Little rays of moonshineHerbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
General
Little rays of moonshine
Herbert, A. P. (Alan Patrick)
English essays -- 20th century; English wit and humor
When you have learned how to do Men, the only other things in Drawing
are Perspective and Landscape.
[Illustration: Fig. 7]
Perspective is great fun: the best thing to do is a long French road
with telegraph poles (Fig. 7).
I have put in a fence as well. Unstable, I fear.
Landscape is chiefly composed of hills and trees. Trees are the most
amusing, especially fluffy trees.
Here is a Landscape (Fig. 8).
Somehow or other a man has got into this landscape; and, as luck would
have it, it is Napoleon. Apart from this it is not a bad one.
[Illustration: Fig. 8]
But it takes a very long speech to get an ambitious piece of work like
this through.
There is one other thing I ought to have said. Never attempt to draw a
man front-face. It can’t be done.
About Bathrooms
Of all the beautiful things which are to be seen in shop windows
perhaps the most beautiful are those luxurious baths in white enamel,
hedged around with attachments and conveniences in burnished metal.
Whenever I see one of them I stand and covet it for a long time. Yet
even these super-baths fall far short of what a bath should be; and as
for the perfect bathroom I question if anyone has even imagined it.
The whole attitude of modern civilization to the bathroom is wrong.
Why, for one thing, is it always the smallest and barest room in the
house? The Romans understood these things; we don’t. I have never yet
been in a bathroom which was big enough to do my exercises in without
either breaking the light or barking my knuckles against a wall. It
ought to be a _big_ room and opulently furnished. There ought to be
pictures in it, so that one could lie back and contemplate them--a
picture of troops going up to the trenches, and another picture of a
bus-queue standing in the rain, and another picture of a windy day
with some snow in it. Then one would really enjoy one’s baths.
And there ought to be rich rugs in it and profound chairs; one would
walk about in bare feet on the rich rugs while the bath was running;
and one would sit in the profound chairs while drying the ears.
The fact is, a bathroom ought to be equipped for comfort, like a
drawing-room, a good, full, velvety room; and as things are it is
solely equipped for singing. In the drawing-room, where we want to
sing, we put so many curtains and carpets and things that most of
us can’t sing at all; and then we wonder that there is no music in
England. Nothing is more maddening than to hear several men refusing
to join in a simple chorus after dinner, when you know perfectly well
that every one of them has been singing in a high tenor in his bath
before dinner. We all know the reason, but we don’t take the obvious
remedy. The only thing to do is to take all the furniture out of the
drawing-room and put it in the bathroom--all except the piano and a few
cane chairs. Then we shouldn’t have those terrible noises in the early
morning, and in the evening everybody would be a singer. I suppose that
is what they do in Wales.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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