THE LUXURY BUILDERS.*

WHAT Sir Reginald Blomfield writes about architecture is always well worth reading. His latest book on French archi- tecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that no architectural library can afford to be without, nor indeed the architectural section that should surely be found in the library of every cultivated person. Sir Reginald's earlier history of French architecture, from 1496 to 1661, now has a worthy sequel in his present admirable book, which carries us on to 1774. The illustrations are abundant and peculiarly well chosen, the majority being reproductions of contemporary prints. Not the least interesting are those giving the plans of the great Chedeaux and Hotels, before whose majestic façades the human spectator is apt to feel puny, inadequate, and abashed. It is heartening, however, to infer from the plans how desperately uncomfortable the great ones must have been. Even with a whole regiment of servants anything approaching real comfort must have been absolutely impossible.

Intent on display at all costs, it was not until late in the eighteenth century that the French began to study " com- modity " in their homes, and in their country " Modern plan- ning " and " Modern conveniences " are very modern indeed. In the period under review it was no uncommon thing for the family's meals to traverse an open courtyard, a gallery, a stair- vase, and half a dozen bed and reception rooms en suite between the kitchen and the dining-room. In the very grand houses of the very great nobles, the galleries would be longer, the inter- vening rooms more numerous, and the soup still colder. But the façade and the painted ceilings would be worth some sacrifice, of which, however, the unfortunate domestics inevitably formed a pait. The long reign of Louis XIV. was, of course, the golden age of country house building, when Paris was ringed about by a • .4 History of French Architecture, 1601-1774. By Sir Reginald B1omfleId•

2 vols. London: G. Bell. Pla.l

whole constellation of lesser Versailles, where the grandees and courtiers of the period poured out incredible sums on sumptuous chateaux and vast gardens in sedulous imitation of their royal master. He, in no more than six years, contrived to spend nearly 60,000,000 francs in garden making and " luxury building " generally. - If the end were bankruptcy, what more beguiling guides thereto than Francois Mansart, Colbert, or Le Vau, the great architects, or Le Notre, greatest of all garden designers ? Cer- tainly the latter took no account of cost whatsoever, spending, for instance, between three and four million francs on mere earth- work at Versailles alone. Yet he had a marvellous " eye for country," and any opportunities it might naturally offer for exploitation, especially in the matter of levels :-

" In all the best designs of Le N3tre the same characteristic features are found, great breadth and simplicity in the general scheme, the utmost use of difference of levels, direct and unbroken vistas leading to dominant features, such as the grotto and cascades at the farther end of the garden, and, lastly, the lavish employment of water as a means of effect in cascades, canals, fountains, and water pieces. Where Le Nttre found woods already on the site he used them in a very skilful manner as a massed background to his gardens, sometimes running back into them with some architectural feature, but never losing his boundaries. He invariably marked tho limits of his garden with definite and formal lines of hedges. Although in his later work he carried his design outside the garden limits by avenues and paues d'oie taken out into the country for miles, there was never any question in the mind of Le Notre as to the relations of art and nature. His design throughout showed a frank and splendid disregard of the ways of nature left to its own devices, and the claims for a sort of deification of nature advanced with such unction by the landscape gardeners . . . would have been simply unintelligible to Le N6tre and his contemporaries."

This great man's passion for water was shared by his patrons, who loved it for its glitter and music when in motion, and for its reflections when still. Water was the fashion, and water there

must be at any cost. The almost impossible would be attempted, and sometimes achieved, by the most elaborate machinery—. windmill pumps, horsemill pumps, and such like—or by means of tunnels and aqueducts.

Versailles was a notoriously waterless site—yet majesty's eye and ear must by no means lack the solace of spouting water- works on the most colossal scale. The great Machine de Marly, which was designed to pump "pleasure water" to Versailles and took seven years and nearly 5,000,000 francs to build, proved a ruinous failure. Hence, in 1685, Louvois, " anxious to commend himself to the King by some prodigious enterprise," began the disastrous aqueduct of Maintenon. " After ten years' work, an expenditure of nearly 9,000,000 francs, and the loss of countless lives, the whole thing had to be abandoned." In this and many other of his mad extravagances the King's evil genius was J. H. Mansart, architectural adventurer, and but distantly related to his great namesake, Francois :— "Jules Hardouin Mansart was perhaps the most successful architect that has ever lived. Others, such as Wren, have had equal opportunities, but no other architect has enjoyed such uniform good fortune. His career was one of astonishing and uninterrupted prosperity, down to the very day of his death. Whether he won this success on his merits, whether he was a really great architect and deserved the reputation that he enjoyed in his lifetime, is another question, the answer to which is to be looked for in the record of his life, and in the buildings attributed to his designs ; but even then we are not at the end of the matter. There remains the obstinate doubt as to who helped, who was really the man who designed these world-famous buildings. Did Mansart himself design them, or was there, as St. Simon says, quite plainly, some architecte sous clef whose identity was sedulously concealed ? The evidence, though very suggestive of the truth of St. Simon's statement, is not absolutely conclusive. On any showing Jules Hardouin Mansart must have possessed considerable ability of some sort. He was not born in the purple. The great architect to whom he was distantly related was out of favour. Yet at an early ago ho managed to push his way to the front, and made for himself and maintained a position at the Court of Louis XIV. without parallel in the history of the architects of any country, ancient or modern."

Sir Reginald has little mercy for J. H. Mansart, whose famous portrait by Rigaud occasions a striking summing-up :-

" Sitting in a chair of state, in his robes as a Chevalier of the Order- of St. Michael, with an enormous periwig, a large, florid, astute person, who gives the impression of the professional super-man, the successful collector of innumerable jobs ' duly carried out for him by a staff of assistants, ' sous clef,' or, as they would now be called, ghosts.' The whole presentation is typical of the reign of Louis XIV., a regime of ponderous and over- powering authority, one man first, the rest nowhere. Among the able practitioners of the Royal service one searches in vain for distinct individualities. In the earlier period there were men of character and distinction : Claude Perrault., gentleman

and scholar ; Blondel, his erudite and acrimonious antagonist ; Charles Errard, painter, architect and swordsman ; Antoine Le Pautre, ill-balanced and irregular, but not without a tom% of genius—all of them men who lived their lives their own way. But . . . both King and Ministers preferred the obedient humble servant to the man of ideas. The result was a high average of technical competence . . . but the romance -of Art was gone, scared out of existence by Mansard's periwig."

Even when he is dealing faithfully with the aesthetic obtuseness of vainglorious Louis, the author yet contrives -a back-hander for his unscrupulous creature :— " The Ring's taste was florid, even coarse, and owing to Mazarin's neglect of his education, nothing had been done -to improve it. The academic refinements of Perrault made no appeal to him. What he wanted was a robust, aggressive, full- blooded vulgarian. Ho found his man in J. H. Mansart, and having once broken loose from the restraint of Colbert, the two ran riot unrestrained at Versailles."

What happened at Versailles was happening elsewhere—and anybody who was anybody seemed to feel impelled by a kind of perverted noblesse oblige to build himself into bankruptcy. Undoubtedly a good deal of trouble arose from the system of delegation that the employment of such high and mighty archi- tects as Mansart and Cotte necessarily involved. They, or more often their assistants, made the plans in Paris, sometimes but not always after visiting the place, the interpretation and realization of the design being left to a Clerk of the Works, or " Resident Architect," who might or might not prove a worthy instrument. No doubt minute supervision of details was in some respects less necessary then than it is to-day:-

"The debt owed by the architects of Louis XIV. to their workmen can hardly be overrated ; they started with advan- tages denied to modern architects who have to do the best they can with the skill they can find in their men, and whose burdens in this regard wore undreamt of by their predecessors."

The French architects of the eighteenth century seem, indeed, to have had all the advantages, their resources being only exceeded by their opportunities. It was only the blind egoism and extravagance of the Kings and the noblesse that at once narrowed their field to mere luxury building, and ultimately left them discredited and distressed :-

"Louis XIV. was full of zeal for his country, but as he identi- fied his country with himself and personally directed its affairs, he satisfied his zeal for the State and the Arts of France by building himself interminable and extremely costly Royal houses.',

Sir Reginald Blomfield has something to say about education and its effect on public taste and consequently upon the Arts themselves :-

" R is difficult at the present day to realize the attitude of the eighteenth century to the Arts. In this country we are so much occupied with politics and -business, that little leisure is left for the Arts. . . . At our public schools and universities the Arts are barely considered as a side issue, and they have, in recent years, been thrust still farther into the background by the overpowering claims—one might almost ,say the insistent self-assertion--of specialized science. It is this dreary specializa- tion that has obliterated the humanism of earlier generations, and.made people forget that the graphic and plastic arts are, in their way, the expression of human emotion and imagination not less than music and literature. In the eighteenth century the intellectual atmosphere was different. Intelligent and educated people felt as keen an interest in the Arts as in any other work :of man, and instead of being taken up with feverish zeal and incontinently dropped, or relegated to a handful of neurotics, the Arts formed a real and pleasant background to the civilized life of the first half •of the eighteenth century."

The author is right in claiming as much for the graphic and plastic as for the other Arts, but ought we perhaps to admit that their influence and appeal are relatively slight in England because the Art form in which we are pre-eminent is that of literature ? In that we probably find our best and readiest expression. And, though there are now signs that we are happily once more recovering an architectural sensibility, we must still, as a nation, give precedence to several -others in this respect—certainly to France.