Every one has a perfectly definite impression of what is meant by an architectural style; and would recognise a building as Egyptian, Greek, Ecclesiastical Gothic, Norman, or Moresque, not merely by the characteristic details of each of these manners, but still more by a perfectly distinct character attained in each manner by the combination of those details—a character which is totally different from any effect that could result from any such random though more or less constant collocation of details as is to be found, for example, in the bastard “Italian Gothic.” This, though it was made popular by Mr. Ruskin, has about as much relation to a true style as a curiosity-shop has to a well-ordered living-room. It is a remarkable fact, and one especially worth dwelling upon in this context, that Italy, the country of the arts, never had an architecture, and could never even adopt one from its neighbours without degrading or abolishing its character as a style. The so-called “Romanesque” was an incongruous hybrid until it was developed into the “Norman” by the northern nations of Europe; and though the pointed arch made its appearance in Italy very early, no Italian architect ever seems to have had any perception of its artistic capacity, even when he adopted in his buildings the constructive system to which that feature belonged. Italy had great architects, but no great architecture. Buildings like St. Mark’s, the Doge’s Palace, the Duomo of Florence, etc., owe their influence upon the imagination to the personality of the architect, which has known how to impress itself on a combination of in themselves unmeaning or incongruous forms, rather than to that imaginative integrity of style which makes every Old English parish church look as if the Spirit had builded its own house. Every great architect—like every great poet, painter, or musician—has his own style, whether he works on the lines of a great integral style like the Northern Pointed, or in a mongrel mode like that of the Romanesque, or in no accepted manner at all. Sir Christopher Wren could not build a common brick house without imposing his own character upon it. But this personal character or style, which always marks the work of the great artist, is usually almost beyond the power of analysis; and, were it otherwise, would scarcely be worth the trouble of analysis, which would only serve the purpose of encouraging imitations of that which owes its value to its unique individuality.

The five styles above named—i.e. the Egyptian, the Greek, the Pointed Gothic, the Norman, and the Moresque—are so much distinguished from all other modes of building by the integrity with which a single idea is carried out in every detail, that in comparison with them there is no other manner which deserves to be called a style. And it is hard to conjecture the possibility of the development in the future of any sixth style which shall deserve to rank with them; for these five seem to have exhausted the five possible modes in which weight or mass of material—apparently the foundations of all architectural expression—can be treated. Two of these styles, the Norman and the Moresque, though equal to the others in artistic integrity, are immeasurably inferior to them in significance; the first three having dealt with and exhausted the only modes in which the primary fact of weight of material in stone construction can be subordinated to religious expression, and the field itself of religious expression in architecture having been in like manner cleared by these styles: for when the Material, the Rational, and the Spiritual have once found utterance in stone—as they have done in the temple-architectures of Egypt, Greece, and Northern Europe—what fourth religious aspect remains to inspire a new art?

It is proposed in these papers to consider the several expressional themes of the five great architectures, and to give a brief exposition of the way in which they are worked out. It should be premised, however, that as it does not require a knowledge of how an effect is produced in order to feel that effect, so it is not pretended that any very distinct consciousness of the adaptation of means to expressional ends must have existed in the minds of the inventors of the great styles of architecture. All artistic production involves a large element of lucky accident, of which the true artist alone knows how to avail himself; and it is often from a lucky accident in a happy season that a great work or a great art will take its origin, as the dropping of a grain of sand into a saturated solution of certain salts will form the centre and cause of its sudden crystallisation. As sound philosophy is only sound sense spread out, so true criticism of great work is only right perception spread out; and the use of criticism of such work is not so much to teach men to enjoy it, as to enable them to pronounce a prompt and assured and demonstrable condemnation of bad or inferior work when false or exaggerated claims are put forth in its favour.

The three primary architectures seem to have owed their origin to three accidents. The immense and wholly unreasonable massiveness which characterises the Egyptian style is probably due to its having emerged from caverns. It carried into the air its memory of having had the rocky earth for its roof and walls, and of the time when its close-packed squadrons of granite shafts were a necessity which it cost nothing to provide. The Parthenon, again, is a manifest glorification in stone of the forms of the wooden hut; and the pointed arch, with all its immense consequences, arose from the constructional accident of cross-vaulting.

Weight, then, which is the most general and characteristic attribute of matter, was taken by the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects as the ground of their several ideas—whether consciously or not, is no concern of ours. The Egyptian architect, as will be shown, subordinated every detail, from the mass of the pyramid—which may be regarded as the form taken by weight in the abstract—down to almost every particular of decoration, to the creation of an effect of compulsory submission to an irresistible and for-ever-enduring material power. The mightiest bulk of Alp or Apennine is a bubble compared with an Egyptian temple, which is the awful life of ponderosity and crushing earthliness; and there is no need to pause in order to point out how aptly this expression suited the political and religious character of the people out of whom Israel fled.

In the architecture of Greece, weight—representative of material force—was still the theme; but it was material force which had met with its match, the force of mind; and the ponderous entablature, every detail of which expresses weight, is lifted and borne beautifully in air by a series of members every one of which conveys the impression of an opposite ascendant force, which recognises but does not suffer in the least degree from its burthen, beneath which the animated shaft is seen to fling away a part of its supporting power just at the point where most weight is borne, and the Caryatides of the Pandrosium can afford to stand with one knee bent easily forward. Here, then, again was a great and new phase of the human mind envisaging the universe, expressed by simple reference to weight of material in its temples.

The third great phase—that in which an ascetic spirituality, refusing all willing alliance with earthliness, only recognises it as a thing to be defied and to be made the measure of the spirit’s predominance—obtained its artistic expression by employing material weight as the symbol of its opponent; which it neither suffers from nor enters into alliance with, but vanquishes, converts, and glorifies in ascending streams of life.

The Moresque style also owes its singular integrity of effect to a peculiar mode of regarding the idea of gravitation: if that can be called a mode of regarding it which consists in a most ingenious and fanciful ignoring of it, either as an oppressor, an ally, or a vanquished foe. The honeycombed domes of the Alhambra and the Mosque of Cordova hang apparently suspended in air upon “pendentives,” like sunny clouds in station; and the astonishing art by which innumerable details are made to concur in this effect would justify this style in ranking with the three foregoing, had this effect any symbolic meaning for the human race and its religions; but it has no meaning for men who have their feet upon the earth, and is only adapted for the palaces and temples of a race of sylphs or gnomes.

Lastly, the Norman style, though no less consistent an exponent of one idea than are the other temple styles, is founded upon no reference to superincumbent weight, but depends almost wholly upon its boast of the mass and eternal stability of the wall. It well conveys the solemn expression of a calm eternity of time; but for religious purposes it will not bear the least comparison with the flamelike Gothic, expressing at once the peace and ardour of the “eternal moment.”

In the following papers a short analysis will be given of the somewhat obscure means by which the well-recognised expressions of these five great architectures are obtained.

II

The symbolisation of material life and power by an elaborately artistic treatment of the mere fact of weight, which is the most universal and obvious attribute of matter, is the object of every general form and of almost every, so-called decorative, detail of Egyptian architecture; the few exceptions, such as the occasional intrusion of the lotus and palm into the capitals of the columns, being due to an obscure but probably intimately related symbolism of a different kind.

The pyramid is the simplest artistic form by which mere weight can be expressed. It is nothing more nor less than a mound or mountain shaped so as to give it an artistic consciousness. The form of the Egyptian Temple is nothing but the expression of this elementary form of weight with emphasis upon emphasis, until there results such an accumulation and concentration of the idea of weight that the whole building seems as if it would crush the earth on which it stands. This effect is mainly produced by a multiplication of the pyramidal form in the masses of the building; by its truncation at various heights, which introduces the powerful element of suggestion; by numerous inferior members which emphasise the expression by contrast; and by such a multiplication and formation of shaft and capital as to convey the idea of an overwhelming burthen above them. The great double-towered Propylon of the typical Egyptian Temple is, in its entire mass, a truncated pyramid; and, as simply such, is a much more forcible expression of pyramidal form than the pyramid itself. This expression is doubled by the division of the upper part of the mass into two low towers. Immense cavetto cornices crown these towers, and intensify their effect by the strongest contrast. Their pyramidal outline is emphasised to the eye by the great roll-mouldings which follow the angles of the masonry from summit to base. Finally, the plane of the great doorway by which the two masses of the Propylon are joined leaves that of the pyramidal mass and becomes nearly perpendicular, while the sides of the doorway become actually perpendicular—constituting a cumulative contrast which seems to double the already manifold emphasis of the main bulk of the building. The comparatively low mass of the body of the temple behind the Propylon is still the truncated pyramid crowned with the contrasting cornice; but the truncation occurs so near the ground, and so far from what would be the apex were the converging lines of wall continued upwards, that the pyramidal form would scarcely have been suggested, were it not for its plainer manifestation in the Propylon; but, with this aid, the eye at once catches the idea of the decapitated pyramid throughout. Through openings in these strongly inclined walls appeared the vertical colonnades; and such niches or apertures as were practised in these walls had the contrast of perpendicular jambs. In front of the vast ponderosity of the Egyptian Temple rose the final and most effective contrast to the whole—the “fingers of the sun”: the pair of tall and slender monoliths, which only tapered sufficiently to give them the reality and the appearance of security. In the interior of the building the idea of weight had to be conveyed in a different manner—namely, by the bulk, number, and form of the columns. Every detail of shaft and capital—with the two or three exceptions already spoken of—was calculated to express actual sufferance from the burthen borne by them. The shafts bulge towards the base, and the capitals likewise swell as they approach their juncture with the shafts; shaft and capital being usually clothed with vertical convex mouldings: the exact reverse of the Doric shaft, which, as will be shown, had exactly the opposite idea to convey. Unlike the repose and sufficiency of the Doric column, the Egyptian expresses violent and yet insufficient energy, which seems to rush towards and to be partially driven back by the entablature. The immense thickness of wall, wherever it was shown, was emphasised by sculpture in very low relief. These are only the main elements of an effect which, and the means of producing which, will be more forcibly felt by a corresponding analysis of Greek architecture, which culminates in the Doric of the Parthenon.

This temple has a double basement, the first of which is on a “dead level”; from this rises the second basement, in which the true life of the building commences. In 1837 Mr. Pennethorne announced the important discovery that the lines of this basement, together with those of the entablature, are not horizontal lines, but parabolic curves; and Mr. Penrose, in 1852, in a work published by the Society of Dilettanti, gave the actual measurements of these curves; which are found to prevail not only in the horizontal but in all the vertical lines and faces, in the inclined lines of the pediment, and in the axes of the shafts. These curves are so subtle—the rise being only an inch or two in as many hundred feet—that they are rather felt than seen; but that they are felt, even by the comparatively gross modern eye, is clear enough from the different way in which it is affected by the Parthenon itself and by any imitation of it by modern builders. It is probable that these curves were in some instances meant to correct optical illusions, by which straight lines would look hollow, etc.; but a far greater motive for their introduction was an effect of animation in the whole and in every part and of unity through the predominance of general curves, which a cultivated eye can discern very easily, but which is probably beyond our present powers of analysis. Above the basement the Doric Temple externally—and the Greek Temple’s architectural beauty is all outside—consists of two parts, of opposite and exactly balanced significance. The first consists of a colonnade of shafts, each of which rises at once from the stylobate, without the footing or “base” found in subsequent styles. The shaft diminishes somewhat rapidly, until it impinges upon and ends in the capital; which is an hyperbolic “ovolo,” spreading widely under the “abacus” or tile, which constitutes the neutral point, or point of rest, between the column and the entablature. The outlines of the shaft (always fluted in early Greek architecture) converge from the base towards the capital—not in straight lines, but in decided parabolic curves, of which the departure from straight lines is greatest at about two-thirds of the height of the shaft. This curve of the shaft is called the entasis; and upon it depends mainly the expressional life of the shaft. It will be remembered that there is a similar swelling in the Egyptian shaft; but this is where it approaches the base. Its position in the Greek shaft expresses an ascendant energy of force, which is manifested most strongly as it approaches the capital. In the one case yielding under weight is expressed, in the other superabundant power. This animated expression is multiplied by every multiplication of the outline provided by the flutings, which in the Greek shaft are concave, expressing concentration of force towards the centre; whereas, in the Egyptian the flutings are convex, expressing further a tendency to bulge and burst under their burthen. A little under the capital, and just where the Greek shaft is thinnest, one or more deep channels are incised in its substance, showing that power can be triumphantly cast away just where power is most needed. The Egyptian shaft, at the same point, is usually bound with a heavy thonglike moulding, as if to prevent it from being crushed. The ovolo, which constitutes the Doric capital, provides and expresses the distribution of the power of the shaft to meet the superincumbent entablature; and the “quirk” or sudden diminution of its breadth immediately under the abacus is a repetition of the device of the incised channels for proving the existence of superabundant power. At the point where the Greek entablature is met with easy grace by the noble spread of the hyperbolic ovolo, the Egyptian capital, as a rule, diminishes and seems to dash itself with violence towards the point of conflict.

As every feature of the column thus expresses cheerful and abundant energy, every detail of the entablature is a mode of expressing the weight which is thus met and carried with such graceful power. The Doric entablature is made up of three parts—architrave, frieze, and cornice—each expressing in a different manner the idea of weight. The architrave is a massive layer of stone with its face unbroken by any sort of “decoration”; it projects beyond the neck of the shaft, so that a line dropped from it would about touch the outer circumference of the shaft at its base. In this member, then, weight is expressed by a simple mass directly imposed upon the centres of support. The frieze is a similar layer of masonry having its face broken up by triglyphs—members resembling, and no doubt originating in, the terminations of beams of timber. These triglyphs are slightly projecting quadrilateral masses of stone, considerably higher than they are broad, and cut into deep vertical channels. They would express little besides the memory of the old timber construction, were it not for the guttÆ which hang below them, separated from them by a fillet. These guttÆ, by multiplying the vertical lines of the triglyphs, confer upon them the appearance of pendants, the force of the earthward tendency being increased by the fillets, whose momentary interruption of that tendency seems to increase it. To increase what Franz Kugler calls the “triglyphic character,” little pendants sometimes occur at the top of the chamfered sides of the triglyphs. No one can realise the whole force of this extremely simple means of expression except by trying what the Doric entablature would be without it. There is, or was, a church in the Waterloo Road, massively built and preserving pretty well all the features of the Doric Temple, except the triglyphs and guttÆ. Their omission makes the whole building light-headed. There seems to be no meaning in the vast current of upward force in the fluted shafts, if that is all they have to carry. Any one can satisfy himself of this point by simply covering the frieze, in a print of a Doric Temple, by a slip of white paper. Of course this all-important triglyphic character, though only expressed in the frieze, is felt to apply to the entire mass of the entablature, of which the weight is thus made visible.

As the architrave expresses simple weight, and the frieze weight depending, so the cornice is weight impending. The great projection of this massive member beyond the face of the frieze and architrave contains in itself the ground of that expression; but it is carefully heightened by the deep undercutting of the corona, which throws the mass forward and separates it by a dark shadow from the top of the frieze; and it is still further heightened by a repetition of the rows of guttÆ—which, however, in this instance seem to be sliding off the inclined faces of the mutules (inclined slabs set in the undercutting of the corona); so that the same device which gives dependent weight in the frieze, expresses weight impendent in the cornice.

These are only a few of the more obvious means by which the lovely equilibrium of the Doric style is created. There are many other details which it is impossible to notice here; but every one bears the central thought constantly in view, and adds to the most perfect—though not perhaps the highest—architectural beauty which the world has ever seen. The other so-called “orders” are only modifications or corruptions of the same idea.

III

Before proceeding to show how the idea of Greek architecture, symbolised in a system of construction and decoration which emphasised to the eye in every detail an exact adequacy of endeavour to effect, was modified or corrupted in the so-called “Ionic,” “Corinthian,” and other “orders,” a few words should be said about the very peculiar and little understood treatment of the wall by the Doric architects. As a contrast to the active conflict of apparently ascending power in the columns with the gravitating power, rendered, as it were, visible in the entablature, the treatment of the walls of the naos, pronaos, and posticum—that is, of the body of the temple and of the porches created by the prolongation of the side walls—is emphatically passive and neutral, and just the reverse of the treatment of the wall by the Egyptians, who made it the base of a truncated pyramid, a mass of conscious ponderosity, which “lean’d down on earth with all its weight.” The vertical junctures of the stones of the walls of the Greek Temple were rendered invisible by polishing their adjacent faces; but the horizontal faces were rough-worked, so that the wall-face presented a series of straight lines parallel to the base. These lines were only strong enough to be plainly seen, through the gaps in that torrent of ascending power, the fluted colonnade; increasing that force by their contrast, but themselves expressing nothing but the fact that the wall was a wall, built in ordinary courses of masonry. Had the perpendicular junctures of the masonry been visible, the contrast to the shafts—which were either monoliths or had the junctures of the frustra so polished that they looked like monoliths—would have been lost. The antÆ, or ends of the walls, are treated in a way which is particularly noteworthy. In the Roman corruptions of Greek architecture these antÆ were confused with and often treated as flattened and applied shafts. The fact of passive resistance of the wall, in contrast to the active resistance of the colonnade, is carefully but very unobtrusively expressed in these wall-terminations in the purest Doric. Where the strongly ascending force of the shaft sacrifices power in order to prove its abundance, the antÆ are increased in breadth and strength by successive cappings, or by mouldings so undercut as to express a rolling over or sufferance from superimposed weight; there is no entasis or visible swell in the antÆ—until they were used by later architects who had lost the sense of what entasis meant; these wall-terminations were further strengthened by a base, which no Doric shaft ever had. The base and capping were, more or less, continued along the top and bottom of the whole wall, the doors and other apertures of which usually diminished in width towards the top, suggesting—but still in a passive and unobtrusive way—the simple reality of weight and pressure in the wall, and affording a further and most important contrast to the living “emporstreben,” as the German critics call it, of the line of shafts. Thus Mr. Ruskin is wrong in saying that “in the Greek Temple the wall is as nothing; the entire interest is in the detached columns and the frieze (entablature?) they bear.” The wall is the expression of the passive life that becomes active when it is concentrated in the colonnade, and has so much more work to do.

In the “Ionic Order” exactly the same idea of the symbolisation of the balance of material and intellectual forces is carried out with the same integrity as in the Doric, though with less simplicity and obviousness. The idea of elasticity—as noticed by Franz Kugler in his Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte for the first time—is added to that of simple upward met by simple downward force. It occurs especially in the base and the volutes of the column, as these members are found modified and perfected by the Attic architects. By tracing the growth of the Attic base, much light will be thrown upon the Greek architectural idea. A base is a support for the shaft. The Doric had no base, because the notion of any weight to be supported was not allowed to be expressed anywhere but in the entablature; the Ionic differing from the Doric mainly in this—that the visible conflict between weight and supporting power, which in the Doric was wholly concentrated upon the abacus, or tile, where the column met the entablature, was in the Ionic so distributed that almost every member was at once agent and reagent, expressing an adequate power of supporting what was above it, but also requiring support from that which was below. A great square stone or plinth is the simplest form of base; but this would have looked poor and inorganic underneath the elaborately fluted and voluted column. The square stone cut into a circle with its edges rounded is the next simplest form; but it was left for the Romans to use this base, for they had not the sensitive eye that discerned the fatal effect of swelling or sufferance from weight which this cushion-like form conveys. The first Ionic base had a scotia, or hollow receding moulding, under the round torus. This contradicted the above impression; but it did it violently and awkwardly. Finally, the Attic base was formed of a large torus below, a smaller one above, and the scotia, or receding moulding, between them; so that the base—which, on the whole, was a spreading and supporting member—was nevertheless narrowest where it would have been thickest had it suffered, like a cushion, from the weight it carried. The fluting of the Ionic order, while it expressed ascendant force like the Doric, had a flat space or fillet instead of a sharp edge between each concavity, and each line of fluting had semicircular terminations. The effect of this was to endow the shaft itself with a substantive expression of weight, which had no existence in the Doric shaft, that flew, like a sheaf of arrows, from the earth to strike against the ovolo of the capital. The Ionic capital, like the Ionic base, had its elastic character perfectly developed by Attic architects. In the original Ionic the ears of the volutes simply hang on either side of the ovolo like horns; but in Attic specimens they appear to be formed by the pressure of the entablature upon a series of elastic curves. The Ionic abacus differs from the Doric in expressing, in common with all the other members of the Ionic column, an active supporting power; whereas the Doric tile is simply negative, the “point of rest” between the opposing forces of the column and entablature. The architrave, the first member of the Ionic entablature, instead of expressing weight by simple mass, as the Doric architrave does, consists of two or three layers of masonry, the upper projecting over the other, and giving to the entire entablature the expression of impending weight, which in the Doric is limited to the corona. In the frieze there are no guttÆ or triglyphs, because the pendent effect which these give to the Doric frieze would be inconsistent with the continuation of the idea of support as well as weight throughout all the members of the Ionic order. In the pure Doric there is absolutely no such thing as ornament; though Kugler, notwithstanding that he is of all critics the one who has come nearest to the perception of the true sense of Greek architecture, asserts that the head and foot members of the antÆ are merely ornamental. How far this is from being the case has been now shown. The so-called “egg and arrow” and other figures into which Greek mouldings were cut have nothing to do with ornament. They are simply the means of emphasising the forms of the mouldings and rendering them visible at distances at which otherwise they would not be distinguished. But in the Ionic we have real architectural ornament, and lines of roses or bands of foliage are inserted at points where it is desirable to express—in the absence of more severe means of expression—the freedom and cheerfulness with which a superincumbent weight is carried.

The “Corinthian” is only a highly decorated Ionic, and the Greeks of the good age seem to have thought it fittest for secular or semi-secular purposes. It only attained somewhat of the character of an “Order” in the hands of the Romans, who had little taste for or understanding of pure Greek art, but had sufficient intelligence to see how to apply ornament for the most part in the right places. When they tried to improve upon the Doric of the Parthenon, they did it in a very characteristic way. They simplified it by doing away with the fluting of the shaft and setting it upon a base of the single torus or roll-moulding, so that it looked like a big sausage set on end upon a small curly one; and instead of the channel cut in the neck of the shaft—which must have been a hopeless puzzle to them—they bound the shaft at the same point with a projecting moulding: as the Egyptians did rightly, because they wanted to express an idea the exact opposite of the Greek one. Meretricious ornament and mock simplicity went hand in hand, and all pretensions to integrity of style had to be abandoned when the arch and the entablature had to be reconciled. As builders the Romans perhaps surpassed all others before or since; and as architects also they were as great as they could be, in the absence of the Greek devotion to the unity produced by one all-pervading symbolic thought.

IV

The pointed Gothic, though it took its rise more than fifteen hundred years after the decay of Attic architecture, and after the intervention of several other styles, of which the “Norman” constitutes one of the five great and only pure styles which the world has seen, is nevertheless in closer artistic relationship with the Attic style than the Norman is, and should be therefore treated earliest. The immense effort which was made to develop a great style from the dome—the natural outcome of the circular arch introduced by the Romans—never came to anything but the production of here and there an edifice which, like the Pantheon and St. Sophia, were miracles of technical skill, until the idea was taken up by the fanciful Moresque architects. Again, the Norman, though a great integral style, as will be shown, is not based upon any relation to weight of material; which is at once the great fact of building, and as such is made by the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects to express the material, intellectual, and spiritual character of worship in ways that exhaust this primary source of architectural symbolism.

Weight—simple and irresistible in the Egyptian, adequately supported in the Greek—is, in the pointed Gothic, not abolished as in the Moresque, but totally vanquished and borne above, as by a superior spiritual power. Two happy accidents gave rise to this architectural development. As the Egyptian architecture was an artistic transfiguration of the necessities of an original cavern architecture, and as the Doric Temple in a similar way transmuted to undreamt-of significance the forms of the timber hut, so the Gothic architecture found in the Basilica—the main forms of which were transmitted through the Norman cathedral—the accidental key to what probably will for ever remain the supreme glory of the art of temple-building. The Basilica itself contained nothing but the discovery of the most convenient way of roofing-in and lighting a great oblong hall. It consisted of nave and aisles; the walls of the nave rising within and above those of the aisles, to form the clerestory, which gave the centre of the edifice externally the appearance of unsheathing itself from and soaring above the rest. The means of emphasising and multiplying this effect indefinitely—as the pyramidal effect was multiplied and emphasised in the Egyptian Temple—were provided by another fortunate accident, the development of the pointed arch from the mechanical necessities of cross-vaulting. No sooner did a row of pointed arches make its appearance in the clerestory windows than the power of Gothic expression, latent in the main body of the building, became obvious. The tower, with its spire, was the first and simplest sequence. It was to the clerestory what this was to the main body of the building. In the course of a few years every detail of construction and decoration became subordinated to the heavenward flight which the main masses of the building had thus taken.

This fact is a threadbare commonplace of architectural criticism, and one which is obvious to the eye of the dullest beholder of the interior or exterior of every Gothic cathedral; but the number and subtlety of the means by which the effect is gained is beyond all reckoning and analysis; and the object of this paper is to point out only a few of them which are not to be found in architectural manuals, and to show how this all-prevailing stream of ardent aspiration was moderated and governed so as to acquire the expression of peace as well as ardour, as befitted the beauty of the Christian temple. Mr. Freeman comes nearer than any other eminent architectural critic to a clear discernment of Gothic character when he says: “Where there is no strife there is no victory; the vertical line cannot be called predominant unless the horizontal exist in a visible condition of subjection and inferiority.” But the vertical line exists in Gothic architecture as much more than a foil to vertical character; it checks and keeps it within bounds, and exhibits it as an expression of the infinite bounded and peacefully bounded by the finite—which is the true character of the life and worship symbolised. Hence the square-headed tower is as fine, if not a finer finish to the Gothic cathedral than the spire. Compare the tower of York with the spire of Freyburg in Breisgau—the finest spire in the world, rising as it does as a spire from the ground—and it will be found that the cessation of the great, steady heavenward current in York, gradually prepared for as it is by the treatment of the face of the tower, and culminating in the compromise of open battlements, each of which frames the pointed arch, creates a more solemn and heart-expanding sense of infinite aspiration than the apparently greater flight of endeavour in the famous spire, which soars indeed twice the height of the tower, but, as it were, evaporates as it soars. The minds of the Gothic architects seem to have been much divided as to which was better: the checked and contained expression of the tower, in which an undiminished force of ascension was suggested, or the exhausting flight of the spire. The tower of Salisbury, for example, was not originally intended to carry the spire, which was added long after the cathedral was completed. They often obtained both features, giving a spire to only one of the west-end towers. There is, perhaps, no more satisfactory treatment of the west front than this, as may be seen in Strasburg Cathedral. Like many other fine effects, this most probably arose from accident—the accident of its not being convenient at the time to add the second spire; but that the incompleteness was fully recognised as a perfection is proved by the many instances of its having been, if not devised, allowed to remain.

There are three ways of treating the spire. It may commence at the earth, as that of Freyburg does, without the intervention of a tower; or it may rise from a tower the head of which is considerably larger than the base of the spire; or the base of the spire may coincide with the top of the tower, in which case it is called a “broach spire.” The second is the finest and by far the most frequent arrangement, as it combines the effects of spire and tower without confusing them; a part of the force of the tower being contained and checked, and a part being allowed to take its self-exhausting flight. It is to be observed, however, that even when the spire is most prominent—as in Lichfield, where there are three of them—it is, when compared with the whole building, only as it were an accidental escape and waste of the vast current of vertical force expressed by the entire mass of the building. Perhaps the most expressive treatment of the tower is in the innumerable examples in which only a very small proportion of its vertical force is permitted to escape in four or more pinnacles, one of which is often larger than the others. Spires and pinnacles are in most cases covered with lines of “crockets”: figures in which ascending power is usually expressed by the upward growth of a leaf; which is emphasised by some check, made apparent to the eye by a strong bulge, like that of a current flowing over a stone. Wherever the idea of weight or side-thrust would occur naturally to the eye—as in buttresses, lower angles of gables, etc.—there is an especial outburst of flaming finial or pinnacle, or other mode of contradicting and reversing the idea, which the Greek architect would have been contented with accepting and beautifying.

Let us now enter the church, which is, within as well as without, a great geyser of ascending life; which may indeed lose itself in the dimness of the vaulted roof, as the spire loses itself in air, but never shows weariness of its flight or a memory of the earth from which it started. As in Egyptian and Greek architecture, so in the Gothic, we must look to the column for the strongest expression of the characterising idea. The Egyptian column suffered and seemed half-crushed under the weight it bore; the Greek rose to its burthen with the glad assurance of being fully adequate to its task. The Gothic is conscious of no task at all; but flies, without the least diminution of its substance, and without swelling either under sufferance or gathering of strength by entasis at any particular point, to the commencement of the arch; where it divides itself, sending up the streams of its clustered shafts, some into the lines of the arch and others to the top of the clerestory wall; then dividing again to follow the lines of the vaulting, there to meet like fingers joined in prayer, but still having no thought of the weight of the roof they really help to carry.

Mr. Ruskin complains of Gothic capitals—as he might also have done of Gothic bases—that they are unnecessary and ridiculous because they have no bearing power. If they had, they would cease to be Gothic, and the whole character of the wonderful art would be ruined. Capitals are sometimes entirely omitted, as in the shafted piers of Cologne; but when this is the case the point at which the arch springs becomes doubtful to the eye, and there is something exhausting in the wholly uninterrupted flight of the vertical lines. The capitals, like the horizontal astragal which often binds at intervals the clustered column, have no other purpose but to correct these effects of unrelieved continuity; and the mouldings of capitals, when they exist, not only have no and express no “bearing-power,” but they very carefully express the contrary by various devices of undercutting, etc. It is the same with the base, when it is not altogether dispensed with. The most common form of Gothic base is a curious caricature of the Attic base, the form of which had been transmitted unimpaired to the Gothic architect through the Romanesque and Norman. It was perched upon and overhung a stilted plinth, which was itself a reversal of the expression of elementary support in the original flat plinth; and the curves of this base were so diminished in one part and exaggerated in another that all reference to supporting power seemed to be derisively abolished. The “ogee” is a moulding which strongly expresses carrying power. A favourite Gothic base was two reversed ogees, the lower projecting far over the edge of the plinth, which, in classic architecture, always afforded a wide-spreading field for the base. And so on.

It would take a bulky volume to trace the wonderful integrity with which the three modes of envisaging the idea of weight are carried out in the three great architectures; but enough has been said to give the clue by which a fairly cultivated and perceptive student may follow up the subject for himself.

V

Before proceeding to consider the Norman and Moresque styles, a word should be said about that portion of Gothic decoration which does not directly help the main effect of aspiration—namely, cusped and foliated tracery, diaper-work, the foliage of spandrels, etc. etc. Kugler says: “This filling-in appears as a peculiar sort of architecture of independent signification.” He does not, however, give the interpretation which he sees to be required. Yet there is an interpretation which only needs to be put in words to be obvious to every eye which has made itself familiar with these objects. In exact proportion to the recognised perfection of these details, as it was attained in the middle or “decorated” period of pointed architecture, they become expressions of an idea almost identical with that which has been traced in the mode by which contented suspension or delay of the infinitely aspiring character in the main lines of the building is conveyed. As the inexhaustible torrent of upward life is checked peacefully, but with no denial of infinite potential aspiration, in the square-headed tower, so the same reconciliation of life with law without the least detriment to either—that reconciliation which is the consummation of Christianity—is expressed even more completely in the more essentially decorative details of pointed architecture. It is in the treatment of foliage that this character can be most easily traced, and this can be done best by comparing it with other modes of treatment. By the Greek architect this and other natural objects, when wanted for ornament, were what is called “conventionalised”; honeysuckles, roses, and waves of the sea were represented by certain formal figures which suited the lines of the architecture, and were not too much like nature to attract attention from those all-important lines to themselves. In the Italian Gothic, again, such natural objects are represented as nearly as possible like nature, but with such slight modifications and arrangements as were necessary to give them the consciousness of art. This is the sort of imitation which Mr. Ruskin recommends, and into which the northern Gothic fell in the decay of the art. But in fourteenth-century Gothic—that is to say, in the Gothic which was as much superior to that of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries as the art of Athens was superior to that of PÆstum or Rome—nature was neither imitated nor conventionalised. The special aim of the fourteenth-century ornamentation is to show a vigorous life playing with perfect freedom in severely geometrical forms—with freedom so perfect that it is difficult to say whether the life shapes the law or the law the life. This highly and essentially symbolic character is the most marked expression of Gothic tracery. In its decay it took the form of licence and weakness in the French “flamboyant,” and of hardness and rigidity in the English “perpendicular”; the life prevailing—to its own destruction—in the one, the lifeless law preponderating in the other. Gothic foliage, again, always feels the law; though, so far from suffering thereby, it is, in its place, far more beautiful than nature. The leafage not only follows geometrical outlines, but swells under its limitation into rich protuberances. The yearning for and potentiality of infinite ascension, peacefully accepting its temporal limitations, and the freedom of life perfected by law, are the artistic motives of every detail as well as of the main masses of pure Gothic.

The Romano-Byzantine style attained in its final development, the “Norman,” to the unity of idea which is the criterion of a true style. The arch up to this time had been treated partly as a thing of beauty in itself and partly as the constructive theme; in the Norman it took its place, expressionally, as subordinate to the wall, the mass of which it carries and distributes between the piers. The wall itself is the artistic theme of Norman architecture, and all decorative and some constructional features are devoted to making a boast of its mass and thickness. Weight—the theme in the three highly contrasted modes of the Egyptian, Greek, and Pointed architectures—plays no part in the Norman expression. The arch, being recognised by the eye for what it is, an infinitely powerful supporter, can express no proportion to finite superincumbent weight; and it is treated as a mere head to the gap in the wall between nave and aisle. The expressional intention of the Norman architects in this matter is curiously and decisively proved by the fact that their favourite arch-mouldings were the billet and chevron—i.e. lines of notches and angles which completely broke up all idea of arch-character as referable to supporting power or to weight distributed on to the piers, and transferred the interest of the eye to the material substance of the wall out of which these figures were cut. The piers between these arches were huge masses of wall, either quadrangular or turned into great cylinders, without entasis or any other sign of having to bear anything; and such decoration as they had was devised so as to deny emphatically any reference to superimposed burthen. The figure of the weight-carrying shaft set in the angles of these piers was their principal decoration; but they were Lilliputian mockeries of the Attic shaft, or were twisted singly or doubly, and in various other ways ridiculed, as it were, the idea that shaft-power was demanded in the huge masses of masonry to which they were attached. The only thing that these little shafts—whether in notch of pier or in recess of porch, blind arcade, or window—ever carried or appeared to carry was a single line of the often innumerable mouldings, the purpose of which was simply to display the immense thickness of the wall, which was the true and only theme of this style. This system of emphasising the wall by negativing the shaft-power was occasionally carried into the almost grotesque excess of representing the shaft as broken in the middle! The favourite treatment of the Norman wall was to boast of its thickness exactly as the Doric shaft boasted of its supporting power—that is, by throwing away some portion of it. The face of the wall was recessed in panels, which were often filled with blind arcades. Modern builders often recess walls in this way in order to save material, leaving the wall thickest where it has most work to do; but the Norman and Lombard architects had no such economy in view. The windows and other apertures in the wall showed, by their shafted and moulded chamfers, the reality of thickness so great that the panelling and blank arcading was seen to be no sacrifice, though it was a delicate and effective suggestion of one. This arcaded panelling is not only on one plane of the wall-surface. The recessed plane is again recessed in the same way, and yet again, arcade within arcade; and finally, in the higher portions of the wall, open galleries are worked in its thickness. In apertures the constructive rule which requires that the bevel or chamfer should slant inwards, to give the better light, is sacrificed to the opportunity of showing the mass of the wall; and the chamfer is external, and is so treated in its decoration as to increase in every possible way the appearance of thickness. The treatment of the doorway, which is the point from which the expressional idea may be best enforced upon every beholder, is very peculiar. When there is no advanced porch, a deep arch is practised through a great part of the wall, and the thickness is emphasised by an elaborate perspective of shafts and mouldings. Within this deeply recessed arch the actual doorway is often worked as a horizontal-headed aperture in a plane face of wall without chamfer; the remaining thickness of the wall, not shown by the recessed arch, being thus left to be measured by the imagination, which has already been excited by the display of thickness within thickness of decorated archway. The Norman architects, in order still further to increase this effect, had sometimes recourse to a device that can scarcely be justified by strict architectural principles, which should never falsify construction in order to heighten expression. A face of wall was advanced in front of the main wall of the building, in order to obtain a much greater depth of masonry for showing off the multitudinously moulded entrance-arch. This projection did not form a real advanced porch, having its proper ecclesiastical purposes, but was nothing but a boast and display of mass in the masonry which really had no existence, the advanced face of wall concealing the fact that there was only mass enough behind it to allow of this misleading display. It may be said that the Gothic spire is constructed simply for display. It is quite true; but it is avowedly so constructed, and there was no concealment about it.

Mr. Ruskin, by the way, strangely affirms that “the direct symbolisation of a sentiment is a weak motive with all men”; inferring thence that there was no intention of aspiration in the Pointed architecture which he cares so little for. But surely the reverse is the case; and such symbolisation, in one way or other, constitutes a great part of the life of all men. The Gothic spire, which was the most costly as well as the most useless feature of the Gothic cathedral, is a final answer to such doctrine, which strikes indeed at the life of all artistic work. If it did not “symbolise a sentiment,” what was done by it?

The round arch, which was the accident of the Norman architecture, being treated therein as a mere cavernous gap in masses of, in themselves, all-sufficient masonry, was, as it has been already said, adopted by the Byzantine architects as the principal theme of their art; but this arch could be made nothing of, as the main source of expression, until it developed the dome; and the dome, as it proved, could not be made much of, until the Moresque builders took it in hand. It had the fatal defect, when on a large scale, of lateral thrust, which could only be met by a construction which had the double defect of positive and negative falsehood. The domes of St. Sophia and St. Vitale, which the eye naturally presumes to be of one mass or substance with the substructure, are really formed, for lightness, of Rhodian bricks, pumice-stone, and coils of empty jars; and yet the lateral thrust is so great that it has to be opposed by a vast buttress-system, which is carefully concealed, because it would contradict, if exposed, the inevitable effect of extreme lightness in the dome. The Renaissance architects found themselves equally at a loss, as we know, in dealing with this feature. Both in St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s there is not one but two entirely separate domes. And when all is done the Byzantine and Renaissance domes are nothing to the eye but hollow shells, with no special artistic expression.

The Moresque architects hit upon the astonishing fancy of giving the dome substance, and thereby reconciling it with the constructive masses which supported and abutted upon it, and at the same time annihilating the idea of weight. This last idea already lurked in the Byzantine domes of St. Sophia, which seem to be carried wholly by “pendentives,” and not at all by the piers to which these are attached. But it only lurked therein; for the eye necessarily inferred the immense lateral weight which piers and walls received. Now the honeycombed domes of the Moresque architecture are multiplied masses of pendentive forms hanging actually in air, and making it impossible for the eye to entertain any idea of lateral thrust in the whole or any part; and every detail of column, wall, and arch corroborates this fanciful negation of weight so perfectly that, for unity of effect, the Attic architecture remains the only rival of the Moresque, though there is this infinite difference between them: that, whereas the first appeals to the imagination and symbolises the Greek ideal of mental and moral equilibrium in forms of true construction, the latter only excites the fancy by a fairy tale. The whole carrying and resisting power of the arch is flung away by conferring upon it outlines which have no such power (the real carrying arch being hidden in the wall far outside the visible arch): the arches in colonnades, etc., seldom rest on, but simply abut against, the columns, which usually carry broad perpendicular beams, these being crossed above the arch-head by similar horizontal beams; so that there is only a small rectangular space of wall over each arch, and the idea of the weight of this being carried by the arch is contradicted by a network of bars carrying the lines of the wall into the upright beams. When a single arch is set in a wall, it is similarly framed in fretwork, the lines of which carry the eye off the arch without being pronounced enough to convey the idea that the force of the wall is thus conducted laterally to some support outside the arch.

It is impossible, in the space which can here be given to the matter, to notice one in a score of the details which combine to produce the effect with which every one is familiar. The purpose of these papers will have been answered if the vivifying thought of each of the five architectures which alone are integral styles, and not mixtures of styles, has been stated clearly, and such hints of the means by which such thought is conveyed have been given as will enable those who care to go further into the subject to do the rest of the analysis by themselves.