XXIII.
LIVERPOOL CATHEDRAL.
Liverpool has now entered into possession of a great work of the imagination. This work will go on growing until its mastery is evident to the whole world, but from now onward Liverpool can follow the growth of her Cathedral with confidence. It is no small thing that a great town should pursue an ideal of this sort. In doing so, Liverpool has herself shown something of this great quality of imagination. As a citizen I like to think whatever may be her failings, it is her outstanding attribute. During the last twenty years she has not only taken the great step, which she has lately celebrated, towards the creation of a temple to her faith, to be, I believe, some day as great and as noble as any yet made, but during the same space of time she has had the imagination and faith to follow other enterprises of this spirit, such as the establishing of a great university, and, among lesser projects, but still indicating something of the same devotion to non-material things, a town’s theatre. If the artist who has been responsible for giving life and form to the Liverpool Cathedral has risen to the heights demanded by so supreme an occasion, we must, nevertheless, remember from the outset those who have had the courage during these years to conceive the project and to provide the means for its realisation on such a scale unattempted since the Reformation. They, as well as Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, have laid the whole town under an obligation and have done a service to us all. Pericles built the temples on the Acropolis, at Athens, to direct the eyes of the Greeks, flushed with the spoils of victory, away from material things. To all Liverpool, irrespective of creed, the great building on St. James’s Mount, in its austerity and beauty, is a similar symbol and a similar gift.
Before the architect came on the scenes the site was chosen. Those who were responsible for this, against a good deal of popular clamour, deserve well of the town. No English Cathedral, with the possible exception of Durham, has so romantic a setting when you get near to it, while no other site would, in my view have provided so good a position from which the Cathedral could assert itself and what it stands for to the whole Merseyside. Already in its present truncated form it is a dominant object from the river, though there is one unfortunate grain elevator below it on the river bank which, in its present shape, seems to mock it. When its great tower, however, is completed, and its whole monumental mass is seen grouped symmetrically about it, with its subsidiary buildings at its base, like attendant tugs to a liner, it will, I think, focus as it should the interest of all the river views. It is fortunately separated from the great commercial buildings at the Pier Head, and the vaster and loftier ones which are yet to arise in that neighbourhood, by a considerable distance and a slight depression. The business quarter of Liverpool, like that of New York, being tied to certain centres, there is likely, for a century or more to come, to be an intervening space of comparatively small buildings between the Cathedral and the only structures which may possibly rival it in height or bulk. This is very important. It would be fatal to confuse two such different aspects of the town’s life.
Near at hand, and under its wing as it were, the Cathedral has the one solemn graveyard Liverpool possesses where many of the citizens of its great period are buried. It is a graveyard, too, of great romantic interest, in the base of an old quarry with lofty sides, from whose stone most of the older buildings in the town have been built. On one side is the Piranesi-like wall supporting Hope-street, lined with sloping walks and the arched entrances to vaults, while on the other is the old quarry cliff, in summer green with trees, on which the cathedral stands. It is among the great merits of Sir Giles Scott’s work that it suits itself so well in detail to this foreground, just as in bulk and outline the finished design will suit itself to the larger picture of the town as a whole. There is a cliff-like character in the bold faces of the transepts which echoes the cliff below. But it is more than that. The horizontal mass of the building, which is emphasised in a way quite unusual in a Gothic structure, tallies very happily with the horizontal mass of the great stone base which the face of the quarry forms. The greenery on this base, too, well sets off the colour of the red Woolton stone, while in the depths below among the winding paths there is hardly a single white marble tomb or angel to form a jarring note. If there is, time has softened it to obscurity, and now that the Cathedral authorities control the graveyard we may be sure no new ones will arise.
So much for the site. Let us now consider for a moment the scheme for the finished exterior as the architect has planned it. Most people remember the interesting design with twin towers over the two transepts—there were only two contemplated in those days—and the high roof connecting them with which Scott won the competition. A great feature in this design was a series of gables along the chancel and nave roof-line like small transepts. These have all been eliminated in order to get greater horizontal character, together with the twin towers themselves, whose somewhat obvious picturesqueness appealed to so many people. Gradually the present symmetrical design has been evolved as the architect has got deeper and deeper into the work. It has been a matter of long and mature thought. Let us recall for a moment the stages. The old design I have just described with its somewhat restless and irregular outline, but with its strange power and novelty, was the work of a young pupil in an office hardly out of his teens. The judges, Mr. Norman Shaw and Mr. Bodley were strongly in its favour. Nevertheless, it is on record that the committee would not accept it, and, indeed, refused to accept any of the five final designs. Especially they felt they could not go to a young man who had as yet built nothing. Finally they persuaded Mr. Bodley to be joint architect. The latter has often been blamed for accepting the position, having already acted as judge, but only by his doing so did Sir Giles Scott and his design survive. For five years they worked together and then Mr. Bodley died. There is a large and elaborate model in existence which shows the stage reached in their joint work. To my thinking it is Sir Giles’ original design tamed down and prettified. Large traceried windows appear everywhere. However, when he was free, he reconsidered everything. If there is any Bodley left, it is in a few mouldings in the Lady Chapel. The main Cathedral is entirely Scott, and the merit or otherwise that is in it, is his alone.
The work, whether we like it or not at first glance, is obviously something new in Gothic architecture. The whole development of medieval Gothic was in the direction of eliminating the wall surfaces. It achieved this by a sort of skeleton construction of lofty piers, arches, vaulting ribs, and flying buttresses. Great glass windows filled the interstices, and these themselves were articulated by stone mullions and tracery in the same linear way. The resulting structure was an intricate scheme of thrusts and supports. Everything was propping something else up. If you pulled out one support the whole would in logical theory come tumbling down. The scoffers said the Crystal Palace was the unseen goal. Certainly, whatever hard qualities such an engineering style contained were emphasised and increased by the archaeologically-minded architects of the Gothic Revival of last century, not least among them in this respect, by Sir Giles Scott’s grandfather, Sir Gilbert. Here, however, at Liverpool, we have something quite different. Although the boney structure of piers and arches, and ribs is there, the architect has clothed it with flesh. The most obvious characteristics of his exterior are its mass and weight. A shell might knock a hole in it, but there would be no danger of its falling. Instead of his building appearing a piece of fairylike construction, as many of our old Gothic cathedrals do, or a thin cast-iron triumph of engineering as some of our modern churches, Sir Giles’ building has the massiveness and almost the repose of a great Roman structure. It appears, from a little distance where the joints cannot be seen, as if it were carved out of the solid, part almost of the rock on which it stands.
This breadth and solidity which will be still further increased when the symmetry of the finished building can be seen is a new quality in Gothic architecture. It is one which is looked for rather in classical buildings. It seems to me, therefore, in adding this quality to Gothic, Sir Giles has rescued Gothic from a dead end and given the style a new life. On the old lines it could only get thinner and thinner, more and more wiry and linear. Now, however, by his plastic treatment, Gothic can be made almost as broad and restful, as welcoming and urbane in its effects as classical architecture, and yet retain its essentially romantic character. I should like now to see the same architect design a great banking hall or railway station. I believe he could give them all the necessary breadth and dignity and yet infuse them with new vitality and interest. By making too his building ultimately a perfectly symmetrical structure, he has given his Gothic structure a monumental character which will be a further distinguishing mark. We all know how the Gothic cathedrals, particularly in France, rise as great piles of masonry and glass above the roofs of the town. We know, too, however, that unless we are looking straight at the west end, with its symmetrical composition, how ill-balanced they often appear; the strong square towers at one end and rounded chancel at the other shored up on every side by an intricacy of flying buttresses. The Liverpool building, with its square-ended nave exactly balancing in length its square-ended chancel, with its pairs of square-ended transepts on either side opposite one another and forming a base from out of which the great wide tower rises, will make a balanced monument from all points of view. This is a character then, to which we are not accustomed in Gothic architecture, but one at which most classical buildings aim. Folk have gone so far as to say Sir Giles has classicised Gothic architecture just as they said his American confrère, the late Bertram Goodhue, who stood to American architecture very much in the same way that he does to English, Gothicised Classic. Both statements are, of course, an exaggeration. Sir Giles has not produced any hybrid building. What he has done has been to enlarge the scope of a certain style in architecture, and in so doing he has put all architects into his debt. This development of Gothic which he has brought about, will, I am convinced, when seen by the historians in retrospect, be the distinguishing mark of our period. If I am right in this it is an even bigger thing to have done than to have built the Cathedral.
In judging the exterior as it is to-day, it is very necessary to remember what the finished building will look like. When this is thought of, certain things which may seem to stand up rather crudely now, like the two turrets at the end of the chancel, will sink into their place in relation to the whole. The great chancel itself, so massive and rock-like, has indeed rather a stocky appearance. To understand it, it must be imagined as a sort of porch to the great group of the four transepts and the central tower. Looking at it from the corner of Hope Street and Upper Parliament Street—one of the best points of view—we see it rising out of the quarry with the Lady Chapel on one wing and the Chapter House on the other, with galleries of vestries and halls about its base, with the great solid buttresses rushing up to the roof. It is a complicated but solid mass. Think, then, what this will mean when the great tower rises behind it, so that the whole of the present chancel seems but a supporting block at its base, a little bigger than the other supporting blocks, the transepts. Think of the tower as beginning in strong, massive walls above the great arches connecting the transepts, and then gradually breaking into greater and greater complexity as it masters the building and rises clear above it, to dominate not only the Cathedral but a large section of Liverpool. I can think of no building which will have such a dramatic climax as this, and because of this I can think of no more inspiring gift for a rich man to make to Liverpool than the gift of this tower.
Then if you walk down under the building along St. James Road you meet almost equally dramatic effects. The great transept rises sheer like a cliff from the wide spread of little steps at its foot—of ordinary size really—while there projects in front of you at one end of these steps a strong, massive porch, with deeply-moulded doorway and Piranesi-like grille. Everywhere there is drama, but it is drama well controlled. There is nothing nightmarish or extreme, though there may be some youthful excesses, especially in the Lady Chapel. Indeed, one of the greatest interests of the Lady Chapel to-day is to see by means of it how the architect and his architecture have grown both in power and control. I heard someone once say that he liked the outside of the Cathedral because it was so ugly. Ugly and pretty are dangerous words which mean very little in themselves, but I think the person I overheard was getting at something real by his remark. He meant the building had character and force. It has this everywhere. The great lines of the design will not be seen till it is completed, but from every part of the present exterior one can feel the strength of the mind and the adventureness of the spirit which have conceived and moulded it.