as a cold, flawless, forbidden land. The extreme æsthetic tendencies which were rampant twenty years ago have been toned down by this inclination, among even our most elaborate house-furnishers, to produce the effect that rooms are intended for every-day use by rational beings. The ultra-queer colors have disappeared, and the carpets and wall-papers no longer suggest perpetual biliousness or chronic nightmare.

I think, too, the idea that a drawing-room can be made bewitchingly cosey by crowding it with all one’s beautiful and ugly earthly possessions has been demonstrated to be a delusion. In these days of many wedding presents, it is difficult for young people to resist the temptation of showing all they have received. I remember that Mrs. George J. Spriggs – she was the daughter, you will remember, of ex-Assistant Postmaster-General Homer W. Green – had seven lamps in her parlor in Locust Road, three of them with umbrageous Japanese shades. Her husband explained to me that there had been a run on lamps and pepper-pots in their individual case.

Now, Mrs. Julius Cæsar would have managed more cleverly. She would have made the lamp-dealer exchange four or five of the lamps for, say, an ornamental brass fender, a brass coal-scuttle, or a Japanese tea-tray, and have made the jeweller substitute some equally desirable table ornaments for the pepper-pots. And yet, when I made my wedding call on Mrs. Cæsar, ten years ago, I remember thinking that her drawing-room was a sort of compromise between a curiosity shop and a menagerie. To begin with, I stumbled over the head of a tiger skin, which confronted me as I passed through the portière, so that I nearly fell into the arms of my hostess. It seemed to me that I had stepped into a veritable bazaar. A large bear skin lay before the fire as a hearth-rug, and on either side of the grate squatted a large, orientally conceived china dragon with an open mouth. Here and there, under furniture or in corners, were gaping frogs in bronze or china. A low plush-covered table was densely arrayed with small china dogs of every degree. On another table was spread a number of silver ornaments – a silver snuff-box, a silver whistle, a silver feather, a silver match-box, and a silver shoe-buckle – all objects of virtu of apparently antique workmanship. There were three lamps with ornamental shades – a fluted china shade, a paper shade in semblance of a full-blown rose, and a yellow satin shade with drooping fringe. From the low studded ceiling depended a vast Japanese paper lantern. Sundry and divers china vases and shepherdesses occupied the mantel-piece and the top of the book-case, and had overflowed on to a writing-table supplied with brass ornaments. There were numerous pictures, large and small, on the walls, under many of which colored china plates had been hung. There were photographs in frames everywhere. The actual space where I could stand without knocking over anything was about the size of a hat bath, and was shut in by a circle of low chairs and divans besprinkled with æsthetic yellow, green, and pink soft silk cushions. On one of these divans my hostess was reclining in a Grosvenor gallery tea-gown, so that she seemed to wallow in cushions, and Julius Cæsar himself was sunk in the depths of one of the chairs, so near the ground that his knees seemed to rest on his chin, and one might fairly have taken him for another china frog of extraordinary proportions. All this in a comparatively small room where there were several other knick-knacks which I have omitted to mention. Better this, perhaps, than the drawing-room of forty years ago, when the visitor’s gaze was bounded by cold green rep, and he was restrained only by decorum from hurling into the fire the tidy or antimacassar which tickled his neck, or detached itself and wriggled down between his back and the back of the chair.

But Mrs. Cæsar’s drawing-room, in her new house on Belport Avenue, has been furnished from a very different point of view than her first one, which shows how rapidly tastes change in a progressive society. Mrs. Cæsar and Julius chose everything themselves this time as they did before, but they had learned from experience, and from the new work of the contemporary decorator. There is plenty of unoccupied space now to show her possessions to advantage, and there are not too many possessions visible for the size of the parlor; there is neither so much uniformity of color and design as to weary the eye, nor so much variety or eccentricity as to irritate it; consequently, the effect on the visitor is not that he is in a room intended for luxurious display, but in an exquisitely furnished room adapted for daily use. In other words, the controlling idea at present, of those who seek to make their houses charming, seems to be to combine comfort with elegance so skilfully that while one may realize the latter, one is conscious only of the former. Though decorators are still experimenting, as probably they always will be, to attain novel effects, they are disposed to make use of queer or attenuated hues, Moorish blazonry, stamped leather, peacock feathers, elephant tusks, stained-glass windows, and Japanese lacquer-work with much more discretion than a few years ago. Virgin-white instead of dirt-brown lights up our halls and stair-cases, and the vast chandeliers which used to dazzle the eye no longer dangle from the ceiling. Indeed, it seems as though it would be difficult to make the interior of the homes of our well-to-do class more comfortable and attractive than they are at present. It may be that some of our very rich people are disposed to waste their energies in devising and striving for more consummate elegance, thereby exposing us all to the charge that we are becoming too luxurious for our spiritual good. But there can be little question that the ambition to surround one’s self with as much beauty, consistent with comfort, as one can afford is desirable, even from the ethical standpoint.

Undeniably our point of view has changed extraordinarily in the last thirty years in regard to house-furnishing, as in regard to so many other matters of our material welfare, and there certainly is some ground for fearing that the pendulum is swinging just at present too far in the direction opposite to that of high thinking and low living; but, after all, though the reaction from ugliness has been and continues to be exuberant, it is as yet by no means wide-embracing. In fact, our cultivated well-to-do class – though it is well abreast of the rest of the civilized world in aspiration and not far behind it in accomplishment, with certain vivifying traits of its own which the old world societies do not possess or have lost – is still comparatively small; and there is still so much Stygian darkness outside it in respect to house-furnishing and home comfort in general, that we can afford to have the exuberance continue for the present; for there is some reason to believe that most of the descendants of our old high thinkers have become high livers, or at least, if low livers, have ceased to be high thinkers. Mutton-soup for breakfast and unattractive domestic surroundings seem to comport nowadays with ignoble aims, if nothing worse; moreover, it must not be forgotten that the plain people of the present is no longer the plain people of forty years ago, but is largely the seed of the influx of foreign peasants, chiefly inferior and often scum, which the sacredness of our institutions has obliged us to receive.

II

If we have become cosmopolitan in the matter of domestic comfort and elegance as regards our drawing-rooms, the same is certainly true of our dining-rooms, and dinner-tables. But here it seems to me that we are more justly open to criticism on the score of over-exuberance. That is, the fairly well-to-do class, for the plain people of foreign blood, and the low liver of native blood, eat almost as indigestible food, and quite as rapidly and unceremoniously, as the pie and doughnut nurtured yeoman of original Yankee stock, who thrived in spite of his diet, and left to his grandchildren the heritage of dyspepsia which has become nervous prostration in the present generation. It seems as though our instincts of hospitality have grown in direct ratio with our familiarity with and adoption of civilized creature comforts, and any charge of exuberance may doubtless be fairly ascribed to the national trait of generosity, the abuse of which is after all a noble blemish. But, on the other hand, facts remain, even after one has given a pleasing excuse for their existence, and it may be doubted if a spendthrift is long consoled by the reflection that his impecuniosity is due to his own disinclination to stint. May it not truthfully be charged against the reasonably well-to-do American citizen that he has a prejudice against thrift, especially where the entertainment of his fellow man or woman is concerned? The rapid growth of wealth and the comparative facility of becoming rich during the last half century of our development, has operated against the practice of small economies, so that we find ourselves now beset by extravagant traditions which we hesitate to deviate from for fear of seeming mean. Many a man to-day pays his quarter of a dollar ruefully and begrudgingly to the colored Pullman car porter at the end of his journey, when he is “brushed off,” because he cannot bring himself to break the custom which fixed the fee. It would be interesting to estimate what the grand total of saving to the American travelling public would have been if ten instead of twenty-five cents a head had been paid to the tyrant in question since he first darkened the situation. If not enough to maintain free schools for the negro, at least sufficient to compel railroad managements to give their employees suitable wages instead of letting the easy-going traveller, who has already paid for the privilege of a reserved seat, pay a premium on that. The exorbitant fees bestowed on waiters is but another instance of a tendency to be over-generous, which, once reduced to custom, becomes the severest kind of tax, in that it is likely to affect the warmest-hearted people.

This tendency to be needlessly lavish in expenditure is most conspicuous when we are offering hospitality in our own homes. Among the viands which we have added to the bills of fare of humanity, roast turkey and cranberry-sauce, Indian meal, and probably baked beans, are entitled to conspicuous and honorable mention, but is it not true, notwithstanding champagne is a foreign wine, that the most prodigious discovery in the line of food or drink yet made by the well-to-do people of this country, is the discovery of champagne? Does it not flow in one golden effervescing stream, varied only by the pops caused by the drawing of fresh corks, from the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World to the Golden Gate? And the circumstance that every pop costs the entertainer between three and four dollars, seems in no wise to interrupt the cheery explosions. There are some people who do not drink champagne or any other wine, from principle, and there are some with whom it does not agree, but the average individual finds that the interest of festive occasions is heightened by its presence in reasonable abundance, and is apt to deplore its total absence with internal groans. But surely ninety-nine men in our large cities out of one hundred, who are accustomed to entertain and be entertained, must be weary of the sight of this expensive tempter at the feast, which it is so difficult to refuse when set before one, and which is so often quaffed against better judgment or inclination. The champagne breakfast, the champagne luncheon, the champagne dinner, and the champagne supper, with a champagne cocktail tossed in as a stop-gap, hound the social favorite from January to December, until he is fain to dream of the Old Oaken Bucket, and sooner or later to drink Lithia water only.

With perpetual and unremitting champagne as the key-note of social gatherings, no wonder that the table ornaments and the comestibles become more splendid. A little dinner of eight or ten is no longer a simple matter of a cordial invitation and an extra course. The hostess who bids her contemporaries to dine with her most informally ten days hence, uses a figure of speech which is innocuous from the fact that it is known to be a deliberate falsehood. She begins generally by engaging a cook from outside to prepare the dinner, which must surely wound the sensibilities of any self-respecting couple the first time, however hardened to the situation they may become later.

At this stage of my reflections I am interrupted by my wife, Barbara – for I was thinking aloud – with a few words of expostulation.

“Are you not a little severe? I assume that you are referring now to people with a comfortable income, but who are not disgustingly rich. Of course, nowadays, the very rich people keep cooks who can cook for a dinner-party, cooks at eight dollars or more a week and a kitchen maid; so it is only the hostess with a cook at four and a half to six dollars a week and no kitchen maid who is likely to engage an accommodator. But what is the poor thing to do? Give a wretched, or plain dinner which may make her hair grow white in a single night? Surely, when a woman invites friends to her house she does not wish them to go away half starved, or remembering that they have had disagreeable things to eat. In that case she would prefer not to entertain at all.”

“The question is,” I answered, “whether it is more sensible to try to be content with what one has, or to vie with those who are better off. We do not attempt to dine on gold plate, nor have we a piano decorated with a five-thousand-dollar painting by one of the great artists, like Patterson, the banker. Why should we endeavor to compete with his kitchen?”

“The clever thing, of course, is to find a cook for six dollars a week who can cook for a dinner-party,” answered Barbara, pensively; “and yet,” she added, “though our cook can, the chances are that nine out of ten of the people who dine with us think that we hired her for the occasion.”

“Precisely. Just because the custom has grown so. It is sheer extravagance.”

“After all, my dear, it is a comparatively small matter – a five-dollar bill.”

“Pardon me. Five dollars for the cook, because one’s own cook is not good enough; three or five dollars for an accommodating maid or waiter, because you cannot trust your chamber-maid to assist your waitress; eight dollars for champagne, and so on.”

“Do not say ‘your’ – mine can.”

“Her, then – the woman of the day. I am trying to show that a small informal dinner is a cruelly expensive affair for the average man with a comfortable working income.”

“I admit that a dinner for eight or ten is expensive,” said Barbara. “It means twenty-five dollars at the lowest, even if you have your own cook. But what is one to do? You don’t seem to appreciate that a good plain cook cannot usually prepare dinner-party dishes, and that a plain dinner is now almost as different from a dinner-party dinner as a boiled egg is from caviare.”

“Precisely. There is the pity of it. The growth here of the French restaurant and the taste for rich and elaborate cookery has doubtless been a good thing in its way, if only that it is now possible to obtain a tolerably well-cooked meal at most of the hotels in our large cities and principal watering-places; but why should people of moderate means and social instincts feel constrained to offer a banquet on every occasion when they entertain? I for one consider it a bore to have so much provided when I go out to dinner.”

“You must admit,” said Barbara, “that dinners are not nearly so long as they were a few years ago. Now, by means of the extra service you complain of, and by keeping the number of courses down, a dinner ought not to last longer than an hour and a half, whereas it used to take two hours and over. In England they are much worse than here. You are given, for instance, two puddings, one after the other, and ices to follow.”

“I agree,” said I, “that we have curtailed the length so that there is not much to complain of on that score. I think, though, that comparatively plain dishes well served are quite as apt to please as the aspics, chartreuses, timbales, and other impressive gallicisms under which the accommodating party cook is wont to cater to the palates of informally invited guests. I sometimes think that the very few of our great great-grandfathers who knew how to live at all must have had more appetizing tables than we. Their family cooks, from all accounts, knew how to roast and boil and bake and stew, culinary arts which somehow seem to be little understood by the chefs of to-day. Then again, the old-fashioned Delft crockery – blue ships sailing on a blue sea – was very attractive. Our modern dinner-tables, when arrayed for a party, have almost too much fuss and feathers. Women worry until they get cut glass, if it is not given them as a wedding present, and several sets of costly plates – Sèvres, Dresden, or Crown Derby – are apt to seem indispensable to housekeepers of comparatively limited means.”

“Cut glass is lovely, and the same plates through seven courses are rather trying,” said Barbara, parenthetically.

“Of course it is lovely, and I am very glad you have some. But is not the modern American woman of refined sensibilities just a little too eager to crowd her table with every article of virtu she possesses – every ornamental spoon, dish, cup, and candlestick – until one is unable to see at any one spot more than a square inch of tablecloth? In the centre of the table she sets a crystal bowl of flowers, a silver basket of ferns, or a dish of fruit. This is flanked by apostle or gold-lined spoons, silver dishes of confectionery of various kinds, silver candlesticks or candelabra fitted with pink or saffron shades, one or two of which are expected to catch fire, an array of cut glass or Venetian glass at every plate, and, like as not, pansies strewn all over the table.”

“The modern dinner-table is very pretty,” responded Barbara. “I don’t see how it could be improved materially.”

“I dare say, but somehow one can’t help thinking at times that the effort for effect is too noticeable, and that the real object of sitting down to dinner in company, agreeable social intercourse, is consequently lost sight of. If only the very rich were guilty of wanton display, the answer would be that the rank and file of our well-to-do, sensible people have very simple entertainments. Unfortunately, while the very rich are constantly vying to outstrip one another, the dinner-table and the dinner of the well-to-do American are each growing more and more complex and elaborate. Perhaps not more so than abroad among the nobility or people of means; but certainly we have been Europeanized in this respect to such an extent that, not only is there practically nothing left for us to learn in the way of being luxurious, but I am not sure that we are not disposed to convince the rest of the civilized world that a free-born American, when fully developed, can be the most luxurious individual on earth.”

Barbara looked a little grave at this. “Everything used to be so ugly and unattractive a little while ago that I suppose our heads have been turned,” she answered. “After this I shall make a rule, when we give a dinner-party, to keep one-half of my table ornaments in the safe as a rebuke to my vanity. Only if I am to show so much of the tablecloth, I shall have to buy some with handsome patterns. Don’t you see?”

Perhaps this suggestion that our heads have been turned for the time being by our national prosperity, and that they will become straight again in due course of time, is the most sensible view to take of the situation. There can be no doubt that among well-to-do people, who would object to be classed in “the smart set,” as the reporters of social gossip odiously characterize those prominent in fashionable society in our large cities, the changes in the last thirty years connected with every-day living, as well as with entertaining, have all been in the direction of cosmopolitan usage. It is now only a very old-fashioned or a very blatant person who objects to the use of evening dress at the dinner-table, or the theatre, as inconsistent with true patriotism. The dinner-hour has steadily progressed from twelve o’clock noon until it has halted at seven post meridian, as the ordinary hour for the most formal meal of the day, with further postponement to half-past seven or even eight among the fashionable for the sake of company. The frying-pan and the tea-pot have ceased to reign supreme as the patron saints of female nutrition, and the beefsteak, the egg, both cooked and raw, milk and other flesh-and-blood-producing food are abundantly supplied to the rising generation of both sexes by the provident parent of to-day. The price of beef in our large cities has steadily advanced in price until its use as an article of diet is a serious monster to encounter in the monthly bills, but the husband and father who is seeking to live wisely, seems not to be deterred from providing it abundantly.