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Updated: May 19, 2025
The pseudo-Gothic revival, of which Knebworth is a late monument, but which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole in the stucco of Strawberry Hill, is, if judged by the strict canons of architectural taste, absurd, but as time goes on and the taste which produced it vanishes the houses in which it embodied itself cease to be mere absurdities. They acquire the rank and dignity of historical documents.
Houses have their fate no less than books; and in the ears of its last Falloden possessor, the whole of the great many-dated fabric, from its fourteenth century foundations beneath the central tower, to the pseudo-Gothic with which Wyatt had disfigured the garden front, had often, since his father's death, seemed to speak with an almost human voice of lamentation and distress.
The result was a retrogression from the point reached by his immediate predecessors to the vicious system followed by the pseudo-Gothic architects in Italy. That is to say, he treated the structure as an inert mass, to be made as substantial as possible, and then to be covered with details agreeable to the eye.
"Oh, the present building is nothing a pseudo-Gothic monstrosity, built about 1830," laughed Delia; "but there are some old remains and foundations of the abbey. It is a big, rambling old place, and I should think dreadfully in want of doing up. My grandfather was a bit of a miser, and though he was quite rich, he never spent a penny he could help." "All the better.
It has a steep roof, gabled and stone-slated, which is not improved by the pseudo-Gothic barge-boards, added during the restorations. Many historical events of great importance have taken place at these market crosses which have been so hardly used. Kings were always proclaimed here at their accession, and would-be kings have also shared that honour.
"Long-drawn files, concentric rings, Each narrowing above each; the wings The uplifted palms, the silent marble lips, The starry zone of sovereign height, All steeped in this portentous light! All suffering dim eclipse!" With the exception of the façade, it is in a pseudo-Gothic style.
There is no congruity when even great people set about doing pseudo-antique sculpture in Canova-Thorwaldsen fashion because Winckelmann and Goethe have made antique sculpture fashionable; there is no congruity when people set to building pseudo-Gothic in obedience to the romantic movement and to Ruskin.
Their places of worship, the blank chapels and pseudo-Gothic churches rear themselves head and shoulders above the dull level, only to repeat the same threat of obedience to a gloomy law.... The thought of Gospel Oak and its like is the thought of imitation, of imitation falling back and becoming stereotyped, until the meaning of the thing so persistently copied has been lost and forgotten."
Modern houses in India are often built in a pseudo-Gothic style, with barbarous innovations in the shape of base metal-work and glaring coloured glass, and in which all sense of proportion has been hopelessly lost. Some of the modern palaces of Indian Rajahs are built and furnished in this style, at an immense cost, and with most incongruous results.
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