The Express.
London, England, 1853-09-10 00:00:00

OUR STREET ARCHITECTURE.

The Fine Arts, like all other businesses of life,
depend for t' sir successful exercise mainly upon
common sense and honesty. Genius itself, far more
frequently than is commonly supposed, consists in
the possession of an uncommon amount of common.
sense, and a more than ordinarily thorough integrity.
Take almoat any example of bad art, architectural or
otherwise, and you will be able to reduce most of its
shortcomings to moral defects in the artist; to want
of apprehension of reality—that is, truth ; to want of
thoughtfulness and diligence to make whatever ap-
prehension he possesses effectual; to reliance upon
the foolishness and ignorance of those who
are to judge his work; to vanity, and so
forth. Until the essential of bad
art is comprehended, we have littlO hope of
art's regeneration. There is some prospect, how-
ever, of a popular recognition of this great truth.
Mr. Ruskin, among writers, has done much towards
making it felt; and we know that it is a truth
deeply implanted in the minds of a few artists from
whom the world is now looking for great things.
Let us consider for a moment what are the con-
clusions to be arrived at, with regard to metropolitan
street architecture, by a very simple and moderate
exercise of common-sense and intellectual integrity.
The adaptation of proper means to the obtaining of
any particular end is such an obvious and common-
place duty and necessity, that its omission indicates
rather moral idiocy than immorality in the common
sense of the word. Yet the grossest neglect and
ignorance of such adaptation is everywhere vi-
sible in our secular architecture. Walk from
the Pall-mall end of St. James's-street to
the West Strand. In that half mile of
street and square, you have several of the most
costly edifices of modern London. You have Greek,
Roman, and Renaissance facades and portico', in
every degree of purity and profligacy, from the noble
simplicity of the Reform Club to the far more costly
club just finished on the opposite side of the way, in
which there are almost as many sins against good
sense as there are stones. Imperfect adaptation of
means to ends is, however, an error common to them
both, and to every other edifice on the whole
line of street which we have indicated.
In all of them we have the architectural modes of
the brilliant south applied to the purposes of the
gloomy north. If the apertures for light in the Re-
form Club are not too large or numerous for a similar
house in Florence, it follows absolutely that they are
not large or numerous enough by half for the pur-
' poses of a London house. And yet to have made
them larger or more numerous would have ruined
the character of the style of architecture adopted.
The natural conclusion which an uninstructed savage
I would draw from this fact is that we know
of no other style better suited to our wants,
and that we are incapable of building securely with
larger apertures. Again, from the vast sums of
money spent upon transporting stone for some of
these edifices, and from the extreme care with which
in others we have plastered up all vestiges of brick
construction from view, the same savage would con-
clude that bricks had ever been under an architec-
tural ban, and that stone was as essential to archi-
tecture as feathers to a court head-dress. The facts
of the case are remarkably the reverse. In the Tudor
Gothic we have the finest secular architecture
in the world. It is, moreover, our own peculiar
style,—the only style, indeed, that is peculiarly oars,
—its entire character is English through and
through. An ancient English mansion expresses in
the liveliest manner the feelings of English comfort
and independence. The glowing brick-work, set off
by slips and notches of cold stone ashlar, bids defi-
ance to the winter's gloom, and reminds us of
the merry hearth, about which the whole edi-
fice looks as if it had gradually agglome-
rated by a process of crystallisation. The
chimneys are conspicuous objects, as they should be,
where the hearth is of so much consequence. The
vast mullioned oriels make the moat of the misty
northern day. No interior arrangements are sacri-
ficed to a proud facade. The outside at once declares
that the inside has been the grand object of the
architect's solicitude. It does not court the suffrages
of the passing public at the expense of its interior hos-
pitalities. Every jutting gable and shadowy recess
is a mystery, of which the key is only to be found hi
some internal convenience and comfort. And yet,
with all this carelessness of what the world outside
may think of it, this old mansion carries, to our mind,
a nobler air than any other form of private habita-
tion hitherto invented, an air as much braver and
lovelier than that of the modern " Grecian house,"
as a face lighted up with health, strength, humanity,
and kindliness, though somewhat irregular in feature,
is lovelier and braver than that of the symmetrical
Adonis of the barber's window.
All external ostentation of wealth of material in
a private dwelling is contrary and revolting to the
subtle moral sense of art. If there ate Houses of
Parliament, Public Museums, and Royal Palaces to
be built, there is no moral reason why the builders
should not spend an extra hundred thousand pounds
or so in transporting their stone material from
some far off quarry, though we think that there is a
very good artistical reason why, in En, and at least,
they should not do so. But when a private person

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' hedges himself in with wetly transported stone, he
proclaims, indeed, that he has a soul above bricks,
but below—architecture; for true architecture, like
all other art, is simple, appropriate, expressive of our
best humanity, and therefore in its private and in-
dividual application, humble, though not mean. And
if, for this and other reasons, stone is an inferior
material to brick for metropolitan private architec-
ture, how incomparably worse must we consider
the plaster mockeries of stone which meet our eyes
in almost every modern dwelling, from the mansion
of the peer to the habitation of the ten-pound house-
holder !