The Cathedral
Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. So ends the short, proud, Latin epitaph the younger Wren had inscribed on his father's tomb in St. Paul's. But while circumspection can expose the genius, it can,pot tell the laborious tale of its realisation, the almost infinite capacity for en- during pains demanded of that genius before it could reach this crowning expression. This re- quires the knowledge and circumstance and imaginative sympathy shown by Miss Jane Lang.
St. Paul's is a work of inspired cerebration, posing few disquieting questions and making no concessions to fancy or rhetoric. It seems a facile construction ex nihilo, Aphrodite-born on the shell of Ludgate Hill. It owes little to baroque models (of which Wren's only acquaintance was a short visit to Italy and a few months in Paris), and derives from no native tradition. Yet the problems it raised were specifically English and Anglican. The vast space beneath the dome, the, structurally Gothic chancel were Wren's answers to the problems of using the architecture of humanism for Church of England purposes : how to make an auditory of a mass-house, while pre- serving in stone the apostolical continuity of the Caroline with the medieval Ecclesia Anglicana.
It is a long tale. The new St. Paul's was not finished until almost sixty years after the old was destroyed. But the history of the re- building goes back before the Great Fire. In Charles I's reign 'nig° Jones built on a new west end, a cunningly contrived Roman temple, and Wren himself had put out plans for further restoration. But the Norman builders had done their work too well. With all the resources at the disposal of Caroline demolition agents it took some twenty years before the old building was dismantled. The building of the new took longer. The last stone in its lantern was placed by the younger Wren who was born in the year when the foundation stone was laid.
In the meantime fortune wavered. The con- tingencies of royal favour, popular support; the alternate prominence of high and low church- manship and Whig and Tory politics; drastic changes of design and shortage of funds— despite a coal . tax diverted to this end; the jealousy of subordinates and the trade-union-like intransigence of the Portland stone quarriers, all conspired to make progress intolerably tedious. And, as if this was not enough, natural disasters —flood, storm, ice, fire and the geology of London—did their worst as well.
Yet somehow the greatest work of art in London was finished. Miss Lang reveals not only the personal but some of the practical problems that had to be faced, most of which may not have even occurred to the lay reader. One commends this admirable book by transposing Wren's epitaph : Circumspectator, si montinzen-
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