1849.] 



THE CIVIL ENGINEER AND ARCHITECT'S JOURNAL. 



32S 



advancing manufactures by means of Art, and thereby giving to 

 Art itself a positive "mercantile value," that it is rather a wonder 

 the book was not laid under interdict in that quarter, and its writer 

 pronounced a tasteless ignoramus, and shallow pretender in mat- 

 ters of art. Sharpe's Magazine, too, has called in question many 

 of Mr. Ruskin's peculiar opinions and tastes, and reproaches him 

 pretty sharply for ignoring or depreciating such glorious achieve- 

 ments of the present age as steam navigation, railroad communi- 

 cation, &c., and for repudiating the active and intelligent spirit of 

 our own times, and inculcating the duty and wisdom of returning 

 to that of the middle ages. The reviewer quotes his tirade against 

 railways, but has not pointed out — perliaps because he thought 

 that every one must detect it — the notable piece of sophistry and 

 paralogy which assures us that "we have just spent a hundred 

 and fifty millions, with which we have paid men for digging ground 

 from one place and depositing it in another"! He who could 

 write such nonsensical stuff, would say — that is, were he con- 

 sistent — farmers pay men for walking up and down a field aU day 

 long after a plough; and builders pay them for buttering bricks 

 with mortar, 



V. It is not, however, from either of the above-named publica- 

 tions, but from a rather recently-established periodical, with the 

 title of the RaynUer, that, in its number for last July, the author 

 of 'The Seven Lamps' has got what is vulgarly called "a com- 

 plete set-down." A^'hen it is known that the Rambler is a "Catho- 

 lic Journal and Review," the hostile tone of the article is fully ac- 

 counted for: nevertheless, it says a very great deal which, unpalat- 

 able as it must be to Mr. Ruskin's admirers and applauders, as well 

 as to himself, they would find it an exceedingly difficult matter 

 to gainsay. Greatly must those be scandalised who have extolled 

 Mr. Ruskin's eloquence and "magical language," when they find 

 the Rambler assuring us that "his ignorance is as egregious as 

 his dogmatism is offensive; and he has adopted a peculiar style of 

 writing, which frequently verges on the unintelligible through the 

 excessive awkwardness of its construction, and Ms utter want of per- 

 ception of the true genius of the English language." As "set-down" 

 the first, that is a tolerably strong one, for it knocks down at a 

 blow what others have cried i(p as a '■'■very remarkable" and distin- 

 guishing excellence in 'The Seven L;ftiips,' and claps an extin- 

 guisher upon it. Further on, the writer in the Rambler says: 

 "There is something so transcendently ludicrous in the notion that 

 the Church of Rome is idolatrous, and yet that the early mediaeval 

 architecture was the result of the purest Christian faith and feel- 

 ing, that we can only suppose that Mr. Ruskin believes that 

 Cranmer, Luther, and Henry VIII., flourished some 700 years 

 ago, and that Salisbury Cathedral was built in the reign of Eliza- 

 beth. The simplicity which can identify the creed and practices 

 of the thirteenth century with those of English Protestantism is 

 so delicious, that whatever else be Mr. Ruskin's deserts, he may lay 

 claim to the invention of something unquestionably 7iew." That 

 is a palpable hit; and it might have been added, that it is anything 

 but consistent in one who contends for the direct influence of 

 religion in matters of taste and art, to extol the mediaeval styles of 

 Papal Italy in preference to our own; to say nothing of his 

 unqualified and wholesale reprobation of "our detestable Perpen- 

 dicular," notwithstanding that it is— as he ought to be able plainly 

 to perceive — the only mode of Gothic wliich is at all capable of 

 being applied to general purposes, and which contains within itself 

 the elements of further development for such purposes at the 

 present day. One very just accusation which the reviewer makes 

 against Mr. Ruskin is, that he does not at all expound the princi- 

 ples of architecture. Upon them his "Lamps" shed no light at all. 

 In fact, there is no sort of system of the aesthetics of architecture 

 in his book; what is intended to look like system, and may pass 

 for such with readers in general, being no more than a perfectly 

 arbitrary and whimsical division of the subject. The critic in the 

 Rambler goes even so far as to hint that Mr. Ruskin is a fool — at 

 least, is one-half a fool, though in the other he may be a genius; 

 and certainly he has uttered some exceedingly gross absurdities. 

 There is also a good deal of sarcastic quizzing — some will say, in 

 lack of argument — fired at Ruskin, in the Rambler, especially as 

 regards his abhorrence of railways and railway-travelling; which 

 perhaps has had some share — the only slmre IVIr. Ruskin holds in 

 railways — in causing the present depreciation of railway shares and 

 property. "Henceforth, ' it is said in the Rambler, "we shall never 

 see a person on the Great Western, or Birmingham, or any other 

 line, huddled-up in a corner of a carriage, dark, sour, and misan- 

 thropic in visage, and resenting the suggestions of any agreeable 

 thoughts as a cruel mockery of an inward and unknown sorrow, with- 

 out thinking of the author of 'The Seven Lamps' rejoicing in his 

 woes, and oppressed with the mingled consciousness that he is tra- 



velling at thirty miles an hour, and that that wicked Paj)ist, the 

 Earl of Arundel and Surrey, is a member of the Commons House of 

 Parliament." Ruskin is also taken-up, or rather set-down, by his 

 reviewer for his extravagantly fanciful, even nonsensical, notions 

 on the subject of beauty in architecture, which must of necessity 

 be altogether different from that of natural objects. According to 

 Mr. Ruskin's reascming, doors, vvindows, &c., must be little better 

 than so many unnatural deformities, they being in the unhappy pre- 

 dicament of letters (i.e. the characters used in writing or painting), 

 to which he objects that they are like nothing in nature. It would 

 therefore seem that he is incapable of discriminating between what 

 belongs to Nature and what to Art; between the mental pleasure 

 afforded by the contemplation of the one, and that afforded by 

 similar contemplation of the works produced by the other. In a 

 word, Mr. Ruskin is a decided Natural; 'and as such I will now 

 leave him, and also leave those who feel any curiosity to learn 

 what farther is said in the Rambler on the subject of 'The Seven 

 Lamps,' to get the publication and read the entire article, which 

 will well repay them for the eighteenpence so bestowed. 



VI. In a paper 'On Style in Architecture,' read by him a short 

 time ago at the Institute, Professor Cockerell very properly depre- 

 cated pedantic imitation of the antique orders, and the illogical 

 application of them; and as to the former fault, he has endeavoured 

 to correct it in his own practice, by daring, in some of the build- 

 ings which he has erected, to deviate considerably from what is 

 considered the standard of the Doric order ; elongating his 

 columns, and substituting a fret for the characteristic triglyphs 

 and metopes of the frieze, — with the view, no doubt, of thereby 

 imparting to it greater delicacy, and mitigating its original stern- 

 ness. But he surely applies it illogically and quite contrary to its 

 nature, when he introduces it — as he he has done — as mere deco- 

 ration in fenestrated fronts, consequently essentially different in 

 their general physiognomy from anything in ancient Greek archi- 

 tecture; and that order is so exceedingly severe and inflexible, so 

 rigid and untractable, as to be fitted for scarcely aught more than 

 a mere portico or colonnade; therefore, to convert it into en ap- 

 plique decoration is, if not to violate, to do violence to its charac- 

 ter, — an indignity which it stubbornly and violently resists. In 

 itself, however, the attempt to break through the frigid formalism 

 established for the treatment of the orders, is a laudable one 

 rather than not, but one which requires in him who makes it more 

 than ordinary artistic skill and power. It is not for every one to 

 make it; non cuivis adire Corinthum : yet surely there are, for there 

 ought to be, some capable of making it successfully, — capable of 

 variously modifving according to circumstances, and in accordance 

 with the particular character required by the actual occasion, the 

 types of columnar and trabeated architecture furnished us by the 

 remains of antiquity. If it be asked, what is to guide them in 

 doing so, the reply is: artistic instinct and feeling, some portion 

 of which, it is to be presumed, architects — at least, some of them, 

 are gifted with, unless architecture be now in the unhappy con- 

 dition of a Fine Art, without artists for its followers, — one which 

 leaves them nothing else to do than to re-combine, or rather merely 

 put together, hackneyed forms and features, — as is not unfre- 

 quently done either in utter ignorance or utter disregard of every 

 principle of artistic composition. 



VII. Professor Cockerell himself has more than once given us 

 combinations more singular than consistent or tasteful, — studied 

 with regard to aim at novelty, yet anything but carefully consi- 

 dered. His Branch Bank of England, at Liverpool, is a compound 

 of strangely discordant elements and conflicting styles, which, 

 though mixed up together, are not amalgamated, but left to show 

 themselves in harsh contrast to each other. Even were there no 

 other inconsistency in the matter, what he has there done is quite 

 at variance with his own e.r cathedra opinions and advice. "How 

 often," he said in his paper on 'Style,' above referred to, "do we 

 find the young architect, fired with the beauty of the classic 

 column and entablature, of the portico and the pediment, intro- 

 ducing them where their unfitness actually destroys the very 

 beauty he is so anxious to display." Nevertheless, in his building 

 at Liverpool, he himself— "fired," perhaps, "with their beauty," — 

 has forcedly introduced a Greek-l)oric order (considerably modified, 

 it is true), whose columns are mere ornamental expletives in the 

 structure — architectural rhetoric without architectural logic; for 

 being attached to the wall, they not only serve no real purpose, 

 but lose the greater part of the effect that would else attend them, 

 and are reduced to mere embellishment, — for which the character 

 of that particular order most especially unfits it; whereas, the 

 portico, loggia, or other colonnade, carries with it the appearance, 

 at least, of utility, and as far as the order itself which is em- 

 ployed is concerned, exhibits it in conformity with its original 



42* 



