Wren’s acute judgment noted the great part played by such factors as historical association, one of the “other causes,” in the public appreciation of architecture.
Earlier in the Tract he makes obeisance to the three principles which had been laid down by earlier writers, but with a characteristic rider:
“Beauty, Firmness and Convenience are the Principles: the two first depend upon geometrical Reasons of Opticks and Staticks; the third only makes the Variety.”
Scholarly though Wren was in his art, he took nothing for granted, but examined the common-places with a desire to establish reasons for them or reject them:
“Modern authors who have treated of Architecture seem generally to have little more in view, but to set down the Proportions of Columns, Architraves and Cornices in the several Orders, as they are distinguished into Dorick, Ionick, Corinthian, and Composite, and in these Proportions finding them in the ancient Fabricks of the Greeks and Romans (though more arbitrarily used than they care to acknowledge) they have reduced them into Rules, too strict and pedantick, and so as not to be transgressed, without the Crime of Barbarity, though in their own Nature they are but the Modes and Fashions of those ages wherein they were used.”
There is a very modern ring about the following moralising:
“Although Architecture contains many excellent Parts, besides the ranging of Pillars, yet Curiosity may lead us to consider whence this Affectation arose originally, so as to judge nothing beautiful but what was adorned with Columns, even where there was no real use of them.... It will be to the purpose, therefore, to examine whence proceeded this Affectation of a Mode which hath continued now at least 3,000 years, and the rather, because it may lead us to the Grounds of Architecture and by what Steps this Humour of Colonades came into Practice in all Ages.”
But for all his contempt of the pedantry of rules of proportion, which the greatest architects of antiquity did not observe unless it suited them, he saw in the Orders themselves something eternal:
“Architecture aims at Eternity; and therefore the only thing uncapable of Modes and Fashions in its Principals, the Orders. The Orders are not only Roman and Greek, but Phœnician, Hebrew, and Assyrian, being founded upon the Experience of all Ages, promoted by the vast Treasures of all the great Monarchs, and skill of the greatest Artists and Geometricians, every one emulating each other.”
Wren rises to his greatest height in the opening of his first Tract, and shows that if his life had fallen out otherwise, he might have left a reputation as a writer: