Coming to maturity, if not born, in temple, palace, and forum, the column has signified, even in pilaster form as in a wall decoration, something apart from and superior to the common daily activities of eating, sleeping and trading. It has been used on great churches and cathedrals, on palaces—though the Italians, unlike the French and English, seem on the whole to have preferred the latter with plain, cliff-like walls—on the fronts of town halls, theatres, and opera houses. It has come to mean, therefore, especially when of great size, something public and monumental or, in Georgian times, aristocratic. This feeling persisted even into the nineteenth century. We see in Regent’s Park and the London squares terraces of houses with some columned or pilastered feature in the centre, or it may be the whole block is so treated. I suppose it was felt that what would be ostentatious in a single house was still permissible to a group. Where no one owned all the columns all could partake of their reflected glory and share it between them. In that way the order was not oppressive. With a duke, of course, it is different. He can have a columned house all to himself, but, then, both he and such a house are in themselves anachronisms.
So it was with the club. The Carlton might have columns—it had them galore, and still retains them—but the more austere clubs, like the Reform and the Athenæum, are above even a communal display of Corinthian glory. That they gain by their restraint all will admit. The order in these buildings is implicit, but not shown; as if the members of the club said, “We are, of course, as good as the Conservatives and the Guards; indeed, we are really such superior people that we have no need to advertise the fact, as they have to do, poor things!”
What, now, is the modern English use of the great order? The answer is, everywhere for every purpose. Where do we find its most conspicuous example? In a great drapery store in Oxford Street. The particular store I have in my mind consists of nothing else—a great range of over-ornate columns, with a metal screen of windows between them. There is, of course, an imperial simplicity about such architecture. It might have been designed by a Roman Emperor in his cups. But he, at any rate, would have kept it for some Imperial purpose, if only as a house for his menagerie or his gladiators. Here, however, it is in the main an advertisement for “soft goods.”
I maintain that that is all wrong, however well the columns and their accessories might be designed. If we use up our finest symbols on such structures, what have we left for really national buildings? The front of this Oxford Street store, when completed, will be more imposing, and in a way more effective, than that of Buckingham Palace.
Something is wrong here in our sense of civic values. Perhaps one need not mind very much about the front of Buckingham Palace being overshadowed (as long as the garden front remains untouched), but what are we to say to the British Museum? That is really important, and has of late years had a magnificent range of Ionic columns added in Montague Place by Sir John Burnet, who is, it is ironical to remember, the very same architect who is increasing the range of giant columns in Oxford Street. Having erected the one, he was probably considered the right person to erect the other. No doubt, too, he was, if the thing were right at all. That is the rub. I maintain it was not.
In the same way every lesser commercial building, except the few really great ones, like Bush House, at the bottom of Kingsway, ape the palace. Immediately opposite the Athenæum Club, on the other side of Pall Mall, is a new bank building, which is covered on every side with the commonest kind of unfluted Corinthian columns—the sort of columns a first-year architectural student draws because he can draw no others. Not content with adding large ones to the building as a whole and lesser ones to the attic, the designer here, whoever he may be, has added baby columns to the doors and windows.
Well, there it is, and you can contrast this early twentieth-century bank, aping royalty and achieving clownishness, with the early nineteenth-century club, refusing all such symbols (except in a small porticoed entrance, where the columns, serving a definite practical purpose, have another meaning) and achieving a nobility which seems almost past our dreaming about to-day. Yet Decimus Burton, when he designed the Athenæum, was only twenty-seven years of age. I am beginning to think we shall not again get architecture in England approaching his till we go to the young men of to-day of twenty-seven and there-abouts who can not only dream dreams, but, like Burton, have received a complete training in the meaning of the symbols they use.
Columns having, then, a special meaning and significance, have, of all architectural detail, to be used with the greatest care. In Bush House, on the Aldwych front, they are used with great boldness, where they symbolise a great gateway at the end of Kingsway to what was designed as a great exhibition building, and with great reserve on the Strand front, where they chiefly announce the entrance to the office of the insurance company or bank which is to use, or uses, the ground floor. In an ordinary drawing-room we know what distinction they can give if introduced discreetly, and, on the other hand, what vulgarity if flamboyantly.
There is, however, a use of columns which has come down to us from classical times to which we do not, I think, sufficiently resort. It is the rostral column, independent and free-standing. Sir Reginald Blomfield has put one up in St. Paul’s Churchyard and adapted it well to the architecture of the Cathedral. The Cunard Company in Liverpool have put up another as a war memorial in front of their magnificent block of offices on the river front, and have, appropriately enough in this case, completed it with ships’ prows and a beautiful figure by Pegram. A free standing column, crowned with a figure, is a form of memorial which is always effective and rarely vulgar. The column in Waterloo Place to an obscure royal duke, called the Duke of York’s Column, is perhaps, and especially in its setting, the finest memorial in London. If Liverpool ever decides to erect a war memorial it could not do better than repeat at the other end of St. George’s Hall the fine column a better age put up to Wellington, so that the greatest post-classical building in Europe would lie evenly between the two.
Such single columns unattached to buildings necessarily take the severest conventional form. That is their safeguard, and that is why the Doric is better for this purpose than the Corinthian, why the Duke of York’s Column is to be preferred so much to Nelson’s.