HOUSES AND GARDENS 



for every-day use, and claiming our admiration chiefly in their adaptability to 

 definite functions in the domestic life, rest like able-bodied paupers on a 

 bench in inglorious idleness. 



The true place of Art is in the service of everyday life, and beautiful 

 furniture should be found fulfilling its function in the home rather than 

 crowded in the museum, where the worship of its beauties becomes a kind of 

 dilettante cult. 



In the days when beautiful things were made every day as a matter of 

 course, there were no museums and no Art Galleries, and the whole art force 

 of the nation was beneficially spent in the construction, adornment and 

 furnishing of its buildings. 



Instead, then, of founding a private museum, it may be urged that the 

 man who builds a large house should resolve to achieve the highest degree of 

 fitness and beauty in all its appointments, and in doing so he will be getting 

 far nearer to the real qualities of the houses of the past than if he aims at a 

 mere histrionic reproduction of the ancestral hall which gives him merely the 

 outward semblances of a body from which the soul has fled beyond recall. 



To consciously aim at achieving " style " in design, either old or new, is 

 to follow a Will of the Wisp. For the pursuit of style, like the pursuit of 

 happiness, must necessarily lead to disappointment and failure. Both alike 

 are essentially bye-products, and the quality of the bye-product is in direct 

 ratio to the worthiness of the ideal pursued. One may liken style to a 

 jewel in the hilt of a sword, which flashes brightly when the blade is drawn in 

 a worthy cause, and to which the warrior absorbed with the matter in hand 

 will give but slight attention. It is a quality of the " flower of things " only 

 to be gained by root culture, and he who aims at style is he who would paint 

 the lily instead of watering it. 



To produce a stately modern apartment, it is not necessary to disinter the 

 Corinthian column, or to set the modern workman once more to carve that 

 oft-repeated formula of acanthus leaves at the bidding of some blind pedant 

 who has no eyes for the beauty of the flowers and trees which surround 

 him. Such vain repetitions do but destroy our sense of the beauty of their 

 originals. 



It is well that the apartments of the mansion should be of stately and 

 dignified aspect, but let it be a stateliness and dignity which is vital, local and 

 modern, the new thought of a new age wrought with eagerness and care, 

 instead of the trite and stale copyism of the forms of the past. It is not 

 necessarily true, as many seem to imagine, that the only alternative of this 

 copyism is a bizarre striving after originality and eccentricity of design, and 

 which, posing as the " new art," is justly condemned by the judicious. New 

 work which is based on the study of the past, which is sane, reasonable and 

 vital, will only be considered eccentric from the point of view of those whose 

 thoughts revolve round obselescent centres. Apparent eccentricity is the 

 necessary concomitant to every advance in thought, and new ideas revolve 

 round a centre which is constantly moving forward. The impressions of the 

 surrounding country reported by the vanguard must necessarily seem untrue 



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