CHAPTER VII.  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?