CHAPTER FIVE: THE MECHANICS OF GENIUS
Logomachia: The mathematics of taste
As was said earlier, Garbett
subscribed to a notion formally belonging to both theology and contemporary
science which assigned a purposive habit to nature. That habit could be
verified by the identification of an implicate order in the phenomena of
nature. This assumption allowed Garbett to talk about artistic creativity in
terms of the discovery of laws and truths. The notion of discovery, as opposed to invention, places
the formulation of a precept upon an objective plane. With reference to the
certainty of purposive order in the universe, discovery is considered better than invention. Discovery
reserves the privilege of invention for a primordial external agent. This agent
is God; his invention is Nature. All that is the artist's own is his
perspicuity in having discovered, disclosed, deduced, or traced the principles,
lamps, laws, truths of architecture that lay hidden within the hieroglyphs of
nature or within the creations of true architects.
In Garbett's view of the artistic process, the artist does not wish his
discoveries and consequent formulas to be dependent on his own imagination.
Instead he wishes them characterised by the self-evidence inherent in the
possibility of deduction. His own creative role is reduced to that of medium
between his public and created nature.
[1]
The question then arises: Why does Garbett want this?
The desire to be a mere medium within a necessitarian
scheme of things feeds on two interrelated traditions. One is science, the
other religion. What they share in common is that the nature of their
judgements are a-priori. They satisfy the desire for certainty, necessity and
predictability. In the early nineteenth century science and religion were not
mutually exclusive. This is amply proven by the flourishing of natural theology
in the writings of William Paley and the Bridgewater
Treatises. Garbett wanted architecture to be based on the same certainties
as science and religion. He wanted a science
of architecture, or a natural
architecture, just as Paley wanted a natural theology. The scientific theorist
actively goes out of his way to deny his own creativity so as to safeguard his
credibility. Garbett wanted to classify one aspect of human experience -beauty
in architecture- into irreducible qualities which could measure rightness and wrongness, which could
reveal truths and paths, merely by adding and subtracting:
The existence of professors of [architecture], implies in
itself that they profess to have attained, by special study, the ability to do rightly
that which others, without that preparation, do wrongly. That is, it implies
the existence of such things as right and wrong taste
in architecture, or, in other words, the dependence of this art on fixed
PRINCIPLES,-otherwise the profession would be useless.
[2]
Garbett considered it
essential that the principles of architecture be seen as laws which pre-exist
their formulation. The positive was being set up against the arbitrary.
The fall of the Gothic system had allowed the theoretical
channels guiding architects to erode to the point where design choices became
arbitrary. Architecture was no longer concerned with the substance of a
building, but with clothing. Form had been artificially separated from content.
This had caused architectural theory to slip into an easy system of
reproducible forms. Choices were made on the basis of near arbitrary motives
such as novelty and antiquity. As these were not considered
by Garbett to be valid motives for the selection of forms, then what was the
solution? How could this hollow and merely nostalgic historicism be stopped?
The answer he proposes and which we shall be discussing in greater detail later
on, was a new system of construction which had, as yet, not been allowed to
develop into a style. If that system or style of construction would be
consistently applied, it would generate a new style of architecture. A
systematic analysis of nature and of past pure
styles would make contemporary architects refocus on the real problems of
architecture and make them forget about stylistic pluralism. The question was
not the Hübschian one of which style?
The question to be answered was, What is
style? If contemporary architects could be made to understand of what an
architectural style was constituted, how it erupted by necessity, then that
understanding would make them realise that to achieve true architecture, they
would have to refrain from trying to separate form from content, that is
clothing from structure.
Prior to that, the creative process had to be understood in
terms of necessary, as opposed to
arbitrary developments. The mind of the artists had to be shown to be working
according to a predetermined plan. A
positive and rigid metaphysical substructure was prerequisite to the
understanding of artistic progress. There was something called perfection and
Garbett assumed it to be external to the perceiving subject, that is, it was an
objective quality. The possibility of such an objective perfectibility related
to a self-consistent system, was essential to his theory: A style progressed
until it reached perfection; it then capitulated into decline. But if there is
something called perfection, and if perfection exists independently of the
beholder, how then to account for apparent and persistent differences in taste?
Garbett had a solution to that:
`There is,' says a
proverb, `no disputing about taste,' i.e. affectations of the palate or other
senses. It is far otherwise with Taste -another word for sound and cultivated
sense, judgement, and perception of fitness. This is a most legitimate,
instructive, and fertile subject for useful discussion and conclusive
argumentation. Most of the differences that appear between persons of
acknowledged good taste will be found on examination to arise from their
different acceptations of the same words, and to vanish when these words are
defined and carefully limited to one meaning.
[3]
The passage is part of
a long polemical tradition concerning the nature of taste. The problem, here,
is not the definition of taste however. The problem is the definition of words
in general. Garbett is not bothered about aesthetics, he is worried about
semantics. That is, as far as the two can be separated. The passage just quoted
was directly inspired on Reynolds' Seventh Discourse:
The common saying that
tastes are not to be disputed, owes its influence, and its general reception, to
the same error which leads us to imagine this faculty of too high an original to
submit to the authority of an earthly tribunal. (...) We often appear to differ
in sentiments from each other, merely from the inaccuracy of terms, as we are
not obliged to speak always with critical exactness.
[4]
Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our
Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) had
also started with similar desires to standardise meaning.
[5]
All of these emphatic demands for univocality descend directly from Locke's plea
in his physiology of the human understanding and more distantly and less
intentionally from Hobbes' work in the same field.
[6]
In the Essay
concerning Human Understanding, Locke recounts resolving an argument with
his colleagues about whether any liquor passed through the filaments of the
nerves.
[7]
The argument was nullified as soon as everyone present was agreed on the
definition of a liquor. The point of this illustration was to show that there
would be general philosophical consensus as soon as the Babylonian curse was
lifted. People not only spoke in different tongues but also with different
meanings. Looseness of terminology was seen by Locke as the main cause of
metaphysical obstructions. These obstructions were made even worse by the
individual fastening of meaning. Personalised dictionaries, when undeclared,
could create impenetrable dams of exclusion, hard circumferences of meaning
which would obstruct the easy flow of discourse, causing everybody to be
talking at crossed purposes. In the end Locke was able to resolve the argument
about liquor and nerves by forcing everyone to declare their dictionaries. Locke's
essay provided many
with the impetus to quantify and standardise meanings at the outset of their
theory. It must be remembered that this tendency was a response to the
metaphysical implications of Galilean and Newtonian physics. Science had
revealed how useful exactness and quantification was and had inspired a
mechanical vision of the universe.
[8]
Locke had worked out the implications of such a natural order for the human
understanding and one of his many bequests to the nineteenth century was the desire
for a mathematics of meaning to create the possibility of a semantic and/or
moral calculus:
I am bold to think, writes Locke, that morality is capable of demonstration,
as well as mathematics: since the precise real essence of the things moral
words stand for may be perfectly known, and so the congruity and incongruity of
the things themselves be certainly discovered; in which consists perfect
knowledge.[9]
The possibilities of
referring ethical discourse to precise external standards, provided a strong
impetus to Garbett's scientification of art theory. The ideal, as he envisioned
it, would be to sharpen words to such a degree that one would ultimately be able to deduce the complete Doric order from simply understanding the principle
of contrast.[10]
Garbett's solution to the problem of taste and
subjectivism was simply to deny that any intrinsic difference in Taste between
individuals was possible. Taste was the perception
of fitness, its discovery. Taste was not dependent on whim and invention. A
quality such as propriety could be assumed external, pertaining to the object,
so that individual differences in perception needed only small semantic
adjustments to align themselves along constant values. Taste was a matter of
overcoming communication difficulties, of conforming each individual's
metaphysical landscape to universally valid standards, instituted and
maintained by way of a social contract. To assume an intrinsic difference in
the perception of individuals was to deny even the possibility of communication.
Such a position would create greater philosophical problems than it could get
rid of in the attempt to explain away any intersubjective differences in Taste.
Univocality would level the subjective element in such a
complex issue as aesthetics and make it conform to rules and axioms as simple
as those of mathematics. The phenomena of nature, or rather the values inherent
in them could then be considered both positive and permanent. Only language was
arbitrary and whimsical. Language was the cause of all dissent. Once an exact
mathematical univocality was established, all misunderstandings would be
cleared up and all differences of opinion would dissolve into a uniform
physical landscape of objective references which had always existed but which had
hitherto simply been veiled by wilfulness and ignorance.
Principles and the mechanics of genius
In the light of the
above it is possible to defend the idea of genius as part of a mechanical
operation. Vitruvius concludes the preface to his emperor with the claim that he
has succeeded in disclosing (aperui) all the principles of
architecture.
[11]
The act of disclosure specifically implies a prior and concealed existence of
principles, presupposing an external reality to which a key exists. At the same
time the word all, precludes any
further movement on the subject. Whatever the motive for such a wildly
confident claim, and whatever the spirit in which such a claim has to be taken,
the shift in Garbett's position in relation to that of Vitruvius consciously exhibits
the prudence of an acquired scientific attitude: Garbett did not pretend to state all the principles now known in the
history of architecture, nor perhaps even the most important of them.[12]
He had a narrower purpose for his book:
It rather aims to dwell
on those [principles] which are most neglected in the present (notoriously
defective) practice of this art.
[13]
Vitruvius could see
little room for artistic progress, nor was he particularly looking for it. His
theory proposes an academic historicism referring back to permanent values
embodied in the image of Greece. Garbett, on the other hand, was about to
propose a system of building from which a new style of architecture could arise
sometime in the future. To maintain a sense of control over that future,
theoretical discourse had to be provided with a model for artistic progress
which followed an ordered path into the unknown. This model arranges artistic
principles according to an anabatical ladder or chain. Artistic discovery thus
becomes subject to rigid procedures of discovery, but which, unlike Vitruvius,
does not preclude the possibility of future change and development:
The principles of Taste
in Architecture, as in every other fine art, can never be all elicited: if they
could, the art would cease to be a fine art: it would no longer afford a field
for genius, which consists in the discovery and practice of principles
previously unknown. (...) Every principle in Art (unlike one in science) has to
be discovered twice; first, by the artist of genius who introduces it into the
practice of his art, but would be quite unable to state or explain it in words;
and secondly, by the critic who translates it into verbal language, and thereby
makes it part of the theory of art. Many centuries may elapse between these two
discoveries of the same principle: when at length it is absorbed into the theory
of art, it becomes common property, and the practice of it ceases to be a mark
of genius, for genius consists in outstripping theory. The advance of theory,
however, does not narrow the field of genius, but urges it on into a higher
sphere. As its secrets are, one by one, wrested from it, so it must wrest others
from nature.
[14]
One must not
immediately infer that scientific principles according to Garbett were considered
to be somehow different to artistic principles. The fact that the one needs to
be discovered twice while the other is discovered only once does not indicate a
fundamental difference between art and science. Both try to overcome and unfold
nature. Instead the distinction between a scientific and an artistic principle
indicates the basic similarity between the roles of art-theorist and the
scientist. The scientist has set about unravelling the divine, his action is
that of understanding and representing. The theorist of art is in this sense a
scientist, the two only differ in the object of their interest. The art- or
architectural theorist has for his field of interest the productions of man,
while the scientist has for his field of interest the productions of nature.
But when the productions of man are pure and truthful they obey the laws of
nature, as was the case with the Greek and Gothic architects.
Organicism and the use of art
The most frequent
criticism of science and scientific procedure during the early part of the
nineteenth century, concerned the separation of entities which many felt should
be seen as one whole. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had insisted on the importance of
a conception of the world whereby the whole was allowed to remain in
tact.
[15]
His ideas go some way to represent the doubts and hesitations to which the
appeal of science was subject during this period. On the one hand science had
infused all inquiry with a desirable measure of objectivity: setting external
standards by which things could be quantified and their relations measured.
This had obvious advantages for the normative sciences. On the other hand,
science was successful in dislocating the world into fragments, instituting
differences without referring them back to a greater resemblance.
That fragmentation was not all due to the exigencies of science however.
In some ways science could be seen to support an organic world-view. In 1831
Peter Legh had identified a crisis in contemporary architecture which, he said,
lacked dignity because of an absence of system.
[16]
The desire for system involved Legh in a rather interesting syncretic
eclecticism reminiscent of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and
Diderot:
[17]
Legh's objective was to
establish a regular, systematic,
universal, and scientific arrangement of important theories, well weighed,
compared, and modified by each other, that can alone establish the restoration
of architecture..[18]
Legh proposed a
systematisation of all systems, a synthesis of all the best parts of earlier
architectural theories. This super-theory, a music of the eye as he called it,
was justified by a direct analogy to science:
In any science, all the
leading and important principles intimately depend on one another; and (..) they
are excellent only in respect of their relative use and importance.
[19]
Legh's eclecticism was
intended to bring together all the true
principles of architecture, from whatever source. Their truth would guarantee
their interdependence and their interdependence would in turn indicate their truth.
In other words, science was seen to be a system which supported an integrated
view of the world.
There is no evidence that Garbett had read Legh. If he
had, he would certainly have approved of this idea. As it is, Garbett practised
what Legh preached. Garbett's system is the result of a conscious eclecticism,
a bricolage-critique of previous theorists. The guiding principle in this
critique postulates that the interdependence of principles is itself an
indication of their validity.
The important analogy
here is the one where art is seen as equivalent to nature. The interdependence
of the laws of nature is paradigmatic for art. This in fact can be defined as
one aspect of an organic approach to art. Garbett's organicism may in fact be
related to the Germanic idealism of Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle
[20] if only because they had directly influenced the development of
transcendentalism in America.
[21]
Apart from the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay on Art provided Garbett with a small but necessary insight for the denouement of the first chapter of the Treatise, and despite Garbett's
dismissive remarks about Emerson's qualities as a philosopher, the essay on Art obviously moulded much of Garbett's
attitude to the relation between art and nature.
Emerson's preliminary thesis in the essay on Art is that the Kantian distinction
between beauty and use is detrimental to sound ethics. Emerson allowed that the
act of semantic distinction was responsible for making human creativity
possible in the first place. But the effect of this was that it put art on
the same level as science. Emerson conceived the proper purpose of art to be
similar to that of science, namely, to further the understanding of
nature.
[22]
This led Emerson to try to diminish the philosophical gap between nature and
culture. Such a gap assumes that culture, as represented by the productions of
man, is somehow intrinsically different to nature, as represented by the
productions of God and the animals and other forms of life. Emerson was
determined to see good art as an expression of natural law:
What is man but nature's
finer success in self-explication?.. and what is his speech, his love of
painting, love of nature but a still finer success?
[23]
The processes of good
art are identical to the processes of nature. Good art is man's attempt at
divine creation. Art can therefore unfold nature. The relationship between man
and art approaches the relationship between God and Nature. It is not for
nothing that the good artist is often labelled divine:
A true announcement of the law of creation,
writes Emerson again, if a man were found
worthy to declare it, would carry art up into
the kingdom of nature,
and destroy its separate and contrasted existence.
[24]
This is the program of
Garbett's Treatise. His primary objective
is to find an architecture which is completely founded on natural law. As far
as Emerson is concerned, this justifies a complete and rigorous organicism with
regard to art. It also makes art supplementary and even secondary to nature.
Emerson's essay on art is in fact an essay on nature. Emerson's organicism
leads to a function for art which is ethical and didactic. The highest function
of art is to teach what is natural. Garbett accepted that as we shall see when
discussing his concepts of the architectural polite and architectural poetry.
Back to genius
The difference between
the artist and the scientist or art-theorist is best expressed by the role
played by language in their respective activities. Artistic genius relies on a sharp
division between doing and saying, between practice and theory. Artistic genius
is the human embodiment of a natura
naturans and, as such, purely performative. In its search for expression,
artistic genius paradoxically outstrips nothing but language: it is silent in
that it does not have the tools to perform a constative translation of what it
does. Moving and rupturing the borders of experience, genius is unable to
describe and analyse what it comes across or what it does or makes. The artist
cannot represent his work of art in any other way but in the medium the artist
has chosen for his or her mode of expression. The artist, does not understand his work of art in terms of
prescriptions to reproduce his magic touch:
[Principles] are the
secrets of great artists, kept secret, not from any selfish motive, but because
artists, seldom much skilled in the use of verbal language, can rarely translate
into that language even the principles with which they are most imbued. Nay, the
most important of these are often of so refined and delicate a nature as hardly
to admit of statement in words. `Yet,' says Sir Joshua Reynolds, `It does not
follow but that the mind may be put into such a train as to perceive, by a kind
of scientific sense, that propriety which words, particularly words of
unpractised writers such as we are, can but feebly suggest'.
[25]
The postulation of a
scientific sense by Reynolds is presumably meant as a complement to the better
known moral sense postulated by Francis Hutcheson. It represents an intuitively
guided surgical instrument for the discovery of scientific truths which correspond to an external reality. The
scientific sense prefigures science in that it is an intuitive instrument by
which it is possible to act but not to represent. The artist of genius has an
intuitive grasp of the principle he has discovered, his understanding of that
principle constitutes the ability to use the principle, but cannot represent
it. For this reason Garbett insists that the principle be discovered twice, if
necessary across the space of centuries. The intuitively held principle, lying
both hidden and for all to see in the particular configuration of visual signs
as kneaded, hacked, painted or drawn into shapes by the artist of genius, has
to be decoded, or, if you will, re-coded into words and precepts. That process
makes the principle part of art-theory.
The implications of this immediately relegate the theory
of art into a role that is supplementary to the artist; a role that is
retrospective and merely affirmative.
Genius on the other hand, finds new metaphysical paths and obstacles
through which to channel experience. That particular way of doing dominates the
work of art, becomes its focal point, its character. Theory maps this character
by translating it into words and precepts. Theory conventionalises style and
character; holds them up for all to understand and possess. Theory drowns
genius by making its discoveries part of language. And language by virtue of
its raison d'être, is communal. The purpose of language is to make the unique
accessible. Artistic genius is allied to practice, the quod significatur, it is mute and proposes an hierarchical
relationship between doing and saying by isolating itself until it is overcome
and disseminated by theory. Artistic genius does not represent nature, instead
it does like nature does, and this is
Garbett's main precept for imitation, derived from Quatremère de Quincy and the
Renaissance.
What does this say of
Garbett's theory? Does he consider himself merely supplementary to genius? The answer is, of course, no, not in the
least. By confining Genius to the mute act of perpetual penetration, by making
it intuitive and uncontrollable, Garbett's theory is not addressed to genius.
The Treatise is an exhortation addressed
to those who follow, those who afterwards live upon the achievements of genius
as translated into precepts by the supplementary theorist. The main short-term
purpose of Garbett's Treatise is to
lift mediocrity a notch or two. That does not mean the Treatise cannot help genius on to its next act of penetration into
the unknown. However, by declaring to have finally understood the meaning of
Nature in terms of contemporary science, and by declaring to have grasped the
causes of Greek and Gothic architecture, Garbett's theory does become a motive
force for genius to climb higher, to a level of which the vague outlines have
been discerned or at least predicted by Garbett. His understanding of nature's
relationship to architecture, of the way the Greeks and the Gothicists looked
at nature will finally exhaust their respective levels of principles and will
force genius onto the next level of principles, causing a new architecture to
arise. That architecture will, Garbett is sure, be based on the tensile style
of construction.
Taste
'"Taste", he says....."er, taste is a
thing....." (Well, I don't know what he said it was...),
Diderot, Rameau's Nephew.
Within the dialectic of
what has here been dubbed the mechanics of genius, taste represents an
underlying logic, it is the judgement of genius:
Genius and taste, writes Sir Joshua
Reynolds, in their common acceptation,
appear to be very nearly related; the difference lies only in this, that genius
has super-added to it a habit or power of execution; or we may say, that taste,
when this power is added, changes its name, and is called genius. They both, in
the popular opinion, pretend to an entire exemption from the restraint of
rules. It is supposed that their powers are intuitive; that under the name of
genius great works are produced, and under the name of taste an exact judgement
is given, without our knowing why, and without our being under the least
obligation to reason, precept, or experience... One can scarce state these
opinions without exposing their absurdity.[26]
Taste, when language
has become fully mathematical, stands for nothing more than the good. The artistic genius wields a
sense which perceives the structure of the world and acts upon it. Taste is the
good which genius is able to broaden or refine when he grasps new principles.
It is the theorist who later makes that broadening or refining of the good a
part of general discourse. One could put the relationship Garbett perceives
between principles, taste and genius in the following way. Taste the raw
material, the perception of the good. Genius represents the agent by which
taste is broadened or refined intuitively. Principles are the axioms of action,
laws by which the good can be achieved. These principles are plucked from
Nature by a process of intuition and then coded into norms by which the effect
which genius has mastered intuitively can be reproduced systematically.
The implications for
the concept of nature are that nature must be infinite in a finite sort of way:
like a ladder, one dimension is finite and constant, the other is infinite and
progressive. Genius, having depleted one level of principles, is forced onto
ever higher levels. This combination of an infinite number of finite levels
from which principles can be deduced, implies that there is progress in art, a
form of teleological evolution, an inevitable movement towards ultimate
perfection.
1.
For
a good example of such an attitude cf. John Dee, Essential readings ed. by
Gerald Suster, London 1986, p. 30.
3.
He
goes on: Thus a late writer [Ruskin, Seven Lamps, Section XIX, in "The
Lamp of Beauty,"] on architecture
lays this down as `a principle of common sense. Wherever you can rest, there
decorate. Where rest is forbidden, so is beauty.' Now, taking these words in
their accustomed meaning, the latter part of the statement is very disputable,
since common sense and the observation of nature fail in discovering that
beauty is forbidden anywhere, or in any circumstance; but when we learn that
this word, as used by the author, is synonymous with ornament or decoration,
our objection vanishes. In: Treatise,
p. v-vi He later goes on to deny the interchangeability of beauty and ornament.
5.
In
the preface to the first edition Burke writes of his motives: The author...found that he was far from
having any thing like an exact theory of our passions, or a knowledge of their
genuine sources; he found that he could
not reduce his notions to any fixed or consistent principles; and he had
remarked that others lay under the same difficulties. He observed that the
ideas of the sublime and the beautiful were frequently confounded; and that
both were indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing, and sometimes
of natures directly opposite.... Such a confusion of ideas must certainly
render all our reasonings upon subjects of this kind extremely inaccurate and
inconclusive. Could this admit of any remedy, I imagined it could only be from
a diligent examination of our passions in our own breasts; from a careful
survey of the properties of things which we find by experience to influence
those passions; and by a sober and attentive investigation of the laws of
nature, by which those properties are capable of affecting the body, and thus
of exciting our passions. If this could be done, it was imagined that the rules
deducible from such an inquiry might be applied to the imitative arts, and to
whatever else they concerned, without much difficulty. Edmund Burke (1987)
p. 1.
6.
The
phrase is Kant's: In recent times the
hope dawned upon us of seeing this dispute settled, and the legitimacy of her
claims established by a kind of Physiology
of the human understanding -that of the celebrated Locke. Immanuel Kant
(1969) p. 2. For Locke on words see his Essay
concerning Human Understanding, Esp. Book III, chapters IX-XI.
7.
The debate having been
managed a good while, by variety of arguments on both sides, I (who had been used
to suspect, that the greatest part of disputes were more about the
signification of words than a real difference in the conception of things)
desired, that, before they went any further on in this dispute, they would
first examine and establish amongst them, what the word liquor signified. (...)
..there was no one there that thought not himself to understand very perfectly
what the word liquor stood for; which I think, too, none of the most perplexed
names of substances. However..upon examination [they] found that the
signification of that word was not so settled or certain as they had all
imagined; but that each of them made it a sign of a different complex idea.
This made them perceive that the main of their dispute was about the
signification of that term; and that they differed very little in their
opinions concerning some fluid and subtle matter passing through the conduits
of the nerves; though it was not so easy to agree whether it was to be called
liquor or no, a thing, which, when considered, they thought it not worth the
contending about. Locke, Essay, III, IX, 16.
11.
Namque his voluminibus aperui
omnes disciplinae rationes. F. Granger (1931) translates the passage with In the Following books I have expounded a complete system of
architecture. p. 4; Fensterbusch (1968) translates the passage with: ich habe in diesen Büchern alle
Lehren der Baukunst dargelegt. p. 23; Morris Hicky Morgan (1914): In the Following books I have disclosed all
the principles of the art. p. 4.
13.
Treatise, p. v-vi. Ruskin, similarly
does not pretend that all, or even the
greater number of, the principles necessary to the well-being of the art, are
included in the inquiry. Ruskin,
Seven Lamps, p. 27. Interestingly enough, Bartholomew, with his
encyclopaedic tendencies, does not allow this point to come forward. His
striving is for completeness.
16.
If system then be all, that
an art requires to bring it to perfection, how lamentable it is that so noble
an art as Architecture should, in modern days, be without system. Peter Legh (1831) p. ix.
20.
cf. Willey (1972), also Orsini (1964, 1969 and 1973); J. Benziger
(1951) 24-48; C. Howard (1980); G. Mackenzie (1939). More recent literature on
Coleridge's organicism is Prickett (1970) and for the most penetrating
discussion of organicism in nineteenth century architecture see Van Eck (1994)
21.
On the influence of Coleridge and Carlyle on Emerson see Thomas Krusche
(1987) & David van Leer (1986).
22.
The virtue of art, writes Emerson, lies in detachment, in sequestering one
object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from the
connection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no
thought...(...) It is the habit of certain minds to give an all-excluding
fullness to the object, the thought, the word they alight upon, and to make
that for the time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, the leaders of society. The power
to detach and to magnify by detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands
of the of the orator and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary
eminency of an object, -so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in Carlyle,- the
painter and sculptor exhibit in colour and stone. The power depends on the
depth of the artist's insight of that object he contemplates. For every object
has its roots in central nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to
represent the world. Therefore each work of genius is the tyrant of the hour,
and concentrates attention on itself. Emerson (1883) p. 78.