THE WAY TO BEAUTY.
The Pleasure of Architecture. By C. and A. Williams-Ellis. (Jonathan Cape. 10s. 6d. net.) THE two authors of The Pleasure of Architecture are to be congratulated on the production of a delightful, stimulating and extremely readable book. After Ruskin provoked his mob of zealots into perpetrating a million atrocities in what our authors define as " Gasworks Gothic " and " Lobster Gothic," a reaction set in. It was felt that architecture could only be saved by the architect, and not by the bungling amateur : for many years the nauseous doctrine prevailed among architects that architecture was a matter upon which no layman could be allowed to pronounce an opinion. This was all very well as far as it went, but it still left the architect at the mercy of Moneybags, in the image of Vicar or Town Council, for Public Opinion having been silenced, those in authority were able to perpetuate their lack of taste in a thousand municipal or ecclesiastical variations. But in this volume, again and at last, the public is encouraged and even petted. In fact, we are definitely told the truth, which is that the only hope for architecture in this country is for the public to be educated up to that point where it would make a real disturbance if a bad building were to be put up.
Alas ! that point is far distant ; before it can be reached there remains much destructive work to be done. At the present moment it must seem to those in the great northern and midland industrial cities as if no civilized city in which all the buildings were harmonious, all the streets nobly planned, had ever existed, or could ever be possible. How, living among this conglomeration of styles and materials, all dissimilar except in its unsuitability for their purpose, could people imagine, or even know, a beautiful building, far less a whole city ? In the same way that in the last hundred years the bodies of the workers in the cities have gradually been poisoned by tinned foods, adulterated beers, " soft drinks," and bread that is-without 'wheat, in the same way that their minds have been poisoned , by the drivel, however unadulterated, of the cheap daily Press and Official Poets, so have their eyes been ruined by the foul air and dis- gusting buildings of their native towns. Before an ideal Sheffield—for example--can be created, it would be necessary for the city fathers to construct secretly a hundred thousand armoured traction engines, and, charging down from the surrounding heights, destroy alike the buildings of the just and the unjust. For, alas ! moral does not always coincide with material beauty. The chapel, indeed, can be more devastating to the eye than the cinema.
But how can you be surprised that so little effort is made by the public, when, as our authors point out, if we make a
pilgrimage to that " Mount Helicon, Boar's the in- tellectual centre, one is given to understand, of Great Britain, " we may see poets and philosophers innocently housed in the jerrybuilder's most hilarious efforts. Variegated shrubs, highly varnished rustic summer-houses, conservatories, fancy bargeboards and cast-iron ridging, and all the paraphernalia of a suburban lay-out here make a little Peckham. But the intellectual flower of the country has noticed nothing."
And in one of the most interesting passages' in the book our authors trace the trouble to its root. In the 'forties of the last century came a great break. There was an enormous new class of respectable " solid " people to be housed ; also a whole army of indescribably ill-treated and wretched indus- trial workers. To the Victorian mind beauty was useless— though ornament, if used with sufficient profusion and if sufficiently substantial in its detail, had a certain use in denoting the wealth, social-position, and, above all, solidity of the person who lived thus encased in cast-iron ivy-leaves, and puffing beneath the almost insupportable weight of his recently acquired armorial bearings. Thus, while the poor were hastily thrown into row after row of featurelcsk badly built, ill-planned and horribly stuffy houses, where they alternately sweltered in summer and froze in winter, the rich were installed in equally objectionable "residences," the interiors of which were still planned as if hot-water, baths, or stairs down . which it would be possible for a housemaid to walk without falling, were but the dreams of ill-balanced minds. The arrangements for servants were made as if the Middle Ages were still in full swing. And to this day, it is a fact that most houses are. built as if electric light were a new invention. No use is made of it. No room is planned specially for those effects of light and shadow that were impossible for our fathers.
Since no reaction is entirely just in its swing, it may perhaps be whispered low that the sweeping away of Victorian ornament has led us to overrate simplicity. We are still so encrusted with the ornamentation of the last age that we do not as yet notice it, but it looks as if we were in for a period of " Safety First" in architecture, when any barn erected on a bare down will be hailed as a supreme achievement of man's imaginative powers. Alas ! the mere absence of ugly, silly and trivial detail does not necessarily, in itself, spell beauty.
Yet it is true, as our authors repeat, that there are signs of a renaissance. The milder rich, the poorer rich so to speak, will no longer put up with the discomfort of their lives. One or two good public buildings, have been erected in London, and, it we can remember that Empire - is `of more value to commerce than to the arts, we may yet have more. Lastly, Mr. J. C. Squire, who has a talent for getting his own way, has founded the Architecture Club, which has held some extremely interesting exhibitions. -It is to be hoped that this fascinating volume will prove that the number of those who feel strongly on the subject is even larger than one is led by these facts to expect.
Not the least entertaining part of the volume are 'the photographs and drawings at the 'end of it. Here one can beguile Ole hours by browsing on Victorian foliage, by looking at the County Council Hall, or comparing the Port of London Authority with a Communal Bath in Holland, a " Regrettable Club " in Pall Mall, with what appears to be a really wonderful inodern 'building in Stockholm. But there remains one protest to be made. The drawings in the book are so charming that the draughtsman almost makes the reader fall in love with Cedar Lawn : a Suburban Synthesis, and its crazy Victorian ...SuERT SITWELL.
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