BROTHER VAN
BOOKS OF THE DAY
By BONAMY DOBREE
NOBODY can read an account of Vanbrugh without liking the man ; and in life no one, not even the Duchess of Marlborough, seemed able to harbour any real resentment against him. " A most good-natured gentleman and pleasant,"' seems to have been the universal view of him. His own rage against the Duchess was in its way genial ; you are not viciously angry if you call someone a b— b— b— old b—, and wish a Scotch ensign may get her ; and if Vanbrugh was a little piqued at Swift's amusing verses about him, that may well have been because they might injure him professionally. Besides, they were ignorant criticism.
For hardly anyone at that time 'seems to have realised what a magnificent architect he was, except, of course, his two great coadjutors, Wren and Hawksmoor, who, with him, made such an admirable triumvirate : they all died despised as architects, their reputations submerged by the incoming wave of Burling- tonian Palladian. If Vanbrugh was at all regarded as a man of talent, it was as a playwright, amusing, rather improper, and full of common sense. Architects, it is true, have often admired him (Adam is a case in point) and have realised that he added something to English building : but it is only of late years, thanks to Professor Webb, Mr. Tipping, Mr. Hussey and Mr. Barman, and to the labours of the Wren Society, that his importance has become generally recognised, and his enormous influence, even on Wren himself, properly appraised.
What distinguishes Vanbrugh, both in playwriting and in architecture, is gusto, an almost overwhelming sense of the fun of living and doing which we find exampled by every phase of his many activities. In a way life must have seemed to him an uproarious lark. He somehow became a soldier, somehow got flung into the Bastille, somehow—as though these things happened to him rather than that he made them happen—he became a playwright and a leading architect, apparently in the same sort of haphazard way that he became Clarenceux King at Arms, and in the end married happily, " by a kind of Messissipy good fortune." He was extraordinarily lucky all his life, except for being caught in the toils of Blenheim ; and if some of his ventures, such as the Haymarket Opera House, were dis- appointments, and though in the end he failed to succeed Wren and to achieve the heights of Garter King at Arms, he carried off these defeats with a breezy good humour which made him happy and likeable to the very last.
There is something extraordinarily English about Vanbrugh, for all his Dutch ancestry, especially in his whole-hearted plug- ging away at the thing that was to be done, and in his utter lack of metaphysics. He fits extremely well into the Queen Anne scene, which is not so much the " Augustan " period of coffee-houses, tea-cups, polished verse and games of ombre, as a turbulent age of revolutionary movements, of the Great War of those days, of fierce political intrigues and religious conflicts ; and he fits into it, not because he took much part in these things, but because he seemed peculiarly made, to be its detached artist. He could conceive the right sort of house for the rising Whig aristocracy, for the military hero of the time, for the new experi- menters in taste. He embodies just as important an aspect of the period as Swift on the one hand or Beau Nash on the other. The tenor of the lives of most of the Augustans was compara- tively even—Addison, Pope, Congreve, Prior, Rowe ; but he, more like Defoe, might be in a Bastille at one moment, at another drinking toasts with the Kit-Cat. He could be friends with all men, from the great lords to Jacob Tonson, to whom his most charming and familiar letters are written. One does not feel with him that civilisation has come to a resting point, but that it is teeming with new and exciting things ; not that life is placid, but that it is full of adventure. There is nothing Sir John Vanbrugh, Architect and Dramatist. By Laurence
Whistler. (Cobden-Sanderson. is.) •
of the critical spirit about him, and it is amusing to contrast him with that other Anglo-Dutchman, Bernard Mandeville, who was keenly aware of the things happening around him in society, things which Vanbrugh accepted blindly. But Mande- ville could never have been one of the best good-hearted men of the Kit-Cat Club.
Of his plays not much need be said ; the fabric of the comedy of manners was too delicate for him, and he held no especial philosophy with which to illuminate it. They are great fun, yes, full of rollicking good sense. These things were too small for him to handle. What he needed to express his immense energy, to satisfy his romantic visual sense and his plastic craving, was an enormous palace which, with its garden, he could design as part of a county. He is the great English master of the Baroque, with its movement, its effects of chiaro- scuro, its daring, its sense of life fully lived. Castle Howard, though immature, as Mr. Webb says, is as astonishing as Blenheim ; Seaton Delval is a miracle ; the gardens at Claremont, and at Stowe till ruined by Capability Brown, marvels of their kind. And there is Greenwich, which owes more to his genius than is usually recognised. He put his hardest work into this department of his life, not only being incredibly fertile in throwing off superb drawings (he always conceived his houses in the round) and making beautifully logical plans, but in seeing to the details of working, of prices, and of all the minutiae of his craft. If he needed Hawksmoor to make the final drawings, and to reduce his dreams to manage- able proportions, he did not shirk attendance at the routine meetings of his governmental boards. And though not one of his buildings remains as he actually designed it—either because he died before they were finished, or because of alteration and destruction—he stamped his ideas on the countryside, and some of his houses are still glorious monuments.
Mr. Laurence Whistler has written a very charming book, but it is difficult for one who knows the sources and the material to assess its value ; so much of it seems familiar, so little new. Nor is Mr. Whistler, one would say, of a sufficiently different generation from recent writers on Vanbrugh to see him from a new vantage ground. Yet though it is not quite true to say with the publishers that this is the first study apart from editorial comment to be written on Vanbrugh, it is the first book to be completely devoted to him. Moreover Mr. Whistler is the first to attempt a popular justification of Vanbrugh as an architect, and he has done it extremely well, gathering together the recent findings of experts, and writing at his best and most vivid when describing Vanbrugh's work. He really sees a Vanbrugh conception in its titanic whole—house, gardens, landscape— and, in describing it imaginatively, makes us see it too.
The book is beautifully produced and admirably illustrated, but one serious grumble must be permitted. In deference to what is supposed to be popular taste, Mr. Whistler has abjured foot-note references, with the result that his biblio- graphy is almost useless. The object of a bibliography is not to assure the reader of the author's erudition (and anybody can cook up a bibliography), but to enable the reader to pursue any particular vein for himself. He might excusably be resentful if, when in pursuit of Vanbrugh buildings, he turned to the History of the Priory and Peculiar of Snaith, and found it merely led to details of Dame Vanbrugh's pedigree, to give an unim- portant but obvious illustration. Again, when given certain information, one would like to know its origin so as to judge of its value, since all sources are not impeccable ; and some of Mr. Whistler's statements are at least controversial. But there is indeed nothing serious to quarrel about on points of fact ; one might suggest that " Wycherley's " reply to Collier was most-probably Gildon's, and a few things of that kind :.but, where Vanbrugh is concerned, Mr. Whistler seems unassailable.
Previous page
