We know little about the amount of Wren’s general reading, but he was certainly a student of Elyot’s Governour. Some years ago I was the means of placing in the R.I.B.A. Library the 1546 edition of this once famous but now almost forgotten book. Its chief interest lies in the fact that it bears the autographs on the title-page of Sir Christopher’s father, Dean Christopher Wren, and of Sir Christopher himself. The other writings scribbled on the margins are the work of much earlier owners of the volume, which was nearly a century old when the Dean acquired it. There is some little evidence that the architect studied the book with care. Sir Thomas Elyot was concerned to set out the whole behaviour of a knightly gentleman, and among other things gives some warnings against the use of oaths. When Sir Christopher was building St. Paul’s Cathedral he was distressed by the profanity of the workmen, and posted up a notice directed against bad language. It is possible that he consulted the Governour before drafting this notice, for the page references in the index under the heading “othes” has been corrected from 170 to 160, and this was possibly done by Wren when he sought for what Elyot had to say about oaths.
CHAPTER XIV
“THE ARCHITECT OF ADVENTURE”
In trying to estimate with any precision what is Wren’s position in the history of British Architecture, the immediate and obvious comparison is with Inigo Jones. I refer to Wren in my Preface as our architect of greatest achievement, because I hesitate to use the simpler words—our greatest architect. In my own mind the latter is a true description, but the enthusiasts for Inigo Jones would dispute it. None, however, can cavil at the statement that Wren achieved more than any other English architect, whatever nice distinctions may be drawn as to the relative greatness of his art and that of Inigo Jones. The two men are not strictly comparable, and represent in their work and outlook two different currents in the history of architecture. Inigo Jones was essentially academic and, in his relationship to the traditional methods of building which he found, the forerunner of the modern professional architect. He had trained himself by much foreign travel and by close study of the facts of building before he embarked on his career. Wren, on the other hand, was essentially an amateur, if the word be understood in its most favourable sense and not in the least contemptuously. Inigo Jones was not an inventor. He took the Palladio tradition as his model and adhered to it with faithfulness. Wren does not seem to have had any particular hero amongst the great Italian architects. He kept throughout his career a free mind, open to the suggestions of his own inventiveness, ready to accept existing conditions, rather than academic rules, as the guides to his treatment of a problem, and eager to try new structural ideas.
It must plainly be said that Wren suffered frequent lapses of taste, and it does no service to his great memory to gloss over these faults. As a result of them it happened that practically no work of Wren, however noble in its conception, however magnificent its solution of difficult problems, can be freed from criticism in detail. He did not produce the complete unity against which no criticism can lie. Of Inigo Jones at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden (as it was before it was rebuilt), and again at the Banqueting Hall, of Robert Adam in the hall at Syon, and of Sir Charles Barry at the Reform Club, it can be said that they made no mistakes. Each achievement is complete and perfect in its kind. But it is impossible to say that even of St. Paul’s Cathedral: there are elements in its design which are weak and confused. Even in the steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, which is very nearly perfect, the diameter of the cylinder enclosed by the ring of columns is hardly right. This sort of criticism is even more true of the majority of the City churches. The cause for this lack of perfection is not difficult to find. Wren was an amateur, not only by the cast of his mind, but by the circumstances of his entry into architecture: he was imperfectly trained for his work.
ST MARY-LE-BOW
If he had followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Italian Renaissance on the spot, not only in respect of design, but also of the facts of building, he would have avoided many pitfalls. Great as is the part which the knowledge of mathematics and geometry plays in his art, nothing did and nothing could take the place of the practical knowledge of the art of building which Jones possessed and Wren lacked, at least until his later years.
It is possible, for example, that the present trouble at St. Paul’s Cathedral would have been avoided if Wren, whose whole admiration was for the Roman manner of building, had gone to Rome to see what, in fact, Roman building was. He would then have learnt that Roman builders did not carry immense weights on piers which consisted, as at St. Paul’s, of a core of rubble cased in by finely jointed ashlar. He would have found that it was advisable to build them either of ashlar throughout, or, if he had decided on a rubble core with an ashlar casing, to interrupt the rubble core at reasonable intervals by courses of hard tiles or bricks. These would have prevented the perpendicular settlement of the rubble that has now disturbed the relation between the rubble and the ashlar casing. The professional Inigo Jones would not have made that mistake. The amateur Wren did. And there is little excuse for this fault. In his Report on St. Paul’s, written before the Fire, Wren is very contemptuous of his Gothic predecessor: “The work was both ill design’d and ill built from the Beginning: ill design’d, because the Architect gave not Butment enough to counterpoise and resist the weight of the Roof from spreading the Walls; for the Eye alone will discover to any man that those Pillars, as vast as they are, even eleven Foot diameter, are bent outwards at least six inches from their first position. This bending of the Pillars was facilitated by their ill Building, for they are only cased without, and that with small stones, not one greater than a Man’s Burden; but within it is nothing but a Core of small Rubbish-stone, and much mortar, which easily crushes and yields to the weight.” When the time came for Wren to build the piers that carry his dome, he fell into exactly the same blunder.
He was similarly defeated sometimes by problems of design for lack of knowledge of the history of his art, and by too great a reliance on his own invention. In trying at St. Paul’s to marry the idea of a great central dome to the Gothic cruciform plan with a determination to preserve the long vista down the aisles, he involved himself in difficulties in the support of the dome which he could not safely overcome without clumsy elements of design, to be discussed later.
PLATE XVI