"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR WALLS?"

In New York a taste for white, relieved if possible with gold, came in from France, for France has always been the mistress of taste for New Yorkers. If not white, then panels or whole walls of the most delicate tints, the practical reason for the choice being that the rooms so decorated "light up well at night." And so they do, and if that were all that is to be considered, the verdict would be unquestionably in favor of this mode of decoration. Only we shall still insist that the whole room should be in harmony, and that violent contrasts between the curtains, carpets, and the coverings of the chairs and sofas, and the walls and ceilings, should not be permitted. The main objection to this whiteness is its want of adaptation to the requirements of our climate. We Americans are great travelers, we dislike stagnation, and as soon as the weather permits, we are off from the city, to the country, to the sea-side, to watering places; and the town-house is deserted. If we lived in our rooms steadily all the year, it might be as important to have them cool-looking in summer as warm-looking in winter, but certainly it is of more importance for us to think of the cold season from November, or even from October, to May or June, (for May is a sulky month in spite of the poets) rather than of the rest of the year.

But, times change, and what was possible to a former generation, is impossible for us of a later time. Even if the old-fashioned simplicity - bareness, as we call it - were agreeable to us, it would be difficult to maintain it, so greatly has the condition of the market for beautiful things and things combining use and ornament, changed within a very few years. The things that go to the furnishing of a house are so vastly improved with us, and things once rare are now become so common - either the things themselves, or their faithful copies - that it is a comparatively easy matter, not even calling for much money, for people in ordinarily good circumstances to have their rooms looking not merely comfortable but handsome. Carpet have always been the rule in American houses, but then Eastern rugs were long scarce, or wholly unknown: now, however, they are to be had in abundance, even good ones are within easy reach, and those the connoisseur calls poor are, many of them, not to be despised. Within two or three years there has been a great improvement in the general character of our furniture - of course, no matter what the fashion is, there will always be dealers who will give it a vulgar tone, either loud or insipid - but, whereas two or three years ago, pretty, well-designed, elegant furniture was only to be had in shops whose dearness forbade them to all but the rich, it is now to be had without difficulty, so rapidly does improvement shoot ahead in our country when once it has got a start. Within a few months I have heard of a firm in our city that offers for sale furniture for cottages and small houses which has been designed expressly to meet the wants of persons with more taste than money. Very good copies of our colonial furniture are now to be had in the shops; but, what is wanted is, things that are more in keeping with our own ways of living and with the general style of our house-furnishing. Excellent as our architects are, they have as yet been allowed too little liberty in designing the furniture for the houses they build us, and in decorating their interior. Not only are clients becoming wise and perceiving how much to their advantage it will be to have the inside of their houses in harmony with the outside, but the furniture-makers, besieged by the fairer part of the public, are calling on the architects for help in satisfying the improved taste of their customers.

In the general course of improvement, the answering of supply to demand, wall-paper have not lagged behind. We have, now, in America as wide a field to choose from as can be found anywhere. English papers, from the most conservative and respectable patterns to the latest artistic growth, are found in all our best shop, and Paris itself cannot show more pretty, coquettish, elegant, stately, rich designs at home, than she send New York every year from her overflowing store.

It may be said, in passing, that France makes no account of one of the prime articles in the creed of the modern English and American schools of Decorative Art, that natural representation of flowers and fruits, and for that matter, imitations of all sorts, should be sedulously avoided. The French permit themselves full liberty in this matter, imitate any thing and every thing they can force into the service of decoration, and when they feel like it, paint flowers and fruits on wall-papers, or weave them into silks, or print them upon chintzes, with such grace and truth to nature, as to deceive the very elect. We Americans, being I suppose at the root more akin to the English than to the French, have blindly accepted the English dictum in this matter, and look upon wall-papers with any but set conventional patterns and somber colors, as vulgar, or as they say, "low form" - for we prefer even English cockney slang to our own. It was from the English we learned to make our dining-rooms dark, and to load them with heavy furniture; there being in reality, not good reason to be given - none at least that I could ever hear of - why dining-rooms should be any darker or drearier than drawing-rooms. So with bed-rooms. 'Tis as much as a man's reputation for good taste is worth, to confess that he likes to see a pretty flowered paper on a bed-room wall; and one can hardly estimate the courage it would take to own that one liked an old-fashioned landscape-paper in a hall-way or in a dining room.

It was not always so in England however, and one of the pleasant features of the so-called "Queen Anne" style that we hear so much about now-a-days, is its freedom from pedantry, its willingness to admit into its scheme of ornamentation almost anything that is intrinsically pretty or graceful. Thus, in furniture, we are free to empty miniature architectural forms - colonnettes, pilasters, pediments, (even broken ones); and one can, if we choose, paint the papers and stuffs with which we cover our walls and furniture, with wreaths of flowers and festoons of fruits; with groups of figures from poetry or history; with grotesques and arabesques from Rome and Pompeii, passed through the brains of Louis XIV's Frenchmen or of Anne's Englishmen; with landscapes even, pretty pastorals set in frameworks of wreaths or ribbons, or more simply arranged like irregular spots in rows of alternate subjects.

To-day we have the choice between this careless freedom from aesthetic restraint, and a docile obedience to certain formal rules, rules sensible enough, no doubt, and when carried out, producing good and reasonable effects, pleasing to the greater number of people, and quite as much "the fashion" as the other. But is seems to me pretty well settled now - thanks to the revived freedom and naturalness of the so-called "Queen Anne" style, and to the far more artistic art of the Japanese with freedom and naturalness equally its characteristics - that the classic laws of symmetry and unity are no longer to be considered the absolute rulers of the field of decorative art. They have their place, and they deserve our respect as much ever they did, but we are at liberty to choose where we will employ them, and where we will not.

In covering our walls with paper, we have to take one of two courses. We must consider, whether the paper is to serve as a background for pictures and ornamental objects, or, whether it is to be treated as an ornament itself. If it is to serve as a background for pictures, then we are to consider what will suit them best, what will at once keep them in their place, and bring them out: but is an error, I think, to suppose, as some people do, that a "quiet" paper is what is wanted for this purpose. A "quiet" paper must be suited like any other to the whole room, and no paper is "good" in itself alone, its goodness, like that of human beings, is entirely relative and depends upon what it is wanted for. If the pictures are dark and rich-looking, in gold frames, they will be suitably backed by a sober background in a brocade or arabesque pattern, one that will suggest the silks or leathers employed for such purposes in older times. Such a paper would indeed be "quiet," but it would not be dull or undecided, which is what people in general usually mean when they use the expression, "a quiet paper." Now, dull or undecided, a wall-paper should never be. On the contrary it ought always to be decided in its tint - a very different thing from being "staring" or "pronounced" - and it ought to harmonize with the pictures or ornaments; it should diffuse, so to speak, the tone of the objects that hang upon it over the whole wall, but it should be subordinate to them, neither over-crowing them or making them look like isolated spots.

But, the pictures may be of quite another sort from those I have described. They may be photographs or prints or delicate water-colors, and in this case the same rule will hold - that the wall-paper should be one that will accord with the general tone of the drawings and photographs. Papers with loose flowing patterns, damasks, or arabesques in the lighter greens, grays, blues, reds and yellows will harmonize with such pictures and show them at their best.

Here I may say that in this matter of photographs and prints a good deal depends upon the way in which they are framed and mounted. If this is done in the old fashion with wide white margins and dark frames - black or brown, with or without lines and ornaments in gold - the effect of the whole will be light and characterless; at any rate one requiring a light background to accord with it. If, on the other hand, the photographs and drawings show no white mounts at all but are surrounded with flat and not too narrow gold mounts, and with frames of dark wood or of wood gilded in the grain and unburnished, the effect may be as rich as that of oil paintings, and the background required will be sober or rich, to correspond.

It may be modestly said that few people know how much decorative effect may be got out of photographs, etchings and engravings. Only, these last must be of a certain sort. As usually treated, they are not effective at all, and many people object to them absolutely and will not frame them. As I have said however, and every artist will, I am sure, uphold me in it, they can be made of great importance in the decorative scheme of the room, and this simply by taking their own general tone as the key-note and working up from that to higher tones in the scale. Of course I am now speaking of photographs that are not "vignetted," but photographs of pictures that are themselves pictorial and come vigorously up to their boundaries on all sides. Photographs such as these from the pictures of the best Italian painters, as well as from Holbein, Velasquez and Reynolds (though the old mezzotints from Reynolds, Gainsborough and Raeburn are better than any photographs) may now be procured with ease and at prices within reach of very humble purses, and when framed as they should be, and backed by a wall-paper that is suited to them, they may hold their own against more pretentious pictures less harmoniously presented.

We have next to think of the division of the wall. This is a matter of the first importance in decoration and the modern wall-papers give us a great help in producing good effects with a very inconsiderable expenditure of money.

If the room be a high one, such as we ordinarily find in city houses, the wall will look better divided into three parts, a dado or wainscot, the wall proper, and a frieze, so called, just below the ceiling. The dado - a word whose etymology I cannot trace, perhaps a corruption of "dais" - plays a part equally decorative and useful. The older name is wainscot, and means wall-protector, a covering of wood laid against the stone or brick wall for warmth and comfort. Originally, and this before plastering was employed, the object of wainscot was purely useful, though according to the means of the house-builder it was carried up to a greater or a lesser height. Plaster was introduced as a substitute for wainscot, cheaper and more easily applied to the wall, and as wood grew scarcer, people ceased to employ it at all for sheathing the inside walls, the only vestige of it being the so-called mop-board (to keep the scrubbing-woman's mop from the plaster, or wall-paper,) base-board, skirting-board as it is variously called. It is a thousand pities the old paneled wainscot was ever given up. Those who have seen rooms in old houses about Boston and Philadelphia with the lower half of the parlor walls covered with a wainscot divided agreeably to architectural taste into its own base, styles, panels and moulded cornice; the mantle-piece of wood, with cupboards and arches at either side; with a wooden cornice running round the whole room and with low seats in the windows - the window-seat, a feature entirely lost to us in these days of thin outer walls - and then the wall-space that was left by this mode of treatment, covered with a landscape-paper, or a paper with large decorative flowers - peonies, hollyhocks, poppies, tulips, softly bright, toned down to chime with the light colors of the paint - whoever has seen such a room as this, must think we have gained nothing in the look of comfort, at least, by discarding the old fashion. And indeed, we show our good taste by coming back to the old style once more, if not in actual wood-work, at least in the devices that produce a similar effect.

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