Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/269

1858.] and what of beauty was possible to them will appear, though it be only a crumbling heap of bricks where the chimney stood, or the grassy slope where the cellar-wall has fallen in.

It is for this reason that persons of taste have taken pains to face their houses with weather-stained and lichen-crusted stone, or invent proper names for them, in imitation of the English manor-houses. But Nature is jealous of this helping, and neither the lichens nor the names will stick, for the reason that they never grew there. They cannot be naturalized without naturalizing their conditions. The gray ancestral houses of England are the beautiful symbols of the permanence of family and of caste. They are the embodiments of traditional institutions and culture. When we speak of the House of Stanley or of Howard, the expression is not wholly figurative. We do not mean simply the men and women of these families, but the whole complex of this manifold environment which has descended to them and in the midst of which they have grown up,—no more to be separated from it than the polyp from the coral stem. All this is centralized and has its expression in the House.

Now as these conditions are not our conditions, the attempt to build fine houses is an attempt to import an effect where the cause has not existed. Our position is that of a perpetually shifting population,—the mass shifting and the individuals shifting, in place, circumstances, requirements. The movement is inevitable, and, whether desirable or not, we must conform to it. So we naturally build cheaply and slightly, that the house be not an incumbrance rather than a furtherance to our life. It is agreeable to the feelings to be well rooted and established, and the results in outward appearance are agreeable. But it is not desirable to be so niched into the rock, that a change of fortune, or even a change in the direction of a town-road, shall leave us high and dry, like the fossils of the Norwegian cliffs, but rather, like the shell-fish of our beaches, free to travel up and down with the tide.

The imitating of foreign examples comes from no real, heart-felt demand, but only from a fancied or simulated demand,—from tradition, association; at second-hand in one shape or another. It is at bottom something of the same flunkeyism that in a more exaggerated form assumes heraldic bearings and puts its servants into livery.

It may well reconcile us to our deprivation to remember at what cost these things we admire are established and kept up. The imagination is pleased with this stability; but it is bought too dear, if progress is to be sacrificed to it, if the freedom and the true lives of the members are to be merged in the family, and if they are to be the stones of which the house is built. It is not desirable to be adscriptus glebæ, whether the bonds be physical or only moral ones. We may well be content to have our limits free, even though our architecture suffer for it. It is better that houses should belong to men, and not men to houses.

But whether we are content or not, it is evident that all hope of improvement lies in the tendency, somewhat noticeable of late, to the abnegation of exotic styles and graces. We have survived the Parthenon pattern, and there seems to be a prospect that we shall outlive the Gothic cottage. Even the Anglo-Italian bracketed villa has seen its palmiest days apparently, and exhausted most of its variations. We are in an extremely chaotic state just now; but there seems to be an inclination towards more rational ways, at least in the plans and general arrangement of houses.

Of course mere negation cannot carry us far. We sometimes hear it said that it is as easy for a house to look well as to look ill, and those who say this seem to think that the failure is due solely to want of due consideration of the problem on the part of our builders, and that we have but to leave out their