Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/43

 Jan. 12, 1872. THE BUILDING NEWS. 27 THE BUILDING NEWS. —_>—_. LONDON, FRIDAY, JAN. 12, 1872. WARWICK CASTLE. CONTROVERSY has arisen, in which Mr. Ruskin takes a conspicuous part, on the proposed restoration of Warwick Castle. In the opinion of that eminent art critic, the ruin should be allowed to remaina ruin, splendid in its dilapidation, unvulgarised by the hand of the modern architect. Mr. Ruskin, upon this point, is very positive, as he is, indeed, upon all others falling within the compass of his sympathies. He protests against a public subscription to rebuild the shattered towers and walls, or to rehabilitate the devastated chambers. With this part of the matter we have nothing to do. It may or may not be a question whether an opulent nobleman, because his ancestral halls and galleries, alive and bright with the noblest works of human genius, have been free to the excursionist’s foot, should suffer his mansion —for in our days castles are either only man- sions or relics—to be given back to him, re- stored, as a gift from his neighbours; but, passing this by, is a gentleman bound, by archeological considerations, to accept a fire as afate, and tolerate a magnificent fragment, instead of going about, in a common-sense way, the redemption of the ruin? Another reflection at once occurs. ‘This disaster was caused by a conflagration. Now there is a vast difference between the gray old fortalices that in England, and in Wales, and in Ger- many, crowding along the steep banks of the Rhine, have mouldered, stone by stone, with ancient windows letting in the mystic light of ages upon their historic floors, and the sudden, black, unpicturesque destruction wrought by fire. ‘The one is a type of time, slow, falling away by degrees, beautiful in decay, haunted by legends, fit subject for poet and sketcher ; the other is a skeleton made in an hour, without a grand thought in connec- tion with it. Besides, should Warwick Castle be now restored, will it be for the first time ? The calamity, again, has been no more than artial ‘The vaulted basements, Czsar’s ower, Guy’s Tower, the outer walls, and the front towards the river, remain, as we are glad to learn, intact. But what of the great hall, and the interior of the east wing, through which the flames passed with desolating effect? They were not, in the proper sense of the term, antiquities at all. They were mere reconstructions, dating from a com- paratively recent period. But the chapel, the armoury, and the state-rooms, of far older date, are unscathed. These are the real antiquities of Warwick Castle, and them itis not proposed to touch. As for the hall, con- cerning which Mr. Ruskin is so plaintive, that roof was constructed less than half a century ago. ‘The celebrated breakfast-room claims no pedigree beyond the reign of Charles II. Elsewhere, a venerable garnish was given to corridors and apartments by suits of Medizval armour, ancestral portraits, fragments of early architecture embedded in modern im- provements, Italian and German specimens belonging to the Middle Ages, quaint carvings, and grotesque sculptures. But nothing which has been destroyed possessed the sanctity which Mr. Ruskin would attribute to it. We areas hostile as can possibly be to vulgar restorations, yet we can perceive no valid reason why posterity should cherish aruin caused by fire. At the same time, it must be conceded that any degree of interest felt in this hoary struc- ture is justified by its history and its tradi- tions. No record remains of the period when the walls of a castle first rose on the rock that shelves to the river Avon. Far before King Alfred’s epoch there were battlements above the English Ehrenbreitstein. The Mercian earls made merry in the gloomy halls of Warwick. The Conqueror himself relied upon this castle asastronghold. Theracesof Newburgh, Beau- champ, Nevil, Plantagenet, and Dudley slept within those massive walls. Under them, five knights, ten sergeants, and a little army of soldiers, kept continual watch in the moat. So strong was the edifice that Henry ILI. prohibited the Dowager Countess of Warwick from remarrying without his permission, in order that he might previously judge what manner of man would be enabled to beard him from the fortified rock on the Ayon. Yet, in that era, the whole building, anent the antiquity of which Mr. Ruskin is so pathetic, was levelledto the ground, the two great towers excepted, New walls, new gates, new towers, were erected; but @uy’s Tower was not then in existence. It dates no farther back than the reign of the third Edward. It may shock our feelings, but it is a fact, that the Castle was long a ruin, in the last century, and that the habitable part of it was used as a county gaol. Not that upon this account it is to be disparaged, but certainly that, after so many vicissitudes, one more restoration can do no possible harm. We might as well have sanctioned a similar scruple, for esthetic reasons, with reference to the Tower of London. As we have said, had this august and majestic structure gradually sunk into decay, with the hoar of ages untouched upon it, the plea against re- construction might have held good; but it is not so. We might hesitate, naturally, to think of a nineteenth-century Guy’s Tower, replacing the embattled parapets, and the heavily-ivied walls, the machicolated bridges over the moat, now changed into two slopes of green velvet, or the Gothic turrets far aloft, whence the besieged once watched the enemy : though eyen here, the antiquity has disappeared, since broad Gothic windows have replaced the cheerless single lights and fatal loopholes. These, we submit, are not the terms upon which to contract for the preservation of aruin, ruinous. In fact, nearly all the lighting of the edifice has been more or less modified. We by no means suggest that the general effect has been in- jured. Still, there is the mighty river front, ramparted and turreted, with open flights of granite steps; still the reminiscences of war and chivalry in every arch and wall; still, there are gorgeous spaces of an interior, not less luxurious, perhaps, than any other in England ; but that which we would emphati- cally point out to the sentimental devotees of ruin is that Warwick Castle has again and again been visited by fire, been restored, and remained a monument of grandeur and beauty. Why not once more? We need not be so reverential of the past as to set up as an idol of archeological worship a fire-brigade an- tiquity. Well, there is enough left to deserve reframing—the famous oak-floored ante- chamber, the still more celebrated cedar- room, with a ceiling unsurpassed as a picture, unless, perhaps, by the wonderful plafond roof in the royal palace of Amsterdam, the ‘¢ vilt-room” and the state bedroom, which is a National Gallery in itself, with its Holbeins, Zuccheros, Titians, Veroneses, Rubens, and Wanderwerfs. ‘Thence may be seen the Avon, as we have often looked upon it, winding down a long slope of the most perfect park scenery, traversed by a picturesque bridge of a single arch, a waterfall, a mill of unknown age, pavilions of white marble, mellowed to a golden tint by time, and the trophy of Guy, so renowned that he became a fable. Guy’s Cliff still bears his name, as does the tower, for was he not, as Lord Lytton records, ‘the last of the barons?” But, unhappily, this generation is critical and, in the words of a sceptical historian, says ‘a shadowy an- cestor so renowned as Guy was a valuable boast to the Earls of Warwick during the dark ages, in which the greater part of society was enamoured of the marvellous, and they sedulously propagated his fame by causing his exploits to be worked in tapestry, by adopting his Christian name, and by calling after him a tower of their Castle. As the ages im- proved in understanding, the story of Guy sank towards disregard; but Sir William Dugdale strangely sullied a page of his excellent history by restoring the fable to serious consideration.” If we do not deeply mistake, Sir William Dugdale has been proved to be right, and his critic wrong. We are not insisting, be it noted, upon all the anecdotes flourished in local guide books con- cerning either the castle itself or Guy’s Cliff, which is loomed over by traditions yet more romantic. We leave to legend the Hermit’s Cave, the scene of the terrible duel between Guy and the Danish Colebrand, the burial of the knight by his neglected but tender wife, the cave in which Guy, having hewn it out with his own hands, is reported to have lived ‘like a palmer poore;” the statue to which a lady sculptor, not so long ago, re- stored a leg, the stables, cellars, and offices, all wrought like Indian temples, out of the: solid mountain; and the fatal spot where Guy Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, nick- named ‘‘ the black hound of Arden,” caused the head of Piers Gaveston, favourite of Edward IL., to be smitten from his shoulders. On the face of the rock may still be read :— P. Gaveston. Earl of Cornwall, Beheaded here + 1311. Now, is it better to repair and keep so far as is possible intact, such an edifice and such a place, with all their associations, than to givethem overto time and allow them to waste into heaps of decay? We wonder, as we have said, whether an argument on the other side would apply to Henry VII.’s Chapel, or Cologne Cathedral, or S. Peter’s at Rome, or the Duomo of Milan, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or Windsor Castle itself? For it comes to this: Windsor Castle ranks among our noblest antiquities. Supposing its state apartments were burnt out, would Mr. Ruskin interfere to prevent their restoration ? If not, why the restoration of Warwick Castle? Both have been, for the purposes of habitation, more or less modernised. Both, it is urged, are properties vested, to some extent, in the nation. Yet both are private residences, for all that, and we cannot expect a gentleman to live in a ruin for the sake of pictorial enthusiasts and autumnal sketchers. This structure, rendered so conspicuous in the public sight by the late conflagration, and the controversy which has arisen out of it, seems to be about as mucha part of English his- tory as the Tower of London itself. In fact, its fortunes, for several generations, followed those of the Crown. Its name confers the title attaching to the earldom, ‘' Earl War- wick, of Warwick Castle.” And its antiquity no modern architectural touches can violate. For Cesar’s Tower stands looming forth, the work of an unremembered generation. It is supposed to have stood for nearly a thousand years, and it is difficult for an unprofessional eye to detect where the rock ends in this part of the castle, and the tower begins. Presu- mably, it is the mostancient part of the whole pile, its method of construction being at once rude and singular. From its side juts out an embattled turret of stone, where imagination may place the herald at arms, demanding, in an epoch long passed, the name and purpose of some beleaguring chief. ‘Through its stu- pendous archway, flanked by battlemented towers, through a second, also turreted, through corridors of amazing dimensions, along which troops of horse, before now, have ridden, with fortifications of the feudal kind frowning on every side; up the grand artificial mount, which supplements the natural rock, and so on, we reach the civilised interior, the home, at seasons, of the family. And in the interval we cross the area of destruction or dilapidation :—The hall ; the marble floor, the breakfast-room, library, and private sitting-room; Lady Warwick's boudoir; three art ante-chambers, if wemay so describe them; and the seven leather-hung bed-rooms. The hall, though much modern-