St. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Great riches are not required for the habit of magnificence; it is enough that a man should dispose of such as he possesses greatly, according to time and place.” As in life, so in art, and especially in architecture, greatness of style is quite independent of wealth of material; indeed, wealth of material is constantly found by true artists to be a fatal hindrance to grandeur of effect. Hence great poets and painters are usually very shy of what commonly pass for great subjects—that is, subjects full of obvious interest and splendour; and, if they treat such subjects at all, they begin by denuding them as far as possible of all that makes them attractive to the novice in art, until they come to a simple greatness which was hitherto a secret.

Now I wish to point out what I conceive to be{147} a principal condition of great effect with small means and in small or comparatively small buildings. It is magnificence in the expenditure of such material as the architect possesses, and especially of stone, brick, and timber. It is commonly supposed, even by architects, that a solidity of wall and roof sufficient to put far out of sight any idea of insecurity or decay, if properly shown forth and expressed by chamfer, moulding, cornice, shafted recess, and the many other “decorations” which are principally methods of showing the thickness of wall and weight of roof, is all that noble building calls for; and that the frequent—nay, general—practice of ancient architecture in going much further than this was simply waste of material caused by want of mechanical knowledge. But those who know most of ancient architecture know best that there was no want of mechanical knowledge displayed in it, but quite the reverse. Not only is mechanical knowledge, equal if not beyond our own, proved by such buildings as York and Salisbury Cathedrals, but the house and cottage builder of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seems to have known all the details of his business fully as well as the most ingenious economist of material that ever “scamped” a modern tenement of the same order. He was fully aware that the strength of a rafter{148} lay rather in its depth than its breadth, and that, for a time at least, a few boards two inches thick and ten inches deep, set edgeways, would suffice to carry the roof, which nevertheless it pleased him better to lay upon a succession of beams ten inches square. It is the reality, and the modest ostentation of the reality, of such superfluous substantiality that constitutes the whole secret of effect in many an old house that strikes us as “architectural” though it may not contain a single item of architectural ornament; and, in the very few instances in which modern buildings have been raised in the same fashion, the beholder at once feels that their generous regard for the far future is of almost as poetical a character as the aged retrospect of a similar house of the time of Henry VII or Elizabeth. A man now hires a bit of ground for eighty or ninety years; and, if he has something to spare to spend on beauty, he says to himself: “I will build me a house that will last my time, and what money I have over I will spend in decorating it. Why should I waste my means in raising wall and roof which will last five times as long as I or mine shall want them?” The answer is: Because that very “waste” is the truest and most striking ornament; and though you and your family’s usufruct of a house thus magnanimously built may be but a fifth of its natural age, there lies in that{149} very fact an “ornament” of the most noble and touching kind, which will be obvious at all seasons to yourself and every beholder, though the consciousness of its cause may be dormant; whereas the meanness of your own plan will be only the more apparent with every penny you spend in making it meretricious.

I have said that a modest ostentation of extreme substantiality is also an element of architectural effect in the kind of building contemplated. This, indeed, is the properly architectural or artistic element. A house will look respectable, and something more than respectable, which has only the reality of being built somewhat better than well. But consciousness is the life of art, and there must be a quiet rejoicing in strength, solidity, and permanence, to give these characters that power over the imagination which a work of art must have. A labourer’s cottage or the smallest village church which has this character is an artistic and rightly architectural work; and the nobleman’s mansion or the cathedral which wants it is not. Here comes in that true “decoration” which scarcely the humblest house of the sixteenth............