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.

Nevertheless, many of these old designs exemplify the elementary essentials of furniture—­good materials, gracefulness, and thorough workmanship.  These are qualities that are to be sought for the cottage as well as for the mansion; and while they may add to the purchase cost of the separate articles, it is possible to secure them at no great increase for the whole over the cheaper goods, provided we guard against the common error in housefurnishing—­overpurchasing.

[Illustration:  Good examples of Chippendale and old walnut.]

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS

What is known in America as the arts and crafts movement has, in its sincere developments, sought to adapt the better qualities of the old designs of furniture to the demands of modern conditions, artistic and practical.  Not always, however, has it been possible to distinguish between the honest effort to enforce a better standard and the various forms of charlatanry under which clumsy and unsightly creations have been and are being worked off upon an ingenuous public at prices proportioned to their degrees of ugliness.  In colonial times many an humble carpenter vainly scratched his noggin as he puzzled over the hopeless problem of duplicating with rude tools and scant skill the handiwork that graced the lordly mansions of merrie England; to-day some wight who can scarcely distinguish a jackplane from a saw-buck essays to “express himself” (at our expense) in furniture, repeating all the gaucheries that the colonial carpenter could not avoid making.

MISSION FURNITURE

Others have set themselves to reproducing the so-called mission furniture which the good priests of early California would have rejoiced to exchange for the convenient modern furniture at which the faddist sniffs.  But most of us who stop to think, realize that there is no magic virtue in antiquity of itself.  The average man, at least, cannot delude himself into the belief that there is comfort to be found in a great deal of the harsh-angled stuff paraded as artistic.