House and Garden 
NOT QUITE SO SIMPLE 
pluck up your English or Italian or Colonial 
by the roots and plant it here, there and 
everywhere and get results that are worth 
while. Architecture to be fit, must fit 
need and purpose and environment—fit the 
living purpose, not the dead precedent. 
Emerson says: 
“ I thought the sparrow’s note from heaven, 
Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; 
I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; 
He sings the song, but it pleases not now, 
For I did not bring home the river and sky;— 
He sang to my ear,—they sang to my eye. 
The delicate shells lay on the shore; 
The bubbles of the latest wave 
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave; 
And the bellowing of the savage sea 
Greeted their safe escape to me. 
I wiped away the weeds and foam, 
I fetched my sea-born treasures home; 
But the poor unsightly, noisome things 
Had left their beauty on the shore, 
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.” 
Cheap ornament has been the bane of 
American architecture, whether it has been 
the jig-sawed atrocities of a day long happily 
past, or the painfully correct 
historic ornament moulded 
or pressed or even carved, 
from which we now suffer. 
There must be some reason 
for the use of ornament. 
There certainly was once. 
But even the best of classic 
ornament seems to me to 
sink into nonsignificance 
compared with its simple 
prototype. How infinitely 
more beautiful the hanging 
swags of fruit or of wreaths, 
leaves and flowers, showing 
forth the joyous ness of 
man’s harvest time, than 
the frozen fruit of his skill 
in ornate frieze and marble 
cap. Certainly when the 
artist, unable to control 
himself in the joy of his art, 
carved or painted on the 
walls of use, he glorified 
building. But how much 
of our so-called decoration 
springs from the fountain 
of unrestrainable art ? Do 
we not after all use decora¬ 
tion for color and texture, 
rather than for the expres¬ 
sion of ideals ? Ornament should for its 
excuse plead interest as well as beauty, but 
what interest can there be in endless repeti¬ 
tion even of a most interesting model, or 
meaningless and inappropriate historic orna¬ 
ment ? We carve and mould and paint to 
get texture and color, when the very rough 
materials that we hide away in cellar walls 
and backing, would give us better texture 
and better color than we can obtain in 
veneered surface or ornamented frieze. We 
are beginning to learn this in regard to brick, 
demanding that the brick shall show the 
touch of fire, and shall have some of the lovely 
texture of rough clay. But then we destroy 
largely its value by over ornamented wood 
or over cut stone. 
If we would consider the structural sig¬ 
nificance of all our material (and there is 
no architecture without this), if we would 
treat wood as wood, stone as stone, and brick 
and plaster for what they are, and carry the 
