UNPUBLICATED MANUSCRIPT

OF

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

ART CRITICISM

"It must be studied on its own side, and under all the conditions of history, landscape and neighborhood".

Mr. Champneys has desired in this book to illustrate believes, and we believe with him that buildings are something & architecture is to be looked at, not as/abstract/isolated buildings, but as gems in a setting or figures in a picture. He is not one of those who say they are looking at a church, when they are looking in truth at set about with trees, led up to by some a curved a church complicated by many low a confusion of roofs and chimneys, connecting itself naturally with the sweep of the old street that leads up to it, and relieved against the blue distance and the bright sky on the horizon. A building is a building indeed, but it is much more; it makes

profile or mars the landscape, it completes or nullifies the outline of a town upon a hill-top. Here in my eye are two notable instances. In one a block of high shapeless barracks on, built in modern days on the battlementsof an old citadel, falls so admirably into harmony with the situation effect, and carries up the sentiment of the steep rock on which the place is founded up into the skyline with so admirable an effect, that it is absolutely the most striking feature of the pile. In the other, a place of some architectural pretensions has been put upon a poor little hill, the outlying buttress of a grand wall of mountains; those who

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remember the hill before it was thus buttressed can alone
felonious lines that the architect
appreciate the fulness of the bad (the whole landscape
before it was thus burlesqued and stuklified) taste that is
displayed. These are crude examples, and do not afford-
express the delicate shades of action and reaction that
dam be traced between the sentiment of able buildings
and the sentiment of their surroundings. And in no place
is this so delicate and amiable, as at least for English-
men, as in such a quiet corner of England as the one Mr.
Champneys has set himself to realise for us. The homely
and He has, he tells us, "a jealous desire that the
modest and homely architecture of our own country should
receive more general appreciation". And in order to
do this And in so doing he wishes He aimed that for
this purpose he desired to take them together, and produce
each building as he touched upon it
keep behind
upon our mind something of the general effect of the
romantic
landscape and some recollection of the its curious geograph-
ical conditions.

Romney Marsh is The district chosen by him is
one of, as I say, of romantic geographical conditions.
Outside of the old coast-line, still strongly marked and
easily recognizable as a coast line, some part, the sea
has gone back step by step until the new coast line is on
the horizon. The principal "note" of the landscape,
says Mr. Champneys, "amid its seriousness. All over the
Trace of the retreating waters are nowhere wanting. You
can recognize what was once an island by the little
grouping together of trees and buildings, and what was once an estuary or lagoon by the stepping
stones now left high and dry, in full sail seem together with stable trees

THOUGHTS ON DEATH

By

Robert Louis Stevenson

For we are accustomed to see flowers laid over
graves of a different sort, over the grave of the
young wife or the young child, over unborn loves in-
terrupted before their time and possibilities cut short,
in token that these loves of these lost ones shall live
on in spite of death, that these possibilities, in some
deeper sense, shall yet be realised, and the touch of
our dead loves remain with us and guide us to the end.

For we are accustomed to scatter flowers over the
young, and it is where love has been cut short untimely
and great possibilities have been restrained by Death.
We strew them there, in token and so they seemed
somehow out of place over one who had lived his life,
and done his utmost of work and garnered his utmost of
love (if indeed the and fallen at last in the fulness of
time, like one of these ripe, if indeed, as if one
should regret that a building was completed or a work
written fairly to an end. And yet there was after all, a
still more As I was thus thinking, another thought
came to me and changed my humour. We are apt to make so
much of the tragedy of death, and think so little of the
enduring tragedy of some lives, that we see more to lament
for in a life cut off in the midst of usefulness and love,
than in one that miserably survives all usefulness and