First and Last Loves

the neo-Swedish style succeeded in favour. Little squashed flowers were engraved on glass (the new R.I.B.A. building is the cathedral of such decoration) or painted in ever-so-dainty shades of pastel pink and pastel green on to unstained birchwood. Later a style that was neither the one nor the other, but called “not too modern and not too traditional” was used, as it is now, for cinemas, churches and public buildings. Sir Giles Gilbert Scott is its most successful exponent. His library at Cambridge is only excelled by his new Bodleian as a “safe blending of tradition with modernism,” whatever that may mean. In London the supreme example of the restrained jazz is his work at Battersea Power Station. There the good, tall chimneys were not allowed to smoke for themselves, an architect was called in to design some fluting part of the way up them.Give me Lot’s Road.But Sir Giles has his great moments.

The reaction from antiquarianism has been almost as harmful as antiquarianism itself.

Before I finish, I would like to enquire into the causes of this extraordinary state.

There are the champions of antiquity.First the experts.

We know the expert by sight and by conversation. “Yes, very interesting, no doubt, but I’m afraid it’s not in my period—you should see Popplethwaite. I believe he has done some work on the subject.” Experts are short-sighted, probably from studying details for so long, they live in museums, they are a little scurfy, a little dirty, very precise and very damning of every other expert. They have that wonderful gift of turning life to death, interest to ashes. The only vitality visible in them is the heartiness of their contempt for the enquiring layman.Then they flower, then they love to dazzle him with words and with references. And that enquiring layman, who might be you or I, is sent home abashed. Perhaps he came to know about aquatints, having admired the colour-prints of Rowlandson and Malton. Admiration for his subject is not what the expert wants. Admiration for his knowledge is what he expects. Perhaps long ago the expert really did like aquatints, but now he only likes knowing about first proofs, raw state, etc., etc. His word for “beautiful” has become “important.” He is as removed from the original purpose of his subject, be it aquatints for illustration, stained glass for telling a story, textile for decoration, as the mathematician from simple arithmetic.

Experts can live in museums and can be divorced entirely from the setting. Museums and the experts who run them are one of the penalties of antiquarianism. Not all museums, for there can obviously be such a thing as an inspiring museum—the picture galleries and sculpture halls. But whenever I walk through long galleries of spears and arrow-heads, of urns and sarcophagi, I do not feel myself taken back to the ancient civilisations. Rather I find myself admiring dignified architecture and thinking what a long walk it is from one end of the Museum to another, and how singularly lifeless the loveliest things appear as soon as they are in a little glass case with a label underneath them. Museums of the uninspired sort, and that is to say most museums, from Forest Hill to Bethnal Green, are the direct children of antiquarianism. They are places where you cannot see the woad for the spears, more often you cannot even see the spears, so remote, so distinct, so classified and subclassified are the little prongs of objects displayed. There is only one London museum of an antiquarian sort which really moves me, and that is Sir John Soane’s, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And this is interesting not only because of its wonderful plan and exquisite furniture and pictures, but also because it was Sir John’s private house.

And along with museums and experts comes the research worker and his institute.Research is the curse of our age.“Research” is the first step on the way to expertdom. There is so much research going on nowadays that teachers are becoming scarce. Already in the universities complaints are being made about there being too many research students and research fellowships. And what, you may ask, is all this research for? Goodness knows. There are at Oxford students researching into modern languages. What are they researching? Are they just being paid money to read minor authors in the original? It looks like it. Research into art is useful, but there can be and is too much of it. Every research student in art means one less work of art—for it means the glorification of antiques and the established, and less encouragement to the struggling artist. If the tremendous amount of money that has been lavished on founding the Courtauld Institute—an institute for breeding art critics and antique dealers of the more expensive sort—had instead been given as a fund for the encouragement and support of living artists, those among my readers who are creative workers would be able to have the more chance of earning a livelihood by what they like best. It is symptomatic of this age of antiquarianism that a thing like the Courtauld Institute exists.

Next comes the authoritative attitude given to antiquarian research. Allow me to quote from a recent review of a publication of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments:

Why does the survey stop at 1714? I have tried to find some significance for the date. Queen Anne died, the Peace of Utrecht had been signed the year before, the South Sea Bubble had not yet burst. Why not 1814? or 1914? Why any date at all? Should not all buildings of merit have been included and rather fewer fragmentary moats and fifteenth-century fonts? Or did none of the Commissioners feel himself capable of deciding what constituted architectural merit? The F.S.A.’s have it, as usual.

It is hard to treat a survey as complete which thus describes Syon House, containing Robert Adam’s best interior work, “A large Tudor house, much altered in the eighteenth century, and incorporating an undercroft of the nunnery of