The Bristol architect was an architectural Radical. When it came, however, to the question of vaulting the aisles he had not the courage of his convictions. Having constructed aisles unusually lofty and impressive, he immediately sets to work to make them look low and ordinary by a complicated, costly and unnecessary system of skeleton vaulting. He seems to have thought that without some method of reducing the apparent height of the aisles, the church would look like no other church; it would look not as if it had the ordinary aisled nave, but as if it had three naves side by side. He ought to have been thankful to have the means of making it look unlike other churches; and, as a matter of fact, a design of parallel naves has a most noble effect, as may well be seen in the nave of Warwick Church, built in the most debased Gothic of the seventeenth century, but one of the most impressive designs in the country, full of light and atmosphere.
A little later, but still in the Curvilinear period, the Berkeley chapel was built, projecting southward from the easternmost bay of the south aisle of the choir, and a sacristy by which it is approached. Here is more skeleton-vault and much elaborate carving. The Newton chapel was also built, projecting eastward from the south transept; and perhaps at the same time the simple vault of the adjacent bay of the choir aisle was put up. A curious and by no means pleasing characteristic of the Bristol fourteenth-century architecture is the series of sepulchral recesses in the walls; they remind one of the cloister doorway at Norwich.
VII. Perpendicular.—Early in the fifteenth century a central tower was added. Here again one is struck by the originality of the Bristol people; it is as beautiful as it is original. Fifteenth-century tower design rather runs in grooves. Gloucester, Evesham, Wrexham, Taunton, and the Somerset towers are cast very much in a mould. It is not so with the Bristol tower. The designer had noticed how beautiful is the effect of a close-packed range of tall clerestory windows, such as those of Leighton Buzzard Church. So, instead of restricting himself on each side of the tower to one or two windows, he inserts no less than three. The range of clerestory windows which the fourteenth-century builder refused to the choir becomes the special ornament and glory of the tower.
VIII. In 1888 the new nave and western towers were completed by Mr. Street. He can hardly be said to have made the most of his opportunities. The new work is copied closely from the old, and so is somewhat uninteresting. He had but to remedy some of the faults of the original design: to omit the ugly skeleton vaulting of the aisles, to simplify the vaulting of the choir, to discard the sepulchral recesses, to improve on the design of the windows of the choir—in which, as at Ely, flowing tracery is not seen at its best; and we should have had something original and interesting. The new nave might have been a criticism of the choir.
The Cathedral of Christ Church, Canterbury.
ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH.
The metropolitan cathedral of Canterbury owes its enthralling interest to its vastness of scale, its wealth of monuments, its treasures of early glass, the great historical scenes that have been enacted within its walls—above all, to that greatest of all historical tragedies to the mind of the mediæval Englishman, the murder of Becket. It does not owe its distinction to its architecture. Whole building periods are almost wholly unrepresented; for the century and a half when English design was at its best, the Canterbury authorities slumbered and slept. What we have is the result of two periods only, with some scraps incorporated from earlier Norman work. What is there is not of the best: the Perpendicular work can be bettered at Gloucester, Winchester, and York; the work in the choir, a foreign importation, is not equal to that of its prototype, the French cathedral of Sens. We have many heterogeneous cathedrals in England. In the rest there is ever an attempt, usually a successful attempt, as at Hereford, and Gloucester, and Wells, to weld the conflicting elements of the design into symmetry and harmony. Canterbury scornfully declines any attempt at composition. Transepts and turrets and pinnacles are plumped down anyhow and anywhere; to the east it finishes abruptly in the ruined crags of a vast round tower; to the west the towers of its façade were, till lately, as incongruous in character as in date. Externally, the lofty central tower alone gives some unity to the scattered masses; internally it is an assemblage of distinct and discordant buildings.