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MCMXXIII
Printed in Great Britain
PREFACE
This little book pretends to be neither a Life of Wren nor a detailed record of his achievement. His working years were more than seventy. At fifteen the inventor of a weather-clock and the author of a Theory of Trigonometry which delighted Sir Charles Scarborough, he died in his ninety-first year, not indeed in professional harness, but still working at the multitudinous problems to which his life had been devoted.
When the definitive “Life and Works” comes to be written, it will itself be someone’s life-work, if it is to be adequate.
I attempt no more than to give impressions of the many sides of a great Englishman, and have taken the liberty to ignore the chronological order which is fitting in a biography.
My old friend Henry Wheatley pleased himself with the notion that people who write get a grossly unfair share of the world’s praise, for the relative greatness of men is judged by what writers say of them, and writers are obsessed by the importance of their own craft.
It is also true that architecture has been in England an inarticulate trade, and one regarded in our generation as a technical mystery with which we are little concerned.
The greatness of Wren has been obscured by the modesty which checked any inclination he may have had to enshrine his thought in writing, save in few and disjointed but admirable fragments on science and architecture: in any case his prodigious output of building left little time for his pen.
It is because Sir Christopher Wren brought to his superb architectural accomplishment the equipment of a mathematician, of a master of natural science, and of a scholar, that it is what it is. He has been called the English Leonardo. The praise, though great, is not excessive, but the parallel falls short of completeness. Leonardo was poet and mystic as well as painter, sculptor, scientist, and philosopher. But if Wren did not carry his head in the clouds, he was still something more than our architect of greatest achievement. He was a man of scientific and intellectual stature worthy to be measured with our best. He was, above all, a great English gentleman. His contemporaries knew his quality: it were very shame if we ignored it. The Bicentenary Celebrations have given us opportunity to pay the homage due.