Nests were the first buildings; I suppose the birds built them long
before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by
his tail from trees. The nests of man were coverts, something between
a hole in the ground and an arbour; a retreat easily turned into a
wig-warn, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay animals and
to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine the cart developing--one of
the earliest of human habitations--and from the cart the boat: tents,
boats, and carts (as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner
more human than houses; they are the shelters of freemen. Some men,
those destined to higher things, are migratory; they have imagination,
being haunted by absent things, and distance of itself allures them,
even if dearth or danger does not drive them on; indeed, dearth and
danger would not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some
safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy. Ranging into
varied climates, these men feel the need of that portable shelter which
we call clothes; and at a slightly greater distance from their skins,
they surround themselves with a second integument, also portable, the
tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately without
foundations, except in the instincts of his soul; and it is only by a
slight anchorage to the earth, in some tempting glen or by some flowing
river, that the cart, boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here
I see the secret of that paradox, that the English people who have
invented the word home, should be such travellers and colonists, and
should live so largely and so contentedly abroad. Home is essentially
portable; it has no terrene foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an
altar; it is an integument of the living man, as the body itself is;
and as the body is more than the raiment, and determines its form, so
the inner man is more than his dwelling, and causes it to mould and
to harden itself round him like a shell, wherever he may be. Home is
built round his bed, his cupboard, and his chimney-corner; and such a
nest, if it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's
Bay to Malacca; at least, it becomes home when the inner man, as he is
prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself there with a family; for a
home is a nest, and somehow incomplete without an egg to sit on.
This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English architecture,
in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking, there is no English
architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated
in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How
entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing
it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems
unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of
part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it!
It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner
man; it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a home. Far
other was the character proper to nobler architecture in its foreign
seats. There it had been essentially military, religious, or civic:
it had begun perhaps with a slight modification or rearrangement of
great stones lying on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its
depths. Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic and
compulsive influence, or with a communal function; it came to glorify
three slabs--the tomb, the hearth, and the altar--and to render them
monumental. The tribe or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and
walled in; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked with a heap
of stones; pillars were set up to the right and to the left of the
presiding deity, to dignify the place where he delivered true oracles,
and dispensed magic powers. This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely
humanized in form, or fantastically named after some animal; and as he
grew colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred head
had to be arched over with more labour and art; and the approach to him
was impressively delayed through pylons, courts, narthex, or nave,
into the sepulchral darkness of the holy of holies. Similarly defences
grew into citadels, and judgement-seats into palaces; and as for
individual men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple
gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the galleries
of the king's court, or built themselves huts to breed in under the lee
of the fortifications.
This sort of architecture has a tragic character; it dominates the soul
rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older
than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation
like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour; life is
passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of
course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that
scamper all over the most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking;
and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to
the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved; yet in their essential
function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming;
they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy; they are
favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they
become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling
celebrations; but always it is a vast affair, like a court ball, in
which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see
and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part
in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this
public character. There is the theatre and the circus, into which one
must squeeze one's person uncomfortably, in order to subject one's
mind to contagious emotions, and the judgements of the crowd; and even
the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-boys wait for
their turn, plays for ever far above the heads of the people; as if
that Neptune and those dolphins were spouting for their own pleasure,
cooling the sunshine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring
whether they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.
All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and yet England
is full of vestiges of them, not only because its fine arts are
derived from abroad, but because, however disguised, the same tragic
themes must appear everywhere. The tomb, the temple, the fortress are
obligatory things; but they become properly English in character only
when their public function recedes into the background, and they become
interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations or accidents
which harmonize them with his sentimental experience. They grow English
in growing picturesque. These castles and abbeys were Norman when
they were built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard,
crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-grown, the
cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts for the roses to
creep over, the frowning keep has lost its battlements and become a
comfortable mansion mantled with ivy; before it the well-dressed young
people play croquet on the lawn; and the chapel, whitewashed within,
politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on Sundays, is
embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard, which the yew seems to
sanctify more than the cross, and the flowers to suit better than the
inscriptions; there is a bench there round the great tree, where the
old villagers sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the
church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense a surer grace
and protection than the church itself: they seem more unequivocally
the symbol and the work of God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in
England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this
cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.
If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not exclude, in
the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive use of the forms
which the needful structure imposes; and these decorative frills or
arbitrary variations of theme might be called comic architecture. This
is the side of the art which is subject to fashion, and changes under
the same influences, with the same swiftness and the same unanimity.
But as fashions among peasants sometimes last for ages, so certain
decorative themes, although quite arbitrary, sometimes linger on
because of the inertia of the eye, which demands what it is used to,
or the poverty of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the
best taste revel in decoration; but the motive here is play and there
display. The Englishman deprecates both; he abominates the tawdry, the
theatrical, the unnecessarily elaborate; and at the same time he is
shy of novelty and playfulness; give him comfortable old grey clothes,
good for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous houses,
where he can live without feeling a fool or being the victim of his
possessions. The comic poses of architecture, which come to him from
abroad, together with its tragic structure, he accordingly tones down
and neutralizes as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how
pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy
shores! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple veracity and
fixity, had already been submerged in attempts to vary it; in England,
as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have
its own roof and its own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque
into the most "classic" designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once
reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the
spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were
fitted to their English setting; how the windows were widened and
subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved
into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and
the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with
its gables, chimneys, and high roofs; whence the delightful brood of
Jacobean and Queen Anne houses; and in the next generation the so
genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad
windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The
tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic
remained.
Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its history, England
had seemed to revel in comic art, and to have made it thoroughly its
own. Domestic taste had reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human
scale; prodigies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted,
doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost rustic porch;
the vast spaces were subdivided, they were encrusted with ornament; the
lines became playful, fan-tracery was invented, and floral pendants
of stone; the walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers,
and Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational skeleton
altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery of fashion.
All England seemed to become one field of the cloth of gold; rooms
looked like gilded palanquins or silken tents, roofs were forests
of bannerets, pinnacles, and weathercocks; heraldry (a comic art)
overspread every garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic
and labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and full
of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even prose was a
maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase was embroidered, and
no self-respecting person could say yea or nay without some artful
circumlocution. It was this outburst of universal comedy that made
Shakespeare possible--an exuberant genius in some respects not like
a modern Englishman; he rose on the crest of a somewhat exotic wave
of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided. Some vestiges of
that spirit seem to linger in American manners; but for the most part
puritanism killed it; and I do not think we need regret its loss. What
could England have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there?
Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan stiffening
was essential to raise England to its external dignity and greatness;
and it was needed to fortify the inner man, to sober him, and persuade
him to be worthy of himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it
elsewhere, in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting
and drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are
experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was the fashion
in London at the end of the nineteenth century tried to be playful,
and to dote on art for its own sake; but in reality it was full of a
perverted moralism; the aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running
away from school; they thought it immensely important to be choice, and
quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture of that time was
certainly not comic in my sense of the word, it did not give a free
rein to exuberant fancy: it was only railway Gothic. But in England the
mists and the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees can
make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of Ruskin: and with
better models, and less wilfulness, I see the fresh building of to-day
recovering a national charm: the scale small, the detail polyglot, the
arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth
and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic architecture
in England follows to the letter the advice of Polonius:
Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy.
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