That an Englishman should be a very great plastic artist is always
rather surprising. Perhaps it is a matter of mere chance; perhaps it has
something to do with our national character—if such a thing really
exists. But, whatever may be the cause, the fact remains that England
has produced very few artists of first-class importance. The
Renaissance, as it spread, like some marvellous infectious disease of
the spirit, across the face of Europe, manifested itself in different
countries by different symptoms. In Italy, the country of its origin,
the Renaissance was, more than anything, an outburst of painting,
architecture and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were,
in Germany, the typical manifestations of the disease. But when this
gorgeous spiritual measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms
were almost exclusively literary. The first premonitory touch of the
infection from Italy “brought out” Chaucer. With the next bout of the
disease England produced the Elizabethans. But among all these poets
there was not a single plastic artist whose name we so much as remember.
And then, suddenly, the seventeenth century gave birth to two English
artists of genius. It produced Inigo Jones and, a little later, Wren.
Wren died, at the age of more than ninety, in the spring of 1723. We are
celebrating to-day his bi-centenary—celebrating it not merely by
antiquarian talk and scholarly appreciations of his style but also (the
signs are not wanting) in a more concrete and living way: by taking a
renewed interest in the art of which he was so great a master and by
reverting in our practice to that fine tradition which he, with his
predecessor, Inigo, inaugurated.
An anniversary celebration is an act of what Wordsworth would have
called “natural piety”; an act by which past is linked with present and
of the vague, interminable series of the days a single comprehensible
and logical unity is created in our minds. At the coming of the
centenaries we like to remember the great men of the past, not so much
by way of historical exercise, but that we may see precisely where, in
relation to their achievement, we stand at the present time, that we may
appraise the life still left in their spirit and apply to ourselves the
moral of their example. I have no intention in this article of giving a
biography of Wren, a list of his works, or a technical account of his
style and methods. I propose to do no more than describe, in the most
general terms, the nature of his achievement and its significance to
ourselves.
Wren was a good architect. But since it is important to know precisely
what we are talking about, let us begin by asking ourselves what good
architecture is. Descending with majesty from his private Sinai, Mr.
Ruskin dictated to a whole generation of Englishmen the æsthetic Law. On
monolithic tables that were the Stones of Venice he wrote the great
truths that had been revealed to him. Here is one of them:
It is to be generally observed that the proportions of buildings have
nothing to do with the style or general merit of their architecture.
An architect trained in the worst schools and utterly devoid of all
meaning or purpose in his work, may yet have such a natural gift of
massing and grouping as will render his structure effective when seen
at a distance.
Now it is to be generally observed, as he himself would say, that in all
matters connected with art, Ruskin is to be interpreted as we interpret
dreams—that is to say, as signifying precisely the opposite of what he
says. Thus, when we find him saying that good architecture has nothing
to do with proportion or the judicious disposition of masses and that
the general effect counts for nothing at all, we may take it as more or
less definitely proven that good architecture is, in fact, almost
entirely a matter of proportion and massing, and that the general effect
of the whole work counts for nearly everything. Interpreted according to
this simple oneirocritical method, Ruskin’s pontifical pronouncement may
be taken as explaining briefly and clearly the secrets of good
architecture. That is why I have chosen this quotation to be the text of
my discourse on Wren.
For the qualities which most obviously distinguish Wren’s work are
precisely those which Ruskin so contemptuously disparages and which we,
by our process of interpretation, have singled out as the essentially
architectural qualities. In all that Wren designed—I am speaking of the
works of his maturity; for at the beginning of his career he was still
an unpractised amateur, and at the end, though still on occasion
wonderfully successful, a very old man—we see a faultless proportion, a
felicitous massing and contrasting of forms. He conceived his buildings
as three-dimensional designs which should be seen, from every point of
view, as harmoniously proportioned wholes. (With regard to the exteriors
this, of course, is true only of those buildings which _can_ be seen
from all sides. Like all true architects, Wren preferred to build in
positions where his work could be appreciated three-dimensionally. But
he was also a wonderful maker of façades; witness his Middle Temple
gateway and his houses in King’s Bench Walk.) He possessed in the
highest degree that instinctive sense of proportion and scale which
enabled him to embody his conception in brick and stone. In his great
masterpiece of St. Paul’s every part of the building, seen from within
or without, seems to stand in a certain satisfying and harmonious
relation to every other part. The same is true even of the smallest
works belonging to the period of Wren’s maturity. On its smaller scale
and different plane, such a building as Rochester Guildhall is as
beautiful, because as harmonious in the relation of all its parts, as
St. Paul’s.
Of Wren’s other purely architectural qualities I shall speak but
briefly. He was, to begin with, an engineer of inexhaustible resource;
one who could always be relied upon to find the best possible solution
to any problem, from blowing up the ruins of old St. Paul’s to providing
the new with a dome that should be at once beautiful and thoroughly
safe. As a designer he exhibited the same practical ingenuity. No
architect has known how to make so much of a difficult site and cheap
materials. The man who built the City churches was a practical genius of
no common order. He was also an artist of profoundly original mind. This
originality reveals itself in the way in which he combines the accepted
features of classical Renaissance architecture into new designs that
were entirely English and his own. The steeples of his City churches
provide us with an obvious example of this originality. His domestic
architecture—that wonderful application of classical principles to the
best in the native tradition—is another.
But Wren’s most characteristic quality—the quality which gives to his
work, over and above its pure beauty, its own peculiar character and
charm—is a quality rather moral than æsthetic. Of Chelsea Hospital,
Carlyle once remarked that it was “obviously the work of a gentleman.”
The words are illuminating. Everything that Wren did was the work of a
gentleman; that is the secret of its peculiar character. For Wren was a
great gentleman: one who valued dignity and restraint and who,
respecting himself, respected also humanity; one who desired that men
and women should live with the dignity, even the grandeur, befitting
their proud human title; one who despised meanness and oddity as much as
vulgar ostentation; one who admired reason and order, who distrusted all
extravagance and excess. A gentleman, the finished product of an old and
ordered civilization.
Wren, the restrained and dignified gentleman, stands out most clearly
when we compare him with his Italian contemporaries. The baroque artists
of the seventeenth century were interested above everything in the new,
the startling, the astonishing; they strained after impossible
grandeurs, unheard-of violences. The architectural ideals of which they
dreamed were more suitable for embodiment in theatrical cardboard than
in stone. And indeed, the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century
was the golden age of scene-painting in Italy. The artists who painted
the settings for the elder Scarlatti’s operas, the later Bibienas and
Piranesis, came nearer to reaching the wild Italian ideal than ever mere
architects like Borromini or Bernini, their imaginations cramped by the
stubbornness of stone and the unsleeping activities of gravitations,
could hope to do.
How vastly different is the baroque theatricality from Wren’s sober
restraint! Wren was a master of the grand style; but he never dreamed of
building for effect alone. He was never theatrical or showy, never
pretentious or vulgar. St. Paul’s is a monument of temperance and
chastity. His great palace at Hampton Court is no gaudy stage-setting
for the farce of absolute monarchy. It is a country gentleman’s
house—more spacious, of course, and with statelier rooms and more
impressive vistas—but still a house meant to be lived in by some one who
was a man as well as a king. But if his palaces might have housed,
without the least incongruity, a well-bred gentleman, conversely his
common houses were always dignified enough, however small, to be palaces
in miniature and the homes of kings.
In the course of the two hundred years which have elapsed since his
death, Wren’s successors have often departed, with melancholy results,
from the tradition of which he was the founder. They have forgotten, in
their architecture, the art of being gentlemen. Infected by a touch of
the baroque _folie de grandeur_, the architects of the eighteenth
century built houses in imitation of Versailles and Caserta—huge stage
houses, all for show and magnificence and all but impossible to live in.
The architects of the nineteenth century sinned in a diametrically
opposite way—towards meanness and a negation of art. Senselessly
preoccupied with details, they created the nightmare architecture of
“features.” The sham Gothic of early Victorian times yielded at the end
of the century to the nauseous affectation of “sham-peasantry.” Big
houses were built with all the irregularity and more than the
“quaintness” of cottages; suburban villas took the form of machine-made
imitations of the Tudor peasant’s hut. To all intents and purposes
architecture ceased to exist; Ruskin had triumphed.
To-day, however, there are signs that architecture is coming back to
that sane and dignified tradition of which Wren was the great exponent.
Architects are building houses for gentlemen to live in. Let us hope
that they will continue to do so. There may be sublimer types of men
than the gentleman: there are saints, for example, and the great
enthusiasts whose thoughts and actions move the world. But for practical
purposes and in a civilized, orderly society, the gentleman remains,
after all, the ideal man. The most profound religious emotions have been
expressed in Gothic architecture. Human ambitions and aspirations have
been most colossally reflected by the Romans and the Italians of the
baroque. But it is in England that the golden mean of reasonableness and
decency—the practical philosophy of the civilized man—has received its
most elegant and dignified expression. The old gentleman who died two
hundred years ago preached on the subject of civilization a number of
sermons in stone. St. Paul’s and Greenwich, Trinity Library and Hampton
Court, Chelsea, Kilmainham, Blackheath and Rochester, St. Stephen’s,
Wallbrook and St. Mary Ab-church, Kensington orangery and Middle Temple
gateway—these are the titles of a few of them. They have much, if we
will but study them, to teach us.