ROMANTIC MOVEMENT FROM 1760 TO THE PRESENT DAY
to the Roman Catholic church. That was in 1808. Chateaubriand
had written his Gtnie du Christianisme in 1802. Then, about 1835 in
England, Augustus Welby Pugin (1812-52) transferred the equation
of Christianity and Gothic into architectural theory and practice.
With him, to build in the forms of the Middle Ages is a moral duty.
And he went further. He contended that, as the mediaeval architect
was an honest workman and a faithful Christian, and as mediaeval
architecture is good architecture, you must be an honest workman
and a good Christian to be a good architect. In this the associational
attitude appears fatefully extended. Similarly contemporary Class-
icists began to brand the architect who favoured Gothic as an
obscurantist and, worse still, his work as popery. On the whole
the arguments of the Gothicists provecl stronger and had, in an un-
expected way, a more beneficial effect on art and architecture, but
the aesthetic value of the buildings designed by the Classicists was
higher. The Houses of Parliament, begun in 1836, are aesthetically
more successful than any later large-scale public building in the
Gothic style (pi. ci). The competition—a significant symptom—
had demanded designs in the Gothic or Tudor style. A monument
of national tradition had to be in a national style. The architect Sir
Charles Barry (1795-1860) preferred the Classical and the Italian.
But Pugin worked with him and was responsible for nearly all the
detail inside and outside. Hence the building possesses an intensity
of life not to be found in other architect's endeavours in the Perpen-
dicular style.
Yet even Pugin's Gothic turns out to be only a veneer, as soon as
the Houses of Parliament are examined as a whole. They have, it is
true, a picturesque asymmetry in their towers and spires, but the
river front is, in spite of that, with its emphasised centre and corner
pavilions a composition of Palladian formality. You can without
much effort visualise it with porticoes of a William Kent or John
Wood type. And strangely enough, the British Museum, perfectly
Greek as it appears, reveals to the deeper-searching an equally
Palladian structure. Centre portico and projecting wings are familiar
features. The Athens of Pericles never conceived anything so loosely
spread-out.
So while the battles raged between Goth and Pagan, neither
realised how all this application of period detail remained on the
surface. Moral arguments and associational tags were freely used,
but architecture as a job of designing to fulfil functions remained
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