Yet these simple buildings of the eighteenth century are not things over which we should sentimentalise. They are for the most part inconvenient for modern conditions, where servants and householders are more or less on an equality. They were built with boldness in their time, to suit the people for whom their many anonymous artists designed them. Because they were built with boldness and sincerity, because they were fit for their purpose, they harmonised with any Tudor and mediaeval buildings surrounding them. It is sentimental and silly to build in their style now, though it may not be sentimental to copy their severity and the restful lines of their cornices. No eighteenth-century architect would have countenanced the imitation of his style today. The man who had the courage to place the great round classical dome of the Radcliffe Camera, hemmed in on every side by Gothic fronts and towers and spires, and by reason of his courage to make that dome the pivot of the University of Oxford, would also have had the courage to build today as sincere an essay in modern materials in its place.† Such courage is the genius of architecture; it is neither classical nor Gothic; it is merely an expression of its age. Therefore the visitor to Oxford need not be surprised by the products of our own age’s architecture in the University buildings—feeble imitations of styles of the past. For when we contemplate that glorious English eighteenth century, we feel that England as an architectural influence is finished.
Why was England an abiding and a restraining influence in architecture? Why did the style of architecture in palace, town house, country mansion, farmhouse, church, chapel and row of workmen’s cottages simplify itself instead of bursting into Continental exuberance? England was rich. She was peaceful. She was agricultural.
I think the reasons for this simplicity are two; in the first place, England had finished her social revolution before the eighteenth century had begun. The battle between Cavaliers and Roundheads, and the partial reform of the Parliamentary system forbade the existence of an aristocracy totally uninterested in politics, only interested in pleasure and the arts. France was to pay for her Rococo: so were Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain and the rest of Europe. The educated ruled, but could not tyrannise. Cowper expressed the popular sentiment in ‘The Task’, though, like all popular sentiments, his contained but a shadow of the truth. ‘Slaves cannot breathe in England’, and English eighteenth-century architecture is the expression of the serious-minded, reasonable few who controlled it, divided by Theism and Atheism, Antinomianism and Calvinism, and lashed for their faults by Pope and Swift and Churchill.
And what the Commonwealth did not do for the solving of the upper classes and their architecture, the Methodist Revival finished off. Not only did it cause Lady Huntingdon to think twice about employing Angelica Kaufmann to paint the ceilings of her house, but it also prevented merchants, mayors, corn chandlers and bankers from parading their growing wealth in ostentatious buildings.
In fact, the reasoned Protestantism of England in the eighteenth century, of an age not so much of faith as of Sovereign Grace, was largely responsible for the simplicity of its architure. The Quakers, the Baptists, the Independents, the Unitarians, the Presbyterians, whose humble brick meeting-houses, survivals of Commonwealth days, lie hidden away from persecution, deep in the back streets of many country towns and in the remoter hamlets from Somerset to Yorkshire, were a chastening influence. Then came John Wesley, saying that all could be saved, and that in ‘My father’s house are many mansions’; and Whitefield preaching that God had prepared a house for them; what need was there of a carved stone dwelling in the high street, of a gilded saloon, of grottoes in the garden, if heaven was built with jasper bulwarks and its streets were paved with gold? ‘Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth.’ Such a message as this completed the work that Cromwell had started. And its influence still survives in that day of rest, the English Sunday.
Today the Lord’s Day Observance Society, which takes such exception to American films of American luxury on the Sabbath, has become the object of ridicule with those who spin down in their super sports cars along the main road to a replica of London at Maidenhead or Brighton; it is probably ridiculed by architects who can afford a motor car.
Yet there are still places where one can appreciate the English Sunday; where the architecture shows up in the silent streets, and the glamour of the shops is for the moment shuttered, and the loud speaker is silenced in the wireless depot. Imagine yourself in Portsmouth on a Lord’s Day morning. Portsmouth is associated with Evangelicalism, a form of religion which seems to grip men who have retired from the navy. The bells are pealing all over the town. Heavy music from the Cathedral church, whose Portland stone tower rides splendidly over the red brick High Street; a tenor bell calls insistently to Holy Eucharist at St Michael’s—an 1880 imitation of a mediaeval church; a tenor bell calls less insistently to Matins at St George’s. St George’s was a pleasant church once, built in the reign of George III, a square brick building, condemned by the superficial as ‘too plain’, and consequently ‘Gothicised’. The galleries were disfigured, the box pews cut down, the windows filled with that repulsive material known as ‘Cathedral Glass’, which sheds a pale pink or pale green light the colour of Bible atlases, and therefore, I suppose, religious; St George’s is a wreck. But least insistent of all the bells on a Lord’s Day morning, that sound across the narrow streets and over a placid harbour and silent dockyard, is the bell that calls to Morning Prayer at St John’s, Portsea. ‘High St Michael’s’, ‘Poor St George’s,’ ‘Low St John’s’ they say in Portsmouth, and St John’s is the last eighteenth-century church that remains totally unspoiled,‡ which I know of in England. For even the service is eighteenth century. And it is there that we will go to worship this morning.
You would hardly notice the church, so well does it fit in with the street, a red brick building, the lines of whose windows do not disturb the houses, which continue in unbroken rows on either side. The doors are apart, and when we have pushed open that of the paned glass screen which leads from the vestibule to the church, what a sight meets the gaze! A forest of woodwork, of excellent joinery; round the walls above, tier the empty galleries, with hard but seemly seats for poorer people, below and level with our shoulders the box pews for the gentry, with their doors which shut with a loud smack. High above the pews is the double-deck pulpit with the clerk’s desk beneath. And at the end of the church the holy table, carefully removed from the wall so as to conform with Protestant doctrine, encircled by simple communion rails. Look up at the white plaster ceiling pleasantly moulded. The incumbent enters. He is wearing the black gown, just as his predecessor of 150 years ago. The congregation, which can only be seen when it stands above its grained oak fastness, is small and bleak. But the rich and scented, who occupied those fine pews when the church was built, have left Portsea, and now their descendants live in half-timbered detached residences which their parents built in the more refined and remoter suburbs.
And at the same time that the bells are ringing for service, there are some places of worship from which no bells call. A stucco Congregational Chapel in a solid Greek manner of 1825, a Wesleyan Chapel in terra cotta Gothic, riddled with dedication stones bearing the date 1888, and many another fane of some odd denomination in pious but bastard Gothic—all stand with their doors open and churchwardens or elders waiting to show us to our seats.
Do not despise the English Sunday. When it is gone, like the elegant terrace or the simple brick house in the High Street, it will be missed. Sunday is sacred to Protestantism, and Protestantism purified our architecture. Now the machine has set the pace, and a month of Sundays will not slow it down.
* Now demolished.
† Fallacious. I suppose this is the only excuse Colonel Seifert can make for Centre Point, Tottenham Court Road.
‡ It was bombed by the Germans in World War II, and totally destroyed.
Chapter VI . Regency Architecture
The Educated Classes State-Conscious
Suburban villa
s, highway side retreats,
That dread the encroachment of our growing streets,
Tight boxes neatly sash’d, and in a blaze
With all a July sun’s collected rays,
Delight the citizen, who, gasping there,
Breathes clouds of dust, and calls it country air.
William Cowper, Retirement
In the present age when the pride of possession is a curse, taxed by the State and envied by the people, I retain it in one matter, that of books. And among all my books those I most like examining, the elegance of whose prefatory remarks is even surpassed by the beauty of their coloured illustrations, are my aquatinted books which date from 1800 to 1830. Not only the coloured Rowlandsons depicting the Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of The Picturesque, not only illustrated tours of the Grand Junction Canal, not only graceful depictions of contemporary modes and rural life, but also the folio publications of architects, illustrating gentlemen’s residences, improvements in landskip gardening, suggestions for summer pavilions or for cottages for the labouring classes, delight me. There is no end to such books, and I can safely say that not one of the many hundreds I have seen and longed to buy has been devoid of merit.
Oh, happy days of the Regency, when the learned had schooled themselves into an outward semblance of responsibility to set an example to rising industrialists, though they might reflect the glitter of the Regent in their hearts; happy days when Shelley and Wordsworth, when Byron and Keats and Hood and Hunt sang among the whirr of the wheels of industry that were to roll Britannia in a chariot to Progress; in days like these my books were different from their counterparts of fifty years before; the flourishes had disappeared from their title pages, the subservience from their dedications; their margins had broadened and their type had been simplified; Bodoni had taken the place of Baskerville, decoration had yielded to space. And as in the typography of books, so had the houses of the Regency been simplified. ‘To be natural and unaffected is the first rule of good taste,’ wrote Edmund Aikin, an obscure provincial architect in 1810. The houses had indeed become simplified, so strictly utilitarian, so decent, that there exist portfolios of architectural examples, published a little over 100 years ago, which may be compared with contemporary domestic architecture in Germany, where the wall surfaces are large and the windows small and regular, and the houses gain an effect therefrom in no way to be associated with antiquity.
Perhaps the best impression of the Regency outlook, of that simplicity which was the logical outcome of the Greek revival, which succeeded the Roman revival of the middle of the eighteenth century, may best be obtained from typical contemporary pronouncements.
In 1810 Mr Edmund Aikin, an architect who will only be known now by those who have bothered to look at the Wellington Assembly Rooms, Liverpool, published a book of designs for villas and other rural buildings, engraved on thirty-one plates with plans and explanations, together with an introductory essay. From the introductory essay, written in an elegant style, the reader may be entertained, even startled, by extracts. Aikin was a typical architect of his period, trained for architecture when Messrs Stewart and Revett had just published their drawings of Grecian antiquities. He and his elders fell under the spell of the Greek revival in architecture, and in their enthusiasm threw off the old school of architects who went for their models to ancient Rome. The day of the long façade of engaged columns, the ‘original steeple’, the Italian window, the rusticated lower storeys, the circular temple on the mound in the park, the red brick with stone dressings and heavy key-stones over door and window depicting old men’s faces, the day of the houses that M. R. James describes so well, the day even of white Portland stone and the imitation of the manner of Wren and his noble contemporaries, the delicate and flattened patterns of the Italian school was over. Greek architecture brought in simplicity. It checked any tendency to the Rococo of the Continent; and that style had to be content with comparative obscurity. It appears sometimes in the corners of clock faces, on Cotswold tombstones, where there was no Flaxman and no Bacon to influence the carver, and in confectionery, where it remains in wedding-cake designs, and on those pink, white and green cakes which are known in teashops as ‘pastries’. It has also survived in fairs.
But Aikin, like his talented contemporaries, discovered that the Greek style was not enough. You could not go on reproducing the Parthenon or the Erechtheum. You could not even take the details, as early Renaissance architects had taken Roman details, alter their proportions and set them up, now as the ornamentation over a mantel, now as a pleasing innovation on a façade, now as a steeple. They had no Jacobethan period of experiment in the change of style from Roman to Greek, such as Renaissance architects had in changing from Gothic to Italian. They were open to hard logic.* When the Jacobethans had experimented in brick and stone, the effect had not always come off; the Greek revivalists reasoned before building. They thought about construction, and realised that detail was of small moment, and that on construction and proportion depended effect. Of course, this had been realised before, but not so widely. Nor had it been carried so far to its logical conclusions, except in ‘utilitarian’ buildings like barns, meeting-houses and farms, which remained as truly Gothic as they had always been and as Regency architecture subsequently became.
Hear the words of Edmund Aikin, the typical Regency architect, who expired after a painful struggle at his father’s house at Stoke Newington, on March 11th, 1820. This is what he wrote ten years before his death in the introductory essay I have already mentioned:
The style of modern Architecture is universally admitted to be founded upon what is called the antique, which has been praised with blind admiration, and acknowledged as authority, in a manner to preclude the exercise of rational criticism: but it may be doubted whether this admiration has been as sincere as vehement, and has not been confined to words and theory, instead of guiding practice. In fact, it may be asserted, with the most trifling exceptions, that no modern building could ever be mistaken for an ancient edifice, setting aside all adventitious marks and dates, and considering each architecturally, or as represented in a drawing. To what can this essential difference be owing? Modern Architects profess to imitate antique examples, and do so in columns, entablatures, and details, but never in the general effect. Is it that they imitate blindly, and without penetrating into those principles and that system, which is superior to the details and guides them? This is a subject which it may be useful and interesting to pursue.
Whoever examines the remains of Grecian Architecture, must be struck with the extreme simplicity of their construction: parallelograms, surrounded with or enclosing ranges of columns, are nearly all that he will meet with. The system of decoration is not separated from that of construction, but forms an essential part of it. The wooden hut is the model of both, the post and lintel are transmuted into the column and entablature, and the cabin into a temple. That the earliest Grecian temples were really of wood is rendered probable, from the circumstance of so many of them being burnt during the invasion of Xerxes; and that wood has sometimes been employed as the principal material in erecting large and magnificent edifices, is shown by the example of the Temple of Jerusalem, which was constructed with pillars of cedar. However, in a country like Greece, abounding with stone and marble, these superior materials would soon supersede the use of timber; and this circumstance would effect certain changes in the forms of Architecture. A wooden lintel, from its fibrous texture, possessing considerable tenacity and strength, in proportion to its weight, may be employed in bearings, where a stone architrave would break by its own gravity; accordingly Vitruvius relates, that the Tuscan temples, in which the intercolumniations were very wide, had wooden architraves. When, therefore, porticoes were erected of stone, it was necessary, in order to insure solidity, to contract the distance between the columns to very narrow limits. A timber building, never secure from accidents by fire or violence, would seldom be constructed with any great solidity or magnificence
; but in stone it is possible, as the energetic industry of the ancient Egyptians has shown, to defy the injuries of time, and almost the violences of rapine. The Architect who builds in stone, may build for eternity; and this idea will offer a motive for that grand solidity of construction, which is an essential element of the sublime in Architecture.
These circumstances led to the perfection of the Grecian style. The original model secured that inestimable simplicity of form and construction which satisfies the judgment, while a superior material preserved it from the meagreness attendant on wooden building, and the hand of taste crowned the whole with grace and beauty. Thus arose the Doric, or, as it might be emphatically called, the Grecian Order, the first-born of Architecture, a composition which bears the authentic marks of its origin, in the forms of wooden construction transferred to stone.
The Romans derived their style of Architecture from the Greeks; but, practising it as imitators, further removed from the original model, and with less severity of taste, they formed a style of magnificence and luxury, always grand, but not unfrequently licentious and incongruous.
Ghastly Good Taste Page 7