All these fashionable rooms resemble each other. The Queen-Anne-mad decorators (some conspicuously) have but one idea and drive it to death. One hears that Mr. Brown or the Misses Smith have decorated So and So's house. We know without ever entering it what that house is like. That house is a bore. There is not one original thought in it, from its inconvenient entrance to its last dark and aesthetic cranny. We know every chair, every tint, every stencil, every brass knob, every bit of carefully discoloured and fatiguingly broidered napery - every wretched hard 'Sheraton' sofa and skewer-legged table - almost every orthodox work of art on those deadly-lively walls. For the most part, these houses reflect no inmate's character, no natural need and requirement - they contain no thought, no sweet little surprise - no touch of genius, nor even of ability.

Yet they are ' aesthetic.' Much labour and lucre are spent on making them so, and the inhabitants are duly 'worked up' to their walls, with a garb and a language of their own. After all, what does aesthetic mean? I once met an aesthetic artist who abhorred sunlight - he said it was 'crude.' So he only painted for two hours a day, after sunset. If aesthetic means 'discriminating,' we only see that the aesthetic discriminate between vulgar comfort and select misery: if it means 'eccentric,' popularity is surely bringing the seeds of death! unless the eccentricity be of speech, and then we bow, baffled, before the 'inescapable and lordly' 'niceness,' which results in 'distinctly inevitable' obscurity. A recent writer in the 'Contemporary Review' explained with some humour the condensed farfetchedness which in China constitutes 'good literary style,' but he did not say whether the aesthetic practice of obscure speech is traceable to aesthetic worship of Nankeen pots and plates.

But though our unregenerate hearts may sigh for relief and something neither blue-green nor green-blue, we must not be unjust. These rooms are so convenient, after all! They are less offensive than the old red and gold business. You can move easily among the sparse furniture. The little joints and inlaid spots are very 'nice' and the little emasculated legs vibrate sympathetically at a touch, so slight are they - poor little naked, shivering things! There is something weakly and feminine about this style, which goes to the heart, surely. Yet the inoffensiveness, unwarmed by some character, some chic, is in itself sometimes an offence. The heart sinks a little as the eye ranges from right to left vainly seeking something which does not weary it, but the monotony is too oppressive and it lights at length upon some natural object, some shrub or flower which Queen Anne has not tampered with in its artless, obstinately characteristic growth and colour.

Fig. 4. - New Queen Anne table.

Nature's Protest

Nature is unmoved by our crazes and our fashions. Nature only has courage to be herself, to assert her own individuality, to follow her own way, and never to be a bore, in spite of dynasties. The cactus or azalea which clothes the hillsides of Turkey or Algiers with pink or scarlet flame, the rose-garden in our own England, the golden common alight with furze in bloom, the apple-orchard and the buttercup-field, rebuke us for our folly. Colour and light and sunshine and shadow, all were made for our pleasure, and the dull lines of decay, suitable in their place, ought not to be our main surroundings. Dirt may be valuable to depress some forced or unnatural effect: but dirt is not the only thing that is ' nice.'Colour is not in itself objectionable, but only our ignorant use of it. Let us not give up wholesome brightness nor wholesome pleasure, even under Roundhead rule: for (as we earlier showed) when the natural balance is destroyed mischief ensues.

Let us press not only shadow but sunshine - not only straight lines but curves - not only sympathies but contrasts, into our service where we want them: and be charged with no burdens of 'oughts' and 'musts' which Nature herself contradicts.