way. So indeed were all the cities of antiquity, each in its proper
status. In the later classical age every one had its impersonation
of sculptured image--the _Tyche_ of the City. Fragments of a figure
of Silchester were found in the Basilica of the old British town; an
image which stood for the genius of the place. London and York were
also sacred in those Roman days, and the figure on our pennies is a
similar Roman imagination for the whole country, _Britannia_. A fine
inscription from Ephesus in the Central Hall of the British Museum
is a delightful example of the forms and ceremonies observed by the
proud cities of antiquity--the ritual prescribed for their worship
in fact. This marble slab, about 7 feet by 3½ feet, bears in large
clear lettering the copy of a letter addressed by Antoninus Pius to
the Magistrates and People of Ephesus _c._ A.D. 140. The emperor
approved that the people of Pergamon had written letters to Ephesus
correctly addressed with the prescribed titles (First and Greatest
Metropolis of Asia, or the like). He thinks that the People of Smyrna
had accidentally omitted this from a decree about joint sacrifice, but
they will behave correctly in future provided that the Ephesians use
the approved titles in writing to Smyrna (pre-eminent in beauty or the
like). This is indeed politeness on a high plane.
One of the ways in which civic spirit, pride, and love must be
refounded is in the sense of historical continuity. Such a sense of
regional reverence is being cultivated in France on a definitely
psychological basis, and those alert Americans have already begun
to work the ground of their antiquities. A publication of a local
historical society, issued as far back as 1900, contains an account
of what they in America call "An Old Ipswich House." It begins with
some words which I must quote: "The extraordinary production and large
circulation of the historical novel is but one of the consequences
of the remarkable growth of patriotic societies in this country in
the last few years. One of the most admirable results of the movement
is the widespread interest in the establishment of local historical
societies in the old towns of New England. [Older towns of Old England,
please note and copy.] These societies have a very fascinating work
before them in the collection of local records, the preservation of old
buildings, in the marking of historic sites. This soil is fertile and
delving therein bears rich fruit of interest, love for the community,
heightened civic feeling, encouragement of local improvement, and a
care for the future of the town. In not a few places the local society
has taken some old house for its headquarters, adorning it with
attractive historical collections. Such a collection is that of the
Bostonian Society, to which the city long ago gave the use of the Old
State House." What might our English towns still do in this way! Or is
it to be that for authentic touch with antiquity we shall soon have to
go to America? In passing may I commend this idea to those who have the
destruction of the old Dean's House at Wolverhampton in their mind or
at least their power?
Germany has long consciously cultivated this field for spirit
production, and I remember an official tract on the psychological value
of Ancient Monuments in promoting national consciousness. It is in
Denmark, however, that an effort to promote national spirit has been
most systematically based on a common knowledge of national traditions,
arts, and music, and spread by means of their admirable "Folk Schools."
Monumental history is a stirring, vital thing: it can be touched. In
every town every child-citizen should know the story and antiquities of
that place. This has always been the way until now. "What mean these
stones?" the children say, and we answer, "I don't know." The history
that can be seen is a strong and stimulating soul-food, entirely
different from vague and wearying written history.
The historical starting-post is only one of many ways of approach to
fine forms of civilisation; we must not wait on the order of our going,
but go at once and from every point at once. Much is being thought and
said about Housing and Town Planning; they are both of the greatest
possible importance, but they are not all. We need at least a third
to go with them--that is a general cleaning, tidying, and smartening
movement, an effort to improve all our public and social arts, from
music to cooking and games. We must control and tax advertisements
to some order, bring pressure on the railway companies to sweep
the microbes out of their stations, and we must whitewash our own
backyards. The danger is to think of housing and planning as technical
matters for experts. It may almost be feared that current talk of town
planning and garden cities may harden with a jargon-like political
formulæ. Our arts and customs are indexes and pictures of our inner
life. Fine bridges, clean, smiling streets, liberal public buildings
are not merely shapes and nothing more. They are essential to our
sense of order, brightness, and efficiency, to our pride, confidence,
and content. A sore protesting slapped-in-the-face feeling cannot be
good for the temper and digestion. A civilised life cannot be lived in
undisciplined towns.
* * * * *
More and more we become the victims of our words and live frightened
by names. Such a name is Architecture. In its mystery vague and
vain pretensions may be shrouded, in its shadows hide many minor
superstitions about correct design, the right style, true proportions.
High priests arise who are supposed to know subtle doctrines and can
point the way to æsthetic safety. And yet all the time there are the
streets, Edgware Road and Euston Road, Oxford Street and Holborn;
there again are our cities, Leeds and Liverpool, Bristol and Plymouth.
Surely these potent and indeed blatant facts might raise doubts as to
the dogmas. The mystification about "architecture" has isolated the
intimate building art from the common interest and understanding of
ordinary men. To talk with a believing architect on his theories is
almost as hopeless as to chaff a cardinal. All the ancient arts of men
are subject to the diseases of pedantry and punditry--music, painting,
poetry all suffer from isolation.
Architecture is human skill and feeling shown in the great necessary
activity of building. It must be a living, progressive structural art,
always readjusting itself to changing conditions of time and place.
If it is true it must ever be new. This, however, not with a willed
novelty, which is as bad as or worse than trivial antiquarianism, but
by response to _force majeure_. The vivid interest and awe with which
men look on a ship or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come
from the sense of their reality. They were shaped so by a higher power
than whim, by a higher aim than snobbery. So must it again be with our
buildings: they must be founded fast on the rock of necessity.
Wordy claims are often made for "Architecture" that it is a "Fine Art,"
and chief of all the arts. These two claims are indeed incompatible
and contradictory. Any mastership in architecture depends on its
universality and its service. It is only chief in the sense that he who
serves is the greatest. But the "Fine Arts" are by definition free from
conditions of human need, and architecture was specially ruled out from
among them by Aristotle. Even so, this idea of fine art unconditioned
and free for delight was a heresy of the Hellenistic decline. To Plato
and the great masters even the "musical" arts were to be not only
healthy but health-giving; they were to be foods for the soul and not
æsthetic raptures and intoxications.
On the other side of the account it may be objected that bare utility
and convenience are not enough to form a base for a noble architecture.
Of course they are not if "bare utility" is interpreted in a mean and
skimping and profiteering way. All work of man bears the stamp of
the spirit with which it was done, but this stamp is not necessarily
"ornament." The unadorned indeed can never stand as low as that which
is falsely adorned in borrowed, brazen bedizenments. High utility
and liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture.
We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions
between the serviceable and the æsthetic, between science and art.
Consider any of the great forms of life activity--seamanship, farming,
housekeeping--can anyone say where utility ends and style, order,
clearness, precision begin? Up to a point, and indeed a long way on,
"style" is a utility. We have to begin again and look on architecture
as an art of service from the communal point of view. The faces of
buildings which are turned outwards towards the world are obviously
of interest to the public, and all citizens have a property in them.
The spectator is in fact part owner. No man builds to himself alone.
Let the proprietor do as he likes inside his building, for we need not
call on him. Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but
nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can
protect us from buildings in the street. It is to be feared that we are
learning to protect ourselves by the habit of not observing, that is by
sacrificing a faculty. General interest and intelligent appreciation of
public arts are a necessity of civilisation. Civic alertness, honest
pride, or firm protest are not matters of taste for a few; they are
essential activities of the urban mind. In cities buildings take the
place of fields, trees, and hedgerows. Buildings are an artificial
form of nature. We have a right to consideration and some politeness
in buildings. We claim protection from having our faces slapped
when we venture into the street. Our cities do not wholly belong to
profit-lords, railway companies, and advertisers.
Architecture, however "properly understood," not only concerns the
man in the street, it comes home to all householders and households.
While our eyes have been strained on the vacuity of correct style, the
weightier matters of construction and efficiency have necessarily been
neglected. We need grates which will warm, floors which may readily
be cleaned, and ceilings which do not crack. These and such as these
are the terms of the modern architectural problem, and in satisfying
them we should find the proper "style" for to-day. Architecture is a
current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation. As it is it
is as much burdened by its tags of rhetoric as Chinese literature. It
has become a dead language. The house of the future will be designed
as a ship is designed, as an organism which has to function properly
in all its parts. Does this not concern everyone, not only as economy
and comfort, but in the mind? Our houses must be made to fit us like
garments and to be larger projections of ourselves. A whole row of
ambiguous words, such as design, ornament, style, proportion, have come
between us and the immediately given data of architecture. Design is
not abstract power exercised by a genius, it is simply the arranging
how work shall be well done. The more necessary the work and the more
obvious, simple, and sound is the foresight the better the design.
It is not a question of captivating paper patterns, it is a question
of buildings which will work. Architecture is a pragmatical art. To
design in the Classic, Gothic, or Renaissance styles is as absurd as to
sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles, paint "like" Holbein, or write
sham Shakespeare. We do not really need a waxwork art by Wardour Street
professionals. We require an active art of building which will take its
"style" for granted, as does naval architecture. Modern building must
shake itself free from its own withered and cast-off skins.
It is commonly supposed, and architects themselves in older days
believed it, that an architect's business was to be an expert in style.
Why he should be so was never explained, except, perhaps, by Philibert
de l'Orme. According to this authority the Temple of Jerusalem was
built in the Classical style, and this work was designed in heaven;
therefore this was the only true or revealed style. An excellent
argument; modern practitioners have kept up a "battle of the styles"
without any such basis for their logic, or rather their eloquence. But
what is or was a style? It is a museum name for a phase of past art. As
a means of classifying what is dead and done the style labels are quite
useful. It has, however, to be kept in mind that these styles, while
they lived and moved, were processes which began, continued, and passed
into something else. They were only phases like those of the changing
moon. That which now professes to be designed in a style, or, as the
still more disgusting slang runs, to be "period work," has not the
essence of life. It is, therefore, not actually of the style which it
simulates but is only in the "style" of the style.
Indeed, the essence of all the old arts was in their vitality, their
response to the natural conditions and the psychology of their times.
The better we seem to reproduce their dead images the more we are
unlike their soul-selves. There is little more reason for an architect
to pretend to work in a style than there is for a chemist. Architects
are properly arrangers and directors of certain classes of structures.
I would like to say that they were building engineers, were it not
that our engineers have failed so shamefully in hiring themselves out
for any form of exploitation and in showing no care for orderliness
and decency. All the past of architecture, as of engineering and
shipbuilding, belongs to us, of course, as race experience, but only as
far as the same is true in all fields of science and literature.
The "Orders" of architecture are names for particular forms of ancient
Greek temple building. Style-names apply to all past fashions of
buildings, Orders only to three--Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The
names are useful as history, but that is all. Now that these Orders
have become shop advertisements, even the would-be correct may be more
ready to give them up.
Style in a modern and universal sense is equivalent rather to "stylish"
than to a style; it interpenetrates the whole texture of a work; it
is clearness, effectiveness, mastery, often it is simplification. We
have to conceive of it in the building art as we do in literature
or athletics. "The style is the man"--yes, and it is also the thing
itself. It is an informing spirit, the spirit of form, it is not a
varnish. We have become so accustomed to architecture looking "dressy"
that we have forgotten the logic of clothes and bury buildings good
enough in themselves under outgrown rags. It has been a true instinct
which calls sham architectural features "dressings."
Another word which the architecturally superstitious whisper with
great awe is proportion. In dealing with such a limited field as the
"Orders," old scholars examined existing examples by measuring them
very carefully to find out their proportions; but, if we had them,
Greek chairs and tables might be measured in exactly the same way. No
general rule of the Greeks has ever been found out by these measurings,
and if it had it would prove nothing for us. Proportion, of course,
rests properly on function, material, and size. There maybe a perfect
proportion, for instance, for a certain class of ships, but that will
only be discovered experimentally, and not by measuring Greek galleys.
* * * * *
I wish I could find some leverage of argument to bring a sense of
citizen responsibility for form in life into the minds and hearts of
all, but right and reason are hardy enough. We may, perhaps, hope more
in a sense of international rivalry in the works and evidences of life.
Civilisation is an Olympic contest in the arts and sciences, a sort of
international Eisteddfod. It is admitted that we must have literature
and we must have music: we must also have building skill, and we have
to aim at inducing a flowing tide in all the things of civilisation. Of
words and arguments I am rather hopeless. One thing only I would ask of
every benevolent reader: that he would take notice of what he sees in
the streets. Do not pass by in a contemplative dream, or suppose that
it is an architectural mystery, but look and judge. Is it tidy, is it
civilised, are these fit works for a proud nation? Look at Trafalgar
Square and Piccadilly Circus, and that terrible junction of Tottenham
Court Road with Oxford Street. Play a new game of seeing London. We
need a movement in the common mind, a longing to mitigate the vulgarity
and anarchy of our streets, and the smothering of the frontages with
vile advertisements, a desire to clean the streets better, to gather up
littered paper, to renew blistered plaster. Some order must be brought
into the arrangement of the untidy festoons of telegraph and telephone
wires hitched up to chimneys and parapets. These are the architectural
works which are needed as a beginning and a basis. The idea of beauty,
daily-bread beauty, not style pretences, must be brought back into
our life. Every town should set up an advisory committee on its
betterment. We must try to bring back the idea of town personality
and town worship; we must set up ceremonies and even rituals to bring
out a spirit of pride and emulation. If we can only stir up general
interest all will yet go well or at least better. By exalting our
towns we should make a platform for ourselves. As it is what can great
money fortunes buy beyond swine comfort and titles? Man is more than a
stomach moving about on legs. A mistake of modern education has been to
train for appreciation of the past rather than for present production.
Such merely critical learning comes at last to be actually sterilising.
As production fails, so even appreciation decays. Full understanding
depends on the power to do. Therefore, leaving the things of the past,
press forward to produce, to be, to live. Remember Lot's wife. There is
much talk of patriotism, but patriotism requires a ground on which to
subsist; it must be based on love of home, love of city, and love of
country. Let nothing deceive us, civilisation produces form, and where
noble form is attained there is civilisation. Life is a process, a flow
of being, and where there is this vital activity music, drama, and the
arts are necessarily thrown off. Living art comes on a tide of creative
intelligence.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES AND NEWS
_Correspondence from readers on all subjects of bibliographical
interest is invited. The Editor will, to the best of his ability,
answer all queries addressed to him._
GENERAL NOTES
We have just received the catalogue of the library of the late Dr.
Daniel, Provost of Worcester, which was bought in its entirety by Mr.
Chaundy, of Oxford. Dr. Daniel, who died in the autumn of last year,
was born in 1836. From boyhood onwards his favourite hobby seems to
have been printing. "As early as 1846 a small hand press at Frome
Vicarage, in Somerset, painfully produced a little letter, and in 1852
at least three numbers of the Busy Bee, printed and published by H.
and W. E. Daniel, at their office, Trinity Parsonage, Frome." In 1856
two more substantial volumes (_Sonnets_, by C. J. C., and _The Seven
Epistles to the Churches_, in Greek) were issued from Frome.
* * * * *
So much for origins. The Daniel Press known to fame only came into
existence in 1874, when the little hand press from Frome was set up in
Worcester. The first book printed by the Daniel Press, at Oxford, was
_Notes from a Catalogue of Pamphlets in Worcester College Library_,
1874, of which five-and-twenty copies were issued. A copy of this
pamphlet is priced at 45_s._ in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue. _A New Sermon
of the Newest Fashion_, printed from a MS. found in the College
Library, appeared in 1877. In this volume Dr. Daniel first made use
of the fount of type which had been cast for Dr. Fell, Dean of Christ
Church, and which had lain forgotten in the Clarendon Press for a
century and a half. Henceforth Dr. Daniel was to make use of the Fell
type in all his publications.
* * * * *
The most treasured book of these earlier years is the _Garland of
Rachel_ (1881), which consists of poems offered to Miss Rachel Daniel
on her first birthday by, among others, Andrew Lang, Austen Dobson,
Robert Bridges, John Addington Symonds, Edmund Gosse, W. E. Henley,
T. Humphry Ward, and Margaret L. Woods. Only thirty-six copies were
printed, one of which is priced in Mr. Chaundy's catalogue at £40.
* * * * *
In 1882 the old press was replaced by a much more scientific machine,
and among the first books to be printed on the new press was
_Prometheus the Firegiver_ (1883), by Robert Bridges. A number of the
Poet Laureate's poems were to be issued from the Daniel Press. Of the
_Poems_ of 1884 one hundred and fifty copies were printed (£3 10_s._ in
Mr. Chaundy's catalogue). _The Feast of Bacchus_ (one hundred and five
copies) and _The Growth of Love_, published anonymously in an edition
of only twenty-two copies, appeared in 1889. The year 1903 witnessed
the publication of two more pieces from Mr. Bridges' pen, namely, _Now
in Wintry Delights_ and _Peace, an Ode written on Conclusion of the
Three Years' War_.
In 1884 Dr. Daniel made use for the first time of a number of fine
seventeenth-century woodcut ornaments. His printer's mark was a piece
of contemporary work, designed by Alfred Parsons, representing Daniel
in the lions' den, with the motto, _Misit Angelum Suum_.
* * * * *
Noteworthy volumes which issued from the Daniel Press in the nineties
were _Our Memories, Shades of Old Oxford_ (1893), a collection of
Oxford reminiscences by various hands; _The Child in the House_ (1894),
by Walter Pater, published only a month or two before his death; _Poems
of Laurence Binyon_ (1895); _Keble's Easter Day_, of which only twelve
copies were printed by Miss Rachel Daniel (1897). Eight years before
Miss Daniel had printed _The Lamb_, by W. Blake, in duodecimo (1889).
* * * * *
Besides those already mentioned, Dr. Daniel issued a number of reprints
of old books. _Sixe Idillia_, translated from Theocritus by E. D.
(possibly Dyer), was reprinted from the unique copy (1588) in the
Bodleian Library. _Love's Graduate_, a comedy, by John Webster, being
Mr. Gosse's distillation of what was Websterian in the Webster-Rowley
comedy of 1661, appeared in 1885. _The Muses Garden of Delights_, a
reprint of a unique Elizabethan volume, edited with an introduction
by William Barclay Squire, was printed by Dr. Daniel in 1901. Another
edition, printed by the Clarendon Press, was published in the same year.
* * * * *
We have mentioned only a few of the Daniel books. A complete
bibliography of the publications of the Press during its first thirty
years of activity may be found in an article by Mr. Madan, at that
time Sub-Librarian of the Bodleian, contributed to the _Times Literary
Supplement_ of February 20th, 1903. As we have already had occasion
to mention in these columns, the Daniel Press is now in the Bodleian,
together with specimens of the books produced on it.
* * * * *
Contemporary private presses are fairly numerous. The two which
produce what are, from a literary point of view at any rate, the most
interesting books are the Hogarth Press and the Ovid Press. From the
Ovid Press Mr. John Rodker has just issued a very handsome edition
of the poems of Mr. T. S. Eliot. Poems by Mr. Eliot have also been
published by the Hogarth Press, together with works in verse and prose
by Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and J. Middleton
Murry.
* * * * *
Our French allies seem to be making a serious effort to break with
that tradition of bad printing which has for so long oppressed their
literature. Several new publishing houses have come into existence with
the avowed purpose of producing books that shall be handsome objects
in themselves. The directors of the _Nouvelle Revue Française_ have
set a higher standard in their publications than most of their rivals.
But even in their editions the most horrible atrocities, such as the
omission of a whole sheet of sixteen pages in the middle of a book,
occasionally happen. But the books produced by _La Sirène_, by _La
Belle Edition_, and the _Société Littéraire de France_ are worthy of
all praise.
* * * * *