"WHAT SHALL WE DO WITH OUR WALLS?"

There are two points in which our house-painters fail when such a task is given them. The chief is, the enjoyment of color. This comes partly from inherited deficiency, and partly from a long education received at their clients' hands, the public enjoying color just as little as the painters themselves. We have insisted so long on covering our great stretches of wall with pale tints - fawns, pearl-grays, ashes-of-roses, apple-greens, with the woodwork to match, that the painters' pattern-books contain nothing else, or did not until lately. And, again, we have so insisted on neatness and precision, that all freedom and spontaneity have been educated out of these workmen. Now, nothing is more characteristic of the best decorative art everywhere - I mean on what may be called its mechanic side - than the freedom with which obedience to the laws of design is paid. We have had our notions of the necessity of formality and symmetry effectually disturbed by the study of Japanese art, but the best art of any people, Greek, Roman, Italian, would have taught us the same lesson. If we had studied the laws of design as revealed by the best examples, we should not be so put about when we see a line left by the painter, which, though all right as far as horizontal or perpendicular are concerned, is a hair's breadth thicker than it was a few inches before, or a wee bit more loaded with paint at one point than at another; nor would it worry us that these stencilled patterns with which the painter has diapered our walls, though true in the main, are still not absolutely obedient to the square of the drill sergeant. One of the open secrets of nature's design is this variety in uniformity, this symmetry produced by balance and not be repetition. the spots upon a leopard's skin, the stripes upon the tiger, seem, to the careless view, regularly disposed, corresponding in number and direction, but it needs only a slight amount of observation to discover that the stars in the sky or the daisies in the meadow are not more freely sown than are these painted spots and streaks on the leopard and the tiger.

But, this freedom, and apparent, if not real, spontaneity of design are not possible to such house-painters as we have, even though their skill in other directions, in the smooth laying-on of color and the matching of tints, be nearly perfect, as it certainly is with the best of them. Even if they were capable of coloring the walls of our houses as harmoniously as the old Pompeians knew how to do, there is another reason, a housekeeper's reason, this time, and not an artistic one, that I think would prevent the universal use of fresco-painting as a means of decorating our walls. This may be simply stated. Our modern mode of living, the necessities of heating and lighting our rooms, since we live almost constantly indoors during the coldest and darkest months of the year, together with other causes, make it necessary for us to clean the walls, ceilings and floors of our houses at least once a year; and while this is done by almost everybody in the Spring, careful housekeepers repeat the cleaning in the Autumn. now, walls colored in distemper (for real fresco - the color applied when the plaster is fresh and absorbent - is never practiced among us) cannot be effectually cleaned, but have to be handled with a good deal of care. And as the first cost of painting in distemper that should be done with any approach to artistic skill, would be considerable, its renewal would only be risked by those to whom expense is of little moment. Practically, therefore, we have been driven in our search for a mode of decoration that should meet all our modern conditions, to the use of wall-paper. For, oil-painting is, now-a-days, only to be thought of when bed-rooms, or small, seldom-used, rooms are under consideration. The expense of carrying out any sustained system of wall-decoration in oil-colors would be too great in the first place and nothing would be gained by it, for, no matter how well done, the artistic effect could never be so pleasing as that produced either by distemper or by wall-paper.

The first practical advantages of wall-paper are, the ease with which it is applied, and the ease with which it is renewed. With our American migratory habits, and love of getting out of one house into another, it is a great recommendation that our new dwelling can be made to change its coat as a snake does his skin, and with new papers on the walls, and fresh paint on the wood-work, be made all sweet and clean from garret to basement. Beside, tastes change from year to year; and, moreover, what pleases one, does not please another, We take possession of a new house, and wonder how our predecessor could have had the bad taste to select such papers for his walls, or how he came to submit to them, if the bad taste displayed in them proves to have been his predecessor's , and not his. In either case we make haste to strip them off the walls that are to be ours, and to put on others of our own selection, which perhaps will be wondered at in their turn by those who shall take the house when we have done with it.

We are told that wall-paper was first used in Europe as a substitute for the tapestry so commonly employed in the middle ages, partly as a protection against the cold and damp of the stone walls of the houses, partly, no doubt, as an ornament. As to its origin, it may have been one of the many inventions borrowed from the East, and I dare say might be traced, like the introduction of porcelain, to the Dutch trade with China and Japan. The Japanese make great use of paper - with paper and the bamboo they contrive to fill out one-half the catalogue of the necessities of life, clay and wood serving for the other half. But the use they make of paper in the construction of their houses is singular. The walls are lined with this material, and the divisions between the rooms are made largely, if not entirely, by means of screens covered with paper as a rule, though, in some cases, silk is employed. Judging from the few hundreds of specimens I have seen, and from what I have been told, the Japanese wall-paper does not come in rolls like ours, but in pieces a little longer than they are broad, and of different sizes: the largest of those that I have examined are three feet long by fifteen inches wide, but the greater part are only fifteen inches long by twelve wide - the longer line being the horizontal. Now, what makes it seem probable that our first European notion of wallpapers come from Japan, it is the fact that the first papers made in Holland and thence introduced into England and France were printed in these small sizes, nor was it until some time in the last century, that the present mode of making long rolls was adopted. I have seen, in old houses on Long Island, walls covered with these small squares of paper. These early wall-papers were handprinted from blocks, and were only one of the many modifications and adaptations of the block-printing which gave us our first books and our first wood-cuts. The next application of the invention was to stuffs, which were printed by hand from blocks, in the same way.

The printing of papers for covering walls is said to have been introduced into Spain and Holland about the middle of the sixteenth century. And I have read, somewhere, that this mode of printing the patterns on small pieces of paper was an imitation of the Spanish squares of stamped and painted leather with which the grandees of Spain covered their walls - a fashion that spread all over Europe. It must be remembered, however, that in the sixteenth century, Spain and Holland were most intimately connected, and there was such a constant give and take between them, so far as arts and manufactures were concerned, that it would be hard to decide such a question as this with certainty. It is even possible the Japanese themselves may have borrowed the first notion of printing their wall-papers in the manner they did, from a former custom of using leather; at any rate, many of their wall-papers imitate stamped leather in texture and pattern, and even in smell, and are not easily distinguishable from it. Still, I incline to believe that the matters are not to be confounded, but that the Spanish, with whom cattle abounded, so that the leather was cheap, and with whom the manufacture of leather into articles of use and ornament was carried to a high degree of perfection, used leather for their walls because, as they treated it - stamping it with rich patterns, painting it and gilding it - they obtained rich and sumptuous effects in interior decoration, and also because it was the material which most naturally suggested itself for the purpose. The sizes of the pieces employed were such as were most naturally and economically cut from the skins, and it is possible that these skins, so stamped and ornamented, may have been introduced into Japan by the Dutch, and imitated by that very imitative people. It seems to me more natural to conclude the making of wall-papers by the Dutch an attempt to imitate what their traders had seen in Japan, and, yet, it may also be that the size and shape of the first Dutch wall-papers were not copied from the Japanese originals at all, but adopted solely from convenience of printing.

I presume it would add considerably to the labor of covering walls with paper, if it were attempted to revive the old fashion of using sheets, and there might be practical difficulties in the way of keeping the papers neat, and their edges unfrayed while on the dealers shelves, but something would be gained in the look of the wall when the paper was laid; the surface would be agreeably varied, not mearly by the more frequent joints, but by differences in the tints of the squares, since it would be almost impossible to produce an absolute uniformity. Something at any rate would be done toward breaking up the monotony which troubles us in the modern perfection of the wall-paper manufacture, and in disturbing the impeccable evenness with which the best hands contrive to lay the long breadths upon the smooth walls.

In the growth of good taste in the community, this monotony has begun to trouble many of us, and attention has been directed to the best way of preventing it. I was speaking some little while ago of the difficulty we encounter in the attempt to get artistic work done easily and cheaply, and there is no reason that cannot be overcome, why it should not be common and cheap. But, an obstacle in the way, not easily surmounted, is found in our American love of neatness and precision, qualities of undeniable excellence, and desirable in housekeeping and in business, but which have no place in the decorative arts, other than in a general way. Our own insistance on this neatness and precision, coupled with the want of artistic feeling in our mechanics, have tended strongly to throw us on mechanical methods, the result being a cheap and characterless decoration, of which we tire almost as soon as it is set before us. And if we try to escape from this kind of work, and seek the same neatness and finish at the hands of the few trained workmen we have, we find the expense out of all proportion to the result. Even the monotony of wall-paper as it used to be applied, and as it is still applied in the majority of our houses, outside the cities at least, was an advance, and an important one, on the monotony of blank whitness that was once the fashion everywhere. Certainly, ten years ago we Americans had a mania for whiteness in our houses, inside and outside! I remember to have been much amused when crossing the Atlantic on the return voyage by an enthusiastic countryman who chanted in unflinching tones the praise of white walls. He said, he had seen every one of the famous buildings in Europe, and not one of them could compare with the Capitol at Washington - it was so white and clean. He was also strong in his expression of disapproval of the universal practice in Europe of coloring the interior walls of the houses. "Why, sir," said he, "over there, as soon as the walls are plastered, or as soon as they are dry, the people either paint them or cover them with wall-paper! Now you know that we Americans think the white plaster most beautiful to look at, and we never think of painting it or papering it until it has begun to look soiled."

There was, no doubt, much truth in this gentleman's statement at the time, ten years ago, when he made it, though even then, the change had begun to set in to the practice which is now almost universal. But, there were different reasons for the love of whiteness in different parts of the country. In Philadelphia, where it still largely survives, there was the Quaker love of neatness and simplicity, the distaste for bright colors which, though not a part of the original inheritance of the Friends, had become identified with their creed in the popular fancy. We have to remember that the introduction of plastered walls had been hailed in England in James the First's time, as one of the greatest of modern improvements, and for a long time it superseded every other method of covering ceilings and walls, and the pleasure taken in it continued for a long time in England, and was naturally transplanted to her American colonies. In New England I suspect it was neither fashion nor any particular liking for bare white walls, that kept the "hard-finish" so long in popularity, but simply poverty, and the disposition to let ornaments go, and throw all the small overplus of money there might be after the necessities of life were gained, into the fund that should supply the solid comforts of life or the education that was there held to be no less an imperative need than bread-and-butter.

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