St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Great riches are not required for the habit of magnificence; it is enough that a man should dispose of such as he possesses greatly, according to time and place.” As in life, so in art, and especially in architecture, greatness of style is quite independent of wealth of material; indeed, wealth of material is constantly found by true artists to be a fatal hindrance to grandeur of effect. Hence great poets and painters are usually very shy of what commonly pass for great subjects—that is, subjects full of obvious interest and splendour; and, if they treat such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them as far as possible of all that makes them attractive to the novice in art, until they come to a simple greatness which was hitherto a secret.

Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be a principal condition of great effect with small means and in small or comparatively small buildings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of such material as the architect possesses, and especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is commonly supposed, even by architects, that a solidity of wall and roof sufficient to put far out of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if properly shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, cornice, shafted recess, and the many other “decorations” which are principally methods of showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, is all that noble building calls for; and that the frequent—nay, general—practice of ancient architecture in going much further than this was simply waste of material caused by want of mechanical knowledge. But those who know most of ancient architecture know best that there was no want of mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite the reverse. Not only is mechanical knowledge, equal if not beyond our own, proved by such buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but the house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to have known all the details of his business fully as well as the most ingenious economist of material that ever “scamped” a modern tenement of the same order. He was fully aware that the strength of a rafter lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes us as “architectural” though it may not contain a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of Henry VII or Elizabeth. A man now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: “I will build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have over I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall want them?” The answer is: Because that very “waste” is the truest and most striking ornament; and though you and your family’s usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may be but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that very fact an “ornament” of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of your own plan will be only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.

I have said that a modest ostentation of extreme substantiality is also an element of architectural effect in the kind of building contemplated. This, indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic element. A house will look respectable, and something more than respectable, which has only the reality of being built somewhat better than well. But consciousness is the life of art, and there must be a quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, and permanence, to give these characters that power over the imagination which a work of art must have. A labourer’s cottage or the smallest village church which has this character is an artistic and rightly architectural work; and the nobleman’s mansion or the cathedral which wants it is not. Here comes in that true “decoration” which scarcely the humblest house of the sixteenth or early part of the seventeenth century was altogether without. In out-of-the-way villages and roadside inns of that period, you will find your attention directed to the thickness and weight of the roof-timbers by a carved or moulded cornice, which measures and expatiates upon the depth and substance of the rafters which terminate therein; or one or more of the brackets supporting the joists of the overhanging bedroom floor will have a touch of carving, to declare with what ease and pleasure the burthen is borne upon their sturdy shoulders; or the lintel of the door will show and boast of the thickness of the wall by a moulded chamfer. A single touch of such decoration glorifies the whole, and puts the living spirit of art into the body of an honest building, however humble it may be.

So far is size from being needful to greatness in architecture, that one of the very grandest pieces of domestic building I ever saw is a little village inn of extremely early date in a Sussex village which scarcely anybody has ever heard of, though it stands but two miles from Berwick Station on the South Coast Railway. This village is Aldfriston. It has in its little market-place an extremely ancient stone cross, far gone in decay, having never been touched by restorer. The whole village has an air of antiquity such as breathes from no other English village I have ever seen; but older than anything, except the cross, is its hostelry—no bigger than a well-to-do bailiff’s cottage, showing no Elizabethan “variety” in its ground-plan, and the front to the street having but three windows above and one on either side of the doorway. Coming upon it quite unprepared for seeing anything particular in the village, this house fairly took my breath away by its exemplification of the way in which ideal and material greatness differ. It was like coming, in a newspaper article, upon three or four lines of great and unknown poetry. Yet it was nothing but a cottage built mightily, and with a mighty consciousness of being so built. It seems never to have been touched, except here and there by the house-painter, since the date at which it was raised, which was probably in the fifteenth century, the carved foliage in the spandrels of the small arched doorway indicating that period. An architect learned in mouldings might perhaps fix the date to within twenty-five years, from those of the cornice. The bedroom story projects considerably over the ground-floor, and is borne by great oak brackets, the faces of which are adorned with painted carvings of figures in mitres, one being St. Hubert, as is shown by the stag at his feet. The spaces between these brackets are ceiled with a great plaster “cavetto,” which, together with the brackets, springs from a wide timber cornice above the door and windows of the ground-floor. In the hollow of this cornice are four or five grotesque faces, the painting of which, though fresh, seems, like the painting of all the other decorations, to be nothing but the original colouring faithfully transmitted. The three windows of the upper floor are bays, and are carried by great spread brackets, carved and painted with most curiously quaint and simple representations of St. George and the Dragon and symbols of his tradition, the tails of two dragons in the central bracket running in their extremities into the outlines of a pointed and foliated arch. The roof is covered in with slabs of ragged stone, thick enough for a London pavement. The dimensions of the timbers of the roof are proved inferentially by the fact that the roof-tree has not sagged an inch under some four hundred years of this burthen; and their mass and power are expressed artistically by their termination in a cornice of immense depth, and consisting of a greater number of moulded “members” than I remember to have seen in any other feature of the kind. The walls are plastered in their plain spaces, but indicate their construction of solid oak—which, by the way, is far more durable than either brick or any ordinary stone—by the chance appearance in one place of a strange animal which runs up the face of the wall and is obviously carved out of a beam otherwise hid by the plaster.

There is nothing heavy in the total effect of this extraordinary piece of cottage architecture; for there is artistic animation everywhere, and the expression of its strength is that of living power and not mere passive sufficiency.

To build such a cottage now might cost about three times as much as it does to build a common country inn of the same dimensions. It would not, of course, suit a London citizen so well as a Chiselhurst villa of like size and cost; but it would be a fit abode for a duke in difficulties.