Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

Fig. 181.—Temple Church, London. Capitals, West Door.

examples of the transitional[75] united with one of the finest of the fully-developed Early Pointed style; the remains which the modern Vandals have left us of St. Saviour’s Church, a noble Early Pointed work; the chapel of Lambeth Palace, in the same style; Ely Place Chapel, a work contemporary with the Eleanor Crosses;[76] the crypt of St. Stephen’s, Westminster; the hall of Lambeth Palace; Westminster Hall, and many an interesting object of minor importance. You have, if you want a day’s or a week’s trip, St. Alban’s Abbey, a never-failing and inexhaustible treasury; Waltham Abbey, with what remains unspoiled of the Cross; Stone Church, Hampton Court, Eltham Palace, Croydon Palace, Beddington Hall, Eastbury House, the ruins of Nether Hall, the Rye House, and many old churches now brought within an hour’s ride of London; not to mention the rapidly failing relics of the old churches of Middlesex, now the mere sport of destructive and ignorant committees, and—with shame I say it—sometimes of equally destructive but more culpable, because only wilfully ignorant, clergymen.

But London supplies other facilities for the study of Mediæval art in addition to its ancient buildings. In the first place, I may mention its libraries, in which the student may devote his spare hours in studying every work which has ever been published bearing upon the subject. The library of the British Museum (including the print-room and the manuscript-room) contains everything of that kind which the student could desire, and I strongly recommend you to gain the privilege of admittance and to make full use of that privilege. Your own library, too, at the Royal Academy, and those of the Institute of British Architects and of the Department of Art at South Kensington, offer every facility for study. I would especially mention that last named as being open in the evenings, and as being one of the most complete libraries of works on art in existence. The Architectural Museum[77] and the South Kensington Museum are absolutely invaluable as aids to the student; so that you have ample employment for the dead season of the year in which sketching tours are impossible, and it is your own fault if you do not make full and ample use of the privileges you possess; for, believe me, they are such as in former times it was impossible to obtain. I need hardly mention the British Museum, which, though not rich in Mediæval works, is the repository of those wondrous stores of Greek and other art which the Mediæval artist knows as well how to value as those who devote to them their more exclusive study.

You will perhaps wonder that I have said nothing as yet of foreign travel. I have delayed this intentionally, and for this reason: the facilities for travelling abroad are now so abundant, and so great a stress has of late years been laid on the study of foreign examples, that there is great danger of the student rushing headlong into foreign travel before he has made himself acquainted, in any but the most superficial manner, with the architecture of his own country.

You may possibly be disposed, after reading my former lectures, to say that, as most of the developments of our art seem to have originated abroad, it would be more systematic to study them in the first instance where they originated, and then to trace their ramifications in other countries. I would reply that, though when writing on a subject one is obliged to be systematic, it is by no means necessary that we should be rigorously so in our studies. Effects have in all sciences to be examined into before their causes are discovered, and it is often better that each student should for himself go through the process of tracing back familiar developments of art through the long course of circumstances which led to them, rather than, beginning at the original germ (which he must learn from others), to proceed—in a course not his own—till he arrives at the result with which he is familiar from its being at his own door.

However this may be, I hold it to be most unnatural for the English student of Gothic architecture to plunge into the study of its productions in other lands before he has made himself perfectly acquainted with those of his own. Our language is mainly derived from German and French, but who would wish his children to be taught those languages before they could speak correctly their mother tongue? We love Gothic architecture in the first instance, not because of the buildings we have heard of or seen pictures of as existing in foreign countries, but from those which we see around us—our own village churches, our own cathedrals, and a hundred objects which we have known from our childhood. From these we learn the native language of the art, and it behoves us to pursue the study of that language, and to perfect ourselves in it, before we turn our attention to foreign dialects, even though they may be of older date than our own.

When, however, you are well grounded in our own architecture, nothing can be more delightful or more instructive than to follow up your studies in foreign countries; though here, again, you must ever keep a watch over yourselves—a guard to your patriotism—lest you should be tempted to forget or to undervalue your mother tongue.[78]

The first country to visit is unquestionably France. A question may occur whether it is best to begin with the old royal domain—the great central province of the Pointed style, the fountain-head of our art—or with Normandy as the connecting link between ourselves and that fountain-head. On this question I would not offer any very strong opinion, though I incline towards the former. I do not think that, after the Romanesque period, the developments of the French came to us in any very great, or at least any very exclusive, degree through Normandy; and we know that very shortly afterwards that link of communication was cut off by our loss of that province, and that immediately after this the architecture of Normandy became more distinctly French, and that of England more exclusively English. I think, therefore, that you would be better prepared to understand the architecture of Normandy by having first studied that of the central province of France.

This, however, is a secondary question. The great matter is, wherever you go, thoroughly to study, thoroughly to sketch; not to hasten over the ground to get through an extensive programme, but to seat yourselves down where you find good material, and work on patiently at it. Where you begin is comparatively of little matter, excepting that it is undesirable to take the abnormal before the normal—the mere dialect before the language.

If you begin at Paris, as the great centre, you will find, amidst the Napoleonic modernisms of that centre of fashion, a very perfect series of typical Mediæval remains, over-restored and otherwise often sadly damaged, but nevertheless of the utmost value. I have mentioned most of them in my former lectures, but I will just enumerate them to refresh your memory, and roughly in chronological order.