increasing brevity of our tenures. Three or four times in twenty years
the outgoing tenant will make good his dilapidations, and the
house-agent will put the premises into tenantable repair--as these
things are settled for us by lawyers and surveyors. After a series of
such processes, what can remain of internal architecture? Can there be
left even a room worth furnishing, in the true sense of the term? The
first step to render it so must usually be the obliteration of as much
as possible of the maimed and distorted construction, which our
leasehold house offers.
What wonder, then, if furniture, beginning again to account herself an
art, should have transgressed her limits and invaded the room? Ceilings,
walls and floors, chimneypieces, grates, doors and windows, all nowadays
come into the hands of the artistic furnisher, and are at the mercy of
upholsterers and cabinetmakers to begin with, and of the
antiquity-collector to follow. Then we bring in our gardens, and finish
off our drawing-room as a mixture of a conservatory and a bric-a-brac
shop.
The fashion for archaeological mimicry has been another pitfall. The
attempt to bring back art by complete reproductions of old-day
furnishings has been much the vogue abroad. The Parisians distinguish
many styles and affect to carry them out in every detail. The Americans
have copied Paris, and we have done a little ourselves. But the weak
element in all this is, that the occupier of these mediaeval or classic
apartments remains still the nineteenth-century embodiment, which we
meet in railway carriage and omnibus. We cannot be cultured Epicureans
in a drawing-room of the Roman Empire, and by the opening of a door walk
as Flemish Burgomasters into our libraries. The heart of the age will
mould its productions irrespective of fashion or archaeology, and such
miserable shams fail to reach it.
If we, who live in this century, can at all ourselves appraise the
position, its most essential characteristic in its bearing upon art has
been the commercial tendency. Thereby an indelible stamp is set upon our
furniture. The making of it under the supreme condition of profitable
sale has affected it in both its functions. On the side of utility our
furniture has been shaped to the uses of the million, not of the
individual. Hence its monotonously average character, its failure to
become part of ourselves, its lack of personal and local charm. How
should a "stock" article possess either?
But the blight has fallen more cruelly on that other function, which is
a necessity of human craftsmanship--the effort to express itself and
please the eye by the expression. Art being the monopoly of "painting,"
and having nothing to do with such vulgar matters as furniture,
commercialism has been able to advance a standard of beauty of its own,
with one canon, that of speedy profits. Furniture has become a mere ware
in the market of fashion. Bought to-day as the rage, it is discarded
to-morrow, and some new fancy purchased. The tradesman has a new margin
of profit, but the customer is just where he was. It may be granted that
a genuine necessity of sale is the stimulus to which all serious effort
in the arts must look for progress, and without which they would become
faddism and conceit. But it is a different thing altogether when this
passes from stimulus into motive--the exclusive motive of profit to the
producer. The worth of the article is impaired as much as the well-being
of the craftsman, and furniture is degraded to the position of a pawn in
the game of the sweater.
We must, I fear, be content at present to put up with exhibitions and
unarchitectural rooms. But while making the best of these conditions, we
need not acquiesce in them or maintain their permanence. At any rate we
may fight a good fight with commercialism. The evils of heartless and
unloving production, under the grind of an unnecessary greed, are patent
enough to lead us to reflect that we have after all in these matters a
choice. We need not spend our money on that which is not bread. We can
go for our furniture to the individual craftsman and not the commercial
firm. The penalty for so doing is no longer prohibitive.
In closing our remarks we cannot do better than repeat our initial
axiom--the art of furnishing lies with the room as much as with the
furniture. The old ways are still the only ways. When we care for art
sufficiently to summon her from her state prison-house of exhibitions
and galleries, to live again a free life among us in our homes, she will
appear as a controlling force, using not only painting and sculpture,
but all the decorative arts to shape room and furniture under one
purpose of design. Whether we shall then give her the time-honoured
title of architecture, or call her by another name, is of no moment.
EDWARD S. PRIOR.
OF THE ROOM AND FURNITURE
The transient tenure that most of us have in our dwellings, and the
absorbing nature of the struggle that most of us have to make to win the
necessary provisions of life, prevent our encouraging the manufacture of
well-wrought furniture.
We mean to outgrow our houses--our lease expires after so many years and
then we shall want an entirely different class of furniture;
consequently we purchase articles that have only sufficient life in them
to last the brief period of our occupation, and are content to abide by
the want of appropriateness or beauty, in the clear intention of some
day surrounding ourselves with objects that shall be joys to us for the
remainder of our life. Another deterrent condition to making a serious
outlay in furniture is the instability of fashion: each decade sees a
new style, and the furniture that we have acquired in the exercise of
our experienced taste will in all probability be discarded by the
impetuous purism of the succeeding generation.
At present we are suffering from such a catholicity of taste as sees
good in everything, and has an indifferent and tepid appreciation of all
and sundry, especially if consecrated by age.
This is mainly a reaction against the austerity of those moralists who
preached the logic of construction, and who required outward proof of
the principles on which and by which each piece was designed.
Another cause prejudicial to the growth of modern furniture is the
canonisation of old.
That tables and chairs should have lasted one hundred years is indeed
proof that they were originally well made: that the conditions of the
moment of their make were better than they are now is possible, and such
aureole as is their due let us hasten to offer. But, to take advantage
of their survival and to increase their number by facsimile reproduction
is to paralyse all healthy growth of manufacture.
As an answer to the needs and habits of our ancestors of one hundred
years ago--both in construction and design--let them serve us as models
showing the attitude of mind in which we should meet the problems of our
day--and so far as the needs and habits of the present time are
unchanged, as models of form, not to be incorporated with our
vernacular, but which we should recognise as successful form, and
discover the plastic secrets of its shape.
With this possession we may borrow what forms we will--shapes of the Ind
and far Cathay--the whole wide world is open to us--of past imaginations
and of the dreams of our own.
But without this master-key the copying is slavish, and the bondage of
the task is both cruel and destructive.
Cruel, because mindless, work can be reproduced more rapidly than
thoughtful work can be invented, and the rate of production affects the
price of other articles of similar kind, so that the one dictates what
the other shall receive; and destructive, because it treats the
craftsman as a mere machine, whose only standard can be mechanical
excellence.
Now, all furniture that has any permanent value has been designed and
wrought to meet the ends it had to serve, and the careful elaboration of
it gave its maker scope for his pleasure and occasion for his pride.
If a man really likes what he has got to do, he will make great shifts
to express and realise his pleasure; he will choose carefully his
materials, and either in playfulness of fancy, or in grave renunciation
of the garniture of his art, will put the stamp of his individuality on
his work.
An example of living art in modern furniture is a costermonger's barrow.
Affectionately put together, carved and painted, it expresses almost in
words the pride and taste of its owner.
As long as we are incapable of recognising and sympathising with the
delight of the workman in the realisation of his art, our admiration of
his work is a pretence, and our encouragement of it blind--and this
blindness makes us insensitive as to whether the delight is really there
or no; consequently our patronage will most often be disastrous rather
than helpful.
The value of furniture depends on the directness of its response to the
requirements that called it into being, and to the nature of the
conditions that evoked it.
To obtain good furniture we must contrive that the conditions of its
service are worthy conditions, and not merely the dictates of our fancy
or our sloth.
At the present moment modern furniture may be roughly divided into two
classes: furniture for service, and furniture for display. Most of us,
however, have to confine ourselves to the possession of serviceable
furniture only; and a more frank recognition of this limitation would
assist us greatly in our selection. If only we kept our real needs
steadily before us, how much more beauty we could import into our homes!
Owing to lack of observation, and of experienced canons of taste, our
fancies are caught by some chance object that pleases--one of that huge
collection of ephemeral articles which "have been created to supply a
want" that hitherto has never been felt--and as the cost of these
fictions is (by the nature of the case) so low as to be of no great
moment to us, the thing is purchased and helps henceforth to swell the
museum of incongruous accumulation that goes by the name of a "furnished
drawing-room."
A fancy, so caught, is soon outworn, but the precept of economy forbids
the discharge of the superfluous purchase, and so it adds its unit to
the sum of daily labour spent on its preservation and its appearance.
This burden of unnecessary toil is the index of the needlessness and
cruelty with which we spend the labour of those whom need has put under
our service.
And the sum of money spent on these ill-considered acquisitions which
have gone to swell the general total of distress, an ever-widening ring
of bitter ripple, might, concentrated, have purchased some one thing,
both beautiful and useful, whose fashioning had been a pleasure to the
artificer, and whose presence was an increasing delight to the owner and
an added unit to this world's real wealth.
Such indiscriminate collection defeats its own aim. Compare the way
Giovanni Bellini fits up St. Jerome's study for him in the National
Gallery. There is no stint of money evidently; the Saint gets all that
he can properly want, and he gets over and above--the addition born of
his denial--the look of peace and calm in his room, that can so seldom
be found with us. Another reason why our rooms are so glaringly
over-furnished is, that many of us aim at a standard of profusion, in
forgetfulness of the circumstances which created that standard.
Families, whose descent has been historic, and whose home has been their
pride, accumulate, in the lapse of time, heirlooms of many
kinds--pictures, furniture, trinkets, etc.--and as these increase in
numbers, the rooms in which they are contained become filled and crowded
beyond what beauty or comfort permits, and such sacrifice is justly made
for the demands of filial pride.
This emotion is so conspicuously an honourable one that we are all
eager to possess and give scope to our own, and so long as the scope is
honest there is nothing more laudable.
But the temptation is to add to our uninherited display in this
particular by substitutes, and to surround ourselves with immemorable
articles, the justification of whose presence really should be that they
form part of the history of our lives in more important respects than
the mere occasions of their purchase.
It is this unreasoning ambition that leads to the rivalling of princely
houses by the acquisition of "family portraits purchased in Wardour
Street"--the rivalling of historic libraries by the purchase of
thousands of books to form our yesterday's libraries of undisturbed
volumes--the rivalling of memorable chairs and tables, by recently
bought articles of our own, crowded in imitation of our model with
innumerable trifles, to the infinite tax of our space, our patience, and
our purse.
Our want of care and restraint in the selection of our furniture affects
both its design and manufacture.
Constantly articles are bought for temporary use--we postponing the
responsibility of wise purchase until we have more time, or else we buy
what is not precisely what we want but which must do, since we cannot
wait to have the exact things made, and have not the time to search
elsewhere for them.
Furniture, in response to this demand, must be made either so striking
as to arrest the eye, or so variedly serviceable as to meet some
considerable proportion of the conflicting requirements made on it by
the chance intending purchaser, or else it must fall back on the
impregnable basis of antiquity and silence all argument with the canon
that what the late Mr. Chippendale did was bound to be "good taste."
"There should be a place for everything, and everything in its place."
Very true. But in the exercise of our orderliness we require the hearty
co-operation of the "place" itself. 'Tis a wonderful aid when the place
fits the object it is intended to contain.
Take the common male chest of drawers as a case in point. Its function
is to hold a man's shirts and his clothes, articles of a known and
constant size. Why are the drawers not made proportionate for their
duty? Why are they so few and so deep that when filled--as they needs
must be--they are uneasy to draw out, and to obtain the particular
article of which we are in quest, and which of course is at the bottom,
we must burrow into the heavy super-incumbent mass of clothes in our
search, and--that successful--spend a weary while in contriving to
repack the ill-disposed space. It can hardly be economy of labour and
material that dictates this, for--if so--why is the usual hanging
wardrobe made so preposterously too tall? Does the idiot maker suppose
that a woman's dress is hung all in one piece, body and skirt, from the
nape of the neck, to trail its extremest length?
The art of buying furniture, or having it made for us, is to be acquired
only by study and pains, and we must either pursue the necessary
education, or depute the furnishing of our rooms to competent hands: and
the responsibility does not end here, for there is the duty of
discovering who are competent, and this must be done indirectly since
direct inquiry only elicits the one criterion, omnipotent, omnipresent,
of cost.
The object to be gained in furnishing a room is to supply the just
requirements of the occupants, to accentuate or further the character of
the room, and to indicate the individual habits and tastes of the owner.
Each piece should be beautiful in itself, and, still more important,
should minister to and increase the beauty of the others. Collective
beauty is to be aimed at; not so much individual.
Proportion is another essential. Not that the proportions of furniture
should vary with the size of the rooms: the dimensions of chairs, height
of tables, sizes of doors, have long been all fixed and, having direct
reference to the human body, are immutable.
Substantially, the size of man's body is the same and has been the same
from the dawn of history until now, and will be the same whether in a
cottage parlour or the Albert Hall. But there is a proportion in the
relations of the spaces of a room to its furniture which must be
secured. If this is not done, no individual beauty of the objects in the
room will repair the lost harmony or be compensation for the picture
that might have been.
A museum of beautiful objects has its educational value, but no one
pretends that it claims to be more than a storehouse of beauty.
The painter who crowds his canvas with the innumerable spots of colour
that can be squeezed out of every tube of beautiful paint that the
colourman sells, is no nearer his goal than he who fills his rooms with
a heterogeneous miscellany of articles swept together from every clime
and of every age.
HALSEY RICARDO.
THE ENGLISH TRADITION
The sense of a consecutive tradition has so completely faded out of
English art that it has become difficult to realise the meaning of
tradition, or the possibility of its ever again reviving; and this state
of things is not improved by the fact that it is due to uncertainty of
purpose, and not to any burning fever of individualism. Tradition in art
is a matter of environment, of intellectual atmosphere. As the result of
many generations of work along one continuous line, there has
accumulated a certain amount of ability in design and manual dexterity,
certain ideas are in the air, certain ways of doing things come to be
recognised as the right ways. To all this endowment an artist born in
any of the living ages of art succeeded as a matter of course, and it is
the absence of this inherited knowledge that places the modern craftsman
under exceptional disabilities.
There is evidence to prove the existence in England of hereditary crafts
in which the son succeeded the father for generations, and to show that
the guilds were rather the guardians of high traditional skill than mere
trades unions; but there is surer proof of a common thread of tradition
in certain qualities all along the line, which gave to English work a
character peculiar to itself. Instances of genuine Gothic furniture are
rare; in England at any rate it was usually simple and solid, sufficient
to answer the needs of an age without any highly developed sense of the
luxuries of life. It is not till the Renaissance that much material can
be found for a history of English furniture. Much of the _motif_ of this
work came from Italy and the Netherlands; indeed cabinet work was
imported largely from the latter country. It was just here, however,
that tradition stepped in, and gave to our sixteenth and seventeenth
century furniture a distinctly national character. The delicate
mouldings, the skilful turnings, the quiet inlays of ebony, ivory,
cherry wood, and walnut, above all the breadth and sobriety of its
design, point to a tradition of craftsmanship strong enough to
assimilate all the ideas which it borrowed from other ages and other
countries. Contrast, for instance, a piece of Tottenham Court Road
marquetry with the mother-of-pearl and ebony inlay on an English
cabinet at South Kensington. So far as mere skill in cutting goes there
may be no great difference between the two, but the latter is charming,
and the former tedious in the last degree; and the reason is that in the
seventeenth century the craftsman loved his work, and was master of it.
He started with an idea in his head, and used his material with meaning,
and so his inlay is as fanciful as the seaweed, and yet entirely
subordinated to the harmony of the whole design. Perhaps some of the
best furniture work ever done in England was done between 1600 and 1660.
I refer, of course, to the good examples, to work which depended for its
effect on refined design and delicate detail, not to the bulbous legs
and coarse carving of ordinary Elizabethan, though even this had a
_naivete_ and spontaneity entirely lacking in modern reproductions.
After the Restoration, signs of French influence appear in English
furniture, but the tradition of structural fitness and dignity of design
was preserved through the great architectural age of Wren and Gibbs, and
lasted till the latter half of the eighteenth century. If that century
was not particularly inspired, it at least understood consummate
workmanship. The average of technical skill in the handicrafts was far
in advance of the ordinary trade work of the present day. Some curious
evidences of the activity prevailing in what are called the minor arts
may be found in _The Laboratory and School of Arts_, a small octavo
volume published in 1738. The work of this period furnishes a standing
instance of the value of tradition. By the beginning of the eighteenth
century a school of carvers had grown up in England who could carve,
with absolute precision and without mechanical aids, all such ornament
as egg and tongue work, or the acanthus, and other conventional foliage
used for the decoration of the mouldings of doors, mantelpieces, and the
like. Grinling Gibbons is usually named as the founder of this school,
but Gibbons was himself trained by such men as Wren and Gibbs, and for
the source from which this work derives the real stamp of style one must
go back to the austere genius of Inigo Jones. The importance of the
architect, in influencing craftsmen in all such matters as this, cannot
be overrated. He has, or ought to have, sufficient knowledge of the
crafts to settle for the craftsman the all-important points of scale and
proportion to the rest of the design; and this is just one of those
points in which contemporary architecture, both as regards the education
of the architect and current practice, is exceedingly apt to fail. Sir
William Chambers and the brothers Adam were the last of the architects
before the cataclysm of the nineteenth century who made designs for
furniture with any degree of skill.
In the latter half of the eighteenth century occur the familiar names of
Chippendale, Heppelwhite, and Sheraton, and if these excellent
cabinetmakers did a tenth of the work with which the dealers credit
them, they must each have had the hundred hands of Gyas. The rosewood
furniture inlaid with arabesques in thin flat brass, and made by Gillow
at the end of the last century, is perhaps the last genuine effort in
English furniture, though the tradition of good work and simple design
died very hard in old-fashioned country places. The mischief began with
the ridiculous mediaevalism of Horace Walpole, which substituted amateur
fancy for craftsmanship, and led in the following century to the
complete extinction of any tradition whatever. The heavy attempts at
furniture in the Greek style which accompanied the architecture of
Wilkins and Soane were as artificial as this literary Gothic, and the
two resulted in the chaos of art which found its expression in the great
Exhibition of 1851.
Three great qualities stamped the English tradition in furniture so long
as it was a living force--steadfastness of purpose, reserve in design,
and thorough workmanship. Take any good period of English furniture, and
one finds certain well-recognised types consistently adhered to
throughout the country. There is no difficulty in grasping their
general characteristics, whereas the very genius of classification could
furnish no clue to the labyrinth of nineteenth-century design. The men
of these earlier times made no laborious search for quaintness, no
disordered attempt to combine the peculiarities of a dozen different
ages. One general type was adhered to because it was the legacy of
generations, and there was no reason for departing from such an
excellent model. The designers and the workmen had only to perfect what
was already good; they made no experiments in ornament, but used it with
nice judgment, and full knowledge of its effect. The result was that,
instead of being forced and unreasonable, their work was thoroughly
happy; one cannot think of it as better done than it is.
The quality of reserve and sobriety is even more important. As compared
with the later developments of the Renaissance on the Continent,
English furniture was always distinguished by its simplicity and
self-restraint. Yet it is this very quality which is most conspicuously
absent from modern work. As a people we rather pride ourselves on the
resolute suppression of any florid display of feeling, but art in this
country is so completely divorced from everyday existence, that it never
seems to occur to an Englishman to import some of this fine insular
quality into his daily surroundings.