The New Architecture

The Speaker, 14 May 1892, pages 584-585, 1,440 words

An architectural renaissance is abroad. The phrase may seem somewhat extravagant, and yet it seems impossible to drive along the Chelsea Embankment, where beautiful Anglo-Dutch houses look out on the river, through perfect Cadogan Gardens, through the lovely district of Pont Street, passing out by Egerton Gardens, and round the red turning of the Fulham Road, contrasting so markedly with the grey hideousness of Alexander Square, without coming to the conclusion that an architectural renaissance is abroad. If the London excursionist still doubts, I will ask him to follow the course of the Cromwell Road until he is convinced.

For nearly a century vain efforts have been in progress to revive the Gothic, to adapt dead liturgies in stone to modern requirements. But the revivalists have failed everywhere, even in churches where legitimate hopes of success might have been held, and the poor Gothic villa is like a Gregorian chant on a penny whistle. It is a maimed, ridiculous thing in itself, and the beauty of our great elms and our dim and misty meadows it most unmercifully jars. A building is not a thing in a frame like a picture, or, perhaps, I should say it is a thing framed in the surrounding landscape, and if it is not in harmony and sympathy with its frame it does not achieve its mission. A wise architect who goes down to the country to build studies the farmhouses and whatever ruins there may be about; he strives for appropriateness, considering the building as a natural consequence rather than as an abstract and separate thing. This is our new and rational theory of architecture. But for more than half a century the aim of architects has been a vain effort to adapt mullioned window to patent blinds and modern water-spouts. We know with what results. The new Law Courts are little more than a monument of dismal pedantry. I will ask him who thinks the clock tower at Westminster a success to go into Westminster Hall and breathe for a moment the great breath of solemnity and grandeur that every rafter exhales. After five minutes in that august hall the modern Gothic will seem to him so much pastry-cook ornamentation and cut-paper embellishment. The so-called Gothic revival culminated in the Albert Memorial. The horrors of this monument were necessary to convince us of the impossibility of Gothic architecture. Then it became clear that we might as well strive to bend the Latin language to the purpose of novels and newspapers as to adapt Gothic to our modern ideas and requirements. Alter the ancient phrase and you inevitably fall into a barbarism; copy an ancient phrase you may, you may copy a second and fit the two together, but you can do no more than move the ancient phrases to and fro. And centuries of pedants have wasted their lives in such fruitless toil, a wiring dead bones – horrid articulated skeletons are all they have produced. And so have hundreds of churches been built; some are barbarisms, some pedantic parodies; in no single one is there the spirit of life.

This new Anglo-Dutch architecture may be unsuitable to public buildings; but my concern here is entirely with domestic architecture, and the Anglo-Dutch seems to me more suitable than anything we have had since the Elizabethans. That Wren and Inigo Jones designed some beautiful private houses is as certain as that Reynolds and Gainsborough painted some beautiful pictures. But the painters seem to me to have held a distinct advantage over the architects. For, while the painters were working in the security of an excellent method, the architects were merely exercising their individual genius in various foreign styles, none of which, as time has shown, was in sufficient natural sympathy with our race to catch root and become, in a modified form, native of the land. I will yield to no one in my admiration of St. Paul's, but is it characteristic of England? And the beautiful houses which Wren and Inigo Jones built in provincial town and country-side are all charming exotics, exquisite embodiments of individual genius, in which, however, the genius of the race does not seem to happen, And lavish as we may be in our admiration for these gems of foreign culture, we find ourselves forced to admit that they are strange in the landscape, and suit it only as a French fashion may lend an unexpected interest to an English face and figure. But when our Anglo-Dutch houses appear the effect on the landscape is the very reverse: at once it becomes more intimate, more familiar, and more penetratingly English. Suddenly our swards seem clothed in their native garment. The picturesqueness of these houses is obvious, but their attraction lies deeper: in an instinctive sense of an England of long ago, and they stir long buried and nearly dead inheritances of original race and climate.

I think I have argued in these columns – I certainly have argued elsewhere – that all that is worthy and vital in our art came to us from Holland. So long as we were faithful to the Dutch tradition our art remained strong and firm; but in the beginning of this century we began to turn our eyes towards France, and just as Italian influence destroyed Dutch art at the end of the seventeenth century, so has French influence destroyed English art at the end of the nineteenth

century. The Dutch graft alone succeeded with us; Dutch genius we alone seem capable of assimilating and adapting to our use. And the red-brick houses which we are building to-day are no more slavish imitations of the houses in Rotterdam than the art of Crome is a slavish imitation of Hobbema's. We are bringing into our adaptation of Dutch architecture the same kind of originality which we brought into our adoption of Dutch art. Bedford Park was our first attempt; there the imitation was too close, and a certain rigidity and self-consciousness is the result. Cadogan Gardens and Pont Street are freer in style, and all over the country this architecture is going, each architect varying it according to the bent of his talent; and it seems to me that we are nearer to-day to possessing a national architecture than we have ever been before. At any moment public taste may change, and the fashion to-morrow may be for classic porticoes. But if taste does not change, this end of the century will be remembered for a new and beautiful style of domestic architecture. We may even succeed in producing some perfect specimens in this style. The style is not yet formed, but it is forming, and what is desirable is that architects should not yet trouble themselves about ornamentation, but rather strive to arrive at some perfect scale of proportion, studying the relations of doors and windows; and these successfully established, each succeeding architect will add something, and so once again a new and definite style of architecture will be constructed.

And not for itself alone it is to be hoped that the new architecture will remain in fashion. It can bring in its train much new decoration in painting and in sculpture. The very existence of the decorative painter and sculptor depends on the architect. The architect ordains their talents as he pleases. As the dance must follow the music, their work must follow his. Hitherto painters and sculptors have been compelled by the architect to suppress all that might be original in them. Think of the fetters that the Gothic imposes! I say "fetters," because "limitations" would compromise my meaning. All art is limited and conditioned, but a fetter is different, and the fetters that have been cast on our decorative artists are archaeology, local colour, and all the thousand links and rivets assembled in the phrase "of the period." Once that imposition is made art is at an end, and its place is taken by the equivalent of the Latin exercise: the artist has begun to write in a dead language, and his thoughts come stillborn out of it. But the new architecture having no tradition, will allow both painter and sculptor to exercise what fancy they have. These decorations may be exquisite – they must be homely, and the very condition of homeliness will help to bring out all possible character and individuality that the style is capable of. It will not be a grand style, that is most certain: art will never be grand again, for life has ceased to be grand: but it will not be parody. G.M.