The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-11-08
THE EARLY JACOBEAN.
BLENDING OF ENGLISH GOTHIC
 WITH RENAISSANCE IDEAS.

ftecture of the World-Its Decline in
 England Different from that of Con-
 tinentaI COuntrTes-Architects Dur- ing James the First's Reign Men of
 Great Taste and Splendid Judgment.
 The decline of Gothic architecture in England was very different from it's decline in the countries of the conti- nent. Here 1t died no violent death in the famboyant extravagances of France, nor yet was it driven out by the passion for the classical styles which the Renaissance inspired in Ita- ly; it fingered on for centuries, gain ing nearly always, like some beautiful old face, a new charm of eXpressive- ness to compensate for those more ob- vious perfections which it had lost. It is not, think, fanciful to suppose that the cause of this enthuanasia consists largely in the fact that it was the per- pendicular which became the most per- manent and essentially English style of Gothic architecture. It was not only that the perpendicular style, erring as it does rather on the side of coldness and lack of imagination, was by its very nature unlikely to fal into the eXtravagant or the bizarre; but its chief safeguard for the preservation both of it's performance and it's charm, lay in it's peculiar adaptability to the purposes of domestic architecture, At the very time (the Elizabethan age) when English ecclesiastical architec- ture was either bad or non-existent those manor houses were being built which seem to so many of us the most delightful places of residence that were ever raised in any age or country, com bining all the historic charm of the Gothic tradition with the English in- stinct for comfort, satisfied by a thor ough mastery of architectural rules, Nor must we forget the influence of Renaissance ideas in these still Gothic buildings of the sixteenth and early | seventeenth centuries. Many beauti- full house have we seen which, while Gothic in it's general tone and outline, | is so full of Renaissance detail that it 1 is really hard to know to which style to attribute it; buildings which must l indeed have seemed strange and freak ish to a contemporary foreigner from their successful combination of that which he had been taught to believe most true to the canons of art with much which he would condemn as bar barous and medieval. For, while it is true that the Renaissance nowhere made a complete and immediate con quest of a country's architecture there are in Italy, for example, Gothic portals covered with classical designs
 and strange quasi-classical churches in Brittany with steeples and all the 1 structural portions of Gothic building wet in England that conquest, which came so much later, came also fal more gradually than in continental countries. Englishmen have been, as a rule, but little influenced by pure theo- " and abstract principle, and it would appear that the revised interest ir classical art was never to our country men, as to the Latin races, a new rev | elation. It is scarcely likely that Eliz- i abethan architects had ever heard ot the doctrines of Vitruvius, nor did
 they modify the received style of build. ing out of any deference for the great. ness of ancient Rome. They would seem rather to have been influenced bN another motive, also highly character. istic of the Renaissance-the motive ot curiosity. Delighted by what was mos immediately attractive in the earlier l Renaissance buildings of Italy ant 1 France, they wished to try their hand so to say, at the new style, and with. out any idea of abandoning the old tc graft upon it what they liked best ot the new.
 And wonderfully well they succeeded In those few years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries men whose names have rarely come down to us achieved the successful fusion of two styles, entirely different both in spirit
 and origin, and both of them then liv. ing styles of art, not archaistic revi
 vals-and achieved it, as 1t would seem | by way of an experiment. For a flu, sion it may justly be called; since, SC harmonious is the general effect ot these buildings, that only after a crit. ical examination We remark that the characteristic perpendicular doorway with it's Gothic mouldings is flanket by pilasters that might have come from some Roman temples, or that the tracery of the Gothic windows is en. tirely classical both in spirit and de. sign. It is impossible to analyze tht quality of these Elizabethan and Jaco
 bean manor houses, so many of which stiH fortunately survive; but I sup. pose that the reason why they appea
 to us so strongly and so immediately is that in them pre- eminently we have the successful adaptation of the means
 to an end, the union of delicate fancy
 with perfect taste, and of a freedom
 from dogmatic rule with deference tt received tradition.
 I have said that it was in domestic architecture that the builders of thi! age eXcelled, and the statement need,
 no defence; but here and there, scat
 tered about the country, we come upol ecclesiastical buildings which, while lacking the grandeur and fine purity O earlier times, have brought into tht sphere of ecclesiastical architecture tn, peculiar homely charm of contempora
 ry secular buildings Naturally enough it is in the colleges of our universitie. that this fortunate tdaptation mos
 frequently occurs. Oxford, however