OUR OWN HOMES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 41, 18 February 1937, Page 18

OUR OWN HOMES

PRESSURE OF HUMANITY

THE DESIRE TO ESCAPE

brie of the popular words of our present age is "escape." Having filled our lives with incessant noise, huge shops, tall buildings, traffic, telephones, and wireless, we now ■ desire to get away from it all—to have scope, however small, for our own individuality, states a writer in the "Manchester Guardian."

It is nearly a century since Leigh Hunt gave expression to this feeling: j "How I detest," he writes, "a modern well-advertised building estate. I should feel, living in one of them, that when I retired to rest perhaps eight hundred masters of households were slumbering in bed-chambers exactly the same size and shape as my own. When I took a bath or lingered over the breakfast table I should be haunted by the knowledge that eight hundred people might probably be taking similar baths and similar breakfasts in precisely similar apartments. ... My old prints, my old china, my old furniture, my old servants, would pine away in such a habitation. Finally, I should die of a surfeit of stucco and be the first lodger entered in the records of the adjoining bleak, unfinished cemetery." If the Regency squares and terraces could inspire so much detestation of their regimented rows, what of the modern blocks of flats, where a hundred precisely similar bedrooms and half a hundred kitchens, that < repeat each other _to the last glazed tile, are covered by a single roof? WHEKE THEY CAN FEEL INDIVIDUAL. Our own homes may be noisy, but broadly speaking, no displeasure nor irritation is occasioned by noise created by ourselves. We smell the roasting of our own leg of mutton with relish, but the stew that is cooking in the flat below is another affair. Even if we are insulated from all these things, the pressure of humanity, felt but unseen, at close quarters is there. So innumerable town-dwellers fly from the modern comfort and conveniences they have so diligently sought to a cottage with no exact counterpart, where there are few conveniences and even less comfort but where they can at least feel their own individuality.

. Much the same sentiment surely influences a great deal .of the presentday purchases of "antiques." It is the individuality of the product, not its beauty or rarity or use, that appeals to us. The quality that man values in himself is that he- is—or at any rate believes himself to be —unique; and if some, of this quality can be attached to his surroundings and possessions he feels the more satisfied. It is characteristic of every period for some persons to stretch out their hands to the receding past, but surely never in such multitudes as today. Escape in time, the imagined reconstruction of a less complex civilisation, when the individual was a personality, not merely one of a crowd, makes the appeal of the past so widely felt now.

A Sussex fire-back or a slipware dish, a Sheraton fire-screen or a bundle of old Valentines, provides us with the extreme contrast of the sentiments of their day and ours. 'The country cottage, which as such makes no appeal to the genuine.countryman, filled with the small but! personal relics of past times provides -the greatest possible contrast to the mansion flat equipped with mass-produced' articles put to-

gether by some furnishing firm...Here at any "rate at' weekends" we""can feel individual, unique, and free from the proximity of the crowd an<i the multiplication of countless identical dwelllings.