ess directions, which art will undergo. Caprice will follow caprice
and no style will be developed.

[Sidenote: Failure of adapted styles.]

A settled style is perhaps in itself no desideratum. A city that should
be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new
inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain
interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and
there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their
glitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart
is usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly
manners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite
genuine; adaptations have to be introduced and every adaptation, the
bolder it is, runs the greater risk of being extravagant. Nothing is
more pitiable than the attempts people make, who think they have an
exquisite sensibility, to live in a house all of one period. The
connoisseur, like an uncritical philosopher, boasts to have patched his
dwelling perfectly together, but he has forgotten himself, its egregious
inhabitant. Nor is he merely a blot in his own composition; his presence
secretly infects and denaturalises everything in it. Ridiculous himself
in such a setting, he makes it ridiculous too by his aesthetic pose and
appreciations; for the objects he has collected or reproduced were once
used and prized in all honesty, when life and inevitable tradition had
brought them forth, while now they are studied and exhibited, relics of
a dead past and evidences of a dead present. Historic remains and
restorations might well be used as one uses historic knowledge, to serve
some living interest and equip the mind for the undertakings of the
hour. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
Ideas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideas
and have not been congealed into memories. Incorporated into a design
that calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as words
that still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. All
depends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so firm and genuine
an appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is still
serviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead.

[Sidenote: Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.]

An artist may be kept true to his style either by ignorance of all
others or by love