Ghastly Good Taste

by John Betjeman

  Although there might be what seemed a waste of money at the Hall, there was no waste of time. True to his generation this early Victorian father produced a large family of late Victorians. Some went to the bad and to the Colonies, some to the Church, and some married into their class, and acquired social position after their father’s slight mistake; others made no effort to rectify it. One remained at home to look after the Hall. The library became dusty and was generally locked. A set of Lever, a set of Surtees, a set of Thackeray and one of Dickens were placed in a few empty shelves that remained, and thereafter the master’s activities were confined to the gun-room. Here the chairs were of red leather, the walls were hung with antlers, as the walls of the main staircase hall with Landseers. The master was rarely off a horse and, when he was on his feet, he was rarely off conversation about horses.

  To the hunt and to pedigree cattle your grandfather’s interests turned. Food and drink were as plentiful as ever. Indoor animals and indoor vegetation far more so. But the end of the Hall was in sight. The Nonconformists in Tetbury, the Freethinkers in the village itself, and, what was far worse, the workmen in the far away towns and their representatives shouted ‘The idleness, the class distinction at the Hall…. Tax it out of existence.’ The idea of a Grand Tour was abandoned, unless a honeymoon in Italy and holidays in Switzerland or the South of France can be called Grand Tours.

  So in 1932 you come to be standing in this library, the collection of all except your most recent ancestors. Your wife has found that the library is a well-proportioned room and pleasanter to look at than the gun-room. It is useful, too, as some of the old books are valuable and can be sold to dealers, and the others can be sold by the ton or by the yard to America as wall decoration, and so help to pay death duties. The old house is too big to live in. Servants cannot be got, and the rooms are too big to be ‘cosy’. Except for the library, the house is shut up and some of those kitchen quarters which are not in the basement have been turned into living rooms. As a last wall between you and the civilisation (if such it can be called) that is soon going to get the better of you is the park and the high-walled kitchen garden. Outside the gates and close to the lodge is a petrol station. ‘Hideous,’ you say, yet what would you do for getting about if it were not there? Part of the park has been sold for building strips of villas. ‘Ghastly,’ you say, yet what would you do without the money that came from them? All round the estate are roaring main roads. ‘The noise!’ you exclaim. Yet what would you do if they were winding and untarred? The country is not what it was to you. You pay enormous taxes to a State which is bent on destroying your position. The convenience of your house is solely that of shelter. The telephone (carried by prominent poles that stride down the eighteenth-century vista) is ringing all day. You are rarely in. You are always seeing friends. Your house is too large and unmovable. You almost want to get rid of it.

  Here are the two sorts of life. Historically separated from one another by the nineteenth century, the transition period. What can you do to reconcile them? Preservation of the countryside is but an ineffective compromise. Clotworthy is dead, and his sons make motorbikes in the Midlands. The praying of the Nonconformists has been heard and even their own establishments are threatened. The democrats and the freethinkers are in. They no longer shout and preach, they are coming up the drive in their motor cars. You are already half a democrat yourself.

  Chapter II · The Argument of the Book

  Ambition sigh’d: she found it vain to trust

  The faithless Column and the crumbling Bust:

  Convinc’d, she now contracts her vast design

  And all his triumphs shrink into a Coin.

  Pope, Moral Essays, Epistle V

  The first chapter of this book was in the nature of an apostrophe. Those who have understood it need go no further, for the succeeding chapters are but elaborations of the opening theme; those who did not understand it need go no further, since the elaborations will not help them. There is little reason for my continuing the rest of the book beyond pleasing my publisher, and indulging my own pleasure in writing and gaining that money which I cannot come by honestly. Architecture suffers by never being dealt with in pamphlets—always in books. A page of illustrations of good and bad buildings will do more than a chapter of text. Here is another textbook, an opportunity for the thousands of ‘art critics’, of whom I am unwillingly one, to air their pedantry and express their annoyance, an opportunity for aesthetic snobs to contest yet another theory; but if one copy of this book goes to every Institute for the Training of Museum Officials, for Preserving the Countryside, for Affiliating Incorporated Painter-Stainers, for Painting and Staining Incorporated Institutes, and to every other body for the official expression of aesthetic self-consciousness, I shall have made enough money to get myself up in an arty manner, and so qualify for a lectureship at some Ruskin School of Art, there to pronounce dicta admired and uncriticised for the rest of my life—an acknowledged ‘expert’ whose opinion will be valuable to Americans. I believe it is Adrian Stokes who says that when art criticism is rampant, art is moribund. And certainly no one would be fool enough to think that a painter or an architect was ever inspired to creative work by art criticism. The disastrous results of the more typical art and architectural school products should be proof enough of that.

  No, this book is written for two reasons. Primarily to dissuade the average man from the belief that he knows nothing about architecture, and secondly to dissuade the average architect from continuing in his profession. In order to accomplish the first task, I opened with an apostrophe which anyone can read without feeling abashed at his abysmal ignorance. To accomplish the second task I brought the word ‘taste’ into the title of my book as a sure draw for the average architect who always considers himself a practical man of it. But both tasks will have failed, for the work is not a novel which will please the average man, and not enough wrapped up in technical terms for the average architect. Today with regard to architecture the average man is a fool and the average architect is a snob.

  ‘Of course, I’m not in a position to criticise,’ says the man in the street, as he gazes up at a colossal hideosity aping the style of Queen Anne, or neatly portraying in yellow and red terra cotta an enlarged edition of a seventeenth-century merchant’s house in Delft. ‘Of course, I’m not in a position to criticise—but it’s always seemed to me a fine building—not altogether practical of course, for us who have to work in it, the rooms are a bit dark—but it’s imposing—that’s what it is—imposing.’

  ‘Mind you, you’re an architect—and I don’t know—but it seems to me there’s some fine things going up nowadays—this is only five years old, you know—the papers said it was magnificent.’ Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century, when the average man did not exist, every gentleman of property felt himself in a position to criticise, and every person without it felt himself in a position to admire. In those days people minded about architecture and took a pride in it. They welcomed an opportunity to build, for a building would improve the landscape; now, how common is the expression, ‘What a pity—they’re going to build there.’ Nor is the average man, whose tasteful little residence shouts its ostentation across the tram-lines to the other side of the main road, entirely to blame for his lack of interest in architecture. Although he lives in a hideous suburb, surrounded by it, walking through it to his office, although he works in an ill-ventilated closet of polished mahogany and bevelled glass where the decoration is continually sticking into him, worrying his eyesight, still he does not notice architecture. Nature is kind. She causes her creatures to adapt themselves to their surroundings; to certain fish in the deepest parts of the ocean she gives enormous eyes which are able to pierce the darkness of the watery deep. To the town-dweller to-day she has given a kind of eye which makes him blind to the blatant ugliness by which he is surrounded. She has affected his critical reasoning powers and his eyesight. Nature is kind, and it is not for me in this book to attempt t
o reverse her laws. Rather I must explain why they have been reversed.

  The average man is but in part to blame, the architect more so. Unfortunately most architects are average men themselves. In my own unpleasant occupation of architectural journalism I am continually meeting architects. Although they are average men, average architects are average individualists. Although intensely proud of being in a ‘profession’—the word ‘trade’ gives architects an upper middle-class shudder—they are intensely jealous of one another. Their camaraderie is limited to the golf club. If you meet the average architect you will not be able to tell him from the average man. He will pull in at his pipe and puff out the opinions of The Times and the Daily Express. As a ‘professional’ man he will keep a brave face in front of the oncoming starvation which is threatening most architects; like any other ‘professional’ man, his talk will be tinged with that class consciousness which is so frequently mistaken for Conservatism. The average architect is good to his children, loyal to his wife, sometimes he is a good practical builder, often he is a good practical draughtsman, always he is a ‘professional’ man. The ‘professional man’ comes before the artist, and, of course, long before the builder and the mason. Because he is an average man, the average architect is blind and subject to those laws of nature which I have already mentioned. If he were not subject to them, the City of London would not look like what it does at present, the main streets of our provincial towns would not exist in their present form, nor would Kingsway, Regent Street, the Thames Embankment; the suburbs would have been planned before they were built, Crewe would have been a paradise and Leeds a garden city. Snobbery would not have existed between builder and engineer and architect. They would all have been one man. As it is, they are all different men, each with a vague idea of the other’s trade, and each attempting to be a jack-of-all trades. East Ham, Swindon, Huddersfield, Manchester, Colindale, New Cross, Ilford, Liverpool Street and Marylebone Station are the result. Not far from the ill-ventilated room where I do my uninteresting work is an architect’s office. There I see a gentleman in pince-nez take off his cuffs and sit down by a drawing-board; presently a ‘cheerioh-old-boy-one-over-the-eight-last-night-high-jinks-in-Finchley’ young man comes in and puts an over all over his plus-fours. He too sits at a drawing-board, somewhat listlessly. Their employer—and the employer of many more such draughtsmen—comes in at about eleven after a busy previous night ‘getting clients’ or fishing for a knighthood, or advertising himself on committees. It is in the hands of these inspired gentlemen, whose fervour runs away with them, whose discontent with the present situation causes them to be almost mad with idealism, whose anxiety to build Jerusalem has expressed itself in their white-hot excitement, it is in the hands of these gentlemen, dear readers, that the noble service of architecture lies. That uninspired underling with the pince-nez and the celluloid cuffs, that top-hole lad who once went to the Forty-Three when he was a student at the Architectural Association, that gentlemanly person who gets himself up as a tactful compromise between a major-general and a business man—those three know, of course, all about economics, engineering, town-planning, the history of art, and sanitation; they are sufficiently imaginative to weld their knowledge into a coherent whole; they are sufficiently devoid of petty jealousy to be able to co-operate with others with the same ideas. They are madly keen to get to work to save the world. They have the tact of a Wren, die taste of a Chambers, the originality of a Soane.

  Oh judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts

  And men have lost their reason—

  It is not because I have such a rooted dislike for English architects, but because I have such a rooted love for English architecture that I write so malevolently of the majority of its present practisers in this country. The importance of architure is immeasurable; its history, whether looked at in detail by counties, in part by countries or in whole by the world, is extraordinary. Book after book has appeared, to attempt to define it, yet no definition has been reached. Perhaps the best attempt to define it was made by Sir Thomas Jackson, whose book Architecture is so much better than were his buildings:

  Architecture is based on building, as poetry may in a manner be said to be based on prose. But architecture is something more than building, and poetry something more than prose. What is it in each case that is added to make the difference? … What has the barbarian done to make this transition from mere building to architecture? What has he added? Certainly not ornament. He has added an idea. He has brought reason to bear upon practice, and this influence once begun and carried on with advancing skill, is the secret of all that followed.

  The beginning of architecture in its humblest form may serve to illustrate a great truth that should never be lost sight of in tracing the history of the art in its progress from style to style. It is this, that all great changes through which architecture passed successively may, as a rule, be found to have originated in suggestions of utility and convenience. Thus Architecture was developed from structural necessities and suggestions, not by addition of ornament to structural form, as some would have it, but by binding structural forms themselves into forms of beauty…. Nowhere did Architecture declare its independence of ornament more vigorously than in the Cistercian buildings of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the rules of that stern order, ornament was absolutely forbidden. There were to be neither painting nor sculpture; the glass was to be white, without cross or ornament, and the bell tower was to be low and unostentatious. Like the Mussulman, the Cistercian artist was deprived of the use of natural ornament. At the most, he could temper the dry severity of the arches of door and window by moulding the edges, and abroad, where moulding was less in fashion then with us, as for instance in Burgundy, in such churches as that at Pontigony, there was but little of that. But notwithstanding this prohibition, the Cistercian has shown us that he could dispense with ornament, and wanted nothing but nicety of proportion, dignity of scale, graceful outline in the forms of his construction to enable him to reach the highest level in his art. The Yorkshire abbeys are mostly Cistercian, and are among the loveliest buildings and the stateliest that have come down to us from the Middle Ages.

  To return to our definitions. What is Architecture? Architecture does not consist in beautifying building, but on the contrary in building beautifully, which is quite another thing…. As prose rises into poetry by the greater elevation of thought, the finer flow of language, the touch of sympathy, grace and pathos, so does building pass into Architecture with the superior grace of the main forms of the fabric, perfect expression of the conditions of the construction and closer harmony between purpose and achievement.

  In a word—Architecture is the poetry of construction.

  After reading such illuminating and excellent writing as this, it seems odd that Sir Thomas Jackson should have been a lover of the Jacobean and have built the regrettable Examination Schools which are such an odd addition to the famous High Street of Oxford.

  For all that excellent definition which I have just quoted, I do not believe architecture can be defined. An attempt at definition can help us to understand it. So many factors are concerned with it, the planning of towns, the increase of population, the conditions of life, the climate, the subsoil, the political tendencies of the people, their aesthetic desires—the whole question of whether a community is influenced by its architecture or architecture by the community—that it is useless to attempt to define it. Sir Thomas Jackson has explained the reasons for getting pleasure out of a seemly building, but he has not explained why the building is there, nor how closely the dress of its inhabitants, their vehicles, and their instruments are connected with its architecture. Nor can he be expected to do so. Architecture cannot be understood by a definition. Some of its beauty may be grasped by an history of it.

  For this reason I am attempting to trace its development in England. I cannot hope to define it. I only hope to cause some interest in it.

  Briefly my argument is this. Before the
Reformation, or even earlier, when all Europe was united in an age of faith, the Church was the dominant force in architecture. For this reason architectural style changed with the opinions of the Church; and all Europe was Christendom, with Holy Church for its expression of consciousness. With the Renaissance and a vague archaeological hankering after classical learning, individuality and doubt, which made themselves felt in the last days of the age of faith, found a means of expression. The intellectual and spiritual muddle is expressed in England by the Jacobean style. As learning came to be more admired and less feared, and reason came into its own, we got the architecture of the age of reason—the work of Wren, of Gibbs, of Kent, of Chambers. There are, of course, exceptions to these seemingly dangerous generalisations. With the dawn of learning developed the system of class consciousness; knighthood and the blind feudalism of the age of faith had vanished. Englishmen desired the then awe-inspiring experience of travel, and Jacobean architecture is often rather like a traveller’s hazy impressions. Then with that acute social battle of the Cavaliers and Roundheads, class consciousness in England established itself with the monarchy. Architecture fell into the hands of the upper classes, and there for over 100 years it remained. The work of Wren, Gibbs, Kent and Chambers is the work of an Upper Class. And by ‘Upper Class’ I mean the educated, not necessarily the well-born. With the Regency the Upper Classes made some concessions to the growing industralists, and we have architects who do not confine themselves to building mansions, churches and hospitals, but who are interested in town planning, and who build streets, terraces, squares, circuses and shops.