In sum, there was a pathetic incompatibility in this architecture between need and achievement, between pretensions and matter-of-fact--a rigid opposition to common sense that a vernacular, however playful, would never countenance. These temples were built with the marmoreal gesture of eternity; they satisfied the desire and fashion of the moment; and today their ghosts parade before us, brave but incredible.
From the standpoint of architecture, the early part of the nineteenth century was a period of disintegration. The gap between sheer utility and art, which the Renaissance had emphasized, was widened with the coming of machinery. That part of architecture which was touched by industrialism became crude beyond belief: the new mills and factories were usually packing boxes, lacking in light and ventilation, and the homes of the factory workers, when they were not the emptied houses of merchants and tradesmen, made to serve a dozen families instead of the original one, were little more than covered pens, as crowded as a cattle market. At the same time that the old forms were undermined by the new methods of mechanical production, a sentimental longing to retain those forms, just because they were old, seized men’s minds; and so industrialism and romanticism divided the field of architecture between them.
It was no accident that caused romanticism and industrialism to appear at the same time. They were rather the two faces of the new civilization, one looking towards the past, and the other towards the future; one glorifying the new, the other clinging to the old; industrialism intent on increasing the physical means of subsistence, romanticism living in a sickly fashion on the hollow glamour of the past. The age not merely presented these two aspects; it sought to enjoy each of them. Where industrialism took root, the traditions of architecture were disregarded; where romanticism flourished, on the other hand, in the mansions, public buildings, and churches, architecture became capricious and absurd, and it returned to a past that had never existed. Against the gross callousness which a Bounderby exhibited toward beauty and amenity, there was only the bland piety of a Pecksniff.