character than is usual with him to the heads of the other two principal female figures, and by the rough and weather-beaten countenance of the entering shepherd.'* And, secondly, here is a typical Ruskin remark on the nature of the Gothic style in architecture: "The feelings and habits in the workman must be understood. There is first the habit of hard and rapid working; the industry of the tribes of the North, quickened by the coldness of the climate, and giving an expression of sharp energy to all they do, as opposed to the languor of the Southern tribes.'* Again, as a criterion of good Gothic work the following could hardly have been improved even by the late Professor E. S. Prior, the best English interpreter of Gothic and let it be said-a Cambridge Slade Professor: 'See if it looks as if it had been built by strong men; if it has the sort of roughness, and largeness, and nonchalance, mixed in places with the exquisite tenderness which seems always to be a sign-manual of the broad vision, and massy power of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it. If the building has that character, it is much already in its favour; it will go hard but it proves a noble one." * Partiality forbids me to match this with a detailed quotation from Wyatt's Slade lectures on the history of architecture with their rare dim remarks about ‘a lighter scale of parts', or 'a beauty of refinement in the execution of foliage [and] mouldings'. However, perhaps one should not be shocked by this deficiency in our Wyatt. For since all his signal contributions concern the principles of design and the appreciation of a new technological architecture, why should he be expected to have been a man of any special sensibility? Here also lies, of course, the explanation of the fact how so undeniably remarkable a man can have been so undeniably bad an architect. Such a contrast between theory and performance is frequent amongst Victorian architects. It occurs in Pugin and Gilbert Scott, even more blatantly in Viollet-le-Duc, and in many others. Very generally speaking one can perhaps say that harmony between theory and performance must be rooted in a much deeper harmony between thought and feeling.* This harmony returned only into the arts of design with William Morris. Morris, it is known, appreciated Owen Jones; Wyatt he will hardly have noticed much. The man to whom he owed most was Ruskin. From Ruskin he received his romantic backward-looking enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. From Ruskin he received his faith in art as 'a happiness for the maker and for the user', * and from Ruskin his hatred for his own century, its machines, its commerce and its grimy cities. Wyatt would have approved no more of Morris than he did of Ruskin. Wyatt worshipped industry and 'the comparative annihilation of time and space, through the railway and telegraph'. He firmly believed in 'free trade ... free press, free navigation, free education. . . comparatively free postal communication' and 'that ruthless destroyer of conventional restrictions-Competition'. Morris on competition is as telling: work in the Middle Ages was intelligent work and pleasant to do. Work now is unintelligent and 'irksome and degrading'. 'The immediate cause of this degrading labour which oppresses so large a part of our people is the system of competitive commerce'; for 'machineorganized labour is necessary to competitive commerce'. * The contrast here between the Cole circle and Morris goes to the very foundations of their feelings and convictions, and hence, when you read the venerable past-Master of Trinity, the Rev. William Whewell, a man in sympathy with the Cole circle, Prince Albert and the ideas behind the exhibition of 1851, pronounce that art ought to be created 'not to satisfy the tastes of the few, n.43 n.44 n.45 n.46 n.47 n.48 n.49 n.50 n.si n.52 [but] to supply the wants of the many',* and then find that Morris said exactly the same what business have we with art at all, unless all can share it'*—then you will be suspicious at once of this seeming concordance. In fact, Morris of course meant something utterly different. His aim was to make all work and all art a joy for the maker and the user. To Cole and the others the aim is, as Wyatt put it in 1849, to provide 'the enjoyments of taste to the enormous and now alln.53 powerful Bourgeois class'.* I will not dwell on the class aspects of this. What matters to me is that Wyatt thinks of the industrialist and the designer for industry, not of the craftsman. And he thinks not of the clientele that can afford the work of the craftsman-Morris's clientele, whether he liked the fact or not, had to be of a certain affluence-but of art which everybody can afford. Hence Cole's Art Manufactures of the forties, hence his activities as Secretary to the Department of Practical Art, and later as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and hence Redgrave's job as Inspector General of Art. Looking at it from the point of view of today, Wyatt, Cole, Redgrave are the predecessors of our Councils of Industrial Design and Art Councils and all the other governmentally-and perhaps academically-aided means of promoting art. They were just as convinced as we are, and as Morris was, that not all is well in the realm of art and architecture, but they believed that by better training and by lecturing and exhibiting, art, architecture and aesthetic understanding might be re-established within our own society, whereas Morris believed that a complete change of heart, if not a complete upheaval of society, would have to n.54 precede the re-establishment of an art worth having.* Who in this argument is right? We have to ask ourselves just as urgently now as they had to in 1851. Who is right? Ruskin and his disciple Morris, or Digby Wyatt? In asking this question in this form, I have cunningly placed Wyatt on the same level as Ruskin and Morris. If you are ready, after having listened to me, to be taken in by this, I shall have succeeded in my humble intention of making the first Cambridge Slade Professor appear for an hour more interesting than he really was. An appendix listing Wyatt's works will be found on pages 266-268 Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 3rd Series, LXIV, 1957 V William Morris and Architecture n. I n.2 n. 3, 4 n.s n.6 n.8 HE FASCINATION of any reading of William Morris, be it his letters or his Tlectures or any monograph on him is to feel in the presence of an excep tionally powerful human being, a being with plenty of contradictions and in- Less familiar perhaps but equally illuminating is the fact that with all this violence he remained yet a detached character, to a remarkable degree managing to keep out of emotional entanglements that might endanger his work. 'I must confess it... I am living my own life in spite of... anything grievous that may n.7 happen.** 'I have ever been loth to think that there were no people going through life... free from binding entanglements. Such a one I want to be.'* Wilfred Scawen Blunt summoned this up immediately after Morris's death. 'He is the most wonderful man I have ever known, unique in this, that he had no thought for any thing or person, including himself, but only for the work he had in hand. ... He was too absorbed in his own thoughts to be either openly affectionate or actively kind. . . . I have seen him tender to his daughter Jenny and nice with her and with his wife, but . . . his life was not arranged in reference to them. To the rest of the world he seemed quite indifferent . . .' n.9 n. 10 n. II n.12 n.13 * And this of a man who gave up painting because it was too unconnected with the promotion of the well-being of others, who gave up architecture because work in an office, as architecture mostly is, was too detached from life, and whose ever-guiding maxim was: 'What business have we with art at all, unless all can share it.'* His socio-aesthetic principles are familiar: art must be for the people, not for the connoisseur; it must be by the people not by ‘unassisted individual genius'.* This is how the conditions of art were in the Middle Ages, and unless such conditions can be restored to our age, there is no hope of a decent art or a decent life. It is from these principles that one must start to understand Morris's faith in architecture. His faith was indeed of the highest: 'the master-art' he calls it,* and 'one of the most important things which man can turn his hand to'.* His hand, it should be noted, not his mind. It may be an accidental turn of phrase, but it is very telling all the same. The crafts that make up architecture were closer to n.16 Morris's heart than the intellectual power of designing. So the aspect of architecture which interested him most is that, according to him, 'every work of architecture is a work of co-operation'.* And so it is, of course, though not necessarily n.14 always in the sense in which Morris meant it. What he meant is the outcome of his veneration for the Middle Ages. 'The ancient buildings of the Middle Ages' were indeed 'the work of associated labour and thought of the people'.* Today, n.15 on the other hand-that is, in Morris's day-the great architect' is 'carefully... guarded from the common troubles of common men'.* How true this was of an age in which an architect of repute designed churches, public buildings, country houses and villas but scarcely ever houses for the common man need hardly be stressed. Yet this is not really what Morris was pleading for. He was a born craftsman, and so he turned his plea at once from architecture in the direction of craft: 'Noble as that art is by itself, and though it is specially the art of civilisation, it neither ever has existed nor ever can exist alive and progressive by itself, but must cherish and be cherished by all the crafts whereby men make the things which they intend shall be beautiful and shall last somewhat beyond the passing day. It is this union of the arts, mutually helpful and harmoniously subordinated one to another which I have learnt to think of as Architecture.'* We today may have our doubts about the word crafts here, irreplaceable as it was to Morris, but the wide view taken of the duties and privileges of the architect will strike a sympathetic chord. In a passage immediately preceding the one just quoted, Morris said more comprehensively that architecture ‘embraces the consideration of the whole external surroundings of the life of man; we cannot escape from it if we would... for it means the moulding and altering to human needs of the very face of the earth itself'.* That surely was bold in the days of Scott and Butter- n.18 field, or even Norman Shaw and Philip Webb, and its logical consequence was that to Morris 'unless you are resolved to have good and rational architecture, it is... useless your thinking about art at all'.* n.17 n. 19 n.20 n.22 But so far this has been architecture in the abstract. Now how do these principles link up with the actual building that surrounded Morris? His enthusiasm was for Gothic architecture, and his dislike of Renaissance architecture was intense, both tastes fostered by his great admiration for Ruskin. He discovered the Gothic style for himself first at Oxford and then when travelling in France at the age of twenty-one. 'O! the glories of the Churches we have seen!" he exclaimed in a letter to a friend,* and at the age of twenty-two he wrote in an article in the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine:* 'I think those same churches of North France the grandest, the most beautiful, the kindest and most loving of all the buildings that the earth has ever borne.' He would have written almost the same at the age of sixty-two. In the same youthful letter there is also a reference to a church 'Deo gratias not yet restored'.* So Morris's great preoccupation with protection instead of restoration started early too and was of course also stimulated by Ruskin.* It led in the end to Morris being instrumental in bring- n.23 ing about the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Anti-Scrape, as they called it, and in formulating the principles for the treatment of old buildings which are to this day valid. They include two important new points: an intense appreciation of the surfaces of buildings, and tolerance for the incongruity of their furnishings, as accumulated through the ages. 'The natural weathering of the surface of a building is beautiful, and its loss disastrous.'* In another place n.24 Morris adds to this aesthetic the historic interest in 'the sentiment attaching to the very face which the original builders gave their work'* —a fallacious argument because weather ruins an original face as thoroughly as the nineteenth-century builder's workmen. Now for furnishings: 'In my opinion there is no remedy... but for the public to make up its mind to put up with "comparatively recent" incongruities in old churches... and to be content with keeping them weathertight.'* Hence Morris's hatred of Gilbert Scott whom he once called 'the (happily) dead dog'* and hence his defence of Wren's City Churches menaced with destruction,* although he obviously could not like them. He called St n.28 Paul's, 'on the grounds of beauty', hardly acceptable 'as a substitute for even the n.25 n.26 n.27 |