The Press. — London, England, 1857-12-19 00:00:00

yittraturt. Remarks on Secular and Domestic Architecture, Present and Future. By George Gilbert Scott, A.R.A. London : Murray. THIS volume is a very interesting one. It is the product of a warm heart, a religious mind, and a fertile but not undisciplined imagina tion. It is pervaded by a single-minded and sincere spirit; and the entire absence of pre tension, of all sneers at rival architects or un professional critics, is a refreshing contrast to the lofty scorn with which some of Mr. Scott's brethren treat the unfortunate layman who is audacious enough to have an opinion on the. fitness of the church in which he is to worship or of the house in which he is to live. Nor have we any reason to suppose that the author himself is belied by these prominent and agreeable characteristics of bis work. No one, we believe, is in his:professional capacity more patient in explanation, more liberal-minded in entertaining fresh ideas, or more ready in accepting suggestions, than the accomplished writer of the pages before us ; and we have little doubt but that these qualities will, with his extended knowledge and correct taste, afford him many more opportunities of putting into practical form the ideas he has here laid before the public. In his opening chapter, " The Present State of Domestic Architecture in its Vernacular Form," Mr. Scott insists with crushing empha sis on the lugubrious ugliness or tasteless finery of almost all houses built at the present day. Down to the Great Rebellion, he con siders that England possessed a national ar chitecture ; but that, owing to the revival of classical associations and " the long sojourn " of our nobles on the Continent," it has since that time gradually declined, till the war from 1193 to 1815 swept it away altogether. He does not more precisely indicate the causes which have substituted flattened roofs for overhanging gables, and square white Palla dian mansions for picturesque Elizabethan manor-houses. We should be rather inclined to ascribe the change to the writers of the eighteenth century, who, without perhaps having a word to say on the subject of archi• tecture, were imbued with a classical spirit which could not but have its effect in other departments besides those of poetry and phi losophy. The spirit of the French Revolution, tending to produce equality in man, a forced symmetry in institutions, and a general dead level in everything, must have felt itself in stinctively and radically opposed to a form of art which long continued to embody many of the feudal influences under which it had come into being. What true democrat could endure to see a house such as that described by Mr. Scott in Chapter VI., where the domestics should be restricted to a minor court only, and where the apartments in which one citizen cooked the dinner should he offensively dis tinguished by its external character from that in which another citizen consumed it? But whatever may be the cause of the decay of Gothic architecture among us, the fact re mains the same; and, probably, few persons of taste will be inclined to dispute the justice of Mr. Scott's strictures on the greater portion of that by which it has been displaced. What, then, is to be the remedy ? Eccle siastical architecture has been already revolu tionised " whereas forty years ago no one " dreamed, if a new church were to be built, " of assimilating it in style to those bequeathed " to us by our forefathers, the reverse is now " the case; no one now entertains the idea of " building one in any style but those of our "old churches." It remains to revolutionise civil and domestic architecture to the same extent. We are not to suppose that there is one style for a church and another for a house, and that Gothic isto be confined to the former, while Venetian, Roman, or builder's compo site will do well enough for the latter. The only question, according to Mr. Scott, is, what style of Gothic are we to choose ? The answer Is, no style in particular, but one based prir eipally on the works of the fourteenth century with unlimited power of adaptation to the rc qturements of our own time. We have bee, pr i n. *The shareholders of the London and Eastern Bank will long have reason to remember the view of Branksea Castle which He has also great sense, and some wit. With ftury, figured on the walls of the Royal Academy a year or two since, these qualifications, therefore, and the corn- le rc- If anything could aggravate the loss of their money, it would be wand of a brisk , the knowledge that it had been spent on building of so smart style, we need not been childish and absurd a character. wonder that in " The Three Clerks" he has I t F 1 1 3 1 1 THE PRESS, DECEMBER 19, 1857. long in arriving at a point where such a pos sibility as this even looms in the distance. Some architects wish to have a style ready ' made, and adopt the Elizabethan in its en tirety. Not long since, if a man wished for something more ornate, he built himself an abbey. This fashion is now past ; that of castle-building, however, as the author ob serves, still survives, in spite of the clever caricatures of Pugin : The Royal Academy exhibitions• continue periodically to show new specimens of it, and the largest and most care fully and learnedly executed Gothic mansion of the present day is not only a castle in name,—it is not a sham fortress, such as those of twenty years back, whose frowning gateway is perhaps flanked on either side with a three-foot clipped edge,--but it is a real and carefully constructed mediaeval fortress, capable of standing a siege from an Edwardian army,—a bulwark against the inroads of a Llewelyn or a Glendower. No pains or out lay have been grudged to render the fortress impregnable under mediaeval conditions, and against an enemy of five centuries back, — Whose bones are dust and their good swords rust, — Whose souls are with the saints, we trust. Now this is the very height of masquerading. The learning and skill with which the pageant has been carried out reflect the highest credit upon the archi tect; yet I cannot but feel it to have been a serious injury to our cause, that so unreal a task should have been imposed upon him ; and a misfortune of no ordinary kind that so much knowledge and skill should not have been directed to the adaptation of the noble style in which he was working to the genuine requirements of the nine teenth century. We regret that space does not permit us to discuss as we should have wished to do some of the details occurring in Mr. Scott's third and fourth chapters. We will make one or two remarks on another point—that of the adoption of Gothic, or modified Gothic, in the streets of towns. Mr. Scott urges, logically enough, that if a style is good in one place, it should be so in another—that if a Gothic mansion or villa is appropriate in the country, it ought not to seem out of place in a town. We can hardly flatter him with the expecta tion that this view will be generally adopted, unless an entire revolution should take place in our national taste. No one will deny the picturesqueness of the High-street of Oxford, or of a town like Nuremberg, with its quaint irre gular houses, its gables of every variety of patternlshowing the strong individualities of the burghers who built them manifest in every curve of its woodwork and angle of its stone. But these specimens can hardly be called imposing. And if the inhabitant of a town at the present day has any wish on archi tectural subjects, it is, probably, that the streets in which he lives should be imposing and regular: that they should resemble, for instance, the Ludwigstrasse at Munich, or the Rue de Rivoli at Paris. If Mr. Cockerell were to design a street of Palladian and Mr. Scott one of Gothic houses, and submit them for approbation to a mixed jury of Englishmen of all ranks and professions, there can be little doubt which way the scale would incline. With regard to detached villas and suburban houses, few persons, probably, will hesitate to claim for Gothic an undoubted preeminence. However tasteless may be some of the ex amples near London, it is impossible to go into a district where a good architect has been at work without recognising its immense supe riority. How charming, for instance, are many of the small residences in the Lake country, those especially in the neighbourhood of Ambleside. And it is impossible not to see that in the case of these, as, indeed, of larger houses, the Gothic style admits of develop ments and additions better than any other. In the symmetrical arrangement which is the pride of a Palladian villa, there is an element of " finality " which makes any proposal of " more rooms " a horror not to be thought of. You would quite spoil the facade. Whereas in a Gothic house you are not unlikely to improve it : at all events it is always pos sible to treat the excrescence in an unobjec tionable manner. With regard to the employment of Gothic for large houses in towns, Mr. Scott seems to have overlooked one point which we have always thought should be taken into con- 1231 sideration. We allude to the great spacious ness which Gothic, if it is to be made dignified as well as picturesque, seems to require in comparison with Palladian architecture. What we mean, though not easy to convey in a definition, will be at once understood from an instance. Would any of the club-houses in Pall-mall look as well as they do if, occupying merely the same area, they were built in the Gothic instead of their own style? Would Bridgewater or Dorchester House wear their present palatial air if they exhibited turrets, gables, and oriels, with more or less irregularity of plan, instead of their Venetian casements and regular entablatures ? Would not Gothic architecture require in each of these cases a building twice the size to pro duce the same amount of effect? The pro portions of Gothic are different from those of Florentine or Venetian buildings. Excessive height does not seem to injure the beauty of the latter ; but the former is, in its best do mestic examples, spread rather than piled, and loses greatly by being obliged to resort to the heaped-up construction which the exigencies of a town site generally demand. Perhaps the most generally interesting chapter in Mr. Scott's " Remarks " is the one " On the Boundaries of Truth and Falsehood "in Architecture." It must here be sufficient to say that his views coincide in many respects with those of Mr. Ruskin, and he shows almost equal ingenuity in answering the ob jections that may be brought against them. We need not, however, enter into these, for all who take up the book at all will be sure to turn to this part of it, and will be amused— or perhaps annoyed—as they look round their rooms, to find in what an atmosphere of shams they habitually live. Mr. Scott's style is exceedingly readable. It is vivid and vigorous, and has the brisk and straightforward air which is always given by a thorough grasp and knowledge of the subject. Though he disclaims any attempt at the graces of composition, we have only observed ono word we should like to expunge. At page 261 we find the following : Whether, then, the architecture of the future be elimi nated by developing on a classic or a Gothic nucleus, &c. This use of the word " eliminate " is a sole cism. To " eliminate " is, literally, "to turn " out of doors " (e limine), " to get rid of from "a calculation," "to put aside "—not "to elicit" or " make to grow"—which is the sense in which Mr. Scott here uses it. The mistake has become so common that all who value correctness of language should hunt it down wherever it is met with. The Three Clerks. A Novel. By Anthony Trollope. Three Vols. London : Bentley. WE confess to having been among those who considered that Mr. Trollope's novel of last season was somewhat unduly praised. " Bar chester Towers " had none of the elements of a first class novel. It stood unmistakeably in the front rank of the second. But above this Mr. Trollope does not seem able to rise. " The Three Clerks " possesses merits of precisely the same order as " Barchester Towers. There is nothing eminently ingenious in the plot, !eminently knowing in the characters, or eminently new in the moral. If, however, we might hazard a conjecture on the state of Mr. Trollope's own mind, we should say that he is perfectly aware of this,—that he knows where his forte lies, and where it does not lie. We believe that he has deliberately aimed at achieving success by extreme carefulness and correctness, rather than by strokes of genius— by taking care that no one part of his story shall fall much below the other parts—and by resolving that where incident was perforco obliged to flag, the language should still be kept up to the mark. Thus plot, character, and purpose, though none brilliant, are all equally good—all help ono another, and coin bine into a very well-flavoured whole. We should add that Mr. Trollope seems to possess the advantage of a high flow of animal spirits, and always writes likes a man in good humour. .;.th