FORGOTTEN SATIRISTS
By ALDOUS HUXLEY
ALL readers of the literary Press must often have noticed that the most ardently contested and the most prolonged controversies, among all those that fill correspondence columns with the rumour of inkpot wars, turn almost invariably upon subjects remote from actuality and of a nature profoundly trivial. Questions of philology and spelling, questions of dates and names and little odd facts—it is on such circumscribed arenas that month-long combats clash and sway and would go on clashing and swaying for ever if it were not for the editor's tyrannically-imposed peace. To the practical man, intent on the immediate, as well as to the philosopher in his abstract world of ideas, this preoccupation with facts that are irrelevant both to the money-maker and the seeker after truth seems at first sight quite incomprehensible. But the explanation is simple. We have leisure and we hate being bored. We must find something that will keep our mind busy without exhausting it. We might, to be sure, occupy ourselves by studying the Einstein theory; but the effort, the agony of trying to think abstractly! No, decidedly the Einstein theory is too much of a good thing. So we fall back on stamp collecting or on what is more absorbing even than stamp collecting—on the inexhaustible past. We turn to history, not for any ambitious Wellsian ideas about humanity, but for the anecdotes, the innumerable bits of Notes and Queryish information which a little patience and curiosity can pick up like shells on a dry beach. How pleasant it is and how restful, after an effort of abstract reasoning (if one has been unwise enough to make that effort), to turn to Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature or to the Literary Recreations of Sir Edward Cook! We are amused, absorbed, instructed, and all without the least expense of spirit. What song the sirens sang, what were Mr. Gladstone's favourite Latin quotations—these things we learn and a thousand more, pleasantly, effortlessly, without tears.
This, then, is my excuse and justification for directing attention to an incident so remote as the Popish Plot, to men so obscure as Settle and Pordage and Flecknoe—their very names are absurd, Dickensian. These long-dead days of controversy fairly bristle with curiosities of literature. We catch glimpses of odd fantastic men performing odd fantastic actions. We see, thrown up by the storm of political passion, strange traits of human psychology that float on the surface like grotesque fishes of the depths dislodged by a submarine earthquake. And so, as we cannot all be Newtons or Empedocleses, let us content ourselves with small things, finding the occupation and amusement we desire in the anecdotes and old wives' tales of history, so pleasant, so futile, so absorbingly human.
Our purpose is to do justice—a little more than justice, it may be—to a few of the minor characters in the drama of the Popish Plot. But with the best will in the world it is impossible not to mention the hero of the piece; Dryden is the Prince of Denmark of the Plot, and without at least a casual reference to his part the play has no sense at all.
Our curtain, then, goes up on the Autumn of 1681; for, in the approved style, we plunge in medias res. The Earl of Shaftesbury is in the Tower on a charge of High Treason. A Bill of Indictment is to be presented against him. It was in anticipation of this event and with the deliberate intention of turning public opinion against Shaftesbury that, on November 17th, Dryden published Absalom and Achitophel.
This was not by any means the first time that Shaftesbury had been attacked. For the past two years the Tory pamphleteers had made him the target of their most envenomed shafts. One at least of these anonymous satires, A Modest Vindication of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a Letter to a Friend concerning his being elected King of Poland, is worthy to be rescued from oblivion. Like almost every pamphleteer of the time, the author of this Modest Vindication seizes on the story that Shaftesbury had offered himself as a candidate for the throne vacated by the death of John Sobieski. The pamphlet opens with an admirable ironic eulogy of the Earl for "his unshaken obedience to every government he has been concerned in or lived under; his steady adherence to every religion that had but hopes to be established." We are now shown the Polish Diet debating on the choice of a king, who shall be capable not only of ruling Poland, but also of conquering and converting the Turk. "Upon these considerations you may imagine the eyes of the whole Diet were turned upon little England, and there upon whom so soon as the little lord of Shaftesbury?" The new king, Anthony I., draws up a list of the attendants whom he proposes to take with him. There is, of course, "Prince Prettyman Perkinoski (Monmouth), to cure the plica or King's evil of this country, in case our own majesty should fail of that virtue"; and finally, at the end of the list, "Jean Drydenurtzitz ... our Poet Laureate, for writing panegyrics upon Oliver Cromwell and libels against his present master, King Charles II."; and to be his deputy no less than Tom Shadworiski" (Shadwell). This tract, it must be remembered, was written after the production of The Spanish Friar and before the publication of Absalom and Achitophel. The author of the "Protestant Play" might still be thought to be a Whig.
The pamphlet ends up with the account of a vision wherein the king-elect sees first the figure of the Whore of Babylon, which changes into that of a murdered Justice of the Peace (Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey), "strangled by a crew of ruffians, who afterwards ran him through with his own sword, that it might be thought he hanged himself." This gives place to a troop of pilgrims armed with black bills (these pilgrims were one of the happiest products of Oates's rich imagination); and they in turn are followed by the hideous vision of the Doctor of Salamanca, Oates himself. All this so deeply impresses King Anthony that he gives up his imperial ambitions, preferring the task of confounding the Pope at home to that of converting the Turks in Poland.
To this same Polish legend and to a certain physical peculiarity, which was the delight of the Tory satirists, Shaftesbury owed one of his most popular nicknames, "Tapski." The "ski" was Polish, but the "Tap" was English and had a real existence. Shaftesbury suffered from an internal abscess, which had to be kept drained by a silver tube let into his side. For the Tories this tap represented all that was most loathsome, most repulsive, most Whiggish. They exulted in descriptions of it. When Shaftesbury wanted to make himself look important, so one pamphleteer assures us, he had only to turn off the tap in order to swell up to a prodigious size. Shaftesbury's Tap and that mysterious Black Box, reputed to contain the certificate of a marriage between Charles II. and Lucy Waters, were the two symbolic objects on which public imagination most greedily seized.
Dryden's satire was issued anonymously. But its authorship was evidently an open secret, for within three weeks of its publication a reply, called Towser the Second, in which Dryden is named as the author, made its appearance. The writer of this piece was the Whig journalist, Henry Care, "whose breeding," says Anthony Wood, "was in the nature of a petty Fogger, a little despicable Wretch, afterwards much reflected upon for a poor snivelling Fellow in the Observators published by Rog: L'Estrange." This person had been the writer of a newspaper entitled The Weekly Paquets of News from Rome, an anti-Catholic journal started in the height of the excitement caused by Titus Oates's evidence. He had been tried in 1680 for libelling Justice Scroggs. His later history is the sadly common tale of the poor Grub Street hack: at the accession of James II. "for bread and Money sake, and nothing else," he passed over to the side in power and turned his pen against the Protestants. Towser the Second is as little and despicable as its author. Towser-Dryden, brother to the original bad dog, Towser-L'Estrange, suffering from a worm "that of the Jebusites smells very strong," runs mad, snarls and snaps at all he meets, treats the whole world, the King included, "à la mode de Billingsgate."
Care's poem is only less stupid than the ponderous Some Reflections upon a late poem, by a Person of Honour, which appeared a few days later. The Person of Honour was Dryden's old enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. Goaded to exasperation by the onslaught made upon him in Absalom and Achitophel, Buckingham set out to overwhelm Dryden under mountains of moral indignation. He succeeded only in proving conclusively that his own share in The Rehearsal, in its own way a masterpiece, must have been extremely small.
Early in 1682 The Reflections were followed by Samuel Pordage's Azaria and Hushai. Twenty years before Pordage had proved himself the possessor of a certain ingenuity by his feat of turning the philosophy of Jacob Boehme into English-rhymed couplets. There are even a few passable passages in the Mundorum Explicatio. But in this satire of his later years he seems to have lost such cunning as he may once have possessed. The sole merit of the piece is a certain dull restraint of language, an avoidance of the drosser scurrilities. He is very temperate, for instance, in what he says of Dryden:
The falling glory of the Jewish stage.
Sweet was the Muse that did his wit inspire,
Had he not let his hackney Muse for hire.
Zimri, we know, he had no cause to praise,
Because he dubb'd him with the name of Bayes,
Because he durst with his proud wit engage,
And brought his follies on the public stage.
But the next Whig satire to appear has real merits. Settle's Absalom Senior is the one good thing produced by the Whigs in their battle with Dryden. Dryden himself had grudgingly to admit that Settle was something of a poet.
Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blundering kind of melody;
Spurred boldly on and dashed through thick and thin,
Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
Free from all meaning, whether good or bad
And in a word, heroically mad.
He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
But fagoted his notions as they fell,
And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well.
This is not altogether just. The verse of Absalom Senior does more than rhyme and rattle; it has a music of its own, and there are passages that are curiously Elizabethan in their conception and execution. Take, for example, this character of the Duke of York, the Absalom Senior of the poem:
The mercy and the clemency divine,
Those sacred sparks, which in mild David shine,
Were all put out and left a starless night.
A long farewell to all that's good and brave!
Not cataracts more headstrong; as the grave
Inexorable; sullen and untuned
As Pride deposed; not Lucifer unthroned
More unforgiving.
It is hardly credible that this should have been written in 1682. It reads like the work of some minor poet in the "giant age before the flood," a contemporary of the grave Lord Brooke. Here again is something no poet of the Restoration has any business to write, a simile in which Settle compares the papist plotter to the alchemist:
Who though he see his bursting limbecks crack,
And at one blast, one fatal minute's wrack,
The forward hope of sweating years expire,
With sad, yet painful, hand new-lights the fire.
Pale, lean and wan, does health, wealth, all consume;
And for the great elixir yet to come
Toils and hopes on.
The poem opens with a history of the ceaseless Catholic efforts, ever since the time of Henry VIII., to recapture England for the old faith. This serves as a preface to the main body of the piece, which deals with the Popish Plot. There is the usual portrait gallery, imitated from Absalom and Achitophel, of the most important figures on either side. This spirited description of Lauderdale is worth quoting:
Let not that hideous bulk of honour 'scape,
Nadab that sets the gazing crowds agape;
The old kirk-founder, whose hoarse croak could sing
The Saints, the Cause, no Bishop and no King.
By the triumphant Saul he was employed
A huge fang-tusk to gore poor David's side,
Like a proboscis in the tyrant's jaw
To rend and root through government and law.
Settle mentions Dryden in connection with Amiel, the Duke of Buckingham. It is pleasant to note that, like Pordage, he pays tribute, albeit a somewhat equivocal one, to Dryden's poetical genius:
But Amiel had, alas, the fate to hear
An angry poet play his chronicler;
A poet rais'd above oblivion's shade,
By his recorded verse immortal made.
No muse could more heroic deeds rehearse;
H' had with an equal, all-applauding verse
Great David's sceptre and Saul's javelin praised.
A pyramic to his saint Interest he rais'd.
The rest of the remarks about Dryden are not so edifying; they refer to that subject, so fruitful of raillery, the poet's marriage with Lady Howard, whom Settle, repeating scandal, describes as
Laura, in faithful constancy confined
To Ethiop's envoy and to all mankind.
The poem ends with a long list of eulogies addressed to the chiefs of the Country Party, dull as such eulogies always are and are always bound to be. For, while we listen to abuse and defamation of almost any kind with pleasure, we are apt to find the recital of a man's virtues extremely tedious; a fact well known to newspaper proprietors, for whom moral indignation—or mud slinging, for the terms are usually synonymous—is spiritual meat and drink, as well as material bread-and-butter.
The publication of Absalom Senior was the high-water mark of Settle's life. In 1673, at the age of twenty-five, he had all the appearances of a great man: he was the author of The Empress of Morocco. But he was very definitely one of those who have had greatness thrust upon them. The success of his fantastic tragedy, gravely judged by the most advanced undergraduate opinion of the day to be superior to anything Dryden had written, was wholly due to the prodigies of log-rolling performed by that shifty and malicious patron of the arts, Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester, who had for a time bestowed his favours upon Dryden, suddenly threw him over and exalted Elkanah Settle in his place. He had The Empress of Morocco specially produced at Court before its appearance on the public stage, and himself contributed a Prologue. The "boom" was so well organised that the public for a time actually took Elkanah seriously. The Empress and her infamous gallant, Grimalhaz, stamped about the stage giving rhymed utterance to sentiments of an unheard of turpitude.
Grimalhaz: Have you considered, madam, what you've done?
Empress: Poisoned my husband, sir, and if you need
Examples to instruct you in the deed,
I'll make my actions plainer understood,
Copying his death on all the royal blood.
Loud and prolonged applause, bursting out again with redoubled fury when the Empress hisses into the ear of this new Macbeth:
and your next step t'a throne
Must be, dear sir, the murder of my son.
The applause died away and with it the cat-calls of Settle's three envious rivals, Dryden, Crowne, and Shadwell. Then came Absalom Senior, and for its author the deserved laureateship of Whiggery. But a year later things took an awkward turn for the Country Party; Settle recanted and wrote a history of the Popish Plot, in which he gave Oates his full due as a scoundrel. When James II. came to the throne he wrote a fawning Coronation Ode in the hope of placating one whom he had himself so short a time before called "inexorable as the grave." He even went so far as to publish a panegyric of Judge Jefferies. Inch by inch he was sinking deeper into the slough of Grub Street. With the Revolution he gave up politics (they seemed altogether too unsafe) and applied for the post of City Laureate. Lord Mayor's Shows were now immortalised to the extent of "living in Settle's numbers one day more." Grown old and very miserable, he was reduced to writing puppet plays, better works of art—who knows?—than the proud Empress of his youth; and we find him at last "hissing in his own dragon" at Bartholomew Fair. He was seventy-six when he died in 1724, having survived long enough to be the target of Pope's barbed malice.
Absalom Senior closes the first act of the drama. The second opens with Dryden's Medal. This personal attack on Shaftesbury roused more fury among the Whigs than even Absalom and Achitophel. In a single day Edmund Hickeringill wrote and sent to press a long retort called The Mushroom. "... And if any man think or say that it is a wonder if this book and verses were composed and writ in one day, and sent to the press, since it would employ the pen of a ready writer to copy this book in a day—it may be so. But it is a truth, as certain as the sun in the firmament, and which, if need be, the bookseller, printer, and other worthy citizens that are privy to it can avouch for an infallible truth—Deo soli gloria—when a divine hand assists, one of despicable, dull and inconsiderate parts may do wonders, which God usually performs by most weak and unlikely instruments." Hickeringill is a charming character; but he hardly comes within the scope of our article. He is not so much a man of letters as a mental case.
Pordage once again stepped forward and dealt a perfectly ineffective blow. He was followed by a new and more truculent champion, Shadwell. Shadwell laid about him with a will. Of Dryden's poetical powers he says condescendingly: "He has an easiness in rhyme and a knack of versifying and can make a slight thing seem pretty and clinquant." On the other hand, he is wholly lacking in originality, and even in his satires has done nothing but "turn the Observator into rhyme." When he is not writing in rhyme, "in which he has a kind of excellence," he is completely insipid. He has no sense of comedy.
Thou never mak'st, but art a standing Jest.
So much for Dryden's literary reputation; now for his character. At this point Shadwell throws the moral indignation about so freely that we are forced to hold our noses and to avert our eyes.
Left scathless by the clumsy grossness of Shadwell's attack, Dryden retorted murderously with MacFlecknoe.
But enough of Shadwell. He has his meed of fame and recognition. His body lies in Westminster Abbey and his plays have been resurrected in the "Mermaid" Edition. Who was Flecknoe? What manner of man was that grandiose figure who
In Prose and Verse was own'd without dispute
Through all the realms of Non-sense, absolute?
There must be many who, like myself, have cherished a sneaking hope that this is an ungenerous judgment, that Flecknoe is not so bad after all. Might one not even discover him, edit him, unearth buried beauties? Alas, one has but to read a few of his many works to realise that Dryden was only speaking the modest truth!
We catch our first glimpse of him at some date about the year 1645, when Andrew Marvell, on his travels in Rome, climbed up three pair of stairs and
found at last a chamber, as 'twas said,
But seemed a coffin set on the stair's head,
the lodgment of Richard Flecknoe, Irishman, priest, poet, and musician. A strange figure:
as thin
He stands, as if he only fed had been
With consecrated wafers, and the Host
Hath sure more flesh and blood than he can boast;
This basso-relievo of a man—
Who, as a camel tall, yet easily can
The needle's eye thread through without any stitch.
No sooner is Marvell within the basso-relievo's clutches than
Straight, without further information
In hideous verse, he, in a dismal tone,
Begins to exorcise, as if I were
Possessed;
and so it goes on
Till the tyrant, weary to persecute,
Left off and tried to allure me with his lute.
Desperate measures have now to be taken; Marvell asks the man to dinner and for a little time, at least, secures a respite. But not for long; the poet,
Satisfied with eating, but not tame,
Turns to recite; though judges most severe,
After the assizes' dinner, mild appear
And on full stomach do condemn but few,
Yet he more strict my sentence doth renew,
And draws out of the black box of his breast
Ten quire of paper, in which he was dressed.
It is a sad example of that all too frequent inconsistency between a man's art and life that the best poem Flecknoe ever wrote should be To Silence:
Still-born Silence, thou that art
Floodgate of the deeper heart,
Offspring of a heavenly kind,
Frost oth' mouth and thaw oth' mind.
There is a certain absurd charm about this reckless mixture of conceits, a charm which would have melted Marvell's heart, if he had heard the piece, as it later melted Lamb's. For what is almost the first and the last time, Flecknoe's poetic method, which is the method of Marvell himself and of all the seventeenth-century metaphysicals reduced to the absurd, actually comes off. Only once again was he ever to produce anything faintly resembling poetry, and that is in this stanza about the ant:
That small republique too, at home,
Where thou'rt perhaps some magistrate—
Little think'st thou, when thou dost come,
There's greater in the world than that.
But this is exceptional; his average poetic level is exemplified by such lines as:
Now to the woodlands, now to th' champains, where
With subtile nets and pitfalls slyly made
She innocently silly fowls betrayed,
While the more lofty inhabitants oth' skies
Sh' allured to ground with brightness of her eyes,
or by that astonishing couplet on Phœbus, which runs:
From 's harnessing of 's horses in the East,
Unto 's unharnessing of them in the West.
From Rome Flecknoe carried his juvenile verses to Constantinople, to Portugal, to Brazil, to Flanders. But no amount of travel could cure him of his fatal habit of writing. Re-established in England after the Restoration, he turned an unlimited leisure to the worst account. He was the author of four plays, only one of which was put upon the stage, and that was duly damned. He contented himself by printing the others with a list of the actors he would have liked to see in the different parts, if he had been able to get them performed—a touching piece of naïveté which does much to endear him to us.
Of his prose works the most ambitious is a little collection of Enigmaticall Characters, of which perhaps the choicest is this on the Drunkard. The Drunkard's wit "is rather the hog's-head than his own, savouring more of Heidelberg than of Helican and he being rather a drunken than a good companion."
Flecknoe dies, like the lady on whose decease he wrote an ode, "died as having nothing else to do," in the year 1678.
Such was Flecknoe. Shadwell's claim to being ranked as Flecknoe's son is amply substantiated by his own protest that in MacFlecknoe "he had been represented as an Irishman, though Mr. Dryden knew very well that he had not set eyes on the country till he was three and twenty and had remained in it then only for four months."
Dryden followed up MacFlecknoe with the character of Og in the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel. Shadwell was unable to reply; he could only faintly complain.
With Part the Second of Absalom and Achitophel the drama of the Popish Plot comes to an end. The curtain falls on this last orgy of murder. All the minor characters are now dead—for Doeg and Mephibosheth lie bleeding by the side of the monstrous Og—and only the hero remains alive. Turning with a bow to the audience, he delivers the epilogue, in which he explains, with the best of good humour, exactly why it is that he, Dryden, is still alive and all the rest lie punctured about him.
"How easy it is," so runs the epilogue, "how easy it is to call rogue and villain, and that wittily! But how hard to make a man appear a fool, a blockhead, or a knave, without using any of these opprobrious terms! There is still a vast difference between the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place. A man may be capable, as Jack Ketch's wife said of his servant, of a plain piece of work, a bare hanging; but to make a malefactor die sweetly was only belonging to her husband. I wish I could apply it to myself, if the reader would be kind enough to think it belongs to me."
[ARCHITECTURE AS FORM IN CIVILISATION]
By PROFESSOR W. R. LETHABY
TOWNS and Civilisation are two words for nearly one thing; the City is the manifestation of the spirit and its population is the larger body it builds for its soul. To build cities and live in them properly is the great business of large associations of men. The outward and the made must always be exact pictures of the mind and the makers. Not only is this so at any given stage, but it is so all the more in a going concern, for the outward is always reacting again on the inward, so that the concrete becomes a mould for the spiritual. Man builds towns so that the towns shall build his sons. As the old Greek said, "The city teaches the man."
William Morris says somewhere that the religions of antiquity were the worshipping of cities. It may seem strange this idea of city worship, but it explains much in the history of art, and we need something of similar sort even now: this and other worships besides and beyond. Before the recognition of the universal and the national we require a much deepened sense of the civic. Here comes before the Beyond. Almost the greatest question of the time is the one of finding wells for the refreshment of our vitality—the inducing of national spirit, town spirit, and home spirit. Such spirit is a very subtle essence, and yet it dwells in houses and cities are its reservoirs. In the Army it has always been recognised that the foundation of the whole vast violent business is spirit. The children of war are wiser than the children of peace. As an example take this scrap from the experience of a new soldier: "The private is taught from the beginning that the first duty of a soldier is obedience, the second cleanliness, and the third may be gathered from this short dialogue between a drill sergeant and a squad of recruits:
"What is the third duty of a soldier?" asks the sergeant. "Honesty, sobriety, and self-respect," we reply. "And what is self-respect?" "Keeping your buttons bright."
We know that Jerusalem was a sacred city, and so was Athens too in its way. So indeed were all the cities of antiquity, each in its proper status. In the later classical age every one had its impersonation of sculptured image—the Tyche of the City. Fragments of a figure of Silchester were found in the Basilica of the old British town; an image which stood for the genius of the place. London and York were also sacred in those Roman days, and the figure on our pennies is a similar Roman imagination for the whole country, Britannia. A fine inscription from Ephesus in the Central Hall of the British Museum is a delightful example of the forms and ceremonies observed by the proud cities of antiquity—the ritual prescribed for their worship in fact. This marble slab, about 7 feet by 3½ feet, bears in large clear lettering the copy of a letter addressed by Antoninus Pius to the Magistrates and People of Ephesus c. A.D. 140. The emperor approved that the people of Pergamon had written letters to Ephesus correctly addressed with the prescribed titles (First and Greatest Metropolis of Asia, or the like). He thinks that the People of Smyrna had accidentally omitted this from a decree about joint sacrifice, but they will behave correctly in future provided that the Ephesians use the approved titles in writing to Smyrna (pre-eminent in beauty or the like). This is indeed politeness on a high plane.
One of the ways in which civic spirit, pride, and love must be refounded is in the sense of historical continuity. Such a sense of regional reverence is being cultivated in France on a definitely psychological basis, and those alert Americans have already begun to work the ground of their antiquities. A publication of a local historical society, issued as far back as 1900, contains an account of what they in America call "An Old Ipswich House." It begins with some words which I must quote: "The extraordinary production and large circulation of the historical novel is but one of the consequences of the remarkable growth of patriotic societies in this country in the last few years. One of the most admirable results of the movement is the widespread interest in the establishment of local historical societies in the old towns of New England. [Older towns of Old England, please note and copy.] These societies have a very fascinating work before them in the collection of local records, the preservation of old buildings, in the marking of historic sites. This soil is fertile and delving therein bears rich fruit of interest, love for the community, heightened civic feeling, encouragement of local improvement, and a care for the future of the town. In not a few places the local society has taken some old house for its headquarters, adorning it with attractive historical collections. Such a collection is that of the Bostonian Society, to which the city long ago gave the use of the Old State House." What might our English towns still do in this way! Or is it to be that for authentic touch with antiquity we shall soon have to go to America? In passing may I commend this idea to those who have the destruction of the old Dean's House at Wolverhampton in their mind or at least their power?
Germany has long consciously cultivated this field for spirit production, and I remember an official tract on the psychological value of Ancient Monuments in promoting national consciousness. It is in Denmark, however, that an effort to promote national spirit has been most systematically based on a common knowledge of national traditions, arts, and music, and spread by means of their admirable "Folk Schools."
Monumental history is a stirring, vital thing: it can be touched. In every town every child-citizen should know the story and antiquities of that place. This has always been the way until now. "What mean these stones?" the children say, and we answer, "I don't know." The history that can be seen is a strong and stimulating soul-food, entirely different from vague and wearying written history.
The historical starting-post is only one of many ways of approach to fine forms of civilisation; we must not wait on the order of our going, but go at once and from every point at once. Much is being thought and said about Housing and Town Planning; they are both of the greatest possible importance, but they are not all. We need at least a third to go with them—that is a general cleaning, tidying, and smartening movement, an effort to improve all our public and social arts, from music to cooking and games. We must control and tax advertisements to some order, bring pressure on the railway companies to sweep the microbes out of their stations, and we must whitewash our own backyards. The danger is to think of housing and planning as technical matters for experts. It may almost be feared that current talk of town planning and garden cities may harden with a jargon-like political formulæ. Our arts and customs are indexes and pictures of our inner life. Fine bridges, clean, smiling streets, liberal public buildings are not merely shapes and nothing more. They are essential to our sense of order, brightness, and efficiency, to our pride, confidence, and content. A sore protesting slapped-in-the-face feeling cannot be good for the temper and digestion. A civilised life cannot be lived in undisciplined towns.
*****
More and more we become the victims of our words and live frightened by names. Such a name is Architecture. In its mystery vague and vain pretensions may be shrouded, in its shadows hide many minor superstitions about correct design, the right style, true proportions. High priests arise who are supposed to know subtle doctrines and can point the way to æsthetic safety. And yet all the time there are the streets, Edgware Road and Euston Road, Oxford Street and Holborn; there again are our cities, Leeds and Liverpool, Bristol and Plymouth. Surely these potent and indeed blatant facts might raise doubts as to the dogmas. The mystification about "architecture" has isolated the intimate building art from the common interest and understanding of ordinary men. To talk with a believing architect on his theories is almost as hopeless as to chaff a cardinal. All the ancient arts of men are subject to the diseases of pedantry and punditry—music, painting, poetry all suffer from isolation.
Architecture is human skill and feeling shown in the great necessary activity of building. It must be a living, progressive structural art, always readjusting itself to changing conditions of time and place. If it is true it must ever be new. This, however, not with a willed novelty, which is as bad as or worse than trivial antiquarianism, but by response to force majeure. The vivid interest and awe with which men look on a ship or an engine, an old cottage or a haystack, come from the sense of their reality. They were shaped so by a higher power than whim, by a higher aim than snobbery. So must it again be with our buildings: they must be founded fast on the rock of necessity.
Wordy claims are often made for "Architecture" that it is a "Fine Art," and chief of all the arts. These two claims are indeed incompatible and contradictory. Any mastership in architecture depends on its universality and its service. It is only chief in the sense that he who serves is the greatest. But the "Fine Arts" are by definition free from conditions of human need, and architecture was specially ruled out from among them by Aristotle. Even so, this idea of fine art unconditioned and free for delight was a heresy of the Hellenistic decline. To Plato and the great masters even the "musical" arts were to be not only healthy but health-giving; they were to be foods for the soul and not æsthetic raptures and intoxications.
On the other side of the account it may be objected that bare utility and convenience are not enough to form a base for a noble architecture. Of course they are not if "bare utility" is interpreted in a mean and skimping and profiteering way. All work of man bears the stamp of the spirit with which it was done, but this stamp is not necessarily "ornament." The unadorned indeed can never stand as low as that which is falsely adorned in borrowed, brazen bedizenments. High utility and liberal convenience for noble life are enough for architecture. We confuse ourselves with these unreal and destructive oppositions between the serviceable and the æsthetic, between science and art. Consider any of the great forms of life activity—seamanship, farming, housekeeping—can anyone say where utility ends and style, order, clearness, precision begin? Up to a point, and indeed a long way on, "style" is a utility. We have to begin again and look on architecture as an art of service from the communal point of view. The faces of buildings which are turned outwards towards the world are obviously of interest to the public, and all citizens have a property in them. The spectator is in fact part owner. No man builds to himself alone. Let the proprietor do as he likes inside his building, for we need not call on him. Bad plays need not be seen, books need not be read, but nothing but blindness or the numbing of our faculty of observation can protect us from buildings in the street. It is to be feared that we are learning to protect ourselves by the habit of not observing, that is by sacrificing a faculty. General interest and intelligent appreciation of public arts are a necessity of civilisation. Civic alertness, honest pride, or firm protest are not matters of taste for a few; they are essential activities of the urban mind. In cities buildings take the place of fields, trees, and hedgerows. Buildings are an artificial form of nature. We have a right to consideration and some politeness in buildings. We claim protection from having our faces slapped when we venture into the street. Our cities do not wholly belong to profit-lords, railway companies, and advertisers.
Architecture, however "properly understood," not only concerns the man in the street, it comes home to all householders and households. While our eyes have been strained on the vacuity of correct style, the weightier matters of construction and efficiency have necessarily been neglected. We need grates which will warm, floors which may readily be cleaned, and ceilings which do not crack. These and such as these are the terms of the modern architectural problem, and in satisfying them we should find the proper "style" for to-day. Architecture is a current speech, it is not an art of classical quotation. As it is it is as much burdened by its tags of rhetoric as Chinese literature. It has become a dead language. The house of the future will be designed as a ship is designed, as an organism which has to function properly in all its parts. Does this not concern everyone, not only as economy and comfort, but in the mind? Our houses must be made to fit us like garments and to be larger projections of ourselves. A whole row of ambiguous words, such as design, ornament, style, proportion, have come between us and the immediately given data of architecture. Design is not abstract power exercised by a genius, it is simply the arranging how work shall be well done. The more necessary the work and the more obvious, simple, and sound is the foresight the better the design. It is not a question of captivating paper patterns, it is a question of buildings which will work. Architecture is a pragmatical art. To design in the Classic, Gothic, or Renaissance styles is as absurd as to sculpture in the manner of Praxiteles, paint "like" Holbein, or write sham Shakespeare. We do not really need a waxwork art by Wardour Street professionals. We require an active art of building which will take its "style" for granted, as does naval architecture. Modern building must shake itself free from its own withered and cast-off skins.
It is commonly supposed, and architects themselves in older days believed it, that an architect's business was to be an expert in style. Why he should be so was never explained, except, perhaps, by Philibert de l'Orme. According to this authority the Temple of Jerusalem was built in the Classical style, and this work was designed in heaven; therefore this was the only true or revealed style. An excellent argument; modern practitioners have kept up a "battle of the styles" without any such basis for their logic, or rather their eloquence. But what is or was a style? It is a museum name for a phase of past art. As a means of classifying what is dead and done the style labels are quite useful. It has, however, to be kept in mind that these styles, while they lived and moved, were processes which began, continued, and passed into something else. They were only phases like those of the changing moon. That which now professes to be designed in a style, or, as the still more disgusting slang runs, to be "period work," has not the essence of life. It is, therefore, not actually of the style which it simulates but is only in the "style" of the style.
Indeed, the essence of all the old arts was in their vitality, their response to the natural conditions and the psychology of their times. The better we seem to reproduce their dead images the more we are unlike their soul-selves. There is little more reason for an architect to pretend to work in a style than there is for a chemist. Architects are properly arrangers and directors of certain classes of structures. I would like to say that they were building engineers, were it not that our engineers have failed so shamefully in hiring themselves out for any form of exploitation and in showing no care for orderliness and decency. All the past of architecture, as of engineering and shipbuilding, belongs to us, of course, as race experience, but only as far as the same is true in all fields of science and literature.
The "Orders" of architecture are names for particular forms of ancient Greek temple building. Style-names apply to all past fashions of buildings, Orders only to three—Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. The names are useful as history, but that is all. Now that these Orders have become shop advertisements, even the would-be correct may be more ready to give them up.
Style in a modern and universal sense is equivalent rather to "stylish" than to a style; it interpenetrates the whole texture of a work; it is clearness, effectiveness, mastery, often it is simplification. We have to conceive of it in the building art as we do in literature or athletics. "The style is the man"—yes, and it is also the thing itself. It is an informing spirit, the spirit of form, it is not a varnish. We have become so accustomed to architecture looking "dressy" that we have forgotten the logic of clothes and bury buildings good enough in themselves under outgrown rags. It has been a true instinct which calls sham architectural features "dressings."
Another word which the architecturally superstitious whisper with great awe is proportion. In dealing with such a limited field as the "Orders," old scholars examined existing examples by measuring them very carefully to find out their proportions; but, if we had them, Greek chairs and tables might be measured in exactly the same way. No general rule of the Greeks has ever been found out by these measurings, and if it had it would prove nothing for us. Proportion, of course, rests properly on function, material, and size. There maybe a perfect proportion, for instance, for a certain class of ships, but that will only be discovered experimentally, and not by measuring Greek galleys.
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I wish I could find some leverage of argument to bring a sense of citizen responsibility for form in life into the minds and hearts of all, but right and reason are hardy enough. We may, perhaps, hope more in a sense of international rivalry in the works and evidences of life. Civilisation is an Olympic contest in the arts and sciences, a sort of international Eisteddfod. It is admitted that we must have literature and we must have music: we must also have building skill, and we have to aim at inducing a flowing tide in all the things of civilisation. Of words and arguments I am rather hopeless. One thing only I would ask of every benevolent reader: that he would take notice of what he sees in the streets. Do not pass by in a contemplative dream, or suppose that it is an architectural mystery, but look and judge. Is it tidy, is it civilised, are these fit works for a proud nation? Look at Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus, and that terrible junction of Tottenham Court Road with Oxford Street. Play a new game of seeing London. We need a movement in the common mind, a longing to mitigate the vulgarity and anarchy of our streets, and the smothering of the frontages with vile advertisements, a desire to clean the streets better, to gather up littered paper, to renew blistered plaster. Some order must be brought into the arrangement of the untidy festoons of telegraph and telephone wires hitched up to chimneys and parapets. These are the architectural works which are needed as a beginning and a basis. The idea of beauty, daily-bread beauty, not style pretences, must be brought back into our life. Every town should set up an advisory committee on its betterment. We must try to bring back the idea of town personality and town worship; we must set up ceremonies and even rituals to bring out a spirit of pride and emulation. If we can only stir up general interest all will yet go well or at least better. By exalting our towns we should make a platform for ourselves. As it is what can great money fortunes buy beyond swine comfort and titles? Man is more than a stomach moving about on legs. A mistake of modern education has been to train for appreciation of the past rather than for present production. Such merely critical learning comes at last to be actually sterilising. As production fails, so even appreciation decays. Full understanding depends on the power to do. Therefore, leaving the things of the past, press forward to produce, to be, to live. Remember Lot's wife. There is much talk of patriotism, but patriotism requires a ground on which to subsist; it must be based on love of home, love of city, and love of country. Let nothing deceive us, civilisation produces form, and where noble form is attained there is civilisation. Life is a process, a flow of being, and where there is this vital activity music, drama, and the arts are necessarily thrown off. Living art comes on a tide of creative intelligence.