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Page 41
As to the windows then; I fear we must grumble again. In most
decent houses, or what are so called, the windows are much too big,
and let in a flood of light in a haphazard and ill-considered way,
which the indwellers are forced to obscure again by shutters,
blinds, curtains, screens, heavy upholsteries, and such other
nuisances. The windows, also, are almost always brought too low
down, and often so low down as to have their sills on a level with
our ankles, sending thereby a raking light across the room that
destroys all pleasantness of tone. The windows, moreover, are
either big rectangular holes in the wall, or, which is worse, have
ill-proportioned round or segmental heads, while the common custom
in 'good' houses is either to fill these openings with one huge
sheet of plate-glass, or to divide them across the middle with a
thin bar. If we insist on glazing them thus, we may make up our
minds that we have done the worst we can for our windows, nor can a
room look tolerable where it is so treated. You may see how people
feel this by their admiration of the tracery of a Gothic window, or
the lattice-work of a Cairo house. Our makeshift substitute for
those beauties must be the filling of the window with moderate-sized
panes of glass (plate-glass if you will) set in solid sash-bars; we
shall then at all events feel as if we were indoors on a cold day--
as if we had a roof over our heads.
As to the floor: a little time ago it was the universal custom for
those who could afford it to cover it all up into its dustiest and
crookedest corners with a carpet, good, bad, or indifferent. Now I
daresay you have heard from others, whose subject is the health of
houses rather than their art (if indeed the two subjects can be
considered apart, as they cannot really be), you have heard from
teachers like Dr. Richardson what a nasty and unwholesome custom
this is, so I will only say that it looks nasty and unwholesome.
Happily, however, it is now a custom so much broken into that we may
consider it doomed; for in all houses that pretend to any taste of
arrangement, the carpet is now a rug, large it may be, but at any
rate not looking immovable, and not being a trap for dust in the
corners. Still I would go further than this even and get rich
people no longer to look upon a carpet as a necessity for a room at
all, at least in the summer. This would have two advantages: 1st,
It would compel us to have better floors (and less drafty), our
present ones being one of the chief disgraces to modern building;
and 2ndly, since we should have less carpet to provide, what we did
have we could afford to have better. We could have a few real works
of art at the same price for which we now have hundreds of yards of
makeshift machine-woven goods. In any case it is a great comfort to
see the actual floor; and the said floor may be, as you know, made
very ornamental by either wood mosaic, or tile and marble mosaic;
the latter especially is such an easy art as far as mere
technicality goes, and so full of resources, that I think it is a
great pity it is not used more. The contrast between its grey tones
and the rich positive colour of Eastern carpet-work is so beautiful,
that the two together make satisfactory decoration for a room with
little addition.
When wood mosaic or parquet-work is used, owing to the necessary
simplicity of the forms, I think it best not to vary the colour of
the wood. The variation caused by the diverse lie of the grain and
so forth, is enough. Most decorators will be willing, I believe, to
accept it as an axiom, that when a pattern is made of very simple
geometrical forms, strong contrast of colour is to be avoided.
So much for the floor. As for its fellow, the ceiling, that is, I
must confess, a sore point with me in my attempts at making the best
of it. The simplest and most natural way of decorating a ceiling is
to show the underside of the joists and beams duly moulded, and if
you will, painted in patterns. How far this is from being possible
in our modern makeshift houses, I suppose I need not say. Then
there is a natural and beautiful way of ornamenting a ceiling by
working the plaster into delicate patterns, such as you see in our
Elizabethan and Jacobean houses; which often enough, richly designed
and skilfully wrought as they are, are by no means pedantically
smooth in finish--nay, may sometimes be called rough as to
workmanship. But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that
have fallen so low as the plasterer's. The cast work one sees
perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of
ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it. It
is simply meant to say, 'This house is built for a rich man.' The
very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed, mostly happens with an
art that has fallen sick. That richly designed, freely wrought
plastering of our old houses was done with a slowly drying tough
plaster, that encouraged the hand like modeller's clay, and could
not have been done at all with the brittle plaster used in ceilings
nowadays, whose excellence is supposed to consist in its smoothness
only. To be good, according to our present false standard, it must
shine like a sheet of hot-pressed paper, so that, for the present,
and without the expenditure of abundant time and trouble, this kind
of ceiling decoration is not to be hoped for.
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