by a hundred paces from the new Public Library at present rising just across the bridge. Here surely was an opportunity for generous art patronage. The building's at the back of Parliament House are unworthy of it ; the Cowgate of to-day is sunk in squalor. The new Library might dignify the one and ennoble the other. It only needed adequate, not extravagant, expenditure, and just a little courtesy to art considerations. But the learned Society, for this pile of 60 yards' frontage, 80 or 90 feet high, draws rigidly the line at =£"12,500 of total cost, in which mean sum even architects' and surveyors' fees must be included. By simple arithmetic, on i?12,500 the tenements below will yield a shrewd percentage; and this, we suppose, must be taken as the measure of the Society's fostering care for art, the deliberate appreciation of the claims of architecture by a main branch of the legal profession. What hope is there for its advancement as a fine art in such conditions? What encouragement to belief in that progress in knowledge and love of art on which we are beginning to plume ourselves so airily?
It is not want of public spirit that leads to a lost opportunity like this, but sheer inability to appreciate the elementary needs of the art, its bare necessaries of life. It is not even a 'bourgeois ideal'; it is the commercial spirit triumphant, and gauging art by its own standard. Our inspiration has not changed since we were dubbed 'a nation of shopkeepers,' in spite of 'aestheticism' and desperate' art movements.' Your true shopkeeper is born, not made; so our sweetness and light are still the perfume of the counter and gas-flare radiance. The conduct of the competition itself had not even the credit of being business-like. Originally limited to invited architects, the competition merged vaguely into a public one; a professional assessor was appointed, and his decision, it is an open secret, overturned; the whole business, from an architectural point of view, as unsatisfactory as it well could be. The question of an assessor's status and authority is certainly difficult, nor can it be here discussed. But at least, if a professional adviser's decision is rejected, his report, in fairness to the competitors, should be made public. For the learned society to upset in private their assessor's judgment, and give forth unqualified their own decision only, is outrageous. Some dozen or more designs were submitted, and quasi-publicly exhibited. All, of course, were hampered by the miserable pittance within which they had at least to say they kept. And all, it may be noted, disclaimed with eager unanimity the spending of an extra shilling on the exterior of the building, or on anything but the interior of the library and solicitors' apartments (gauging, perhaps accurately enough, the wishes of the learned society). But even hampered as they were, we cannot help feeling that the designs, for the most part, were commonplace, and too often conceived with no regard for the conditions and the site. Only one competitor showed an exterior perspective viewed from the only point where the building could be seen; yet rarely could there be a case in which a building should be more specially designed for its peculiar site. We wonder if the assessor shared the competitors' disregard of this, a point of some importance for what aspires to be a public building.
Further, the majority of the designs were strangely unsuited to the associations and surroundings of the site. What more out of place in the Cowgate of Edinburgh than the uninteresting classicality of Dignity and Simplicity, or of Themis or of Lex? The most marked exception to this was Scottish Seventeenth Century, a facade characterised by quiet breadth of treatment and good feeling, very successfully harmonising with the traditions of old Edinburgh. Lex, it may be noted, had not covered the site, a tribute to the Society's parsimony to be commended for its sincerity; but within these narrowed limits the author had exhausted the opening letters of the alphabet in bewildering alternatives. Wisdom., Health, and Beauty, the design ultimately preferred for inscrutable reasons, is distinguished externally by an offspring of bay windows projecting from the parent walls, numerous as families in the Cowgate are apt to be; further, by a flat roof over the reading-room that will make the west end very unsightly from George IV. Bridge, the one point of view that ought to have been most studied. Internally it is remarkable for its treatment of the unhappy corridor leading to the meeting hall, a sort of tunnel, eight feet high or thereabouts, bored through the books of the library, and but ill wedded to the large exterior bay windows. It is noticeable that this corridor vanished in the perspective (not technically but completely), and was transformed into solicitors and tables.
Our intention, however, has not been to dwell on the designs in detailed criticism, but to point
the moral of this melancholy competition ; liow low, namely, our present state of education in art, how feeble our feeling for it, how inadequate to deal with architecture in a public spirit, how dead to its claims as the broadest of the arts.
