Architecture And Archeology.

ARCHITECTURE OE THE DARK AGES . * I am someii'hat afraid lest by the title I have selected for this paper , I may have lured hither under false pretences some mistaken lovers of Medieval architecture , in the hope of hearing a treatise upon their favourite phase of art ; not , I trust , that any could suppose that I am capable of

endorsing the stigma upon it , which such term was intended ' to convey ; but it is possible that some niay have thought that I proposed to enter the lists in its behalf in the character of an apologist . Should any have been so misled , they must pay for their mistake by their disappointment , if such they deem it , for I hold that calumny to have been long ago refuted .

The " dark ages" to which I am about to refer are quite other than Medieval , as far at any rate as architecture and the other arts are concerned . They are those , fche central or midnight century of Avhich , if Ave may credit the historian Carlyle , lacked light in other senses besides the artistic ; being as regards political and moral honesty also " bankrupt ;" certainly hi all matters of taste they ivere steeped in the

deepest gloom . The jficture I cannot ] 3 romise to make inviting , but ifc may , nevertheless , be in some degree instructive , and shoAV us what to avoid , a lesson not less valuable than that Avhich teaches us what to study and adojjt . As the dark ages of architecture do not then date from the birth of the art , they do not include , nor do they

necessitate any inquiry into the probable form of the wigwam of the "Pre-Adamite" man , if any such existed , and more fortunate than Mr . Wallis ' s stone breaker , hadsuch a shelter while chipping his flint hatchets ; nor need I trouble you with any speculations as fco the early efforts of the pre or post Noahites , AA-hich , perhaps , some millions of years later , may have preceded or followed the fabled transition of the

type of the timber hut into that of the stone temple ; for such essays in building cannot claim a title to the name of architecture at all : or if any be inclined to concede it to them , it coulcl he bufc as architecture in infancy , and , therefore , even if only babbling by the light of nature , nofc altogether dark nor dead ; its glimmerings , if but the first of the dawn , are surely , though slowly perhaps , about to broaden into daylight ; tho men who wrought it were looking forwards and nofc backwards ; they were gaining step by step in advance , never pausing ; one nation taking ib up

where ifcs predecessor left it , each meanwhile giving ifc some individual impress and adding some new thoughts to the general stock , and fusing them into a consistent ancl intelligent whole . Thus we may trace art from age to age until the " dark ages , " and find that it was ever a language wherein men simply and naturally expressed what there was in them to

tell , and which we may read with an assurance greater than ei-en thafc we can give to their written records , seeing that there is less likelihood of there having been tampered ivith . As from the boivels of the earth our geologists are diggingnew fossil facts ivhich explain or correct our misreadings of sacred writ ; so our Layards and Newtons are excavating , from more recent strata , actual fragments of buried Assyrian

cities and Mausoli in Asia Minor , which in like manner throw new light upon profane history and convict half our cherished traditions of being mere fables , putting us , as it ivere , face ivith the kings , priests , and warriors of those ancient days , which had become to us almost as obscure as tho ' mornings and ei'enings" of the-Jcreation , with their wondrous intervals . So ib is with the kings of Egypt ; their

acts and all that they did are chronicled on the Avails of granite and sarcophagi of basalt , lately visited and ably described by Professor Donaldson , and in these clays of railways Ave can quickly re-unite in the mind at least the sculptures of the Parthenon , housed in our Museum , to their empty sockets in the ruins of the temple on the Acropolis of Athensand so gain a limpse of that perfectlbeautiful

, g y art in which the polished Greek sought to represent his ileal of the divine . Then the Roman has left us his notions of architectural shoiviiiess in his versions of the five orders , which , whatever

they may be worth , were his own , until eclectism in " the dark ages " confounded all nationality and propriety in such matters . Even the Byzantine , in whose hands art seemed to stagnate for a season , wrought out in his unmistakable manner the types tradition handed down to him , and set the dome as his sign-manual over the crux ancl each ai-m of the churches , which he built on that plan of his , the " Greek Cross . "

The Arab , again , had his slim minarets and fretted domes , ivith an array of pointed and stilted arches whose curves seemed to have been fashioned after that of his oivn falchion . The Barbarians , also , who overturned the Roman Empire and settled down upon its lees , gave sense and nerve to the effete nonsense which they found in the shape of decorative

art in that classic land , and thought out for themselves a better ( being the proper ) way of using the archivolt , and wreathed the tame foliage of the Corinthian capital into something like the grace and freedom of nature , and told , in their sculptures , without reserve , what thoy themselves believed in , loved , ancl were amused by . Then followedsurpassing all previous effortsthe Gothic

, , or Medieval development of art , the grandest , noblest , and most scientific ivhich the world has seen ; for even it , in its restless strivings after conceptions of beauty , seemingly as infinite in their variety as in the number of ifcs works and its schemes for realising them , ifc sometimes over-shot its powers , and making not sufficiently sure of its substructure in haste to soar upivards , prepared for itself such

catastrophes as those recorded of the ToAvers of Winchester and Ely , by Professor Willis , and that just witnessed at Chichester ; we have yet hundreds of other examples , equally fine , which have lasted for centuries and may last as many more . AVe may , therefore , still be more thankful for its lofty and noble aims , des ] fifce such occasional failures , than for the lower if safer aim of styles content to grovel near

tho ground , and whose superior science consists in poising huge stones upon columns , in ignorance of the principal arch , whereby the . space could be well spanned , and in avoiding every chance of thrust in order to escape a difficulty which they knew not how to deal with . Throughout all these several styles not one link in the chain of art was lost—not one lying phase had yet appeared .

We may approve one more than another , we may find errors and backslidings , but no systematic and deliberate falsehood and betrayal of the spirit of the age can be found in the whole history of art until we come to " the dark ages . " The Greeks seem to havo been gifted rather with consummate refinement than with much originality . We can well see that they admired ancl borrowed from the

ornament of Persia and Egypt ; but ive have no proof of their having attempted to build Egyptian halls in the streets of Athens or sham caves of Ellora about ifcs Acropolis . The Christians , when freed by Constantine from the persecution which had repressed all their preidous efforts , bodily adopted the pagan basilias for their churches , and built others after the same typo , yet we do not find that they attempted

to compose them out of porticoes copied from the antique , or piled Grecian monuments one above another to serve for belfries or campanili . It is a question of tho greatest moment to us , but one which I have nofc time noiv to discuss , hoAV it was that the Medieval or Gothic phase of art should , after its brilliant and rapid growthhave rested so short a time at the height

, of development which ifc reached , and thence declined with almost equal rapidity , till it fizzed itself away in Franco in the luxury of " Flamboyant" tracery , and in England was strangled in its strait-jacket array of the rigid " Perpendicular . " It suffices for our present purpose to know that it died from inherent decay , and not from any assault from without .

That this , as every other stylo thafc preceded ifc , should ha \ -e gone the way of all things of earth , may be a matter for regret , yet not of surprise , and its ha \ -ing done so is not the question which I havo proposed to consider on the present occasion , but , rather , how it happened that after it came " the deluge ? " We have seen that all previous styles successively rose , culminated , and fell , only to be followed