which is most to be avoided, if we would avoid making ourselves
unnecessarily absurd, is that of decreeing immortality during or soon
after their lifetime to literary men and artists. If, indeed, there
existed academies of art and literature, which should consist of all the
best men of their kind, all actuated by the most disinterested
appreciation of merit not their own in their own profession, then we
might have some approximation--but only an approximation--to a safe
tribunal; and if Smith and his friends were such boobies as to want the
cake of fame before it was baked, Smith might be “busted up” in the
Abbey, or obtain a parliamentary guarantee of being puff-worthy, in his
own day or immediately after, with little more to be said against it
than that it was a want of decorum, all the more disgusting on account
of the dignity of the occasion and the absence of any call for hurry.
But, as no such academy could exist, or, if it existed, could make its
decrees prevail with those who are the decreers of statues, how does the
matter stand? A man who has done his best, perhaps, to give us harmless
amusement, and whose only crime is that of having succeeded too well in
adapting himself to the poor capacities and passing moods of his present
audience, is now in such danger as he never was at any former time of
finding himself rewarded with ten thousand per annum here and an
eternity of contempt hereafter.
If persons of culture and natural taste have often to confess that the
painter or poet or novelist whose muse was the seemingly faultless
mistress of his affections five-and-twenty years ago, now stands before
him as a false Duessa, what should we think of the right to raise
monuments claimed by that public which is as changeable in its tastes
as it is liberal in paying for their indulgence? Yet it is this public
that is venturing more and more audaciously to anticipate the verdict of
time. True, it often uses a Minister or a committee of experts as its
agent, councillor, and representative; but it is none the safer for
that. If the agents themselves know better, they know the value of their
own popularity too well to say so; or they may have a secret grudge
against Smith, and so cry “Ay” with all their hearts when the people
ask, “Shall Smith have a statue?”
XXII
IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS IN ARCHITECTURE
St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Great riches are not required for the habit
of magnificence; it is enough that a man should dispose of such as he
possesses greatly, according to time and place.” As in life, so in art,
and especially in architecture, greatness of style is quite independent
of wealth of material; indeed, wealth of material is constantly found by
true artists to be a fatal hindrance to grandeur of effect. Hence great
poets and painters are usually very shy of what commonly pass for great
subjects--that is, subjects full of obvious interest and splendour; and,
if they treat such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them as far
as possible of all that makes them attractive to the novice in art,
until they come to a simple greatness which was hitherto a secret.
Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be a principal condition of
great effect with small means and in small or comparatively small
buildings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of such material as the
architect possesses, and especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is
commonly supposed, even by architects, that a solidity of wall and roof
sufficient to put far out of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if
properly shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, cornice,
shafted recess, and the many other “decorations” which are principally
methods of showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, is all that
noble building calls for; and that the frequent--nay, general--practice
of ancient architecture in going much further than this was simply waste
of material caused by want of mechanical knowledge. But those who know
most of ancient architecture know best that there was no want of
mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite the reverse. Not only is
mechanical knowledge, equal if not beyond our own, proved by such
buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but the house and cottage
builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to have known
all the details of his business fully as well as the most ingenious
economist of material that ever “scamped” a modern tenement of the same
order. He was fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in
its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards
two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to
carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a
succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest
ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that
constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes
us as “architectural” though it may not contain a single item of
architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern
buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once
feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as
poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the
time of Henry VII or Elizabeth. A man now hires a bit of ground for
eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on
beauty, he says to himself: “I will build me a house that will last my
time, and what money I have over I will spend in decorating it. Why
should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five
times as long as I or mine shall want them?” The answer is: Because that
very “waste” is the truest and most striking ornament; and though you
and your family’s usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may be
but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that very fact an
“ornament” of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at
all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of
its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of your own plan will be
only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it
meretricious.
I have said that a modest _ostentation_ of extreme substantiality is
also an element of architectural effect in the kind of building
contemplated. This, indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic
element. A house will look respectable, and something more than
respectable, which has only the reality of being built somewhat better
than well. But consciousness is the life of art, and there must be a
quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, and permanence, to give these
characters that power over the imagination which a work of art must
have. A labourer’s cottage or the smallest village church which has this
character is an artistic and rightly architectural work; and the
nobleman’s mansion or the cathedral which wants it is not. Here comes in
that true “decoration” which scarcely the humblest house of the
sixteenth or early part of the seventeenth century was altogether
without. In out-of-the-way villages and roadside inns of that period,
you will find your attention directed to the thickness and weight of
the roof-timbers by a carved or moulded cornice, which measures and
expatiates upon the depth and substance of the rafters which terminate
therein; or one or more of the brackets supporting the joists of the
overhanging bedroom floor will have a touch of carving, to declare with
what ease and pleasure the burthen is borne upon their sturdy shoulders;
or the lintel of the door will show and boast of the thickness of the
wall by a moulded chamfer. A single touch of such decoration glorifies
the whole, and puts the living spirit of art into the body of an honest
building, however humble it may be.
So far is size from being needful to greatness in architecture, that one
of the very grandest pieces of domestic building I ever saw is a little
village inn of extremely early date in a Sussex village which scarcely
anybody has ever heard of, though it stands but two miles from Berwick
Station on the South Coast Railway. This village is Aldfriston. It has
in its little market-place an extremely ancient stone cross, far gone in
decay, having never been touched by restorer. The whole village has an
air of antiquity such as breathes from no other English village I have
ever seen; but older than anything, except the cross, is its
hostelry--no bigger than a well-to-do bailiff’s cottage, showing no
Elizabethan “variety” in its ground-plan, and the front to the street
having but three windows above and one on either side of the doorway.
Coming upon it quite unprepared for seeing anything particular in the
village, this house fairly took my breath away by its exemplification of
the way in which ideal and material greatness differ. It was like
coming, in a newspaper article, upon three or four lines of great and
unknown poetry. Yet it was nothing but a cottage built mightily, and
with a mighty consciousness of being so built. It seems never to have
been touched, except here and there by the house-painter, since the date
at which it was raised, which was probably in the fifteenth century, the
carved foliage in the spandrels of the small arched doorway indicating
that period. An architect learned in mouldings might perhaps fix the
date to within twenty-five years, from those of the cornice. The bedroom
story projects considerably over the ground-floor, and is borne by great
oak brackets, the faces of which are adorned with painted carvings of
figures in mitres, one being St. Hubert, as is shown by the stag at his
feet. The spaces between these brackets are ceiled with a great plaster
“cavetto,” which, together with the brackets, springs from a wide timber
cornice above the door and windows of the ground-floor. In the hollow of
this cornice are four or five grotesque faces, the painting of which,
though fresh, seems, like the painting of all the other decorations, to
be nothing but the original colouring faithfully transmitted. The three
windows of the upper floor are bays, and are carried by great spread
brackets, carved and painted with most curiously quaint and simple
representations of St. George and the Dragon and symbols of his
tradition, the tails of two dragons in the central bracket running in
their extremities into the outlines of a pointed and foliated arch. The
roof is covered in with slabs of ragged stone, thick enough for a London
pavement. The dimensions of the timbers of the roof are proved
inferentially by the fact that the roof-tree has not sagged an inch
under some four hundred years of this burthen; and their mass and power
are expressed artistically by their termination in a cornice of immense
depth, and consisting of a greater number of moulded “members” than I
remember to have seen in any other feature of the kind. The walls are
plastered in their plain spaces, but indicate their construction of
solid oak--which, by the way, is far more durable than either brick or
any ordinary stone--by the chance appearance in one place of a strange
animal which runs up the face of the wall and is obviously carved out of
a beam otherwise hid by the plaster.
There is nothing heavy in the total effect of this extraordinary piece
of cottage architecture; for there is artistic animation everywhere, and
the expression of its strength is that of living power and not mere
passive sufficiency.
To build such a cottage now might cost about three times as much as it
does to build a common country inn of the same dimensions. It would not,
of course, suit a London citizen so well as a Chiselhurst villa of like
size and cost; but it would be a fit abode for a duke in difficulties.
XXIII
“OLD ENGLISH” ARCHITECTURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN
The style of architecture in which the great majority of country houses,
and very many town houses, from the cottage to the mansion, have been
built during the past fifteen years, is a very great improvement upon
the nameless mode--for which no better title could be invented than the
“factory style”--which prevailed in house architecture during great part
of last century and the first half of this. And it is a yet greater
improvement upon the falsification of that simple though sordid way of
building, by attempting to change its misery into magnificence by
“compo” mockeries of stone construction and a style of ornament created
to express the thickness of the wall or the weight of roof of a
Renaissance palace. Most persons are contented with describing the
improved mode as Old English, fancying that it is a real return to the
way in which houses were built in the reign of Elizabeth or James or
thereabouts. But there is a notable distinction between ancient and
modern “Old English.” It is this: the “variety” in form which is of the
essence of the last was but the accident of the first. Whitehall and the
Parthenon are not more simply symmetrical in their masses than are many
of the finest specimens of Early English domestic architecture; and the
“variety” which we moderns suppose we are copying is, in nearly all
cases, either the result of change of plan in the process of building,
or of subsequent additions by which the original symmetry was
sacrificed. That the sacrifice was often without loss, and often even a
gain--as such a sacrifice could never be in the case of a Greek or
Renaissance building--is owing to the fact that domesticity is the
central thought and expression of the one kind of architecture and
public ostentation of the other. Accordingly, the keynote of an Early
English house is its stack of chimneys, upon which it was considered
impossible to lavish too much ornament. From the cottage of the Sussex
labourer to the great nobleman’s mansion--such as that most exquisite of
all existing specimens of Tudor building, “Compton in the Hole”--the
chimneys are the things which first attract the eye and delight it
longest; whereas the Greek, Roman, or Renaissance house is heartily
ashamed of its smoke, and has never yet succeeded thoroughly in dealing
with its disgrace. Symmetry, then, in the old country house was looked
upon as good; but convenience and comfort, and the expression of
convenience and comfort, better. Now, in a house well and deliberately
planned for the convenience of any household, large or small, the
ground-plan and elevation will be naturally simple and symmetrical;
simplicity, too, is economical, and economy a part of domesticity.
Accordingly, the great Tudor mansions and palaces of England, the
builders of which could have best afforded to pay for the supposed charm
of “variety,” are, for the most part, the simplest in plan and
elevation; while it is in the ill-planned and often-added-to village inn
or rectory that the vagaries of “variety,” so alluring to the modern
mind, are almost exclusively found.
In Old English architecture this variety is a very real though
accidental beauty. It has the double charm of intensifying the primary
expression of domesticity by the very sense of the sacrifice which has
been made to it, and of giving the building, however small, a touch of
historical character. But what if these beauties of the old architecture
are sought to be obtained in the modern by sacrifices of convenience,
economy, and domesticity, and by a deliberate planning of structural
“after-thoughts,” or subsequent necessities, from the beginning! What if
a house, full of small and uncomfortable rooms connected, or rather
isolated, by mazes of dark staircases, landings, and passages, has been
manifestly built at one blow, and at twice the cost at which a simple
and symmetrical and scarcely less--nay, to the initiated,
more--beautiful house of the same period of architecture might have been
built, without the sacrifice of any modern convenience? Surely, if the
devil were an architect his “favourite sin” would be this kind of
“cottage of gentility.”
The “variety” of a real Old English house is not only nearly always the
outcome of some convenience or necessity discovered or arising after the
first building of it, but is nearly always obviously so. Some little
difference of style not too great to break harmony, will indicate a
difference of date; or it will be shown by some infraction of the lines
of the original building. The library or parlour which cuts off a return
of the label of the pantry window is manifestly an addition. But it
would be too ridiculous to copy such proofs of accident and alteration
into a nineteenth-century rectory, villa, or mansion; and the
consequence is, that to an understanding eye its variety is often in
appearance, as it is in reality, mere imbecility aping the movements of
reason.
There is no real anachronism in the revival of the ordinary details of
Old English house architecture, though there is sometimes in that of the
material. The “half-timbered” wall belongs only to times and places in
which bricks and tiles are not to be had, and in which abundance of the
best oak timber is. But hooded gables, deep cornices, bracketed bays,
weather-tiled walls, the projection of upper over lower stories, and
almost all the other charming features of the mode, have sound reasons
of use which hold as good now as they did in the year 1600; and in these
reasons alone consists their architectural charm. The characteristic Old
English chimney--the most ornamental feature of the style--has its full
justification in use; the loading of the top with projecting layer after
layer of bricks, laid even or notch-wise, forming that security against
hurricane which is so often sought, in the “factory” style, by the one
or more long iron rods which agreeably break the sky-line of many modern
mansions. Even the scalloped tile, which so often replaces the square in
old weather-tiled walls, has its utilitarian purpose--a saving of
material; the greatest breadth of the scallop being superposed upon the
juncture of the tiles below, so as to protect it from wet. The
projection, in a long low house of the modest rectory or farmhouse type,
of the bedroom story over the basement is the feature farthest of all
from being merely ornamental. In such a house more space was usually
wanted for bedrooms than for living-rooms and offices, and a very
moderate projection of the upper story supplies this additional space.
XXIV
ARCHITECTURAL STYLES
I
Every one has a perfectly definite impression of what is meant by an
architectural style; and would recognise a building as Egyptian, Greek,
Ecclesiastical Gothic, Norman, or Moresque, not merely by the
characteristic details of each of these manners, but still more by a
perfectly distinct character attained in each manner by the combination
of those details--a character which is totally different from any effect
that could result from any such random though more or less constant
collocation of details as is to be found, for example, in the bastard
“Italian Gothic.” This, though it was made popular by Mr. Ruskin, has
about as much relation to a true style as a curiosity-shop has to a
well-ordered living-room. It is a remarkable fact, and one especially
worth dwelling upon in this context, that Italy, the country of the
arts, never had an architecture, and could never even adopt one from its
neighbours without degrading or abolishing its character as a style. The
so-called “Romanesque” was an incongruous hybrid until it was developed
into the “Norman” by the northern nations of Europe; and though the
pointed arch made its appearance in Italy very early, no Italian
architect ever seems to have had any perception of its artistic
capacity, even when he adopted in his buildings the constructive system
to which that feature belonged. Italy had great architects, but no great
architecture. Buildings like St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the Duomo of
Florence, etc., owe their influence upon the imagination to the
personality of the architect, which has known how to impress itself on a
combination of in themselves unmeaning or incongruous forms, rather than
to that imaginative integrity of style which makes every Old English
parish church look as if the Spirit had builded its own house. Every
great architect--like every great poet, painter, or musician--has his
own style, whether he works on the lines of a great integral style like
the Northern Pointed, or in a mongrel mode like that of the Romanesque,
or in no accepted manner at all. Sir Christopher Wren could not build a
common brick house without imposing his own character upon it. But this
personal character or style, which always marks the work of the great
artist, is usually almost beyond the power of analysis; and, were it
otherwise, would scarcely be worth the trouble of analysis, which would
only serve the purpose of encouraging imitations of that which owes its
value to its unique individuality.
The five styles above named--_i.e._ the Egyptian, the Greek, the Pointed
Gothic, the Norman, and the Moresque--are so much distinguished from all
other modes of building by the integrity with which a single idea is
carried out in every detail, that in comparison with them there is no
other manner which deserves to be called a style. And it is hard to
conjecture the possibility of the development in the future of any sixth
style which shall deserve to rank with them; for these five seem to have
exhausted the five possible modes in which weight or mass of
material--apparently the foundations of all architectural
expression--can be treated. Two of these styles, the Norman and the
Moresque, though equal to the others in artistic integrity, are
immeasurably inferior to them in significance; the first three having
dealt with and exhausted the only modes in which the primary fact of
weight of material in stone construction can be subordinated to
religious expression, and the field itself of religious expression in
architecture having been in like manner cleared by these styles: for
when the Material, the Rational, and the Spiritual have once found
utterance in stone--as they have done in the temple-architectures of
Egypt, Greece, and Northern Europe--what fourth religious aspect remains
to inspire a new art?
It is proposed in these papers to consider the several expressional
themes of the five great architectures, and to give a brief exposition
of the way in which they are worked out. It should be premised, however,
that as it does not require a knowledge of how an effect is produced in
order to feel that effect, so it is not pretended that any very distinct
consciousness of the adaptation of means to expressional ends must have
existed in the minds of the inventors of the great styles of
architecture. All artistic production involves a large element of lucky
accident, of which the true artist alone knows how to avail himself; and
it is often from a lucky accident in a happy season that a great work or
a great art will take its origin, as the dropping of a grain of sand
into a saturated solution of certain salts will form the centre and
cause of its sudden crystallisation. As sound philosophy is only sound
sense spread out, so true criticism of great work is only right
perception spread out; and the use of criticism of such work is not so
much to teach men to enjoy it, as to enable them to pronounce a prompt
and assured and demonstrable condemnation of bad or inferior work when
false or exaggerated claims are put forth in its favour.
The three primary architectures seem to have owed their origin to three
accidents. The immense and wholly unreasonable massiveness which
characterises the Egyptian style is probably due to its having emerged
from caverns. It carried into the air its memory of having had the rocky
earth for its roof and walls, and of the time when its close-packed
squadrons of granite shafts were a necessity which it cost nothing to
provide. The Parthenon, again, is a manifest glorification in stone of
the forms of the wooden hut; and the pointed arch, with all its immense
consequences, arose from the constructional accident of cross-vaulting.
Weight, then, which is the most general and characteristic attribute of
matter, was taken by the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects as the
ground of their several ideas--whether consciously or not, is no concern
of ours. The Egyptian architect, as will be shown, subordinated every
detail, from the mass of the pyramid--which may be regarded as the form
taken by weight in the abstract--down to almost every particular of
decoration, to the creation of an effect of compulsory submission to an
irresistible and for-ever-enduring material power. The mightiest bulk of
Alp or Apennine is a bubble compared with an Egyptian temple, which is
the awful _life_ of ponderosity and crushing earthliness; and there is
no need to pause in order to point out how aptly this expression suited
the political and religious character of the people out of whom Israel
fled.