Chapter 8: )

In England the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival were effective solvents of Romantic Classicism, because both, and particularly the latter, were consciously nationalistic, emphasizing in an increasingly nationalistic period the recovery of local rather than of universal building traditions. For a good part of their local acceptability they were dependent, moreover, on certain warm connotations which their visual forms had for English patrons. The Rustic Cottage, the Tudor Parsonage, the Castellated Mansion had all, supposedly, been autochthonous products of the insular past. On the other hand, even though the English of the eighteenth century had adopted as their own such foreign painters as Claude and Poussin, from whose canvases the Italian Villa mode principally derived both its forms and its prestige, that mode was certainly not English in its ultimate prototypes. It is readily understandable, therefore, that it was the Italian Villa, of all the established vehicles of the Picturesque, which had the greatest success in a Germany romantically mad about Italy. But such superb compositions as the Court Gardener’s House by Schinkel (Plate 14A) or Persius’s Friedenskirche at Potsdam (Plate 15), perhaps the highest international achievements in the Picturesque genre, owed only their basic concept, if even that, to England. Their elements were for the most part borrowed directly from Italian sources, and they were carefully composed according to a formal discipline not inconsonant with the standards of Romantic Classicism.

The Swiss Chalet, an even more alien mode in England than the Italian Villa, was a native one in Central Europe. Hence one finds Schinkel first, and then his pupils, exploiting it with considerable virtuosity as the _Tirolerhäuschen_. Indeed, the particular form of wooden fretwork which came to be called ‘gingerbread’ in English, one of the favourite forms of later Picturesque detail everywhere in the western world from Russia to America, is more likely to be derived from Alpine chalets via nineteenth-century German than via nineteenth-century English intermediaries.

Romantic Classicism, being founded on the basic Western European heritage of Greece and Rome, could readily broaden its sources to include the Early Christian and the Italian Renaissance. But to men of the early nineteenth century the Gothic was not a universal European style as we are likely to consider it today; it was ‘Early English’ or ‘Altteutsch’ or (with far more justification) ‘l’architecture française’. The bigotry of the English Gothic Revival was so intense in the forties that Scott was denounced in _The Ecclesiologist_ for even entering a competition for a church in Germany since, if successful, his clients would be Lutherans not Anglicans. Such insular narrowness made the Catholic Pugin’s Gothic paradoxically intransmissible to Catholic countries abroad, quite as intransmissible in effect as the Jacobethan. Scott won his Hamburg competition by modulating, to the horror of puristic compatriots, his usual fourteenth-century English Decorated towards its German equivalent, on the whole a grander style as he exploited it there.

Continental nationalism, like Continental Neo-Catholicism outside France,[145] favoured earlier—or later—modes than the Gothic, down at least to the mid century. The _Rundbogenstil_, moreover, despite the fact that the precedent for its detail was quite as often Italian as local, received warm support from nationalists in Germany; when exported, moreover, as to the Scandinavian countries and the United States, it was properly recognized as a German product (see Chapters 2 and 5). In Latin countries, and particularly in Italy, Gothic continued to seem alien; hence there are few examples of revived medieval design of any sort there or in Spain and Portugal before 1850. Jappelli’s highly exceptional work at Padua, mentioned earlier, is rich and delicate but not in the least plausible to Northern eyes in the way of Ehrhardt’s somewhat similar Italian Gothic houses in Dresden.

A European consensus of taste had been achieved by the late seventeenth century, despite the division of Europe into Catholic and Protestant countries, and this consensus was maintained, and even grew in strength, for another hundred years and more. When it finally broke down in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it necessarily broke down in different ways and to a different degree in each country. No new cultural synthesis was achieved, at least as regards architecture, before our own day. The resultant stylistic patchwork that the second half of the nineteenth century inherited was largely the product of the increasing nationalism of the two decades that preceded the mid century. This particularistic nationalism, rather than the concurrent increase in mere eclecticism of taste—for such eclecticism had existed to a greater or lesser degree since the mid eighteenth century—explains the major difference in the architectural climate around 1850 from that around 1800; at least it is some part of the explanation. To be Roman in architecture, to be Greek, even to be Italian, one need not cease to be English or French or German. But to be Tudor one must be English, as to be _François I_ one must be French, or so it seemed to most architects and their clients in the forties.

From this pattern of growing nationalistic divergence, this Late Romantic disintegration of the cultural unity that had remained strong and vital through the first few decades of the century, it is important now to turn to an aspect of architecture that derived from a different international absolute, that of science and technology. The English led in most technological developments affecting building methods from the mid eighteenth century on, both in the introduction of new materials and in the exploitation of new types of construction to serve new needs. But they led only because the Industrial Revolution, at once the result of certain major technological changes and the cause of innumerable others, had its origins and its early flowering in England. Before the first half of the nineteenth century was over, other countries to which the Industrial Revolution came relatively late were rapidly catching up. After the fifties technological leadership in building passed from Britain to the United States and to the Continent. Some consideration of the increased use of iron and glass between 1790 and 1855 may well conclude the first part of this book.

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