Milton's England

by Lucia True Ames Mead

In a memorable passage in his lectures on Architecture in Edinburgh, Ruskin recalls the power with which the Gothic forms appeal to the imagination when embodied in poetry and romance. He asks what would result were the words tower and turret, and the mental pictures that they conjure up, removed. Suppose Walter Scott had written, instead of “the old clock struck two from a turret adjoining my bedchamber,” “the old clock struck two from the landing at the top of the stair.” “What,” he asks, “would have become of the passage?” “That strange and thrilling interest with which such words strike you as are in any wise connected with Gothic architecture, as for instance, vault, arch, spire, pinnacle, battlement, barbican, porch,—words everlastingly poetical and powerful,—is a most true and sure index that the things themselves are delightful to you.” As to stylobates, and pediments, and triglyphs, and all the classic forms, even when pure and unvulgarised by decadent Renaissance work, how utterly they fail to satisfy the poetic instinct of the man of English lineage is well expressed by James Russell Lowell, as he stood within the portals of Chartres Minster:

“The Grecian gluts me with its perfectness
Unanswerable as Euclid, self-contained,
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
But ah! this other, this that never ends,
Still climbing, luring fancy still to climb,
As full of morals, half divined, as life,
Graceful, grotesque, with ever new surprise
Of hazardous caprices, sure to please,
Heavy as nightmare, airy light as fern,
Imagination’s very self in stone!”

Of the type of architecture most favoured by Milton’s contemporaries, Ruskin says:

“Renaissance architecture is the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructive faculties from the Grand Canal [in England, he might have said, old Chester or old Canterbury] to Gower Street, from the marble shaft and the lancet arch and the wreathed leafage ... to the square cavity in the brick wall.” This is a strong expression of a half truth. But the baldness and blankness of Gower Street and a thousand other streets is not so hopeless as the pretentious bastard Renaissance work which modern London shows. The rich modern world can not plead poverty as its excuse for ugliness. Even the village cottage of three centuries ago, as well as the city streets, showed a popular love of beauty and a power to attain it which few architects, or rather few of their patrons, permit the modern world to see.

But let the lover of past beauty take new courage. Hundreds of signs disclose the dawn of a revival of true taste in which England and America bid fair to lead the world.

Though in most of its forms the Renaissance art that accompanied the new age of discovery and expansion of commerce in the century before Milton indicates a decadence of the love of beauty, exception must be made to much delightful domestic architecture that has the Tudor stamp and is distinctly English, and unknown on the Continent.

The introduction into the background of portraits of such classic outlines as domes, arches, and marble pilasters, is a device used by painters when they would flatter the vanity of their patrons and give them a courtly setting. No Byzantine or Norman arch, or Gothic spire or portal, however rich in decoration, can equal the severe but pompous lines of the Renaissance in conveying a sense of pride. Says Ruskin: “There is in them an expression of aristocracy in its worst characters: coldness, perfectness of training, incapability of emotion, want of sympathy with the weakness of lower men, blank, hopeless, haughty insufficiency. All these characters are written in the Renaissance architecture as plainly as if they were graven on it in words. For, observe, all other architectures have something in them that common men can enjoy; some concession to the simplicities of humanity, some daily bread for the hunger of the multitude; quaint fancy, rich ornament, bright colour, something that shows a sympathy with men of ordinary minds and hearts, and this wrought out, at least in the Gothic, with a rudeness showing that the workman did not mind exposing his own ignorance if he could please others. But the Renaissance is exactly the contrary of this. It is rigid, cold, inhuman; incapable of glowing, of stooping, of conceding, for an instant. Whatever excellence it has is refined, high-trained, and deeply erudite, a kind which the architect well knows no common mind can taste. He proclaims it to you aloud.... All the pleasure you can have in anything I do is in its proud breeding, its rigid formalism, its perfect finish, its cold tranquillity.... And the instinct of the world felt this in a moment.... Princes delighted in it, and courtiers. The Gothic was good for God’s worship, but this was good for man’s worship.... The proud princes and lords rejoiced in it. It was full of insult to the poor in its every line. It would not be built of materials at the poor man’s hand.... It would be of hewn stone; it would have its windows and its doors and its stairs and its pillars in lordly order and of stately size.”

To the novice, who is beginning to decipher the inner meaning of sermons in stones in which the ages have recorded, all unconsciously, the life and aspiration of the past, these words may sound harsh and fantastic.

With the memory of such rare geniuses as Michael Angelo and Wren, and their awe-inspiring cathedrals, built in the Renaissance forms, one may hesitate before completely accepting Ruskin’s dictum. Ruskin himself has done homage to their genius and the greatness of their work. “There were of course,” he says, “noble exceptions.” Yet surely the devout Christian must feel under their glorious domes not so much like praying and reverencing his Maker as glorifying the work of men’s hands. Under any dome and architectural reminder of Roman thought and life, whether it be Wren’s mighty St. Paul’s, or his small and exquisitely proportioned St. Stephen’s, Wallbrook, almost in its shadow, the worshipper must feel something akin to Ruskin’s sentiment. A meek and contrite heart feels alien and uncomforted amid its perfection.

But Ruskin’s word chiefly concerns the more perfect Gothic of the Continent, and the manifestations there—worse than any in England—of riotous and insolent excess in its Renaissance work. The most ostentatious and offensive monument in Westminster Abbey, which is adorned with meaningless mouldings, artificial garlands, and cherubs weeping hypocritic tears, is not so odious as those which Venice, Rome, Antwerp, and a hundred other cities reared upon the Continent. Those tasteless, costly structures which modern Englishmen are but now learning to condemn illustrate completely the pride and arrogance of a world drunk with new wealth, in which fashion supplants beauty.