CONTEXT 187 : MARCH 2026 47 CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 45 The inspector-general Dryburgh Abbey. September. 10 am. Deserted. Light rain. Silence. Two unseen crows debate a point. Silence again. Spellbinding. The trees of the Earl of Buchan’s 200-year-old arboretum imbue Dryburgh with a special enchantment. In the shelter of the standing remains of the abbey church there is a plain, red, polished granite chest tomb. The minimal inscription reads, ‘Sir Walter Scott, Baronet, died September 21, AD 1832’. Given this self-chosen simplicity and seclusion, one does wonder what he would have made of Edinburgh’s memorial, the gothic extravaganza festooned with 68 statues of characters from his novels. Trivia question (you’ll thank me in a pub quiz some day): which two antiquaries provided stories for operas by Bizet? I have trailed one. Scott’s The Fair Maid of Perth scarcely survived her translation to the far-too-prosaic Jolie Fille and has had perhaps 50 performances ever. Prosper Mérimée’s Carmen scores possibly a quarter of a million. Scott is chasing with Rossini’s La Donna del Lago and Donizetti’s Lucia de Lammermoor, but Mérimée wins by a distance. Scott was an antiquary of the old school. He collected historic artifacts with abandon, although he was a bit of a sucker for dubious provenances. His house at Abbotsford is still stuffed with them. In his novel The Antiquary (his self-declared favourite) the eponymous axial character, Jonathan Oldbuck, is a satirization of himself and his cronies. It seems plausible to assume that Mérimée styled himself on Scott. Scott was a generation older, but the parallels in both literary approach and antiquarian interests is strong, both seeing national heritage as cultural capital, and both using tangible and intangible historical contexts in their fiction. Mérimée translated Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor into French as La Famille Ashton and, as a polyglot polymath might, translated Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev and Spanish literature. Mérimée’s theretofore lacklustre literary career took off in 1829 when he discovered his metier: the novella, of which he was the first notable exponent. He did not, like Scott, aspire to a long and affectionate marriage. His bachelor lifestyle, in which the wives of illustrious men featured strongly, resulted once in his being runner-up in a duel. Nevertheless, this did mean that he knew a lot of influential people. In 1831 he started a meteoric rise through the civil service of the new bourgeois monarchy of Louis-Philippe. Mérimée’s passion for heritage was shared by Louis-Philippe and by 1833 Mérimée was inspectorgeneral of historic monuments for France. There followed a 27-year career cataloguing and restoring France’s architectural heritage after decades of neglect, revolution and war. His approach to conservation – restore authentically without invention – aligns pretty well with modern practice, although his protege Viollet le Duc and other successors had more freestyle approaches. By the time of Mérimée’s retirement in 1860, having survived two turbulent regime changes, the official list of monuments historiques had fewer than 3,000 entries. This was because private owners, notably the church, could object to inclusion. Mérimée’s own survey list was much longer, and today the online Base Mérimée contains over 300,000 entries. Mérimée used his tours of inspection and travels abroad to collect ideas for his novellas. In several of these he employs a ‘frame narrative’ in which a narrator (say, a wandering archaeologist) hears a story from a person he meets. Many authors have used this device, one of them being Walter Scott in Old Mortality. Restoration of the great abbeys of the Tweed valley would never have been possible even in French hands, but modern 3D renderings help keep the cultural memory alive, as do Scott’s novels The Monastery and its sequel The Abbot. The eponymous monastery Kennaquhair is most commonly supposed, from its architectural description, to be based on Melrose Abbey. But the first paragraph of The Monastery specifically contrasts Kennaquhair with ‘the no less splendid establishments of Melrose, Jedburgh and Kelso’, and the rest of the description is a better fit for Dryburgh. So shall we let popular opinion have its way about Melrose? That leaves the enchantment of Dryburgh to me, you, Walter Scott and two crows. James Caird Mérimée: a passion for heritage Jonathan Coe’s recent The Proof of My Innocence is a stand-out page-turner involving overlapping realities. This is an expression from the world of quantum mechanics which might, I feel, also be applied to the history of architectural theory. It seems to me that Vitruvius’s description, two millennia ago, of the essentials of architecture being firmitas, utilitas and venustas, have yet to be improved on. These words are more familiar today in the paraphrase by Sir Henry Wotton in the early seventeenth century as firmness, commodity and delight, although perhaps this misses the wider ranges of meaning in the Latin words. You may remember Douglas Adams’s idea, in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that all civilizations go through three phases of development, represented by the questions ‘How can we eat?’, ‘Why do we eat?’ and ‘Where shall we have lunch?’: the How, Why and Where phases. Applying these to history of architectural theory, the Why phase begins in the age of enlightenment, which brings the onset of many overlapping realities. By this time, the likes of Alberti, Serlio and Palladio had pretty much knocked Vitruvius into shape, and rather too many architects and commentators were looking for something else to write about. Generally architects do not make good writers, nor writers architects. Inigo Jones, Wren, Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh all saved their ink for the drawing board and let their buildings speak for them. But very many others were not so reticent. The overlapping realities of the Overlapping realities Mies van der Rohe: less is more (Drawing by Rob Cowan) middle period of architectural theory are mostly concentrated on style, with the fashionistas like Lord Burlington, Horace Walpole, Richard Payne Knight and Ruskin tending towards a variety of didactic moralistic stances. Ruskin, in particular, was a hugely talented artist and writer such that his influence had no serious challengers in Britain for half a century. Moralism featured less among continental writers, whence came many of the rationalist principles that have featured in the architecture of the last 100 years. Nicolaus Goldmann, Leonhard Sturm and Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand stand out for me because they continued the cause of Vitruvian rationality, and the pool of ideas that prompted later pithier epithets such as Louis Sullivan’s ‘form follows function’ and Mies van der Rohe’s ‘less is more’. Now, if you are thinking of reading Thomas Harris’s Three Periods of English Architecture (1894): don’t. Its opacity makes it a real page-turner – 20 or 30 at a time. I fish this lacklustre example from the sea of overlapping realities because one of Harris’s few notable buildings is Stokesay Court, not far from where I live; one of the biggest and least distinguished piles in Shropshire. Its overcautious detailing was described by Pevsner in 1958 as ‘symmetrically Elizabethan’, but by 2006 John Newman’s new edition of the Shropshire volume had promoted it to ‘full-blown Jacobean’. It makes one wonder what Harris thought it was. ‘Jacobethan’ covers it, but that word had not yet been coined. The first two of Harris’s three cryptically titled chapters ‘At work’, ‘Asleep’ and ‘Awakening’ are about the historic merits of the gothic style and a polemic about neoclassical styles, which were Harris’s bête noir. ‘Awakening’, however, set out his vision for a 20th-century, pan-European architectural style based on the then emerging use of steel and aluminium. I guess he got what he wanted, but maybe not to his total satisfaction; and certainly not to that of the distinguished scholar, the late James Stevens Curl (see page 8), whose antipathy to the international style equalled Harris’s to classicism. For all the last 300 years of bickering in a world of overlapping realities, it all comes down to firmness, commodity and delight. The axial question is: whose delight? To quote the otherwise unnamed ‘Princess of France’ in Love’s Labours Lost: ‘beauty is bought by the judgement of the eye’, so I am afraid I can not answer for anyone but me. Now, where shall we have lunch? James Caird
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=