Part 10

As the architrave expresses simple weight, and the frieze weight depending, so the cornice is weight impending. The great projection of this massive member beyond the face of the frieze and architrave contains in itself the ground of that expression; but it is carefully heightened by the deep undercutting of the corona, which throws the mass forward and separates it by a dark shadow from the top of the frieze; and it is still further heightened by a repetition of the rows of guttæ--which, however, in this instance seem to be sliding off the inclined faces of the mutules (inclined slabs set in the undercutting of the corona); so that the same device which gives dependent weight in the frieze, expresses weight impendent in the cornice.

These are only a few of the more obvious means by which the lovely equilibrium of the Doric style is created. There are many other details which it is impossible to notice here; but every one bears the central thought constantly in view, and adds to the most perfect--though not perhaps the highest--architectural beauty which the world has ever seen. The other so-called “orders” are only modifications or corruptions of the same idea.

III

Before proceeding to show how the idea of Greek architecture, symbolised in a system of construction and decoration which emphasised to the eye in every detail an exact adequacy of endeavour to effect, was modified or corrupted in the so-called “Ionic,” “Corinthian,” and other “orders,” a few words should be said about the very peculiar and little understood treatment of the wall by the Doric architects. As a contrast to the active conflict of apparently ascending power in the columns with the gravitating power, rendered, as it were, visible in the entablature, the treatment of the walls of the _naos_, _pronaos_, and _posticum_--that is, of the body of the temple and of the porches created by the prolongation of the side walls--is emphatically passive and neutral, and just the reverse of the treatment of the wall by the Egyptians, who made it the base of a truncated pyramid, a mass of conscious ponderosity, which “lean’d down on earth with all its weight.” The vertical junctures of the stones of the walls of the Greek Temple were rendered invisible by polishing their adjacent faces; but the horizontal faces were rough-worked, so that the wall-face presented a series of straight lines parallel to the base. These lines were only strong enough to be plainly seen, through the gaps in that torrent of ascending power, the fluted colonnade; increasing that force by their contrast, but themselves expressing nothing but the fact that the wall was a wall, built in ordinary courses of masonry. Had the perpendicular junctures of the masonry been visible, the contrast to the shafts--which were either monoliths or had the junctures of the _frustra_ so polished that they looked like monoliths--would have been lost. The _antæ_, or ends of the walls, are treated in a way which is particularly noteworthy. In the Roman corruptions of Greek architecture these antæ were confused with and often treated as flattened and applied shafts. The fact of passive resistance of the wall, in contrast to the active resistance of the colonnade, is carefully but very unobtrusively expressed in these wall-terminations in the purest Doric. Where the strongly ascending force of the shaft sacrifices power in order to prove its abundance, the antæ are increased in breadth and strength by successive cappings, or by mouldings so undercut as to express a rolling over or sufferance from superimposed weight; there is no _entasis_ or visible swell in the antæ--until they were used by later architects who had lost the sense of what entasis meant; these wall-terminations were further strengthened by a base, which no Doric shaft ever had. The base and capping were, more or less, continued along the top and bottom of the whole wall, the doors and other apertures of which usually diminished in width towards the top, suggesting--but still in a passive and unobtrusive way--the simple reality of weight and pressure in the wall, and affording a further and most important contrast to the living “emporstreben,” as the German critics call it, of the line of shafts. Thus Mr. Ruskin is wrong in saying that “in the Greek Temple the wall is as nothing; the entire interest is in the detached columns and the frieze (entablature?) they bear.” The wall is the expression of the passive life that becomes active when it is concentrated in the colonnade, and has so much more work to do.

In the “Ionic Order” exactly the same idea of the symbolisation of the balance of material and intellectual forces is carried out with the same integrity as in the Doric, though with less simplicity and obviousness. The idea of elasticity--as noticed by Franz Kugler in his _Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte_ for the first time--is added to that of simple upward met by simple downward force. It occurs especially in the base and the volutes of the column, as these members are found modified and perfected by the Attic architects. By tracing the growth of the Attic base, much light will be thrown upon the Greek architectural idea. A base is a support for the shaft. The Doric had no base, because the notion of any weight to be supported was not allowed to be expressed anywhere but in the entablature; the Ionic differing from the Doric mainly in this--that the visible conflict between weight and supporting power, which in the Doric was wholly concentrated upon the abacus, or tile, where the column met the entablature, was in the Ionic so distributed that almost every member was at once agent and reagent, expressing an adequate power of supporting what was above it, but also requiring support from that which was below. A great square stone or plinth is the simplest form of base; but this would have looked poor and inorganic underneath the elaborately fluted and voluted column. The square stone cut into a circle with its edges rounded is the next simplest form; but it was left for the Romans to use this base, for they had not the sensitive eye that discerned the fatal effect of swelling or sufferance from weight which this cushion-like form conveys. The first Ionic base had a _scotia_, or hollow receding moulding, under the round _torus_. This contradicted the above impression; but it did it violently and awkwardly. Finally, the Attic base was formed of a large torus below, a smaller one above, and the scotia, or receding moulding, between them; so that the base--which, on the whole, was a spreading and supporting member--was nevertheless narrowest where it would have been thickest had it suffered, like a cushion, from the weight it carried. The fluting of the Ionic order, while it expressed ascendant force like the Doric, had a flat space or fillet instead of a sharp edge between each concavity, and each line of fluting had semicircular terminations. The effect of this was to endow the shaft itself with a substantive expression of weight, which had no existence in the Doric shaft, that flew, like a sheaf of arrows, from the earth to strike against the ovolo of the capital. The Ionic capital, like the Ionic base, had its elastic character perfectly developed by Attic architects. In the original Ionic the ears of the volutes simply hang on either side of the ovolo like horns; but in Attic specimens they appear to be formed by the pressure of the entablature upon a series of elastic curves. The Ionic abacus differs from the Doric in expressing, in common with all the other members of the Ionic column, an active supporting power; whereas the Doric tile is simply negative, the “point of rest” between the opposing forces of the column and entablature. The architrave, the first member of the Ionic entablature, instead of expressing weight by simple mass, as the Doric architrave does, consists of two or three layers of masonry, the upper projecting over the other, and giving to the entire entablature the expression of impending weight, which in the Doric is limited to the corona. In the frieze there are no guttæ or triglyphs, because the pendent effect which these give to the Doric frieze would be inconsistent with the continuation of the idea of support as well as weight throughout all the members of the Ionic order. In the pure Doric there is absolutely no such thing as ornament; though Kugler, notwithstanding that he is of all critics the one who has come nearest to the perception of the true sense of Greek architecture, asserts that the head and foot members of the antæ are merely ornamental. How far this is from being the case has been now shown. The so-called “egg and arrow” and other figures into which Greek mouldings were cut have nothing to do with ornament. They are simply the means of emphasising the forms of the mouldings and rendering them visible at distances at which otherwise they would not be distinguished. But in the Ionic we have real architectural ornament, and lines of roses or bands of foliage are inserted at points where it is desirable to express--in the absence of more severe means of expression--the freedom and cheerfulness with which a superincumbent weight is carried.

The “Corinthian” is only a highly decorated Ionic, and the Greeks of the good age seem to have thought it fittest for secular or semi-secular purposes. It only attained somewhat of the character of an “Order” in the hands of the Romans, who had little taste for or understanding of pure Greek art, but had sufficient intelligence to see how to apply ornament for the most part in the right places. When they tried to improve upon the Doric of the Parthenon, they did it in a very characteristic way. They simplified it by doing away with the fluting of the shaft and setting it upon a base of the single torus or roll-moulding, so that it looked like a big sausage set on end upon a small curly one; and instead of the channel cut in the neck of the shaft--which must have been a hopeless puzzle to them--they bound the shaft at the same point with a projecting moulding: as the Egyptians did rightly, because they wanted to express an idea the exact opposite of the Greek one. Meretricious ornament and mock simplicity went hand in hand, and all pretensions to integrity of style had to be abandoned when the arch and the entablature had to be reconciled. As builders the Romans perhaps surpassed all others before or since; and as architects also they were as great as they could be, in the absence of the Greek devotion to the unity produced by one all-pervading symbolic thought.

IV

The pointed Gothic, though it took its rise more than fifteen hundred years after the decay of Attic architecture, and after the intervention of several other styles, of which the “Norman” constitutes one of the five great and only pure styles which the world has seen, is nevertheless in closer artistic relationship with the Attic style than the Norman is, and should be therefore treated earliest. The immense effort which was made to develop a great style from the dome--the natural outcome of the circular arch introduced by the Romans--never came to anything but the production of here and there an edifice which, like the Pantheon and St. Sophia, were miracles of technical skill, until the idea was taken up by the fanciful Moresque architects. Again, the Norman, though a great integral style, as will be shown, is not based upon any relation to weight of material; which is at once the great fact of building, and as such is made by the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects to express the material, intellectual, and spiritual character of worship in ways that exhaust this primary source of architectural symbolism.

Weight--simple and irresistible in the Egyptian, adequately supported in the Greek--is, in the pointed Gothic, not abolished as in the Moresque, but totally vanquished and borne above, as by a superior spiritual power. Two happy accidents gave rise to this architectural development. As the Egyptian architecture was an artistic transfiguration of the necessities of an original cavern architecture, and as the Doric Temple in a similar way transmuted to undreamt-of significance the forms of the timber hut, so the Gothic architecture found in the Basilica--the main forms of which were transmitted through the Norman cathedral--the accidental key to what probably will for ever remain the supreme glory of the art of temple-building. The Basilica itself contained nothing but the discovery of the most convenient way of roofing-in and lighting a great oblong hall. It consisted of nave and aisles; the walls of the nave rising within and above those of the aisles, to form the clerestory, which gave the centre of the edifice externally the appearance of unsheathing itself from and soaring above the rest. The means of emphasising and multiplying this effect indefinitely--as the pyramidal effect was multiplied and emphasised in the Egyptian Temple--were provided by another fortunate accident, the development of the pointed arch from the mechanical necessities of cross-vaulting. No sooner did a row of pointed arches make its appearance in the clerestory windows than the power of Gothic expression, latent in the main body of the building, became obvious. The tower, with its spire, was the first and simplest sequence. It was to the clerestory what this was to the main body of the building. In the course of a few years every detail of construction and decoration became subordinated to the heavenward flight which the main masses of the building had thus taken.

This fact is a threadbare commonplace of architectural criticism, and one which is obvious to the eye of the dullest beholder of the interior or exterior of every Gothic cathedral; but the number and subtlety of the means by which the effect is gained is beyond all reckoning and analysis; and the object of this paper is to point out only a few of them which are not to be found in architectural manuals, and to show how this all-prevailing stream of ardent aspiration was moderated and governed so as to acquire the expression of peace as well as ardour, as befitted the beauty of the Christian temple. Mr. Freeman comes nearer than any other eminent architectural critic to a clear discernment of Gothic character when he says: “Where there is no strife there is no victory; the vertical line cannot be called predominant unless the horizontal exist in a visible condition of subjection and inferiority.” But the vertical line exists in Gothic architecture as much more than a foil to vertical character; it checks and keeps it within bounds, and exhibits it as an expression of the infinite bounded and peacefully bounded by the finite--which is the true character of the life and worship symbolised. Hence the square-headed tower is as fine, if not a finer finish to the Gothic cathedral than the spire. Compare the tower of York with the spire of Freyburg in Breisgau--the finest spire in the world, rising as it does as a spire from the ground--and it will be found that the cessation of the great, steady heavenward current in York, gradually prepared for as it is by the treatment of the face of the tower, and culminating in the compromise of open battlements, each of which frames the pointed arch, creates a more solemn and heart-expanding sense of infinite aspiration than the apparently greater flight of endeavour in the famous spire, which soars indeed twice the height of the tower, but, as it were, evaporates as it soars. The minds of the Gothic architects seem to have been much divided as to which was better: the checked and contained expression of the tower, in which an undiminished force of ascension was suggested, or the exhausting flight of the spire. The tower of Salisbury, for example, was not originally intended to carry the spire, which was added long after the cathedral was completed. They often obtained both features, giving a spire to only one of the west-end towers. There is, perhaps, no more satisfactory treatment of the west front than this, as may be seen in Strasburg Cathedral. Like many other fine effects, this most probably arose from accident--the accident of its not being convenient at the time to add the second spire; but that the incompleteness was fully recognised as a perfection is proved by the many instances of its having been, if not devised, allowed to remain.

There are three ways of treating the spire. It may commence at the earth, as that of Freyburg does, without the intervention of a tower; or it may rise from a tower the head of which is considerably larger than the base of the spire; or the base of the spire may coincide with the top of the tower, in which case it is called a “broach spire.” The second is the finest and by far the most frequent arrangement, as it combines the effects of spire and tower without confusing them; a part of the force of the tower being contained and checked, and a part being allowed to take its self-exhausting flight. It is to be observed, however, that even when the spire is most prominent--as in Lichfield, where there are three of them--it is, when compared with the whole building, only as it were an accidental escape and waste of the vast current of vertical force expressed by the entire mass of the building. Perhaps the most expressive treatment of the tower is in the innumerable examples in which only a very small proportion of its vertical force is permitted to escape in four or more pinnacles, one of which is often larger than the others. Spires and pinnacles are in most cases covered with lines of “crockets”: figures in which ascending power is usually expressed by the upward growth of a leaf; which is emphasised by some check, made apparent to the eye by a strong bulge, like that of a current flowing over a stone. Wherever the idea of weight or side-thrust would occur naturally to the eye--as in buttresses, lower angles of gables, etc.--there is an especial outburst of flaming finial or pinnacle, or other mode of contradicting and reversing the idea, which the Greek architect would have been contented with accepting and beautifying.

Let us now enter the church, which is, within as well as without, a great geyser of ascending life; which may indeed lose itself in the dimness of the vaulted roof, as the spire loses itself in air, but never shows weariness of its flight or a memory of the earth from which it started. As in Egyptian and Greek architecture, so in the Gothic, we must look to the column for the strongest expression of the characterising idea. The Egyptian column suffered and seemed half-crushed under the weight it bore; the Greek rose to its burthen with the glad assurance of being fully adequate to its task. The Gothic is conscious of no task at all; but flies, without the least diminution of its substance, and without swelling either under sufferance or gathering of strength by entasis at any particular point, to the commencement of the arch; where it divides itself, sending up the streams of its clustered shafts, some into the lines of the arch and others to the top of the clerestory wall; then dividing again to follow the lines of the vaulting, there to meet like fingers joined in prayer, but still having no thought of the weight of the roof they really help to carry.

Mr. Ruskin complains of Gothic capitals--as he might also have done of Gothic bases--that they are unnecessary and ridiculous because they have no bearing power. If they had, they would cease to be Gothic, and the whole character of the wonderful art would be ruined. Capitals are sometimes entirely omitted, as in the shafted piers of Cologne; but when this is the case the point at which the arch springs becomes doubtful to the eye, and there is something exhausting in the wholly uninterrupted flight of the vertical lines. The capitals, like the horizontal _astragal_ which often binds at intervals the clustered column, have no other purpose but to correct these effects of unrelieved continuity; and the mouldings of capitals, when they exist, not only have no and express no “bearing-power,” but they very carefully express the contrary by various devices of undercutting, etc. It is the same with the base, when it is not altogether dispensed with. The most common form of Gothic base is a curious caricature of the Attic base, the form of which had been transmitted unimpaired to the Gothic architect through the Romanesque and Norman. It was perched upon and _overhung_ a stilted plinth, which was itself a reversal of the expression of elementary support in the original flat plinth; and the curves of this base were so diminished in one part and exaggerated in another that all reference to supporting power seemed to be derisively abolished. The “ogee” is a moulding which strongly expresses carrying power. A favourite Gothic base was two _reversed_ ogees, the lower projecting far over the edge of the plinth, which, in classic architecture, always afforded a wide-spreading field for the base. And so on.

It would take a bulky volume to trace the wonderful integrity with which the three modes of envisaging the idea of weight are carried out in the three great architectures; but enough has been said to give the clue by which a fairly cultivated and perceptive student may follow up the subject for himself.

V