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 glebes_, 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.
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