question of ownership never troubles anybody. I am in the habit of
telling my people that if the Church of our parish were to be swallowed
up by an earthquake some fine morning, there would be only one man who
would be a gainer by the catastrophe, and that man would be the rector.
For his benefice would at once become a sinecure, and there would be
nothing to prevent his removing to the metropolis and living there
during some months of the year, and living in the Riviera during the
other months, and leaving his people to shift for themselves--nothing
to prevent this except those trifling considerations of duty and
conscience which of course need not be taken into account. But when
it comes to a question of _preventing_ the church from tumbling down,
or when it comes to a question of pulling it about--when it comes to
_restoring_ it--then practically the ownership is surrendered to the
parson in the frankest and the freest and the most generous way by the
whole body of the parishioners. Then the parson is allowed to be the
only responsible owner of the fabric. It is remembered that he rang the
bell when he came into his freehold: therefore it must be his; and if
he does not take the whole burden of collecting the money and seeing
the work through and making himself personally responsible for the
cost, in nine cases out of ten it will not be done at all.
Now I am not the man to speak with disrespect of my brethren of the
clergy. I do not believe that in any country or in any age there was
ever a body of men so heartily and loyally trying to do their duty, and
so generously sacrificing themselves to what they believe to be their
duty, as the clergy of the Church of England are at this moment. But,
whether it is their misfortune or their fault--and we are none of us
faultless, not even the parsons--I am bound to express my belief that
ninety-nine out of every hundred of the clergy of the Church of England
know no more about the technical history of their churches than they
know about law--in fact, as a body, the clergy know as little about the
history of Church Architecture as lawyers know about Theology, and I
could not put the case more strongly than that.
Unhappily, however, the parallel between the amiable weakness of the
two professions and their relative attitude towards the two sciences
in which each of them delights to dabble may be carried out only too
closely. For it is painfully observable in both cases that the members
of the two professions are profoundly convinced--the lawyers that a
knowledge of theology, the divines that a knowledge of architecture,
comes to them severally by a kind of legal or clerical instinct. If a
lawyer chooses to plunge into scientific theology, and to write a book
on the two Decalogues, or give us his _obiter dicta_ on the errors of
the Greek Church, though nobody is much the wiser nobody is much the
worse, except the man who reads the pamphlet or the volume. But when it
has been decided that a church requires a thorough overhauling, then
the resigning the absolute control over and disposal of the sacred
building to the parson to be dealt with as he in his wisdom or his
ignorance may judge to be best becomes a very much more serious matter.
It would be easy to look at that matter from the ludicrous point of
view, but it is a great deal too serious for handling as though it
were anything to laugh at. Unhappily, we most of us know a great deal
too much about it. The parson in some cases jauntily determines to be
his own architect, and the village bricklayer highly approves of his
decision, and assures him in strict confidence that architects are a
pack of thieves, just as, in fact, jockeys are. The builder begins to
“clear away,” then the parson gets frightened. Then he thinks he’d
better have an architect--“only a consulting architect you know!” Then
the bricklayer recommends his nephew brought up at the board school who
has “done a deal of measurement and that like,” and then.... No! no! we
really cannot follow it out to the bitter end. But in many cases where
the good man, distrusting his own power, does call in the help of one
supposed to be an expert, the process and the result are hardly less
deplorable. There is nothing to prevent the most ignorant pretender
from starting as an architect to-morrow morning; nothing to prevent
his touting up and down the country for orders, though he is no more
qualified to advise and report upon an ancient building than he is to
construct the Channel tunnel. And we all know this very significant
fact, that there never was a church that ever was reported upon by
one of these solemn and aspiring young gentlemen without antecedents
and without any misgivings, which was not at once pronounced to be in
a most dangerous condition from weathercock to pavement. The roof is
always in a most hopeless condition, the walls are frightfully out of
the perpendicular and have been so for many generations, the bells
jiggle alarmingly in their frames, the jackdaws have been pecking
away at the mortar of the tower, fifty rectors lie buried in the
chancel, and a hole was dug for every one of them, and all these holes
imperatively demand to be filled up with concrete. But mercifully, most
mercifully and providentially, a professional gentleman has been called
in at the critical moment, exactly in the very nick of time, and now
the dear old church may be saved, saved for our children’s children by
being promptly restored. Thereupon the worthy parson--he, too, glad of
a job--sets to work and the thing is done.
But _what_ is done? The men that started this Society, this union for
the protection of the noble structures that are a proud inheritance
come down to us from our ancestors, they answered with an indignant
protest: “An immense and irreparable wrong is done, and the state
of things which makes it perfectly easy for a wrong like this to be
repeated every week is a shameful national scandal, which we will
not cease from lifting up our voices against till some means shall
have been devised for preventing the periodical recurrence of these
abominable mutilations, these cruel obliterations, these fraudulent
substitutions up and down the land of new lamps for old ones.”
At starting this was all that our pioneers ventured to proclaim. I
have often heard people object, “These gentlemen are so vague, they
don’t know what they would be at!” Now, I know that with some folk it
is quite sufficient to condemn any men or any opinions to pronounce
them _vague_. Why! Since the beginning of the world no great forward
movement, no great social religious or political reform, has ever
achieved its object and gone on its victorious course conquering and to
conquer which did not pass through its early stage of vagueness--that
stage when the leaders were profoundly conscious of the existence of
an evil or an injustice or a falsehood which needed to be swept away,
though they did not yet see what the proper manner of setting to work
was, or where the broom was to be found to do the sweeping with.
Oh ye merciful heavens! save us from cut-and-dried schemes, at least at
starting! All honour to the men, say I, who did not pledge us all to
a scheme, to a paper constitution, but who had the courage to say no
more than this: “Here in the body politic there is a horrible mischief
at work; the symptoms are very bad, very alarming. Do let us see if
some remedy cannot be found. Do help us to see our way out of our
perplexity.”
Eleven years have now gone by since the Society for the Protection of
Ancient Buildings was founded, and I venture to think that the time
has come when we must pass out of this stage whose characteristic is
said to be vagueness of statement and uncertainty in the plan of
operations, and when it behoves some one to speak out and propose
that we should take a step in advance. I have no right to compromise
my betters by pledging them to any crude proposition, or any course
which may seem to myself to be the right one. But, as a mere private
person, I hereby declare it to be my strong opinion that no time ought
to be lost in settling the very important question to whom the churches
of England do belong, and who have the right of defacing, degrading,
debasing the temples of God in the land, turning them into blotchy
caricatures, or into lying mummies smalmed over with tawdry pigments,
like the ghastly thing in Mr. Long’s picture in the Academy this year,
with an effeminate young pretender in the foreground making a languid
oration over the disguised remains of the dead.
There are some things (and they are the most precious of all things)
which no man has any moral right to treat as his own. They are the
things which came to us from an immemorial past, and which belong to
our children’s children as much as to ourselves. In the county of
Norfolk we have one aged oak that has stood where it stands now for at
least a thousand years. Under its shadow twenty generations of a noble
race have passed their childhood and early youth, left it with a fond
regret when the call came to them to engage in the battle of life, and
returned at last to find it still there, hale and vigorous as it was
centuries before the earliest of their ancestors settled in the land
where its mighty roots are anchored. The story of that race is full of
romance not untinged by pathos. If that oak were a talking oak, what
moving tales it could tell! If ’Arry ’Opkins of ’Ounslow should cast
his fishy eyes upon that monster vegetable, his first impulse would be
to carve upon its gnarled bark his own hideous name or at least those
two unhappy initials which he cannot pronounce. His next would be to
suggest that the tree should be trimmed up--restored in fact. I should
not like to be the man to make that proposition. And why? Because I
think the noble gentleman who calls that oak his heirloom looks upon it
as a sacred trust which he holds from his forefathers, and holds for
his posterity too--a trust which it would be dishonour to neglect, to
mutilate, or to destroy.
But within a pistol-shot of that venerable and magnificent tree stands
the little village church. There lie the bones of twenty generations of
De Greys; there they were baptized, wedded, buried. There they knelt
in worship, lifted up their voices in prayer and praise; from father
to son they bowed their heads at the altar, gazed at the effigies of
their ancestors--sometimes bitterly lamenting that the times were
evil and poverty had come upon them, sometimes silently resolving that
they would carve out for themselves a career--sometimes returning to
thank God who had enabled them so fully to perform their vow--sometimes
glad at the sound of their own marriage bells, sometimes sad when the
tolling of those bells announced that another generation had passed
away. There stands that little church. The old Norman tower was
standing as it stands to-day when, at the beginning of the fourteenth
century, the first De Grey came to Merton; and I have not a doubt that
if a self-styled professional gentleman, young enough and presumptuous
enough and ignorant enough, were to appear upon the scene, he would
solemnly and emphatically advise that Merton Church should at the
earliest possible moment be restored. The horrible thought is that
under quite conceivable circumstances the thing might be done with very
little difficulty and before you knew where you were.
Think of the feelings of that old oak then!
I know I shall be told that a tree is one thing and a church is
another, that the one you cannot restore but you can restore the other.
You can restore neither; you can murder both if you are a heartless
assassin. Was it in the 1851 Exhibition that they built up the bark of
a giant of the Californian forests and told us it was a restoration of
a wonder of the world that had reared up its lofty top to heaven even
from the days of the Pharaohs? A restoration! Nay! a colossal fraud.
But such a fraud as is perpetrated in our midst every month, and which,
when men have committed, they are actually proud of.
I am often asked, When was this or that church built? And my answer
is ready at hand. It was not built at all! It grew! For every church
in the land that has a real history is a living organism. Do you tell
me that yonder doorway is of the twelfth century; that yonder tower
may have stood where it does when the Conqueror came to sweep away
“pot-bellied Saxondom;” that the chancel was rebuilt in the time of
the Edwards--the rood screen crowded into a place never meant for
it during the Wars of the Roses, the pulpit supplied by a village
carpenter in the sixteenth century, the carvings of the roof destroyed
in the seventeenth, the royal arms supplied in the eighteenth, and
therefore that nothing but a clean sweep is to be made of it all, as
a preliminary to building it all up from the ground in the nineteenth
century? Do you call that restoration? You assure me that you will
faithfully and religiously copy the old. Why that is exactly what you
can’t do! You can’t copy the marks of the axe on early Norman masonry.
You can’t copy Roman brickwork; you daren’t copy Saxon windows that
let the light in through oiled canvas in the days when sacredness, and
mystery, and a holy fear were somehow associated with the presence of
dimness and darkness and gloom. You can’t restore ancient glass: the
very secret of its transcendent glories lies in the imperfection of
the material employed. Nay, you can’t even copy a thirteenth-century
moulding or capital: you can’t reproduce the carvings you are going
to remove--you have no eye for the delicate and simple curves: your
chisels are so highly tempered that they are your masters, not your
servants: they run away with you when you set to work and insist on
turning out sharply cut cusps, all of the same size, all of them
smitten with the blight of sameness, all of them straddling, shallow,
sprawling, vulgar, meaningless; melancholy witnesses against you that
you have lost touch with the living past. You can make the loveliest
drawings of all that is left, but the craftsmen are gone. There’s where
you fail; you say this and that ought to be done, and this or that
is what I mean; but when you expect your ideas carried out then you
utterly fail.
I know it is often said that the men of bygone times--say of the
fifteenth century--were at least as great restorers as we are. If
it were true, that would not excuse us. But is it true? Why, so far
from it, it is exactly because the architects of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries did _not_ aim at restoring that our modern
visionaries so often ask to be allowed to destroy their work and
to reproduce what they destroyed. I am no great admirer of those
perpendicular gentlemen, with their ugly flattened arches and their
huge gaping west windows and their trickery and their pretence and
their insincere display, but they did know their own minds. They did
retain some architectural traditions, and they had some architectural
instincts. But what have we to represent even their instincts? Have our
craftsmen anything in the shape of historic enthusiasm? or any sympathy
with the religious feeling or ritual of the past? Emphatically, No!
Have they the old spirit of humility and reverence, of generous regard
for their masters, teachers, and pastors in religion or in art? Have
we among us the self-distrust which kept in check the hankering of
our forefathers to alter or improve? Or have we only the fidgetty and
utterly reckless impatience of belonging to the majority of dismal
beings, who never make a great hit and leave no monument behind them
except of the things they destroyed?
A few weeks ago I was engaged in examining the muniments of the Diocese
of Ely, and I came upon an agreement drawn up in strictly legal form
between the Prior of the convent of Ely on the one part and Thomas
Peynton, master mason of Ely, on the other part--the convent agreeing
to allow Peynton an annuity for life of twelve marks of lawful money of
England--_i.e._ £8 sterling--without board and lodging, and a suit of
clothes such as gentlemen wore, he to do such masonry and stone-cutting
as the Sacrist of the convent should lay upon him, and further to teach
three apprentices, to be nominated, fed, and boarded at the cost of the
convent, which in return was to benefit by all the profits of their
labour. If the convent should at any time send their master mason to
work at any of their outlying possessions, then and only then was the
good man to receive an allowance for his maintenance. If his health
broke down or he became incapacitated by old age, he was to receive a
pension of six marks a year, and his clothes, but nothing more. Who
has not stood before some of our cathedrals and found himself asking,
“How was this temple piled up to heaven? How could men build it in
those rude old times.” How? Because in those rude old times, as we are
pleased to call them, there were men like simple old Thomas Peynton
of Ely, who, having food and raiment, were therewith content; men who
lived for the joy and glory of their work and did not regard their art
as a means of livelihood, so much as an end to live for; men _who_ were
so stupid, so far astray, that to sacrifice the joy of living for a
mountain of coin seemed to them _propter vitam vivendi perdere causas_.
You will be able to restore the churches which these men built when you
can revive among the humblest workmen the spirit which animated the
benighted, deluded, Quixotic enthusiasts of the days gone by, and not
till then.
Meanwhile, we do know how to build better houses to live
in--immeasurably grander hotels, magnificent clubhouses, and sumptuous
restaurants. Our bridges and our railway stations, our barracks and our
shops, are structures of which we have a right to be proud; but as for
our churches, let us be humble, let us forbear from meddling with what
we do not understand. Let us pause before we set ourselves to restore,
let us be thankful if we are permitted to preserve.
But preserve? How are we going to begin? As a preliminary, as a _sine
quâ non_, what is wanted is to stop all unlicensed meddling with all
ancient buildings throughout the land. This can only be done by making
it quite plain to whom those buildings belong. The ownership of the
Houses of God must no longer be left, as it is, an open question. It is
absolutely necessary that the present anomalous condition of affairs
should be got rid of, and without delay, and I see only one way out of
the difficulty. The old churches are a heritage belonging to the nation
at large, and now, more than ever before, it is true that the public at
large have a claim to be heard before these venerable monuments of past
magnificence should be dealt with as if they were the private property
of individuals, or of a handful of worthy people inhabiting a minute
geographical area. There are cases not a few where the whole population
of a parish could be completely accommodated in a single aisle of
the village church. In one case that I forbear from naming lest some
incompetent and restless aspirant for notoriety should fly upon the
spoil and tear it limb from limb--one case of a certain parish where
the population is under 200 all told--where there still exists one of
the most magnificent churches in England, capable of accommodating
at least 1,200 worshippers on the floor, and that church untouched
by profane hands for centuries, its very vastness has frightened the
most audacious adventurers, and it still stands in its majesty as the
wonder and pride of the county in which it is situated.
To restore it according to the notions only too much in vogue would
absorb a considerable fortune; to preserve it for future generations,
unmutilated, undefaced, and in a condition to defy the elements for
centuries, would require a few hundreds; and yet it would probably be
easier to find a Crœsus who to gratify his own vanity or whim would
be ready to lavish thousands upon that glorious structure and turn it
into a gaudy exhibition for nineteenth-century sightseers to come and
stare at; easier to find that than to find the hundreds for putting
the church into substantial repair. Yet I for one am inclined to think
that to do the last is a duty, to do the first would probably end in
committing an outrage. When we contemplate such churches as this (and
it is by no means a solitary instance), what forces itself upon some of
us is that they need first and foremost to be protected before we begin
to speak even of repairing them. We talk with pride of our National
Church. Is it not time that we should begin to talk of our _National
Churches_, and time to ask ourselves whether the ecclesiastical
buildings of this country should not be vested in some body of trustees
or guardians or commissioners who should be responsible at least for
their preservation? Is it not time that we should all be protected
from the random experiments of ’prentice hands and the rioting of
architectural buffoonery?
All honour to the generous enthusiasm which has urged so many
large-hearted men and women in our time to make sacrifices of their
substance, not only ungrudgingly but joyfully and thankfully, to make
the Houses of God in the land incomparably more splendid and attractive
than they were. But even enthusiasm, the purest and noblest and
loftiest enthusiasm, if misdirected and uninstructed, has often proved,
and will prove again, a very dangerous passion. Before now there have
been violent outbreaks of enthusiastic iconoclasm when the frenzy of
destroyers has been in the ascendant and when those who would fain
preserve the monuments of the past have been persecuted to the death.
Is there enthusiasm abroad--enthusiasm to strengthen the things which
remain that are ready to die? By all means let it have scope; give it
opportunity of action; let it have vent, but beware how you allow it to
burst forth into wild excesses; let it be at least kept under control.
Build your new churches as sumptuously as you please. Ours is the age
of brick and iron, of mechanical contrivances, of comfort and warmth
and light. Put all these into your new temples as lavishly as you
will, and then peradventure the Church architecture of our own time may
take a new departure; but for the old Houses of God in the land, aim at
preserving them and do not aim at more!
Let it be enacted that, whosoever he may be, parson or clerk, warden
or sidesman, architect or bricklayer, man or woman, who shall be
convicted of driving a nail into a rood-screen or removing a sepulchral
slab, of digging up the bones of the dead to make a hole for a heating
apparatus, bricking up an ancient doorway or hacking out an aperture
for a new organ or scraping off the ancient plaster from walls that
were plastered five hundred years ago--any one, I say, who shall do any
of these acts, even with the very best motives, if he have committed
such an offence without the license of a duly constituted authority,
shall be adjudged guilty of a misdemeanour and sent to prison without
the option of paying a fine. Would you do less in the case of a student
at the National Gallery who should presume to restore Gainsborough’s
“Parish Clerk” or Francia’s “Entombment”?
Having made unlicensed meddling with our churches penal, the next thing
to be done is to carry out a survey of our churches, and to obtain an
exhaustive report upon the condition of all the ancient ecclesiastical
buildings in the country which up to this moment have escaped the
ravages of the prevailing epidemic. I am afraid the list of such
favoured edifices would stagger and horrify us all by its smallness.