Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/433

Rh interpreter of the Gothic in nature. "There is not a single spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trosachs to the other. All their rocks are heavily rounded, and the introduction of the word 'spire' is a piece of inaccuracy in description, ventured merely for the sake of the Gothic image." The italics are Mr. Ruskin's own, hut they serve our turn too.

He counsels the New Town to set about de-Hellenising itself with all convenient speed. The denizens of Drummond-place and Randolph-crescent and the "lave," may indeed fear, and, as he tells them, must expect at first that there will be difficulties and inconsistencies in carrying out the new, the Gothic, style; but these will soon be conquered, he assures them, if too much is not attempted at once. "Do not be afraid of incongruities," he says,—"do not think of unities of effect" [almost the only thing Edinburgh architects have thought of, and about the last they will be willing to surrender to the Goth]. "Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them; build a porch, or point a window, if you can do nothing else; and remember that it is the glory of Gothic architecture that it can do anything. …. Only be steadily determined that, even if you cannot get the best Gothic, at least you will have no Greek; and in a few years' time,—in less time than you could learn a new science or a new language thoroughly,—the whole art of your native country will be reanimated." With much that the lecturer contends for, in his general defence of Gothic and defiance of Greek, we heartily concur—and incidentally we may express our thanks for his just strictures on the bad building of the day, in the parts concealed by paint and plaster, and "the strange devices that are used to support the long horizontal cross beams of our larger apartments and shops, and the framework of unseen walls." We own to some fellow-feeling in his opinion of the vastly-lauded St George's Church—or, as he irritatingly describes it, to men and women born and bred in sight of and reverence for it, "one of your most costly and most ugly buildings, the great church with the dome, at the end of George-street. I think I never saw a building with a principal entrance so utterly ghastly and oppressive; and it is as weak as it is ghastly. The huge horizontal lintel above the door is already split right through." His satire is legitimately directed, too, against the leonine ornamentation of the Royal Institution, carefully finished off at the very top of the building, "just under its gutter," where such "most delicate and minute pieces of sculpture"" have the finest prospect of being out of sight, out of mind. "You cannot see them in a dark day, and perhaps may never, to this hour, have noticed them at all. But there they are: sixty-six finished heads of lions, all exactly the same; and therefore, I suppose, executed on some noble Greek type, too noble to allow any modest Modern to think of improving upon it." And here the lecturer amused his auditors by a diagram, the work of Mr. Millais, representing in most piquant contrast one of these impossible heads of noble Greek type, and the actual head of a tiger in the Gardens at Broughton, no lion being available in that collection. A copy of the drawing forms the frontispiece, and a very taking one, of this volume of lectures, to enable all to compare a piece of true, faithful, and natural work with "the Grecian sublimity of the ideal beast," as perpetuated by the traditions of the Renaissance.