W. Morrison.
Rev. G. Style.
This letter was received by the Headmaster on March 2. The effect of such news coming without any previous warning can be imagined. The difficulty of commemorating the Diamond Jubilee year had seemed overwhelming and this unexpected offer from Mr. Walter Morrison dissipated the troubles in a moment. In the second place a School Chapel had alone been wanting to complete the seclusion and privacy of the School, and hitherto the prospect of such a building had seemed unattainable. It was now offered as a gift.
WALTER MORRISON J.P.
Mr. Morrison had recently returned from travelling in the East and had been greatly impressed by one particular feature of Eastern Architecture. The dome is almost universal in Palestine, and Mr. Morrison desired that an architectural experiment should be made in England. He wished to see the School Chapel built in the Gothic Style but with a dome. Mr. T. G. Jackson, R.A., was approached upon the subject and remembering that his former Master, Sir Gilbert Scott, had always hoped to undertake such a work, he gladly made his plans.
The aim of all the best Architecture is to construct a building of such a kind that it will withstand the ruin of the ages and will prove an opportunity for doing well whatever it is built for. The purpose of a house is that a man should be able to live in it. The essence of a church is that it should provide a place of worship. It is easy enough to construct a four-square building with accommodation for a required number of people but brick walls are not sufficient. Utility does not consist only in adequate space; it has many other features, closely inwoven with it. Fitness is the keynote of beauty. Taken by themselves there is little beauty to be seen in two parallel straight iron lines running through the country-side, but conceive of them as railway lines, adequately and without any unnecessary waste of material performing the office for which they were made, and few sights can be more charged with the very essence of beauty. The purpose that underlies the construction and the complete fulfilment of that purpose is beauty.
But a Church cannot be content only with a building sufficiently well-built to hold its worshippers and sufficiently in tone with its surroundings to express the unity of art and nature. It has a further form of expression that it must satisfy. It is a religious building, and as such its characteristics and its form must exemplify religious tendencies and thought. A barn can be supremely beautiful, but it does not radiate the atmosphere of worship. A Church must be characterized by certain great and instinctive elements of grandeur, it must breathe the spirit of reverence, it must, as Ruskin says, "speak well and say the things it was intended to say in the best words." Giggleswick School Chapel may justly be said to fulfil all these conditions. It is in harmony with its surroundings, and it is a structure of great architectural beauty, that is to say, it expresses its purpose in the best way.
