_August 5._--It is an idea of mine that a country with a genius for
architecture is only able to show that genius supremely in one style, not
in all styles. The Catalans have a supreme genius for architecture, but
they have only achieved a single style. The English have attempted all
styles of architecture, but it was only in Perpendicular that we attained
a really free and beautiful native style in our domestic buildings and
what one might call our domestic churches. Strassburg Cathedral is
thoroughly German and acceptable as such, but Cologne Cathedral is an
exotic, and all the energy and the money of Germany through a thousand
years can never make it anything but cold, mechanical, and artificial.
When I was in Burgundy I felt that the Burgundians had a genius for
Romanesque, and that their Gothic is for the most part feeble and insipid.
Now, how about the Normans? One cannot say their Romanesque is not fine,
in the presence of William the Conqueror's Abbaye aux Hommes, here at
Caen. But I should be inclined to ask (without absolutely affirming)
whether the finest Norman Romanesque can be coupled with the finest
Burgundian Romanesque. The Norman genius was, I think, really for Gothic,
and not for what we in England call "Norman" because it happened to come
to us through Normandy. Without going to Rouen it is enough to look at
many a church here. The Normans had a peculiar plastic power over stone
which Gothic alone could give free scope to. Stone became so malleable in
their hands that they seem as if working in wood. Probably it really was
the case that their familiarity with wood-carving influenced their work in
architecture. And they possessed so fine a taste that while they seem to
be freely abandoning themselves to their wildest fantasies, the outcome is
rarely extravagant (Flaubert in his _Tentation_ is a great Norman
architect), and at the best attains a ravishing beauty of flowing and
interwoven lines. At its worst, as in St. Sauveur, which is a monstrosity
like the Siamese twins, a church with two naves and no aisles, the general