First and Last Loves
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ANTIQUARIAN PREJUDICE1
I COME to you fresh from Evensong and with my outlook widened. Architecture has a wider meaning than that which is commonly given to it. For architecture means not a house, or a single building or a church, or Sir Herbert Baker, or the glass at Chartres, but your surroundings; not a town or a street, but our whole overpopulated island. It is concerned with where we eat, work, sleep, play, congregate, escape. It is our background, alas, often too permanent.
Gradually, after years of enforced blindness, we are becoming aware of it again. When we wake up one morning and find the view from our windows shadowed by a colossal block of flats built to look like Hampton Court piled on top of itself several times; when we are perhaps driven to live in a flat where the central heating will not turn off, where the picture rail is at the wrong height, where the lift whines like a mosquito at irregular intervals during the night, where Bing Crosby croons across the dark well, where the door won’t shut because the wood has warped, where there is no sun or too much sun, where the nearest station is twenty minutes’ walk; when we go to a village we used to know and find it a town, and a muddled town at that; when we hear, as I heard the other day, of the bay window of a modern Tudor house lifted by a storm from its setting and flung over the opposite house-tops while the family in the parlour was at Sunday dinner; when we hear of another modern semi-detached villa where the grate fell out of the chimney-breast and had to be screwed in again, and at spring-cleaning time the family next door found its piano screwed to the wall; when we see the squares of London being transformed into wells for blocks of flats—witness Berkeley Square; when we hear of Mr. Rudolf Palumbo putting up things which will scrape as much of the London sky as the L.C.C. will allow, in places which were left open by the foresight and civic sense of our forefathers; when we see super-cinemas made in the manner of Stockholm Town Hall, and town halls made in the manner of Wembley Exhibition; when we see every field and every hill striped with imitation Tudor or Queen Anne villas; when we learn that these are all owned through building societies, and realise that the luckless occupants will find themselves in a few years’ time saddled with a slum; when we realise that each of these occupants is a landowner of potential slum property which nothing but a change of heart, to be wrought by nothing short of a miracle, will induce him to give up; when we hear of the party politics which hinder any constructive architectural effort of the L.C.C.; when we hear, learn, see all this and a great deal more which would cause this easily written diatribe to continue for the rest of this essay; when we hear all this, those of us with a sense of justice, let alone a love of good building, begin to think that there is something wrong with architecture today. We begin to notice our surroundings.
It would be outside the scope of what I am saying to bring in all the causes of this muddle. But one cause at least I can indicate, and can analyse, that of antiquarian prejudice. A love of the ancient has bitten into most of us. I suppose everyone who feels afraid, and most of us do, of the delightful benefits which science has bestowed on us, and everyone who feels a certain disgust, as most of us do, at the financial machinations of people behind the building trade, prefers looking back to looking at the present. Certainly we err in not looking forward, largely because the immediate present makes us feel we dare not do so.
For myself, almost any age seems civilised except that in which I live. My preference is for the first quarter of the nineteenth century in England when the æsthetic outlook seems to have been particularly bright. The generation before mine preferred the reign of Queen Anne and mid-eighteenth-century work. A glance at fashionable antique shops will prove to you that that is the generation which still has the purchasing power. The generation before that preferred the Jacobean—witness Willett houses in Sloane Street district, Hampstead, and the grander suburbs of London; our grandfathers and colonials still have their furnishing schemes decided for them by certain big shops. The generation before that preferred the later medieval styles—witness the work of Bodley and Garner, Burne-Jones and William Morris. The generation before that preferred the thirteenth century—witness the spiky Gothic churches, spraying out of the stucco, the Albert Memorial, St. Mary Abbot’s, Kensington, and the fine Catholic Apostolic in Gordon Square.
The generation before that—and we are back in that first quarter of the nineteenth century which I so greatly admire—hardly looked back at all, except in a literary way, building here a miniature Abbotsford, there a minor Fonthill, and in St. Pancras New Church, a perfect reproduction of various details of Greek Temples. The Gothic, Norman or Greek revivals of those days were essentially original and vigorous. They were not dead reproduction. They were a harmless veneer, covering interiors adapted to contemporary life. Alongside them grew up those early experiments in cast iron and glass which resulted in the Crystal Palace, almost the only flower of a new architecture which was able to thrust up its head among the hothouse revivals by which it was eventually choked. Alongside them, too, grew up the new architecture of railways, canals and planned building estates of which vestiges have been allowed to remain: King’s Cross station; the Grand Junction canals; Kennington; the Regent’s Park; the New River Company’s property, to cite London alone. In fact, one may say that, until the ’forties and in certain instances until later, architecture had full confidence in itself.
It is not my intention to cover, as has been so often covered before, the history of the Gothic and other revivals during the nineteenth century. Instead, I will divide architecture into four groups, and show where antiquarianism has stepped in to hinder it; then I will show where the over-reaction or under-reaction from antiquarianism has done an equal amount of harm. The four groups are: Ecclesiastical, Monumental, Domestic and Planned.
There is much to say about antiquarianism in relation to ecclesiastical building, despite the fact that more churches seem to be pulled down than put up. Though it is not the authoritative opinion of the Church—vide the Seventh Report of the Central Council for the Care of Churches—it seems to be the æsthetic influence of bishops and lesser clergy that causes only eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century churches to be pulled down, and of them we have too few examples. But those who have visited episcopal palaces will know the cheerful chintzes, the Oxford frames, the electroliers, the islands of mat that one leaps to, like George Israel jumping the icefloes with the Moravian Gospel to Poland, on one’s way from bed to the brass can of tepid water; you will know the taste in leatherwork of the Bishop’s wife, the cork mats on the refectory table; you who know these—for what is an episcopal palace but the rectory spread thinly over a multitude of rooms?—you who know these, will not be surprised to hear that one Renaissance church has been demolished as “pagan,” and that another has been scheduled for demolition. You who know how the homes of the spiritually minded are furnished, how much good nature and genuine humility there are in those homes, have probably become, with me, no longer surprised at the æsthetic arrogance of their inhabitants. Yet among no section of the public is such witting antiquarianism rampant as among the clergy and, more especially, their wives. And when we realise that the clergy, despite new legislation in the matter of faculties, are able with one lick of vermilion or orange, one fretsaw saint, one furtive hatchet-stroke into box-pew, hatchment or commandment-board, to ruin the embodiment in stone and wood of generations of English church people—when we realise this, then indeed we will look apprehensively at the rectory drawing-room when we go to get the key of the church. If the parish is poor and the rector, too, all is well, the church will not be harmed. But if the walls of the rectory show signs of an interest in art; if plaster saints, woodcuts in the manner of Eric Gill, etchings, Brangwyns, Margaret W. Tarrants predominate over the more decent taste for family photographs and Arundel prints, then hey presto! before we know where we are there will be a box-pew cleared away to make a children’s corner, a decent classic monument destroyed to reveal a conjectured wall-painting, a Royal Arms remo
ved as “not devotional,” and the church will be transformed into a little scrap album to contain bits and oddments from church-furnishers and artistic ladies’ handicrafts shops wherever the name of an E.E. piscina is held in high esteem.
What, you may ask, has this to do with antiquarianism? To which I reply that, like E.E. piscinæ, it has everything. The clergy are medievalists almost to a man. And not medievalists of a lovable kind. Theirs is the mental calibre of Sir Gilbert Scott, translated into the present day. They have not the originality of Butterfield, Burges, Teulon or Comper, in their play with Gothic. Palgrave writing of the Albert Gross (Memorial) says: “It fails, not because much of it is inspired from older sources—for in all architecture copying holds a great place—but because it is unimaginative copying, and hence neither fused into harmony with itself, nor appropriate to its situation. Imagination is the vital quality in art; and the want of it will always be found to resolve itself into want of intelligence.” Comper has lent me his copy of Palgrave’s book, and he has pencilled in the margin against this passage, “mostly true.” Palgrave’s strictures and Comper’s comment may be applied to the clergy and to antiquarians (or archæologists as they now call themselves) generally. Let us see, while we are dealing with these literal archæologists, and before we pass on to the wider influence of antiquarian prejudice, what their outlook is. The best illustration I can think of is to put side by side passages of prose, each describing the same place. It gives you an idea, incidentally, of the debasement of topographical literature. First: The Guide, 1901; reprinted 1902, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06, ’07, ’08, ’09, ’10, ’14, ’18, ’20, ’21, ’22, ’23, ’24, ’25, ’26, ’27, ’28, ’29, etc.:
“Tickleby Tomcat. (Station: West Lincolnshire Light Railway—1½ miles.)—The manor of Tuckoldbury is mentioned in Domesday Book as being worth XVIII pence, and held by one Lanfranc de Tuckoldbury, its glebes, messuages, and pottages for all time. Thence the manor of Tuckoldbury seems to have had that of Tommecutte added to it by bill of Attainder from Simon de Montfort. It passed from the family of the Lanfranc mentioned in Domesday to John Strongitharm, Abbot. We have no record of the goodly abbot’s residence on the twin estates, though doubtless the revenues derived therefrom to the Abbey of Walsinghame, where a certain ‘John String-i-ham’ was abbot in 1301, and who can probably be identified with the John Strongitharm (see Victoria County History, Vol. I, p. 659). At the dissolution of the monasteries the estates passed to one Edward Stronghorn, doubtless a relative of our abbot, in whose family it remained until comparatively recent times (1682). Tomcat Park is modern.
“The Church, Norm., E.E., Dec., with Perp. features; Trans. window in S. Transept, has an interesting double piscina in the N. Porch.”
That’s the stuff for tourists—also for the vicar who has had it copied out in script and hung framed above the alms box, an inducement, if ever there was one, to contribute to the fabric of a building which has so interesting a record in the annals of our land. Notice the grisly facetiousness of “one Lanfranc” and “the goodly abbot” and “a certain John String-i-ham.”
The vicar’s wife, however, is on the C.P.R.E., and by no means so dry-as-dust an antiquarian. She much prefers the account of the village given by Mr. Sussex Tankard in his popular work, Hiking down the Valleys Wild, based perhaps on The Guide and the Ordnance Map:
First to the right after Claxby, then sharp left again down a winding lane, and another turn to the right at the fork, and you are in Tickleby Tomcat. There’s something of a good old Lincolnshire ring about a name like Tickleby Tomcat, and, indeed, the name goes back in various forms till Domesday. Now there is something about picturesque Tickleby that makes it quite possible to imagine that Norman Barons and monks of old took (like Abbot Strongitharm, of whom more anon) pleasure in leaning over picturesque Tickleby Bridge—or perhaps there was only a ford then—watching the beautiful Tickold wind its way to the North Sea. The ancient church has a fine double piscina in the porch on the North side.
You will notice the plentiful scattering of the words “picturesque,” “ancient,” “fine,” “beautiful”—adjectives taken straight from antiquarian literature and consequently now become quite meaningless. “Picturesque” may be used fearlessly to describe anything remote which one has not had time to visit; “Beautiful” is equally safe with a stream that is not actually a sewer, and directions of a most precise kind can be written by anyone able to read a map. “Ancient” is a pretty safe word for a country church which Kelly’s Directory does not describe as having been rebuilt by Sir Gilbert Scott or Street, and “piscinæ,” if they are distinguishable as piscinæ, are always “fine.” So are aumbries, stoups, apses, lancets, squints, niches and other paraphernalia.
So far we have seen Tickleby Tomcat through the eyes of persons, who, for all we know, have never been there. True, the writer of The Guide may have visited the church to rub a brass, but finding no brass, have gone off in a temper as black as his own heel ball, pausing to note the piscina to which an antiquarian vicar desperately drew his attention.
What is Tickleby Tomcat really like? We shall never know. Let me point what it may well be. Fifty grey limestone cottages with thatched roofs in a clay district where oaks and elms are numerous. There are no hills near, and an east wind comes straight off the east coast twenty miles away, full of salt and very cold. The four most prominent features of the village are: (1) a sequence of Georgian bow-windowed shop-fronts in the main street; (2) a water tower in the Scottish Baronial style; (3) Tomcat Park, a decayed house, possibly early Georgian, inhabited by the surviving sister of an extinct and unimportant peer. In the Park are some temples, a grotto and an obelisk ascribed to Sir William Chambers. The house inside has complete Georgian fittings, oil-lamps, portraits, furniture, earth-closets, except in the new wing, which is 1880 Tudor, result of a final bust on the part of the late peer; (4) a line of fancy bungalows, connected with the sugar beet industry, along the road for half a mile towards Claxby. They were put up too recently to be marked on Mr. Sussex Tankard’s map. The bridge, which he chats about so hopefully, is a concrete structure in the 1920 Municipal Renaissance style, put up by the Horncastle Rural District Council.
I say this having fallen into topographical traps of a like nature myself in the course of writing guide-books.
The church is the one building in the village of no interest at all. It was so generously restored by our peer that any of the Perp., E.E., etc., features remain in such a rebuilt state as to be almost new. The piscina was left out by the architect, Mr. G. E. Street2—and consequently left in the N. Porch It now consists of some pieces of decayed stone which may well have come off the vicarage rockery.
Apart from Tomcat Park, the only objects of interest (notice the phrase) are the people. But antiquarianism is not interested in people.
I fear that this disquisition from ecclesiastical matters to topographical writing may have caused you to lose the thread of what little argument there was before. Back again, then.
We have three more groups of architecture to consider in the green cathedral-glass light of antiquarian prejudice. Here the light is less direct, less obviously antiquarian, but none the less depressing.
By monumental architecture I mean public libraries, town halls, banks, swimming-baths, offices, railway stations. We have many fine examples of buildings in the monumental style from the past—Greenwich Hospital, Somerset House, St. George’s Hall (Liverpool), Euston Hall and great Arch, the Houses of Parliament, King’s Cross Station, each representing the best of the various phases of English secular architecture. Why is it that the twentieth century has produced not a single monumental English building of any real excellence? Why is it that Waterloo Station is a grandiose muddle of pre-war sculpture stuck on to an honest industrial building? What makes the new Regent Street such a grimy joke? Why is South Africa House so hideous? Why do we dread every steel scaffolding for what is going to be spread across it? First, there is the timidity miscalled �
�tradition,” but really antiquarianism, which enslaves be-knighted architects. You are told that it is the Building Acts which cause every London building to be cloaked with Portland stone. This is not so, but even if it were so the Building Acts would not prescribe Corinthian columns and commercial Baroque to be sculpted on as well. “Tradition” has been aptly described by the late A. R. Powys as digested experience. Can it be, then, that all contemporary architects of English monumental work have been suffering from indigestion? Yes, it can. And it is as unpleasant for them as it is for us. All of them, except perhaps Sir Reginald Blomfield, must realise that their banks and libraries are somehow not quite like St. George’s Hall, Greenwich Hospital, the Fitzwilliam, the Louvre, or whatever they intended them to be like—in spirit, of course, not in plan. I think the failure comes from “antiquarianism”; they think that columns and swags are “traditional”; really these appendages become antiques, unless they can be moulded into an individual style which none of the knighted architects—except now and then Sir Edwin Lutyens—has the genius to do. On the other hand, to go to the opposite extreme and let the new frightening materials, that they never knew when they were young men, do the job for them as Paxton let cast iron or glass do his job at the Crystal Palace, this savours of Bolshevism. For an antiquarian reason, to which the present state of architecture in U.S.S.R. gives the direct lie, an honest, plain structure of steel, glass, and/or reinforced concrete is considered Bolshevistic or international. And, of course, since the new materials have burst on the world more or less simultaneously, and since everyone who experiments with them is bound to produce work similar to that in a country hundreds of miles away, the style is bound to seem international. But no more and no less international than the graves of the Bronze Age men or the fortresses of the Middle Ages.