[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIR, — In your editorial note
to Mr. Cook's welcome announce- ment in the Spectator of March 28th of the progress of the Imperial Peace Memorial, you say : "We are a Saxon, not a Latin, people, and so the Gothic form seems more appropriate to our dead than the classical." May I venture to point out that if " Saxon " architecture can be described as belonging to any school at all, it must be called classical; for it was merely a rather barbaric copy of the Roman style introduced into this country by those who followed Julius Caesar and settled in Britain, with effects that were far more lasting than has sometimes been supposed? The Arab blood they intro- duced into our mountain and moorland ponies has not yet finished its good work ; but their architecture was rightly superseded by the pointed style, which attained its greatest perfection in the ile de France. What is now called" Gothic" architecture cannot be more English than it is French, though I should have thoroughly agreed with you had you spoken of a "Northern" style as more appropriate to a Northern people. It happens that a cloister in memory of honoured dead has been built in "a Gothic form." It is now standing, and may be seen any day, in Paris. It is the Memorial to the Hundred Swiss Guards who fell in defence of the French Monarchy. I cannot think you have sufficiently considered the effect of a similar building in London. At any rate, I am glad to find that you are "by no means enemies of classical architecture," and that you, therefore, may sympathise with the style on which Inigo Jones left the enduring impression of our best English characteristics, of our national love for order, dignity, proportion, and solidity. If I read Mr. Cook's proposal aright, the building he describes must contain a number of tablets for the proper inscription of some twenty- five thousand names, including soldiers, sailors, and all who gave their lives for the cause. Each tablet may be different in the territorial themes of its decoration, but all would be uniform in size and character. They must be easily visible and accessible, yet sheltered from the rain, in a building worthy of its object, —magnificent, but austere, certainly not merely decorative. Tall columns would surround an open space, and behind them, and beneath a roof, would be a wall to bear these tablets. A flight of steps might lead the public into this "cloistered colonnade" directly from the sidewalk of the Embankment overlooking the river near the garden of the House of Lords. The building, in Portland stone and marble, could be set up at a cost entirely proportionate to the funds at the disposal of the Committee. A design very similar in character may be studied by any one interested in these matters in the Duke of Devonshire's magnificent collection of Inigo Jones's work, intended for a London site. Very many of us are grateful to General Elliot for drawing attention to the extraordinary delay of the Government in giving at least their official sanction to a scheme that has been before them for the length of time which Mr. Cook's letter reveals, a scheme which has nothing whatever to do with either politics
["F. S. A." writes most persuasively, but we cannot agree. We gladly, however, accept his amendment—a Northern style for a Northern people—which is a much improved formula. No doubt if we could get an Inigo Jones design a great deal of our objection would vanish, for that great artist had in his classic style something of the Gothic spirit, as had all the Elizabethans, early and late, in literature and in art. (For example, when Inigo Jones designed a costume for Ariel, he made him look like a Perugino angel, and not like a fat Porn. peian Cupid.) But our fear is that when once the classical artist is let loose we shall get, not an Inigo Jones design, but some- thing in what, if we may coin a word, may be described as the Gorgonesque style ; e.g., a heavy colonnade, a boisterous frieze and architrave,—with boys and fruits and dolphins and masques and oxen's skulls rioting together in "admired confusion,"— and scattered through the work in meaningless profusion hydrocephalous pediments and hydropic porticoes. From this we would fain escape into a cool and simple Gothic cloister like that of New College, Oxford. The New College cloisters enlarged would give us just what we want.—ED. Spectator.]
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