The Atlantic Monthly Part 9

There is no one fact of our human existence that has a stronger influence upon us than the house we dwell in,--especially that in which our earlier and more impressible years are spent. The building and arrangement of a house influence the health, the comfort, the morals, the religion. There have been houses built so devoid of all consideration for the occupants, so rambling and hap-hazard in the disposal of rooms, so sunless and cheerless and wholly without snugness or privacy, as to make it seem impossible to live a joyous, generous, rational, religious family-life in them.

There are, we shame to say, in our cities _things_ called houses, built and rented by people who walk erect and have the general air and manner of civilized and Christianized men, which are so inhuman in their building that they can only be called snares and traps for souls,--places where children cannot well escape growing up filthy and impure,--places where to form a home is impossible, and to live a decent, Christian life would require miraculous strength.

A celebrated British philanthropist, who had devoted much study to the dwellings of the poor, gave it as his opinion that temperance-societies were a hopeless undertaking in London, unless these dwellings underwent a transformation. They were so squalid, so dark, so comfortless, so constantly pressing upon the senses foulness, pain, and inconvenience, that it was only by being drugged with gin and opium that their miserable inhabitants could find heart to drag on life from day to day.

He had himself tried the experiment of reforming a drunkard by taking him from one of these loathsome dens and enabling him to rent a tenement in a block of model lodging-houses which had been built under his supervision. The young man had been a designer of figures for prints; he was of a delicate frame, and a nervous, susceptible temperament. Shut in one miserable room with his wife and little children, without the possibility of pure air, with only filthy, fetid water to drink, with the noise of other miserable families resounding through the thin part.i.tions, what possibility was there of doing anything except by the help of stimulants, which for a brief hour lifted him above the perception of these miseries? Changed at once to a neat flat, where, for the same rent as his former den, he had three good rooms, with water for drinking, house-service, and bathing freely supplied, and the blessed suns.h.i.+ne and air coming in through windows well arranged for ventilation, he became in a few weeks a new man. In the charms of the little spot which he could call home, its quiet, its order, his former talent came back to him, and he found strength, in pure air and pure water and those purer thoughts of which they are the emblems, to abandon burning and stupefying stimulants.

The influence of dwelling-houses for good or for evil--their influence on the brain, the nerves, and, through these, on the heart and life--is one of those things that cannot be enough pondered by those who build houses to sell or rent.

Something more generous ought to inspire a man than merely the percentage which he can get for his money. He who would build houses should think a little on the subject. He should reflect what houses are for,--what they may be made to do for human beings. The great majority of houses in cities are not built by the indwellers themselves,--they are built _for_ them, by those who invest their money in this way, with little other thought than the percentage which the investment will return.

For persons of ample fortune there are, indeed, palatial residences, with all that wealth can do to render life delightful. But in that cla.s.s of houses which must be the lot of the large majority, those which must be chosen by young men in the beginning of life, when means are comparatively restricted, there is yet wide room for thought and the judicious application of money.

In looking over houses to be rented by persons of moderate means, one cannot help longing to build,--one sees so many ways in which the same sum which built an inconvenient and unpleasant house might have been made to build a delightful one.

"That's so!" said Bob, with emphasis. "Don't you remember, Marianne, how many dismal, commonplace, shabby houses we trailed through?"

"Yes," said Marianne. "You remember those houses with such little squeezed rooms and that flouris.h.i.+ng staircase, with the colored-gla.s.s china-closet window and no butler's sink?"

"Yes," said Bob; "and those astonis.h.i.+ng, abominable stone abortions that adorned the door-steps. People do lay out a deal of money to make houses look ugly, it must be confessed."

"One would willingly," said Marianne, "dispense with frightful stone ornaments in front, and with heavy mouldings inside, which are of no possible use or beauty, and with showy plaster cornices and centre-pieces in the parlor-ceilings, and even with marble mantels, for the luxury of hot and cold water in each chamber, and a couple of comfortable bath-rooms. Then, the disposition of windows and doors is so wholly without regard to convenience! How often we find rooms, meant for bed-rooms, where really there is no good place for either bed or dressing-table!"

Here my wife looked up, having just finished re-drawing the plans to the latest alteration.

"One of the greatest reforms that could be, in these reforming days,"

she observed, "would be to have women architects. The mischief with houses built to rent is that they are all mere male contrivances. No woman would ever plan chambers where there is no earthly place to set a bed except against a window or door, or waste the room in entries that might be made into closets. I don't see, for my part, _apropos_ to the modern movement for opening new professions to the female s.e.x, why there should not be well-educated female architects. The planning and arrangement of houses, and the laying-out of grounds, are a fair subject of womanly knowledge and taste. It is the teaching of Nature. What would anybody think of a bluebird's nest that had been built entirely by Mr.

Blue without the help of his wife?"

"My dear," said I, "you must positively send a paper on this subject to the next Woman's-Rights Convention."

"I am of Sojourner Truth's opinion," said my wife,--"that the best way to prove the propriety of one's doing anything is to go and _do it_. A woman who should have energy to go through the preparatory studies and set to work in this field would, I am sure, soon find employment."

"If she did as well as you would do, my dear," said I. "There are plenty of young women in our Boston high-schools who are going through higher fields of mathematics than are required by the architect, and the schools for design show the flexibility and fertility of the female pencil. The thing appears to me altogether more feasible than many other openings which have been suggested to woman."

"Well," said Jennie, "isn't papa ever to go on with his paper?"

I continued:--

What ought "our house" to be? Could any other question be asked admitting in its details of such varied answers,--answers various as the means, the character, and situation of different individuals? But there are great wants pertaining to every human being, into which all lesser ones run. There are things in a house that every one, high or low, rich or poor, ought, according to his means, to seek. I think I shall cla.s.s them according to the elemental division of the old philosophers,--Fire, Air, Earth, and Water. These form the groundwork of this _need-be_,--the _sine-qua-nons_ of a house.

"Fire, air, earth, and water! I don't understand," said Jennie.

"Wait a little till you do, then," said I. "I will try to make my meaning plain."

The first object of a house is shelter from the elements. This object is effected by a tent or wigwam which keeps off rain and wind. The first disadvantage of this shelter is, that the vital air which you take into your lungs, and on the purity of which depends the purity of blood and brain and nerve, is vitiated. In the wigwam or tent you are constantly taking in poison, more or less active, with every inspiration. Napoleon had his army sleep without tents. He stated, that, from experience, he found it more healthy; and wonderful have been the instances of delicate persons gaining constantly in vigor from being obliged, in the midst of hards.h.i.+ps, to sleep constantly in the open air. Now the first problem in house-building is to combine the advantage of shelter with the fresh elasticity of out-door air. I am not going to give here a treatise on ventilation, but merely to say, in general terms, that the first object of a house-builder or contriver should be to make a healthy house, and the first requisite of a healthy house is a pure, sweet, elastic air.

I am in favor, therefore, of those plans of house-building which have wide central s.p.a.ces, whether halls or courts, into which all the rooms open, and which necessarily preserve a body of fresh air for the use of them all. In hot climates this is the object of the central court which cuts into the body of the house, with its fountain and flowers, and its galleries, into which the various apartments open. When people are restricted for s.p.a.ce, and cannot afford to give up wide central portions of the house for the mere purposes of pa.s.sage, this central hall can be made a pleasant sitting-room. With tables, chairs, bookcases, and sofas comfortably disposed, this ample central room above and below is, in many respects, the most agreeable lounging-room of the house; while the parlors below and the chambers above, opening upon it, form agreeable withdrawing-rooms for purposes of greater privacy.

It is customary with many persons to sleep with bed-room windows open,--a very imperfect, and often dangerous mode of procuring that supply of fresh air which a sleeping-room requires. In a house constructed in the manner indicated, windows might be freely left open in these central halls, producing there a constant movement of air, and the doors of the bed-rooms placed ajar, when a very slight opening in the windows would create a free circulation through the apartments.

In the planning of a house, thought should be had as to the general disposition of the windows, and the quarters from which favoring breezes may be expected should be carefully considered. Windows should be so arranged that draughts of air can be thrown quite through and across the house. How often have we seen pale mothers and drooping babes fanning and panting during some of our hot days on the sunny side of a house, while the breeze that should have cooled them beat in vain against a dead wall! One longs sometimes to knock holes through part.i.tions and let in the air of heaven.

No other gift of G.o.d, so precious, so inspiring, is treated with such utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as this same air of heaven. A sermon on oxygen, if one had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came. A minister gets up in a crowded lecture-room, where the mephitic air almost makes the candles burn blue, and bewails the deadness of the church,--the church the while, drugged by the poisoned air, growing sleepier and sleepier, though they feel dreadfully wicked for being so.

Little Jim, who, fresh from his afternoon's rambles in the fields, last evening said his prayers dutifully, and lay down to sleep in a most Christian frame, this morning sits up in bed with his hair bristling with crossness, strikes at his nurse, and declares he won't say his prayers,--that he don't want to be good. The simple difference is, that the child, having slept in a close box of a room, his brain all night fed by poison, is in a mild state of moral insanity. Delicate women remark that it takes them till eleven or twelve o'clock to get up their strength in the morning. Query,--Do they sleep with closed windows and doors, and with heavy bed-curtains?

The houses built by our ancestors were better ventilated in certain respects than modern ones, with all their improvements. The great central chimney, with its open fireplaces in the different rooms, created a constant current which carried off foul and vitiated air. In these days, how common is it to provide rooms with only a flue for a stove! This flue is kept shut in summer, and in winter opened only to admit a close stove, which burns away the vital portion of the air quite as fast as the occupants breathe it away. The sealing-up of fireplaces and introduction of air-tight stoves may, doubtless, be a saving of fuel: it saves, too, more than that; in thousands and thousands of cases it has saved people from all further human wants, and put an end forever to any needs short of the six feet of narrow earth which are man's only inalienable property. In other words, since the invention of air-tight stoves, thousands have died of slow poison. It is a terrible thing to reflect upon, that our Northern winters last from November to May, six long months, in which many families confine themselves to one room, of which every window-crack has been carefully calked to make it air-tight, where an air-tight stove keeps the atmosphere at a temperature between eighty and ninety, and the inmates sitting there with all their winter clothes on become enervated both by the heat and by the poisoned air, for which there is no escape but the occasional opening of a door.

It is no wonder that the first result of all this is such a delicacy of skin and lungs that about half the inmates are obliged to give up going into the open air during the six cold months, because they invariably catch cold, if they do so. It is no wonder that the cold caught about the first of December has by the first of March become a fixed consumption, and that the opening of the spring, which ought to bring life and health, in so many cases brings death.

We hear of the lean condition in which the poor bears emerge from their six-months' wintering, during which they subsist on the fat which they have acquired the previous summer. Even so in our long winters, mult.i.tudes of delicate people subsist on the daily waning strength which they acquired in the season when windows and doors were open, and fresh air was a constant luxury. No wonder we hear of spring fever and spring biliousness, and have thousands of nostrums for clearing the blood in the spring. All these things are the pantings and palpitations of a system run down under slow poison, unable to get a step farther. Better, far better, the old houses of the olden time, with their great roaring fires, and their bed-rooms where the snow came in and the wintry winds whistled. Then, to be sure, you froze your back while you burned your face, your water froze nightly in your pitcher, your breath congealed in ice-wreaths on the blankets, and you could write your name on the pretty snow-wreath that had sifted in through the window-cracks. But you woke full of life and vigor,--you looked out into whirling snow-storms without a s.h.i.+ver, and thought nothing of plunging through drifts as high as your head on your daily way to school. You jingled in sleighs, you s...o...b..lled, you lived in snow like a snow-bird, and your blood coursed and tingled, in full tide of good, merry, real life, through your veins,--none of the slow-creeping, black blood which clogs the brain and lies like a weight on the vital wheels!

"Mercy upon us, papa!" said Jennie, "I hope we need not go back to such houses!"

"No, my dear," I replied. "I only said that such houses were better than those which are all winter closed by double windows and burnt-out air-tight stoves."

The perfect house is one in which there is a constant escape of every foul and vitiated particle of air through one opening, while a constant supply of fresh out-door air is admitted by another. In winter, this out-door air must pa.s.s through some process by which it is brought up to a temperate warmth.

Take a single room, and suppose on one side a current of out-door air which has been warmed by pa.s.sing through the air-chamber of a modern furnace. Its temperature need not be above sixty-five,--it answers breathing purposes better at that. On the other side of the room let there be an open wood- or coal-fire. One cannot conceive the purposes of warmth and ventilation more perfectly combined.

Suppose a house with a great central hall, into which a current of fresh, temperately warmed air is continually pouring. Each chamber opening upon this hall has a chimney up whose flue the rarefied air is constantly pa.s.sing, drawing up with it all the foul and poisonous gases.

That house is well ventilated, and in a way that need bring no dangerous draughts upon the most delicate invalid. For the better securing of privacy in sleeping-rooms, we have seen two doors employed, one of which is made with slats, like a window-blind, so that air is freely transmitted without exposing the interior.

When we speak of fresh air, we insist on the full rigor of the term. It must not be the air of a cellar, heavily laden with the poisonous nitrogen of turnips and cabbages, but good, fresh, out-door air from a cold-air pipe so placed as not to get the lower stratum near the ground, where heavy damps and exhalations collect, but high up in just the clearest and most elastic region.

The conclusion of the whole matter is, that, as all of man's and woman's peace and comfort, all their love, all their amiability, all their religion, have got to come to them, while they live in this world, through the medium of the brain,--and as black, uncleansed blood acts on the brain as a poison, and as no other than black, uncleansed blood can be got by the lungs out of impure air,--the first object of the man who builds a house is to secure a pure and healthy atmosphere therein.

Therefore, in allotting expenses, set this down as a _must-be_: "Our house must have fresh air,--everywhere, at all times, winter and summer." Whether we have stone facings or no,--whether our parlor has cornices or marble mantels or no,--whether our doors are machine-made or hand-made. All our fixtures shall be of the plainest and simplest, but we will have fresh air. We will open our door with a latch and string, if we cannot afford lock and k.n.o.b and fresh air too,--but in our house we will live cleanly and Christianly. We will no more breathe the foul air rejected from a neighbor's lungs than we will use a neighbor's tooth-brush and hair-brush. Such is the first essential of "our house,"--the first great element of human health and happiness,--AIR.

"I say, Marianne," said Bob, "have we got fireplaces in our chambers?"

"Mamma took care of that," said Marianne.

"You may be quite sure," said I, "if your mother has had a hand in planning your house, that the ventilation is cared for."