Obviously, to build at all is to impose something upon an age that may be more than willing to build for itself.  The day may soon come when no man will do even so much without some impulse of apology.  Posterity is not compelled to keep our pictures or our books in existence, nor to read nor to look at them; but it is more or less obliged to have a stone building in view for an age or two.  We can hardly avoid some of the forms of tyranny over the future, but few, few are the living men who would consent to share in this horrible ingenuity at St Paul’s—­this petroleum and this wax.

In 1842 they were discussing the decoration of the Houses of Parliament, and the efforts of all in council were directed upon the future.  How the frescoes then to be achieved by the artists of the day should be made secure against all mischances—­smoke, damp, “the risk of bulging,” even accidents attending the washing of upper floors—­all was discussed in confidence with the public.  It was impossible for anyone who read the papers then to escape from some at least of the responsibilities of technical knowledge.  From Genoa, from Rome, from Munich especially, all kinds of expert and most deliberate schemes were gathered in order to defeat the natural and not superfluous operation of efficient and effacing time.

The academic little capital of Bavaria had, at about the same date, decorated a vast quantity of wall space of more than one order of architecture.  Art revived and was encouraged at that time and place with unparalleled obstinacy.  They had not the malice of the petroleum that does violence to St Paul’s; but they had instead an indomitable patience.  Under the commands of the master Cornelius, they baffled time and all his work—­refused his pardons, his absolutions, his cancelling indulgences—­by a perseverance that nothing could discourage.  Who has not known somewhat indifferent painters mighty busy about their colours and varnishes?  Cornelius caused a pit to be dug for the preparation of the lime, and in the case of the Ludwig Kirche this lime remained there for eight years, with frequent stirrings.  This was in order that the whole fresco, when at last it was entrusted to its bed, should be set there for immortality.  Nor did the master fail to thwart time by those mechanical means that should avert the risk of bulging already mentioned.  He neglected no detail.  He was provident, and he lay in wait for more than one of the laws of nature, to frustrate them.  Gravitation found him prepared, and so did the less majestic but not vain dispensation of accidents.  Against bulging he had an underplot of tiles set on end; against possible trickling from an upper floor he had asphalt; it was all part of the human conspiracy.  In effect, the dull pictures at Munich seem to stand well.  It would have been more just—­so the present age thinks of these preserved walls—­if the day that admired them had had them exclusively, and our day had been exempt.  The painted cathedrals of the Middle Ages have undergone the natural correction; why not the Ludwig Kirche?