the two happily combined—a war on bad art and on a bad educational system joined economically in one.
So much, then, for thoughtless superfluity as an impediment to a recognition of true values. I want now to come to the importance of permanence as a condition underlying the aim of all production if it is to be wholesome in its social results. I have said that an instinct for permanence is what differentiates artistic from supposed trade interests. Take architecture. Do you imagine that architects or builders are likely to design or build in the same style for a system of short leaseholds as they might for freeholds? And is the building which is calculated just to "save its face" until the lease expires likely to be so good either in design or workmanship?
Read, in that connection, what Coventry Patmore says in his essay on "Greatness in Architecture":
"The house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was," he says, "fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many
