Page:Bulandshahr- Or, Sketches of an Indian District- Social, Historical and Architectural.djvu/81

 In themselves they are pretty enough, but they are still an offence against propriety, since solid stone is a material of which no real door would be made. The defect is characteristic of the old native habit of thought, which was seldom much distressed by the incongruous. In other respects the design appears to me to be eminently typical of the higher Indian civilization of the nineteenth century, conservative of the national genius, but open to European refinements. The lace-like tracery of the pierced panels, the surface sculpture of others, the general grouping, no less than the details of the ornamentation, are all oriental in character; while, at the same time, the colonnade could never have been what it is, but for the influence of Italian design. The building is still unfinished and wants its parapet, which will add greatly to its beauty.

The art revival, which in the minor luxuries and conveniences of life, has of late years effected so much in England, has even there as yet made no very profound impression on architectural methods. It is still almost as true as when Ruskin framed the indictment twenty years ago, that all the pleasure, which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in pictures, sculpture, minor objects of virtu, or mediæval architecture, which we enjoy under the term picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings; the reason being that modern European architecture, working as it does on known rules and from given models, is not aṇ art, but a manufacture. No true art, whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, says the same thing over and over again: the merit of architectural as of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things: to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in brick and stone than it is of genius in verse or prose. In British India so little is this recognized, that "standard plans" are provided at head-quarters for every class of public building, and are forced upon universal acceptance throughout the length and breadth of the province, with little or no regard to local conditions as regards material, or the habits of the people, or the capacity of the workmen. Such uniformity is certainly not conducive to convenience of design, excellence of construction, or economy in expenditure; but it probably facilitates the orderly arrangement of the records in the central bureau, and is therefore highly approved by departmental authorities. As an example of the pitch to which this passion for stereotyped forms is sometimes carried, I remember noting in one large Municipality that the prin-