30 DECEMBER 1916, Page 13

BOOKS.

THE CHATEAUX OF FRANCE.* Wares the Hun prevents us from getting tho refreshment that conies from looking at beautiful things much overdue to tired eyes and brains, while we cannot see the glories of French architecture in stone and in brick set in ample parks or by the side of noble rivers, we must choose the next best thing, and visit them in books, and own their sovereign charms in pictures and in print. Sir Andrea Cook, who knows the glories of the architecture of the French chateaux as well as any man alive, has during the past year contributed a series of studies of twenty- five great houses of France to Country Life. These have now been republished, " profusely embellished," as the old-fashioned cataloguers used to say, with numerous photographic plates. These illustrations it is not necessary to praise or to describe, for every one knows that the photographic artists of Country Life exhaust the powers of the camera in all matters of architecture, external and internaL We may, and personally do, prefer the copperplates of Vitruvius Britannic= or of the older French describers and designers, or the lithographs of the " thirties " and " forties " of last century—living things, if not always perfectly accurate things. But even though ono may regret their seemly pomp and serene graciousness, we are not going to look the photographic gift-horse in the mouth. This is the age of the Sovereign Camera, and we must help to carry on the King's Government— provided the three-colour process is barred.

Sir Theodore Andrea Cook is the best of guides, for he is equally interested in history and in architecture. The letterpress exactly reflects in this respect the fascination of the châteaux. Groat men and great deeds are, as it were, built into their walls, and of these ho reminds us as we walk in vision the long galleries, ascend the enchanted and enchanting staircases, or wander among the gargoyles of the glorious roofs. Nowhere is the magic, of the Renaissance in the North more completely displayed than in the architecture of the French chateaux between, say, 1480 and 1680. You get the best of both systems of architecture combined in a whole that has a fascination beyond words. By 1600 the lamp of genius in architecture was burning very low in Italy. Dulness and pomposity were but half concealed by that miraculous power over stone and brick and the other raw material of architecture which never has loft, and we believe never will leave, the Italian. Put though this gift even in decay may against our will extort our admiration, it cannot fire our souls. At any rate, the light temporarily lost in Italy in the seventeenth century burnt brightly in France. Take for example the staircase and the chimnevpiece. While the staircases of the Italian palaces had become dully efficient, the French architects so wound their stone convolutions as to give them almost as great an appearance of magnificence as those of Genoa, Rome, or Venice, and yet =nava to set our hearts on fire. The magical graining of the stair roofs, the miraculous intricacies of the balustrades, the perfection of the stone window-frames, take our breath away. But though we are almost frightened by the successful daring by which stone and brick are made to do things that we shoull only expect of wood or metal, art is never sacrificed to necromancy. Stateliness and even decency and comfort are never thrown over to appease the love of the fantastic. Ths best chAteau architecture is never wild. French logic, French sobriety, and the French sense of appropriateness are always in command.

Some of the most delightful things in the book which Sir Andrea Cook and Mr. Ward, who supplies the introduction, have given us are the examples of French Mediaeval and Renaissance sculpture. The great, though for the most part nameless, artists who designed

• Twenty-jive Great Houses of Francs. By Sir T. A. Cook. London : Offices of Country Mfe and George Nevnes. kg. =LI

the carvings on the staircases and walls of the chateaux, and above all on the chimney-breasts, were often as skilful as all but the very best of the Italians. With the eternal competence of the Latin, they have preserved the charm, the delicacy, and the romance of the Middle Age. The French Gothlo sculptors were particularly happy in their low-reliefs, veritable perspective pictures in stone. Some of the most wonderful of these true lithographs are those in the Maison Bourgtharoulde at Rouen. They illustrate the Field of the Cloth of Gold, the last great pageant of the Middle Age. Unhappily, as Sir Andrea Cook points out in his very interesting preface, these priceless carvings have been left to decay, and very soon no record of them will exist except the casts in the Crystal Palace. There are some excellent photographs in the present volume, but, alas ! they only show what we have lost and are losing. They are too far gone even to make a good photograph. It often happens that in a photograph of a mutilated piece of sculpture the ruin wrought by time and man is concealed. Fortunately, however, not quite all the sculptures at Bourgtheroulde need be described as ruins. The admirable picture of the fishermen has not yet been worn to a shadow, as may be seen in the photograph on p. 211.

Among other pieces of sculpture which are happily well preserved are the exquisite low-reliefs by Jean Goujon to be found in the Chateau of Anet (Eure-et-Loir). They are stated to be. Angels, though Heaven help these gay and fantastic courtier pages if they met any of Milton's winged warriors of the Lord in the fields of Air! A Guards' officer admonishing his sergeant for letting his men go about " improperly dressed" would be nothing to this Paradisiacal Strafing. But whether Angels good or bad, they have all that great artist's inimitable charm— the charm of suggesting a true Greek rather than a Graeco-Roman art. Of course Jean Goujon bad his faults. For example, we admit that he terribly overdid the trick of glorifying his statues by making the heads too small and the bodies too long. But when every allow- ance is made for such faults, he remains splendid and inspiring, one of the greatest and most original of sculptors. He had the sense of beauty to perfection. He beguiles alike the heart and the eye.

Before we leave Sir Andrea Cook's volume we may mention that be does full justice to that most fascinating of buildings, the Chateau Josselin (Morlaihan), and more than justice to the Chateau de Chambord. No doubt the latter building could not have been left out in any account of the chateaux of France, and no doubt it is and always will be of enormous interest to architects. In spite however of the double stale- case and the wonderful wilderness of rooks, it remains perhaps the ugliest building in the world. It is a nightmare in leprous white stone, and nothing can atone for, or even explain, its clotted horrors. A small child going over a new but bad house, of which the proprietors were very proud, is said to have remarked : " Who made all this place so horrid ? " Why the architect made Chambord. so horrid is a difficult question. Partly, no doubt, it was due to a natural defect in the designer, but partly too to the fact that he was practising an art that was not merely dying but dead, and not only dead but in the world's opinion damned. He was trying to be Gothic when the true spirit of Gothic arohitecture had for ever departed from the earth. And worst of all, he was trying to be grandiose. He wanted to build, not a wonder in stone, but the biggest and most pompous building of his period. He wanted above everything to be colossal and to make people open their mouths and gape at his wonders. And above and beyond all this, he wanted to fuel the vanity of a meanly vain set of masters and their vain Courts. In Italy and in the later Italian styles these aspirations would not have mattered. Often they gave us some- thing stupendous and almost inspiring, as for example the great Pisani Villa at Stra. There the architect's chief desire was for immensity. Stucco and the Italian sky and the Italian instinct for magnificence have done the trick. We may say, " How wicked I " but we certainly add, " How delightful I " At Chambord we can only shudder and say, " Why cumbereth it the ground ? " It has not even any redeeming vices. It is appallingly competent and appallingly coarse. Whichever way you look at it—in front, from behind, from the side, or even from the topmost pinnacle of the roof, it grins at you like some painted and enamelled dowager with an ill-fitting and frowsy wig and a fashionleas brocaded bodice and skirt. It ought to be made a prison for German professors and practisers of Bealpolitik. They are the only inhabitants who would be really appropriate.