By Mr. T. Gumbier Parry. 51 



architectural design. The artist has made all light and flimsy 

 which the architect had left purposely and necessarily massive, 

 bold and broad. Both mind and eye are offended at the result. 

 He has placed the two arts in direct antagonism. He has stultified 

 the architecture, and reversed every condition of equilibrium, 

 opening that which should be closed, lightening that which should 

 be heavy, leaving weighty masses of masonry without apparent 

 support. He has turned heavy walls into thin air, and has left 

 massive arches to carry the clouds. But the great works of other 

 times have given us the precedents and principles to attain the 

 same success. Surely it will not be denied that if ever taste cul- 

 minated to its highest act, it was in the creation of beautiful 

 works. If ever there was authority in taste which we are bound 

 to reverence, it was when art had attained its greatest triumphs. 

 Individual taste may nowadays rebel, in vanity and self-assertion, 

 but the greatest artists of the greatest days did otherwise. I am 

 confident that in conjunction with architecture all arts are raised 

 at once to their highest sphere. Architecture is the most conven- 

 tional of all arts, the creature of thought most abstract and refined 

 — and with it the others can find companionship complete and 

 sympathetic only in their purest and noblest forms, where all power 

 is concentrated to symbolise and suggest rather than to realise, to 

 address imagination rather than to satisfy curiosity. Naturalism 

 and imitation is another, a distinct, and most inferior phase both 

 of sculpture and painting — a phase, indeed, to which a good pupil 

 must attain — to which the master must have himself attained to 

 reach his higher standing ground. They are steps, mere steps, 

 which all must mount who care to feel the pure air above, and to 

 see the broad horizon of arts' poetry in all its beauty. I conclude 

 then with this, — that if those various arts of which my subject has 

 treated could be attained, and their spirit guided by the genius of 

 one master mind — if their full powers could be compelled and 

 their resources welded together with unity of purpose and unity of 

 result ; such a conclave of the arts could only meet for one great 

 triumph — in an architecture completely beautiful — the mother and 

 the mistress of them all. 



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