To surface ornament of marquetry, occasional carved insertions can be added. But light, neat, and elegant woodwork, panelling, bookcases, cabinets, dressers, chairs, and tables, can be turned out without these additions, and the variety might be endless.
Carved acanthus foliage, bulging legs and surfaces, artistic carving and marquetry, and chiselled metal-mountings must be the work of trained sculptors. The engine gives them no real help. To design, that is invent (not to copy), carving and marquetry that will bear comparison with the products of Riesener, and of the school of Gibbons, is not to be done by command of appliances or skilful workmanship _only_. The artist who is thoroughly at home in designs of this kind, is the pupil or descendant of masters whose traditions are well established:
But neat furniture, unornamented by hand-work, ought to be turned out of the engine-room, the perfection of lightness, convenience, and strength. And here the buyer will look for the advantage of _cheapness_. We do not find that our large makers supply well-made machine furniture _cheap_. As a broad rule, prices seem to be calculated on _what a man would do_, and work done in the machine is priced, as if a man had made it by hand. In point of fact, five or six men's work is done in the same time, and the cost of wages charged on articles so made, will leave a disproportioned profit, notwithstanding the expense of setting up and maintaining the steam plant.
Decorative furniture can never be had at a cheap rate.
A word, in conclusion, as to the arts which are necessarily pressed into the service of furniture, and their prospects of the future.
These "sumptuary" arts have been spoken of in these pages as a revival in furniture and _style_, as dead. The disorders that culminated in the French revolution cut off our present European thoughts, or at least our manners and customs, from the past.
We are now trying to revivify past traditions. The furniture makers have made extraordinary exertions in this direction. How will it be in the coming years?
Some critics are of opinion that "art manufacture" is a delusion, and that, if our academicians were equal to the ancient Greeks, we should not find that rich buyers would care about the shapes of their chairs (if comfortable), the colours of their walls, and so forth--a singular delusion. If Phidias, Michael Angelo, and Raphael exhibited at Burlington House, their pupils and followers would overflow with good work in various degrees of elaboration. We should find it in our churches, houses, seats, carriages, and the rest. This is what _did_ happen when the great artists were flourishing. Ugliness and vulgarity were not endurable anywhere. Mentor expressed himself in drinking cups, Cellini in brooches, Holbein in daggers, Michael Angelo in a candlestick, Raphael culminated in a church banner. The art that finds its utterances on knobs, or handles, or drawer fronts, is restricted certainly, because the object is of awkward shape or surface, is to be handled and used, and is only a part of something larger. Nevertheless the street of tripods in Athens, the front of the _biga_ in the Vatican, were "occasions" on which good sculptors did the best that those occasions allowed of. Four fine silver images, representing four great provincial capitals, in the Blacas Collection (now to be seen in the British Museum), were perhaps the ends of the poles of a Sedan chair.