If these views seem to any one low and prosaic, let me remind him that
poetry does not differ from prose in being false. We must respect the
facts. If there were in this country any considerable number of persons
to whom the buildings they daily enter had any positive permanent value
besides convenience,--who looked upon the church, the bank, or the
house, as upon a poem or a statue,--the birth of a national architecture
would be assured. But as the fact stands, while utility, and that of a
temporary and makeshift sort, is really the first consideration, we are
not yet ready to acknowledge this to others or to ourselves, and so fail
to get from it what negative advantage we might, but blunder on under
some fancied necessity, spending what we can ill spare, to the
defrauding of legitimate demands, as a sort of sin-offering for our
aesthetic deficiency, or as a blind to conceal it. The falsehood, like
all falsehood, defeats itself; the pains we take only serve to make the
failure more complete.
This is displayed most fully in the doings of "Building Committees."
Here we see what each member (perhaps it would be more just to say the
least judicious among them) would do in his own case, were he free from
the rude admonitions of necessity. He has at least to live in his own
house, and so cannot escape some attention to the substantial
requirements of it; though some houses, too, seem emancipated from such
considerations, and to have been built for any end rather than to live
in.
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