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.