CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT .WfTH THE INCOlffi. OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN I'sSn . BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE Cornell University Library NA 2500.S42 1914 The architecture of humanism; a study in 3 1924 014 760 353 DATE DUE pa^ ^ nSf^ T^ff:! mmm^^ *3UN 1 nar; P^ J Af R - 7" OJJir : m^ |i$i!^|ff|i» ,, HS^^^^^SS^''^ ?■ '1 "^mrnm f**8i«iS!i»^ 34^)#f iJiW*°^ > TTTOZ ^//A" "Z 'vr-''<»M&:,'fS^, CAYLOMO PRINTED INU.S. A. The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014760353 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM A Study in the History of Taste BY GEOFFREY SCOTT BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1914 £.V. TO CECIL PINSENT PREFACE The scope of this book requires a word of explanation, since from a very simple purpiose it has developed to a rather complicated issue. My intention had been to formulate the chief principles of classical design in architecture. I soon realised that in the present state of our thought no theory of art could be made convincing, or even clear, to any one not already per- suaded of its truth. There may, at the present time, be a lack of architectural taste : there is, unfortu- ately, no lack of architectural opinion. Architec- ture, it is said, must be ' expressive of its purpose .' or 'expressive of its true construction,' or 'expressive of the materials it employs ' or ' expressive of the national life ' (whether noble or otherwise) or ' ex- pressive of a noble life ' (whether national or not) ; or expressive of the craftsman's temperament, or the owner's or the architect's, or, on the contrary, ' academic ' and studiously indifferent to these factors. It must, we are told, be symmetrical, or it must be picturesque — ^that is, above all things, unsymmetrical. It must be ' traditional ' and ' scholarly,' that is, resembling what has already been done by Greek, viii THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM Roman, Mediaeval or Georgian architects, or it must be ' original ' and ' spontaneous,' that is, it must be at pains to avoid this resemblance ; or it must strike some happy compromise between these opposites ; and so forth indefinitely. If these axioms were frankly untrue, they would be easy to dismiss ; if they were based on fully reasoned theories, they would be easy, at any rate, to discuss. They are neither. We have few ' fully reasoned ' theories, and these, it will be seen, are flagrantly at variance with the facts to be explained. We subsist on a number of architectural habits, on scraps of tradition, on caprices and prejudices, and above all on this mass of more or less specious axioms, of half-truths, unrelated, uncriticised and often con- tradictory, by means of which there is no building so bad that it cannot with a little ingenuity be justified, or so good that it cannot plausibly be condemned. Under these circumstances, discussion is almost impossible, and it is natural that criticism should become dogmatic. Yet dogmatic criticism is barren, and the history of architecture, robbed of any standard of value, is barren also. It appears to me that if we desire any clearness in: this matter, we are driven from a priori sesthetics to the history of taste, and from the history of taste to the history of ideas. It is, I believe, from a failure PREFACE ix to appreciate the true relation of taste to ideas, and the influence which each has exerted on the other, that our present confusion has resulted. I have attempted, consequently, in the very narrow field with which this book is concerned, to trace the natural history of our opinions, to discover how far upon their own premisses they are true or false, and to explain why, when false, they have yet remained plausible, powerful, and, to many minds, convincing. This is to travel far from the original question. Yet I believe the inquiry to be essential, and I have sought , to keep it within the rigorous limit of a single argu- ment. On these points the reader will decide. So far as this study is concerned with the culture of the Italian Renaissance, I am indebted, as every student must always be indebted, primarily to Burckhardt. I have profited also by Wolfiflin's Renaissance und Barok. To the friendship of Mr. Bemhard Berenson I owe a stimulus and en- couragement which those who share it will alone appreciate. Mr. Francis Jekyll of the British Museum has kindly corrected my proofs. 5 Via delle Terme, Florence, February 14, 1914. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .... CHAP. I. RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE II. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY III. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY {continued) : Naturalism and the Picturesque IV. THE MECHANICAL FALLACY V. THE ETHICAL FALLACY . VL THE BIOLOGICAL FALLACY VII. THE ACADEMIC TRADITION VIIL HUMANIST VALUES IX. ART AND THOUGHT ANALYTIC SUMMARY PAGE I 37 66 94 121 165 186 .Io| 244 265 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM INTRODUCTION ' Well-building hath three conditions : Com- modity, Firmness, and Delight.' From this phrase of an English humanist ^ a theory of architecture might take its start. Architecture is a focus where three separate purposes have converged. They are blended in a single method ; they are fulfilled in a single result ; yet in their own nature they are dis- tinguished from each other by a deep and permanent disparity. The criticism of architecture has been confused in its process ; it has built up strangely diverse theories of the art, and the verdicts it has pronounced have been contradictory in the extreme. Of the causes which have contributed to its failure, this is the chief : that it has sought to force on ^ architecture an unreal unity of aim. ' Commodity, firmness, and delight ' ; between these three values the criticism of architecture has insecurely wavered, not always distinguishing very clearly between them, 1 Sir Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture. He is adapting Vitruvius, Bk. i. chap, iii, A 2 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM seldom attempting any statement of the relation they bear to one another, never pursuing to their conclu- sion the consequences which they involve. It has leaned now this way and now that, and struck, be- tween these incommensurable virtues, at different points, its arbitrary balance. Architecture, the most complex of the arts, offers to its critics many paths of approach, and as many opportunities for avoiding their goal. At the outset of a fresh study in this field, it is well, at the risk of pedantry, to define where these paths lead. Architecture requires ' firmness.' By this neces- sity it stands related to science, and to the standards ^ of science. The mechanical bondage of construction i has closely circumscribed its growth. Thrust andl balance, pressure and its support, are at the root of i the language which architecture employs. The in- herent characters of marble, brick, wood and iron have moulded its forms, set limits to its achievement,, and governed, in a measure, even its decorativ^ detail. On every hand the study of architecture encounters physics, statics, and dynamics, suggest-l ing, controlling, justifying its design. It is open to^ us, therefore, to look in buildings for the logical expression of material properties and material laws.j Without these, architecture is impossible, its his4 tory unintelligible. And if, finding these everywherJ paramount, we seek, in terms of material properties] INTRODUCTION 3 and material laws, not merely to account for the history of architecture, but to assess its value, then architecture will be judged by the exactness and sincerity with which it expresses constructive facts, and conforms to constructive laws. That will be the scientific standard for architecture : a logical stand- ard so far as architecture is related to science, and no further. But architecture requires ' commodity.' It is not enough that it should possess its own internal co- herence, its abstract logic of construction. It has come into existence to satisfy an external need. That, also, is a fact of its history. Architecture is sub- servient to the general uses of mankind. And, immediately, politics and society, religion and liturgy, the large movements of races and their commot^ occupations, become factors in the study. These determine what shall be built, and, up to a point, in what way. The history of civilisation thus leaves in architecture its truest, because its most uncon- scious record. If, then, it is legitimate to consider architecture as an expression of mechanical laws, it is legitimate, no less, to see in it an expression of human life. This furnishes a standard of value totally distinct from the scientific. Buildings may be judged by the success with which tliey supply the practical ends they are designed to meet. Or, by a natural extension, we may judge them by the value 4 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM of those ends themselves ; that is to say, by the external purposes which they reflect. These, indeed^ are two very different questions. The last makes a. moral reference which the first avoids, but both' spring, and spring inevitably, from the link which architecture has with life — from that ' condition of well-building ' which Wotton calls commodity. And architecture requires 'delight.' For this reason, interwoven with practical ends and their mechanical solutions, we may trace in architecture a third and different factor — the disinterested desire for beauty. This desire does not, it is true, culmin- ate here in a purely aesthetic result, for it has to deal with a concrete basis which is utilitarian. It is, none the less, a purely aesthetic impulse, an impulse distinct from all the others which architecture may simultaneously satisfy, an impulse by virtue of which architecture becomes art. It is a separate instinct. Sometimes it will borrow a suggestion from the laws of firmness or commodity ; sometimes it will run counter to them, or be offended by the forms they would dictate. It has its own standard, and claims its own authority. It is possible, therefore, to ask] how far, and how successfully, in any architectural! style, this aesthetic impulse has been embodied ; how| far, that is to say, the instincts which, in the otheli arts, exert an obvious and unhampered activityj^ have succeeded in realising themselves also through INTRODUCTION 5 this more complicated and more restricted instru- ment. And we can ask, still further, whether there may not be aesthetic instincts, for which this instru- ment, restricted as it is, may furnish the sole and peculiar expression. This is to study architecture, in the strict sense, as an art. Here, then, are three ' conditions of well-building,' and corresponding to them three modes of criticism, and three provinces of thought. Now what, in fact, is the result ? The material data of our study we certainly possess in abundance : the statistics of architecture, the history of existing works, their shape and size and authorship, have long been investigated with the highest scholar- ship. But when we ask to be given not history but criticism, when we seek to know what is the value of these works of art, viewed in themselves or by comparison with one another, and why they are to be considered worthy of this exact attention, and whether one is to be considered more deserving of it than another, and on what grounds, the answers we obtain may be ready and numerous, but they are certainly neither consistent nor clear. The criticism of architecture has been of two kinds. The first of these remains essentially historical. It is content to describe the conditions under which the styles of the past arose. It accepts the confused and partly fortuitous phenomenon which architec- 6 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM ture actually is, and estimates the phenomenon by a method as confused and fortuitous as itself. It passes in and out of the three provinces of thought, and relates its subject now to science, now to art, and now to life. It treats of these upon a single plane, judging one building by standards of constructive skill, another by standards of rhythm and proportion, and a third by standards of practical use or by the moral impulse of its builders. This medley of ele- ments, diverse and uncommensurated as they are, can furnish no general estimate or true comparison of style. Doubtless, as a matter of history, architecture has not come into existence in obedience to any a priori aesthetic. It has grown up around the practical needs of the race, and in satisfying these it has been deflected, now by the obstinate claims of mechanical laws, now by a wayward search for beauty. But the problem of the architect and that of the critic are here essentially different. The work of the architect is synthetic. He must take into simul- taneous account our three ' conditions of well-build- ing,' and find some compromise which keeps a decent peace between their claims. The task of the critic, on the contrary, is one of analysis. He has to dis- cover, define, and maintain the ideal standards of value in each province. Thus the three standards of architecture, united in practice, are separable, and INTRODUCTION 7 must be separated, in thought, ( ^iticism of th e I jistorical type f ails to apply an ideal and consistent analysis, for the insufficient reason that the practice of architecture has, of necessity, been neither con- sistent nor ideal. Such criticism is not necessarily misleading. Its fault is more often that it leads nowhere. Its judgments may be individually accu- rate, but it affords us no general view, for it adopta no fixed position. It is neither simple, nor compre- hensive, nor consistent. It cannot, therefore, furnish a theory of style. '^he_second_tYEP of criticism is more dangerous. For the sake of simplicity it lays down some ' law ' of architg ctural taste . Good design in architecture,^ it will say, should ' express the uses the building is intended to serve ' ; 'it should faithfully state the facts of its construction,' or again it should ' reflect the life of a noble civilisation.' Then, having made these plausible assumptions, it drives its theory to a conclusion, dwells on the examples that support its case, and is willing, for the sake of consistency, to condemn all architecture in which the theory is not confirmed. Such general anathemas are flattering alike to the author and his reader. They greatly simplify the subject. They have a show of logic. But they fail to explain why the styles of architecture which they find it necessary to condemn have in fact been created and admired. Fashion consequently 8 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM betrays these faultless arguments ; for whatever has once genuinely pleased is likely to be again found; pleasing ; art and the enjoyment of art continue in the condemned paths undismayed ; and criticism is left to discover a sanction for them, if it can, in some new theory, as simple, as consistent, and as logical as the first. ; The true task of criticism is to understand such aesthetic pleasures as have in fact been felt, and then to draw whatever laws and conclusions it may from that understanding. But no amount of reasoning i will create, or can annul, an aesthetic experience ; for the aim of the arts has not been logic, but delight. The theory of architecture, then, requires logic ; but it requires, not less, an independent sense of beauty. ' Nature, unfortunately, would seem to unite these qualities with extreme reluctance. , Obviously, there is room for confusion. The ' condition of delight ' in architecture — ^its value as an art — may conceivably be found to consist in its firmness, or in its commodity, or in both ; or it may consist in something else different from, yet dependent upon these ; or it may be independent of them alto- gether. In any case, these elements are, at first sight, distinct. There is no reason, prima facie, to suppose that there exists between them a pre-estab- lished harmony, and that in consequence a perfect principle of building can be laid down which should, INTRODUCTION 9 in full measure, satisfy them all. And, in the absence of such a principle, it is quite arbitrary to pronounce dogmatically on the concessions which art should make to science or utility. Unless it can be proved that these apparently different values are in reality commensurable, there ought to be three separate schemes of criticism : the first based on construction, the second on convenience, the third on aesthetics. Each could be rational, complete, and, within its own province, valid. Thus by degrees might be obtained what at present is certainly lacking — ^the data for a theory of architecture which should not be contradicted at once by the history of taste. The present study seeks to explain one chapter of that history. It deals with a limited period of architecture, from a single point of view. The period is one which presents a certain obvious unity. It extends from the revival of classical forms at the hands of Brunelleschi, in the fifteenth century, to the rise of the Gothic movement, by which, four hundred years later, they were eclipsed. The old medisevalism, and the new, mark the boundaries of our subject. At no point in the four centuries which intervened does any line of cleavage occur as distinct as those which sever the history of architecture at these two points. And between them there is no 10 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM true halting-place. Thus the term 'Renaissance architecture,' which originally denoted no more than the earlier stages, has gradually and inevitably come to be extended to the work of all this period. It is true that during these years many phases of architectural style, opposed in aim and contradic-- tory in feeling, successively arose ; but the language in which they disputed was one language, the dialects they employed were all akin ; and at no moment can we say that what follows is not linked to what went before by common reference to a great tradition, by a general participation in a single complex of ideas. And incompatible as these several phases — the primitive, classic, baroque, aca- demic, rococo — may at their climax appear to be, yet, for the most part, they, grew from one another by gradual transitions. The margins which divide; them are curiously difficult to define. They form, in fact, a complete chapter in architecture, to be read] consecutively and as a whole. And at the two moments with which our study begins and ends, the sequence of architecture is radically cleft. The build- ing of the Pazzi Chapel in Florence marks a clear break with the mediaeval past, and with it rises a tradition which was never fundamentally deserted, until in the nineteenth century traditionalism itseU was cast aside. It is in Italy, where Renaissance architecture was INTRODUCTION ' ii native, that we shall follow this tradition. The archi- tecture of France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in a lesser degree, that of the Georgian period in England, might furnish brilliant examples of the same manner of building. The Italian experiment enabled the architects of France, amid their more favourable environment, to create a succession of styles, in some ways more splendid, and certainly more exquisite and complete. Yet,_if we wish to watch architectural energy where it is most concen- trated, most vigorous, and most original it is to Italy that^_we must turn. And in a study which is to deal rather with the principles than with the history of Renaissance architecture, it will be convenient thus to restrict its scope. From what point of view should this architecture be judged so as best to reveal its unity and its intent ? A general survey of the period will show grounds for deciding that, while a mechanical analysis or a social analysis may throw light on many aspects of Renais- sance architecture, it is only an aesthetic analysis, and an aesthetic analysis in the strictest sense, which can render its history intelligible, or our enjoyment of it complete. If the essence, and not the acci- dents merely, of this architectural tradition is to be recognised, and some estimate of it obtained that does not wholly misconstrue its idea, this ground of analysis must be consistently maintained. The 12 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM architecture of the Renaissance, we shall see reason; to conclude, may be studied as a result of practical needs shaped by structural principle ; it must be studied as an aesthetic impulsion, controlled by aesthetic laws, and only by an aesthetic criticism to be finally justified or condemned. It must, in fact, be studied as an art. Here, however, is the true core of the difficulty. The science, and the history, of architecture are studies of which the method is in no dispute. But = for the art of architecture, in this strict sense, no agreement exists. The reason has few problems so difficult as those which it has many times resolved. Too many definitions of architectural beauty have proved their case, enjoyed their vogue, provoked their opposition, and left upon the vocabulary of art their legacy of prejudice, ridicule, and confusion. The a:ttempt to reason honestly or to see clearly in architecture has not been very frequent or conspicu- ous ; but, even where it exists, the terms it must employ are hardened with misuse, and the vision it invokes is distorted by all the preconceptions which beset a jaded argument. Not only do we inherit the wreckage of past controversies, but those contro- versies themselves are clouded with the dust of more heroic combats, and loud with the battle-cries of poetry and morals, philosophy, politics, and science. For it is unluckily the fact that thought about the INTRODUCTION 13 "arts has been for the most part no more than an incident in, or a consequence of, the changes which men's minds have undergone with regard to these more stimulating and insistent interests. Hardly ever, save in matters of mere technique, has archi- tecture been studied sincerely for itself. Thus the simplest estimates of architecture are formed through a distorting atmosphere of unclear thought. Axioms, holding true in provinces other than that of art, and arising historically in these, have successively been extended by a series of false analogies into the pro- vince of architecture ; and these axioms, unanalysed and mutually inconsistent, confuse our actual experi- ence at the source. To trace the full measure of that confusion, and if possible to correct it, is therefore, the first object of this book. We enter a limbo of dead but still haunt- ing controversies, of old and ghostly dogmatisms, which most effectively darken the counsel of critics because their presence is often least perceived. It is time that these spectres were laid, or else, by what- ever necessary libations of exacter thinking, brought honestly to life. The path will then be clear to attempt, withj less certainty of misconception, a statement of the aesthetic values on which Renaissance architecture^ is based. To follow, in concrete detail, this Architecture of 14 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM Humanism, to see how the principles here sketched out are confirmed by the practice of the Italian builders, and to trace their gradual discovery, will be the task of another volume. CHAPTER I RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE The architecture of Europe, in the centuries during which our civilisation was under the sway of classical prestige, passed in a continuous succession through phases of extraordinary diversity, brevity and force. Of architecture in Italy was this most particularly true. The forms of Brunelleschi, masterful as they appeared when, by a daring reversion of style, he liberated Italian building from the alien traditions of the north, seem, in two generations, to be but the hesitating precursors of Bramante's more definitive art. Bramante's formula is scarcely asserted, the poise and balance of classic proportion is scarcely struck, before their fine adjustments are swept away upon the torrent that springs from Michael Angelo. In the ferment of creation, of which Italy from this time forth is the scene, the greatest names count, relatively, for little. Palladio, destined to provide the canon of English classic building, and to become, for us, the prime interpreter of the antiquej^here makes but a momentary stand among the contending creeds. His search for form, IS i6 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM though impassioned, was too reactionary, his con- clusions too academic and too set, for an age when creative vigour was still, beyond measure, turbulent. With that turbulence no art that was not rapid and pictorial in its appeal could now keep pace. The time was past when an architecture of such calculated restraint as Sammichele had foreshadowed could capture long attention ; and the art of Peruzzi, rich though it was with never -exhausted possibilities, seems to have perished unexplored, because, so to say, its tempo was too slow, its interest too unob- trusive. Vignola, stronger perhaps than these, is before long forgotten in Bernini. Architecture becomes a debatable ground between the ideals of structure and decoration, and from their fertile con- flict new inventions are ever forthcoming to please a rapidly - tiring taste. Fashions die ; but the Renaissance itself, more irresistible than any force which it produced, begets its own momentum, and passes on, with almost the negligent fecundity of nature, self-destructive and self-renewing. We are confronted with a period of architecture at once daring and pedantic, and a succession of masters the orthodoxy of whose professions is often equalled! only by the licence of their practice. In spite of its liberty of thought, in spite of its keen individualism, the Renaissance is yet an age of authority ; and Rome, but pagan Rome this time, is once more the RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 17 arbiter. Every architect confesses allegiance to the antique ; none would dispute the inspiration of Vitruvius. For many the dictates of the Augustan critic have the validity of a papal deliverance upon a point of faith. Yet their efforts to give expression to this seemingly identical enthusiasm are contra- dictory in the extreme. Never were the phases of a single art more diverse. For to consistency the Renaissance, with all its theories, was vitally indiffer- ent. Its energy is at every moment so intense that the forms, not of architecture alone, but of every material object of common use, are pressed into simultaneous and sympathetic expression ; yet it is guided on no sure or general course. Its greater schemes too often bear evidence to this lack of con- tinuity, this want of subordination to inherited prin- ciple. Upon the problem of St. Peter's were engaged the minds of Bramante, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Peruzzi, Sangallo, Fontana, Maderna and Bernini. So much originality could not, without peril, be focussed at a single point ; and those of Bramante's successors who were fortunate enough to carry their schemes into execution, obscured, if they did not ignore, the large idea which he had bequeathed to them. The history of St. Peter's is typical of the period. Shaped by a desire as powerful as it is undefined, its inventive impulse remains unexhausted, and style succeeds to style in the effort to satisfy the B ♦ 18 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM workings of an imagination too swift and restless to abide the fulfilment of its own creations. In this the Renaissance stands alone. J The mediaeval Gothic had indeed been equally rapid, and equally oblivious of its past, so rapid and so oblivious that few of its principal buildings were completed in the style in which they were begun. Nevertheless it pursued one undeviating course of constructive evolution. Beside this scientific zeal the achievement of the Italian builders might appear, at first sight, to be as confused in aim as it was fertile in invention. Contrast it with the cumulative labour, the intensive concentration, by which the idea of Greek atchi- tecture, ever reiterated, was sharpened to its per- fection, and the Renaissance in Italy seems hut a pageant of great suggestions. Set it beside the antique styles of the East, compare it with the monu- mental immobility which for eighteen centuries was maintained in the architectural tradition of Egypt, and it might pass for an energy disquieted and^: frivolous. Yet, at every instant in the brief sequence of its forms, it is powerful and it is convinced ; and from the control of its influence Europe has attempted to free itself in vain. We shall seek without success, among conditions external to art, for causes adequate to an effect so varied, so violent, and so far-reaching. The revolu* tions which architecture underwent in Italy, from the RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 19 fifteenth to the eighteenth century, corresponded to no racial movements ; they were unaccompanied by social changes equally sudden, or equally complete ; they were undictated, for the most part, by any exterior necessity ; they were unheralded by any new or subversive discovery whether in the science of construction or in the materials at its command. All these, and other such conditions, did indeed con- tribute to the architectural result. Sometimes they set their limits to what was accomplished, sometimes they provided its opportunity. But none of them separately, nor all in conjunction, will sufficiently explain the essential character of the whole move- ment, or of each successive step, nor afford any clue to the sequence of its stages. They are like the acci- dents of a landscape which might shape the course of a wandering stream. But the architecture of Italy is a river in the flood. Race, politics^ the changes of society, geological facts, mechanical laws, do not exhaust the factors of the case. Taste — tiie dis- interested enthusiasm for architectural form — ^is some- thing which these cannot give and do not necessarily control. Nevertheless it is by reference to these external factors that the architectural forms of the Renaissance are persistently explained. Let us see how far such explanations can carry us,, It is probably true that a ' Renaissance ' of archi- tecture in Italy was, on racial grounds, inevitable. 20 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM Already in the twelfth century there had been a false dawn of classic style. Indeed, it seems evident that mediaeval art could exercise but a temporary dominion among peoples who, however little of the authentic Roman strain they might legitimately boast, yet by the origin of their culture stood planted in Roman civilisation. Classic forms in Italy were indigenous and bound to reappear. And this fact is important. It enables us to dismiss that unintelligent view of Renaissance architecture, once fashionable, and still occasionally put forward, which regards it as a pedan- tic affectation, or perverse return to a manner of building that was alien and extinct. But it is a fact which in no way helps us to understand the precise form of classic culture which the Renaissance assumed. It does not explain the character, number, and variety of its phases. And it tells nothing of classic culture in itself. Racial considerations are here too general and too vague. The field of politics might seem more fruitful. The growth of the new style is undoubtedly associ- ated, at Florence, Milan, Naples and other city states, with the rise to power of the Italian ' tyrants,' themselves another echo of antiquity, and another characteristic expression of the Renaissance, with its cult for individuality and power. Cosimo I., whom Michelozzo followed into exile at Venice,?) Lorenzo, the protector of Giuliano da Sangallo, RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 21 Alphonso in the South, in the North the Sforzas — these, and others like them, were certainly influential patrons. But it would be difficult to maintain that they left a deep imprint of themselves, or their government, upon the character of the art. Gis- mondo Malatestaj tyrant of Rimini, the rough soldier who caused a Gothic church to be converted into the equivalent of a pagan temple dedicated to his mistress, and flanked it with the entombed bones of Greek philosophers and grammarians, may well impress us with his individuality ; but, as between him and Alberti, his architect, himself of noble family and one of the greatest humanists of his time, there can be little doubt where the paramount imagination lay. yhe influence of patro nag e pn art is easily mis-stated. Art may be brought to the service of the state and its rulers ; but the most that rulers can do towards determining the essence of an art is to impose upon it a distinctively courtly character, and the coherency which comes of a strongly centralised organisation. We should, for instance, misconstrue the inmost nature of Augustan art, or of the art of Louis xiv., if we were to ignore this factor. But nothing similar is true of the Renaissance city-state. Here the conditions were merely such as to give free play to an architecture which, intrinsically, in its character as an art, remained independent of them. The sole centralising influence, in any imaginative sense, was 22 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM that of the Church, and even this was not felt as such! till after the art had acquired its own natural momen- tum in the free, secular life of Florence. It must be recognised, however, that the existence, in the sixteenth century papacy, of a soil perfectly^ suited to receive the roots of the restored art was in itself a piece of rare good fortune. The return to the antique, however tentative and, so to say, pro- vincial, at the first, was in essence and by implica- tion a return to the ' grand style ' — to an imperial, and, in the literal sense, a 'catholic ' architecture. For the assertion and development of such a style the papacy was the ideal instrument : the papacy with its imperial court, its boast of ancient con- tinuities, its claim to universal dominion, its pagan inheritance, and its pomp. All sijich qualities were favourable to the vigour of a partly retrospective' enthusiasm, fascinated by the broken ruins in which ancient Rome had embodied splendours so similar to these. And this was not all. For, in proportioi| as the classic movement was no empty revival, in proportion as it represented a rising to the surface of the preferences, still vital and potent, of an ancient; and indigenous culture, which claimed a future as confidently as it possessed the past, just in that measure it required a field in which to realise its own creative resources, its own untried originality. It could not have found itself in any rigid discipline RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 23 or imposed continuity such as that which, later, in the France of Louis xiv., gave to architecture a formal and restricted aim. It needed the patronage of a large idea, but it required also space and scope, that it might attempt every mode of self-realisation yet stand committed to none. This space, and this patronage, the papacy was fitted to provide. The rivalry of successive popes, their diverse origins and sympathies, their common passion to leave behind them an enduring monument of their power ; above all, their detached office, controlling the different states of Italy and forcing each of them to bring its own artistic temperament within the spell of Rome, gave architecture, in perfect combination, the focus ^nd the liberty, the varied impulse and the renewed vitality necessary for making a great imaginative experiment wilder the influence of the antique. The papacy, then, may be considered to have predetermined in some degree the formation of Renaissance style. Yet we must not exaggerate its contribution. By its imperial quality it will appear to have furnished the large idea to which the new classic architecture might stand in service. But we must not overlook the extent to which the papacy was itself indebted, for that quality, to the artists of the Renaissance. It is a common fallacy to account for artistic expression by external conditions for whose very being that expression is in some cases responsible, 24 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM and which, but for that expression, would never, perhaps, have been supposed to exist. In the present case, no doubt, this point could not be pressed very! far. Yet St. Peter's and the Vatican, and the great monuments of restored Rome, are witnesses no less to the power of architecture to create and define the imaginative value of the Renaissance papacy, than to the encouragement and inspiration which the papacy contributed to art. Moreover, the char- acter of the papacy in this period was la,rgely formed by the character of its popes ; and such men as Pius II., Leo X., and Julius ii., were fit patrons of Renaissance architecture, partly for the reason that , they were cultivated enthusiasts, a\yake to the ideals ; of an art which, quite independently of themselves, had given evidence of its nature, and which was already, in the eyes of all men, an energy so vigorous and splendid, that the popes could conceive no securer means of adding to their fame than by inviting its support. So, too, with the more particular religious and social movements by which the phases of Renaissance architecture have sometimes been explained. When the Counter- Reformation made its bid for popularity, it erected on every hand churches in the baroque manner frankly calculated to delight the senses and ! kindle comnion enthusiasms. Never, perhaps, has architecture been more successfully or more deliber- RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 25 ately made the tool of policy than by this brilliant eflfort which transformed the face of Italy ; nor has the psychological insight of the Jesuits been mani- fested with greate"r sureness than when it thus enlisted in the service of religion the most theatrical instincts of mankind. But, once more, the very success of the movement was occasioned by the fact, so well appreciated by the Jesuits, that the taste for such an architecture was already there. The readiness of the seicento Italians to respond to an architectural appeal, their delight in such qualities as these baroque churches embodied, are pre-existent facts. The achievement of the Jesuits lay in converting these preferences of a still pagan humanity to Catholic uses, aggressively answering the ascetic remonstrance of the Reformation by a still further concession to mundane senses. The artistic significance of the style which the Jesuits employed, remains something wholly independent of the uses to which they put it. To explain the first by the second is to misconstrue the whole matter. To condemn the first on account of the second, as has repeatedly been done, is nothing less than childish. Somewhat similar objections will apply when the architectural history of Italy is interpreted as the outcome of social changes. The ' increase of wealth,' the ' rise of great families,' the ' luxurious habits of a more settled society ' — ^those useful satellites of 26 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM architectural history— helped, no doubt, to create the demand which architecture satisfied. But the significant point is precisely that it was to artistic uses that this wealth, this power, and these opportun- ities, were devoted, and to artistic uses of a particular kind. Rich and flourishing societies have not seldom grown up, and are growing up in our own time, without any corresponding result. Prosperity is a condition of great achievements ; it is not their cause. It does not even stand in any fixed relation to their progress. It provides power, but does not, artistic- ally, control its use. The economic conditions which, in Italy, assisted the architecture of the Renaissance to assume such prominence, did not vary with the marked and swift alterations of its style. The style had an orbit, and an impetus, of its own. In Italy nothing is commoner than to find an architectuigl display wholly disproportionate, and even unrelated, to the social purpose it ostensibly fulfils, and to the importance or prosperity of the individuals or com- munities responsible for its existence. Princely gates, more imposing than those of a great mansion, lift up their heads in the loneliest places of the Cam- pagna, but nothing glorious goes in. They lead, and have always led, to unpeopled pastures or humble farmsteads. The baroque spirit delighted in this gay inconsequence. It appreciated grandeur for its own sake, aesthetically ; and it had a sense of paradox. RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 27 In Tuscany, on the other hand, though Cosimo had to rebuke the toolordly schemes of Brunelleschi, and though the Strozzi Palace frowns in unfinished grjndeur, the noblest occasions are often met by an "exquisite humility of architecture. Yet, chastened as it was to its extreme refinement, this modest style of Tuscany must sometimes have formed the frame to very mediaeval manners. A great critic, Profesgor ] Wolfflin, reviewing the numerous changes in style which marked the entrance of the Baroque, is content to refer them to a change in ■ the Spirit of the time.' Nineteenth century mythology is favourable to the phrase ; and ' the Spirit of the time * is often spoken of as a social power. But * the Spirit of the time ' does not exist independently of the activities which manifest it. It is the atmosphere which results from their combined operation ; or it is the influence of the earlier and more spontaneous of these activities as felt by those which come more tardily or more reluct- antly into play. Now, among those activities, art and architecture were in Italy ever to the forefront, as spontaneous and vital a preoccupation as existed in the national life. It is hardly philosophical, among a number of parallel manifesti^tions of energy, to explain the stronger by the weaker ; yet that is what an appeal to * the Spirit of the time,' if it means anything, here implies. When, therefore, we have interpreted a change in architecture by a change in 28 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM ' the Spirit of the time ' we have in this case demon- strated a mere tautology. ^ Nor shall we fare much better in the attempt to find the key to Renaissance architecture in con- structive science. There have been occasions when the discovery of a new structural principle, or the use of a new material, has started architectural design; upon a path which it has followed, as it were of neces- sity, unable to desist from its course until the full possibilities of the innovation had been explored. Each step is determined by a scientific logic ; and beauty lingers in the art by a fortunate habit, or comes, in some new form, by accident to light. Such, in some sense, was the case with the mediaeval Gothic ; and so it might be with some future architecture of steel. But such was not the case with the architec- ture of the Italian Renaissance. No constructive innovation explains the course which iF~pursued. The dome of Brunelleschi, unquestionably, by its audacity and grandeur, the effective starting-point of the Renaissance, was indeed a great triumph of engineering skill ; but it involved no fundamental principle which was not already displayed in the dome of Pisa or the Baptistery of Florence. On the con- trary, although the construction of the Renaissance was often vast in extent and courageous in conception, it was at the same time simpler and less scientific; than that of the centuries immediately preceding, RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 29 and it was based for the most part upon the simplest traditional Roman forms. In proportion, moreover, as the use of stucco became prevalent, the construction which it concealed became an object of indifference. The one constructional practice which distinguishes the Renaissance does but confirm the insignificant interest which construction, as such, possessed for the men of this period. That practice is the constant and undisguised use of the tie-rod to strengthen and secure arches and vaults which of themselves were insufficient to withstand the outward thrusts. This was an expedient by no means unknown to the Gothic builders. But what in mediaeval construction had been an exceptional remedy, was accepted by the Renaissance builders as an obvious and legitimate resource. There was nothing novel in the expedient. Its frequen t recurrence si gnifies not the adoption of a new constructive principle, but . the-ad option of a iJgSL-artisticpoint of view. The suggestive point about its use is that the element on which, in real fact, the stability of the construction depended was ignored, frankly and courageously, in the aesthetic design. The eye was expected to disregard it as completely as it disregards the prop which in ancient sculpture supports a prancing horse. That is to say, between the aesthetic purpose of the work, and the means by which, in actual construction, it could be realised, a sharp distinction was now admitted. How 30 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM far such a distinction between construction and design is legitimate for architecture is open to dis- pute. The question, which is a difficult one, must be examined more closely in a later chapter. Here we may notice it merely as a confirmation of our state- ment, that it was not from any new constructive interest that the impulse of the Renaissance style was derived, or its progress defined. On the con- trary, it is frequently objected that the decorative use of the Orders so conspicuous in Renaissance;! architecture did not express structure, that it was contrary to construction, and, for that reason, vicious^ Lastly, architectural design was not dictated* except to a slight degree, by the materials employed. This physical explanation of style is much favoured by modern critics, but it is singularly inapplicable to the period we are considering. Italy is rich in every kind of building material, and the architect could suit ' his heeds. No doubt the great blocks of stone whicbf; could be quarried at Fiesole assisted the builders of the Pitti Palace, as it had assisted the Etruscans^ before them. Probably the inspiration lay rather in the Etruscan tradition than in the material itselfsi Still, had the Florentine builders rested content with the Etruscan masonry, it might be said, without essential untruth, that their materials determine^ their style. But the Florentines brought to perfec- tion hot only the most massive of Italian styles, but RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 31 also the lightest. Their most remarkable achieve- ment was a sudden power of quiet delicacy and grace. Conversely, when the baroque architects of Rome desired a monumental and Cyclopean effect, they obtained it without the Florentines' advantages. Again, the hard pietra serena of Tuscany may lend itself to fine carving ; but the passion of the Floren- tines for exquisite detail is no less marked in their painting, where no such factors operated, than in their architecture. Clearly, therefore, it sprang in both cases from an independent and native prefer- ence of taste. And, conversely, once more, the rough travertine of Rome did not yield up its ' natural ' effect, its breadth of scale and roundness of feelings until the baroque imagination, trained in painting to seek for soft transitions and broad shadow, began to require those qualities in architecture. Till then, travertine had been used, against its nature, in the Florentine tradition of sharp detail. In the Renai s- sance the imagination came first ; and where it exis ted it never Jail gd to find materials for its expression, No doubt one material was better than another, and an architect accustomed, as were the Italians, to his tools, would take the best he could ; but the men of the Renaissance were notoriously, and perhaps viciously, indifferent to the matter. If they con- ceived a design which called for a material difficult to obtain, they made no scruple about imitating it. 32 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM Their marbles and their stones are often of paintedi stucco. When the blocks of masonry with which! they built were not in scale with the projected scheme,^ the real joints were concealed and false ones were introduced .1 And these practices were by no means confined, as is sometimes suggested, to the later and supposedly decadent phases of the art. MaterialfJ^ then^3ras.utterly subservient to style.ax**( s4vj^ Enough has now perhaps been said to suggest that Renaissance architecture in Italy pursued its course and assumed its various forms rather from an aesthetic, and, so to say, internal impulsion than| under the dictates of any external agencies. The architecture of the Renaissance is pre-eminently an architecture of Taste. , The men of the Renaissance| evolved a certain architectural style, because they liked to be surrounded by forms of a certain kind. These forms, as such, they preferred, irrespective of their relation to the mechanical means by which: they were produced, irrespective of the materials out of which they were constructed, irrespective somcn.^ times even of the actual purposes they were to serve. ^ e.g. in the Strozzi Palace many apparently vast blocks of stone are made up of shorter ones with concealed vertical joints. In the Cancelleria, conversely, long stones are made to appear shorter thad they are, by ' joints,' which are in reality only channels on the surface^ In both cases the purpose is to maintain ' scale ' ; the unit of designj that is to say, is not material but sesthetic. f RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 33 They had an immediate preference for certain com- binations of mass and void, of light and shade, and, compared with this, all other motives in the forma- tion of their distinctive style were insignificant. For these other motives, being accidental, exerted no ccHisistent pressure, and, consequently, were absorbed or thrust aside by the steady influence of a conscious taste for form. As an architecture of taste, then, we must let it rest, where our historians are so unwilling to leave it, or where, leaving it, they think it necessary to condemn : as though there were something de- ' graded in liking certain iotms- for their own sake and valuing architecture primarily as the meang. by which they may be obtained. What is the cause of this prejudice ? What is the reason of the persistent attempt to force upon architectural art such external standards, and to explain it by such external influences ? Clearly, it is this. Taste is supposed to be a matter so various, so capricious, so inconsequent, and so obscure that it is considered hopeless to argue about it in its own- terms. Either, "it is thought, we must resign our- selves to chaos, or we must exclude taste from our discussion, or we must reduce taste to terms of some- thing more constant and reliable. Only by so re- ducing it can we control it, or hope to understand it. •niejtendency^ jfLJact, spring&JroniJthjeJmBatience^. of the intellect in t he presen ce of a factor which seems 34 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM - to disown its authority, and to be guided, if it is guided at all, by instincts of which the intellect can give no immediate account. It is an unconscious attempt to drill art into the ready-made categories which we have found useful in quite other fields, and to explain the unfamiliar by the familiar. It is the application to art of the methods of science, which sometimes are less concerned with the ultimate truth about its facts than with bringing them within the range of a given intellectual formula. But it is unscientific to persist in the application when it is clear that the formula does not fit. f' We have dealt in this chapter with a point of his- torical fact. It is historically true that the distinctive control in Renaissance architecture lay not in con- struction or materials or politics, but, chiefly and typically, in the taste for form. 1 It follows that it is reasonable to analyse the Italian styles primarily in terms of taste : to ask, how far do they fulfil that third * condition of well-building ' which WottOH names ' delight.' But it is one thing to state how Renaissance archi- tecture arose ; it is quite another to estimate its value,* For it may be rejoined that good taste in architecture consists in approving what is truthfully built — ex- pressive alike of the methods and materials of its construction on the one hand, and, on the other, of the ends it has to serve ; and that if the taste of the RENAISSANCE ARCHITECTURE 35 Renaissance was indifferent to these points it was bad taste, and the architecture which embodied it bad ajrchitecture. Thus, the very factors which, on the point of history, we have relegated to a secondary place, might still, on the point of cesthetics, resume their authority. This view of architecture has many adherents. It finds confirmation — so at least it is claimed — ^in the greater styles of the past, in the practice of the Greek and Gothic builders. To ignore this rejoinder would be to fall into the common error of dogmatic criticism, and to neglect a large part of actual artistic experience. But it is a view of architecture which the Renaissance builders, at least, were far from holding. It is at variance with buildings which were enjoyed, and enjoyed enthusiastically, by a people devoted, and presumably sensitive, to art. Confronted by those rival dogmatisms, how can -• we proceed ? The natural course would be to examine * the buildings themselves and take the evidence of our owii sensations. Are they beautiful, or not ? But on our sensations, after all, we can place no immediate reliance. For our sensations will be determined partly by our opinions and, still more, by what we look out for, attend to, and expect to find. All these preoccupations may modify our judgment at every turn, and interpose between us and the clear features of the art an invisible but obscuring veil. Before 36 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM we put faith in our sensations, before we accept the verdict of others, it is necessary to examine,/ more i closely than has yet been done, the influencjes by which contemporary opinion, in matters of larchi- tecture, is unwittingly surrounded and controlled. CHAPTER II THE ROMANTIC FALLACY The Renaissance produced no theory of architecture. It produced treatises on architecture : Fra Giocondo, Alberti, Palladio, Serlio, and many others, not only built, but wrote. But the style they built in was too alive to admit of analysis, too popular to require defence. They give us rules, but not principles. They had no need of theory, for they addressed them- selves to taste. Periods of vigorous production, absorbed in the practical and the particular, do not encourage universal thought. The death of the Renaissance tradition should have enabled men, for the first time, to take a general view of its history, and to define its principles, if not with scientific exactness, at least without provinci- ality or bias. Of the causes which precluded them from so doing, the first was the prolonged ascendency of the Romantic Movement. tf The Romantic Movement created, in all the arts, a deep unrest, prompting men to new experiments ; and, following on the experiments, there came a great enlargement of critical theory, seeking to justify 37 38 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM and to explain. \ So it was with the theory of architecture. How far, in this change of thought, has it been strengthened and enriched ; how far encumbered and confused ? A clear view of Re- naissance architecture requires an answer to this question. Although, in every department of thought, there are principles peculiar to it, necessary to its under- standing, and with reference to which it should pro- perly be approached, yet all the elements of human culture are linked in so close and natural a federation, that when one among them becomes predominant, the others are affected to an instantaneous sym- pathy, and the standards appropriate to the one are transferred, with however little suitability, to all. v'^Such,' towards the close of the eighteenth century, was the case of the Romantic Movement, which, from being an enlargement of the poetic sensibility, came, in the course of its development, to modify the dogmas and control the practice of politics and of architecture. By the stress which it laid on qualities that belong appropriately to literature, and find place in architecture, if at all, then only in a secondary degree, it so falsified the real significance of the art that, even at the present time, when the Romantic Movement is less conspicuous in THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 39 the creation of architecture, the fallacies we shall trace to it are still abundantly present, in its criticism. 'T- /Romanticism may be said to consist in a highl development of poetic sensibility towards the remote; as such. It idealises the distant, both of time and place ; it identifies beauty with strangeness. In the curious and the extreme, which are disdained by a classical taste, and in the obscure detail which that taste is too abstract to include, it finds fresh sources of inspiration^ It is most often retrospective, turning away from the present, however valuable, as being familiar. It is always idealistic, casting on the screen of an imaginary past the projection of its unfulfilled desires. Its most typical form is the cult of the. extinct, 'in its essence, romanticism is not favourable to plastic form. It is too much concerned with the vague and the remembered to find its natural expression in the wholly concrete. Romanti- cism is not plastic ; neither is it practical, nor philo- sophical, nor scientific. Romanticism is poetical. From literature it derives its inspiration ; here is its strength ; and here it can best express its meaning. In other fields — as in music — it has indeed attained to unimagined beauties ; but always within certain limits and upon fixed conditions. For here, on a borrowed ground, if, it fail to observe the laws which music, or architecture, or life, as concrete 40 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM arts, may impose, then even that element of value which Romanticism introduced, becoming mute and ineffective, is sacrificed in the failure of the whole. I It would be a mistake to imagine that Romanticisal was in any way a new force at the time when, with the French Revolution, its various manifestations- came into such startling prominence as to require attention and receive a name. Any movement strong enough to become conspicuously dominant; must long previously, it is safe to suppose, have been latently operative. And, in architecture, although| the Romantic Movement of the nineteenth century! dealt the final death-blow to the tradition of the Renaissance, yet that tradition, it must not be for- gotten, was itself a romantic movement. The cult of medisevalism, stimulated by the revival of ballad literature and by antiquarian novelists, is not more romanticist than the idealisation of antiquity, four centuries earlier, stimulated by the revival of classi*: poetry and the enthusiastic antiquarianism of Paduaix*; scholars. Nor, for that matter, is it more romanticist than the neo-Greek architectural movement of the Hellenising emperors in antiquity itself. Why, then, it is natural to ask, should a motive which in the second and fifteenth centuries proved a source of strength, be regarded, in the nineteenth, as a dis- astrous weakness ? THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 41 A. have said that only upon fixed conditions can romanticism express itself through the more concrete arts. In architecture these conditions are threefold. First, there should be no fundamental incongruity between the forms suggested by the romantic impulse and those customary to architecture at the time of their introduction. For, since the architect can never wholly override custom nor contradict tradition, and since the transformation of style is consequently slow, it follows that the old elements and the new will have to exist, in some sense, side by side. / So long, therefore, as these remain incongruous, the ex- periment will be endangered. Secondly, it is essential that the romantic impulse should come at a moment when the art of form is vigorous enough for the work of assimilation, and capable of translating the poetic material into plastic shape. Finally, as a third con- dition, it is essential that the technique and organisa- tion required by the new ideal should be, as far as> possible, identical with those of the existent art. For neither technique nor organisation can be called into being suddenly and at will : yet on these both the existence and the character of architectural style depend. The instruments, therefore, which the romantic impulse finds to its hand must be suited to the forms which it seeks to impose. | 4, ." Now the ideal of architecture which the Romantic Movement in the nineteenth century attempted to 42 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM introduce contradicted each of these conditions. It had a poetic interest in mediaevalism ; but the forms of mediaevalism were radically incongruous with those of the Renaissance ; they required an irrecoverable organisation and a lost technique ; and they were invoked at a moment when architectural vigour was shaken by deep changes in the social order on which it had depended. | '"'* The purpose of romanticism should have been the fusion of a poetical interest with the forms and ^principles of an existing art. Had the Romantic Movement complied, even in some degree, with the essential conditions, a genuine architectural style might have been created, formed, as it were, out of the materials of that which it superseded. In some directions, while the good sense of the eighteenth century still controlled the situation, this was indeed accomplished. For the first signs of the change had been innocent enough. In the middle of the eigh- teenth century, that romantic attitude, which later was to culminate in a wholly false aesthetic, . can already be recognised in a certain restlessness and satiety with native and traditional forms, and in a tendency to take interest in remote kinds of art. One of the earliest indications of this spirit is the taste, prevalent at that time in French society, and imitated to a less degree in England and in Italy, for the art of China, which Eastern commerce and the mission- THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 43 ary efforts of the Jesuits had made known .^ In this case our three necessary conditions were fulfilled . For one of the phases of Renaissance art, which will fall in due course to be examined, was the translation into architectural language of our pleasure in rapid, joyous, and even humorous physical movements. In France, this phase was embodied in the art of Louis xv. It was contemporary with the climax of that interest in the Chinese which, we have said, was an early instance of the romantic spirit. Now, in its pre- dilection for gay and tortuous forms, as also in its love of finish, the art of China (as the French under- stood it) was perfectly congruous with their own. It required no organisation which contemporary art was not able to supply ; and the zeal for it came at a time when architecture was so vigorous that it readily assimilated such elements of the new material as suited its requirements, and produced, in the Chinoiseries of the eighteenth century, a charming invention, which, while it gratified the romantic instinct of the age, added, at the same time, to its appropriate decorative resources. >^The successive stages of the Gothic taste exhibit very clearly the character of romanticism, and the point at which it overweighs the sense of form. Up * The Chinese Trading Company of Colbert was founded in 1660 ; the Compagnie des Indes in 1664. From 1698 to 1703 the Amphitrite cruised in Chinese waters. Vide J. Gu6rin, Les Chinoiseries au XVIH^ Siicle. 44 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM to the middle of the eighteenth century the mediaeval style merely spelt discomfort, desolation, and gloom.^ Noble owners, so far as theiT purse allowed, converted their Gothic inheritances, as best they could, to the Georgian taste, or rebuilt them outright. Then enters the spirit of history, the romance of the dis- tant and the past, with archaeology at its 'heels. The connoisseurs, about 1740, are full of zeal for the stylistic distinctions between the Egyptian, the Gothic, and the Arabesque, and charmingly vague about their limits. Their studies are pursued with- out calling in question the superior fitness of th^ classical tradition. Nevertheless, the orthodoxies of archaeology now hold sway. They are submitted to not without reluctance. Gray, in 1754, writes of Lord Brooke, at Warwick Castle : ' He has sash'd the great Appartment . . . and being since told that square sash-windows were not Gothic, he has put certain whim-wams within side the glass, which, appearing through, are made to look like fret- work. Then he has scooped out a little Burrough in the massy walls of the place for his little self and his children, which is hung with chintzes in the exact * There were not wanting those who maintained this opinion throughout the whole period of the romantic movement. In 1831, when it was at its height, even the stately and tempered medievalism of Knole still inspires the Duchesse de Dino with the utmost melancholy: ' Cette vieille f fee (the housekeeper) montre fort bien I'antique et lugubre d6meure de Knowles, dont la tristesse est incomparable.' — Duchesse de Dino, Chronique. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 45 manner of Berkley Square or Argyle Buildings. What in short can a lord do nowadays that is lost in a great, old, solitary castle but skulk about, and get into the first hole he finds, as a rat would do in like case ? ' ^ But the vital taste of the time could not rest satisfied with archaM)logy. The Gothic forms were a romantic material, rich with the charm of history. Could they be fused with the living style ? Batty Langley thought they could, and by no other mind more readily than his own. ' Ancient archi- tecture, restored and improved by a great variety of grand and useful designs, entirely new, in the Gothick mode * ; ' Gothic Architecture, improved by rules and proportions.' These were the titles Langley successively affixed to the first two editions of his work. They show two alternative ways of regarding the same question — ^the Gothic, steadied and sobered by ' pro- portion ' ; the ancient architecture made various with Gothic fancies. Here was no question of a mediaeval revival, as the next century understood it, but a true attempt at fusion. But then the two elements to be fused were utterly incongruous. If this was not clear before. Batty Langley's designs must have made it obvious to all who were not blinded by historical enthusiasm. And, on the whole, the right inference was drawn. ' Gothic Umbrellos to terminate a view ' ; Gothic pavilions for ' the inter- • Letters of Thomas Gray, edited by D. C. Tovey, vol. I. No, cxiv. 46 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM section of ways in a Wood or Wildernesse,' were well enough. Here they might be admitted as curiosities — ^as literary reminders of the romantic past, or shrines to the poetry of nature with which the mediaeval style was conceived to be related. Above all, they might act as a foil to the classical elements themselves, and do a dual service by stimulating the sense of history while they set off the immaculate consistency of the time. The Gothic suggestions might even penetrate the house. They might, without dis- cordancy, provide the traceries of a book-case or enrich the mouldings of a Chippendale table. Here and there, in the light spirit of fashionable caprice, they might furnish the decoration of a room, just as, elsewhere, an Eastern scheme might dominate. But to go further, and Gothicise the main design, seemed, at the first, an obvious fault of taste. ' I delight,' writes Gray to Wharton, ' to hear you talk of giving your house some Gothic ornaments already. If you project anything, I hope it will be entirely within doors : and don't let me (when I come gaping into Coleman Street) be directed to the " gentleman's at the ten pinnacles " or " with the Church Porch at his door." ' ^ And when, at Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole allowed a quaint imitation of mediaevalism to furnish his whole design, the concession, startling and even absurd as it seemed to his contemporaries, > Letters of Thomas Gray, vol. I. Ko. cxiv. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 47 was made in a spirit of amused pedantry and conscious eccentricity, or, at most, of archaeological patronage ; nor could the amateurs of that time have credited the idea that the trefoils and pinnacles of Walpole's toy heralded a movement which would before long exterminate alike the practice and the understanding of their art. The irony of this situation has an exact and tragic counterpiart in the favour accorded at that epoch by the more philosophic and enlightened of the French aristocracy to those theories of ' natural ' equality (themselves another expression of romanti- cism) which were destined to drive these noble patrons, their philosophy and their enlightenment, entirely out of existence. Side by side with this sense of Gothic as an amusing exotic — an attitude which was thoroughly in the Renaissance spirit and characteristic, above all, of the eighteenth century — ^there grew up a more serious perception of its imaginative value. When Goethe visits Strasburg Cathedral it is no longer, for him, the work of ' ignorant and monkish barbarians, 'but the expression of a sublime ideal : and Goethe's mind foreshadows that of the coming century. At the same time he has no quarrel with the existing standards ; a complete reaction against these is as yet unimaginable. But a change of attitude shows itself both with regard to Gothic and also to the living style. These now came more and more to be regarded 48 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM symbolically, as standing for certain ideas. And in particular the habit arose of regarding Greek and Gothic art as contrasted, parallel and alternative modes of feeling. But the good taste of the period, although already permeated with Romanticism, recog- nised this distinction between them : the Gothic must remain an external object of admiration ; the Greek feeling could be fused with the existing art, the Greek forms grafted on to, or extricated from, the living tradition. Just as it had required no impos- sible change to impart a Chinese turn to the gay Renaissance style of Louis xv., so, with equal facility, the romantic idealisation of Greece could be expressed by emphasising the elements of severity in the essenti- ally Renaissance style of Louis xvi. But a species hof literary symbolism becomes increasingly evident in the attempt. ( Tlm^ interest ._is.^^tgd^_mQix_jmd - V^o^.? from the q rt__itseJ^f_to the ideals_Qf_civilisaiian« The Greek modes of the period are deliberately meant to ' suggest ' its political or other doctrines ; and the intrusion of Egyptian detail which followed Napoleon's African expedition is an instance of the same allusive tendency. Thus, though an apparent continuity is still maintained, a radical change has taken place. A romantic classicism of sentiment and reflection has overlaid and stifled the creative classicism which sprang up in the quattrocento and till now had run its course. In imparting THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 49 to the Renaissante tradition this literary flavour, in adopting this unprecedentedly imitative manner, the vigour of the Renaissance style was finally and fatally impaired. • In obedience to the cult of ' ideal ' severity it cut down too /scrupulously all evidence of life ; and when, with the) passing of the old order of society, vanished also the high level of workpanship and exquisite ordering of ideas which that society had exacted, then the ruin of the classical style was consummated, and poverty of execution completed what poverty of design had begun. } The antique, which Brunelleschi invoked, was now realised with full self-consciousness ; in the last stages of the Empire style the resources of classic architecture seem at length to be exhausted ; in that style the architects of Napoleon built the monument, and wrote the epitaph, of Renaissance art. v^But the romantic impulse, when it has thus dealt the death-blow to the living Renaissance tradition, still had its course to run. The attitude of mind of which the Empire style was the classical expression had yet to manifest itself in other forms less fit. Its final and definitive achievement was, of course, the general revival of Gothic. Towards this end the literary and sentimental currents of the time combined more and more powerfully to impel it, and as the nineteenth century progressed and the old standards became forgotten, romantic enthusiasm in archi- D 50 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM tecture was concentrated upon this alone. \ Beckford, at Fonthill, finding in the Georgian mansion he inherited no adequate stimulus to the raptures of imagination, instructed his architect Wyatt to design ' an ornamental building which should have the appearance of a convent, be partly in ruins and yet contain some weatherproof apartments.' ^ \ The scheme at length developed into vast proportions. Impressive galleries of flimsy Gothic delighted their master with vague suggestions of the Hall of Eblis, and a tower, three hundred feet in height, rose above them to recall the orgies of the wicked Caliph. Five hundred workmen laboured here incessantly, by day, and with torches in the night. But the wind blew upon it, and the wretched structure fell incontinently to the ground. The ideal of a monastic palace ' partly ruined ' was ironically achieved. And the author of Vathek, contemplating in the torchlight his now crumpled, but once cloud-capped, pinnacles, may stand for the romantic failure of his time — ^for the failure of the poetic fancy, unassisted, to achieve material style. /It forms no part of our scheme to dwell upon the phases of the mediaeval revival. They exhibit the > Vide The Life and Letters of William Beckford, by L. Melville. Beckford rebuilt his tower, but it again fell to earth. His life (1760- 1844) bridges the interval between Walpole and Ruskin, and is an admirable example of fiie romantic spirit at its height. Vathek and Fonthill exhibit its power and its weakness. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 51 romantic spirit in a cruder, a less interesting, and a less instructive manner than the Greek movement which we have been criticising. Technique, organi- sation, vigour, understanding — everything, in fact, save learning and enthusiasm, were wanting to it. It illustrates, as abundantly as one could wish, the effect upon architecture of an exclusively literary attitude of mind ; and as few to-day would do otherwise than lament its achievements, we may take leave of them. But among the consequences of that ill-timed experiment we have to emphasise this. The Romantic Movement, in destroying the existing architectural tradition, destroyed simultaneously the interest which was felt in its principles, and replaced it by a mis- understood mediaevalism out of which no principles of value could ever be recovered. The catastrophe for style was equally a catastrophe for thought; To this, without doubt, no small part of the existing confusion in architectural criticism may be traced. We laugh at Fonthill and Abbotsford and Straw- berry Hill : Georgian architecture once again enjoys its vogue. Yet the Romantic Tendency, expelled from architecture, still lingers in its criticism. The Gothic revival is past, while the romantic prejudices that engendered it remain. And these it is important to define. •^he first fallacy of Romanticism, then, and the 52 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM gravest, is to regard architecture as symbolic, Litera- *ture is powerful to invest with fascination any period of history on which its art is imaginatively expended. Under the influence, directly or indirectly, of litera- ture the whole past of the race is coloured for us in attractive or repellent tones. Of some periods inevit- ably we think with delight ; of others with distaste. A new historical perspective, a new literary fashion, may at any time alter the feeling we entertain. Yet the concrete arts which these different periods pro- duced remain always the same, still capable of address- ing the same appeal to the physical senses. If, then, we are to attend impartially to that permanent appeal, we must discount these ' literary ' preconceptions. But everything which recalls a period of the past may recall, by association, the emotions with which that period is, at the time, poetically regarded. And to these emotions, originally engendered by literature, romanticism makes the other arts subservient. The element in our consciousness which ought to be dis- counted, it makes paramount. Its interest in the arts is that, like poetry, they should bring the mind within the charmed circle of imaginative ideas. But these ideas really belong to the literary imagination whence they sprang, and one result of applying them to architecture, where they are not inherent, is that all permanence and objectivity of judgment is lost. Thus, for example, the Gothic building from being THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 53 the 'expression ' of 'ignorant and monkish barbarians,' came to 'suggest' the idealised Goth — 'firm in his faith and noble in his aspirations' — ^who inspired the enthusiasm of Coleridge ; and the forms of an architecture which later came to be admired as the lucid expression of constructive mathematics were about this time commonly praised as the archi- tectural image of primeval forests. Some minds find in the work of the mediaeval builders the record of a rude and unresting energy ; others value it as the evidence of a dreaming piety. Now, it is an ' expres- sion of infinity made imaginable ' ; next, the embodi- ment of ' inspired ' democracy. It is clear that there is no limit to this kind of writing, and we have only to follow the romantic criticism through its diverse phases to feel convinced of its total lack of any objective significance. Any characteristic, real or imagined, of a mixed set of northern races, during a period of several hundred years, is discovered at will in these cathedrals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although it is more than doubtful how far such characteristics are capable of being embodied in architecture, or, if embodied, how far we, with our modern habits of thought, can extract them un- falsified, or, if extracted, how far they are relevant to the quality of the work. The whole process is purely literary, its charm is in the literary value of the idea itself, or in the act and process of 54 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM association. »/Moreover, since literary exercises invite effects of contrast, the architecture of the Renaissance comes to be treated, like the villain in the melodrama, as a mere foil to the mediaeval myth.) And because Renaissance life happened to yield no stimulus to the nineteenth century imagination, the architecture which ministered to the uses of that life became ipso facto commonplace, A combination of plastic forms has a sensuous value apart from anything we may know about them. Romanticism allows what it knows, or conceives itself to know, about the circum- stances among which the forms were produced, to divert it from giving unbiassed attention to the purely aesthetic character, the sensuous value, of the con- crete arts. If it is a question of architecture, the architectural design is taken as standing for the period which invented and is associated with it, and as suggesting, conventionally, the general imaginative state, the complex feelings of approval or disapproval which the idea of that period happens to evoke. Architecture, in fact, becomes primarily symbolic. It ceases to be an immediate and direct source of enjoyment, and becomes a mediate and indirect one. ^ Under the romantic influence, then, the interest in architecture is symbolic, and taste becomes caprici- ous. But that is. not all. It becomes also unduly stylistic, and unduly antiquarian. For in proportion as architectural form is symbolically conventional THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 55 its precise character becomes far less important than its general so-called ' style ' ; just as in a handwriting the precise forms are less important than the mean- ings to which they refer, and exist only to call up the latter. Romanticism conceives styles as a stereo-, typed language. Nineteenth century criticism is full of this prepossession : its concern is with styles • Christian ' and ' un-Christian ' ; one ' style ' is suitable to museums and banks and cemeteries ; another to colleges and churches ; and this not from any architectural requirements of the case, but from a notion of the idea supposed to be suggested by a square battlement, a Doric pillar, or a pointed arch.'- And such criticism is far more occupied with the importance of having, or not having, these features in general, than with the importance of having them individually beautiful, or beautifully combined. It sets up a false conception of style and attaches ex- aggerated value to it. For it looks to the conven- tional marks of historical styles for the sake of their symbolic value, instead of recognising style in general for its own value. ! And there ensues a further error. Every period of * Nor is this prepossession extinct. When, recently, the most eminent of English architects projected a basilica for the Hampstead Garden Suburb, the Bishop of London swept the admirable scheme aside, declaring he ' must have a spire point to God.' We trust his lordship is finding some solace at Golder's Green for the signal injury done him by Sir Christopher Wren. 56 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM romanticism, ancient or modem, has, it is safe to say, been a period of marked antiquarianism. The glamour of the past, and the romantic veneration for it, are very naturally extended to the minutiae in which the past so often is preserved, and are bound to lend encouragement to their study. Nor is this study in itself other than beneficial. But the fault of the antiquarian spirit, in architectural thought, is precisely that it attaches an undue importance to detail as opposed to those more general values of Mass, Space, Line, and Coherence with which archi- tecture properly deals, and which it will be the later purpose of this study to analyse and describe. For the present it is enough to emphasise the fact that between Renaissance architecture and the antiquarian criticism of the Romantic fallacy there is a funda- mental opposition : and that opposition lies in their attitude to detail. For antiquarian criticism regards detail as the supreme consideration and Renaiissance architecture regards it as a secondary and subservient consideration. And not only do they give it a different degree of importance, but, still more, they give it an importance of a wholly different kind. For in Renaissance architecture the purpose of detail, as we shall see, is primarily to give effect to the values of Mass, Space, Line, and Coherence in the whole design ; and, secondarily, upon a smaller scale, to exhibit these qualities in itself. But for the romantic THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 57 or antiquarian criticism it is required to be ' scholarly,' that is, to correspond exactly to some detail previ- ously used in the period poetically approved. In this way, although it would seem highly unscholarly not to discover the aesthetic function of detail in general before dogmatising upon its use in particular cases, the antiquarian criticism of architecture has usurped the prestige of scholarship. And thus the romantic attitude which begins in poetry ends in pedantry, and the true spirit of architecture eludes it altogether. In the warfare of romantic cbntroversy, Renaissance forms were defiantly multiplied, and sneeringly abused, as though the merit of the style consisted in the detached and unvalued elements common to the Piazzetta of Venice and the clubs of Pall Mall. Like the dishonoured fragments that mark the site of a forgotten temple, detail, mutilated by ignorant misuse — detail, and the conventional insignia of the styles — ^was all that remained of the broken edifice of a humanist tradition. And, as the merit of Renaissance architecture consists less in the variety than in the disposition of its forms, it became at last, as its enemies accused it of always having been, the lifeless iteration of a stereotyped material. \/ The first pitfall, therefore, into which architectural criticism fell was that prepared for it by the Romantic Movement. The understanding of Renaissance archi- tecture suffered from this, and still suffers, both by 58 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM neglect, and by misinterpretation. It was inevitable that Romantic criticism should neglect the Renais- sance style. I Its antiquarian enthusiasts found in it no free scope, because the field was already well explored, the subject well formulated : they were revolted, moreover, by the unconventional use which the Renaissance artists often made of classical design ; and, attracted to the mediaeval by its wealth of unex- plored detail, they followed all the more willingly the summons of the romantic impulse which, by an accident of culture, had now set towards the middle ages. Its poetic enthusiasts, equally, were repelled from the Renaissance tradition because it was in- sufficiently remote, insufficiently invested with the glamour of the unknown ; because it could be made symbolic of no popular ideas, and because it could not, like the Greek or the Gothic, be fitted at once into a ready-made, poetical connection. And thus, insensibly, the Renaissance style, since symbolic it had to be, became symbolic of ideas that were unpopular. The conditions in which it had grown up seemed relatively prosaic. Prosaic, therefore, and dull the Renaissance forms must necessarily be found .'^ \ » Cf. Mr. Lethaby in a recent work : ' It must, I think, be admitted by those who have in part understood the great primary styles, Greek or Gothic, that the Renaissance is a style of boredom. . . . Gothic art witnesses to a nation in training hunters, craftsmen, athletes ; the Renaissance is the art of scholars, courtiers. ..." Such a statement, in a history which is content to dismiss the whole period in eight pages (or rather less than is devoted to the architecture of Babylon), THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 59 y^'Such were the consequences of the prepossession which translates material forms into terms of 'literary' ideas. Ji fet it n iust_-not be said that literary ideas have no ' legitimat ej_ ^ce in architectural. experi- _ence. Every experience of art contains, or may contain, two elements, the one direct, the other in- direct. The direct element includes our sensuous experience and simple perceptions of form : the im- mediate apprehension of the work of art in its visible or audible material, with whatever values may, by the laws of our nature, be inherently connected with that. Secondly, and beyond this, there are the asspciations which the work awakens in the mind — our conscious reflections upon it, the significance we attach to it, the fancies it calls up, and which, in consequence, it is sometimes said to express. This is the indirect, or associative, element, j These two elements are present in nearly every aesthetic experience ; but they may be very differently may justify us in saying that, at the hands oi our romantically-minded critics, the Renaissance suffers from neglect, and that it suffers from misinterpretation. For Mr. Lethaby further complains of its buildings that they are ' architects' architecture ' : architecture, that is to say, not convertible, presumably, into terms of poetry or historical romance, but requiring a knowledge of architectural principles for its appre- ciation. Renaissance architecture, in fact, is here read off in terms of Renaissance society, and those who enjoy it as an art are stigmatised as ■ architects.' When a critic, perhaps as learned and as eminent as any now writing on the subject of architecture in England, can offer us these censures, even in a popular work, as though they were accepted commonplaces, it is not easy to hope that the Romantic Fallacy is becoming extinct. — W. R. Lethaby, Architecture, 1912, pp. 232-3. 60 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM combined. Literature is an art which deals pre- ponderatingly with ' expression.' Its appeal is made through the indirect element. Its emphasis and its value lie chiefly in the significance, the meaning and the associations of the sounds which constitute its direct material. Architecture, conversely, is an art which affects us chiefly by direct appeal. Its emphasis and its value lie chiefly in material and that abstract disposition of material which we call form. Neither in the one case nor in the other is the method wholly simple. Mere sound in poetry is an immedi- ate element in its effect. And some visual impres- sions in architecture are bound up almost inextricably with elements of ' significance ' : as, for example, the sight of darkness with the notion of gloom, or of unbroken surfaces with the notion of repose. Never- theless, the direct elements of poetry — ^its sound and form — are valuable chiefly as means to the significance. They are employed to convey refinements of meaning, or to awaken trains of association, of which mere unassisted syntax is incapable. They enrich or sharpen our idea. The sounds delight us because, in them, the sense is heightened ; and formal rhyme, by linking one phrase with another, adds a further intricacy of suggestion. But the merely formal, merely sensuous values of poetry are fully experienced when we read a poem in an unknown language ; and the experiment should assure us that in literature THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 6i the direct elements are valuable, almost solely, as a means to the indirect, and that the method of the art is strictly associative. In architecture, on the other hand, so small is here the necessary importance of mere significance, that a building whose utilitarian intention is crudely ignoble, and which is thus sym- bolic of ignoble things, may easily affect us, through its direct elements, as sublime. Literature may possess abstract architectural properties — scale, pro- portion, distribution — ^independent of its significance ; architecture may evoke a poetic dream, independent of its forms ; but, fundamentally, the language of the two arts is distinct and even opposite. In the one we await the meaning ; in the other we look to an immediate emotion resulting from the substance and the form. The reason of this difference is obvious. The material of literature is already significant. Every particle of it has been organised in order to convey significance, and in order to convey the same signifi- cance to all. - But for the material of architecture, no system of accepted meanings has been organised. If, therefore, we derive associative values from its forms, those values will be determined wholly by the accidents of our time and personality. Our readings will disagree. Thus, while each individual, or gene- ration, may add to the direct pleasures of architecture a further element of associative delight, this associ- 62 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM ative element is not fixed or organisable ; it does not contain the true intention or typical value of the art, and cannot be fitted to contain them. X Now since language, meaning, and association play so large a part in our practical life, and form the very texture of our thought, there has been little danger at any time that the significance of literary art should be overlooked. There has never been — save perhaps to a slight degree in the eighi^enth century — ^an 'architectural fallacy' in literature, though it has often been the case that the minor element of value — the sensuous element of literature — ^is totally forgotten. But this same habitual preoccupation with 'signifi- cance ' which has kept literature vital has, in archi- tecture, led us to lay undue weight on what is there the secondary element, and to neglect its direct Value, its immediate and typical appeal. This, then, is the ' literary fallacy ' in architecture; It neglects the fact that in literature meaning, or fixed associa- tion, is the universal term ; while in architecture the universal term is the sensuous experience of substance and of form, j /The Romantic Movement is a phase, precisely, of this literary preoccupation. It is the most extreme example of the triumph of association over direct experiences which the history of culture contains. Its influence upon taste can never be quite undone ; nor need we wish it. Romanticism, as a conscious THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 63 force, has brought with it much that is valuable, and holds the imagination of the age, with an emphatic and pervasive control. But the danger is great lest a spirit which has rendered intelligible so many ancient and forgotten beauties, and created so many that are new, may-, in its impetus, render ineffective for us some less insistent types of art, towards the perfection of which the tradition of centuries has austerely worked. Such an art is the architecture of the Renaissance. Here, then, if we indulge at all in literary ideas, let us at least be sure that they do not obscure from us the value of the style. | V One fact should be stated in defence. These ' literary ' ideas ought not to be the primary value, of a. material art ; they are, nevertheless, its ultimate value. For, since man is a self-conscious being, capable of memory and association, all experiences, "of whatever kind, will be merged, after they have been experienced, in the world of recollection — ^will become part of the shifting web of ideas which is the material of literary emotion. And this will be ■true of architectural experience. | It may begin as a sensuous perception, but as such it is necessarily more transient and occasional than its remembered signifi- cance, and more isolated and particular than when fused by reflection with the rest of our remembered life. Its significance outlives it in the mind. There is, therefore, so to say, a literary background to the 64 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM purely sensuous impression made upon us by plastic form, and this will be the more permanent element in our experience. When we renew the sensuous perception of the work of art, in addition to the immediate value this perception may have for us, there will be, surrounding it, a penumbra of ' literary ' and other values. And as our attention to the sensuous properties relaxes, it is to these that it will 'naturally turn.»^ In so far, then, as the literary values of the work of art enrich our complete experience of it, they are clear gain. And in so far as the Romantic Movement has stimulated our sensibility to such literary values, that also is a clear gain. It would be absurd to demand (as in some of the arts enthusiasts are constantly demanding) that we should limit our enjoyment of an art to that delight which it is the peculiar and special function of the art to provide. To sever our experience into such completely isolated departments is to impoverish it at every point. In the last resort, as in the first, we appreciate a work of art not by the single instrument of a specialised taste, but with our whole personality. Our experience is inevitably inclusive and synthetic. It extends far beyond the mere reaction to material form. But its nucleus, at least, should be a right perception of that form, and of its aesthetic function. It is reasonable, then, to claim that the sesthetic enjoyment which is proper and special to a given art should be the first THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 65 and the necessary consideration, and that in relation to this the quality of a style should primarily be appraised. Whether or not that peculiar enjoyment can be enriched and surrounded with others of a different and more general nature must be a second- ary question, and one with which the criticism of a given art, as such, need have no concern. When, therefore, our architectural critics condemn the Renaissance style on this secondary ground before they have fairly considered its claims on the primary ground, this, we may fairly say, is unsound and mis- leading criticism, criticism tending to obscure real values and diminish possible enjoyments, criticism vitiated by the Romantic Fallacy. I CHAPTER III THE ROMANTIC FALLACY {continued) Naturalism and the Picturesque I ^Romanticism has another aspect. We have seen that it allows the poetic interest of distant civilisa- tion to supplant the aesthetic interest of form. But the romantic impulse is not attracted to history alone. It is inspired by the distant and the past ; but it is inspired, also, by Nature. For, obviously, those qualities which romanticism seeks, these Nature possesses in the highest degree. Nattire is strange, fantastic, unexpected, terrible. Like the past, Nature is remote. Indifferent to human preoccupations and disowning human agency, Nature possesses all the more forcibly an imaginative appeal. Thus, in the last century, and earlier, together with the ballad- revival and the historical fiction, came, far more powerful than either, a new poetry of Nature. Under the influence of this poetry. Nature's unconsidered variety became the very type and criterion of beauty, and men were led by an inevitable consequence to value what is various, irregular, or wild, and to value THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 67 it wherever it might be found. As in the cult of the past, so, too, in this cult of the 'natural,' it was literature, the true instrument of the Romantic Movement, that led the way. | " It is evident that architecture and the criticism of architecture have reflected this poetic change. The formal garden, necessarily, was the first object of attack. In the Renaissance taste the garden was an extension of the main design. It was a middle term between architecture and Nature. The transition from house to landscape was logically effected by combining at this point formality of design with naturalness of material. The garden was thus an integral, an architectural, element in the art. But when Nature, through poetry, acquired its prestige, the formal garden stood condemned. Unpleasing in itself, becaiise ' unnatural,' it was in addition a barbarous violence, a ruthless vandalism upon pools and trees^ It was an offence against Nature all the more discordant because it was expressed in Nature^'s terms. Thus, before the impact of Naturalism shook traditional design in actual architecture, the formal garden was already gone. Eighteenth century philo- sophers, seated under porticoes still impeccably Greek, were enabled comfortably to venerate Nature — or, if not Nature, at least her symbol — ^as they watched their ancestral but unromantic gardens give place to a ' prospect ' of little holes and hills. At 68 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM their bidding a change was wrought throughout Europe, as sudden as it was complete. In a moment every valley had been dejected, the straight made crooked, and the plain places rough. The change in architecture was not slow to follow. Here, as the last chapter showed, a romantic sense of history, treating styles as symbols, could look with equal favour on the Gothic and the Greek, and had provoked a romantic revival of both. But the romantic sense of Nature weighted the balance in favour of the mediaeval. The Gothic builders be- longed to the 'nobly savage' north, and had built against a background of forest and tempest. The Greeks stood for reason, civilisation, and calm. More than this, a certain ' natural ' quality belonged to the Gothic style itself. Like Nature, it was intricate and strange ; in detail realistic, in composition it was bold, accidental and irregular, like the composition of the physical world, i^ Among the causes of the Gothic revival, the poetry of Nature, that cast on all such qualities its transforming light, may certainly be given an important place. | uThe influence of the sense of Nature upon building did not exhaust itself in the taste for Gothic. In England there grew up a domestic architecture which attaches itself to no historic style and attempts no definite design. It is applied, like the Georgian manner before it, indifferently to the cottage and the THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 69 great house. J But while the Georgian taste sought to impart to the cottage the seemly distinction of the manor, the modem preference is to make the manor share in the romantic charm of the cottage. In Latin countries this architecture is not found ; its place is wholly taken by a resurrection of the ' Styles.' But in England, where the hold of style is slighter and the sentiment of landscape more profound, the rustic influence in taste has been extreme. It favours an architecture which satisfies practical convenience, and, for the rest, relies on a miscellany of sloping roofs and jutting chimneys to give a * natural ' beauty to the group. Save for a certain choice in the materials and some broad massing of the composi- tion, the parts bear no relation to one another or to the whole. No such relation is attempted, for none is desired. The building grows, without direction, from the casual exigencies of its plan. The effect intended, if not secured, is wholly ' natural.' The house is to take the colour of the countryside, to lie hidden in the shadows and group itself among the slopes. Such, in fairness, is its ideal, realised too seldom. So far as this architecture takes any inspira- tion from the past, it looks to the old farm-buildings long lived in, patched, adapted, overgrown : buildings, so unconscious in their intent, so accidental in their history, as almost to form part of the Nature that surrounds them, and for whose service they exist. 70 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM What measure of beauty may belong to such an architecture will later be considered.. It is irrelevant here to insist on the unfortunate effect it is calculated to produce when reiterated, with how monotonous a variety, on either side of a continuous street. But certainly, whatever be its merits, the habit of taste which it implies is hardly favourable to an under- standing of the Renaissance. •''Order and subtleties of proportion require an habitual training in the eye. The Greeks, as some of the ' optical ' corrections of the Parthenon have revealed, responded here to distinctions of which to-day even a practised taste will be almost insensible. The Renaissance inherited their ideal, if not their delicacy of sense. But a ' natural ' architecture, so far from affording such practice to the eye, raises a prejudice against order itself ; because whatever qualities a ' natural ' archi- tecture may possess are dependent on the negation of order. A taste formed upon this violent and ele- mentary variousness of form, conceives a Renaissance front as a blank monotony because that, by contrast, is all it can discern. What wonder, then, if it accepts the verdict of the poetry of Nature, and declares the Renaissance style to be a weary and contemptible pomp, while it endows its own incompetence with the natural ' dignity ' of the fields and woods. ) ^Two duties, then, were required of architecture when the poetry of Nature had done its work. First, THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 71 it must disguise, or in some way render palatable, the original sin of its existence : the fact that it was an artificial thing, a work of man, made with hands. To this end Nature herself might seem to have intended a variety of creeping, and ultimately overwhelming, plants, by means of which much of the architectural art of England has been successfully rendered vain.^ To eradicate the intellectual element of design, to get rid of the consistent thought which means for- mality, is thus the first or negative condition of a ' natural ' architecture. Its second aim is more positive. When once the evil spirit of conscious krt has been exorcised, the door can be opened to a pandemonium of romance. The poetry of Nature can infect architecture with all her moods : idyllic in the rustic style we have described ; fantastic and wild in every kind of mediaeval reminiscence or modern German eccentricity. \ y It is of the essence of romantic criticism that it permits literary fashion to control architectural taste. I This is the cardinal point to which once more we are brought back, and on which once more we may * The habit of smothering fine architecture in vegetation is peculiarly English. The chapel of Trinity College at Oxford — to take an example out of a thousand — is habitually indicated to visitors as an object of special admiration on account of a crude red creeper which completely conceals it, together with the fact that it is, or would be, one of the most graceful works of architecture in that city. Naturam furca expellas. . . . But our romantic professors have evidently abandoned the struggle and exchanged Horace for Wordsworth. 72 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM insist. That the architectural judgment is made in unconsciousness of the Hterary bias is immaterial. A literary fashion is easily conceived of as an absolute truth, and the unconsciousness of a prejudice only adds to its force.] For the power of literature extends far beyond its conscious students ; by a swift con- tagion it determines, even in illiterate minds, the channels of their thought, the scope of their attention, and the values to which they will respond. It leads men to say, at a given epoch, summarily : ' The artificial or the formal is less worthy than the natural,' without any necessary analysis of what these abstract terms involve. Their aesthetic attention to the con- crete case is obstructed by the phrase ; and archi- tecture serves as a mere symbol of the idea. • But this, the central point of the Romantic Fallacy, must be guarded from misunderstanding. The in- fluence of literature upon the arts of form exists at all times, and is often beneficial. Romanticism is a permanent force in the mind, to be neither segregated nor expelled. It is only in the manner of its opera- tion that the fallacy occurs. \ The arts of form have their native standards, their appropriate conventions ; standards and conventions founded in experience, and necessary to render them effective in any under- taking, howsoever inspired. When for any reason tradition, which is the vehicle of those standards and conventions, wavers or decays, then the literary THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 73 influence will, in all likelihood, impose inappropriate standards of its own. The necessary balance be- tween formal and significant elements, which in every art is differently poised, is then overweighted. Over- chained with literary significance and atrophied in its design, the art of form loses the power to impress ; it ceases, in any aesthetic sense, to be significant at all. i^hus, in transporting romance from poetry to architecture, it was not considered how different is the position which, in these two arts, the romantic element must occupy. For, in poetry, it is attached not to the form but to the content. Coleridge wrote about strange, fantastic, unexpected, or terrible things, but he wrote about them in balanced and conventional metrps. He presented his romantic material through a medium that was simple, familiar, and fixed. But in architecture this distinction could not be main- tained. When the romantic material entered, the conventional form of necessity disappeared . ' Quaint' design and crooked planning took its place. For here form and content were practically one. And, further, the romantic quality of the material was, in archi- tecture, extremely insecure.l The * magic casements ' of Keats have their place in a perfectly formal and conventional metric scheme that displays their beauty, and are powerful over us because they are imagined. But the casements of the romantic architecture, realised in stone, must lack this reticence and this 74 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM support.. They were inconvenient rather than magical, and they opened, not on the ' foam of perilous seas,' but, most often, upon a landscape- garden less faery than forlorn. Certain images of architecture in their proper context, formal and poetic, are romantic. Remove them from that context, and render them actual, and it becomes evident that there is nothing inherent in the architecture itself that can evoke an imaginative response. Again, there are actual works of archi- tecture that by the lapse of time are almost fused with Nature, and by the course of history almost humanised with life. These, too, are romantic. But if they are repeated anew, it becomes evident that the romantic element was adventitious to the archi- tectural value. The form itself, which must inevit- ably be the object both of architectural art and criticism, is found to be valueless altogether, or valued only by a vague analogy of thought. And this, in effect, is the case with the conscious architecture of romance. Sharply concrete, divested of the charm of age, it lacks alike the material beauty and the imaginative spell. The formal basis is lacking which alone can give it power. II But the prejudice against the ' unnatural ' style of the Renaissance was something more than an THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 75 association of architecture with poetical ideas. As that, indeed, it began. But we shall underrate its force, and falsely analyse its ground, if we do not recognise in it, also, an association of architecture with ethical ideas. The poetry of Nature furnished the imagery of the gospel of freedom. The Romantic Movement, with its theory of Natural Rights, gave to Nature a democratic tinge. The cult of Nature had its say on conduct : it was a political creed. It was more ; for, in proportion as orthodoxy waned and romanticism gathered force, a worship of Nature — ^for such, in fact, it was — supplanted the more definite and metaphysical belief. A kind of humility, which once had flowed in fixed, Hebraic channels, found outlet in self-abasement before the majesty, the wildness and the infinite complexity of the physical creation. Of all the changes in feeling which marked the nineteenth century, none perhaps was profounder or more remarkable than this, and none more dramatic in its consequences for art. The instinct of reverence, if science dislodged it from the supernatural world, attached itself to the natural. This sentiment, which for the agnostic mind was a substitute for religion, became for the orthodox also the favourite attitude of its piety. A vague pantheism was common ground between the Anglican Wordsworth, the rationalist Mill, and the revolutionary Shelley. Nature, un- adorned, was divine herself — or, at the least, was God's 76 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM garment and His book ; and this, not in the elegant and complimentary sense in which Addison might have so regarded her, but with a profound power to satisfy the mystic's adoration. The argument assumed a different plane. To be ' natural ' was no longer a point merely of poetic charm — ^it was a point of sanctity. With Ruskin, for example, the argument from Nature is always final. ' Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook ? ' To improve on Nature's architecture were a like impertinence. It is even suggested that forms are beautiful precisely in rela- tion to the frequency with which Nature has employed them. And not only does he place a sacramental value on the study of Nature deduced from an arbitrary theological doctrine that it is God's ' book,' but he makes it a sin to study the human instinct, as though Nature's 'book' had expurgated man, and the merit of creation ceased at the fifth day. Doubt- ful logic this — and scarce orthodox theology ! Yet there is little doubt that Ruskin's reiterated appeal to the example of Nature to witness against the formal instincts of man, did far more to enforce the prejudice against the ' foul torrent of the Renais- sance ' than he effected either by detailed reasoning or general abuse, un the face of all this poetry and rhetoric, in the face of all the sermons that were eloquent in stones, it is not surprising that Naturalism became the aesthetic method, and the love of Nature THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 77 the most genuine emotion of our age. The emotion was as universal as it was genuine.] A rich harvest of invention rewarded this attentive humility in the empirical sciences ; the generation was encouraged by Emerson to 'hitch its waggon to a star'; the dis- cipline of Nature, poetically inspired and religiously sanctioned, was pragmatically confirmed. Once more in the changes of civilisation, to ' live accord- ing to Nature * became a creed. But to live according to Nature means also, inci- dentally, to build and to garden according to Nature. And since the sublimity of Nature — ^its claim to worship — ^lay in its aloof indifference to man and in its incalculable variety, to build and garden accord- ing to Nature meant, as the progress of art soon demonstrated, to have a house and garden which betrayed, so far as possible, no human agency at all — or, at least, such human agency as might be mani- fested must be free from one specifically human quality — ^the ' self-contemplating reason.' This, with its insistence on order, symmetry, logic, and propor- tion, stood, in the ethics of Nature, for the supreme idolatry.^ ' This may perhaps furnish a philosophic basis for the advice once offered by a French nobleman, when consulted as to the most pro- pitious method of laying out a garden in the then novel Romantic Manner : ' Enivrez le jardinier et suivez dans ses pas.' The ' self- contemplating reason,' temporarily dethroned by this expedient, is, for Ruskin, a constant source of political tyranny, architectural pedantry and spiritual pride. 78 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM On the one side was Nature : the curves of the waves, the line of the unfolding leaf, the pattern of the crystal. All these might be studied, and in some way architecturally employed — ^no matter how — so long as the knowledge and the love of them were evident. On the other stood the principles of Palladio, and all the pedantry of rule and measure, made barren by the conscious intellect. The choice between them was a moral choice between reverence and vanity. This was the refrain of The Stones of Venice and all the criticism ' according to Nature.' The cult of Nature has a venerable history ; but it is interesting to notice the change it has here under- gone. For Nature, as the romantic critics conceive it, is something very different from the Nature which their Stoic predecessors set up as an ideal, and very different also from Nature as it actually is. For the element in Nature which most impressed the Stoics was law, and its throne was the human reason. /To ' follow reason ' and * to live according to Nature ' for Marcus Aurelius were convertible terms. The human intellect, with its inherent, its ' natural ' leanings towards order, balance, and proportion, was a part of Nature, and it was the most admirable and important part. But Nature, in the ethical language of her modern aesthetic devotees, stands most often in definite contradistinction to the human reason .\ They were willing to recognise authority ' in the round THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 79 ocean and the living air,' but few remembered with Wordsworth to add : ' and in the mind of man.' The architect's work must be a hymn to creation, must faithfully reflect the typical laws and imitate the specific character of all that Nature presents. But the typical law and specific character of humanity, to impose order and rhythm on its loose, instinctive movements and proportion on its works — this is the unworthy exercise of ' self-contemplating Greeks,' the mark of * simpletons and sophists.' While all things in nature fulfil their own law, each after its kind, man alone was to distrust his law and follow that of all the others ; and this was called the example of Nature. Yet, since even so some choice is in prac- tice forced upon him, the sole result of ' following Nature ' is to sanctify his own caprice. Nature becomes the majestic reminder of human Httleness and the insignificance of other people's thought. It is difficult to treat with total seriousness a phase of opinion so fatally paradoxical. Yet it sank deep into the public taste ; and even now a discernible taint of moral reproof colours the adverse criticism of formal architecture ; and a trace of conscious virtue still attends on crooked planning, quaint design and a preference for Arctic vegetation unsymmetrically disposed. ^^ The creed of Nature entailed two consequences : first, a prejudice against Order and Proportion, 8o THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM and, therefore, against the Renaissance — ^for however deeply Order and Proportion may characterise the laws of Nature, they are far to seek in its arrangement; secondly, an emphasis on representation, on fidelity to the natural fact. | This was soon made apparent in painting — first, in the microscopic realism of the Pre-Raphaelites ; later, with more regard to the facts of vision, in impressionism. Architecture — ^an ab- stract or, at the least, a utilitarian art — ^might have been expected to escape. But it contained one element which exposed it to attack : it contained architectural sculpture. It followed, therefore, that this element, which admitted of representation and could be pressed directly into the cult and service of Nature, should become supreme. ' The only admira- tion worth having,' it is said in The Seven Lamps, ' attaches itself wholly to the meaning of the sculp- ture and the colour of the building.' ' Proportion of masses is mere doggerel.' And not only was sculpture thus thrust out of its true relation and made the chief end and criterion of architecture, but it was required, by the same argument, to be realistic. But architecture, if it means anything, means a supreme control over all the element? of a design, with the right to arrange, to modify, to eliminate and to con- ventionalise. Here, instead, arrangement becomes * doggerel ' and convention a blasphemy. ^ In this, it will be noticed, the romanticism of Nature reached a THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 8i conclusion exactly parallel to the romanticism of His- tory. The latter, fas we saw, becoming antiquarian,} emphasised detail at the expense of the whole, and allowed architectural detail to deteriorate into a stylistic symbol. So, in this case, sculpture takes the place of architecture and deteriorates into realism. All this was necessarily fatal to the Renaissance style. Here there was little sculpture, and that little for the most part was conventional. Artificial in detail, artificial in design, here was an ' unnatural ' architecture. Further condemnation could not be required. Ill No fashion could have so securely established itself that was rooted in preferences altogether irrational or even new. Naturalism in architecture is partly a poetical taste ; partly it is an ethical prejudice, and in each case it has been shown to be fallacious. But naturalism is also frankly aesthetic : a preference not merely of the fancy or the conscience, but of the eye. It may have entered modern architecture by a kind of false analogy, and may still derive from poetry a half-unreal support ; but it has a solid footing of its own. For the place of what is unexpected, wild, fantastic, accidental, does not belong to poetry alone. These are the qualities which constitute the pictur- esque — qualities which have always been recognised 82 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM as possessing a value in the visual arts. And one cause of offence in Renaissance architecture is pre- cisely its lack of this picturesqueness of which Nature is so full. For the sake of this merit to the eye, how much decay has been endured and awkwardness forgiven ! In a theory of architecture, what place then, if any, can be found for this true merit of the picturesque ? What was, in fact, its place in the architecture of the Renaissance ? j To these questions an answer should be given before the romantic criticism of architecture can be fairly and finally dismissed, i/If the wild and the accidental are absent from Renaissance architecture, it is certainly not because the men of that period were blind to their attraction. \ The term pittoresco was, after all, their own invention. It stood, on its own showing, for the qualities which suggest a picture, and are of use in the making of it. Picturesque elements — elements that are curious, fantastic, accidental, had been sought after in the painting of Italian backgrounds almost from the first. Their presence gave a special popularity to such subjects as the Adoration of the Kings, depicted, as by convention they habitually were, with strange exotic retinues and every circumstance of the fancied East. Thus the word itself, when, soon after the middle of the seventeenth century, it came into use, marked not so much a new virtue in painting as a THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 83 new analytic interest, taking note for the first time of a permanent character in the art. Nor were these romantic elements limited to landscape and costume. They took the form, often enough, of inventions of fantastic architecture. "- And this is the more signifi- cant since in the Renaissance painters and archi- tects are almost one fraternity, and the two arts were frequently conjoined. I But their sense of the freedom appropriate to the painted architecture is in strong contrast to the strictness they imposed upon themselves in the con- crete art. /The nearer art approached to the monu- mental, the more this self-denying ordinance became severe. Whatever surrounds us and contains our life ; whatever is insistent and dominating ; whatever permits us no escape — that, they felt, must be formal, coherent, and, in some sense, serene. Real archi- tecture, by its very scale and function, is such an art. It is insistent, dominating, and not to be escaped. The wild, the fantastic, the unexpected in such an art could not therefore be allowed to capture the design. That, if we may judge from their work, was the principle in which Renaissance architects put faith. I This principle, like all the principles of Renaissance architecture, rested on a psychological fact. The different effects which art is able to produce, however various and incommensurable they may radically be, 84 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM are commensurable at least in this : that each in some degree makes a demand on our attention. Some works of art affect us, as it were, by mfiltration, and are calculated to produce an impression that is slow, pervasive, and profound. These seek neither to capture the attention nor to retain it ; yet they satisfy it when it is given. Other works arrest us, and by a sharp attack upon the senses or the curiogjty, insist on our surrender. Their function is to stimu- late and excite. But since, as is well known, we cannot long react to a stimulus of this type, it is essential that the attention should, in these cases, be soon enough released. Otherwise, held captive and pro- voked, we are confronted with an insisteaJLjjppeql which, since we can no longer respond to it, must become in time fatiguing or contemptible. Of these two types of aesthetic appeal, each com- mands its own dominion ; neither is essentially superior to the other, although, since men tend to set a higher value on that which satisfies them longest, it is art of the former kind which has most often been called great. But they do both possess an essential fitness to different occasions. Wherever an occasion either refuses or compels a sustained atten- tion, a right choice between the two types will be a first condition of success. - Fantastic architecture, archi- tecture that startles and delights the curiosity and is not dominated by a broad repose, may sometimes THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 85 be appropriate. On a subdued scale, and hidden in a garden, it may be pleasant enough ; but then, to be visited and not lived in. At a theatrical moment it will be right. It may be gay ; it may be curious. But it is unfitted, aesthetically , for the normal uses of the art, for it fatigues the attention ; and archi- tecture once again is insistent, dominating and not to be escaped.! fr- The practice of the Renaissance was controlled, if not by this reasoned principle, at least by an instinc- tive sense for its application. Even in the picture — since this, /too, must have its measure of attention — the ' picturesque ' element is made subordinate ; it is subdued to that wider composition of line and tone and colour which contains it.\ And the complete picture itself is, or should be, subordinate once more to the formal scheme of the architecture, where it fills an appointed place. Consequently, the * acci- dental ' element, in the final result, is adequately submerged within the formal ; it gives, without insistence, the charm of strangeness and variety to a general idea which it is not suffered to confuse. ',y This the Renaissance allowed ; but the Renais- sance went further. It was not only in painting that the picturesque could be favourably included ; it was not only in its farms and hill-town buildings, pic- torial as their beauty is. The Renaissance ended by reconciling the picturesque with classic architecture 86 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM itself. The two were blended in the Baroque. It is not the least among the paradoxes of that profoundly great style that it possesses, in complete accord, these contrary elements. To give the picturesque its grandest scope, and yet to subdue it to architectural law — this was the baroque experiment and it is achieved. 'The baroque is not afraid to startle and arrest. Like Nature, it is fantastic, unexpected, varied and grotesque. It is all this in the highest degree. But, unlike Nature, it remains subject rigidly to the laws of scale and composition .| It enlarged their scope, but would not modify their stringency. It is not, therefore, in any true sense accidental, irregular, or wild. It makes — ^for the parallel is exact — a. more various use of discords and suspensions, and it stands in a closely similar relation to the simpler and more static style which preceded '^it, as the later music to the earlier. vA.t enlarged the classic formula by developing within it the principle of movement. But the movement is logical. For baroque architecture is always^ logical : it is logical as an aesthetic construction, even where it most neglects the logic of material construction. It in- sisted on coherent purpose, and its greatest extrava- ' I am speaking throughout of baroque architecture at its best. Naturally, in some cases there is charlatanism, or an ignorant attempt, to imitate the forms without perceiving the theory of the art. But the essence of the modern ' picturesque ' taste in architecture is its absence of theory, its insistence on the casual. THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 87 gances of design were neither unconsidered nor inconsistent. It intellectualised the picturesgue.j That the baroque style should be supreme in the garden and in the theatre- — the two provinces which permit design its greatest liberty — was to be expected. The fountains and caryatides of Caprarola, the stage conceptions of Bibbiena and Andrea Pozzo, are un- surpassed. But the baroque could satisfy no less the conditions of a monumental and a permanent art. The colonnade of St. Peter's, Bernini's St. Andrea, the Salute at Venice, the front of the Lateran, are ' exciting ' architecture : they startle the attention ; they have the vivid, pictorial use of light and shade ; the stimulus of their effect is sharp. In all this they achieve the immediate merit of the picturesque. Yet their last and permanent impression is, of a broad serenity ; for they have that baroque assurance which even baroque convulsion cannot- rob of its repose. They are fit for permanence ; for they have that massive finality of thought which, when we live beside them, we do not question, but accept. Here, then, in the painting and architecture of the Renaissance, is an example of the fit eniployment of the picturesque. But these restrictions were not ..' destined to be respected. wThe cult of Nature, by its necessary hostility to convention, modified the treat- ment of the picturesque and destroyed in it those 88 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM saving qualities which can reconcile it with a 'domi- nating and insistent art' : the qualities of reserve, finality, and repose. | While the Renaissance was in its vigour, the romantic view of Nature was no enemy of classic architecture. Of this the painters give us evidence enough. The painting of Claude Lorrain poeticised Nature in a luminous Virgilian mood, to which his vision of classic architecture, so far from being foreign, was the almost necessary complement. With- out the austere quiet of his temples, Nature, in its tranquillity, might seem less human than he dreamt ; without their Corinthian state, less sumptuous. Poussin, more sylvan in his interpretation, is not less classic in his forms. The more dramatic nature- painters — Salvator and the rest — did not press the wildness of their inspiration beyond its natural confines. It is perhaps only with Piranesi that a '^ew spirit begins to show its force. /In Piranesi, the greatest master of the picturesque in art. Nature holds architecture in its clasp, and, like the ' marble- rooted fig tree,' shatters and tortures it in its embrace.'^ The consequences which were in due course to follow from the union are foreshadowed in the earliest phase of this master's art. He conceived a vision of infer- nal dungeons, without meaning, exit or hope ; archi- tecture, surrendered to the picturesque, was doomed in two generations to fall to the chaos without achieving THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 89 the grandeur of Piranesi's ' Carceri.' Piranesi's etchings were multiplied rapidly and widely circulated; and the effect of their picturesque power on the imagination of the eighteenth century was decisive. Thus the way was made ready for the work of litera- ture, and the new poetry of Nature when it came was reinforced by an existing fashion. Painting and literature were now as one. The taste for the picturesque, defensible enough in those two arts, could not be long constrained within their limits. A picturesque architecture was required — ^an archi- tecture untrammelled by those restraints which even the baroque style had hitherto observed. The philosophy of the Revolution favoured this impulse of the arts. True, it wrapped itself at first in a Greek mantle and David contrived a Doric background for its sages and tyrannicides. But ' natural ' rights and a creed of anarchy could not for ever ally them- selves with the most austere, the most conventional of styles. The philosophy of freedom invoked for architecture, as for life, the magic charm of Nature. But the material of architecture, no less than that of politics, was unfitted to receive its impress. For, in these obdurate forms, variety must prove tedious and licence lose its fascination. But such an argument is incomplete. Picturesque building, it may be replied, in so far as it is insistent, 90 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM curious and wilfully capricious, like the modem style of Germany or the fantastic style of the Gothic revival, may be thus unfit. But architecture which aims at the picturesque need not be insistent. There is a romanticism of conceits : the romanticism of Chambord, or the poetry of Donne. But 'there is also a romanticism of natural simplicity : the roman- ticism of Wordsworth and of a ' rustic ' architecture. Architecture, in fact, can be picturesque without affectation, and various without disquiet. Why should not this be favoured ? Where is the fault in that domestic type of architecture, the variety. of the form of which is conditioned solely by conveni- ence ? Here will be repose, because the picturesque- ness is unstudied, fitting the house to unselfconscious nature. No insistent appeal is thrust on the atten- tion, for no deliberate appeal exists. This, in our time, is the true rival to the Renaissance style. It is this architecture which has so firm a hold in England, which seems to us so good to paint and good to live in. Poetry and sentiment are in its favour ; it indolently provides pleasure to the eye. Leave it to be over- grown and it will be soon ' transformed by the en- chantment of Nature to the likeness of her own creations.' Its beauty is secure from fashion, for it is elementary and genuine. This is true ; but how much shall we be willing to forego for the sake of this inoffensive, this sometimes THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 91 charming, architecture ? With what is it con- trasted ? It is usually implied that the alternative is mere formality. /Formality, too, has its inherent, its, perhaps equal, charm. But it has more. It is the basis of design. Everything in architecture which can hold and interest the intellect ; every de- light that is complex and sustained ; every subtlety of rhythm and grandeur of conception, is built upon formality. Without formality architecture lacks the syntax of its speech. By means of it, architecture attains, as music attains, to a like rank with thought. Formality furnishes its own theme and makes lucid its own argument. ' Formal ' architecture is to the ' picturesque ' as the whole body of musical art to the lazy hum and vaguely occupying murmur of the summer fields, j All this is sacrificed ; and perhaps even that little merit is not gained. Time and decay, colour and the accidents of use, the new perspective from the unfore- seen angle of chance vision, may be trusted to give picturesqueness to the austerest architecture. Con- fusion will not lose its charm because there once was thought. Design is no implacable enemy of the picturesque ; but the picturesque ideal is at variance with tradition and repugnant to design. ^ Our concern is here with one point only.i>^t is not, certainly, that the picturesque is without merit ; the merit of it is indeed too obvious. It is that, as an 92 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM ideal, the picturesque renders taste obtuse, or suffers it to remain so. Like a coarse weed, not unbeauti- ful in itself, it tends to stifle every opportunity of growth. The modern taste for picturesqueness — ^as the old painters suffice to prove — ^brought with it nothing that was new. Nature, and man's work, is full of a picturesque beauty that has never passed unnoticed. But the aesthetic content of the pictur- esque is not constructive and cannot be extended. Nevertheless, it is upon this quality, so low in the scale, so unhopeful for future creation, and so unhelp- ful for an understanding of the formal past, that modern taste has been concentrated. This is the novelty and the prejudice. | There is a beauty of art and a beauty of Nature. Constru cti on. when it relaxes the principles of designj does not become Nature : it becomes, more probably, slovenly art. Nature, for a living art, is full of suggestion ; but it is none the less a resisting force — something to be conquered, modified, adorned. It is only when the force of art is spent, when its attempt is rounded and complete, that Nature, freed from the conflict, stands apart, a separate ideal. It is thus the last sign of an artificial civilisation when Nature takes the place of art. Not without reason, it was the eighteenth century at its close — ^that great, finished issue and realised pattern — ^which began the natural cult. For a single moment, while the past THE ROMANTIC FALLACY 93 still imposed its habit upon thought, disaster was arrested, j The cult of Nature was a convention like the rest, and sought a place within the scheme. But the next step was the suicide of taste. Taken in isolation, made hostile to the formal instincts of the mind. Nature led, and can only lead, to chaos, whence issued a monstrous architecture : informe ingens, cut lumen ademptum. Thus it was that by the romantic taste the artificial was scorned, though art, whatever else it is, is necessarily that ; and it ^s sco r ned si mply because it was not natural, which no art can hope, by whatever casuistry, to become. CHAPTER IV THE MECHANICAL FALLACY Such, in broad outline, were the tendencies, and such, for architecture, the results, of the criticism which drew its inspiration from the Romantic Movement. Very different in its origins, more plausible in its reasoning, but in its issue no less misleading, is the school of theory by which this criticism was succeeded. Not poetry but science, not sentiment but calcula- tion, is now the misleading influence. It was impos- sible that the epoch of mechanical invention which followed, with singular exactness, the close of the Renaissance tradition, should be without its effect in fixing the point of view from which that tradition was regarded. The fundamental conceptions of the time were themselves dictated by the scientific investigations for which it became distinguished. Every activity in life, and even the philosophy of life itself, was interpreted by the method which, in one particular field, had pr oved so fruitful. Every aspect of things which eluded mechanical explanation became disregarded, or was even forced by violence into mechanical terms. For it was an axiom of 81 THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 95 scientific method that, only in so far as phenomena could so be rendered, might any profitable results be expected from their study. To this rule the arts Jproved no exception.- But they were affected by the prevailing theories in two contrary directions. In many minds, aesthetics, like all philosophy, became subordinated to the categories of materialistic and mechanical science. On the other hand, those who valued art tended more and more to claim for each art its separate consideration. For, since the essence of the scientific procedure had been the isolation of fields of inquiry — ^the subjection of each to its own hyppthetical treatment — ^it was natural that the fine arts, also, should withdraw into a sphere of autonomy, and demand exemption from any values but their own. ' Art for art's sake,' for all its ring of sestheti- cism, was thus, in a sense, a motto typical of the scientific age ; and Flaubert, who gave it currency, was an essentially scientific artist. But the fine arts employed their autonomy only to demonstrate their complete subservience to the prevailing scientific preoccupation. Each bowed the knee in a different ' way. Thus Painting, becoming confessedly impres- j sionistic, concerned itself solely with optical facts, with statements about vision instead of efforts after significance. Literature became realistic, statistical, and documentary. Architecture, founded, as it is, on construction, could be rendered, even more 96 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM readily than the rest, in the terms of a purely scien- tific description ; its aims, moreover, could easily be converted into the ideals of the engineer. Where mechanical elements indisputably formed the basis, it was natural to pretend that mechanical results were the goal ; especially at a time when, in every field of thought, the nature of value was being more or less confused with the means by which it is pro- duced. Now, although the movement of thought we have just described was in no way allied to the Romantic, and may even, in a measure, be regarded as a reaction against it, yet one characteristic, at least, the two had in common, and that was an inevitable prejudice against the architecture of the Renaissance. The species of building which the mechanical movement most naturally favoured was the utilitarian — the ingenious bridges, the workshops, the great construc- tions of triumphant industry, proudly indifferent to form. But, in the ' Battle of the Styles,' as the anti- thesis between Gothic and Palladian preferences was at that time popularly called, the influences of science reinforced the influences of poetry in giving to the mediaeval art a superior prestige. For the Gothic builders were not merely favourites of romance ; they had been greatly occupied with the sheer pro- blems of construction. Gothic architecture, strictly speaking, came into existence when the invention of THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 97 intermittent buttressing had solved the constructive problem which had puzzled the architects of the north ever since they had set out to vault the Roman basilica. The evolution of the Gothic style had been, one might almost say, the predestined progress of that constructive invention. The climax of its effort, and its literal collapse, at Beauvais, was simply the climax and the collapse of a constructive experiment con- tinuously prolonged. In no architecture in the world had so many features shown a more evidently constructive origin, or retained a more constructive purpose, than in the Gothic. The shafts which clustered so richly in the naves were each a necessary and separate articulation in the structural scheme ; dividing themselves into the delicate traceries of the roof, construction is still their controlling aim. The Greek style alone could show a constructive basis as defined ; and, for a generation interested in mechani- cal ingenuity, the Gothic had this advantage over the Greek, that its construction was dynamic rather than static, and, by consequence, at once more daring and more intricate. Thus, Gothic, remote, fanciful, and mysterious, was, at the same time, exact, calcu- lated, and mechanical : the triumph of science no less than the incarnation of romance. In direct contrast with this stood the architecture of the Renaissance. \^Here was a style which, as we have seen, had subordinated, deliberately and without Q 98 THE ARCHITECTU5£-ei\HUMANISM hesitation, constructional fact to aesthetic effect. It had not achieved, it seemed not even to have desired, that these two elements should be made to corre- spond. Where a constructional form supplied them with an agreeable effect, its architects had not scrupled to employ it, even where it no longer fulfilled a con- structive purpose. On the other hand, with equal disregard for this kind of truth, those elements of construction which really and effectively supported the fabric, they were constantly at pains to conceal, and even, in concealing, to contradict. ( Constructive science, which so long had been the mistress of architecture, they treated as her slave ; and not con- tent with making mechanical expedients do their work while giving them no outward recognition, they appropriated the forms of a scientific construction to purely decorative uses, and displayed the cornice and pilaster divorced from all practical significance, like a trophy of victory upon their walls. And, in pro- portion as the Renaissance matured its forms and came to fuller self-consciousness in its methods, this attitude towards construction, which had already been implicit in the architecture of ancient Rome, with its 'irrational' combination of the arch and lintel, became ever more frank, and one might almost say, ever more insolent. Chains and buttresses in concealment did the work which some imposing, but unsound, dome affected to contribute ; fagades THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 99 towered into the sky far above the churches, the magnitude of whose interiors they pretended to express, and buildings which, in reality, were com- posed of several stories, were comprehended within a single order. It is useless to minimise the extent to which such practices were typical of the Renaissance. Although it is only in Italy, and in the seventeenth century, that the most glaring examples are to be found, yet the principles which then reached their climax were latent, and even, in many cases, visible from its earliest period. They are inherent in the point of view from which the Renaissance approached the question of aesthetics. And, on the continuous plane of increas- ing ' insincerity ' which the style, as a whole, presents, it would be unreasonable and arbitrary to select this point or that as the limit of justifiable licence, and to decry all that came after, while applauding what went before. This, none the less, is the compromise which is fashionable among those critics who feel that concessions must be made, both to the strictures of the ' Scientific ' criticism on the one hand, and to the acknowledged fame of the ' Golden Age ' of archi- tecture on the other. But such a procedure is mis- leading, and evades the real issue. It is, on the con- trary, imperative to recognise that the Renaissance claimed and exercised this licence from the first, and to make the closest examination of the doctrines 100 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM which that claim involves. The relation of con-'' struction to design is the fundamental problem of architectural aesthetics, and we should welcome the necessity which the Renaissance style, by raising the question in so acute a form, imposes for its discus- sion. But the issue is not such a simple one as the ' scientific ' criticism invariably assumes. We must ask, then, what is the true relation of construction to architectural beauty ; how did the Renaissance conceive that relation ; and how far was it justified in its conception ? Let us begin by attempting, as fairly as we may, to formulate the ' scientific ' answer to the first of these questions ; let us see where it leads us, and if it leads us into difficulties, let us modify it as best we can, in accordance with the scientific point of view. f^ * Architecture,' such critics are apt to say, ' archi- tecture is construction. Its essential characteristic as an art is that it deals, not with mere patterns of light and shade, but with structural laws. In judging architecture, therefore, this peculiarity, which con- stitutes its uniqueness as an art, must not be over- looked : on the contrary, since every art is primarily to be judged by its own special qualities, it is pre- cisely by reference to these structural laws that archi- tectural standards must be fixed. That architecture, in short, will be beautiful in which the construction is best, and in which it is most truthfully displayed.* THE MECHANICAL FALLACY loi And in support of this contention, the scientific critic will show how, in the Gothic style, every detail con- fesses a constructive purpose, and delights us by our sense of its fitness for the work which is, just there, precisely required of it. And he will turn to the Doric style and assert the same of that.. Both the great styles of the past, he will say, were in fact truthful presentations of a special and perfect constructive principle, the one of the lintel, the other of the I vault. <:: Now, in so far as this argument is based on the Greek and mediaeval practice of architecture, it is an argument a posteriori. But it is clearly useless to reason dogmatically a posteriori, except from the evidence of all the facts. If all the architecture which has ever given pleasure confirmed the principle stated in the definition, then the argument would be strong, even if it were not logically conclusive. Admitting, then (for the moment), that the descrip- tion given of Greek and mediaeval architecture is a fair one ; admitting, also, the Greek pre-eminence in taste, and the acknowledged beauty of the Gothic, the argument from these is clearly not, in itself, an adequate condemnation of a different practice em- ployed by the Romans and the Renaissance, which has enjoyed its own popularity, and whose case has not yet been tried. But we may suppose our scientific critic to reply 102 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM that he does not base his case on authority, but on the merits of his definition : that his argument is, on the contrary, a priori, and that he cites Greek and mediaeval architecture merely as an illustration. Can we say that the illustration is a fair one ? Is it a sufficient description of the Greek and Gothic styles of architecture to say that they are ' good construc- tion, truthfully expressed ' ? Is it even an accurate description ? Are they, in the first plare, ' good construction ' ? Now, from the purely constructive point of view— the point of view, that is to say, of an engineer — good construction consists in obtaining the necessary results, with complete security and the utmost economy of means. But what are the 'necessary' results ? In the case of the Greek and Gothic styles, they are to roof a church or a temple of a certain grandeur and proportion ; but the grandeur and proportion were determined not on practical but aesthetic considerations. And what is the greatest economy of means ? Certainly not the Doric order, which provides a support immeasurably in excess of what is required. Certainly not the Romanesque, or earliest Gothic, which does the same, and which delights us for the very reason that it does so. Greek and mediaeval construction, therefore, is not pure i construction, but construction for an aesthetic pur- pose, and it is not, strictly speaking, ' good ' con- THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 103 struction, for, constructively, it is often extremely clumsy and wasteful. Can we now describe it as ' construction truthfully expressed ' ? Not even this. For the Greek detail, though of constructional origin, is expressive of the devices of building in wood ; reproduced in stone, it untruthfully represents the structural facts of the case. And if by ' truthfully expressed construction ' it is meant that the aesthetic impression should bring home to us the primary constructive facts (a very favourite clicM of our scientific critics), how are we to justify the much applauded ' aspiring ' quality of Gothic, its ' soaring ' spires and pinnacles ? In point of structural fact, every dynamic movement in the edifice is a downward one, seeking the earth ; the architect has been at pains to impress us with the idea that every movement is, on the contrary, directed upwards towards the sky. And we are delighted with the impression. And not only does this definition, that the beauty of architecture consists in ' good construction truth- fully expressed,' not apply to the Greek and mediaeval architecture, not only does it contradict qualities of these styles which are so universally enjoyed, but it does apply to many an iron railway-station, to a printing press, or to any machine that rightly fulfils its function. Now, although many machines may 104 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM be beautiful, it would be a reductio ad absurdum to be forced to admit that they all are : still more that they are essentially more beautiful than the Greek and Gothic styles of architecture. Yet to this conclu- sion our definition, as it stands, must lead us. Clearly, then, when Greek and Gothic buildings are cited in support of the view that the essential virtue of architecture lies in its being ' good con- struction truthfully expressed,' we must take objec- tion, and say, either these styles, and, a fortiori, all others, are essentially bad, or our definition must be amended. The scientific criticism would presumably prefer the latter alternative. Those of its supporters who identify architectural beauty with good and truthful construction (and there are many) it must disown ; and we may suppose it to modify the definition somewhat as follows : Beauty, it will say, is necessary to good architec- ture, and beauty cannot be the same as good con- struction. But good construction is necessary as well as beauty. We must admit, it will say, that in achieving this necessary combination, some conces- sions in point of perfect construction must constantly be made. Architecture cannot always be ideally economical in its selection of means to ends, nor perfectly truthful in its statement. And on the other hand, it may happen that the interests of sincere construction may impose some restraint upon the THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 105 grace or majesty of the design. But good architecture, j nevertheless, must be, on the whole, at once beautifull and constructively sincere. . \ But this is to admit that there are two distinct elements — good construction and beauty ; that both have value, but are irreducible to terms of one another. How then are we to commensurate these two different elements ? If a building have much of the second and little of the first — ^and this, many will say, is the case of Renaissance architecture — ^where shall we place it, what value may we put upon it, and how shall we compare it with a building, let us say, where the conditions are reversed and constructive rationality co-exists with only a little modicum of beauty ? How is the architect to be guided in the dilemma which will constantly arise, of having to choose between the two ? And, imagining an extreme case on either side, how shall we compare a building which charms the eye by its proportions and its elegance, and by the well-disposed light and shade of its projections, but where the intelligence gradually discovers constructive ' ' irrationality ' on every hand, and a building like our 1 supposed railway station, where every physical sense is offended, but which is structurally perfect and sincere ? Now, the last question will surely suggest to us that here, at any rate, we are comparing some- thing that is art (though, it may be, faulty art) with something that is not art at all. In other words, that 106 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM from the point of view of art, the element of beauty is indispensable, while the element of constructive rationality is not. The construction of a building, it might conceivably be suggested, is simply a utilitarian necessity, and exists for art only as a basis or means for creating beauty, somewhat as pigments and canvas exist for the painter. Insecure structures, like fading pigments, are technical faults of art ; all other structural considerations are, for the purposes of art, irrelevant. And architectural criticism, in so far as it approaches the subject as an art, ought perhaps to take this view. T^But there the scientific criticism should certainly have its reply. Granting, it will say, that beauty is a more essential quality in good architecture than constructive rationality, and that the two elements cannot be identified, and admitting that the criticism of architectural art should accept this point of view, there is still a further consideration. It will claim that architectural beauty, though different from the simple ideal of engineering, is still beauty oj structure, and, as such, different from pictorial or musigal beauty : that it does not reside in patterns of light and shade, or even in the agreeable disposition of masses, but in the structure, in the visible relations of forces. The analogy between construction and the mere material basis of the painter's art, it will say, is false : we take no delight in the way a painter stretches' THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 107 his canvas or compounds his pigments, but we do take delight in the adjustment of support to load, and thrust to thrust. It is no doubt legitimate to add decorative detail to these functional elements ; they may be enriched by colour or carving ; but our pleasure in the colour and the carving will be pleasure in painting or sculpture ; our specifically architec- tural pleasure will be in the functions of the structural elements themselves. It is in this vivid constructive significance of columns and arches that their archi- tectural beauty lies, and not simply in their colour and shape, as such, and so far as the structural values are absent, and the eye is merely charmed by other qualities, it is no longer architectural beauty that we enjoy. Only, these functional elements must be vividly expressed, and, if necessary, expressed with emphasis and exaggeration . The supporting members must assure us of their support. Thus, the Doric or the Romanesque massiveness, while it was in a sense bad science, was good art ; yet its beauty was none the less essentially structural. Thus, the printing press or the railway station will now appro- priately fall outside our definition because, although truthfully and perfectly constructed, and fit for their functions, they do not vividly enough express .what those functions are, nor their fitness for performing them. Structurally perfect, they are still structu- rally unbeautiful. On the other hand, the arches and io8 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM pilasters of many Renaissance buildings may be agreeable enough as patterns of form, but are no longer employed for the particular structural purpose for which apparently they are intended, and so, in diminishing the intelligibility and vividness of the whole structure, diminish at the same time its beauty. Thus, the one group fails because, though functional, it is not vivid ; the other because, though vivid, it is not functional. '^ Such, or somewhat such, would be the statement of a ' scientific ' view of the relation of construction to architectural design, as we should have it when divested of its more obviously untenable assertions and stated in extenso. In the modem criticism of architecture, we are habitually asked to take this view for granted, and the \intenable assertions as well ; and this is accepted without discussion, purely owing to the mechanical preconceptions of the time, which make all criticisms on the score of 'structure ' seem peculiarly convincing. Such a view, even in the modified form in which we have stated it, sets up an ideal of architecture to which indeed the Greek and mediaeval builders, on the whole, conformed, but to which the Romans conformed very imperfectly, and to which the Renaissance, in most of its phases, did not conform at all. It cuts us oflf, as it seems, inevit- ably, from any sympathy with the latter style. Be- fore accepting this unfortunate conclusion, let us see THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 109 whether the ideal is as rational and consistent as it sounds. In the first place, it is clear that the vivid con- structive properties of a building, in so far as they are effectively constructive, must exist as /ac^5i,- The security of the building, and hence also of any artistic value it may possess, depends on this ; and a support which seemed to be adequate to its load, but actually was not, would, as construction, be wrong. But in so far as they arej\a^d, they must exist as appear- ances.. It is the effect which the constructive pro- perties make on the eye, and not the scientific facts that may be intellectually discoverable about them, which alone can determine their vividness. Con- struction, it may be granted, is always, or nearly always, in some sense, our concern, but not always in the same sense. The two requirements which architecture so far evidently has are constructive integrity in fact, and constructive vividness in appearance. Now, what our scientific critics have taken for granted, is that because these two require- ments have sometimes beeil satisfied at the same moment, and by the same means, no other way of satisfying them is permissible. But there has been no necessity shown thus far, nor is it easy to imagine one, for insisting that these two qualifications should always be interdependent, and that both must invari- ably be satisfied at a single stroke. Their value in no THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM the building is of a wholly disparate kind : why, then, must they always be achieved by an identical expedient ? No doubt when this can be done, it is the simplest and most straightforward way of secur- ing good architectural design. No doubt when we realise that this has been done, there may be a certain intellectual pleasure in the coincidence. But even the Greeks, to whom we are always referred, were far from achieving this coincidence. When they took the primitive Doric construction, and raised it to a perfect aesthetic form, the countless adjustments which they made were all calculated for optical eflfect. They may not have entailed consequences contrary to structural requirements, but at least the optical effect and the structural requirements were distinct. The Renaissance grasped this distinction between the several elements of architectural design with extreme clearness. It realised that, for certain pur- poses in architecture, fact counted for everything, and that in certain others, appearance counted for every- thing. And it took advantage of this distinction to the full. It did not insist that the necessary fact should itself produce the necessary appearance. It con- sidered the questions separately, and was content to secure them by separate means. It no longer had to dance in fetters. It produced architecture which looked vigorous and stable, and it took adequate measures to see that it actually was so. | Let us see THE MECHANICAL FALLACY iii what was the alternative. Greek architecture was simply temple architecture. Here, architectural art was dealing with a utilitarian problem so simple that no great inconvenience was encountered in adjusting its necessary forms to its desired aesthetic character. Nor was there any incongruity between the aesthetic and practical requirements of a Gothic cathedral. But the moment mediaeval building, of which the scientific criticism thinks so highly, attempted to enlarge its scope, it was compelled to sacrifice general design to practical convenience, and was thereby usually precluded from securing any aesthetic quality but the picturesque. And even so it achieved only a very moderate amount of practical convenience. Now the Renaissance architecture had to supply the utilitarian needs of a still more varied and more fastidious life. Had it remained tied to the ideal of so-called constructive sincerity, which means no more than an arbitrary insistence that the structural and artistic necessities of architecture should be satisfied by one and the same expedient, its search for structural beauty would have been hampered at every turn. And, since this dilemma was obvious to every one, no one was offended by the means taken to overcome it. And not only was the practical range of architec- ture thus extended without loss to its aesthetic scope, but that scope itself was vastly enlarged. In the 112 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM dome of St. Peter's we see a construction, the grandeur of which lies precisely in the self-contained sense of its mass, and the vigorous,; powerful contour which seems to control and support its body. Yet actually the very attempt to give it this character, to add this majestically structural effect to the resources of architectural art, meant that Michael Angelo ran counter to the scientific requirements of a dome. )The mass which gives so supreme a sense of power is, in fact, weak. Michael Angelo was forced to rely upon a great chain to hold it in its place, and to this his successors added five great chains more. ) Had he adhered, as his modern critics w6uld desire, to the Byzantine type of dome, which alone would of itself have been structurally sufficient, he must have crowned St. Peter's with a mass that would have seemed relatively lifeless, meaningless, and inert. Structural ' truth * might have been gained. Struc- tural vividness would have been sacrificed. It was not, therefore, from any disregard of the essential constructive or functional significance of architectural beauty that he so designed the great dome, but, on the contrary, from a determination to secure that beauty and to convey it.j It was only from his grasp of the relative place for architecture of constructional fact and constructional appearance, that he was enabled, in so supreme a measure, to succeed. And it was by their sense of the same distinction that the THE ]\|ECHA; ^ICAL FALLACY 113 architects of ths Renaissance, as a school, not only enriched architejtture witi new beauty, but were able to dignify the current of iordinary life by bending to its uses the once rigid foriAs of the antique. And this they did by basing their art frankly on the facts of perception. They appealed, in fact, from abstract logic to psychology. A similar defence may be entered for the Renais- sance practice of combining the arch with the lintel in such a way that the actual structural value of the latter becomes nugatory, and merely valuable as surface decoration, or for its elaborate systems of projections which carry nothing but themselves. If we grant that architectural pleasure is based essenti- ally upon our sympathy with constructive (or, as we have agreed, apparently constructive form), then no kind of decoration could be more suitable to archi- tecture than one which, so to say, re-echoes the main theme with which all building is concerned. In Renaissance architecture, one might say, the wall becomes articulate, and expresses its ideal properties through its decoration. A wall is based on one thing, supports another, and forms a transition between the two, and the classic orders, when applied deco- ratively, represented, for the Renaissance builders, an ideal expression of these qualities, stated as gene- ralities. The fallacy lies with the scientific prejudice which insists on treating them as particular statements H 114 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM of constructive fact wherever they occur. And, if the Renaissance architects, on their side, sometimes introduced a decorative order where on purely aesthetic considerations the wall would have been better as an undivided surface, or if they introduced a decorative order which was ill-proportioned in itself, or detracted from the spatial qualities of the building — ^which was, in fact, unsuccessful as decoration— this we must view as a fault rather of practice than of theory. And their tendency to abuse their oppor- tunities of pilaster treatment must be held to spring from an excessive zeal for the aesthetics of construction, the nature of which they understood far more exactly and logically than their modern critics, who, while rightly insisting on the fundamental importance of structure not only in architectural science, but in architectural art, overlook the essentially different part which it necessarily plays in these two fields, and who imagine that a knowledge of structural fact must modify, or can modify, our aesthetic reaction tojtructural appearance. / To this position the scientific criticism would have a last reply. It will answer — (for the complaint has often been made) — ^that this apparent power and vigour of the dome of Michael Angelo depends on the spectator's ignorance of constructive science. In proportion as we realise the hidden forces which such a dome exerts, we must see that the dome is THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 115 raised too high for security, and that the colonnade falls too low to receive the thrust, and that, in any case, the volume of the colonnade is inadequate to ^e purpose, even were the thrust received. This is one of the commonest confusions of criticism. Just as, in the previous question, the scientific view fails adequately to distinguish between fact and appearance, so here it fails to mark the relevant distinction between feeling and knowing. Forms impose their own aesthetic character on a duly sensitive attention, quite independently of what we may know, or not know, about them. This is true in regard to scientific knowledge, just as in the last chapter we saw it to be true in reference to historical or literary knowledge. The concavity or convexity of curves, the broad relations of masses, the proportions of part to part, of base to superstructure, of light to shade, speak their own language, and convey their own suggestions of strength or weakness, life or repose. The suggestions of these forms, if they are genuinely felt, will not be modified by anything we may intel- lectually discover about the complex, mechanical conditions, which in a given situation may actually contradict the apparent message of the forms. The message remains the same. [For our capacity to realise the forces at work in a building intellectually is, to all intents, unlimited ; but our capacity to realise them cBsthetically is limited. We feel the value ii6 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM of certain curves and certain relations of pressure to resistance by an unconscious (or usually unconscious) analogy with our own movements, our own gestures, our own experiences of weight. By virtue of our subconscious memory of these, we derive our instinc- tive reactions of pleasure, or the reverse, to such curves and such relations. But the more complex forms of construction can address themselves only to the intelligence, for to these our physical memory supplies no analogies, and is awakened by them to no response. So, too, if there be an exaggerated disparity between the visible bulk of a material and its capacity for resistance, as for instance in the case of steel, it is perfectly easy to make the intellectual calculus of its function in the building, but it is quite impossible to translate it into any terms of our own physical ex- perience. We have no knowledge in ourselves of any such paradoxical relations. Our sesthetic reactions are limited by our power to recreate in ourselves, imagin- atively, the physical conditions suggested by the form we see : to treuiscribe its strength or weakness into terms of our own life. The sweep of the lines of Michael Angelo's dome, the grand sufficiency of its mass, arouse in us, for this reason, a spontaneous! delight. The further considerations, so distressing to the mechanical critic, remain, even when we have understood them, on a different plane, unfelt. ~~^ This theory of sesthetic must indeed be dealt with THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 117 more adequately in a later chapter, but even if our scientific assailant refuses to admit the distinction between knowing and feeling to be important, and claims — for to this it seems he is reduced — ^that aesthetic feeling is consequent on all we know, and that architectural beauty lies, in fact, in the intelligibility of structure, his position — ^and it seems to be the last — is simply met. ^For if it is to be a case of full under- standing, the chains which tie the dome are part of what we understand. Why are we to conjure up the hidden forces of the dome, and refuse to think of the chains which counteract theni ?j But, granted the chains, the structure is explained, and the knowledge of the fact should give the scientific critic the satis- faction he desires. And if our pleasure lies in intel- lectually tracing, not the means by which the structure is made possible, but the relation of the structure to its purpose, then this pleasure would be derivable from the work of the Renaissance architect no less than from that of the mediaeval one. For, given that the end proposed by the former is understood to be different — ^and we have shown that it was different — ^from that proposed by the latter, then the different methods chosen in the two cases are no less exactly adjusted to their ends in the one case than in the other. No doubt when the aesthetic sense is atrophied, when the attention is concentrated upon scientific curiosity, when the Renaissance architect is. conceived to have ii8 THE ARCHITECTURE OF HUMANISM]] attempted something different from what he did attempt, then the dome of St. Peter's may induce nothing but an intellectual irritation. But then, this attitude to architecture, carried to its logical results, ignores its character as an art altogether, and re- duces it simply to engineering ; and we have already demonstrated the reductio ad absurdum which that involves. Thus vanishes the argument from structure. The prestige which still, in all our thought, attaches to mechanical considerations, has given to so weak a case a perverse vitality. One central point should, however, be clear from this analysis. It may be re- stated in conclusion, for it is important.j Two senses of ' structure ' have been entangled and con- fused. ■ Structure, in one sense, is the scientific method of ' well-building.' Its aim is ' firmness J Its end is achieved when once the stability of architecture is assured. And any means to that end are, scientifi- cally, justified in proportion to their effectiveness. Structure, but now in a different sense, is also the basis of architectural ' delight' For architecture, realised aesthetically, is not mere line or pattern. It is an art in three dimensions, with all the consequence of that. It is an art of spaces and of solids, a felt relation between ponderable things, an adjustment to one another of evident forces, a grouping of materiar bodies subject like ourselves to certain elementary THE MECHANICAL FALLACY 119 laws. Weight and resistance, burden and effort, weakness and power, are elements in ourown .exgeri- ence,