Chapter 8 THE LURE OF OLD FURNITURE

Eight old Chippendale chairs and two settees sold recently at Christie's for 5,600 guineas, and report says quickly after the auctioneer's hammer dismissed the lot they changed hands again at ￡1,000 profit to the buyer. There must be great charm in old furniture when people scramble for it regardless of cost. I suppose money is dull stuff to own heaps of unless you can exchange it for things that give the heart a passing thrill of pleasure (the great sport is in the making it); and the more money you make, the more it takes you to work up the thrill.

A millionaire's smile is an expensive hobby to cultivate. Gathering a bunch of wild primroses in the sunny April woods gladdens the heart of a child amazingly, and he dreams the pleasure over again in his sleep. It costs over 5,000 guineas to tingle the feelings of a rich man. The child's outlay is more economical, but it fetches as much enjoyment.

Wherein lies the secret charm of old furniture? I love it myself, and for that reason ask the question for the pleasure given in answering it. I am only a trifler in antiques, possessing a few pieces of exquisite old oak of the seventeenth-century period; also several pieces of walnut furniture which are old Italian. The Italian pieces lie fallow in a villa just outside the barriéra St. Domenico, Florence, where we live with them half the year round. Beautiful old walnut furniture counts much more in its own homeland, while the alien oak of England, which we love here, is cold and expressionless in the rooms of an Italian villa on the sunny slopes of Fiesole. It loses its aura in a strange land.

Old furniture with a time-worn glossy face on it is interesting because it is made by the hands of man; and the man used his brain in making it, as well as his hands; surely man's delight is in man's work. A piece of old furniture reflects the mind of its maker in every detail of its construction, and that is a very fascinating feature to me; for we are told on high authority that "hand-work possesses character, almost personality," and we believe the high authority with all our heart.

Modern furniture has no personality, and so it transmits no message; it is machine-made, and I hold no kinship with machinery to cherish warm feeling in its favour; but handcraft ever commands our respect, and when well done wins our widest admiration.

Machine-made work carries a lie on the face of it; it imitates handwork. The machine simulates a trouble that has not been taken. It produces beautifully designed and ornamented imitations of ancient handcraft at trifling cost. Who cares for beauty produced by formula? Beauty is the flowering of noble labour linked to useful purpose. Cheapness and showiness are the flaring advertisements of the mechanical cabinet-maker to-day, and he hits with precision the public taste.

Give me to admire something a man has laboured lovingly and honestly to produce, not what a machine vomits out standard pattern; something a man has put the power of his brain into as well as the dexterity of his hand. William Morris quaintly remarks: "If you have anything to say, you may as well put it into a chair or a table." The cabinet-maker speaks to us with his tools in a language of his own invention. The cabinet-maker has helped to make English homes comfortable to live in, and for so doing we owe him a debt of gratitude. His tools are not the sword and the cannon, but the plane, the chisel, and the swift-moving saw. His art is not destructive to life, piling on misery to man's many woes, but he enriches life manifold by adding comfort and luxury to the widening circle of human happiness. His rewards are not stars and garters and hereditary honours conferred by princes for brave deeds done on the field of battle, but just the recompense that the master of the tools' true play appreciates; the simple pleasure of good work well and truly done sent forth to take honourable place in the stately homes of England, knowing that by such fine hand-craft he will speak from his grave to people unborn; and he even cherishes the inspiring hope that those who are possessors of his treasured work done in oak and walnut and sweet satinwood will, in the hereafterward, in the quietude of their sequestered homes, surrounded by familiar furniture of high lineage, bestow on the workman a passing measure of praise; for these worthy craftsmen put the best of their lives into the labour of their hands.

Old furniture is delightful in your home because it is old. Age has an alchemy of its own that ennobles the work of man. A brand-new house is deadly unromantic, even if it is a dream of architectural excellence. Its appearance is garish and crude. New stones and raw bricks are ugly in the days of their youth, but age transforms the place, be it manor-house or thatched cottage, until enchantment haunts the fabric. I dearly love the grace of antiquity that mellows the venerable homesteads of England and blends the intermingling lustre of tradition with the roll of their lengthening years.

Age likewise has a mellowing influence on furniture. Obliteration of exactitude of form is essential charm in it as it is in a man or woman. You resent the loudness of a newly made rich man. His manners smell strongly of varnish just put on; his vanity and self-importance are unsavoury morsels to swallow without salt. He is a terror to his polite neighbours and a stranger to himself. Wait and see; he will tone down as the mills of life grind off the sharp angles and smooth him into a decent fellow.

Good taste resents primness and self-assertiveness in new furniture; its raw outlines and sharp angles offend the eye. When these stubborn features are subdued by centuries of wear and tear and the wondrous old-time bloom of rich deep colour glorifies the ripened oak with softness and transparency of tone, that quality so delightful to sight and touch which distinguishes genuine antique furniture, then sentimental feeling waxes strong and renders the work attractive to us.

Vague and visionary thoughts of past owners flit across the mind, and kindle emotions in the presence of an ancient piece of furniture of good repute. It idealizes in our minds, and becomes beautiful to us. It is a call of the past. It is an unwritten chapter in some old family history, and we want to handle the key of the legend locked up in it. There may be tragedy or comedy, or a mixture of both, recorded in the family log-book, and the stately old carved-oak court cupboard dozing in the banqueting-hall, generation after generation, saw it all through from beginning to end, but it whispers away no family secrets to inquisitive people. An evil day broke the family fortunes. The venerable court cupboard vacated its place of honour which it occupied for centuries in the Yorkshire manor-house, and has taken up quarters with us in our Sussex home. It is no longer mere chattel; there is human interest in it.

I wonder if it takes kindly to its new home? Land, they say, sometimes resents change of owners, especially passing from a family who had held lordship of the soil for generations. When the old squire dies, the last of his line, the land grieves. It seems to know that it is going to be sold and broken up, and it loses heart. It goes rotten like apples. A patch goes wrong here and a patch goes wrong there, and the rottenness spreads and runs together. It takes the land long to get used to a new master.

Has our old oak court cupboard sensitive feelings like the ancestral acres? Or is it silently and sullenly indifferent to all the changes of fortune that befall it?

I have an oak armchair with a unique story to tell. The back of it is one large panel carved with heavy flora and foliated decoration; on the cross-rail below the panel is carved in bold raised letters:

16 ELLIN RYLAND 94

The two arms are bountifully carved, and the carving terminates in a large Tudor rose forming a knob at the end of each arm. The arm-tops, through constant use, are smooth and shine like unto burnished bronze. The supports and front legs are twisted in good Jacobean manner, and the broad stretcher is carved with two long feathery, flowing acanthus-leaves curling round gracefully at the tips as if under pressure of a strong breeze, and crouching within their embrace nestles a rose in ambush. The chair has been mothered with lifelong care, and the bloom and beauty of age sit upon it like a crown of glory. So Ellin Ryland has won for her name immortality among the roses.

We often think of Ellin and question the chair about her, but information does not flow freely from that quarter. Did Ellin order the chair from the cabinet-maker herself? I think not; perhaps her lover gave it her on her birthday, or her husband on their wedding-day. No doubt the chair's existence celebrates a red-letter day in the annals of the family. The name now is only a legend to us, but there it is, legible after the flight of two hundred and twenty years. The old chair is a better monument to Ellin Ryland's memory than a stone slab in a damp churchyard, with her name graven on it in crumbling letters.

I dare say Ellin had a thin slice of vanity in her nature; we all have, and would like our names printed somewhere imperishably. During two hundred and twenty years the moss and lichen, the sun and the frost, conspire together to obliterate any lettering in churchyard stones, but the writing in tablet-oak on the armchair is as brave as ever. The name is only a legend, but it keeps her memory green.

I do not turn my house into a museum of antiques, but certainly I choose interesting old furniture to live with where choice is possible; it has a cheery influence on your temper. I love to walk amongst my treasures and touch them with my hand and admire their cloistered beauty. I started housekeeping in Victorian days, after the orthodox manner of Englishmen about to marry, by buying new furniture. To get the genuine article I bought it in framework and had it upholstered and finished at home, under my eye. As years rolled on, piece by piece the Victorian furniture vanished from our rooms and old pieces supplanted them, and the rooms grew pleasant to look upon and cosy to sit in. Your furniture has a subtle influence on your disposition. You live with it daily all the year round as you do with your wife, and you married her because she was the girl you loved best in the world, and since the wedding-day her influence has coloured your life more than you can measure and contributed mysteriously to make you the manner of man you are. Your furniture adds much to your pleasure and quiet enjoyment of home life if you have the right sort. Old furniture with quietness of line is the best to live with--it is suggestive of repose.

I love old furniture because its workmanship is artistic. Style in a chair or table is the all-important thing. A piece of furniture, however simple in design, if it is wrought artistically, stimulates the imagination, arouses the emotions, and provokes endless delight in the connoisseur. We are keen observers to-day, and curious over work done centuries ago. We handle a well-bred piece of furniture with respect as we trace the skill shown in beauty of line; the eye travels joyously over its well-balanced proportions and hovers with admirance over its downright dexterity of carving. No literal copy of antique furniture made in the forcing factories of to-day has feeling in it. It is very accurate in line and detail but it lacks expression, and that is where the artistic spirit enters, that is where the charm holds us. As old Higgery the carpenter explained himself out of it when Lord Louis Lewis complimented him on being the finest carpenter of his age: "Ah, sir," he replied, "Chippendale was the finest cabinet-maker of his age and Sheraton of his; but they went beyond that. They had the Idea. I can use my tools as well as either of them--better, maybe, for 'tis a subtle thing to give a semblance of age to a new piece, but I haven't got the Idea, and never had. If the imagination had gone with the craft, King George might have seen his period of furniture as well as any of the others."

Chippendale and Sheraton were without doubt the cleverest cabinet-makers of their age; but many an unnamed workman of their period has left us the splendid legacy of his "ideas" in furniture which is scattered over the comfortable homes of England, with no pedigree attached except the imprimatur of a master craftsman's genius.

Speaking of artistic furniture, I do not mean elaborate furniture overladen with a heavy ornament which confuses its lines and perverts its beauty into vulgarity. Simplicity is the fairest form of art. Simplicity consists not so much in plainness of production as in singleness of purpose. The essence of simplicity is the absence of self-consciousness. A combination of simplicity of character and great artistic power is difficult to find, but when found it is the most perfect combination and produces finest work. Art is often self-conscious, and quickly runs to seed in superfluous ornamentation. The Louis Quinze style is unwholesome as poison. It is brilliantly clever, but it is fascinatingly demoralizing. It reflects in art the luxury and insincerity, the licentiousness and effeminacy of the age that invented it.

Gaudy and overornamented furniture is teasingly self-conscious, and conceited stuff to live with. Its lines are vulgar and sensuous curves. It is always staring at you, grinning at you, ogling you, and saying, "Observe me, and admire." Just the very character of the frivolous women, the Pompadour and the Du Barri, who ruled the voluptuous Court of Louis XV., and who squandered the royal revenues in extravagance of art and craft, so that the artist's taste was wasted in riotous designing and the craftsman's skill debased in excesses of ornament.

Sumptuous furniture and splendid apparel are closely wedded together, and cannot be separated with success. If I lived among Louis Quinze furniture I should often see in the room with me ghosts of gallant courtiers, dressed in long silk coats, embellished with gold braid, and vests of rainbow hue, with cravats and ruffs of billowy lace, carrying at their hips a long rapier, and toying with a bejewelled snuff-box as they moved noiselessly with an elegant devil-may-care swagger, mixing with superbly decorated marqueterie cabinets and tables and bronze statuettes and Sèvres china bleu du roi; and shadowy ladies of high degree would be there, wearing capacious and flowery dresses and powdered hair, sitting in the chequered light of evening on seats richly upholstered in pale rose Gobelin tapestry, smiling dreamily on the exquisites of the old régime--all of them fatally gifted mortals with manners polished as the hard, shining surface of the parquet floor they gaily tread: the whole scene a vision glorious, composing an harmonious blend of colour, grace, and beauty. Modern men lounging in tweed Norfolk jackets, or dressed sombre in black swallow-tail coats, with a cigarette lolling on their lips, and ladies tailored into close-fitting costumes of neutral tints, however beautiful in themselves, would be completely out of the picture.

A peculiar reason why old furniture is coveted by many people is because it is fashionable and scarce. The quantity that remains in the country, drawn from the homes of our easy-going port-wine-drinking Georgian forefathers, is decreasing, and buyers are increasing, so competition runs riot for really good pieces.

There is plenty of worthless old furniture for sale, as there are worthless "Old Masters" asking for buyers. Americans are the greedy collectors who raid the market with their unlimited dollars and pay sensational prices for the prize pieces to adorn their town houses in New York or Chicago.

Collecting is a fascinating hobby. I have found pleasure hunting for antiques far away from the heated atmosphere of Christie's auction-rooms. The joy of the chase is great, and the habit grows upon you. I have made many enjoyable excursions into the country with a clear-cut object in view which gives zest to the journey. Rummaging through second-hand shops in the back streets of provincial towns or in out-of-the-way villages searching for spoil is an alluring pastime to indulge in, and if you love the country through which you travel for the country's sake you will be very happy on the trail, and want to go again whether much or little plunder falls to your quest. Old cathedral towns yield the best results. There are many sleepy second-hand shops loitering round the cathedral waiting for customers to step in after visiting the sacred fane. There is much lumber and little treasure in most of them; but if you don't find what you want, in looking for it you may find something that pleases you better, like the man who was digging a hole in his garden to bury a dead dog and unburied a Greek statue of Venus.

Calling at the smart antique dealers' spacious establishments in London is an édition de luxe version of the same story. Here choice pieces are assembled, polished and poised adroitly to arrest attention. Some of these elegant salons resemble museums; the surroundings breathe order, calm, refinement. Prices rule high as the aristocratic character of the place you visit.

Nothing is cheap in these sanctuaries of the old nobility of furniture and art treasure except courtesy and affability, which are supplied gratis by the faultlessly accoutred gentleman of the department, who checks you on entering and conducts you round. Any object you look at he explains for your edification. He rivals the showman at Windsor Castle or the Tower of London for knowing his part and throwing at you torrents of information as he strides along. He revels in it, and his importance and intelligence mesmerize you and keep most of your five senses stirring. You admire him as an oracle of antique lore, and listen to him with fear and trembling. His beaming smile encourages you to live, and politely you ask another question.

Here the business of selling is practised as a fine art. The attendant is so well bred, well groomed, so condescending and obliging you feel yourself a criminal if you escape him without making a purchase. You say: "I should like to go back and see that satinwood chair again." "Ah," he replies, "that is a most interesting piece; King Edward often sat in that chair. It belonged to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of King Edward; it was the King's favourite seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at Redcote Manor. And here is the oak table you admired so much as we passed along. We know the pedigree of it. It came from Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire. It has been in possession of the family since the year 1620. We bought it at the Hall last week, and so it has never been in the trade. How beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror; surely the butler must have polished it every week when he waxed the oak floor. It has never been damaged or repaired; it is genuine all over. It is a precious and faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is only...!"

There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the buyer of old furniture. Even in the garden of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling landscape. Fraud is not unknown side by side with honest dealing. Not all furniture is old as it looks. That is where that predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and preys upon humanity in general and the innocent amateur in particular.

There are sly manufactories of old furniture busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables, cabinets, out of oddments of oak and mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of broken and decayed furniture. New wood is added in parts where necessary to complete the transformation, and when these modern antiques are blended, stained to harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed, as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it as antique as possible: we must sell the old wine with the dust on the bottle."

There is no fixed market value to old furniture as there is to postage-stamps or War Loan stock. The dealer sets his own price on his goods, and the cupidity of the public guides him how best to do it. He is a keen observer of human nature, and plays up to its little weaknesses for his own advantage, and he does it smilingly.

It is wonderful how environment works on our feelings and baffles our judgment. In the twinkling of an eye it changes the value we place on things. Dress the same man in two different suits of clothes, and you have all the difference in our cursory opinion between a lord and a tinker. The same article exhibited in shop-windows East or West of London changes its value appreciably, and we are blindly content to buy in the dearest market if it is the most elegant, and fancy we get full value for money.

I know a man in Florence who wanted an old Tuscan table, and he padded round the city looking for one. In a small shop where much furniture was crowded into little space he saw the article that pleased him. The dealer asked twenty-four pounds for it. He tried to beat down the price, but the dealer would not humour him, so he left without buying. Presently a large dealer in antiques entered the shop, fancied the table, and paid twenty-four pounds for it straightway, and removed it to his own premises, which are spacious and commanding. The man in quest of a Tuscan table visited the spacious premises and saw the table in its grander home, fell in love with it again, and bought it for forty pounds. Afterward he told the dealer in the small shop that he had found the table he wanted at Mr. So-and-so's, and, quite elated, he described his purchase. "Yes, I know about it," replied the rejected dealer. "You have paid forty pounds for the table I offered to sell you for twenty-four." The buyer looked foolish, and said: "But it was so much better displayed at Mr. So-and-so's shop that I did not recognize it being the same table; it looked worth twenty pounds more in his place than it did in yours."

The auction-mart frequently governs the price of old furniture and gives it an upward lift. The psychology of the auction-room is an interesting study. The loaded atmosphere of the place has a compelling influence that gets the better of one's judgment. In a shop a man scoffs at the tall price of a piece of furniture and haggles doggedly with the dealer to reduce it thirty shillings; in the auction-room if the same piece were offered he would compete with the crowd to raise the price of it incontinently. It is the consistent conduct of inconsistent human nature. It is that bellicose little devil who hides himself at the bottom of every human being, impelling him down into the danger zone to fight, who is guilty of the rash and feckless deed. A man enters the auction-room in a happy, breezy frame of mind, not to buy, just to look on and see what things are fetching. The serpent of the place tempts him, and he is a lost soul. His good resolutions evaporate like water on a hot plate, leaving no trace behind. The fighting impulse in him leaps up, and he bids and bids again, and eventually he finds himself the possessor of a rare old mahogany bureau hatched in the reign of our King George, but inadvertently described in the catalogue as a masterpiece of the cabinet-maker's craft composed in the times of Queen Anne!