Page:The Building News and Engineering Journal, Volume 22, 1872.djvu/18

 2 EE TS THE BUILDING NEWS. Ttalian—nay, if he works in Byzantine, Saracenic, or modern Persian, he can, and as a matter of fact he does, if he be a man of the least artistic power, ‘‘ group his windows and other parts so as to produce a pleasing effect, and arranges his masses with a view to light andshade ;” and he can, and, on the same sup- position, does ‘‘use his ornament so as to aecentuate and explain his construction, and in doing so” enriches ‘‘ his surfaces.” Two principles more universally admitted or more generally followed by the leading architects of the day could not be mentioned, and neither the one nor the other of them has anything at allto do with the question of style. If the grouping of the windows and other parts is all, then, most obviously the windows may be arched or square-headed, pointed or round, plain or traceried, and the “‘ other parts of the building” may be columns or piers, buttresses or pilasters, gables or flats, and so on through the whole glossary of-architec- tural terms. It is precisely the function of a style to settle of which out of all these sorts the different features shall be. Mr. Fergus- son anathematises the work of every living architect, and then, when hard pressed to say what he really does want, asks for perhaps the only two things which every living archi- teet worth the name agrees to give him. We have enough sympathy with some of Mr. Fergusson’s aims to feel sorry at this lame and impotent conclusion. It seems as absurd to us as it does to him that people should fancy it a merit in a design for every one of its details to be a repetition of some detail in an old example. Our respect for precedent amounts precisely to this: if the treatment for which there is precedent is structurally and artistically good, and if it suits our requirements, let us keep it ; if not, let us try and invent a better one. We have never upheld the clique who seem to have swallowed Medizvalism whole. We have always insisted on the necessity of change, a necessity which may ultimately produce a re- casting of the whole Gothic system; and we have tried to indicate many points where such change was urgently needed. We have not, indeed, demanded that every feature, save what have sprung up since yesterday, should be swept away. ‘To listen to Mr. Fergusson’s utterance in Maemillan, one might fancy that the very heavens and earth were not the same as they were in the thir- teenth century. One might suppose that our arehitects had dropped from the clouds, and had insisted on perpetuating customs only fitted to the climate and building materials which they had been accustomed to, asnatives, say, of the planet Jupiter. At any rate, Mr. Fergusson could not wish to make a cleaner sweep of them then than now, and could not re- monstrate more forcibly against their entire proceedings from first tolast. Such exaggera- tion is unworthy of an able and learned man. The historian of architecture, whatever he may imply in addressing a popular audience, knows perfectly well that national styles have always been developed out of pre-existing styles, by taking away or adding to them a little at a time. He cannot but remember, too, how much out of the grand sum of causes which ought to mould and influence our Eng- lish style remains just the same now as six hundred years ago. We have the same climate; and as to this we may take the testimony of M. Taine. No man surely can be less biassed in favour of Mediewvalism : few men more distinctively modern in thought. He comes to London, looks at our Classic, our Italian architecture; pities that dreary pile of building known as _ Somerset House, and asks what in the world induced us to set these productions of Southern Europe to shiver on the banks of the Thames. ‘Vhey inspire him with horror and commiseration; it would be charitable, he seems to feel, either to send them back to Italy or to putthem out of their misery at once. He goes to Westminster Abbey ; here, he exclaims in a rapture, is the architecture for the climate, serious, earnest, in harmony with its surroundings; an architecture that will stand foe and smoke and rain, and yet one that brightens up with a marvellous beauty at every gleam of sunshine. Our climate, then, is the same as ever, and our Gothic suits it; our materials are the same, with a few additions ; and our national tastes are not far from the same, as witness the zeal and passion which the Gothic revival has everywhere called forth. These are three very considerable factors in the sum, and as to them we think our architecture has no cause to change. If Mr. Fergusson thinks differently he should at least publish his reasons. We more than suspect that he would find it hard to give any. ‘There is a comfort, which is common to people of the most opposite persuasions, in solemnly shak- ing their heads, and telling the world it is all wrong. It does not require much thought and consideration ; it does not involve the speci- fying of particular transgressions or the ap- portioning more or less of praise or blame. You ask, ‘‘What are we doing that is so bad?” and the answer is, ‘‘ Never mind what ; you are going the wrong way, andyou will all come to a bad end.” ‘This is the sub- stance of Mr. Fergusson’s teaching, as it is that of other members of the damnatory clique. We take the liberty of most emphati- cally denying its correctness as a general statement. Modern Gothic architects may be (we think they are) wrong in many points, though in these we believe they are mending. Wrong on all points they cannot be. The style they practise fitted our climate and materials when it first arose, and must fit them equally now, since neither one nor the other have altered. One more word sbout the nineteenth-cen- tury work at South Kensington. ‘The stan- dard example of it set before us happens, by a singular accident, to be rather difficult of examination. We have not before us, and we do not know where to find, Captain Fowke’s design for the Natural History Museum, but we are well acquainted with the work known as Captain Fowke’s at the South Kensington Museum. It is no seeret that nearly all save the engineering construction was designed by Mr. Godfrey Sykes and by architectural assistants, and not by Captain Fowke atall. It was, in fact, carried out on the same principle as the Albert Hall and present Exhibition building—that, namely, of appointing an officer in the army to receive the credit of it, while some clever but un- friended architect finds the brains and does the work. The matter is notorious, and if Mr. Fergusson did not care to call public at- tention to it, he need not have gone out of his way to extol the genius of this supposi- titious designer. What we have to do with, however, is the style: and this we shall pro- bably not be far wrong in concluding to be similar to that of the Museum. ‘This, then, is no more nineteenth century than ninth. It is a mixture, and a rather clever one, of several past styles: of which, however,the Renaissance is to the others in the proportion of about twenty to one. The chief thing that is roof and columns, which, as there are no ancient models to copy from, could not be otherwise. ven here, however, in the iron roof, the spandrils are filled in with Gothic tracery—the Greek honeysuckle is freely used in cast patterns,—and the painted decoration is of sixteenth century style. In other parts of the work, instead of the ‘barbarous ” ornament of the Middle Ages, with their absurd love for birds, and leaves, and flowers, and their quaint realistic portrait sculpture, we have something much more elegant and refined. ‘Lhere is a profusion of naked boys carrying festoons, and a quantity of hook-nosed griffins with acauthus-leaf tails. This, we presume, is what the modern style has in store for us; but if so, we hope it will not inconveniently hurry itself about making an appearance. It will not be a first appear- Jan. 5, 1872. ance, in any case; the world tried it, and got rid of it, before our great-great-grandfathers were born. Yet this, so far as we can extract any practical suggestion at all from the cloud- masses of Mr. Ferguson’s eloquence, is the coming style, or, at least, the groundwork of that style. ‘‘Our very old friend the Italian,” as a correspondent of the Times expresses it, seems to be what is destined to transform the world. If so, there is some hope for England yet. ‘The architectural profession, indeed, have gone astray, but the journeymen plasterers are in the right track ; our Law Courts may back-slide into Gothic, but our suburban terraces hold the promise of the future. We have done, for the present, with Mr. Fergusson’s theories. All the sound and fury expended on them shrinks, as we haye seen when they are analysed, into the couple of platitudes which we quoted from the Times. All the practical suggestion to be obtained from them amounts to this, that their author likes Renaissance better than Gothic. All the contemporary examples which illustrate them, of retrograde architects and progres- sive amateurs, are ingenious, but palpable fictions. Yet there is a nucleus of fact round which all this nebula of fancy has arranged itself, An accumulation of error does exist on the other side, which, as by a process. of electrical induction, has given rise to the ac- cumulation of opposite error on this one. The All-Imitative School, more than anybody else, have produced the All-Original School, and Mr. Denison may be reckoned among the primary causes of Mr. Fergusson. For a modern architect to boast that every one of his details is copied from some old example is absurd enough, and we should like to know the grounds for charging this absurdity on Mr. Street. But there is one thing more absurd, and that is, to insist that we may not even put these details together as we want— - to lay on us the burden not merely of re- peating Medizval styles to the letter, but actually of following, with a blind obedience hardly conceivable, the very planning and arrangement of Medieval buildings. Amongst those who have tried hardest to impose on | the world this final infliction we have always” been accustomed to number Mr. Denison. His opinions on civil architecture we know little about, but on questions of church- building we remember them too well. Any- thing more rigid, more inelastic, more im- capable of change, and growth, and adapta- tion, we have never met with. Contem- porary art, had they controlled it, would not have been dead, nor sleeping ; it would have been fossilised outright, and Mr. Fergusson would have found such an abundance of facts to justify his sweeping censure, that his powers as a writer of fiction might have still lain dormant. As itis, the followers of the one leader supply the material for the extra- vagances of the other. If Mr. Denison’s party used their style reasonably, and modi- fied it cautiously and wisely in « modern direction, where would be the point of a sneer about their going back to the Dark Ages? If modern about it is the treatment of the iron | trying to create a new style, were first to ascertain how far some old one would really meet their requirements, where would be those abortions in bricks and mortar with which the effete Gothic clique twit their op- Our damnatory critics are, after all, neces- sary to each other. Whether they are neces- sary to the public is a different question. Dr, Johnson’s remark is not true without exceptions. For our own part, we are conten to do what little may lie in our power forthe progress of art, without the reward of being anathematised from all points of the compass once or twice a week. Just new there is an interval of peace, and our two theorists are well employed in settling matters with each other. We join the general shout of satis- faction at the sight, and hope they long may remain so. i
 * Mr. Fereusson’s disciples, instead of each
 * ponents?