We take great satisfaction and pleasure in announcing Mr. Parsons as the author of that section of this book which is entitled “The Art of Home Furnishing and Decoration.” It is written in Mr. Parson’s typically intimate and forceful style, and every paragraph is replete with information and suggestions of great value. We are sure that this book will hold your interest from the first to the last word, and that in the end you will look on the possibilities of your home and your life within it in a fresh and considerably enlarged perspective.
After you have spent an hour with Mr. Parsons on the general theme of home furnishing and decoration, we believe that it will profit you to read what is written by ourselves in the latter part of the book on the specific subject of linoleum and its relation to the principles that Mr. Parsons has laid down.
Armstrong Cork Company
The Art of Home Furnishing and Decoration
FRANK ALVAH PARSONS
Man is exactly what he lives in, for environment is the strongest possible factor in man’s development. One may be so long among loud noises, bad odors, inharmonious colors and wrong arrangements of things that one doesn’t mind them, because one has let them become an integral part of one’s self. They are there, and they are as bad as they were at first, but one has become immune to them. This being admitted, it follows, of course, that concordant sounds, agreeable odors, harmonious colors and pleasing arrangements have their immediate effects, but their tendency is toward refinement, culture and artistic appreciation instead of toward brutality, ignorance and indifference. It is certainly not hard to see what effect is produced by living in any wrong environment. As a person accustoms himself to it, he becomes like it. When he is like it, he will admire only its kind, and whatever he does will be as nearly like his environment as he himself is.
The importance of thoroughly comprehending this truth cannot be overstated. The mental and artistic quality of the nation and even its physical comfort depend upon it. This viewpoint, being somewhat new to us, accounts for the upheaval in our ideas of what a home really is. Looking a little into this matter may perhaps stimulate us still further in our thinking, which will affect our way of doing whatever we attempt in the future.
The Home Molds Our Tastes and Lives
In the first place the home is the center of all life’s activities. We are born there, and long before we have seen the shop, the office, the church or even the school, our first impressions of the fundamentals of life have become fixed. These are exceedingly hard to efface.
The school can hardly hope to counteract in the child’s mind the effect of hearing incorrect language spoken at home for six years; the church is greatly handicapped in its influence where wrong principles of life have determined habits during the first years; the artistic sense is practically dead and refinement of taste impossible in that child whose parents have given the usual wall papers, rugs, hangings, pictures and other objects of modern furnishing a chance to do their unrestricted work. Most of these have been made to sell, but not to people who use any judgment in buying. Occasionally we think of the durability or the comfort of an article, but how seldom of the colors, the patterns, the combinations of different periods with different meanings, all of which unite to make an unthinkable, inharmonious jumble which produces a reaction on an impressionable person little short of criminal. This being the case, is it any wonder that too frequently we are satisfied with inferior things or that we are not able to compete with other nations in creating better ones?