Lawrence Weaver

“ Wren was the man to whom his associates turned for help in solving their individual problems, because of his extraordinary ingenuity in inventing apparatus which would establish or dispel the truth of some scientific idea, and still more because of his ready kindness and modesty. During the early days of the Royal Society he was not only in an especial manner the cement which kept together the whole fabric, but the inspirer of much work which was carried to fruition by others. ”

“ There is a common phrase for men of encyclopædic knowledge, that they have forgotten more than other men ever knew. It would be true of my old friend, Mr. Arthur Bolton, Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, but—he has not forgotten. He has been so helpful and full of suggestions that it would be more honest if his name were with mine on the title-page. But he shares Wren’s gift of modesty as well as learning, and I need only express an admiring gratitude. I am indebted to the Duke of Portland, to the Warden of Wadham, and to the Editor of Architecture for permission to reproduce portraits. ”

“ A manuscript lecture, De corpore Saturni ejusque phasibus Hypothesis, flits irritatingly by us as having been possessed by one William Jones, Esquire, but after that—silence. The Gresham oration was a little pompous and for the “politer genii” whom he espied in his audience.
“A time would come when men would be able to stretch out their eyes as snails do (Wren worked with a thirty-six foot glass at Oxford) and extend them to fifty feet in length, by which means they should be able to discover ten thousand times as many stars as we can.” ”

“ The suggestion that Wren was the master mathematician of Europe will not do. It is enough to affirm of him that he was an ingenious geometrician who made several minor advances in that science. He left no evidence of mathematical genius, a quality which ought to be reserved to the authors of far-reaching and fruitful conceptions. The true significance of Wren’s mathematics lies [36] in the fine way in which he applied them in his buildings. No one is a better representative of applied science as compared with pure or fundamental science. ”

“ Without a guiding hypothesis the mind is lost in a wilderness of facts, but the value of the hypothesis must be checked continually by its capacity to embrace the known facts and to predict new ones. None the less, Bacon’s method was at the time a necessary summons to experiment, and under its stimulus the young men of the day attacked the problem of the natural world about them with the enthusiasm of crusaders. ”

“ In all Wren’s writings he shows an acute perception of the fact that architecture has had an immensely long evolution. He had, of course, no suspicion as to how far back its origins were to be sought, but clearly he was approaching the idea that forms, once constructive, pass into decoration and become part of the language of architecture. ”

“ Wren had the true spirit of Bacon, and, with further travel, might have seen further through the idols of his market-place.
He seems to have realised the trouble in which he had involved himself in the arches of the octagon that supports his mighty dome. Every architectural student since his day has sat and speculated as to what the solution might have or should have been. ”

“ Wren’s paper is no more than a fragment, but it is a noble fragment and begins thus:
“Whatever a man’s sentiments are upon mature deliberation, it will still be necessary for him in a conspicuous Work to preserve his Undertaking from general censure, and so for him to accommodate his Designs to the gust of the Age he lives in, tho’ it appears to him less rational. I have found no little difficulty to bring Persons, of otherwise a [150] good genius, to think anything in Architecture would be better than what they had heard commended by others, and what they had view’d themselves. ”

“ My old friend Henry Wheatley pleased himself with the notion that people who write get a grossly unfair share of the world’s praise, for the relative greatness of men is judged by what writers say of them, and writers are obsessed by the importance of their own craft.
It is also true that architecture has been in England an inarticulate trade, and one regarded in our generation as a technical mystery with which we are little concerned. ”

“ Under King George I., when Wren was a very old man, he lost his appointment, but only as the culmination of a discreditable campaign against him by futile people who lacked the wit to appreciate the greatness of the man against whom they plotted their dishonest little persecutions.
In so far as Wren’s advancement as an architect may be attributed to any one man, it is clear that John Evelyn the diarist must have the credit. ”

“ For as a corollary to his method Bacon had insisted upon the necessity of studying the common arts and crafts hitherto regarded as beneath the dignity of philosophy. In the operations of the mechanic or the smelter, and in the growth of crops, were to be found the materials of science. So the new philosophers were universally curious and their curiosity about things was the note of the society in which Wren grew up and the dominant feature of his own mind until he settled down to architecture. ”

“ Speaking broadly and generally we can say that Wren was universally accomplished in all the science of the time, that in several directions he showed a quality of mind that was only short of the highest, and that finally he abandoned the pursuit of pure science too soon to have accomplished in any branch such a mass of work as would mark him as one of the founders of that science. It must always be remembered that Wren took to architecture when he was just over thirty, and was immersed in a huge practice when he was thirty-five. ”

“ Any doubt as to the reality and massive quality of his genius can easily be dissipated by a consideration of what imitators have done. No domed church on the lines of St. Paul’s has achieved equal beauty and grandeur, nor have any of the innumerable steeples, based on his inventions, been of the same rank. In domestic buildings, his special character remains pre-eminent and informs the best work of to-day—a certain graciousness that in others degenerated often into heaviness. ”

“ As a result of them it happened that practically no work of Wren, however noble in its conception, however magnificent its solution of difficult problems, can be freed from criticism in detail. He did not produce the complete unity against which no criticism can lie. Of Inigo Jones at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden (as it was before it was rebuilt) , and again at the Banqueting Hall, of Robert Adam in the hall at Syon, and of Sir Charles Barry at the Reform Club, it can be said that they made no mistakes. Each achievement is complete and perfect in its kind. ”

“ Wright Henderson, the biographer of Wilkins, wrote of him, “his greatness fell short of genius, for it was the effect of ordinary qualities, rarely combined and tempered into one character; but more effective for useful work in the world than genius without sanity.” Soon after the Civil War broke out, Wilkins was living in London as the chaplain of Charles Lewis, Prince Elector Palatine, with whom Christopher renewed a childish acquaintance. ”

“ Inigo Jones was not an inventor. He took the Palladio tradition as his model and adhered to it with faithfulness. Wren does not seem to have had any particular hero amongst the great Italian architects. He kept throughout his career a free mind, open to the suggestions of his own inventiveness, ready to accept existing conditions, rather than academic rules, as the guides to his treatment of a problem, and eager to try new structural ideas. ”

“ Paul’s Cathedral would have been avoided if Wren, whose whole admiration was for the Roman manner of building, had gone to Rome to see what, in fact, Roman building was. He would then have learnt that Roman builders did not carry immense weights on piers which consisted, as at St. Paul’s, of a core of rubble cased in by finely jointed ashlar. He would have found that it was advisable to build them either of ashlar throughout, or, if he had decided on a rubble core with an ashlar casing, to interrupt the rubble core at reasonable intervals by courses of hard tiles or bricks. ”

“ If the Gothic Revivalists had worked on Wren’s lines, the Church would not now be saddled with a legacy of badly built Kentish rag and rubble churches and spires, thinly roofed with Welsh slates, an endless anxiety to parishes unable to find money to remedy original defects of construction. ”

“ Wren’s common sense and real respect for Gothic are alike shown by his proposal for the spire: “I have made a Design, which will not be very expensive but light, and still in the Gothic form, and of a Style with the rest of the Structure, which I would strictly adhere to, throughout the whole Intention: to deviate from the old Form would be to run into a disagreeable Mixture: which no Person of a good Taste could relish.” ”

“ In 1710 young Christopher Wren was deputed by his father to lay the top-stone of the lantern which surmounts the dome, and did it in the presence of Sir Christopher and Edward Strong and other workmen who had been engaged on the building. It was a proud day for the old man of seventy-eight who had carried through a unique task despite every difficulty. ”

“ Not the least interesting of an architect’s designs are those which are never carried to full fruition. The most notable of these was a great Palace at Winchester, begun for Charles II. Not much of it was built, for the King died before it was finished, and his successors did not like Winchester. The uncompleted core was later adapted so drastically for use as barracks that it ceased to have any Wren significance. ”

“ Wren shows himself in one of his characteristic moods as a sane economist where the purpose of the building makes economy an æsthetic as well as a practical virtue. The Hospital is a liberal education in the handling of London brickwork. When Sir John Soane, in the days of Nash stucco, had to add an Infirmary building, he was careful to design in brick and content to despise the abuse it evoked at that time. At Hampton Court Wren had a very different problem: he was housing not pensioners but a King and Queen. His original scheme had a quality of immensity. ”

“ TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY, CAMBRIDGE: RIVER FRONT.
Noble as this design was, I confess I take more pleasure from Wren’s design for a monument (also in All Souls Library) which Sir Reginald Blomfield reproduces [C] with the note that it was probably drawn by Grinling Gibbons. It shows a lady reclining on a couch, not unlike Raggi’s Lady Cheyne in Chelsea Old Church, but she points with a lively gesture to cherubs flying above her in a burst of rays and clouds. It shows Wren in his most baroque mood, and is perhaps his reminiscence of old Bernini’s monumental manner. ”

“ With regard to the art of the plasterer, Wotton had said: “Plastique is not only under sculpture, but indeed very sculpture itself, with this difference that the plasterer doth make his figures by addition, and the carver by subtraction.” Wren makes short work of this with, “This proposition can never hold true to the name of sculpture.” ”

“ When the time came for Wren to build the piers that carry his dome, he fell into exactly the same blunder.
He was similarly defeated sometimes by problems of design for lack of knowledge of the history of his art, and by too great a reliance on his own invention. In trying at St. Paul’s to marry the idea of a great central dome to the Gothic cruciform plan with a determination to preserve the long vista down the aisles, he involved himself in difficulties in the support of the dome which he could not safely overcome without clumsy elements of design, to be discussed later. ”

“ Hampton Court, for all its size, is a gentleman’s house rather than a palace, and Wren’s treatment of the smaller rooms fills a marked place in the development of the English interior. Left more to himself, Wren would have been more English in the height of his rooms. He had a sense of fitness which is of the essence of good architecture. Wren was unlucky at Hampton Court in more than in one of his clients. ”

“ There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth.
Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there [157] is the same feeling that caused Sir John Vanbrugh to refuse the succession to his office “out of tenderness for Sir Christopher Wren,” and that led the Spectator to publish a noble tribute repudiating the ingratitude of his dismissal. The lovers of architecture everywhere will feel that in honouring Wren they have honoured the Art to which a man of such amazing gifts and nobility of character was content to devote the flower of his life. ”

“ I am convinced with Machiavel, or some unlucky fellow, ’tis no matter whether I quote true, that the world is generally governed by words. I perceive the name of a quadrangle will carry with it those whom you say may possibly be your benefactors, though it be much the worse situation for the chambers, and the beauty of the college, and of the particular pile of building ... but, to be sober, if any body, as you say, will pay [47] for a quadrangle, there is no dispute to be made ”

“ Many good Gothick forms of Cathedrals were to be seen in our Country, and many had been seen abroad, which they liked the better for being not much different from ours in England: this humour with many is not yet eradicated, and, therefore, I judge it not improper to endeavour to reform the Generality to a truer taste in Architecture by giving a larger Idea of the whole Art, beginning with the reasons and progress of it, from the most remote Antiquity ”