* St Anselm’s, Davis Street, by Balfour and Turner.
Chapter IV · The Upper Classes Take Over from Holy Church
Set me fine Spanish tables in the hall;
See they be fitted all;
Let there be room to eat
And order taken that there want no meat.
See every sconce and candlestick made bright,
That without tapers they may give a light.
Look to the presence: are the carpets spread,
The dazie o’er the head,
The cushions in the chairs,
And all the candles lighted on the stairs?
Perfume the chambers, and in any case
Let each man give attendance in his place!
Anonymous, Christ Church MS.
Not only the Lollards, but also the wanderers across the sea, were the cause of the break-up of the age of faith. Knowledge, as God said, was the fruit of evil. The Renaissance was as great an enemy to the Romanist faith as Communism is to capitalism. The ‘humanities’, the knowledge of classical Latin and Greek, were associated with the desire of man to free himself from superstition. The inevitable self-consciousness which waylays a man, as soon as he has been freed from some bonds whether ethical or economic, waylaid the blushing English adventurer who was unable fully to understand the discoveries of the Renaissance. Not every Englishman can be a Bacon, a Wyclif or a Shakespeare. And, although some brilliant exceptions showed themselves in the world of letters in England, it was not until Inigo Jones’ and Wren’s time that architecture was able to express itself in the scholarly manner of the Renaissance. Until then what is known as Jacobean and Elizabethan architecture remained the architecture of doubt.
The dissolution of the monasteries was not the death blow to Gothic architects. The class ascendancy, which took the place of church ascendancy, needed an architecture too. Barons were no longer in need of fortified castles, for a culture from the sunny courts of Italy filled all intelligent men in England with a desire for sunny courts and culture in their own country. Those that had the money built themselves palaces, which to this day are the last beautiful effort of architects unaffected by the humanistic or Renaissance tradition. Their plain brick buildings set about with lawns and clipped yew and box, surveyed by oriel windows and arranged in an orderly plan within and without, have caused the ‘Tudor’ style to be the cause since of many a hopeless revival.
The older colleges at Oxford are examples of the Tudor style, with the low courtyard of students’ rooms broken by chapel and the dining-hall rising out of the low blocks surrounding them. Not unlike the colleges were the manor houses of the sixteenth century, the domestic expression of Perpendicular architects who have become secular even in their church building. The courtyard round which the manor was built was entered by a gate tower, and on the opposite side stood the great hall and buttery and kitchen; to the right of this a withdrawing room and a chapel, on the left of the courtyard, bedrooms. Tudor manors were built after a monastic plan, and in the beginning, life in them was a sort of secular monasticism, servants and masters eating in the same room, and all collected and working within the narrow limits of the manor itself.
As travel grew popular and class consciousness grew greater, the ordered group-life of the manor split up into sections. Labourers returned to the village, the chapel and chaplain were removed and religious life centred in the parish church until, by the eighteenth century, vast houses were planned, with ground floors and first floors full of fine rooms for the gentry, and dark basements and squalid attic bedrooms for the servants. The gentry had come under the influence of learning, they would no longer be amused by or interested in their dependents, as they were in the days of Shakespeare and before him. The servants were still too much of a group, blinded by a faith in the gentry, to notice the discomfort in which they lived. Industrialism, the knowledge of the machine, a harder and more cruel learning than that of Latin and Greek, was first to rouse them from their torpor. And those who were roused built themselves hideous miniatures of the life they once had witnessed, with parlour, bedrooms and labour-saving kitchenette. They became the middle classes, and Leeds and Sheffield and the suburbs of London are full of them. A whole book could be written on the social conscience as shown in the plan of the house. I expect some German or some Don has written it.
Nevertheless, I doubt whether there can be found a complete Tudor domestic building today which was unaffected by the learning of the Renaissance. The pedantry of Lyly in his Euphues, the scholasticism which Shakespeare parodied, the concrete equivalent of Holophernes’ ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ appeared in decoration. Though the architects remained steady enough, as, until the last century in England, they always have done, the old craftsmen who carved the reredos and capitals on cathedrals went off their heads. Nor is it surprising. Their new master, his lordship, brought back a book of Italian designs boldly engraved on wood, spaciously printed and bound in tooled leather and neatly kept flat by a gorgeous metal clasp. ‘Copy these,’ said he, ‘I will have them about the doors, and on the panelling and on the ceiling.’ And copy them they did. The results are the curious designs now known vaguely as Jacobean or Elizabethan, exquisite in workmanship and colour, often vile in proportion.
So important a part did decoration play in the post-Reformation house that quite soon, with the employment of foreign designs and frequently foreign craftsmen, architecture and decoration were for the first time in England divorced. The mason who built the fine brick chimney stack, and the glazier who constructed the grand windows of his lordship’s new mansion, knew little of what was going on inside. Decoration became for a time what it has become today, an applied form of ornamentation, a separate trade to cover up the ‘ugly bare patches’ left by architecture. For this reason Jacobean is cheap and easy to copy today. The ornament can now be machine-made and bought by the yard, and glued on to a simple wooden framework at the minimum of expense.
When faith was abandoned at the beginning of the Renaissance period in England, men did not know where to look for shackles. They could find for a time no medium for self-expression. Early Renaissance architecture in England represents their state of chaos. When a faith has been for centuries a living faith, its upheaval results not only in a common discontent and restlessness, but also in a muddled, restless architecture. I see in the years of religious doubt immediately following the Reformation, before men’s minds became accustomed to the monarchical government that was finally to be established under William and Mary for 200 years, a parallel with our own time. Today industrialisation and aristocratic government have become incompatible; the way out offered by Communism seems to be going too far; we are without shackles again and cannot find any in a compromise. The difference is again a religious one, although it may be expressed in different terms. Our own conflict between jazz-modern and monumental Queen Anne, the one as stupid and uncomprehending as the other, is similar to the struggle between the architecture of faith and the architecture of humanism which went on from 1550 to 1650.
Luther had stimulated thought all right, but he had not gone far enough, and the logical conclusion seemed a little like hell; just as Communism seems a little like hell to the individualist today, so individualism seemed like hell to the Catholic group-conscious mind after the Reformation. This state of mind is expressed by Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:
The difference between loving men as a result of first loving God, and learning to love God through a growing love of men, may not at first sight appear profound. To Luther it seemed an abyss, and Luther was right. It was, in a sense, nothing less than the Reformation itself. For carried, as it was not carried by Luther, to its logical result, the argument made, not only good works, but sacraments and the church itself unnecessary…. Its effects on social theory were staggering. Since salvation is bestowed by the operation of grace in the heart and by that alone, the whole fabric of organised religion, which had mediated between the individu
al soul and its Maker—divinely commissioned hierarchy, systematised activities, corporate institutions—drops away as the blasphemous trivialities of a religion of works. The mediaeval conception of the social order, which had regarded it as a highly articulated organism contributing in their different degrees to a spiritual purpose, was shattered, and differences which had been distinctions within a larger unity were set in irreconcilable antagonism to each other. Grace no longer completed nature: it was the antithesis of it. Man’s actions as a member of society were no longer the extension of his life as a child of God: they were its negation. Secular interests ceased to possess even remotely, a religious significance: they might compete with religion, but they could not enrich it. Detailed rules of conduct—a Christian casuistry—are needless or objectionable: the Christian has a sufficient guide in the Bible and his own conscience. In one sense the distinction between the secular and the religious life vanished. Monasticism was, so to speak, secularised; all men stood henceforward on the same footing towards God; and that advance, which contained the germ of all subsequent revolutions was so enormous that all else seems insignificant. In another sense, the distinction became more profound than ever before. For, though all might be sanctified, it was their inner life alone which would partake of sanctification. The world was divided into good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. The division between them was absolute; no human effort could span the chasm.
With this break up of Holy Church, further justified by the devastating logic of Calvin, it is small wonder that architecture seemed muddled and uncertain, and that decoration frequently became mistaken for it. Men’s buildings very clearly reflect their mental outlook and their social life. Social power had shifted from the Church into secular hands. It is safe to say that, starting with Henry VIII, architecture in this country shifted into the hands of the upper classes. For that reason creative effort was mostly expended in domestic work, the churches that were built took on either a domestic or severely Protestant character, and the face of England changed from remote and ill-connected clusters of magnificent Gothic buildings and squalid Gothic cottages to park-like scenery and stately mansions, connected by roads more frequently used than before. The squalid cottages remained, for, although the social power had shifted, the social order was still much the same.
Elderly architectural opinion today divides into two at this point. There are those who admit that no English architecture exists after Henry VII’s Chapel. There are those who admit that no English architecture is worth consideration before Inigo Jones. The intermediate period has received a deal of study. The first school of thought look for the Gothic struggling through the decoration, and the second look for the decoration struggling into a classical form.
The style in which the Gothic predominates may be called, inaccurately enough, Elizabethan, and the style in which the classical predominates over the Gothic, equally inaccurately, may be called Jacobean. To save the time of those who do not wish to distinguish between these periods of architectural uncertainty, I will henceforward use the term ‘Jacobethan’.
To the outside world the only claim of Jacobethan architecture to consideration is that it is ‘antique’. Unfortunately the ‘antique’ claim is a strong one. To anyone who seriously considers proportion, the top-heavy pediments and awkward goddesses, neither classic nor Gothic, the unshapely curves of a pseudo-classicism will be nothing but unpleasant. Consider such famous transitional mansions as Burghley House or Kirby or Audley End. The fine big windows recall the last glories of Perpendicular churches. But look at the attic. Rows of columns, plastered against a purely ornamental curved gable, rise tier upon tier. The effect is that of a Victorian mahogany overmantel in stone. One longs to fill in the few undecorated spaces that are left with pieces of looking-glass. To me the appeal of Jacobethan is indeed remote. The colouring is sometimes cheerful and harmonious, as may still be seen in some of the tombs of country churches. But more often the effect of a building, or of panelling, or of a tomb of this time is vulgar and ostentatious. Admittedly the work of Torrigiano in Henry VII’s Chapel in Westminster Abbey is an exception. Jacobethan architecture is the product of adventurers who were more interested in the new-found thrill of money than in architecture and whose art therefore expressed a care-free, purse-proud state of mind. This style is saved from the complete atrophy of English architecture today by the fact that then a man was capable of being care-free and purse-proud at the same time. Jacobethan architecture may be ugly, but it is never dull.
The mental upheaval of the immediate post-Reformation period was a stimulus to literature, but not to architecture. The extravagance by which it was characterised looked well enough in the jewelled writings of the Elizabethans, though it required a genius to set it in order. Such happy truculence could not be expressed in brick or wood or stone. Under Edward VI, Protector Somerset made an attempt to establish Calvinism, which was reversed by Mary into an attempt to establish Romanism. Elizabeth attempted a compromise, and the end was that brilliant and, let us hope, never-to-be-altered compromise, the English Common Prayer Book. But it may be easy to still the ruthless logic of Calvanism with a leaven of Arminianism; it may be simple to sound the deepest fountain of poetical imagery with the mythology of the ancients and an ancient form of Christianity as a double inspiration. Architecture will not admit of a compromise nor of uncertainty; its demands are as stern and hide-bound as the materials of which it is composed. It needed a genius to adopt the new way of thinking and to apply it to stone. And in architecture the equivalent of Spenser was Inigo Jones and of Shakespeare, Wren.
Reformation was made more significant by an influx of wealth. Marauders and adventurers found themselves saddled with squalid dwellings unsuited to the state which their new-found freedom expected. Even the yeomen were prosperous. The new wealth led to new building, and, considering the smallness of the population of England at the time, the extent of the new building was surprising. I am sure there is not a reader of this book who cannot recall at least half a dozen time-honoured relics of Jacobethan architecture. Almost every other village of any size has a Jacobethan wing to its manor, either edging incongruously out of the Georgian main block, or responsible for the demolition of the Georgian building at the beginning of this century.
Upon re-reading what I have written, I may have been a little unfair to Jacobethan, because I have only considered buildings in the style as an architectural whole. The detail is frequently beautiful. Humble examples of Jacobethan art are pleasanter than grand ones. I can cite as instances the chests of parish churches, the details of tombs and monuments, the old pews as at Inglesham, near Lechlade, and Walpole St Peter, in Norfolk, the panelling of many a Cotswold manor. These show by the beauty of their craftsmanship and their satisfactory proportions that English architecture was not dead, only temporarily moribund in some of her members.
Chapter V · Educated Architecture
Near some fair Town I’d have a private Seat
Built uniform; not little, nor too great:
Better if on a rising Ground it stood;
On this side Fields, on that a neighb’ring Wood.
It should, within, no other Things contain
But what were Useful, Necessary, Plain:
Methinks ’tis nauseous, and I’d ne’er endure
The needless Pomp of gaudy Furniture.
John Pomfret, The Choice, 1699
The architecture of humanism, a phrase used by every art critic, and learned at the same time as the rest of the art language, which so many writers find useful and which will probably be fostered by the Courtauld Institute of Art, is generally regarded as the architecture of the Renaissance. Gothic builders planned a building first, or added to an older building, and then fitted in the windows afterwards, to suit their comparatively strange ideas of how much light a room should have. The humanist architect, acting on what he had so far learnt from the humanities, planned the façade and its windows first and fitted in the
rooms behind afterwards. This difference in technique is generally regarded as the demarcation between the mediaeval architect and the architect of the Renaissance. Such a difference is, of course, a too hard and fast line by which to divide two periods of even so hard and fast a subject as architecture.
There are buildings that are made entirely for their façade in this country and which exhibit little skill in the plan behind; these are generally modern buildings put up in the Queen Anne manner in London and the provinces. Such work also existed in the eighteenth century, and, although there was not then the coarseness of treatment which we see today in those ghastly white Portland stone edifices of, say, the new Regent Street, they have only the charm of bric-à-brac, rather amusing little things for interior decorators to chat about to clients. Blenheim Palace, though delightful in general grouping, is not more than a piece of gigantic bric-à-brac. This was realised by those sensible people of the eighteenth century, for a contemporary wrote of it:
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