condition has been constant, this one requirement clear in all places
and at all times, that the work shall be that of a school, that no
individual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary, accepted
types and customary decorations; and that from the cottage to the
palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, and from the garden fence
to the fortress wall, every member and feature of the architecture of
the nation shall be as commonly current, as frankly accepted, as its
language or its coin.
IV. A day never passes without our hearing our English architects called
upon to be original, and to invent a new style: about as sensible and
necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags
enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a
coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about the
fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who
wants a new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. It
is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and they
be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman or
Saxon, or Norman or English laws. But it is of considerable importance
that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another, and that code
accepted and enforced from one side of the island to another, and not
one law made ground of judgment at York and another in Exeter. And in
like manner it does not matter one marble splinter whether we have an
old or new architecture, but it matters everything whether we have an
architecture truly so called or not; that is, whether an architecture
whose laws might be taught at our schools from Cornwall to
Northumberland, as we teach English spelling and English grammar, or an
architecture which is to be invented fresh every time we build a
workhouse or a parish school. There seems to me to be a wonderful
misunderstanding among the majority of architects at the present day as
to the very nature and meaning of Originality, and of all wherein it
consists. Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new
words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in
painting, on invention of new colors, or new modes of using them. The
chords of music, the harmonies of color, the general principles of the
arrangement of sculptural masses, have been determined long ago, and, in
all probability, cannot be added to any more than they can be altered.
Granting that they may be, such additions or alterations are much more
the work of time and of multitudes than of individual inventors. We may
have one Van Eyck, who will be known as the introducer of a new style
once in ten centuries, but he himself will trace his invention to some
accidental bye-play or pursuit; and the use of that invention will
depend altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of the period.
Originality depends on nothing of the kind. A man who has the gift, will
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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