TECTURAL ARTICLES. (X.) Domestic buildings have always furnished a clue to the manner of life of their inhabitants; first of the individual, then of the community of individuals, and finally of that grouping of com munities which forms a nation. They are something almost of the soil, since they are so much something of the race. Domestic architecture has always reacted to outside influences, but funda mentally it has developed in a much more local way. Each sec tion of a country, with its own individual habits and traditions of living, has had its local expression of domestic architecture, and yet all these varied expressions have had something in common, namely a reflection of the mental outlook and the physical customs of each individual race of peoples. Outside influences have tinged development, but no one country has ever completely mislaid the national characteristics of its home building. Very gradually, however, as international relations have increased, the barriers of race have been lowered, and the domestic architecture of one country has reacted increasingly to the influences of an other. To-day intellectual movements spread with growing rapid ity. Interchange of ideas makes for greater community of out look; and in architecture there have crept in certain features which are a common expression of requirements shared by people in many countries.
England.—English domestic architecture provides an illustra tion of this theory, though house building in Great Britain has for so long set a standard to the world that it has itself been a main source of inspiration, and as such has latterly been compara tively immune from foreign influences. Prof. Santayana, in his essay on "English Architecture," mentions that "strictly speaking, there is no English architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated. . . . How gently, for instance, how pleas antly, the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy shores!" This appreciation is a very true one. Foreign influences, beginning in Norman times, working through the various phases of Mediaevalism, and the Dutch and Italian importations, to the periods of Classic Revival, have all left their mark on English domestic architecture. But always these influences have been
absorbed and transmuted into something so removed from the original prototype that the result has become a national expression.
English domestic architecture stands pre-eminent ; and that is largely owing to the presence, from whatever influences derived, of certain precious and peculiar qualities : a natural and unaffected use of beautiful materials ; an intimate sense of scale, bringing Eng lish homes into a beautiful relationship with the countryside ; a simplicity which rejects pretention and pomp. The home is a place designed to live in, and not primarily to receive in. England's Jacobean and Queen Anne houses are at once naïve, friendly and intimate, with touches of quiet fancy in the detail of tall gables, chimneys and carved panelling. In Georgian houses there is a warm friendly brickwork, an air of breeding and gentility in the quiet formality of the charming fronts behind which lie rooms at once so convenient in shape and so affable in decoration. In the I8th century there is just a touch of pedantry, which is less display of learning than intellectual good humour; then comes the period just preceding our own times, which has provided the one real menace to a continuity of fine tradition. This break was due to a variety of causes : to a i 9th century "revival" of Greek and Roman architecture, from which resulted the outcrop of pseudo Italian "villas"; to the teachings of Ruskin as misinterpreted first by an eager band of seekers after architectural truth, and after wards by speculating builders. Or, which is more likely, to the change in social conditions brought about by the great industrial era of the 19th century, dominated by the advent of machinery and characterized by a degradation of the human ideal. Archi tecture reflected the human characteristics of the time and these were not of the type which would promote beautiful qualities in architecture.