ARCHITECTURE

One sees right away that the English are a home people, a domestic

people; and he does not need to go into their houses or homes to find

this out. It is in the air and in the general aspect of things.

Everywhere you see the virtue and quality that we ascribe to home-made

articles. It seems as if things had been made by hand, and with care

and affection, as they have been. The land of caste and kings, there is

yet less glitter and display than in this country, less publicity, and,

of course, less rivalry and emulation also, for which we pay very

dearly. You have got to where the word homely preserves its true

signification, and is no longer a term of disparagement, but expressive

of a cardinal virtue.

I liked the English habit of naming their houses; it shows the

importance they attach to their homes. All about the suburbs of London

and in the outlying villages I noticed nearly every house and cottage

had some appropriate designation, as Terrace House, Oaktree House, Ivy

Cottage, or some Villa, usually cut into the stone gate-post, and this

name is put on the address of the letters. How much better to be known

by your name than by your number! I believe the same custom prevails in

the country, and is common to the middle classes as well as to the

aristocracy. It is a good feature. A house or a farm with an

appropriate name, which everybody recognizes, must have an added value

and importance.

Modern English houses are less showy than ours, and have more weight

and permanence,--no flat roofs and no painted outside shutters. Indeed,

that pride of American country people, and that abomination in the

landscape, a white house with green blinds, I did not see a specimen of

in England. They do not aim to make their houses conspicuous, but the

contrary. They make a large, yellowish brick that has a pleasing effect

in the wall. Then a very short space of time in that climate suffices

to take off the effect of newness, and give a mellow, sober hue to the

building. Another advantage of the climate is that it permits outside

plastering. Thus almost any stone may be imitated, and the work endure

for ages; while our sudden changes, and extremes of heat and cold, of

dampness and dryness, will cause the best work of this kind to peel off

in a few years.

Then this people have better taste in building than we have, perhaps

because they have the noblest samples and specimens of architecture

constantly before them,--those old feudal castles and royal residences,

for instance. I was astonished to see how homely and good they looked,

how little they challenged admiration, and how much they emulated rocks

and trees. They were surely built in a simpler and more poetic age than

this. It was like meeting some plain, natural nobleman after contact

with one of the bedizened, artificial sort. The Tower of London, for

instance, is as pleasing to the eye, has the same fitness and harmony,

as a hut in the woods; and I should think an artist might have the same

pleasure in copying it into his picture as he would in copying a

pioneer's log cabin. So with Windsor Castle, which has the beauty of a

ledge of rocks, and crowns the hill like a vast natural formation. The

warm, simple interior, too, of these castles and palaces, the honest

oak without paint or varnish, the rich wood carvings, the ripe human

tone and atmosphere,--how it all contrasts, for instance, with the

showy, gilded, cast-iron interior of our commercial or political

palaces, where everything that smacks of life or nature is studiously

excluded under the necessity of making the building fire-proof.

I was not less pleased with the higher ornamental architecture,--the

old churches and cathedrals,--which appealed to me in a way

architecture had never before done. In fact, I found that I had never

seen architecture before,--a building with genius and power in it, and

that one could look at with the eye of the imagination. Not mechanics

merely, but poets, had wrought and planned here, and the granite was

tender with human qualities. The plants and weeds growing in the niches

and hollows of the walls, the rooks and martins and jackdaws inhabiting

the towers and breeding about the eaves, are but types of the feelings

and emotions of the human heart that flit and hover over these old

piles, and find affectionate lodgment in them.

Time, of course, has done a great deal for this old architecture.

Nature has taken it lovingly to herself, has set her seal upon it, and

adopted it into her system. Just the foil which beauty--especially the

crystallic beauty of architecture--needs has been given by this hazy,

mellowing atmosphere. As the grace and suggestiveness of all objects

are enhanced by a fall of snow,--forest, fence, hive, shed, knoll,

rock, tree, all being laid under the same white enchantment,--so time

has wrought in softening and toning down this old religious

architecture, and bringing it into harmony with nature.

Our climate has a much keener edge, both of frost and fire, and touches

nothing so gently or creatively; yet time would, no doubt, do much for

our architecture, if we would give it a chance,--for that apotheosis of

prose, the National Capitol at Washington, upon which, I notice, a

returned traveler bases our claim to be considered "ahead" of the Old

World, even in architecture; but the reigning gods interfere, and each

spring or fall give the building a clean shirt in the shape of a coat

of white paint. In like manner, other public buildings never become

acclimated, but are. annually scoured with soap and sand, the national

passion for the brightness of newness interfering to defeat any benison

which the gods might be disposed to pronounce upon them. Spotlessness,

I know, is not a characteristic of our politics, though it is said that

whitewashing is, which may account for this ceaseless paint-pot

renovation of our public buildings. In a world lit only by the moon,

our Capitol would be a paragon of beauty, and the spring whitewashing

could also be endured; but under our blazing sun and merciless sky it

parches the vision, and makes it turn with a feeling of relief to rocks

and trees, or to some weather-stained, dilapidated shed or hovel.

How winningly and picturesquely in comparison the old architecture of

London addresses itself to the eye,--St. Paul's Cathedral, for

instance, with its vast blotches and stains, as if it had been dipped

in some black Lethe of oblivion, and then left to be restored by the

rains and the elements! This black Lethe is the London smoke and fog,

which has left a dark deposit over all the building, except the upper

and more exposed parts, where the original silvery whiteness of the

stone shows through, the effect of the whole thus being like one of

those graphic Rembrandt photographs or carbons, the prominences in a

strong light, and the rest in deepest shadow. I was never tired of

looking at this noble building, and of going out of my way to walk

around it; but I am at a loss to know whether the pleasure I had in it

arose from my love of nature, or from a susceptibility to art for which

I had never given myself credit. Perhaps from both, for I seemed to

behold Art turning toward and reverently acknowledging Nature,-indeed,

in a manner already become Nature.

I believe the critics of such things find plenty of fault with St.

Paul's; and even I could see that its bigness was a little prosy, that

it suggested the historic rather than the poetic muse; yet, for all

that, I could never look at it without a profound emotion. Viewed

coolly and critically, it might seem like a vast specimen of

Episcopalianism in architecture. Miltonic in its grandeur and

proportions, and Miltonic in its prosiness and mongrel classicism also,

yet its power and effectiveness are unmistakable. The beholder has no

vantage-ground from which to view it, or to take in its total effect,

on account of its being so closely beset by such a mob of shops and

buildings; yet the glimpses he does get here and there through the

opening made by some street, when passing in its vicinity, are very

striking and suggestive; the thin veil of smoke, which is here as

constant and uniform as the atmosphere itself, wrapping it about with

the enchantment of time and distance.

The interior I found even more impressive than the exterior, perhaps

because I was unprepared for it. I had become used to imposing

exteriors at home, and did not reflect that in a structure like this I

should see an interior also, and that here alone the soul of the

building would be fully revealed. It was Miltonic in the best sense; it

was like the mightiest organ music put into form. Such depths, such

solemn vastness, such gulfs and abysses of architectural space, the

rich, mellow light, the haze outside becoming a mysterious, hallowing

presence within, quite mastered me, and I sat down upon a seat, feeling

my first genuine cathedral intoxication. As it was really an

intoxication, a sense of majesty and power quite overwhelming in my

then uncloyed condition, I speak of it the more freely. My companions

rushed about as if each one had had a searchwarrant in his pocket; but

I was content to uncover my head and drop into a seat, and busy my mind

with some simple object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared

about me stole into my soul and possessed it. My sensation was like

that imparted by suddenly reaching a great altitude: there was a sort

of relaxation of the muscles, followed by a sense of physical weakness;

and after half an hour or so I felt compelled to go out into the open

air, and leave till another day the final survey of the building. Next

day I came back, but there can be only one first time, and I could not

again surprise myself with the same feeling of wonder and intoxication.

But St. Paul's will bear many visits. I came again and again, and never

grew tired of it. Crossing its threshold was entering another world,

where the silence and solitude were so profound and overpowering that

the noise of the streets outside, or of the stream of visitors, or of

the workmen engaged on the statuary, made no impression. They were all

belittled, lost, like the humming of flies. Even the afternoon

services, the chanting, and the tremendous organ, were no interruption,

and left me just as much alone as ever. They only served to set off the

silence, to fathom its depth.

The dome of St. Paul's is the original of our dome at Washington; but

externally I think ours is the more graceful, though the effect inside

is tame and flat in comparison. This is owing partly to its lesser size

and height, and partly to our hard, transparent atmosphere, which lends

no charm or illusion, but mainly to the stupid, unimaginative plan of

it. Our dome shuts down like an inverted iron pot; there is no vista,

no outlook, no relation, and hence no proportion. You open a door and

are in a circular pen, and can look in only one direction,--up. If the

iron pot were slashed through here and there, or if it rested on a row

of tall columns or piers, and were shown to be a legitimate part of the

building, it would not appear the exhausted receiver it does now.

The dome of St. Paul's is the culmination of the whole interior of the

building. Rising over the central area, it seems to gather up the power

and majesty of the nave, the aisles, the transepts, the choir, and give

them expression and expansion in its lofty firmament.

Then those colossal piers, forty feet broad some of them, and nearly

one hundred feet high,--they easily eclipsed what I had recently seen

in a mine, and which I at the time imagined shamed all the architecture

of the world,--where the mountain was upheld over a vast space by

massive piers left by the miners, with a ceiling unrolled over your

head, and apparently descending upon you, that looked like a petrified

thunder-cloud.

The view from the upper gallery, or top of the dome, looking down

inside, is most impressive. The public are not admitted to this

gallery, for fear, the keeper told me, it would become the scene of

suicides; people unable to withstand the terrible fascination would

leap into the yawning gulf. But, with the privilege usually accorded to

Americans, I stepped down into the narrow circle, and, leaning over the

balustrade, coolly looked the horrible temptation in the face.

On the whole, St. Paul's is so vast and imposing that one wonders what

occasion or what ceremony can rise to the importance of not being

utterly dwarfed within its walls. The annual gathering of the charity

children, ten or twelve thousand in number, must make a ripple or two

upon its solitude, or an exhibition like the thanksgiving of the Queen,

when sixteen or eighteen thousand persons were assembled beneath its

roof. But one cannot forget that it is, for the most part, a great

toy,--a mammoth shell, whose bigness bears no proportion to the living

(if, indeed, it is living), indwelling necessity. It is a tenement so

large that the tenant looks cold and forlorn, and in danger of being

lost within it.

No such objection can be made to Westminster Abbey, which is a mellow,

picturesque old place, the interior arrangement and architecture of

which affects one like some ancient, dilapidated forest. Even the

sunlight streaming through the dim windows, and falling athwart the

misty air, was like the sunlight of a long-gone age. The very

atmosphere was pensive, and filled the tall spaces like a memory and a

dream. I sat down and listened to the choral service and to the organ,

which blended perfectly with the spirit and sentiment of the place.