ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY
tower had to him some of die awe-inspiring qualities of the dark
Middle Ages can be appreciated from surviving illustrations. Here
the eccentricity of a millionaire seems to have created something
truly romantic. FonthiU was built by James Wyatt (1746-1813) from
1796 onwards. But already as early as 1772 Goethe in front of Stras-
bourg Cathedral had found words of passionate admiration for the
Gothic spirit in architecture. "It rises like a most sublime, wide-
arching Tree of God, who with a thousand boughs, a million of twigs,
and leafage like the sands of the sea, tells forth to the neighbourhood
the glory of the Lord, his master. ... All is shape, down to the
minutest fibril, all purposes to the whole. How the firm-grounded
gigantic building lightly rears itself into the air! How filagree'd all
of it, yet for eternity. . . . Stop brother, and discgrn the deepest
sense of truth . . . quickening out of strong, rough, German soul
... Be not girled, dear youth, for rough greatness by the soft
doctrine of modern beauty-lisping."1
Now here the Gothic style is no longer something in the same
category as Rococo, Chinese and Hindu, it stands for all that is
genuine, sincere, elemental—in fact very much for what Winckel-
mann, and only a little later Goethe himself, saw in the art of Greece.
The Greek and the Gothic were both, in the minds of serious
aestheticians and artists, the salvation from 18th-century flippancy.
But they could not be an effective remedy. For no healthy style can
stop at the mere imitation of another. The Renaissance had not done
it. The Grecians of the early ipth century did it too often. Goethe in
the most classical mood of his Iphigenia remained essentially original.
But in feet what he had praised more than anything at Strasbourg
was originality in the sense of Young. And so the few architects of
Goethe's era who possessed true genius used the forms of Greece
and Rome with the greatest freedom. Of Greece and Rome; for an
equally free and masterly style based on Gothic principles time was
not yet ripe. The sense of mediaeval building had not yet been
sufficiently digested to allow for a revival in another than an imita-
tive sense.
Two architects above all others must be mentioned as the creators
of an original idiom of 1800: Sir John Soane in England and Friedrich
Gilly in Prussia. Soane (1753-1837) had gone through apprenticeship
and Royal Academy tuition, when he went to Rome in 1778.
1 Geoffrey Grigson's translation, published in The Architectural Review, vol. 98,
1945-
194