LEDOUX, GHXY AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
century forgot about Soane and Gilly and remained smugly satisfied
with the imitation of the past? Such a lack of self-confidence is the
last thing one would expect from an epoch so independent in com-
merce, industry and engineering. It is the things of the spirit in
which the Victorian age lacked vigour and courage. Standards in
architecture were the first to go; for while a poet and a painter can
forget about their age and be great in the solitude of their study and
studio, an architect cannot exist in opposition to society. Now those
to whom visual sensibility was given saw so much beauty destroyed
all around by the sudden immense and uncontrolled growth of cities
and factories that they despaired of their century and turned to a
more inspiring past. Moreover the iron-master and mill-owner, as
a rule self-made men of no education, felt no longer bound by one
particular accepted taste as the gentleman had been who was brought
up to believe in the rule of taste. It would have been bad manners
to build against it. Hence the only slightly varied uniformity of the
English 18th-century house. The new manufacturer had no manners,
and he was a convinced individualist. If, for whatever reasons, he
liked a style in architecture, then there was nothing to prevent him
from having his way and getting a house or a factory or an office build-
ing or a club built in that style. And unfortunately for the immediate
future of architecture he knew of a good many possible styles,
because—as we have seen—some sophisticated and leisurely
cognoscenti of the i8th century had explored for fun certain out-
of-the-way architectural idioms, and a set of Romantic poets was
revelling in nostalgic fantasies of the distant in time and space. The
Rococo had reintroduced alien styles, the Romantic Movement
had endowed them with sentimental associations. The ipth century
lost the Rococo's lightness of touch and the Romantics* emotional
fervour. But it stuck to variety of style, because associational values
were the only values in architecture accessible to the new ruling class.
We have seen Vanbrugh's defence of ruins for associational
reasons. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his thirteenth Discourse of 1786
made the same point more neatly. He explicitly counts amongst the
principles of architecture "that of affecting the imagination by means
of association of ideas. Thus," he continues, "we have naturally a
veneration for antiquity; whatever building brings to our remem-
brance ancient customs and manners, such as the castles of the Barons
of ancient Chivalry, is sure to give this delight/*
Hence on the authority of the late President of the Royal Academy
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