[In the following review, Godfrey provides a comparison of three architectural history books, and The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste by Clark does not receive a favorable review.]

Histories of architecture are of two types. The one is written for the student who desires to learn how to distinguish styles and periods and to familiarise himself with the character of famous buildings. The other, which is history proper, is concerned with the light which architecture throws on the life of its period, and with the national and social causes of its development or decay. In the latter the author's point of view will mean much in the matter of interpretation, but the former should be free from bias and personal preference. Yet since the appraisement of building requires the setting up of certain standards of æsthetic value (related in many minds with ethical and religious values) it is difficult for the author to divest himself of a certain pedagogic and didactic pose. The text-book of the late Professor Hamlin of Columbia University, the eighteenth edition of which was published in 1928, has no doubt proved its usefulness by its extraordinary conciseness. In less than 500 pages (which include 245 illustrations) he has traversed the history of building in the Old and New World from its beginning to the present day. It is a miracle of compression, for many of its pages are filled with lists of (a) authorities to be consulted, (b) buildings representative of each period. Yet it is readable, and this quality is gained by an unavoidably dogmatic method of summing up that is often at variance with recent revisions of judgment and changes in canons of taste. Thus, a book, so handy to the student, may stereotype some prejudices that a profitable study of architecture should avoid; but on the whole it is sensible and healthy, achieving its end in a direct and forceful manner.

The same cannot be said of the bird's-eye view of the subject which has been attempted for schools in A Book of Architecture. This is a pamphlet of 32 pages, and in such a compass it might have contained a crisp survey of the Classical, Gothic and Renaissance periods; but, alas, its text and its illustrations lack just those qualities of clarity and self-explanation that they most need. A little more care and ability in its production would have saved it from the disservice it will unwittingly do to the cause of introducing architecture into the schools.

Mr. Kenneth Clark's book, which is in the second category of architectural works, is a readable, even an entertaining account of the principal actors in the “tawdry” drama of the Arts which goes by the name of The Gothic Revival. It possesses, further, a real value as a carefully documented record of the successive beliefs and ideals which inspired (and incensed) architects from the time of Horace Walpole to that of John Ruskin. But the author disappoints us by failing to disclose the historical kernel of one of the strangest problems in the history of taste: the cause and to a large extent the effect are alike hidden from him. It is to his credit that he can tell a long story of almost consistent failure and hold our interest by his manner of telling it. Yet we feel we are entitled to more enlightenment. Why did the Gothic Revival fail? “Of course,” says Mr. Clark, “the quality of Gothic architecture depended entirely on the character and sentiments of the Middle Age, and for this reason, above all, Gothic was quite beyond revival.” Is it not equally true that the quality of the Gothic revival “depended entirely on the character and sentiments” of the early nineteenth century, and that its failure was a direct correlation of the achievements of that age in realms other than architecture? Industry had become industrialism, the crafts had become manufactures, the eyes of the practical makers of things were turned to mechanical invention and away from the age-long preoccupation of making beauty. If it had not been so men would have satisfied their soul-hunger by other means than quarrelling about styles, and they would have been able to transmute any form of building (even bastard Gothic) into a style of architecture that would have taken its place proudly in the annals of the art. Their polemics were wholehearted, their building but half-hearted, and this book is a sadly amusing history of better phrases than structures. Only the eighteenth century could find a native place for Gothic as it did for Chinese motifs in its furniture and decoration. Mr. Clark's book contains many instances of how far a writer can get away from the facts of architectural history, and one of his phrases calls for serious protest. He makes the surprising statement that the “Gothic Revival was an English movement, perhaps the one purely English movement in the plastic arts”! Omitting for the moment the special contribution of Englishmen to the earlier phases of medieval architecture, are we to forget the work of the fifteenth century with its strong national characteristics, or the early Tudor period so exclusively our own, or the range of domestic architecture from Elizabeth to Anne? The word “perhaps” does not save the author from a sad libel on English builders, and throughout this book there are many other flaws in what is in the main an interesting narrative. “The Napoleonic wars saved antiquarians from the troublesome discovery that the pointed arch existed on the Continent at an early date,” is a characteristic sentence in which the repellent, if not wholly inaccurate, use of the word “antiquarian” for “antiquary” reflects alike on the author's style and judgment, just as the substance of the sentence is an (unjust) reflection on English scholarship. The truth is that Mr. Clark writes of a period which was so conscious of its deficiencies in the world of architecture that it spent its energies in much futile quarrelling in print, and, infected by the distemper, his own narrative becomes to him more important than the subject, which would bear a less subtle analysis. It is possible to dissent altogether from his suggestion that the “revival” of Georgian architecture is the symptom of present-day romanticism. It is more likely to be the very reverse, the result of a serious address by architects to the practical business of building and the discovery, without undue fuss, of a method and a style suited for our development. Time will show. Let us remember that just as only unsuccessful revolts are called rebellions, so only unsuccessful plagiarism of style is stigmatised as revival. The renaissance is the standing memorial of a rebirth that transformed its prototype and produced an art of the first rank and of a beauty all its own.