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

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-

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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