The question applies with as much force to the Gothic revival as to the classical. But to the former Mr. Fergusson has applied the test with less than his usual fairness. In his hatred of all mere copying we heartily concur. Of the impossibility of any genuine invention in architecture as long as this system of imitation prevails, we are not less convinced than himself; but we cannot see why it should be more monstrous to copy in one dead language than another, or bring ourselves to think that the Teutonic forms are quite so dead for us as those which Vignola and Palladio consecrated with their canons. He has still farther departed from his general impartiality, by allowing religious or theological considerations to have weight in determining a question of art. The Walhalla and the Madeleine, although examples of direct imitation, never receive from him the crowning stigma which brands as forgeries the new church on the glacis of Vienna, or that of St. Nicolas at Hamburg. The feeling which has unconsciously prompted this distinction is closely connected with what we conceive to be his defective view of Gothic architecture in general. Until a genuine style comes into existence which shall be applicable to every building raised by every Englishman, without reference to his political or his religious creed, it is quite possible that one style may be more suitable for one class of structures than another.*

In

We can do no more than touch briefly on this, as on other questions of interest arising out of an examination of modern buildings. The subject of the appropriateness of styles for different purposes has been more fully discussed in an article on Public Monuments in a previous Number of this Review (April, 1862). It was there stated that, as a monument to the dead, no memorial could compete in beauty with the Eleanor Cross, or admit in an equal degree the application of sculpture and painting without the slightest traditional conventionality. We welcomed therefore with sincere pleasure the announcement that the memorial to the Prince Consort was to assume this form. When the idea of a monolithic obelisk was abandoned on account of its costliness, there remained the alternative of placing the statue of the Prince, habited in the garb of Pericles, within a Greek temple, or to represent him, as he really lived, on a monument of which the character might be strictly national. The former was felt to be intolerable; and it was no slight relief to think that a monument worthy of the Prince might at length be raised by the architect of the Martyrs' Memorial at Oxford. We confess our utter disappointment. The design is not an Eleanor Cross at all. Its character is purely Italian Gothic; and the shrine is in fact a gigantic exaggeration of the ciborium or tabernacle which frequently covers the Holy Sacrament in continental churches. As a monument, the idea would seem to be taken from the tomb of

either case it must of necessity be a question of adaptation or of copying. Whether we use Italian or Gothic designs and details, we are in either case speaking a language which is not really our own; but where or in so far as it may be necessary to condemn, the measure in which either may be congenial to us must be the measure of our criticism. When the Italian architects consciously abandoned the details of Teutonic art, they deserved but little blame for casting aside architectural forms which they had never entirely made their own. The same indulgence should in all fairness be extended to those who in this country have reverted to the forms which are as congenial to us as ever the features of Roman art could be to Brunelleschi or Bramante. This Mr. Fergusson seems unable to see. For him a medieval cathedral is the work of men who lived a long time ago, and from whom we are separated by a vast gulf in religion, thought, and feeling. He can only think of them as our ignorant and hardfisted forefathers' (p. 484.); nor can he believe it possible that an educated man can appreciate the English architecture of the Middle Ages, as he can that of republican Athens or imperial Rome. Anyone who is at once educated and impartial will thoroughly appreciate both; but it is in the nature of things impossible that an Englishman should really feel the same patriotic enthusiasm for the latter, which it is at least possible that he may feel for the former. The Parthenon will bring to his mind the glorious age of Ictinus, of Phidias, and of Pericles. For the student of English history, the noblest works of our Teutonic architecture freshen the remembrance of that memorable century to which we owe all that essentially distinguishes our English constitution from even the most advanced in continental Europe. The

the Scaligers at Verona; but the scale of the proposed structure is ludicrously exaggerated. The upper part is out of all proportion with the lower: and the height of the whole monument is dwarfed by the colossal statuary on the advanced pedestals. The result would be the same, if such sculpture were placed round an Eleanor Cross; but a height of 150 feet is in itself as great an absurdity for this exaggerated Italian shrine as would be a height of 300 feet for an English cross. In all probability, the faults which strike us most in the design will be brought out still more painfully on the scanty site allotted to it, which leaves a clear space of only a few feet on each side of the monument. Whatever be the merit of an architectural design, the first condition of effect is that it should be adapted to the area in which it is to be placed, and to the points from which it can be seen. In all these respects, the erection of a Gothic, tabernacle in one corner of Hyde Park is to be deprecated.

Roman ritualists of the present day have little more liking than Protestants for the endless vistas which open before us in the naves of York or Winchester. When, therefore, Mr. Fergusson speaks of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, as far more appropriate to Protestant worship than any of the Gothic designs recently erected' (p. 276.), he says what may be perfectly true, but it altogether begs the point in question. As a fact, during the whole existence of the English Church since the Reformation, there have been those who have adhered to a different idea, and we have no right to demand the general acceptance of our own notion of what may be suitable for the proper celebration of Divine worship in a Protestant community in the nineteenth century.' But this is precisely what Mr. Fergusson does, when he asserts that in the recent Gothic revival, chancels were thrown out simply for effect (p. 320.). He might have learnt that the chancel is no superfluous ornament in Mr. Hope's ideal of the nineteenth century cathedral; yet, with his characteristic inability to throw himself into forms of thought different from his own, he attributes to the younger Pugin a spirit of forgery, because for ecclesiastical buildings he wished to revive the general plan of medieval churches. The insinuation is unfair; and no good can ever be done by forcing any part of this discussion into so false a channel. Mr. Fergusson in great part misapprehends his meaning, when he tells us that every page of Pugin's works reiterate, "Give us • “truth, — truth of materials, truth of construction, truth ""of ornamentation," &c. &c.; and yet his only aim was to ' produce an absolute falsehood. Had he ever succeeded to the 'extent his wildest dreams desired, he could only have produced 'so perfect a forgery that no one would have detected that a 'work of the nineteenth century was not one of the fourteenth 'or fifteenth' (p. 318.). So far as this charge is true, we have no wish to qualify it, or to make light of the hindrances which it puts in the way of any developement of genuine art. We will grant that the perfect Gothic church of Pugin or of Mr. Scott, might have been built in the Middle Ages. But we must be just. Mr. Fergusson has himself admitted that the Walhalla reproduces the Parthenon, and that anyone, judging from the exterior, might fairly set down the Madeleine at Paris as a work of the same age with the Maison Carrée at Nismes, or the Erechtheion as belonging to the same period with St. George's Hall at Liverpool. If there is forgery in the one case, there is forgery also in the other. If it is absurd to make barometers and thermometers look like the works of the dark ages, long before those impostors Torcelli, or Galileo,

'or Newton are said to have invented them' (p. 328.), is it less absurd to put upon them ornaments which might make us fancy that they were invented in the days of Pericles or Julius Cæsar? To speak thus is to deal in useless exaggerations. Anyone who has read attentively the works of Pugin will see that in his demand for truth he was crying out mainly for truthfulness of construction and decoration. With him the plan of a church was not a subject for debate; it is not easy to see how from his point of view it could have been. The Renaissance architects had spread a taste for large halls and oratories; but the ritual of the Roman Church had never varied, and with the continuance of the same wants it seemed illogical to infer the necessity of different arrangements. What Pugin resisted with all his energy was that system of false construction and ornamentation which no one else has condemned with greater vehemence than Mr. Fergusson. It was ludicrously false to place buttresses and crockets on chairs and tables, or to make the butler clean his plate in a bastion. It was in Pugin's eyes scarcely less false to make up a tower, as at St. Pancras, by placing one Temple of the Winds on the top of another, or to produce a steeple, as Wren did at Bow Church, by plagiarising every form of a Gothic tower and spire, and translating them into the Renaissance dialect. If he could see little merit or originality in substituting a balustrade for an open parapet, and an obelisk in place of a pinnacle, it needs some assurance to say that he was wrong.

In truth, with all his correctness of taste, Mr. Fergusson has in this volume chiefly laid himself open to charges of inconsistency. It could hardly be otherwise. In his own words, it is difficult to write calmly and dispassionately ' in the midst of the clamour of contending parties, and not to 'be hurried into opposition by the unreasoning theories that ' are propounded on both sides' (p. 242.). Hence, perhaps, it was to be expected that he should impute especially to the Gothic revivalists that vice of applying ornamentation without thought which he had previously (pp. 22-48, &c.), denounced as the inherent tendency,' or rather the bane,' of the Renaissance styles. It may be true that in using the classical style, it ' required the utmost skill and endless thought to make the 'parts, or details, adapt themselves even moderately well to the purposes of Modern Church Architecture' (p. 319.): but as a fact, this thought had rarely, perhaps never, been bestowed on the subject. When the Renaissance architects availed themselves of pillars and pilasters, their real recom'mendation was that they covered the greatest amount of

space with the least amount of thought' (p. 48.). But it is a mere assumption to tell us that one of the most important advantages of the Gothic style is its cheapness. In a Gothic building, the masonry cannot be too coarse, or the materials 'too common. The carpentry must be as rude and as unmechanically put together as possible; the glazing as clumsy, and the glass as bad as can be found' (p. 319.). The charge is curious when applied to Gothic, as distinguished from a style which, except in actual paintings, allows no treatment which is not conventional. The rules of the great Renaissance architects have stereotyped the forms of capitals, entablatures, and cornices; but the sculptured foliage of Cologne Cathedral is faulty, as being far too natural. With ourselves, it seems to be for the present a question of adaptation or copying, whether the forms chosen are classical or Gothic. We do not deny the beauty of St. Paul's Cathedral, we are not blind to the demerits (such as they are) of the Palace of Westminster. The British Museum may be a finer building than the museum recently completed by the University of Oxford. But while Mr. Fergusson minutely criticises the Houses of Parliament and the Oxford Museum, he omits (it would almost seem of set purpose) to notice a large number of buildings which really belong to another class. He can scarcely be too severe on the spasmodic straining after every imaginable eccentricity which is betrayed by such designs as those of All Saints', Margaret Street, or the chapel of Balliol College, Oxford. But buildings which appear studiously to avoid every English form must not make us forget that the works of Mr. Scott are in general examples of purely Teutonic art. It would be absurd to suppose that he has invented any new style, and perhaps presumptuous to imagine that his designs may lead directly to any such developement. But none who examine the chapel of Exeter College, Oxford, will discover there either falsity of construction or misapplication of ornament, while all will see (what no Renaissance design can exhibit) capitals and corbels, brackets and bosses, of which no one example is like another, and all of which were patiently worked out on the spot by the artist who had before him the living foliage of nature. If the careful and earnest elaboration of details is likely to lead hereafter to a better condition of art, then Mr. Scott has contributed more than any other living man to the result so eagerly desired by Mr. Fergusson.

Conventionality is, indeed, no essential characteristic of the architecture of Teutonic Christendom. The foliage which graces its piers and arches may be strictly natural. The drawings which fill its windows may, and ought to be, as true as those of Benjamin

VOL. CXVIII. NO. CCXLI.

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