These comparisons are probably, on the whole, somewhat unfair to the high-grade furnace.
CHAPTER IV
FURNITURE
Much of good sense and more that is nonsensical has been written about furniture. Observation tends to justify belief that in general effect the nonsense has proved more potent than its antithesis.
THE QUEST OF THE BEAUTIFUL
Originality has been preached, and we have seen the result in abnormalities that conform to no conception of artistic or practical quality ever recognized. Antique models have been glorified, with a sequence of puny, spiritless imitations. Simplicity has been extolled, and we find the word interpreted in clumsiness and crudity. Delicacy of outline has been urged, and we triumph in the further accomplishments of flimsiness and hopeless triviality.
And yet through all that has been preached, through all that has been executed, there runs a vein of truth. Each age should express itself, not merely the thought of centuries past; still, it can expect to do little more than take from antecedent cycles those features that will best serve the present, adding an original touch here and there. So far, then, as we find in the furniture of the Georgian period, or of Louis Quinze, or even of the ancient Greeks, such suggestions as will help us to live this twentieth-century life more comfortably and agreeably, we may with good conscience borrow or imitate.
ANCIENT DESIGNS
Some "very eminent authorities" assure us that many of the objects of our admiration in museums and in private collections are remnants of the furnishings of the common households of the olden times. If the breadth of knowledge of the "eminent authorities" is indicated by this assertion, they must have touched only the high places in history, so far as it records social conditions. The truth is that the household appurtenances which have survived to our time are mostly those of the few and not of the many, of the palace and mansion and not of the cot. These articles were costly then and they would be costly now, and very often quite as useless as costly. They were not found in the cottage of the older days, and they do not belong in the cottages of the present.