Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

Such an inquiry is the more necessary from the extraordinary contrariety of opinion which we find to exist as to the real character of the style, as well as the external and internal causes of its development. Such opinions assume the most contradictory forms. One class of them may be denominated the religious view of the question. Under this head one party describes it as Christian, and another as Roman Catholic architecture. One attributes to its various parts a deep symbolisation of Christian truth; another discovers in them nothing but the mystic arcana of Romanism; while another cuts the knot by protesting that it is Mahometan architecture. A second class of opinions assumes an ethnological form. Under this head some have thought the style especially English; some pre-eminently German; some, again, in the most exclusive and straitened sense of the term, French; and others (in the widest sense) Teutonic; while the entanglement is again cut through by the champions of the Saracenic claim.

Then comes a political class of disputants. One declares the style to be nothing more or less than the visible exponent of feudalism. If the system of Durandus were applied to this view, we should perhaps have the orders of the arch shown to represent the divisions of feudal aristocracy.—The point of the arch to be the king; the outer voussoirs the great, and the inner the lesser, vassals; the clustered pillars to be the bishops surrounded by their clergy; the ashlar stones the freemen; the rubble stones the villains and serfs; the mortar to be the bond of union or of slavery by which the whole system was cemented together; and the painted glass to be that clerical monopoly of learning by which the pure light of knowledge was imparted through an artificially-coloured medium. Others have, however, shown that the style developed itself just when feudalism was giving way, and just among those very communities who were most resolutely exerting themselves for its overthrow; and that, in England especially, it synchronises with the foundation of those institutions to which we owe our liberties and our greatness; while our knot-cutting friends would contemptuously pooh-pooh the whole question by saying that it had nothing to do either with feudalism or Magna Charta, but was simply the natural result of the Crusades.

Again, as to its more practical characteristics; one party claims for it the most unbounded liberty, another denounces it as curbing the free following of practical and artistic requirements. The very same party sometimes describes it as excluding the light of day, and sometimes as offering no protection against the glare of sunshine. In fact, without going farther into these contrarieties, it may be sufficient to say that among those who have not gone much into the subject no opinions are too inconsistent either with one another or with facts to find ready advocates.

My object in this and the succeeding lecture will be to show that the style originated in no occult influences; that, if it can be called either Christian, Teutonic, French, English, German, or Western European, it is so only in a plain, straightforward, and historical, and not in any hidden, exclusive, or mysterious, sense; but that it, in fact, arose from the application of plain common sense to plain practical requirements; that many of these requirements were not peculiar to the period, but belong to all time; that many were not limited to a race or climate, but are common, with certain modifications, to different races and countries; and that the application of the same class of common sense to altered requirements would produce results by no means militating against those thus arrived at, but, on the contrary, tending to enrich, to amplify, and to add new life, variety, and harmony to the art which it had first suggested.

To judge of the practical reasonableness of a style of building, it is not enough to prove that it answers its purpose; we may pre-suppose that all civilised people would effect as much as that—indeed, that all people would do so who can construct at all; for if uncivilised, their aim would be more simple and more readily attained.

The question is, whether the purpose is provided for by means consistent with common sense, with the laws of nature, with the properties of the materials at hand, and without an expenditure of labour and material disproportioned to the result. In this I do not restrict the question to merely utilitarian results, but admit the artistic element in a degree proportioned to the rank and purpose of the edifice. I would also wish to guard myself against being understood to imply that the superior reasonableness of a style of architecture proves a higher state of civilisation among the people who use it. Inventions are often accidental, and independent of high civilisation. Thus, though an arch is a more rational means of spanning a wide opening than a single block of marble, the early Romans who used the arch were probably much less civilised than the early Greeks, who were ignorant of it.

The Egyptians and the Greeks used most nobly the means of spanning openings with which they were best acquainted, and for which their numerous quarries of granite and marble supplied them so liberally with the materials; but such a mode of construction is manifestly costly, dependent upon natural facilities of the most exceptional kind, and extremely limited in its application. The use of the arch obviates all these difficulties, and consequently a mode of construction which admits the arch is more rational than one which does not. Roman architecture, in short, than Greek.

The Romans were, in fact, eminently a practical race, and their architecture is in its construction in a high degree practical and rational; they by no means limited themselves to the use of costly and bulky materials, but united in their structures the use of all the materials of which their world-wide dominion gave them command, and were equally successful in employing in them the most stupendous masses of marble, as at Baalbec, the granite of Egypt, or the flint-nodules of Kent; and never hesitated at spanning the widest structure with vaults of domes of such solidity as almost to defy the ravages of the elements and of time.

The two great defects in the rationale of their architecture were—first, that, as the conquerors of the world, the resources at their command were so unlimited that economy of material seems to have been almost dismissed from their consideration, and their principle of statics seems to have been rather that of passive and inert resistance than of equilibrium of forces; and, secondly, that, having adopted the artistic features of Greek architecture, they attempted to unite them with their own totally different system of construction, in a manner which cannot always be said to be consistent with reason.