Ghastly Good Taste

by John Betjeman

  After the Reform Bill the Middle Class, which represents industrialism, took control—or rather lost control—of the fine Regency tradition. The rest of the book must be a sad but exciting history of the chaos that resulted. The only hope that I can put forward is that England will emerge from its present state of intense individualism and become another Christendom. Not until it is united in belief will its architecture regain coherence. That union cannot come until a return of Christendom. Whether that Christendom will be a Union of Soviet Republics, a League of Socialistic Nations or an Ecclesiastical Union, it is not for me to say. I only know, like everyone else, that we are changing in a rapid and terrifying manner to some new form of civilisation which will demand new architectural expression. Perhaps we are rushing towards annihilation. In that case there will be no architecture at all. For me that is the most satisfactory solution.

  Chapter III · Christendom

  O tell of His might,

  O sing of His grace,

  Whose robe is the light,

  Whose canopy space;

  His chariots of wrath

  The deep thunder clouds form,

  And dark is His path

  On the wings of the storm.

  Sir Robert Grant, Hymns A. and M.

  I am pleasantly awoken every morning in London by the sound of a church bell at eight o’clock. It sounds above the early lorries and rides triumphant over the roaring engines being warmed up in the garage of the street behind me, before the chauffeurs depart to fetch their precious masters to the office. And every morning as this bell rings, one elderly sexton, two old ladies and a pale youth attend the daily communion—or mass, as it is called among Anglo-Catholics—in St Agatha’s. During the day the church remains open, and some more old women and some

  Young men, that no one knows, go in and out

  With a far look in their eternal eyes.

  But out of every 500 people who go down my street, I do not think it would be inaccurate to say that less than three call in at St Agatha’s.* When the bell rings and wakes me in the morning, even though I am tired, I envy the young man and the two old women and the sexton their faith, that will let them face the discomfort of early rising for a mystic experience in St Agatha’s to carry them through the day. That early morning bell is symbolic of the lost age of faith; the symbolism becomes even more pathetic when, twenty minutes after the eight o’clock bell, six strokes on the sanctus tell the people cleaning the gramophone shop and the men at the ‘Lex Garage’ opposite that the Son of Man died to save the world, and has died again just across the road today.

  Church art today is at a low ebb, and it is hard to believe that the faith which built St Agatha’s (which is, by the way, an impressive building of Edwardian date) created the Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which remain more lasting memorials to Catholicism than the frail old women who represent English Catholicism today. The church was an ideal to work for; its fierce energy and its increasing multiplicity of outward symbols in the mediaeval age created the energy of the Norman style and the multiplicity of the Gothic.

  In those happy days, when man did not have a mind of his own, the king ruled the baron, the baron the yeoman, the yeoman the serf, and the Church ruled all. Happy days of feudalism when the greatest injustice was not that the serf was starved and the baron overtaxed, but that the Ottomans occupied Jerusalem! Happy days of feudalism, before nation rose against nation, when death and torture and oppression were compensated for in heaven and when the wicked were cast into hell! Happy days of feudalism, when a local saint daily somewhere in Christendom performed a miracle, and when Christ might come in person round the next corner! With such an all-powerful representative on earth as Holy Church, with such a living rock upon which she was built, is it surprising that no spire could be too high, no decoration too costly, no nave too broad, no altar too filled with precious stones, for the worship of a God who gave his rewards, if not in this life, at least in the next? With the certainty of heaven, did it matter to the architect and the mason, that their names were forgotten? Their reward was in their work, and their eternal rest with the saints whose images they carved on the west fronts of Lincoln, Wells and Salisbury, and in the porches and towers and side-chapels of their village churches. Although we know that William of Sens was the designer of the major part of the choir in Canterbury Cathedral, we do not know who was the carver of the capitals therein. The Gothic architects sunk their individuality in their faith.

  And because in the Middle Ages architects were not generally cursed with a desire to perpetuate their names to posterity, and because they lacked the mammon of unrighteousness ‘individuality’ which we so much admire, Holy Church took over their works and crystallised their aspirations. And as faith can move mountains, so nothing was impossible to Holy Church and the energetic masons, carvers, designers and jewellers of which she was comprised. The round arches and flat roofs of the Normans were not enough for the Plantagenets, just as the grace of Saxon architecture and draughtsmanship had not been enough for William the Conqueror. The delicate creative genius of the oppressed Saxons struggled through and expressed itself in Gothic architecture. Without any self-conscious change Gothic architecture grew out of the Norman or Romanesque. The faith of Holy Church could not be encased in mere stone. The stone must soar with her. And the height of her soaring was the pointed arch.

  For this reason the genius of Gothic architecture comes out in the fascinating history of the pointed arch. There are several theories as to its origin and that of the ribbed vaulting characteristic of Gothic architecture. In the romantic days, when our rude native architecture was thought to have been rediscovered by its Beckfordian exponents, it was argued that the shady lengths of the cathedral naves were an attempt to portray in stone, avenues in forests whose trees met in a point overhead. The theory of the Romanticist gave way to that of the pedant, and for a long time it was imagined that the intertwining of the rounded Norman arches suggested the pointed arch to Gothic architects. It has, moreover, always been contended that the pointed arch came from the East. And certainly the pointed arch was no new discovery, for it was used in the seventh century in the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of El-Aksa at Jerusalem. In Egypt it is to be seen in Coptic churches of the sixth century. It is therefore generally supposed that pointed or Gothic architecture received its impetus from the Crusaders, starting in Sicily and spreading through Italy to France, and thence at last to England, where the early pointed style appears at Fountains Abbey, which was built in the twelfth century. Although Western architects may have realised, from hearing about or from seeing Eastern examples, that the pointed arch was a possibility, all who understand these principles of Gothic architecture, which Ruskin and Le Corbusier have expounded, will not be able to credit a theory which makes the Gothic architects mere imitators. For the most part they were engineers in stone, as all their buildings demonstrate, from the immense Salisbury Cathedral spire (1331) to that Crystal Palace of stone and glass, King’s College Chapel, Cambridge (1450). And when we consider that Fountains Abbey, one of the first English buildings to possess a pointed arch, was of Cistercian foundation, and that the stern Cistercians set no store by decoration, depending always on beauty of proportion and the glory of ingenious construction for their effect, I think it seems more unlikely still that the pointed arch was a mere innovation from the East.

  The manner in which the Gothic architect evolved the pointed arch and the ribbed vaulting characteristic of his style is best described by that admirable and already quoted writer, Sir Thomas Jackson.

  The main difficulty arose from the round arch, which being an inelastic form could not be adapted to irregular heights, and the solution was found in the adoption of the pointed arch, which admitted of being raised to various heights as the circumstances required. This overcame the difficulty of the arches which could now be brought to suitable levels and be made equal at the crown. But it left the difficulty of the carved surfaces of the vaulting
worse than ever. These surfaces were too irregular to meet symmetrically on regular lines, for they needed to be twisted and tilted to come together at all, and so it was that the system of strengthening the lines of intersection by ribs was invented. The surfaces could not be brought together except by such twisting and winding as to be dangerous, and therefore ribs were constructed on the lines of true arches, and the panels of the vaulting were fitted between them, and rest on them securely, even when these surfaces wind. Vaulting thus became a system of ribs and panels; the ribs forming a framework or skeleton, which is clothed by a covering or ceiling of light masonry, which however, from its arched form, has a constructive strength of its own.

  All the thrust outward and downward of such heavy vaulting as this was, therefore, concentrated on the columns which supported it. As it was impossible to build any large enough to bear such a weight—for the thick round Norman columns had, like all Norman buildings, notoriously insecure foundations—the Gothic architects solved the problem in quite another way. They made the supporting columns comparatively slender, and the outward thrust of the vaulting they counter-balanced by a flying buttress pressing into the column from the exterior of the building. A well-known example of this form of construction may be seen in Westminster Abbey.

  As their skill in this delicate art of thrust and counter-thrust grew, the necessity for an obvious flying buttress was removed by the systems of lierne and fan vaulting. This last development of Gothic vaulting Jackson describes as follows:

  An example of the lierne vault at Winchester will show how the whole surface of the vault came to consist of a network of ribs, great and small in every interval of which a separate ‘filling-in’ piece had to be fitted. It may easily be understood that the least settlement of a pier would disarrange this elaborate puzzle-work and make some of the pieces loose. … It was this, no doubt, that suggested uniting rib and panel in one substance, a plan that of course upset the whole theory of rib and panel vaulting. The entire vault now became a shell of solid masonry; the ribs, instead of carrying the vault, became mere surface ornaments, mere panelling, decorating the underside of the vault, and no longer elements of the construction.

  This is called fan vaulting, which started with Gloucester Cathedral cloisters (1351–1412), one of the most beautiful features of that most beautiful and interesting of all English mediaeval cathedrals. It later appeared in King’s College Chapel (1447) and St George’s Chapel, Windsor (1508), and Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster (1512). The latest example is at Christ Church, Oxford, where the whole vaulting over an enormous staircase leading to the dining-hall seems to rest on a single column and the surrounding walls. This architectural freak was the work of Dr Fell and a London architect named Smith, and was completed in 1630, long after classical architecture had begun to reign.

  I have gone into detail in describing the process of Gothic vaulting to show that the architects of our mediaeval cathedrals, who are generally considered rude and ignorant old retainers of a superstitious religion, were in reality highly skilled engineers. There is no difference between the genius which erected the Crystal Palace or the newest battleship and the genius which built King’s College Chapel or St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The one used steel, the other stone. The sentimentalising of Gothic architecture into a form of elementary archaeology suitable for the middle forms in schools, combined with the unfortunate efforts which we see everywhere, of the so-called Gothic revivalists, has made the word ‘Gothic’ anathema to the average modern appreciator of architecture. I remember at school receiving lectures on Norman fonts. Such lectures were to most people very naturally boring, and have contributed considerably to the general decline in the study of architecture in this country. If some well-meaning canon delivers a talk on the English cathedrals in a school, he will inevitably go into detail about ye Quainte olde Pryore Lanfranc, who boughte ye silver crosse for ye high altar for two shillings, as though such a picturesque fact had anything to do with architecture. In the same spirit he will show illustrations of gargoyles and of the more elaborate intricacies, frequently hideous, of Gothic decorative detail, with such remarks as that we cannot carve like that nowadays. It is such talk as this that leads people to believe that nothing is good unless it is hand done. It leads people to believe that Gothic architecture is a quaint survival that cannot be done nowadays, to which the obvious answer is that it cannot be done nowadays, and anyone would be a fool and wastrel who would attempt to build a Gothic building in stone or brick today.

  It is this admiration for a Gothic arch or a Norman window which leads people on local councils to sacrifice convenience and any Georgian building to some trumpery piece of Early English tracery, built into a wall in the main street of a town. The same spirit caused the Bishop of London to pull down a lovely little eighteenth-century church in the City, called St Catherine Coleman, within the last few years, on the ground that it was modern (1741) and undistinguished. St Catherine Coleman contained the old box pews, the galleries, the clear glass and the fittings—those relics of a sturdy, departing Protestantism, which are hardly to be found anywhere else in the country, and which are an ornament to the eighteenth century, that great period in our history. Nevertheless, the neighbouring church of St Helen’s, Bishopsgate, was not even condemned with the other nineteen ‘modern’ and Wren City churches which were to be taken down in 1921. This building survived the fire and is therefore ‘old’. It does not matter that it was ravaged by the Victorians, that it is no more distinguished than the average country church, of which there are thousands of examples everywhere. It is of ‘historical and antiquarian interest’, and therefore must be preserved. I will have more to say of the present state of ecclesiastical art in a later chapter; at present it is enough to say that the Gothic architects who built St Helen’s would have viewed with dismay the last century’s spoliation of their work, and would certainly have preferred that St Catherine Coleman should be preserved, Protestant though it was, than the farce of preserving another building just because it was ‘old’.

  Mediaeval architects were innovators and experimentalists, despite or rather because of their faith. Gothic has fallen into the hands of antiquarianism, and architecture and the dead had of that grisly science are generally considered by the public to be identical. Those well-meaning canons who lecture, those preservation-mad town councillors who obstruct, and those dreary Wykehamical antiquarians have preponderated in their opinions for long enough. No Gothic architect could have borne with them.

  Maybe Gothic architecture has been so misrepresented because of the extreme remoteness of the ages in which it was built. The Middle Ages are even harder for us to understand than the nineteenth century. And that is putting the matter as strongly as possible. The eighteenth and seventeenth centuries are much nearer. We cannot live in the silence which surrounded past ages in English history. No part of England is today so remote that one can sit in it for half an hour without hearing somewhere the hoot of a train or the roar of car and motor bicycle. Today in Ireland it is certainly possible sometimes to find silence among those remote inland counties, where the colour-washed towns will be full of jennet-, donkey-and horse-drawn carts of a market day, and when on every other day of the week houses and fields are still as the bare hills. And today in Ireland something of the faith of the Middle Ages prevails. To people who live in small cabins among wastes of bog and water, closed in by hills and only approached by uneven lonely roads, the silence brings a faith. The hills have personalities, the hawthorn hedges are full of fairies, the rowan trees keep evil from the threshold, and the voices of heavy swans that fly across the distance are the singing of departed spirits. Today we call such beliefs superstition. But if we in England consisted, as we did once, of scattered communities huddled between a silent earth and sky, disturbed only by the noises of animals and the elements, we would readily believe in ghosts and evil, and though our vehicles moved slower, our minds might progress a little faster in unearthly things. An
d as the horse carried us through empty forests or over stormy downs, we might realise that man can be driven as much by the fear which follows him behind as by the more pleasant hopes, affections and aspirations that lead him on. It is not for me or for anyone to say that the old way of living is ‘better’ than the present, or that a community which lived in stone dwellings, clustered firmly round an ancient church, is more permanent than the community which lives in motor cars and small flats and houses taken on a short lease. I am only emphasising the remoteness of mediaevalism and the futility of attempting to preserve its methods, planning or buildings in an urban civilisation.

  In the village of Thaxted, in Essex, there has been an attempt, not unsuccessful, to centre the life of the place round the catholic service of the church. The church has become a place of importance once more, not a seedy relic continually needing repairs to the chancel; there is some reason for the numerous footpaths which lead to it, dotted across the ordnance map; and the footpaths are not always straight. Church social life was not originally confined to tea-parties and Dorcas Societies. At Thaxted, the public-house is not looked upon as a place of sin. Yet, despite the religious atmosphere of Thaxted Church, and despite the communal life centring round it and the able and great character of Conrad Noel, the incumbent, one realises that it is only in remote agricultural districts that faith, as the mediaeval church knew it, stands any chance of surviving. Therefore one cannot blame the canons who lecture and the preservation-mad town councillors and the Wykehamists for treating Gothic architecture in terms of mediaeval archaeology. Every village with its cottages clustered round its church is a relic. For the cottagers have moved to the towns, and the cottages are filled with arty escapists who are trying to blind themselves with the past, and the workers are in the cinema in Stortford, or on their motor bicycles, or listening to the wireless, or reading Lord Castlerosse or James Douglas in the Sunday Express, when the bell for service rings. But do not blame the vicar, he is no longer a man with authority. Blame the age, for that is the only thing which can frighten you. The age has lost one faith, but it does not yet seem to have found another.