MOST people are now alive to the importance of beauty as a refining influence. The appetite for artistic instruction is even ravenous. We cannot be too thankful that it is so, for the vacuum can be filled as easily as the purse can be emptied. Just now every shop bristles with the ready means: books, drawings, and objets de vertu from all countries are within everybody's reach, and all that is lacking is the cool power of choice.

It will be my endeavour to point out in these pages that choice remains, and to warn my readers that beauty and art, like pure water, rely upon the tidal flow of new thoughts; they lie in no stagnant pool. The mind which blindly accepts fashions simply because they are fashionable, without trying to discriminate in what the new is better than the old, may be said to resemble those caged reptilian jaws, champing without discretion flesh, feathers, and blanket at once.

No doubt things are rapidly mending in domestic art. People brought up in that fog which the French Revolution left us floundering in, people who loved sunsets and flowers and music may be, who sketched scenery, enjoyed Byron, and went punctually to the Royal Academy - but scarcely noticed their own walls and carpets (I speak of the mass of 'genteel' society thirty years ago) - these people woke up some time since to the influence of surroundings on the mind and temper. They began to resent the discomfort and ugliness which their indifference had attracted round them, and they inaugurated a kind of Reformed Faith in art.

How long since did the clogged wheels begin to yield to individual efforts? Who was the first hero who pulled up and burnt his ' cheerful' patterned Brussels, in scarlet and sour green? Who first sold his drawing-room 'suite' - his velvet sofa backed with cotton - his six small chairs with torturing backs, two arm-chairs, vile marquetry table, and gilt console? The orthodox ' chiffonier' of unmeaning shape, with mirror-back that reflected our frightful bodies in one focus, and mirror-doors that made fun of our detached legs in another: and all the floriated false curves and flourishes ground (not carved) in mahogany and glued wherever they were likeliest to be knocked off - all the false 'embossed mouldings' (also glued on), recalling nothing, in their vacant misconstruction of classic types, but human teeth, or emblems of disease ingeniously connected: where are these horrors now?

They are all relegated to the seaside lodging-house, along with the glossy white walls and rattling and writhing fender, and the rampant-lion rug.

We can all rejoice at this result: but few of us can apply the moral, for few remember whence the horrors sprang, or realise that all this outrageous vulgarity of design and bad, scamped work, was the final British version of something in itself good - nay, the apotheosis of art as applied to furniture - the fashion of Louis Ouatorze.

What has come, as a reaction, is just sufficiently better to express the popular sense of having done wrong. Society has confessed its sins and promised to amend: but there is always the risk when running from one 'lion in the path' that we shall run straight into the jaws of another. Alas! the new faith has assumed a livery quite as forced as the old one: quite as ugly it often threatens to be, with stiff patterns instead of flowing ones, morbid colours instead of gay ones, but equally ill-proportioned, vulgar, and machine-begotten, perhaps more depressing. The New Art furniture at its worst is a very ghastly parody on its name, and without the wholesome discipline of enlightened discrimination I fear that it has a future more dismal still than any previous fashion.

The Natural Basis

If people would think for themselves, turning over the leaves of Nature's book instead of simply aping others, we should have more comfort and more beauty in our homes.

At present our eyes seem blinded by prejudices rooted so long ago that we have forgotten their origin. We should never have asked whether the culture of beauty is good for us, had we observed that beauty simply means the harmonious adaptation of each thing to its purpose and to the purposes of the rest; that the mere forces of nature, such as growth, circulation, balance, and all other laws resulting from eternal attraction and repulsion, are the parents of curves and colours, which have no moral significance unless we impart it. And we should never have pushed culture too far if we would have taken a hint from the humblest creatures which select their habitations and adapt their array to circumstances.

To be healthy and happy, we must have beautiful and pleasant things about us. If we cannot have trees and flowers, mountains and floods, we can have their echoes - architecture, painting, textile folds in changing light and shade.

Every nation reflects its surroundings in its art, while its art is spontaneous, not scholastic, and that is how schools of art have grown up. Art may be said to be good wherever natural laws dictate it, and bad in proportion as it sets natural laws at defiance; this, whether there be any conscious attempt to copy nature or not. From the Chinese effects indirectly derived from their transparent atmosphere, their dazzling and involved foliage, and their strange beasts, down to the quaint homely art of colourless Iceland, it seems as if nature were working through us ever outward.

Thus Art, if we will suffer it, becomes a natural chronicle; though we can hardly estimate progress by any particular cult. To-day, energy runs rather to books than carvings, but picture and language are equally the expression of thought. The ancients talked and looked about them: we write and read.

But surely of late one kind of expression has been unduly neglected, and the pictorial kind to which we usually apply the term Art is better than mere language because it can please the eye without making incessant demands upon the brain. It unites us more completely with outward nature; it can delight a thousand eyes and hearts at once; it draws us out of ourselves; and its variableness is infinite. Art properly applied should counteract the influence of books, which nurse the modern bent towards privacy and self-contained reserve.