Literary Real-Estate

SOMETIMES I wonder what writers, if they had n’t been writers, would have done for a living? Rossetti and Du Maurier, of course, would have given themselves wholly to art, and Sidney Lanier brimmed over his cup with music. Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton are men who can both lecture and write; in fits of sickness I long for kind, capable Mary Roberts Rinehart to ‘special’ my case; while Kipling, accredited agent of the Red Gods, could arrange delightful, adventurous trips to dead, enchanted cities and painted islands in the Pacific. But since, like everyone else, I look when I read for the thing that most interests me, I have been wondering lately how many authors could have been successful interior decorators. Now, anybody can describe a room. Minute detail is n’t what I mean; that’s a matter of mere statistics: so many tables, so many chairs. To make a reader feel a room’s presence, its infinite, intimate charm, is a different thing, given supremely to just a few.

But those few do it so exquisitely! How comfortable you always are in Archibald Marshall’s novels, whether you are visiting the Clintons, or sitting at ease with Mrs. Redcliffe in her gay-chintzed, oak-raftered room glowing with candles, softly shining with the rare undergleam that comes with old, loved things: treasured china, polished brass, and well-rubbed furniture. As you read, a sense of incomparable ease is directly transferred to you — so directly, indeed, that I am determined Marshall shall do such a room for me. But, if ever I am an innkeeper, or owner of a Manor Farm, I shall retain the services of Charles Dickens. For, just as Pickwick always makes me hungry, so do these ample abodes find me stretching like a cat to the warmth of their welcoming hearths. Candlelight, candlelight, and crackling logs, and merry voices. ‘If any of the old English yeomen had turned into fairies when they died, it was just the place in which they would have held their revels.’

And yet, is this picture more endeared than Snowbound? Ah, I never want a New England farmhouse unless our gentle, kindly Whittier will arrange it for me. So often I have sat happily in that homely, firelit room, watching the cat’s dark silhouette upon the whitewashed wall, the witches making their tea under the bareboughed lilac tree, the mug of cider simmering slow between the straddling feet of the old Turk’s-head andirons. Not Time nor Change nor all the deep-piled snows of winter can ever quench the memory of that ruddy fire glowing on the wide and clean-winged hearth.

But again I turn to England to Coleridge. (Is it their ‘ abidingness’ that gives the English such an exquisite sense of interior?) He is to fashion for me a Gothic room, a

perfect in every detail, down to the silver, angel-swung veilleuse, to protect me all the night from wandering spirits of the dark. And for it Keats shall stain a jeweled mullioned window, to throw its benediction of colors on me as I kneel at my orisons, and place magic casements to look out upon the foam of perilous seas.

Next, should I desire a Renaissance apartment, — I don’t in the least, but everybody else seems to, nowadays, — why, that I would entrust to Browning; the poet who wrote ‘The Bishop Orders his Tomb at Saint Praxed’s’ could not help revealing the resplendent paganism of that triumphant time. But Tennyson can’t and shan’t decorate even a corner of a room for me! Despite Maud’s own little oak room, notwithstanding all the splendid pictures in ‘ The Palace of Art, ’ I have misgivings; I distrust the soundness of his taste. I vow that the malice of Max Beerbohm’s very Victorian cartoon is not in my mind as I write; but I am convinced that Lady Flora, taking her ’broidery frame and adding a crimson to the quaint macaw, was but completing a scheme that already dominated the drawing-room — other quaint macaws in staring crewelwork on cushions and screens, with, probably, the final elegance of antimacassars on chair-backs. Rather Tennyson shall ‘landscape’ my estate for me, spread his dark green layers of shade, give me a high hall garden, with rooks to cry, ‘Caw! Caw! Caw! Caw!’ at the falling of twilight. Though I do hope he will consult Amy Lowell about the more intimate house-planting; I want her flowing melodies in blue, her parterres of brilliant tulips. And I should welcome a few words of advice from Compton Mackenzie, since Plasher’s Mead always inspires me with the hope that some day I shall marry a gardening parson in the South of England.

Amy Lowell, too, — for she so well knows how beautiful the sun can be on bricks and pewter, — shall plan my kitchen — after talking it over with Padraic Colum, who is to hang the lantern-clock, and fill my dresser with shining delf. Oh, and I am almost forgetting my haunted chamber! I’m writing to Walter de la Mare about that, for he will contrive such delicately modulated terrors: faint winds to stir a dusky arras; frail, wistful ghosts to flitter down old galleries polished by moonlight.

The loveliest chamber I have not yet shown you — Galsworthy’s matchless ’little whitewashed withdrawingroom of a thatched, whitewashed cottage. . . . A log, dropping now and then, turned up its glowing underside, and the firelight and the lamplight seemed so to have soaked into the white walls, that a wan warmth exuded. Silvery dun moths, fluttering in from the dark garden, kept vibrating like spun shillings, over a jade-green bowl of crimson roses; and there was a scent, as ever in that old, thatched cottage, of wood-smoke, flowers, and sweetbriar. ’

But for an all-round understanding of Things, the Things that are tangible thoughts, give me Anne Douglas Sedgwick. In every story that she writes there is this inner sense, the same serene discernment: ‘The Third Window,’ ‘Hyacinths,’ ‘The While Pagoda, ’ all are examples of excellence. Her rooms are the backgrounds of her characters; sometimes, indeed, they seem almost the characters themselves.

Do you envy me? I am neither rich nor poor; to quote my beloved Horace Walpole, I have just ‘a middling house’; but cric-crac, in an instant, behold my palace rise. And not yet have you tasted its fullest joy; I never have to dust; I walk through my rooms, and find them swept and garnished. Praise be, I don’t even know that there is such a thing as a Servant Question!