A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of people
larger than the race of people that live down his own streets. And he
also sees a land where the horses take the place of men. A Bulwer Lytton
lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth instead of outside.
A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady whose age is a few years more
than the average woman would care to confess to; and pictures crabs
larger than the usual shilling or eighteen-penny size. The number of so
called imaginative writers who visit the moon is legion, and for all
the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well
have gone to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of
the world one hundred or one thousand years hence. There is always a
depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so, that one
feels great consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves
shall be comfortably dead and buried before the picture can be realized.
In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and
happy, and all the work is done by electricity.
There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds
to come. One is reminded of those pictorial enamel-paint advertisements
that one sees about so often now, in which all the members of an
extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room,
spreading enamel-paint over everything they can lay their hands upon.
The old man is on a step-ladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with
"cuckoo's-egg green," while the parlor-maid and the cook are on their
knees, painting the floor with "sealing-wax red." The old lady is doing
the picture frames in "terra cotta." The eldest daughter and her young
man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of "high art yellow,"
with which, so soon as they have finished wasting their time, they
will, it is manifest, proceed to elevate the piano. Younger brothers
and sisters are busy freshening up the chairs and tables with
"strawberry-jam pink" and "jubilee magenta." Every blessed thing in that
room is being coated with enamel paint, from the sofa to the fire-irons,
from the sideboard to the eight-day clock. If there is any paint left
over, it will be used up for the family Bible and the canary.
It is claimed for this invention that a little child can make as much
mess with it as can a grown-up person, and so all the children of
the family are represented in the picture as hard at work, enameling
whatever few articles of furniture and household use the grasping
selfishness of their elders has spared to them. One is painting the
toasting fork in a "skim-milk blue," while another is giving aesthetical
value to the Dutch oven by means of a new shade of art green. The
bootjack is being renovated in "old gold," and the baby is sitting on
the floor, smothering its own cradle with "flush-upon-a-maiden's cheek
peach color."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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