My Association Hall

How few of us can feel that our houses are true expressions of our own taste, any more than our characters are embodiments of the qualities we most admire! Both are cluttered up with hereditary odds and ends, good and bad, often mutually antagonistic and inharmonious, creating discords for which we are not responsible.

What a strange inchoate jumble my own living-room must present to an alien eye, yet how full of rich associations to an heir of the ages who sees the invisible threads which bind the incongruous objects into unity. The chaos is presided over by Great-aunt Deborah’s old colonial highboy, which, I remember, always stood, an austere sentry, in the hall of the old Salem house. There, by the fireplace, stands an Italian marriage-chest which Cousin Elisha triumphantly imported from Florence, to be desecrated later as a wood-box. The Louis XV sofa, which a romantic family connection brought back from Paris, with its pedigree tied to its graceful ankle, gives a Gallic touch to my auction-room; and as for the Georgian mirror in the crowded corner there above the old settle — whenever I glance in it to straighten my cap, I smile to think of the strange scenes it reflected when it hung over the mantel in Uncle Timothy’s fairy palace during the brief period of his meteoric splendor. As I write, I am seated in a heavy black walnut chair, ‘a bold upholsterific blunder,’ which reveals Queen Victoria’s proportions in every line. Yet how can I harbor the thought of banishing this seat of the mighty in which my grandfather wrote all his sermons? — though, to be sure, it forms but a quaint companion to the graceful Chippendale desk given to me at my own marriage by a friend now forty years dead.

I look at the pictures on my wralls and realize that a critic of art would wince at the exhibition and condemn my naïve innocence in assembling so tasteless a medley; but what do I care for his artistic tortures? That uncompromising old Puritan, with his hard chin and ‘granite lip,’ once hung on Aunt Sargent’s wall in the Plymouth homestead, and she used to tell me with pride that it had been called ‘as good as a Harding,’ as if praise could go no further! The engraving of the Sistine Chapel is just as fine to me as though it hung in solitary confinement (the form of capital punishment recommended by our latter-day æsthetic reformers). Of course I know that that queer old lithograph of Niagara Falls is just as poor as my daughterin-law tells me it is, but she does n’t remember how my father used to point to it with shy pride as a reminiscence of his wedding journey.

I realize that it is not the fashion nowadays to have likenesses of one’s friends smiling at one from every domestic nook and corner — I am told that such things are mere dust-catchers, and I suppose that if friends themselves were proclaimed to be obsolete survivals they too would be banished from the heart. But oh, the difference to me, in my solitary old age, if I could not smile back, through tears, at all those young companions of my youth clad in the strange garb of half a century ago!

And so, when knowing ones of the new generation talk about their ‘period rooms,’ and show me, as objectlessons, their own white-paneled drawing-rooms with one perfect painting set like a gem into the woodwork above the fireplace, their harmonious — though slightly severe — furnishing, their restful draperies, the note of restraint intensified by the ecclesiastical candlelighted gloom, I feel like exclaiming, ‘Why, but this is a self-made room; and though I look on it with the same respect with which I look on a selfmade man, I, personally, am very glad that I had ancestors!'

Of course, these ignorant young perfectionists imagine that they are teaching me something when they show me the products of their brains and their pocket-books; but their houses are to me, ‘icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection, no more,’ like Maud’s face. Give me character, don’t give me taste.

If our rooms are supposed to express ourselves, how can they fail to reflect some of the queer incongruous inheritances that go to make us what we are? If I have Grandfather Black’s hot temper and Grandmother White’s cool judgment; if I combine Uncle Robert’s irony and Aunt Sarah’s sensitiveness; if my disposition shows a strange blending of my parents’ contradictory traits, how can I claim to be anything but a complex being whose inconsistencies like to express themselves individually? Yet when I emerge from my ‘ Association Hall,’ as I have christened my own house, crowded with heirlooms good, bad, and middling, like my own unbeautiful character; and when I go to the harmonious drawing-rooms of my young friends, I can exclaim, with real conviction, ‘Charming, my dear, charming! How exactly it expresses your own nature!’

It is true — as true as the criticisms your pained eyes reveal when they turn sadly away from my chamber of horrors which is, to me, so full of the tender grace of a day that is dead. But oh, if my tongue should utter the thoughts that arise in me when I look at your beautiful impersonal backgrounds, you would never give me a chance to commiserate you again! Having shown me the house, you would show me the door, for little as you like my room, you would find it better than my company.