XVIII. Furnishing

Having built a small house on the principles which have been advocated, it would seem a relatively simple matter to obtain the necessary movable furniture to complete its interior. Already the house with its cupboards and seats will be partially furnished, and the additional furniture required, being not essential for effect but merely for use, will not include those unnecessary articles, which are merely so many stumbling-blocks for the occupants. Such furniture cannot be bought in shops any more than the kind of house I have endeavoured to describe can be found ready built. The shops will merely offer a choice between the Ugly furniture made to meet the demands of those as yet innocent of artistic cravings, and the “Art” furniture made for those who are presumed to be better informed.

But the New Art as interpreted by the shops is more to be avoided than the old ugliness. Whatever Art may be admitted to the house it must be genuine Art and not Trade Art. The best way to secure a satisfactory result in furnishing is to have the furniture made specially for its position—a few things soundly and simply constructed which shall seem a part of the whole scheme.

In many parts of the country old furniture of a simple type—gate tables, rush-bottomed chairs, bureaus, &c.—may be obtained at a very reasonable cost; and such things, with a few special made furnishings which cannot be obtained in this way, will always be at home in a house such as I have described. This old furniture has a sort of human character about it; and the varied planes of its surfaces, with its strong construction and evidences of careful leisurely work, make it inviting and homely. The modern “Art furniture bears testimony, on the contrary, that it is the work of a drilled automaton. Its pretence to finish is a mere superficial deceptive smartness. No human being ever loved or lingered over its completion, and its Art is the bait held out to the purchaser as a substitute for real excellence of design or manufacture.

In modern furniture all the charm which belongs to the imperfect efforts of the hand of man, all the sympathy with material and carefulness of finish, are replaced by this superficial mechanical perfection. The old furniture stands against the wall at its ease. It is affable, generous and comely, but the modern work is stiff and repellant. There is nothing personal or human about it, and while its shallow smartness may be well enough for a room kept for show, it will never seem quite at home in the rooms we live in.

To the man about to furnish perhaps the best advice is that contained in the single word Don’t.” Or at least he may be invited to pause and consider. Furniture making and furniture selling, as now practised, is a trade rather than an art, and the only artistic skill apparent is that evinced by the salesman in inducing the public to believe that they must have things which they can very well do without. The art of furnishing is perhaps best understood by the Japanese, who have no furniture at all in their houses. But in the Western World we have acquired the habit of sitting on chairs and at tables, and a certain degree of furnishing is essential. The great fault of nearly all modern rooms is that they are over-furnished, and the first step in their reform would consist in removing all the unnecessary and cumbrous furnishings which crowd floors and walls. There would then be sufficient floor space for the use of the occupants, and the few furnishings carefully diisposed could be seen to the best advantage, while the domestic evolutions—the turning out of rooms and the daily dustings and cleanings of furniture—would be a simple matter.

The modern lady who wishes to achieve in her drawing-room an effect which is “quite Japanese” fondly imagines she is doing so by accumulating the greatest possible number of vases, fans and bamboo furniture. In the real Japanese room how different is the aim of its occupant 1 The walls and the floor are alike bare, and there is nothing to distract the attention from the single flower arrangement or picture which adorns the room. Or again, the collector of the antique surrounds himself with a host of cabinets, tables and chairs, and other pieces, and thinks in this way to recall the beauty of the Old English apartments. But here again it is not realised that the furnishing of these was really of the simplest, and the single contents of one modern house would furnish a dozen houses in the old way. While, however, this custom of over-furnishing may be tolerated in the mansion, in the contracted space of the smaller houses, where space and means are alike limited, there is 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 comfortless buildings, so the furnishing firm strives to get them filled to overflowing 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 mvented. 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 v/hich 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 purchases afterwards repented of. It must be remembered that what happens to take th e fancy in the showroom is not necessarily the thing which will maintain its charm in daily life, and the very insistence of its appeal gives a fair indication of its transient nature. The beauty ot furniture is to a great extent a relative matter, and its fitness for a special place in a room will often be a more important point than its intrinsic merits, which may be quite at variance with its surroundings. And so it will be most desirable to have furniture: specially made to suit particular rooms, and so to form the finishing touches olf the scheme which begins with the structure of the house. There should be no hiatus between house and furniture. Wherever the conditions make it reasonable, the furniture should in the form of fitments constitute a part of thte building, and the movable furniture should seem a part of the house, and not an alien importation.

Furniture, like everything else in the house, should be the best of its kind, and it is better to have a first-class article of an inferior kind than a second-class one of what claims to be a higher order, just as in building it is better to have the best possible kind of cottage instead of the worst kind of mansion.

The furniture of the shops often fails, because while it poses as artistic and pretends to features and qualities which can only be obtained by the single desire ot the designer and workmen to achieve beauty, it is really at heart entirely commercial, and produced under factory conditions which make the Art of the workman impossible.

But there is a kind of furniture to be had which, frankly factory made, is excellent of its kind. The kind of chair used for churches is an example of this. There is no pretence here of “Art” finish. It bears evidence that it is put together quickly and simply, and turned out in the least possi ble time.

To French polish it, to put a little bit of carving or inlay on the back, to add what is popularly supposed to be Art to it, would be to hopelessly vulgarise iit. It would become good enough for the suburban drawing-room perhaps, but would be no longer good enough for the church. There are several types of chair of this kind which are all excellent in their way. They are made chiefly of ash, but often a piece of beech or some other wood is used, and this casual combination of material is quite in character with its simple and direct appieal of the whole. If furniture is to be turned out in factories, this is how it ahould be made, with no affectation of arts and crafts.

In ma.king special furniture for a house it must be recognised that it is necessarily more expensive than furniture made by the dozen—and in furnishing under economic restrictions it is desirable to include as much as possible the cottage antique, and the factory furniture described above. But if furnishing is undertalken on the principle of omitting everything that is not actually required, iit will be possible to have a few things specially made, instead of a multitude of articles not really required, and which cannot be said to be cheap at any price.

In the making of furniture there are two principal methods of construction in the joining of its woodwork. The simplest is that now used in making packing-cases, the wood being joined by means of nails. The more complicated is that in which the wood is joined by letting one piece into another by the use of what are called mortices and tenons.

It is a foregone conclusion nowadays that the simplest way of doing a thing is necessarily the worst way, and the nail in modern woodwork has been considered a thing to be hidden. While in all other details of construction a virtue has been made of frankness, and while the pegs of the tenon are displayed to view, the nail is sedulously concealed by all kinds of artifices. In the making of the simple kinds of furniture in which the wood is joined by nails of the kind known as clout-headed, made by a blacksmith, these might be shown without shame, and form a feature in the design, and nothing could be reasonably urged against this simple and direct “packing-case” construction for a chest or cabinet.

As to how far it is justifiable to attempt to reproduce ancient styles of furnishing in modern rooms will depend on many circumstances. It must necessarily always be absurd to aim at reproducing the styles of the Gothic period, or those which were in the Renaissance time coloured by its influence. The modern Jacobean room, if it include all the carving and ornaments of the period, must necessarily be a failure, simply because Jacobean art was a workman’s art to a great extent, and we have no workman now who would be able to re-create the spirit of the Jacobean age. It would be as reasonable to ask of the modern workman to write you a Shakespearean sonnet as to carve you a Jacobean panel. A judicious selection of those features and principles which are suitable for reproduction under modern conditions would lead to a room which in its traditionalism would bear the stamp of reasonableness. And this thoughtful modified version of old work must not be confounded with the Wardour Street tradition of artificiality, worm-eaten carving, and other deceptions.

The later and more histrionic styles of furnishing in which ethical standards are given up for superficial refinements, and which were the setting for a life divorced from realities, and which seem a kind of elaborate play-acting, are more easily reproduced under modern conditions. Your modern workman may copy a Louis XV. chair, though he cannot a Jacobean one. In the modern school of furniture that is generally the most satisfactory which is based on the principles of old work. In its aim to achieve a rational quality of simplicity it sometimes tends to become somewhat unsympathetic and severe, and the recognition of the materials is not so much considered as qualities of lines and surfaces. A straining after effect and over-accentuated ornament is often found, which destroys all sense of repose. The true course seems here a middle one, between the extreme of archaic revivals on the one hand, and aggressive originality on the other, and in reaching forward to the unborn beauty of the future still to hold fast that which is good in the work of the past.

The enthusiasm with which the designer of the revival period set himself to copy exactly mediaeval work may have been ill-judged; but it seems no less 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 workmanship 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.