Year: 1878

We are beginning of late years to
have better idea of giving to these
wooden and stone boxes some of the
grace of form and color which nature
SO lavishly provides for us out of doors.
We grow bOlder in architecture and
furniture as we are surer OfOur ground.
Warmer colOring is beginning to tone
the outside and inside of our homes
colOring more requisite with our thin
ner air and colder skies than in southern
Europe, from which we brought home
the idea. Nobody can visit the great
magazines of upholstery, of bric-a-
brac or china in New York and Bos-
ton, without acknowledging that the
aesthetic taste of the well-to-do classes
must have developed greatly since the
days when hideous brocatelles and
enormous chandeliers, gilt and CLASSY,
constituted the perfection of artistic
furnishing. As people we are not
only lavish with our money to art, but
eager for hints how TO spend it best in
h'i s'i Nitt- dlt
enough to offer us the means. Out of
these stores of furniture and decora-
tions any man with correct or even
delicate taste and the money may fur
isfactIon As anywhere in Europe. The
difficulty lies IL the lack of taste in
those who have means, or of means
where knowledge is not wanting.
Wealthy Americans go to Paris or Italy
and bring back a hodge-podge of Per-
sian carpets and gobelin tapestries,
patched Roman pottery eight hundred
years B. c. and glittering Sevres and
Worcester ware made week ago,
carved cabinets from Italian palaces,
black with age, and Morris marvellous
wall papers, bronzes, marbles, South
American bags and Egyptian scarabei,
and all these they pile and jam into their
twenty-foot brown stone houses, and
lecture over them to their visitors accor-
ding to certain fragmentary rules of
art which they have gathered in the
same haphazard fashion.


Fashion correspondents tell US that a
taste is developing lately for the rocco
in furniture. There is a demand for
even the old clocks and tables used by
our grandfathers. Most of us remem-
Der with certain satisfaction which
no modern drawing-room gives us,
some old fashioned farmhouse ''living
rOom," with the eight-day clock in one
corner and the angular cupboard in the
other. We do not know why the floor,
covered with its green rag carpet, the
two Shaker rocking chairs where the
old people sat, the open fire, the table
with the country paper and pair of
spectacles upon it, should come up be-
fore us with a certain sense of satisfac-
ton, beauty and repose. 1t is not the
cleanliness of the room. The parlor of
Il magnate in a Western town is cleaner,
yet we rem ember il with a shudd1r;
the violent flower-basket in the carpet,
the satin curtains, the blue brocatelle
sofas, the enormous Parian vases on the
mantel, all staring into great mirror,
and telling it what they cost-who
among those who are in good society"
has not seen it all?


The secret we suggest in the plenish-
ing of a house or room, of giving this
sense of completeness and satisfaction,
is the expression by every different
part of some leading idea-whether that
be of a place for work, for rest, for cosy
home comfort, or for sensuOus luxury.
The farmhouse keeping room sugges-
ted to us, unconscious of it though we
may have been, rest after honest labor,
the calm of decent old age; the vulgar
provincial parlor or the drawlng-room
of man of taste speaks ofnothing but
money and its ignorant abuse. We re-
member certain hut in the Allegheny
mountains where the walls were of un-
painted pine boards with wide ehinks
between, and the furniture that of the
poorest quality, where an odd drapery
of home woven white netting over the
walls, and curtains of white muslin
wherever curtains were possible, left
curious impression on the mind of
quiet and purity. To all home-makers
out of unfurnished houses we would
say, Give your body of bricks, paper,
carpets and color, a soul of some sort or
other. If you have any great work of
art sufficient to enter in and possess Il
room, give the room up to it. Make
hangings, seats and ornament pay
homage to it-retire as far as possible
out of sight. Do not make the air of
your sitting-room uneasy with fighting
gladiators, or confuse your guests at
dinner and heat your ices with too
naked Venuses. If you have little
money but great ambition for genteel
appearance, abjure shams. Turn your
back on imitation china made by your
self, on cheap chintzes that fade, and
dried and painted grasses that are the
rOughed ghosts of summers, In short,
take warning by nature, whose tab
leaux are each complete in itself, and
who is. always and at all risks. real.