I. ARCHITECTURE 19

of pleasing, if people will attend to it; that there is no law against its pleasing; but, on the contrary, something wrong either in the spectator or the art, when it ceases to please. Now, therefore, if you feel that your present school of architecture is unattractive to you, I say there is something wrong, either in the architecture or in you; and I trust you will not think I mean to flatter you when I tell you, that the wrong is not in you, but in the architecture. Look at this for a moment (fig. 2);¹ it is a window actually existing-a window of an English domestic building*-a window built six hundred years ago. You will not tell me you have no pleasure in looking at this; or that you could not, by any possibility, become interested in the art which produced it; or that, if every window in your streets were of some such form, with perpetual change in their ornaments, you would pass up and down the street with as much indifference as now, when your windows are of this form (fig. 1). Can you for an instant suppose that the architect was a greater or wiser man who built this, than he who built that? or that in the arrangement of these dull and monotonous stones there is more wit and sense than you can penetrate? Believe me, the wrong is not in you; you would all like the best things best, if you only saw them. What is wrong in you is your temper, not your taste; your patient and trustful temper, which lives in houses whose architecture it takes for granted, and subscribes to public edifices from which it derives no enjoyment.

5. “Well, but what are we to do?” you will say to me; “we cannot make architects of ourselves.” Pardon me, you can-and you ought. Architecture is an art for

* Oakham Castle. I have enlarged this illustration from Mr. Hudson Turner’s admirable work on the domestic architecture of England.2

¹ [Here printed as Plate II.]

² [Some Account of Domestic Architecture in England from the Conquest to the end of the 13th Century, by T. Hudson Turner, 1851. The window, from the Hall of Oakham Castle, faces p. 30. For another reference to the book, see below, p. 140 n..]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]