336 The Evolution of Architecture. 



support and the beginnings of all possible sincerity were in 

 this half-unconscious step. Necessity is the mother of in- 

 vention, and as the paucity of Roman ruins in Ravenna put 

 her architects upon their mettle till they said " So much the 

 better ! " so in Germany the same paucity, the same lack of 

 Roman material to steal or copy, brought about a much more 

 original style than southern France or Italy attained. But 

 this German Romanesque, which reached its climax in the 

 noble symmetry of Speyer, the cathedral of that city, was, 

 after all, a primitive Romanesque carried to its farthest point 

 of characteristic excellence. It is a Romanesque that has a 

 closer cousinship with the towers of Lombardy and of Saxon 

 England than with the sturdy strength of Caen and Dur- 

 ham. And here again we have a capital illustration of evo- 

 lutionary principles. The type became so definitely fixed 

 that there was no chance for the varieties. The consequence 

 was that Germany never developed a type of Romanesque so 

 liberal and expansive as that of France and England in the 

 eleventh and twelfth centuries : So joined was she to her 

 idols, that the Gothic could not persuade her to abandon 

 them. The German Gothic of Cologne and Strassburg 

 and Freiburg is merely a French importation, not a native 

 growth. 



For beauty of Romanesque detail we go to southern 

 France, but for the free development of a Romanesque, as 

 self-centered as the Gothic in its magnificent virility, we must 

 go to Normandy and to the England of the Norman Kings. 

 In Caen and Durham we have the best examples of this 

 noble and impressive style. Why call it Romanesque ? For 

 one thing it reproduces the forms of the Roman basilica, 

 where the Byzantine rooted back into such Roman circular 

 tombs or mortuary chapels as those of S. Constanza and 

 Minerva Medica. For another thing it is essentially Roman 

 in its construction. It is more frankly Roman than the 

 Roman. It confesses its structural character where the 

 Roman architecture of the Empire disguised it with a veneer 

 of lying ornament. In the nave of Durham and the tran- 

 sept of Winchester there is nothing to remind us of Rome's 

 borrowed ornament. There is everything to remind us of 

 the Rome that built the aqueducts of the Campagna and the 

 arches of the Colosseum. Reversion is a principle of evolu- 

 tion of which Darwin had a good deal to say. In Norman 

 Romanesque we have a reversion to the Roman type of sim- 

 ple strength, unspoiled by foreign drapery. 



