BOOKS.
THE POETRY OF ARCHITECTURE.* Tins is a youthful work of Mr. Ruskin's, exhumed from the- pages of Loudon's Architectural Magazine for 1837. As the- full title shows, the original scheme was characteristically ample. In the magazine, this scheme went no further than chapters on cottages in England, France, Italy, and Switzer- land, and villas in Italy and England. But the kind of treatment adopted in these chapters, the deduction of archi- tectural forms from considerations of natural scenery and of national character, was carried on in later works like the Seven Lamps of Architecture and the Stones of Venice. This earlier work is vaguer, and in a great deal of its leisurely disquisition there is an effect of inflation arising from the pompous machinery of reasoning brought to bear on an insufficient matter. The author says in Prleterita,--" These youthful essays, though deformed by assumption, and shallow in contents, are curiously right up to the points they reach ; and already distinguished above most of the literature of the time, for the skill of language,. which the public at once felt for a pleasant gift in me." There are certainly many passages in the book which antici- pate the fine descriptive effects of later work, but none, perhaps, which is so memorable that it calls for reprinting, in view of the " assumptions " and the " shallow con- tents." Those responsible for the republication state that Mr. Ruskin himself had intended some years ago to issue the book, but hesitated on account of the poverty of the old magazine illustrations. The drawings are now reproduced by photogravure, and are some of them very pretty; but it seems a pity to let a desire for completeness lead to the in- clusion, in a writer's collected works, of all his immature essays. Mr. Ruskin's reputation has recently suffered from a sumptuous edition of his insignificant poems. The present volume might well have been left where it was for the curious to hunt out for themselves.
* The Pepin of Architecture; or, The Arohitcoturs of the Nations of Europu considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and National Cliarauter. IIy John Raskin. With Illustrations by the Author. London George Allen. 189k
The parts of the book in which Mr. Ruskin comes to closest terms with his subject are those dealing with the cottages of Westmoreland and Switzerland, and the lake-side villas of Italy. In all these cases he writes with gusto, and describes the fit- ness of the buildings for place and people, and the pleasant effects of form and colour that their combination with features of natural scenery gives rise to. But Mr. Ruskin is never satisfied unless he formulates an admiration of a special case into a law making that case the only possible and necessary one. He deduces it from a ready heaven of categories in the most ingenious way, and proves every other way of doing the thing impossible or illicit. When such a law is established, then so much the worse for any cases that contradict it. For example, he decides that the combination of brick with stone quoins is for ever inadmissible. What, then, about the com- bination of stone with brick in the most beautiful houses of Amsterdam P It is fit only," he says, "for a place whose foundations are mud, and whose inhabitants are partially animated cheeses." All through the book there runs a rashly adopted classification of scenery into four colours,—blue, green, grey, and brown. Blue is attached to cultivated country, green to woodland, and laws are laid down for the colouring of buildings according to this easily inter- changeable description. Indeed, when we get away from the statement, often true, that A is fit and beautiful, to the further statement that no other effect, B, would have done at all, because C is D, we generally find on reflection that B might have been just as effective, and that " C is D" is one of those emotional statements which are easily reversible. If the mud of Amsterdam is a good argument against stone quoins, the mud of Venice would be found to reinforce the propriety and beauty of the Doge's Palace.
The unassailable statements in the hook are chiefly those based on fitness for climate and use, which are a rather different matter from the claims of scenery and national character for expression in architecture. Indeed, when the considerations of use, of climate, of accessible material, are put aside, and also that rather important part of architecture, the designer's art in it, what can be assigned to nature and to national spirit is a very indefinite and elusive quantity. To lay down that Italy suggests melancholy and elevated feeling, as a law to govern the " cottage " in Italy, is an admirable preliminary to sentimental rhapsody for the traveller, but it is likely to blind the architectural observer to the real connec- tions of things. In the same way, to assign Egyptian archi- tecture and mythology to delirium brought on by going about in the heat with a bare head, is probably too simple for the historical facts, religious or artistic, however well it may con- vey the feverish impression of a visitor. The same personal note breaks out sportively from behind the judicial and critical mask in the passage about windows in the British villa. Here it is :-
"For, first, the only prospect which is really desirable or delight- ful is that from the window of the breakfast-room. This is rather a bold position, but it will appear evident on a little consideration. It is pleasant enough to have a pretty little bit visible from the bed- rooms ; but after all, it only makes gentlemen cut themselves in shaving ; and lallies never think of anything beneath the sun when they are dressing, Then, in the dining-room, windows are absolutely useless, because dinner is always uncomfortable by daylight, and the weight of furniture-effect, which adapts the room for the gastronomic rites, renders it detestable as a sitting- room. In the library, people should have something else to do than looking out of the windows ; in the drawing-room, the un- comfortable stillness of the quarter of an hour before dinner may, indeed, be alleviated by having something to converse about at the windows ; but it is very shameful to spoil a prospect of any kind by looking at it when we are not ourselves in a state of corporal comfort and mental good-humour, which nobody can be after the labour of the day, and before he has been fed. But the breakfast-room, where we meet the first sight of the dewy day, the first breath of the morning air, the first glance of gentle
eyes That would be in place in an essay on personal caprices in building, and another passage on windows might, perhaps, pass among the reflections of the sentimental tourist :-
" The unfrequency of windows in the body of the building is partly attributed to the climate ; but the total exclusion of light from some parts, as the base of the central tower, carries our thoughts back to the ancient system of Italian life, when every man's home had its dark secret places, the abodes of his worst passions ; whose shadows were alone intrusted with the motion of his thoughts ; whose walls became the whited sepulchres of crime.; whose echoes were never stirred except by such words as they dared not repeat ; from which the rod of power, or the Alger d passion, came forth invisible; before whose stillness princes grew pale, as their fates wore prophesied or fulfilled by the horoscope or the hemlock ; and nations, as the whisper of anarchy or of heresy was avenged by the opening of the low doors, through which those who entered returned not. The mind of the Italian, sweet and smiling in its operations, deep 'aid silent in its emotions, was thus in some degree typified by those abodes."
Yet it is hardly a national characteristic to make prison- windows scarce.
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