Fred.

LETTER XXIX.

From the Architect.

Consistency, comfort, and carpets.

My dear Fred:  I don’t despise the new fashions.  I admire them—­when they are good.  Will you please try to understand that a thing of beauty is a joy forever?  Whatever is born of truth, whether in art or religion, belongs to eternity; it never goes out of fashion.  Will you also remember that modern styles, modes, fashions, inventions,—­call them what you will,—­are the mere average product of human thought and labor during a few years; the old that abides is drawn from the superlatively good of former countless generations, culled over and over again till that alone remains which has stood the test of your critics and reformers all along down from Adam, or up from the last monkey who wept to find his first-born without a tail and morally accountable.

Certainly it is easier to say what to avoid than what to accept, for there’s more of it.  Broad is the road of error, and the faults and follies, vices and sins, that wrangle and riot therein, are thicker than crickets on a sandy road in October,—­thicker and blacker.  You may catch them all day and there’ll be just as many left.  But the devoted followers of truth you may count on your fingers and carry them home in your bosom.  Besides, the right thing to do cannot be told in detail for another, since every man must manifest his own individuality as he must work out his own salvation.  In the millennium I expect we shall find no two houses built or furnished alike.

No; you are not to understand that lath and plaster are unfit for first-class dwellings, but there is no sense in trimming a gingham suit with point lace.  A general uniformity of value in the material of which your castle is built is as essential as uniformity of style.

Yes; there is an objection to cheap floors, carpets or not; and now I’ve gone through your last lot of interrogation-points backward, which brings me where I left off in the former letter.

You propose to carpet the floors and ask to have them made to fit the carpets.  Would you also like the walls to fit the paper-hangings, and the windows the curtains?  Do you know what kind of carpets you will use in each room; just how long and how wide they will be to half an inch; the width of the borders; how much they will stretch in putting down; how much “take up” in the making (you see I can use interrogation-points)?  Do you really know anything about them with certainty?  I ask for information, as the same request is often made as to building the house to fit the carpets, and any attempt to comply with it seems to me a great waste of mathematics.