are endless series of village churches, as well as others of greater
pretensions. Stamford is rich in work of this age, but I will only
allude to the churches of St. Mary and All Saints. Close by is the
beautiful Early English tower of Ketton. Grantham possesses the most
stately steeple (next only to Salisbury) in the kingdom; and on another
road I may mention Frampton, as having the most perfect of all simple
Early towers and spires that I know. But let us hasten on to the
crowning glory of the district, whose lordly towers preside in serene
majesty over the whole surrounding country.
No English cathedral is, externally, so imposing as that of Lincoln, nor
do I recollect any abroad which, as a whole, surpasses it; and nearly
the whole of its sublime architecture belongs virtually to this century,
though in actual date it begins a few years earlier, and ends a few
years later.
It is the custom to speak of Salisbury as the great typical example of
the Early English style, and its unity and completeness may warrant the
claim; but both for the grandeur of the whole and the artistic beauty of
every part, and also as a complete exponent of English architecture
throughout the whole duration of its greatest period, Lincoln far
surpasses it. Its leading features form a perfect illustration, and that
on the grandest scale, of the entire history of our architecture, from
the last years of the twelfth to the early part of the fourteenth
century.
As I have so often mentioned, the Pointed style commences here with the
choir, the smaller transept, and perhaps the chapter-house,[54] all of
which seem to have been erected before the year 1200 by Bishop Hugh. It
is commonly stated that his architect was a Frenchman from Blois; and M.
Lassus broadly states that he reproduced at Lincoln, in 1188, the design
of a church commenced at Blois in 1138. I am not able to speak as to the
authorities on which these statements are founded, but I must say that
the internal evidence afforded by the building itself gives it, so far
as I can judge, little or no support. In the first place, an eastern
transept, in addition to that at the main crossing, is much more
frequent in England than in France; whether the cathedral of Blois (now
destroyed) possessed this I do not know. In the second place, the
polygonal chapter-house is an equally English feature. In the third
place, one of the most remarkable characteristics of this work is the
nearly universal use of the round abacus--that distinctively English
detail--and that at a period somewhat earlier than that of its customary
predominance. The general distribution of the parts seems to me rather
English than French, and though the work displays some idiosyncrasies, I
do not see in them anything to indicate a French origin, unless it be in
the capitals of the main pillars; indeed, it is a work in which
distinctively English characteristics appear in a somewhat advanced
state of development. As to its being a reproduction of a work commenced
at Blois in 1138, the assertion carries with it its own refutation; for,
in an age of restless progress, is it likely they would take the trouble
to bring over a foreign architect of so retrograde a taste as to ignore
the artistic progress made in his own country during half a century? In
fact, the wonder of the work is being so much in _advance_ of its age,
and that advance is not in a French but an English direction. The Church
of St. Nicholas, at Blois, is in the Early Pointed style of the latter
half of the twelfth century, but bears not the least resemblance to
this; it is of the same character which is usual in French transitional
works, and its carving is strictly Byzantine, not a trace of which have
I observed in Bishop Hugh’s work. If, then, a French architect was
engaged here, he must not only have made over the details of his work
wholly to Englishmen, but have studiously followed English forms in the
general features.[55]
The rebuilding of the cathedral seems to have been followed on
systematically westward by the two successors of Bishop Hugh, till the
completion of the nave by Bishop Grostete, about 1240.
The nave is by far the finest portion of the work as then completed,
and is, probably, on the whole, the grandest example of the Early
Pointed style in this country. It exhibits our Early English style in
its highest state of development: massive without heaviness, rich in
detail without exuberance, its parts symmetrically proportioned and
carefully studied throughout, the foliated carving bold and effective,
there seems no deficiency in any way to deteriorate from its merits.
[Illustration: Fig. 120.--Rose-window, North Transept, Lincoln
Cathedral.]
The west end is unique, being a vast and almost unperforated wall
covered over with range upon range of decorative arcading, flanked by
two vast stair turrets, and backed by two noble towers, the completion
of which was, however, delayed till a much later period. It always
strikes me as a very impressive front, but I find that it does not
strike all eyes so favourably. I would call attention to the beautiful
chapels to the right and left on entering from the west, with their
light and elegant columns contrasting most agreeably with the massive
piers of the nave; also to the noble rose window in the north transept,
perhaps the finest in England (Fig. 120).
The most gorgeous part, however, of the cathedral is its eastern
portion. This was added between the years 1256 and 1282, and is
consequently a little later than Henry III.’s work at Westminster. It
agrees with it in style, but carries out the principle of window tracery
on a far grander scale. It is, in fact, the most splendid work of that
period which we possess, and, did it not lack internal height, I do not
think it could be exceeded in beauty by any existing church.
The sculpture with which it was once profusely enriched was of a very
high order, the foliated carving perfectly exquisite, the mouldings and
other details of the most perfect character. The east window is probably
the finest in the kingdom, as is the east front in general, after
allowing a certain abatement for the error of having false gables to the
aisles.
I have already mentioned the exquisite portal, the sculpture in which is
superb (Fig. 122).
The student of Mediæval art ought to make a long sojourn at Lincoln, and
study its treasury of art at his leisure; not forgetting, by the by, the
beautiful remains
[Illustration: Fig. 122.--South-east Portal, Lincoln Cathedral.]
of the chapel to the bishop’s palace hard by the cathedral.
[Illustration: Fig. 121.--Lincoln Cathedral, View from the South-east.]
In passing northward from Lincoln, a profitable digression may be had to
Southwell, whose noble choir seems to be an emanation from Lincoln, and
its far-famed chapter-house from York; and to Newstead, whose beautiful
west front and lovely carving agrees in style with the eastern portion
of Lincoln.
Yorkshire is especially the land of minsters and abbey churches. To
attempt here a description of them would be vain; a Yorkshire tour is
one of the richest treats the student can look forward to, and one to
which he ought to be liberal in his allowance of time. At York itself
the transept is among the finest examples of the earlier part of the
style, and the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey of its later portion. I know
few works so enchanting as the latter. It agrees in date with the east
part of Lincoln, and is not unlike it in detail. It is a mere wreck, but
worthy of the closest study, and the shattered fragments which lie on
every side offer melancholy facilities to the student. The chapter-house
of the cathedral is a little later, and has been well called a “Domus
Domorum,” though I would not willingly admit its superiority to those of
Westminster or Salisbury.
The neighbouring village church at Skelton--said to have been built by
the same hands as the transept of the cathedral, and the ruined chapel
of St. Leonard’s Hospital in the gardens round the abbey--show how
unerringly the same style fitted itself to works of the most stupendous
or of the humblest scale.
This great county is filled with the noble productions of the thirteenth
century. The minsters of Beverley and Ripon owe much of their beauty to
it; and scarcely one of the abbey churches, whose lovely but mournful
ruins add a charm so melancholy to the secluded valleys of Yorkshire,
fails to show the work of the great period.
I cannot attempt even a cursory description. Go, I pray you, and study
for yourselves: go to Fountains Abbey, and study well its choir and
eastern chapels, with their massive pillars, the tallest perhaps in
England, and the remains of its wonderful abbatial hall, exposed to view
by the recent excavations, and its many other wonders; but do not be
satisfied with a passing visit: take up your quarters at Ripon, and
follow up your studies from day to day. A week is but a short allowance
for so rich a school of art. Then go to Rivaulx and Whitby, twin works,
it would seem, of the same accomplished architect. I cannot award the
palm to either--they are truly a “_par nobile fratrum_,” and it is fair
to prefer whichever of them we have seen the last. Their great point of
difference is that the choir of one has been vaulted, and that of the
other has shown its timber roof; but in glorious architecture they are
equal, and almost unequalled. As you go from York to Whitby you pass a
small fragment of the Abbey of Kirkham: stop and look at it: small as it
is, it is one of the best designed pieces of work I ever saw. If from
Whitby you cross the moors to Guisborough, you will see what was
probably the work of the very end of the century--the stupendous east
end of that abbey, with its east window exceeding even that at Lincoln
in height.
If you go on to Durham, the Chapel of the Nine Altars will rivet your
attention;[56] and farther yet at Hexham,[57] at Dryburgh, and far on
through Scotland, to the Chapel of Holyrood, and the glorious remains of
Elgin Cathedral, and that noble temple yet preserved unruined at
Glasgow, you will find a long series of the art of this wonderful age.
In returning, pray look in at Furness Abbey, where you will find an
absolute gem of our style in the ruined chapter-house.[58] It has been
of the same construction with the Temple Church, and of exquisite
beauty.
I have passed over the whole series of southern examples--as Hythe,
Shoreham, Winchester, Boxgrove, Wells, Llandaff (one of its most
original productions), Worcester, Lichfield, Hereford, and a hundred
more examples, all of which supply proofs of the wonderful perfection of
the architecture of this century.
But a mere catalogue is both useless and wearisome.
I ought also to have called special attention to the circumstance, that
while in France nearly every great church is vaulted, such is not the
case in English works: they seem to have acted with perfect freedom in
this respect, and their churches, even the largest of them, have
frequently had open timber roofs, and suffer little by the variety.
One thing cannot fail to strike every one who closely studies our old
architecture. In early Norman buildings we often find rude and clumsy
workmanship; in works from the middle of the fourteenth century, on to
the extinction of Gothic architecture, we frequently meet with the
same--the work of rude, untutored hands, evidently unable to do justice
to their style; but from about 1175 to the end of the thirteenth
century, and nearly fifty years later, we scarcely ever meet with this
inequality. The art seemed to be all-pervading. Certain buildings may
have been plain to a degree, and rustic in their object and material,
yet you rarely find anything you can call rude in workmanship or
unskilful in treatment. It was a great period, and its greatness seemed
to pervade even the most secluded districts, and the workmen everywhere
to have felt a pride in keeping up to the period of their art in which
their lot had been cast. Nor need we wonder at this, for _everywhere_
were buildings going on; scarcely a village church escaped the notice of
the builders of this wonderful age. The whole country was engaged in the
one work of building, and that with an ardent feeling to render their
work worthy of the style they had generated.
And let us not imagine that the architecture of the age developed itself
only in cathedrals, abbeys, or churches of any kind; all other buildings
evince the same spirit: a barn of the thirteenth century shows the
nobleness of the pervading style as clearly as even the cathedral
itself, and what remains of their domestic architecture tells the same
tale. Everything was done _well_, in good taste, and in accordance with
reasonable and practical requirements and the means at command.
Nor was it to architecture alone that the arts of the period were
devoted: we find the same art expended on stained glass, on metal-work
of all sorts, on enamels of the most magnificent character, on the
illumination of manuscripts, the painted decoration of the buildings, on
jewellery, on ivory-carving, on embroidery, on woven fabrics, tapestry,
seal-engraving--in fact, on every branch of decoration; every one of
which arts were carried out with a degree of skill and instinctive taste
truly amazing. All these branches should, however, be treated of
separately.
In my enumeration of buildings I have limited myself to our own country;
but we all know that in France the same great facts are, if possible,
yet more wonderfully proved. The architecture of the thirteenth century,
in France, is rendered illustrious by an endless category of buildings,
the most glorious perhaps which the world has produced.
Germany, though her style is broken harshly by the cause I have before
alluded to, nevertheless furnishes, whether in the native variety of the
former or in the adopted one of the latter half of the century, a series
of buildings of which any country might well be proud.
In Italy the style was certainly imported from the North; but was it an
unnatural transplantation? I should say by no means so. Had not Italy
her own Romanesque, which she had in some degree exported to Northern
countries? and have I not shown that Pointed architecture was a natural
and logical development from Romanesque? Why, then, should it be
accounted foreign to the land from which Romanesque itself had
sprung?--and if the growth of Pointed architecture was aided by ideas
culled from Byzantium and the East, why should those ideas be less
suited to Italy than to France or England, whose communications with the
East were far less direct? Did not she take part in the same Crusades?
nay, did not the Byzantine element in French art actually come there
through the medium of Italy? Let us not, then, deny to her a fair
participation in the architecture of the age. We had it before her, it
is true, but let us not on that account say that it is none of hers.
The great fault in the Mediæval architecture of Italy lies in its
details, such as its mouldings, etc., which evince too much of their
antique original: its great value lies in its use of materials of varied
colour, of inlaying, mosaic-work, and other decorative arts, inherited
also from the past. These arts ally themselves well with our style,
though the Classic mouldings do not so; and in our judgment of Italian
work we should never lose sight of this; we may otherwise be led either
to reject real merit from the offence which incongruous detail offers to
our taste, or we may be led to accept what is bad and spurious, because
gilded over, and its demerits concealed by beautiful art, which would
appear to greater advantage if united with purer architecture.
Another cause, however, which gives great value to the Mediæval art of
Italy, arises from the somewhat accidental circumstance that her
internal position was such as to require town buildings very much of the
kind which we want now. The consequence is that Italy was, even in those
early days, the land of street palaces, and that we find yet remaining
there numberless buildings of a class which we find but rarely in other
countries, and those treated in a manner very parallel with what we
often require at the present day. Not, let it be borne in mind, that
they are treated in a manner essentially different from the coeval works
in more Northern countries, but rather that there were more of them,
that these were on a larger scale, and that more of them have remained
to our own day.
It is a mistake to suppose that the secular architecture of Italian
cities essentially differed from that of the same period elsewhere. If
you will carefully look through any book showing specimens of the
domestic architecture of France in the thirteenth century, you will find
that it closely resembles that of Italy, except in having purer details.
The same kind of window, for instance, which, from habit, people have
got into the way of calling Italian or Venetian, prevailed in France and
Germany, and is often found in England.
[Illustration: Fig. 123.--Palais des Podestats, Orvieto, Italy.]
[Illustration: Fig. 124.--Torre di Santa, Ninfa, Palermo.]
I give you a series of Italian (Figs. 123, 124), French (Figs. 125,
126), German (Figs. 127, 128, 129), and English (Figs. 130, 131, 132,
133, 134, 135) windows of early date, where you can scarcely
distinguish the one from the other; indeed, you would seldom be able to
detect an Italian window at all, if divested of the accidental clothing
of its non-essential details. This establishes the unity of the style;
yet the fact remains that works of the kind are more abundant, larger,
and more developed in Italy, and that they may consequently be studied
there to great advantage as an aid and expletive to what we learn
elsewhere.
[Illustration: Fig. 125.--Meslay, near Tours, France.]
[Illustration: Fig. 126.--From Houses at Cluny.]
[Illustration: Fig. 127.--The Emperor’s House, Gostar.]
[Illustration: Figs. 128, 129.--Houses at Cologne.]
This brings me to the concluding subject of my lecture--the question of
what lessons we should learn from what has passed in array before us,
and what effect it ought to have on our own artistic practice.
[Illustration: Fig. 130.--Window, West Gateway, College Green,
Gloucester.]
[Illustration: Figs. 131, 132, 133.--From an old building called
Canute’s Castle, Southampton.]
[Illustration: Fig. 134.--Moyse’s Hall, Bury St. Edmunds.]
It would be hopeless to enter upon the general question of the revival
of styles. I will suppose that question to have been disposed of _for_
us, and limit myself to considering what is the most reasonable course
to follow in conducting such a revival, or rather in carrying on the
development of a style upon a revived basis such as that of the
architecture we have been considering.
[Illustration: Fig. 135.--Oakham Castle, Rutlandshire.]
Now, such a revival, to begin with, is hardly to be viewed as a
deliberate act. A man would scarcely be bold enough to make up his mind,
_à priori_, to revive a style of architecture: circumstances must have
gradually led to such a course, and it must have been set about
gradually, and almost unconsciously, to give it a chance of success. We
may, in looking back upon what has taken place, construct a very good
theory for it all; but no such theory really led to it--it came about
very much of itself. We may, by thought and by studying our position, do
a little in finding good reasons for an existing movement; but the
movement itself must have arisen from some more hidden and deep-seated
cause, or it would have died away long ago. What, then, does this
deep-seated feeling demand, and with what will it be satisfied?
It craves spontaneously after a great style of art, which it sees to
have been once the birthright of our race. It demands that we should--I
will not say simply _revive_ that style of art, but that we should
_revivify_ it: not that it should be reproduced as a splendid pageant,
to be re-enacted for the sake of gratifying our romantic or antiquarian
predilections, but that we should rekindle its actual life; and having
done so, should not only think, and design, and invent in that style,
as the living medium for the expression of our artistic aspirations, but
that we should cause it to take root, to spring forth, to germinate and
ramify--to shape itself to all the demands of our age, and to adapt
itself to its materials, its discoveries, its inventions, and its
science; in short, to become in every sense a living, a vigorous, a
growing art.
Now, to further such an object, what is the best manner in which we can
make use of the lessons to be learnt from the past creations of that
style?
One of the lessons I think we should learn is to work in the same free
and liberal spirit in which our forefathers worked: not to do _what_
they did, but _as_ they did. If we, on the one hand, shut ourselves up
in our own country, and, reproducing the style we find to have prevailed
here, sulkily rejecting the lessons to be learned from neighbouring
lands, we may produce a servile reproduction of _what_ was done by our
predecessors, but shall be acting anything but _as_ they acted. If, on
the other hand, we travel widely, and, giving free license to our
individual preferences or momentary fancies, we import now this style,
and now that--here building in a French, there in an Italian variety of
our style--we shall in each case be doing _what_ was done in one or
another province of Mediæval art, but shall be equally far from doing as
the old artists did: the one course involves servility, the other adds
to it frivolity.
The great principle on which the Mediæval architects of each country
instinctively acted was, while adhering in the main each to the dialect
of the great art which happened to be current amongst them, to improve
it by the free importation of ideas and adoption of hints from
whencesoever they might be derived, but especially from the dialects of
the same artistic language. Thus, for instance, the Pointed architecture
of the royal domain of France is, as a whole, a logical sequence of the
Romanesque of the same district; yet no scruple was felt at importing
into it the Byzantine capitals and foliage, which had come to them
through the medium of Venice; and to this foreign importation they owed
some of the greatest beauties of their architecture; nay, if the
Oriental origin of the Pointed arch be true, they went further, and
engrafted upon their traditional art a feature learned from the infidels
they were combating. Again, the English Pointed may be traced step by
step from the preceding style, yet they had no hesitation about
introducing into it details developed by the French. The Germans carried
the principle too far: giving up their own traditional variety of
Pointed architecture, they adopted the French developments ready made;
yet, having done so, they worked them up in a manner quite their own:
while in Italy, the new style having been brought in upon the
pre-existing Romanesque, they soon elaborated it into a dialect as
distinctively characteristic as those of other European countries.
Besides this, no nation had any scruples about employing artists
belonging to another; so that the advancement made by each became in a
degree the common property of all; and even the woven fabrics and other
manufactures imported from the far East were allowed to offer
suggestions to the European decorator.