its character as a Gothic structure is perfectly maintained. It is to be judged, then, as an ancient Gothic building is to be judged. One asks whether the system of vaulting with ribs, and a filling or shell of light stone work between the ribs, is supported and resisted in the best and most economical way by the system of buttressing, and whether this system of buttressing without, and the system of vaulting within, are equally expressed in the artistic design. The fact that the modern building cannot be allowed the cost of much architectural sculpture in its exterior, though unfortunate, cannot be urged as a serious defect, in view of the fact that the English mediæval churches have but little sculpture as compared with those of the Continent, their adornment being concentrated more generally upon the West front, or parts of the interior.
If now we try to call to mind some building inspired, on the whole, by classical taste and the classical spirit of design, but showing also independence and a strictly modern conception, we shall find that the search is not a rewarding one. There are few modern buildings in which the classic orders are used at all, or in which classic details have been carefully studied, without what seems to be a strict adherence to recognized types of classic or neo-classic general design. The Greek who was building oblong temples, very strictly limited to a given number of columns and a given slope of roof, might still group small shrines as they are grouped in the Erectheum; and he, the Greek designer, generally careful of his Orders, may substitute for his columns a row of draped statues with perfect success. The designers of imperial Rome, dealing with dwelling houses, all on one floor, with columned courtyards and covered porticoes surrounding gardens open to the sky, were still capable of building on the side of a cliff and in the Imperial City, too, and producing a house three stories high on one side and one story on the other—handling their semi-Greek and semi-Italian details with perfect ease and nearly perfect grace, and investing the whole with a consistent scheme of ornament. The modern designer in the classical styles will not do that very often. In the first place, he will have studied only the grandiose buildings of antiquity, the great temples and porticoes with their minutely accurate symmetry of plan: and in the second place, he will have conceived of the modern use of classic forms as being, on the whole, a simple thing, easy to the naturally gifted designer. The one thing which the modern workman in classic styles expects to get from his building is refinement of proportion, reaching on the one side towards dignity and on the other side towards grace. Now, to one who is naturally strong in such things, the obtaining of these beauties of proportion is an easy thing: it is achieved or it is not achieved in the course of a very few hours of preparation and study of the problem. It is hardly conceivable that a modern adept in the classical system of design should think much of detail except as to the accurate copying of sculpture and of the curvature of mouldings from ancient examples.
In mediæval styles, we moderns study the small town house, the humble parish church, with its squat tower and plain windows without tracery, as well as the great cathedral, typical of the style and embodying its full character. Of classical antiquity there were no such things to study, during the years when the modern feeling for classical art took shape; nor have there been until the present day many opportunities for judging of the smaller and simpler designs. And therefore we take from classical art mainly its colonnades, its stately use of the three great Orders of Greco-Roman antiquity, with a very few of their slighter modifications. Those buildings of the great days of the empire in which no columnar adornment existed, we have hardly learned to respect—we still look upon them as exceptions hardly worthy of the attention of one who would study the great arts of antiquity. Now it appears to one who will study the past closely and fearlessly, that the Romans themselves were a little overawed by their system of columnar architecture, and were slow to abandon or even modify it during the long centuries of its constant application to the diverse needs of the old Mediterranean world. Still more are we moderns overawed by the columns and entablatures, so that we dare not play with them: and yet, how can you hope to design if you are afraid to play with the members of your composition? The taste of the American communities, our great cities within the borders of the United States, is markedly for that kind of gravity which we associate with the classical styles—with the few large openings, the horizontal cornices, the low-pitched or invisible roofs, the smooth white, or light colored, surfaces of unbroken simplicity, the carefully studied classical colonnade. The taste of similar communities in England is as evidently based upon a long familiarity with the picturesque forms of the Middle Ages and of the Elizabethan and earlier Jacobean styles, that is to say, of so much of the Renaissance as reached England before the foundation, by Inigo Jones, of the Italian semi-classical style in that country. Similar to this is the feeling in Germany: for it is most surprising to Americans living, as they have done since 1880, in a time of almost complete agreement among the architects as to the unique and solitary importance of Italian neo-classic methods of design, to see the numerous German publications teem with studies of sixteenth century half timbered fronts, of seventeenth century stepped gables and turrets crowned with “extinguishers,” and of eighteenth century florid modifications of the rococo style. In France there is an orthodox style, a recognized style: and yet it is in France that the most seriously considered departures from that style have been made.