Follies
Pat Rogers
The Baroque Age in England Judith Hook (Thames & Hudson £8.50)
Talk of an English baroque has the specious air of paradox. Like the Cornish Riviera, it suggests an attempt to put some southern colour into pallid Anglo-Saxon cheeks. Yet the marks of baroque invention lie thickly about the landscape; sacred and profane, London and provincial, our scenery bursts into the architecture of sforzando and bravura. St Paul's still looms up from almost every angle, and the City spires pierce a skyline of office-blocks more eccentrically than ever. Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh littered the countryside with porticos and pyramids, temples and turrets, obelisks and octagons. Inland from cheerful Whitley Bay broods the sinister mansion of Seaton Delaval ; the inoffensive Vale of Pickering is suddenly confronted by the melodrama of Castle Howard. Eastbury has gone from Cranborne Chase, with its knobbly balustrades and heavy horizontal emphases: but everywhere that oolite stone could be quarried or carted, the monuments survive—Blenheim, Chatsworth, Kimbolton.
Yet, as Judith Hook points out in this excellent book, the impulse was short-lived, the movement stalled and diverted. It was a peculiar tragedy of English baroque art that it never found its own spokesman', so that the showy folios of Colin Campbell and the prim designs of Burlington could redirect patronage. The Whig version of architecture prevailed; Shaftesbury and Palladianism triumphed, the Board of Works was neutered, and baroque went underground with Jemmy Gibbs. I am not so unhappy about this process as Mrs Hook is, but I must admit that much was lost. If it seems too strong to speak of 'the blast of the Palladian winter', bringing in 'frigidly classical' standards, one has to agree that expressive power was lost. Mrs Hook does well to celebrate the things that were achieved : the ceiling at Greenwich, the gardens at Wrest, the Radcliffe Camera. Mrs Hook is the laureate of a style but also of an epoch : 'The age of Wren, Vanbrugh, Hawksmoor and Gibbs, of Lely and Kneller, of Grinling Gibbons and Caius Gabriel Cibber, of Clarendon and Bishop Burnet, of Hobbes, Locke, and Newton, of Dryden, Swift and Pope, of Purcell and even of Handel can never be regarded as any
thing other than a Golden Age: d
. and wharisteas exceedingly well on patronage most illuminating section on 'money and materials', with a notable discussion of the Portland stone industry. She has read plenty (that is, not too much) and has looked about herself alertly and perceptively. The illustrations are particularly apt in regard to in tenors: it is possible to take in detail as well as the broad effect, and without that the whole language of baroque, becomes unintelligible.
My only serious criticism would be that names like Dryden and Purcell, often trotted out in the historical argument, don't fully earn their keep in the text : their art is never shown to be properly baroque, or indeed properly anything. I am not convinced that Addison was attacking Marlborough in Cato, though it is good Tory doctrine to believe as much ; while it is odd to call Shrewsbury, the King of Hearts, 'a Whig through through', when the Junto set thought him a trimmer easily bought off by Harley and when he actually voted in favour of Sacheverell. But these are tiny flaws in an impressive edifice. Mrs Hook has made fine historical, political and ideological sense of a complex and cosmopolitan movement ; she uncovers an aesthetic of freedom where the Whig tradition saw just baroque follies.
solutely normal part of parental experience —particularly upset us, so we laugh.
Professor Howe, who is a geographer, is brisk about these matters. At first sight his book, full of maps, graphs, tables, looks reassuringly scientific and the Grand Guignol of the photographs—smallpox worse than lung cancer—is well done. conveying both information and frisson. But read his text, and doubt creeps in, try to follow it through systematically and doubt is confirmed. This is no systematic treatise on the historical geography following the tracks of three of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse from Cornwall to Caithness, from pre-history to Mrs Castle. Rather it is an omniumgatherum, valuable certainly, but consistently orderly hardly ever, and with only one quite visible principle at work, a concentration on that capital city of British mortality, Glasgow.
Professor Howe teaches there in the University of Strathclyde. A few hundred yards from him, therefore, is one of the most interesting sights of Europe, the corner at which the magnificent medieval cathedral draws away from the Royal Infirmary where the statue of Lord Lister turns its back on the troubled, extravagant mansions of the Victorian dead, that most visually violent of cemeteries, the Necropolis. Yes, Glasgow was a good place wherein to write this book.
Unfortunately modern cheerfulness and trendy gloom keep breaking in. In the introduction we follow the World Health Organisation in defining health as 'complete physical, mental and social well being . . . not merely the absence of disease or infirmity'. Now that I would call not health but either rubbish or the Kingdom of God. Fashionable doom closes the book : 'It is palpably unwise to continue to interfere with man's habitat without ... striving to determine the real and lasting effects of such actions on man's health and general well-being. To ignore these effects may lead to the extinction of life on this planet and the death of tomorrow'. This commination comes out nowhere, for up to then the last chapter is basically the success story of how death has been further and further postponed in this century.
Yet Professor Howe is much better than that. He has read widely—see his long bibliography—he has good stories to tell, including some familiar ones like that of the Broad Street pump and the spread of cholera in London, and he is generally at his best on specific diseases. Some of his accounts of the 'vile customs of our ancestors' are excellently vivid. In part he is let down by his sources : no-one I suspect knows much about these matters before 1600 and what is suspected, like the history of syphilis, is very dubious. Demographic history is, certainly, a learned subject, but, alas, not a very intellectually animated one, though that is changing. Geography and history never sit so easily
together as they should. So a really satisfying piece of haute vulgarisation is probably
not yet possible on this subject. But on the other hand the historical chapters, some
two-thirds of the book, are a very good read, stuffed with facts, and all for £1.25 in these inflationary days. Also, if unevenly, there is much material here of genuine value for reference. The 'king of terrors' deserves a better book and perhaps the author will write it, but 1 don't see Professor Howe even then outbidding Dr Comfort in my newsagent's. Life and death both deserve better historiography than they get.
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