“Architecture has its political Use; Public Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Commonwealth. The Emulation of the Cities of Greece was the true Cause of their Greatness. The obstinate Valour of the Jews, occasioned by the Love of their Temple, was a Cement that held together that People, for many Ages, through infinite Changes.”
I have quoted at what may seem to be inordinate length, but Wren is justified alike by the content of his thought and the aptness of his phrase, and I am concerned rather to reveal the man than my idea of him.
In all Wren’s writings he shows an acute perception of the fact that architecture has had an immensely long evolution. He had, of course, no suspicion as to how far back its origins were to be sought, but clearly he was approaching the idea that forms, once constructive, pass into decoration and become part of the language of architecture. This is the final and, as I believe, the effective reply to the puritan theorist, who cries aloud for the discarding of traditional features in art. Sir Joshua Reynolds warned his students that the business of a painter is to paint a fine picture, and that he is not to be cheated of his materials by specious arguments. Wren was clear-sighted enough to see that the Orders have a definite beauty value: his only trouble was that he was not fully equipped to bend them wholly to his will. The western front of St. Paul’s may be taken as an instance. As a Whole it is a magnificent composition, and a source of inspiration to everyone with any feeling for architecture, but can it be pretended that the segmental vault of the upper portico does not belie the entablature and pediment in front of it? Wren could cut away architrave and frieze inside for the benefit of his great arches, and refer his critics to the Temple of Peace (now the Basilica of Maxentius) at Rome for his authority, but he lacked the insight or the courage to deal with the external problem in the same fashion. The fact is that the great architect of any age is both leader and led, and cannot wholly escape the limitations of his time. But there are valid compensations. His work could not be justly representative of the age, one of the significant values of architecture, if he could entirely dissociate himself from his age. When it is remembered that Sir William Chambers can actually say in his Civil Architecture (1759) that every time he passes St. Paul’s he regrets that the pilasters have no entasis—probably few know it—we can form an idea of the limitations of thought that Wren would have to encounter. Vitruvius,[F] with all his imperfections, was still enthroned, and few, if any, had yet divined the real relation of that retired military engineer to the arts of Greece and Rome. Wren had the true spirit of Bacon, and, with further travel, might have seen further through the idols of his market-place.
He seems to have realised the trouble in which he had involved himself in the arches of the octagon that supports his mighty dome. Every architectural student since his day has sat and speculated as to what the solution might have or should have been. Wren left a sufficiently feeble suggestion of curtains and seated apostles, occupying the tribunes (three in each presumably), as a means of veiling the defect. But the difficulty goes deeper than that: the octagon is peculiarly troublesome to handle in terms of the Orders, as a number of failures exist to show.
Wren’s work was always improving. The last, and westernmost, bay of St. Paul’s inside shows more breadth and grandeur, but the carving of the spandrels is so strange that one wonders if it can really be original. This brings us to a characteristic of Wren which probably accounts for some of his lapses of taste. It seems likely that he was not hard-hearted enough with the people who worked under him, that he was too generous, too ready to accept things on his assistants’ and craftsmen’s assurance that they were the best that could be produced. He may thus have been led into an occasional acquiescence, both in design and construction, in things which he must have well known were not really right. Confronted with every sort of difficulty, and none too well backed, he must have been desperately anxious to avoid delays. His very ingenuity, moreover, would lead him to make the most of what was available. Unfortunately in works of eternity—architecture aims at eternity—such compromises meet with a stern Nemesis.
In the two centuries that have elapsed since his death Wren has been admired and followed from very different points of view. It has been justly said that he has been in fashion and out of fashion and is now above fashion. Any doubt as to the reality and massive quality of his genius can easily be dissipated by a consideration of what imitators have done. No domed church on the lines of St. Paul’s has achieved equal beauty and grandeur, nor have any of the innumerable steeples, based on his inventions, been of the same rank. In domestic buildings, his special character remains pre-eminent and informs the best work of to-day—a certain graciousness that in others degenerated often into heaviness. There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth.
Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there is the same feeling that caused Sir John Vanbrugh to refuse the succession to his office “out of tenderness for Sir Christopher Wren,” and that led the Spectator to publish a noble tribute repudiating the ingratitude of his dismissal. The lovers of architecture everywhere will feel that in honouring Wren they have honoured the Art to which a man of such amazing gifts and nobility of character was content to devote the flower of his life.
Sir Christopher Wren was the very fulfilment of Wotton’s prophecy—“Architecture can want no commendation, where there are Noble Men or Noble mindes.”
APPENDIX I
A NOTE IN AMPLIFICATION OF THE REFERENCE IN CHAPTER IV. TO PASCAL’S PROBLEM
Mathematicians who wished to answer Pascal’s challenge were given until October 1, 1658, for a solution, and an umpire, M. de Cavarci, was nominated, and the prizes were 40 doubloons or pistoles and for the second, 20. In a letter of October 10 Pascal says he has received both attempts at solutions of the problems set and also a number of discussions of matters connected with the cycloid which did not pretend to be solutions of his problem: