"ARISING 511UT OF" CASSEL-SUR-MONT.
ACITY that is set on a hill must be quite conspicuously dull if it is to avoid being a little picturesque and at least touched with romance. The same applies to Princes. Both have great opportunities—that may be made the most of or squandered. Usually they are squandered. So far as picturesqueness is con- cerned, Louis Xrir. and Mont St. Michel might be said to have exploited the capabilities of their respective positions beyond their possible limit. Their sense of the dramatic is over-developed- situations are overcharged and strained—there is a haunting uneasi- ness about their conscious and deliberate unreasonableness. The English climate and the English temperament are not congenial to either fairy princes or fairy cities. There is a stolid common- sense and a self-consciousness, a dread of ridicule, that curb and circumscribe the imagination, and bid dreams and their dreamers keep their place and not interfere with the practical projects of plain men. We claim this imaginative timidity as a virtue—we plume ourselves on our mistrust of ideas—we proudly point to Manchester and the map as proof that we do very well without them. We prosper in spite of this deficiency, not because of it. Our many solid virtues have triumphed, our defects notwith- standing.
However, we are going to change all that. A new Protestant party has arisen—in philosophy, art, literature, industry, commerce, and politics. In architecture, the progressive Protestants are looking to the new Civic Arts Association for salvation. Not to it alone—there are other prophets in the wilderness. But it is their newest prophet, and a prophet of some promise, in an acceptable time. Cassel-sur-Mont is a little hill town that is just sufficiently conscious of its exalted position to have dressed and disposed itself suitably. Not over-dressed, not "dressed for the part," but dressed as elegantly and picturesquely as workaday life in the country would reasonably permit. No airs, no affectation, just the seemly comeliness proper to a local capital. It never forgets that; but neither does it forget that cabbages and pigs are bought and sokl in its "Grand Place" on market day, that it has a tannery as well as an assembly room, and that the airs and graces of "high life" would be absurd amidst the sturdy thrift and industry of the place. Such a town is Cassel-on-the-Hill, in the department of Calais. It is what Aylesbury might have been and probably almost was . . . once. Rye is not unlike it now ; Richmond in Yorkshire and Bridgnorth in Salop might both have been called cousin to it. once. Unlike our towns that might have matched it, here time, prosperity, and theUrban Council have all conspired to beautify the place, not to blight and blast it. The introduction of an electric) tramway, water supply, and drainage seems almost to have added to the amenities of the place rather than to have destroyed them. They are a wonderful people, the French. They see nothing odd or un- natural in the beautification of a convenience, or in the pains- taking mitigation of its inherent ugliness if such there be. Neither did William Morris. There is no good reason why a beautiful (and profitable) grove should not surround a sewage works or cover a colliery rubbish-heap, or why railway stations and gasworks should produce sore eyes and heavy hearts. Modern Germany was entirely sound in this respect. She realized that her people had eyes in their stout bodies, some very critical and appreciative eyes, and remem- bered this singular fact when organizing and equipping her public services. The ideal Englishman (who mercifully does not exist— only highly adulterated variations) divides things into two water- tight compartments, one labelled " Ugly " and the other "Orna- mental." Under the former heading come all things that are solid and unpretentious and useful, whilst overmantels, fretwork, and lace curtains may be said to represent his conception of" ornament." Proportion, texture, colour, refinement, craftsmanship, and appro- priateness, the contributory attributes of true beauty, he does not
remotely understand or concern himself with. The ornamental as against the beautiful is what he stands for. "I'm a plain man,
and there's no arguing about taste. I just know what I like—and that's something nice and bright and ornamental." And where he likes it is on and over his mantelpiece. He likes " art " kept in its place and not spread over life and work and the world. It would have been well indeed with such " art " had it been confined for ever to the most sacred inner innermosts, and had it not succeeded in slopping out of doors, and in climbing poisonously over houses, streets, and even whole cities like some horrid fungoid growth.
Save for a new and criminal Gendarmerie which is entirely sinful, as coquettishly vicious a travesty of architecture as the wit of man could plan, there is next to nothing fungoid in Cassel. By the mercy of God, this flaunting thing of shame has its pitch in a side- street that it is no way necessary to traverse. Its unwholesome half- baked and livid new art need not scorch and scar the traveller's eye, if he be wary. But it is fair that he be warned. Hero, indeed, is a wanton squandering of opportunities, as sad as strange. What a motif, what suggestion, in a prison house ! Think of our Old Bailey as it was not so long since—" the most imaginative building in Europe," as some one happily described it. Solid, inscrutable, grim, yet so finely disposed and proportioned as to thrill the spectator with a melancholy sort of pleasure. Even a village lock-up can be made to waft its aura out to the happy free through the medium of its exterior architecture—a breadth of rough blank wall ; a small barred window, set high and deep ; a studded oaken door, all bar. and bolts ; a low arched doorway, tunnel-like and dark. Ito sinister, suggestive front frowns perpetual warning on the passer-by. Not so at Cassel. Here the inexorable majesty of the law is repre- sented by this flippant gaud, this riot of encaustic brick and tile, of simpering gablets with contorted barge-boards all fret ted and bedizened with distressful paint. A Casino gone wrong, "the Kursaal that took the wrong turning," might look somewhat thus. And as though to redress the balance, to correct the average, the Casino proper (for Cassel, you should know, possesses a Casino of a rather shamefaced, hang-dog sort) is as uncompromising a barrack of a place as could well be imagined, standing four-square, citadel- like, on the old Chateau eminence that piles above the town. The Wolf and the Sheep have waggishly exchanged their skins ; the prison visitors and the pleasure-seekers might well repair to the wrong establishments, led astray by the dissembling architecture of each. But we have business with neither. It is the beauties of the place we have come to see, not to pry out its little blemishes. The beauties are many and very various. There can therefore be no argu- ment as to their order of merit. There is no dogmatizing as to the relative excellence of an olive and an oratorio.
The writer heads his list unquestionably with the House of Van Damme. Not that his selection will be accepted unchallenged and unquestioned by the majority. Artists will mock at it, preferring a score of other subjects—the fantastic Maine; the venerable church with its pretty bells hung in its belfry windows ; even the jolly bits of picturesque ramshackledom that everywhere abound. And as painters they may be right. Archaeologists will scorn it as being quite too much of a now boy to be in any way noticed or made much of, and will prefer a dozen other claimants. And in their queer way they will be right too. For your true-blue antiquarian is as much obsessed by the claim of seniority as though he were an early Victorian War Secretary. He does not allow his nominations to be influenced or biassed by the defects or mere merits of the nominee. Happy single-minded old gentlemen, dear old devotees of dates! To them, bronze tools are more than works of art ; a Norman arch than flesh and blood. As for the ordinary tripper, he will pass by on the other side, not even wondering what those white walls and closely shuttered windows may conceal and guard within. That ever there should be clay so gross! A tall and silent house, tiers of shuttered windows, and no responsive quickening of the pulse—no stirring of the imagination, no speculation, no curiosity, no fairy story ! No fairy story Why, the whole edifice is the wildest, whimsiest fabrication that ever strayed out of fiction and somehow contrived to materialize as fact. It is the most improbable of structures conceivable. Yet somehow it does undeniably exist — unlikely, queer, fantastic as a dream. The House of Van Damnify
however, demands and deserves another story. C. W. E.
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