All of these imitations are as careful as possible. If in any detail the style imitated has been abandoned, even for a moment, it has been with a feeling of “needs must”; no pains have been spared to keep close to the ancient spirit. The interior is what is fine in the basilica of St. Boniface and it is a favorable way of regarding this epoch of copying to take this building as our example, because the construction and the system of design are so very simple, so easy to grasp and to imitate, that nothing more than a delicate care for details and the power of reproducing them is needed. The mosaics and the paintings of the interior are indeed not equal to those of a great Roman basilica, either in its original state or as it has come down to us; the painters and designers of the time were not competent to reproduce those; a critical judge would say that the carving of the marble capitals lacked something of initiative—something of energy; the general effect of color of the interior, though far from unpleasing, though even agreeable to the visitor, may be thought much less noble than that of a fine Italian church. And yet this is one of the most attractive interiors in Europe, and one may visit it many times during a season and like it better all the time. It is to be heartily enjoyed, and yet when there is a question of its artistic merit as a design, the favorable comment is much less unreserved. For what have we to admire? Only sympathy in observing, and fidelity in reproducing, monuments of the past. Do we feel as we speak the word “only” that such sympathy and such fidelity are so rare that they deserve very hearty recognition? That may be, and yet the praise given to the architectural effort may be not great. It is not by sympathy and fidelity alone that great designs are made.
Let it be admitted that if the architects of all Europe had been so delighted by this, or by some similar undertaking, as to begin to work, altogether, in the Latin style—to build all their churches in that style and to study the problem of designing civic buildings, and dwellings also, to correspond—a new style and a worthy one might have originated. Let that be admitted: the failure of the nineteenth century has been in the absence of any such unanimity. No great body of architects has ever agreed on what was to be done. There has always been a competing school, a rival school, sometimes several of them, armed with reasoning and enthusiasm as strong as that of the school in question and prepared to beat down its feeble growth.
Or let us take the Glyptothek, a composition as completely Greek as the feeling and the perception of the day enabled the architect to make it; are we to take the shafts without flutings, which seem to be called for, as so many violations of Greek verity? In all Grecian art, moreover, there are no round-headed niches, that is to say, niches covered by semi-domes, because there are no arches therein. There are no frontispieces made up of an entablature, a pediment and two pilasters, used for mere ornament and surrounding a round-topped opening. There are no entablatures constructed with flat arches which replace, or, as in this case, relieve a flat lintel composing the epistyle. None of those things are Greek: and yet it is clear that Klenze meant to be as Greek as Ictinos. Let us compare with that front the façade which immediately confronts it from the south side of the broad Königsplatz, the Exhibition building, finished about 1840. (See Plate LVI.) Here is a building which is more purely classic than the Glyptothek in almost every respect, Roman rather than Greek in its proportions, in the free use of the Corinthian column, very elaborately worked, in the free use of pilasters with sculptured capitals, in the employment of carved modillions: and yet it is more truly Greek in its mouldings, which are studied with extreme care, and in the absence from it of such violations of archæological accuracy as those already mentioned with regard to the Glyptothek. It would be thought by many to be a finer design, attracting less attention merely because not the home of a very important collection of classical sculpture, and a mere shelter for temporary exhibitions of modern art.
The Propylæa (see Plate LVI), also at Munich, is the most nearly Greek of all, for even its use of details not known to us in ancient work, is very careful and marked by perfect feeling for the style. It is, however, only a gateway of honor: and in that capacity it has been easy to treat. The designer, Klenze, deserves credit for not having copied some one of the ancient gateways more closely, so as to avoid responsibility.
It is impossible to escape from this method of criticism. You cannot judge of these nineteenth century buildings without asking whether they are or are not faithful copies of some structure of the sixth century, A. D., or the fifth century B. C., or of whatever epoch of the past. Those who deprecate the unfavorable character of the general criticism which is based upon regret for this ceaseless copying, tell us constantly that the artists of the great times copied also, that they were always studying the buildings already erected and trying to improve upon them. That is true; but the buildings they copied, with alterations, with improvements, with enlargements, with refinements, with natural striving for growth, were the buildings of their own time, called forth by the same necessity which controlled them, fitted for the same community, based upon the same well understood method of construction. The familiar comparison and lesson drawn from the modern art of the shipbuilder (for instance) illustrates this. The skilled shipbuilder whittles out his model with an eye on the past and on the present, and he proposes to modify the lines of his own latest partial success or of his rival’s endeavor in such a way as to give his new hull more speed, more carrying capacity, more stiffness—whatever may be his immediate object. He never goes back to the ships of the time of Queen Elizabeth with a deliberate intention of building an Elizabethan hull and sparring it and rigging it in an Elizabethan way. No matter now about the causes of this difference; the fact remains, and we are face to face with this curious condition of things, that whereas every important change in building, in the past, has been accompanied by a change in the methods of design, so that even in the times of avowed revival there was seen no attempt to stick to the old way of designing while the new method of construction was adopted; now in the nineteenth century and in what we have seen of the twentieth century our great new systems of building have flourished and developed themselves without effect as yet upon our methods of design. We still put a simulacrum of a stone wall with stone window casings and pediments and cornices and great springing arches outside of a structure of thin, light, scientifically combined, carefully calculated metal—the appearance of a solid tower supported by a reality of slender props and bars.
The mediæval styles, that is to say, Romanesque in all its forms and Gothic of all epochs, have been copied in the nineteenth century with an accuracy even greater than that used for the classical and neo-classic styles. In all such reproductions the standard of criticism must be the same. Plate LVII shows the great church at Doncaster in Yorkshire, a building erected with singular care and forethought and at great expense, with the deliberate purpose of imitating what is often called the “decorated” style of English Gothic. The architect, and his principal adviser, a gentlemen who had given much thought and pains to the study of English Gothic, agreed that the perpendicular style, of the years from 1350 on, had been allowed too great an influence in the Gothic revival of the time (about 1860) and chose the work of the first half of the fourteenth century as their prototype. To this style they were faithful. It is nearly true to say that an imitation so close as to be deceptive would have been the greatest success, in the opinion of the designer and his employers. The main exception to this statement—the main difference avowedly preserved between the modern and an accurate transfer or cast of an ancient building is to be found in the sculpture of the capitals in which a modern realistic study of natural plant forms is evident; and in like manner the design of the font in the near foreground which is not like any old English font, but is an abstract design showing much study of old English metal work, silver altar vessels and the like. Plate LVII also shows the exterior of this interesting building which is very large for an English parish church, the tower being one hundred and seventy
