House and Garden 
in time for the Liverpool Cathedral Competition. 
It is fair, however, to say that this is merely an 
architect’s view, and not Mr. Goodyear’s. Though 
his friends are giving New York the benefit of asym¬ 
metric planning, he himself holds to the pessimism 
born of past experience. He is doubtful whether 
even when we have specified refinements to con¬ 
tractors we shall succeed in getting the mediaeval 
art into modern buildings. He is no reformer, in¬ 
deed, of modern architecture, but merely concerned 
in the historical accuracy of research. This ques¬ 
tion of irregularity in ancient building has occupied 
him more or less for thirty years, and during the last 
ten he has visited, photographed, measured, and 
plumbed an extraordinary number of ancient church¬ 
es—mostly in Italy, but at Constantinople also, and 
as near to us as Amiens and Wells. There is no 
question that by this hard work he has won his way 
to our complete acknowledgment of the facts so 
beautifully displayed in his exhibition at Edinburgh. 
If not exactly the discoverer of irregularities, he can 
claim to have been the first to have systematised 
their phenomena, and to have made it easy now for 
everybody else to perceive them. Mr. Goodyear’s 
catalogue lays, perhaps, a little too much stress— 
quite pardonably under the circumstances—on the 
hidden grace of these refinements, which are not to 
be perceived by careless glances, and yield tbeir se¬ 
crets only to the initiated eye. As a matter of fact, 
some of these graceful obliquities have obtained the 
comment of observers, and the handbook of a ca¬ 
thedral usually points out that the Lady-chapel bends 
to one side as a symbol of the bent head of the Figure 
on the crucifix. It has also been remarked that 
mediaeval walls are not always perfectly vertical. 
Indeed, the asymmetry of ancient church construc¬ 
tion and general decoration has struck not only Rus- 
kin, but the whole army of sketchers and measurers 
that have for fifty years been making drawings of 
churches and cathedrals. Still, Mr. Goodyear must 
be freely allowed the merit of giving these facts a 
classification and a nomenclature. His are the first 
steps to a scientific understanding of what his meas¬ 
urements and photographs triumphantly show to be 
accessory to so much of the ancient beauty of ar¬ 
chitecture. 
It has to be added, however, that Mr. Goodyear 
wishes to carry us further than classification. Aim 
as he may at being only an accurate recorder of ir¬ 
regularities, he cannot help going behind the phe¬ 
nomena he tabulates and showing us, not the meth¬ 
od only, but the meaning of it all. At page xiv of 
his classified catalogue I read as follows: “Aside 
from the accidental element, the builders of the Mid¬ 
dle Ages frequently practised predetermined and 
carefully considered constructive arrangements which 
were intended to make their buildings more impo¬ 
sing, more attractive, and more interesting to the eye.” 
There can be no question that this deliberate in¬ 
tention is what his exhibition is designed to prove 
to us. He shows how such arrangements are spe¬ 
cially observable in those cathedrals which may be 
taken as expressive of national aspirations, “on 
which therefore unusual care has been lavished,” 
such as St. Mark’s, the Duomo of Pisa, and the 
Notre Dame of Paris. Indeed, the title of “Archi¬ 
tectural Refinements,” applied to the exhibition, 
makes it quite clear that to Mr. Goodyear the ir¬ 
regularities found by him are not only not mistake 
nor accident, but are due to an intention of design— 
in fact are proofs of a distinct theory of beautiful 
creation in the art of building. The following pages 
will discuss this interesting point. 
Mr. Goodyear’s photographs supplement his no¬ 
menclature of bends, deflections, and such like. 
But I think the various classes of appearances may, 
perhaps, be better brought before the reader’s eye 
if I take a hint from an informal summary given by 
him in the text of his catalogue, and arrange his phe¬ 
nomena thus:— 
Class I.—Variations from regularity which have 
the appearance of: 
(a) Errors of measurement, such as the unequal 
spacing of piers in arcades or of window- 
widths in a series of bays. 
(b) Errors of squareness, as when transepts are 
not accurately at right angles to naves, or 
when arcade walls go canting away from 
a front. 
Class II.—Irregularities which have the appear¬ 
ance of resulting from weak abutments or founda¬ 
tions, such as the spreading of arches, the curving 
of walls, the leaning of facades, etc. 
Class III.—Irregularities which present them¬ 
selves as seemingly due to difficulties of site, as 
when existing buildings cramp a rectangular setting 
out, or prevent the regular symmetries. 
The above three classes of appearances are suf¬ 
ficiently common in all buildings, whether modern 
or ancient: the facts that they suggest have engaged 
the attention of all architects called upon to be sur¬ 
veyors. Three other classes are not so common 
to us. 
Class IV.— In this I put deviations from regu¬ 
larity with which we have less experience in the 
modern building of churches, for the reason that 
our builders are not hampered by the necessities of 
a church service going on during the course of erec¬ 
tion. Both in their buildings and additions the old 
builders had to provide that services should begin 
at the earliest date possible and not be interrupted. 
The choir of a new church was roofed in somehow 
as soon as it could be, and subsequent building had 
to be carried on outside its enclosure and at a disad¬ 
vantage for exactly fitting the old work. So in med¬ 
iaeval buildings as they have come down to us there 
192 
