'Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song;
Memories haunt thy pointed gables like the rooks that round them throng.'
To claim the merit of variety for our streets is wrong, for they are not varied, but only incongruous. Their variety is rather that of an architectural museum than the result of any combination. We have styles enough, in all conscience, but none that will tolerate any other.
Against this may be urged the very argument with which we set out, that a nation's architecture should be the exponent of its national character, and as we are made up of every people and every class, that this heterogeneous mélange is our normal style. But mark the distinction: Although we are made up of so many diverse elements, yet the component parts are severally and mutually held in solution. Each so affects the mass as to give rise to a new element—not a mere union, but a result—not an addition, but a multiplication. But with the representative art, the materials have merely come in contact—nothing more. Our houses lack that social element which characterizes our people. Each is itself, and itself alone, ruining the appearance of its neighbors, and ruined by them in turn. Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo, is the only law; while we are a chemical solution, our architecture is only a mechanical one.
How proceed, then, to develop our national style, that unborn something which a future age might refer to as American, just as we speak of Byzantine or Gothic? Are we waiting for somebody to invent it? We think, maybe, that it is to spring forth, ready made, like Minerva from the brain of Zeus. If this is our idea, we might as well give up at once and confess to the world our imbecility. Never, from Adam's day to this, did anybody ever invent a new architecture. It is purely a matter of genealogy. For just as we trace back a family line, can we trace the generations of art. Spite of its complications, many an offshoot can be followed up directly to the parent stock. Taking, for example, the mediæval architecture of Spain, the brilliant 'Moresco,' we find it to be a combination of the vigorous Gothic of the North with the beautiful though effeminate Saracenic—the exotic of the South. And of these latter, each is traceable, though by different lines, to the same great prototype, the Roman. For when Rome was divided, the Dome fell to the inheritance of the Eastern Empire, and the Basilica (which was only a Greek temple turned inside out) to the Western. The former, joined to the Arabian, and the latter to the Gothic, formed two great families, from the union of whose descendants sprang the Moresco. But even the Roman was a derivative style, leading us back successively through Greece, Assyria, and Egypt. Each step is visibly allied to the preceding, and yet how unlike the pyramid and the Spanish cathedral! Did history permit, all the styles that have ever existed could be traced in the same way; it is quite as easy to account for their diversities, as for those of the nations that produced them. Ham and Japheth were of the same household, yet how different their descendants of to-day! As from one man sprang all people, so was there an original germ of architecture from which all successive styles have been derived.
The composite forms that have arisen since commerce and civilization have brought the ends of the world together, increase the complication. There have been marriages and intermarriages, some good matches and some bad ones, some with vigorous and some with sickly offspring, and some hybrids of such monstrous malformation as almost to make us fear that a new style can be invented. But the effect is impossible without the cause. Save the mysterious Pyramids, every structure extant acknowledges its ancestry. If physiologists are fond of claiming the history of the race as one of their own chapters, architecture has at least an equal claim.
But all this does not mean that we are mere passive agents in the matter. We are, in a great measure, the 'external influences' that modify art. The motion exists, but it devolves upon us to give direction.
We have already alluded to Venetian architecture as being parallel in origin and tendency to our own, and much can be gained, we believe, by a careful examination of what it accomplished. Not that we ought to copy, line for line, the doge's palace or the Casa d'Oro—the arabesque arcade, or the Gothic balcony—that would only be following the well-worn rut of imitation. We are not to study the result, but the cause. For the causes that produced the style in question were not unlike what we find at home to-day. A commercial republic, there was the same liberty of expression—the same preponderance of the individual over the national; and there, as here, are we attracted rather by the elegance of independent units than by any general unity of design.
But the growth of art in Venice (we ask special attention) was due to her central situation, and the simultaneous influx of foreign elements. It was her commerce that made Venice great: her glory came and departed with it. Witnessing, as she did, the development of all the mediæval styles, she became—geographically and historically—the metropolis of architecture. 'The Greeks,' says Ruskin, 'gave the shaft, Rome gave the arch, the Arabs pointed and foliated the arch.... Opposite in their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the North and from the South—the glacier torrent and the lava stream, they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman Empire; and the very centre of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, is Venice.
'The ducal palace of Venice contains the three elements in exactly equal proportions, the Roman, Lombard, and Arab. It is the central building of the world.'
Truly, it was a glorious success that art achieved in the Italian republic, Whether the old precedents were violated or not, the result is unquestionably pleasing, and the pleasure-seeking tourist lingers there as long as the critic.