So beauty bright, if you would wed,
        When lovers come to woo,
    Beware the tossing of the head,
        The glance that looks askew.
    Men ask for love, and not for wit
        That scorches where it glows,
    'Tis heart, not head, you ought to hit;
        Uncurl your scornful nose!

ARCHITECTURAL TALKERS AND
DOERS.

TWO phases of Talking and Doing have
already been dealt with in these pages,* but
the subject is not by any means exhausted.
There remains, especially, one aspect of it
under which the respective peculiarities of
the Talkers and the Doers appear almost
more conspicuously than under any other.
Architecture is the subject which, of all
others, has been discussed the most fully
and criticised the most severely by that
dilettanti fraternity about whom we have
already had something to say. The
lamentations which these gentlemen make over
the degradation of modern architecture are
profoundly dismal. "Of all the arts,"
the Talkers say, "this one has fallen the
lowest. In these days, even at its best, it
arrives at nothing but a base and servile
mimicry of what was done hundreds of
years ago. Slavish reproductions of the
glorious structures of Greece and Rome,
on the one hand, or of the lavishly-decorated
cathedrals and palaces of the Gothic time,
on the other. When the average architect
has to erect a building now-a-days, what
does he do? He either sends one of his
pupils to make a drawing, to scale, of some
ancient edifice, which he copies with all the
accuracy of which he is capable; or else he
gets together a mass of studies of detached
parts of one of those fine old structures,
and makes up a whole by combining them
together. Is this a right state of things? Is
it right that we should have no style of our
own? that there should be a Classical style,
a Gothic style, a Renaissance style, but no
Nineteenth-century style, nothing distinctive
of our own day? Have modern architects
no ideas of their own?"
* See ALL THE YEAR ROUND, New Series, vol. iii.,
pp. 271 and 537.

With that they proceed to lash every one
of our modern architectural attempts with
all sorts of savage sarcasms. They liken
this thing to a pepper-castor, and that to
a dumb-waiter. They ask if anything so
mean and paltry as Regent-street, or so
contemptible as Trafalgar-square, was ever
beheld by mortal eyes? When they come
in contact with a specimen of modern
architecture which is really good, and the
artistic claims of which they are unable
altogether to ignore, they fall back — it
being absolutely necessary to deny all
merit to the modern builder — upon the
want of originality of the edifice in question,
and point out with malignant
satisfaction how every part of it has been copied
from some already existing building, which
was erected in the good old times when
"there were architects in the world."

The answer to all this is, that, in the first
place, one of the inevitable consequences of
the passage of time is that the discovery of
absolutely new things shall become a more
and more rare event. So much has been
already discovered, that the office of those
who would once have been discoverers and
inventors is only now to discover and
invent new developments, new adaptations,
of what was found out long ago. In
connexion with the fundamental laws relating
to the construction of a building, for
instance, what that should be entirely new
would be possible? The edifice must have
walls, and those walls must be pierced with
apertures, some to admit air and light to
the interior of the building, and others to
afford the means of ingress and egress.
Then as to the shape of these apertures;
their tops must of necessity be either
square or arched; if the latter, the arch
must be either round or pointed, and more
or less elevated or depressed; and in
accordance with the degree in which it
partakes of one or other of these characteristics
will the arch be found to belong to one or
other of the existing orders of architecture.
The architect must have a roof, and, when
the enclosed space is at all large, he must
have columns to support the roof. Nor
are these the only inevitable conditions
of his undertaking. These are the structural
necessities, but there are decorative
necessities as well. The surface of his
wall must have projections and recesses, a
blank wall and an unbroken square building
being things intolerable to the eye.
His roof-line must be broken, and this
must be done with towers, or steeples, or
cupolas, of different dimensions, and these,
according to the shape and proportion
which he gives them, will, like the
windows and the doors, inevitably assume
forms which will assign them a certain
definite place among already existing orders
of architecture.

It is easy, under these circumstances,
for the Talker to apostrophise the Doer