Eupeptic Van

A.L. Rowse

Masks and Façades: Sir John Vanbrugh, Madeleine Bingham (Allen and Unwin £6.95) What reason we have to be grateful to Vanbrugh! I love him for his great houses — palaces rather: splendid monuments of an age full of confidence in itself, the tough and virile country that had the imagination to conceive the Blenheim campaign, then erect a palace to commemorate it, defeat the Grand Monarch and place his head — from the town-gate of Tournai — upon the garden-front in Oxfordshire. And in Vanbrugh the age of Queen Anne found exactly the right architect to express it — the imagination and the swagger, the sense of drama in stone, the latent romanticism, the exaggeration.

Vanbrugh was Queen Anne's own choice for the job — rather surprising, since Van was all his life a Whig and owed his rise to the Whig magnate, the Earl of Carlisle. One would have expected her to prefer Wren, as Marlborough's Duchess did. There was something historically appropriate in it: Vanbrugh's flamboyance, the coarseness of texture, was right for the national monument Blenheim Palace — 'Castle' originally — was always intended to be. One sees the ebullience, the eupeptic Fleming, extrovert and a good fellow, in Van's portraits — as against the refinement and reserve, the mingled sharpness and sweetness in Wren's face.

This renders it the more difficult to make Vanbrugh's biography interesting — and Miss Bingham, though readable, has not succeeded very well. If he had been a conjured spirit like Swift, a tortured soul like Dr Johnson, or a malicious invalid like Pope, he would stand out more sharply. As it was, he appears so very normal and well-rounded a personality, popular with everybody, successful at everything, even at marriage — when belatedly at fifty-five he married a lady of family thirty years younger. Everything went too well with him. Though a full-bodied type, fleshy to look at, very virile in his works, he doesn't seem even to have stepped over the traces in that not very virtuous age. Perhaps Van took it all out in work — that, and the delights of bachelor society: he was one of the founder members of the Kit Cat Club, fond of his cronies like booksellerTonson. What stands out is the natural way in which Vanbrugh turned from one occupation to another, without any awkward transition, or engaged in them simultaneously — dramatist, herald, architect: there is something Elizabethan about it.

Anyway, where did Vanbrugh learn his architecture? Nobody knows: he seems to have picked it up: Probably during his two years' confinement in France — again Voltaire noted how odd it was that he never expressed a word of resentment against the country that imprisoned him. He used the opportunity to improve his spoken French, acquaint himself with the theatre and, presumably, architecture. Everything came ready to hand: he adapted a number of French plays later on, usually improving on them. His patron had him made a herald, when he had no knowledge of heraldry or respect for genealogy. This enraged the irascible Cornishman, John Anstis, most learned of heralds, to have this amateur promoted over his head. Yet here, too, Van scored: when sent to confer the Garter on Prince George of Hanover (later George II) Vanbrugh's fluent French and gentlemanly bearing enabled him to cut a figure such as

Anstis-could never have done. Vanbrugh succeeded in everything: he reallY won his long battle with Duchess Sarah. MiSS Bingham, like everybody else, is unsympathetic to Sarah; a rather coarse academic historian„ called her tout court, "that atrocious woman. This was characteristically insensitive: she was not atrocious, and there is a good deal more to be said for her — which is hardly ever appreciated — than against her. I have a soft spot for the old dragon, and find her a grand comic character. She had common sense on her side over Blenheim: she couldn't bear the idea of such a vast edifice, "that wild, unmerciful house" — yet she was defeated by Van and the Duke together, with whom nothing was ton good or expensive for Blenheim (the nation was„ paying for it). In the end, it cost some £300,00u

— multiply by perhaps twenty for today. ,

For all the expense and all the years it was in building Sarah could not get Van to finish a part of it to live in — the whole thing was t° rise, or fall, together. Then there was the immense bridge over the trickle of a stream. with Van making rooms within it for himself; when she stopped this, he fitted up the old ruinous manor, which Sarah wanted clearedf out of the way, with an observatory for himsel on top. Was he never going to finish? NO wonder she wrote: He was very fond of an old building that stood awrY and spoiled the view from the Great Avenue to tile, house, upon which he laid out a good round sum at money to make a habitation for himself; and a great expense there was to lead it, and a closet in the middle — as if he had been to study the planets. As soon 35 I discovered this I put a stop to it. Miss Bingham is wrong, in thinking 013,1 Blenheim, vast as it is, was ever finishea

Vanbrugh wanted to finish it with a grand,

saloon, or gallery, ennobled with 'bustos, looking west over what is now the lake. Sarah wouldn't have it and, after the Duke's death,

concluded the works "without the help of all architect; for I know of none that are not mat;

or ridiculous." She declared that she liked everything plain from the decoration of a drawing-room to a lady's face — and there she, was, landed with a baroque palace of a hundreo bedrooms to furnish. Blenheim was never properly appreciated in its own day, or by the Victorians — though the artist in Reynolds saw the point of it,s mountainous masses, its ranged lights an" shadows, the marvellous roofscape. Looking across the park from the great gate, one sees what a stage-set it is. There leaps to mind the unity of Vanbrugh's work, the dramatist in the architect. Even so, the most dramatically exciting of all his works is Seaton Delaval, on its bare windswept plateau by the Northumbrian coast. That essential Victorian, G. M. Trevelyan, vihn, lived in Northumberland from his boyhood, ha' never bothered to see it, until I urged him to do so in the last year or so of his life. I fear the Victorian in him did not much respond to the gaunt, half-ruined baroque splendour. What magnificence it'must have had before the firec; Something of the damage has been made goo in our time through a remarkable campaign rehabilitation set going by Lord Hastings; he should be made an earl for his good work — earls have been made for less creditable contributions to the nation's inheritance. We owe the recovery of beautiful Kimbolton, only just in time, to the remarkable headmaster there, Mr Lewis (not C.S., surely), with s exquisite Pellegrini and Ricci frescoes. "rI Reverend Mr Peters" called in to replace damaged work must be Matthew Peters, a charming painter in his own right. Some of Mis5 Bingham's `Ludgements, whether aesthetic or historical, fail to commend themselves. "Alth: ough some architectural critics have Pat

forward the theory that Hawksmoor could do

without Vanbrugh a great deal more easilY than Vanbrugh could do without Hawksmonr, this leaves out the vital spark of imagination which conceived the plans." Anybody Wh°,, knows Hawksmoor's work knows that his via' an„ Original, even daring, imagination as well as vanbrugh's. And on history: "But Queen Anne represented, like Queen Victoria, a pious middle-class Point of view. Hers was a transitional reign, and tl2e Powers of the monarch were to disappear atter her death in the pudgy hands of German monarchs, with one feeble attempt to resuscitate them in the reign of George III." This is Pretty good nonsense, as any professional h,istorian knows. A good deal of the writing is s,,411,_Ply too facile. The subtitle of the book is ' he Man in his Setting.' Though a reliable rough account of the external events of his life, there is not much penetration into the man, and to write a good biography of so versatile a Rolus one needs a thorough knowledge of the

of the time, literary and dramatic, architec`Ural and social. Non-historians are apt to think

historical biography a softer option than it really is.