For myself, almost any age seems civilised except that in which I live. My preference is for the first quarter of the nineteenth century in England when the æsthetic outlook seems to have been particularly bright. The generation before mine preferred the reign of Queen Anne and mid-eighteenth-century work. A glance at fashionable antique shops will prove to you that that is the generation which still has the purchasing power. The generation before that preferred the Jacobean—witness Willett houses in Sloane Street district, Hampstead, and the grander suburbs of London; our grandfathers and colonials still have their furnishing schemes decided for them by certain big shops. The generation before that preferred the later medieval styles—witness the work of Bodley and Garner, Burne-Jones and William Morris. The generation before that preferred the thirteenth century—witness the spiky Gothic churches, spraying out of the stucco, the Albert Memorial, St. Mary Abbot’s, Kensington, and the fine Catholic Apostolic in Gordon Square.
The generation before that—and we are back in that first quarter of the nineteenth century which I so greatly admire—hardly looked back at all, except in a literary way, building here a miniature Abbotsford, there a minor Fonthill, and in St. Pancras New Church, a perfect reproduction of various details of Greek Temples. The Gothic, Norman or Greek revivals of those days were essentially original and vigorous. They were not dead reproduction. They were a harmless veneer, covering interiors adapted to contemporary life. Alongside them grew up those early experiments in cast iron and glass which resulted in the Crystal Palace, almost the only flower of a new architecture which was able to thrust up its head among the hothouse revivals by which it was eventually choked. Alongside them, too, grew up the new architecture of railways, canals and planned building estates of which vestiges have been allowed to remain: King’s Cross station; the Grand Junction canals; Kennington; the Regent’s Park; the New River Company’s property, to cite London alone.In fact, one may say that, until the ’forties and in certain instances until later, architecture had full confidence in itself.
It is not my intention to cover, as has been so often covered before, the history of the Gothic and other revivals during the nineteenth century. Instead, I will divide architecture into four groups, and show where antiquarianism has stepped in to hinder it; then I will show where the over-reaction or under-reaction from antiquarianism has done an equal amount of harm. The four groups are: Ecclesiastical, Monumental, Domestic and Planned.
There is much to say about antiquarianism in relation to ecclesiastical building, despite the fact that more churches seem to be pulled down than put up. Though it is not the authoritative opinion of the Church—vide the Seventh Report of the Central Council for the Care of Churches—it seems to be the æsthetic influence of bishops and lesser clergy that causes only eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century churches to be pulled down, and of them we have too few examples. But those who have visited episcopal palaces will know the cheerful chintzes, the Oxford frames, the electroliers, the islands of mat that one leaps to, like George Israel jumping the icefloes with the Moravian Gospel to Poland, on one’s way from bed to the brass can of tepid water; you will know the taste in leatherwork of the Bishop’s wife, the cork mats on the refectory table; you who know these—for what is an episcopal palace but the rectory spread thinly over a multitude of rooms?—you who know these, will not be surprised to hear that one Renaissance church has been demolished as “pagan,” and that another has been scheduled for demolition. You who know how the homes of the spiritually minded are furnished, how much good nature and genuine humility there are in those homes, have probably become, with me, no longer surprised at the æsthetic arrogance of their inhabitants. Yet among no section of the public is such witting antiquarianism rampant as among the clergy and, more especially, their wives.And when we realise that the clergy, despite new legislation in the matter of faculties, are able with one lick of vermilion or orange, one fretsaw saint, one furtive hatchet-stroke into box-pew, hatchment or commandment-board, to ruin the embodiment in stone and wood of generations of English church people—when we realise this, then indeed we will look apprehensively at the rectory drawing-room when we go to get the key of the church. If the parish is poor and the rector, too, all is well, the church will not be harmed. But if the walls of the rectory show signs of an interest in art; if plaster saints, woodcuts in the manner of Eric Gill, etchings, Brangwyns, Margaret W. Tarrants predominate over the more decent taste for family photographs and Arundel prints, then hey presto! before we know where we are there will be a box-pew cleared away to make a children’s corner, a decent classic monument destroyed to reveal a conjectured wall-painting, a Royal Arms removed as “not devotional,” and the church will be transformed into a little scrap album to contain bits and oddments from church-furnishers and artistic ladies’ handicrafts shops wherever the name of an E.E. piscina is held in high esteem.
What, you may ask, has this to do with antiquarianism? To which I reply that, like E.E. piscinæ, it has everything. The clergy are
