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i8              The Decoration of Houses
  But it must never be forgotten that every one is unconsciously
tyrannized over by the wants of others,- the wants of dead and
gone predecessors, who have an inconvenient way of thrusting
their different habits and tastes across the current of later exis-
tences.   The unsatisfactory relations of some people with their
rooms are often to be explained in this way.   They have still in
their blood the traditional uses to which these rooms were put in
times quite different from the present.  It is only an unconscious
extension of the conscious habit which old-fashioned people have
of clinging to their parents' way of living.   The difficulty of
reconciling these instincts with our own comfort and convenience,
and the various compromises to which they lead in the arrange-
ment of our rooms, will be more fully dealt with in the following
chapters.   To go to the opposite extreme and discard things
because they are old-fashioned is      equally unreasonable.   The
golden mean lies in trying to arrange our houses with a view to
our own comfort and convenience; and it will be found that the
more closely we follow this rule the easier our rooms will be to
furnish and the pleasanter to live in.
  People whose attention has never been specially called to the
raison d'~tre of house-furnishing sometimes conclude that because
a thing is unusual it is artistic, or rather that through some occult
process the most ordinary things become artistic by being used in
an unusual manner; while others, warned by the visible results
of this theory of furnishing, infer that everything artistic is un-
practical.  In the Anglo-Saxon mind beauty is not spontaneously
born of material wants, as it is with the Latin races.  We have to
make things beautiful; they do not grow so of themselves.      The
necessity of making this effort has caused many people to put
aside the whole problem of beauty and fitness in household deco-