ue.

CHAPTER II

CHARACTER IN HOUSES

"_For the created still doth shadow forth the mind and will which made
it._

"_Thou art the very mould of thy creator_."

It needs the combined personality of the family to make the character of
the house. No one could say of a house which has family character, "It
is one of ----'s houses" (naming one or another successful decorator),
because the decorator would have done only what it was his business to
do--used technical and artistic knowledge in preparing a proper and
correct background for family life. Even in doing that, he must consult
family tastes and idiosyncracies if he has the reverence for
individuality which belongs to the true artist.

A domestic interior is a thing to which he should give knowledge and not
personality, and the puzzled home-maker, who understands that her world
expects correct use of means of beauty, as well as character and
originality in her home, need not feel that to secure the one she must
sacrifice the other.

An inexperienced person might think it an easy thing to make a beautiful
home, because the world is full of beautiful art and manufactures, and
if there is money to pay for them it would seem as easy to furnish a
house with everything beautiful as to go out in the garden and gather
beautiful flowers; but we must remember that the world is also full of
ugly things--things false in art, in truth and in beauty--things made to
_sell_--made with only this idea behind them, manufactured on the
principle that an artificial fly is made to look something like a true
one in order to catch the inexpert and the unwary. It is a curious fact
that these false things--manufactures without honesty, without
knowledge, without art--have a property of demoralizing the spirit of
the home, and that to make it truly beautiful everything in it must be
genuine as well as appropriate, and must also fit into some previously
considered scheme of use and beauty.

The esthetic or beautiful aspect of the home, in short, must be created
through the mind of the family or owner, and is only maintained by its
or his susceptibility to true beauty and appreciation of it. It must, in
fact, be a visible mould of invisible matter, like the leaf-mould one
finds in mineral springs, which show the wonderful veining, branching,
construction and delicacy of outline in a way which one could hardly be
conscious of in the actual leaf.

If the grade or dignity of the h