562) TRANSACTIONS OF SECT.ON Ge 
or in structural design, as those which I have instanced, is ignorance on the part 
of the designer of the nature of the elements he employs, or a lack of skill to 
devise a possible or reasonable arrangement of details that will secure the general 
effect he desires. : 
It may almost savour of sacrilege to quote, in this connection, from the writ- 
ings of that ‘ wild, wilful, fancy’s child’ the story of whose eight short years of 
life and literary work Dr. John Brown has given in his charming ‘ Pet Marjorie’ 
—a record of perhaps the shortest. human life that has formed the subject of a 
biography. But the lines are too pertinent to my purpose to be withheld, and 
the frankness of the confessions they contain, of a childlike limitation of artistic 
power, may be commended to those who practise either the fine arts or the arts 
of construction, and feel compelled to ‘trust to their imagination for their facts,’ 
or to resort to the association of incompatible details for lack of knowledge, or 
of ability to attain their ends by more reasonable means. 
Marjorie writes of the death of James II. :— 
‘He was killed by a cannon splinter, 
Quite in the middle of the Winter; 
Perhaps it was not at that time, 
But I could find no other rhyme!’ 
‘Quite in the middle of the winter,’ describes Auzust 3, 1460 a.D., with no wider 
licence than we find assumed in the works of more experienced, if less candid, 
artists and craftsmen. Again in her sonnet to a monkey—written, we must 
remember, when she was six or seven years of age—she acknowledges the ‘com- 
pelling power of an artistic aim :— 
“His nose’s cast is of the Roman : 
He. is a very pretty woman, 
I could not get a rhyme for Roman 
So was obliged to call him woman.’ 
It may seem that I have wandered widely from my text: those who found 
discourses on texts usually do! But there is, or ought to be, a closer connection 
than is usually recognised between the work of the engineer and that of those 
to whom we usually restrict the title of artist. There was no great gulf fixed 
between the fine arts and the utilitarian arts in earlier times. Some at least 
of those to whom we owe the greatest advances in the fine arts were eminent 
also.in the arts of construction. We may claim such men as Michelangelo, 
Raphael, and Leonardo da Vinci as masters in the arts of construction as wel] 
as in those with which their names are usually associated. The separation of the 
beautiful and the useful is quite a modern vice. But much that I have ventured 
to Say in the digression—if such it be—is applicable, with little or no alteration 
of terms, to the work of our own profession. The architect or engineer who, 
for the sake of effect, fills the space between the flanges of a beam or girder with 
slabs of stone, or cast-iron pillars and arches, that could not fulfil the function 
of. a web, exhibits just the same lack of skill as Pet Marjorie owns up to— 
shall I say?—like a man. Such practices have no ‘basis in reason and propriety,’ 
and the employment of such ‘decorative features’ is certainly not a ‘ grouping 
of elements with science.’ It is said that ‘The highest art is to conceal art’ ; 
the lowest in matters pertaining to our profession is to conceal ill-devised con- 
struction with false and senseless masks. But what I have said has, I think, 
a sufficiently obvious bearing on the mechanical arts—I need not further point 
the moral. 
There is an old maxim to the effect that ‘the designer should ornament his 
construction and not construct his ornament.’ This is an admirable rule so far 
as it goes, but it should be subordinated to a higher rule, that he should orna- 
ment his structure only if he lacks the skill to make it beautiful in itself. A 
structure of any kind that is intended to serve a useful end should have the 
beauty of appropriateness for the purpose it is to serve. It should tell the truth, 
and nothing but the truth, and if its character be such that it can be permitted 
to tell the whole truth, so much the better. It should be beautiful in the sense 
in which we commonly use the term with respect to a machine—we call a 
mechanical device heautiful only if it strikes us as accomplishing the end for 
