The Age of Inigo Jones
The Age of Inigo Jones. By James Lees-Milne. (Batsford. 42s.) BEGINNING his book with a quotation from Antony and Cleopatra. "On the sudden a Roman thought hath struck him," Mr. Lees-Milne continues: "Indeed, it came like a thunderbolt, the conviction that building in England must, in order to be beautiful, conform absolutely to the ideals set by Ancient Rome. Accordingly, Inigo Jones brought about the most momentous revolution that English architecture has experienced."
That revolution Mr. Milne illuminates most clearly by his author- itative text and pictures, too modestly averring that "The Age of Inigo Jones may not be read as literature. It is frankly a reference book, without being a work of scholarship . . . for I am—to purloin the Ards of Sir Henry Wooton—but the gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff." However that may be, here, collected together With workmanlike skill, is all that any but a devotee-specialist might wish to know about Inigo Jones, his works, his clients, his colleagues and his setting.
"Worthily reckoned among the most excellent architects this nation ever bred" was a contemporary judgment that the passage of three centuries has but confirmed.
Considering how little he actually built, his fame would be surprising Were it not that it is supported by his brilliance as a draughtsman that won from Vandyke the tribute " . . not to be equalled by whatever great masters in his time, for boldness, softness, sweetness and sureness of his touches"—and by other talents and graces together making up a complex but commanding character.
To Inigo Jones has been ignorantly and indeed absurdly attributed all sorts of buildings that he could not possibly have built, either because he was dead or not yet born at the relevant date, because they show none of the classical polish of all the master's authentic works, or because the builder could have been in no position to command the much-sought-for services of the King's Surveyor.
Wales, particularly, having bred few architects but many Joneses, has blandly claimed the greatest of them as the designer of a variety of Jacobean buildings that, if pleasant enough, are too primitive, rough and provincial—too obviously vin ordinaire—ever to be granted the honourable vintage label claimed, by any but patriotic innocents. Actually there is, alas! nothing whatever to suggest the most distant connection of Inigo with Wales, except his surname, his father having been a Smithfield clothworker.
Even Mr. Milne has failed to discover much about the first thirty years of his chief character's life, but thereafter skilfully dashes in a series of sketches of him from many different angles and sources that build up into a complete and convincing picture.
He is particularly happy in his telling of Jones's collaboration with Ben Jonson in the production of their celebrated Court Masques and of their venomous quarrelling. If Jonson was waspishly jealous, Jones was bombastic, but seems to have given as good as he got in the way of insulting verses. Thus "To his false friend Mr. Ben Jonson": ". . . thou has writ Of good things and bad things not with equal wit; The reason is, or may be quickly shown The good's translation, but the ill's thine own."
After his final break with Jonson and a calmer period of co- operation with lesser poets, he ended up in 1640 in Davenant's Masque Salmacida Spolia with his most elaborate and brilliant piece of stagecraft only just before the Puritans put an end to all such goings-on.
With near a hundred illustrations, the book does give one a vivid picture of the England of Inigo Jones, a transitional England where, not in architecture alone, native variousness was giving place to classical formality.
CLOUGH WILLIAMS-ELLIS
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