feet high and almost exactly equal to the total length.
As there is no architectural style peculiar to the nineteenth century in any of the lands occupied by Europeans, it is inevitable that the greater number of modern buildings should be more or less completely suggested by the fine art of the time when there was a style of interest and of individual character. Very few are the nineteenth century buildings which are absolutely without such suggestion. At the same time there are a certain number in which only a general study of ancient art is visible, and it is of these that our tenth chapter treats.
CHAPTER X
NINETEENTH CENTURY: ORIGINAL DESIGN
THE work of Henry Hobson Richardson may be named as a noticeably intelligent attempt to regain the lost excellence of an ancient style without copying it closely. This appreciation has to do only with his buildings of the years from 1875 to a short time before his early death in 1886. He studied deliberately the Romanesque architecture of the middle and south of France, and as the elaborate sculpture of human subject, so common in the churches of that style, would not have been practicable in America in the nineteenth century, he developed, with the assistance of certain American sculptors, a semi-Byzantine system of foliated design which adapted itself well to his arched porticoes and his elaborate interior compositions of woodwork. Other lands than France were visited and their treasures put to use: thus, the central tower and the general grouping of the masses in his celebrated design, Trinity Church in Boston, Massachusetts (see Plate LVIII), are evidently studied from a Spanish original. This is well shown in the illustration named, which shows the church as Richardson left it. The tower on the extreme left has been replaced by the accessories of the new west porch.
Now in such a design as this we have to separate that which is frankly copied and that which is of independent design. Thus, the inlay of different colored stones, so marked in the apse, and in a simpler way in the transept, on the left of the picture, is taken directly from churches of Auvergne. The question, then, would be whether, the idea of a mosaic on a large scale being once adopted, the design furnished is a good one for the place. Such designs are almost common property: they float around the world and every designer has his mind stored with them: the question is not of originality in combining a star with some zigzags, but rather of providing a pattern of just the right size and character to fill the given spot, as well as to have an independent beauty of its own. The great central tower, studied probably from the cathedral of Salamanca in Spain, is evidently open to question as to whether it is sufficiently massive in appearance. There is to many persons an appearance as if the stone work were composed of too many and too slight colonnettes, lintels, arches, and the rest, involving the use of a great number of small stones, laid up not in a massive wall but in a slighter and more exposed fashion, not a skeleton, but suggesting the idea of something very open to the weather. The Spanish originals have somewhat the same effect but it is less marked in the old buildings and with them it is not combined with that mosaic of different colored stones which, although the practiced builder knows it to be superficial merely, yet gives to most spectators a feeling as if the wall were not solidly laid up. The building is certainly faulty in lacking the appearance of ponderosity. Seen through a haze or by dim light it is a noble composition, the forms exquisitely balanced, the central tower perfectly well marking its place and its structure. It is not until the building is seen in a brilliant light and its detailed effect begins to tell upon its general masses that any exception can be taken to its merit as a general central tower. That the lack of solidity in appearance may be the more clearly understood, it is well to compare with the church itself the porch which was built long after Richardson’s death, though avowedly according to his general design. This porch, though a small structure, has a massiveness in all its parts, which the church has been said to lack. The sculpture is also especially noteworthy as being full of that mediæval feeling which forced even the carefully modelled human figure, with elaborate drapery, into the service of the architectural design; while still the modelling has that anatomical truth which modern school-taught generations require.
The conclusion is, with regard to this church, that we are free to judge of it as an independent design once we have cleared away some few doubts of archæological accuracy: once it is established that the designer has felt at liberty to take a general form of his central tower from impressions received in Spain, while many of the details are taken almost bodily from the heart of France, the rest is to be accepted, as also the adaptation and working-in of the borrowed details, as a design well adapted to the requirements of the building, to its place in an open and uncrowded site where the building stands free on every side, and to its material, a sandstone, not very fine nor very hard. It is one of the best designs in the picturesque fashion which modern times have seen.
A similar piece of bold adaptation to an ancient style is seen in Truro Cathedral (Plate LIX) in Cornwall, begun about 1880. No person who has lived among English cathedrals could ever mistake this building for a design of the Middle Ages; and yet
