BY SUSAN HAYES WARD.

CHAPTER I.—THE HALL.

In studying how to make home beautiful, we must not forget that, first of all, there must be a home; and that in a true home, the household, and not the house, is of primary importance. We have all seen careful housekeepers whose first and last thought was to keep their domains with absolute neatness, and whose domestic law was of Median and Persian inflexibility. Overshoes must be left here; slippers must be put on there; the front stair-carpet must only be trodden by the visitor’s foot; the front door-latch must never be lifted by the children’s hand; curtains must be drawn close lest carpets fade; and autumn fires remain unlighted lest ashes fly. These were housekeepers, not home makers. The virtue of carefulness is a housewife’s glory; but when carried to an excess, it becomes a woman’s shame, leading her to imagine that meat is more than life, raiment than body, and house than man. Of the virtuous woman we read first: “She openeth her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness;” then that “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness;” after which it follows naturally that “her children rise up and call her blessed, her husband also, and he praiseth her;” but when the devil of neatness enters into a woman he defies family comfort, and banishes the angel of peace from the home. And yet comfort, important though its place may be in the home economy, is not to be the first aim. A wise critic says: “Every house should have in it that which tells of strength, and seems to favor self-sacrifice, simplicity, self-control. Nothing is finer in a house than a kind of subtle ubiquitous spirit, which asserts the superiority of the household, and tells you that they fear neither hunger nor cold, neither toil nor danger, and do not bow down, night and morning to the vulgar divinity, Comfort.” Not the house we live in, but the life we live in it is that on which the real beauty of home depends. In the House Beautiful, not Mr. Cook’s, nor Mrs. Allen’s, but in that incomparable House Beautiful which Bunyan has described for us, even there the boy Matthew fell sick from tampering with the fruit of Beelzebub’s garden. Compared with this soundness of inner life in the house, these questions of outer adornment, of taste, or expediency, or expense, are but unimportant matters, since no home can be truly beautiful that is tarnished by an unworthy life within its walls.

So much of preliminary statement must be pardoned me, because in the refined paganism of these days there seems to be a mania for magnifying the house we live in, and the highest religion of many a family is simply to make their home beautiful and attractive. It is better than no religion at all—but a higher religion teaches us to make the homes of the poor comfortable before—we make our own beautiful, shall I say? Not at all; but before we spend freely to gain this end. For the external beauty of home does not depend on the amount of money spent in its adornment. Money buys a great deal of clutter that had far better be left in the shops; money buys a vast amount of superfluous stuck-on ornaments, that were better left off, but money does not and can not buy good taste—an eye for color, thoughtful care for the general comfort, a quick wit, and common sense. Yet these are the safest and surest helps to the woman who aims to make her home attractive to the eye and restful to the body.

Let us enter the door of this woman’s house and see what she allows and what she disallows.

First, we notice that her entry and stairways are planned upon as liberal a scale as possible. That is but common sense, for furniture and trunks must go in and out, up and down, to say nothing of household and visitors, and the broader the entry way, the more hospitable and inviting it can be made with chairs, table and sofa. Modern builders have at last learned this, and they are giving us the old-fashioned hall again, with a corner or side fireplace, and, if possible, an outlook on the back garden. This hall is not kept too dark in winter, nor too light in summer. In cold weather we need cheerfulness, warmth, and light on entering the house. In summer we should step from the glare of a vertical sun and heat of the nineties, into a cool, refreshing shade, kept, of a purpose, darker than sitting-room, dining-room and kitchen, to prevent flies from swarming into the hall and up the stairway and becoming the pest of the morning sleeper. The back stairs also are closed, either above or below, so that premonitory hints of meals to come may not ascend to the bedrooms and go down the front stairs to guests in the parlor, thus proclaiming on the housetop what you whisper to your cook in the kitchen.

“Aim at a gold gown and you’ll get a sleeve,” says our grandmother’s proverb; so our wise woman knows what is best and aims for it, but contents herself with what she can get. For an American house, the best flooring, generally speaking, would be—for a vestibule—tiles of small pattern and modest color, such as yellow and brown, which would take no injury from muddy overshoes or dripping umbrellas; for the rest of the house hard wood floors (Southern pine is admirable), plain or very simply inlaid. Elaborate patterns in inlaid woods should be avoided, except in large rooms, and contrasts of colors, such as stripes of black walnut and hard pine, which make a narrow hallway look yet narrower; but a modest border might be inlaid around any room, hall, parlor, or bedroom with good effect, if desired, with a substantial oriental rug in the midst of it all. There can be nothing better than this.

But a cheap pine floor, if properly laid, can be stained and made to do good service, instead of hard wood, and a strip of cocoanut matting running the length of the hall is not to be despised; or, if cracks yawn too perceptibly to have the floor bare, it can be covered with a plain, self-colored drugget or carpet filling, or “two ply,” while a strip of bright carpet passes from the doorway up the stairs, and enlivens the hall. Or, simpler yet, the floor can be painted a serviceable yellow or gray, and a width of rag carpet can add warmth and color. There are pretty straw mattings in greens and reds and cream colors which, with the aid of rugs, serve admirably for floor coverings, but they are hardly durable enough for entry ways. Our wise woman bears in mind that a well-laid, hard wood floor will outlast many a drugget, or carpet, or coat of paint, or oil cloth, and she does up her hall floor, at first, in as durable a fashion as her purse will allow.

There is a certain fitness of things also to be observed. Good taste forbids her to step from an entry with stained or painted pine floor and rag carpet to a parlor with inlaid floors and Persian rugs. The rag carpet of the hall demands something correspondingly simple in the reception room; a floor stained or painted in the same fashion, or a straw matting, with perhaps a few breadths of “Morris” carpet, of warm color and quiet figure, sewed together to make a rug, and raveled at the ends for fringe.

As for walls, it is convenient to divide them with a chair rail or moulding of the same stuff as that used for mop-boards and door casings, fastened about four feet from the floor and running around the entry and up the side wall of the stairway. The wall below this moulding can be painted in oil a warm olive-brown or green, or a dull red, and, when so painted, can be washed like the woodwork.

A more expensive way would be to panel off this space with big cedar shingles of the sort that cost about $25 a thousand, provided the rest of the woodwork is repainted, or with wood corresponding with the finish of the room. Unpainted woodwork, even though made of soft pine, is far better from the housekeeper’s standpoint than that which is coated with paint. Pine, when oiled and varnished—not too heavily—assumes a rarely beautiful hue and shows the variety of its markings to very good effect. The wall space above could be papered with some figured pattern corresponding in color with that below the chair-rail, or dado, as it is called (if that is painted rather than paneled), but the wall-space should be of lighter tint than the dado, or it could be calcimined, or kalsomined, as they spell and pronounce it in New Jersey.

When paper is used, the pattern should not be so large as to make the room look small, nor so pronounced as to prevent the walls from serving as a fair back-ground for pictures and plants.

But suppose our prudent woman can afford neither chair-rail nor oil-painted dado, and yet would like to divide the wall space. Then let Mr. Kalsominer paint a dado of olive-brown or green, a wall space of much lighter shade, and a ceiling of cream color. He can also paint a band of dull red where the chair-rail should be, and then our wise woman, if she be also a woman of faculty, will take the little red paint pot into her own hand and will cut out of varnished paper some conventional leaf or flower, and using this as a stencil, with a stiff brush she will powder[A] this leaf or flower at regular intervals of about a foot all over the dado. Or, discarding the stencil, some simple arrangement of triple dots might be used that need only be indicated with a pencil point and then painted on, with a small brush, free hand. The kalsominer would double his prices if he did it, but the room will be twice as pretty if she does it herself. Or she may powder her lighter wall space with figures of the same dark shade as the dado, so harmonizing the upper and lower portions, while a yet darker brown line divides them. But the stenciling of a wall space requires too much step-ladder work for the ordinary woman. Last, and probably cheapest of all, she may use wall paper—the darkest shade below—of some stiff diaper or tile pattern, the lighter above, with border between; the ceiling being washed a lighter harmonizing color.

As to the furniture of the hall, it ought to begin outside the door, with a bench, or settle, or chair, at least, upon the piazza, or “stoop,” for any weary body to drop down upon while the door is undoing. A wide piazza gives room not only for a few chairs, and the picturesque and comfortable hammock, but for a table, as well, where the afternoon cup of tea can rest, or the work-basket with the weekly mending. A broad platform with awnings is a comfortable and picturesque addition to a house of plain and unattractive exterior. Happy and healthy are the households whose piazzas are their summer sitting-rooms.

The vestibule should have closets or some very plain and simple receptacle for umbrellas and India rubber shoes. In the hall proper comes up the vexed question of the hat tree. It is an ungainly, aggressive piece of furniture, and very cumbersome. If possible, let it be done away with. If there is a closet under the stairs for the family hats and coats, then the chance visitor can throw off his coat on the hall sofa or table. Hall chairs are useful, with a box seat holding whisk broom, hat brush, driving gloves, and things of that sort, and so is the table drawer; any of these contrivances are better than the hat tree, and so is a simple rail hidden away in some dark corner under the stairs, if there be no closet, with pegs attached for hats and coats. “There can be no reasonable law against making a hall chair both comfortable and suitable to its situation. The common Windsor high-backed arm-chair, made in the same wood as the table, and with a cushion covered with some bright colored material is well suited for this purpose; or a chair … with a high back and broad, low seat looks both severe enough to discourage unbecoming lounging, and yet sufficiently comfortable to secure a proper degree of rest for the weary.”

And where in the hall can hangings and stuffs be used to best advantage? Enter any house and look about for yourself. If the ground glass of the vestibule door be exposed and staring, the hall floor bare and cold, the hall chair hard and stiff, the doors to the reception or sitting-room all closed, rising black and grim before you, and the hall itself so dark that you can not see even where to lay down your companionable umbrella, does there not come over you a chill, as if you were being repelled by the spirit of inhospitality? The entrance hall gives you no hearty cheer of welcome. But warm up the floor with a rug, lay a restful and inviting cushion on the chair; open the door that leads to the room where the household gathers, or where your hostess is to receive you, or take it off the hinges bodily and lay it away, and hang instead a curtain that shall give a glimpse of the warmth and light within, while still shutting out the draught. Let soft silk or Madras muslin hang in full folds over the window in the door, and the stranger who enters no longer feels like a prisoner in Doubting Castle, whom Giant Despair has cast into a dungeon for trespassing on his grounds, but rather shall I not say, as if he had fallen upon the House Beautiful, built on purpose for the entertainment of pilgrims, where only the fair virgins Prudence, Piety and Charity would be his companions?

Just so inviting was the entrance to my wise woman’s house when I last visited her. It was a house with a door in the middle, the hall running through the entire depth. Midway, an arch curtained with Mexican blankets half screened the back hall, which served for the family music room. Facing the piano was a long, old-fashioned sofa, where the weary head of the house could lie and be rested by music from his daughter’s fingers or the voices of his children. This happy man, who had his quiver full of them, had one of those charming houses that grows with the household. Near the side entrance, what used to be a dining-room is now known as the coat room. I saw one side of the room literally lined with coats and wraps, hats and bonnets, depending from some hat rack arrangement of domestic manufacture. Boots, shoes, and galoches of all shapes and sizes stood in a suitable rack beneath. Guns and hunting gear, fishing rods and tackles, bows and arrows, grace hoops, battle-doors and shuttle-cocks, tennis rackets and croquet mallets and balls all found their appointed places here. Water and towels awaited the convenience of those who must make a partial toilet in haste. Even the shoe-blacking had its own corner. A book case on the wall held well thumbed grammars and geographies side by side with dictionaries, college text-books and a cook book or two; while before the fireplace that “filled the room on one side,” you might see a young Nimrod greasing his boots or polishing his gun; and later, the little folks popping corn, making caramels, or boiling taffy. When the wise woman, after looking well to the ways of her household, devises such liberal things as these in their behalf, no wonder her children rise up and call her blessed.

The room on which the average American housekeeper expends the most thought and pains is the parlor, as she calls it. The word parlor means, primarily, a room for conversation. Properly speaking, the room where members of the family gather that they may talk together, is the parlor (from the French parler), but somehow the word has been applied to “the best room of a house, kept for receiving company, as distinguished from the sitting room of the family.” We have an English word for that—drawing room—contracted from withdrawing room—a room appropriated for the reception of guests “to which a company withdraws from the dining room.” Since the household is more important than the house, the best of the house should be at the service of the household; hence whatever is most comfortable and cheerful should be in the parlor where the family congregate. If aside from the dining room and kitchen there is but one other room on the first floor, let that be the parlor for family use, the “living room,” unless there be a family sitting room on the second floor.

For people who entertain many guests the reception or withdrawing room is a necessity, and it is often convenient in city houses to have, in addition, a smaller room near the door, where the lady of the house can receive visitors without disturbing the family party or the friends whom she may be entertaining in the drawing room.

There is never need of saying to an American housewife, let the room where you receive your friends be as handsome as may be. I would rather say let it be as comfortable as you know how to make it. Do not keep it dark and unwholesome, stuffy and shut up. If your economical soul refuses to expose its treasures always to the light of day, at least do your best to make the room look habitable, and as if it were put into daily use. What can be more embarrassing to a guest than to be ushered into a dark room, cold and repellent in winter, close and stifling in summer, there to wait drearily till the mistress of the house has donned her good clothes and is ready to push back the shutter or raise the curtain that she may have light enough to recognize her guest?

Our English sisters set us a good example in this respect. Their drawing rooms are made comfortable, with easy chairs strong enough to hold a man’s weight, with tables conveniently placed, with books here and an embroidery frame there, and a lady’s work basket near at hand, not at all too fine for daily use. I have seen an American lady hustle her work basket out of the room when the door-bell rang, hide her thimble in her pocket, and assume an air of elegant idleness and leisure, as if she were ashamed to be caught needle in hand. Her English sister, better bred, would lay down her work to welcome her guest, and resume it again, as a matter of course, to set her visitor at ease.

A marble-topped center table is not essential to a drawing room; nor are a photograph album and illustrated books essential ornaments of the center table. The morning papers, the last number of The Century, and a readable book are more attractive ornaments than the most costly album, though filled with pictures of all the celebrities you have ever seen. I would have a book case, at least a book-shelf, in every room in the house—I have three in my hall, even—and the reception room surely is no exception to the rule. Let there be books at hand for the entertainment of guests, and let there be every facility possible for rendering the room light enough to read or to sew. In a large room there should be more than one table, and student lamps in abundance where there is no gas. Where gas is burned there should still be lamps or drop-lights on the tables. Parsimony in lamp-light is as bad as parsimony in fuel or in bedding, and results in serious injury to the eyes. As to the matter of heating our houses, there have been so many funny things done in the attempt to affect a compromise between the fire place and the furnace that almost every house has in it something incongruous in this line. The old-fashioned fireplace for burning wood was healthful and artistic, but it often smoked, and in the depth of winter seldom gave out sufficient heat. The grate in which anthracite coal is burned, or soft coal, was good, but the care of the coal fire, though not so continuous as of the wood, was still a heavy burden. There is a price to pay for every comfort, and we can not rightly enjoy the comfort without paying its full price. But that seemed a hard doctrine, and so the inventors went to work. They gave up that abomination, the air-tight stove, which rose in grim blackness an offense to the eye, and parched all the air for us before we had breathed it in. Then the furnace came in and there was an era of real rejoicing. Fireplaces were walled up and holes cut in all the floors, but with hot air furnaces there were new complications. Water pans which should be replenished daily were as often as not left empty, and the air was no better to breathe than that baked dry by an air-tight stove, and the fire, as a rule, required a man’s hand. Beside, holes in the floor were not inviting to have around. But the furnace, whether hot air or steam, did warm the house. Thermometers stood at from seventy to eighty instead of being kept where they belonged, down in the sixties, and throat and lung diseases multiplied. Then some one who had not forgotten the cheer of the fireplace introduced the hot air from a chimney register, giving out heat, with no sign of fire, from the old spot, and then came the make-believe iron logs with an internal gas arrangement which was lighted when guests came, and burned in a pathetic, appealing way, provoking the beholder now to laughter and now to tears.

It was left to the Æsthetic craze to bring in the last and worst affront of all to comfort and common sense, a fireplace with highly glazed tiles and elaborate wrought iron back, with choice and costly fenders, tongs, and andirons of brass and steel, with all the appointments of the fireplace of the most luxurious stamp, but all too fine for possible use, with absolutely nothing intended for use. The poor, foolish, iron logs never deceived any one, but they burned; nevertheless, these beautifully tiled fireplaces, with their spick and span hearths are mere husks, and are as loathsome and cluttersome as are the “air castles” and wax fruit, which these Æsthetics would banish in contempt from their homes. The height of luxury is to have the sharpness of winter’s cold subdued by a good furnace in the cellar, which modifies the air all over the house, and then to have open fires here and there to give cheer as well as additional warmth and good ventilation, and a fireplace finished with plain brick, without a tile, the brick work, freshened up occasionally by painting it with Indian red mixed with milk, after the fashion of fifty years ago, or a plain iron grate for coal, used as occasion calls, is in better taste for a drawing room than the most elaborate combination of tiles, brass and steel kept for mere show. When any object, not alone a fireplace, but any object designed primarily for use is so excessively ornamented as to fail of its mission of utility, this very excess of decoration becomes an offense and renders the object neither useful nor beautiful.

Wm. Morris’s stringent rule, “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” applies with full force to the drawing room; and when the housekeeper has striven first of all to supply her drawing room with comfortable, useful pieces of furniture, she may look around her with surprise to find that almost without her thought the place has grown beautiful as well.