Part 8

Why the Egyptians loved things colossal I do not know, but the taste of the Romans for the grandiose is easier to understand. It seems to have been part and parcel of that yearning for the super-human which filled late antiquity. This yearning took two distinct directions. Among the worldly it fostered imperialism, organization, rhetoric, portentous works, belief in the universality and eternity of Rome, and actual deification of emperors. Among the spiritually-minded it led to a violent abstraction from the world, so that the soul in its inward solitude might feel itself inviolate and divine. The Christians at first belonged of course to the latter party; they detested the inflation of the empire, with its cold veneer of marble and of optimism; they were nothing if not humble and dead to the world. Their catacombs were perforce on the human scale, as a coffin is; but even when they emerged to the surface, they reduced rather than enlarged the temples and basilicas bequeathed to them by the pagans. Apart from a few imperial structures at Constantinople or Ravenna their churches for a thousand years kept to the human scale; often they were diminutive; when necessary they were spread out to hold multitudes, but remained low and in the nature of avenues to a tomb or a shrine. The centre was some sombre precinct, often subterranean, where the inward man might commune with the other world. The sacraments were received with a bowed head; they did not call for architectural vistas. The sumptuousness that in time encrusted these sanctuaries was that of a jewel--the Oriental, interior, concentrated sumptuousness of the cloistered arts. Yet the open-air pagan tradition was not dead. Roman works were everywhere, and not all in ruins, and love of display and of plastic grandiloquence lay hardly dormant in the breast of many. It required only a little prosperity to dispel the mystical humility and detachment which Christianity had brought with it at first; and the human scale of the Christian Greeks yielded at the first opportunity to the gigantic scale of the Romans. Spaces were cleared, vaults were raised, arches were made pointed in order that they might be wider and be poised higher, towers and spires were aimed at the clouds, usually getting only half way, porches became immense caverns. Brunelleschi accomplished a _tour de force_ in his dome and Michelangelo another in his, even more stupendous. These various strained models, straining in divergent directions, have kept artists uneasy and impotent ever since, except when under some benign influence they have recovered the human scale, and in domestic architecture or portrait painting have forgotten to be grand and have become felicitous.

The same movement is perhaps easier to survey in philosophy than in architecture. Scarcely had Socrates brought investigation down from the heavens and limited it to morals--a realm essentially on the human scale--when his pupils hastened to undo his work by projecting their moral system again into the sky, denaturalizing both morals and nature. They imagined a universe circling about man, tempering the light for his eyes and making absolute his childlike wishes and judgements. This was humanism out of scale and out of place, an attempt to cut not the works of man but the universe to human measure. It was the nemesis that overtook the Greeks for having become too complacently human. Earlier the monstrous had played a great part in their religion; henceforth that surrounding immensity having been falsely humanized, their modest humanity itself had to be made monstrous to fill its place.

Hence we see the temples growing larger and larger, the dome introduced, things on the human scale piled on one another to make a sublime fabric, like Saint Sophia, triumphal arches on pedestals not to be passed through, vain columns like towers, with a statue poised on the summit like a weathercock, and finally doors so large that they could not be opened and little doors had to be cut in them for men to use. So the human scale turned up again irrepressibly, but for the moment without its native dignity, because it had been stretched to compass a lifeless dignity quite other than its own.

20

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE

Nests were the first buildings; I suppose the birds built them long before man ceased to be four-footed or four-handed, and to swing by his tail from trees. The nests of man were coverts, something between a hole in the ground and an arbour; a retreat easily turned into a wig-warn, a hut, or a tent, when once man had begun to flay animals and to weave mats. From the tent we can imagine the cart developing--one of the earliest of human habitations--and from the cart the boat: tents, boats, and carts (as the Englishman knows so well) are in a manner more human than houses; they are the shelters of freemen. Some men, those destined to higher things, are migratory; they have imagination, being haunted by absent things, and distance of itself allures them, even if dearth or danger does not drive them on; indeed, dearth and danger would not of themselves act as incentives to migration, if some safer and greener paradise were not present to the fancy. Ranging into varied climates, these men feel the need of that portable shelter which we call clothes; and at a slightly greater distance from their skins, they surround themselves with a second integument, also portable, the tent, cart, or boat. The first home of man is appropriately without foundations, except in the instincts of his soul; and it is only by a slight anchorage to the earth, in some tempting glen or by some flowing river, that the cart, boat, or tent becomes a dwelling-house. Here I see the secret of that paradox, that the English people who have invented the word home, should be such travellers and colonists, and should live so largely and so contentedly abroad. Home is essentially portable; it has no terrene foundation, like a tomb, a well, or an altar; it is an integument of the living man, as the body itself is; and as the body is more than the raiment, and determines its form, so the inner man is more than his dwelling, and causes it to mould and to harden itself round him like a shell, wherever he may be. Home is built round his bed, his cupboard, and his chimney-corner; and such a nest, if it fits his habits, is home all the world over, from Hudson's Bay to Malacca; at least, it becomes home when the inner man, as he is prompted inwardly to do, surrounds himself there with a family; for a home is a nest, and somehow incomplete without an egg to sit on.

This seems to me to be the true genealogy of English architecture, in so far as it is English. Strictly speaking, there is no English architecture at all, only foreign architecture adapted and domesticated in England. But how thoroughly and admirably domesticated I How entirely transmuted inwardly from the classic tragic monumental thing it was, into something which, even if in abstract design it seems unchanged, has a new expression, a new scale, a new subordination of part to part, and as it were a new circulation of the blood within it! It has all been made to bend and to cling like ivy round the inner man; it has all been rendered domestic and converted into a home. Far other was the character proper to nobler architecture in its foreign seats. There it had been essentially military, religious, or civic: it had begun perhaps with a slight modification or rearrangement of great stones lying on the ground, perhaps infinitely rooted in its depths. Its centre was no living person, but some spot with a magic and compulsive influence, or with a communal function; it came to glorify three slabs--the tomb, the hearth, and the altar--and to render them monumental. The tribe or the king had a treasure to be roofed over and walled in; the mound where the dead lay buried was marked with a heap of stones; pillars were set up to the right and to the left of the presiding deity, to dignify the place where he delivered true oracles, and dispensed magic powers. This deity himself was a pillar, scarcely humanized in form, or fantastically named after some animal; and as he grew colossal, and his features took form and colour, his sacred head had to be arched over with more labour and art; and the approach to him was impressively delayed through pylons, courts, narthex, or nave, into the sepulchral darkness of the holy of holies. Similarly defences grew into citadels, and judgement-seats into palaces; and as for individual men, if they did not sleep in the embrasure of some temple gate, or under some public stair, they found cubicles in the galleries of the king's court, or built themselves huts to breed in under the lee of the fortifications.

This sort of architecture has a tragic character; it dominates the soul rather than expresses it, and embodies stabilities and powers far older than any one man, and far more lasting. It confronts each generation like an inexorable deity, like death and war and labour; life is passed, thoughtlessly but not happily, under that awful shadow. Of course, there are acolytes in the temple and pages in the palace that scamper all over the most hallowed precincts, tittering and larking; and the same retreats may seem luminous and friendly afterwards to the poet, the lover, or the mind bereaved; yet in their essential function these monuments are arresting, serious, silent, overwhelming; they are a source of terror and compunction, like tragedy; they are favourable to prayer, ecstasy, and meditation. At other times they become the scene of enormous gatherings, of parades and thrilling celebrations; but always it is a vast affair, like a court ball, in which one insinuates one's littleness into what corner one can, to see and feel the movement of the whole, without playing any great part in it. Even the most amiable forms of classic architecture have this public character. There is the theatre and the circus, into which one must squeeze one's person uncomfortably, in order to subject one's mind to contagious emotions, and the judgements of the crowd; and even the public fountain, at which the housemaids and water-boys wait for their turn, plays for ever far above the heads of the people; as if that Neptune and those dolphins were spouting for their own pleasure, cooling the sunshine for their own bronze limbs, and never caring whether they soused the passing mortal, or quenched his thirst.

All these forms and habits are intensely un-English, and yet England is full of vestiges of them, not only because its fine arts are derived from abroad, but because, however disguised, the same tragic themes must appear everywhere. The tomb, the temple, the fortress are obligatory things; but they become properly English in character only when their public function recedes into the background, and they become interesting to the inner man by virtue of associations or accidents which harmonize them with his sentimental experience. They grow English in growing picturesque. These castles and abbeys were Norman when they were built, they were expressions of domination and fear, hard, crude, practical, and foreign. But now the moat is grass-grown, the cloister in ruins, the headless saints are posts for the roses to creep over, the frowning keep has lost its battlements and become a comfortable mansion mantled with ivy; before it the well-dressed young people play croquet on the lawn; and the chapel, whitewashed within, politely furnished with pews, and politely frequented on Sundays, is embowered in a pretty garden of a graveyard, which the yew seems to sanctify more than the cross, and the flowers to suit better than the inscriptions; there is a bench there round the great tree, where the old villagers sit of an evening, and its branches, far overtopping the church spire with its restored sun-dial, seem to dispense a surer grace and protection than the church itself: they seem more unequivocally the symbol and the work of God. So everything, in its ruin, seems in England to live a new life; and it is only this second life, this cottage built in the fallen stronghold, that is English.

If great architecture has a tragic character, it does not exclude, in the execution, a certain play of fancy, a sportive use of the forms which the needful structure imposes; and these decorative frills or arbitrary variations of theme might be called comic architecture. This is the side of the art which is subject to fashion, and changes under the same influences, with the same swiftness and the same unanimity. But as fashions among peasants sometimes last for ages, so certain decorative themes, although quite arbitrary, sometimes linger on because of the inertia of the eye, which demands what it is used to, or the poverty of invention in the designer. The worst taste and the best taste revel in decoration; but the motive here is play and there display. The Englishman deprecates both; he abominates the tawdry, the theatrical, the unnecessarily elaborate; and at the same time he is shy of novelty and playfulness; give him comfortable old grey clothes, good for all weathers, and comfortable, pleasing, inconspicuous houses, where he can live without feeling a fool or being the victim of his possessions. The comic poses of architecture, which come to him from abroad, together with its tragic structure, he accordingly tones down and neutralizes as far as possible. How gently, for instance, how pleasantly the wave of Italian architecture broke on these grassy shores! The classic line, which is tragic in its simple veracity and fixity, had already been submerged in attempts to vary it; in England, as in France, the Gothic habit of letting each part of a building have its own roof and its own symmetry, at once introduced the picturesque into the most "classic" designs. The Italian scale, too, was at once reduced, and the Italian rhetoric in stone, the baroque and the spectacular, was obliterated. How pleasantly the Palladian forms were fitted to their English setting; how the windows were widened and subdivided, the show pediments forgotten, the wreathed urns shaved into modest globes, the pilasters sensibly broadened into panels, and the classical detail applied to the native Gothic framework, with its gables, chimneys, and high roofs; whence the delightful brood of Jacobean and Queen Anne houses; and in the next generation the so genteel, so judicious Georgian mansion, with its ruddy brick, its broad windows, and its delicate mouldings and accessories of stone. The tragic and the comic were spirited away together, and only the domestic remained.

Nevertheless, at one of the greatest moments in its history, England had seemed to revel in comic art, and to have made it thoroughly its own. Domestic taste had reduced Gothic too, in England, to the human scale; prodigies of height and width in vaulting were not attempted, doors remained modest, hooded, perhaps, with an almost rustic porch; the vast spaces were subdivided, they were encrusted with ornament; the lines became playful, fan-tracery was invented, and floral pendants of stone; the walls became all glass, the ceilings carved bowers, and Gothic seemed on the point of smothering its rational skeleton altogether in luxurious trappings and the millinery of fashion. All England seemed to become one field of the cloth of gold; rooms looked like gilded palanquins or silken tents, roofs were forests of bannerets, pinnacles, and weathercocks; heraldry (a comic art) overspread every garment and utensil. Poetry, too, became euphuistic and labyrinthine and nevertheless friendly and familiar and full of a luscious humour, like the wit of the people. Even prose was a maze of metaphors and conceits, every phrase was embroidered, and no self-respecting person could say yea or nay without some artful circumlocution. It was this outburst of universal comedy that made Shakespeare possible--an exuberant genius in some respects not like a modern Englishman; he rose on the crest of a somewhat exotic wave of passion and vivacity, which at once subsided. Some vestiges of that spirit seem to linger in American manners; but for the most part puritanism killed it; and I do not think we need regret its loss. What could England have been but for the triumph of Protestantism there? Only a coarser France, or a cockney Ireland. The puritan stiffening was essential to raise England to its external dignity and greatness; and it was needed to fortify the inner man, to sober him, and persuade him to be worthy of himself. As for comic art, there is enough of it elsewhere, in the oriental and the French schools, and in painting and drawing, if not in architecture, all the younger artists are experimenting with it. The sort of aestheticism which was the fashion in London at the end of the nineteenth century tried to be playful, and to dote on art for its own sake; but in reality it was full of a perverted moralism; the aesthetes were simply Ruskin's pupils running away from school; they thought it immensely important to be choice, and quite disgraceful to think of morals. The architecture of that time was certainly not comic in my sense of the word, it did not give a free rein to exuberant fancy: it was only railway Gothic. But in England the mists and the ivy and the green sward and the dark screening trees can make endurable even that abortion of the ethics of Ruskin: and with better models, and less wilfulness, I see the fresh building of to-day recovering a national charm: the scale small, the detail polyglot, the arrangement gracious and convenient, the marriage with the green earth and the luminous air, foreseen and prepared for. Domestic architecture in England follows to the letter the advice of Polonius:

Costly thy garment as thy purse can buy, But not expressed in fancy: rich, not gaudy.

21

THE ENGLISH CHURCH

Compromise is odious to passionate natures because it seems a surrender, and to intellectual natures because it seems a confusion; but to the inner man, to the profound Psyche within us, whose life is warm, nebulous, and plastic, compromise seems the path of profit and justice. Health has many conditions; life is a resultant of many forces. Are there not several impulses in us at every moment? Are there not several sides to every question? Has not every party caught sight of something veritably right and good? Is not the greatest practicable harmony, or the least dissension, the highest good? And if by the word "truth" we designate not the actual order of the facts, nor the exact description of them, but some inner symbol of reconciliation with reality on our own part, bringing comfort, safety, and assurance, then truth also will lie in compromise: truth will be partly truth to oneself, partly workable convention and plausibility. A man's life as it flows is not a theorem to which there is any one rigid solution. It is composed of many strands and looks to divers issues. There is the love of home and the lure of adventure; there is chastity which is a good, and there is love which is a good also; work must leave room for sport, science for poetry, and reason for prejudice. Can it be a man's duty to annul any of the elements that make up his moral being and, because he possesses a religious tradition, shall he refuse the gifts of his senses, of his affections, of his country and its history, of the ruling science, morality, and taste of his day? Far from it: religion, says the inner man, ought rather to be the highest synthesis of our nature, and make room for all these things. It should not succumb to any dead or foreign authority that ignores or dishonours them. The Englishman finds that he was born a Christian, and therefore wishes to remain a Christian; but his Christianity must be his own, no less plastic and adaptable than his inner man; and it is an axiom with him that nothing can be obligatory for a Christian which is unpalatable to an Englishman.

Only a few years ago, if a traveller landing in England on a Sunday and entering an Anglican church, had been told that the country was Catholic and its church a branch of the Catholic church, his astonishment would have been extreme. "Catholic" is opposed in the first place to national and in the second place to Protestant; how then, he would have asked himself, can a church be Catholic that is so obviously and dismally Protestant, and so narrowly and primly national? Why then this abuse of language? And why this silly provincialism of insisting on always calling Catholics Roman Catholics, as if there were any others, and they were not known by that name all the world over? Nevertheless, the restoration of an elder Anglicanism in our day has somewhat softened these paradoxes; and when we remember how fondly the English screen their instincts in legal fictions and in genteel shams, the paradoxes vanish altogether.

What is Protestantism? It is all things to all men, if they are Protestants: but I see in it three leading _motifs_: to revert to primitive Christianity, to inspire moral and political reform, and to accept the religious witness of the inner man. Now the Church of England, intensely Protestant as it seemed until the other day, is not Protestant in any of these respects. No established national church could possibly be so. The subjection to Parliament which renders the English church not Catholic, renders it also not Protestant. To a primitive Christian, to a puritan reformer or to a transcendental mystic, a religion established by lay authority is a contradiction in terms; a lay government may be more or less inspired by righteousness, but it cannot mediate salvation. A Protestant is essentially a nonconformist. Moreover, if we examine the theology of the English church, we see that whilst incidentally very heretical, it is still fundamentally Catholic; it admits only a single deposit of faith and one apostolic fountain of grace for all mankind. But in its view heresy in any branch of the church does not cut it off from the tree. Heresy is something to which all churches are liable; the pope of Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople fall into it hardly less often or less desperately than the archbishop of Canterbury himself. Heresy is to be conceived as eccentricity within the fold, not as separation from it; it is the tacking of the ship on its voyage. Saint Peter or Saint Paul or both of them must have been heretical in their little controversies; and Christ himself must have had at times, if not always, but a partial view of the truth; for instance, in respect to the date and the material nature of his second coming. Accordingly, although it may be a little trying to the nerves, it is no essential scandal that a curate should be addicted to Mariolatry, or that a dean should be unfortunately ambiguous on the subject of the Incarnation: such rapids and backwaters in the stream of Christian thought only prove how broad and full it is capable of being.