HOUSES AND GARDENS 



nothing to be urged in its defence. The custom has its origin in unchecked 

 acquisitiveness the desire to possess merely for the sake of possessing things 

 which take our fancy and will help to furnish our rooms. Such a desire it 

 is the part of the salesman to foster and encourage ; and just as we find the 

 speculative builder pandering to the public demand for pretentious and com- 

 fortless buildings, so the furnishing firm strives to get them filled to over- 

 flowing with pretentious and comfortless furniture. 



In the much-abused Early Victorian era, the furniture of the shops was 

 frankly and consistently ugly, and however repellant it was there was at least 

 no spurious art about it. Art as a modern trade term was happily not 

 invented. But just as the corruption of the best is always the basest, so the 

 modern art show-room has reached a depth unplumbed by the work which 

 preceded it. This spurious Trade Art with its canting catchwords follows 

 sedulously every step of the small band of serious workers in the Arts and 

 Crafts, with caricatures adapted and exaggerated to suit the public taste. If 

 occasionally it enrols amongst its designers an artist who produces really good 

 work it cannot refrain from producing a " line " of goods which are nearly 

 enough allied to his to deceive an easily gulled public, and so the last state is 

 worse than the first. 



Real beauty of work, it cannot be too often insisted, can only be produced 

 by designers and workmen who are engaged primarily in their work for its 

 own sake. If it is done with money-making as a leading motive it must 

 necessarily become debased. In order to attract the public it is necessary that 

 furniture should aggressively intrude its claims to Art on the passer by, and 

 in the specimen rooms of the modern firm the art must all be underlined. In 

 such surroundings there is indeed no escape from this persistent appeal 

 Everything seems to pose and smirk, and Art is shrieked from every corner. 



To turn from such surroundings to the showroom of real antique furniture 

 is to experience an intense sensation of relief. There is no superficial smartness 

 of trade finish here, but a welcome sense of leisured workmanship. The 

 measured tick of the grandfather's clock seems to set the key to the whole 

 effect, and the excellence of the furniture is of a reticent kind which does not 

 insist on recognition. It possesses in short that quality of repose which should 

 be the essential attribute of the home. 



But it does not necessarily follow from this recognition ot the superiority 

 of old work to the New Art of the shops, that modern furniture should 

 consist of copies of old, or that all new designs are necessarily blatant and 

 vulgar. But the better class of modern work cannot be produced under the 

 conditions which obtain in the modern factory, but must be the result of 

 careful design and workmanship which shows a sympathetic treatment of 

 material. It must be the expression of convictions instead of mere interests, 

 and the questions " will it pay ? " or " will it sell ? " must be subordinated to 

 the inquiry as to whether it is good work or bad. 



To the man who wishes to furnish nowadays, it is a little difficult to know 

 how to proceed, and more than a little difficult to avoid the various baits held 

 out to him by the enterprising manufacturer, and the result is often injudicious 

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