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History in the Furniture Styles History of Early American Colonial Furniture

 In the preceding chapters we have had occasion  frequently to note the close connection it is possible to trace between the on early American colonial furniture styles and current history. The subject is of sufficient interest to warrant us in asking the reader's attention to a few brief illustrations showing how faithfully great social movements have been reflected in the furniture of the time. It is absolutely necessary for the proper understanding of some modes to realise their historical setting and to interpret the furniture in the light of the social condition of the people. From the earliest times down to our own day one steady development has been going on, that has brought rich and poor nearer together so far as the requirements of their dwellings go. That feature is distinctly visible right through the centuries. The great baronial castles of feudal times have degenerated (if, indeed, degeneration is the proper word to use; it is questionable whether a " degeneration upward " is not illustrated) into the modern country houses, with their beautiful drawing-rooms and boudoirs, and from the labourer's rough shed of a cottage, with rude hewn bench, has evolved its prettily furnished, comfortable present-day equivalent, with furniture, so far as purposes of utility go, equal in every way, and often far superior, to the best that wealth can obtain. In such manner has style in furniture kept pace with the march of history. Since the Middle Ages and the Peasants' Revolt the monopoly of privileges by the aristocracy has been steadily demolished. In proportion as the liberties of the people have increased the authority of the hereditary lord has become lessened, until, with the growth of a democratic constitution, Jack has become very nearly as good as his master. As with Jack so with Jack's house. In sympathy with the increasing importance of Jack, his dwelling has ever moved. His liberties and and his comfortable on early American colonial furniture stand together. They are possessions time has won him, and the history of his house and its content less than the history of his legal position and his rights of franchise, tell of his progress since the days when, as serf, he was subject to the will of the feudal lord.

Thus, even in the reign of Elizabeth we find a made in the direction of introducing comfort into the cottages of the poor in on early American colonial furniture. It was an age of extravagance luxuriousness, but underlying all the frivolity of times was a seriousness on the part of the people that was apparent directly their liberties seemed to be threatened, as the Queen found on more than one occasion. Our eyes are more often turned upon the follies of the Court upon the increasing prosperity of the common people, yet the latter was more real at this time than ever before in our history, and the reign in which our liberties may be said to have taken root is the reign that with the witnessed the birth of the comfortable British home.

But whilst this general movement may be traced from the earliest times, it has not proceeded without checks, and here and there the march has been arrested temporarily by local conditions. Even countries as a whole have seemed for a time to stay the forces of the evolution process. In social matters periods of glorious freedom have been followed by times of great oppression, and the rigid morality of Puritanism in on early American colonial furniture gave way to the licentiousness of the Restoration. Even so in furniture; progress has not been without halt, and periods of rococo follow closely upon the heels of pure and classic design.

The manners and morals of the times are reflected closely in on early American colonial furniture arts and crafts, of which France affords us plain illustration. Consider for a moment the expensive grandeur of the Louis XIV. furniture. How eloquently it tells of the times that called it forth. Follow carefully the changing styles through the reign of Louis XV., and note how unmistakably the events of the period are stamped upon its furniture. The Court is growing poorer, its public functions are conducted on a-smaller scale, its tastes are less pure, its will is enfeebled, it is becoming incapable of earnestness, and its blare life needs pampering. Every one of those features may be read in French furniture as the strength of Louis XIV. gives place to the follies and vices of Louis XV. and the consequent development of the rococo. Proceed and trace the coming of Louis XVI., when the Court is purged of its impurity, but is weaker than ever. Gone is the rococo, and dainty prettiness tells loudly of the effeminate character of the ruler. Then "the deluge" that was foretold, out of which comes Napoleon, like a modern Caesar, re-establishing the pure classic of Greece and Rome. It is an era of on early American colonial furniture "Puritanism" in France, and, like all extremes, leads to extremities of reaction, and is closely followed by the "baroque" or " debased rococo."

In England and the Americas in on early American colonial furniture the same principle holds good. Our golden era of furniture, the time of the splendid productions of Chippendale and Sheraton, is contemporaneous with the moral, religious and philanthropic revivals in the reign of George II. When the Wesleyans were urging the duty of earnestness and honesty, the great craftsmen we have named were preaching the same sermon no less eloquently in their enduring work. In the reign of George III. the movement continues. Honest work is the keynote of the time, from statesman to workman, and the age has bequeathed to us Wedgewood and his pottery, Watt and the steam engine, Arkwright and the spinning machine, and in furniture the work of Ince and Mayhew, Manwaring, Heppelwhite and the brothers Adam. Green, the historian, says of the reign:, " In the nation at large appeared a new moral enthusiasm." Truly, history is to be read in manufactures as well as in books.

And what of l'Art Nouveau in Design of early American colonial furniture?

When the chief characteristics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are determined in the making of history, perhaps the two most noteworthy features will prove to be the restlessness and the boldness of the period. The most sacred things are questioned and nothing is taken for granted merely on the ground that it has been. The boldness that questions fearlessly the ancient traditions, that attacks laws hitherto regarded as integral parts of the Constitution, that calls upon revered institutions to justify themselves by modern arguments, is coupled with a spirit of restlessness that cries out for " something new." Clerics denounce the frivolity of the age; Conservative politicians declare that "we are all Socialists now"; artists of the old school talk bitterly of the " hooliganism " of their modern rivals.

The truth is that all see, from their different points of view, the same movement taking place. Each in his own department may check excesses, but each is powerless to stay the tide. Each may believe that he lives in a - decadent age in on early American colonial furniture, that his is the one voice left, crying in the wilderness of modernity, the message of the true prophet. Yet it is incorrect to call ours a " decadent age." On the contrary, are we not witnessing the first stages of a new renaissance, the full results of which may be enjoyed by our childrens' children?

Our view is that in the on early American colonial furniture style called l'Art Nouveau the spirit of the times, as indicated above, is accurately reflected, and in its bold restlessness we trace one more illustration of the fact that the manners and customs, and even something of the temperament of a people, find expression in the decorative tendencies of the age.

The foregoing may be regarded as somewhat in the nature of a bird's-eye view of a great subject. It could be extended indefinitely, and the quest would prove both interesting and profitable. The reader, should he be so disposed, will have no difficulty in following up the suggestions in other directions. One or two further con­siderations arising out of the principle, however, we desire very briefly to indicate.

There are few people who have not experienced indescribable feelings akin to awe and reverence in the presence of some monumental work of antiquity. John Ruskin often refers to the sensation, as, for instance, when he wrote of the Ducal Palace (" Stones of Venice," vol. II.), " Sometimes when walking at evening on the Lido, whence the great chain of the Alps, crested with silver clouds, might be seen rising above the front of the Ducal Palace, I used to feel as much awe in gazing on the building as on the hills, and could believe that God had done a greater work in breathing into the narrowness of dust the mighty spirits by whom its haughty walls had been raised and its burning legends written, than in lifting the rocks of granite higher than the clouds of heaven and veiling them with their various mantle of purple flower and shadowy pine." In that passage Ruskin beautifully indi­cates the real secret of our emotion in the presence of great works of art. It is not that the stones have over us some mystic power to stir our blood ; it is not even that the real beauty of the work itself appeals to us. That is, of course, true, but only accounts for our feeling of admiration and the gratification of our artistic sense. The deeper sensation of awe and of reverence is attribut­able, as Ruskin states, to a recognition, often unconscious though it be, of the fact that these inanimate buildings carry us into the presence of human beings who lived and fought and struggled like ourselves. If we could analyse our feelings, should not we find that we are awed, not with thoughts of the brick and stone, but of the hands and brains that wrought and fashioned them into shape? Great works of architecture - it is a truism - tell us eloquently of the character of the men. who created them. Ruskin has worked out this idea for us. Let him put it in his own words. He writes (" On the Old Road"): "All lovely architecture was designed for cities in cloudless air . . . cities built that men might live happily in them and take delight daily in each other's presence and powers. But our cities, built in black air which, by its accumulated foulness, first renders all, ornament of on early American colonial furniture invisible in distance, and then chokes its interstices with soot; cities which are mere crowded masses of store and warehouse and counter, and are, therefore, to the rest of the world what the larder and cellar are to a private house; cities in which the object of men is not life, but labour; and in which all chief magnitude of edifice is to enclose machinery ; cities in which the streets are not the avenues for the passing and procession of a happy people, but the drains for the discharge of a tormented snob, in which the only object in reaching any spot is to be transferred to another; . . . for a city or cities such as this no. architecture is possible-nay, no desire of it-" is possible to their inhabitants."

We have quoted these passages because what is true of architecture is true in the domain of furniture. Ruskin has shown how history is written in the world's buildings. The same is true of the world's furniture. Have we not here some explanation of the ever-living interest manifested in the collection of old pieces of furniture to which the enthusiasm of the collector is to some extent attributable. Each genuine old chair or bureau has its tale to tell of the age that gave it birth, and of the hands that gave it shape. The emotion caused by beholding some stately cathedral or magnificent palace is closely related to the feelings that inspire the antiquarian and the connoisseur. Though they may often be unconscious of it, their pleasure in the acquisition of some fine old piece may nevertheless be assigned in the last analysis, to that human interest in men that is one of the ineradicable traits of our nature. The morbid expression of it is found in the eager competition often witnessed to secure the possession of something owned by a notorious criminal the rational and healthy expression of it is to be found in the genuine love of the antique, and the desire to possess, not for mere ostentatious display, but for love of it, some link binding the present with the past.

Let us illustrate this principle in practice. A collector stands before two pieces. One is a fine old Sheraton bureau-the other a late Louis XV style. Chair on early American colonial furniture. How can he read history in the two?

The first tells its story plainly. The well-seasoned, per­fectly selected wood is as good to-day as it ever was, the drawers open without careful coaxing or application of force, the doors close accurately and even the locks remain in order. Pass your hand over the article. There are no rough edges telling of poor finish, nothing is scamped or shoddy. The bureau stands before you as fit to-day for the purpose for which it was made as the day. its maker proudly gave it the finishing touch of his master hand. Its lines are beautiful, but its beauty is not divorced from utility. It fulfils all the conditions that William Morris demanded of " good citizens' furniture." It was made in an age of industrial honesty and moral enthusiasm. Examine it as closely as we will, its testimony remains unshaken. It is an honest piece of work, made by an honest man for honest men. In its production it benefited alike the man who made it and the man who bought and used it. Trade measures and social reform in Parlia­ment and a great religious revival are the features of the age noted by the historian, and old Sheraton's bureau of early American colonial furniture tells the same story to all who have eyes to read it.