THE AURA OF A HOUSE.
WE talk of a haunted house, but surely all houses are haunted unless they are brand-new and have never been lived in. Every house has a " spirit " of its own,—some effluence not to be accounted for by the bricks and mortar wherewith it is built, or the skill of the architect who built it. Have we not all experienced on entering certain houses an instant sense of mental expansion, and in others a like sen- sation of shrinking ? The moment we stand within certain doors we know that we shall come out of them with a feeling of relief, while we go through others confidently expecting a
haven of pleasantness. The atmosphere of some houses transforms the casual visitor. He may know that at No. 10 in such-and-such a street he will make a totally different im.
pression on a stranger from the one he would make if he met him at No. 11. The aura of the house is antipathetic to him
or sympathetic, as the case may be. At the one he is atfhis best, at the other at his worst; and some men's social best and social worst are very far apart, which is one reason why we hear so many contradictory social judgments. Every one can call to mind some familiar house, it may be ugly without, it is often shabby within, where the atmosphere is warm with past welcomes, and the exhilaration of something we like to think of as appreciation and know in our hearts to be kindness, where good talk seems to be induced by the very walls, where jests are good because the jesters are happy, and every guest takes out a better opinion of himself and the world than he took in. Where such an aura exists the hosts know the secret of social success in the best sense of the word, and can afford to scorn the attractions of upholstery and fine food. But there are other houses, full not only of beautiful things, but traversed by a file of agreeable people, in which no one is ever quite at his ease, in which the air is at best but coldly pleasant. No doubt these differing atmospheres are due to the inhabitants of the various houses, but their imme- diate presence is not always necessary to render it effectual. It is quite possible to feel its oppression or its invigoration alone in one's bedroom.
Is it all a matter of the association of ideas ? Perhaps it is; and yet sometimes we are tempted to think that something more definite and tangible may explain the phenomena, and that brick walls do actually absorb and retain the mental atmosphere of those who habitually live in them. This theory we know could be reduced to an absurdity in a moment. Some one may make us ridiculous by suggest- ing that a housewife searching for a house for the season should first inquire the disposition and average luck of its permanent inhabitants ; or we may be asked how long a depressing atmosphere will last in a house after the depressed owners have left, and in how many months a Mark Tapley might be supposed to disinfect a house inhabited by a Mrs. Gummidge or a Schopenhauer. We are quite willing to laugh with the scorner, but, after all, have we not at least a semblance of right on our side? Take a prosaic instance. A house in which a tragedy has taken place is not easy to let, and is often supposed to be haunted. But when we begin to examine the evidence for the crop of ghost-stories to which such an occurrence gives rise, we find that it is all contradictory, and hardly worth sifting. On the other hand, the fact remains that a supernatural terror commonly attacks sensitive people when sleeping in certain rooms, and that in the majority of instances those rooms are found to have been the scenes of horrible mental agitations. Again, the consecration of a church does not for most Protestants consist in words said by a Bishop, nor yet in the presence of an altar at the east end. Many men would as soon worship in a barn, and acknowledge no grace in the ecclesiastic but that which Orders cannot convey. All the same, the aura of a church is a very definite thing, and appeals to Roman Catholic and Protestant alike. No one enters the hospitable doors of a Cathedral between the times of service in order to gossip or talk business. The impalpable incense of devotion pervades his spirit and banishes his frivolity without asking his creed.
Some interest attaches to all those who live in great historic houses, especially if their ancestors have lived there for many generations. The general public experiences a great hankering to go inside their homes and try whether for a moment they can comeamder the spell of their walls. Philistines ignorant of architecture and indifferent to furniture, to whom Chippendale was a carpenter and Louis Quinze suggestts nothing but a King, will spend time, trouble, and money in order to go through the somewhat disagreeable process of seeing an inhabited house on a show-day. From the point of view of the learned, they may know little of its history, but they have a dim idea that its walls are reeking with human experience and reflect more of life than can be crammed into threescore years and ten.
But those who actually live in such houses, are they greatly affected by mental atmospheric influence ? We have heard it maintained that they are not. Certainly they seldom speak as if they were ; but of those things which men feel the most they often speak the least. Emerson declares that the people who feel Nature's charms most keenly say least about her spell. " One can hardly speak of it directly without excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed company what is called the subject of religion." No doubt a man of letters who passes a month in the atmosphere of such a house can often show forth its secret better than those who have lived in it since the Wars of the Roses; but that fact, to our mind, proves nothing. We can imagine a man whose very soul was imbued with the aura of his home to whom it would never occur to talk of its tradi- tions. The passed-away folk who peopled his childish dreams, the pictures which looked down in compassion or maddening indifference upon sorrows which seemed to be eternal, have become his friends or his enemies, have whispered to him their stories, stories all connected with his own, and have sealed his lips with confidence. For him they cannot be works of art to be analysed, attributed, dated, and valued, nor yet historical shades to be conjured up and forced to illustrate a phase of history. Their life has entered into his, they have fired or quenched his ambition, they stand behind him to set off or foreshorten his figure in the eyes of the world, but he does not look back at them ; he remembers, however, what they have taught him. But with the man of imagination coming from the outside it is quite different. It is not for him to see, absorb, and keep silence ; his business is to look, listen, and tell. Will the aura of these great houses be for ever neutralised by the aroma of money brought in by the millionaires who buy them ? We think not. The first generation will carry its atmosphere with it, an atmosphere inimical to fancy and powerful to lay the spirit of the past. The ghosts of tradition are proud ; they do not make new friends. But children break through all reserves : they are the equals of all the world, the heirs of the ages, the good comrades of the quick and the dead.
Probably our scornful listener is becoming tired. 'Romantic surroundings,' we hear him say, strike the imagination of all in a more or less degree. As to unaccountable feelings of depres- sion and cheerfulness, they lay hold of us all very often when we are out of doors. Wherever we are we have days when the workaday world is sufficient for us, and days when we are obsessed by fancies. The aura of a house is nothing whatever but the stamp put by our immediate surroundings upon our passing frame of mind. If we go where we know we are liked, our vanity is flattered and we feel well and clever ; if we go among unsympathetic people, we put our hurt feelings down to the atmosphere. As to the church argument, have we not been accustomed from childhood to control our thoughts in a place of worship ? Any wholly unaccountable sense of happi- ness experienced in a given house is probably attributable to the soil or the ventilation; while a lasting or widespread de- pression should make the sufferers suspect the drains.' Well, we are not quite convinced, but we are willing to let the practical man have the last word.
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