built in a species of aspiration; but I do not suppose that any one here
will think it was a religious one. "Go to now. Let us build a tower
whose top may reach unto heaven." From that day to this, whenever men
have become skillful architects at all, there has been a tendency in
them to build high; not in any religious feeling, but in mere exuberance
of spirit and power--as they dance or sing--with a certain mingling of
vanity--like the feeling in which a child builds a tower of cards; and,
in nobler instances, with also a strong sense of, and delight in the
majesty, height, and strength of the building itself, such as we have in
that of a lofty tree or a peaked mountain. Add to this instinct the
frequent necessity of points of elevation for watch-towers, or of points
of offense, as in towers built on the ramparts of cities, and, finally,
the need of elevations for the transmission of sound, as in the Turkish
minaret and Christian belfry, and you have, I think, a sufficient
explanation of the tower-building of the world in general. Look through
your Bibles only, and collect the various expressions with reference to
tower-building there, and you will have a very complete idea of the
spirit in which it is for the most part undertaken. You begin with that
of Babel; then you remember Gideon beating down the tower of Penuel, in
order more completely to humble the pride of the men of the city; you
remember the defense of the tower of Shechem against Abimelech, and the
death of Abimelech by the casting of a stone from it by a woman's hand;
you recollect the husbandman building a tower in his vineyard, and the
beautiful expressions in Solomon's song,--"The tower of Lebanon, which
looketh towards Damascus;" "I am a wall, and my breasts like
towers;"--you recollect the Psalmist's expressions of love and delight,
"Go ye round about Jerusalem; tell the towers thereof: mark ye well her
bulwarks; consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generation
following." You see in all these cases how completely the tower is a
subject of human pride, or delight, or defense, not in any wise
associated with religious sentiment; the towers of Jerusalem being named
in the same sentence, not with her temple, but with her bulwarks and
palaces. And thus, when the tower is in reality connected with a place
of worship, it was generally done to add to its magnificence, but not to
add to its religious expression. And over the whole of the world, you
have various species of elevated buildings, the Egyptian pyramid, the
Indian and Chinese pagoda, the Turkish minaret, and the Christian
belfry,--all of them raised either to make a show from a distance, or to
cry from, or swing bells in, or hang them round, or for some other very
human reason. Thus, when the good people of Beauvais were building their
cathedral, that of Amiens, then just completed, had excited the
admiration of all France; and the people of Beauvais, in their jealousy
and determination to beat the people of Amiens, set to work to build a
tower to their own cathedral as high as they possibly could. They built
it so high that it tumbled down, and they were never able to finish
their cathedral at all--it stands a wreck to this day. But you will not,
I should think, imagine this to have been done in heavenward aspiration.
Mind, however, I don't blame the people of Beauvais, except for their
bad building. I think their desire to beat the citizens of Amiens a most
amiable weakness, and only wish I could see the citizens of Edinburgh
and Glasgow inflamed with the same emulation, building Gothic towers[7]
instead of manufactory chimneys. Only do not confound a feeling which,
though healthy and right, may be nearly analogous to that in which you
play a cricket-match, with any feeling allied to your hope of heaven.
[Footnote 7: I did not, at the time of the delivery of these lectures,
know how many Gothic towers the worthy Glaswegians _have_ lately built:
that of St. Peter's, in particular, being a most meritorious effort.]
20. Such being the state of the case with respect to tower-building in
general, let me follow for a few minutes the changes which occur in the
towers of northern and southern architects.
Many of us are familiar with the ordinary form of the Italian bell-tower
or campanile. From the eighth century to the thirteenth there was little
change in that form:[8] four-square, rising high and without tapering
into the air, story above story, they stood like giants in the quiet
fields beside the piles of the basilica or the Lombardic church, in this
form (_fig._ 9), tiled at the top in a flat gable, with open arches
below, and fewer and fewer arches on each inferior story, down to the
bottom. It is worth while noting the difference in form between these
and the towers built for military service. The latter were built as in
_fig._ 10, projecting vigorously at the top over a series of brackets or
machicolations, with very small windows, and no decoration below. Such
towers as these were attached to every important palace in the cities of
Italy, and stood in great circles--troops of towers--around their
external walls: their ruins still frown along the crests of every
promontory of the Apennines, and are seen from far away in the great
Lombardic plain, from distances of half-a-day's journey, dark against
the amber sky of the horizon. These are of course now built no more, the
changed methods of modern warfare having cast them into entire disuse;
but the belfry or campanile has had a very different influence on
European architecture. Its form in the plains of Italy and South France
being that just shown you, the moment we enter the valleys of the Alps,
where there is snow to be sustained, we find its form of roof altered by
the substitution of a steep gable for a flat one.[9] There are probably
few in the room who have not been in some parts of South Switzerland,
and who do not remember the beautiful effect of the gray mountain
churches, many of them hardly changed since the tenth and eleventh
centuries, whose pointed towers stand up through the green level of the
vines, or crown the jutting rocks that border the valley.
[Footnote 8: There is a good abstract of the forms of the Italian
campanile, by Mr. Papworth, in the Journal of the Archaeological
Institute, March 1850.]
[Footnote 9: The form establishes itself afterwards in the plains, in
sympathy with other Gothic conditions, as in the campanile of St. Mark's
at Venice.]
[Illustration: PLATE VI. (Fig. 10., Fig. 9.)]
21. From this form to the true spire the change is slight, and consists
in little more than various decoration; generally in putting small
pinnacles at the angles, and piercing the central pyramid with traceried
windows; sometimes, as at Fribourg and Burgos, throwing it into tracery
altogether: but to do this is invariably the sign of a vicious style, as
it takes away from the spire its character of a true roof, and turns it
nearly into an ornamental excrescence. At Antwerp and Brussels, the
celebrated towers (one, observe, ecclesiastical, being the tower of the
cathedral, and the other secular), are formed by successions of
diminishing towers, set one above the other, and each supported by
buttresses thrown to the angles of the one beneath. At the English
cathedrals of Lichfield and Salisbury, the spire is seen in great
purity, only decorated by sculpture; but I am aware of no example so
striking in its entire simplicity as that of the towers of the cathedral
of Coutances in Normandy. There is a dispute between French and English
antiquaries as to the date of the building, the English being unwilling
to admit its complete priority to all their own Gothic. I have no doubt
of this priority myself; and I hope that the time will soon come when
men will cease to confound vanity with patriotism, and will think the
honor of their nation more advanced by their own sincerity and courtesy,
than by claims, however learnedly contested, to the invention of
pinnacles and arches. I believe the French nation was, in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries, the greatest in the world; and that the French
not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to a perfection
which no other nation has approached, then or since: but, however this
may be, there can be no doubt that the towers of Coutances, if not the
earliest, are among the very earliest, examples of the fully developed
spire. I have drawn one of them carefully for you (_fig._ 11), and you
will see immediately that they are literally domestic roofs, with garret
windows, executed on a large scale, and in stone. Their only ornament is
a kind of scaly mail, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of
the common wooden shingles of the house-roof; and their security is
provided for by strong gabled dormer windows, of massy masonry, which,
though supported on detached shafts, have weight enough completely to
balance the lateral thrusts of the spires. Nothing can surpass the
boldness or the simplicity of the plan; and yet, in spite of this
simplicity, the clear detaching of the shafts from the slope of the
spire, and their great height, strengthened by rude cross-bars of stone,
carried back to the wall behind, occasion so great a complexity and play
of cast shadows, that I remember no architectural composition of
which the aspect is so completely varied at different hours of the
day.[10] But the main thing I wish you to observe is, the complete
_domesticity_ of the work; the evident treatment of the church spire
merely as a magnified house-roof; and the proof herein of the great
truth of which I have been endeavoring to persuade you, that all good
architecture rises out of good and simple domestic work; and that,
therefore, before you attempt to build great churches and palaces, you
must build good house doors and garret windows.
[Footnote 10: The sketch was made about ten o'clock on a September
morning.]
[Illustration: PLATE VII. (Fig. 11., Fig. 12.)]
22. Nor is the spire the only ecclesiastical form deducible from
domestic architecture. The spires of France and Germany are associated
with other towers, even simpler and more straightforward in confession
of their nature, in which, though the walls of the tower are covered
with sculpture, there is an ordinary ridged gable roof on the top. The
finest example I know of this kind of tower, is that on the north-west
angle of Rouen Cathedral (_fig._ 12); but they occur in multitudes in
the older towns of Germany; and the backgrounds of Albert Duerer are full
of them, and owe to them a great part of their interest: all these great
and magnificent masses of architecture being repeated on a smaller scale
by the little turret roofs and pinnacles of every house in the town; and
the whole system of them being expressive, not by any means of religious
feeling,[11] but merely of joyfulness and exhilaration of spirit in the
inhabitants of such cities, leading them to throw their roofs high into
the sky, and therefore giving to the style of architecture with which
these grotesque roofs are associated, a certain charm like that of
cheerfulness in a human face; besides a power of interesting the
beholder which is testified, not only by the artist in his constant
search after such forms as the elements of his landscape, but by every
phrase of our language and literature bearing on such topics. Have not
these words, Pinnacle, Turret, Belfry, Spire, Tower, a pleasant sound in
all your ears? I do not speak of your scenery, I do not ask you how much
you feel that it owes to the gray battlements that frown through the
woods of Craigmillar, to the pointed turrets that flank the front of
Holyrood, or to the massy keeps of your Crichtoun and Borthwick and
other border towers. But look merely through your poetry and romances;
take away out of your border ballads the word _tower_ wherever it
occurs, and the ideas connected with it, and what will become of the
ballads? See how Sir Walter Scott cannot even get through a description
of Highland scenery without help from the idea:--
"Each purple peak, each flinty _spire_,
Was bathed in floods of living fire."
Take away from Scott's romances the word and idea _turret_, and see how
much you would lose. Suppose, for instance, when young Osbaldistone is
leaving Osbaldistone Hall, instead of saying "The old clock struck two
from a _turret_ adjoining my bedchamber," he had said, "The old clock
struck two from the landing at the top of the stair," what would become
of the passage? And can you really suppose that what has so much power
over you in words has no power over you in reality? Do you think there
is any group of words which would thus interest you, when the things
expressed by them are uninteresting?
[Footnote 11: Among the various modes in which the architects, against
whose practice my writings are directed, have endeavored to oppose them,
no charge has been made more frequently than that of their
self-contradiction; the fact being, that there are few people in the
world who are capable of seeing the two sides of any subject, or of
conceiving how the statements of its opposite aspects can possibly be
reconcilable. For instance, in a recent review, though for the most part
both fair and intelligent, it is remarked, on this very subject of the
domestic origin of the northern Gothic, that "Mr. Ruskin is evidently
possessed by a fixed idea, that the Venetian architects were devout men,
and that their devotion was expressed in their buildings; while he will
not allow our own cathedrals to have been built by any but worldly men,
who had no thoughts of heaven, but only vague ideas of keeping out of
hell, by erecting costly places of worship." If this writer had compared
the two passages with the care which such a subject necessarily demands,
he would have found that I was not opposing Venetian to English piety;
but that in the one case I was speaking of the spirit manifested in the
entire architecture of the nation, and in the other of occasional
efforts of superstition as distinguished from that spirit; and, farther,
that in the one case, I was speaking of decorative features, which are
ordinarily the results of feelings, in the other of structural features,
which are ordinarily the results of necessity or convenience. Thus it is
rational and just that we should attribute the decoration of the arches
of St. Mark's with scriptural mosaics to a religious sentiment; but it
would be a strange absurdity to regard as an effort of piety the
invention of the form of the arch itself, of which one of the earliest
and most perfect instances is in the Cloaca Maxima. And thus in the case
of spires and towers, it is just to ascribe to the devotion of their
designers that dignity which was bestowed upon forms derived from the
simplest domestic buildings; but it is ridiculous to attribute any great
refinement of religious feeling, or height of religious aspiration, to
those who furnished the funds for the erection of the loveliest tower in
North France, by paying for permission to eat butter in Lent.]
23. For instance, you know that, for an immense time back, all your
public buildings have been built with a row of pillars supporting a
triangular thing called a pediment. You see this form every day in your
banks and clubhouses, and churches and chapels; you are told that it is
the perfection of architectural beauty; and yet suppose Sir Walter
Scott, instead of writing, "Each purple peak, each flinty spire," had
written, "Each purple peak, each flinty 'pediment.'"[12] Would you have
thought the poem improved? And if not, why would it be spoiled? Simply
because the idea is no longer of any value to you; the thing spoken of
is a nonentity. These pediments, and stylobates, and architraves never
excited a single pleasurable feeling in you--never will, to the end of
time. They are evermore dead, lifeless, and useless, in art as in
poetry, and though you built as many of them as there are slates on your
house-roofs, you will never care for them. They will only remain to
later ages as monuments of the patience and pliability with which the
people of the nineteenth century sacrificed their feelings to fashions,
and their intellects to forms. But on the other hand, that strange and
thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise
connected with Gothic architecture--as for instance, Vault, Arch, Spire,
Pinnacle, Battlement, Barbican, Porch, and myriads of such others, words
everlastingly poetical and powerful whenever they occur,--is a most true
and certain index that the things themselves are delightful to you, and
will ever continue to be so. Believe me, you do indeed love these
things, so far as you care about art at all, so far as you are not
ashamed to confess what you feel about them.
[Footnote 12: It has been objected to this comparison that the form of
the pediment does not properly represent that of the rocks of the
Trossachs. The objection is utterly futile, for there is not a single
spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trossachs to the other. All their
rocks are heavily rounded, and the introduction of the word "spire" is a
piece of inaccuracy in description, ventured _merely for the sake of the
Gothic image_. Farther: it has been said that if I had substituted the
word "gable," it would have spoiled the line just as much as the word
"pediment," though "gable" is a Gothic word. Of course it would; but
why? Because "gable" is a term of vulgar domestic architecture, and
therefore destructive of the tone of the heroic description; whereas
"pediment" and "spire" are precisely correlative terms, being each the
crowning feature in ecclesiastical edifices, and the comparison of their
effects in the verse is therefore absolutely accurate, logical, and
just.]
24. In your public capacities, as bank directors, and charity overseers,
and administrators of this and that other undertaking or institution,
you cannot express your feelings at all. You form committees to decide
upon the style of the new building, and as you have never been in the
habit of trusting to your own taste in such matters, you inquire who is
the most celebrated, that is to say, the most employed, architect of the
day. And you send for the great Mr. Blank, and the Great Blank sends you
a plan of a great long marble box with half-a-dozen pillars at one end
of it, and the same at the other; and you look at the Great Blank's
great plan in a grave manner, and you dare say it will be very handsome;
and you ask the Great Blank what sort of a blank check must be filled up
before the great plan can be realized; and you subscribe in a generous
"burst of confidence" whatever is wanted; and when it is all done, and
the great white marble box is set up in your streets, you contemplate
it, not knowing what to make of it exactly, but hoping it is all right;
and then there is a dinner given to the Great Blank, and the morning
papers say that the new and handsome building, erected by the great Mr.
Blank, is one of Mr. Blank's happiest efforts, and reflects the greatest
credit upon the intelligent inhabitants of the city of so-and-so; and
the building keeps the rain out as well as another, and you remain in a
placid state of impoverished satisfaction therewith; but as for having
any real pleasure out of it, you never hoped for such a thing. If you
really make up a party of pleasure, and get rid of the forms and fashion
of public propriety for an hour or two, where do you go for it? Where do
you go to eat strawberries and cream? To Roslin Chapel, I believe; not
to the portico of the last-built institution. What do you see your
children doing, obeying their own natural and true instincts? What are
your daughters drawing upon their cardboard screens as soon as they can
use a pencil? Not Parthenon fronts, I think, but the ruins of Melrose
Abbey, or Linlithgow Palace, or Lochleven Castle, their own pure Scotch
hearts leading them straight to the right things, in spite of all that
they are told to the contrary. You perhaps call this romantic, and
youthful, and foolish. I am pressed for time now, and I cannot ask you
to consider the meaning of the word "Romance." I will do that, if you
please, in next lecture, for it is a word of greater weight and
authority than we commonly believe. In the meantime, I will endeavor,
lastly, to show you, not the romantic, but the plain and practical
conclusions which should follow from the facts I have laid before you.
25. I have endeavored briefly to point out to you the propriety and
naturalness of the two great Gothic forms, the pointed arch and gable
roof. I wish now to tell you in what way they ought to be introduced
into modern domestic architecture.
You will all admit that there is neither romance nor comfort in waiting
at your own or at any one else's door on a windy and rainy day, till
the servant comes from the end of the house to open it. You all know the
critical nature of that opening--the drift of wind into the passage, the
impossibility of putting down the umbrella at the proper moment without
getting a cupful of water dropped down the back of your neck from the
top of the door-way; and you know how little these inconveniences are
abated by the common Greek portico at the top of the steps. You know how
the east winds blow through those unlucky couples of pillars, which are
all that your architects find consistent with due observance of the
Doric order. Then, away with these absurdities; and the next house you
build, insist upon having the pure old Gothic porch, walled in on both
sides, with its pointed arch entrance and gable roof above. Under that,
you can put down your umbrella at your leisure, and, if you will, stop a
moment to talk with your friend as you give him the parting shake of the
hand. And if now and then a wayfarer found a moment's rest on a stone
seat on each side of it, I believe you would find the insides of your
houses not one whit the less comfortable; and, if you answer me, that
were such refuges built in the open streets, they would become mere
nests of filthy vagrants, I reply that I do not despair of such a change
in the administration of the poor laws of this country, as shall no
longer leave any of our fellow creatures in a state in which they would
pollute the steps of our houses by resting upon them for a night. But if
not, the command to all of us is strict and straight, "When thou seest
the naked, that thou cover him, and that thou bring the poor that are
cast out to _thy house_."[13] Not to the work-house, observe, but to
_thy_ house: and I say it would be better a thousandfold, that our doors
should be beset by the poor day by day, than that it should be written
of any one of us, "They reap every one his corn in the field, and they
gather the vintage of the wicked. They cause the naked to lodge without
shelter, that they have no covering in the cold. They are wet with the
showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock, for want of a
shelter."[14]
[Footnote 13: Isa. lviii. 7.]
[Footnote 14: Job xxiv. 6-8.]
26. This, then, is the first use to which your pointed arches and gable
roofs are to be put. The second is of more personal pleasurableness. You
surely must all of you feel and admit the delightfulness of a bow
window; I can hardly fancy a room can be perfect without one. Now you
have nothing to do but to resolve that every one of your principal rooms
shall have a bow window, either large or small. Sustain the projection
of it on a bracket, crown it above with a little peaked roof, and give a
massy piece of stone sculpture to the pointed arch in each of its
casements, and you will have as inexhaustible a source of quaint
richness in your street architecture, as of additional comfort and
delight in the interiors of your rooms.