Greek lines and other architectural essays

Preface

This little book contains a selection of architectural essays which have been written at intervals during an active professional career of more than thirty years. The kindly indulgence with which they have been received by my brethren in the craft, and the friendly curiosity with which they have been regarded by the laity, may be attributed perhaps mainly to the fact that, unlike most literary expositions of the subject, they have been developed rather from practice than from theory, and that they had the advantage of that sort of sincerity which is the natural product of conviction rather than sentiment. I have been encouraged to believe that it might be possible so to collate a few of these papers as to form a sequence, in which, from first to last, there should be evident a more or less orderly development of thought. To this end the earlier

VI

PREFACE.

essays in especial have been largely rewritten, and all have been, so far as practicable, brought to date. The essay on Blois is the only one of the series which now makes its first appeal to the public. Perhaps, in their present consecutive form, these papers may have enough of symmetrical unity to secure for the architectural matters of which they treat a more intelligent popular interest than could be obtained by any sort of disconnected publication.

h. y. b.

Contents

Greek Lines and their Influence on Modern Architecture

The Growth of Conscience in Modern Decorative Art

Historical Architecture, and the Influence of the Personal Element upon it

I

The material beauty of the world, as exhibited in the manifold forms, colors, sounds, perfumes, motions of nature, is created for a nobler purpose than only to delight the senses and please the aesthetic faculties. When, according to the suggestions of our merely human passions and instincts, we ease our hearts of love by heaping treasures and the choicest gifts of fancy in the laps of those whom we most dearly cherish, we take no credit to ourselves for such precious prodigalities ; for they are the inevitable and disinterested outpourings of affection. They are received as such. When, therefore, we see that all the beneficent energies of nature are

GREEK LINES.

expressed with a profusion of beauty which is not necessary to their efficient operation, we accept the manifestation, are made happy in the consciousness of being beloved, and, constituted as we are in the image and likeness of God, express our instinctive gratitude in those fine human sympathies which impress the seal of truth on the primary idea of our creation.

But if our

“ little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love ”

are a reflection of the divine spirit within us, and if our capacity for enthusiasm, in the primary etymological use of the word — that is, our ability to be possessed or inspired by the spirit of a god, — is one more proof that we are created in the image of Deity, there is still another and more significant mark of relationship.

The human heart, in its best estate, forever yearns to create , to give in some form expression and life to those evasive ideals of loveliness which are planted within our consciousness by the aspects of nature. Our instinctive longing to embody these illusive phantoms of beauty is godlike. But the immortal songs which remain unsung, the exquisite idyls which gasp for words, the bewildering and

GREEK LINES.

restless imagery which seeks in vain the eternal repose of marble or of canvas, — while these reveal the affectionate and divine desires of humanity, they prove, also, how few there are to whom it is given to learn the great lesson of creation. When one arises among us who, like Pygmalion, makes no useless appeal to the Goddess of Beauty for the gift of life for his ideal, and who creates as he was created, we cherish him as a great interpreter of human love. We call him poet, composer, artist, and speak of him reverently as Master . We say that his lips have been wet with dews of Hybla ; that, like the sage of Crotona, he has heard the music of the spheres ; that he comes to us, another Numa, radiant and inspired from the kisses of Egeria.

Thus, as infinite Love begets infinite Beauty, so does infinite Beauty reflect into finite perceptions that image of its divine parentage, which the antique world worshiped under the personification of Astarte, Aphrodite, Venus, and recognized as the great creative principle lying at the root of all high Art.

There is a curious passage in Boehme, which relates how Satan, when asked the cause of the enmity of God and his own con-

GREEK LINES.

sequent downfall, replied, — “ I wished to be an Artist.” So, according to antique tradition, Prometheus manufactured a man and woman of clay, animated them with fire stolen from the chariot of the sun, and was punished for the crime of creation ; Titans chained him to the rocks of the Indian Caucasus for thirty thousand years.

This Ideal, this Aphrodite of old mythologies, still reigns over the world of art, and every truly noble effort of the artist is saturated with her spirit, as with a religion. It is impossible for a true work of art to exist, unless this great creative principle of love is present in its inception, in its execution, in its detail. It must be pervaded with the warmth of human, passionate affection. The skill which we are so apt to worship is but the instrument in the hands of love. It is the means by which this humanity is transferred to the work, and there idealized in the forms of nature. Thus the test of art is in our own hearts. It is not something far away from us, throwing into our presence gleaming reflections from some supernal source of light and beauty ; but it is very near to us, — so near that, like the other blessings which lie at our feet, we overlook it in our far-reaching

GREEK LINES.

searches after the imaginary good. W e, poor underlings, have been taught in the school of sad experience the mortal agony of love without skill, the power of perception without the power of utterance. We know how dumb are the sweet melodies of our souls, how fleeting their opulent and dreamy pageantries. But we have not fully learned the utter emptiness and desolation of skill without love. We accept its sounding brass and tinkling cymbals for immortal harmonies. We look reverently upon its tortured marbles, its architectural affectations, its canvases stained with academic knowledge, as revelations of higher intelligence ; unaware that if we go down to the quiet places of our own souls, we shall find there the universe reflected, like a microcosm, in the dark wellsprings, and that out of these wellsprings in the deep silence rises the beautiful ideal, Anadyomene, to compensate and comfort us for the vacancy of life. If we know ourselves, it is not to the dogmas of critics, the artificial rules of aesthetics, that we most wisely resort for judgments concerning works of art. Though technical externals, though conventionalities, sophisticated by the complications of modern life, and the address of manipulation naturally take

GREEK LINES.

possession of our senses and warp onr opinions, there are depths of immortal truth within us, rarely sounded, indeed, but which, when dimly revealed in some rare moment of insight, seem to show that we possess a standard and a criterion far nobler than the schools can give us.

The broken statues and columns and traditions and fragmentary classics, which Greece has left us, are so still and tranquil to the eye and ear, that we search in vain for the Delphic wisdom they contain, till we find it echoed in the sympathetic depths of our souls, and repeated in the half-impalpable ideals there. It is in this favored land of art that we must seek for the earliest, the clearest, and the purest external expressions of these ideals, whose existence we but half suspect within us. It is not pleasant, perhaps, to think that we were nearly unconscious of some of the highest capacities of our humanity till we recognized their full expression in the ashes of a distant and dead pagan civilization ; that we did not know ourselves till

“ The airy tongues that syllable men’s names In pathless wildernesses ”

uttered knowledge to us among the ruins of Hellas. It is good for us to lend a spiritual ear to these ancient whisperings, and hear

GREEK LINES.

nymph calling to nymph and fann to faun, as they caper merrily with the god Pan through the silence. It is good for us to listen to that “ inextinguishable laughter ” of the happy immortals of Olympus, ever mingling with all the voices of Nature and setting them to the still sweet music of humanity, — good, because so we are reminded how close we are to the outward world, and how all the developments of visible beauty are figurative expressions of our own humanity; Thus it is that the poetic truths of old religions exquisitely vindicate themselves ; thus we find, even we moderns, with our downward eyes and our wrinkled brows, that we still worship at the mythological altars of childlike divinities ; and when we can get away from the distracting Bedlam of steam-shrieks and machinery, we behold the secrets of our own hearts, the Lares and Penates of our own households, reflected in the “ white ideals ” on antique vases and medallions.

Abstract lines are the most concentrated expressions of human ideas, and as such are peculiarly sensitive to the critical tests of all theories of the Beautiful. Distinguished from the more usual and direct means by which

GREEK LINES.

artists express their inspirations and appeal to the sympathies of men ; distinct from the common language of art, which contents itself with conveying merely local and individual ideas by imitations or translations of natural forms, abstract lines are recognized as the grand hieroglyphic symbolism of the aggregate of human thought, the artistic manifestations of the great human Cosmos. The natural world, passing through the mind of man, is immediately interpreted and humanized by his creative power, and assumes the colors, forms, and harmonies of Painting, Sculpture, and Music. But abstract lines as we find them in Architecture and in the ceramic arts are the independent developments of this creative power, coming directly from humanity itself, and obtaining from the outward world only the most distant motives of composition. Thus it is an inevitable deduction that Architecture is the most human of all arts, and its lines the most human of all lines.

“ A thing of beauty is a joy forever ; ”

and the affectionate devotion with which this gift is received by finite intelligences from the hand of God is expressed in art, when its infinite depth can he so expressed at all, in a

GREEK LINES.

twofold language, — the one objective, the other subjective ; the one recalling the immediate source of the emotion, and presenting it palpably to the senses, hut more or less infused with the thought or mood of the artist ; the other portraying rather the emotion than the cause of it, and, by an instinctive and universal symbolism, reflecting the character of the impression made by it upon the creative instinct and inner consciousness of mankind. Hence come those lines which aesthetic writers term u Lines of Beauty,” suggesting rather than expressing meanings, — simple and elementary, but of far-reaching and various significance ; animated with life and thought and musical motion, and yet still and serene and spiritual.

The mysteries of orb and cycle, with which old astrologers girded human life, and sought to define from celestial phenomena the horoscope of man, have been brought down to modern applications by learned philosophers and mathematicians, who have labored with ingenuity and skill to trace the interior relationships existing between the recondite revelations of their geometry, their wonderful laws of mathematical harmonies and unities, and those lines which are creations of art, as

GREEK LINES.

distinguished from imitations of nature, and which, because their various characteristics emanated from the inborn genius or spirit of the races of mankind, have become symbols of humanity. No well-organized intellect can fail to perceive that some sublime and immortal truth underlies these speculations. Undoubtedly, in the straight line, in the conic sections, in the innumerable composite curves of the mathematician, lie the germs of all these symbolic expressions. But the architect, whose lines of beauty vary continually with the emotions which produce them, who feels in his own human heart the irresistible impulse which gives to them their exquisite balance, their sensitive poise, their delicate significance and value, cannot allow that the spirit and motive of these lines are governed by the exact and rigid formulas of the mathematician to any greater extent or in any other manner than as the numbers of the poet are ruled by the grammar of his language. These formulas may be applied as a curious test to ascertain what strange sympathies there may be between such lines and the organic harmonies of nature and the universe ; but these formulas do not enter into the soul of their creation any more than the limitations of counterpoint and rhythm

GREEK LINES.

laid their incubus on the lyre of Apollo. The porches where Callicrates, Hermogenes, and Callimachus walked were guarded by no such Cerberus as the disciples of Plato encountered at the entrance of the groves of the Academy, —

“ Let no one ignorant of Geometry enter here ; ”

but the divine Aphrodite welcomed all mankind to the tender teachings of the lotus, the acanthus, the honeysuckle, and the seashell, and all the sweet relationships of nature to the heart of man.

The tendency of many modern writers to account for the lines of Greek mouldings and vases by considering them developments of strict scientific laws, results of mathematical proportions, and by endeavoring to restrict their freedom to the narrow limitations of geometric lines and curves, nicely adapted from the frigidities of Euclid, is dispiriting to the artist. 66 The melancholy days have come ” for art when the meditative student finds his early footsteps loud among these dry, withered, and sapless leaves, instead of brushing away the dews by the fountains of perpetual youth.

Now it is capable of distinct proof that abstract lines of beauty, as in all their infinite

GREEK LINES.

variations of movement they are delicately sensitive to the moods or emotions of the artist, are results of the noblest creative capacities of mankind and expressions of the highest art.

The water-lily, or lotus, perpetually occurs in Oriental mythology as the sublime and hallowed symbol of the productive power in Nature, — the emblem of that great life-giving principle which the Hindu and the Egyptian and all early nations instinctively elevated to the highest and most cherished place in their Pantheons. Mr. W. H. Goodyear, in his recent essay on “ The Ionic Capital and the Origin of the Anthemion,” attempts very ingeniously to prove that from the drooping calyx leaves of this plant were derived some of the most characteristic decorative features of Greek art. But however this may be, Payne Knight many years ago attributed the adoption of this symbol to the fact that the lotus, instead of rejecting its seeds from the vessels where they are germinated, nourishes them in its bosom till they have become perfect plants, when, arrayed in all the irresistible panoply of grace and beauty, they spring forth, Minerva-like, float down the current, and take root wherever deposited. And so it

GREEK LINES.

was used by nearly all the early peoples to express the creative spirit which gives life and vegetation to matter. Lacshmi, the beautiful Hindu goddess of abundance, corresponding to the Venus Aphrodite of the Greeks, was called “ the Lotus-born,” as having ascended from the ocean in this flower. Here, again, is the inevitable intermingling of the eternal principles of Beauty, Love, and the Creative Power in that pure triune medallion image which the ancients so tenderly cherished and so exquisitely worshiped with vestal fires and continual sacrifices of art. Old father Nile, reflecting in his deep, mysterious breast the monstrous temples of Nubia and Pylse, bears eloquent witness to the earnestness and sincerity of the old votive homage to Isis, 66 the Lotus-crowned” Venus of Egypt. For the symbolic water-lily, recreated by human art, blooms forever in bud or flower in the capitals of Karnac and Thebes, and wherever columns were reared and lintels laid throughout the length and breadth of the “ Land of Bondage.” It is the keynote of all that architecture and the basis of its decorative character. A brief examination into the principles of this new birth of the Lotus, of the monumental straightening and stiffening of its graceful

GREEK LINES.

and easy lines, will afford some insight into the strange processes of the human mind, when by divine instinct it creates out of the material beauties of nature a work of art.

It is well known that the religion of the old Egyptians led them to regard this life as a mere temporary incident, an unimportant phase of their progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs an immortality of calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of life the sentiment of death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their ancestors were the most sacred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem them speedily was a point of the highest honor. They had corpses at their feasts to remind them how transitory were the glory and happiness of the world, how eternal the tranquillity of death.

Now, how was this prevailing idea expressed in their art ? They looked around them and saw that all organic life was full of movement

GREEK LINES.

and wavy lines ; their much-loved Lotus undulated and bent playfully to the solemn flow of the great Nile ; the Ibis fluttered with continual motion ; their own bodies were full of ever-changing curves ; and their whole visible existence was unsteady, like the waves of the sea. But when the temporary life was changed, and “ this mortal put on immortality,” when the mummy was swathed in its everlasting cerements for its long sleep, their eyes and souls were filled with the utter stillness and repose of its external aspects ; its features became rigid and fixed, and were settled to an everlasting and immutable calm ; the vibrating grace of its lines departed, and their ever-varying complexity became simplified, and assumed the straightness and stiffness of death. In this manner the straight line, the natural expression of eternal repose, in contradistinction to the wavy line, which represents the animal and vegetable movements of life, became the motive and spirit of their art. The anomaly of death in life was present in every development of the creative faculty, and no architectural or decorative feature could be so slight and unimportant as not to be thoroughly permeated with this sentiment. The tender and graceful lines

GREEK LINES.

of the Lotus became sublime and monumental under the religious loyalty of Egyptian chisels. Whether used in construction or decoration, these lines, so stiffened and formalized, seem to bring us into the presence of a strange phase of human life and thought, long since passed away from any other contact with living creatures. When applied to the rendering of the human figure, especially in the heroic forms of Egyptian art, — in the statues and portraits of kings, in the sphinxes, in the colossi of Memnon, and the royal tombs, — these solemn and fateful lines appear in effect to overwhelm the idea of human mutability and movement in the awful repose of immortality. It seems sufficiently evident that this process of formalizing the lines of the human figure in Egyptian art was not the result of a limitation of the powers of the artist to express movement and life, but rather of a consecration of his art to the service of a fundamental religious dogma.

“ Solid-set,

And moulded in colossal calm,”

all the lines of this lost art thus recall the sentiment of endless repose, and even the necessary curves of its mouldings are dead with straightness. The love which produced

GREEK LINES.

IT

GREEK LINES.

these lines was not the passionate love which we understand and feel ; they were not the result of a sensuous impulse ; but the Egyptian artist seemed ever to be standing alone in the midst of a trackless and limitless desert, — around him earth and sky meeting with no kiss of affection, no palpitating embrace of mutual sympathy ; he felt himself encircled by a calm and pitiless Destiny, the cold expression of a Fate from which he could not flee, and in himself the centre and soul of it all. Oppressed thus with a vast sense of spiritual loneliness, when he uttered the inspirations of art, the memories of playful palms and floating lilies and fluttering wings, though they came warm to the love of his heart, were attuned in the outward expression to the deep, solemn, prevailing monotone of his humanity. His love for the lotus and the ibis, more profound than the passion of the senses, dwelt serene in the bottom of his soul, and thence came forth transfigured and dedicated to the very noblest uses of life. This is the art of Egypt.

But among all the old nations which have perished with their gods, Greece appeals to our closest sympathies. She looks upon us with the smile of childhood, free, contented, and happy, with no ascetic self-denials to check

GREEK LINES.

her wild-flower growth, no stern religion to bind the liberty of her actions. All her external aspects are in harmony with the weakness and the strength of human nature. We recognize ourselves in her, and find all the characteristics of our own finite nature there developed into a theism so human, clothed with a personification so exquisite and poetical, that the Hellenic mythology seems still to live in our hearts a silent and shadowy religion without ceremonies or altars or sacrifices. The festive gods of the Iliad made man a deity to himself, and his soul the dwelling-place of ideal beauty. In this ideal they lived and moved and had their being, and came forth thence, bronze, marble, chryselephantine, a statuesque and naked humanity, chaste in uncomprehended sin and glorified in antique virtue. The beauty of this natural life, and the love of it, was the soul of the Greek ideal; and the nation continually cherished and cultivated and refined this ideal with impulses from groves of Arcadia, vales of Tempe, and flowery slopes of Attica, from the manliness of Olympic games and the loveliness of Spartan Helens. They cherished and cultivated and refined it, because here they set up their altars to known gods and

GREEK LINES.

worshiped attributes which they could understand. The ideal was their religion, and the art which came from it, the expression of their highest aspiration.

When the Apostle Paul read upon the Athenian altar the dedication 66 To the Unknown God/’ inscribed when the old mythology was becoming obsolete in the progress of philosophic doubt, he saw a manifestation of that Greek spirit, inquisitive, restless, but ever creative, which, three hundred years afterwards at Byzantium, made this people the first interpreters of Christianity in a new art. Heine, in his 66 Beisebilder,” tells the strange story of the Homeric feast of the immortal gods upon Olympus, interrupted by a pale Jew, crowned with thorns, dripping with blood, and bearing a heavy cross of wood, which he threw with a thunderous crash upon the high table, and immediately the golden goblets were overturned and the pagan pageant faded from the sight forever; with it faded the Greek ideal, to be dimly recalled, as we shall presently see, after many centuries of complete slumber, in the rediscovery of the principle of Greek Lines.

Lines of beauty, produced in such a soil, were not, as might at first be supposed, tropic

GREEK LINES.

growths of wanton and luxurious curves, wild, spontaneous utterances of superabundant life. The finely studied perception of the Greek artist admitted no unimaginative, pre-Raphaelite imitations of what Nature was ever giving him with a liberal hand in the whorls of shells, the veins of leaves, the life of flames, the convolutions of serpents, the curly tresses of woman, the lazy grace of clouds, the easy sway of tendrils, flowers, and human motion. He was no literal interpreter of her whispered secrets. But the grace of his art was a deliberate grace, — & grace of thought and study. His lines were creations , and not instincts or imitations . It was his religion so to nurture and educate his sensitiveness to beauty and his power to love and create it, that his works of art should be deeds of worship and expressions of a godlike humanity. Unlike the Egyptian’s, there was nothing in his creed to check the sweet excess of Life, and no grim shadow, u feared of man,” scared him in his walks, or preached to him sermons of mortality in the stones and violets of the wayside. Life was hallowed and dear to him for its own sake. He saw it was lovable, and he made it the theme of his noblest poems, his subtlest philosophies, and his high-

GREEK LINES.

est art. Hence the infinite joy and endless laughter on Olympus, the day-long feasting of the gods, the silver stir of strings in the hollow shell of the exquisite Phoebus, “ the soft song of the muse with voices sweetly replying.”

I believe that all true lines of grace and beauty, though they are necessarily infinite in variety and meaning, are capable of division into three distinct classes, according to the respective spirit or genius of the three civilizations out of which they grew, and that each class, as it expresses a unity of great significance in the history of the human race, is capable of concentrating its distinguishing characteristics in one representative line, which may stand as the symbol, the gesture, as it were, of an era in this history. If this is possible, these three symbols would represent not only the arts of three great eras, but the essential quality of their life and thought, of which these arts are themselves the symbol and the record. These lines, from the nature of the case, are not precise or exact, like a formula of mathematics, to which the neophyte can refer for deductions of grace to suit any premises or conditions. This, of course, is contrary to the spirit of beautiful design ; and

GREEK LINES.

the ingenious Hay, who maintained that his “ composite ellipse ” is capable of universal application in the arts of ornamental composition, and that by its use any desirable lines in mouldings or vases can be mechanically produced, especially Greek lines, fell into the grave error of endeavoring to materialize and fix that animula vagula , blandula , that coy and evasive spirit of art, which is its peculiar characteristic, and gives to its works inspiration, harmony, and poetic sentiment. Ideal beauty can be hatched from no geometrical eggs. Of these lines one expresses the most subtle grace yet conceived by the mind or executed by the hand of man. This line pretends to be merely a type of that large language of forms, with which the most refined intellects of antiquity uttered their joyful worship of Aphrodite in Greek art.

The three great distinctive eras of art, in a purely psychological sense, were the Egyptian, the Grecian, and the Romanesque, — including in the latter term both Roman art itself and all subsequent art, whether derived directly or indirectly from Rome, as the Byzantine, the Mahometan, the Mediaeval, and the Renaissance. Selecting the most characteristic works to which these great

GREEK LINES.

eras respectively gave birth, it is not difficult by comparison to ascertain the master-spirit, or type, to which each of these three families may be reduced. If we place these types side by side, the result will be as in the diagram,

EGYPTIAN. GREEK. ROMAN.

presenting to the eye, at one view, the concentration of three civilizations, Destiny, Love, and Life ; — - destiny, finding utterance in the stern and inflexible simplicity of the tombs and obelisks of Egypt ; love, expressing itself in the statuesque and thoughtful grace of Grecian temples, statues, and urns ; life, in the sensuous and impulsive change, evident in all the developments of art, since Greece be-

GREEK LINES.

came Achaia, a province of the Roman Empire. In the central type., as exhibited in the diagram, we see a happy mingling of the essential qualities of the other two. The genius of Greece, on the one hand, tempers the rigid repose of Egypt with the passion of life, and, on the other, restrains the passion of life with a spirit of intellectual tranquillity. Humanly speaking, it seems to stand for a condition of perfect art, representing the highest development of creation by man. At one point in the history of the race the secret of perpetual youth seemed to have been disclosed, at once grave with memory and jocund with hope. This intermediate line is the essence of the age of Pericles ; and in it u the capable eye ” may discover the pose of the Cnidian Y enus of Praxiteles, of the Jupiter Olympus of Phidias, and the other lost wonders of ancient chisels, and, more directly, the tender severity of Doric capitals and the secret grace of the shafts of the Parthenon.