Page:The venture; an annual of art and literature.djvu/47

 coloured. Any householder is master of a landscape, and the view is at his mercy. Everything may be set out of order by the hard colour and the paper thinness of his slate roof. See the dull country that the Channel divides, half of it on the Dover heights, and half on those of the Pas de Calais. It is all one dull country. It has not the beauty of downs, nor of pasture; it has neither trees nor a beautiful bareness; it has no dignity in the outlines of the hills; but the French side has the beauty of roofs, and the English side makes the very sunshine unsightly with towns and villages covered with slate. All the French roofs are light in their tone, silver greys, greenish greys in the towns, a pure high scarlet in the solitary farms. This kind of French tile retrieves all the poor landscape of patchwork fields, green and dull in their unshadowed noons. The red is strong, simple, and abrupt, a vermilion filled with yellow.

It is true that old village tiles are fine, although they be dark, but only on condition that the cottages they roof should be whitewashed or of a cheerful brick. There is brick and brick, and all the very light colours are good. Light rosy bricks and very small, long in shape, seem the most charming, and these are rare. Next come the coarse but admirable light yellow-red. But any man who builds a house of dark bricks inclining to purple and pointed with slate colonrcolour [sic], would have done better to erect something in stucco with pillars and a portico. All kinds of red villas continue to crowd upon our sight, and it is to be feared that many a purchaser is afraid