They were passing an odd group of chairs when Eleanor laughingly drew their attention to two. “Just look at that fat old roistering chair conversing with the thin straight-laced prig of a side-chair, next to him.”
Her description was so true of the two chairs, that her companions laughed.
“Yes,” said Mr. Fabian, “the stiff-backed puritanical chair is telling the fat old rascal what a coarse bourgeois manner he shows in such good company.”
“Daddy, how could such a clumsy chair ever get into this famous museum?” asked Nancy.
“Because it can claim antiquity,” replied her father. “In early English times, when Squires and over-lords ruled the land, they spent most of their time in drinking and gambling. This chair is a type of them, is it not?”
“It certainly is,” agreed the girls.
“So you will find almost every period of furniture. They tell, truer than one thinks at the time, of the type of people that makes and uses them. You will find effeminate pieces in the reign of the Louis’, and hard-looking furniture in German history. Our own American furniture tells, better than all else, of the mixing of nations in the ‘melting-pot.’ Our furniture has no type, or style, individually its own.
“The so-called sales advertised in department stores are symbolic of what Americans are satisfied with: hodge-podge ready-made factory pieces, quickly glued together, and badly finished. As long as it is showy, and can demand a high price, the average American is satisfied. And that is the great error we interior decorators have to correct—we have to educate the people away from confusion and into art and beauty.”
Having seen the best examples of old furniture on exhibition in the Museum, Mr. Fabian prepared to go. As they walked quietly through the corridor to the main entrance, he said impressively: “I consider you girls have seen some of the best products to be found in the world today. The results of many ideals and hard work.
“You must know, that a good ideal thought plans a perfect chair or table; and that thought eventually expresses itself in the object it sees in mind. If the object is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, it elevates the whole world just that much. If it falls short of the artist’s ideals and hopes, he must do it over again, sooner or later, to reach the perfect model in mind. Thus he expresses God (good) in his ideals. If he refuses to try again to perfect his work, he knows he has failed utterly and he has nothing but the result of lowering his ideal—failure and deformity.”