HOUSES AND GARDENS 



fatal to deliberately ignore traditional work, and to set up a personal and 

 isolated effort against the accumulated knowledge of centuries. 



The extent to which tradition may thus be admitted will depend on the 

 fitness of the style which has inspired the work to modern conditions of work- 

 manship and to modern life. A house, it may be urged, should be homogeneous, 

 and to design a Jacobean dining-room and a Louis XV. drawing-room in a 

 building of the Georgian period can be hardly defended. The building and 

 its furnishing should present an all pervading unity, and not a heterogeneous 

 collection of samples of historical periods ; and while the general scheme may 

 become more dainty and elegant in the drawing-room, and more homely and 

 masculine in the hall, there should be no definite break in the continuity of 

 the whole, while the structure itself should bear a definite relation to the 

 furnishing and decoration. 



And this necessity for unity of effect which has been urged in the planning 

 of the house this necessity to break away from the conception of a house as 

 a series of unrelated compartments suggests at once the advisability of not 

 seeking to reproduce historical styles, but to treat the whole scheme broadly, 

 introducing, it may be, much that has been used in the past, and combining 

 and arranging the new to form a completely harmonious result. 



CHAPTER NINETEEN 



DECORATION 



N turning now to consider the matter of decoration, one is 

 conscious of crossing a definite boundary-line and entering 

 a new land where practical realities are exchanged for 

 dreams. So far in the building of the house, and in its 



furnishing, everything that has been done has had a practical 



purpose at the root of whatever beauty it may have achieved a purpose 

 which one could fall back on, as it were, so that at the worst the house 

 might claim to be a shelter from the elements, and its furniture to minister 

 to 1 } material needs. But in the decoration of the house no such excuse 

 can be urged for the failure to achieve beauty. If it has no beauty it is 

 useless, and worse than useless and before covering our walls with sprawling 

 patterns it will be well to consider this carefully. There are no laws which 

 compel a man to decorate his house, and unless there is a real desire for beauty 

 in the house there seems little excuse for its decoration. In the days when 

 heraldry flourished, decoration had a definite purpose. It was a kind of 

 graphic writing, which, besides being eminently decorative, conveyed definite 

 facts. This heraldic system still survives in a kind of fossilised form as 

 a pedantic dilettantism which has quite lost its former significance. If, how- 

 ever, heraldic decoration is used in the decorative rather than the archaeological 

 spirit, it affords an extremely effective means of adornment for the house. 



45 



