THE TYRANNY OF HOUSES.

Otago Witness, Issue 2403, 22 March 1900, Page 56

THE TYRANNY OF HOUSES.

The genesis of ■ house-building was a dimple affair of wind and weather. In the tropics the dawn of human intelligence went one step beyond the monkey's instinct to rest in leafy branches} and fashioned a shelter of broken boughs beside some favourite water hole or patch of fruit. In colder latitudes our ancestors fought with the bear for his cave, as men now dispute > for diamond fields ; while the first New Mexican amiably shared his rock dwelling With the first turkey, which "was no more than civil, seeing that .he bird Avas every pit as cleanly and tidy a housekeeper as he. (The cave man of the north was doubtless a Utilitarian soul; the stability of his mansion did not stimulate the fancy as did the constant play of form and coloiu in&e1 parable from the labom of his tropical mother, evei renewing his faded and windlevelled residence. Still, in time, such an artist as Kipling describes in the " Story of Meg " felt a mighty stirring of the spirit impelling him to scratch the outline of the mighty aurochs on his wall, while the general tribal intelligence had evolved the earliest cooking-pot, and from that time house appliances and house decorations have progressed together. Little did the primeval woman of the woods, fleeing to her rock shelter in storm, And .gladly staking off its soot from her

feel "when the day was fan* again, — little clicL she think of the caves of the future, destined to hold her pale daughters willing prisoners alike from the life-giving sunlight and the lightsome moonlight. For it is a fact that one half of civilised womankind is in a worse case than the -snail, who, if inseparable from his house, can at least take it abroad with him and enjoy change of scene in his natural leisurely manner. But with the cloistered — one had almost said "submerged" — half we have mentioned it is not so ; yeai in, year out, ahey are seen toiling at these heavy shells, that have grown to their spirits, if not to their bodies. No true reformer has anything but praise for the " virtuous woman " of the Book of Proverbs. It is difficult to compare the labours of the grand old Hebrew housemother, " rising while it is yet night to give meat to her household," with the cares of a modern matron, contriving and scraping, not to make home a joyful resting place, bub to acquire a drawing-rocm suite just £10 dearer than Mrs Brown's next dooi — making the comparison of this and that r stove polish a matter of life and death, and perpetually fearing sun on the carpet and scratches on the mahogany. Far indeed is this trivial, anxious, acid woman, whose \ soul has shrunk into a feeble echo of Mrs ' Beoton's Househould Guide, removed from I the Hebrew ideal, whose labours Aveie crowned with " clothing of silk and fine linen," and far, too, from the uncomplaining Milly Bartons of our own day, to whom j poverty and self-sacrifice bring no such earthly meed ; and whose reward is with the martyrs. But for the fretted nerves, aching eyesight, and wearied muscles of the wilfully submerged half, if they are counted at all it is only as the useless penances of the sacred swing and the ordeal of the five fires put to the Brahmin's account. Day by day these tyrannous shells of ours with all the conventions crusted about them are demanding more of their victims' j lives, and shutting out more of the blessed j leisure and sunlight that is every woman's j birthright. No one victim is to blame : ! ignorance, want of mental perspective, is the foe that in this case so often lays the foundation of nemalgia, dyspepsia, and lung trouble. " Too much house " should be the rider on more women's death-ver-dicts than one care.s to contemplate.

The firrit step towards ennobling life is nearly always to simplify it. Let us simplify our houses, with all their appliances, decorations, and furnishings. They are not too large, seldom large enough, but they are far too full of stifling impedimenta. They are not too beautiful, but they show a superabundant, and often tawdry, straining afltr the icsthetic. They are not oven too clean, though needless showy brasses and mouldings are toiled at till dazzling to, behold. House-polishing and hygiene may or may not work upon parallel lines. How manj a wearied domestic, to whom linoleum and table accessories are made an affliction, slurs over her plain duty to the sink and the saucepan, so that her genteel employers are literally "eating death" off fine china and silver? How many baleful germs' lurk ijj our easily rugs, our useless

curtains? Let us sell the hundred and one gimcracks that we have deluded ourselves into considering things of beauty, and buy instead one stately urn or handsome vase that might have graced a classic vestibule. George Curtis, a famous American

ess-ayist, deals- a crashing blow at the un-home-like jjver-furnished palaces of New York millionaires. In " Oui Best Society "' an imaginary African ambassador, presumably a polished Arab, deals incisively with the colourleso mental poverty betrayed by the merchant princes and their wives in the glaring parade of Indian, Japanese, medieval and modern French art that littered every house in Fifth Avenue with a terrible uriformity of confusion. We are not guilty of these -people's riches ; we are guilty of their taste. £)ur own bits of choice Satsuma cost just eighteenpence, and mingled with our other one-and-sixpenny replicas of Mrs Brown's ornaments, they convey much the same impression as the American's treasures. A quarter of the labour, a quarter of the expense, and a mind free of precedent and emulation would tend to individuality and beauty. Three strokes from a master pencil suggest a picture ; three words from a master pen suggest a poem : why should not our few well chosen ornaments, our sun-defying rugs and easy chairs, suggest .our very selves to all beholders? Our life has become so complex that our very houses are largely a mask of character. " Strengthen and simplify," — that should be the housemother's motto.