Chapter XVII: Appendix: V (p. 220)

RECOLLECTIONS BY SIR R. ROWAND ANDERSON

16, Rutland Square, Edinburgh,
_October_ 4, 1920.

I quite appreciate your desire that I should send you something of my recollections of the late Marquis of Bute, for whom I had the honour of doing some important work. Lord Bute's architects certainly had considerable opportunity of meeting him and getting to know him as he appeared in their department, for one of the outstanding facts of his life was that he was never out of the mortar-tub.

It was one of his brothers-in-law, the late Lord Herries, I think, who used to tell him that he would go down to posterity as the Brick-and-Mortar Lord. But no one who had the privilege of knowing him ever associated his works with any of the ideas of quantity, monotony, and mere utilitarianism, which the mention of the humblest of building materials might conjure up in the minds of people who had not that privilege. Quantity of production, and expenditure of time and money had no prescribed relations to each other when time or money was required to procure the most appropriate material, or time was required to determine the precise design. I remember saying to him once, when something had been delayed till I thought it must be tiresome to him, "Why not let it be finished, and off your mind?" His reply was, "But why should I hurry over what is my chief pleasure? I have comparatively little interest in a thing after it is finished." That saying supplied the key to much that, without it, might be misconstrued in the annals of his architectural undertakings. What he did not consider of importance was allowed to go through at once. What he thought of importance he made a matter for his personal thought, and no detail was so small as to be secure of passing unobserved, or so apparently insignificant {242} that an indefinite delay might not be suffered till he had determined whether it was to be converted into a feature, or at least the vehicle of an allusion to some idea which interested him.

The fact is that Lord Bute possessed great imagination, learning, and taste, and an inexhaustible patience and power of calm deliberation before coming to any conclusion which he deemed to be of any importance; and it so came about that he seldom, if ever, changed his mind and ordered anything to be altered after it had once been done.

I have heard a tale which was supposed to exemplify the nicety of his taste and the grand scale on which he gratified it. The story may have been meant for a parable only, but it narrated circumstantially how that his architect had imported a shipload of marble columns from Italy, and put them up in a certain palace which he was building for the Marquis, but that when his lordship came to see them, behold, they were not of the exact tint which he wanted, so incontinently they were thrown out, and another shipload was brought, which turned out, of course, to be perfection, of which the pillars themselves, as they stand there to-day, are the lively proof.

That the story of the throwing out of the pillars, like the tale of the three hundred and sixty Celtic Crosses in Iona, which were said to have been thrown into the sea, is apocryphal, I gravely suspect. The thing which it professes to relate never occurred in connection with any work in which I was concerned, and I think I would have heard of it had it happened in any of Lord Bute's other undertakings, at least in Scotland. The unlikely part of the story is that he had allowed himself to be landed with a vast quantity of the wrong stuff for such an important purpose. The rest of it, his fabled measures for getting himself out of the difficulty, is quite true to his character. I, at least, never knew him to be diverted from his intention on the score of delay or cost.

I remember a case which is somewhat in point, his choice of the railings for the gallery of the great hall of his house, or, rather, palace of Mountstuart, although the case is more interesting as an illustration of his mind in a more important aspect. I had proposed, in accordance with my duty, a design strictly in keeping with the mediaeval character of the building. Lord Bute, however, had seen and {243} remembered the ancient and curious bronze railings which stand round the tomb of Charlemagne at Aix-la-Chapelle, and he determined to take, what was to him the opportunity of erecting a facsimile of them in Scotland. I went, therefore, to Aix and made measured drawings of them on the spot. By his directions I had the copies cast in Edinburgh, and they stand now in their place in Mountstuart in all the variety and yet unity of their originals. They are not Florentine, but if you ask me what should have prevented a Florentine nobleman from erecting them in his palace in Florence, I could not tell you. Sentimentally, at any rate, they would have been appropriate. I refer, of course, to the historical fact, of which I am sure the Marquis was aware, that it was no other than Charlemagne who relieved the Florentines from the tyranny of the Longobards, and conferred upon them the freedom of a municipal government.

The influence of the art of Peter de Luna, as seen in the style which was chosen by Lord Bute in matters connected with the Chapel at Mountstuart, occurs to mind in this context. That the famous Spaniard was an architect, or a discriminating patron of architecture, Saragossa testifies; but he was more to Lord Bute, he was the Pope, the Benedict XIII., whose papal bull confirmed the foundation charter of St. Andrews University. He was not acknowledged as Pope by England or Italy, but he was acknowledged by Scotland, and that went a long way with Lord Bute. That his lordship reflected on the possibility of his choice giving pain to any one who did not accept de Luna's pontificate is, I think, unlikely, seeing that without question, he was confiding the execution of his whole ideas to an architect who was actually a member of a Reformed Church. I pointedly omit to make any allusion in this context to the traditional authorship of the design of the Cathedral of Cologne.

Lord Bute's mind was steeped in history; and on that account, though he by no means always bowed the knee to authority, his ideas, like his conversation, in matters of architecture were always interesting. Soon after the first occasion on which he did me the honour to consult me, he told me that he made it his practice not to give all his undertakings into the hands of any one architect, that he liked always to be in touch with several of the profession; it was to his advantage, he was good enough to say, as well {244} as his pleasure, to hear the opinions of different men on the things of their trade. If I may judge by the numbers of specialists in very different departments, whom I used to meet on my visits to his lordship, he had a satisfaction in their conversation and their ways of looking at things which was perhaps similar to that which Sir Walter Scott records in his Journal that he had found in the conversation of Robert Stevenson, the engineer to the Commissioners of Northern Lighthouses.

So far as I know, Lord Bute never had any building done for himself in this country after any varieties of the style of Ancient Greece. That this abstention in his particular case should be credited only to his wise sense of its unfitness for his purposes in a climate such as ours, must be the opinion of any one, who, like myself, ever had the privilege of visiting the remains of Ancient Greece in his company, and of observing the extraordinarily deep impression which they made on him.

R. ROWAND ANDERSON.

P.S.--By way of footnote to the paragraph in which I mention Peter de Luna, I may say that it was on a visit which I made to Saragossa on Lord Bute's behalf that I was fortunate enough to procure a cast of de Luna's now mummified head. The cast I have now confided to the care of St. Andrews University.

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