ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM Ij6o TO THE PRESENT DAY
Old-English. By 1840 pattern-books for builders and clients include
many more styles: Tudor, French Renaissance, Venetian Renais-
sance and others. That does not however mean that at all moments
during the ipth century all these styles were really used. Favourites
changed with fasliion. Certain styles became associationally branded.
A familiar example is the Moorish synagogue. Another is the per-
severance of the batdemented castle for prisons. An account of
architecture from 1820 to 1890 is bound to be one of the coming and
going of period styles.
On the Classical side 1820-40 is characterised by the most
correct Neo-Greek. Fancy had left the treatment of antiquity even
earlier than that of the Middle Ages. The results are competent,
and in the hands of the best architects of a noble dignity. The British
Museum, begun in 1824 by Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867), is
amongst the best examples in Britain (pi. c), or would be if
its front with its grand Ionic order of the Erechtheum in Athens
could been seen from a distance; Carl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-
1841), Gilly's pupil, is the greatest, most sensitive and most original
representative on the Continent (fig. 97), William Strickland
(1787-1854) probably the most vigorous in the United States.
For now, with the Greek Revival, America can no longer be left
out of the picture of Western architecture. American building had
been colonial to the end of the i8th century; colonial as the latest
Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings of the Spanish and the
Portuguese in North, Central and South America. The Greek Re-
vival in the United States is also still closely dependent on European,
especially English examples, but national qualities, such as a remark-
able stress on engineering technique, sanitary installation and equip-
ment in general, now come to the fore. The ideological back-
ground of the strict Neo-Greek is the liberal humanism of the
educated classes in the early ipth century, the spirit of Goethe, i.e.
the spirit which created our first public museums and art galleries,
and our first national theatres, and which is responsible for the re-
organisation and the broadening of education.
On the Gothic side the corresponding development leads back
to the Romantic Movement. Young Goethe's enthusiasm for
Strasbourg had been a revolutionary genius's worship of genius. To
the'generation after his, the Middle Ages became the ideal of Christian
civilisation. Friedrich Schlegel, one of the most brilliant of Romantic
writers and one of the most inspired Gothicists, became a convert
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