or her the
proper use of a really useful process; for whether the object is to
produce a decoration or a simulated tapestry, it is not attained by
these methods.

The ordinary process of painting in dyes upon a wool or linen fabric
woven in tapestry method, and fixing the colour with heat, enables the
painter--if a true tapestry subject is chosen and tapestry effects
carefully studied--to produce really effective and good things, and this
opens a much larger field to the woman decorator than the ordinary
unstudied shams which have thrown what might become in time a large and
useful art-industry into neglect and disrepute.

I have seen the walls of a library hung with Siberian linen, stained in
landscape design in the old blues and greens which give tapestry its
decorative value, and found it a delightful wall-covering. Indeed we may
lay it down as a principle in decoration that while we may use and adapt
any decorative _effect_ we must not attempt to make it pass for the
thing which suggested the effect.

Coarse and carefully woven linens, used as I have indicated, are really
far better than old tapestries for modern houses, because the design can
be adapted to the specific purpose and the texture itself can be easily
cleaned and is more appropriate to the close walls and less airy rooms
of this century.

For costly wall-decoration, leather is another of the substances which
have had a past of pomp and magnificence, and carries with it, in
addition to beauty, a suggestion of the art of a race. Spanish leather,
with its stamping and gilding, is quite as costly a wall covering as
antique or modern tapestry, and far more indestructible. Perhaps it is
needlessly durable as a mere vehicle for decoration. At all events
Japanese artists and artisans seem to be of this opinion, and have
transferred the same kind of decoration to heavy paper, where for some
occult reason--although strongly simulating leather--it seems not only
not objectionable, but even meritorious. This is because it simply
transfers an artistic method from a costly substance, to another which
is less so, and the fact may even have some weight that paper is a
product of human manufacture, instead of human appropriation of animal
life, for surely sentiment has its influence in decoration as in other
arts.

Wood panelling is also a form of interior treatment which has come to us
by inheritance from the past as well as by right of natural possession.
It h