Part 29 (1/2)

Nearly every decade of the past two centuries can be traced by the scholar in London streets and monuments. Nay, from the time of the Great Fire, when Wren, that master spirit in architecture, rose in his strength, and undertook to rebuild sixty destroyed churches,--the progress, or falling off, of London in this art can be generally traced in the metropolis. Wren, best known to posterity as the builder of St. Paul's, was a remarkable figure of his robust time. Like the magician of some old fairy tale, he caused a new and more beautiful London to rise again from its ashes. Macaulay wrote of him:

”In architecture, an art which is half a science ... our country could boast at the time of the Revolution of one truly great man, Sir Christopher Wren; and the fire which laid London in ruins, destroying 13,000 houses and 89 churches, gave him an opportunity unprecedented in history of displaying his powers. The austere beauty of the Athenian portico, the glowing sublimity of the Gothic arcade, he was, like most of his contemporaries, incapable of emulating, and perhaps incapable of appreciating; but no man born on our side of the Alps has imitated with so much success the magnificence of the palace churches of Italy.”

Wren's master-work, it may be said, is after all only imitative; St.

Paul's in London is but an adaptation of St. Peter's in Rome. But it is a free adaptation, and in the grand style. Nor will any one be disposed to deny the great architect's wealth of imagination, originality and resource, who studies Wren's sixty City churches, none of which, either in spire or church itself, is a duplicate of another.

Perhaps, among them all, it is the spire of St. Mary-le-Bow that, for grace and beauty of design, bears away the palm.

For forty years no important building was erected in London in which Wren was not concerned. That his wider plan for the regulating and straightening of the streets themselves was not adopted we have, perhaps, reason to be thankful. While nearly all the city spires recall Wren's master-hand and versatile tastes, the Banqueting House, that well-known palatial fragment in Whitehall, is the princ.i.p.al monument left to us by Inigo Jones, Wren's immediate predecessor.

Inigo Jones is princ.i.p.ally famous as the designer of that splendid palace of Whitehall that was never built, that ”dream-palace” of Palladian splendour that was intended to replace the ancient ”York House” of Wolsey, the former ”Whitehall” of the Tudors. The river-front of this imagined palace, as designed by Inigo, would, in its n.o.ble simplicity, have been a thing of beauty for all time; it is to be regretted that the plan was never carried out. The civil troubles of the impending Revolution, the want of money for so grandiose a scheme, prevented the undertaking. The sole realisation of the dream is now the old Banqueting House that we pa.s.s in Whitehall, a building isolated among its neighbours, intended only as the central portion of but one wing of the enormous edifice. Cruel, indeed, is the irony of history, and little did James I., for whose glory this magnificent palace was planned, think ”that he was raising a pile from which his son was to step from the throne to a scaffold.” For this very Banqueting House served later as Charles's vestibule on his way to execution. With the final banishment of the Stuarts, Whitehall was deserted as a Royal residence; and the old palace, destroyed by successive fires, its picturesque ”Gothic” and ”Holbein” gateways removed as obstructions, has in its turn made way for imposing Government Offices. Yet the Banqueting House, sole and sad relic of a vanished past, still stands solidly in its place, and is now used as a Museum.

What, one imagines, would modern London have been had Inigo Jones's plan found fruition, and the whole of Whitehall, from Westminster to the Banqueting House, been given up to his palatial splendours? That the present Buckingham Palace is but a poor subst.i.tute for such imagined magnificence is certain, and the loss of Inigo's fine Palladian river-frontage is perhaps hardly atoned for by the terrace of our modern Houses of Parliament; yet these, too, are beautiful, and Whitehall has not lost its palatial air; for its wide and still widening streets, its s.p.a.cious and imposing Government Offices, still serve to keep up the illusion, and, at any rate, the state of royalty.

Already one of the handsomest streets in London, its buildings are being yet further improved, and a new War Office of vast proportions is rising slowly on the long-vacant plot of ground where, it was said, three hundred different kinds of wild flowers lately grew, whose yellow and pink blossoms used to wave temptingly before the eyes of travellers on omnibus-tops.... Now, never more will flowers grow there; no longer will the picturesque, green gabled roofs of ”Whitehall Court” look across to the fleckered sunlight of the Admiralty and the Horse Guards. Instead, palatial buildings, something after the Palladian manner of Inigo Jones's imagined Whitehall Palace, will form a n.o.ble street, in a more or less continuous line of ma.s.sive splendour; a road of palaces, to be further dignified by the erection of new and s.p.a.cious Government Offices, near the Abbey, on the line of the destroyed and obstructive King Street. When all the Whitehall improvements are carried out, the dignity and beauty of London will gain immensely, and the view down the long street of palaces,--the Abbey, un.o.bstructed by intervening buildings, s.h.i.+ning like a star at its Parliament Street end,--will be among the very finest sights in the metropolis.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Horse Guards._]

If Inigo Jones, steeped in Italian art, was severely Palladian in style, Wren, his successor, ”a giant in architecture,” was a versatile and original genius. The quant.i.ty and the quality of his work may well overpower a later age. ”He paved the way,” says Fergusson, ”and smoothed the path”; none of his successors have surpa.s.sed if, indeed, equalled him. During the eighteenth century, the Renaissance still held sway in architecture; James Gibbs, in 1721, built the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, of which the Grecian portico, says Mr. Hare, ”is the only perfect example in London”; the brothers Adam, of ”Adelphi” fame, flourished, giving, with their doorways, their fireplaces, their curves and arches, a new impulse to the domestic architecture of their day; Sir William Chambers erected Somerset House; and Sir John Soane, who in 1788 designed the present Bank of England, was, with others of his contemporaries, a pioneer of the coming cla.s.sical revival. With the beginning of the nineteenth century the change came, and architectural design in England completely changed. Now the ”new Greek lines” that, say the French, ”go so ill with our northern climate,” became all the rage; the mild Gothic of Wren, itself a ”last dying echo,” completely disappeared, and Greek temples, ”orders,” pediments, columns, grew everywhere like mushrooms. Nash, the architect of the Regency, the ”Apostle of Plaster,” planned out Regent Street, a new road to extend from the Prince's colonnaded mansion Carlton House, to the new Park named after him: hence arose the Quadrant, and the Regent's Park terraces already alluded to. All was Greek, everything was colonnaded, at that day:

”Once the fas.h.i.+on was introduced it became a mania. Thirty or forty years ago no building was complete without a Doric portico, hexastyle, or octastyle, prostylar, or distyle in antis; and no educated man dared to confess ignorance of a great many very hard words which then became fas.h.i.+onable.

Churches were most afflicted in this way: next to these came gaols and county halls, but even railway stations and panoramas found their best advertis.e.m.e.nts in these sacred adjuncts; and terraces and shop-fronts thought they had attained the acme of elegance when either a wooden or plaster caricature of a Grecian order suggested the cla.s.sical taste of the builder.”

Nash was the chief introducer of ”stucco” (the covering of brick with cement to imitate stone), which has since become so vulgarised everywhere, and especially in the fas.h.i.+onable West End squares and streets. Nash's tastes in this respect gave rise to the following epigram:

”Augustus at Rome was for building renowned, And of marble he left what of brick he had found; But is not our Nash, too, a very great master?

He finds us all brick, and he leaves us all plaster.”

All the great public buildings of the time shared in the cla.s.sic revival. The British Museum, built by the Smirkes in the first half of the last century, at enormous expense, is the most successful imitation of Ionic architecture in England. The style of the pediment is after that of the Athenian Acropolis. Though critics object to it that it has no suitable base, it is, nevertheless, an imposing structure. The Greek portico of the London University Buildings, in Gower Street, erected by Wilkins in 1827, is, says Fergusson, ”the most pleasing specimen of its cla.s.s ever erected in this country.” But it is so secluded and recessed from the street, as to be hardly seen.

Its architect, Wilkins, had the misfortune to be chosen to erect our much-abused National Gallery building, with its condemned ”pepper-boxes” of cupolas; the designer, however, was so hampered by conditions and restrictions, as to be almost helpless in the matter.

The National Gallery, nevertheless, still stands on the finest site in London, an object of scorn to visitors and foreigners.

But the ultra-cla.s.sic craze, in London, burnt itself out at last in one final flare. Of the innumerable buildings that still tell of the extent of the mania, perhaps the most exaggerated is the church of New St. Pancras, built after not one but several Athenian temples. It is a strange medley of forms, a real nightmare of Greek art. Its tower is a double reproduction of the ”Temple of the Winds,” one temple on the top of the other: while its interior and its caryatids are modelled on the Erechtheion. Poor caryatids, designed for the bright sunlight of the Acropolis, and imprisoned, blackened and ogre-like, in the dreary and muddy Euston Road! ”Calm” you may be, in your pre-surroundings, but hardly ”far-looking”; for your view is restricted (even if fog does not restrict it yet further) to the uninspiring buildings of Euston Station opposite! Truly, they who placed you here must have been somewhat lacking in sense of humour!

The double Tower of the Winds is not so unhappy as the poor caryatids; it even looks well, in its height and its silvery greyness, seen over the Tavistock Square trees, which hide its inadequate portico. The failure of this incongruous church, added to its vast expense, brought the final reaction from the cla.s.sical fever; yet, from one extreme, men directly rushed to the other.

The Gothic revival, as might be expected, set in severely; the cla.s.sic sculptors changed their style and became Gothic; new Gothic sculptors, Pugin, Britton, and others, arose on the artistic firmament. Then, in 1840-59, Sir Charles Barry built the chief modern architectural feature of London, the New Palace of Westminster, in the mediaeval and Tudor style. The small chapel of Henry VII. gave the idea for this vast edifice. The enormous structure, so often criticised, is yet, to judge by the many photographs and views annually sold of it, the most popular building in London.

Even M. Taine, who consistently falls foul of all London architecture that is not Gothic, speaks thus of it:

”The architecture ... has the merit of being neither Grecian nor Southern; it is Gothic, accommodated to the climate, to the requirements of the eye. The palace magnificently mirrors itself in the s.h.i.+ning river; in the distance, its clock-tower, its legions of turrets and of carvings are vaguely outlined in the mist. Leaping and twisted lines, complicated mouldings, trefoils and rose windows diversify the enormous ma.s.s which covers four acres, and produces on the mind the idea of a tangled forest.”

The great Exhibition of 1851 gave, naturally, much impetus to the enlargement, as well as the architecture, of London. And though the English school of architects became somewhat more catholic in taste, yet the Gothic style still held the public favour. b.u.t.terfield's severe church of All Saints, Margaret Street, delighted the public taste, and initiated the fas.h.i.+on for ”b.u.t.terfield” spires; Scott's church of St. Mary Abbott's, Kensington, was also popular. Would not either of these be noticed, if ”planted out” in an Italian valley? And Street's well-known New Law Courts, in the Strand, built 1879-83, are the latest expression of modern Gothic. Opinion is divided on the subject of their merits, but undoubtedly they form, viewed from the Strand, a fine pile of buildings.

What is called the ”Queen Anne” building craze has set in strongly of late years, its chief pioneers being the two architects,--Norman Shaw, who built the picturesque mansion of Lowther Lodge, solidly fine in its darkened red-brick, close to the Albert Hall,--and Bodley, who designed the fine offices of the London School Board on the Thames Embankment. Lowther Lodge is said to ”exhibit very well the merits of the best order of ”Queen Anne” design of the domestic cla.s.s”; its successors are much more efflorescent. Everywhere now spring up so-called ”Queen Anne” mansions, streets, houses, public offices; and red-brick, terra-cotta, nooks, ingles, cas.e.m.e.nt windows are multiplying _ad libitum_ all over the metropolis. Different styles prevail at different times, and the ”Queen Anne” wave just now threatens to overwhelm us. Flats, stores, police-stations, hotels, all are becoming ”Queen Anne.” Even if walls are still thin, even if the jerry-builder is still to the fore, new streets are, none the less, built in the ”Queen Anne” manner; and the last stage of every craze is worse than the first.

What, then, is the prevailing architecture of London? We have perused its history; we have wandered through its streets, and have gazed on all and every style of building. Decision ought to be easy. Yet it is not so easy as it looks. In the Forum at Rome, you have to dig to find out all the different strata of buildings--republican, monarchical, imperial. In London, it is even more puzzling, for here you see them all together, above ground, in close juxtaposition--Tudor, Stuart, Hanoverian--it needs more than a magician's wand to relegate each to its proper period in history. Wren's St. Paul's, the enormous Hotel Cecil, the Whitehall Government Offices, the old timbered mansions in Bishopsgate Street, Pennethorne's new Tudor Record office, the Railway Architecture of Charing Cross and of Liverpool Street, the Aquarium hung gaily with posters, the Savoy Hotel in white and gold--you have them all, side by side. You pa.s.s through the prevailing stucco and heavy porticoes of Belgrave Square,--the new red-brick and terra-cotta of the Cadogan and Grosvenor Estates,--the stone dignity of Broad Sanctuary,--the dull brick uniformity of Bloomsbury;--which style, think you, suits your ideal London best?

But, while it may reasonably be matter for conjecture as to what architectural style really suits London best,--or if, indeed, a wholesome mixture of all styles be not a desideratum,--it seems, perhaps, safe to say that it is the ”dark house,” in the ”long, unlovely street” of Tennyson's condemnation, of Madame de Stael's vituperation,--that, in its dull uniformity, really occupies most of the area of London. There are, of course, minor differences. In West London, the ”unlovely street” may flower into questionable stucco; in East London, it may become lower, dingier, and meaner: but in original intent all are the same. So monotonous, indeed, are they, that, in secluded squares or corners, one welcomes joyfully an original door-knocker, even such a door-canopy as that described in _Little Dorrit_, ”a projecting canopy in carved work, of festooned jack-towels, and children's heads with water-on-the-brain, designed after a once-popular monumental pattern.” In interiors, these same monotonous houses may all differ widely, though even here no universal rule of taste can be laid down; and the little School Board boy who said, navely, ”Rich people's houses ain't nice inside; there is books all round, and no was.h.i.+n'” unconsciously testified to the wide differences entailed by ”the point of view.” In Mayfair, Westminster, or Belgravia,--yes, even in Bloomsbury, one dull brick or stucco house-front may present the same external gloom as another, and yet, internally, may differ much from that other in glory. And this fact is typical of poor as well as of rich London. An Englishman's house is his castle, and Englishmen's tastes, as we know, are seldom much in evidence. ”Adam” ceilings, ”Morris” tapestries, Pompeian courts, leafy vistas, mediaeval halls, ”Queen Anne”, ”ingleneuks,” all these may surprise the visitor, when once the ”Open sesame” has revealed to him all that lies behind that magic front door that guards the Briton's household G.o.ds from the vulgar glare of the street.

Even some of the treasure-houses of England's magnates, merchant-princes, and collectors are curiously unsuggestive externally. In this connection I may quote Mr. Moncure Conway's description of the late Mr. Alfred Morrison's house in Carlton House Terrace, adorned by the genius of Mr. Owen Jones:

”The house” (he says) ”is one of those large, square, lead-coloured buildings, of which so many thousands exist in London, that any one pa.s.sing by would p.r.o.nounce characteristically characterless. It repeats the apparent determination of ages that there shall be no external architectural beauty in London. Height, breadth, ma.s.siveness of portal, all declare that he who resides here has not dispensed with architecture because he could not command it.

In other climes this gentleman is dwelling behind carved porticoes of marble and pillars of porphyry; but here the cloud and sky have commanded him to build a blank fortress and find his marble and porphyry inside of it. Pa.s.s through this heavy doorway, and in an instant every fair clime surrounds you, every region lavishes its sentiment; you are the heir of all the ages.”