156 
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Sir Christopher Wren, Architect 
(Continued from page 154 ) 
satisfying relationship with every other 
part. And the same is true of the 
smallest buildings belonging to the 
period of Wren’s maturity. 
So much for the first and greatest of 
Wren’s virtues as an architect. Next 
we must consider his originality and 
his ingenuity. His originality shows 
itself in the way in which he combines 
the accepted forms of classical Re¬ 
naissance architecture to create designs 
that are entirely English and his own. 
The steeples of his city churches are 
an obvious example of this originality, 
while his domestic architecture—that 
wonderful application of classical prin¬ 
ciples to the best in the English tradi¬ 
tion—is another. His ingenuity is 
shown in a hundred instances; we see 
it in his astonishingly varied solution 
of the problems presented to him in 
the rebuilding of the city churches. Ir¬ 
regular spaces had to be covered, the 
largest possible congregation had to be 
accommodated, the greatest possible 
variety of design obtained, and a 
decent air of richness and dignity im¬ 
parted—all for very little money 
indeed. Those who have seen Wren’s 
London churches will agree that it 
would hardly have been possible to 
achieve all these desired ends as satis¬ 
factorily as Wren has achieved them. 
All the rest of Wren’s virtues seem 
to be corollaries of that great moral 
virtue of gentlemanliness of which we 
have already spoken. It was his gen¬ 
tlemanliness which, while it made him 
respect humanity and desire that men 
and women should live with decency, 
dignity, and even a certain grandeur, 
caused him at the same time to shrink 
from all that was showy, pretentious, 
theatrical, mock-heroic. One has only 
to compare Wren with a few of his 
Italian contemporaries to appreciate 
this gentlemanliness. The Italian 
baroque artists of the 17th Century in 
Italy were interested above everything 
in the striking effect, the astonishing 
coup d’ceil, the violent gesture, the im¬ 
possible air of splendor and magnifi¬ 
cence. Fine as much baroque architec¬ 
ture is, there is a swagger, a flourish, 
and a staginess about most of it which 
becomes, after a time, extremely offen¬ 
sive and fatiguing. 
DIGNIFIED AND UNTHEATRICAL 
How vastly different is the Italian 
theatricality from Wren’s sobriety and 
restraint! Wren was a master of the 
grand, a lover of spaciousness and 
dignity. If only her citizens would 
have allowed him he could have made 
the new London which arose from the 
ashes of the Fire of 1666 the most 
beautiful and dignified and magnificent 
town in Europe. But with all his feel¬ 
ing for grandeur and dignity, Wren 
never dreamed of building for effect 
alone. The dignity which was his 
ideal was something very different from 
the theatrical magnificence of his Italian 
contemporaries; he was never theatri¬ 
cal, never showy or pretentious or vul¬ 
gar. His churches are monuments of 
temperance and chastity. His palace 
at Hampton Court is not the showy 
and uncomfortable stage setting for 
absolute monarchy which # Mansart 
built at Versailles for Louis XIV; it 
is a country gentleman’s house—more 
spacious, of course, and with statelier 
rooms and more impressive vistas—a 
house where it is possible to feel at 
home and to forget that one is a king. 
His successors of the 18th Century 
and 19th Century—and for that matter 
of the early twentieth—forgot his les¬ 
sons in the art of being a gentleman 
architecturally. Afflicted by the folie 
de grandeur, the 18th Century built 
country houses in imitation of Versailles 
and Caserta—stage houses, all for show 
and empty magnificence. The men of 
the 19th Century sinned in a diametri¬ 
cally opposite way; for they forgot that 
man is or should be a reasonable being, 
leading a life of dignity and decency. 
They tried to pretend that he was 
a peasant or at best a robber baron of 
the Middle Ages. They built large 
houses as though they were cottages, 
all holes and corners and quaint fea¬ 
tures, without a decently proportioned 
room, without symmetry or balance, 
with no harmony between a mass of 
over-decorated and over-emphasized 
parts. The gentlemanliness of Wren 
was supplanted, first by a staginess 
that had, in any case, the merit of 
grandiosity, then by a conscious rus¬ 
ticity that had no merit at all. Today 
however, there are signs of a renewed 
understanding of Wren. Architects are 
beginning to build houses for gentlemen. 
wren’s planning 
In matters of proportion, scale, and 
dignified composition, the 20th Century 
has everything to learn from Wren. 
Wren’s planning, though infinitely 
more reasonable than the planning of 
his academic successors of the 18th 
Century, does not entirely satisfy mod¬ 
ern requirements of convenience, labor- 
saving, and privacy. The 18th Century 
architects thought only of the design 
of their great houses and nothing 
of the convenience of the people who 
were to live in them. Let us suppose, 
for example, that they wanted to build 
one of those numerous variations on 
the theme of the central block con¬ 
nected by colonnades with side pavil¬ 
ions which are so common in 18th 
Century architecture: they would carry 
out the design with a ruthless artistic 
logic—completely ignoring the factor 
that, to take the food from the kitchen 
to the dining room, the servants might 
in all probability have to walk along 
fifty yards of open colonnade, up a 
Staircase, and through a suite of recep¬ 
tion rooms. Wren, whose genius was 
always essentially sane and practical, 
never committed the absurd blunders 
of his academic successors. His usual 
plan was the plain square or oblong 
which Inigo Jones had introduced from 
Italy, and which had already largely 
superseded the picturesque but some¬ 
what inconvenient plan of houses built 
round internal quadrangles, so dear to 
the Elizabethans. This square box he 
divides up into convenient rooms on a 
principle that is very much the same 
as it is today—with these differences: 
that he used a greater number of small 
newel staircases than we are accustomed 
to consider necessary and that, like all 
his generation, he saw no objection to 
placing rooms en suite. 
In other respects Wren’s planning is 
as good and sensible as it can be. 
The details of Wren’s internal designs 
are always admirable. His comely and 
dignified staircases, his beautifully pro¬ 
portioned paneling, his fireplaces, often 
charmingly placed across the corner of 
a room, his deeply recessed windows 
and doors—all these things are admir¬ 
able and could not be improved. The 
astonishing thing is that people were 
ever fools enough to desert this com¬ 
fortable, dignified, and thoroughly de¬ 
cent tradition for the hideous and ill- 
proportioned discomforts of Ruskinian 
Gothic or for the affected rusticity and 
quaintness of the early 20th Century 
cottage style. 
