Mr. Ruskin’s denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I
have heard it repeated, nearly all the stone and lime we have to show.
Many however find a grand air and something settled and imposing in the
better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles
induces an agreeable stimulation of the mind. But upon the subject of
our recent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with
Mr. Ruskin’s, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his large
declamatory and controversial eloquence.
Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offence, is added to
another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismallest structures
keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with
them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying
chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true
character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view
to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they tell me,
fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for
you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in
clamant disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no style of
art, only to a form of business much to be regretted.
Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the
windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there
any profit in a misplaced chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy
builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green
timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and
there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so
situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is a
noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of Lucifer.
There are daring and gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
being contemptible; and we know that ‘fools rush in where angels fear to
tread.’ But to aim at making a common-place villa, and to make it
insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the homeliest
achievement, and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip all
competitors in the art of conceiving and rendering permanent deformity;
and to do all this in what is, by nature, one of the most agreeable
neighbourhoods in Britain:—what are we to say, but that this also is a
distinction, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful?
Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but these things offend
the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the
town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have ever
the farther to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the country
air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous body, it
would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the builders
and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of yore,
with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the other; and
as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated,
right-minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at
once.
Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use
asking them to employ an architect; for that would be to touch them in a
delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect they
were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world to
point out any reasonably well-proportioned villa, not his own design; and
let them reproduce that model to satiety.