The Cathedral Church of St. Paul, London.

FROM THE SOUTH.

From Lincoln and Lichfield to St. Paul’s, the transition is vast and abrupt. It is a transition from the archaic, mediæval, feudal world to modern England. Mediæval religion, mediæval art is dead—killed by the printed book. Mediæval architecture also succumbs before the printed book. The master-masons of the old cathedrals, whose very names for the most part are unknown, give place to architects of European fame—men who read books, write books, and work to book. The mediæval architect was a builder and nothing else. The Renaissance architect was first of all a scholar, and secondly an artist; and only incidentally an architect. He learnt the art of architectural design, not in the builder’s yard, but by preference at the goldsmith’s bench. From jewellery he turned with equal facility to painting and sculpture, to civil engineering or to the art of fortification, to water-colours, to stage mechanism, to landscape gardening, to poetry, politics or diplomacy. Among the men of this versatile genius Christopher Wren holds a worthy place. Heproceeded to Oxford at the early age of fourteen; and obtained a fellowship at All Souls’. Physical science and astronomy were his first love. At the age of twenty-five “he was known in scientific circles all over Europe,” and was Professor of Astronomy. He wrote on comets, and gnomonicks, and diplographic pens. In his twenty-ninth year he was honoured with the degrees of D.C.L. and LL.D. at Oxford and Cambridge. He helped to found the Royal Society, and was twice its President. He was even a Member of the House of Commons in two Parliaments. In his thirty-first year he turned his attention to architecture—attracted, no doubt, largely by the physical and mathematical problems involved. Two years later he set out to the Continent to see for himself the great works of the Revival of Classical Architecture. Unfortunately he went no farther than Paris: those masterpieces of the Renaissance, Brunelleschi’s dome at Florence, Michael Angelo’s dome at Rome, he was fated never to see. For the rest of a life unusually prolonged he was to be occupied in imitating models which he had never seen. The result is perhaps not to be regretted. He left behind him not the close copy of Italian Renaissance work which we might have had, under more favourable circumstances, from Inigo Jones, but an English Renaissance style of marked individuality and originality, and therefore of great interest. He had to think out all his problems—problems of construction and problems of planning—for himself.

WEST FRONT.

Wren, like his employers, the citizens of the City of London was a sound Protestant; and when he was commissioned torebuild St. Paul’s after the Great Fire, his intention was to give London a Protestant cathedral. He was less concerned to provide processional aisles and altared chapels than a vast unencumbered central area for preaching. The new cathedral was to be a gigantic preaching-house. To provide the vast central area demanded, the narrow crossing beneath the central tower of a Gothic cathedral was abandoned. Instead of a central tower he resolved to employ a dome—the only form of roof which would cover so vast a span. One mediæval cathedral in England, and one only, had such a crossing. It was the superb cathedral of Ely, where Wren’s uncle was Bishop. But it was no doubt of St. Peter’s, Rome, that Wren was thinking, rather than of Ely. Just as St. Peter’s, Rome, had been built to rival and surpass the Florence Duomo, so Wren designed that his own new cathedral should be an improvement on St. Peter’s, Rome. In the supports of his dome he chose to follow the unhappy precedents of Florence and Ely rather than the nobler type of St. Peter’s and Santa Sophia; he blocked up his central area with eight piers, instead of poising his dome on four supports, as in the metropolitan cathedrals of the East and West.

AS FIRST PROJECTED.

In Wren’s favourite design, as shown in the model still preserved in the cathedral, the dome was to be abutted to the west by an aisleless vestibule or nave, itself crowned by a minor dome; while to the north, east, and south, it was intended to give it the support of a surrounding ring of domical chapels, opening into the central areaby a series of fairy-like vistas and ever-changing contrasts of light and shadow. But the Anglican clergy rose in revolt at the position assigned to them in the cathedral—a position contrary to any precedent of the Anglican Church; and refused to sit in a ring all round the central area beneath the dome. On the other hand, the Court party, almost openly expecting, and with good reason, the restoration of the old religion, wanted an aisled nave with room for the pageantry of processions and with provision of chapels for the saint-worship soon to be restored. Romanisers and Anglicans alike united to condemn a plan which failed to provide for the ritualistic needs of either. Wren had to start again; and London had to put up with a Renaissance cathedral which in plan is as mediæval as that of Ely, with aisled nave, aisled choir, aisled transepts, and even with a western transept, as again at Ely. St. Paul’s then, is primarily, an aisled (i.e.a basilican) church, with, incidentally, a dome thrown in. And therein lies the fault of the design. Internally, the church predominates over the dome. Unless you stand beneath or almost beneath the dome, you can hardly see that a dome is there at all. Narrow nave, narrower aisles, the multiplied obstructive masses of the various piers, hide the dome away from view. Rightly designed, a great central dome ought to be all in all; everything should lead upto it; everything should be suppressed that does not lend it strength or grace. Its thrusts are great, and cannot be resisted by the piers of aisles, unless the piers are positive mountains of masonry; aisles, then, should be omitted. The dome should rest on four arches, and their thrusts should be resisted by the solid walls of the unaisled nave and choir and the two transepts. And these four great limbs of the church should be kept short, to give the dome full value.

NAVE.

Again, just as the central dome dictates the plan of the church, so it should dictate the form of the vaulted roof. There were three types of vault at Wren’s disposal. One was the intersecting vault, a second the domical vault, a third the waggon or tunnel vault. The first is altogether out of harmony with a central dome, though Wren has employed it in some of his City churches. What he adopted was the second: he vaulted the nave with a row of four domes, the choir with a row of three. Thus, it might be thought, with seven domes leading up to a central dome, Wren had secured harmony and success. It is not so. Nothing can be more distressing to the eye than to follow the up and down line of the little domes till it suddenly plunges into the central abyss. The only tolerable form of vault in connection with a central dome is the tunnel vault, as it is employed in St. Peter’s, Rome; or, still better, in S. Annunziata, Genoa. Such a tunnel vault, however, should start direct from the cornice, and not, as at St. Paul’s, from a meaningless attic interposed between cornice and vault.

CHOIR.

As it stands, in the internal elevation of the cathedral Wren has given us a hybrid design. It reminds one of Gothic, for there is a travesty of a clerestory; it is Classic, for beneath is a gigantic Order. Wren has hesitated between two opinions. He might have given us a three-storied interior—pier-arcade, triforium and clerestory—of course with Classical detail, as is done with charming effect in the noble cathedral at Pavia; or a one-storied interior, as at St. Peter’s. As his patrons insisted on having aisles, he might well have adopted theformer alternative, and have presented us with what might have been very beautiful—a Classical triforium. If he wanted the majesty of the single gigantic Order of St. Peter’s, he should have omitted the attic, run up the Order twenty feet higher, and lighted the nave by lunettes cut through a tunnel vault. As it is, the miserable attic is of no value in itself, and at the same time diminishes the importance of the pier arcade. However, as we have seen, Wren is not responsible at all forthe plan, and only partially for the proportions of the interior of St. Paul’s. He has not given us of his best, because the world of his day would not have it. Most of the defects that one laments are absent from his earlier and favourite design:e.g., the ugly subsidiary arches under the oblique arches of the octagon of the dome, and the bad lighting of the dome itself.

LOOKING WEST.

Externally everything is different. No ritual, Anglican or other, interfered. Wren had free play: all his success and any faults are his own. What it fails to do internally the great dome does externally with colossal success: it dominates everything—not only the church, but London. Every part of the vast building gathers up into the all-compelling unity of the central dome. Inside, St. Paul’s is all church; outside, it is all dome. Into this exterior has grown in concrete embodiment all Wren’s aspirations: his aspirations for grandeur, massiveness, and power; for monumental stability, for unity, for harmony, for symmetry and proportion, for beauty of curve and line. St. Paul’s has none of the airy lightness of Salisbury and Lincoln; it possesses in compensation the rock-hewn solidity and majesty of Durham. In Lincoln and Salisbury, and in Exeter and York, the windows are counted by hundreds; along the flanks of St. Paul’s windows are few and far apart, and they are confined to the aisles; the great screen-wall above rises sheer like a precipice, almost unbroken by an opening. Simple and grand, too, is the handling of the masses. At the re-entering angles of thetransepts square masses project to form a stable platform for the mighty dome; towers project to the flanks of the western bays of the nave, giving breadth and dignity to the main façade. Otherwise the design is symmetry itself. Everything is in the “grand manner.” Perhaps the side-elevation is a little monotonous, and the western chapels block off the towers at their spring, but they were forced on Wren against his better judgment: internally the nave gains greatly; externally they are a mistake. One would perhaps have liked also that the screen-wall of the side aisles of the choir and transepts, instead of ending square, should have circled round in one vast majestic sweep, in harmony with the curving dome above, after the fashion of the fine cathedral of Como. The flatness, moreover, of the side-elevations gives but little room for play of light and shade. There are none of the pits of darkness that lurk between the buttresses and transepts of Beverley or Lincoln. Only in the recessed west front and behind the colonnade of the dome the shadows brood. Nature, however, or rather London smoke, has given St. Paul’s a chiaroscuro of its own—not to be washed off, as has been foolishly proposed, by Vandal fire-engines. Where the rain lashes the building, especially its angles and projections, the good Portland stone is white and clean; where sheltered by projecting cornices it is black as Erebus.

FLYING-BUTTRESSES AND SCREEN-WALL.

Externally, it is a building of two stories. Wren designed it originally for one story, but was unable to get big enough blocks of stone to carry a single gigantic Order, as at St. Peter’s, up to the cornice; for which we may be thankful. The façade also is composed of two Orders of columns, and they are necessarily comparatively small columns. But all appearance of weakness is admirably removed by arranging them in couples; indeed, one would be sorry to have instead of this noble design Wren’s own one-story façade as shown in his model,—still more to have that of Inigo Jones.

The harmony, too, of the noble design is delightful. The two stories of the columns of the façade become two stories of pilasters on the flanks of the nave; at the ends of the transepts they sweep round into lovely semicircular colonnades; colonnades form the central stages of the western steeples; the drum of the dome is encircled by a superb colonnade; the dome itself culminates in a colonnaded lantern. See, too, how the lantern, domical above and colonnaded below, sums up the composition of the dome beneath; and how the western steeples prepare the eye for the transition from the rectilinear colonnades of the great façade to the swelling curve of the dome,—itself reproduced in the north and south circular porches and in the apsidal choir. St. Paul’s is “a house at one with itself.”

It is true that the dead wall from aisle windows to cornice is perhaps the “most unmitigated building sham upon the face of the earth.” It has absolutely nothing to do at all except to hide away some flying-buttresses—the very ugliest eye ever saw—which Sir Christopher might well be reluctant to expose to the jeers of the man in the street. It is true, too, that there is built up in this dead wall enough good stone to construct half a dozen parish churches. It has been urged that it was built to weight the foot of each flying-buttress after the manner of a Gothic pinnacle. But not even a Gothic baby would have provided continuous abutment for intermittent thrusts. The dead wall may perhaps bedefended on artistic, but certainly not on constructional grounds.

INNER DOME, CONE, AND OUTER DOME.

In the dome, Wren had three conflicting ideals to realise: (1) to make the dome so lofty that it should be visible externally from base to summit; (2) to make it so low internally that it should range with the vaulting of nave, choir, and transepts; (3) to finish it with a stone lantern as lofty and heavy as an ordinary church spire. At St. Peter’s the dome externally squats down so low that from most directions one must walk a mile away to get a complete view of it; the internal domeis so lofty as to be invisible from most parts of the church; the lantern is much smaller and lighter than is required by so mighty a dome; and is in a condition of very unstable equilibrium, badly supported, cracked, and tied together in all directions. All these difficulties Wren triumphantly disposed of; nevertheless, for his triumph he has received little but censure and abuse. He made two domes; and brought the inner dome, which is of brick (see diagram), far lower than the outer one—though not low enough. Secondly, he mounted the outer dome, which is of wood covered with lead, on a lofty colonnaded drum, visible of all men even from the narrow street below. Thirdly, between the two domes (see diagram) he built a cone of brick, and on this cone he poised the lantern—which is as heavy as an ordinary church-spire—in perfect security. If the outer dome were removed—e.g., if it were burnt, as it may some day, being of wood—the lantern would still stand perfectly safe on its conical support. In the dome of St. Paul’s Wren’s engineering capacities culminate. But it is more than a piece of engineering. No tower, no spire, no group of towers or spires, impresses itself on the imagination like the dome of St. Paul’s. Lincoln and Salisbury, Lichfield and Durham, retire before the claims of this overwhelming younger pile,

“whose sky-like domeHath typified by reach of daring artInfinity’s embrace.”

“whose sky-like dome

Hath typified by reach of daring art

Infinity’s embrace.”

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