CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: GOTHIC; THE DEATH OF A
STYLE
The science of Gothic
The Gothic, throughout
its career, nobly imitated nature in one particular, which the classic system
never attempted. In the organisms of Nature, and those of the Gothic system (but
of no other), do we find a most rigid economy of material, accompanied by no
economy at all of workmanship,- often none of manual labour, but never any of
mental labour. The most lavish expenditure of labour (or at least of thought)
seems to have been considered no waste, if effecting the smallest saving of
material; and the whole decorative system consisted in removing superfluous
matter not conducive to strength.
[1]
The Gothic had continued
the Roman process of cutting away at the substance of buildings; the advance of
science was tackling the waste-problem. However, the contemporary admiration for
this slimness, without its cause being properly understood had simply become an
excuse for inexpensive building. That is well illustrated by the motivation for
the choice of Gothic as the style for the commissioners churches: it was thought
cheap.
[2]
But it is precisely where Gothic stands for religion and for religious
buildings that this tug of war between a desire for permanence and the
admiration for Gothic economy began to bother the architectural conscience. The
loud despair at the flimsiness of church buildings and Pugin's well-known
disenchantment with his own creations as mentioned earlier, illustrate this
fact adequately. Economy and cheapness are two different concepts, thinly
divided by the fact that they both refer to the same thing, but on the basis of
different attitudes. It was felt that financial considerations born out of
meanness rather than prudence were being allowed to corrupt the ideology of
economy.
The waste of materials in Greek
temples was no waste in the ordinary sense, it was the conspicuous waste, not merely of a science in its infancy but the
exuberance of visual, religious and social sophistication. The waste of
materials was a necessary corollary to faith, an act of sacrifice to eternity.
This need for waste was undermined by the scientific excellence of Gothic
builders. The sacrifice of material was therefore transformed into a sacrifice
of mind. Since then however, the ideal of economy had merely evolved into the
compromise of permanence. Society's symbolism had lost its way in the urgency
of commercial enterprise and social upheaval.
The Gothic architects: Parental influence
Garbett's
knowledge of Gothic architecture is impressive. This is not surprising. His
grandfather had been something of a Gothic scholar, publishing several articles
in the various publications prepared by John Britton. His father Edward William
Garbett had, in 1834 written a little pamphlet in which, among other things, he
defended the authority of his opinions concerning the restoration of the abbey
church at Bath on account of:
A constant and
professional experience and study of old English edifices throughout a period of
twenty-five years, the information of my father gathered during twenty years
still further back; our well known connection with one of the most splendid
edifices of our land [Winchester Cathedral], and the result of his labours and
superintendence there; my own designs and erections in the Old English style,
which have been thought not unworthy of public approbation; and the advantage
which I have enjoyed in intercourse and communication with gentlemen of the most
generally acknowledged purity of taste..
[3]
This
statement, combined with the substance of the arguments in favour of carefully
considered restoration of the said church, show that much of young Garbett's
thorough architectural education must have come from family tradition.
The exact extent of his father's or
grandfather's influence is rather difficult to gauge exactly. Apart from a few
remarks made in the publication just mentioned, his father has left us no
detailed account of his architectural principles. There are, however, a number
of ideas offered by him which bear more than a striking resemblance to
viewpoints held by his son. The first is the unquestionable superiority of
Greek architecture over Roman an idea which would also have been upheld by
Garbett's Grandfather who designed ably in the Greek style; another is that harmony,
or consistency in a design is best achieved by the efforts of a single mind.
The last is a warning against the dangers of imitating one school of thought to
the exclusion of others, an idea which was ultimately derived, from Reynolds' Discourses. All this encourages the view that part of
the reason for Garbett's reliance on theories propounded by people of a much
earlier generation than his own is due to the education he received from his
father and grandfather.
[4]
As to Garbett's father's ideas on Gothic architecture, they are best
illustrated by his church at Theale (1820-22) which was closely modelled on
Salisbury Cathedral, a fact which conforms to the conditions imposed by his son
on the use of precedent. The object of imitation must be looked for among the
real stuff, the cathedrals, and not among the parish churches which were, in
most cases, no more than frames for empty and unmeaning forms built by
illiterate rural masons.
[5]
All things considered, it is safe to hazard the conjecture that much of the
substance of Garbett's Treatise
represents the cud, long chewed by the family and modified to an unknowable
extent by Garbett himself.
But this family tradition was not
arrived at spontaneously. In fact, Garbett's honest declaration of his sources
show just how much of his analysis depends for many of its facts on secondary
sources. The names mentioned in the Treatise,
especially with regard to Gothic scholarship, read like a thorough
bibliography, including everything that at the time was respected for its
thoroughness and excluding much of what was considered to be mere apology, or,
what is just as likely, theologically unsound, such as the younger Pugin and
the Ecclesiologists.
The vault dissected: the mysteries of the
arch
Why does the archway not collapse even though it appears to
have no support? It is because the stones all want to fall down
together. Heinrich von Kleist.
Gothic
architecture in Garbett's Treatise is not eulogised for the sake of advocating
its revival, far from it. Gothic as a style for the present was dead, as dead as
the Greek, more dead even, and it could not be honestly resuscitated. Like the
chapter on Greek architecture, this act of exemplification was meant as a
retrospective confirmation of his abstract principles, a teleological
re-interpretation of history to merge his thinking, about unity versus variety,
contrast versus gradation and the subordination of form, with tradition and
within the context of those principles to re-evaluate the Gothic system. Some of
his assertions were, as we have seen, considered subversive to the esteem in
which Gothic architecture was held as encapsulating English identities and
represented by the comfortably bucolic Parish church.
The death of Greek architecture had been caused by the introduction of
the arch: one
constructive change, the introduction of oblique pressure destroyed it.[6]
The introduction of the arch not only killed the Greek system but it also threw
architecture into a state of confusion, a misguided struggle against truth: The arch was introduced
by the Etruscans or Romans: but its necessary attendant, the prop, was struggled
against for fifteen centuries.[7]
The half columns, stuck on the facade of the Colosseum, are not just a huge
ornament, they in fact serve as buttresses and constitute a huge lie as the
fact of their being dressed as columns disguises their true
purpose.[8]
Because of the introduction of the arch, architecture had to have time to
disregard the old and systematise this new system of construction. All periods
of mixed construction therefore are, by definition, periods of struggle, to get
rid of the old, and to integrate the new. Architecture would only be able to
return to the narrow road of truth and achieve a true character once it was
realised that arches required the buttress to be unmasked and openly admitted
to: It is this that
marked the grand restoration from falsehood to truth.[9]
Within this context Garbett makes the valid observation, which was also made by
every subsequent commentator on A.W.N Pugin's principle advocating not
constructed decoration but decorated construction, that it is a principle not
only applicable to good Gothic architecture but to all good
architecture.[10] This is the only reference Garbett ever makes to the younger Pugin.
Garbett follows Samuel Ware in shifting the starting point of the Gothic
system from the invention of the pointed arch to the introduction of the pointed
vault.[11]
Vaulting, he writes, [is] the all pervading MOTIVE- the final CAUSE of Gothic
architecture, that to which all its members subserve, for which everything else
is contrived, and without which the whole apparatus would be aimless and
unmeaning...[12]
A very detailed handling
of the Vault ensues, acknowledging its debt to Ware, Bartholomew and, naturally,
to Robert Willis' "On Gothic Vaulting," even using a variation of the latter's
famous illustration of Henry VII's chapel in Westminster Cathedral.[13]
An important observation within the discourse on vaults is his reference
to a widely held debate concerning the properties of the catenary. Ware had
identified the catenary principle as the proof of the structural sophistication
of the gothic architects, even suggesting that its discovery was the cause of
the Gothic. The pointed arch and the cross-section of the gothic vault were to
be seen as easy-to-draw geometrical variations of the catenary. The imaginary
line of gravitational pressure to which the building was subject and which
followed the catenary principle, was then incorporated within the excess masonry
(the walls and the flying buttresses) supporting the vault.
Bartholomew in his Specifications, analyses the arch on this principle.
During meetings of the Freemasons of the Church he used to illustrate the
principles of the catenary and the diminution of mass using vertebrae of
animals. In a series of editorials in The Builders concerning Westminster Bridge and signed
by a medal with the letters F.Q he argues that:
The ancient freemasons
appear to have been intimately acquainted with the catenarian principle of
construction....They found that they could nearly imitate the form of the chain
curve, by drawing with little trouble, with the compass, a pointed arch; but
knowing that a weight appended from the centre of the catenary draws it still
more nearly into the form of the pointed arch; when they reversed the curvature
and put it into absolute work, they added to the vertex of the arch a weight,
which they usually carved into the form of an ornamental boss.[14]
Garbett does not however
enter into much detail in the Treatise, merely acknowledging that Wren's contemporary
and colleague the scientist Robert Hooke was the first to have (re)discovered
the principle.[15] While discussing the vaulting of Henry the Seventh chapel, Garbett
writes:
This property of arches
(by which each pressure concentrated on a point calls for a cusp at that point,
and each cusp calls for a concentration of pressure on it) may be shown by the
catenary, which becomes an inverted Gothic arch whenever a weight is suspended
from one link. Hooke's discovery, "ut pendet continuum flexile, sic stabit
contiguum rigidum inversum," is a motto never to be forgotten in Gothic
Building. A French street lamp, or a spider's web, may thus teach the architect
important lessons; and perhaps the equilibrium of some of the boldest vaultings
was insured by experiments on systems of chains representing the ribs
inverted.[16]
This is an idea which he
derived from the complex pattern of structuralist thinking covering the English
seventeenth century, the French and Italian eighteenth centuries but which was
directly transmitted to him through Robison, Bartholomew, Ware and Willis. Ware
had given the most systematic treatment of the idea and probably anticipated, be
it in a less spectacular way, Gaudi's method of vaulting as employed in his
Sagrada Familia (1903-1906) in the vault of the Burlington arcade of which he
was the architect.[17]
As to the country of origin of the Gothic vault, he is content to follow
the remarks made by William Whewell and German scholarship as represented by
Georg Moller, de Lassaulx and Carl von Wiebeking that the Germans were
responsible for the first imperfect steps.[18]
As vaulting is the
generating principle of Gothic architecture in general, it is not surprising
that Garbett takes the whole thing to its logical extreme. He quotes Wiebeking
who states that all wooden ceilings were no more than temporary models, put in
position in order to allow the masonry a number of years to settle before
imposing the enormous weight of the permanent stone vault.[19] Consequently all wooden roofs are condemned when used in connection with
Gothic architecture. Their use in modern Gothic is the result of ignorance,
their designers perpetrators of deception.
In his division of the Gothic system into periods he follows Rickman
completely.[20] The latter also introduced Garbett to the observation that:
in the complete Gothic, every horizontal line meeting a
vertical one, either terminates or changes direction, while the vertical
continues its course unaltered. In the pure Greek,’ Garbett continues, precisely the reverse takes place; all vertical lines are
stopped by the first horizontal one they meet, while the horizontal continue
from corner to corner of the building.[21]
The idea fits
rather well with Garbett's ideas on constructive unity and the differentiation
of styles on the basis of their statical principles. He concludes that the
difference between Greek and Gothic architecture consists not in the proportion
of horizontal lines to vertical ones, but rather in their respective continuity.
This defines their respective characters of grand repose and romantic aspiration
or growth.
At one point Garbett
makes a detailed comparison of Amiens and Salisbury, trying to define
Englishness (emphasis on the effect of the exterior) and Frenchness (emphasis on
the effect of the interior) in Gothic architecture. In the process he mentions
George Downing Whittington at once revealing the source for his
critique.[22]
Lastly I should like to
mention Garbett's treatment of Wren's St. Stephen Walbrook from a Gothic point
of view, which occurs in a discussion about the merits of the octagon in
building for a more even dispersion of pressures. The discovery of the octagon
for this purpose is given to Alan de Walsingham, who introduced it to Ely
Cathedral after the fall of its central tower in 1322. The discussion of Wren's
classical work from a Gothic point of view, immediately suggests a comparison
with Soufflot's Ste. Geneviève (1755-1792) which was also built incorporating
Gothic scholarship and Wren's influence.[23]
One could elaborate endlessly on Garbett's discussion of Gothic
architecture, but the archaeological aspect of the Treatise, is
derivative and takes second place to the Treatise's real purpose, which is normative. Suffice it
to say that he concludes his analysis with a description of what the complete Gothic
should consists of, namely:
1, Universally pointed
arching, each arch being composed of several ribs or mouldings (...); 2, Ribbed
vaulting; 3, Apparent buttresses; 4, Pillar-clustering, with reference to the
ribs (...); 5, Pinnacle-clustering; 6, Window tracery with subordination (of
principal and minor tracery bars) and, lastly, Foliation or foiling, an
universal though seemingly non-essential ornament.[24]
But more
interesting than the pinnacle of Gothicitity is the morbid fascination with its
rupture and subsequent decline. The doctor is generally not interested in health
above and beyond its use as a standard to measure disease. Garbett's
contribution to the enormous growth of architectural histories of his time, is,
like Bartholomew's essay on the decline of excellence primarily an
analysis of corruption. This is simply explained by their normative intentions
to avert the impending crisis and return architecture to the dignity it enjoyed
with the Greeks and the Gothicists.
History and the division of magnitude
The vicissitudes
of style through time are caused by the superimposition of several
processes.
Garbett's ideas on the historical development of a pure style and the
progress of architecture are described in terms of popular analogies with
biological processes, such as growth and ageing. Such analogies applied to the
rise and decline of the institutions of civilisation are as old as time and do
not even need the proximity of Gibbon's Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, to be explained,
even though Gibbon is mentioned by nearly every architectural historian in the
nineteenth century. The Gothic, as such died of the corruption inherent to old
age:
The art [of architecture] had before, in the After-Classic
decline, shown all the indescribable but unmistakable symptoms of old age, -
that picturesque but graceless decrepitude so exactly opposite to the equally
indescribable charm of youth: but it had never before fallen into this dotage
that characterises the After-Gothic whether amid the blaze of Flamboyant
tracery, or the Perpendicular panelling and fan-work, or the vegetating
luxuriance of German hood-work... Those who think the Gothic system fell a prey
to classical pedantry, a retrograde principle, or what they are pleased to call
"vandalism" are greatly mistaken. There was nothing forced, fanciful,
retrograde, or abnormal in the change from Florid Gothic to the Classical
"Renaissance." The former was not superseded by the latter. It had fair play,
and the field to itself. It fell by its own inherent principles of decay, and
left the field vacant, before the perceived absence of true architecture
rendered the importation of a new style necessary. (..) [That style] is rightly
named a "renaissance," though it was not the renaissance of architecture. That
we admit to have taken place already, not in the sixteenth century, but in the
first half of the thirteenth.
Interesting in
this context is Garbett's distinction between architecture and style as a
nostalgic application. The renaissance of architecture occurred with the rise of
the Gothic, the renaissance as we know it is merely a nostalgic attempt at
reversion through the medium of acquired associations.
The birth, rise, perfection, decline and ultimate death of a style needed
to be subsumed within a greater development of Garbett's super-stylistic concept
of architecture which could follow Fergusson's wonderful diagram of linear
historical development. The curious likeness it bears to Laurence Sterne's
diagram illustrating the plot of Tristram Shandy's pre-natal autobiography may
be fortuitous, although both try to represent the same contingencies affecting
constant progress. Garbett's explanation of this super-stylistic development,
connecting the Greek with the Gothic, is represented by an uninterrupted
Bolero-like anabatic process showing how structural elements are subject to a
continual cell-division from magnitude into multitude:
In one respect,(..) the
fall of the Gothic architecture perhaps differed from that of the Classic, and
was more complete. It was a fall out of which nothing could be expected to
arise, - a fall not of a style or system merely, but, in a sense, of the entire
art. It was the end of a progress in one constant direction, which had run
through the whole history of European architecture, quite independently of the
changes from style to style.(...) This was the progress from magnitude to
multitude...the apparatus of the art, in its second complete phase, consisted of
diminished and multiplied derivatives from the chief structural members of the
first phase. Even the sorry little "tobacco-pipe shafts" (as Goethe calls them)
of the expiring Gothic, were the direct lineal descendants (however degenerate
they may seem) of the massy columns of Karnac and Selinus, - derived by an
uninterrupted process of reduction and multiplication of parts..(...) Art,(..)
after counting her age by centuries, had then completed her world-long career, -
had, at length, worn herself out. The process could be carried no further;
complication had reached its limit, - in the finite divisibility of the
material, - in the finite capacity of man, - and the finishers of those piles
should have inscribed on them, "Architecture is Finished; henceforth be content
to copy.[25]
Transcending the perfect
Superimposed on
this irrevocable course from magnitude to multitude is the process indicating
the advancement of Truth or rather of Purity, which in Garbett's vision had
experienced two peaks, the Greek and the Gothic. The concept of historical
development in terms of rise and decline must uphold the view that change can be
valued in terms of good and bad, must be set against a standard of the true in
its meaning of goodness and of which the symptom is its inherent beauty.
Everything anticipating that standard aspires to it in its effort to
throw off its imperfections, but that process does not halt itself once the
standard has been reached, for everything which comes after aspires to transcend
that perfection and, over-reaching in its attempt to continue progress,
necessarily falls into decline.[26]
Perfection is absolute, it resides in the immutable, the unchanging and
the a-priori. This is no paradox and there is no need to reconcile the
immutability of perfection with the inevitability of its succession in history,
after all perfection is achieved relative to a set of premises, by the search
after truth, the
moment that perfection is reached it is superseded by the ambition of architects
and the impatience of an ignorant public:
Advance, writes Garbett, is constant as long as there is room for each artist to
make a considerable improvement, visible to the vulgar, not so refined as to
elude the public gaze. But it is obvious that as a style or school advances, and
gets nearer its proposed truth, there is less and less room left for great
improvements, or rather for great changes; for the greatness of an improvement
is not proportional to the greatness of the change. At length there is no room
for great steps, but the only possible improvement is in points of detail and
exquisite refinement,- in the size of a moulding, the turn of a curve, - in
things that the vulgar eye cannot perceive. (...) Then comes the cry, "Is
architecture stagnant? Can architects do nothing but copy?" The weak,
time-serving artist is seduced, and breaks his allegiance to the Truth, the Aim
of the School. He will make a bold step. He will pass for a genius. He makes a
change, not for the sake of Truth, but for the sake of change. He makes a
considerable step, a step visible to all, and therefore a false step. The deed
is done. The point is turned. The school has culminated. It is a declining
school.[27]
Real genius, as
opposed to those eager for public approbation, is able to broaden or alter that
set of premises, thus shifting the goal posts of perfection. That is how the
paradox of the changelessness of perfection and the inevitability of advance is
resolved and the two ideas are related to each other.
The problem with the perfection of a style, is that the appreciation of
its perfection is not synchronised with the fact, just as theory in his view of
processes always follows genius. Like the idea of youth: the young do not, in
their innocence, appreciate youth, this is left to the old, who see in it, not
achieved perfection but the lost potential of it. This is inherent to ideas of
good and bad. Corruption is latent in the architect who capitulates to an
ignorant public, of which he himself is a part. The public, in their innocence,
cannot appreciate perfection. Thus due to the opposing forces of change and the
ideal of changelessness, the concept of decline is created to enforce the
asserted truth of principles and the belief in progress towards perfection.
The death of a style
Greek architecture
died, as we have seen, as a result of the introduction of the arch. This was not
the only cause. The baroque character of Hellenism shows how even the Greeks
succumbed to the temptation of trying to transcend perfection:
In the decline of taste,
in all countries and in all arts alike, everything is ornament, if not fritter,
and no beauty is seen in the pure noble breadth and simplicity of the earlier
productions.[28]
The introduction
of ionicism from
Asia and the still later adoption of the Corinthian order into Greek
architecture, neither of which were indigenous even though both were perfected
by their adopted country, serve to warn the reader against the gradual supremacy
of ornament and the invidious domination of the lighter classes of form which
were ousting the graver classes: The Corinthian order, with all its elegance, indicates the
approach, if not the commencement, of the decline in Grecian art.[29]
Only through the Doric order can Greek architecture claim to be pure.
That purity, being represented by consistency, is best achieved by the efforts
of a single mind. The invention of the Doric order is consequently attributed to
a single architect: the mythical Dorus.
As the Homeric poems
have triumphantly refuted the attempts to regard them as compilations, so is
there in the Doric order, and especially in its oldest examples, that perfect
consistency and unity of idea that proclaims it to be, in all essential points,
the production of one mind...and on this point we are constrained to receive the
tradition of Vitruvius, that, whatever number may have aided in its progress, it
had one inventor, the greatest mind that has ever been directed to
architecture.[30]
The proposition
follows up on the title of the Treatise, which speaks not of Greek architecture, but
of Greek architects. It is a deliberate distinction facilitating the vision of
the process of design as an essay in pure reasoning as deducible from a set of
axioms and premises, best performed by just one mind, so as to show consistency
in the generation of an idea and unity in the result. After that process, the
resulting system, such as in this instance the Doric order, is up for grabs, to
be perfected and inevitably brought to culmination and subsequent capitulation
by other minds. Every system, however good, is thus bound on an irrevocable
course towards eventual decline. Even the Parthenon which is commonly seen as
the apotheosis of Greek architecture, in fact shows a tendency towards ionicism,
and is consequently considered less pure than earlier examples such as That which crowns the
rock of Corinth.
After-Gothic
As far as the
Gothic is concerned, once the system of construction was perfected in the early
thirteenth century, each country seized on its own emphasis, and, concentrating
on that to the exclusion of everything else, unbalanced the health of
architecture as a whole.
The Germans, for example, seized on the idea of growth in pursuit of a budding and sprouting
expression, their chief vice became interpenetration, letting everything
overgrow until the
buildings became covered with tracery.[31]
The French, on the other hand, seized on the expression of aspiration:
by a slight change in
the prevailing forms of flowing tracery, they converted the loops or leaves into
flame-like forms, till the flamboyant appeared not vegetating as in Germany, but
blazing from the foundation to the bristling
finials.[32]
The English were merely
confused, thinking, erroneously, that an abundance of vertical lines would
increase the expression of aspiration, thus they were led to
convert all the flowing lines of the window tracery into vertical ones,
producing a style less rich and certainly less varied than any of the other
After-Gothics.[33] That, at least, was one theory.
The other, which Garbett appears to favour in the end is that the
Perpendicular style might have arisen through the extreme and rational
application of the principle of constructive unity according to which a
style is pure and perfect in proportion to the exclusiveness with which a
certain mode of construction pervades, or appears to pervade, every feature from
the greatest to the least.[34] In the Gothic system this principle is arching, so that every hint of
trabeation such as a horizontal beam should be avoided. In fine Gothic
architecture the stone is treated as though it were flexible, in that no
dependence is placed on its rigidity; that flexibility, if real instead of
metaphorical, would soon show up any hint of trabeated construction in the
various forms of Gothic: In the Perpendicular style alone do we find tracery which,
if converted into a flexible material, would undergo no change of form.[35]
And to prove that this consistency in applying the principle of constructive
unity is what moved the English Gothicists to overreach the Gothic to become
Perpendicular he cites the crinkle-crackle of Henry the Seventh's Chapel, which
use perpendicular tracery throughout except in the flying buttresses, for here statical
principles rather required the voiding to be effected by circles, as in the spandrils of the Pont-y-Prydd and
iron bridges.[36]
The corruption which the Perpendicular nevertheless represents, does not
therefore stem from its departure from the constructive wisdom of Gothic
science, instead the
grand error of the 'Perpendicular' was in its introduction of a graver class of
form in details than prevailed in Main features.[37]
But as the Greek style had been given the final coup de grâce by the
introduction of the arch, so the expiring Gothic was given the finishing stroke
by the return to beam and lintel construction and the introduction of the
tie:
The loss of constructive unity,
the return to universally mixed construction, as in the Ante-Gothic ages,
completed the downfall.[38] And now we are again in a period of crisis, of arbitrary choices, slowly
working out and assimilating the principles of tension, which one day will
burgeon into a new style of architecture.
Evolution
To understand
Garbett's ideas on historical progress they need to be seen within the context
of contemporary thoughts on change and progress. Charles Darwin's ideas on
evolution were not to become public until 1859, so that they may be safely
excluded from the argument here, or can they? There were quite a few
evolutionary theories in circulation long before Darwin institutionalised the
idea. We have to take two factors into account when discussing Garbett's
diagrammatic representation of history.
The first is a rather curious and in fact problematic reference made in
later life, saying that he was taught a version of the evolutionary theory
during his stay in Jamaica in 1845, by a surveyor named Potts. This might
conceivably have affected his view of historical processes. Unfortunately he
never tells us exactly how this theory was supposed to work; nor can we safely
assume that he extrapolated from this theory his own ideas on historical
development.
The other factor is Lyell's immensely popular book on Geology, which came
out in 1835 and which discusses the ideas of Lamarck quite fully. Garbett's
knowledge of Geology and his later critique of Sir Charles Lyell's geological
theories on the origin of the earth and the anti-catastrophe theory, do suggest
that he was familiar with the book and therefore conversant with the theories of
Lamarck. This is especially interesting as Lamarck's four laws of evolution
project a conception of progress which, whatever their conscious relation to
Garbett, exhibit a close resemblance on a number of points with regard to the
latter's view of historical development. I am further tempted to bring the laws
themselves into the picture as they were discussed in relation to Emerson and
Greenough:
1. Life, by its own
forces, tends continually to increase the volume of every body that possesses
life, and to enlarge the dimensions of that bodies parts, up to a limit which
life itself brings about.[39]
This theory in
particular coincides with the ideas Garbett entertained on the fall of the
Gothic system and the saturation point which a particular style reaches in the
advancement of truth. The idea also distantly reflects the undercurrent of the
Malthusian circle as defined in Malthus' Essay on the Principle of population (1798 & 1803)
which says that a period of economic growth is accompanied by a population
explosion which subsequently exhausts the economic potential, causing
mass-starvation creating the room for another period of economic expansion.
2. The production of a new organ in an animal body results
from the supervention of a new want that continues to make itself felt, and of a
movement to which this want gives birth and which it encourages.
This law
systematises Garbett's ideas concerning the perfectibility of styles through the
desire for form during the search after truth. In anticipation of perfection
this desire is represented by a lust for truth. Beyond the saturation point of a
style's perfectibility that desire changes into an arbitrary and desperate wish
for novelty and change, usually for the sake of public approbation and
individual ambition.
3.The development of organs and their force of action are
constantly in proportion to the employment of those organs.
Each style, as
becomes clear from Garbett's analysis of them has its own preoccupations, its
own emphases and develops exclusively along those preoccupations. The want for
truth, searched for by the exclusive pursuit of the principle of contrast caused the eruption
of the Doric order. The various national variations of the After-Gothic
similarly developed according to this principle.
4. All that has been acquired, laid down, or changed in the
organisation of individuals, in the course of their life, is conserved by
generation and transmitted to the new individuals which proceed from those which
have undergone these changes.
The close resemblance
between this law and Garbett's view of the accumulation of traditions along the
line of advancement of truth and purity, betrays the ubiquity of this principle,
which, indeed is closely reminiscent of Edmund Burke's organic
conservatism.[40] There is with regard to three of the laws no need to conclude a too
definite connection between Lamarck and Garbett. To a large extent these views
of progress were endemic and could be established on any number of
analogies.
The Lamarckian principle of desire for change as the principal agent of
progress in a species, constitutes a variation on the one which Darwin was later
to dub the principle of natural selection. It is rarely noted that Darwin's
theory of Natural selection was in large measure inspired on his
analysis of Artificial selection, the principles of which were
common knowledge in a still largely agrarian culture. Architectural development
was considered an artificial process in that it presupposed a self-conscious
sense of purpose. The interesting thing about that is that the theories of
Lamarck and Darwin converged in this principle of artificial
selection which needs desire on the part of the selector to bring any
development about; this is also the point at which they submerged into popular
culture. The specifically Lamarckian agent of want, will or desire, can be
represented by the animal-breeder who selects his mating stock to follow up the
qualities he desires for the development of his stock. And that was an ample
analogy for the architect and the rational development of architecture.
The Future
What then of the
future? It is the future which the book is supposed to mould and support. Having
acknowledged Bartholomew's discovery of the existence of three systems of
building, and having noted that two of them have already been developed into
architectural styles, he offers the third for consideration: ..the third is
ours:
To this third system of constructive unity, there is no old
style adapted. None was invented for it. It is a new thing, and its treatment
must be new, new, because subject to old principles; and to be effected only by
a patient search into those old principles.
That justifies his
detailed analysis into the principles of the Greek and Gothic architects, it is
these which have to be generalised to become flexible to new purposes. On top of
that every pure style had to struggle against old prejudices:
The method of tying
building together (said Wren), instead of giving the arches, &c., sufficient
butment, is contrary to the principles of sound architecture. Yes, contrary to
the only two systems of architecture known to him or to us, but not therefore
contrary to all possible systems. A Greek would have condemned thus the method
of wedging stones together by lateral pressure; and after this method was
introduced and used in all buildings, it was fifteen centuries before architects
could be brought to admit the appearance of this lateral pressure. For a still
longer period has tension been a principle of building, and yet not of
architecture; much longer has the tie been struggling for admission and been
refused.[41]
Quoting William
Whewell on the need for a system to be bound by a single principle uniting the
whole, he formulates the challenge to architects which is to systematise the tie
into an architecture. And Garbett has already seen some glimmerings in the
distance:
There is a class of
buildings tending towards a new style of construction - becoming less mixed in
this respect - and approaching a consistent use of tensile covering, to the
exclusion of every other.[42]
Unfortunately
Garbett does not tell us outright what he means by this class of buildings,
whether he includes engineering works in this category or not. Later he would
publish a design for a method of roofing himself, which certainly is based on
the idea of tying walls together, but it is hopelessly impractical. And he was
certainly no supporter of Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace when it was completed a
year after the Treatise was published. All this makes it unclear as to
what he means by this new class of buildings. For the moment however, we have
still to struggle as a new style will certainly not grow by itself:
There is, among other
art-destroying fallacies, a notion now prevalent, that architectural styles
sprung up by themselves, and that if we wait long enough, in process of time a
new one may grow up, we know not how. (...) Let us not deceive ourselves: a
style never grew of itself; it never will. It must be sought and sought in the
right way. We may blunder on in a wrong path for ever, and get no nearer the
goal...[43]
But if tension will
eventually give us a style, that is, if we go about it carefully enough, this is
still a long way away. There has therefore to be an interim solution to
supplement the long term ideal. Because of the prevalence of mixed construction
he offers his contemporaries the Hübschean and Barry-esque solution of Italy: a country which has
never attained a system of constructive unity, but which, precisely because
of its persistent use of mixed construction techniques, developed a range of
appropriate styles based on classical details, possessing a pliancy that may be
bent to all the purposes probably that can ever be required in buildings of
mixed construction.[44]
He recommends the continuation of a process that started with the Italian
Renaissance, or as he calls it the Florentine, Roman and Venetian schools, which
he likens in character to the Doric, Ionic and Corinthian orders
respectively.[45]
As far as the imitation of the Greek and the Gothic is concerned Garbett
remains firm. Even if the two pure systems are too good to be given up far more are they too
good to be abused and caricatured. If they are worth copying at all, they are
worth copying completely; and this can never be done but by copying their
construction as well as their decoration.[46]
His father's church in Theale, Berkshire, and Leo von Klenze's Walhalla,
may, perhaps, be cited as examples of what he means.
But the object of the Treatise was not the advocacy of a particular style but
a plea for architects to take the narrow road of a more abstract truth and
honesty. Garbett's theory was an attempt to generalise architecture into a moral
philosophy. In fact Garbett ends his treatise with a motto he would like to see
engraved on everybody's compasses: one which I suspect to contain nearly the whole theory of
art, and one which makes the humanisation of architecture semantically
complete:
SEEK NOT TO SEEM WHAT YOU WOULD BE,
BUT TO BE WHAT YOU WOULD SEEM[47]
4. E.W. Garbett (1834) p. 8: ..about the same period that the labours of Stuart and his associates introduced the knowledge of the architectural remains of Greece, at once differing from the established models, and exhibiting in many respects an unquestionable superiority...; On p. 12, commenting on the unity of style shown by particular parts of the abbey church, he writes: as the offspring of one mind, a peculiar harmony may perhaps be expected; finally on p. 7, he writes concerning copyism: ..the exclusive devotion to that minute and confined system of rules gathered by Palladio and other restorers of the Ancient classic school in Italy from the remains of Roman art, which, besides reducing the study of architecture to a dry and uninteresting science, had confined the works of its more recent professors in many instances to pedantic and f