Vanbrugh

“ Her radiant shape upon its verge did shiver Aloft, her flowing hair like strings of flames did quiver.
“There!” cried Vanbrugh, his countenance glowing with a fierce inspiration that made it grand through all its ugliness—“there! what woman could paint that?—or rather, what man! Alas! how feeble we are—we, the boldest followers of an Art which is divine.—Truly there was but one among us who was himself above humanity, Michael the angel!” ”

“ The Austrian specialist, not dreaming that his opinion could be disregarded, and filled with enthusiasm for Vanbrugh’s achievement, had addressed a letter to him, congratulating him in the warmest terms. The letter did not elate Vanbrugh in the least, but it brought him round to the publisher to find out what was being done with his book. ”

“ Sir John Vanbrugh (Vol. viii., pp. 65. 160. 232.) .—Are not your correspondents on the wrong scent as regards the birthplace of Sir John Vanbrugh? In the memoir prefixed to the collection of his Plays, 2 vols. 12mo., 1759, it is said:
"Sir John Vanbrugh, an eminent dramatic writer, son of Mr. Giles Vanbrugh of London, merchant, was born in the parish of St. Stephen's, Walbrook, in 1666. The family of Vanbrugh were for many years merchants of great credit and reputation at Antwerp, and came into England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, on account of the persecution for religion." ”

“ Vanbrugh, with his good-humoured smile and military bearing, talks in a fatherly way to the daughter, is deeply impressed with her many attractions, and is not sorry to learn that her ambition is all for comedy. He promises to use his good offices with Mr. Rich to have her enrolled as a member of the Drury Lane company, keeps his word, too—something for a gentleman to do in the year 1699—and soon has the satisfaction of seeing his new protégée hobnobbing with Mrs. Verbruggen, Wilks, Cibber, and other players of the house, while drawing fifteen shillings a week for the privilege. ”

“ As he made this answer, it seemed to the Advocate as if the principle of honour by which his actions had been guided until within the last few days were slipping from him, and as if the vilest wretch that breathed had a right to call him his equal.
"We will pass that by," said Vanbrugh, helping himself to wine. "Really, your wine is exquisite. In some respects you are a man to be envied. It is worth much to a man not only to possess the best of everything the world can give, but to know that he has the means and the power to purchase it. ”

“ I with my hand will continually create beauty.” And so he did—ay, and where he created, he loved. He took his art for his mistress, and, like the Rhodian sculptor, he clasped it to his soul night and day, until it grew warm and life-like, and became to him in the stead of every human tie. Thus Michael Vanbrugh had lived, for fifty years, a life solitary even to moroseness; emulating the great Florentine master, whose Christian name it was his glory to bear. He painted grand pictures, which nobody bought, but which he and his faithful little sister Meliora thought the greater for that. ”

“ Sir John's first cousin, William Vanbrugh, was nominated by Evelyn for the secretaryship of the Greenwich Hospital commission, 31 May 1695, subsequently became secretary and comptroller of the treasury chamber, and died on 20 Nov. 1716. ‘Mr. George Vanbrugh,’ song-writer, who flourished 1710–25, was probably the son of this William (cf. Brit. Mus. Cat. Music) .
After education, in all probability at Chester grammar school, John Vanbrugh was sent in 1683 to France, where he received his architectural training. ”

“ The affectation of her speech, the peculiarity of her stare and glare, give the casual spectator a curious sensation. There is a good deal of the freakish in her method; it is not natural, wholesome and universal. Yet beneath the surface one realizes that Miss Vanbrugh is an artist, who has evolved marvelously since New York saw her in a silly play called “The Queen’s Proctor.” ”

“ He had the uneasy glance of a man who fancies [181] himself haunted by a sight he fears to see. Vanbrugh looked at him a long time in silence and then rose to go.
"I am sorry, old man," he said, with something almost like a sigh. "You live too much alone," he added, turning as he was about to open the door. "You ought to get married."
Brett smiled in rather a ghastly fashion which did not escape his friend.
"I cannot leave New York," he repeated mechanically.
"Perhaps you will before long," said Vanbrugh, going out. ”

“ When he had finished the listener gave him a questioning look.
“But if there are no children?”
Vanbrugh frowned for the first time, and his voice hardened.
“I have lived a hard and abstemious life,” he said; “I have been stricter with myself than with anyone else. My reward is to have a child in whom I have never detected a weak spot. I have a right that she shall make a happy marriage, and receive a woman’s crown of honour—a happy motherhood.”
Alistair bowed his head again, and scattered the cards from his hand. ”

“ Vanbrugh’s houses may be taken as the highest manifestation of the spirit of the age in house building; the exaltation of social grandeur, the scenic magnificence of architecture. That they rather missed the mark in respect of comfort and convenience, as we understand those qualities, was not held to be a great drawback. ”

“ He was asking this young man to surrender the sweetest [313] form of earthly happiness; what could he offer him in exchange?
“Has science nothing else to say to me? You are a physician; if I am diseased, cannot you cure me?”
Vanbrugh was disconcerted.
“We are only groping our way as yet,” he answered mildly. “Remember that all knowledge was forbidden by the priesthood for a thousand years. We are only in the beginning of a better age.”
“The age in which there will be no men like me!” Alistair commented. “And in the meantime science has no gospel for me.” ”

“ I have walked through life with my eyes fixed on the stars, and my feet tripped up by every ditch. My mother thinks that I am wicked, [315] and you say that I am diseased. And to me—yes, to me—you all seem blind people burrowing in the earth and refusing to be happy.”
Vanbrugh shook his head.
“I am not responsible for what others have said to you. In my eyes you are simply a victim of heredity. I do not want my daughter’s children to be victims in their turn; that is all. If you love her——”
“I do love her,” Alistair interrupted fiercely. ”

“ The theatre was opened to the public with an Italian opera, which was followed by three of Molière’s comedies, and these by the Confederacy, Vanbrugh’s masterpiece on the whole, though perhaps its finest scenes are not equal to the finest scenes in The Relapse.
Vanbrugh at last withdrew from the disastrous speculation; Congreve had already withdrawn. But a man to whom Fortune had been so kind as she had been to Vanbrugh could hardly be depressed by any of her passing frowns. Queen Anne at once sent him abroad on an important state errand, and afterwards he was commissioned to build Blenheim. ”

“ He rarely attempts blank verse, and when he does (as in ‘Æsop’) the result is atrocious, while his attempts at poetic utterance are the merest fustian. But the ‘Relapse’ and the ‘Confederacy’ are full of sparkling dialogue and not deficient in character. Vanbrugh and Congreve copied nature, says Fielding (Tom Jones, pref. to bk. xiv.) , while their successors do but copy them. Lord Foppington, ‘the best fop ever brought upon the stage’ (Ward) , is as famous as Dundreary, and with more reason. Above all, Vanbrugh's comedies have the merit of facility. ”

“ If all stories [205] about him are true, he had an ample share of the popular vices. He is said to have been killed by tumbling downstairs while drunk. His three plays are The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664) , She Would if She Could (1668) , and The Man of Mode (1676) . They are more uneven than Wycherley’s, and at their worst are grosser; but they are clever, and can be lively and amusing.
3. Sir John Vanbrugh (1666–1726) . Vanbrugh’s career, though much of it is obscure, seems to have been a varied one, for at different times he was a soldier, a herald, and an architect. ”

“ There is a considerable amount of rough humour in Vanbrugh, and some indelicacy, more like that of Aristophanes than of English writers. We find one gentleman calling another "Old Satan," and fashionable ladies indulging freely in oaths. A nobleman tells a lady, before her husband, that he is desperately in love with her, "strike me speechless;" to which she replies by giving him a box on the ear, and her husband by drawing his sword. Everything bespeaks a low and primitive state of society ”

“ In all probability Russell Vanbrugh had been doing more work than was good for him, but as he was a man of extremely well-balanced and healthy nervous organisation the one ill effect he experienced from having worked harder than usual was a sudden and irresistible determination to do absolutely nothing for twenty-four hours. ”

“ Of his architectural studies we know absolutely nothing, unless we may accept Swift’s account, who pretends that Vanbrugh acquired the rudiments of the art by watching children building houses of cards or clay. But this was probably ironical. However he came by his skill, in 1702 he stepped into sudden fame as the architect of Castle Howard.’
It is indeed extraordinary that a man should have undertaken such big jobs as Castle Howard and Blenheim without leaving any trace whatever of the means by which he became credited with the power to execute them. ”

“ This edition was favourably noticed by Macaulay in his well-known ‘Essay on the Comic Dramatists,’ in which he deals at length with Congreve and Wycherley to the exclusion of Vanbrugh and Farquhar. All these accounts were superseded by the memoir by Arthur Ashpitel [q. v.] in the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ (8th edition, 1860) , which is based upon the most careful research. Wyatt Papworth added much as to Vanbrugh's architectural career in the ‘Dictionary of Architecture,’ and in 1893 appeared the valuable ‘life’ prefixed to the standard edition of Vanbrugh by W. C. Ward. ”

“ Curiosities, 1840, pp. 411–414; the Blenheim Castle building accounts are among the ‘Marlborough Papers’ in Brit. Mus. Addit. MSS. 19592–605) .
The verdict of Vanbrugh's literary rivals as to the architectural merit of Blenheim was wholly unfavourable. In the minds of less prejudiced critics there has been great divergence of opinion; but it must be conceded that Vanbrugh hardly rose to his opportunities. The general plan of a grand central edifice, connected by colonnades with two projecting quadrangular wings, and of the approaches (including the ‘Titanic bridge’) , is admirable in its way. ”

“ Vanbrugh divided his scanty earnings into two equal portions. Fifty pounds a year paid for his food and clothes and the rare holidays conceded to health, with the other fifty he bought books and scientific instruments.
The subject he had chosen to investigate was the cells of the brain.
At the age of forty he completed his work on the brain, and the fifteen years’ penal servitude to which he had been sentenced by human stupidity and spite approached its term. ”

“ Next of Vanbrugh's pieces appeared the ‘False Friend,’ produced at Drury Lane at the end of January 1702, and published in February without the author's name (London, 4to; ‘Friendship à la Mode: a Comedy of two acts altered from Sir John Vanbrugh,’ appeared at Dublin, 1766, 8vo) . ”

“ If these good women, if one so filled with the spirit of Christian charity as his mother, could see nothing blameworthy in his desertion of Molly—indeed, nothing that was not wholly praiseworthy—surely it was absurd for him, the prodigal [280] and the bankrupt, the unbeliever and the misanthrope, to let himself be tormented by misgivings. To ruin what was left of his own life for the sake of one whom no human sacrifice could redeem—surely this were madness rather than heroism.
In this mood he became a ready listener to the philosophy of Sir Bernard Vanbrugh ”

“ Here, too, was a man with a very distinct individuality, whose buildings show it at every turn. The conditions under which 18th century architects worked, however, were very different from those of to-day. Vanbrugh, in connection with his own plays, may have made rough drafts for the scenery. It was hardly more than such that he needed to make for his buildings in the first instance. The complicated and exact modern working drawings, sufficient to form the basis of a contract which will stand in law, were unknown in his days. ”

“ Rather to his surprise, but even more to his relief, he was taken, not into the drawing-room, but into the physician’s consulting-room, and offered the patient’s chair.
The man whose grey powerful eyes, under their square wall of forehead, were turned on him with something of the penetrative power of a searchlight, [178] across a fragile-looking desk in some decorative wood, was a man with a remarkable history.
There are some men of whom their friends are accustomed to say that they should like them better if they were not so clever. Vanbrugh had started in life with this handicap. ”

“ When he was made Clarencieux king-at-arms, Swift said he might now "build houses." The secret of this ridicule was, that Vanbrugh was a Whig. Sir Joshua Reynolds has left the following high encomium on his merits as an architect. "In the buildings of Vanbrugh, who was a poet as well as an architect, there is a greater display of imagination than we shall find, perhaps, in any other ”