BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Eccentricity of Textbooks
IT seems hardly necessary to add to the two pages of press hyperbole which the publishers (following familiar text-book custom) include in this jubilee edition of the famous tome. Banister Fletcher is now secure of its place alongside Grove, Fowler, Sowerby, the Oxford Dictionary and the D.N.B. And if the present reviewer is over- sensitive to the special vices of text-books, he is no less an addict of Banister Fletcher, a shot of whose thumping Victorian prodigality needs to be injected regularly into the thin blood of every modern architect.
A text-book can pass through an infinite number of editions with- out changing its personality. The B.B.C. building and the Empire State may get into the final pages, but 1896 is the date on the fly- leaf. Hence, for instance, the book's fervent nationalism. Archi- tecture, which of all the arts has been, and must always be, regionally, and not politically, differentiated, is here split arbitrarily into schools coincident with the nation-States of the late nineteenth century (e.g., " Belgian and Dutch Gothic "). British architecture, of course, gets top priority (French mediaeval 57 pages, English mediaeval 131 pages, Italian Renaissance 76 pages, English Renaissance 104 pages), and while special chapters are devoted to prehistoric architecture and to the architecture of the British Dominions, famous and lovely styles such as that of the Russian Orthodox Church, or the Baroque of South Germany and the Habsburg Empire, or the eighteenth- century architecture of Sweden and Denmark, are not mentioned at all. One other omission, surprising in the circumstances : no examples are shown of Georgian vernacular architecture, of the terrace houses and country towns which some consider our unique contribution. Wren is given a sort of apotheosis not accorded to any other architect in history, after which, sooner than we should be, we are among the Victorians, of whom there is a remarkable list, including famous names like J. Whichcord, Capt. Fowke, H. Gribble and the Leeming brothers. (Fischer von Erlach is not mentioned.) A factory by Sir Banister Fletcher is illustrated, but nothing by Nash or Soane.
Hunting for omissions in text-books is a good game, mild revenge for the agony of examinations. More serious, because more damaging to the student, is the arbitrary chopping-up of the flow of history into easily memorable compartments, of which that drab Victorian trio, E.E., Dec. and Perp., is the notorious example. It would be unfair to suggest that Sir Banister, whose scholarship is evident on nearly every page, is guilty of the kind of solecism immortalised in ro66 and All That ; but his " comparative method " of studying the history of architecture does enforce generalisations which any specialist can dispute. Last and least serious weakness of every universal history is long-sightedness. The telescope works perfectly up to any distance, but within a hundred years or so of the date of writing it cannot focus at all. The chapters on modern English
and American architecture are a nightmare catalogue of pretentious mediocrity, from which it would be painful to quote. Who could guess that behind this sickly facade of civic centres and state capitols and public libraries Paxton was, spinning his magic webs, Voysey struggling for the child's vision and Le Corbusier staking the claims of modern architecture? (None of these is mentioned except Paxton once as a gardener.) It is as if an art historian ended the great story of painting in Europe with the names Lawrence, Winterhalter, Land- seer, Bouguereau, Sargent, Laszlo and Lavery ; then hinted at the existence of Cezarme in this sentence:
" The novel forms being evolved arise from new conditions, materials, and possibilitie§ in design, and these must result in that originality which is so much scught after in the mcdemist school of thought which has set itself against the architecture of precedent and tradition."
Fortunately the book does not end on this grumpy and misleading note. There follows a sort of appendix illustrating what are oddly called the " non-historical " styles of India, China, Japan and " the Saracens." With a sigh of relief one travels again in the realms' of gold. The new edition is notable for an increase in size of nearly all the 4,00o-odd illustrations, which has been achieved by the simple expedient of narrowing the margins. A comparatively small number of new photographs have been added. But the glory of the book remains its unique collection of line drawing& These are endlessly fascinating. It would be nice to know who did them.
LIONEL BRETT.
Previous page
