more pernicious error of regarding all decoration as arbitrary, unmeaning, and independent of construction. The error prevailed for centuries, and originated and completed the decay of every great style of architecture; it hid the discharging arch above the Roman doorway, with the falsehood of the sculptured architrave; it began the destruction of the Pointed style by the introduction of intersecting tracery lines; it brought about, by an easy gradation from forms either insignificant or unnatural, the ruinous contradiction of imitated materials, giving to Raffaello's Pandolfini Palace its cornice of perishable wood; it blinded the architects of the Cinque-cento manner in England and France to the absurdity of facing Gothic masses with spectral reminiscences of Greek details; and it has received its final glorification in the plaster splendours of London slop-shops and gin-palaces.

Con

We believe that it is demonstrably wrong to regard the leading transitions of architectural style as having consisted wholly, or even mainly, in the fulfilment of new constructional necessities, and the effects to the eye, as having been no more than the simple, unforeseen, and unintended sequences. structional change, as an unavoidable condition to great novelties of effect, must have preceded such novelties in order of time. But who will venture on the absurdity of maintaining, for example, that the prodigious height of the naves of Beauvais and Cologne, and still more that of the spires of Salisbury and Strasburg, sprang from any necessities in the new construction, instead of the success and establishment of the new construction being chiefly owing to its capacity for producing this and other visual effects, which remained impossible till the round arch shot up into the lancet, and the ponderous masses of Roman and Lombard wall dissolved into the fairy framework of windows and buttresses? The very birth of the Pointed style seems to have been owing to the purely artistical element of architecture, to the desire for loftiness and magnificence, for their own sakes, and not to any incapacity of the preceding style for the fulfilment of all ordinary purposes of church-building.

We readily admit, as an important principle, perhaps the most important principle of architecture, that the peculiar artistical expression in every great and pure style, as the Egyptian, Greek, Lombard, Moresque, and Northern Pointed,—and, in an inferior degree, the mixed expression of less perfect styles, as the Roman, early Byzantine, Venetian-Gothic, and Cinquecento, is always in a peculiar and harmonious relation with the manner of construction adopted. It is in every case an expres

1851. Expression in Architecture not yet appreciated.

369

sion which could not be obtained, legitimately, under any other condition of construction. The law of the construction may be regarded as the theme of the architectural harmony; but its illustration is no such straightforward and prosaic business as Mr. Ruskin, and certain excellent architects, who are excellent in spite of the defects of their theories, would have us believe. These defects, in most cases, perhaps, consist rather in the statement than in the feeling of the truth, which, in the fewest words, appears to be this ;-every kind of construction, when carried out in the simplest manner, is productive of some peculiar expression, which may or may not be one and the same with the truth of construction. Thus, the literal fact of the balance of supporting and supported members is the natural expression of the unadorned Greek hut;' and this expression, heightened immeasurably in emphasis, by means at which we shall presently glance, is the fundamental expression of the Erectheion and the Parthenon. Again, the semblance of ascendant energy, which is a violent contradiction of the literal truth of stones and mortar, is the unassisted expression of the nave walls rising out of the aisle-roofs, in the barest of the temporary churches' on the outskirts of London. This expression was seized on by the inventors of the Northern Pointed, and was repeated, and heightened, and illustrated by them in a hundred different ways. The Lombard architects, who built according to the same leading form, which was that of the Roman basilica, wanted the groined roof, the pointed arch, and the buttress system, and were consequently greatly limited in the power of developing its chief fundamental expression; they therefore devoted themselves, like the early Greek architects, to emphasising, by various appeals to the imagination, the simple constructive truth. Walls of enormous and uniform thickness were required to support the arched roof; and, accordingly, the power of the wall is the theme of a most interesting and elaborate system of decoration. The Romans made an attempt to develope a system of expression out of a construction based upon the semicircular arch: they almost wholly failed. The attempt was renewed by the Byzantines, with little better success. It was reserved for the Arabian architects to found upon the mechanical properties of the arch an expression which emulated, and even surpassed, the Northern Gothic in the extent of its departure from obvious constructive reality. The Egyptian builder continually laboured to give expression to that preponderance of mass, the existence of which was a condition imposed upon him by his materials and his want of science in using them. The architecture of the

Renaissance, in its best monuments, confuses, rather than reconciles, the three principles of the wall, the arch, and the entablaOther styles are modifications, combinations, or degradations of these, and respectively owe their claims to be regarded as styles to their development of one or more of these orders of natural expression.

6

In the following remarks, then, it will be our main object to show, that in every true style of architecture there are many details which should be classed as means of architectural expression,-a phrase which seems preferable to the term decoration,' or ornament;' for these words convey to most persons the notion of something more or less extraneous, or detachable, and they fail to include features which, nevertheless, decidedly refuse to be classed under the head of constructional necessities. The want of a full recognition of this order of details has been the source of an immense amount of misapprehension and confusion among architects and writers on architecture. By the architects of the Renaissance, and by their successors down to the beginning of the present century, the means of architectural expression, in the ancient styles, were treated as arbitrary ornaments; and some of the best writers of our own time, who have perceived this error, have themselves erred in the opposite direction, not less widely because much less dangerously, by regarding, or endeavouring to regard, the class of details in question, either as the ultimate fulfilments, or as the artistic exponents, of a merely constructive perfection.

A good deal of vagueness and timidity is necessarily manifest in the declarations of most writers upon this matter. Mr. Pugin's well-known maxim, for example, sounds much more simple and satisfactory before, than after, a little consideration of its terms: The two great rules for design are these,I. That there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety. II. That all ornaments should consist of the enrichment of the essential construction of the building.' The truth or falsehood of the first statement depends entirely upon the latitude in which the word propriety' is taken. Artistical propriety would, we conceive, include much which would be excluded by barely utilitarian propriety. The second rule asserts one of the conditions of ornament, but as a definition of ornament it is totally worthless, on account of the indefinite and inadequate meaning of the word 'enrichment.' Insufficient as this declaration appears to be, it is perspicuity itself when compared with the definitions of some architectural critics. Mr. Ruskin, however, in the Stones of Venice,' is bold and

1851.

Expression in Architecture not yet appreciated.

371

clear enough; vagueness and pusillanimity of affirmation are not among the charges which we shall have to make against his new volume. He states his principles broadly and simply at the outset, and then gives detailed applications of them; praising, as good architecture, all that agrees with them, and overwhelming with unmitigated, and often very eloquent scorn, whatever constitutes a departure from them. There is no mistaking his data, nor, if these are admitted to be the truth, and the whole truth, is there any denying his conclusions. Now, because some of Mr. Ruskin's leading principles are, in the main, the same which Mr. Pugin*, and other influential writers besides himself, have enunciated, though with less distinctness, and have maintained, though commonly with far less boldness and consistency, we conceive that we may be rendering good service to architecture, by a somewhat detailed demonstration of certain weak points in the critical system expounded in The Stones of Venice.' We shall glance briefly at each of the great styles of architecture above enumerated, regarding them not from the constructive point of view, from which nothing fresh is to be seen, nor under the aspect of their peculiar decoration, understanding by this term what Mr. Ruskin, and most critics who have spoken at all plainly on the subject, seem to understand by it, namely, sculptured and painted imitations of natural and artificial objects, chosen and executed for the sake of an interest, which may be more or less appropriate in character, but of which the character is not altogether destroyed by detachment from the architecture. By considering in each style its properly architectural expression, and the means by which this has been obtained, we may be enabled, not only to add our mite to the existing stock of architectural criticism, but also to increase the practical worth of that stock, by rendering more definite than heretofore its real extent and signification. On our way, we hope to justify the Greek and Northern Gothic architects, and shall, in part, excuse those of

* We are somewhat surprised to find Mr. Ruskin speaking in terms of unmixed wrath against Mr. Pugin. We sympathise quite as little as he does with that gentleman's rapturous visions of the ideal temple, where the 'albs hang in the oaken ambries, and the 'cope chests are filled with orphreyed baudekins; and pix, and pax, 'and chrismatory are there, and thurible and cross!' &c. &c.; but it seems to us that Mr. Pugin has been long, diligently, and not without success, calling for the introduction into architectural practice of some of the very principles upon which Mr. Ruskin lays most stress. In which case, this precursorship might be considered as constituting a claim to more merciful treatment.

the Renaissance from some of the overwhelming charges which Mr. Ruskin has brought against them; and we trust that, before we conclude, our readers may have arrived at a clear understanding of a principle of great practical importance, as well to the production of works of architectural art as to the formation of a right judgment concerning them. We cannot, however, claim priority, even for the statement, much less for the perception of this principle: could we have done so, we should not have entertained our present bold conviction of its value. Its workings must have been felt by most persons as constituting a great part of the delight which they have received from architecture; and its existence has been repeatedly acknowledged, or assumed, in architectural criticism, though nearly always with a strange misappreciation of the extent and importance of its operations. F. Kugler, in his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte' (a book which ought to be translated into English), and Mr. Freeman, in his History of Architecture,' have shown clear apprehensions of the source of architectural expression in a few of the details of Greek temple architecture: and some of the curious methods by which the Northern Gothic obtains the effect of ascendant energy, are become matters of ordinary criticism. merit we mean to claim, is simply that of having shown, in something like its true breadth and depth, the working of a law, which is so paramount and universal, as almost always to have won for itself a dim recognition, even from critics whose theories have tended to persuade them, as far as possible, to overlook its existence.

The

To begin chronologically with Egypt: the effect of enormous massiveness, and of everlasting stability, is what first strikes, and to the last chiefly impresses, the beholder of her architectural forms. Massiveness in excess would necessarily characterise the original works of unpractised and unscientific builders in stone. It must be some time before the greatest length, with the least thickness of shaft and lintel, consistent with security, could be experimentally ascertained. The first builders would keep well on the safe side; and the unsought result, under almost any condition of construction, would be a high degree of that expression which distinguishes Egyptian architecture above every other style. Indian cavern architecture, and early Doric, for example, exhibit this superfluous massiveness; so that a careless observer would be likely enough to describe them as having an Egyptian look: there is, however, a wide difference in the way in which this fact of superfluous massiveness and its expression were dealt with by the three kinds of architects. The Egyptian designer was pre