BOOKS AND WRITERS
/N the decade after the first war there was not much writing about architecture and no really good writing at all. March Philipps's The Works of Man and Geoffrey Scott's The Archi- tecture of Humanism were both pre-war books, and they were the books people read when they wanted something about architecture which was not home-made archaeology (" note the double piscina in the south transept ") or history of the kind which plods round a patchwork of half-tone blocks: and Whatever people did read, they read nothing about the architecture of the nineteenth century. In politics, in religion and literature that century might have a respectable interest ; Lytton Strachey, indeed, showed that respecta- bility was, precisely, the evocative clue. 1 But in architecture—no. Even Sir Banister Fletcher's comprehensive History of Architecture on the Comparative Method declined to compare the nineteenth century with anything, and dealt with it under " English Renais- sance " in a series of potted biographies beginning with John Nash and ending with Mr. (as he then was) Giles Gilbert Scott. The twentieth century was still so young that the nineteenth looked only like the horrible antithesis of the eighteenth, the night after the fresh (because still freshly discovered) Georgian day.
A book called The Gothic Revival, coming out in 1928, might still just conceivably have been the work of some ancient straggler from the 'eighties, containing recollections of Pearson and Bodley and staking the future of English architecture on Liverpool Cathedral. It might have been that ; and there was really only one other thing it could be—a reassessment" by an adventurous young writer who had fallen under the spell of Lytton Strachey. That, of course, is what it was, and the writer, who had lately taken his Final Schools at Oxford, was Kenneth Clark. By 1930 the book was renowned ; by 1940 an unobtainable classic.
The Gothic Revival has just reappeared.* Sensibly, the author has not attempted to revise it, contenting himself with a few rather acid obituaries of dead opinions and a tolerant review in the form of a letter to the publisher. " For better or worse, The Gothic Revival is a period piece, a document, rather pathetically, in the history of taste which it sets out to anatomise." Well, all books with any life in them become period pieces in a quarter of a century. (of this century, anyway), and this one is not much the worse for it. Sir Kenneth's own self-criticism forestalls the re-reviewer- and, rather irritatingly in this case, forestalls him with nearly com- plete accuracy. Sir Kenneth now finds the first three chapters dull ; " they read like a B.Litt. thesis." Alas! was it possible even in 1927 to write about the romantic eighteenth century without count- ing, like sheep crossing a stile, the footsteps to countless doctorates ? The chapters are not really by any means so dull, but they are, as Sir Kenneth again, I think, recognises, rather out of balance. He made a valuable discovery about Thomas Gray as a back-room authority on Gothic, advising Horace Walpole and dating mediaeval buildings with exceptional acuteness, but did not take up the vital clue dropped by Gray when he stated that Kent introduced the " Batty Langley Manner."
Kent, it is surely true to say, was the inventor of eighteenth- century Gothic. He did not build much of it, but what he did build has all the tricks, and has them before anybody else's buildings have them. The date of his first Gothic work at Hampton Court is 1732, which is about the date of the last Gothic of the seventeenth- century school, stemming from Wren and his Tom Tower at Oxford. Kent's Gothic, so infectiously easy to draw and so decently cheap to build, is a style which nobody has quite explained. The odd thing about it is that it has few obvious connections with English Gothic, and has, on the other hand, a tincture of Italian, and it would perhaps be worth investigating whether the style does not owe at least as much to Italian theatre design as to anything which Kent could have met with in this country.
The omission of Kent (apart from brief references) does not invalidate any of Sir Kenneth's chapters, though they would have 'The Gothic Revival: an Essay in the History of Taste. By Sir Kenneth Clark. New and Revised Edition. (Constable. 15s.) been stronger had his position been appreciated. The omission of various smaller Gothic fry who have lately been resurrected (notably Edward Wing of Aynhoe, who must have been associated with Browne Willis, the antiquary) hardly matters at all. The first four chapters of the book will remain an extremely useful sketch of a complicated subject until somebody undertakes to deal with it in a long book and in a manner approaching finality.
The real charm of The Gothic Revival only begins to unfold itself when, about the middle of the book, we come to the Houses of Parliament and their architects—Barry, the acknowledged and knighted architect, and Pugin, the unacknowledged. Here Sir Kenneth was peculiarly fortunate, for in 1928 Barry had been more or less, and Pugin completely, forgotten except by a very few architects and scholars. Of Pugin the average student in a school of architecture would not have heard, and to the educated public he was, if anything, a name sounding somewhat like Pusey and carrying vaguely kindred associations. There had been no bio- graphy since 1861, and a brilliant series of articles by Paul Water- house lay (as they still lie) securely buried in the early files of the Architectural Review. So Sir Kenneth had the exquisite task of disinterring, for a generation all ready to smile at Victorian eminence, one of the most remarkable and romantic Victorians of them all. It is a great tribute to Sir Kenneth to say that, in doing so, he not only wrote a marvellously vivid and epigrammatic essay, -but actually, in doing justice to the subject, did justice to the man. When one re-reads the chapter after twenty-two years, the balance still seems right. It is still not possible to discover that Pugin's buildings are great, or even always good, architecture ; it is still necessary to go to the decorative designs and sketches to estimate the degree of his talent. But, equally, the recognition that Pugin was the precursor, not only of Ruskin and Morris, but of much in the philosophy of architecture which we hold to today, has only been confirmed and underlined in the interval.
The chapter on " ecclesiology " was perhaps a little more amusing when it was written than it is now. It was true enough to write in 1928: " A dead fashion can hardly be made credible ; but I must ask the reader to believe that Gothic archaeology was once a popular subject." Today, when no publisher's list seems complete without something on old churches, chantries or monuments, it is not quite so true. The subject has come back to life, a very different life, for the new respectability of archaeology and ecclesiology has little to do with _religious faith and nothing at all to do with modern architectural style. It has, on the other hand, a good deal to do with the widespread use of automobiles and the paintings of John Piper. The Victorian conviction that Gothic was the only true style, and that, of its phases, only one, the Early Middle Pointed, was suitable for revival, remains, of course, as grotesque as ever. The state of mind of the editors, and, indeed, the readers, of The Ecclesiologist, the organ of the Cambridge Camden Society, must ever be a source of amazement, if not of amusement. Where, today, can we find a censorship as dogmatic, as self-assured, as vituperative as theirs ? Perhaps the periodical indictments of " formalism " on the part of Soviet critics are as near as we shall get, and it is curious to reflect that their manner of expression is inherited from Marx, who presumably evolved that mode of cen- sorious disgust, which is peculiarly his, in the Victorian environment which gave us, likewise, The Ecclesiologist!
Today, partly as the result of this book, the Gothic revival is steadily being rehabilitated. Much will be written about it in the next half-century, and I am sure that a great deal of its ugliness will be found virtuous, if not beautiful. Already we are becoming accustomed to divorce the 'concepts of " beauty " and " art," and, wherever this may lead us; it will surely be to some vantage point
from which the works of Butterfield and Street, Teulon and perhaps even the monstrous Bassett Keeling, will look very enticing. Eventu- ally, perhaps, some of Clark's judgements may seem a little lacking in respect, but I am doUbtful if many of them will be found
Previous page
