Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

Crome loomed down on them.
    â€˜The great thing about Crome,’ said Mr Scogan, seizing the opportunity to speak, ‘is the fact that it’s so unmistakably and aggressively a work of art. It makes no compromise with nature, but affronts it and rebels against it. It has no likeness to Shelley’s tower, in the “Epipsychidion,” which, if I remember rightly—
    â€˜â€œSeems not now a work of human art,
    But as it were titanic, in the heart
    Of earth having assumed its form and grown
    Out of the mountain, from the living stone,
    Lifting itself in caverns light and high.”
    No, no; there isn’t any nonsense of that sort about Crome. That the hovels of the peasantry should look as though they had grown out of the earth, to which their inmates are attached, is right, no doubt, and suitable. But the house of an intelligent, civilized, and sophisticated man should never seem to have sprouted from the clods. It should rather be an expression of his grand unnatural remoteness from the cloddish life. Since the days of William Morris that’s a fact which we in England have been unable to comprehend. Civilized and sophisticated men have solemnly played at being peasants. Hence quaintness, arts and crafts, cottage architecture, and all the rest of it. In the suburbs of our cities you may see, reduplicated in endless rows, studiedly quaint imitations and adaptations of the village hovel. Poverty, ignorance, and a limited range of materials produced the hovel, which possesses undoubtedly, in suitable surroundings, its own “as it were titanic” charm. We now employ our wealth, our technical knowledge, our rich variety of materials for the purpose of building millions of imitation hovels in totally unsuitable surroundings. Could imbecility go further?’
    Henry Wimbush took up the thread of his interrupted discourse. ‘All that you say, my dear Scogan,’ he began, ‘is certainly very just, very true. But whether Sir Ferdinando sharedyour views about architecture or if, indeed, he had any views about architecture at all, I very much doubt. In building this house, Sir Ferdinando was, as a matter of fact, preoccupied by only one thought – the proper placing of his privies. Sanitation was the one great interest of his life. In 1573 he even published, on this subject, a little book – now extremely scarce – called,
Certaine Priuy Counsels
by
One of Her Maiestie’s Most Honourable Priuy Counsel, F. L. Knight
, in which the whole matter is treated with great learning and elegance. His guiding principle in arranging the sanitation of a house was to secure that the greatest possible distance should separate the privy from the sewage arrangements. Hence it followed inevitably that the privies were to be placed at the top of the house, being connected by vertical shafts with pits or channels in the ground. It must not be thought that Sir Ferdinando was moved only by material and merely sanitary considerations; for the placing of his privies in an exalted position he had also certain excellent spiritual reasons. For, he argues in the third chapter of his
Priuy Counsels
, the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe. To counteract these degrading effects he advised that the privy should be in every house the room nearest to heaven, that it should be well provided with windows commanding an extensive and noble prospect, and that the walls of the chamber should be lined with bookshelves containing all the ripest products’ of human wisdom, such as the Proverbs of Solomon, Boëthius’s
Consolations of Philosophy
, the apophthegms of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the
Enchiridion
of Erasmus, and all other works, ancient or modern, which testify to the nobility of the human soul. In Crome he was able to put his theories into practice. At the top of each of the three