venge” says the “blessed church bells” do, the fiendish noise merely draws more demons about me. I cannot collect my thoughts. I must wait for the planchette to move. I cannot see to make a mark, literally, on my paper until some charitable inspiration burns over the drawing-board and in that manner illumines it.
People affect to sneer at what they call the pose of an artistic temperament. There is no such thing as an artistic temperament, really, some eccentric equation. If you are a good man you are an artist
in your particular channel of usefulness. If you are a bad one, then, in the gentle words of the Earl of Beaconsfield to the noisy voter who interrupted his speech—“You oughtn’t to be.” The inspiration 1 am talking about is the element of godliness that is in every one of us, as it was in the Savior preeminently, the centrifugal incentive to exploit as much faith, hope and charity in the world through the chosen medium, in this case architecture, as lies within our power. Now, when you stop to consider that this inspiration of ours is not the first of its line but a reincarnation of predecessors which have repeatedly visited our antecedents since as long ago as the inception of the design for the Sparrow house
in the sixteenth century, and made them, in turn, its votaries, you can understand how the thing operates —why it is a peremptory long-distance call.
“Soldiers!” said Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids, “forty centuries are watching your achievement.” But it was not the vast size of Cheops, nor the miracle of transporting the huge stones for its construction that appealed to this prodigious military captain (cribbed from Victor Hugo) so much as it was the people who did the stunt—those Egyptians, those pharaohs, those dy
nasties—the personal element and dramatic story, the Pyramids epitomized so dynamically as to awaken spirituality even in a foreign invader bent on ruthless conquest. If the Pyramids, handicapped by their negative environment of arid sand, could have gotten Napoleon on the ’phone where one of our psycho-analysts would have failed before so positive an adversary, may we not readily understand how easy it is for the Sparrow house in a setting of quaint graciousness to captivate the art student in quest of just such inspiration? Like the Pyramids, it is not so much the architectural fabric as it is the intimate home history of England we read in every significant motive and detail: and that means
THE SPARROW HOUSE IN THE BUTTER MARKET, IPSWICH, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND
People affect to sneer at what they call the pose of an artistic temperament. There is no such thing as an artistic temperament, really, some eccentric equation. If you are a good man you are an artist
in your particular channel of usefulness. If you are a bad one, then, in the gentle words of the Earl of Beaconsfield to the noisy voter who interrupted his speech—“You oughtn’t to be.” The inspiration 1 am talking about is the element of godliness that is in every one of us, as it was in the Savior preeminently, the centrifugal incentive to exploit as much faith, hope and charity in the world through the chosen medium, in this case architecture, as lies within our power. Now, when you stop to consider that this inspiration of ours is not the first of its line but a reincarnation of predecessors which have repeatedly visited our antecedents since as long ago as the inception of the design for the Sparrow house
in the sixteenth century, and made them, in turn, its votaries, you can understand how the thing operates —why it is a peremptory long-distance call.
“Soldiers!” said Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids, “forty centuries are watching your achievement.” But it was not the vast size of Cheops, nor the miracle of transporting the huge stones for its construction that appealed to this prodigious military captain (cribbed from Victor Hugo) so much as it was the people who did the stunt—those Egyptians, those pharaohs, those dy
nasties—the personal element and dramatic story, the Pyramids epitomized so dynamically as to awaken spirituality even in a foreign invader bent on ruthless conquest. If the Pyramids, handicapped by their negative environment of arid sand, could have gotten Napoleon on the ’phone where one of our psycho-analysts would have failed before so positive an adversary, may we not readily understand how easy it is for the Sparrow house in a setting of quaint graciousness to captivate the art student in quest of just such inspiration? Like the Pyramids, it is not so much the architectural fabric as it is the intimate home history of England we read in every significant motive and detail: and that means
THE SPARROW HOUSE IN THE BUTTER MARKET, IPSWICH, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND