Thoughts On Having a House

Do Houses Have Lives, Characters, Spiritual Careers of Their Own?

HUGH WALPOLE

IT IS very characteristic of the times in which we are living that for a bachelor to have a whole house to himself in London seems rather a wicked proceeding.

Although I believe firmly in avoiding the sin of repentance and abjuring self-condemnation whenever and wherever it may crop up, it is nevertheless the truth that, ever since I stepped into my house in the early days of last September, I have felt perpetual twinges of conscience. Those twinges have been emphasized by the remarks of one or two of my more honest friends—I have one friend who, through an unaltering friendship of nearly ten years' wear and tear, has consistently spoken what he feels the truth to me and on one or two occasions rather more than the truth.

He has a warm heart and a gently cynical brain—a difficult pair to run in harness together. On this occasion, when I had shown him round the house, he said to me: "Yes. It's all very nice. But what do you have a house for at all? The only excuse for a house like this is matrimony. If you have a wife and children, it is worth while making them comfortable and gathering together pretty things for them to look at. But when you're alone-"

"I'm never alone," I said. "What about friends?"

"Friends don't care about your pretty things," he answered, "they want to talk about themselves and their affairs. They'll look at your pictures and your books and wonder how long it will be before you will settle down and let them talk.

"Besides," he added, "you're being very old-fashioned in having a house. Do you realize that nowadays no one in any town lives in a house? Take New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Berlin, any capital you please— they all live in flats or compartments."

. "All the more reason I should have a house," I answered, "somewhere for my friends to spread themselves when they've been cramped for weeks in flats that they can't swing a cat in-"

"Oh, come!" he interrupted, "you're not so altruistic as all that. You took a house for yourself, not for your friends. You're wasting your substance on things that don't matter. Four servants for one man! Disgusting! In these days when everyone is hard-up."

How I Was Ashamed

I FELT for a day or two properly ashamed of myself. For a moment I thought that I would sell my house and live in a whitewashed cell somewhere, keep one picture (a water-colour of Benois), two books (my first Endymion and Boswell's Johnson), and have my meals at an A. B. C. I should be free if I did that; could depart for Tokyo at a moment's notice, locking my cell and taking my Endymion with me.

Then I could give any money I made by my writing to the poor, and when the inevitable time came when my novels sold no longer I could retire into my cell and live on a penny a year.

Of course, in actual truth, I did nothing of the kind. I stayed on in my house. I bought some rugs and two etchings by Gordon Craig and three comfortable and very expensive armchairs. I made my library as pleasant as I could make it, with a fine portrait of Walter Scott over the mantelpiece to give the room the blessing of his noble and generous personality. I arranged my books in their proper order and adopted the grass and trees of Regent's Park that spread beyond my windows as my own especial property. I discovered three of the kindest human-beings to look after me ("You just wait," said my friends, "See what you think of them in three months' time"). I had my ceilings painted blue, and put orange carpets on the stairs.

I had loved the house from the first moment I saw it. It was built at the end of the XVIIIth century and has round pillars in the dining-room and a balcony beyond the library. It is a comer house and any sun that London chooses to bestow upon its citizens finds its way across my floors.

My Friends in My House

MY friends came and broke bread with me and I could give them a whole chicken at my own table instead of taking them to the Carlton Grill, where nothing belongs to one and everyone is better-dressed than oneself. I liked my friends in my house better than I had ever liked them in a restaurant. It is true perhaps that I bored them with my first editions and my pictures, but there was so much time and so much space that they could slip away from me when I was tiresome and go to sleep on my sofa when I was persistently loquacious. I myself became, I could not but fancy, a more agreeable person. When I am .shouting against a band in a restaurant that tendency to preach which is in my blood becomes violently active. In the tiny chambers where I formerly lived, if I gave a tea-party to four of my friends all my books had to be moved from their places and piled on the floor in rebellious heaps, and the gentleman in the room next to mine always struggled through the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata precisely at the moment of my guests' arrival.

I found that my health was better than it had ever been before. The little bedroom in my chambers was squeezed in between the heavy grey walls of three adjacent buildings. Not sun nor light nor air ever penetrated there and I woke, therefore, every morning with a headache.

I could now ask friends to stay with me without compelling them to sleep on the sofa in the sitting-room, and if they stayed for a week or longer I was able to give them a whole sitting-room to themselves, into which they might escape when my irritating tricks and habits were assaulting their nerves.

The park beyond my window changes its form and colour as often as the sea. The grass field beyond my railings seems like my grass field and even now, in the depths of the winter, seems greener than any grass that I have ever seen out of Ireland. I can pretend if I like that I am in the very depths of the country. I can do that for a whole day by the simple expedient of shutting off the telephone. Formerly I could only do that by going to bed, falling asleep and dreaming of Cornwall. You have every right to say, "But why should you enjoy these advantages? Think of all the poor fellows without work, without beds, without food. Are you not ashamed to-?"

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But, if I lived in my cell, they would gain no benefit. I should be ill, melancholy and a pessimist, and I sadly fear that the money that I spend on this house would do very little towards finding them work. Were it arranged by the State that we should all live in cells, all be paid the same salaries and eat at a communal kitchen, in a month half my companions would be deep in debt and the other half mortgaging the debtors' cells and adding them to their own.

Moreover, it is an undoubted fact that one is more inclined to help other people when one is happy than when one is unhappy. I am. in luck for the moment; in a year or two, perhaps in a month or two, I may be out of luck again and shall take my turn with the others. Had I never had a good time at all, I might grudge others their fortune; having had it, I shall wish them well and be grateful for what I had. The ideal thing would be, I suppose, that everyone should have a taste of the good time—everyone in turn.

Well, I won't grumble when my good time goes. Meanwhile it is absurd to pretend that leisure and comfort and general kindliness do not add to one's happiness. Of course they add to it. Don't you believe anyone who says they were just as happy when they had nothing a year and lived in a four pair back. The thing is, not to depend on your good time for your happiness —to let it go, if it leaves you—and not to grudge the good times that other people enjoy.

The Demon Fireplace

ALL this is sufficiently platitudinous. I have not yet mentioned the real discovery that I have made about having a house. I have known, of course, for many years that houses have lives of their own. Even flats and upper parts may sometimes catch fragments of crushed and invaded history, if old walls are allowed to stand, old fireplaces remain and old boards are still permitted to creak and groan. I remember once in the chambers of a friend of mine a most malignant fireplace. It was a beautiful Adams affair and my friend was proud of it, but not in the right way. His taste was not of the very best; he preferred anything new to anything old, he said, but so many people came to see his fireplace and stare at it and "admire it that he thought that there must be something fine about it.

The furniture in the room was a suite—very solid and very expensive— from Naples. On the mantelpiece he had a hideous gold clock and a bronze statue of a very modern Lady Godiva on a very modern quadruped. Well, that fireplace never left him alone. The clock fell, no one knew how, and was broken. Lady Godiva's horse lost a leg and every day sparks and flaming coal flew onto the precious Kidderminster rug and burnt holes in it. The fires in that fireplace made such noises as I'ye never heard before or since, ugly growling menacing noises, so constant and abusive that even the dullest people noticed them. Many other cases of a similar kind I know. Let anyone say that houses and furniture have no conscious independent life of their own at his peril 1

My house is not yet malignant—on the contrary, I feel the friendliest advances on every side of me. There is a cupboard at the top of the house of which I am not sure and two boards on the middle landing which always impress me, when I cross them, with a sense of unreliability; not material unreliability mind you—physically they are sound enough—but a spiritual rebellion that may become active, if I do not behave myself.

On the whole, however, the house is friendly and increasingly so as the days pass. I am inclined to believe that it is pleased with the collection of old books that I have given it. Absurd to pretend that my library would be just as pleased did my shelves contain nothing but bright new modern editions. There is a corner devoted to XVIIIth and early XIXth century novels in their original state. That is the. cosiest, happiest, most tranquil corner of the whole house. These books, many of them, were born just when the house was born. They opened their eyes upon the world together, were thrilled together by the news of Waterloo and Trafalgar, saw the French Revolution flame and seize the world with its hot fires; shrugged their shoulders at the first steam-engine, applauded crinolines and shuddered at Burke and Hare.

Even the shelves near to them, in which Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope and George Eliot take up so much room in their cumbrous but enchanting green and yellow-backed parts, are accepted by the house as something worthy of their place and of a true and a decent dignity.

My modern poets—my Sassoons and Hodgsons and Drinkwaters, still more my Vers Librists, my Sitwells and Aldingtons arid Huxleys, know they have no place here. For a month I tried to force them upon the room—it would not have them; they are now in the morning-room with paintings by Paul Nash and Nevinson and a modern carpet from Teheran.

But it is the dining-room that most uncompromisingly keeps its character. This must always have been the dining-room, because it gathers the morning sun so enchantingly and looks out upon the garden and, in the spring time, will be vocal with the song of birds. In the Forties and Fifties there were held in it, I'm sure, many of those wonderful mid-Victorian breakfasts that began at ten of the clock and continued until the early hours of the afternoon. Did anyone do any work in those days? When did Macaulay and Rogers and Browning and Foster and Dickens produce their fast-issuing, neverending volumes? Who can afford now to spend the morning over breakfast?

I have, of course, no proof that Macaulay or Rogers or Foster breakfasted in my house, but I like to think that an ambitious and wealthy merchant—Horatio Tripp, perhaps—with a feeling for literature and a wonderful cook, did on one or two occasions entice some of them into my dining-room. They complained of course—"Such a bore, old Tripp's breakfasts! But still one never knows whom one may meet there—and his chops and curry . . ." and

they complained, but they went. At least I hope they did. I believe that Benjamin Robert Haydon came once to Tripp to borrow money from him and one of the very last breakfasts that Browning ate in London before he eloped with Elizabeth Barrett was in this very house!

Best of all, the house seems to tell me that Horatio Tripp's predecessor—Montague Caston—knew Lockhart and gave Sir Walter tea here a year or two before that last sad journey to Naples.

Well, why not? Can anyone contradict me? The House says so and the House is the only one who knows.