July, 1922 
29 
COMFORT AND PERIOD FURNITURE 
Our Modern Habit of Being Comfortable Makes the Exclusive 
Use of Old Furniture In Our Houses an Impossibility 
M ANNERS, speech, the habits of daily life, change con¬ 
tinually from age to age. The history of taste is a 
history of incessant and generally quite unreasonable 
fluctuation. The world has never thought or acted in a consis¬ 
tent way for fifty years together. To our ancestors, the life of 
the present generation, with its flappers, jazz and illicit drinking, 
would seem mad and immoral; and, looking back at our ances¬ 
tors, we can cordially reciprocate the opinion. 
One of the most complete and radical changes in the stan¬ 
dards of everyday life that has taken place during the last two 
or three centuries is the change in the standard of comfort. The 
well-sprung armchair, the sofa, the davenport, the chaise longue 
and the noble army of cushions have become, in this 20th Century 
of ours, an indispensable part of our daily life. The 20th 
Century drawing room is a reclining room, a sprawling room, 
where comfort reigns supreme. Comfort is creeping in every¬ 
where, into public places as well as the home. The seats in our 
places of entertainment steadily widen and soften. 
Looking at the furniture in a typical 20th Century shop, you 
would imagine that the contemporary American spends at least 
half of his three-score years and ten sitting or reclining. And 
you would not be so very far wrong. 
H OW different this is from the order of things which pre¬ 
vailed only a few generations ago. Our ancestors, unless 
they were persons of considerable wealth and eminence, ate 
their dinner sitting on stools or benches. Their nearest approach 
to the easy chair was the high-backed wooden armchair. The 
sofa did not exist; it remained for the 17th Century to invent its 
ancestor, the day-bed. 
Most of our social life today is passed in chairs and on 
sofas; our ancestors spent most of theirs standing. If they 
frequented the court or the houses of the nobility, etiquette 
demanded that they should stand, whether they liked it or not. 
And even the great seemed to have preferred peripatetic conver¬ 
sation to an armchair talk by the fireside. The ideal Elizabethan 
drawing room was not stuffed with enormous chairs and sofas 
like the reclining rooms of today. It was a long gallery, unob¬ 
structed by furniture, where one could walk up and down, like 
a sea captain on his quarter deck, in silent meditation or in 
converse with one's friends. 
W ITH the passing of the 17th and 18th centuries, comfort 
gradually increased. The sofa made its appearance and 
the padded chair opened its inviting arms. But the armchairs of 
the 18th Century, comfortable as they are, were still demure, 
respectable pieces of furniture. One had to sit in them with a 
certain rigid propriety. Good manners did not allow one to 
sprawl, and the chairs were the guardians of good manners. 
The modern easy chair, in which repose takes on so abandoned 
a posture, dates from very recent times. It represents a final step 
in the direction of the ideal of comfort, which only became 
possible with the relaxation of etiquette and a change in the 
standard of good manners. 
To us, comfort is now a necessity; we have contracted the 
habit of it and cannot give it up. We can judge how unpleasant 
'it would be to revert to the standards of the past by visiting a 
country like Italy, where the standard of comfort is still very 
much what it was in the 18th Century. Sit on the wooden 
benches of an Italian third class carriage; go to an Italian eve¬ 
ning party, where every one stands for hours together: you will 
realize then how profoundly our habits and standards have 
changed in the last century or so. Inured from their tenderest 
years, the Italians positively enjoy standing; they sleep soundly 
on the diabolic seats of their third class carriages, and when 
they want a rest they really like sitting on marble benches 
at the wayside. It is all a matter of habit. We who have 
contracted the habit of comfort cannot now return to ancient 
standards. 
I T is this fact which renders so absurd any attempt to recon¬ 
struct an ancient period in the furniture of a modern house. 
A purely 18th Century drawing room is a possibility. Though 
he may resent the absence of deep easy chairs in which he can 
sprawl, the 20th Century man will be able to accommodate him¬ 
self well enough in the round armchairs and on the sofas of 
Louis XV and XVI. The trouble begins when one turns the 
clock back another hundred years or so. No 20th Century 
American will feel really comfortable in a room furnished com¬ 
pletely in the Jacobean or Elizabethan style. A room in which 
there is no sofa, but only a few carved wooden chairs, would 
strike him as insufferably austere. In such surroundings he 
would find himself thinking—with what an aching nostalgia— 
of the leather monsters in the club smoking room, of those huge 
elephantine chairs in which it is miraculously possible to com¬ 
bine the most restful slumbers with the most earnest perusal of a 
magazine. A room fitted up witli Gothic furniture would merely 
be one worse than the Elizabethan. 
No, given our habits of today, a strictly period room is an 
absurdity. We are not Elizabethans, we are not contemporaries 
of Chaucer, we are not early Italians or even modern Italians— 
and it is silly to pretend that we are. A really accurate period 
reconstruction looks like a museum and is impossible to live in 
with reasonable comfort. 
T HE way to use old furniture is frankly to combine it with 
modern pieces. A contemporary drawing room must have 
armchairs' and a sofa, or even a chaise longue; it must also have 
upright chairs, and there is no reason why these should not be 
old English or old Italian, old French or old Spanish. 
To harmonize old pieces of different periods and countries 
with one another and with modern furniture requires a certain 
tact and judgment, a sensitive taste. But when that taste has 
been duly exercised, the result will be infinitely preferable to a 
dully correct period room. It will also be possible for people 
with modern standards of comfort to live in such a room. This 
fact is important. Furniture was made for man, not man for 
furniture; let us think of ourselves before our antiques. 
