How is it that this so-called irreligious age in which we live, and this certainly a vulgar one if we are to judge it by its civic buildings, has produced ecclesiastical buildings which are living and vital things, while that Victorian age, in spite of its hymns and its prayer meetings, its battles of the styles and its religious arguments, produced mainly, if not entirely, dead copies, or rather travesties, of worn out past architecture?
It is a strange paradox and one which I think can be explained only by the fact that under the mass of neglect and indifference with which religion struggles to-day, a few enthusiastic artists are able to work with a freedom which was denied to their fellows in the second half of the nineteenth century, when every layman was an ecclesiologist and every parson had some half-baked theory of medieval art of his own, which he felt it his duty to run. What chance had the poor architect when his style was dictated to him and confined to some fifty years of a century itself five centuries old? Yet that was everywhere the common practice. Archæology reigned supreme, the only difficulty being that the exact fifty years for imitation and revival changed from time to time. It was a case of the dead not only burying the dead, but burying the living too.
To my thinking it was the interior of Bentley’s great Catholic Cathedral at Westminster which finally broke the idea that Gothic, in one of its many past manifestations, was the only religious style. That grave and vast interior proved indeed that the requisite conditions for solemn building lay really in the opposite direction. It showed that lofty plain wall surfaces, even of common stock brick, were more important in giving the idea of remoteness and seclusion from the world than the richest clustered Gothic columns. One felt after first seeing the Westminster Cathedral that even the Abbey nave, probably the most perfect piece of Gothic in England, if it were new to-day and fresh and unhallowed by endless associations, would not have the same power over the mind, the same humbling yet inspiring effect that this vast dimly lit hall of plain brickwork and concrete possessed. The very simplicity of its round arches, its sheer unbroken walls and piers, its plain sedate domes gave it a solemnity which richer and more articulate structures like correct Gothic ones could not from their nature possess. That it was, however, foreign and to a certain extent therefore esoteric in its appeal, while it made it no doubt very convenient to its particular purpose, rendered its style difficult if not unsuitable to general adaptation to ordinary and smaller churches.
The effect of Bentley’s work, however, was none the less pronounced. It showed the Gothic architects of our churches, or certain of them who were open to new inspiration, that there were very impressive qualities to be obtained in church building which a strict adherence to past forms of Gothic could not give.
Gothic is essentially a linear style in which the eye travels along the well-marked lines of deeply indented piers, arches, and vaulting ribs. The interior of the Westminster Cathedral, on the other hand, especially before its decoration was attempted, had all the Byzantine feeling for large and finely modulated surfaces. Of strongly drawn moulded lines there were few. The world, we know, was shut out by high walls and another world suggested by the broad arches and domes, and by the very blueing of the atmosphere which their great height enabled them to bring about. How to get some of the strength and solidity of those walls and domes into ordinary church building was the new problem.
The solution was found in a new and free Gothic in which walls and solid piers took the place of Gothic columns and plain vaulting that of ribbed, in which the coloured stone lantern to which the old Gothic church approximated gave way to some form of massive interior lit by an occasional rich window. The new churches which I have in mind are buildings which look in on themselves rather than out on to the world. To the outside world they present a plain and often uncompromising exterior. They are in the world, but not of it—perhaps that, too, is symbolical of our time.
If it was Sir Gilbert Scott to whom we owe so much of the harder and less pleasing Gothic of Victorian times, as well as much destructive restoration of our Cathedrals, it is to his grandson, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to whom we owe to-day some of the best of these new free Gothic churches as well as, at Liverpool, the one great new Gothic cathedral of our age. If anyone ever made good the sins of his grandfather, this architect certainly has. Though still a young man he has already built sufficient work to mark our era and to start a new renaissance in church building. It is a veritable renaissance in that the spirit of adventure necessary to a renaissance is there. His work, even the smallest, such as his church of the Annunciation at Bournemouth, has qualities of imagination and scale which place it in an entirely new category. While using Gothic detail for decoration he builds with the solid bigness of the Romans. It is too early yet to speak of his great cathedral, when but a third of a structure second only in size to St. Peter’s, Rome, among Christian structures, has yet been completed, but there is already enough to be seen (especially now that a portion of the building is enclosed) for us to feel that at last we are to have a building which in the grandeur of its scale and the daring of its design will represent a greater individual effort of the imagination than that called forth by any cathedral yet erected in these islands.
VIII.
THE USE OF THE COLUMN.
The classical column, together with its entablature of architrave, frieze, and cornice, commonly called the order, is one of the most abused features in modern architecture. It has, of course, come down to us, full of meaning and character, from Greek and Roman times by way of the Renaissance, each age, as it were, having laid its own deposit upon it. It has always, however, in the course of its long journey, retained something of its pristine importance and glory.