The Wadsworth House, Middletown, Conn.
EFFLORESCENCE OF COMMERCIALISM.
have not succeeded. It is, indeed, a grand misfit, because we do not define art rightly. Yet people appear not to want to divine the true definition, no doubt on account of a well-founded premonition that it is going to be an unequivocal rebuke to the selfishness that exacts a certain rate per cent. of return out of everything. Commercialism may defer, but cannot defeat, the enevitable. Art means charity. Now if it were only that kind of charity which the lexicon of commercialism defines as the giving of tithes of whatever a man possesses to the poor, we could still manage as did a certain rich young man we have read about in the lesson. And like him, not being entirely satisfied in our consciences nor with results, we could demand, as did he, what we yet lack, what latent phase of cunning we have overlooked? And it will then become our turn to be the exceeding sorrowful party, for there is no cunning about it. What this generation yet lacks—we have quite everything else—is a sufficiency of the vast, comprehensive form of charity that was intended to be the end and object of every life. That is the synonym of art.
CHAPTER III
THE ANCIENT RÉGIME AND—ANDREW JACKSON
Veneration for ancestors, and for what ancestors knew, has not been regarded as an American virtue. Yet there was a time entirely beyond the memory of this generation when traditions were religiously handed down and respected in America. It is heresy to suppose that the Colonial builders were au fait in the science of æsthetics. They were not. There was more excuse for ignorance upon their part than there is for ignorance upon ours; but architecture as a fine art was as little understood by the farmer at large in pre-revolutionary times as is evidenced by the modern farmer whose concrete ideas upon the subject are so charmingly set forth in the curiosity I have been fortunate to secure for this chapter ([Plate XVIII]). Only, no Colonial farmer would have dared to perpetuate such originality, even though he dreamed it in his
MANTELPIECE, AMERICAN RENAISSANCE. EPOCH 1806.