Design for All Saints’ Cathedral at Albany. by h. h. Richardson
WEST ELEVATION.
to be the centre of “congregational worship.” The old cathedrals are most admirably adapted to be the theatres of ecclesiastical processions and pageants; and although the Episcopal Church has a more highly developed ritual than any other Protestant body, it does not provide for these on a cathedral scale. The Church of England cannot be said really to employ the minsters it has inherited. An eminent architect, who was not only an Englishman, but an “Anglo-Catholic,” was compelled to describe an ancient cathedral in its modern English use as merely “a museum of antiquities, with a free sacred concert on Sunday.” Even among Catholic countries Spain is almost, if not quite, alone in fully using her mediæval cathedrals as modern churches of the people, instead of secluding them as “historical monuments” from the ordinary life of the nation. In a country in which the arts of reading and writing have been acquired by but a small fraction of the people, the saying of Victor Hugo cannot have come true. The book has not destroyed the church, and the invention of printing has not affected either the spirit or the form of devotion. The dramatic and spectacular instinct, so strong among the Southern nations, and among the English-speaking peoples perhaps weaker than anywhere else, has found natural vent, in a country in which the type of religion has remained mediæval, in those gorgeous ceremonials, addressed to the imagination and not to the intellect, which really require and employ the stage and the scenery of a mediæval cathedral. Not York or Salisbury, not Cologne or Strasburg, not Rheims or Amiens, hardly Milan or St. Peter’s itself, so fully shows to our generation the popular need which the mediæval minsters were meant to answer as it is shown to travellers on one of the great feasts of the Church in Toledo or Seville. The tardy completion of Cologne under the auspices of a Protestant emperor, and by the contributions of Protestant Germany, not as any longer the temple of the national faith, but as an architectural monument of which the German people have reason to be proud, and the completion of which is a monument also of the union of Germany, more fitly represents the modern attitude of mind respecting cathedrals.
An American Protestant church nearly as long as Cologne (and such is the dimension proposed for the Cathedral of New York) is obviously far beyond the limits of a convenient auditorium, and beyond the ritual requirements of the Episcopal Church. In such a structure the space occupied by the largest congregation that can be assembled within the sound of a single voice is but a fragment, and such a congregation itself but an incident to be recognized and provided for, indeed, but by no means to be allowed to become the chief object of design. But the aim of these remarks has been to show that it is by its success as an architectural monument that the cathedral must be justified, if it is to be justified at all. In this point of view the very excess, which in any utilitarian point of view is wasteful, becomes an element of impressiveness as being an emphatic rejection in a building erected to the glory of God, of “the nicely calculated less or more” that is suitable and inevitable to buildings erected primarily for the use of man.
II
Mr. Richardson’s design for the Cathedral of All-Saints at Albany is herewith so fully illustrated as to enable the architect to estimate the effect the interior would have had in execution, and the untrained reader to form an impression of the exterior effect, which, however
