of real, not fancied, requirement. As long as it is our whims, and not
our necessities, that build, it matters little how much pains we take,
how learned and assiduous we are. I have no hope of any considerable
advantage from the abundant exhortation to frankness and genuineness in
the use of materials, unless it lead first of all to a more frank and
genuine consideration of the occasion for using the materials at all. If
it lead only to open timber roofs and stone walls in place of the
Renaissance stucco, I think the gain very questionable. The stucco is
more comfortable, and at least we had got used to it. These are matters
of detail: suppose your details _are_ more genuine, if the whole design
is a sham, if the aim be only to excite the admiration of bystanders,
the thing is not altered, whether the bystanders are learned in such
matters or ignorant. The more excellent the work is in its kind, the
more insidious and virulent the falsity, if the whole occasion of it be
a pretence. If it must be false, let it by all means be gross and
glaring,--we shall be the sooner rid of it.

It may be asked whether, then, I surrender the whole matter of
appearance,--whether the building may as well be ugly as beautiful. By
no means; what I have said is in the interest of beauty, as far as it is
possible to us. Positive beauty it may be often necessary to forego, but
bad taste is never necessary. Ugliness is not mere absence of beauty,
but absence of it where it ought to be present. It comes always from a
disappointed expectation,--as where the lineaments that do not disgust
in the potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus,
whom accordingly Nature kindly puts out of sight. It is bad taste that
we suffer from,--not plainness, not indifference to appearance, but
features misplaced, shallow mimicry of "effects" where their causes do
not exist, transparent pretences of all kinds, forcing attention to the
absence of the reality, otherwise perhaps unnoticed. The first step