ANTIQUES.(T.S. Eliot)

[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to any one who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," 1919.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many beneficiaries of modern culture" on both sides of the Atlantic "began to feel they were its secret victims," observed the historian T. J. Jackson Lears. Machines had changed both the construction and appearance of furniture: effective methods for laminating and bending wood, and the introduction of the coil spring and other metal parts permitted the production of new forms with new functions. In the United States, the factory with its disciplined workers marked the onset of industrialization and the introduction of unparalleled rewards for the common man. But in England at mid-century John Ruskin protested with reason: "No machine yet contrived, or hereafter contrivable, will ever equal the fine machinery of the human fingers."

When the world was invited to the great Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, visitors were generally awed by the mighty Corliss steam engine, but more sensitive viewers and critics were dismayed by the furniture exhibits that showed a taste for ostentatious grandeur but no pride in craftsmanship. Here was no pastoral Eden but clanging hammers, whirling wheels, and plumes of smoke and steam. While the idea of labor-saving devices held a strong appeal in a country concerned with establishing economic ...