The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-01 00:00:00

Napoleon 111 's Transformation of Paris,

How much soever there may be in the existing
Government of France on which Englishmen can-
not look with satisfaction, the Saturday _Review
remarks, it cannot be denied that during the last
ten years commercial advances and " strategical
exigencies" have, between them, given an impulse
to architecture in that country which has called

forth noteworthy results. Even our insular vanity,
impervious as it is on many points alike to ridicule
and to reason, has been lately compelled at once to
admire much of what has been done in Paris and

despise most of what bas been done in London

And those who are aware of the taste and skill
which place the French, in art generally, really
and truly in their favourite position as the " leaders
of European civilisation," and who remember that,
during the middle ages, they were simply the
greatest and the most inventive architects of Chris-
tendom, will be ready to believe that, amongst a
certain number of failures or partial successes, they
cannot have half rebuilt the main streets of their
capital without producing much which may well
make us blush for Tyburnia and Kensington, for
what has been done in Cromwell-road, and for what
is doing in Downing-street. We will give but one
example here, but it shall be a decisive one. It is
enough to look at their Exhibition Bailding—at
once graceful, massive; appropriate, and original—
and at the huge block which so unaccountably lin-
gers of our own, and to recognise our superiors.
Whilst, however, we confess all this to the full,

we are not at all disposed to hold up the recen

works, in Paris and elsewhere, as either thoroughly
satisfactory in themselves or as models for our in-
struction. Things during the last ten years
have been done too rapidly, and on too large
a scale to admit of that thoughtful study and
careful execution which are at the bottom of good
work in architecture as in everything else, Per-
haps the very best of the modern houses of Paris,
such as those engraved by Mr. Fergusson in the
volume which we cannot recommend too often to
our readers' notice, are amongst those erected at the
beginning of the period of reconstruction. It is im-
possible to escape the conviction that, since that
time, the architects, skilful and thorough as they
are, have been overtasked ; although even a hasty
survey shows that they rarely produce anything ab•
solutely tame, and, it need hardly be said, never fall
into that mindless commonplace, that fixed and
deeply-seated clumsiness, which the barbarous
builders to whom our contractors apparently en-
trust the new regions of London seems as little able
to escape from as to be sensible of.

We will name a few noticeable specimens, in the
hope that readers who happen to visit Paris may be
induced to examine them, and then, recalling for a
moment Belgrave-square, or Queen's-gate, orAlbert-
road, or Westbourne-terrace—anything and every-
thing in short that has been built on a system in our
ugly capital—may ask whether our criticism be riot
only too just. Such are the Restaurant de la Belle
Gabrielle, the corner house of the Rue Nicolas
Flamel (elegant), and the Maison Tour (more severe)
—all instancesain the best part ot the Rue Rivoli.
No. 43, Boulevart de Sebastopol (rive gauche), and
the corner house of the Rue Reamur and Rue S.
Martin, exhibit graceful and original treatment of
the balcony ; No. 10 in the other half of the Sebas.
topol Boulevart is an instance of the felicitous ma-
nagement of pilasters. It would be easy to treble
our list. Almost everywhere we find some at least
of what may be called the fundamental principles
of domestic architecture followed—elegant and
varied decoration, individuality of design (few
houses being absolutely like their neighbours), and,
so far es strikes the eye, truthful and solid construc-
tion. Where a space has to be bridged ever, as in
the windows of a shop, the French architect either
throws an arch at once, which is certainly the most
satisfactory mode to the eye and the stablest for the
building, or he makes the upper line of the shop
front flat, and places a graceful low window be-
neath the arch, which then spans two stories. In
England we generally have a dead uniformity of
uglinesr, each house as like all the rest ot the row as if,
the Demon of Monotony had cast them in a mould
whilst, even in our more elaborate attempts the front
wall of a shop almost always appears to rest on
sheets of plate-glass, the real supports being a couple
of thin iron columns, which the builder absurdly
tries to conceal. Our decorations are either absolutely
nothing—the bald wall and the square hole—or vary
between the eternal triangular pediment and bracket
heading, and the diseased efflorescence of badly-
modelled garland which breaks out in the neigh-
bourhood of Queen's Gate, or in the Victoria Ter-
minus hotel. Of the materials which nature has
given us we make, in nineteen cases out of twenty,
ennve.n
no appreciable use whatever. AVe cannot
bake our excellent clays to a lasting surface ; we
cannot model the most plastic substance
i,ne er
seiu)nlaaseetaesrrutetr
into any form but an ill -shaped lump.
in league with the house pointer, thenp
d
N:aripeltaice:
e
nthat a
nbirni lookcgktshe wa gloomy,ll wth one andnf forthwith—inthu
endlessof bright and durable plaster—daubs it with
a dismal gray, which must henceforth be smeared
with white lead every other year, like a door or a
cupboard. A marble facade would, we believe, in
fifty years (and fifty years are the youth of a house),
prove a cheaper thing than this abominable arrange-
ment.

People in France would not put up, with such
shabby work as this. They prove it in the best
possible way, by doing the contrary. It is no won-
der that their universal verdict, when they come to
London, should be a condemnation of its ugliness.
l'i.ovoking and humiliating as this is, or ought to
be, to us, it is more humiliaing still to be forced to
allow that the cause is mainly our own want of taste

and sense in our architecture. For our churches
sometimes for our public buildings (as the new
Assize Courts at Manchester by Mr. Waterhouse,
or the St. Giles' Schools by Mr. Edward Barry), we
have architects equal to, or even better than, the
best Frenchmen. If the building speculator never
and the private person rarely employs them for our
houses, the solo reason is, that they do not care to
do so. The truth is that, from the Premier down-
wards, we love domestic ugliness; we are enchanted
with architectural commonplace ; we think it a
proud boast, fit for a Briton, to contrast the cold,
angular, and forbidding look of the exterior with
tl:e comfort inside. Other nations, meanwhile, have
comfort and beauty too; for that the taste shown in
the French dwelling-houses and railway stations
does not impair their comfort, we readily confess
when the dissatisfied Englishman compares his inn
or terminus with those across the water. Indeed,
the idea that beauty and comfort are in any sense
opposing or competing qualities is in itself, often as
we hear it, the simple confession of complacent
ignorance. It is like fancying that geology is °P.
posed to cookery, or that common sense is hostile
to the rule of three.

Almost everybody feels the force of this vevatiocg
contrast when he returns from Paris to London ;
it is the burden of every traveller's story. Agd
we have here dwelt upon it because those who have
the credit of England at heart must wish to see
this consciousness of our inferiority in domestic
architecture utilised for our improvement, not re"
ferred in an idle way to anything in the materials
employed in France, or in the Imperial systenl.
Improvement here is, strictly, a matter publici juro•
Every one who builds, or allows to be built for hilg,
an ugly house, perpetuates an eyesore to annoy or
deaden the taste of thousands. And that ninety.
nine out of every hundred houses recently built ja
London are eyesores is, we believe, not open to
denial. On the chapter of materials we cannot fur"
ther enter now. But, returning to our more imme-
diate subject, an examination of recent French
architecture will show that the excellence of it, se
far as it goes, is due to what Governments can but
remotely influence—the general taste of the people.

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