April 26, 1718.
And there arose a king that knew not Joseph.
And Gallio cared for none of these things.
He retired to his house at Hampton Court observing “Nunc me jubet Fortuna expeditius philosophari” and, in a strain of piety, which was as truly characteristic as the Stoic note, “If I glory, it is in the singular mercy of God, who has enabled me to begin and finish my great work, so conformable to the ancient model.” After more than two hundred years we rejoice to add, in the words of the Bicentenary Service, “We render Thee thanks, O Lord, for the singular gifts which Thou didst bestow upon Thy servant, Christopher Wren.”
The malevolence of his masters at the Cathedral pursued him to the grave, but it gave his son the opportunity of inventing an immortal epitaph. Sir Christopher was buried in the crypt, but the suggestion of a monument was rejected by the authorities.
So the younger Christopher, seeking to explain the absence of a fitting memorial in the place of his father’s greatest triumph, wrote on the plain tablet which marks his resting-place, as the closing words of his epitaph,
“SI MONUMENTUM REQUIRIS: CIRCUMSPICE.”
But the fatuous proceedings of Commissioners and King alike have faded into their proper perspective, and St. Paul’s remains the supreme monument of the genius of a single architect.
What, in fact, did Wren achieve in the building of St. Paul’s? Much can be written of his handling of the Orders, of his structure of the dome, of the details of the plan, and so forth; but there are broader issues involved. St. Paul’s gave the first opportunity since the Middle Ages for the creation of a Cathedral in England, and Wren’s task was a Protestant Cathedral. Hitherto the Cathedral builder had made two churches under one roof, a choir for Canons, whether secular or regular, or for monks, and a nave for the laity, the two divided by a solid screen which prevented nave worshippers from seeing the high altar. Wren’s plan was a half-way house between the mediæval type and the idea of St. Peter’s with the high altar as the central feature under the dome. It was a classical translation of the plan of his uncle’s Cathedral of Ely, in so far as it retained the aisle vistas by supporting the dome on eight piers instead of four. It was English in that it set the altar in a ritual choir well to the east of the crossing. It was Protestant and characteristic of Wren’s views in its provision of an admirable “auditory.”
St. Paul’s Cathedral may fairly be called the apogee of English Baroque, because it is the finest English expression of what Mr. Geoffrey Scott calls the Architecture of Humanism. It represents with peculiar faithfulness the outlook of the best minds of the last half of the seventeenth century, for Wren was one of them, and had the power to give it expression. St. Peter’s, the only church with which it is not unnaturally compared, was a pasticcio of many minds brought to bear in succession on a far larger but not æsthetically more difficult problem, and it suffers from a consequent confusion, as well as from its abnormal scale. St. Paul’s was the work of one commanding personality, who developed indeed in the course of its building—the difference between the warrant plan and the church itself is proof enough of that—but he did so consistently and with a single aim. Westminster Abbey is the supreme flower of Gothic art in England, if not in the world, and the perfect expression of the Age of Faith. St. Paul’s is a no less perfect emblem of what England could make of humanistic ideals in art joined with robust English Churchmanship expressed through so sincere an Anglican as was Sir Christopher Wren.
St. Paul’s is incomparable—the word is used advisedly—as a piece of architecture, and it is prodigiously English.