If the English have no imagination, they should not scorn to be
commonplace; or rather they should remember that poverty cannot be
disguised by beggarly borrowing, that it may be ennobled by calm
independence. Our national architecture never will improve until our
population are generally convinced that in this art, as in all others,
they cannot seem what they cannot be. The scarlet coat or the
turned-down collar, which the obsequious portrait-painter puts on the
shoulders and off the necks of his savage or insane customers, never can
make the 'prentice look military, or the idiot poetical; and the
architectural appurtenances of Norman embrasure or Veronaic balcony must
be equally ineffective, until they can turn shopkeepers into barons, and
schoolgirls into Juliets. Let the national mind be elevated in its
character, and it will naturally become pure in its conceptions; let it
be simple in its desires, and it will be beautiful in its ideas; let it
be modest in feeling, and it will not be insolent in stone. For
architect and for employer, there can be but one rule; to be natural in
all that they do, and to look for the beauty of the material creation as
they would for that of the human form, not in the chanceful and changing
disposition of artificial decoration, but in the manifestation of the
pure and animating spirit which keeps it from the coldness of the grave.
Pages:
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222