House and Garden 
PAINTED WALL FROM A ROMAN HOUSE 
Now in the National Museum at Rome. The squares in either side of the central panel evidently simulate framed 
movable pictures and spacing, which made them parts of a complete artistic scheme. 
alluded to and if it were permitted to speak seri¬ 
ously on such a subject of universal jest as woman’s 
clothes, it might be argued that, in spite of certain 
obvious shortcomings clue largely to mere fashion, 
here we have a surprising display of instinctive 
art kept on a very high level. We may say instinc¬ 
tive because, as a rule, dressmaking and millinery 
are the work of comparatively uncultivated people 
who would be as much astonished at being told they 
were working according to the principles of art 
as was M. Jordain to find that he had been talking 
prose all his life. Of course, beautiful costumes 
are often designed by trained artists, but the greater 
number are not. Still daring to be serious, it 
may be asserted that the strongest art impulse of 
the average woman is expended on her clothes. 
All the feeling she has for harmony of color and 
form, rhythm and flow of line, the balance and 
equilibrium of part to part, for organizing a variety 
of shapes, colors and forms into a harmonious 
whole, is here brought 
into play. Nothing in 
the environment of the 
average woman so 
completely conforms 
to the principles of 
good taste as to her 
clothes and it is not 
too much to affirm that 
with the same efi-'ort, 
and exactly the sam.e 
instinct for form, line 
and color, applied to 
her domestic surround¬ 
ings she could lift them 
to a point at least on a 
level with her ward¬ 
robe. 
There is an ancient 
proverb, too often 
quoted to have the 
charm of novelty, that 
tells us there can be 
no discussion about 
matters of taste—and 
“the moral of that,” 
as the Duchess was so 
fond of saying to Alice, 
is that there can be no 
discussion abouta mat¬ 
ter in which every one 
is sure his opinion is 
just as good as anoth¬ 
er’s. In fact, most peo¬ 
ple are very “touchy” 
about this business. 
For those of us who 
knowGellett Burgess’s 
recent but already famous classification of people 
into “Bromides” and “Sulphites” it is difficult to 
think back on a time when we felt in a vague resent¬ 
ful sort of way that the person who says “I don’t 
know anything about art, but I know what I like” 
belonged indeed to a class, but it needed his illumi¬ 
nating genius to point out the simple truth that 
the habitual users of this and kindred phrases 
could be classified into a group whose salient char¬ 
acteristic is that they do most of their thinking 
in grooves. These are the people whom, with 
full justice to their manifold possibilities for all of 
the virtues, Mr. Burgess calls Bromides. Now, 
their professions of humility on matters of art are 
usually made in so assertive a manner that it would 
be a bold person who dared to imply that not to 
know anything about art was not in itself a virtue. 
When, as it sometimes happens, a person of this 
estimable class is really perplexed by a question 
of taste and does not really know what he does 
252 
