第37章 ON FURNISHED APARTMENTS(3)
New furniture has no charms for me compared with old.It is the old things that we love--the old faces, the old books, the old jokes.New furniture can make a palace, but it takes old furniture to make a home.Not merely old in itself--lodging-house furniture generally is that--but it must be old to us, old in associations and recollections.The furniture of furnished apartments, however ancient it may be in reality, is new to our eyes, and we feel as though we could never get on with it.As, too, in thecase of all fresh acquaintances, whether wooden or human (and there is very little difference between the two species sometimes), everything impresses you with its worst aspect.The knobby wood-work and shiny horse-hair covering of the easy-chair suggest anything but ease.The mirror is smoky.The curtains want washing.The carpet is frayed.The table looks as if it would go over the instant anything was rested on it.The grate is cheerless, the wall-paper hideous.The ceiling appears to have had coffee spilt all over it, and the ornaments--well, they are worse than the wallpaper.
There must surely be some special and secret manufactory for the production of lodging-house ornaments.Precisely the same articles are to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they are never seen anywhere else.There are the two--what do you call them? they stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where they are never safe, and they are hung round with long triangular slips of glass that clank against one another and make you nervous.In the commoner class of rooms these works of art are supplemented by a couple of pieces of china which might each be meant to represent a cow sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of Diana at Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you like to fancy.Somewhere about the room you come across a bilious-looking object, which at first you take to be a lump of dough left about by one of the children, but which on scrutiny seems to resemble an underdone cupid.This thing the landlady calls a statue.Then there is a "sampler" worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the "Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly framed and glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated, or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.
You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the rent is.
"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.
"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden burst of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal in excess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (a still higher figure).
What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one shudder to think of.Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she used to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying.Young men lodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves.I should have had to live in an attic.
Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed.The higher you get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings.On the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man underneath.You start in the attic and work your way down to the first floor.
A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one time or another.Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the world hides away in its attics.Haydn grew up in an attic and Chatterton starved in one.Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets.Faraday and De Quincey knew them well.Dr.Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself.Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a drunken, premature old age.Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs.Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer--the roll is endless.Ever since the habitations of men were reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.