any past style as in the simpler and more commercial building. There is much sculpture, rather carefully designed and cut with great brilliancy. There is a rather free use of pseudo-classic columns and colonnettes; there is a daring combination of larger architectural details, such as gables of cut stone with rounded outline, capped with bold drip moulds, pinnacle-towers wrought into niches with statuary, a porch of entrance with a very boldly projecting hood, well handled, with caryatid figures, a staircase tower with a cut stone attic of great merit, and ventilation towers combined with the roof structure and differentiated finely from the masonry-built forms near them. It is a costly building, a refined and thought-out design; and yet one cannot say that there is anything of the past in it more than this—that it is based upon the spirit and taste of the Renaissance rather than upon that of the classic epoch, or of the mediæval epoch, early or late, or of the Post-Renaissance epoch, beginning in the North about 1650. This relative independence is what the foreigner sees most strongly in modern English architectural practice.
Now, in German lands, there is a little less freshness of artistic thought; the artist is always in the presence of the great past, in such a way that even his deviations from its spirit are self-conscious in a way; and this feeling it is which drives the daring designer—the man who would be original and who asks us to sympathize with his manly desire to build for the nineteenth century what the nineteenth century needs, not what a former century made for itself—to very strange vagaries. Plate LXII is one of the best of these dashing attempts at novelty. Every part of the wall-surface is occupied with painting in neutral colors, which painting is in some cases reinforced by reliefs in plaster. It is not a polychromatic design, but a design in light and shade wrought into emblematic, armorial, purely decorative, and even representative forms. It is noticeable that the realized painting of human figures and accessories, so marked a feature of the ground story, with its splendid King Gambrinus at the left, and the Lady Hopfen at the right, stops with the sill-course, and that the rest of the painting is much more abstract and conventional. Apart from the painting, the design is somewhat commonplace in its main masses; though that statement is unfair as it stands, because it was not intended to be seen without the painting, while the details, as of the window jambs and mullions, are very carefully wrought and very interesting. It is only above the eaves that the design becomes commonplace, and even there it is redeemed by the very bold fire wall on each side broken into gable-steps of unusual design.
In this inquiry we are taking smaller buildings as more likely to express the general thought of the community than are those exceptional monuments which form landmarks in history. We are compelled, of course, to select the designs of men who are famous, however unknown they may have been when the buildings we select were put into shape: but even the work of such renowned architects as Charles Garnier shows and explains the general trend of thought, especially when seen in their earlier tasks. Thus, the building shown in [Plate LXIII,] the Club-house of the Cercle de la Librairie, which was completed about 1880, shows the exceptional merit (exceptional in modern cities) of the Paris fronts, together with their comparative lack of significance, at least in detail. The entrance on the corner and the round tower forming a vestibule below and an admirable card-room above, are characteristic of Paris streets. Straight from this doorway, and, therefore, diagonally to both the fronts, goes a passageway into a staircase which forms another round tower-like structure. In the upper story, the large room at the left is a billiard room, that on the right, a salon of reception and entertainment, the “conversation room” of the club. All this is perfectly well expressed in the external design: and that credit—the credit of that sort of realism always restrained and always
