Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/17

 THE BUILDING NEWS AND ENGINEERING JOURNAL. DAMNATORY ART-CRITICISM. qt was Dr. Johnson, if we remember rightly, who explained the popularity of a certain itinerant preacher by saying ‘People like a ‘man who damns them, and run after him to save them.” The remark is as true in archi- tectural matters as in religious ones, and the same trick which answered a century ago in the latter is now proving itself quite as suc- cessful in the former. The simplicity of the device adapts it to the meanest intellect. Nothing is needed beyond a fair amount of assurance and a tolerable command of strong language. Scold the world loud enough and long enough, andit will come in time to respect you. Tell your neighbours, by implication, that they are all a pack of fools, and some of them will assuredly prove it, by taking you for a wise man. Accuse the ablest living artists of not having left a single blunder un- committed, and weak-minded persons, who neither know them nor you, may fancy you to be an able artist. This road to fame, indeed, is at present rather crowded. The number of gentlemen who have each discovered | everybody but himself to be hopelessly and fundamentally wrong is really getting exces- sive. The poor public is distracted. It would fain give its attention all round, and not lose a scrap of the abuse which its censors shower on it and on each other; but the business is overdone. One damnatory critic, like one clown at a pantomime, is as much as can be really enjoyed. Two may be bearable, but half a dozen only destroy each others’ effect. Familiarity breeds contempt, curses are growing tame, and execrations will soon be a drug in the market. Several of these performers have been, and now are, devoting themselves to the general entertainment. ‘They have all one starting- point, the New Law Courts, and all one con- clusion: “Everybody wrong but me.” Nothing, however, can be more various than their intermediate course. Mr. E. W. Pugin condemned the competition designs on the ground that they were “ not Gothic :” adding, if we remember rightly, that Mr. Street's was the only one of them which had any claim to that title. Mr. Fergusson condemns this cesign because itis Gothic. Mr. 1B. B. Deni- son condemns it, as far as we can trace his reasons, because it shows the influence of foreign study and of “ihe outcry for a new Style.” We have been anxiously expecting alr, Garbett to condemn it, on the ground that its architect is paid by a percentage on outlay ; but his duty towards it was, perhaps, sufficiently discharged by the general com- mination which he published in our columns a twelvemonth ago. We may add that a leading review, in an article which we re- printed a year or two since, condemned all the Law Courts designs, because they aimed at making one grand building of what should have been, and in the Middle Ages would have been, a group of several; and that nearly eyery journal which now finds fault with Mr. Street’s production does so because it is treated as a group, and not as one grand building. From all these critics we will select two whose remarks, wild as some of them are, do seem to have a nucleus of common-sense. Mr, Pugin’s works afford, at least to professional readers, a reasonable opportunity of judging what his theories are worth. We have every desire to do them justice ; but looking, not at petty imperfec- tions, but at their general drift and tendency, we can only say that if this is what Gothic ought to be, our meeting-house architects are the class who understand it best. Mr. Pugin’s principles may be admirably fitted to pro- duce his own description of work, but we may part company with him on observing that this is not precisely the description of work which we, or most lovers of art, wish to see produced. Mr. Fergusson’s article, copied from Mac- millan’s Magazine into our last number, re- quires a longer notice. In point of reasoning, it strikes us as hardly worthy of its author. To take the first case that occurs, for in- stance : the two paragraphs about our ‘‘ Tudor Parliament Houses, our Edwardian Law Courts, and our Norman Museum,” with the suggestion about going still further back to the Saxon and Druidical styles, are all very well to lead up to the joke with which they conclude. No one, however, knows better than Mr. Fergusson that there is not the slightest foundation, in fact, for his sugges- tion of this backward movement, and it is rather too bad of him to palm the fiction on his non-professional readers. What are the circumstances of the case? Mr. Street, per- sonally, is so far from receding to a more archaic style that, to the regret of many of his admirers, he now works in a later and more fully developed one than that which he adopted a few years ago; while Mr. Water- house, who is accused of going back to Nor- man, was actually forced into the use of round arches in order to match the ‘ thoroughly nineteenth-century ” work of Captain Fowke ! As for this “‘ thoroughly nineteenth-century ” work itself, we have something to say. As far as the iron construction goes, this description may apply. Cast iron columns and wrought metal roofs have never been used till recent times; we have had, and are having to find out, the best way of using them; hence our use of them is characteristically modern. But if they had, as is perfectly conceivable, hap- pened to come first into use in the thirteenth century, then the thirteenth century builders, and not we, would have discovered this best way of using them; and we should have been reduced to one of two alter- natives: either, finding the thirteenth cen- tury treatment of cast iron to be the best possible one, we should have imitated and adhered to it, and haye been taunted perpetually by Mr. Fergusson for doing so; or else, to escape this terrible penalty, we should have given itup, and been content with an inferior treatment—‘‘an ill-favoured thing, sir, but our own.” Now, what we have supposed in the case of iron is precisely what has happened inthe case of almost every other building material; we cannot adopt a radically new treatment unless we are content with a radically bad one. For instance, we have no new way of using stones or bricks to bridge an opening. There is nothing better than an arch, and no form of arch so good in most situations as a pointed one. It is thousands of years, however, since arches were invented, and hundreds of years since pointed arches were ; and consequently hardly any form of arch but an absurd one can be characteristically modern. In such cases as this, and such cases make up ninety percent. of our building construction, we must be content, in the main, to keep what has been handed down to us. In certain points of detail we may improve on it, but these points must grow smaller and smaller as time goes on. In some other points, we may modify it to our tastes and wishes, and succeeding ages may modify it to theirs. But, the best ways of using the best building materials having once been discovered, there isno such radical change possible as Mr. Fergusson would imply. If we use pointed arches, he can always, if he likes, make that a reason for saying that we imitate Gothic ; and if we use round ones, it is easy for him to charge us with copying Norman or Byzantine. Our so using them as to fulfil all modern purposes, and to contain, in his own words, ‘‘ every nineteenth-century contrivance,” will not save us, any more than it has saved Mr. Waterhouse, from the general condemnation. Mr. Fergusson, however, replying to Mr. Denison inthe Times, admits that all forms of construction may possibly have been used, and that no new ones remain to be introduced, but forms of construction, he says, are the property of the engineer and the builder. ‘The special province of the architect is. firstly, ‘‘ to construct ornamentally”—that is ‘‘ to group the windows or .other parts of a building so as to produce a pleasing effect and to arrange his masses so as to yield light and shade,” &c., and secondly ‘‘to orna- ment his construction”—that is ‘to use ornament so as to accentuate and explain his construction, and in doing so enrich and vary his surfaces.” ‘‘ By following these two maxims, and these only, the [ancient] archi- tects of every country haye produced beanti- ful and appropriate buildings, and I don’t in the least see why ours should not do the same if they will only persevere in the same path.” We utterly deny that this has ever been done by following these two maxims only, though they are two very good ones in their way ; but the curious thing is that they have nothing whatever to do with style. Whether an architect works in Gothic or Romanesque, or