He must have been a curious, unforgettable figure to meet in the street. He wore a wide-skirted black dress coat, a regency style he kept to the end of his life; loose trousers; shapeless shoes for endless tramping while he looked at buildings; and a black silk handkerchief wrapped round his neck. His overcoat was specially made with enormous pockets, to contain all his necessities—shaving things, change of linen, etc.—on his continental rambles, without the bother of luggage. On the return leg, he often threw away his dirty linen and instead stuffed his giant pockets with crucifixes, pieces of medieval stained glass or ornaments, and even on one occasion a monstrance. In contrast to this rough outdoor garb—which made him “look like a dissenting minister with a touch of the sailor”—when he was actually designing, at his Gothic desk he wore a black velvet gown like that of a medieval magus, though this too had giant pockets, inside and out. And for church, he wore black silk knee-breeches and silver-buckled shoes. Indeed, he even donned a surplice at his house in Ramsgate, in order to read vespers and compline in the attached church. As he put it, “I dress upon True Principles!”
This gives a clue to the second question that arises about Pugin. Since he was entirely devoted to reviving Gothic, can he really be called an original creative artist? Was he not a mere revivalist? The answer is an emphatic no. It must be borne in mind that in architecture there are, in practice, only three or four different ways of designing buildings. All were discovered not just centuries but millennia ago, and all subsequent building styles have been revivals, conscious or not. Egyptian architects of the Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom were revivalists. So were the Greeks and Romans. Romanesque architecture was a revival, and so was the classicism of the Italian Renaissance. Pointed-arch Gothic, which made its appearance in the late twelfth century, can be described as a new decorative style, though the buildings on which it was imposed had revivalist ground plans. Pugin believed that Gothic had grown up, pari passu, with civilized English society and was natural to England. He also believed, with more justice, that Gothic, once fully established in England, had never died out there. Indeed it is possible to point to Gothic forms used in every decade of the seventeenth century. Even St. Paul’s has, essentially, the ground plan of a Gothic cathedral. If we look for the origins of the “Gothick revival,” we have to go far back into the eighteenth century. In England, Gothic is as much a tradition, reflecting a mood and a culture, as a style. Horace Walpole, in promoting “Strawberry Hill Gothick,” was working in that tradition. It is possible, as Kenneth Clark argued in his book on the Gothic revival, to cite direct links between Strawberry Hill and the “specimens” provided in the works of both Pugins, father and son. But they also, and especially the son, established historical accuracy based on observation and study; and their books, as Clark points out, mark the point at which “Walpole’s dream of correct Gothic was realisable.”15
Pugin assimilated Gothic to the point where it became part of his being. His passionate identification with it was so intense and complete that his imagination gothicized not just scenes but people. His second wife died in 1844, and eventually—after much searching and soul-searching—he was married again, to a delightful woman called Jane Knill, exclaiming, “I have got a first-rate Gothic woman at last.” He had eight children, all of them with Gothic credentials and all engaged in artistic activities. His life at Ramsgate was Gothic. He rose at six, to pray, like a Benedictine monk. Then he worked. There were family prayers at eight. He allowed only seven minutes for breakfast and fifteen for lunch. Compline in the church was invariably at eight, followed by supper at nine, then bed at ten. He did not smoke or drink, and he ate plain medieval food. He was excellent company, however—a superb conversationalist and particularly attractive to women, whether Gothic, classical, or baroque beauties. He was so immersed in Gothic that he was frightened of the dark and terrified of haunted rooms. Like Macbeth, he believed in ghosts. Also, he was so immersed in Gothic that he could let his artistic instincts roam freely through all its variations and, more important, its possibilities. This had a bearing on his creativity. He was just as innovative and unconstrained as a fourteenth- or fifteenth-century master mason asked to produce a new cathedral or add to an old one. Thus most of Pugin’s Gothic designs, for buildings, furniture, or anything else, are entirely original. Only occasionally are they conscious replicas, and then always for a particular reason. What is so remarkable about his work is that it is “correct” Gothic, being designed in that spirit while having no precise precedent in the Middle Ages. Indeed he designed many Gothic objects that medieval people had never thought of, including an ingenious Gothic umbrella he used for sketching in the rain. From first to last he was a creative artist of extraordinary sensibility and on an enormous scale. He worked, in short, in the same way as the men who designed and built Chartres, Notre Dame, Canterbury, Wells, and Ely, except that he was supervised not by bishops and canons but by his own artistic conscience.
Pugin was not a Victorian but a romantic, who came to aesthetic consciousness in the Regency, and whose affinities were with Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth rather than with Tennyson, Carlyle, or Ruskin. Oddly enough, though, he achieved his apotheosis as a designer in a quintessential Victorian event, the Great Exhibition of 1851. In general, the quality of design among the thousands of objects shown was deplorable and incoherent. The outstanding exception was the “Medieval Court,” in which all the craftsmen he had used and encouraged, especially Crace, Hardman, Minton, and Myers, got together to produce a glittering array of beautiful things, all in the Gothic manner, from tiles and wallpapers to lecterns, tabernacles, chairs, flower stands, brassware, and precious objects, tables, cabinets, textiles, and carpets, virtually all designed by Pugin. It was generally voted the centerpiece of the entire display; and designers, aesthetes, intellectuals, and opinion formers from all over the world turned it into a cult meeting place as long as the exhibition lasted. Afterward, many of its contents went into museums and collections. This was the event that turned Gothic revival into the normative style for ecclesiastical, state, and public buildings, not only in England but throughout the empire, and also in much of Europe and America. Scores of cathedrals and thousands of churches were built as Pugin would have wished—though not often so “correctly”—as were enormous edifices like Bombay’s principal railway station and London’s Law Courts. It was Pugin’s moment of triumph, and had he lived longer he would certainly have gone on to become one of the great Victorians, perhaps the greatest of them all. But by the end of 1851 he fell seriously ill, and the next year he died, mad. His architectural enemies (he had no others) said that his disorder was “general paralysis of the insane,” the climax of syphilis, but the only evidence is that he was treated, at one point, with mercury. Though he was making little sense in his final days, he kept his creative spirit. His last recorded words were: “There is nothing worth living for but Christian architecture and a boat.”16 Just before he died, in September 1852, he designed a floriated cross for St. Mary’s Beverley. The drawing survives, and the cross was made—and very fine it is. Thus passed one of the most continuously, persistently, and intensely creative artists of all time.
If there were world enough and time I would like to devote myself to tracing the influence of Pugin, and his interaction with three other great nineteenth-century men of art: John Ruskin (1819–1900), William Morris (1834–1896), and the French Gothic revivalist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879). Ruskin was seven years younger than Pugin, and by the time he went to Christ Church, Oxford (soon to have its riverfront gothicized in exactly the way Pugin urged), much of Pugin’s written work was available, and he eagerly studied it. Indeed Ruskin’s first important writing, “The Poetry of Architecture,” published in the Architectural Magazine in 1837–1838, was the direct result of Pugin’s teaching. Ruskin went on, in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–1853), to carry further Pugin’s essential message that the way men build reflects the sp
iritual as well as the material value of their culture. Indeed Ruskin’s central demand, for moral principles in architecture, was essentially a recapitulation of Pugin’s teaching. Ruskin was immensely influential among clever young men, especially at Oxford, just as Pugin was among craftsmen; and one of Ruskin’s followers was Morris, twenty-two years younger than Pugin and thus a true Victorian. Morris decided to become an architect after seeing the Medieval Court in 1851 and reading Ruskin and Pugin at Oxford. After visiting the cathedrals of Chartres, Amiens, and Rouen, Morris, following Ruskin, came to believe that medieval craftsmen had enjoyed much greater freedom in their work and art than their modern equivalents, who were enslaved by an industrial system which demanded uniformity, mass production, and above all large profits to make an adequate return on capital, and so used cheap materials and shoddy methods. Morris, as a youthful craftsman, learning tapestry weaving, carpentry, sewing, painting, and sculpture as well as building, agreed with Pugin and Ruskin that Gothic was the supreme mode; he called Ruskin’s On the Nature of Gothic, which he reprinted sumptuously when he created the Kelmscott Press, “One of the few necessary meritable utterances of the century.” But what Morris learned from the medieval world was not so much the inevitability of Gothic, except in so far as it sprang from nature, the source of all art, as the importance of individual craftsmanship. Art was the superlative form of craft, the foundation of all creative activity. Instead of using a group of firms, as Pugin did, Morris, who inherited capital from his family and had a shrewd (even harsh) business sense, formed what artists came to call “the Firm,” known as “Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company, Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture, and the Metals.” It listed on its first circular Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, P. P. Marshall, and Morris himself. This alliance, which included six major artists, naturally did not last, any more than the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, one of its precursors, lasted. But Morris continued his firm throughout his life, in one form or another, and made it profitable and productive.17
Morris himself failed as a painter and an architect. His socialism, too, was defective in that he ran his firm, supposedly a cooperative in which workers shared the profits, as a standard commercial enterprise, even a ruthless one, since he did not believe ordinary workingmen could be trusted to spend money sensibly. As a furniture maker too, he was often accused, with justice, of making uncomfortable chairs and impractical articles generally. But he produced magnificent stained glass. And as a designer, especially of patterned textiles and wallpapers, he has never been surpassed. Many of his designs—especially Trellis, Pomegranate, Chrysanthemum, Jasmine, Tulip and Willow, Larkspur, Acanthus, Honeysuckle, Marigold and Willow Boughs, to give some of the most notable in chronological order—have been in use (chiefly for wallpaper, but also for cotton prints, rugs, runners, and tiles) for 150 years and are still popular today.18 Moreover, Morris’s work and example became, almost imperceptibly, the “arts and crafts movement,” whose objective was to design beautiful, well-made things; place them in every household; and so elevate the taste and morals of society. This movement spread to America, to the British empire, and all over Europe, leading to the foundation of thousands of craft firms in every branch of the arts, which not only produced high-quality goods in prodigious quantities but in many cases survive into the twenty-first century and have permanently changed the way we see everyday objects. Thus Pugin and Morris, starting from the same premise but working in different ways and modes, created a worldwide resistance to the aesthetic weaknesses of the industrial age; and it would be hard to say which of them made the larger and more lasting contribution to making the world a more beautiful place. Morris’s taste as a designer was uniquely pure—it can be said with truth that he never produced a bad or even a mediocre design. On the other hand the creative spirit in Pugin burned with a more intense, gemlike flame (to quote Walter Pater, one of his admirers), and as an artist, producer, and entrepreneur, as well as an architect of genius, he was a much better example than Morris of moral principles in art. But these are all matters of opinion. Together they transformed taste, all over the world, in ways that have had permanent consequences.
By contrast, Viollet-le-Duc, though learned, gifted, immensely industrious, and highly sensitive, was not primarily a creator. Although he has often been called the “French Pugin,” and although he was responsible, following Pugin and hugely influenced by Pugin’s work, for making Gothic respectable and even popular in France, he was a different kind of artist, and the differences between him and Pugin are illuminating. Viollet-le-Duc was two years younger, born in 1814, and he took many years to find his niche in France’s teeming artistic world. His father was curator of rural residences under Louis-Philippe; his uncle was a pupil of David and later art critic of the Journal des Débats. Violletle-Duc, following his father (like Pugin), became a superb architectural draftsman and topographical artist in watercolor. For many years he assisted a remarkable publishing entrepreneur, Baron Taylor, in illustrating a series (modeled on English examples that went back to the 1780s) called Voyages Pittoresques et Romantique dans l’Ancienne France (1820 and following years). It eventually encompassed 740 volumes and 2,950 illustrative folios, each of four plates. It aimed to include every “old” building in France and employed artists such as Eugène Isabey, Horace Vernet, and R. P. Bonington (who lived mostly in France) as well as Viollet-le-Duc, though he was the most important contributor, drawing beautiful entourages, as they were called—lithographic drawings surrounding the texts. At the Salon of 1838 he won a gold medal for his superb drawings of Raphael’s loggia at the Vatican, and the next year he became an inspector in France’s National Council of Civic Buildings (he was to remain in the state sector for the rest of his life).19
His work was overwhelmingly in restoration. Victor Hugo, as a young man, had raised his powerful voice in protest at the way France’s medieval architectural heritage, the largest by far in the world, was being allowed to deteriorate—indeed was being pulled down. Hugo’s protests and those of others were effective, and Viollet-le-Duc was the key figure in the national response. He is identified with three projects in particular—the restoration of Notre Dame in Paris, the rescue of the enormous and unique medieval town-cathedral-palace-fortress of Carcassone, and the rebuilding of the magnificent castle of Pierrefonds. But he was also involved in scores of other important restoration projects, of churches, cathedrals, abbeys, and public buildings, all over the country. Despite bitter twentieth-century criticism, similar to that leveled at Gilbert Scott in Britain, Viollet-le-Duc’s work was generally of the highest quality and based on profound knowledge. He was sensitive in deciding what had to be rebuilt, what could simply be restored, and how restoration should be done. He provided, too, a unique record of his work in his magnificent “before” and “after” watercolors, which are among the best topographical drawings ever made. Like Pugin, he was responsible for a series of immense books, which are works of architectural and historical philosophy as well as deeply researched records. They include his Dictionnaire Raisonné de l’Architecture Française du XIème au XVIème siècles (9 vols., Paris, 1854–1868) and his Dictionnaire Raisonné du Mobilier Français de l’Époque Caroligienne à la Renaissance (6 vols., 1858–1874), which revolutionized the study of medieval art and architecture in France and throughout Europe. Viollet-le-Duc became an expert not only on how medieval artists and artisans worked but on many arcane subjects—locks and locksmiths, wood-casters, joiners, clothes, armor, weapons, and siege engines—illustrating all these topics with stunning watercolors and etchings. He entered into the spirit of medieval craftsmanship as thoroughly as Pugin. But though he could reproduce medieval designs of great utility to nineteenth-century builders who wanted to work or decorate in the Gothic manner, he lacked Pugin’s extraordinary skill in producing new expressions of the art. His Habitations Modernes (2 vols., Paris, 1877) shows a disappointing lack of originality
; and his own country house, La Vedette (near Lausanne, now destroyed), makes a poverty-stricken contrast to Pugin’s work at Ramsgate.20
Both Pugin and Viollet-le-Duc acquired a knowledge and feeling for medieval art that have never been equaled. But a comparison of their work shows that knowledge and skill in reproducing it in word and line are not enough. Creative power must be there too, as it was superabundantly in Pugin’s case, and as it conspicuously was not in Viollet-le-Duc’s. Carcassone and Pierrefonds can be admired and enjoyed as medieval entities, brought back to artificial life by a restorer of spectacular energy.21 But Pugin’s church at Cheadle is a genuine masterpiece of nineteenth-century art and architecture, which could have been created in no other age and by no other man.
9
Victor Hugo: The Genius Without a Brain
VICTOR HUGO (1802–1885) was a creative artist on the grandest possible scale, with the widest scope and the highest productivity. In all four great divisions of literature—poetry, drama, the novel, and the essay—he was equally productive and remarkable. At thirteen he was writing classical tragedies and stories, and three years later he received public recognition with a prize from the Académie de Toulouse. Thereafter his output was incessant (except for one period of depression in the mid-1840s when he turned from writing to drawing) until he suffered a stroke in 1878, at age seventy-six, and slowed down. Even then he continued to write sporadically until his death at age eighty-three. He published in all about 10 million words, of which 3 million were edited from his manuscripts and published posthumously.
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