A Breeze from the Woods, 2nd Ed.

THE HOUSE ON THE HILL

A country without grandmothers and old houses needs a great many balancing compensations. Everywhere one is confronted with staring new houses, which require an external ripening in the wind and sun for half a century. If the motherly wisdom of seventy-five years is lodged therein, it is something of recent importation. I have walked two miles to see an old lady, who not only bears this transplanting well, but is as fresh and winsome in thought as a girl of sixteen. If only there had been an old house, a stone fire-place – wide at the jambs – and a low, receding roof in the rear, with a bulging second story and oaken beams, nothing more would have been wanting.

When, therefore, it was whispered, one day, that there was an old house in the middle of a large lot on a hill, overlooking the Golden Gate, there was a strong and unaccountable desire to take possession of it immediately. But when the fact was stated that the house was ten years old, that there was moss upon the shingles, low ceilings within, and a low roof without, the destiny of that house was well nigh settled. The owner wanted money much more than old houses. In fact, a Californian who refuses to sell anything, except his wife, is only found after long intervals. The transfer of ownership was natural enough. It followed that one evening there was a dreamy consciousness that we were the owner of a small, rusty-looking cottage, set down in the middle of an acre lot, defined by dilapidated fences, and further ornamented by such stumps of trees as had been left after all the stray cattle of the neighborhood had browsed them at will. As incidents of the transfer, there was the Golden Gate, with the sun dropping into the ocean beyond; the purple hills; the sweep of the bay for fifteen miles, on which a white sail could be seen, here and there; and, later, the long rows of flickering street lamps, revealing the cleft avenues of the great city dipping toward the water on the opposite side of the bay.

Consider what an investment accompanies these muniments of title. It is not an acre lot and an old house merely, with several last year's birds' nests and a vagrant cat, but the ownership extends ninety-five millions of miles toward the zenith, and indefinitely toward the nadir. No one can, in miners' parlance, get an extension above or below. It is a square acre, bounded by heaven and hades.

If my neighbor builds an ugly house, why should I find fault with it, since it is the expression of his wants, and not of mine. If these are honestly expressed, he has compassed the main end of house-building. He may have produced something that nobody in the wide world will be suited with, or will ever want but himself. But if it is adapted to his wants, it is only in some remote and æsthetic way that his neighbors have anything to do with the matter. They may wish that he had not made it externally as ugly as original sin; that he had laid a heavy hand on the antics of architect and carpenter; that lightning would some day strike the "pilot-house," or some other excrescence which has been glued on to the top; and that a certain smart obtrusiveness were toned down a little to harmonize with a more correct taste. But one could not formulate these defects and send them to his neighbor without running a risk quite unwarranted by any good that might be effected.

Taking possession of an old house, its ugliness is to be redeemed, not rashly, but considerately, and in the spirit of gentleness. Its homeliness has been consecrated; its doors may have been the portals both of life and death. Possibly, some one has gone out whose memory of it in the ends of the earth will transform it into something of comeliness and beauty.

Investing an old house, the first process is to become thoroughly acquainted with it, and then, if it is to be enlarged, push it out from the center with such angles as will catch the sun, and will bring the best view within range from the windows. It will grow by expansions and accretions. You want a bed-room on the eastern side, because of the morning sun. By all means, put it there. The morning benediction which comes in at the window may temper one to better ways all the day.

No man will build a house to suit his inmost necessities, unless he proceeds independently of all modern rules of construction. Some of these are good enough, but they nearly all culminate in an ambitious externalism. The better class of dwellings erected seventy-five years ago contained broad staircases, spacious sleeping-rooms, and a living-room, where the whole family and the guests, withal, might gather at the fire-side. The house was an expression of hospitality. The host had room for friendships in his heart, and room at his hearthstone. The modern house, with its stiff angularities, narrow halls, and smart reception-rooms, expresses no idea of hospitality. It warns the stranger to deliver his message quickly, and be off. It is well adapted to small conventional hypocrisies, but you will never count the stars there by looking up the chimney.

One may search long to find the man who has not missed his aim in the matter of house-building. It is generally needful that two houses should be built as a sacrifice to sentiment, and then the third experiment may be reasonably successful. The owner will probably wander through the first two, seeking rest and finding none. His ideal dwelling is more remote than ever. There may be a wealth of gilt and stucco, and an excess of marble, which ought to be piled up in the cemetery for future use. But the house which receives one as into the very heaven – which is, from the beginning, invested with the ministries of rest, of hospitality, of peace, of that indefinable comfort which seems to converge all the goodness of the life that now is with the converging sunbeams – such a dwelling does not grow out of the first crude experiment. It will never be secured until one knows better what he really wants than an architect or carpenter can tell him.

"Did you bring the old house up to this ideal standard?" Just about as near as that pear tree, at the lower end of the garden, has been brought up to a perfect standard of fruiting. You perceive that where half of the top was cut away, and new scions inserted, the pears hung in groups and blushed in the autumnal sun. As you let one of them melt on your palate, turn to the other side of the tree, and note that, if ever a premium were offered for puckering, acrid fruit, these pears from the original stock ought to take it.

Now, if you graft your ideas on to another's, premising that his views were crude and primitive, the result will be somewhat mixed. We should say that the grafts put into that old house were tolerably satisfactory. But we counsel no friend to build over an old house, unless he owns a productive gold mine, and the bill of particulars at the end of his exploit is more interesting and gratifying to him than any modern novel.

There was, however, a shade of regret when it was announced that nothing more remained to be done. For three months there had been a series of gentle transitions, and an undercurrent of pleasurable excitement as a door appeared in a new place, a window opened here and there, stairways were cut, and old pieces pushed off and new took their places. It seemed as if these transitions ought to be always going on, and therefore the most natural thing in the world that the carpenters should always be cutting or hammering that house. They might grow old and another set take their places, but there would always be some room to enlarge, or some want growing out of the exigencies of a new day. Moreover, the first part taken in hand would in time decay or become antiquated, and why not associate builders and house together, since all the jars, wrenching of timbers, sawing and hammering had become musical, and seemed to be incorporated as the law of the house? Nothing but financial considerations prevented a contract for life with the builders, and the life-long luxury of changing an old house into a new one. There came a day at last of oppressive silence. Painters came down from their ladders; the carpenters packed up their tools and walked thoughtfully around, taking an honest view on all sides of a structure which had grown under their hands until, outwardly, there was not the slightest semblance of the old house which they took in hand some months before. There was a shade akin to sadness on the face of the master workman. Evidently the idea of ever leaving that house had overtaken him for the first time that day. He had grown with the house; or, at any rate, his children had been growing. Why should he not come back on the morrow, and plumb, hammer and saw; creeping up the ladder with every new day, and sliding down with every descending sun?

The loftiest house, and the most perfect, in the matter of architecture, I have ever seen, was that which a wood-chopper occupied with his family one winter in the forests of Santa Cruz County. It was the cavity of a redwood tree two hundred and forty feet in height. Fire had eaten away the trunk at the base, until a circular room had been formed, sixteen feet in diameter. At twenty feet or more from the ground was a knot-hole, which afforded egress for the smoke. With hammocks hung from pegs, and a few cooking utensils hung upon other pegs, that house lacked no essential thing. This woodman was in possession of a house which had been a thousand years in process of building. Perhaps on the very day it was finished he came along and entered it. How did all jack-knife and hand-saw architecture sink into insignificance in contrast with this house in the solitudes of the great forest! Moreover, the tenant fared like a prince; within thirty yards of his coniferous house a mountain stream went rushing past to the sea. In the swirls and eddies under the shelving rocks, if one could not land half a dozen trout within an hour, he deserved to go hungry as a penalty for his awkwardness. Now and then a deer came out into the openings, and, at no great distance, quail, rabbits and pigeons could be found. What did this man want more than Nature furnished him? He had a house with a "cupola" two hundred and forty feet high, and game at the cost of taking it.

It was a good omen, that the chimneys of the house on the hill had not been topped out more than a week, before two white doves alighted on them, glancing curiously down into the flues, and then toward the heavens. Nothing but the peace which they brought could have insured the serenity of that house against an untoward event which occurred a week afterward. Late one evening the expressman delivered a sack at the rear door, with a note from a friend in the city, stating that the writer, well knowing our liking for thoroughbred stock, had sent over one of the choicest game-chickens in San Francisco. The qualities of that bird were not overstated. Such a clean and delicately-shaped head! The long feathers on his neck shaded from black to green and gold. His spurs were as slender and sharp as lances; and his carriage was that of a prince, treading daintily the earth, as if it were not quite good enough for him. There was a world of poetry about that chicken, and he could also be made to serve some important uses. It is essential that every one dwelling on a hill, in the suburbs, should be notified of the dawn of a new day. Three Government fortifications in the bay let off as many heavy guns at daybreak; and, as the sound comes rolling in from seaward, the window casements rattle responsively. But these guns do not explode concurrently; frequently more than ten minutes intervene from the first report to the last one. There is ever a lingering uncertainty as to which is making a truthful report, or whether they are not all shooting wide of the mark. Then, there is a military school close by, which stirs up the youngsters with a reveille, a gong and a bell, at short intervals. With so many announcements, and none of them concurrent, there would still remain a painful uncertainty as to whether the day had dawned; but when that game bird lifted up his voice, and sounded his clarion notes high over the hill, the guns of Alcatraz and the roll of the drums over the way, there could be no doubt that the day was at the dawn.

For a week did this mettlesome bird lift up his voice above all the meaner roosters on the hill; but one morning there was an ominous silence about the precincts where he was quartered. The Alcatraz gun had been let off; but the more certain assurance of the new day had failed. Something had surely happened, for a neighbor was seen hurrying up the walk in the gray of the morning, red, puffy, and short of wind, at that unseasonable hour.

"Come with me, and take a look in my yard… There, is that your blasted game chicken?"

"Why, yes – no – he was sent over as a present from a friend."

Just then the whole mischief was apparent; a great Cochin rooster was sneaking off toward the hedge, bloody and blind; two Houdans lay on their backs, jerking their feet convulsively – in short, that hen-yard had been swept as with the besom of destruction.

"Do you call that a poetical or sentimental bird, such as a Christian man ought to worship?"

"No, not exactly."

Just then that game chicken arched his beautiful neck and sent his clear notes high over the hill and into the very heavens. We hinted, in a mollifying way, that he had escaped over a fence ten feet high, but that blood would tell.

"Yes, I think it has told this morning. Never mind the damages; but I think you had better cut his wings," said our neighbor, already placated.

That bird was given away before the next sunset. But O! friend; by the guns of Alcatraz, and the white doves that alighted on the chimney-tops, emblems of war and peace, send us no more game chickens, to disturb the peace of the hill, or to finish the work of destruction begun on that unlucky morning.

From the hill one may look out of the Golden Gate, as through the tube of a telescope, and see all the watery waste and eternal scene-shifting beyond. When the dull, undulating hummocks look like a drove of camels in the desert, you may be sure that the newly-married couple just embarking on the outward-bound steamer, on a bridal tour to Los Angeles or the Hawaiian Islands, will cease their caroling and chirping within an hour. Half an hour after sunset, if the atmosphere is clear, one may see the wide-off light of the Farallones; the nearer lights of Point Bonita and Alcatraz, almost in line, dwarfed to mere fire-flies now; but when the Gate has lost the glow of its burnished gold, these great sea-lamps, hung over this royal avenue, tell an honest home story for the battered ships low down on the horizon.

The little tugs which round under the quarters of the great wheat ships and rush them out to sea, know how to overcome the inertia of the great hulks. They tug spitefully, but the ship has to move, and you see the white sails already beginning to fall down from the yards, for the work where the blue water begins. It may be a grotesque association, but have you never seen a small woman, with a wonderful concentration of energy, tug her great lazy hulk of a husband out into the broad field of earnest endeavor in much the same way? Once there, his inertia overcome, the feminine tow-line cast off, he did brave and honest work, making the race quite abreast of average men. But the woman, who tugged him from his lazy anchorage out into a good offing, did as much for that man as he ever did for himself. Nothing more fortunate can happen to a great many men than that they be towed out to sea early. And in not a few instances, nothing more unfortunate could happen than that they should ever return. This last remark would have been softened a little, had it not been repeated with emphasis by a tender-hearted woman.

Just after a winter rain, there are occasionally realistic views of the great city in the foreground, which are so ugly that one never forgets them. The hills are brought nigh; all the houses seem to rise out of the desert, and along the water front the spars of shipping look like a forest which has been blasted by some devouring flame. It is certain that these forests will never sprout again; and there is such a dead look that, were it not for the little tugs going back and forth, one might imagine that all men had hastened away, and left the city to silence and the desert. But after nightfall the thousand lamps glorify the city; the blackened forest along the water front has faded out; and a mild sort of charity steals over one, suggesting that, after all, it is a goodly city set upon a hill, and that its peculiar beauty is not alone in appearing to the best advantage by gaslight. The background of hills is more angular and jerky than ever before, because all the softening effect has been taken out of the atmosphere. There is no distance, no dreamy haze to spread like a gossamer veil over these hard outlines. Nature is wonderfully honest and self-revealing. Evidently these hills were never finished. They lack all the rounded beauty, all the gentle curves and slopes, and all the fine touches of a perfected work. They look as if, when in a plastic state, they had been set by the jerk of an earthquake. Who knows but another jerk might take these kinks out and tone down all these stiff angles, and otherwise put on the finishing touches? If it must be done in this way, let the softening undulations be as gentle as possible. It is very inconvenient to get up in the morning and find that the chimney-top is either on the garden walk, or that it has been turned three-quarters round, in the very wantonness and devilment of Nature.

Some day there will be a closer recognized relation between landscape gardening and landscape painting. If the work is done badly in either department, it will make little difference whether an acre of canvas is hung upon the wall, or whether lines have been badly drawn and colors crudely laid on to an acre of earth. The style of trimming trees so that they are a libel on Nature, and the geometrical diagrams worked up in a garden, can hardly be referred to any very high standard of art. But if my neighbor is delighted with trees representing spindles, ramrods, paint brushes, cylinders, cones, and what not, I would no more quarrel with him than with the man who is under the pleasing delusion that he is an artist, because, in a more remote way, he has been traducing Nature with certain grotesque figures laid on to canvas.

A hedge will bear cutting into line, because it is to be treated as nothing more than the frame of the landscape to be worked up. The former may be as stiff and artificial in its way, as a gilt or mahogany frame, and do no violence to good taste; if it hides an ugly fence, a point has been gained. One cannot expect much diversity of surface on a single acre. A large lawn will give the effect of greater flatness. If you find the hired gardener, bred in some noted school in Europe, setting out trees in straight lines, exhort him to penitence at once. If he remain obdurate, cut the trees down with your little hatchet and pitch them over the fence, but keep your temper as sweet as a June morning. He will see by that time that you have ideas to be respected. Grouping the trees, on the lawn and elsewhere, neutralizes, in part, the effect of a flat surface; it is better than the poor apology of a little hillock, which suggests an ant's nest, or that a coyote may be burrowing in that vicinity. Something may be done in the way of massing colors with annuals to produce good effects. But ribbon gardening, according to the patterns laid down by florists, has no nearer relation to art in landscape gardening than crochet work has to landscape painting. It is a fantastic trick, which may very well please rural clowns, but is in some sort an offense to good taste.