“Tone.”

The grateful shade of the æsthete.

The æsthetes in their day revelled in untidiness. They made a cult of it, and in their worship included a leaning towards dirt, which they canonised under the name of “Tone.” Many of them permitted even their faces to acquire tone by this means, which was carrying the thing too far. But they did much for succeeding generations in banishing a too pronounced neatness from dress and the home. Has not the influence of the æsthete delivered us from the terrible propriety of chairs ranged along the wall, piano to match, and the centre-table, with its unalterable rigidity of central ornament and rim of book and vase in conic sectional immutability?

A word to the wise.

Oh, it was all most beautifully tidy, but do, for a moment, recall it and compare it with the drawing-room of to-day. I do not mean the dusty litter of dilapidated draperies and orgie of over-crowded ornament to be found in some houses, but to the sane, yet artistic arrangement of table and lamp, piano and pottery, palm and vase, clustering fern and glowing blossom or snowy flower, to be seen in thousands of English homes at the present hour. Here tidiness is not absent, but its rigours are avoided. Its essence is extracted, while its needless extremes—its suburbs, as it were—are totally ignored. We have learned how to be clean, yet decorative, in our homes and our costume, to distinguish between severity and simplicity, and, so far, good. But the point is that tidiness should not overcome us to the hurt of others, and consequently our own. If husbands persist in leaving a trail of newspapers all over the house, something after the fashion of the “hare” in a paper-chase, let us calmly fold them and assuage our inner revolt as best we may. If the children scatter their toys about, we can make them put them tidily away, and that is more than we can manage with their fathers! But to be too acutely tidy leads to friction and the development of that “incompatibility of temper” which seems to be quite a modern disease, to judge from the very numerous instances of it that come before the public notice.