THE importance of surroundings and their effect on personal appearance is very considerable. People certainly look different in different rooms. Some look vulgar in one place and refined in another, just as some look pretty in one dress and plain in another. A pale person against a pale wall paper disappears; whilst in a well-coloured room human pallor may be set off and made pleasing. A person of high colour in a room full of hues which do not properly contrast with herself either derives so much reflected glow that she becomes empurpled and fiery, or else her personality is destroyed by the surroundings over-assimilating or absorbing her, so that she becomes a mere letter in an alphabet of violent colour.

In my book, the 'Art of Beauty,' the suggestion that surroundings ought to be adapted to persons, and the colours of rooms to their inhabitants, was much misunderstood. A great deal of small fun was made out of my supposed assertion that ladies should dress up to their rooms, or re-decorate them to suit every new dress, or refuse to dine out without a warranty of the colour they were expected to sit against. Of course all this was wide of the mark. What I did say, and what continued observation has confirmed me in, is, that rooms being a background for human beings, and coloured surfaces having definite artistic relations to one another, different hues must be arranged with thought and skill where juxtaposition to faces and complexions is unavoidable, i.e., not only in dress, but in the wall papers and furniture of rooms. Not that people are to adapt themselves to their walls, but that their walls are to be adapted to them; not that there are to be special niches and panels where fair beauties or dark beauties, or ladies in red, green, or yellow, are to sit, loll, or stand, but that a room, in its decoration and general colouring, is to be regarded as an accessory to the main object, the individual, and to be so skilfully planned that dark and fair, red, green, and yellow persons, are equally well treated within it, and look equally well.

Nor must this be thought impossible or impracticable, for there is no doubt that there are certain colours which are infallibly good backgrounds, just as there are others which are unmistakably bad backgrounds: that these are not few but many, and that they are not all blue-green or green-blue, very little experience can teach - in short, nearly every colour and material may be combined into a harmonious whole with a little care and artistic reflection.

One of my strongest convictions, and one of the first canons of good taste in house decoration, is that our houses, like the fish's shell or the bird's nest, ought to represent our individual tastes and habits, never the habits of a class. Fishes are not all herrings, birds are not all sparrows; let us, too, accentuate the varieties which exist among us. There is nothing so foolish, nothing so destructive to the germination of real taste and art-feeling in England, as the sheeplike English inclination to run in a flock. Instead of using their brains and eyes, people cry out, 'What shall I do?' or worse, 'What do other people do?' and directly they find out they do it too, like babies. This manner of proceeding reminds me of a young lady whom I once taught to sketch from nature, and who drew a line or two and then asked me, 'Where is the next line to go to?' 'Look and see,' was all I could reply - the very last thing she thought of doing.

Why will not people use their own faculties, and judge for themselves what looks best here or there, and so contribute something new and individual to society?