NAVE.
Again, just as the central dome dictates the plan of the church, so it should dictate the form of the vaulted roof. There were three types of vault at Wren’s disposal. One was the intersecting vault, a second the domical vault, a third the waggon or tunnel vault. The first is altogether out of harmony with a central dome, though Wren has employed it in some of his City churches. What he adopted was the second: he vaulted the nave with a row of four domes, the choir with a row of three. Thus, it might be thought, with seven domes leading up to a central dome, Wren had secured harmony and success. It is not so. Nothing can be more distressing to the eye than to follow the up and down line of the little domes till it suddenly plunges into the central abyss. The only tolerable form of vault in connection with a central dome is the tunnel vault, as it is employed in St. Peter’s, Rome; or, still better, in S. Annunziata, Genoa. Such a tunnel vault, however, should start direct from the cornice, and not, as at St. Paul’s, from a meaningless attic interposed between cornice and vault.
CHOIR.
As it stands, in the internal elevation of the cathedral Wren has given us a hybrid design. It reminds one of Gothic, for there is a travesty of a clerestory; it is Classic, for beneath is a gigantic Order. Wren has hesitated between two opinions. He might have given us a three-storied interior—pier-arcade, triforium and clerestory—of course with Classical detail, as is done with charming effect in the noble cathedral at Pavia; or a one-storied interior, as at St. Peter’s. As his patrons insisted on having aisles, he might well have adopted the former alternative, and have presented us with what might have been very beautiful—a Classical triforium. If he wanted the majesty of the single gigantic Order of St. Peter’s, he should have omitted the attic, run up the Order twenty feet higher, and lighted the nave by lunettes cut through a tunnel vault. As it is, the miserable attic is of no value in itself, and at the same time diminishes the importance of the pier arcade. However, as we have seen, Wren is not responsible at all for the plan, and only partially for the proportions of the interior of St. Paul’s. He has not given us of his best, because the world of his day would not have it. Most of the defects that one laments are absent from his earlier and favourite design: e.g., the ugly subsidiary arches under the oblique arches of the octagon of the dome, and the bad lighting of the dome itself.
LOOKING WEST.
Externally everything is different. No ritual, Anglican or other, interfered. Wren had free play: all his success and any faults are his own. What it fails to do internally the great dome does externally with colossal success: it dominates everything—not only the church, but London. Every part of the vast building gathers up into the all-compelling unity of the central dome. Inside, St. Paul’s is all church; outside, it is all dome. Into this exterior has grown in concrete embodiment all Wren’s aspirations: his aspirations for grandeur, massiveness, and power; for monumental stability, for unity, for harmony, for symmetry and proportion, for beauty of curve and line. St. Paul’s has none of the airy lightness of Salisbury and Lincoln; it possesses in compensation the rock-hewn solidity and majesty of Durham. In Lincoln and Salisbury, and in Exeter and York, the windows are counted by hundreds; along the flanks of St. Paul’s windows are few and far apart, and they are confined to the aisles; the great screen-wall above rises sheer like a precipice, almost unbroken by an opening. Simple and grand, too, is the handling of the masses. At the re-entering angles of the transepts square masses project to form a stable platform for the mighty dome; towers project to the flanks of the western bays of the nave, giving breadth and dignity to the main façade. Otherwise the design is symmetry itself. Everything is in the “grand manner.” Perhaps the side-elevation is a little monotonous, and the western chapels block off the towers at their spring, but they were forced on Wren against his better judgment: internally the nave gains greatly; externally they are a mistake. One would perhaps have liked also that the screen-wall of the side aisles of the choir and transepts, instead of ending square, should have circled round in one vast majestic sweep, in harmony with the curving dome above, after the fashion of the fine cathedral of Como. The flatness, moreover, of the side-elevations gives but little room for play of light and shade. There are none of the pits of darkness that lurk between the buttresses and transepts of Beverley or Lincoln. Only in the recessed west front and behind the colonnade of the dome the shadows brood. Nature, however, or rather London smoke, has given St. Paul’s a chiaroscuro of its own—not to be washed off, as has been foolishly proposed, by Vandal fire-engines. Where the rain lashes the building, especially its angles and projections, the good Portland stone is white and clean; where sheltered by projecting cornices it is black as Erebus.
