PLACE DU ST. Vi
COUR D'HONNEUR
Greek Lines and
Other Architectural Essays
Henry Van Brunt











Architectural
Library


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GREEK LINES
\
AND OTHER ARCHITECTURAL ESSAYS
BY
HENRY VAN BRUNT
FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLTN AND COMPANY
1893


To
WILLIAM ROBERT WARE,
THIS BOOK,
AN INADEQUATE RESULT OP MANY FRUITFUL YEARS OF
PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL RELATIONS WITH
HIM, IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED
BY THE AUTHOR.





PREFACE.
This little book contains a selection of archi-
tectural essays which have been written at
intervals during an active professional career
of more than thirty years. The kindly indul-
gence with which they have been received by
my brethren in the craft, and the friendly cu-
riosity with which they have beeu regarded by
the laity, may be attributed perhaps mainly to
the fact that, unlike most literary expositions
of the subject, they have been developed rather
from practice than from theory, and that they
had the advantage of that sort of sincerity
which is the natural product of conviction
rather than sentiment. I have been encour-
aged to believe that it might be possible so to
collate a few of these papers as to form a
sequence, in which, from first to last, there
should be evident a more or less orderly devel-
opment of thought. To this end the earlier


vi PREFACE.
essays in especial have been largely rewritten,
and all have been, so far as practicable, brought
to date. The essay on Blois is the only one
of the series which now makes its first appeal
to the public. Perhaps, in their present con-
secutive form, these papers may have enough
of symmetrical unity to secure for the archi-
tectural matters of which they treat a more
intelligent popular interest than could be
obtained by any sort of disconnected publica-
tion.
H. V. B.
Kansas City, Mo., July, 1893.


CONTENTS
/ PAGE
Greek Lines and their Influence on Modern
Architecture ./ 1
The Growth of Conscience in Modern Decora-
tive Art 92
Historical Architecture, and the Influence
of the Personal Element upon it . . 134
The Royal Chateau of Blois .... 164
The Present State of Architecture . . . 202
Architecture and Poetry 234





LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
The Egyptian Lotus 17
The Three Typical Lines 24
Greek Doric Capitals 33
The Ionic Capital of the Erectheum . . 38
The Greek and Roman Cyma .... 49
The Roman Ionic Capital 52
The Chateau of Blois.
General Plan ....... 166
Pavilion of Louis XII., Exterior Facade . . 168
Pavilion of Louis XII., Detail of Exterior Facade 170
Pavilion of Louis XII., Interior Facade . . 172
Pavilion of Francis I., Interior Facade . . 184
Pavilion of Francis I., Grand Staircase . . 188
Pavilion of Francis I., Exterior Facade . . 192
Doorway of St. Tropheme at Arles . . . 234





GREEK LINES
AND
OTHER ARCHITECTURAL ESSAYS.
GREEK LINES AND THEIR INFLUENCE
ON MODERN ARCHITECTURE.
I.
The material beauty of the world, as exhib-
ited in the manifold forms, colors, sounds,
perfumes, motions of nature, is created for a
nobler purpose than only to delight the senses
and please the aesthetic faculties. When, ac-
cording to the suggestions of our merely
human passions and instincts, we ease our
hearts of love by heaping treasures and the
choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those
whom we most dearly cherish, we take no
credit to ourselves for such precious prodi-
galities; for they are the inevitable and dis-
interested outpourings of affection. They
are received as such. When, therefore, we see
that all the beneficent energies of nature are


2
GREEK LINES.
expressed with a profusion of beauty which is
not necessary to their efficient operation, we
accept the manifestation, are made happy in
the consciousness of being beloved, and, con-
stituted as we are in the image and likeness of
God, express our instinctive gratitude in those
fine human sympathies which impress the seal
of truth on the primary idea of our creation.
But if our
"little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love"
are a reflection of the divine spirit within us,
and if our capacity for enthusiasm, in the
primary etymological use of the word — that
is, our ability to be possessed or inspired by
the spirit of a god, — is one more proof that
we are created in the image of Deity, there is
still another and more significant mark of re-
lationship.
The human heart, in its best estate, forever
yearns to create, to give in some form expres-
sion and life to those evasive ideals of love-
liness which are planted within our conscious-
ness by the aspects of nature. Our instinctive
longing to embody these illusive phantoms of
beauty is godlike. But the immortal songs
which remain unsung, the exquisite idyls
which gasp for words, the bewildering and


GREEK LINES.
s
restless imagery which seeks in vain the eter-
nal repose of marble or of canvas, — while
these reveal the affectionate and divine desires
of humanity, they prove, also, how few there
are to whom it is given to learn the great
lesson of creation. When one arises among
us who, like Pygmalion, makes no useless
appeal to the Goddess of Beauty for the
gift of life for his ideal, and who creates as
he was created, we cherish him as a great in-
terpreter of human love. We call him poet,
composer, artist, and speak of him reverently
as Master. We say that his lips have been
wet with dews of Hybla; that, like the sage
of Crotona, he has heard the music of the
spheres; that he comes to us, another Numa,
radiant and inspired from the kisses of Egeria.
Thus, as infinite Love begets infinite
Beauty, so does infinite Beauty reflect into
finite perceptions that image of its divine
parentage, which the antique world worshiped
under the personification of Astarte, Aphro-
dite, Venus, and recognized as the great
creative principle lying at the root of all high
Art.
There is a curious passage in Boehme,
which relates how Satan, when asked the
cause of the enmity of God and his own con-


GREEK LINES.
5
searches after the imaginary good. We, poor
underlings, have been taught in the school of
sad experience the mortal agony of love with-
out skill, the power of perception without
the power of utterance. We know how dumb
are the sweet melodies of our souls, how
fleeting their opulent and dreamy pageantries.
But we have not fully learned the utter
emptiness and desolation of skill without
love. We accept its sounding brass and tin-
kling cymbals for immortal harmonies. We
look reverently upon its tortured marbles, its
architectural affectations, its canvases stained
with academic knowledge, as revelations of
higher intelligence; unaware that if we go
down to the quiet places of our own souls, we
shall find there the universe reflected, like a
microcosm, in the dark wellsprings, and that
out of these wellsprings in the deep silence
rises the beautiful ideal, Anadyomene, to com-
pensate and comfort us for the vacancy of
life. If we know ourselves, it is not to the
dogmas of critics, the artificial rules of aesthet-
ics, that we most wisely resort for judgments
concerning works of art. Though technical
externals, though conventionalities, sophisti-
cated by the complications of modern life,
and the address of manipulation naturally take


6
GREEK LINES.
possession of our senses and warp our opinions,
there are depths of immortal truth within us,
rarely sounded, indeed, but which, when dimly
revealed in some rare moment of insight, seem
to show that we possess a standard and a cri-
terion far nobler than the schools can give us.
The broken statues and columns and tradi-
tions and fragmentary classics, which Greece
has left us, are so still and tranquil to the
eye and ear, that we search in vain for the
Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it
echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls,
and repeated in the half-impalpable ideals
there. It is in this favored land of art that
we must seek for the earliest, the clearest, and
the purest external expressions of these ideals,
whose existence we but half suspect within us.
It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we
were nearly unconscious of some of the high-
est capacities of our humanity till we recog-
nized their full expression in the ashes of a
distant and dead pagan civilization; that we
did not know ourselves till
"The airy tongues that syllable men's names
In pathless wildernesses"
uttered knowledge to us among the ruins of
Hellas. It is good for us to lend a spiritual
ear to these ancient whisperings, and hear


GREEK LINES.
7
nymph calling to nymph and faun to faun, as
they caper merrily with the god Pan through
the silence. It is good for us to listen to that
"inextinguishable laughter " of the happy im-
mortals of Olympus, ever mingling with all
the voices of Nature and setting them to the
still sweet music of humanity, — good, because
so we are reminded how close we are to the
outward world, and how all the developments
of visible beauty are figurative expressions of
our own humanity. Thus it is that the poetic
truths of old religions exquisitely vindicate
themselves; thus we find, even we moderns,
with our downward eyes and our wrinkled
brows, that we still worship at the mythologi-
cal altars of childlike divinities; and when we
can get away from the distracting Bedlam of
steam-shrieks and machinery, we behold the
secrets of our own hearts, the Lares and Pe-
nates of our own households, reflected in the
"white ideals" on antique vases and medal-
lions.
Abstract lines are the most concentrated
expressions of human ideas, and as such are
peculiarly sensitive to the critical tests of all
theories of the Beautiful. Distinguished from
the more usual and direct means by which


8 GREEK LINES.
artists express their inspirations and appeal to
the sympathies of men; distinct from the com-
mon language of art, which contents itself with
conveying merely local and individual ideas
by imitations or translations of natural forms,
abstract lines are recognized as the grand
hieroglyphic symbolism of the aggregate of
human thought, the artistic manifestations of
the great human Cosmos. ^The natural world,
passing through the mind of man, is immedi-
ately interpreted and humanized by his creative
power, and assumes the colors, forms, and har-
monies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music.
But abstract lines as we find them in Archi-
tecture and in the ceramic arts are the inde-
pendent developments of this creative power,
coming directly from humanity itself, and ob-
taining from the outward world only the most
distant motives of composition. Thus it is an
inevitable deduction that Architecture is the
most human of all arts, and its lines the most
human of all lines.
"A thing of beauty is a joy forever ;"
and the affectionate devotion with which this
gift is received by finite intelligences from the
hand of God is expressed in art, when its in-
finite depth can be so expressed at all, in a


GREEK LINES. 9
twofold language, — the one objective, the
other subjective; the one recalling the im-
mediate source of the emotion, and presenting
it palpably to the senses, but more or less in-
fused with the thought or mood of the artist;
the other portraying rather the emotion than
the cause of it, and, by an instinctive and
universal symbolism, reflecting the character
of the impression made by it upon the creative
instinct and inner consciousness of mankind.
Hence come those lines which aesthetic writers
term "Lines of Beauty," suggesting rather
than expressing meanings, — simple and ele-
mentary, but of far-reaching and various sig-
nificance; animated with life and thought and
musical motion, and yet still and serene and
spiritual.
The mysteries of orb and cycle, with which
old astrologers girded human life, and sought
to define -from celestial phenomena the horo-
scope of man, have been brought down to
modern applications by learned philosophers
and mathematicians, who have labored with
ingenuity and skill to trace the interior rela-
tionships existing between the recondite rev-
elations of their geometry, their wonderful
laws of mathematical harmonies and unities,
and those lines which are creations of art, as


10
GREEK LINES.
distinguished from imitations of nature, and
which, because their various characteristics
emanated from the inborn genius, or spirit of
the races of mankind, have become symbols
of humanity. No wehVorganized intellect can
fail to perceive that some sublime and im-
mortal truth underlies these speculations.
Undoubtedly, in the straight line, in the conic
sections, in the innumerable composite curves
of the mathematician, lie the germs of all
these symbolic expressions. But the architect,
whose lines of beauty vary continually with
the emotions which produce them, who feels
in his own human heart the irresistible impulse
which gives to them their exquisite balance,
their sensitive poise, their delicate significance
and value, cannot allow that the spirit and
motive of these lines are governed by the exact
and rigid formulas of the mathematician to any
greater extent or in any other manner^han as
the numbers of the poet are ruled by the
grammar of his language. These formulas
may be applied as a curious test to as^Pain
what strange sympathies there may be between
such lines and the organic harmonies of nature
and the universe; but these formulas do not
enter into the soul of their creation any more
than the limitations of counterpoint and rhythm


GREEK LINES.
11
laid their incubus on the lyre of Apollo. The
porches where Callicrates, Hermogenes, and
Callimachus walked were guarded by no
such Cerberus as the disciples of Plato en-
countered at the entrance of the groves of the
Academy, —
"Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here;"
but the divine Aphrodite welcomed all man-
kind to the tender teachings of the lotus,
the acanthus, the honeysuckle, and the sea-
shell, and all the sweet relationships of nature
to the heart of man.
The tendency of many modern writers to
account for the lines of Greek mouldings and
vases by considering them developments of
strict scientific laws, results of mathematical
proportions, and by endeavoring to restrict
their freedom to the narrow limitations of
geometric lines and curves, nicely adapted
from the frigidities of Euclid, is dispiriting to
the artist. "The melancholy days have come"
for art when the meditative student finds his
early footsteps loud among these dry, withered,
and sapless leaves, instead of brushing away
the dews by the fountains of perpetual youth.
Now it is capable of distinct proof that
abstract lines of beauty, as in all their infinite


GREEK LINES.
13
was used by nearly all the early peoples to
express the creative spirit which gives life and
vegetation to matter. Lacshmi, the beautifid
Hindu goddess of abundance, corresponding
to the Venus Aphrodite of the Greeks, was
called "the Lotus-born," as having ascended
from the ocean in this flower. Here, again,
is the inevitable intermingling of the eternal
principles of Beauty, Love, and the Creative
Power in that pure triune medallion image
which the ancients so tenderly cherished and
so exquisitely worshiped with vestal fires and
continual sacrifices of art. Old father Nile,
reflecting in his deep, mysterious breast the
monstrous temples of Nubia and Pylae, bears
eloquent witness to the earnestness and sin-
cerity of the old votive homage to Isis, "the
Lotus-crowned" Venus of Egypt. For the
symbolic water-lily, recreated by human art,
blooms forever in bud or flower in the capitals
of Karnac and Thebes, and wherever columns
were reared and lintels laid throughout the
length and breadth of the " Land of Bondage."
It is the keynote of all that architecture and
the basis of its decorative character. A brief
examination into the principles of this new
birth of the Lotus, of the monumental
straightening and stiffening of its graceful


14
GREEK LINES.
and easy lines, will afford some insight into
the strange processes of the human mind,
when by divine instinct it creates out of the
material beauties of nature a work of art.
It is well known that the religion of the
old Egyptians led them to regard this life as
a mere temporary incident, an unimportant
phase of their progress toward that larger and
grander state imaged to them with mys-
terious sublimity in the idea of Death or
Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they
expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of
transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their
tombs an immortality of calm repose. And
so their houses have crumbled into dust ages
ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the
relations of life the sentiment of death was
present in some form or other. The hallowed
mummies of their ancestors were the most sa-
cred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem
them speedily was a point of the highest honor.
They had corpses at their feasts to remind
them how transitory were the glory and happi-
ness of the world, how eternal the tranquillity
of death.
Now, how was this prevailing idea expressed
in their art? They looked around them and
saw that all organic life was full of movement


GREEK LINES.
15
and wavy lines; their much-loved Lotus un-
dulated and bent playfully to the solemn flow
of the great Nile; the Ibis fluttered with con-
tinual motion; their own bodies were full of
ever-changing curves; and their whole vis-
ible existence was unsteady, like the waves
of the sea. But when the temporary life
was changed, and "this mortal put on im-
mortality," when the mummy was swathed in
its everlasting cerements for its long sleep,
their eyes and souls were filled with the utter
stillness and repose of its external aspects; its
features became rigid and fixed, and were
settled to an everlasting and immutable calm;
the vibrating grace of its lines departed, and
their ever-varying complexity became simpli-
fied, and assumed the straightness and stiff-
ness of death. In this manner the straight
line, the natural expression of eternal repose,
in contradistinction to the wavy line, which
represents the animal and vegetable move-
ments of life, became the motive and spirit of
their art. The anomaly of death in life was
present in every development of the creative
faculty, and no architectural or decorative
feature could be so slight and unimportant
as not to be thoroughly permeated with this
sentiment. The tender and graceful lines


16
GREEK LINES.
of the Lotus became sublime and monumen-
tal under the religious loyalty of Egyptian
chisels. Whether used in construction or dec-
oration, these lines, so stiffened and formal-
ized, seem to bring us into the presence of a
strange phase of human life and thought,
long since passed away from any other con-
tact with living creatures. When applied to
the rendering of the human figure, especially
in the heroic forms of Egyptian art, — in
the statues and portraits of kings, in the
sphinxes, in the colossi of Memnon, and the
royal tombs, — these solemn and fateful lines
appear in effect to overwhelm the idea of
human mutability and movement in the aw-
ful repose of immortality. It seems suffi-
ciently evident that this process of formaliz-
ing the lines of the human figure in Egyptian
art was not the result of a limitation of the
powers of the artist to express movement and
life, but rather of a consecration of his art to
the service of a fundamental religious dogma.
"Solid-set,
And moulded in colossal calm,"
all the lines of this lost art thus recall the
sentiment of endless repose, and even the
necessary curves of its mouldings are dead
with straightness. The love which produced


GREEK LINES.
17


18
GREEK LINES.
these lines was not the passionate love which
we understand and feel; they were not the
result of a sensuous impulse; but the Egyptian
artist seemed ever to be standing alone in the
midst of a trackless and limitless desert,
— around him earth and sky meeting with no
kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace of
mutual sympathy; he felt himself encircled by
a calm and pitiless Destiny, the cold expres-
sion of a Fate from which he could not flee,
and in himself the centre and soul of it all.
Oppressed thus with a vast sense of spiritual
loneliness, when he uttered the inspirations of
art, the memories of playful palms and float-
ing lilies and fluttering wings, though they
came warm to the love of his heart, were
attuned in the outward expression to the deep,
solemn, prevailing monotone of his humanity.
His love for the lotus and the ibis, more pro-
found than the passion of the senses, dwelt se-
rene in the bottom of his soul, and thence came
forth transfigured and dedicated to the very
noblest uses of life. This is the art of Egypt.
But among all the old nations which have
perished with their gods, Greece appeals to
our closest sympathies. She looks upon us
with the smile of childhood, free, contented,
and happy, with no ascetic self-denials to check


GREEK LINES. 19
her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to
bind the liberty of her actions. All her ex-
ternal aspects are in harmony with the weak-
ness and the strength of human nature. We
recognize ourselves in her, and find all the
characteristics of our own finite nature there
developed into a theism so human, clothed
with a personification so exquisite and po-
etical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still
to live in our hearts a silent and shadowy re-
ligion without ceremonies or altars or sacrifices.
The festive gods of the Iliad made man a deity
to himself, and his soul the dwelling-place of
ideal beauty. In this ideal they lived and
moved and had their being, and came forth
thence, bronze, marble, chryselephantine, a stat-
uesque and naked humanity, chaste in uncom-
prehended sin and glorified in antique virtue.
The beauty of this natural life, and the love
of it, was the soul of the Greek ideal; and
the nation continually cherished and culti-
vated and refined this ideal with impulses
from groves of Arcadia, vales of Tempe,
and flowery slopes of Attica, from the man-
liness of Olympic games and the loveli-
ness of Spartan Helens. They cherished
and cultivated and refined it, because here
they set up their altars to known gods and


GREEK LINES.
21
growths of wanton and luxurious curves, wild,
spontaneous utterances of superabundant life.
The finely studied perception of the Greek
artist admitted no unimaginative, pre-Raphael-
ite imitations of what Nature was ever giving
him with a liberal hand in the whorls of shells,
the veins of leaves, the life of flames, the
convolutions of serpents, the curly tresses of
woman, the lazy grace of clouds, the easy
sway of tendrils, flowers, and human motion.
He was no literal interpreter of her whispered
secrets. But the grace of his art was a
deliberate grace, — a grace of thought and
study. His lines were creations, and not
instincts or imitations. It was his religion
so to nurture and educate his sensitiveness to
beauty and his power to love and create it,
that his works of art should be deeds of wor-
ship and expressions of a godlike humanity.
Unlike the Egyptian's, there was nothing in
his creed to check the sweet excess of Life,
and no grim shadow, "feared of man,"
scared him in his walks, or preached to him
sermons of mortality in the stones and violets
of the wayside. Life was hallowed and dear
to him for its own sake. He saw it was lov-
able, and he made it the theme of his noblest
poems, his subtlest philosophies, and his high-


22
GREEK LINES.
est art. Hence the infinite joy and endless
laughter on Olympus, the day-long feasting of
the gods, the silver stir of strings in the hol-
low shell of the exquisite Phoebus, "the soft
song of the muse with voices sweetly re-
plying."
I believe that all true lines of grace and
beauty, though they are necessarily infinite in
variety and meaning, are capable of division
into three distinct classes, according to the
respective spirit or genius of the three civili-
zations out of which they grew, and that each
class, as it expresses a unity of great signifi-
cance in the history of the human race, is
capable of concentrating its distinguishing
characteristics in one representative line, which
may stand as the symbol, the gesture, as it
were, of an era in this history. = If this is
possible, these three symbols would represent
not only the arts of three great eras, but the
essential quality of their life and thought, of
which these arts are themselves the symbol
and the record. These lines, from the nature
of the case, are not precise or exact, like a
formula of mathematics, to which the neophyte
can refer for deductions of grace to suit any
premises or conditions. This, of course, is
contrary to the spirit of beautiful design; and


GREEK LINES.
23
the ingenious Hay, who maintained that his
"composite ellipse" is capable of universal
application in the arts of ornamental compo-
sition, and that by its use any desirable lines
in mouldings or vases can be mechanically
produced, especially Greek lines, fell into the
grave error of endeavoring to materialize and
fix that animula vagula, blandula, that coy
and evasive spirit of art, which is its peculiar
characteristic, and gives to its works inspira-
tion, harmony, and poetic sentiment. Ideal
beauty can be hatched from no geometrical
eggs. Of these lines one expresses the most
subtle grace yet conceived by the mind or exe-
cuted by the hand of man. This line pretends
to be merely a type of that large language of
forms, with which the most refined intellects
of antiquity uttered their joyful worship of
Aphrodite in Greek art.
The three great distinctive eras of art, in
a purely psychological sense, were the Egyp-
tian, the Grecian, and the Romanesque, —
including in the latter term both Roman
art itself and all subsequent art, whether
derived directly or indirectly from Rome,
as the Byzantine, the Mahometan, the Me-
diaeval, and the Renaissance. Selecting the
most characteristic works to which these great


24
GREEK LINES.
eras respectively gave birth, it is not difficult
by comparison to ascertain the master-spirit,
or type, to which each of these three families
may be reduced. If we place these types side
by side, the result will be as in the diagram,

EGYPTIAN.
ROMAN.
presenting to the eye, at one view, the con-
centration of three civilizations, Destiny,
Love, and Life ; — destiny, finding utterance
in the stern and inflexible simplicity of the
tombs and obelisks of Egypt; love, expressing
itself in the statuesque and thoughtful grace
of Grecian temples, statues, and urns; life,
in the sensuous and impulsive change, evident
in all the developments of art, since Greece be-


GREEK LINES.
25
came Achaia, a province of the Roman Empire.
In the central type, as exhibited in the dia-
gram, we see a happy mingling of the essen-
tial qualities of the other two. The genius
of Greece, on the one hand, tempers the rigid
repose of Egypt with the passion of life, and,
on the other, restrains the passion of life with
a spirit of intellectual tranquillity. Humanly
speaking, it seems to stand for a condition of
perfect art, representing the highest develop-
ment of creation by man. At one point in the
history of the race the secret of perpetual
youth seemed to have been disclosed, at once
grave with memory and jocund with hope.
This intermediate line is the essence of the
age of Pericles; and in it "the capable eye"
may discover the pose of the Cnidian Venus of
Praxiteles, of the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias,
and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels,
and, more directly, the tender severity of Doric
capitals and the secret grace of the shafts of
the Parthenon.
According to Pliny, Apelles, when he visited
the great painter Protogenes, at Rhodes, and
found him not at home, inscribed a line upon
a board, assuring the slave that this line would
signify to the master who had been to see him.
Whatever the line was, Protogenes, we hear,


26,
GREEK LINES.
recognized in it the hand of the greatest lim-
ner of Greece. It was the signature of that
Ideal, known to the antique world by its wider
developments in the famous pictures of the
Venus Anadyomene, and Alexander with the
Thunderbolt, hung in the temple of Diana at
Ephesus.
The gravity with which this apparently
trifling anecdote is given us from antiquity
evidently proves that it was one of the house-
hold tales of old Greece. It did not seem ab-
surd in those times, when art was recognized
as a great unity, an elaborate and copious
language, founded on the simplest elements of
life, and, in its grandest and widest Sowings,
bearing ever in its bosom, like a great river,
the memory of the little weeping Naiad far up
among the mountains with her "impoverished
urn.
Thus every great national art, growing up
naturally out of the necessities of an earnest
people, expressing the grand motives of their
life, as that of the Greeks and the Egyptians
and the mediaeval nations of Europe, is founded
on the simplest laws. So long as these laws are
obeyed without affectations or sophistications,
art is good and true; so long as it remembers
the purity and earnestness of its childhood,


GREEK LINES.
27
the strength that is ordained out of the mouth
of tabes is present in all its expressions; but
when it spreads itself abroad in the fens and
marshes of humanity, when it becomes remi-
niscent and imitative, when it is governed by
archaeology and pretends to be what it is not,
it loses the purity of its aim, the singleness
and unity of its action, — it becomes stag-
nant, and sleeps in the death of idleness.
When one studies Greek art, the whole mo-
tive of it seems so childlike and so simple that
the impulse to seek for that little Naiad which
is the fountain and source of it all is irresisti-
ble. I have endeavored, in the representative
line which I have traced, to embody the char-
acteristic grace of the delicate and elegant
lines in the profiles of Greek mouldings and
vases, and to present a type of the restrained
and carefully balanced rhythmic movement,
the aristocratic poise, which distinguish the
composition of Greek ornament. It is impos-
sible to produce this line with a wanton flour-
ish of the pencil, as I have done in that easy
and thoughtless curve which Hogarth, in his
quaint " Analysis of Beauty," assumed as the
line of true grace; nor yet are its motions
governed by any cold mathematical laws. In
it is the earnest and deliberate labor of love.


28
GREEK LINES.
There are thought and tenderness in every in-
stant of it; but this thought is grave and al-
most solemn, and this tenderness is chastened
and purified by wise reserve. Measure it by
time, and you will find it no momentary de-
light, no voluptuous excess which comes and
goes in a breath; but there is a whole cycle of
deep human feeling in it. It is the serene joy
of a nation, and not the passionate impulse of
a man. Observe, from beginning to end, its in-
tention is to give expression by the serpentine
line to that sentiment of beautiful life which
was the worship of the Greeks; but they did
not toss it off, like a wine-cup at a feast.
They prolonged it through all the varied emo-
tions of a lifetime with exquisite art, making
it the path of their education in childhood
and of their wider experience as men. All
the impulses of humanity they bent to a
kindly parallelism with it. This is that fa-
mous principle of Variety in Unity which St.
Augustine and hosts of other philosophers
considered the true ideal of Beauty. Start with
this line from the top upon its journeying:
look at the hesitation of it ere it launches into
action; how it cherishes its resources, and
gathers up its strength ! — with a confidence
in its beautiful Destiny, and yet with a chaste


GREEK LINES. 29
/
shrinking from the full enjoyment of it, how
inevitably, but how purely it yields itself to the
sudden curve! It does not embrace this curve
with a sensuous sweep, nor does it, like Sap-
pho, throw itself with quick passion into the
tide. It enters with maidenly and dignified re-
serve into a new life which, as you glance at it,
seems almost ascetic, and reminds you of the
rigid fatalism of Egypt. Its grace is almost
strangled, as those other serpents were in the
grasp of the child Hercules. But if you
watch it attentively, you will find it ever
changing, though with subtlest refinement,
ever human, and true to the great laws of
emotion. There is no straight line here, no
death in life, but the composure of "maiden
meditation" moving with serious pleasure
along the grooves of happy change. It cer-
tainly does not seem to be merely fanciful to
attribute the character of this line to a habit
of chastity in thought and of elegant reserve
in expression. Follow it still farther, and you
will find it grateful to the sight, neither fa-
tiguing with excess of monotony nor cloying
the appetite with change. And when the
round hour is full and the end comes, this end
is met by a Fate, which does not clip with the
shears of Atropos and leave an aching void,


30
GREEK LINES.
but fulfills itself in gentleness and peace.
The line bends quietly and unconsciously to-
wards the beautiful consummation, and then
dies, because its work is done.
When we examine the innumerable lines of
Greek architecture, we find that the artists
never for an instant lost sight of this ideal.
Its deliberate and carefully studied grace was
everywhere present, and mingled not only with
such grand and heroic lines as those of the
sloping pediments, the long-drawn entablatures,
and massive stylobates of the Parthenon and
Theseion, bending them into curves so subtly
modulated that our coarse perceptions did not
perceive the variations from the dead straight
lines till the careful admeasurements of Pen-
rose and Cockerel and their confreres of France
assured us of the fact, still further confirmed
by the skillful photographs of Stillman; not
only did it make these enormous harp-strings
vibrate with deep human soul-music, but there
is not an abstract line in moulding, column, or
vase, belonging to old Greece or the islands
of the iEgean or Ionia or the Greek colonies
of Italy, which does not have the same deep
meaning, the same statuesque and thoughtful
pose. Besides, I very much doubt if the
same line, in all its parts and proportions, is


GREEK LINES.
31
ever repeated twice, — certainly not with any
emphasis; and this is following out the great
law of our existence, which varies the emotion
infinitely with the occasion which produced it.
Let us suppose, for example, that a moulding
was needed to crown a column with fitting
glory and grace. Now the capital of a column
may fairly be called the throne of ideal ex-
pression; it is the cour d'honneur of art.
The architect in this emergency did not set
himself at "the antique," and seek for au-
thorities, and reproduce and copy; for he de-
sired not to present with pedantic accuracy
and historical respect some effect of beautiful
design which he had seen in the capitals of
Assyria, or Persia, or Egypt, and which had
been developed from some condition of struc-
ture, or use, or habit of mind different from his
own, but to devise a feature which physically
and aesthetically should answer all the require-
ments of its peculiar position, a feature whose
lines should have essential relationships with
the other lines around it, those of shaft, archi-
trave, frieze, and cornice, — should swell its
fitting melody into the great fugue. And so,
between the summit of the long shaft and that
square block, the abacus, on which reposes
the dead weight of the lintel of Greece, the


32
GREEK LINES.
Doric echinus was fashioned, crowning the
serene Atlas-labor of the column with exqui-
site completion, and uniting the upright and
horizontal masses of the order with a marriage
ring, whose beauty is its perfect fitness. The
profile of this moulding may be rudely likened
to the upper and middle parts of the line
assumed as the representative of the Greek
ideal. But it varied ever with the exigency
of circumstances. Over the short and solid
shafts of Paestum it assumed the shape of a
crushed cushion; that of the Acropolis at Seli-
nus (shown in diagram at A) had a similar
character. The conditions in these early ex-
amples of the style seemed to the artist, as the
shaft had an abundance of reserved strength,
to require at this point a moulding of softened
grace, while the Parthenon (shown at B)
and the temple of Ceres at Eleusis (shown
at C) exhibited in their echini more energetic
profiles, as if their service of support could
not be performed satisfactorily to the eye with-
out an expression of effort, somewhat like
that of a muscle in strong tension. The com-
paratively slender grace of the shafts in these
two latter and later examples — a grace em-
phasized by the almost imperceptible vertical
curves with which these shafts diminish, in the


GREEK LINES.
33

THE GREEK DORIC CAriTAL.


34
GREEK LINES.
entasis, from base to summit — demanded at
the bearing point a demonstration of power to
justify their delicacy of proportion. The es-
pecial profile of the echinus in these cases
seemed to be preordained from the base of the
shaft, like a flower from the root. It was
created as with "the Dorian mood of soft re-
corders." Between these two extremes there
is an infinity of change, everywhere modified
and governed by " the study of imagination."
The same characteristics of nervous grace
and severe intellectual restraint are found
wherever the Greek architect put his hand and
his heart to work. Every moulding bears an
impress of refinement, and modulates the light
which falls upon it with exquisite and har-
monious gradations of shade. The sun, as
it touches the mouldings of the entablature,
makes visible music there, as if it were the
harp of Memnon, — presenting a series of
horizontal and parallel shade and shadow
lines, delicately contrasting in melodious suc-
cession, according to the profiles of the mould-
ings which produced them ; the cymas, ovolos,
and beads, creating fine graduated pencilings
of shade, whose upper and lower boundaries
die away with soft modulations; the fillets,
throwing sharp and thin shadows along the


GREEK LINES.
35
illuminated marble surfaces; the overhanging
corona making a broad, defined shadow,
broken by reflected lights playing on the
supporting bed-mouldings. All the phenom-
ena of reflected lights, half lights, and broken
lights are brought in and attuned to the great
daedal melody of the edifice. The antiquities
of Attica afford nothing frivolous or capricious
or merely fanciful, no playful extravagances
or wanton meanderings of line; nor did they
ever submit to the tyranny of conventional
formulas; but, ever loyal to the purity of a
high ideal, they give us, even in their ruins, a
wonderful and very evident unity of expres-
sion, pervading and governing every possible
mood and manner of thought.
No phase of art that ever existed gives us
a line so very human and simple in itself as
this Greek type, and so pliable to all the uses
of monumental language. If this type were
a mere mathematical type, its applicability to
the expression of human emotions would be
limited to a formalism absolutely fatal to the
freedom of thought in art. But because it
has its birth in love, as distinguished from
pedantry, from scholastic or archaeological
conformity; because it indicates a refined
appreciation of all the movements of life and


36
GREEK LINES.
all the utterances of creation; because it is
the humanized essence of these motions and
developments, it becomes a prolific unity, con-
taining within itself the germs of a new world
of ever new delight.
When this type in Greek art was brought
to bear on the interpretation of natural forms
into architectural language, we shall curiously
discover that the creative instinct of the artist
and his reverence for the integrity of his ideal
were so great, that he not only subjected these
forms to a rigid subservience to the abstract
line till nature was nearly lost in art, but the
adoption of these forms under any circum-
stances was limited to some two or three of
the most ordinary vegetable productions of
Greece and to one seashell.1 This wise re-
serve and self-restraint present to us the best
proof of the fastidious purity of his thought.
Nature poured out at the feet of the Greek
artist a most plenteous offering, and the lap of
Flora overflowed for him with tempting gar-
lands of beauty; but he did not gather these
up with any greedy and indiscriminate hand,
he did not intoxicate himself at the harvest
of the vineyard. If he adorned his festivals
1 Mr. Goodyear, as we have seen, argues that they were
all derived from one, the Egyptian lotus.


GREEK LINES.
37
profusely with garlands and wreaths of flow-
ers, he decorated his works of art with serious
and reverential reserve, contenting himself
with two or three simple types, which he
varied with an invention at once chaste and
elegant. Intent upon the nobler aim of cre-
ating a pure work of art, he considered what
expression or character of line or movement
was required in the surface which he was
to decorate, whether frieze, soffite, necking,
border, moulding, capital, or vase, and taking
two or three of the most familiar products
of the soil, he studied their principles of
growth, their creative sentiment, and ad-
justed them to his decorative purpose, in fact
re-created them. The design was not bent
to accommodate them, but they were trans-
lated and lifted up into the sphere of art. It
is not impossible that the Greek artist, in
this process of secondary creation, may have
been influenced more or less by certain crude
traditionary forms, which had reached him
from the Nile and the Euphrates; for the ar-
tistic instinct quickly appreciates and absorbs
any motive of design which may pass under
his observation. But the Greek work was
developed so far beyond all these precedents
that, if possibly his initiative may be ques-


38
GREEK LINES.
tioned, his supreme creative power cannot for
a moment be disputed.
If we examine the magnificent Ionic capi-
tals of the porch of Athene Polias in the
Erechtheum, we may see that the Greek
could be profuse without being redundant.

GREEK IONIC.
Whether the main idea of this lovely and
elaborate creation came from some archaic
type of Ionia or Persia or Assyria, or whether
it was drawn from the convolutions of a sea-
shell, he made "old things new" with his
perfect art, and remodeled whatever they
may have given him of suggestion into a
composition of exquisite harmony and order.
Examine the volute: this is the nearest ap-
proach to a mathematical result that can be


GREEK LINES.
39
found in Greek architecture; yet this very
approximation is one of the greatest triumphs
of art. No geometrical rule has been dis-
covered which can exactly produce the spirals
of the Erechtheum, nor can they be found in
shells. In avoiding the exuberance of the lat-
ter and the rigid formalism of the former, a
work of human thought and love has been
evolved. Follow one of these volutes with
your eye from its centre outwards, taking all
its congeries of lines into companionship; you
find your sympathies at once strangely en-
gaged. There is an intoxication in the grad-
ual and melodious expansion of these curves.
They seem to be full of destiny, bearing you
along, as upon an inevitable tide, towards
some larger sphere of action. Ere you have
grown weary with the monotony of the spiral,
you find that the system of lines which com-
pose it gradually leave their obedience to the
centrifugal forces of the volutes, and, assum-
ing new relationships of parts, sweep grace-
fully across the summit of the shaft, and
become presently involved in the reversed
motion of the other volute, at whose centre
Ariadne seems to stand, gathering together
all the clues of this labyrinth of beauty.
This may seem fanciful to one who regards


40
GREEK LINES.
these things as matters of convention. But
inasmuch as, to the studious eye of affection,
they suggest human action and human sympa-
thies, this perhaps may be accepted as a proof
that they had their birth in some correspond-
ing affection. It is the inanimate body of
Geometry made spiritual and living by the
creative power in the human heart. And
when a later generation reduced the Ionic
volutes to rule, and endeavored to inscribe
them with the gyrations of the compass, they
have no further interest for us, save as a
mathematical problem with an unknown value
equal to a mysterious symbol x, in which the
soul takes no comfort. When we reasonably
regard the printed words of an author, we not
only behold an ingenious collection of alpha-
betical symbols, but are placed by them in
direct contact with the mind which brought
them together, and, for the moment, our train
of thought so entirely coincides with that of
the writer, that, though perhaps he died cen-
turies ago, he may be said to live again in us.
The capitals of the Erechtheum have the same
renaissance in every heart capable of being
touched by a work of art, which, though con1-
ventional in form, is inspired by the breath of
imagination. The spirit of the ancient artist


GREEK LINES.
43
"And he, with many feelings, many thoughts,
Made up a meditative joy, and found
Religious meanings in the forms of nature."
Like Faustus, he was permitted to look into
her deep bosom, as into the bosom of a friend;
to find his brothers in the still wood, in the
air, and in the water; to see himself and the
mysterious wonders of his own breast in the
movements of the elements. And so he took
Nature as a figurative exponent of humanity,
and extracted the symbolic truths from her
productions and used them nobly in his art.
Garbett, an English aesthetical writer, as-
sures us that the Anthemion bears not the
slightest resemblance to the honeysuckle or
any other plant, " being no representation of
anything in nature, but simply the necessary
result of the complete and systematic attempt
to combine unity and variety by the principle
of gradation." But here he speaks like a
geometer, and not like an artist. He seeks
rather for the resemblance of form than the
resemblance of spirit, and, failing to realize
the object of his search, he endeavors to find
a cause for this exquisite effect in pure reason.
With equal perversity, Poe endeavored to per-
suade the public that his "Raven " was the
result of mere sesthetical deductions!


44
GREEK LINES.
If, in brief, we would know the secret of
the Greek ideal we must first learn what vir-
tues are hidden in simplicity and truth, and
love with the wisdom and chastity of old Hel-
lenic passion. We must sacrifice, not only
undisciplined invention, but cold academic
formulas, the precepts of pedants, the dogmas
of precise archaeologists, of architectural geo-
meters and botanists, whose specious superfi-
cialities are embodied in the errors of modern
art, — we must sacrifice these at the shrine
of the true Aphrodite; else the modern Pro-
crustes will continue to stretch and torture
Greek lines on geometrical beds, and the aes-
thetic Pharisees around us will still crucify
the Greek ideal.


GREEK LINES.
45
n.
"As when a ship, by skillful steersman wrought
Nigh river's mouth or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail, —
So varied he, and of his tortuous train
Curl'd many a wanton wreath in sight of Eve,
To lure her eye."
And Eve, alas! yielded to the blandishments
of the wily serpent, as we moderns, in our art,
have yielded to the Roman ideal of beauty,
symbolized in the easy flowing and licentious
curve which we have ventured to call an ex-
pression of Life, as contrasted with those se-
verer lines which were created by Love in the
ideal of Greece, and by Destiny in that of
Egypt. This is the line made familiar to us
by the thoughtless flourish of Hogarth's pen-
cil, and, in a far wider sense, it is the line
which has controlled all the demonstrations of
modern art since the time of the Roman Em-
pire, because this art has been rather imitative
than creative and has held a too faithful mir-
ror up to nature. At all events it has been
content to let the purer ideal remain petrified
in the marbles of Greece for nearly nineteen
centuries.


46
GREEK LINES.
I have endeavored to show how the Greek
ideal may be concentrated in a certain ab-
stract line, not only of sensuous, but of intel-
lectual beauty. I have endeavored to prove
how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence,
expresses the civilization of Pericles and Plato,
of Euripedes and Apelles. It is now pro-
posed briefly to relate how this line was lost,
when the politeness and philosophy, the liter-
ature and the art of Greece were chained to
the triumphal cars of Roman conquerors, —
and how it seems to have been found again
in our own day, after slumbering so long in
ruined temples, broken statues, and cinerary
urns.
The scholar who studies the history of
Greek art has a melancholy interest, like a
surgeon, in watching its slow but inevitable
atrophy under the incubus of Rome. The
wise but childlike serenity and cheerfulness
of soul, so tenderly pictured in the white
stones from the quarries of Pentelicus, had, it
is true, a certain sickly, exoteric life in Magna
Graecia, as Pompeii and Herculaneum have
proved to us. But the brutal manhood of
Rome overshadowed and tainted the gen-
tle exotic like a Upas-tree. The imported
Greek, indeed, was permitted by his Roman


48
GREEK LINES.
we cannot but be impressed by the fact that,
in decorating their enormous fabrics with the
Greek orders, they used them as barbaric con-
querors used the spoils of war. The delicate
Greek lines were at once bent to answer uses
of ostentation and not of art. In fact, a
comparison of the architectural details of
a Greek with those of a Roman monument
reveals the contrasts between the genius of the
two races more clearly than is shown in any
other visible demonstration. To narrow a
broad subject down to an illustration, let us
look at a single feature, the cyma reversa, or
the Lesbian cyma, as it was understood in
Greece and Rome. This is a supporting
moulding of very frequent occurrence in
classic entablatures, a curved surface with a
double flexure. Perhaps the type of Greek
lines, as represented in the previous paper on
this subject, may be safely accepted as a fair
example of the Greek interpretation of this
feature. The Romans, on the other hand,
not being able to understand and appreciate
the delicacy and deep propriety of this line,
seized their compasses, and, without thought
or love, mechanically produced a gross likeness
to it by the union of two quarter-circles,
thus: —


GREEK LINES.
49

GREEK. ROMAN.
Look upon this picture, and on this! — the
one, refined, delicate, fastidious, sensitive as
a facial outline, and varying its character ac-
cording to its especial function in the group
of mouldings to which it belongs; the other,
thoughtless, mathematical, sensuous, reappear-
ing ever with a stolid monotony. Roman
architecture was ever bold, ingenious, and al-
together admirable in its structure and in its
adaptation to practical and political uses; and
in respect to the decoration of its architecture,
it was magnificently redundant and prodigal.
But though it respected the art of Greece,
from which it borrowed all its finer qualities of
detail, it accepted the letter for the spirit, and
converted Greek mouldings into inflexible
formulas. But even this letter, when they


50
GREEK LINES.
transcribed it, writhed and was choked beneath
hands which knew better the iron caestus of
the gladiator than the subtle and spiritual
touch of the artist.
We can have no stronger and more con-
vincing proof that architecture is the truest
record of the various phases of civilization
than we find in this. Subjected to the im-
perial power and prodigal wealth of Rome, the
Greek slaves were ready to teach their masters
the literature, the philosophy, and art of their
native country, — to conquer their conquerors
with the refinements of a higher civilization.
But Rome had her own ideas to enunciate;
and so possessed was she by the impulse to
give form to these ideas, to her ostentation,
her pride, her sensuous magnificence, that she
could not pause to learn calm and serious les-
sons from the Greeks who crowded her forums,
but, seizing their fair sanctuaries, she stretched
them out to fit her standard. She took the
pure Greek orders to embellish her endless
arcades; she piled these orders one above the
other; she bent them around her gigantic cir-
cuses, she decorated every moulding of them
lavishly with leaves, ovolos, or strings of pearls,
and loaded every frieze with pompous inscrip-
tions or with crowded undulations of wreathed


GREEK LINES.
51
foliage; she constructed their shafts with
precious Oriental marbles and crowned them
with capitals of gilded bronze; she applied
them as decorations to her triumphal arches
and to the immense vaulted halls in her baths
and basilicas; till at last they had become ac-
climated and lost all their peculiar refinement,
all their intellectual and dignified humanity.
Every moulding, every capital, every detail,
was formulated so as to be capable of ready
reproduction. Out of the suggestions con-
tained in the little delicate capitals of the
choragic monument of Lysicrates and the
Temple of the Winds at Athens, she devel-
oped that peculiarly Roman institution, the
sumptuous Corinthian order; and added to it
a variation if possible still more gorgeous,
known as the Composite. These she estab-
lished as official standards of her luxury and
power, and with them she overawed the bar-
barians in the remotest colonies of her
empire.
The Romans had neither time nor inclina-
tion to bestow any love or thought on the
expressiveness and especial significance of sub-
ordinate parts. But out of the suggestions
and reminiscences of Greek lines they made a
rigid and inflexible grammar of their own, —


52
GREEK LINES.
a grammar to suit the mailed clang of Roman
speech, which, in its cruel martial strength,
sought no refinements, no delicate inflections
from a distant Acropolis. The result was
the insolent splendor of the Empire. How
utterly the still Greek ideal was forgotten in
this noisy ostentation, how entirely the chaste

ROMAN IONIC.
spirituality of the Greek line was lost in the
round and lusty curves which are the inevi-
table footprints of sensual life, scarcely needs
further amplification.
I have referred to the Ionic capital of the
Erechtheum as containing a microcosm of
Attic art, as presenting a fair epitome of the
thought and love which Hellenic artists offered
in the worship of their gods. Turn now to
the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of


54
GREEK LINES.
the clear atmosphere of Greece, should make
such graduated effects of shadows and shades
in contrast with light as, in combination with
those produced by the other members, should
create a result of fine but complicated harmony.
In this way he played delicately with sunlight,
as a musician plays with sounds. His horizon-
tal fines of light and dark were broken, where
necessary for the sake of punctuation, by the
regular interruptions of mutules, triglyphs,
metopes, and dentils, each being scaled so as to
have its due part in the whole design. He re-
fined his lines and mouldings to such a point
of sensitive delicacy that the least variation in
them would produce to his fastidious eye an
effect of discord. The profiles of his mould-
ings became as sensitive as the lines of the
brows, the nose, or the mouth on the face of
Apollo. These lines could not be altered by
a hair's breadth without affecting the sentiment
of the god-like ideal. Greek structure became
in fact a highly organized unity, in which
there was no mere perfunctory or conven-
tional element, each detail being essential to
the whole.
The Romans were prompt to imitate, but
they could not assimilate an organism so
fine. Their intensely practical and energetic


GREEK LINES.
55
spirit was too impatient to worship at a shrine
requiring a service of constancy and love.
The expression of unity was lost. Their
structure was one thing and their decoration
was another, and the decorative element was
converted into a system of convention, as
shown by the exact precepts of their own
Vitruvius. This arrangement enabled the
conqueror, without waste of time in that long
contemplative stillness out of which alone the
beauty of the true ideal arises, out of which
alone man can create like a god, to avail him-
self at once of the Greek orders, not as a sen-
sitive and delicate means of fine aesthetic ex-
pression, but as a mechanical language of con-
trasts of form to be used according to the
exigencies of duty. The service of Greek art
was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome, it be-
came academic. Thus systematized, it is true,
it awes us by the superb redundancy and sump-
tuousness of its use in the temples and forums
reared by that omnipresent power from Bri-
tannia to Baalbec. But the art which is sys-
tematized is degraded. Emerson somewhere
remarks that man descends to meet his fellows,
— meaning, I suppose, that he has to sacrifice
some of the higher instincts of his individuality
when he desires to become social, and to meet


56
GREEK LINES.
his fellows on that low level of society which,
made up as it is of many individualities, has
none of those secret aspirations which arise
out of his own isolation. Society is a system-
atic aggregation for the benefit of the mul-
titude, but great men lift themselves above it
into a purer atmosphere. As Longfellow says,
"They rise like towers in the city of God."
So with art, — when we systematize it we
degrade it, and deprive it of life and the
power of progression. A singular proof of
this is found in the fact that the Roman
orders never have anything in them reserved
from the common ken. They are reduced to
rule, and therefore superficial. They were not
based upon principles, like the Greek orders,
and consequently the necessary modifications
to which they, like all other formulas of fine
art, must be subjected in use have been modi-
fications of caprice rather than of structural
development. Indeed, the Greek orders, in the
hands of the Romans, gradually assumed char-
acteristic forms which they never would have
taken upon themselves if they had continued
to be expressions of building as a practical art.
Virtually, the Roman orders died in the
first" century of the Christian era. We all
know how, when the authority of the pagan


GREEK LINES.
57
schools was gone and the stern Vitruvian laws
had become lost in the mists of antiquity,
these orders gradually fell from their strict
allegiance, and art was made free again by the
enfranchised Greeks of Byzantium, under an
entirely new religious impulse from Palestine.
Structure and the decoration of structure
were once more united, but in a fresh,
progressive system, full of animation, power,
and color, looking not backward to the con-
templative ideal of the pagan Greeks, but for-
ward eagerly to a triumphant demonstration
of the new faith by art. The new spirit was
rude and vigorous, but sincere and aspiring.
Its typical line was one of robust and vig-
orous life, exuberant, because of the final
safe establishment of Christianity after the
persecutions of Aurelian and Diocletian. In
the Romanesque of the West this line did not
vary essentially in its character; but it de-
veloped and enlarged in its expressions, and,
with the establishment and organization of the
faith, it gradually assumed a characteristic of
serious purpose. But, in after Gothic times,
the spirit of the forgotten Aphrodite, ideal
beauty, sometimes seemed to lurk furtively in
the image of the Virgin Mary, and to inspire
the cathedral builders with somewhat of the


58
GREEK LINES.
old creative impulse of love. But the work-
ings of this impulse are singularly contrasted
in the productions of the pagan Greek and
the mediaeval artists. Nature, we have seen,
offered to the former mysterious and oracular
Sibylline leaves, profoundly significant of an
indwelling humanity diffused through all her
woods and fields and mountains, all her foun-
tains, streams, and seas. Those meditative
creators sat at her feet, earnest disciples, but
gathering rather the spirit and motive of her
gifts than the gifts themselves, making an
ideal and worshiping it as a deity. But for
the cathedral builder, Dryads and Hamadry-
ads, Oreads, Fauns, and Naiads did not exist,
— the Oak of Dodona uttered no oracles.
"A primrose by the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more."
To him nature was an open book, from which
he continually quoted with a loving freedom,
not to illustrate his own deep relationships
with her, but to give greater glory to that
vast Power which stood behind her beautiful
text and was revealed to him in the new reli-
gion from Palestine. He loved fruits and
flowers and leaves because they were mani-
festations of the love of God; and he used


GREEK LINES.
59
them in his art, not as motives out of which
to create abstract forms, out of which to de-
velop an ideal humanity, but to show his in-
tense appreciation of the Divine love which
gave them. Had he been a Pantheist, as Or-
pheus was, it is probable he would have ideal-
ized these things and created Greek lines.
But believing in a distinct God, the supreme
originator of all things, he was led to a wor-
ship of self-sacrifice and offerings, and needed
no intellectual ideal, studiously celebrating
and illustrating his own humanity; his service
cultivated his moral rather than his sesthetical
faculties. So, with a lavish hand, he appro-
priated the abundant beauty of nature, some-
times imitating its external expressions with
his careful chisel, but generally conventional-
izing them to suit the structural conditions of
his capitals, spandrels, and panels, his crockets,
belts, corbels, and the bosses of his soaring
groins. The life of Gothic lines was in their
sensuous liberty, though they were sometimes
drawn with marvelous delicacy and refinement
of feeling; the life of Greek lines was in
their intellectual reserve. Those arose out of
a religion of emotional ardor; these, out of a
religion of philosophical reflection. Hence,
while the former were free and picturesque,


60
GREEK LINES.
the latter were serious, chaste, and very hu-
man.
Therefore the line typical of the Gothic or
lay spirit of the Middle Ages, like that of
Roman, Byzantine, and Romanesque art, is
still the full and sensuous line of life, as con-
trasted with the restrained and delicate line of
Greek art. And yet when the noble artistic
spirit of the thirteenth century interpreted in
form the mysticism, the asceticism, the spirit-
ual aspiration of the time, it sometimes seemed
to confer upon this symbol a certain purity of
movement which we do not find in the others.
But it was not a Greek line; for the mediaeval
craft-spirit, however inspired, could never en-
ter into that region of calm study and deep
reflection from which alone could proceed the
shafts of the Parthenon and the capitals of
Athene Polias. And so the Greek lines slept
in patient marble through the long Dark
Ages, and no one came to awaken them into
beautiful life again. No one, consecrated
Prince by the chrism of nature, wandered into
the old land to kiss the sleeping beauty
into life, and break the deep spell which was
around her kingdom.
Architecture promptly and exactly fulfilled
its great function as a recorder of history,


GREEK LINES.
til
when, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
it expressed in classic terms the revival of the
literature and learning of Rome, the joyous
emancipation of the mind from the gloom and
doubt of the Middle Ages, and its new birth
into a larger and fuller life. But when Bru-
nelleschi and Alberti made the first attempts
to utter this sentiment in Italian palaces and
churches, archaeology had not measured and
restored the ruins of Rome, and aesthetics had
not estimated their true value in the history
of art. The Pantheon, the Colosseum, a few
shattered remains of columns and entabla-
tures, neglected, insulted, misunderstood, alone
remained to testify to the magnificence of
Rome. The first expressions of the Renais-
sance, at Florence, in the dome of the Cathe-
dral, in San Lorenzo, San Spirito, and the
Pitti palace; at Mantua, in San Andrea;
at Rimini, in San Francisco, all following
the impulse of classic Rome, as then imper-
fectly comprehended, committed the new
movement irrevocably to architectural mani-
festations based on that line of life which
had made the order of Jupiter Stator different
from that of the Parthenon, and the portico of
the Temple of Concord different from that of
the Erechtheum. So wanton were the wreaths


62
GREEK LINES.
it curled in the sight of the great masters of
that period, that they all yielded to its subtle
fascinations and sinned like their mother Eve.
Had such men as Bramante, Michel An-
gelo, San Gallo, Palladio, Scamozzi, Vignola,
San Michele, Bernini, been inspired by the
thoughtful lines of Greece, so catholic to all
human moods, and so wisely adapted to the
true spirit of reform, it is not too much to say
that all subsequent art would have felt the
noble impulse; that structure and the decora-
tion of structure would have been once more
reconciled, as they were in the temples of
Greece and in the cathedrals of the Middle
Ages. Pedantic formalism and academic rules
would not have converted architecture into a
series of elegant but conventional quotations
from the classics, thus removing it from the
sympathy of the people; and the refining in-
fluence of these great masters would have
worked to far more profitable and various re-
sults. If the knowledge and ingenuity of
modern times had beeij so directed, modern
architecture would have been kept in a path
of consistent development, adjusted to all the
varying conditions of civilization.
The Gothic architecture of the early part
of the fifteenth century was ripe for the spirit


GREEK LINES.
63
of healthy reform. It had been actively ac-
cumulating, during the progress of the age of
Christianity, a boundless wealth of forms, a
vast amount of constructive resources, and ma-
terial fit for innumerable architectural expres-
sions of human power. But in the last two
centuries of this era the love which, here and
there in the earlier period, as in the west
fronts of Rheims and Chartres, had almost
succeeded in giving a character of intellectual
beauty to this sensitive art was gradually de-
praved and vulgarized by the pride of the
workman; and a luscious and abandoned lux-
ury of line led it farther and farther astray
from the true path, till at last it became like
an unweeded garden run to seed, and there
was no health in it. In the year 1555, at
Beauvais, the masonic workmen uttered their
last cry of defiance against the old things
made new in Italy. Jean Wast and Frangois
Marechal of that town, two cathedral builders,
said that they "had heard of the Church
of St. Peter at Rome, and would maintain
that their Gothic could be built as high and
on as grand a scale as the antique orders of
this Michel Angelo." And with this spirit
they built a wonderful pyramid over the cross
of their cathedral. But it fell in the fifth


64
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year of its arrogant pride, and this is the last
we hear of Gothic architecture in those times.
Over the picturesque ruins the spirits of the
old conquerors of Gaul once more strode with
measured tread, and began to set up their pre-
vailing standards in the very strongholds of
Gothic supremacy. These conquerors tram-
pled down the true as well as the false in the
mediaeval regime, and the broad daylight of
the Renaissance utterly extinguished that sole
lamp of knowledge, which had given light to
the ages of darkness and had kindled into life
and beauty the cathedrals of Europe.
An architecture of mystic symbolism, of
severe asceticism, of spiritual aspiration, of su-
perstitious adoration and fear, could not live
in this daylight of awakened intelligence.
Whatever may have been its capacities for ex-
pansion, it could not have been continued in
the new era without losing its character of
truth as an exposition of history. The apos-
tles of the Renaissance followed an impulse
far more powerful than their own individual
fancies when they rooted it out bodily, and
planted instead an exotic of pagan Rome.
It was the rebirth of an art system, which
in its former existence had developed in an
atmosphere of conquest. It taught them to


GREEK LINES.
65
kill, burn, and destroy all that opposed the
progress of its triumph. It was eminently
revolutionary in its character; and its reign, to
all those multitudinous expressions of life and
thought which had arisen under the Gothic
era, was one of terror. Truly, it was a fierce
and desolating instrument of reform.
It is a tempting theme of speculation to
follow in the imagination the probable pro-
gress of a Greek instead of a Roman renais-
sance, into such active, intelligent, and imagi-
native schools as those of Rouen and Tours
in the latter part of the fifteenth century, —
of Rouen, with its Roger Arge, its brothers
Leroux, who built there the picturesque Hotel
Bourgtheroulde, its Pierre de Saulbeaux, and
all that legion of architects and builders who
were employed by the Cardinal Amboise on his
castle of Gaillon, — of Tours, with its Pierre
Valence, its Francois Marchant, its Viart and
Colin Byart, out of whose rich and playful
craft-spirit arose the quaint fancies expressed
in the older parts of the chateaux of Amboise
and Blois, in which the old Gothic spirit
seemed to have been refined and rejuvenated
for a new and brighter career, which it was
destined never to see. Such a renaissance
would not have come among these venial sins


GREEK LINES.
67
Yet when we examine the works of the Re-
naissance, after the system had become more
manageable and acclimated under later Italian
and French hands, we cannot but admire the
skill with which the lightest fancies and the
most various expressions of human contrivance
were reconciled to the formal rules and pro-
portions of the Roman orders. The Renais-
sance palaces and civil buildings of France,
especially before the scholasticism and ped-
antry of the seventeenth century had quite
overwhelmed the native spirit of romance, are.
so full of ingenuity, and the irrepressible in-
ventive power of the artist moves with so much
freedom and grace among the stubborn lines
of that revived architecture, that we cannot
but regard the results as a proof that the high
creative power still lies dormant in the race,
awaiting only for the opportunity or the ini-
tial force to express itself in a manner worthy
of our civilization. We cannot but ask our-
selves, If the spirit of those architects could
obtain so much liberty under the restrictions of
such an unnatural and unnecessary despotism,
what would have been the result if they had
been put in possession of the very principles
of Hellenic art, instead of the dangerous and
complex models of Rome, which were so far


68
GREEK LINES.
removed from the purity and simplicity of
their origin? Up to a late day the great aim
of the Renaissance has heen to interpret an
advanced civilization with the sensuous line;
and, so far as this line is capable of such
expression, the result has been satisfactory.
Thus four more centuries were added to
the fruitless slumbers of Ideal Beauty among
the temples of Greece. Meanwhile, in turn,
the Byzantine, the Northman, the Prank, the
Turk, and finally the bombarding Venetian,
left their rude invading footprints among her
most cherished haunts, and defiled her very
sanctuary with the brutal touch of barbarous
conquest. But the kiss which was to dissolve
this enchantment was one of love; and not love,
but cold indifference, or even scorn, was in the
hearts of the rude warriors. So she slept on
undisturbed in spirit, though broken and shat-
tered in the external type, and it was reserved
for a distant future to be made beautiful by
her disenchantment and awakening.
In 1672 a pupil of the artist Lebrun,
Jacques Carrey, accompanied the Marquis
Ollier de Nointee, ambassador of Louis XIV.,
to Constantinople. On his way he spent two
months at Athens, making drawings of the
Parthenon, then in an excellent state of pre-


GREEK LINES.
69
servation. These drawings, more useful in
an archaeological than an artistic point of
view, are now preserved in the Bibliotheque
Nationale of Paris. In 1676, two distin-
guished travelers, one a Frenchman, Dr. Spon,
the other an Englishman, Sir George Wheler,
tarried at Athens, and gave valuable testi-
mony, in terms of boundless admiration, to
the beauty and splendor of the temples of the
Acropolis and its neighborhood, then quite
unknown to the world. Other travelers fol-
lowed these pioneers in the traces of that old
civilization. But in 1687, Konigsmark and
his Venetian forces threw their hideous bomb-
shells among the exquisite temples of the
Acropolis, and, igniting thereby the powder
magazine with which the Turks had dese-
crated the Parthenon, tore into ruins that love-
liest of the lovely creations of Hellas. It was
not until the publishing of the famous work
of Stuart and Revett on "The Antiquities
of Athens," in 1762, that the world was made
familiar with the external expressions of Greek
architecture. This publication at once created
a curious revolution in the practice of archi-
tecture, — a revolution extending in its effects
throughout Europe. A fever arose to repro-
duce Greek temples; and to such an extent


70
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was this unintelligent revival carried out that
at one time it bid fair to supplant the older
renaissance. The spirit of the new renais-
sance, however, was one of mere imitation,
and had not the elements of life and power to
insure its ultimate success. It was a revival
of formulas and not of principles. Nobody
thought of applying the refining influences of
the Greek lines to any structural forms save
those known and used by the Greeks in their
temples and stoas. The Roman arch, which
had become indispensable, was not purified by
the Greek spirit of truth, and the modern
facade, without columns or pilasters, was not
affected by it. No attempt was made to accli-
mate the exotic to suit the new conditions it
was thus suddenly called upon to fulfill; for
the sentiment which actuated it, and the love
by which it was created, were not understood.
It was the mere setting up of old forms in
new places; and the Grecian porticoes and
pediments and columns, which were multi-
plied everywhere from the models supplied
by Stuart and Revett, and found their way
profusely even into this new world, still stare
upon us gravely with strange alien looks.
The impetuous current of modern life beats
impatiently against that cumbrous solidity of


GREEK LINES.
71
peristyle which sheltered well in its day the
serene philosophers of the Agora, but which
is the merest impediment in the way of
modern traffic and modern necessities. The
spirit of formalism, engendered by the old
renaissance, took hold of the revived Greek
lines, and stiffened them into acquiescence
with a base mathematical system, which effec-
tually deprived them of that life and repro-
ductive power which belongs only to a state
of artistic freedom. They were reduced to
rule and deadened in the very process of their
revival. The "Carpenters' Guides" in the
opening of the nineteenth century explained
to the builders the details of this system, and
everywhere throughout our country the public
buildings and private mansions of that period
reproduced the forms of the Greek orders
with unimaginative reiteration. The retired
merchants of our Atlantic coast and the
wealthy planters of Louisiana and Mississippi
were housed behind stately porticoes of wood
or stucco carefully imitated from the marble
antiquities of Attica.
The Greek ideal, though strangely trans-
planted thus into the noise of modern streets,
was not awakened from its long repose by the
clatter and roaring of our new civilization.


72
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As regarded the uses of life it still slept
in petrifactions .of Pentelic marble. And
when those petrifactions were repeated in mod-
ern quarries, it was merely the shell they
gave; the spirit within had not yet broken
through.
Greek lines, therefore, owed their earliest
revival to the vagaries of a capricious taste,
and the desire to give zest to the architecture
of the day by their novelty; it was not for
the sake of the new life there was in them,
nor of that refining spirit, by the application
of which alone to modern design a wise re-
birth of ancient love in art could be procured,
without a sacrifice of everything else which has
been inherited from the past. These lines are
not an intolerant power, but a creative princi-
ple, by which all that is valuable of this inheri-
tance may be preserved and adjusted to the
complicated conditions of modern lif e. It is
not surprising that some of the more mod-
ern masters of the Roman Renaissance, with
whom that system had become venerable,
from its universal use as the vehicle by which
the greatest artists of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries had expressed their
thoughts and inspirations, regarded with pe-
culiar distrust these outlandish innovations on


GREEK LINES.
73
the exclusive walks of their own architecture.
For they saw only a few external forms which
the beautiful principles of Hellenic art had
developed to fit an old civilization; the appli-
cability of these primary principles to the re-
finement of the architectural expressions of a
modern state of society they could not of
course comprehend. About the year 1786
we find Sir William Chambers, the leading ar-
chitect of his day in England, in his famous
treatise on "The Decorative Part of Civil
Architecture," giving elaborate and emphatic
expression to his contempt of that Greek art
which had presented itself to him in a guise
well suited to cause misapprehension and er-
ror. "It must candidly be confessed," he
says, "that the Grecians have been far ex-
celled by other nations, not only in the mag-
nitude and grandeur of their structures, but
likewise in point of fancy, ingenuity, variety,
and elegant selection."
Two distinguished German artists — the
one, Schinkel of Berlin, born in 1781,
— the other, Klenze of Munich, born in
1784 — were children when Chambers ut-
tered these treasonable sentiments concern-
ing Greek art. Later, at separate times,
these artists visited Greece, and so filled them-


74
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selves with the feeling and sentiment of the
art there, so consecrated their souls by the ap-
preciative study of its divine love, that the
patient Ideal at last awoke from its long slum-
bers, entered into the breathing human tem-
ples thus prepared for it by the pure rites of
Aphrodite, and once more lived. Thus in the
opening years of the nineteenth century was
a new and reasonable renaissance, not of an
antique type, but of a spirit which had the
gift of immortal youth, and uttered oracles of
prophecy to these chosen Pythians of art.
Through Schinkel, the pure Hellenic style,
only hinted at previously in the attempts of
less inspired Germans, such as Langhaus, who
embodied his crude conceptions in the once
celebrated Brandenburg Gate, was fairly and
grandly revived in the Hauptwache Theatre
and the beautiful Museum and the Bauschule
and observatory of Berlin. He competed with
Klenze in a series of designs for the new pal-
ace at Athens, rich with a truly royal array of
courts, corridors, saloons, and colonnades. But
the evil fate which ever hangs over the com-
petitions of genius was baleful even here, and
the barrack-like edifice of Giitner was pre-
ferred. His latest conception was a design of
a summer palace at Orianda, in the Crimea,


GREEK LINES.
75
for the empress of Kussia, where the purity
of the old Greek lines was developed into the
poetry of terraces and hanging-gardens and
towers, far-looking over the Black Sea. Schin-
kel was called the Luther of architecture; and
the spiritual serenity which he breathed into
the pomp and ceremonious luxury of the art
of his day seems to give him some title to
this distinction. Yet, with all the freedom
and originality with which he wrought out the
new advent, he was perhaps rather too timid
than too bold in his reforms, — adhering too
strictly to the original letter of Greek exam-
ples, especially with regard to the orders. He
could not entirely shake off the old incubus
of Rome.
And so, though in a less degree, with
Klenze. When, in 1825, Louis of Bavaria
came to the throne, he was appointed govern-
ment architect, and in this capacity gave
shape to the noble dreams of that monarch,
in the famous Glyptothek, the Pinakothek,
the palace, and those civil and ecclesiastical
buildings which render Munich one of the
most monumental cities of Europe. It was
his confessed aim to take up the work of the
Renaissance artists, having regard to our in-
creased knowledge of that antique civilization


76
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of which the masters of the sixteenth century
could study only the most complex develop-
ments, and those models of Rome which were
farthest removed from the pure fountain-head
of Greece. "To-day," he said, "put in pos-
session of the very principles of Hellenic art,
we can apply them to all our actual needs,
— learning from the Greeks themselves to
preserve our independence, and at the same
time to be duly novel and unrestrained ac-
cording to circumstances." These are cer-
tainly noble sentiments; and one cannot but
wish that when, in 1830, Klenze was called
upon to prepare plans for the grand Walhalla
of Bavaria, he had remembered his sublime
theory and worked up to its spirit, instead of
recalling the Parthenon in his exterior and the
Olympian temple of Agrigentum in his in-
terior. The last effort of this distinguished
artist was the building of three superb palaces
for the museum of the Emperor at St. Peters-
burg, finished in 1851.
The seed thus planted fell upon good
ground and brought forth a hundred-fold.
This revival of Hellenic principles is still in-
fusing life into modern German designs; and
so well are these principles understood that
architects do not content themselves with the


GREEK LINES.
77
mere reproduction of that narrow range of
motives which was uttered in the temples of
heroic Greece. By the very necessity of the
Greek line, they are rendered catholic and un-
excluding in their choice of forms, but fas-
tidious and hesitating in expressing them in
this new language of art. This wholesome re-
straint is recognizable in much of their recent
work, and it undoubtedly is a result of their
Greek studies. But inasmuch as these are
pursued with the true German spirit of scien-
tific precision and system, it cannot be denied
that modern German art has still a character
of pedantry. The national genius aims at cor-
rectness in art and archaeology, as well as in
science and philosophy. It is not discursive
or imaginative, but essentially scholastic; it
respects the authority of formulas and the dis-
cipline of dogmas. It is not original but ex-
act. Within these limitations the best work
of the nation is admirable, but not often in-
teresting. It nearly always bears the stamp
of conscientious study; but it is rarely brilliant.
For its best qualities it is clearly indebted to
those two illustrious pilgrims who brought
back from the land of epics, not only the
scallop-shells upon their shoulders, but in their
hearts the consecration of ideal beauty.


78
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According to the usual custom, in the year
1827 a scholar of the Ecole des Beaux Arts
in Paris, having achieved the distinguished
honor of being named grand pensionnaire of
architecture for that year, was sent to the Aca-
demie Francaise in the Villa Medici at Rome,
to pursue his studies there for five years at the
expense of the government. This scholar
was Henri Labrouste. While in Italy his at-
tention was directed to the Greek temples of
Paestum. Trained, as he had been, in the
strictest academic architecture of the Renais-
sance, he was struck by many points of dif-
ference between these temples and the Palla-
dian formulas which had hitherto held despotic
sway over his studies. In grand and minor
proportions, in the disposition of triglyphs in
the frieze, in mouldings and general senti-
ment, he perceived a remarkable freedom from
the restraints of his school,— a freedom which,
so far from detracting from the grandeur of
the architecture, gave to it a degree of life
and refinement which his appreciative eye now
sought for in vain among the approved models
of the Academy. Studying these new revela-
tions with love and veneration, it was not long
before the pure Hellenic spirit, confined in the
severe peristyles and cellas of the Paestum tern-


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79
pies, entered into his heart with all its elastic
capacities, all its secret and mysterious sympa-
thies for the new life which had sprung up
during its long imprisonment in those stained
and shattered marbles. Labrouste, on his re-
turn to Paris in 1830, surprised the grave
professors of the Academy, Le Bas, Baltard,
and the rest, by presenting to them, as the re-
sult of his studies, carefully elaborated draw-
ings of the temples at Paestum. Witnessing,
with pious horror, the grave departures from
their rules contained in the drawings of their
former favorite, they charged him with error,
. even as a copyist. True to their prejudices,
their eyes did not penetrate beyond the out-
ward type, and they at once began to find
technical objections. They told him, never
did such an absurdity occur in classic archi-
tecture as a triglyph on a corner! Palladio
and the Italian masters never committed such
an obvious crime against propriety, nor could
an instance of it be found in all Roman an-
tiquities. It was in vain that poor Labrouste
upheld the accuracy of his work, and re-
minded the Academy that among the Roman
models no instance had been found of a
Doric corner, — that this order occurred only
so ruined that no corner was left for exam-


80
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ination, or in the grand circumferences of
the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus,
where, from the nature of the case, no corner
could be. The professors still maintained
the integrity of their long-established ordi-
nances, and, to disprove the assertions of the
young pretender, even sent a commission to
examine the temples in question. The result
was a confirmation of the fact, the ridicule of
Paris, the consequent branding of the young
artist as an architectural heretic, and a con-
tinued persecution of him by the Ecole des
Beaux Arts. Undaunted, however, Labrouste
established an atelier in Paris, to which
flocked many intelligent students, sympathiz-
ing with the courage which could be so
strong in the conviction of truth as to brave
in its defense the displeasure of the powerful
hierarchy of the school.
Thus was founded a new renaissance in
France at a time when the genius and inge-
nuity of the nation was beginning to chafe un-
der the severe restrictions of the old academic
formulas; and in this genial atmosphere
Greek lines began to exercise an influence far
more thorough and healthy than had hitherto
been experienced in the whole history of mod-
ern art. To the lithe and elegant fancy of


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81
the French this revelation was especially grate-
ful. It seemed in a measure to restore to them
the freedom of which they made such magni-
ficent use in the time of Francis L, before the
Renaissance had been academically formalized
by the Mansarts and their successors. For the
youth of this nation soon learned that in these
newly opened paths their invention and senti-
ment, so long straitened and confined within
the severe limits of the old system, could move
without irksome restraint, and at the same
time be preserved from licentious excess by
the delicate spirit of the new lines. Thus nat-
ural fervor, grace, and fecundity of thought
found here a most welcome outlet.
For some time the designs of the new school
were not recognized in the competitions of the
Ecole des Beaux Arts ; but when, in the course
of nature, some two or three of the more
strenuous and bigoted professors of Palladio's
golden rules were removed from the scene of
contest, the new cult was received at length
into the bosom of the architectural church,
and now it may be justly deemed a distinctive
architectural expression of French art.
Labrouste was not alone in his efforts; but
Duban and Constant Dufeux seconded him
with genius and energy. Most of the impor-


82
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tant buildings which have been erected in
France within the last fifty years have either
been unreservedly and frankly affected in
their general architectural character by the
Greek lines, or have been refined by more lim-
ited applications of Hellenic principles. Even
the revived mediaeval school, which, under the
distinguished leadership of M. Viollet le Due
and the lamented M. J. B. A. Lassus, was
strengthened to a remarkable degree in France,
and which shared with the Greek idea the dis-
pleasure of the Academy, — even this tacitly
acknowledged the power of Greek fines, and
instinctively suffered them to purify, to a cer-
tain degree, the old grotesque Gothic license.
One of the most remarkable peculiarities of
this school was, that it seemed to encourage
the expression of individual traits in the
architects; to give fluency and ease to archi-
tecture, and to free the spirit of the design-
ers from the impediments of conventionalism.
Indeed, when Greek lines were first revived
in the Paris ateliers, the architects were so
much impressed by the freedom which the use
of these lines gave to all the processes of de-
sign, when compared with the restrictions of
practice under the Roman academic system,
that the new dispensation of art was called a


GREEK LINES.
88
style, and christened Romantique, to distin-
guish it from what was conventionally called
classic. Of course this freedom, in insincere
hands, was frequently abused, and this abuse
made it all the more evident that the only ac-
ceptable service of Greek lines is one of love,
and not of affectation or imitation. The ordi-
nary decorations of windows and doors were
not confined to conventional shapes, as of yore,
but were idiosyncratic, according to the degree
in which they were influenced by the Greek
spirit. If the designer had a thought to ex-
press, his Greek lines enabled him to put it in
architectural form, just as a poet attunes his
thought to the harmony and rhythm of verse.
Antique prejudices, bent into rigid conformity
with antique rubrics, were often shocked at the
strange innovations of these new dissenters
from the faith of Palladio and Philibert De-
lorme, — shocked at the naked humanity in
the new works, and would cover it with the
conventional fig-leaves prescribed in the hom-
ilies of Vignola. Laymen, accustomed to the
cold architectural proprieties of the old re-
naissance, and habituated to the formalities of
the five orders, the prudish decorum of Italian
window-dressings and pediments and pilasters
and scrolls, were surprised to see ideas at


84
GREEK LINES.
length so clearly set forth in architectural
forms that the intention of the building in
which they occurred was at once patent to
the most casual observer, and the story of its
destination told with the eloquence of a poeti-
cal and monumental language. All revolutions
have proved how hard it is to break through
the crust of custom, and this was no ex-
ception to the rule; yet in justice it must be
said that every intelligent mind, every eye
possessing the " gifted simplicity of vision,"
to use a happy phrase of Hawthorne's, re-
cognizes the emancipation and enlargement
effected by the application of the true Greek
spirit to the arts of design, and sees in it a
clarifying and renovating influence, clearing
away the dust and cobwebs which ages of pre-
judice have spread thickly around the magnifi-
cent art of architecture.
Unlike the unwieldy and ponderous classic
or Italian systems, whose pride cannot stoop
to anything beneath the haughtiest uses of
life without being broken into the whims
of the grotesque and rococo, the Greek
renaissance has already proved that it may
be applied with graceful ease to the most
playful as well as the most serious employ-
ments of art. It has decorated the perfumer's


GREEK LINES.
85
shop on the boulevards with the most deli-
cate fancies woven out of the odor of flowers
and the finest fabrics of nature, and, in the
* hands of Labrouste, has built the great Biblio-
theque Ste. Genevieve, the most important
work with pure Greek lines, and perhaps the
most exquisite, while it is one of the most
serious, of modern buildings. The learning
exhibited in this composition does not make
it pedantic, its careful simplicity of motif
does not weaken its interest, nor does its re-
finement and purity destroy its power. The
neo-Grec has also been used with especial suc-
cess in funereal monuments. Structures of
this character, demanding earnestly in their
composition the expression of human senti-
ment, have hitherto been in most cases un-
satisfactory, as they have been built out of a
narrow range of renaissance, Egyptian, and
Gothic motives, originally invented for far
different purposes, and since then classified,
as it were, for use, and reduced to that in-
flexible system out of which have come the
formal restrictions of modern architecture.
Hence these formulas have never come near
enough to human life, in its individual
characteristics, to be plastic for the expres-
sion of those emotions to which we desire to


GREEK LINES.
87
and though taken frankly, in its general
form, from a common Gothic type, its chaste
and graceful freedom from Gothic conventions
of detail gives it a life and poetic expressive-
ness which must be exceedingly grateful to
the love which commanded its erection.
Paris thus affords us, in some of its modern
architecture, a happy proof of the inevitable
reforming and refining tendencies of the ab-
stract lines of Greece, when properly under-
stood and fairly applied. Under their in-
fluence old things have been made new, and
the coldness and hardness of academic art
have been warmed and softened into life.
Through the agency of the Greek school, per-
haps more new and directly symbolic archi-
tectural expressions have been uttered within
the last forty years than previously since the
beginning of the seventeenth century. Like
the gestures of pantomime, which constitute
an instinctive and universal language, these
abstract lines, coming out of our humanity
and rendered elegant by the idealization of
study, are, it is hoped, restoring to architec-
ture its highest capacity of conveying thought
in a monumental manner.
One of the most dangerous results of that
eclecticism which the advanced state of our


88
GREEK LINES.
archaeological knowledge has made the prin-
cipal characteristic of modern design consists
in the fatal facility thus afforded us of avail-
ing ourselves of vast historical resources of
forms and .combinations ready made to suit
almost all the exigencies of composition, as we
have understood it. The public has thus been
made so familiar with the set variations of
classic orders and Palladian windows and cor-
nices, with Venetian balconies and arcades,
with all sorts of Spanish, Italian, English,
French, and Dutch interpretations of the
classic theme, with all manner of Gothic
chamfers and cuspidations and foliations, and
the other conventional symbols of architec-
ture, which undeniably have more of know-
ledge than love in them, — so accustomed
have the people become to these things, that
the great art of which these have been the
only language now almost invariably fails to
strike any responsive chord in the human
heart, or to do any of that work which it
is the peculiar province of the fine arts to
accomplish. Instead of leading the age, it
seems to lag behind it, and to content itself
with reflecting into our eyes the splendor of
the sun which has set, instead of facing the
east and foretelling the glory which is coming.


GREEK LINES.
89
Architecture, properly conceived, should al-
ways contain within itself a direct appeal to
the sense of fitness and propriety, the com-
mon-sense of mankind, which is ever ready to
recognize reason, whether conveyed by the
natural motions of the mute, or the no less
natural motions of lines. Now history has
proved to us, as has been shown, how, when
the eloquence of these simple, instinctive
lines has been used as the primary element
of design, great eras of art have arisen, full of
the sympathies of humanity, immortal records
of their age. It cannot be denied, on the
other hand, that our eclectic architecture,
popularly speaking, is not comprehended,
even by the most intelligent of cultivated
people; and that, so long as it is contented
to be merely reminiscent and archaeological,
the inevitable rapid development of structural
science and new materials, and the changes in
our social conditions, which necessarily must
impose new forms upon buildings, cannot be
properly and adequately recognized in art.
When architects, instructed by the past, and
guided by principles, and not by the preju-
dices of schools, seek to give these new forms
a consistent decorative character, they are ac-
tually creating an architecture belonging to
our times and to our people.


90
GREEK LINES.
The French of to-day are apparently not
so loyal to the Greek revival as they were
a few years ago; possibly they have been
discouraged by the results of one or more
false starts. Yet I think it may be safely
said that the characteristics of the best con-
temporary art of Paris are controlled by a
Greek spirit, though it still has to struggle
against academical influences, long estab-
lished, and inhospitable to any innovation
which does not recognize the venerable for-
mulas of Vignola.
Let our artists turn to Greece, and learn
how, in the meditative repose of that anti-
quity, these ideals arose to life beneficent
with the baptism of grace, and became visible
in the loveliness of a hundred temples. Let
them there learn how in our own humanity is
the essence of form as a language, and that to
create, as true artists, we must know our-
selves and our own distinctive capacities for
the utterance of monumental history. After
this sublime knowledge comes the necessity of
the knowledge of precedent. The great Past
supplies us with the raw material, with orders,
colonnades and arcades, pediments, consoles,
cornices, friezes and architraves, buttresses,
battlements, vaults, pinnacles, arches, lintels,


GREEK LINES.
91
rustications, balustrades, piers, pilasters, tre-
foils, and all the innumerable conventionalities
of architecture. It is plainly our duty not to
revive and combine these in those cold and
weary changes which constitute much of mod-
ern design, but to make them live and speak
intelligibly to the people through the eloquent
modifications of our own instinctive lines of
life and beauty.
The riddle of the modern Sphinx is, How
to create a new architecture? And we find
the (Edipus who shall solve it concealed in
our own hearts.


THE GROWTH OF CONSCIENCE IN
MODERN DECORATIVE ART.
Self-examination has become one of the
characteristic instincts of modern civilization.
It was not long ago that Carlyle described this
instinct as a sort of moral dyspepsia, prevail-
ing more or less absolutely in all the grades of
society. However this may be, it is true that,
unlike our forefathers, we take nothing for
granted. The religious beliefs, the social
traits, the manners and customs, which we
have inherited from them are subjected to
analysis and discussion. A new electric search-
light reveals the errors of conservatism. The
result of this study is the establishment of
certain reasonable but not unchanging types,
with which, in the conduct of life, according
to our several lights, we seek to establish
a conscientious conformity. Concerning art,
however, for various reasons which we shall
presently consider, there has been until lately
a reluctance to bring to bear upon it any such
reorganizing and revolutionary tendencies.


94 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
This vacillation of the type which has
prevented modern architecture from devel-
oping a style, in the accepted sense of the
word, is the natural result of the increase of
our knowledge of form, as developed in his-
torical architecture, and the growth of the
archaeological spirit. Unlike any of our pre-
decessors in art, we have been seriously
embarrassed by the unbounded range and
variety of precedent at our command. There
is no phase of historical art which we have not
studied; wheresoever and howsoever human-
ity has expressed itself in forms of art, these
forms are at our fingers' ends, and are ready
to seduce us this way or that, according to our
mood. The mind of the designer is preoccu-
pied by innumerable favorite motifs derived
from every side and every era, each associated
with some phase of ancient life, and sanctified
or sweetened by ancient traditions; each with
a value aside from intrinsic picturesqueness,
beauty, or quaintness, and all contending for
new expression. Whether he has been en-
gaged upon a composition of architecture or
upon a composition of decoration, — which
also is architecture, or the completion and
fulfillment of it, — his energy has been con-
cerned first, perhaps, with the choice of types


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 95
agreeably to the caprice or fashion of the
moment; next, with the degree of precision
with which he is to follow them when chosen;
and, finally, — with such reserve of force as
might be at his disposal after these exhausting
processes, — with the adjustment of his chosen
forms to his needs according to his best inge-
nuity and skill. Under these circumstances,
the modern process of design, whether this
exact order of proceeding has been followed
or not, must be a complicated one, and must
differ fundamentally from all which have pre-
ceded it. The exact character of this differ-
ence it is important for us to understand at the
outset, to the end that we may the better
comprehend the new and strange conditions
under which art is developed in these modern
days.
The Greek architect of the time of Pericles
had before him a fixed and sacred standard of
form. There were probably dim traditions
from his Pelasgic ancestors, and from Syria and
Egypt. These were the only styles or forms
that he knew, and his own had been developed
from them into a hieratic system. He had no
choice; his strength was not wasted among
various ideals; that which he had inherited
was a religion to him. The simple cella with


98 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
development of any one particular set of forms,
as Gothic, or Romanesque, or Renaissance, and
voluntarily to shut themselves off from the
rest of their inheritance of beautiful things;
and wherever any such exist their neighbors
aje not so confined. In this particular we
do not work together with any characteristic
unity of sentiment. All the decorative arts
are subjected to the same dissipation of forces.
At the same moment we are designing and
painting Greek vases; decorating Japanese
screens; constructing furniture according to
our reminiscences of the Gothic of the Ed-
wards, or of the Renaissance of the Jameses, of
Queen Anne, or of the Georges; covering our
walls with designs suggested by the stuffs of
Florence and of the exhaustible East, by the
brocades of France, by the stamped leather
of Venice, with arabesques and conceits from
all the styles; and with these we decorate the
interiors of houses which on the outside have
been inspired originally from traditions of
every era of art, as set forth in books, prints,
and photographs innumerable.
It is therefore a common reproach against
the arts of to-day that they are discursive,
without convictions or enthusiasm; that our
depth is shallowed in many channels; that


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 99
we produce many and not great things;
that in painting we have no masterpieces
like those of Italy in the fifteenth century,
or of Flanders in the sixteenth; that in sculp-
ture the ideal of the Greek marbles, though
shattered and defiled, is to us absolutely un-
approachable, not in execution only, but in
comprehension; that in architecture we can-
not reproduce the perfection, the purity,
and perfect fitness of the Greek forms, the
grandeur and extent of those of the Ro-
man Empire, the idealism, the enthusiasm,
the consistent and powerful development, of
the religious works of the thirteenth century,
the elegance and refinement and self-control
of the Italian masters of the fifteenth cen-
tury, or the innocent exuberance of the
French builders in the sixteenth; that in
the fictile arts we cannot approach the French
and Italian potters of that era; that in fab-
rics we are still far excelled by the Orientals,
and by the products of mediaeval looms; that
in furniture, for fertility of design, for perfec-
tion of execution, for richness of carving, we
are surpassed by the Philibert de l'Ormes, the
Le Pautres, the Boules, of France, in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, by the Gib-
bons and the Chippendales of England in the


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 101
began to be felt when the necessity of making
choice among several types or styles was first
imposed upon the artist; this choice implying
the idea of self-justification, and giving an
added sense of personal responsibility, which
has naturally grown with the increase of our
knowledge. During the existence of a pre-
vailing or exclusive style, as in any time
previous to the middle of the last century,
there was far less scope for individuality
of expression than now, when the necessity
of making choice among many styles and
among innumerable motifs constantly com-
pels the designer to a review of his own re-
sources and acquisitions, and to a special
adjustment of them to new conditions of
structure, use, and material. The new labors
thus imposed upon him of selecting or reject-
ing with discretion, of combining and mod-
ifying, necessarily result in an expression of
his own peculiarities of thought and habits
of mind, which would have been impossible
to a Greek of the time of Pericles, or to a
Frenchman of the time of St. Bernard.
Hermogenes and Callicrates, Apollodorus
and Vitruvius, Viellard de Honcourt, Robert
de Luzarches, and William of Wyckham,
each of these concerned himself with the de-


102 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
velopment of a type of form, and carried it
on one step further towards perfection. In
this type their individuality was lost. They
and their brethren are therefore but the shad-
ows of names. Erostratus the fool, who
burnt the Temple of Diana at Ephesus, is far
better remembered in history than Ctesiphon,
the architect who built it. Ctesiphon, though
a great artist, was but the agent of a process
of development in style; his work was rather
a growth than a creation. But Sir Charles
Barry, Alfred Waterhouse, Charles Gamier,
Karl Friedrich Schinkel, of our time, built
their monuments in the Houses of Parliament
at London, the Law Courts at Manchester,
the New Opera at Paris, and the Royal Thea-
tre at Berlin; these buildings, and all other
conspicuous monuments of modern times, are
full of the personality of their authors, be-
cause they are rather creations than growths.
Even so late as the sixteenth century the Re-
naissance palaces of Italy, built by Vignola,
Scamozzi, Serlio, and Palladio, who knew no
models but those of Rome, do not betray the
personal characteristics of their designs to the
same extent and in the same manner as do
the neo-Greek works of Henri Labrouste in
Paris, the modern Gothic of Scott, Burgess,


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 103
and Street respectively, the modern Greek
of the Scotch Thompson in Edinburgh, the
"Queen Anne" revival of Norman Shaw, the
Romanesque revival of our own Richardson,
and so on through a host of more or less illus-
trious contemporaries, most of them changing
their styles from time to time according to
their moods.
Confused amongst a multiplicity of types,
we impress upon our work a certain effect of
archaeological pedantry or breathless effort;
we are either affected and coldly precise, or
we overcrowd our designs with detail; our
greatest and most difficult virtues, therefore,
are sincerity, reserve of force, self-denial, sim-
plicity, repose. The artists of antiquity found
simplicity and repose in mere fidelity to a rigid
standard, — a fidelity untempted by the dis-
coveries of archaeology, and easy because of
the purity and perfection of the type. Their
ideal was a divinity; their service to this di-
vinity was worship and obedience. Our ideal
is a museum of heterogeneous and beautiful
forms, and our service to it is selection, re-
jection, adaptation, analysis, discussion, classi-
fication. Indeed, the modern artist is not the
servant of his ideal; he properly seeks to be
its master. Whenever, like a mediaeval artist,


104 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
he tries to render obedience to the ideal, the
very perfection of his knowledge betrays him.
However faithful he would be to his selected
type of forms, he must needs breathe into it
a spirit quite his own. If he would repro-
duce in his modern work the strong Gothic
of the early Cistercian abbeys, he remembers
also the refinements of Giotto in the Campa-
nile of Florence. If he would imitate the ele-
gant exuberance of the Roman Ionic, he can-
not forget the fine chastisement of invention
in the Ionic of the portico of Minerva Polias
on the Acropolis of Athens. Thus his work
is sophisticated by his knowledge. He is like
an actor playing a part. He cannot conceal
his effort. He is self-conscious.
In this way the modern spirit of self-ex-
amination, of which I have spoken, is grad-
ually applied to art. The application of a
rule of morality to the arts of design follows
naturally, and is in exact harmony with the
modern spirit of culture. I desire to treat of
this growth of conscientiousness as the qual-
ity most characteristic of the art of to-day, —
a quality which until now has never made its
appearance in the decorative arts, and from
which the most happy results may be reason-
ably anticipated; without which, in fact, these


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 105
arts will become mere antiquarianism, desti-
tute of soul or inspiration.
Conscientiousness, as applied to architec-
ture, corrects and supplements feeling; it
does not take the place of feeling. It re-
gards this art, not as a business, or an amuse-
ment, or as a service of grace and poetry
merely, but as a duty, carrying with it cer-
tain moral responsibilities like any other duty.
This is a modern idea; it consists in the de-
sire to establish some constant and conscious
standard, by the observance of which, in the
midst of the enormous and complicated de-
mands made upon the decorative arts in our
day, in the midst of the embarrassing accumu-
lation of available and conflicting precedents,
in the midst of the new materials, new inven-
tions, new creeds, new manners and customs,
constantly presenting themselves, a new art
made up of many arts may be formed and
kept from anarchy and confusion.
Now how is this newly awakened conscience
of the architect or decorative designer applied
to his work? In what way does it correct
his taste or affect his artistic instincts?
It has been discovered that, in every great
era of art, material has been used according
to its natural capacities: by the consistent


106 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
use of such natural capacities the arts have
approached perfection; by their abuse they
have inevitably declined. Thus, as regards
architecture, in a district which produced
granite alone, the prevailing style would sub-
mit to certain modifications to suit the con-
ditions of the material: the mouldings would
be few and large, the sculpture broad and
simple, depending rather upon outline than
upon detail for its effect. In places where
the stone was easily worked, the mouldings
and carvings would be more frequent. Where
fine marbles were available, the architecture
would be delicately detailed, and affect a
quality of refinement impracticable under
other conditions. Where colored marbles
abounded, the wall surfaces would be ve-
neered with them in patterns, and designs in
tarsia would become frequent. Where clay
only prevailed, there would arise an architec-
ture distinctly of brick and terra cotta. If
the stone of the district was coarse and friable,
it would be used in rough walls, covered with
a finish of cement or plaster, which in its turn
would create a modification of style priding
itself upon its smoothness of surface, its dec-
oration by incisions and fine moulding and
applied color. Thus, Egyptian art was, in


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 107
some of its most characteristic expressions, an
art of granite; the mediaeval arts of France
and England were mostly arts of limestones
and sandstones of various qualities; the art
of Greece was an art of fine marble; that of
North Italy was an art of baked clay; that
of Venice and Florence was distinguished for
its inlays of semi-precious marble; that of
Rome, as her monuments were a part of her
political system, and were erected all over
the Roman world as invariable types of her
dominion, was an art of coarse masonry, in
whatever material, or of concrete, covered
with moulded plaster or with thin veneers of
marble. In like manner, forms executed in
lead were different from forms executed in
forged iron. Forms cast in moulds were dif-
ferent from forms forged or wrought with the
chisel. Forms suggested by the functions
and capacity of wood were quite different
from any other. H
It is no less true, however, as is well known,
that in their origins the Greek styles bore
reminiscences of the primitive arts. The
pylons of Egypt recalled the structures of
mud and reeds which preceded them; the
marble temples of Greece remembered the
wooden frames of the primeval buildings;


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 109
Such doctrines as this have been so often
preached in the literature of the times that
they have become commonplace. They suffi-
ciently indicate the conscientious tone of pub-
he sentiment as regards art, and the designers
silently but diligently endeavor to meet the
demand for a moral art with all the accepted
devices of truthful work. About the middle
of the nineteenth century, when the idea of
morality in art was new, and its first disciples
were flushed by the consciousness of their
own piety, the dogma brought about results
in practice which clearly indicated the super-
sensitive condition of the artistic mind at
that time. We had an era of moral furniture,
of which Mr. Eastlake was fortunate enough
to be the prophet; but as the conclusions of
the dogma were too rigid, its requirements
too exacting, its illustrations of the principle
of truth of material and truth of construction
too literal and narrow, its productive power
was speedily exhausted. There were doctri-
naires, precisionists, petits maitres, formalists,
in this conscientious movement in the arts, as
in every other new intellectual activity; they
were ready to push the newly discovered prin-
ciples to conclusions too absolute and mechan-
ical, and to expose our arts to the danger of


110 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
a recoil. Thus the "Eastlake furniture,"
which excluded curved lines on principle;
which made the manner of construction —
the joiners' part of it — more important than
the designers'; which elevated the mortise
and tenon to the dignity of a principle of
art, by very reason of its great show of hon-
esty, like any other ostentation of morality,
soon palled upon the senses. With our inex-
haustible inheritance of forms in which curved
lines do appear, in which the idea of the de-
signer is of more importance than the device
of the cabinet-maker, we cannot remain long
content with such pious exclusions.
But with all this, the conscientious spirit
once aroused in art is not likely to be put
to sleep again until a great work has been
done. The designer would not quiet it if he
could, for it gives to his work a new sig-
nificance and power; it enables him to defend
it by saying, "This composition of lines or
of colors I am satisfied with, not merely be-
cause it gives me a sensuous gratification ; not
merely because it recalls this or that motif in
some of the chefs-d'oeuvre of art; nor because
it reminds me of certain historic forms ren-
dered precious by traditions and long use;
not because it copies nature exactly; nor be-


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. Ill
cause it follows a certain accepted fashion of
the day, — but because I know it is right.
And why? I have reasoned about it, and
can explain it by an appeal to your intellect.
It belongs in its place, and accomplishes its
object with a directness which could not be
reached by mere intuition. It is not a mere
matter of taste, concerning which there is no
disputing. I cannot do otherwise than I have
done and remain true to the conditions of my
art. My forms are developed out of the ne-
cessities of my problem; they are not chosen
because they are beautiful only, but because
they are fit. Indeed, they would not be
beautiful for my use if they were not fit.
I have been taught by experience to distrust
my own intuitive fancies and predilections for
this or that form, for this or that style; they
seduce me from the truth. I have been
taught to discipline my resources; to sub-
ject them to critical analysis and discussion
within my own mind before using them; to
lop off what is irrelevant to my theme; to
give greater emphasis here; to distract atten-
tion there; to harmonize the whole with the
especial demands of my subject. I find that
these conscientious processes, so far from
weakening my fancy, so far from diminish-


112 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
ing the interest of my work, in reality make
my resources of design more available for my
use, and render my compositions far more
beautiful than any that I did before I had
taught myself to reason. I have learned the
artistic value of sincerity, simplicity, and self-
denial. I not only feel, but I understand."
Before the latter half of the nineteenth
century such language as this would have
been impossible, but now it simply illustrates
a common thought of the modern designer
undertaking to create works of art; it illus-
trates a growing spirit in all the decorative
arts. The masters of the great historical styles
were constrained to concentrate their attention
on the purification and development of a sin-
gle type; we, among innumerable conflicting
types, instead of vacillating, are beginning to
reason, to extract from them principles of de-
sign, to apply rules of aesthetics. It is evident
that no one can invent a new set of forms,
conceived on new principles, which shall ob-
literate the memory of all that archaeology has
given us, and therefore that, whatever style
may succeed in obtaining recognition as mod-
ern, it must have its roots somewhere in the
past. With its vast inheritance, architecture
must be more dependent on derivation than


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 113
invention. It is equally evident that our re-
sources of precedent will increase with the pro-
gress of time. Where, then, are we to look for
a remedy for the increasing embarrassment of
our knowledge? What can relieve us from an
anarchy of forms on the one hand, or from the
ignoble domination of a series of unreasonable,
capricious fashions or revivals on the other?
It seems logical to infer that, as in the sci-
ences the accumulation of knowledge never
has been regarded as an affliction, so in art the
accumulation of precedents from Greece, Rome,
and Byzantium, from Egypt and Syria, from
the Orientals and Spanish Moors, from medi-
aeval Christendom, from the masters of the
fifteenth century, from the chateaux and pal-
aces of the Renaissance, from the revivals and
rehabilitation of all those forms by our many-
sided contemporaries, — this abounding wealth
should hardly prove an embarrassment to us
unless we are unfit to use so precious a heritage.
With this heritage we have tried all sorts of
experiments. We have, for example, tried the
effect of arbitrary exclusions. The time is not
far distant when the world of art was divided
into hostile camps, some holding to one set of
precedents and regarding all others as mislead-
ing and pernicious, the rest considering that


114 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
safety resided only in the very forms rejected
by their competitors, — some for Gothic and
some for classic. Fifty years ago, two archi-
tects could not meet without a quarrel. It
was the " battle of the styles." We have tried
this in architecture and in the other decorative
arts, but have found that under such divisions
we have made no progress. We have also, in
turn, tried indifference as to the quality of
the precedent, and masqueraded now in one
dress and now in another, curious only in the
perfection and accuracy of our copying; in
other words, we have tried pure archaeology,
and found that it could not satisfy the cravings
of the artist to create.
We are now at last beginning to learn that
this great inheritance of forms is in fact the
legitimate language of our art, copious, rich,
suggestive, sufficient to all our moods; valu-
able to us, not for the sake of its own words
and expressions and phrases, but because of
its usefulness in enabling us the more fully
and elegantly to express our own thoughts and
the ideas which belong to our time.
To obtain success in the decorative arts,
according to this new light, there must now
be added to the qualification of the artist a
new and hitherto unknown element, that of


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 115
research and learning. The artists of classic
and romantic times expressed themselves with
ease in their own vernaculars, without know-
ledge of any other mediums of expression.
We of modern times can hardly be said to have
vernacular tongues, but must say what we
have to say in a composite of many and various
elements. We cannot use this composite with-
out a process of reasoning. In expressing our
thoughts, we must take heed that we do not
misuse an old language; that we do not narrow
our art by becoming specialists in this or that
dialect; that we do not lose our proper inde-
pendence by imitating the peculiar idioms or
tricks of expression of any other author or set
of authors; and more especially, that we do
not waste our strength in futile efforts to in-
vent a new tongue. We must have a care not
only as to what we say, but as to how we say it.
The individual can no longer be lost in his art.
Modern architecture thus allies itself more
closely with humanity than ever; it must ap-
peal, not to the senses alone, but to the mind
and heart. Indeed, so saturated is it with hu-
manity that we apply to it moral terms: we say
that it is sincere or insincere, true or false, self-
denying or self-indulgent, proud or debased.
Or we speak of it as a thing of the intellect: it


116 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
is learned or ignorant, profound or superficial,
closely-reasoned and logical or shallow and
discursive. Such should be the modern deco-
rative arts, according to the high standard set
up by the new culture. In this way, apparently,
we are to create an art of the twentieth century.
It is evidently not to continue a mere art of
correct revivals, now of this or now of that
school, according to an inexplicable fashion.
Beneath these superficial excitements there is
growing this new sense of responsibility as to
the real duties of art.
Thus, in building a modern church, the
problem is not satisfied by accommodating a
given number of worshipers for a given cost,
with due regard for the decent setting forth of
given rites in an edifice which is merely an
accurate quotation from a given style, a correct
reproduction of forms recognized by antiqua-
rians as peculiar to a certain distinctive era of
art. It is no longer sufficient that it is good
Romanesque or good Gothic of any age or
place. This is practical archaeology, perhaps,
but not architecture. The matter of accom-
modation, cost, and rites being the same, the
question is, first, as to the most suitable
structure according to modern methods, and,
second, as to the most available material; then,


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 117
what forms are best suited to give this structure
and material the most honest and elegant
expression possible under the circumstances,
adapting these forms to the local conditions of
fenestration, exit and entrance, aspect and
surroundings. The artist seeks not to invent
new forms to meet these conditions ; they will
come soon enough if needed. There is a
venerable and inexhaustible language of old
forms; there are innumerable traditionary
details, developed out of the experience of man-
kind in former ages; there are devices of
construction developed into shapes associated
with the triumphs and trials of Christianity
everywhere. With the fullness of this lan-
guage he utters his thought completely, having
in mind only the fairest and aptest expres-
sion of his idea. To these processes there are
essential, as we have discovered, not learning
and research merely, not inventive skill and
genius merely, not poetic feeling and fine sym-
pathies merely,but all these combined, together
with the usual technical qualities which must
form a necessary part of the equipment of
the architect. The result must inevitably be,
according to the genius, intelligence, and
inspiration of the designer, a work of art, —
not a correct historical reproduction, but essen-


118 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
tially a thing unknown before, a veritable
contribution to the pleasure and profit of
mankind, a step onward. It is of course de-
pendent upon the learning or skill of the artist
whether, in using the old forms of expression,
he avoids incongruities; and, while it is not
of the least consequence whether he commits
anachronisms or not, he must see to it that
they are not offensive. He may put Greek
and Gothic together if he can, or inform his
Gothic with Greek principles, which is better,
but it is necessary to the perfection of his
expression that all the details shall be recon-
ciled one to another and made one whole.
The decorative arts, from the highest to
the lowest, are decorative in that they are
fitted for a fixed place, and in that place re-
lated, in either subordination or command, to
the effect of other pieces of art. "All the
greatest art in the world," says Ruskin, "is
fitted for a place and subordinated to a
purpose. There is no existing highest-order
art but is decorative. The best sculpture yet
produced has been the decoration of a temple
front; the best painting, the decoration of a
room. Raphael's best doing is merely the
wall-coloring of a suite of apartments in the
Vatican, and his cartoons were made for tap-


120 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
affected by the miserable caprices of any
combination of upholsterers. It can only be
secured by a study of the peculiar needs and
uses of the room, its aspect, its shape, and its.
surroundings; by the discovery of the key of
color necessary to the case; by the survey of
available precedents for motifs and sug-
gestions of form; by the conscientious and
intelligent rejection of every fancy which,
however dear to us, however fashionable,
however picturesque or original or graceful,
is not essential to the realization of this ideal.
We know of innumerable rooms, decorated in
innumerable ways, by innumerable devices,
under all degrees and varieties of civiliza-
tions, ancient and modern, and according to
all conditions of living. These are importu-
nate in suggesting ideas to the modern
designer. Without the exercise of the virtue
of self-denial he is at the mercy of these
thronging fancies, and becomes a mere super-
ficial eclectic. This virtue must be a leading
characteristic of the new discipline which we
are approaching, both in the greater and lesser
arts of decoration. The obvious necessity of
exercising it, if we would create works of art,
is another proof of the intense self-conscious-
ness which we must inject into our work.


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 121
We cannot decorate a simple panel in
these modern days in any spirit but that of
self-consciousness. If this takes the form
of complacency in our own skill or knack,
confidence in tricks of color or form which we
have picked up, imitations of what has con-
stituted other people's success, we can have
no real success of our own. If the self-
consciousness is conscientious; if it rejects
the temptations of its own genius and know-
ledge; if it considers first the function of
this especial panel, its position and surround-
ings, treating it according to the natural ca-
pacity of the material, — if of metal, adjust-
ing the form of the decoration so that it may
be beaten, chiseled, engraved, or cast into
shape; if of clay or plaster, so that the form
may be developed by modeling; if of wood,
so that it may be carved or painted, — and
whether the composition is executed in form
or color according to these conditions, if this
form or color is kept properly subordinate to
the rest of the composition, and is content
simply to illustrate or decorate the function of
the panel as an essential part of a greater
whole, we may hope to create a work of art.
But we do not undertake to decorate this
panel without an unconscious survey of the


122 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
whole historical field; how have similar con-
ditions been met in previous conditions of
life? An Egyptian would have formulated
his work according to his religion, and filled
his panel with a vertical composition of reeds
and lotus flowers, dead with straightness,
rigid, precise, hieratic. A Greek would have
contented himself with a wild honeysuckle,
but would have extracted from it the very
essence of beauty, grave, sweet, corrected, and
chastened to the last limit of refined expres-
sion. A Roman would have chosen the
acanthus and the olive, and would have given
to them exuberance, vigor, sensuousness,
abundance of life and motion, pride, and vain-
glory. A monastic designer of the twelfth
century, taking up the dim traditions of the or-
namentation of the later Roman Empire, would
have conventionalized the common leaves and
flowers of the wayside, and forced them to
grow with formal symmetry within the boun-
daries of the panel. A lay architect of the
fourteenth century would have given a consum-
mate image of what such leaves and flowers
should be if they had been created for the
sake of his panel; their shapes and their mo-
tions would have been adjusted to the form
of his panel, conventionalized and crowded.


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 123
A century later, he would have crumpled,
twisted, and undercut the leaves with danger-
ous perfection of craftsmanship, and they
would have wandered wanton outside the lim-
its of the panel; strange animals would have
been seen chasing one another among the
leafage. An architect of the Renaissance
would have remembered the Roman work;
but the Roman acanthus and olive, under his
hands, would have been quickened and re-
fined with new detail, new motion, finer in-
spiration and invention. They would have
received a new impulse of life, a new creation,
a finer and more delicate spirit. But the art
would still have been pagan art; not exuber-
ant and ostentatious, but subdued to a strict
relationship with the borders of the panel,
observant of the centre line, illustrated with
conceits of vases, medallions, birds, masks, an-
imals, boys, garlands, and pendants, all obedi-
ent to laws of absolute symmetry. For it was
the era of the renaissance of learning, the
era of concetti in literature as well as art.
The decorator of the Elizabethan era would
have frankly left nature, and covered his
panel with armorial bearings and grotesque
emblazonments, with accessories of strap work
curled and slashed capriciously. The Saracen


124 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
would have filled it with his arabesque tangles
and pious texts. The Japanese, following
immemorial traditions of art, perfected by
successive generations working loyally, con-
summate interpreters of natural forms, would
have disregarded any considerations of sym-
metry, and projected into the field of the
panel a spray of natural leafage from some
accidental point in the boundary, cutting
across a background of irregular horizontal
or zigzag bars; a quick flight of birds would
stretch their wings across the disk of a white
moon, or a stork would stand contemplative
upon one leg in the midst of his water reeds,
with the sacred Fusiyama in the distance,
barred with its conventional clouds; and yet
the composition would be suited to no other
shape or size than that of the long panel for
which it was composed.
In the presence of all these crowding im-
ages, the modern designer stands asking,
"Which shall I choose, what shall I reject,
and why?" They are all his; they are his
rightful inheritance, the legitimate language of
his art. He not only has all the beautiful
things in nature at his command, but he also
knows how they have been used by his prede-
cessors; how they have been interpreted and


126 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
part of the history of mankind, conventional-
ized it, in fact, for the uses of art, — this is no
less important. The artists who practice design
and the theorists who dream of it naturally
disagree. What! cry the latter, must we go
to art when we have infinite nature all around
us? When the clover and the daisy grow in
the clod beneath our feet; when the sagittaria,
with its pointed leaves, the water-cress, and
the long reeds wave by the river's brim, and
the white lily floats upon its bosom; when the
oak leaf and the acorn help to form the shade
in which we repose, — must we go afar to learn
how these things were carved by forgotten
hands upon the capitals and corbels, in the
spandrels and panels and friezes, of sacred
buildings, six hundred years ago; or to dis-
cover in what way they made beautiful the
oaken screens and cabinets in the chateaux of
the sixteenth century; or how they were
beaten and twisted out of ductile iron in the
balconies of Venice, or moulded, baked, and col-
ored in the potteries of Palissy and of Sevres;
how they were painted upon the fans or
cast on the bronze vases of Japan? On the
other hand, the artist says, What are we to do
with our heritage of forms? Are we to leave
them to the antiquaries to label and classify


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 127
and set up in museums, or are we to abandon
them to quacks and pretenders, the spend-
thrifts of art, to be worn by them as savages
wear the costumes of civilization? In any
event, they cannot be forgotten. Every day
they are made more accessible. The instinct
of mankind is to use them, and we must see
to it that they are used in a manner consist-
ent with the dignity of art, with far-reaching
research, but with self-control, self-denial, and
conscience.
Thus there are two great books of reference
for the artist: the book of nature and the book
of art, that is, the book of the interpretation
of nature by mankind. If we could close the
latter and forget it, and if nature were our
only resource, the best of us would perhaps be-
come pre-Raphaelite, and we should peep and
botanize in a manner commendable to this great
prophet. Much of a certain class of errors
might be obliterated from modern art; but our
imagination, untrained, undisciplined, without
food of immemorial experience, would run into
unreasonable excesses. The opportunity and
the desire to ornament would not be less, but
the available resources would be infinitely
impoverished. Our observation of nature
would doubtless become quickened, but theory


128 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
would begin its work of transformation or
caricature, and the element of conscience in
art, as there would be less occasion to exercise
it, would be deadened, if not destroyed. The
decorator would soon perceive that the natural
form could not be sculptured upon his capital,
or painted upon his ceiling, or woven in his
fabric, or burned into his porcelain, for a thou-
sand obvious reasons, without undergoing some
process of transformation. The work of con-
ventionalizing these forms would at once
begin; but, in the absence of instruction and
inspiration from all precedent art, it would
develop slowly, painfully, with barbarous
imperfections and childish crudities. Our
art would be a strange mixture: there
would be, on the one hand, an absolute
fidelity to natural forms, interpreted with
the skill which would result from concentra-
tion of thought; and, on the other, a more
prevalent element of barbarous and illiterate
invention, covering the surfaces of things
with thoughtless repetitions of detail, as on
an Indian paddle. We should be relieved
from our embarrassments of precedent, in-
deed, but we should suffer from a new and
greater embarrassment of poverty. The em-
barrassments of our wealth we are now learning


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 129
to correct by cultivating the ennobling qualities
of self-denial and conscientiousness. The em-
barrassments of poverty could only engender an
overworking, and consequently a debasement,
of the powers of imagination. Man, with an in-
finity of thought to express,—for no fate but
death could stop the activity of the mind, —
would have no competent language with which
to express it. He could only utter inarticulate
cries, like a child.
Therefore to say that nature is the only
fountain of art is incorrect. Ruskin, illustrat-
ing this principle, said: "If the designer of
furniture, of cups and vases, of dress patterns
and the like, exercises himself continually in
the imitation of natural form in some leading
division of his work, then, holding by this stem
of life, he may pass down into all kinds of
merely geometrical or formal design with per-
fect safety and with noble results. . . . But
once quit hold of this living stem, and set
yourself to the designing of ornamentation,
either in the ignorant play of your own heart-
less fancy, as the Indian does, or according to
received application of heartless laws, as the
modern European does, and there is but
one word for you, — death; death of every
healthy faculty and of every noble intelligence;


130 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
incapacity of understanding one great work
that man has ever done, or of doing anything
that it shall be helpful for him to behold."1
There is much more of this very beautiful
language, but when we get away from its spell
and return to facts it seems as if we had been
listening to a sort of pantheistic hymn. To
go to nature for refreshment and inspiration is
always wise; but there is refreshment and in-
spiration also in the works of man. After God
had made the green things of earth and all the
animals, the creeping, the flying and swimming
creatures, he made man, and endowed him
with faculties to appreciate, enjoy, and com-
mand the rest of the creation. The result was
that man immediately began a creation of his
own, — a creation of the second order. His
materials were not chaos and darkness, but
light and nature. The result of this second-
ary creation is art. To us of the nineteenth
century, for whom have been preserved most
of the productions of this secondary creation,
not by dim tradition but by scientific re-
searches above and beneath the ground far
and near, accurately collated, analyzed, and
published, — to us, richly endowed as none of
our predecessors have been (for literature has
iRuskin, The Two Paths, pp. 46, 47.


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 131
only discovered the true art of Greece and
Syria, of Japan and India, for example, with-
in the last forty years), this secondary creation
stands as the image of the primary creation in
the human mind; and the human mind, doubt-
less, is the masterpiece of the Supreme Creator.
By this agency nature has undergone wonder-
ful transformations; and although the water-
lily of Egypt, the acanthus and honeysuckle
of Attica, the olive and laurel of Rome, the
trefoil, the ivy, the oak, of the Chris-
tian builders, the inexhaustible flora of later
times, and all the animal creation, from man
to insects, by the processes of art have taken
new shapes, — although they have been often
modeled in " the light that never was on sea
or land," — it is not wise to stigmatize these
"old things made new" as the product of
heartless laws, and as a conspiracy against na-
ture. There is, in fact, as much nature in the
minds, which have thus idealized, conventional-
ized, and changed natural forms, as there is in
the natural forms themselves; and these
minds and all the forms of art in which
their thoughts have been embodied can no
more be neglected by the modern designer
than can the primary creation itself.
When the gentle Perdita declines to offer


132 CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE.
to her father's guests carnations and streaked
gillyflowers, because they are "nature's bas-
tards," — the products of
..." an art which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating Nature," —
the wise Polixines replies: —
"Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean : so, o'er that art,
Which, as you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.
This is an art
Which does mend nature, — change it rather: but
The art itself is nature."
This is the thought which I would enforce:
Our present conditions of life must give to art
in all its forms certain distinctive character-
istics. These conditions require the establish-
ment of principles, and not forms, as standards
of excellent work. They make forms the
language and not the end of art; and they
inculcate the enlargement and enrichment of
this language by the study of nature and of
all the antecedent arts, to the end that we
may express our thought in art, as we would
in literature, with an elegance, precision, and
completeness commensurate with our larger
opportunities, our richer inheritance, and our
greater resources. Modern design, especially


CONSCIENCE IN ARCHITECTURE. 133
in architecture, has hitherto concerned itself
with the parts of speech, and given us exer-
cises in grammar. Now we are prepared to
give to art its larger and truer function; to
appeal to the sympathies, not only of gram-
marians and archaeologists, of pedants and
architects, but of all the people, by speak-
ing to them, not with a dead language, but
with a living language of form, which should
interest, instruct, and delight them; by ap-
pealing not only to their taste, but to their
intellect and heart in terms which belong to
our reminiscent but progressive civilization,
and which therefore those who choose can
understand.
The supreme difficulty which confronts the
modern architect is, with the knowledge at his
command, to avoid sophistications, pedantries,
technicalities. The very finest result of high
culture, in architecture as in literature, is to
utter thought with simplicity.


THE PERSONAL EQUA TION. 135
the science of building, and, second, the es-
tablishment of principles instead of formulas,
aesthetics instead of archaeology; and we have
learned that chief among these influences
is the discovery, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, of Greek lines, which
represent the highest point of culture ever
reached by man in art. By the revival
and application of the principles involved in
these lines, it is hoped that the great body of
precedents by which we are now embarrassed
will be elevated, refined, purified, and cor-
rected for our use in modern work, so that our
civilization, at once reminiscent and eagerly
advancing, may be adequately expressed in
our architecture.
I am persuaded that the curious differences
between the conditions under which ancient
and modern architecture was and is devel-
oped cannot be properly understood until
the relation of the architect to architecture,
until the effect of his personal equation upon
the style of his time, shall have been made
clear. I cannot but think that a comparative
study of these conditions would not only be
historically interesting, but would throw some
light upon the nature of the responsibilities
of the modern architect in regard to his art.


138 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
because it was deliberately intended to express
the history of the times in which it was built,
but because it is a work of art, unconsciously
expressing that civilization in terms the most
exalted and beautiful within the scope of the
builders.
We may affirm, therefore, in general, that
the qualities of the Gothic or romantic and of
the Renaissance or classic civilizations are
graphically expressed in their respective arts,
and that the characteristic differences between
these two arts constitute the most suggestive
evidence of the corresponding differences in
the conditions of the societies out of which
they grew. Referring to architecture in es-
pecial, I ask you to consider with me some of
these differences, not from a technical point
of view, but to ascertain, if possible, what
sort of men they were who were more imme-
diately concerned in producing these two
forms of art, and what were their relative
functions in respect to their work.
When Diocletian laid aside the cares of em-
pire, at the end of the second century, while
Christianity was struggling for existence, he
retired to Spalatro, on the eastern coast of
the Adriatic, where he built a fortified pal-
ace covering nine and one half acres. This


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 139
immense pile of buildings was the most impor-
tant architectural expression of the Decline of
the Roman Empire. If archaeology had made
a true analysis of this monument before Gib-
bon's time, that historian would have been
furnished with a chronicle even more signifi-
cant of the true spirit and genius of the
later Empire than he was able to deduce from
any or all of the voluminous documents which
form the basis of his history. But it is more
germane to our present purpose to note that
the first Christian builders, as the late Mr. Free-
man pointed out, discovered in the remains of
this vast edifice a principle of construction
which gave direction and character to the
whole body of Byzantine and early Christian
art, and had its final and most unexpected
development in the art of the Middle Ages.
This principle of construction was simply
the starting of the arch directly from the
capitals of the columns without the interpo-
sition of the horizontal entablature. At this
point in history the horizontal members of
the architectural scheme, which all through
the history of classic art had formed its most
conspicuous and characteristic feature, were
practically abandoned, and the way was
opened for the growth of the vertical and


142 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
of engineers; it appears in the steady and
admirable progress of achievement in works
of severe utility, — bridges, aqueducts, sewers,
canals, embankments, factories. But this is
not art, because, unlike the Gothic evolu-
tion, it is not in the hands of artists. The
functions of the modern engineer and that
of the lay builder of the Middle Ages differ
in this important respect: the one develops
a theory of construction with a view to ob-
taining perfect mechanical fitness and stabil-
ity in the most direct and economic way pos-
sible, and with a complete disregard, if not
contempt, for aesthetic conditions; the other,
in like manner, aims at fitness and stability
by the use of scientific and technical methods,
but he confers upon his work beauty as well
as fitness, grace as well as stability; he aims
to charm the eye as well as to satisfy the mind
with harmony of proportions and elegance of
detail, following in this respect the evident
system of the great Creator, who never
made anything ugly while making it strong.
A Cistercian abbey, produced under the rule
of that most rigid of mediaeval reformers,
St. Bernard, in its austere, unornamented
construction, shows how a severe work of
engineering may be made a work of art.


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 143
A Clunisian abbey, resulting from the more
generous discipline of the older order, is no
more a work of art because of its super-
added luxury of sculpture and splendor of
color. The modern engineer gives us prose,
the mediaeval builder gives us poetry.
If painting and sculpture, and to a certain
extent music, are imitations of nature in-
fused with the spirit of man, architecture,
which is not an imitation of nature, is a di-
rect growth from the spirit of man; indeed,
it is a creation of the second order, and con-
sequently, as I claim, an expression of human
character so accurate that all the phases of
the essential development of that character in
the history of civilization should be read in
the successive manifestations of this peculiarly
human art.
In the beginning of the period of the
Renaissance, the Gothic tree having exhausted
itself with blossoms, there was grafted into
its enfeebled stock a new shoot, which, with
the advancement of learning and the growth of
the human mind, gradually but surely changed
the character of mediaeval forms, until at
length they disappeared entirely. Indeed,
so completely did this new influence take
possession of the human mind that, after


144 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
hardly a century of transition, the vast poetic
monuments of mediaeval art became, in the
midst of the new civilization, not only barbaric
enigmas, but objects of insult and contumely.
The complete neglect or fundamental mis-
understanding of the principles of Gothic
art — a neglect which prevailed from the
fifteenth to the middle of the eighteenth
centuries, while literature seemed to have
hardly a consciousness of the existence of
this form of art — constitutes in itself a
revelation in the history of the intellect
not to be obtained from any other source.
Meanwhile the great functions of the church
were celebrated in the cathedrals, and genera-
tion after generation worshiped within, leav-
ing no trace except in the removal of the
delicate tabernacle-work of altar, reredos,
screen, and chantry, and the substitution of
correct work in the classic taste, without a
suspicion of incongruity. Secular buildings
were constructed against their solemn walls
without a thought of sacrilege. Every market-
place in Europe was overshadowed by the as-
piring front of a Gothic facade with its rich
traceries, its fretted gables, its buttresses, pin-
nacles, galleries, niches, statues, and spires;
but these great piles for three centuries were


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 145
as strange and uncouth to those who lived in
these hallowed precincts as the Aztec monu-
ments or the Buddhist topes and temples of
India are to us. They apparently uttered no
word and furnished no thought or pleasure in
all this time to prince, priest, or peasant; and
so they waited in silence and patience until
the slow antiquary of modern times began to
discover in them the symbols and handwriting
of an earlier civilization, the types of a con-
sistent art, not entirely barbaric or without
meaning.
Now what was the nature of the new prin-
ciple of art which meanwhile was powerful
enough to so completely preoccupy the minds
of the builders? It was based upon an archi-
tectural formula, the classic orders. This
formula was the standard by which archi-
tecture henceforth was to be measured and
corrected.
If mediaeval architecture was a system
based upon the free and unobstructed de-
velopment of structural forms, that of the
Renaissance was based upon authority and
discipline. The classic formula was recog-
nized as the embodiment of the spirit of the
antique world, by the revival of which alone,
it was thought, redemption from mediaeval


146 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
barbarism and the new birth of civilization
were possible. The essence of this formula
was an arbitrary system of proportion, com-
posed of isolated columns or attached pilasters
supporting horizontal entablatures. The ver-
tical members were composed of bases, shafts,
and capitals; the horizontal members, of
architraves, friezes, and cornices. Each of
these divisions was further subdivided into
mouldings; and as all these parts had de-
veloped together, and got their shape by
mutual adjustment after many trials, as, with
the advancement of refinement, artists became
curious in respect to the shape and relative
disposition of these subordinate parts, the
result was finally the highest expression
of architectural style known to mankind.
Though this delicate and precise mutual ad-
justment might have been reached in other
styles, as in Gothic, it has only been reached
in the classic, and the examples of it are the
so-called orders of architecture. It is their
advantage that they were developed in actual
use, — not by theory but by practice, — and
that they grew into shape, embodying in their
modifications the experience and feeling of
successive generations of Greek and Roman
architects, concentrated upon the work of


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 149
was an art of construction more or less or-
namental. Now ornament is the product of
sentiment and imagination, but the invention
of ornament in such a service as Gothic art
did not call for the highest artistic effort in
this domain. The grouping of pinnacles upon
buttresses, the filling of apertures with rich
tracery, the fretting of sky-lines with crockets
and finials, the enrichment of mouldings by
conventional billets, beads, chevrons, ropes,
and leafage, the decoration of wall surfaces
with an embroidery of carved diapers, cusped
arches, and canopied niches, — this sort of
work was not the labor of illustrious masters,
but of nameless trained craftsmen ; nay, even
the iconography and symbolism which crowded
the porches were part of a hieratic system, to
which the men who produced it were in the
position rather of humble catechumens or neo-
phytes than of independent artists. Their
labors were in no small part didactic, like
the labors of writers and printers. In the ab-
sence of books and of the ability to read them,
the carvers disseminated the doctrines of the
church, told stories, imparted ideas, religious
and secular, by the works of their hands, in a
conventional and childlike language of images,
pictures, and symbols, which even the un-


150 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
learned could understand. Gothic ornament
was thus, to a great extent, intended not only
to decorate, but to teach.
On the other hand, the composition of or-
nament for its own sake did not become a
leading principle until after the revival of
learning, when a new style arose, based upon
a rigid formula which was itself perfection,
and therefore, as I have intimated, incapable
of progression. Under these circumstances,
the variety demanded of art by the newly
awakened civilization was only obtainable
either by distorting or degrading the formula
itself, as was actually done in the eras of
the Baroque in France, the Rococo in Italy,
the Chirrugueresque in Spain, or, when the
formula was respected, by overlaying it with
ornament not necessarily suggested by the
formula, ornament invented and adjusted by
the creative spirit of man. This formula also,
as, according to the Roman system, it was not
materially affected by structure, but applied to
it, and, as it was to a large degree inflexible for
the expression of special ideas, or of the pur-
pose of the building to which it was applied,
depended mainly upon its ornament, which
therefore had to be of a character sufficiently
imaginative to convey these ideas by emblem,


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 151
attribute, or allegory, like simile and metaphor
in poetry. Thus, unlike the nameless Gothic
craftsmen, the famous ornamentists of the Re-
naissance, not having occasion to teach, were
only concerned to beautify and illustrate.
It is evident that this process of decorating
without degrading the unalterable classic type
could not have been effected by traditions,
or by any such anonymous body of trained
artisans as kept the Gothic evolution in a
workmanlike track. The contingency called
into existence the modern architect, with his
books and prints and his archaeological equip-
ment. The composition and application of
ornament demanded a new and higher quality
of invention and imagination, because orna-
mentation had become a far more important
function in architecture. The energy and en-
thusiasm of the intellectual life, newly awak-
ened after the sleep of the Dark Ages, found
its natural expression in a finer and more
imaginative quality of invention than was
possible to the pious craftsmen who, in the
service of the church, built their best thoughts
into the crockets and gargoyles of the cathe-
drals, and were blest in their humble self-
sacrifice. In short, the Gothic method resulted
in an impersonal art; the Renaissance method
necessarily led to a personal art.


152 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
If Gothic art was the development of prin-
ciples of construction applied to meet simi-
lar requirements, each experimental abbey or
cathedral differed from its predecessor in ex-
act proportion to the progress in the art of
building vaults with small stones, not in pro-
portion to the genius of the master-builder.
The decoration of these structures was not
an essential incident in this scheme of gen-
eral development. No single monastic or lay
builder could impress his individuality upon
this mighty advancing tide. Its progress was
made up of forces far too great to be turned
this way or that at his bidding. He was the
servant of evolution, and not its master; he
made the evolution consistent, grammatical,
and beautiful, and in this disinterested service
his name and character were lost.
Brunelleschi and Alberti were the first
Italian artists who, in the beginning of the
fifteenth century, studied the ruins of ancient
Rome; they made the earliest essays in the
renaissance of classic architecure. Now, if
these artists had discovered in these ruins (as
the first Christian builders did at Spalatro)
a new principle of construction, capable of in-
definite expansion in the wider fields of the new
civilization, instead of an order of architecture,


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 153
a more or less inflexible dogma of proportion,
and if Francis I. had carried that principle
back to France with the spoils of his first
Italian conquest, instead of taking with him a
crowd of Italian artists, the guardians of the
ancient formula, we might have witnessed the
phenomenon of another impersonal art, like
that of the mediaeval period, to the development
of which, in the course of time, the genius of
the great French Renaissance masters, Phili-
bert de Lorme, Pierre Lescot, and the Mansarts
would hardly have been necessary. If, on the
other hand, at the end of the Romanesque
period in the twelfth century, a certain form
and proportion of vaulting and abutment had
been invested with such peculiar sanctity that
it would have been impious to vary from it
henceforth in any essential particular, deco-
ration would have at once assumed the first
instead of the subordinate place in the archi-
tecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies; and, instead of a series of nameless
masons and master-builders, we should have
had a catalogue of individualities as illustrious
and specific as that which confers its peculiar
personal interest on the history of the Renais-
sance.
Now as to the evidences of the personal


154 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
character of Renaissance art, although the
classic formula was set up and accepted as
absolute authority in the fifteenth century,
although it has been used with veneration for
nearly five centuries up to the present time,
and although every architect since Palladio,
designing in the style of the Renaissance, has
intended above all things to be correct in his
use of this simple type, and to build according
to the Italian taste, the result has been, not
monotony, not cold and colorless uniformity,
but a variety of expression elsewhere unknown
in architecture. In studying these variations
as they are exhibited in the buildings of the
Renaissance up to the present day, we shall
find that they are not capricious or accidental;
there was one class of variations in France,
one in England, one in Germany, one in
Spain, one in Holland, one in Italy. These
distinctions of class are easily recognizable:
they follow natural laws, they interpret na-
tional temperament or genius by a visible
demonstration. Thus the French Renaissance
abounds in elegant variety; it is nearly always
refined, delicate in detail, and full of feeling
and animation. The English Renaissance is
for the most part unimaginative and heavy,
feeble in invention, prosaic and cold; but it


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 155
was not without its single era of great and
original development at the hands of Wren
and his followers after the London Fire. The
German follows the French at a great distance;
where it has not been merely imitative, its
principal characteristic has been hard correct-
ness and pedantry, purified and enlightened,
however, in the beginning of the nineteenth
century, by the Greek revival of Schinkel and
Klenze. The Spaniard handled the orders
with great freedom, and overlaid them with
a sort of barbaric and ungrammatical splen-
dor, which is almost Oriental in its profusion
and color. The Dutch variation was homely
and honest, like the people. But in Italy,
the natural birthplace of the Renaissance,
Vignola, Seilio, Palladio, Bramanti, Scamozzi,
first taught the world how true artists, hold-
ing alike to a rigid formula, could invest it
with purity and delicacy; how they could be
correct without dullness, precise without ped-
antry, poetic without license. These were the
earlier Italian developments; the later masters,
betrayed by the contortions of Borromini, the
undisciplined inventions of Bernini, the coarse
magnificence of Michael Angelo, lost their
purity in profusion, and vulgarized the type
in their passion for grandeur. Still the Ital-


156 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
ians were always the true masters of the
Renaissance, and the rest of Europe went to
school to them. But we have seen that though
the architects of France, England, and Germany
tried to imitate the Italian manner, they were
always French, English, and German; the
national spirit betrayed them. All the forces
of art were united in the desire to make the
revised classic forms cosmopolitan. They
studied the same authorities, learned by heart
the same formulas of proportion, copied the
same monuments, but failed in their efforts to
make a universal architecture. Indeed, there
was not only a national impress left upon their
works, but no two architects of the same
nation could produce similar work. Each
interpretation had a character of individual-
ity ; the phenomenon remains true to this day.
A late writer very happily said that "archi-
tecture tells us as much of Greece as Homer
did, and of the Middle Ages more than has
been expressed in literature. Yet," he adds,
"it has been silent since the thirteenth cen-
tury." This latter proposition is after the
dogmatic fashion prevalent in modern English
criticism, following Mr. Ruskin, the most elo-
quent, the most fascinating, the most illogical,
of all writers upon architecture. It is equiva-


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 157
lent to saying that the personal equation in
modern architecture, rendered necessary by the
adoption of a formula as the basis of design,
has prevented the art from exercising its nat-
ural function as an evidence of contemporary
history, as it did when design was confined to
the development of a theory of construction,
in the series of Greek temples and mediaeval
cathedrals. The fact is that architecture,
whether personal or impersonal, cannot be
forced away from this function, even by the
most determined exercise of the modern priv-
ilege of masquerading in the trappings of old
forms of art. Indeed, it is sufficiently evident
that this very personal character imposed upon
architecture by the conditions of the Renais-
sance, in rendering it more sensitive to impres-
sions of environment, has made it a more
accurate exponent of the quality of the
civilization which produced it than has been
the case with any form of impersonal art, the
characteristics of which must be largely due
to its own internal forces and structural con-
ditions. While the development of structure
depends upon science, that of ornament is
poetic, and, like all poetry, must be an ex-
pression of contemporaneous civilization, as
the poetry of Homer, of Virgil, of Horace, of


158 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
Dante, of Chaucer or Milton, of Moliere or
Beranger, of Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson
or Whitman, indicates respectively a condition
in the progress of our race. Each is a pro-
duct of its own especial era, and would have
been impossible in any other. . '-'it is therefore
not so much its structural as its decorative
element which makes the metropolitan cathe-
dral a reflection of the mediaeval life which
swarmed about the market-place under its
shadows, or entered its porches with banners.
But if we survey the progress of mediaeval
French architecture from the time of Philip
Augustus in 1180 to that of Charles VII. in
1422, — from St. Bernard of Clairvaux to Joan
of Arc, though in this era more than sixty
cathedrals of the first class were built, involv-
ing an expenditure of more than $500,000,000
in our money (an activity in building oper-
ations hardly surpassed in history), — we
shall find that no monarch and no court was
able to impress upon it any characteristic
which would enable us to distinguish any one
phase of its progress as the style of Louis VIII.
the Lion, of Louis IX. the Saint, of Philip III.
the Hardy, of Philip IV. the Fair, of Charles
V., VI., or VII. There are no such styles;
the art of these reigns was an evolution of


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 159
forces, and, as such, it was an impersonal art.
No phase of this evolution is identified by the
name of a sovereign, even as a matter of
convenience in nomenclature, for by its nature
it could not submit to the caprices of any
court.
On the other hand, when architecture had
ceased to be a structural evolution, and was
based upon a formula of pilasters and entab-
latures, enclosing imposts and arches, decora-
tion or ornament assumed a function until then
unknown,1 and there was a distinctive style
corresponding to the character of each reign,
often contrasting with curious abruptness.
Thus we recognize a style of Francis L, free,
elastic, poetic, romantic; of Henry IV., bold,
coarse, grotesque; of Louis XIV., full of
grandeur without, of pomp and splendor
within (Viollet-le-Duc has called it "the new
Renaissance "); of Louis XV., frivolous, licen-
tious, ostentatious, rococo; of Louis XVI.,
decent, orderly, pure to prudishness; of the
First Empire, a theatrical display of imperial
1 " Strip a chapel of the fifteenth century of its orna-
mental adjuncts," says Symonds in his Renaissance in Italy,
"and an uninteresting shell is left. What, for instance, would
the facades of the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni he
without their sculptured and inlaid marbles?" The Fine
Arts, p. 80.


160 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
Roman properties, meagre and tarnished; of
the Second Empire, elegant hut profuse
and luxurious, drawing its motifs from every
historical source, but harmonizing them with
a fastidious, academical spirit, not unconscious
of the purifying and ennobling influence of
the newly discovered Greek principles of art, —
a style of to-day, too near to us to be recog-
nized now in just perspective, but for which
our French contemporaries will be held re-
sponsible in the next century. So there is a
style of Elizabeth, of the Stuarts and Tudors,
of Mary, of Anne, of the Georges, and
of Victoria. So, also, in Spain, the enthu-
siasm, the efflorescent splendor and pride, of
Ferdinand and Isabella and of Charles I. are
clearly expressed in the joyous and sunny
exuberance of the architecture of their times.
But in the time of Philip II. there was
promptly substituted for this brilliant mani-
festation a cold, academical formalism, in full
sympathy with his iron rule.
This astonishing display of sympathy is
rendered possible by the fact that the archi-
tecture of these eras must necessarily be sat-
urated with the subjective personality of the
architects, in order to its proper adjustment to
the spirit of the times. In fact, the compo-


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 161
sition of ornament, like the composition of
poetry, cannot be evolved from theory alone;
neither can exist in definite shape save by
virtue of the individual character, attributes,
and mental equipment of the author, as they
are affected by the era in which he lives. It
is his genius which confers upon it all its
specific quality. It is his knowledge, his train-
ing, his convictions, his taste, which so adjust
ornament to a formula of proportion as to
confer upon it especial character and interest.
It is true that a large part of Renaissance
ornament, as of all architectural ornament, is
conventional. The enrichment of the orders
is obtained not only by the imaginative arts
of sculpture and painting, which must neces-
sarily be infused with personal genius like a
poem, but by ornament of convention, which
is common property, i. e. certain types of or-
nament applied by general acceptance to the
decoration of the mouldings and other details
of the orders; but it is also obtained by a cer-
tain hardihood in varying their proportions.
But the use of conventional ornament im-
plies choice, discretion on the part of the
architect, and these are only personal quali-
ties; and the variation of the proportions is
an appeal to his powers of invention, corrected


162 THE PERSONAL EQUATION.
by his academic training, by his knowledge of
precedent, and by his artistic feeling. If an
ignorant man plays with proportions, the
result is inevitably disgrace and vulgarity.
Without technical training, he can produce
successful results only by an abnegation of
himself, and is only acceptable when he fol-
lows the classic formula with unimaginative
fidelity. It is only the scholar who can handle
his orders with freedom. The advancement
of archaeological learning, the accumulation
and accessibility of architectural precedent,
in making it impracticable to the modern
architect to build better than he knows, have
inevitably forced him into an increasing de-
gree of self-consciousness in his work, and,
in depriving it of the grace of innocence and
naivete, have made it a more sensitive index
of his individuality.
It is evident, therefore, that the present
and future architecture of all civilized na-
tions must, unlike that of all primitive
peoples, express, not so much the natural
man as the artificial or conscious man,—
the man of learning and of resources which
have been gathered together out of the past,
and distilled in the alembic of his own per-
sonality. The picturesque and romantic days


THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 163
of an impersonal architecture will return no
more; but the art, in the future as in the past,
whether personal or impersonal, must continue
to embody the essential parts of the history
of the human intellect.


J
i THE ROYAL CHATEAU OF BLOIS,
AN EXAMPLE OF ARCHITECTURAL EVIDENCE IN THE
HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION.
In the Chateau of Blois, as it exists to-day,
are brought together three clear and brilliant
architectural expressions, each developed from
a distinct era in the history of mankind.
These expressions are so characteristic and so
connected as to invite a comparative study of
them, with a view to showing, by an analysis
of this monument, how architecture may be
used as an evidence of civilization. In mak-
ing this attempt, I am not without hope that,
though confined within limits too brief for an
entirely adequate exposition, I may be able to
illustrate the intimate and inevitable con-
nection which must exist between any genu-
ine and unaffected demonstration of archi-
tecture and the especial conditions of that
phase of the history of humanity which pro-
duced it, and of which it must be an expouent.
I hope to be able in this way to show that
architecture, instead of being an art of pure


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 165
convention, the full appreciation of which can-
not be obtained without a comprehension of
certain technical qualities inaccessible to any
but trained intelligences, has really taken
shape and style coincidently with the pro-
gress of mankind; that it is an essential part
of that progress, and has been closely de-
pendent on it for all those qualities which
give it value in art. It is therefore an art
of humanity, and may be read like an open
book.
The traditions of this stronghold go back
to the time of the Romans. But all construc-
tions previous to the thirteenth century have
either been entirely obliterated, or. have been
buried in the mass of the more modern walls.
Of the work of the thirteenth century there
remain, on the north corner of the quadrangle,
the great mediaeval hall of the castle of the
counts of Blois, divided in two by a central
range of arches, each half of the hall having
a barrel vault; and, in the west corner of the
pile, the lower parts of the round tower,
called du Moulin. All other work of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been
destroyed, or imbedded in the foundations and
converted into crypts and dungeons.
This early mediaeval work has no value


166 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
from an architectural point of view. But
it contains sufficient evidence that the lives
spent by the immediate predecessors of Louis
XII. in these rude chambers, with their nar-
row stairs and tortuous communications, and
in these dark groined galleries, must have
been coarse, gloomy, and meagre, full of lurk-
ing suspicions and baleful secrets, when com-
pared with those led by the later households
of royalty, upon whom the bright influence
of the revival of learning had been shed
through open windows, and whose intelligence
had been quickened by the tales of Boccaccio,
and refined by the poems of Dante, Petrarch,
and Ariosto.
It will be observed, on examining the gen-
eral plan of the chateau in its present condi-
tion, that it consists of three wings, so dis-
posed with their subordinate pavilions as
nearly to inclose a cour d'honneur in the
form of a distorted quadrangle, this irregular-
ity being the most conspicuous and character-
istic bequest left to the new structures by the
old mediaeval castle. The northeast side of
this court was built by Louis XII. at the end
of the fifteenth century; the northwest side,
by Francis I. in the middle of the sixteenth
century; and the southwest side, by Francois








THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 167
Mansart, who in 1635 began to build this
wing as the palace of Gaston d'Orleans,
after having overthrown the buildings of the
fifteenth century which had occupied that
part of the site. The southeast side is par-
tially formed by the chapel of St. Calais,
which is a part of the wing of Louis XII.;
the constructions which formerly completed
the inclosure on this side, and which be-
longed partly to Louis XII. and partly to
Gaston d'Orleans, having been lately swept
away.
The whole castle, having been nearly ruined
by neglect, pillage, and revolutions, has been
restored in the interest of monumental history
for the French government by M. Duban, who
seems to have performed his difficult and ex-
acting task with prudence and archaeological
exactness. At all events this learned architect
has left here three distinct masses of building,
in which the capable eye may read much of
the history of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and
seventeenth centuries.
We present herewith illustrations of the two
fagades of the wing of Louis XII., the one
facing outward on the Place du Chateau, and
the other inward on the court.
^ The earliest experiments elsewhere in France





THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 169
then for the first time felt in France, and of
acclimatizing in that country a style associated
with the more advanced civilization of Italy.
The building is in black and red brick,
arranged in faint patterns, combined with
light stone. It has a high purple slate roof,
conspicuous chimneys, beautifully studied dor-
mers, both large and small, and much lead
flashing about the dormers and chimneys and
on the crests, this metal work being richly
decorated in gold and colors with the insig-
nia of Louis and Ann, — the porcupine, the
knotted cord, the fleur-de-lis, and the ermine.
The details of this building bear all the
evidences of a late development of a style
long practiced by a highly gifted race of na-
tive builders, — a style which, though it owed
its existence and its essential characteristics to
ecclesiastical conditions, was clearly under-
going an interesting and highly picturesque
process of secularization. The fenestration is
adjusted less to satisfy considerations of sym-
metry than to the most convenient service of
the apartments. The general disposition of
the mass is stately, formal, temperate, and
composed; but in detail it is picturesque and
ornate to a very high degree, and very intelli-
gently and thoroughly studied. The moral


170
THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
influence of the renaissance of learning must
have been most powerful in being able to
supplant with its architectural formulas a na-
tive style so rich, so highly organized, and so
full of capacity for expression. The wing of
Louis XII. represents, indeed, the very high-
est point reached by the pure domestic archi-
tecture of the Gothic period, and indicates
that even in those troubled times there existed
a clear ideal of tranquil security for private
life. Possibly this architecture is its last
expression; for it is evident that the style has
been enriched, and perhaps to a certain extent
sophisticated, by accumulations of ingenious
precedents developed from its own conditions.
Yet, even in an example so late as this, there
is a sufficiency of daring and original design,
which is indulged in without straining the
resources of the style in the least degree.
The great gateway entrance to the cour d'hon-
neur, flanked by its rich engaged shafts sup-
porting the conventional Gothic framework
and canopy of the famous niche, wherein,
against a rich background sown with fleur-de-
lis, rides in state the king upon his charger;
the little sally-port beside the gate, to provide
for which with such naivete and grace classic
art might be challenged in vain; the stone



CHATEAU OF BLOIS: THE WING OF LOBIS XII. MAIN ENTRANCE
OF EXTERIOR FACADE


• •
• • •








174 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
It would be evident to him, in the first place,
that this architectural demonstration, as it
gives every indication of fluency and ease of
expression and has none of the crudeness of ex-
periment, must be the unaffected language of
a people inspired by a native aptitude and
fondness for art; that this architecture had
gradually assumed new qualities and capacities
in sympathy with improved conditions of life;
that, as it is fundamentally different from any
other contemporaneous style, it was essentially
a native and not a foreign growth, was
thoroughly imbued with the national spirit,
and that it was therefore a free art, intelligible
to all, and not to the learned only. The
student sees before him a work which cannot
possibly be sporadic, exceptional, or accidental,
but one which could only exist as the latest
expression of a living art, indicating by its
open and hospitable treatment, and by the
delicacy of its detail, that a gentler and more
domestic life had begun to take the place of
those feudal conditions, out of which an archi-
tecture of defense and defiance had been de-
veloped, — an architecture of vast frowning
and windowless walls, of battlements, barbican
towers, and deep moats. The native grace of
expression, which in the earlier stages of its


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 175
growth in profane architecture had a tendency
to a certain grimness of humor, to an unre-
strained play of grotesquerie, often coarse, but
full of life and power, had here begun to
submit to a sentiment of decent reserve and
order, in harmony with the manners and
customs of a higher civilization. A national
architecture of this sort, an unaffected growth
from local conditions, is not one to yield
promptly to the suggestions of passing fash-
ions or tastes; it is too happily adjusted to the
conditions of contemporary life to be made
the plaything of fortune. If the court, at the
time of the building of the wing of Louis XII.,
found itself more or less preoccupied by Italian
classic literature, pictures, statues, and furni-
ture, it was hardly yet prepared to quote the
revived classic upon the walls of the king's
palace.
Though the mediaeval style had been ex-
clusively used for three centuries and a half
and was hampered by the limitations of feudal
life or preoccupied by religious emotions, the
ingenuity and inborn artistic spirit of the
French builders had, up to the close of the
fifteenth century, when domestic life was be-
coming more secure, succeeded in developing,
out of these mediaeval elements, a secular


176 THE CHATEAU OF BLOTS.
architectural system, which, though it had
begun perhaps to show some signs of fatigue,
though it had been somewhat strained, per-
haps, in the efforts to meet the exactions of a
larger and more complicated ideal of living,
and, like all styles, in their later stages
of development, had lapsed into an over-
refinement and effeminacy of lace-like de-
tail, was still very beautiful, instinct with
flamboyant life, and capable of reasonable ex-
pansion on certain lines. Certainly this work
of Louis XII. of Blois was neither moribund
nor decrepit.
The student turns to the wing of Francis I.,
and finds that, though there is a strong con-
sanguinity between the two masses of struc-
ture, they are differentiated most emphatically
by the prevalence of classic feeling in the
latter, while in the wing of Louis XII. there
is absolutely no trace of this feeling. No one,
he thinks, can study the wing of Louis XII.
without seeing that there was no crying need
for reform. Some other impulse, therefore,
than mere architectural necessity must have
caused this sudden divergence of style.
Between the completion of the wing of
Louis XII. and the beginning of that of
Francis I. (really less than fifty years), there


178
THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
which came out of the immemorial East.
The best fruits of the first discovery were
hardly ready to be gathered until nearly three
centuries had elapsed ; the fruits of the second
were even then ripening. In analyzing the
wing of Francis I. at Blois, we shall discover
one of its most prolific and most beautiful
manifestations.
This consummate building seemed to belong
to a period in history when the forces of civi-
lization were undergoing an evolution, lead-
ing mankind from darkness to light, from
childhood to maturity, from mystery, romance
and chivalry to science and investigation, to
letters and commerce, if not finally toward
the ideal condition of universal peace and the
established happiness of the race. Architec-
ture was becoming conscious of itself; it was
beginning to lose its old grace of innocence,
and to assume a new grace of knowledge.
This building expressed a phase of this
development. To study it as an example of
a new fashion in art is to disregard its far
more potent function as an exponent of the
history of humanity at the moment of its
most important transition.
When the skeptic, inquisitive light of the
Renaissance began to penetrate with fuller


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 179
effulgence into the dark recesses of the six-
teenth century, the secular life of the times
experienced a very marked enlargement; it
was in fact, more than an emancipation from
the bonds of mediaevalism, it was a re-birth of
the mind, and the revised classic forms from
Italy at length presented themselves to the
awakened intelligences of these children of
art, not as representing an ancient style of
architecture, to be quoted with respect and
fidelity, but as an essential part of an intel-
lectual revelation, and as a means of express-
ing their glad consciousness of enfranchise-
ment with a far more adequate and copious
vocabulary than had been furnished them by
the cramped traditions of the cloisters.
If this new life, this sudden dawn of the
modern era of civilization, needs a clearer evi-
dence than is supplied by the general history
of this bright period of transition, this evi-
dence may be discovered at the chateau of
Blois in the characteristic contrasts between
the work of Louis XII. and that of Francis I.
The dates, as we have seen, are less than fifty
years apart, but these fifty years were far
better than "a cycle of Cathay." We can
see here, not merely a change of fashion, dic-
tated by the desire for novelty for its own


180 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
sake, but an architectural demonstration of a
great mental revolution, affecting all the
springs of human action. It is, in fact,
the most astonishing symbol of emancipation
ever presented in the language of art, — first,
because it was unconscious, unaffected and
sincere; and second, because it was no mere
perfunctory repetition of the established and
venerable formulas of the classic orders of
architecture, but a translation of them, with-
out any hesitation of doubt, into a new archi-
tectural system, precisely reflecting the spirited
and intelligent independence of the French
artists. Nothing could be more insubordi-
nate, and at the same time more joyous and
triumphant. The architecture of Francis I.
had but little in common with the work of
the contemporaneous Italian masters, but its
insubordination was not the insubordination
of ignorance or barbaric license; for, though
it disregarded the established types, its ex-
uberance was not disorderly, and its brilliancy
was refined and consistent. It was Gothic in
its freedom from classic symmetry and re-
straint ; it was classic in its quick and intuitive
comprehension of the true spirit of the deco-
rative architecture of the Romans.
These audacious artists of the sixteenth


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 181
century, whose names even are unknown to
us, hurried along, as it were, by the swift
current of those wonderful fifty years of
intellectual regeneration, seemed by some
instinct of sympathy to understand, better
than any of their successors up to the
present time, that the Romans had used the
Greek orders, not as an expression of con-
struction, as the Greeks did, but of decoration,
having no essential relation to construction;
that the development which the classic orders
had enjoyed from Augustus to Diocletian had
been a development in an entirely different
direction from that which they would have
experienced if the Romans had continued to
use the Greek post and lintel as the basis of
their system of building, instead of the arch
and concrete vault, to which the orders had
been applied as a mere decorative envelope.
They seemed by intuition to comprehend that
the orders had therefore gradually changed
from the virginal purity and fastidious deli-
cacy of the Greeks to the magnificent sensual
redundance and ostentation of the Romans,
reflecting in this way the character of the
conquering race; and that as this system of
architectural forms, unlike any other system
before or since, had indefinitely expanded and


184 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
sions of the wing of Louis XII., and formed
a part of the accommodation provided for
the court of that monarch. The part lying on
the other side of this wall, toward the cour-
d'honneur, belongs to Francis I., by whom the
old part of the wing was remodelled and
furnished with a new outside facade.
The fagade on the interior court shows
that the lessons in the classic styles given by
the great Italian masters, who were enter-
tained by the court like princes and am-
bassadors of art, were received by the native
artists with intelligence and respect, but were
not learned by rote. These lessons were assim-
ilated, but not accepted as laws. - We have
here a truly Gothic irregularity of fenestra-
tion. The windows of the basement have but
little vertical coincidence with those of the
two superimposed . stories. The former are
each flanked by short pilasters, supporting a
string course, which is a line of demarkation
between the inferior order and that of the
important system of pilasters which decorate
the two stories above, and which have no
essential relation with those standing beneath
them. The greater order of pilasters is irreg-
ularly spaced so as to have a constant relation
with the windows ; for the intelligent builders








THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 185
immediately understood that these features, as
used by the Romans, had a decorative and not
a structural function. There is an entablature
or string course between the two principal
stories, dividing the pilasters belonging to
each into two superimposed orders. The
wall face is crowned by a great cornice and
balustrade of excessive richness; in this
balustrade, for the conventional cuspidated
Gothic open work of the corresponding bal-
ustrade in the wing of Louis XII., is substi-
tuted an open work composed of the royal
initials F (crowned), and C for Claude, the
queen, entangled with the knotted cord.
Above, half hidden, is a range of lucarnes
strangely contrasting with their Gothic neigh-
bors, and, though uttered in a pagan tongue,
as it were, quite as rich and poetic as those
which were expressed in the vernacular.
Each is crowned by a Cupid in a canopied
niche, which is flanked by flying consoles,
ramping from highly embellished pinnacles,
and the whole is relieved against an enormous
slate roof with massive grouped chimneys.
The blank panels of the wall contain each
the king's salamander, crowned.
The general effect is as studied and refined,
and essentially as classic, as any contempora-


186 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
neous work in Italy; indeed, much of the
decoration in the panels of the pilasters is
identical with that 9t Italy. The differences
are not differences of caprice, of ignorance, or
carelessness ; there is nothing savage, raw, or
grotesque in them, such as occurred in the
earlier attempts at Gaillon, Ecouen, or even in
the Tuileries, and such as distinguish the con-
temporary attempts at classic by Henry VIII.
and those of his immediate successors in Eng-
land. The correct orders, brilliantly set forth
by the scrupulous and finely pointed pencils of
the trained Italian gentlemen, finished with
the regular formulated details of architraves,
frieze, and cornice, and exquisitely embellished
with all the delicate resources of their art,
instructed but did not dazzle the^French
masters. The alertness of their minds, the
independence of their genius, their instinctive
impatience of scholastic restraints, their facility
in the invention of ornament, developed from
the absolute models set before them a new art,
never seen before. They converted the old
cornice of defense into a cornice of most
delicate beauty. The coarse corbels which
supported it were replaced by elegant classic
modillions, and the black machicolations be-
tween them, through which the defenders of


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 187
the castle poured missiles and boiling oil upon
the besiegers below, beca ne a series of deli-
cately moulded arches, and each enshrined
a shell; beneath was a rich bed of dentils
and minor mouldings; above was a powerful
Gothic overhanging and undercut moulding,
interrupted by gargoyles.
"Peace hath her victories,
No less renown'd than war,"
and architecture crowns the triumphs of the
gentler dispensation with beauty.
But yesterday these builders had found in
the freedom of their old GothifcHt language as
copious as they needed, in which to express
the spirit of the times; %ut when the Italians
presented them with a new set of motifs and
a new theory of design, belonging to the
new learning, and a part of the brilliant "mani-
festations of the revived classic art, these
unknown and unnamed masters of living style
received the pilasters, architraves, friezes, cor-
nices, pediments, and consoles of the Renais-
sance, and treated them with the same joyous
and ingenious liberty as they had been accus-
tomed to use when their language was a
language of moulded chamfers, carved labels,
and cuspidated tracery. They sang their old
songs in the new tongue, but with a grace of





THE CHATEAU OF BLOTS. 189
ation of this cornice is entirely justified here;
nothing less would have been sufficent. This
feature of the fagade, which might have chal-
lenged criticism under other circumstances,
thus seems to be quite condoned. The ver-
tical mass of these piers, which, in plan,
radiate like buttresses from a common central
point, is divided into two sections by horizon-
tal mouldings, marking the line of the third
story floor; they are furnished with bases and
sculptured capitals. In a niche upon the lower
part of the face of each of these piers stands
a beautifully executed female figure upon a
corbel and beneath a pinnacled canopy, en-
riched with the most playful fancies of Gothic
imagination, expressed in the terms of a new
art. All these features are set on lines paral-
lel with the cornice and base. With these the
horizontal elements of the design cease. Every
other feature ramps with the gentle ascent of
the stairs, thus encased. Richly carved bal-
conies, arranged on these sloping lines, are
carried from pier to pier, coincident with the
sweep of the stairs, stopping against the re-
turns of the piers and near their face. Deeply
recessed between each pair of piers, and be-
neath each of these balconies, is a raking
beam supported by richly carved pilasters.


190 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
Above the cornice line, this unprecedented
composition finishes with an attic order, bear-
ing a decorated entablature, of which the
vertical elements are strongly emphasized, and
a balustrade. Every panel, large and small,
bears the royal insignia, the crowned F and the
crowned salamander.
A design so bold as this, so beautiful in its
detail, so original, handling the classic formu-
las with such easy confidence, is certainly an
astonishing piece of work to be executed by
the children of the carvers who achieved the
Gothic building of Louis XII. only fifty years
before; but the latter constructed the great
vaulted staircase in the corner of the interior
court. The skill required to do that, when
applied to this new and much more difficult
problem, needed to be supplemented by a rare
quality of artistic inspiration, sympathy, and
excitement to make such an achievement
possible. By some purists this staircase has
been called "a plaything." In fact it is a
useless chef-d'oeuvre, which never could have
been built in a settled and serious age; but
the joyous new birth and enfranchisement of
the mind, which were then filling all the cor-
ners of Christendom with inspiration and light,
could not have their due record in architecture
with any less ebullient demonstration.


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 191
Turning now to the renowned outer fagade
of this wing, we recall that it is a mere
superficial facing, upon a construction of the
previous century, and that the whole composi-
tion started from the necessity of establishing
a communication, around the outside of the
round mediaeval Tour du Moulin, between the
great mass of buildings forming the south-
west wing and that of the northwest wing.
This gallery of communication took the form
of an envelope of arches in two stories, with a
projecting bay, all the arches being separated
by engaged columns, whose circular form and
vertical lines are carried upward from bottom
to top without interruption, after the Ro-
manesque manner. Subsequently these orders
were extended for six bays northward, pilas-
ters being substituted for engaged columns,
and wide three-centred arches taking the place
of the narrow round arches. At a still later pe-
riod the orders were extended six bays further
toward the north, segmental arches taking
the place of the three-centred ones, used in
the previous section. In this way the whole
of the fagade was at length enveloped. The
roof is supported in the Italian manner by
columns free-standing above the pilasters
underneath, thus furnishing a continuous pro-


192 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
tected passage-way connecting the apartments
in the roof. Near the centre this continuity
is interrupted by a stone dormer in two stories
with gable and tall finials.
One great secret of the successful effect of
this noble composition lies in the fact that
the French builders had not yet quite thrown
off their mediaeval disregard of absolute
symmetries and repetitions. The two orders
of the loggia are not arranged according to
any mathematical and geometric system of
correspondence and contrasts. They are not
academical in their dispositions. They have
never been set down in text-books as examples
for study. The old Gothic spirit of liberty,
restrained from license by the instinct of art,
prevails from one end to the other of this
facade. The loggias grew into place subject
in their details to accidents and to adjustments
of new forms to old conditions. It would be
unprofitable and inartistic to explain these
differences of treatment, or to attempt to
give a reason for them. This is the business
of the archaeologist. It is sufficient to say
here that these variations of treatment do not
result in an effect of careless picturesqueness.
The composition is essentially an expression of
unity of the highest quality. Its variety does





194 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
nation to a noble architectural motif, would
be an affectation which would inevitably be-
tray its author.
The vast basement of the old mediaeval
structure develops at the northern end a
series of round arched coupled windows, each
pair collected under a single arch. The an-
cient substructure is a massive battering wall,
growing out of the steep natural slopes of the
hill, upon which the mighty fabric stands.
Out of this battering surface a series of ver-
tical piers or buttresses is gradually disen-
gaged, each sustaining a pilaster of the super-
structure; each pilaster breaking through the
horizontal lines of entablature, creates, from
foundation to roof, a system of vertical lines,
relieving the composition from that predomi-
nance of the horizontal motif which would
have robbed it of its movement, and given to
it a ponderous majesty, like that of the great
amphitheatres at Rome or Verona. Indeed,
the contrast in character between the antique
arcades and those of this sixteenth century
movement is full of significance when consid-
ered in their relations to the history of the
mind.
The first and second stories of loggias are
connected, the former with the apartments of


THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS. 195
the queen, and the latter with those of the
king. To provide for the proper lodgment of
the royal pair, the splendid equipment of the
interior chambers must have an adequate pala-
tial expression on the exterior. To this end
the series of loggias is broken in four places,
unequally distributed, by the projection of
two octagonal oriels, near the north end, cor-
belled out from diagonally placed piers of
the root-like substructure, and finishing with
carved balconies on the level of the first
loggias; the other two are in the form, one
of a rich corbelled balcony, and the other,
developed from the queen's chamber, in the
form of a delicate oriel with a domical roof,
thus reaching a higher level than the others.
In short, the succession of deep bays is broken
by numerous accidental irregularities of detail,
not only without affecting the majestic unity
and repose of the whole, but conferring upon
it a charm of picturesqueness, which relieves
it from the evil of monotonous and mechani-
cal uniformity.
The mellowed tones of the masonry on the
front are offset by the rich colors bestowed
upon the decorations of the deep jambs of
the loggias, and the outside world is thus per-
mitted to have an exterior suggestion of the


THE CHATEAU OF BLOTS. 197
spiration was the genius of the times in which
they lived. They were not engaged in an
amusing experiment of self-culture with a new
set of architectural forms; they were not con-
sciously practicing with a new theory of es-
thetics; but they were, as artists, sensitive to
all the strange movements in the world around
them — movements such as never before had
stirred the minds and hearts of the nation.
This complete development of a new style
within less than half a century could not have
arisen merely from the creative power or flex-
ible intelligence of the artists, who were the
agents in the quick transition, but must have
been due to the fact that they were sharing in
a new impulse of great moment pervading a
whole people, and awakening it into a condi-
tion of extraordinary intellectual excitement.
Classic art, under these circumstances, re-
vealed capacities of jubilant expression such
as the Italian masters appear never to have
suspected. Their renowned Certosa of Pavia,
with its boundless opulence of beautiful de-
tail, is perhaps the nearest approach they ever
made to such an expression; but it conveys
to the mind an idea rather of elegant prod-
igality, of refined and highly accomplished
artifice, kept strictly within the bounds of


200 THE CHATEAU OF BLOIS.
cannot be intelligently followed without re-
vealing alTthe essential processes and charac-
teristics of this evolution. No lesson is so
impressive as an object-lesson. The narrow
and gross restrictions of the intellectual life
of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries;
its aspirations and its growth in capacity for
refinement and elevation in the fifteenth; its
sudden and triumphant expansion and libera-
tion in the sixteenth; its firm establishment
on the basis of law and order in the seven-
teenth; all these vital and progressive move-
ments of humanity are recorded on the walls
of Blois in characters which can be easily
read by any mind open to the appeals of art.
If written history is distracted by episodes
and accidents, if it substitutes personalities
for principles, and is subjected to the moods
and prejudices of chroniclers, these uncon-
scious architectural evidences can always be
depended upon to correct and to simplify the
record, and to reveal the true spirit of the
times. Beneath the surface of the detestable
politics of the sixteenth century, beneath the
treacheries and assassinations with which the
pages of the historian are preoccupied, be-
neath the gossip and scandals of the court,
set forth by the inimitable Brantome, were the


THE CHATEAU OF BLOTS. 201
great fact of the Renaissance, and the glad
beginnings of modern civilization. The mon-
uments do not tell anecdotes of the eras when
they were built, or concern themselves with
personalities; but they were inspired by the
fundamental principles which were directing
the progress of mankind.


THE PEESENT STATE OF ARCHI-
TECTURE.
In a recent number of the London " Athe-
naeum" there appeared a review of a new
translation of Arabian poetry. A passage in
this review is worth quoting, because, in com-
menting on the conditions of civilization which
affect that form of art called poetry, it uses
language equally applicable to that other form
of art called architecture, and is thus uncon-
sciously significant of the close analogy ex-
isting between the various forms of art in
which man has expressed his higher emotions.
The passage, with a few verbal changes,
mainly in substituting the word " architecture"
and its derivatives for the word " poetry " and
its derivatives, is as follows : —
"The architecture of a people, who have
preserved their natural character and simpli-
city, and have so far learnt nothing from other
civilizations, must always possess a strong
fascination. As soon as the period of study
and learning arrives we obtain, indeed, forms


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 203
of architecture and poetry beautiful in them-
selves, and full of the thoughts and inventions,
the spirit and characteristics, of the best works
of many nations, but we lose the simplicity,
the unaffected naturalness, the fresh outlook
upon life and nature, which belong to prim-
itive races. The freshness and sincerity which
are exhibited in the architectural works of
such races arise from the fact that they
formed their style for themselves, with no
assistance from other nations, and developed
form naturally and out of necessity, with no
admixture of preconception derived from books
and study. They did not suffer from the
difficulties which beset the modern architect;
they had no models in other styles to teach
them to affect impressions which they did
not feel; there was no searching after origi-
nality with them, since the native and instinc-
tive ideas and forms of art had not been ex-
hausted in their time; and though they spared
no pains to attain the utmost degree of artistic
finish in their work, they were not ever striving
after the discovery of new motifs, or rare
combinations and tricks of design, to render
their work original and interesting."
This quotation may fairly introduce what I
have to say on the present conditions of archi-


204 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
tecture. It is impossible justly to study this
theme without constant comparison of the
attitude, functions, and methods of the archi-
tects who produced what we now recognize as
the historical styles, with those of the modern
architects, who, far more learned and versatile,
far better equipped, are contending with pro-
jects of building far more complex, in an
atmosphere infinitely less favorable to purely
artistic achievement.
The profession of architecture is now re-
proached because it has failed to establish "a
style," because it has not agreed upon a
system, because its followers do not move in
parallel lines onward towards a consummation
of art commensurate with our civilization, in
the same way that contemporaneous science
has moved towards the development of the
electric telegraph, of electric lighting, of the
telephone; because at our annual conventions
the president of the British or American In-
stitute of Architects is not able, like the
president of the National or International
Academy of Sciences, to report in his address
a definite and orderly progress of achievement.
But architecture is a fine art upon a basis
of science ; if it were a pure science we could
emulate the electrician, the geologist, the politi-


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 207
Byzantium; in a political conquest, perhaps,
like that of the Normans in England; in a
moral reform, like that of St. Bernard in
France; in an intellectual revival, like that of
the Renaissance in Italy ; or by the influence
of a brilliant court, like that of Elizabeth or
Louis XIV., demanding an especial expression
of splendor or triumph. And these new forms,
in their turn, were developed to completion by
the same processes of consecutive experiment
in a narrow field of enterprise, and consti-
tuted in each case a style, an exponent of
manners and customs, with a beginning, a
middle, and an end, between two brief eras of
doubt, called, in the history of art, eras of
transition. It is important to note that these
old styles disappeared and these new styles
arose, not in the modern manner by caprices
of fashion or by theories of aesthetics, but
because they followed unconsciously and in-
evitably corresponding changes in the historic
conditions of our race, and were a part of the
development of civilization.
Now in the modern architectural chaos
there appears to be a notable exception in
the work of the French people. In Paris,
archaeology and the theory of architecture are
taught in an official school of fine arts, which


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 209
correct, brilliancy, as in the Hotel de Ville,
of Paris, and the New Opera. If the archi-
tectural conventionalism which it fosters is
sometimes commonplace and monotonous, it
is always correct, never illiterate, and often
scholarly. If it disciplines individuality of
thought, so that the style, in the hands of in-
ferior artists, becomes unduly uniform and un-
interesting, it protects common work from the
dangerous vagaries of invention, and keeps it
pure. Originality is not sought after with the
feverish eagerness which must be the prevail-
ing characteristic of work done under a con-
dition of liberty. The school, in fact, is a
propaganda of faith in an arbitrary type of
art. While it narrows the range of expres-
sion, it encourages academic precision, fosters
beautiful invention in detail, and leads to a
study of ornament far more delicate and pre-
cious in its results than is elsewhere possible.
As a school for practice and education, it
therefore maintains a conspicuous advantage.
Viollet-le-Duc, with all his knowledge and
all his convictions, eloquently urged in favor
of a return to Greek and mediaeval methods
in design, was unable to create a successful
revolt from the national styles as established
under this official system. On the whole,


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 213
greater degree than that of any other nation.
It abounds in episodes of ingenuous and
gallant effort, now in one shape and now in
another, sometimes merely for the sake of
change, and sometimes for the sake of prin-
ciple. Not long ago, as has already been
noted in a previous essay, it became neces-
sary, in the interest of peace and quiet, to
exclude by formal by-laws the discussion of
the relative merits of classic and of Gothic
art in the societies. The profession in Eng-
land was divided into hostile camps by an
irrepressible conflict of architectural princi-
ples. The Gothicists, by the chance of war,
gained the day, and held the field undis-
puted for some forty years. This warfare,
however grotesque it may now appear to us,
who, by conviction and not by indifference,
have become catholic, bears witness to a sin-
cerity and zeal on pure questions of principle
in art, which are unparalleled in history.
Indeed, these are among the best fruits of
liberty.
The main characteristic of modern English
architecture consists in its series of revivals.
In the absence of academic taste, guided by
official schools, the architect is under the do-
minion of a prevailing fashion, which, while it


214 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
lasts, is as powerful as if promulgated by an
edict of government. He aims less to please
with old forms than to astonish with new.
Any strong mind or hand in the profession
fortunate enough to make a happy revival
of a style or phase of architecture, which
had until then been laid aside and forgot-
ten, establishes a starting-point for a host of
young imitators, who at length constitute a
school, numerously and enthusiastically fol-
lowed; and thus a fashion in design takes
possession of contemporary art and has its
run through a course of years, until some
other guiding spirit awakens a new revival
and makes a new fashion, which succeeds
until its capacity for producing novelty has
been exhausted. The movements which have
had the most enduring effect are the Greek
revival, the modern Italian revival, the Gothic
revival, the Queen Anne revival, the free
classic revival; and now we are awaiting the
manifestation of some master spirit who will
turn the development of English thought,
fatigued by these fruitless experiments, into
some new and unexpected channel of archae-
ology, or, perhaps, by a new theory of es-
thetics as applied to structure, direct it at last
into some really modern and more intelligent
field of effort in art.


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 215
It is a peculiarity of these successive experi-
ments that they are revivals of completed sys-
tems, of forms incapable of further progres-
sion. Viollet-le-Duc, as I have once before
noted, wisely remarked that a prosperous ca-
reer in art can start only from primitive types,
of which the powers of development are un-
exhausted by use. The practical effect of the
revival of a style which has had its era of
glory and its associations of history is to give
to the architect an opportunity to exhibit his
ingenuity in adapting old forms to new uses,
and to display a facility of quotation which
is often mistaken for genius, but which is
really little more than memory, cultivated
and effective indeed, leading him "to affect
impressions which he does not feel," but not
touching the springs of life in art. Mean-
while, the public are interested in it simply as
they are interested in any other new fashion,
not because it has in it the healthy breath of
life, but because it is in vogue, and has been
made reputable by architectural usage. Few
architects have courage or force enough not
to follow this usage. They are bound by it
hand and foot while it lasts, and its powers
are tested and strained to the uttermost limits
by being forced into service often unconge-
nial to its natural capacity.


216 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
It is very noteworthy that the greatest of
the English revivals, that of medieval art,
had its basis in an awakened conscience.
Pugin and Ruskin preached the gospel of
this revival; they asked for a return to the era
of truth in art; they asked that architectural
expression should be controlled by structure,
and that decoration should follow the methods
of nature. The Gothic revival is the only in-
stance in history of a moral revolution in art.
It is but fair to observe, however, that its long
continuance in English practice may be partly
attributed to that antiquarian spirit which has
kept the architects busy in preserving and re-
storing the historic monuments of mediaeval
England. On the other hand, the revival of
the style, called of Queen Anne, was a revo-
lution effected largely under the influence of a
literary sentiment. If the genius of Norman
Shaw struck the first blow, the genius of
Thackeray gave the movement inspiration and
character. Both revivals were patriotic, and
would have been impossible if not associated
with phases of English history. But neither
conscience, nor historic sentiment, nor patriot-
ism, can make art; they can give character and
variety, they can supply mo tifs, they can min-
ister to emotions and inspire poetry, but they


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 217
cannot make a style. Hence these English
fashions, which have had loud and sometimes
effective imitations in the practice of American
architects, have apparently had no permanent
influence in improving the practice of archi-
tecture either in England or here. They have
made dilettanti among the public and virtuosi
among the architects, but they have not cre-
ated artists. There is plenty of archaeology,
but no inspiration, in an architectural fashion
which is hampered by the necessity of strict
conformity. "Creation and preservation,"
said Sergeant Troy, "don't do well together,
and a million antiquarians can't invent a
style." The Gothic revival gave opportunity
for innumerable experiments; for many years
it preoccupied the minds of the Anglo-Saxon
people, and was ingeniously and sedulously
adapted to every possible habit of modern life
which could be ministered to by architectural
forms. But this adaptation, though the
writers have called its results "Victorian
Gothic," did not advance Gothic art one step
towards the creation of a modern English
style, because it did not develop any capacity
for expansion in this new service. Its potency
for new expressions was speedily exhausted
without satisfying the requirements of com-
r


218 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
mon sense or meeting the practical conditions
to which it was applied. It was replaced —
not, it is important to note, through any pro-
cess of logical succession, — by the accident
of the Jacobean, or Queen Anne, or free clas-
sic revival, which at every point was an
offense to the architectural morality engen-
dered by the preachments of Pugin and
Ruskin, and possibly a result of them, as
the license of Charles II. naturally followed
the rigid Puritanism of the Commonwealth.
This revival also is proving unsuccessful, be-
cause the capacities of the type had been al-
ready exhausted before the revivalist made
his first quotation. Neither of these types
permitted expansion or progress; and the re-
habilitations of them have proved to be
merely sterile incidents in the history of
modern architecture. They have not, so far
as we can see, furnished to the English civili-
zation of the nineteenth century any fitting
and adequate architectural expositions.
These revivals, as I have said, found a large
and by no means an unintelligent expression
in the United States. But the national genius
of our architects and their freedom from the
tyranny of historic precedent encouraged them
to a far wider range of experiment in archi-


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 219
tectural forms. Out of these experiments
hitherto there have as yet come no definite
promises for art. But the higher education
of the architect and the more exacting de-
mand for studied and grammatical expression
have in these latter days, especially in those
parts of the country where the higher civili-
zation obtains, already practically supplanted
the illiterate products of our earlier conditions
with better work. They have succeeded in
establishing a higher technical standard of
performance without loss of that quality of
intelligent liberty in which lie our greatest
hopes and our largest promise. The service
of our architectural schools is already amply
justified by its results. Their graduates have
spread abroad in Western as well as Eastern
States, and wherever they have had opportu-
nity of practice they have sown good seed,
and are steadily rendering obsolete the nor-
mal American types of raw and undisciplined
invention, of audacious exaggeration and
caprice. This is the first and most whole-
some step towards rational reform. We have
had good practice and experience in following
the English fashions, but here their reign has
never been undisputed. By the entire absence
of local traditions; by the entire absence of


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 221
nation, a nation of builders. No part of the
history of civilization is so various in its archi-
tectural expressions, good, bad, and indifferent,
as that of the American people. In quan-
tity, certainly, we have in a given time accom-
plished more in this field than any other peo-
ple. Our distinctive practical necessities, our
mechanical genius in the matter of building-
appliances, the nature of our building-mate-
rials, the exigencies of climate, the charac-
teristics of social life, and the invention of
new systems of structure, like the braced and
riveted steel frame, enveloped by terra cotta
or by masonry of brick or stone as a fire-proof,
have created certain corresponding distinctive
qualities in our architecture; but they have
not established as yet anything approaching
that coherent body of architectural forms
which constitutes a style.
The architect, in the course of his career,
is called upon to erect buildings for every
conceivable purpose, most of them adapted to
requirements which have never before arisen
in history. Practical considerations of struc-
ture, economy, and convenience preoccupy
his mind, and his purely and conventionally
architectural acquirements are subject to fre-
quent eclipse in practice. His great architec-


222 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
tural models often give him no hint, and stand
too far apart from modern sympathies and
use to serve him for inspiration and guidance.
Railway buildings of all sorts; churches with
parlors, kitchens, and society-rooms; hotels on
a scale never before dreamt of; public libraries,
the service of which is fundamentally different
from any of their predecessors ; office and mer-
cantile structures, such as no preexisting condi-
tions of professional and commercial life have
ever required; school-houses and college build-
ings, whose necessary equipment removes them
far from the venerable examples of Oxford
and Cambridge; skating-rinks, theatres, ex-
hibition buildings of vast extent, casinos, jails,
prisons, municipal buildings, music balls,
apartment houses, and all the other structures
which must be accommodated to the compli-
cated conditions of modern society, — these
force the architect to branches of study, to
which his books, photographs, and sketches
give him little direct aid. Out of these emi-
nently practical considerations of planning
must grow elevations of which the essential
character, if they are honestly composed, can
have no precedent in architectural history.
On the other hand, in the days when defi-
nite historical styles may be recognized, archi-


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 223
tecture was displayed in a comparatively
limited class of structures; thus, in the thir-
teenth century there were ecclesiastical build-
ings, a few town halls, and feudal castles
built for defence. This limitation kept prac-
tice within manageable boundaries and pre-
served the style from aberrations and perilous
experiment.
Even though a prevailing fashion or revival
may give a color of unity to contemporary
buildings erected under the conditions which
I have described, what wonder if there is the
most perplexing variety of architectural ex-
pression? What wonder if the superficial
critic, seeking for a characteristic type and
finding none, cries out that art is dead, that
there is no American style? What wonder if
he decries the American architect as a creature
withoutconvictions? In fact, the canons of
criticism, which guided the opinions of our
forefathers under narrower conditions, and
which led them to pronounce judgment with
the formulas "correct," or " not correct," are
no longer applicable. The art which of all
the fine arts is the only one dependent on
practical considerations must be a free art,
from the nature of the case. It cannot be
confined within the bounds of any historic


224 PRESENT STATE OF 'ARCHITECTURE.
styles and remain true to its functions; it can-
not meet the requirements of modern life in a
strait-jacket of antiquarian knowledge and
archaeological forms. The functions of the
critic have become far more difficult, and re-
quire a far more catholic, unprejudiced, and
judicial mind, a far wider range of knowledge
and sympathy, than could possibly grow up
under the teachings or examples of Vitruvius
or Palladio, Philibert de Lorme or Sir William
Chambers, Sir Christopher Wren or the broth-
ers Adam, Pugin or Ruskin, or any other
prophet or expounder of ancient principles,
with their rigid doctrines of exclusions and
their exact formulas of practice in design. It
is an era of experiment and invention, of
boldness and courage. Conscientious fidelity
to style in the merely archaeological sense no
longer leads to great and successful achieve-
ments, because the requirements of modern
buildings are far beyond its capacity. The
narrow city facade, crowded with necessary
windows, elbowed by uncongenial neighbors,
restricted by municipal regulations, with story
piled upon story, and the whole hanging over
a void filled with enormous sheets of glass, the
bete noir of architectural composition, is a de-
fiance to all rule and precedent in art. Iron


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 227
new work in architecture shows in some de-
gree the influence of this vigorous style. It has
the advantage of being an early, unfinished
and uncorrupted type, and it will be interest-
ing to see in what direction and to what end
its apparently unexhausted capacities will lead
us, by the course of constant and intelligent
experiment to which it is now subjected. But
these experiments are often open to the
charge of an affectation of barbarism and
heaviness inconsistent with our civilization.
They have, however, in the best hands, fairly
broken loose from the bonds of archaic prece-
dent in the style, and have already acquired
new elements with a tendency to that delicacy
and refinement which are necessary to satisfy
modern culture, and to that elasticity which is
essential to modern requirements. This revi-
val will cease to be a masquerade, and will be
in the healthy path of natural development,
as soon as it begins to show a capacity for a
more perfect adjustment to our material and
moral conditions. Whether it will succeed in
reaching this stage, or whether it will pres-
ently begin to fatigue by monotony and so fall
into disuse, there is no question that the ex-
periment is based upon sounder principles
than that of any other now under study.


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 229
This essay began with a quotation explain-
ing how the necessary equipment of the mod-
ern architect, his organized business appli-
ances, his library, his prints, his photographs,
his familiarity with the historic styles in all
their phases of development, glory, and de-
cline, his conscious aesthetics, — his study, in
short, has predisposed him to insincerity and
affectation, and prevented him from com-
peting on equal terms with the creators of
the great styles. There is another element of
difficulty which it is important to note. Our
predecessors, before the era of learning, had
the good fortune to be sustained by public
sympathy. Criticism they felt to be an active,
incessant, and intelligent force. There could
be no such thing among them as pedantry.
The language of art was a common language
which all understood; it was therefore used
with force, correctness, and discretion, and
broke naturally into poetry and song. The
result was that the builder designed, not bet-
ter than he knew, but under correction, and
with the knowledge that his efforts would be
appreciated at their full value; he was en-
couraged, surrounded, sustained, admonished,
and taught by public opinion. If, in this
atmosphere, he was a leader, it was solely by


230 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
force of genius working in common paths.
The people were all handiworkers. Fingers,
brains, and heart wrought together at the
forge, in the stone-cutter's yard, with the
weaver's shuttle, at the jeweler's bench, with
the carver's chisel, in the armorer's shop.
The mind of every artisan was prompt to
conceive, and his hand was quick to execute
variations of form in his own craft, to give
new interest and individuality to his work,
however humble. It was natural
Dass er im innern Herzen spiiret
Was er erschafft mit seiner Hand.
This constant exercise of intelligent inven-
tion made him sensitive to every expression of
art, and he was not indifferent when his breth-
ren, the masons or stone-carvers or painters
or workers in wood or metal or glass, united
their best individual handiwork in an archi-
tectural symphony. Under this pressure, with
this powerful correlation of forces behind, the
growth of definite architectural styles was in-
evitable.
It was no less inevitable, in the progress
of civilization, that labor-saving machinery
should take the place of handiwork; that
artisans should become mechanics or tenders
of machinery, in the products of which their


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 231
best qualities of mind and heart could have no
concern whatever. Thus the common artistic
instinct, which, in the aggregate, constituted
intelligent public sympathy in Athens, in
Ravenna, in the Isle de France, does not exist
in Manchester and New York. The archi-
tect is left to work out his problems alone,
"with difficulty and labor hard," unsustained
by appreciative recognition and criticism,
buried in the study of ancient precedent and
in the contemplation of theories of design.
The fundamental motive of his work is
changed, and the best results of his labors,
more or less affected by the pale cast of
thought, are set up in the public places in com-
plete silence. Criticism, if any, has become
indifferent and careless. The architect is
neither praised for his good points, nor
blamed for his bad. Few care whether they
are good or bad. They are not understood.
In this emergency the architects unite in
societies, for the sake of professional fellow-
ship and mutual encouragement. They form
a caste apart; they are no longer the leaders
and exponents of public sentiment and
thought in questions of art; no longer agents
in the development of a style. Not having
the correction, the stimulus, and assistance of


232 PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE.
public knowledge and interest to keep them in
a straight path of fruitful development, they
make devious excursions in new fields, they
"affect impressions which they do not feel,"
they masquerade in various capricious dis-
guises, all with the hope of astonishing the
ignorant and arousing the indifferent.
Under these circumstances, it is much to be
feared that the advance of the profession in
these modern days is, to a large extent, a pro-
gress of architecture into regions inaccessible
to the public. The most intelligent laymen
do not pretend to appreciate its motives or to
comprehend its results. But without their aid
architecture cannot advance.
The members of the profession have begun
to say one to the other, Let us cease this pro-
cess of fruitless sophistication; let us study
how we can excite intelligent interest. This
point once gained, we shall at length have
established a standard of performance which,
if advanced by us in our practice with wise
persistency and honest, straightforward en-
deavor, may at length give us a public whose
good opinion will be worth earning. We have
discovered that mere caprice, mere novelty, will
not answer. This may amuse the vulgar for
a while, but it makes the judicious grieve.


PRESENT STATE OF ARCHITECTURE. 233
When in our schools and in our practice we
can succeed in cultivating a fine artistic feeling
and in establishing really catholic ideals in
design without falling into dilettanteism or
into habits of mere imitation; when we can
use our knowledge of good examples, mod-
ern and ancient, so that it will not betray us
into quotations for the sake of quotations,
into conformity for the sake of conformity;
when we can work without caprice and de-
sign reasonably, so that every detail shall
be capable of logical explanation and defense,
without, detriment to a pervading spirit of
unity; when we can be refined without weak-
ness, bold without brutality, learned without
pedantry; when, above all, we can content
ourselves with simplicity and purity, and re-
frain from affectations; we shall have con-
quered the indifference of the people, and
shall have accomplished more than has yet
been done in modern England with all its
archaeology, or in modern France with all its
academical discipline, but we shall have done
no more than should result from an intelligent
use of our precious and unparalleled condition
of liberty in art.



DOORWAY OF ST. TKOPHEME AT AKLES





236 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
poetry's various moods. And yet, with one or
two possible exceptions, whenever the muse
does celebrate architecture, she seems to stoop
from her high career, and to be afflicted with a
paralysis either of the intellect or of the im-
agination, which leaves her unfit to express an
intelligible idea on the subject.
It is well known that no two architects who
have attempted to restore, on paper, the villa
Laurentinum of Pliny, by following the de-
tailed and elaborate description of it in his
famous letter to Gallus, have succeeded in pro-
ducing similar designs. Disraeli, in his " Curi-
osities of Literature," infers from this that it
is idle to indulge in architectural descriptions,
as they cannot succeed in presenting clear pic-
tures, and that the pen should not intrude on
the province of the pencil. But the question
is not so much one of description as of inter-
pretation. Architectural ideas and motifs ex-
cite in the minds of architects certain emotions,
which are rarely shared in their fullness by
the laity. But I hesitate to believe that it is
impossible for the pen to convey to the public at
least some part of these emotions. It seems
unreasonable that certain defined capacities of
delicate enjoyment should be in a condition of
permanent and hopeless atrophy in the minds


238 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
Sansovino, of the other masters of architecture,
ancient and modern, is no more a mere pedan-
tic display of technique than the work of
Mendelssohn, Beethoven or Wagner. The
art is not merely conventional or academic ; it
is essentially an expression of humanity in its
noblest and most God-like moods.
Under these circumstances, it is remarkable
that this magnificent and inspiring art is gen-
erally reduced by the poets to the subordinate
function of furnishing an indispensable back-
ground to the persons and movements of the
poem, and is referred to with certain common-
places of description which nearly always fail
to suggest the really essential values of the
theme, which betray either indifference or
ignorance as to fact, and which often present
impossibilities of form and structure. Sculp-
ture, painting, statues, tapestries, all often re-
ceive worthy recognition in verse, but the noble
shrine which incloses and protects them, for
which they were made and of which they are
a part, is passed by with a conventional epi-
thet, conveying to the mind no recognizable
image. In fact, the intrinsic qualities of
architecture seem, for the most part, to be in-
visible to the poets and inaccessible to their
sympathies. When they refer to a monument


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 239
of this art, it is generally to recall some his-
torical association or incident connected with
it, to draw an inference, to point a moral or
adorn a tale. They do not seem to realize
that its pilasters or buttresses, its base and
cornice, its windows and doors, its panels and
stringcourses, its columns and arches, have
assumed shape and character coincidently with
the progress of mankind; that these features
can be interpreted as demonstrations of hu-
manity and as evidences of civilization, all
highly idealized and converted into visible
poetry; that their ornaments of sculpture are
a re-creation of the works of the great Creator,
reflections of nature, slowly developed in types
and conventional forms by the action of the
human mind through centuries.
The emotions aroused in the mind of an
intelligent expert by the contemplation of a
work of pure architecture, in whatever style
and of whatever race, are necessarily complex
and difficult to describe; but I am persuaded
that the quality and keenness and scope of
these emotions are such as have been awak-
ened by no other of the fine arts. To the
"capable eye" there is, in the first place, the
charm of repose, which includes almost all the
virtues of design. Then follow the gracious


240 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
and caressing appeal of technical harmony and
grace in outline and proportion, in symmetry
or balance of parts, in color, texture, de-
tail, and distribution of ornament; the pleasing
evidences of scholarship without pedantry, if
the work is modern, of the intelligent study and
adaptation of historical styles to modern use,
of reserved power, of the absence of affecta-
tion or caprice ; the just subordination of the
personality of the author to his theme; the
skillful adjustment of means to ends; the per-
fect agreement between construction and dec-
oration : and, in certain cases, the glad recog-
nition of the audacity of genius in breaking
through the trammels of convention, and cre-
ating a surprise which does not offend. In
the second place, outside of technique, the
student is moved, in the contemplation of an
historical monument, by its poetic suggestions;
by the effect of national or local spirit on the
treatment of outline and detail, and of that
unconscious but inevitable imprint made by
contemporaneous political, religious, social, or
commercial conditions, which differentiates an
architectural achievement from any other work
of fine art, and makes it an evidence in the
history of civilization. He has learned that
the architectural monument is saturated with


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 243
that to his complete comprehension of the full
meaning of an architectural monument there
is needed an interpreter, who can not only feel
it, as an expert, in its evident and remoter
meanings, but who, if possible, can analyze
and demonstrate it, thus opening to the world
this most fertile and most delicate source of
intellectual and emotional delight.
We would first look for such an interpreter
among the poets, who express their ideas with
words and figures, symbols and allegories, just
as the architects express theirs with a language
of forms, compact of ideals and conventions,
developed in the progress of mankind by a
similar process of creative imagination; but
apparently no poet, even in this century, the
most inquisitive of all in the history of our
race, has tried to comprehend the best thought
which the sister art expresses, although, as we
shall presently see, two or three of our own
time seem to have shown that the obstacles
are not insurmountable, when the spirit is
willing and the mind informed.
The old metrical romances, like those of
Lydgate, the monk of Bury, or Piers Plowman,
like the " Romance of Sir Degrevant," or Brad-
shaw's quaint translation in verse of " The Lyfe


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 245
art in general he more than once, in passages
illuminated with poetic fire, anticipated with-
out an effort the labored conclusions of mod-
ern aesthetics. But though his Duncan and
Banquo, as they approached the castle of Mac-
beth, discoursed on its pleasant seat and on the
martlets who built upon it coigns of vantage,
and though, in other scenes, he managed by
an accidental word or phrase to suggest archi-
tectural scenery and surroundings, he never
dwelt upon or interpreted a single feature of
this noble art, or presented a definite image
of any of its historical manifestations. Ap-
parently no impression was made upon his
mind even by contemporary buildings. Bacon,
on the other hand, had a very intelligent inter-
est in architecture, and wrote of it with far
more sympathy than any of his contempora-
ries; but Shakespeare made no use of the
frequent opportunities of his dramas to refer
to it, save once, very indirectly, in the Second
Part of " Henry IV.:"
"When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model;
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection;
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices; or, at least, desist
To build at all?"


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 247
The Ionic then, with decent matron grace,
Her airy pillar heaved; luxuriant last,
The rich Corinthian spread her wanton wreath.
The whole so measured true, so lessen'd off
By fine proportion, that the marble pile,
Form'd to repel the still and stormy waste
Of rolling ages, light as fabrics look'd
That from the magic wand aerial rise."
It was from a body of pedantic Vitruvian
formulas, dry and inelastic as a demonstration
of Euclid or a rule of grammar, that all the
architectural notions of the period were de-
rived. It was a part of the elegant learning
of the day to commit to memory the four
orders as they were then understood. Every
demonstration outside of these orders was bar-
baric. And yet we search in vain through
the rhymed heroics of Dryden, Pope, and
their imitators of the eighteenth century for
an appreciative or intelligible idea even of a
correct classic composition. When they at-
tempted it, the result was a shapeless, dis-
ordered, heterogeneous mass; set to most
harmonious verse, indeed, but hopelessly in-
harmonious in the image. Vanbrugh, one of
the numerous fashionable gentleman-poets of
the time, himself the architect of Blenheim
and Castle Howard, is not inspired, in his own
verse, to correct the ignorant incongruities of
his contemporaries. When Pope, imitating
-


248 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
Chaucer in the scheme of his poem, and Mil-
ton in his architectural imagery, essays to
present a poetic idea of the Temple of Fame,
we have, in elegant and facile rhymes, an
horrific intermingling of crude hints of Doric,
Barbaric, and Gothic styles, which can convey
absolutely no sane impression of structure or
form in outline or detail. If the poet of
Twickenham villa, in his insatiable greed for
knowledge, had considered it worth his while
to master the simplest elements of architec-
ture, how readily could he have enshrined, in
the elegant artificiality of his lines, a subject
so much in sympathy with his poetic methods
as a classic composition, with its ordered peri-
style, its walls rich with color and incrusta-
tions behind the open screen of marble shafts,
its pilastered pavilions and sculptured pedi-
ments, its decorations of statues and painting,
and, over all, its storied dome! It is hard to
conceive how such an imagination could be
indifferent to a fact so poetic, so orderly, so
easy to comprehend, so adjustable to the pur-
pose of his verse.
In fact, the general insensibility to effects
of art in the eighteenth century is one of the
most remarkable phenomena in the history of
the intellect. Gothic art in especial suffered


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 249
from this eclipse of feeling. Its most mag-
nificent monuments, the great metropolitan
cathedrals of the Middle Ages, themselves
poems in stone, were not only neglected dur-
ing this long period, but despised, insulted, and
misunderstood. When they were referred to
at all, they were stigmatized as demonstrations
of barbarism. They touched no responsive
chord in the human heart until the modern
romantic school arose, and Boisseree in Ger-
many, Viollet-le-Duc and Victor Hugo in
France, Pugin and Ruskin in England, re-
stored them to the admiration and affection
of mankind. Until then, through all those
long years, to the poets as well as to the com-
mon herd, they uttered absolutely no word,
and gave no breath of inspiration. To the
literature of this time architecture was merely
a series of stiff, unpliant formulas of classic
art, without principles, only half compre-
hended, — a fetich to pedants, an enigma to
the people. Since the enlightenment fur-
nished by the romanticists, since the exposi-
tion by certain late writers of the theory and
principles of the art, the sentiment of archi-
tecture has begun to penetrate the tardy per-
ceptions of the poetic instinct; yet only in
two or three instances has it received anything
like an intelligent recognition.


250 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
Towards the close of the period of sterility,
one strong, clear voice broke the long silence
with strains which accomplished more for the
recognition of architecture in literature than
all other agencies combined. Among all the
poets, Sir Walter Scott seems to stand alone in
his thorough appreciation of the value of real
architectural background and accessories to
the interest of romantic verse. He used his
archaeological knowledge and his fondness for
mediaeval architecture with the skill of a prac-
ticed romancer and the sympathy of a poet.
His example was the potent factor in the cre-
ation of that particular romantic school in
English literature which followed him. But
none of his imitators approached this mighty
minstrel in the truth with which the charac-
teristic details of chapel, castle, or abbey were
made essential parts of his picturesque stories.
Abbotsford itself, the realization in material
substance of Scott's architectural ideals, is but
indifferent architecture ; it is at best but pinch-
beck medievalism. These ideals of structure,
however, found much happier expression in his
verse, the plan of which did not necessitate
exactness of portrayal, much less attempt to
interpret the intrinsic properties of his mediae-
val models. The architect is relieved to find


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 251
that this one poet, at least, did not make non-
sense of his buildings. Whether the scene of
his poem was laid in Melrose Abbey or Nor-
ham Castle, or whether it took him to the
Saxon monastery of " St. Cuthbert's holy isle,"
to the stronghold of Crichtoun, or to the
towers of Tantallon, the wizard's touch was
true. His poetic visions never betrayed an
historical monument. The flow of his imagi-
nation was corrected and held in check by the
rare quality of honest loyalty to the facts of
architecture as he understood them. Even in
his details of description, though he touched
them but lightly, the architect recognizes the
salient points of the style of the building
which he celebrates. His archaeological know-
ledge was ever sufficient to his theme, and
in great part inspired it, as was the case
with Victor Hugo in "Notre Dame." If the
schools created by these masters had, with
poetic penetration and sympathy, continued
the investigations of romantic art so bril-
liantly begun, literature would have been en-
riched by a new light out of the past, and
architecture would, in some of its phases at
least, have become an open book instead of
an undecipherable myth or hieroglyph, of
which the interest to the world resides in its
outward grace, and not in its inward meaning.


254 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
forms the eye of the dome, whose vast coffered
concave, itself an epic poem, appeals to him
in vain.
Perhaps the attitude of Byron towards this
art is revealed in the stanza of the fourth
canto wherein, with lofty disdain, he refers to
the students of sculpture : —
"I leave to learned fingers and wise hands,
The artist and his ape, to teach and tell
How well his connoisseurship understands
The graceful bend and the voluptuous swell:
Let these describe the undescribable."
But surely, to leave untouched all the deep
human meanings involved in the purely archi-
tectural points of the great monuments of
which he sings; much more, to remain insen-
sible to such points as appeals of art, betrays
at least an astonishing indolence of mind. In
fact, like most of his tuneful brethren, he was
a mere impressionist as regards architecture.
Like them, he had not patience enough to
study the subject, nor cared to penetrate the
veil of conventionalism which shuts out from
casual view its richest and most potent signifi-
cations. They flattered and caressed the
blurred and imperfect images made upon their
minds by these objects of art, and delighted
the world with their unstudied reflections.
Rogers is another poet who, like Byron, wan-


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 255
dered through the old lands of art in search
of inspirations; but if Byron did, at rare
moments, break into irrepressible panegyric
when some one of these great monuments of
human intelligence and aspiration forced itself
upon his reluctant apprehension, Rogers ran-
sacked all Italy for poetic emotions, but
apparently did not see a building from the
beginning to the end of his metrical career.
Wordsworth, with less fire than Byron, but
with a far sweeter and more patient poetic
instinct, at times seemed almost to enter the
enchanted castle, and to arouse to life its
sleeping beauty. No architect can read his
forty-third and forty-fourth ecclesiastical son-
nets, on King's College Chapel at Cambridge,
without grateful recognition.
"Vex not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned —
Albeit laboring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only — this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!
Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more;
So deemed the man who fashioned for the sense
These lofty pillars, spread this branching roof,
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering, and wandering on as loath to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.


256 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
"What awful perspective! while from our sight
With gradual stealth the lateral windows hide
Their Portraitures, their stone-work glimmers, dyed
In the soft cheekerings of sleepy light.
Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite,
Whoe'er ye be, that thus, yourselves unseen,
Imbue your prison bars with solemn sheen,
Shine on, until ye fade with coming Night!
But, from the arms of silence, — list! oh list! —
The music bursteth into second life;
The notes luxuriate, every stone is kissed
By sound, or ghost of sound, in mazy strife;
Heart-thrilling strains, that cast, before the eye
Of the devout, a veil of ecstasy!
"They dreamt not of a perishable home
Who thus could build."
There is another master who penetrated
deeper yet behind the veil, and showed that
he not only appreciated a work of architec-
ture, but understood somewhat of the struc-
tural form through which its sentiment found
expression. No architect could ask for a
clearer picture than that presented by Brown-
ing's half-pagan Bishop when he ordered his
cinque-cento tomb in St. Praxed's Church.
The voluptuous Renaissance of the episcopal
cenotaph suggests a definite image in shape
and color, not only of the material object, but
of the idea behind it. It is but a sketch, yet
it is touched with the hand of a master, whose
inspiration has behind it not only feeling, but
knowledge.


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 257
Tennyson, in his " Palace of Art," gives us
the merest phantasm, like Thomson's " Castle
of Indolence," or like the temple in Shelley's
"Revolt of Islam." These are all cloud-capped
visions in a "pleasing land of drowsyhed,"
without foundation or tangible substance.
Lowell, too, in his "Cathedral," is beauti-
fully vague, and, though his poem is rich with
precious thought, it wanders from its theme,
and misses nearly all those points of true
Gothic design and sentiment which present
themselves with inspiring suggestion to the
imagination of every architect who knows and
loves his cathedral of Chartres. He himself
frankly says: —
"I, who to Chartres came to feed my eye
And give to Fancy one clear holiday,
Scarce saw the minster for the thoughts it stirred
Buzzing o'er past and future with vain quest."
But we could not ask for a more exquisite
sketch, as the work of an impressionist, than
this of the exterior : —
"Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes
Confronted with the minster's vast repose.
Silent and gray as forest-leaguered cliff
Left inland by the ocean's slow retreat,
That hears afar the breeze-borne rote and longs,
Remembering shocks of surf that clomb and fell,
Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman,
It rose before me, patiently remote


258 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
From the great tides of life it breasted once,
Hearing the noise of men as in a dream.
I stood before the triple northern port,
Where dedicated shapes of saints and kings,
Stern faces bleared with immemorial watch,
Looked down benignly grave and seemed to say,
Ye come and go incessant • we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past ■
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
Of faith so nobly realized as this.
I give thanks
For a new relish, careless to inquire
My pleasure's pedigree, if so it please,
Nobly, I mean," nor renegade to art.
The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness,
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
The one thing finished in this hasty world,
Forever finished, though the barbarous pit,
Fanatical on hearsay, stamp and shout
As if a miracle could be encored.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals half-divined as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise
Of hazardous caprices sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy-light as fern,
Imagination's very self in stone!
With one long sigh of infinite release
From pedantries past, present, or to come,
I looked, and owned myself a happy Goth."
If, with such affluence of imagination and
diction, Lowell had not heen, as he confessed,
"careless of his pleasure's pedigree," like the
rest of the impressionists in verse and in art;


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 259
if he had had more of the pre-Raphaelite
qualities, which inspect and analyze the source
of pleasure before attempting to portray, he
would have interpreted this lovely mediaeval
enigma like a prophet.
Emerson, with a delicate and almost une-
qualed depth of poetic insight, touched, as it
never had been touched before or since, one
truthful chord in " The Problem :"
"The hand that rounded Peter's dome
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome
Wrought in a sad sincerity;
Himself from God he could not free;
He builded better than he knew ;—
The conscious stone to beauty grew."
But he left his brief architectural strain too
soon, and left how much unsung!
Longfellow's muse, it must be admitted, is
indebted for some of its happiest imagery to
his fine consciousness of the romantic senti-
ment in Gothic art. No European poet, born
and bred in the shadow of cathedral or cloister,
ever felt more deeply than this sweet minstrel
from Maine, or expressed more tenderly, the
emotions which a true poet should feel under
these influences. But he never wrote an ar-
chitectural poem, and it is very evident that
he never studied and did not really compre-
hend the true Gothic, which he loved so much


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 261
Are merely shadows cast by outward things
On stone or canvas, having in themselves
No separate existence. Architecture,
Existing in itself, and not in seeming
A something it is not, surpasses them
As substance, shadow."
The architect who completed for the Duch-
ess Marguerite the church of Brou, and the
sculptor who carved the tomb within, though
they aimed to appeal to such refined intelli-
gence as that of Matthew Arnold, and to touch
with their art such sensitive hearts as his,
studied their careful details and created their
harmonies of form in vain so far as he was
concerned. His lovely lines on this church
and tomb have no recognition of the fullness
of the message which these objects were in-
tended to convey, and present no clear picture
even of their apparent form. His delicate in-
stinct, when confronted by the visible poetry
in these monuments of art, felt no sympathetic
thrill, and saw only the effect of the tinted
light from the windows as it played upon the
pavement; the shafts and groined vaulting of
the church appeared to him only a "foliaged
marble forest; " and his poetic eye discovered
only "chisell'd broideries rare" and "carved
stone fretwork" on the tomb, where were
sculptured the two forms, —


262 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
"One, the Duke in helm and armour;
One, the Duchess in her veil."
The competent interpretation which the "fro-
zen music " of one art had a right to demand
from the inspired insight of the other is vainly
sought for in this beautiful verse. Here, as
elsewhere, the sister arts remained strangers
one to the other, and the real architecture of
the church of Brou was invisible to one who
should have been its oracle.
Byron's haughty disdain for the study of a
work of art may be something more than a
personal idiosyncrasy; it may represent the
characteristic attitude of all his poetic broth-
ers and sisters. But a mind familiar with this
noblest of the fine arts, and trained to its prac-
tice, finds it difficult to condone this indolence
or indifference of the tuneful choir. Of
course it may be said that a poet need not be
a geologist or a botanist to enable him to treat
a landscape in adequate poetic phrase, and
that, therefore, to celebrate justly an architec-
tural theme, the equipment of an architect or
of an archaeologist is not necessary to him;
that the " Tintern Abbey " of Wordsworth, for
instance, is a beautiful and satisfactory poem
as it stands, and that it would have been no
more acceptable if, instead of the exquisite


266 ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY
mapped out in cold blood, but I fancy tbat
the form of the composition has forced it not
only to overflow the original prudent boun-
daries of the argument, but at several points
to take an unexpected turn of emotion or
imagination, which I dare to hope may pos-
sibly be explained or condoned as the process
of the evolution of prose into what may be
called poetry. I am not at all sure on this
point; but the process, I believe, if it has to
some extent idealized the thought, or perhaps
led it astray, has not betrayed the architec-
ture, for the integrity of which I must be held
responsible.
Possibly the- method of presentation which
I have employed may, in skilled and practiced
hands, render architecture intelligible to those
who, as Burke said, are ready to yield to sym-
pathy what they refuse to description. At all
events, if the results which mere plodding
industry, under the impulse of long-cherished
enthusiasm and corrected by a reasonable
knowledge of the subject, has reached, may
not afford a sort of pleasure to others, it may
at least interest them, as, under the circum-
stances of its production, a curiosity of litera-
ture.
If it is remembered that in this modest


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY. 267
experiment I do not rashly pretend to com-
pete with the poets, nor even to prove that
the field, which I still believe to be rich in
poetic thought and abounding in food for the
imagination, is accessible to them, the obvious
comment will not be made, that "fools rush
in where angels fear to tread."
I am tempted, therefore, to release this
child of painful endeavor from its secret place,
with the pathetic inquiry upon its hps, " Have
I a right to exist?"
THE CHURCH DOOR.
A STUDY IN ROMANESQUE.
Twice four hundred years have borne
To this doorway, gray and worn,
Weary weights of grief and sin;
Contrite, have they entered in,
And, beneath the arch of stone,
Laid their burdens down, and known
That to faith, whate'er betide,
The doors of heaven are opened wide.
For, with invitation sweet,
The pastoral Church, her flock to greet,
To fold, to comfort, and to feed,
This Portal Beautiful decreed.
The narrowing arch is deep and wide;
Niched in its jambs on either side,
Shaft beyond shaft in ordered state
Stand on their solid stylobate,
Their leafy capitals upholding
Archivolt and fretted moulding;


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
In various forms their doable duty
To bear with strength and crown with beauty.
Now, nature, with her soft caress,
Has stooped the carver's work to bless
With the mystery and surprise
Of her silent sympathies.
Centuries, whose mellow tones
Sleep upon these votive stones,
Have smoothed the threshold with the beat
Of their penitential feet;
And age to art a grace has lent
Quite beyond the art's intent,
To conscious stone, to human thought,
A new interpretation brought.
The spirit, waked by patient art
In the quarry's sleeping heart,
Taught to repeat its lessons clear
On fretted arch and storied pier
In utterance beautiful, that finds
Quick access to lowly minds,
Whispers from the graphic stone
Solemn secrets of its own, —
Runes which, heard aright, betray
Stories of the ancient day;
Tell what never scribe nor sage
Wrote on the historic page
Of arts and manners, and the place
Reached in the progress of the race,
When builders toiled, untaught but true,
And "builded better than they knew ;"
Tell, in some new exotic grace
In turn of leaf or chisel's trace,
In flower's shape or carver's thought,
The sources whence the people caught
The strength to rise from old to new,
From dark to light, from false to true;


ARCHITECTURE AND POETRY.
Let my new-world vision see,
When these doors unfold for me,
When upon this threshold-seat
Linger my expectant feet,
And the blessing on my head
From the lifted Hand is shed.
When, beneath far Western skies,
Seeds of this ancient art surprise
The children of a younger race
With blossoms of exotic grace,
While the vigorous germs retain
The virtues of their primal strain;
When, in sweet and virgin earth,
They find a new and prosperous birth,
And, in spacious, strenuous air,
A growth more free, a bloom more fair.
So may a strong and simple art,
Born in innocence of heart,
Unfold beyond the builder's hope
In purer line and larger scope,
And modern life and light fulfill,
With studied aim and conscious skill,
The promises which, all unknown,
Slept in the old prolific stone;
So may a living art be freed
From the pedant's narrowing creed,
And the awakened age at last
Break its bondage to the past.