Out of these physical necessities beauty may grow; but an
adjustment must first take place between the material stimulus and the
sense it affects. Beauty is something spiritual and, being such, it
rests not on the material constitution of each existence taken apart,
but on their conspiring ideally together, so that each furthers the
other's endeavour. Structure by itself is no more beautiful than
existence by itself is good. They are only potentialities or conditions
of excellence.

[Sidenote: Structures designed for display.]

An architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may have
recourse to a subsidiary construction. The facade, or a part of it, or
the interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to
elaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or
even conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely
beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given
concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front
in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it
overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite
another material. What we admire is not so much a facade as a triumphal
gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world,
wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home.
This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public,
to whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moral
sense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monuments
occupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside were
actually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in each
independently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautiful
facades, even if independent of their building, are buildings
themselves, and since their construction is decorative there is the
greater likelihood that their decoration should be structural.

In relation to the house, however, the facade in such an extreme case
would be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structural
within its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building where
construction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament has
an indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning about
it. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose the
fallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything is
tru