He saw around
him beautiful old houses like his own, old churches which spoke of
a high natural instinct for fineness of form and detail. These
things seemed to stand for a widespread and lively joy in simple
beauty which seemed to have vanished out of the world. In ancient
times it was natural to the old builders if they had, say, a barn
to build, to make it strong and seemly and graceful; to buttress it
with stone, to bestow care and thought upon coign and window-ledge
and dripstone, to prop the roof on firm and shapely beams, and to
cover it with honest stone tiles, each one of which had an
individuality of its own. But now he saw that if people built
naturally, they ran up flimsy walls of brick, tied them together
with iron rods, and put a curved roof of galvanised iron on the
top. It was bad enough that it should be built so, but what was
worse still was that no one saw or heeded the difference; they
thought the new style was more convenient, and the question of
beauty never entered their minds at all. They remorselessly pulled
down, or patched meanly and sordidly, the old work.
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