Certain Personal Matters | Page 2

the best
one was the history of our race for three generations. There was more
in her house than the tombstone rectitude of the chair-backs to remind
me of the graveyard. I can still remember the sombre aisles of that
house, the vault-like shadows, the magnificent window curtains that
blotted out the windows. Life was too trivial for such things. She never
knew she tired of them, but she did. That was the secret of her temper, I
think; they engendered her sombre Calvinism, her perception of the
trashy quality of human life. The pretence that they were the
accessories to human life was too transparent. We were the accessories;
we minded them for a little while, and then we passed away. They wore
us out and cast us aside. We were the changing scenery; they were the
actors who played on through the piece. It was even so with clothing.
We buried my other maternal aunt--Aunt Adelaide--and wept, and
partly forgot her; but her wonderful silk dresses--they would stand
alone--still went rustling cheerfully about an ephemeral world.
All that offended my sense of proportion, my feeling of what is due to

human life, even when I was a little boy. I want things of my own,
things I can break without breaking my heart; and, since one can live
but once, I want some change in my life--to have this kind of thing and
then that. I never valued Aunt Charlotte's good old things until I sold
them. They sold remarkably well: those chairs like nether millstones
for the grinding away of men; the fragile china--an incessant anxiety
until accident broke it, and the spell of it at the same time; those silver
spoons, by virtue of which Aunt Charlotte went in fear of burglary for
six-and-fifty years; the bed from which I alone of all my kindred had
escaped; the wonderful old, erect, high-shouldered, silver-faced clock.
But, as I say, our ideas are changing--mahogany has gone, and repp
curtains. Articles are made for man, nowadays, and not man, by careful
early training, for articles. I feel myself to be in many respects a link
with the past. Commodities come like the spring flowers, and vanish
again. "Who steals my watch steals trash," as some poet has remarked;
the thing is made of I know not what metal, and if I leave it on the
mantel for a day or so it goes a deep blackish purple that delights me
exceedingly. My grandfather's hat--I understood when I was a little boy
that I was to have that some day. But now I get a hat for ten shillings,
or less, two or three times a year. In the old days buying clothes was
well-nigh as irrevocable as marriage. Our flat is furnished with
glittering things--wanton arm-chairs just strong enough not to collapse
under you, books in gay covers, carpets you are free to drop lighted
fusees upon; you may scratch what you like, upset your coffee, cast
your cigar ash to the four quarters of heaven. Our guests, at anyrate, are
not snubbed by our furniture. It knows its place.
But it is in the case of art and adornment that cheapness is most
delightful. The only thing that betrayed a care for beauty on the part of
my aunt was her dear old flower garden, and even there she was not
above suspicion. Her favourite flowers were tulips, rigid tulips with
opulent crimson streaks. She despised wildings. Her ornaments were
simply displays of the precious metal. Had she known the price of
platinum she would have worn that by preference. Her chains and
brooches and rings were bought by weight. She would have turned her
back on Benvenuto Cellini if he was not 22 carats fine. She despised

water-colour art; her conception of a picture was a vast domain of oily
brown by an Old Master. The Babbages at the Hall had a display of
gold plate swaggering in the corner of the dining-room; and the visitor
(restrained by a plush rope from examining the workmanship) was told
the value, and so passed on. I like my art unadorned: thought and skill,
and the other strange quality that is added thereto, to make things
beautiful--and nothing more. A farthing's worth of paint and paper, and,
behold! a thing of beauty!--as they do in Japan. And if it should fall
into the fire--well, it has gone like yesterday's sunset, and to-morrow
there will be another.
These Japanese are indeed the apostles of cheapness. The Greeks lived
to teach the world beauty, the Hebrews to teach it morality, and now
the Japanese are hammering in the lesson that men may be honourable,
daily life delightful, and a nation great without either freestone houses,
marble mantelpieces, or mahogany sideboards. I have sometimes
wished