CARVED STAIR PARTS BALUSTERS SPINDLES NEWEL POSTS FINIAL 
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AND CRAFTSMEN

Or we choose another sheet of writing paper and have Pelham Place in reverse, with Pelham Crescent at the end of it. A flagpole rises at the edge of the promenade out of the sand. Ladies in white crinolines, for summer wear, are talking over the railings. A britschka or open carriage comes quickly past, and we are to imagine the shining leather of its hood, put back, and glistening in the hot sun. On the other side of the road, by the houses, a lady and gentleman are walking along. We see the line of his arm and walking stick, and the outline of her mantle swelling down into her crinoline, a line of beauty once as familiar as the snood and trousers of our shelter dress. In the distance, a wooded hill behind the houses, more sandstone cliffs, and the raised Arcade of shops below the Crescent. In a third, and last sheet, Pelham Crescent lies straight in front of us. We are looking at it from the sea. There are a row of the old bathing machines, horsedrawn into the waves, and many ladies and gentlemen walking by the salt margin of the sands, at high tide near the houses. A carriage passes along tike foreshore. We see the characteristic lamp posts, the area railings an verandahs, while Pelham Crescent opens before us with wings or arms outstretched, of bow windows, and a high Classical portico for head or centre, the whole lying under the golden cliff behind, and displayed like a fantastic vision in the little space between the cliffs and sea. It is curious to think that Hastings was the haunt of artists. W. H. Hunt, who painted birds' nests and primroses in watercolour with such fidelity to natural appearances, and was a cripple, came to Hastings for his health, and "found many of his rustic subjects in its neighbourhood". It was favoured, too, by the Pre-Raphaelites. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Miss Siddal were married here. We feel tempted to cross the English Channel and land at Trouville, for on the far side of those fabulous waters lies a world of fashion that is more fantastic still. It was, according to legend, Isabey, who painted the portrait of the King of Rome as an infant Grenadier, in a little bearskin, tapping at his drum, who suggested to Boudin that he should take for his subject the fantastic improbability of the crowd of fashion on the summer sands. The villas were in polychrome or Pompeian style, but Boudin is only interested in the skies, the summer elegancies, and flat sands. We see the Empress Eugenie in her short scarlet crinoline, with a walking stick to help her on the treacherous sands, and surrounded by her ladies, but it is no more than a fleeting and fantastic vision, and as soon as we look closely at them, they are gone.

The English seaside town nearly always possesses a parade, or terrace, or a chemist's shop, dating from the early nineteenth century. The seaside town that I know best, where I was born, has a splendid example in the gold and white Regency staircase of the Royal Hotel. This particular town was famous for the jockey carriages that drove along the sands; but when I was last at Scarborough I found that the memory of the fantastic characters of my childhood outweighed the architecture. I could have waited, hardly daring to move, as in a trance, outside certain houses that I remembered. Character, as well as architecture, is a dying art. This, at least, must be the opinion of Mr. Max Beerbohm, a survivor from another age, who remarks that in his youth one would have referred to London as " she " or " her ", whereas, now, one mentions London, instinctively, as "it".

CARVED STAIR PARTS BALUSTERS SPINDLES NEWEL POSTS FINIAL AND
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But the first third of the nineteenth century, until 1830 or a little later, cannot be characterized as other than one of the flourishing periods in England for the arts. The portraits of Sir Thomas Lawrence, the land­scapes of Constable and Turner, the greatest of William Blake's water­colours and engravings, these are the painters of the age of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Architecture has no great names. Neither Nash, nor Papworth, nor even Barry, are on the first or second line of genius. But just as it was a great age of illustration, as the art of aquatint produced some of the most beautiful of English books, and a great age of lettering, whether in printed books, or in the names and ornaments above the shops (198), so the genius of the age is found in a single piece of Regency or Empire furniture, in the simple lines of a particular room, or in some detail that is imbued with all the character of its time and epoch. Individuals, like Thomas Hope, or Augustus Welby Pugin, in their different spheres, are more personal than anything that has come down to us from the age of taste. There is no longer the fluency of an age when the hand of man could not go wrong. All the styles were in the field together, "and the devil took the hindmost". The Prince Regent could build in the Classical manner of Henry Holland, and in the Mogul, and the Gothic manners. He, even "seeking to impart artistic effect wherever he thought it possible, sent Monsieur Vilmet, his chef de cuisine, to the elder Pugin, that he might instruct him in the art of drawing and design-wishing his table to be decked with taste, and the confectionery, etc., built up in artistic forms". Or, in fact, the Gothic diningroom of Carlton House had set pieces and confectionery in the Gothic taste.

1 Offenbach, who lived at the Villa Orphee, only a few miles from Trouville, at Etretat, across the estuary of the Seine, wrote the music for a one-act comedy, the Romance de la Rose, which is entirely in the "atmosphere" of Trouville in the Second Empire. It was given at the Bouffes on 11 December 1869. Here is the plot. An American widow hears, sighed or whispered forth, at the seaside, the famous romance, The Last Rose of Summer, which Flotow put into his opera Martha. She would like to know who is the singer. It must be beyond doubt the musician who lives close by with an artist. But, no, the musician sings badly and out of tune; it is the artist who has the charming voice. But the artist, unfortunately, is not in search of adventure; for he has an extremely pretty mistress, and so he leads on the American widow by having the Last Rose of Summer blared forth on a clarionet that is out of tune, by a badly strung guitar, etc., etc. We may imagine for ourselves how Offenbach has given free rein to his comic genius in this little comedy. We will conclude in the words of M. Louis Schneider, without attempting to translate "Il y a dans sa partition une chanson ‘le Chien du colonel' , accompagne d'aboie­ments, qui est d'une inenarrable fantaisie et dont le succes a ete complet". Offenbach, by Louis Schneider Paris, 1923.

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.As late as 1830 it was still possible to build a charming house. Willey Hall, near Bridgnorth, by one of the nephews of James Wyatt, and Grimston Park, Tadcaster, probably by Decimus Burton, are two last instances. Another example is Bure Homage, built in Hampshire by the Baroness de Feucheres, Sophia Dawes, the daughter of a fisherman in the Isle of Wight, who retired to England with a fortune after the mysterious death of her senile lover, the last Conde. This latter house might be described as a Regency counterpart to Lees Court, for the intention is the same, a simple Classical villa carved stair parts balusters spindles newel posts finial  and architectural fittings in reminiscence of another clime. There are one or two houses in the strict Grecian manner, Wallington, in Northumberland, the home of the Trevelyans, being typical, and drawing strength, it may be, from the proximity of Grainger's Newcastle, and from the Modern Athens of Playfair and the "Greeks". There was even a Bceotian manner; while the Neo-Greek style gave occasion for some extraordinary churches in London and in Glasgow. St Pancras church, by the Inwoods, reproduced the caryatids of the Erectheum. We are arriving at the last architects; at William Wilkins, who designed University College, London, and the National Gallery. St George's Hall, Liverpool, by H. L. Elmes, is a reconstruction of the tepidarium of the Thermw of Caracalla. In the same paragraph we have to put St Luke's, Chelsea, the first church of the "Revival".

1 We may be permitted to hope that Monsieur Vilmet was not subjected to the rigid discipline of Mrs. Pugin. The elder Pugin, a refugee from France, married Miss Catherine Welby, the "Belle of Islington", a district at that day the headquarters of the Royalist Emigration. After his marriage, his articled pupils were inmates of his house. "A discipline was enforced in the social system of the establishment which owed its origin to Mrs. Pugin. It was severe and restrictive in the extreme and the smallest want of punctuality or infringement of domestic rules excited the marked displeasure of the lady. Mrs. Pugin usually retired to rest at nine o'clock and rose in the morning at four; she therefore thought it salutary that the pupils should commence their studies at six o'clock in winter as well as in summer; indeed, from the moment the mistress of the house awoke no one was ever permitted to get any rest. First came the loud ringing of the bell to rouse the maids, then in quick succession the bell to summon the pupils from their beds, and the final peal requiring their presence in the office by eight o'clock. At half-past eight they were sum­moned to breakfast, and on entering the room Madame was already seen at the head of the table ; on approaching it each youth made a profound bow, the neglect of which would quickly have been visited with reproof. A short prayer was then said, and breakfast despatched in constrained silence. . After dinner, the pupils con­tinued to work incessantly at the desk till eight o'clock. The only leisure afforded them was from that hour till ten, when they retired to rest. Nothing could exceed the stern manner in which this routine was carried out. The cold, cheerless and unvarying round of duty was wretched and discouraging." Recollections of A. N. Welby Pugin, by Benjamin Ferrey, London, 1861.

Is it any wonder that Augustus Welby Pugin, brought up in such a household, was happiest in his sailing boat, alone? He died, insane.

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FINIAL  AND ARCHITECTURAL FITTINGS THE REGENCY
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Barry is building the sham Gothic Toddington, in Gloucester­shire, and will begin work, shortly, upon the Houses of Parliament, with Augustus Welby Pugin to draw the carved stair parts balusters spindles newel posts finial  and architectural fittings ornaments. The most complete specimen of this latter is Alton Towers, Staffordshire, built for his Catholic patron, Lord Shrewsbury, "a vast ill-connected series of galleries and towers", with an entrance through a lofty tower, up a flight of steps guarded by the family supporters, two tall rampant Talbot dogs, each holding a gilt banner; an octagon like a chapter house, and a Gothic conservatory. The fountains, whether by Pugin or not, were most curious, at least in the description. "The War fountain", we are told, "is so named from the numerous jets crossing each other like spears ; the screw fountain is a short pillar with deeply grooved sides, in which the water flashes like bands of silver; and the Chinese fountain consists of a jet of water that streams like a flag from the gilt pinnacle of a pagoda."

Barry could build the neo-Perpendicular Houses of Parliament, and at the same time, the Reform Club with an exterior taken from a Venetian palace, and an interior court copied from the Palazzo Massimi at Rome. Perhaps the Reform, with the adjacent United Services and the Athenaeum, are the last of our good buildings. The mid-Victorian architects are often magnificent in their measured drawings. Burges, particularly, is quite remarkable in this respect. But we find it impossible, for our part, to share in the craze for the sham Gothic churches of the mid-Victorian "Revival". That can only be a pastime for minds that have not tasted the beauties of the past. Their only pleasure in such buildings must be the despair of hopelessness. Probably the most horrible experience of this nature is a visit to St Mary's Cathedral, at Edinburgh, the "Early English masterpiece" of Sir Gilbert Scott, built in the most barren period of the "seventies", and peerless for ugliness, unless it be for its own sister, Scott's chapel of St John's, at Cambridge. The prospect is bleak indeed, though Sir Gilbert Scott and his contemporaries were certain, nevertheless, that they were living in a period of Christian architecture second to none. Ruskin, himself, seems to have deplored the excesses committed in his name. Probably the only tolerable interiors were those, as at the Marl­borough Club, in Pall Mall, given over to Landseer prints and horsehair chairs and sofas. And the charm of prettiness cannot be denied to Balmoral with its carved stair parts balusters spindles newel posts finial  and architectural fittings carpets and curtains of Stuart tartan.

But rescue is not far off. Less than fifteen years separate Balmoral and the Red House, Beckenham, built by Philip Webb for William Morris. Soon Norman Shaw and the more original Charles Annesley Voysey are at work. The first house by Lutyens was built in 1889, and the story of English architects and craftsmen is brought down to our own times. That we have living architects in our day is certain; but that they will be given their opportunity is not sure at all. The new Waterloo Bridge is not a good augury for the future of the art. A competition for the new bridge among intelligent children would have produced designs more expressive of the functions and the pleasures of a bridge over a great river, and of the entrance into one of the great capitals of the world. Or a sculptor like

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Henry Moore, who is so powerful in his drawings, could have been asked for his suggestions.Instead, we have a bridge which means nothing, leads nowhere, and has no status and no nationality.

For the triumphs of our architecture, old and new, are eloquent of the English language. We have a prose, and poetry, that are incomparable. English architecture in carved stair parts balusters spindles newel posts finial  and architectural fittings, if it has not the early Renaissance of Italy or Spain, was born a generation later, and lasted through the decadence of the Latin countries. Eighteenth century France had its great names; but as Europeans, not Englishmen, we must prefer our own buildings of the later period. We shall even find that our architecture and our language are the arts of England. But the art is impracticable without its craftsmen. It is this that gives to architecture its corporate body. The art is not personified in a single figure. We have no Christopher Smart or William Blake, but the entire tree loads with fruit on every branch. The minor arts are all flourishing, and all fall together. The leaves wither, and the long winter comes. We may conclude that it is unlikely it will flower in our lifetime. Our days and nights are not propitious. But, where the genius of architecture has once lingered, it may mine again. Of that genius, and its fruits, none can doubt who know our buildings from the Norman and the Gothic down to nearly modern times. They are the glory of England, second only to the written word.