THE PIPER HERESIES
SIR,—By way of conclusion to an edifying discussion, I present my compliments to Mr. Piper and those who are concerned to defend him against the charge of heresy, and would confess myself as in- curably romantic as any of them, but aware, however, that my own satisfaction in the spectacle of picturesque decay must be at the ultimate expense of the very survival of the admired ruin.
Deeply moved as I, too, certainly am by the glamour of devouring ivy, damp-stains, owls, bats and the other flora and fauna of structural disintegration, I yet see them as a luxury too dearly bought at the expense of posterity who, in the course of time, will have nothing to sentimentalise over but a heap of rubble where Mr. Piper and I happily luxuriate in the contemplation of crumbling arches and mouldering tracery.
I say that we must curb our own romantic sensibility lest we selfishly deny our successors even artificially preserved samples of what we so ardently enjoy. The thorough but usually discreet protective operations of the Office of Works may, for the moment, rub a little of the bloom off the picture, but only that the essential thing itself may survive.
I confess that my expressed concern for history is largely a dishonest excuse for the maintenance of a plentiful allowance of ruins, failing which any countryside seems to me definitely lacking in amenity.
Harlech, Criccieth, Conway and Camarvon castles, with sundry minor ones, are all within a very short radius of my home, but as I could not
actually see any one of them from the window where I am now writing, I found it necessary to build a considerable keep, ruined round-tower, and sundry outworks on a cocky eminence in the middle distance, where a glade, opening between the oak groves, seemed to demand some such culmination. Similarly I once fabricated a ruined abbey on a little island for a like-minded friend, another bit of scene-painting in the solid that seems to give general pleasure, and of which I only pretend to be ashamed.
Finally, may I say that as a supporter of the Georgian Group, I hare been perpetually involved in protests against the destruction of build- ings, particularly of the Regency, that, through the strange drafting of the Ancient Monuments Act, and its disastrous preoccupation with pre-Augustan antiquity, are outside the official pale? Your.cor- respondent Mr. Gee may be startled to learn that I not only signed the Carlton House Terrace Memorial to the Commissioners for Crown Lands, but actively campaigned on its behalf, as well as for the pre- servation of the Adelphi and of old Regent Street. Of the latter I have piously preserved some fragments of authentic Nash in the fabric of Portmeirion Village, where I have not felt it necessary to bridle the vein of deep romanticism from which I, too, have now confessed myself a sufferer, even as Mr. Piper so acutely suspected.— I am, Sir, your obedient servant, CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS.
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