to disown its authority, and to be guided, if it is guided at all, by instincts of which the intellect can give no immediate account. It is an unconscious attempt to drill art into the ready-made categories which we have found useful in quite other fields, and to explain the unfamiliar by the familiar. It is the application to art of the methods of science, which sometimes are less concerned with the ultimate truth about its facts than with bringing them within the range of a given intellectual formula. But it is unscientific to persist in the application when it is clear that the formula does not fit.

We have dealt in this chapter with a point of historical fact. It is historically true that the distinctive control in Renaissance architecture lay not in construction or materials or politics, but, chiefly and typically, in the taste for form. It follows that it is reasonable to analyse the Italian styles primarily in terms of taste: to ask, how far do they fulfil that third condition of well-building' which Wotton names 'delight.'

But it is one thing to state how Renaissance architecture arose; it is quite another to estimate its value. For it may be rejoined that good taste in architecture consists in approving what is truthfully built-expressive alike of the methods and materials of its construction on the one hand, and, on the other, of the ends it has to serve; and that if the taste of the

Renaissance was indifferent to these points it was bad taste, and the architecture which embodied it bad architecture. Thus, the very factors which, on the point of history, we have relegated to a secondary place, might still, on the point of asthetics, resume their authority.

This view of architecture has many adherents. It finds confirmation-so at least it is claimed-in the greater styles of the past, in the practice of the Greek and Gothic builders. To ignore this rejoinder would be to fall into the common error of dogmatic criticism, and to neglect a large part of actual artistic experience. But it is a view of architecture which the Renaissance builders, at least, were far from holding. It is at variance with buildings which were enjoyed, and enjoyed enthusiastically, by a people devoted, and presumably sensitive, to art.

Confronted by those rival dogmatisms, how can we proceed? The natural course would be to examine the buildings themselves and take the evidence of our own sensations. Are they beautiful, or not? But on our sensations, after all, we can place no immediate reliance. For our sensations will be determined partly by our opinions and, still more, by what we look out for, attend to, and expect to find. All these preoccupations may modify our judgment at every turn, and interpose between us and the clear features of the art an invisible but obscuring veil. Before

we put faith in our sensations, before we accept the verdict of others, it is necessary to examine, more closely than has yet been done, the influences by which contemporary opinion, in matters of architecture, is unwittingly surrounded and controlled.

CHAPTER II

THE ROMANTIC FALLACY

THE Renaissance produced no theory of architecture. It produced treatises on architecture: Fra Giocondo, Alberti, Palladio, Serlio, and many others, not only built, but wrote. But the style they built in was too alive to admit of analysis, too popular to require defence. They give us rules, but not principles. They had no need of theory, for they addressed themselves to taste. Periods of vigorous production, absorbed in the practical and the particular, do not encourage universal thought.

The death of the Renaissance tradition should have enabled men, for the first time, to take a general view of its history, and to define its principles, if not with scientific exactness, at least without provinciality or bias. Of the causes which precluded them from so doing, the first was the prolonged ascendency of the Romantic Movement.

The Romantic Movement created, in all the arts, a deep unrest, prompting men to new experiments; and, following on the experiments, there came a great enlargement of critical theory, seeking to justify

and to explain. So it was with the theory of architecture. How far, in this change of thought, has it been strengthened and enriched; how far encumbered and confused? A clear view of Renaissance architecture requires an answer to this question.

Although, in every department of thought, there are principles peculiar to it, necessary to its understanding, and with reference to which it should properly be approached, yet all the elements of human culture are linked in so close and natural a federation, that when one among them becomes predominant, the others are affected to an instantaneous sympathy, and the standards appropriate to the one are transferred, with however little suitability, to all.

Such, towards the close of the eighteenth century, was the case of the Romantic Movement, which, from being an enlargement of the poetic sensibility, came, in the course of its development, to modify the dogmas and control the practice of politics and of architecture. By the stress which it laid on qualities that belong appropriately to literature, and find place in architecture, if at all, then only in a secondary degree, it so falsified the real significance of the art that, even at the present time, when the Romantic Movement is less conspicuous in