Giants and Dwarfs
English Architecture since the Regency. By H. S. Goodhart-Rendel. (Constable. 25s.) CURRENT architectural opinion has a psychological twitch where the nineteenth century is concerned, and the field of criticism is littered with the bodies of those who have fallen forward in their eagerness to praise or denounce, but almost free of those who have fallen backwards in being fair. In the heroic period of functionalism, Victorian archi- tecture stood as an awful warning, a whore of Babylon at whom the first prophets of le sentiment moderne jabbed fingers of reproach. Then when the second generation, Men of Good Will but Cold Feet, found that functionalism was no flirt and had to be taken seriously, what more natural than to relapse into the Babylonish arms, explaining that slim girls, intellectual girls, were all right:but give them something solid and comfortable.
Perhaps the youngest generation, reared in the shelter of the giants of the 'twenties, will be able to take things easier, but, while 'we wait for a dispassionate study from one of them, they have been partially forestalled by a book which is clear-headed about the nineteenth century because written by a Victorian-born, a pre-Functionalist, an unwarranted survival from the Forsyte era. Mr. Goodhart- Rendel's English Architecture since the Regency is written as if the Modern Movement had never been. For this one may adduce two reasons: first, that his own. architectural practice has been chiefly in churches and country houses, fields where the moral categories of Functionalism have been least imperative; And, \ secondly, that this book is based on lectures delivered in Oxford in 1934, a time and a place in which modern architecture was probably unknown until the author's last, \and least thought-out, lecture was delivered.
This book is an intermediate stage between those lectures and a larger, definitive work on the recent past which he has been promising for some time. It is a work which one anticipates with trepidation, for his viewpoint, though welcome in its lack of the usual passions, is so close to the events he describes that all perspectives are distorted, unrevisably one fears. In this present book giants, to our way of thinking, are masked by the dwarfs standing in front of them. Every attempt to discuss William Morris is foiled by the obtrusive presence of William Butterfield, Sand, although the latter has been much taken up by the Men of Cold Feet, none would suggest that he was the more important of the two. Yet this, by implication, would seem to be Mr. Goodhart-Rendel's view. He couples their names frequently, but devotes far more space to the harsh, angular, unconformable church-Gothic of Butterfield. No doubt he has a point, for Morris's importance lies chiefly in his theories. He was no architect, and the buildings designed for him by Philip Webb look more like chastened exercises in the Butterfield manner than anything else. It is useful to have this rubbed in (and the book is full of similar useful correctives), but in the history of architecture it is Morris who is the constituent figure, and Butterfield who is a passing eccentric. But then Mr. Goodhart-Rendel likes eccentrics. He it was who coined the useful term rogue-architect to describe those who were persistently out of step with Victorian opinion, and the image of a lone elephant crashing, distractedly through the jungle of the nine- teenth century describes exactly the kind of architect he admires. Men who • founded fashions, or became successful, he treats with a certain reserve. Norman Shaw he fails to focus with the certainty of his snapshots of Gothicising eccentrics. His treatment of Voysey, though very funny, is quite unjust, and-his view of the Glasgow school can best be described as quaint. But all of these, and especially the last who were most conspicuously out of step, are of greater impor- tance for the twentieth than the nineteenth century. The Glasgow
style, with its perverse and delicate cultivation -of the subjective, its neurotic passion, its brilliant spatial fantasies, belongs in feeling to the post-1918 period, an epoch with which Mr. Goodhart-Rendel has contrived to live in tolerant neighbourliness, but without compre- hension.
In the body critical, as at present constituted, he is himself a "rogue," and his book is probably the last of its kind we shall ever see. Witty and idiosyncratic, hopelessly,one-sided in that it deals only with "Art Architecture," it crashes at random through the categories of Functionalist theory and art-historical method by which most current criticism proceeds. It is a dangerous book for the un-instructed, but it will be treasured here and there (by your reviewer, for instance) for the occasional acid turn of phrase with which it -lights up the nineteenth century from within. REYNER BANHAM.
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