Mr. Van Brunt's Greek Lines

IN the essay which gives this book ¹ its title, Mr. Van Brunt analyzes the spirit of Egyptian, of Greek, and of Roman architecture as embodied in the character of the lines which are dominant in the three forms, shows the benefit which has come in recent years from the revival of a real appreciation of the Greek spirit in France, and pleads for its more general appreciation among ourselves. But he is careful to separate this spirit from that special array of forms and proportions through which the Greeks themselves gave it voice ; and as we read the chapters called The Growth of Conscience in Modern Decorative Art, Historical Architecture and the Influence of the Personal Element Upon It, The Present State of Architecture, and The Royal Château of Blois, we realize that the thread which binds them all together, and makes them a genuine book with a consistent purpose and meaning, is a wise insistence upon the essential difference between the conditions which control and inspire architecture to-day and those which governed it in any epoch of the past.

We are shown that a wide acquaintance with many architectural tongues has succeeded to the firm possession of a single vernacular tongue, while the development of modern civilization presents ever new problems, unprecedented in their variety and complexity. Therefore, naïveté, un-self-consciousness, an instinctive following of common aims, an unquestioning use of common expedients, no longer exist; study, research, and self-conscious selection, resulting on the one hand in eclecticism, and on the other in the expression of personality, have been established in their stead.

All this has often been said before, but usually with deploring comments, and the assertion that as the great past was, so any great future needs must be. We are constantly told that we must somehow return to simplicity, naïveté of mind; must bend eclecticism to the establishment of general, or at least of national conformity; and must thus banish pronounced individuality from architecture, if it is again to flourish by fulfilling its true rôle as an interpreter of the corporate intelligence and taste, the typical conditions and aspirations, of humanity. Mr. Van Brunt, however, assumes an opposite point of view. Just for the reason, he maintains, that modern architecture is learned, self - conscious, based upon reason, comparison, and choice, it does represent, it does interpret, the current life of man ; indeed, “ it allies itself more closely with humanity than ever ; ” and therefore its future triumphs must be looked for along novel paths.

The great significance and value of Mr. Van Brunt’s book, we think, spring from the way in which — with apt historical illustrations, clear theoretical explantious, and much felicity of descriptive phrase — he establishes the correctness of this point of view. We are confident that he will open many eyes to the fact that we are curiously conservative with regard to the needs and the possibilities of modern architecture ; most illogically conservative, if we test ourselves by our attitude toward other manifestations of human thought. Why, indeed, should we hold a position here which we do not hold in respect to any form of science, any political or social question, even any other branch of art? Why here alone should we say, “ The future must be as the past has been “ ?

Surely we ought to recognize, here as elsewhere, that a spreading cosmopolitanism is the great characteristic of modern times ; that it embraces ever more and more the legacies of all the nations of the past as well as the teachings of all the nations of the present; that it must mean the growth of eclecticism in thought and action ; and that — breaking down barriers of place and time, weakening the integrity of national and local types, and increasing the materials for exact self-expression — it must also mean the accentuation of personality. Architecture now truthfully expresses this great characteristic and all its consequences, just as, in earlier times, it expressed the consequences of localization, limitation, intense nationalism, and community in aims and ideas. Should we not look forward to a day when it may develop beauty and power from its present kind of truth, rather than dream of a day when it may become powerful and beautiful by striving for a kind of truth which changed conditions have turned into falsehood ? Even if we think modern English literature inferior to that of Elizabeth’s time or of Anne’s, we do not lay the blame to the fact that it is less insular in spirit; nor do we say that it ought to concentrate itself upon one or two literary forms, as Elizabethan writers concentrated themselves upon the drama, eighteenth-century writers upon the essay and the heroic couplet. We recognize that new and wider times demand a new scope, a new eclecticism, and a new degree of personal independence in literature ; and, as Mr. Van Brunt shows, we ought to recognize the same thing with regard to architecture.

To-day our architecture is in a transition state ; it has lost the old simplicity, the old homogeneity, and it is as yet unable to digest that enormous wealth of material, to utilize rightly that new chance for personality in expression, which the development of the human mind and the enlargement of the artistic horizon have inevitably forced upon it. But if there is hope for its future, this must be read in a wiser employment of its riches, not in their willful, and therefore untruthful limitation; in a clearer, more sensible, sensitive, and exact, and consequently more artistic rendering of personal feeling, not in its oppression and suppression under an anachronistic yoke of general conformity. Instead of anticipating the establishment of “ a new style,” Mr, Van Brunt declares, — and, we believe, with entire veracity, — we ought to anticipate a time when, various and eclectic as they may be, our buildings will each and all possess “ style ” in the sense of unity, harmony, clarity, logically conceived and logically completed force and charm.

We should like to see some well-equipped student of poetry discuss in how far Mr. Van Brunt is right to blame the poets of the world — as he does in his final chapter — because they have never described architectural forms, and definitely interpreted their historical, æsthetic, and emotional significance , because they have merely noted the emotions aroused in the casual beholder, or at most have sketched them in an “ impressionistic ” manner. It would need, however, to be a long discussion, for it would involve the whole question in how far an art which appeals to the mind through words may try to portray artistic creations which speak primarily to the eye. Mr. Van Brunt’s own essay in descriptive verse is singularly charming; but we think its best passages are not those which describe the church portal which he takes as his theme, but those which characterize the intentions and emotions of its builders.

It is, of course, through mere slips of the pen that, on page 138, Mr. Van Brunt dates the palace of Diocletian at Spalatro from the end of the second instead of the third century, and, on page 104. speaks of “ the strong Gothic of the early Cistercian abbeys.”The first churches in which the austere tenets of the Cistercian order were embodied belong to the beginning of the twelfth century ; and it was the florid Romanesque, fostered by Clunisian builders, which provoked St. Bernard, standing in the typical Clunisian church at Vézelay, to the passionate declaration that its “ bizarre and monstrous figures,” carried even into the sanctuary itself, had nothing Christian about them. Mr. Van Brunt is much too well trained in the history of his art not to know this ; and therefore we may likewise see but a momentary forgetfulness in his assertion, on page 216, that the modern revival of Gothic in England “ is the only instance in history of a moral revolution in art.” More purely moral than this, less complicated with sentimental and patriotic ideas, was the Cistercian revolt against luxury in art. Of course it was not a revolution in the sense that it established a new structural system, — introduced a new style, in the usually accepted meaning be the term. But if one compares Cistercian Romanesque with other contemporary forms, —if, for instance, one compares the heavy, severe, and bald interior of St. Trophimus at Arles with the portal or with the cloister of the same church, — the difference between them, as expressions of the history of human thought and feeling, seems greater than that between Victorian Gothic and Victorian Renaissance, despite the fact that the round arch is used in both. The luxuriant native Romanesque of Provence was, indeed, practically killed by the Cistercian “reform;” and without our knowledge of the intense moral passion which inspired this reform, it would be impossible to understand how the same communities, in the same half-century, could have practiced two forms of art so radically unlike.

Mr. Van Brunt does but follow the example of all other historians when he says that the new principle of construction from which all the forms of mediæval art were to develop — the principle involved in “ the starting of the arch directly from the capitals of columns without the interposition of the horizontal entablature ” — was learned by early Christian builders from Diocletian’s palace. But one wishes that he could have been prompted to inaugurate a more accurate manner of speech with regard to this important building. Of course it is the one great landmark, — the one known and dated building in certain parts of which columns and arches were used with no trace of an entablature between them. But it is hard to believe that it taught or influenced, directly or indirectly, all the early Christian builders who worked in a similar way. It was a famous building, but was not in a prominent, accessible situation ; between the fourth and eighth centuries the age was one of artistic disintegration, and also, almost everywhere in the West, of dire artistic necessity. Many builders must have experimented, without knowledge of what their brethren were doing or recently had done ; and a new use of column and arch is just the experiment that would most naturally be forced upon them. Using, as we know they did, ready-made columns taken from ruined Roman works, and being, as we know they were, deficient in skill, and often in good materials, many of them must have sprung their arches of small stones directly from their borrowed capitals, with no more thought of principles or precedents than of the Weighty consequences which were to result from the general adoption of the new device.