X.
WHO DESTROYED OUR TOWNS?
Some may think the obvious answer to this question is “those who covered our towns with soot.” But this is a superficial view. Wash the soot away and the shapes remain the same. My own view is that the fell deed was done unconsciously and from the highest motives by certain amiable gentlemen in the last century.
If any one wants to get some measure of the harm the Gothic Revival did and still does to our towns and villages let him visit the cities of northern Italy. There he will see how the classical tradition of simple rectangular buildings, with regularly spaced windows and low-pitched roofs, still controls all vernacular building. He will see everywhere dwelling-houses, farm-houses, factories, both new and old, which in their unaffected dignity, simplicity and repose might be the work of our own Sir Edwin Lutyens in his latest manner. Motoring across the Lombardy Plain or in the train through the hills of Tuscany one is always coming across another Lutyens house. One continually sees the buildings of Smith Square surrounded by vineyards, solid square blocks with widely and evenly spaced windows and plenty of plain wall surface. Americans in Italy must similarly have found numerous examples of the work of their great domestic architect Charles A. Platt.
Now in the eighteenth century we in England were building in the same Italian way. The square Queen Anne and Georgian houses with their regular windows and low roofs, which line the high streets of our country towns or stand as independent units surrounded with their walled gardens, are the exact counterpart of similar Italian buildings, allowing for differences in materials, such as universal stucco and pantiles in Italy and brick and generally slate or plain tiles with us, though sometimes, particularly in London, we used pantiles, too. These simple buildings, whether large or small, as one can see in Italy, always composed satisfactorily one with the other. Such buildings never jar with one another or with the landscape.
Outside Milan, a town which in size and business life compares with Manchester or Leeds, there is no rash of ugly little squiff-eyed villas with perky roofs, irregular windows and ugly projections in front and rear. Everywhere there are these simple cubical structures with regular windows, plastered and roofed as has been the tradition for centuries. Even in the centre of Milan, after walking about the town for a week, I could find only one irregular aggressive modern structure. I certainly did not find many good modern buildings, but—and this is much more important to the town as a whole—the masses of bad ones which we seem in England to take for granted were not there.
Now if the Gothic Revival had not broken up the classical tradition with us, should we still be building in town, suburb and country in the same simple way? I venture to think we should. It is appalling therefore to imagine the infinite damage that that movement of earnest but archæologically-minded men has done for us and our inheritance. We pride ourselves as a nation on our strong conservatism and common sense, but in truth we are more sentimental, more easily swept away by romantic highfalutin than any other race except the purely Teutonic ones. Ruskin simply turned us, or rather our houses, upside down. The quiet dignified old England of Rowlandson’s drawings—I refer to the houses not to the people—was changed to the speckled red and white, the pink and blue irregularly strewn crumbs of any awkward pointed shape of which Bournemouth, wholly built in Ruskinian and post-Ruskinian times, provides the supreme example.
We may laugh at modern Italian painting or cry when we compare it with the old, we may sneer at the dexterity which produces endless alabaster figures of girls in tight-fitting bathing costumes or of sentimental cupids, though we should remember that they are mostly made for the English market; but we cannot afford to look down on ordinary modern Italian building, free as it is from all eccentricity and strong as it is in its traditional way. Noticing the same good shapes and proportions everywhere in town and country alike, we see it is a real vernacular form of expression. It must be the work of folk who do it largely, if not entirely, instinctively. I doubt whether in most cases architects are employed at all. If they are, they must be almost celestial architects who are willing for the public good to sink their personalities and eccentricities in a way unknown to us.
To my argument that it was the Gothic Revival that did the damage and set us all on the wrong track, some may reply that Italian towns like Siena are full of real Gothic palaces, and yet they compose perfectly and their streets provide more beautiful scenes than any others. To this I would answer that the Italian Gothic palaces may have been built during the Gothic period, and are indeed full of Gothic detail, but they are not Gothic in spirit. They are rectangular in shape without any excrescences, bay windows and pointed roofs which show, just as the Gothic Towers of St. Gemignano are all rectangular. Gothic in Italy was never more than skin deep and was never revived as a semi-religious, semi-sociological exercise. When Italy wanted to let off steam and be romantic and exciting, as all live folk do every now and then, she invented the baroque, and a very splendid invention it was for the purpose. How much better to swagger and pose a little with some invention of your own than to fiddle about with monkish ideas five centuries old and standing for a completely different outlook on life. Anyhow the baroque never interfered with the peasants’ or citizens’ dwellings, never turned the house of the clerk from a quietly beautiful cottage into the little suburban English villa as did our own revived Gothic.