ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM I?6o TO THE PRESENT DAY
the manufacturer and merchant could feel justified in placing
associational criteria foremost. Visual criteria his eyes were not
trained to appreciate. But the eyes of architects were; and it was a
grave symptom of a diseased century that architects were satisfied
to be story-tellers instead of artists. But then painters were no better.
They too, to be successful, had to tell stories or render objects from
nature with scientific accuracy.
Thus by 1830 we find a most alarming social and aesthetic situa-
tion in architecture. Architects believed that anything created by
the pre-industrial centuries must of necessity be better than anything
made to express the character of their own era. Architects5 clients
had lost all aesthetic susceptibilities, and wanted other than aesthetic
qualities to approve of a building. Associations they could under-
stand. And one other quality they could also understand and even
check: correctness of imitation. The free and fanciful treatment of
styles developed into Qne of archeological exactitude. That this
could happen was duetto that general sharpening of the tools of
historical knowledge which characterises the ipth century. It is in
truth the century of Historicism. After the system-building i8th
century, the ipth appears to an amazing extent satisfied with, say, a
historical and comparative study of existing philosophies to the study
of metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, etc., themselves. And so it was in
theology and philology too. Similarly architectural scholarship
abandoned aesthetic theory and concentrated on historical research.
Thanks to a subdivision of labour which architecture, like all
other fields of art, letters and science, took over from industry,
architects were always able to draw feom a well-assorted stock of
historical detail. No wonder that little time and desire were left
for the development of an original style of the ipth century. Even
with regard to Soane and Gilly we have to be careful not to over-
estimate their originality and "modernity". Soane did a great deal
that is more conventional titan his own house. There are even
some Gothic designs by him. And Gilly drew and published in detail
the grandest of the mediaeval castles of the German knights in East
Prussia. Exquisite as these drawings are, the attitude that made Gilly
spend so much time on them is only partially romantic and patriotic.
Antiquarian ambition is at least as conspicuous in these careful
renderings. The case of Girtin's and Turner's early water colours is
very similar. They are the transition (though still a romantic tran-
sition full of creative power) between the polite 18th-century
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