Chapter 7

THE VILLA QUARTERS.

MR. RUSKIN'S denunciation of the New Town of
Edinburgh includes, as I have heard it repeated, nearly
all the stone and lime we have to show. Many however
find a grand air and something settled and imposing in
the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the
confusion of styles induces an agreeable stimulation of
the mind. But upon the subject of our recent villa
architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with
Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious
of his large declamatory and controversial eloquence.

Day by day, one new villa, one new object of
offence, is added to another; all around Newington and
Morningside, the dismallest structures keep springing up
like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with them,
each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and
carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an
eye discovers their true character. They are not houses;
for they were not designed with a view to human
habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they
tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of man.
They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing
is built where every measurement is in clamant
disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no
style of art, only to a form of business much to be
regretted.

Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where
the size of the windows bears no rational relation to the
size of the front? Is there any profit in a misplaced
chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy builder gain
more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal
plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be
omitted, and green timber employed, in the construction
of even a very elegant design; and there is no reason why
a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so
situated as to look comely from without. On the other
hand, there is a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring
fiasco like the fall of Lucifer. There are daring and
gaudy buildings that manage to be offensive, without
being contemptible; and we know that 'fools rush in where
angels fear to tread.' But to aim at making a common-
place villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each
particular; to attempt the homeliest achievement, and to
attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any
theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to
outstrip all competitors in the art of conceiving and
rendering permanent deformity; and to do all this in what
is, by nature, one of the most agreeable neighbourhoods
in Britain:- what are we to say, but that this also is a
distinction, hard to earn although not greatly
worshipful?

Indifferent buildings give pain