The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London.
FROM THE SOUTH.
From Lincoln and Lichfield to St. Paul’s, the transition is vast and abrupt. It is a transition from the archaic, mediæval, feudal world to modern England. Mediæval religion, mediæval art is dead—killed by the printed book. Mediæval architecture also succumbs before the printed book. The master-masons of the old cathedrals, whose very names for the most part are unknown, give place to architects of European fame—men who read books, write books, and work to book. The mediæval architect was a builder and nothing else. The Renaissance architect was first of all a scholar, and secondly an artist; and only incidentally an architect. He learnt the art of architectural design, not in the builder’s yard, but by preference at the goldsmith’s bench. From jewellery he turned with equal facility to painting and sculpture, to civil engineering or to the art of fortification, to water-colours, to stage mechanism, to landscape gardening, to poetry, politics or diplomacy. Among the men of this versatile genius Christopher Wren holds a worthy place. He proceeded to Oxford at the early age of fourteen; and obtained a fellowship at All Souls’. Physical science and astronomy were his first love. At the age of twenty-five “he was known in scientific circles all over Europe,” and was Professor of Astronomy. He wrote on comets, and gnomonicks, and diplographic pens. In his twenty-ninth year he was honoured with the degrees of D.C.L. and LL.D. at Oxford and Cambridge. He helped to found the Royal Society, and was twice its President. He was even a Member of the House of Commons in two Parliaments. In his thirty-first year he turned his attention to architecture—attracted, no doubt, largely by the physical and mathematical problems involved. Two years later he set out to the Continent to see for himself the great works of the Revival of Classical Architecture. Unfortunately he went no farther than Paris: those masterpieces of the Renaissance, Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence, Michael Angelo’s dome at Rome, he was fated never to see. For the rest of a life unusually prolonged he was to be occupied in imitating models which he had never seen. The result is perhaps not to be regretted. He left behind him not the close copy of Italian Renaissance work which we might have had, under more favourable circumstances, from Inigo Jones, but an English Renaissance style of marked individuality and originality, and therefore of great interest. He had to think out all his problems—problems of construction and problems of planning—for himself.
WEST FRONT.
Wren, like his employers, the citizens of the City of London was a sound Protestant; and when he was commissioned to rebuild St. Paul’s after the Great Fire, his intention was to give London a Protestant cathedral. He was less concerned to provide processional aisles and altared chapels than a vast unencumbered central area for preaching. The new cathedral was to be a gigantic preaching-house. To provide the vast central area demanded, the narrow crossing beneath the central tower of a Gothic cathedral was abandoned. Instead of a central tower he resolved to employ a dome—the only form of roof which would cover so vast a span. One mediæval cathedral in England, and one only, had such a crossing. It was the superb cathedral of Ely, where Wren’s uncle was Bishop. But it was no doubt of St. Peter’s, Rome, that Wren was thinking, rather than of Ely. Just as St. Peter’s, Rome, had been built to rival and surpass the Florence Duomo, so Wren designed that his own new cathedral should be an improvement on St. Peter’s, Rome. In the supports of his dome he chose to follow the unhappy precedents of Florence and Ely rather than the nobler type of St. Peter’s and Santa Sophia; he blocked up his central area with eight piers, instead of poising his dome on four supports, as in the metropolitan cathedrals of the East and West.
AS FIRST PROJECTED.
In Wren’s favourite design, as shown in the model still preserved in the cathedral, the dome was to be abutted to the west by an aisleless vestibule or nave, itself crowned by a minor dome; while to the north, east, and south, it was intended to give it the support of a surrounding ring of domical chapels, opening into the central area by a series of fairy-like vistas and ever-changing contrasts of light and shadow. But the Anglican clergy rose in revolt at the position assigned to them in the cathedral—a position contrary to any precedent of the Anglican Church; and refused to sit in a ring all round the central area beneath the dome. On the other hand, the Court party, almost openly expecting, and with good reason, the restoration of the old religion, wanted an aisled nave with room for the pageantry of processions and with provision of chapels for the saint-worship soon to be restored. Romanisers and Anglicans alike united to condemn a plan which failed to provide for the ritualistic needs of either. Wren had to start again; and London had to put up with a Renaissance cathedral which in plan is as mediæval as that of Ely, with aisled nave, aisled choir, aisled transepts, and even with a western transept, as again at Ely. St. Paul’s then, is primarily, an aisled (i.e. a basilican) church, with, incidentally, a dome thrown in. And therein lies the fault of the design. Internally, the church predominates over the dome. Unless you stand beneath or almost beneath the dome, you can hardly see that a dome is there at all. Narrow nave, narrower aisles, the multiplied obstructive masses of the various piers, hide the dome away from view. Rightly designed, a great central dome ought to be all in all; everything should lead up to it; everything should be suppressed that does not lend it strength or grace. Its thrusts are great, and cannot be resisted by the piers of aisles, unless the piers are positive mountains of masonry; aisles, then, should be omitted. The dome should rest on four arches, and their thrusts should be resisted by the solid walls of the unaisled nave and choir and the two transepts. And these four great limbs of the church should be kept short, to give the dome full value.