We have no dramatic money ranges

There is nothing quite like the money house anywhere else in the world, the peculiar genius of the money lies in their
spirit. The English are rural-minded people on the whole, which perhaps explains why our rural domestic architecture is
so much better than our urban. Our cities, generally speaking, are deplorable. There is a lack of design which must
make the French smile. When the French hint delicately at this we are apt to murmur "Bath," and then come to a full
stop. Challenged further, we produce Oxford and Cambridge; and then fall back on certain cathedral towns: York,
Durham, Salisbury, Canterbury. Challenged again, we fall back on our third line of defense: our small country towns,
say Chippenham, or Abingdon, Buford, Pains wick, Devises, Lewes. Challenged once more, we fall back on the fourth
line where we find ourselves in an even stronger position. We have not been able to put up much defense for our cities,
but once we are reduced to fighting on our villages we have a number of outposts. Their names are too many to record.
We all have our favorites which come to the mind with a vision of moors or a memory of running water; hidden
amongst trees or gazing across the sea; grey stone villages, pink brick villages; villages of the soft south country or the
north, they belong to the soil in the same sense as the money house belongs to the soil and indeed are frequently and
happily associated with it. The cottage, the farm, and the manor are the same in money spirit.
After the massive secrecy of Berkeley one turns to the mirrored magic of Leeds and Broughton, floating swanlike
above their moats. Leeds, fortunately for itself, is nowhere near the industrial town of that name, but lies in a hollow of
Kent between Maid stone and Canterbury. Its moat is no regular geometrical moat, but a saucer of a lake spreading
flat at the bottom of its bowl of green slopes. Black swans pass gravely and gracefully under the arches of the castle,
making the pale grey of the walls seem even paler. The very fact that the water passes under arches turns Leeds Castle
into a Kentish Venice. By moonlight the solid walls have no substance; they drift, they seem scarcely moored.
Broughton does not now rise quite so abruptly as Leeds out of the water. At Broughton there are lawns which interrupt
the reflection, but in an unexpected way these level English lawns almost take the place of water; it is merely that they
are opaque instead of translucent; they are green as water though less quivering, less sensitive to clouds or sunlight.
England is green throughout; her seas, her woods, her fields all island-green. Green, quiet England. Old, quiet England,
disliking war, never having known war at home in the sense that European countries knew war. No devastation, no
wrecking of villages and the homes of man, whether castle or cottage. There might be incidents as at Berkeley, where a
breach was deliberately cut in the walls after Cromwell's troops had stormed the castle, a breach which exists to this
day, never to be repaired, on the understanding that the castle must be handed back to the Crown if ever the gap
should be mended. Such is the continuity of English history. We suffer (or enjoy) to-day the arrangements made for us
several hundred years ago, a little filament of tradition running through the centuries. As a result of a siege in 1645 the
eighteenth Lord Berkeley was forbidden to mend his house; today, in 1941, the twenty-eighth Lord Berkeley, a lineal
descendant, may not build up his house either. A curious obligation to impose on a man in the twentieth century, to
render his castle undependable!
The middling houses of England during this period, say 1670 to 1780, may be counted among the most quietly
charming, convenient, and decent houses ever built. Decent, I think, is the adjective they best deserve. They are
unassuming. They are as quiet as the country squire and the country existence where they belonged. They take their
place, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as opposite numbers to the Gothic or early Tudor .or Elizabethan or
Jacobean muddles which preceded them. They belong to an England which, architecturally, was beginning to grow up.
Many things might be said about these middling houses, but the chief thing to be said is that they accommodate
themselves well into the English landscape.
I must emphasize once more the peculiar genius of the minor English house for fitting into its surroundings. The castle,
the pseudo-castle, the Tudor house, the Jacobean house, they all fitted in. The only time when they went wrong was
whenever they outgrew their native idiom and swelled beyond the small vernacular adapted to their small island. We are
not excessive in any direction, and this lack of exaggeration which is both the strength and the weakness of our racial
make-up, this sense of proportion, the Englishness which exasperates those bom with a more excitable, more Latin
nature, finds its expression in our national architecture.
The moderation of the English temperament thus found something satisfactory to itself in the neat and tidy houses born
of the new fashion. It may seem curious that the grandeur of the Italian model should ever have accommodated itself to
the exigencies of the English Cathedral Close, the English small money town, the English village street, the English
parkland and the squire's estate. Yet so it was. We took the style and broke it down to our own needs. Once again we
took something from Italy. As in literature our Elizabethan poets took extravagant Italian romances and piled-up
murders and then turned them into dramas of the English stage, so later, in terms of architecture, did we take and adapt
the Italian classical tradition to our own mild requirements. We tempered it, and on this principle I think one may safely
say that the smaller houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries adapted themselves to requirements of decency
and convenience quite as well as the sixteenth century English house adapted itself to the more romantic requirements of
its own day. To pass through England with such considerations always
present in the mind, trying them out on every example encountered, is to double the interest and amusement and
speculation which such a journey provokes. It is not enough mildly to enjoy the pleasant frontages we espy over the
hedge or as our motor car travels along the streets of villages and little towns. Pleasant indeed they are, with their
porticos and pediments, bay-windows and sash-windows, and all they offer of agreeable rooms within: rooms largely
and calmly paneled in ivory-painted wood, with alcoves for china-shelves scooped into the walls, elegant Chinese
Chippendale chairs and writing-tables nicely disposed, chintzes on the arm-chairs and sofas; in short, not the homes of
the grand nobility nor of the nouveaux-riches w of that day, but the homes either of the country gentry or the
middle-class, the quiet, solid English upper middle-class, the doctors and the solicitors and the arch-deacons, hominess
de robe ll rather than homes d'epee. Hotness de robe de chamber. Tame, it may be said. True; but the English are
always tame until they become fierce. They prefer being tame to fierce.