It is not that we are poorer or more penurious than our ancestors, but that we have more wants than they, and that the new wants overshadow the old. What is spent in one direction must be spared in another. The matter-of-course necessaries of our life were luxuries or were unknown to them. First of all, the luxury of freedom,—political, social, and domestic,—with the habits it creates, is the source of great and ever-increasing expense. We are still much behindhand in this matter, and shall by-and-by spend more largely upon it. But, compared with our ancestors, individual culture, to which freedom is the means, absorbs a large share of our expenditure. The noble architecture of the thirteenth century was the work of corporations, of a society that knew only corporations, and where individual culture was a crime. Dante had made the discovery that it is the man that creates his own position, not the accident of birth. But his life shows how this belief isolated him. Nor was the coincidence between the artistic spirit of the age and its limitations accidental. Just in proportion as the spirit of individualism penetrated society, and began to show itself as the Renaissance, architecture declined. The Egyptian pyramids are marvels to us, because we are accustomed to look upon the laborer as a man. But once allow that he is only so much brute force,—cheap, readily available, and to be had in endless supply, but as a moral entity less to be respected than a cat or a heron, and the marvel ceases. Should not the building be great to which man himself is sacrificed? Later, the builders are no longer slaves; but man is still subordinate to his own work, adores the work of his hands. This stands for him, undertakes to represent him, though, from its partial nature, it can only typify certain aspects or functions of him. A Gothic cathedral is an attempt at a universal expression of humanity, a stone image of society, in which each particle, insignificant by itself, has its meaning in the connection. It was the fresh interest in the attempt that gave birth to that wonderful architecture. This is the interest it still has, but now only historical, since the discovery was made that the particle is greater than the mass,—that it is for the sake of the individual that society and its institutions exist. Ever since, a process of disintegration has been going on, resulting in a progressive reversal of the previous relation. Not the private virtues of the structure, but its uses, are now uppermost, and ever more and more developed. Even in our own short annals something of this process may be traced. Old gentlemen complain of the cost of our houses. The houses of their boyhood, they say, were handsomer and better built, yet cost less. There is some truth in this, for the race of architect-builders hardly reaches into this century. But if the comparison be pushed into details, we soon come to the conviction that the owners of these houses were persons whose habits were, in many respects, uncouth and barbarous. It is easy to provide in the lump; but with decency, privacy, independence,—in short, with a high degree of respect on the part of the members of the household for each other's individuality,—expense begins. Letarouilly says it is difficult to discover in the Roman palaces of the Renaissance any reference to special uses of the different apartments. It was to the outside, the vestibule, courtyard, and staircase, that care and study were given: the inside was intended only as a measure of the riches and importance of the owner, not as his habitation. The part really inhabited by him was the mezzanino,—a low, intermediate story, where he and his family were kennelled out of the way. Has any admiring traveller ever asked himself how he could establish himself, with wife and children, in the Foscari or the Vendramin palace? To live in them, it would be necessary to build a house inside.
Nor is there any ground for saying that the fault is in the builders,—that the old builders met the demands of their time, and would equally satisfy the demands of our time, without sacrifice of their art. The first demand in the days of good architecture was, that the building should have an independent artistic value beyond its use. This is what architecture requires; for architecture is building, pure,—building for its own sake, not as means. What Mr. Garbett says is, no doubt, quite true,—that nothing was ever made, for taste's sake, less efficient than it might have been. But many things were made more efficient than they might have been; or, rather, this is always the character of good architecture. It is in this surplus of perfection, above bare necessity, that its claim to rank among the fine arts consists. This character the builders of the good times, accordingly, never left out of sight; so that, if their means were limited, they lavished all upon one point,—made that overflow with riches, and left the rest plain and bare; never did they spread their pittance thin to cover the whole, as we do. It is for this reason that so few of the great cathedrals were finished, and that in buildings of all kinds we so often find the decoration in patches, sharply marked off from the rest of the structure. This noble profuseness is not, indeed, necessarily decoration; the essence of it is an independent value and interest in the building, aside from the temporary and accidental employment. The spires and the flying-buttresses of the Northern cathedrals cannot be defended on the ground of thrifty construction. The Italian churches accomplished that as well without either. How remote the reference to use in the mighty portals of Rheims, or the soaring vaultings of Amiens and Beauvais! Does anybody suppose that Michel Angelo, when he undertook to raise the dome of the Pantheon into the air, was thinking of the most economical way of roofing a given space? These fine works have their whole value as expression; it is with their visible contempt of thrift that our admiration begins. They pared away the stone to the minimum that safety demanded, and beyond it,—yet not from thrift, but to make the design more preëminent and necessary, and to owe as little as possible to the inert strength of the material.
But though we admire the result, we have grown out of sympathy with the cause, the state of mind that produced it, and so the root wherefrom the like should be produced is cut off. There is no reason to suppose that the old builders were men of a different kind from ours, more earnest, more poetical. The stories about the science of the medieval masons are rubbish. All men are in earnest about something; our men are as good as they, and would have built as well, had they been born at the right time for it. But now they are thinking of other things. The Dilettanti Society sent Mr. Penrose to Athens to study in the ancient remains there the optical corrections which it was alleged the Greeks made in the horizontal lines of their buildings. Mr. Penrose made careful measurements, establishing the fact, and a folio volume of plates was published to illustrate the discovery, and evince the unequalled nicety of the Greek eye. But the main point, namely, that a horizontal line above the level of the eye, in order to appear horizontal, must bend slightly upwards, was pointed out to me years ago by a common plasterer.
It is not that our builders are degenerate, but that their art is a trade, occupies only their hands, not their minds, and this by no fault in them or in anybody, but by the natural progress of the world. In each age by turn some one mental organ is in a state of hypertrophy; immediately that becomes the medium of expression,—not that it is the only possible or even the best, but that its time has come,—then it gives place to another. Architecture is dead and gone to dust long ago. We are not called upon to sing threnodies over it, still less to attempt to galvanize a semblance of life into it. If we must blame somebody, let it not be the builder, but his employers, who, caring less even than he for the reality of good architecture, (for the material itself teaches him something,) force him into these puerilities in order to gratify their dissolute fancies.
If these views seem to any one low and prosaic, let me remind him that poetry does not differ from prose in being false. We must respect the facts. If there were in this country any considerable number of persons to whom the buildings they daily enter had any positive permanent value besides convenience,—who looked upon the church, the bank, or the house, as upon a poem or a statue,—the birth of a national architecture would be assured. But as the fact stands, while utility, and that of a temporary and makeshift sort, is really the first consideration, we are not yet ready to acknowledge this to others or to ourselves, and so fail to get from it what negative advantage we might, but blunder on under some fancied necessity, spending what we can ill spare, to the defrauding of legitimate demands, as a sort of sin-offering for our aesthetic deficiency, or as a blind to conceal it. The falsehood, like all falsehood, defeats itself; the pains we take only serve to make the failure more complete.
This is displayed most fully in the doings of "Building Committees." Here we see what each member (perhaps it would be more just to say the least judicious among them) would do in his own case, were he free from the rude admonitions of necessity. He has at least to live in his own house, and so cannot escape some attention to the substantial requirements of it; though some houses, too, seem emancipated from such considerations, and to have been built for any end rather than to live in. But in catering for the public, it is the outsiders alone that seem to be consulted, the careless passer-by, who for once will pause a moment to commend or to sneer at the façade,—not the persons whose lives for years, perhaps, are to be affected by the internal arrangement. It is doubtless from a suspicion, more or less obscure, of the incoherency of their purpose, that such committees usually fall into the hands of a "practical man,"—that is, a man impassive to principles, of hardihood or bluntness of perception enough to carry into effect their vague fancies, and spare them from coming face to face with their inconsistencies. Thus fairly adrift and kept adrift from the main purpose, there is no vagary impossible to them,—churches in which there is no hearing, hospitals contrived to develop disease, museums of tinder, libraries impossible to light or warm. And what gain comes to beauty from these sacrifices, let our streets answer. Good architecture requires before all things a definite aim, long persisted in. It never was an invention, anywhere, but always a gradual growth. What chance of that here?
The only chance clearly is to cut away till we come to the solid ground of real, not fancied, requirement. As long as it is our whims, and not our necessities, that build, it matters little how much pains we take, how learned and assiduous we are. I have no hope of any considerable advantage from the abundant exhortation to frankness and genuineness in the use of materials, unless it lead first of all to a more frank and genuine consideration of the occasion for using the materials at all. If it lead only to open timber roofs and stone walls in place of the Renaissance stucco, I think the gain very questionable. The stucco is more comfortable, and at least we had got used to it. These are matters of detail: suppose your details are more genuine, if the whole design is a sham, if the aim be only to excite the admiration of bystanders, the thing is not altered, whether the bystanders are learned in such matters or ignorant. The more excellent the work is in its kind, the more insidious and virulent the falsity, if the whole occasion of it be a pretence. If it must be false, let it by all means be gross and glaring,—we shall be the sooner rid of it.
It may be asked whether, then, I surrender the whole matter of appearance,—whether the building may as well be ugly as beautiful. By no means; what I have said is in the interest of beauty, as far as it is possible to us. Positive beauty it may be often necessary to forego, but bad taste is never necessary. Ugliness is not mere absence of beauty, but absence of it where it ought to be present. It comes always from a disappointed expectation,—as where the lineaments that do not disgust in the potato meet us in the human face, or even in the hippopotamus, whom accordingly Nature kindly puts out of sight. It is bad taste that we suffer from,—not plainness, not indifference to appearance, but features misplaced, shallow mimicry of "effects" where their causes do not exist, transparent pretences of all kinds, forcing attention to the absence of the reality, otherwise perhaps unnoticed. The first step toward seemly building is to rectify the relation between the appearance and the uses of the building,—to give to each the weight that it really has with us, not what we fancy or are told it ought to have. Mr. Ruskin too often seems to imply that fine architecture is like virtue or the kingdom of Heaven: that, if it be sought first, all other things will be added. A sounder basis for design, beyond what is necessary to use, seems to me that proposed by Mr. Garbett, (to whom we are indebted for the most useful hints upon architecture,) namely, politeness, a decent regard for the eyes of other people (and for one's own, for politeness regards one's self as well). Politeness, however, as Mr. Garbett admits, is chiefly a negative art, and consists in abstaining and not meddling. The main character of the building being settled by the most unhesitating consideration of its uses, we are to see that it disfigures the world as little as possible.
Let me, at the risk of tediousness, proceed to bring these generalities to a point by a few instances,—not intending to exhaust the topic, but only to exemplify the method of approaching it.
The commonest case for counsel, and more common here than anywhere else, is where a man is to build for himself a house, especially in the country,—for town-houses are more governed by extraneous considerations. The first point is the aspect,—that the living-rooms be well open to the sun. Let no fancied advantages of view or of symmetrical position interfere with this. For they operate seldom and strike most at first, but the aspect tells on body and mind every day. It is astonishing how reckless people are of this vital point, suffering it to be determined for them by the direction of a road, or even of a division-fence,—as if they had never looked at their houses with their own eyes, but only with the casual view of a stranger. It does not follow, however, that the entrance must be on the sunny side, though this is generally best, as the loss of space in the rooms is more than made up by the cheeriness of the approach. For the same reason, unless you are sailing very close to the wind, let your entrance-hall be roomy. It is in no sense an unproductive outlay, for it avails above in chambers, and below in the refuge it affords to the children from the severer rules of the parlor.