When the strange holiday time was over, and the University was in a frame for building again, the period of Wren and of his school began. The Chapel of Brasenose, built under the Commonwealth, marks the point when the relations of the mixed styles were becoming too strained. The Sheldonian Theatre announces the rupture. It is in Wren’s happiest manner. There is no building where the audience is more artfully disposed so as itself to be a great part of the architecture. This was followed by various buildings of the school of Wren. He revised Bathurst’s design for Trinity Chapel, though he clearly thought it a bad job, and he is said to have had a hand in Hawksmoor’s work at Queen’s and All Souls. Certainly the robust screen and gateway of the Queen’s front are not unworthy of him. Aldrich’s All Saints’ Church and Peckwater Quad at Christ Church belong to the early eighteenth century. The last great building in this manner is Gibbs’s Radcliffe Library. It gives the University a comfortable centre as only a dome can, and counts for quite half in any distant view of Oxford buildings.
The rest of the eighteenth century has nothing very notable to show. Hawksmoor, in his nightmare buildings at All Souls’, had proved how dead Gothic was. A good deal of Classic went up, the work of academic amateurs, dabbling in Vitruvius and Palladio. But one holds one’s breath till the period is well over. Dilettanti among the dons travelled to Italy and came back terribly ashamed of their barbarous Oxford. It is a matter for thankful wonder that all the old buildings were not replaced by Palladian colleges. The clean sweep of old Queen’s and of the mass of buildings that made way for the Radcliffe, must have tempted many a common room. Hawksmoor actually prepared a design for a brand-new Classic Brasenose, with four domes and a High Street front. Magdalen had the narrowest escape. A Mr. Holdsworth, a Fellow of the College, “an amiable man and a good scholar,” returned from a sojourn in Rome full of enlightenment. His first scheme was to pull down the whole building, tower and all; but he had to give up the tower chapel and hall, and content himself with the destruction of the cloister quad. However, he began his scheme with the New Buildings on unoccupied ground, and somehow it was not carried further; so the great new quad, with its three colonnades, remained on paper.
But in 1771 the University set itself to a wider change. The rough unpaved streets in which the buildings were rooted like trees, the island markets that blocked the traffic, the narrow rambling bridges, and above all, the North Gate or Bocardo by St. Michael’s, and the East Gate above Magdalen, hurt the best feelings of dons dreaming of vistas and piazzas. The place, besides, was no doubt very dark and dirty. An Act of Parliament was obtained for cleaning, lighting, and paving the town, removing gates and other obstructions, building markets, and repairing or rebuilding Magdalen Bridge. So Oxford became convenient and lost half its pictorial effect. The old bridge over the Cherwell at Magdalen was everything that a good bridge can be without being convenient. It had a chequered course of six hundred feet over land and water, leaping the water in a series of arches of different height and width just as was necessary; occupied by houses and shops where it crossed the land; and throwing out, at irregular intervals, angular bays of varying width and projection. But in some places it was as narrow as thirteen feet, some of the arches were ruinous, and the city and county were responsible for the repair of different parts, which they both appear to have left alone. So it had to come down. The new bridge, as well as the market and other changes, was the work of an engineer named Gwyn. His bridge kept something of the old picturesqueness, though in a formal way. It had the same places to go over; a circular bay in the centre stood for the old angles; and the lines at either end swept out in graceful curves. But people were very angry because it was so narrow and high. The roadway was afterwards heightened to reduce the pitch of the bridge, the parapet was lowered, and in our own time the width has been doubled for the convenience of trams. Old St. Clement’s Church, too, has gone from the road on the further side, and has been rebuilt in another place and manner in full view of every one who crosses the bridge.
Many of the old houses had been shorn away in the process of widening the streets; but some people were not satisfied. The old Gothic buildings had begun to command a certain zeal without knowledge; but people disliked the Gothic pattern of the streets, and the irregular patches of domestic buildings. They wanted to have things cleaned up, and made regular; to have “views;” to see the great buildings in solitary distance with no interference from house-roofs or trees, a thing that very few buildings in the world can stand. An interesting evidence of this state of mind is a little book by a certain rector of Lincoln, Dr. Tatham. It was he who defaced the old quad of his college with stupid battlements and other changes. He is remembered by Mr. Cox as an old gentleman, who lived out of Oxford, but might be seen landing his pigs in the market-place on Saturdays, and who, in defence of the faith and the Three Witnesses, in the University pulpit, wished all the “Jarmans” at the bottom of the “Jarman” Ocean. The book is called “Oxonia Explicata et Ornata: Proposals for Disengaging and Beautifying the University and City of Oxford.” The buildings of Oxford, he thought, were “too crowded and engaged. Our forefathers seem to have consulted petty convenience and monastic reclusiveness, while they neglected that uniformity of Design which is indispensable to elegance, and that grandeur of Approach which adds half the delight. If the Colleges and Public Edifices of this place were drawn apart from each other, and dispersed through the extent of a thousand acres, so that each might enjoy the situation a man of genius would approve, we might boast,” &c. He prefixes to the book a little design of his own for a martyr’s memorial, “a triumphant monument to be placed across Broad Street, the whole so airy as very little to obstruct the view of the buildings.” Of this design one may say that it would have been much more interesting than the Eleanor Cross of Sir Gilbert Scott.
THE ’VARSITY BARGE.
This cross of Scott’s was one of the first new works at Oxford of the Gothic revival. Wyatt and others had already worked at what they called restoration, and Pugin’s gateway, lately removed, had been set up at Magdalen the year before. Oxford has suffered its full share of buildings that were the costly grammatical exercises of men learning a dead tongue. In architecture such exercises are more expensive and obtrusive than in any other art, and it will be long perhaps before people will have the courage and sacrifice to pull them down again. Some are merely learned and lifeless, like Buckler’s Magdalen School and Jesus, and Scott’s Chapel of Exeter. Others are hopeless, sullen blocks, like Scott’s extensions of Exeter and New College, and Butterfield’s new buildings at Merton. Others are fancifully bad, like the conscientious ugliness of the Museum, and the recherché ugliness of Balliol, and the mixture of both in the Meadow Buildings of Christ Church. Butterfield in Balliol Chapel and Keble College shows a great power of geometrical invention in form and colour, an invention for the most part greatly astray. It is refreshing among all this to come upon the strong, though wayward artistic temperament of Burges in the decoration of the hall and chapel of Worcester, or even the respectable classic Taylorian buildings of Cockerell, unpleasant in colour and jarring on the spirit of the place as they are.
Very different work has been done of late years. There is less about it of defiant expression of undesirable artistic personality, or pedantic exhibition of a style—more recognition of the power of the place, more actual artistic instinct. Even the much abused Indian Institute of Champneys, in spite of the heavy frivolity of its details and interior, is, in the disposition of the wall and window space, the invention of its tower, and the way the whole building takes its place in the picture, a piece of architecture, which such things as Balliol are not. The space of blank wall on its corner tower is worth more than all the geometrical troubles that fret the face of Keble. At Magdalen, again, the genius of the old buildings has been lovingly reproduced by Mr. Bodley in the new. His tower is not good, and it was carrying faithfulness too far to reproduce the stupid gargoyles and grotesques of the original; but much of the rich decoration in wood and stone is refined in design and workmanship. One can praise, too, the extension of St. John’s. It may be said of all the new Oxford buildings that they are apt to be heavy within, owing a good deal to the fear of fire that makes all the staircases of stone.