Page:History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 1.djvu/44

12 well worthy of the most attentive consideration. Indeed, it is almost impossible to indicate one single building in any part of the world, designed during the prevalence of this true form of art, which was not thought beautiful, not alone by those who erected it, but which does not remain a permanent object of admiration and of study even for strangers in all future ages.

The result of the other system is widely different from this. It has now been practised in Europe for more than three centuries, and by people who have more knowledge of architectural forms, more constructive skill, and more power of combining science and art in effecting a great object, than any people who ever existed before. Notwithstanding this, from the building of St. Peter's at Rome to that of our own Parliament Houses, not one building has been produced that is admitted to be entirely satisfactory, or which permanently retains a hold on general admiration. Many are large and stately to an extent almost unknown before, and many are ornamented with a prof useness of which no previous examples exist; but with all this, though they conform with the passing fashions of the day, they soon become antiquated and out of date, and men wonder how such a style could ever have been thought beautiful, just as we wonder liow any one could have admired the female costumes of the last century which captivated the hearts of our grandfathers.

It does not require us to go very deeply into the philosophy of the subject to find out why this should be the case; the fact simply being that no sham was ever permanently successful, either in morals or in art, and no falsehood ever remained long without being found out, or which, when detected, inevitably did not cease to please. It is literally impossible that we should reproduce either the circumstances or the feelings which gave rise to classical art and made it a reality; and though Gothic art was a thing of our century and of our own race, it belongs to a state of society so totally different from anything that now exists, that any attempt at reproduction now must at best be a masquerade, and never can be a real or an earnest form of art. The designers of the Eglinton Tournament carried the system to a perfectly legitimate conclusion when they sought to reproduce the customs and warlike exercises of our ancestors; and the pre-Raphaelite painters were equally justified in attempting to do in painting that which was done every day in architecture. Both attempts failed signally, because we had progressed in the arts of war and painting, and could easily detect the absurdity of these practices. It is in architecture alone of all the arts that tlie false system remains, and we do not yet perceive the impossibility of its leading to any satisfactory result.

Bearing all this in mind, let us try if we can come to a clearer definition of what this art really is, and in what its merits consist. Let