Church Design for Congregations: its Developments and Possibilities. By James Cubitt, Architect. With nineteen plates. Smith and Elder.
The practical divorce of Art and Utility has told nowhere more disastrously than in the building of churches. Gothic buildings with 'long-drawn aisles and fretted roof,' designed and adapted for the processional and ritual worship of the Romish Church, have for three centuries been the dreary reverberating theatres of Protestant reading and preaching. Perhaps few of us could recall a more comfortless ideal than a rural parish church in winter, half the congregation excluded from seeing, and the other half from hearing the monotonous reader of prayers and sermons. Nonconformists, while rightly deeming that the Episcopal Church had no monopoly of Gothic architecture, have not been always wise in their appropriation of it. They have built the old Gothic church with its nave, two aisles, transepts, and chancel, its clustered stone pillars and clerestory, utterly unmindful of the fact that of all styles of ecclesiastical building it was the most unsuited for their worship and preaching. Their dignified discomfort led to the substitution of iron columns, as incongruous, and, in artistic effect, as ugly as anything that could be imagined—'a mediæval church,' as Mr. Cubitt says, 'in the last stage of starvation.' If we must have nave and aisles, as he justly remarks, we seem shut up either to bad arrangement or bad architecture. Fame and fortune await the architect who can create a new order of buildings for Congregational worship which shall avoid both. Mr. Cubitt seems ambitious to attempt this, and he breaks a lance with old conventionalism with great courage and skill. The type that is required, he says, 'does not present itself in the ordinary nave and aisles plan, whether its nave-piers are thick or thin; but it may be hopefully sought in either of these two ways—'by designing our churches without columns at all, or by designing them with substantial columns placed where they will cause no obstruction. The former system is already adopted in small buildings, and there are some signs of its future employment on a larger scale. It allows great variety of form. Its plans may be oblong, cruciform, circular, or polygonal; or still better, a fresh combination of three different elements. On the latter system the columns may be few in number and far apart, or they may be placed so near the side walls as to obscure, not the seats, but only the passages leading to them. We may thus have either the wide nave with narrow side aisles, or the ordinary nave with very wide bays, or both together. We may plan a grand open space before the pulpit and communion table—surely a natural arrangement for a Protestant Church—and we shall find ample scope for architecture in its external and internal treatment.' The subsequent chapters are virtually a development and illustration of these ideas. The writer advocates the admission of the dome into Gothic architecture; he has much to say on behalf of the Eastern mosque; and no one who has stood in the vast and simple area of St. Sophia, at Constantinople, built, it must be remembered, as a Christian church, could fail to have been greatly impressed with its magnificent congregational capabilities. Galleries in theatre form, iron column churches, lanterns, and most other things that perplex church builders, are discussed. The merit of Mr. Cubitt's work is that it is strictly utilitarian. It recognises the actual necessities, not only of Congregational worship, but of Congregational church builders; it boldly grapples with all inartistic incongruities; it avoids 'schools' and 'orders,' and honestly seeks to supply what is wanted under genuine artistic conditions. Abundance of plates and drawings illustrate Mr. Cubitt's theories. We heartily commend this book to all whom it may concern, as the most independent, intelligent, and scholarly attempt in the direction indicated that has been made.
POETRY, FICTION, AND BELLES LETTRES.
The Window; or, the Loves of the Wrens. Words written for Music, by Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate; the Music by Arthur Sullivan. Strahan.
So many rumours have been for so long in circulation about this volume, and the names of its joint authors are so eminent, that it is not surprising it should have excited much curiosity and many hopes. We venture to predict that neither the curiosity nor the hopes will be disappointed. Mr. Tennyson's songs need not fear being 'tested' in the same crucible with the 'Lotos Eaters,' or 'In Memoriam,' or we may add with 'Maud,' or the 'Princess.' Nor will Mr. Sullivan's music be found less characteristic of his genius, or other than fully worthy of the words to which it has been composed.
The 'Window' is, we believe, the first attempt in English—certainly the first attempt of any eminent English poet—to cast a series of events or emotions into the form of a set of connected songs. Wordsworth's well-known series of sonnets are an approach to the same thing; but the song—a composition of two or three stanzas, suitable to music—is not so favourite a form with English poets as with those of Germany. There the cycle of songs—the Liederkreis or Liedercyclus—is better known. Readers of Heine and Chamisso will remember more than one instance. We are glad to welcome it to English literature, not only as a new form of verse, but also because of the promise which it gives of many a marriage between fine poetry and fine music—a marriage hitherto far too rare among us.
The 'Window,' then, is a 'circle of songs,' twelve in number, describing the hopes and fears of a lover parted from his mistress, and uncertain what her reply will be to the great question he has asked her.
In the first—'On the hill'—he stands on the slope of the valley which separates his home from hers, and as he looks across the distance sees the flash from the window-pane of his love:—
'The lights and shadows fly!