No, there would be too many of them! The houses that he had never entered would become famous. “The only house in South London that Harris never had a drink in!” The people would rush to it to see what could have been the matter with it.
Saxon kings were crowned in Kingston but then its greatness passed away for a time, to rise once more when Hampton Court84 became the palace of the Tudors and the Stuarts85. Many of the old houses speak of those days when Kingston was a royal town, and nobles and courtiers lived there, near their King, and the long road to the palace gates was cheerful all day with clanking steel and rustling silks and velvets, and fair faces. The spacious houses, with their large windows, their huge fireplaces, and their gabled roofs86 were constructed in the days “when men knew how to build.” The hard red bricks have only become more firm with time, and their oak stairs do not creak and grunt when you try to go down them quietly.
Speaking of oak staircases reminds me that there is a magnificent carved oak87 staircase in one of the houses in Kingston. It is a shop now but it was evidently once the mansion of some great person. A friend of mine, who lives in Kingston, went in there to buy a hat one day, and, in a thoughtless moment, put his hand in his pocket and paid for it then and there88.
The shopman (he knows my friend) was naturally a little amazed at first; but, quickly recovering himself, and feeling that something ought to be done to encourage this sort of thing, asked our hero if he would like to see some fine old carved oak. My friend said he would, and the shopman took him through the shop, and up the staircase of the house. The balusters were a brilliant piece of art, and the wall all the way up was oak-paneled, with carving that would have done credit to89 a palace.
From the stairs, they went into the drawing-room, which was a large, bright room, decorated with startling though cheerful blue paper. There was nothing, however, remarkable about the room, and my friend wondered why he had been brought there. The owner went up to the paper, and tapped it. It gave a wooden sound.
“Oak,” he explained. “All carved oak, right up to the ceiling, just the same as you saw on the staircase.”
“But, good heavens! man,” protested my friend; “you don’t mean to say you have covered over carved oak with blue wallpaper?”
“Yes,” was the reply: “it was an expensive work. But the room looks cheerful now. It was awful gloomy before.”
I can’t say I altogether blame the man. From his point of view90, which is of the average householder, desiring to take life as lightly as possible, there is reason on his side. Carved oak is very pleasant to look at, and to have a little of, but it is no doubt somewhat depressing to live in, for those who aren’t fond of it. It would be like living in a church.
No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn’t care for carved oak, should have his drawing-room paneled with it, while people who do care for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of this world. Each person has what he doesn’t want, and other people have what he does want.
Married men have wives, and don’t seem to want them; and young single fellows cry out that they can’t get them. Poor people who can hardly keep themselves91 have eight hearty children. Rich old couples, with no one to leave their money to, die childless.
Then there are girls with lovers. The girls that have lovers never want them. They say they would rather be without them, that they bother them, and why don’t they go and make love to Miss Smith and Miss Brown, who are plain and elderly, and haven’t got any lovers? They themselves don’t want lovers. They never mean to marry.
It does not do to dwell on these things92; it makes one so sad.
There was a boy at our school, we used to call him Sandford and Merton93. His real name was Stivvings. He was the most extraordinary fellow I ever came across. I believe he really liked study. He used to get into awful rows for sitting up in bed and reading Greek; and as for French irregular verbs there was simply no keeping him away from them. He was full of weird and unnatural ideas about being a credit to his parents and an honour to the school; and he desired to win prizes, and grow up and be a clever man, and had all those sorts of weak-minded ideas. I never knew such a strange creature, yet harmless as the babe unborn94.
Well, that boy used to get ill about twice a week, so that he couldn’t go to school. There never was such a boy to get ill as that Sandford and Merton. If there was any known disease going within ten miles of him, he had it, and had it badly. He would take bronchitis in the dog days95, and have hay-fever at Christmas; and he would go out in a November fog and come home with sunstroke.
They put him under laughing gas one year, poor fellow, and drew all his teeth, and gave him a false set, because he suffered so terribly with toothache; and then it turned to neuralgia and earache. He was never without a cold, except once for nine weeks while he had scarlet fever96. During the great cholera scare of 1871, our neighborhood was the only one free from it. There was only one case in the whole parish: that case was young Stivvings.
He had to stay in bed when he was ill, and eat chicken and custards; and he would lie there and sob, because they wouldn’t let him do Latin exercises, and took his German grammar away from him.
And we other boys, who would have given ten terms of our school life for being ill for a day couldn’t catch so much as a stiff neck97. We fooled about in draughts, and it did us good, and freshened us up; and we took things to make us sick, and they made us fat, and gave us an appetite. Nothing we could think of seemed to make us ill until the holidays began. Then, on the first day, we caught colds, and severe cough, and all kinds of disorders, which lasted till the term started again; when suddenly we would get well again, and be better than ever.
Such is life; and we are as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.
To go back to the carved oak question, our great-great-grandfathers must have had very fair notions of the artistic and the beautiful. Why, all our art treasures of today are only the usual items of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real beauty in the old soup plates, beer mugs, and candle snuffers98 that we prize now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes99. The pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to admire, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel ornaments100 that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of today always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow pattern dinner plates101 be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the twenty-first century? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown) be carefully mended and dusted only by the lady of the house?
That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished apartments. It is a white dog. Its eyes are blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect; its expression is nearly imbecile. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends laugh at it, and even my landlady herself has