Structures designed for display.
An architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may have recourse to a subsidiary construction. The façade, or a part of it, or the interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to elaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or even conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite another material. What we admire is not so much a façade as a triumphal gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world, wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home. This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public, to whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moral sense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monuments occupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside were actually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in each independently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautiful façades, even if independent of their building, are buildings themselves, and since their construction is decorative there is the greater likelihood that their decoration should be structural.
In relation to the house, however, the façade in such an extreme case would be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structural within its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building where construction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament has an indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning about it. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose the fallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything is true decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enriches the impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorative impulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makes meaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual origin of ornament) I make a design out of somebody’s initials, or symbolise fantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thing upon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once.
Appeal made by decoration.
To love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to have hungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when it cannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion of things simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligent people as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawed at seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm the senses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takes cultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate value of what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function and ultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and silently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all ultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What astonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand suggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely glutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to the inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian craves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels replete and comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without ideal mediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it is the condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally exist together, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent and eventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety in foretaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volume and variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At that earlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty.
Its natural rights.
That the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to be completely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experience which further justifies the above analysis. For sensation is the matter of ideas; all representation is such only in its function; in its existence it remains mere feeling. Decoration, by stimulating the senses, not only brings a primary satisfaction with it, independent of any that may supervene, but it furnishes an element of effect which no higher beauty can ever render unwelcome or inappropriate, since any higher beauty, in moving the mind, must give it a certain sensuous and emotional colouring. Decoration is accordingly an independent art, to be practised for its own sake, in obedience to elementary plastic instincts. It is fundamental in design, for everything structural or significant produces in the first instance some sensuous impression and figures as a spot or pattern in the field of vision. The fortunate architect is he who has, for structural skeleton in his work, a form in itself decorative and beautiful, who can carry it out in a beautiful material, and who finally is suffered to add so much decoration as the eye may take in with pleasure, without losing the expression and lucidity of the whole.
It is impossible, however, to imagine beforehand what these elements should be or how to combine them. The problem must exist before its solution can be found. The forms of good taste and beauty which a man can think of or esteem are limited by the scope of his previous experience. It would be impossible to foresee or desire a beauty which had not somehow grown up of itself and been recognised receptively. A satisfaction cannot be conceived ideally when neither its organ nor its occasion has as yet arisen. That ideal conception, to exist, would have to bring both into play. The fine arts are butter to man’s daily bread; there is no conceiving or creating them except as they spring out of social exigencies. Their types are imposed by utility: their ornamentation betrays the tradition that happens to envelop and diversify them; their expression and dignity are borrowed from the company they keep in the world.
Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.
The Greek temple, for instance, if we imagine it in its glory, with all its colour and furniture, was a type of human art at its best, where decoration, without in the least restricting itself, took naturally an exquisitely subordinate and pervasive form: each detail had its own splendour and refinement, yet kept its place in the whole. Structure and decoration were alike traditional and imposed by ulterior practical or religious purposes; yet, by good fortune and by grace of that rationality which unified Greek life, they fell together easily into a harmony such as imagination could never have devised had it been invited to decree pleasure-domes for non-existent beings. Had the Greek gods been hideous, their images and fable could not so readily have beautified the place where they were honoured; and had the structural theme and uses of the temple been more complicated, they would not have lent themselves so well to decoration without being submerged beneath it.