“But as you have mentioned ancient dwellings, allow me to remark that those of Pompeii, even the most luxurious, do not exhibit externally any of those magnificent features which you seem to admire. The ancients reserved for the interior such luxury as they affected, and it does not appear that they troubled themselves to display anything of it to the passers-by. I have not a very clear idea of what their villas,—their country-houses,—may have been; but everything leads me to believe, as far as we can judge from the remains preserved to us, that in them nothing was sacrificed to that distinctively modern vanity which aims to make an external display of architectural forms to strike the vulgar.
“I believe that those country palaces of Northern Italy with which you have been so deeply smitten, are rather products of vanity than abodes adapted to the habits of those who have erected them; in fact, they have scarcely been inhabited, and the dilapidated condition in which you see them does not date from yesterday. Erected to satisfy vanity and the desire to make a show, they lasted as habitations only as long as works due to vanity are accustomed to last—that is, for a few years of the life of an individual; after which they were abandoned.”
“You call vanity,” replied M. Durosay, “what I think to be love of art—the desire to exhibit a work of art.”
“Probably we shall never agree upon that point,” answered Eugène. “I think that art—in architecture at least—consists in being truthful and simple. You see in it only a form that charms or repels you: I look for something else; or rather I consider first whether this form is really the expression of a requirement—whether a reason can be given for its existence; and it charms me only so far as this condition is fulfilled, according to my judgment.”
“You consider a barn, therefore, a work of art?”
“Certainly; if it is constructed so as to afford a suitable shelter for what it is intended to hold, it is, in my view, more admirable than an inconvenient palace, though decorated with colonnades and pediments.”
“You ought to go to America.”
“Perhaps it would be wise to do so, if I knew that its people tried to build simply in accordance with the tastes and requirements of the inmates. But in America, as everywhere else now-a-days, they make pretensions to style, and copy what they believe to be the beautiful par excellence; that is, they follow, without discrimination, traditions whose origin and principle they do not care to investigate.”
“Come,” said M. de Gandelau, who found the discussion rather tedious, “we have travelled a good way from Paul’s house; but to satisfy you, when you come and see my daughter in her new dwelling, we will have a pasteboard portico put up in front of one of the façades, and under the shade some Berri maidens dressed up as Venetians, and some gentlemen in scarlet robes playing on the guitar and the bassoon. It is getting late, and time to go to bed.”