These are two works of European Gothic architecture that epitomize the charm of the middle ages.

Bonafatius Bridge, Bruges

Chimères on the roof of Notre Dame de Paris

The Chimères were made and placed on Notre Dame in the 1800s. The Bonafatius Bridge was designed and erected in 1905. There are, of course, thousands of other examples of Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture from all over the world that were built between 1820 and 1950. Big Ben, Yale University, the National Cathedral in Washington, and the Cinderella Castle in Walt Disney World are famous examples. But most people presumably realize that an American cathedral was not actually built in the middle ages. The examples shown above are notable because they can easily fool viewers; one could almost call them “counterfeit Gothic.”

I used to regard authenticity as a high value, and I would dismiss a Victorian Gothic structure while admiring even a rather crude work genuinely made before 1200. If that preference is defensible, I think the underlying principle is some version of Schiller’s idea of naive and sentimental art. Naive artists do what they think is right or best. They don’t see themselves as having a “style” but as making objects that are beautiful and true. In contrast, sentimental artists imitate the styles of other times, admiring their authenticity. After sentimental art arises, naive art becomes impossible.

Thus nineteenth-century European and American architecture is almost all “revivalist” (neogothic, neoclassical, neo-Egyptian, etc.), with the exception of structures that were perceived as functional, such as railway stations and bridges. We see those functional buildings as naive but impressive; we recognize that the Gare du Nord has a style even though its builders just thought they were covering railway tracks. As for the neogothic works, we reject them as sentimental fakes–especially when they infiltrate genuinely medieval places like Bruges or Notre Dame. They may be OK in Orlando, but not in Paris.

But that judgment is contestable. Schiller’s distinction between naive and sentimental art is itself a product of a certain time. Placing a high value on authenticity (as he did) is characteristic of Romanticism. One could instead see Victorian Gothic art as very fine, at its best. One could celebrate the spirit of play that sometimes animates it. And one could recognize an authentic impulse in the devout attempt to replicate a defunct culture.

I write all this now because I am reflecting on my visit to the Palácio Nacional da Pena, near Sintra, Portugal, which appears Moorish/Gothic but was really built in 1842-1854. Crowning a steep mountain, it overlooks a real Moorish castle that was itself heavily reconstructed in the same period (deliberately to look like a Romantic ruin).

Pena is fun. Because it was meant for play, everything is designed for maximum entertainment, not for any serious purpose. For instance, there are fortifications meant simply to be walked on for the view; they have no defensive purposes. Inside, concrete walls are painted to look like wood. Even the trees on the mountain’s slopes were carefully planted by a monarch of German extraction, to resemble a Teutonic forest.

This kind of example exposes the decadent currents in revivalism, the real pitfalls of inauthenticity. Play is fine; we are homo ludens. Gothic woodcarvers engaged in play when they depicted magical beasts on misericords. But when you tax people to build expensive seats of government, you had better be at least somewhat serious. Pena is furnished in a cluttered, Edwardian style, just as the last royal family of Portugal left it when they fled republican rebels. They deserved to be kicked out of a place so frivolous and so costly. I thought the parts of Pena that remain from a medieval monastery (namely, a small chapel and a cloister) were far more satisfying that the pseudo-Gothic additions, not because the craftsmanship was better in the former, but because excellence requires a degree of seriousness.

My bottom line: fine art needs an authentic motivation, but imitating another culture can be done with authenticity.

“Every moment happens twice: inside and outside, and they are two different histories.”

Zadie Smith finished her first book, White Teeth, while she was an undergraduate. It’s much more than a prodigy’s tour de force; I think it’s a fine and lasting novel.

It is elaborately plotted. The events span the period 1857-1999 and create a complex and deliberate pattern, full of symmetries and recurrent patterns. The whole structure encompasses three extended families (Bangladeshi Muslim, West Indian/British, and Anglo-Jewish) plus numerous well-developed hangers-on. As an example of what geometers would call a “reflection symmetry,” the two Bangladeshi twin brothers grow up in the East and the West, each embracing the other’s hemisphere, and they both make love to the same woman on the same day, whose child could therefore be either one’s. As an example of a “rotational symmetry”: at one point, disgruntled teenagers from each family are living with the next. Guns are fired in parallel situations in 1857, 1945, and 1992.

This whole structure could be considered artificial and mannered–especially when everything comes together neatly in the denouement. Smith is interested in no less a matter than Fate, the sense that life is pre-plotted. This seems especially salient in the lives of immigrants from the former colonies. Their lives are symmetrical, recurrent. Fate is also an explicit topic in at least three cultures that Smith explores and counterposes: Islam, Christian fundamentalism, and molecular biology.

I am not as interested in Fate, but I love the elaborate structure for a different reason. As many have noted, Smith is a genuine genius at mimicking and sympathetically portraying diverse people. Who am I to say whether she can see the world like an 85-year-old Jamaican Jehovah’s Witness? But I can vouch for her precise evocation of a secular Jewish teenage boy with academic parents living in North London in the 1980s. I was there, and she’s got that demographic spot on. All the other characters–who range magnificently across continents, religions, generations, races, and classes–seem entirely plausible.

What happens when you create an artificial structure of events and portray it from myriad perspectives, sympathetically and without the imposition of your own voice? That is a liberal political achievement, because it respects individuality and difference and refuses to boss people around, even in the imagination. It is also an artistic achievement. “For me,” Nabokov wrote, “a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” Nabokov’s recipe is: curiosity, which makes you describe all kinds of people and objects; tenderness, which makes you love them all; plus aesthetic pleasure, which arises when the first two are achieved harmoniously and elegantly. Smith is an artist in the true Nabokovian sense.

Having just finished Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1868), I want to report that you cannot have any more fun reading a novel from that century. (Which is saying a lot.) It’s a detective story with some initial elements that later become commonplace: a country house party with eccentric guests, a missing diamond, incompetent local constables, a lovely young lady, a likable young man, and a genius of a detective who has an absorbing hobby. (“The Great Cuff” cares for roses as Holmes loves his violin and Nero Wolfe, his orchids). All this is described by a Watson-like narrator who has trustworthy motives but less perception than the reader.

But then, since Collins is a fount of plot ideas rather than a derivative writer, the story veers away from what will later become the formula of a drawing room detective story. We are soon reading text by other narrators and following the course of a troubled love story. By the time we’re done, we’ve been to India, heard the lamentable story of man from the colonies whose life is ruined by racist prejudice as well as disease and scandal, and observed a scientific experiment meant to reveal the location of the lost Moonstone.

It is all very suspenseful, and suspense is an explicit topic of the narration. (The experiment at the end, in particular, requires creating suspense for several onlookers.) All this was grist for my sister’s mill. In The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt, Caroline Levine argues that Victorian novelists developed new techniques for creating suspense. This was not just a trick or a way of providing entertainment and pleasure. Rather, they put their readers through an experience of suspending judgment and awaiting evidence that was reminiscent of science and that had a similar moral purpose. In the Moonstone, as she notes, the suspense catches the attention of onlookers who have been confused by prejudice and makes them reach the moral truth.

In passing, she explains that Collins was one of the first novelists to complain that reviews gave away too much plot. The same writer who more or less invented the detective novel was also an early critic of “spoilers.” Strangely enough, the back cover of my copy of the Moonstone (Barnes & Noble Classics, 1993) gives away a major event that only occurs on page 447 of a 472-page novel. It was probably the worst spoiler that I have ever seen on a book cover, but fortunately I came to believe it was an outright error and so was pleasurably surprised when the event actually occurred.

The moral backbone of Tolstoy’s War & Peace seems to be a distinction, or maybe a continuum. Simple, authentic virtue is at one end, and complexity, affectation, and vice are on the other:

At first, I read with great resistance, because this moral scheme seems wrong to me. If you have the choice, shouldn’t you be bilingual rather than monolingual, curious rather than ignorant, and ambitious for the good rather than fatalistic and passive?

But then I began to realize that the moral scheme is more complicated. Complexity and artifice are always bad in War and Peace, but they have several alternatives–as symbolized by the fates of the main characters:

• Prince Andrei always has an instinct for the purely abstract, the completely simple; a love of absence. He senses his ideal when, badly wounded at Austerlitz, he stares at the empty blue vault of the sky. His end is perfect renunciation, an embrace of death as the negation of life.
• Both Natasha and Marya find fulfillment by completely submerging themselves in family life and marriage–an ideal that strikes me as patriarchal.
• Nikolai Rostov becomes a good landowner, putting the peasants’ welfare ahead of his own and managing his farm well. He finds fulfillment in work, when previously (488) he was only good when idle.
• Pierre loses his pretensions and his “great man theory” of history. By the end, he would no longer want to assassinate Napoleon to achieve fame. His hero is the fatalistic peasant Karataev. But Pierre continues to care about politics and to love a particular wife and family.

If Pierre is the moral heart of the novel, I can find a spirit here to endorse.

(All quotations from the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Vintage, 2007)