FURNISHING.

Evening Star, Issue 4209, 23 August 1876, Page 3

FURNISHING.

(From the Saturday Review.) It appears probable that a few years hence we may see a strong reaction of taste in favor of extreme simplicity which will influence both dress and furniture. Materials will naturally bo more costly and magnificent, but these qualities will no longer be found in mere trimmings. So many people have been bitten with the present madness for decoration—people, for the most part, who have never paused to think what decoration is—that those who have innate good taste, or who have studied ornament on rational grounds, will presently flee in disgust to whitewashed walls and dimity curtains. Such sensitive spirits deserve sympathy. They have been sorely tried. The man cursed with natural or acquired taste walks through the valley of this world as through a place of torture and humiliation. His best feelings are made scourges wherewithal to torment him. After preaching for years the mission of art in the regeneration of the uncivilised, he finds all his pet theories turned against him. He may love Japanese screens where any screens are required, but he might be roasted alive in a friend’s drawingroom before he could get one for use. The walls are, so to speak, creeping with Japanese screens, but what cares he how Japanese they be if he has no ladder by him to fetch one down ? Blue plates are very well adapted to feed from, and may look very well in the china closet. But, hung on wires in formal rows, they become monotonous. When ladies washed up their own china after a “ dish of tea,” as they replaced it carefully in a corner cupboard or on a miniature dresser, it was quite right that such articles of convenience should be as handsome as the porcelain itself. But when ladies no longer tend their own tea-things, it is ridiculous to see sets of cups and saucers ranged on shelves in the drawing-room with a teapotor two in the middle, none of them ever intended for the unhallowed uses of everyday life. Why should slop basins be studded over the room as thick as spittoons in a bar parlor ] They are matter in the wrong place. A pat of butter is none the better for a splendid device on its unctuous surface. Perhaps our lumps of coal will soon bo sent up to the drawing-room carved and gilt for the burning. One longs to see ornament in its proper place. Candlesticks that hold no candles, flower vases empty of roses, copper coal scuttles of antique form on the top of cabinets, beer jugs filled only with dust, such are the contents of modem rooms. Greek tombs, Oriental pagados, and curiosity shops in Holborn are ransacked to furnish our chambers, and while the shelves are covered with old Worcester and the mantelpiece groans under brazen chargers, our tea is served in Stallordshire stoneware set out on a Birmingham tray. This is turning domestic art upside down and inside out. Though handsomely bound books form the best ornaments for the library shelf, we seldom think of bestowing, even on what we read, any but the gaudy cloth of the modem publisher. Yet books can be arranged so as to form as harmonious a wainscoting as Indian matting, and are surely a more satisfactory investment than even old oak, while for the purposes of ordinary decoration there is nothing for a moment to be compared with natural flowers. It is in beautifying the things we use that the most lasting satisfaction is to be found, not in buying rows of greybeard jugs or Italian medicine jars.