The House

“THERE can be no beautiful homes built,” an architect once said, “until people cease to travel overmuch, and cease their restless flitting from habitation to habitation.” Whether or not this is true, it remained, by a paradox, for the modern generation of well-nigh homeless people to realize and to interpret, in one fashion or another, the sentiment of houses, that peculiar personal sentiment which makes them intimate revelations of character and disposition. This feeling, the product of a self-conscious age, exists, perhaps, just because of that detachment between men and their home-backgrounds in which a designer of buildings saw the chief obstacle to the growth of an organic domestic architecture. The wanderers seem to appreciate the significance of their houses in proportion to the restlessness that keeps them always in the mood of departure.

Both the restlessness and the self-conscious attitude towards the home are modern. The cavalier of Charles the First’s time had probably little realization of the correspondence between his gallant and liberal existence and his Elizabethan house with its inimitable mingling of dignity and sweetness. The palaces of Venice and of Florence re flected the magnificent lives of their masters, but not as the result of design. In Florence the splendor of these householders was militant, and the very walls speak of a state of power and pride held against all comers. In Venice they looked from lovely windows to catch the first glimpse of sails bringing the gold and purple of the East to their silent doorways; and the richness and ease of those Venetian households are symbolized on many a graceful façade of the palaces of the dream-like city. But whether these men fought, or bartered, or gave themselves up to the love of beauty, they remained passionately devoted to one city, to one street in that city, to one house in that street; and so, all unconsciously, their personalities were reflected in homes which no modern ingenuity can duplicate, because the spirit which made them possible no longer exists.

The past hundred years, the century which saw the means of travel made simple and universal, was responsible for driving or luring people from their homes in myriad directions and on myriad quests, making of the time a great wanderjahr whose close is not yet; with the result, especially in the United States, that the homestead or the ancestral house has become well-nigh an anachronism, while in the minds of many people a loneliness has been created, a strange homesickness as of those who have no background but the landscape of the world.

By way of compensation perhaps, these exiles, knowing no more permanent home than an apartment or a rented dwelling, have developed a keen appreciation of the house in its ancient aspect as the product of personality; as a material expression of many spiritual experiences, long past, perhaps, but thus possessed of a dim immortality. The generation that has forgotten how to build a cathedral knows full well why its hand and brain are fruitless; it holds the wistful knowledge that only the age of faith could produce the great Gothic houses of God. The men and women to whom family life has become, in many cases, only a mirage, linger over the thought that the immortality of the house is bound up with the kindly offices of affection, each chamber witnessing to some variety of these offices. Walter Pater, a homeless scholar, dwelling all his life in halls sacred to the intellectual affections, had perhaps, among his contemporaries, the keenest, realization of this mystical meaning of the house. His works abound in passages showing an almost hyper-sensitiveness to the significance of that abode in which men spend their short, vivid existence, — the rooms upon the walls of which, for a brief season, they write their names and their desires. The Château d’Amour seemed at first to Gaston de Latour “a delightful, half-known abode of wonders . . . afterwards a nursery of refined or fantastic sentiment, as he recalled, in this chamber or that, its old tenants or their doings.” It requires no learning to understand why Florian in The Child in the House remembered the angle at which the sun in the morning fell upon the pillow ; the little angel-faces and reedy flutings that stood out round the fireplace of the children’s room; the blossom of the red hawthorn in the garden; the feeling of the cool, old parlor; and the pathetic aspect of the dismantled rooms when he was to leave them at last.

This sensitiveness to houses and their meanings was common in one aspect or another to many of Pater’s contemporaries and predecessors, and links him to the pre-Raphaelite school of writers and painters. The work of that circle used material life as a series of symbols, form and color expressing the unutterable. It was natural that they should find the very draperies of the house significant, should transform the red rose into passion, should find the scent of flowers heavy, and the sunshine over-golden in a room that had concealed a guilty love. To Rossetti one place was never like another: each house bore the imprint of the souls it sheltered; each chamber was deep-tinctured with pain or joy. In his paintings every detail is fraught with meaning, as the frieze of cherub-heads in the room where Dante sits when they come to tell him of Beatrice’s death; the lamp over the strait, white bed of the Virgin in The Annunciation. In his poetry the same feeling is visible for the mystery of the house, inhabited, or from which its tenants have passed away, as in the sonnet on Blake’s work-room and deathroom : —

The Blessed Damosel leans from the rampart of God’s house, to which, it would seem, all the intimate symbols of the earthly existence have been transferred. The long series of the love-sonnets is called The House of Life, as if the experiences of love were indeed a series of rich and many-colored chambers. This use of the word house seems peculiar to a wandering and nostalgic generation. A certain sonnet by Francis Sherman bears the title “The House of Forgiveness,” making of forgiveness not an act, but a feeling in which one is really at home, though the home-coming be sorrowful.

A less mystical expression of this appreciation of the significance of houses is found in their studied and self-conscious adornment by their tentative inhabitants, replacing the old natural process made possible by the long continuance of one family in the homestead. It is not by chance that the Mona Lisa hangs where the flickering firelight may reveal her smile; that the bowl of roses is placed in a window that frames a snowy landscape. This trickery may not be the fruit of a great age; but it is not without its fascination, revealing as it does the complex modern character, in a sense homeless, and round which a noble and simple dwelling would not naturally shape itself.

In one of these self-conscious houses, the bedrooms are ascetic, their bareness relieved only by a single picture upon the walls,—in each case a great picture good to look upon last of all as one sinks to sleep. The living-rooms below are in strong contrast to these chambers of sleep, because of their offerings to the eye in books and pictures and adornments, all disposed with subtle intention, even to the violets placed near the drooping head of Michael Angelo’s Slave; and an Antinous near a crucifix. Noble heads by Rubens, by Rembrandt, and Vandyke hang on the walls of the dining-room that the household may dine always in great company. It is her house by all these things, by the mottoes carved over fireplaces and doorways, by the pictures on the staircase wall, a fair procession ascending to the upper floors; it is her house because it perfectly reflects its modern chatelaine, the restlessness of her intellect, the catholicity of her tastes. It is a house, wonderfully adorned; but it imparts no impression of permanency, because it expresses not the accumulated tastes of generations of the same family, but the moods of an individual.

There is another form of the house which seems peculiar to this generation. In cities where space is grudgingly meted out, a room becomes in many cases representative of an entire house, since within it are brought together the symbols of the home that exists only as an ideal. The teatable, the couch, the shelf of books, the little growing plants, all in close proximity, are expressive of the one-room state of existence through which a considerable portion of humanity is passing, an existence typical of certain social conditions of modern life, — the congestion of population in cities, the increase of women wage-earners, the increase of the independent “bachelor-woman,”and, perhaps as the mainspring of the whole, the restlessness of the modern temper.

The one room is in some instances more significant of personality than an entire house, since in it are brought together the gods that its tenant cannot do without, the single shelf of books outweighing thus the great library as a key to character. The acquired literary affections of the one-room tenant are frequently stowed away in cellar or loft; but his heart speaks from the volumes on his limited shelves. In a certain hall-bedroom are many works on social economies; but, as a reward for labor when ambition flags towards midnight, there are the Essays of Elia, the poems of Villon to meet an occasional vagabond mood of the boy, and novels of Dickens to stimulate good-humor. This then is his house. It holds one touch of romance, a drawing of Duse’s head. He had seen her play one troubled, unforgetable night when his youth was in abeyance. In another room a bachelor, a lover of horses, has lived for ten years surrounded by colored pictures of reigning favorites. This cheerful and meagre house is home to him. The centre of still another room is one of Leonardo’s intellectual Madonnas. About her are grouped austere or mystical faces by other masters. In the bookcase are Maeterlinck and Shorthouse and Meredith. There is no teatable in this room, and the chafing-dish is absent.

Yet both the single-room house and the many-chambered houses of the rich — the one transitory, the others but places of intermittent dwelling—are representative of a generation of wanderers. The spirit of unrest possesses rich and poor alike; the college-bred and those who have not received that somewhat doubtful gift of modern progress, “a thorough education.” The tendency of the times is to render men homeless in more than the material sense. An irresistible force, saddening to some, sweet to others, has driven them from their house of faith, from their accustomed modes of thought, from the old habitations of the intellect. They are driven by the spirit into the wilderness, there to build new, but not permanent tabernacles. This mental exile, or this thirst for discovery, has its counterpart in the material life. Home is the tent, the lodging-house, the vestibuled car, the ocean-steamer, the furnished house to rent for a season. The very rich are not content with one home on whose chambers to record their lives. Their year is divided among many places, so that it is not possible for them to feel the spirit of the house, that intimate charm produced by long indwelling. There is no time for those accumulated impressions which make up the sense of home. Cosmopolitanism does not know that there is only one window in the world where the blossoms of the cherrytree drift across the sill, only one room where the summer dawn steals in as an enchantment, only one fireplace before which to dream and dream. Yet these wanderers are often those who are most homesick, and who appreciate most keenly the New England or Southern house where generation after generation of the same family has left its impress.

There is a conception of the house, however, which belongs exclusively to no age, or to no social condition; which is less of an ideal than a longing for a fixed habitation, a friendly abode for that part of man’s being which resents the hospitality of death. The dweller for seventy years in the ancestral home, and the dweller in a dozen studios may feel towards the close of life, or at times of deep emotion, the imperious memory of a house that they cannot find. The simplicity of the early church, the childlike literalness of the Middle Ages, placed it in a material heaven and enriched it with the gems and gold of earth. Marcus Aurelius, in the loneliness of the House of the Cæsars, built for himself “a wide city” in which to forget Rome and remember humanity. Augustine called it the City of God. The hermits were content with caves in anticipation of that ample dwelling-place. The tombs on the Appian Way, spacious abodes of the dead, witnessed to the finality of all things, as the twilight of Rome came on with gorgeous hues; but Christian sepulture gave to the body a house in the earth, where it might await — through how many centuries!— the final home-coming of the just.

The immemorial associations of men from birth to death are centred in this craving of both soul and body for a habitation upon which to leave their impress. If the nostalgia for the material abode be great, that for the spiritual is greater. In wistful moods men may remind their fellows that this longing is an uncertain index that a House will be provided. What to one generation is the language of immortality, becomes to another but an elaborate epitaph, and the last habitation of all may furnish only a text for the Hydriotaphia of a Sir Thomas Browne. But whatever the doubt of the intellect, men will not cease to write upon the walls of their houses the inscriptions that witness to their strong desires, to their unconquerable hopes.