In trying to estimate with any precision what is Wren’s position in the history of British Architecture, the immediate and obvious comparison is with Inigo Jones. I refer to Wren in my Preface as our architect of greatest achievement, because I hesitate to use the simpler words—our greatest architect. In my own mind the latter is a true description, but the enthusiasts for Inigo Jones would dispute it. None, however, can cavil at the statement that Wren achieved more than any other English architect, whatever nice distinctions may be drawn as to the relative greatness of his art and that of Inigo Jones. The two men are not strictly comparable, and represent in their work and outlook two different currents in the history of architecture. Inigo Jones was essentially academic and, in his relationship to the traditional methods of building which he found, the forerunner of the modern professional architect. He had trained himself by much foreign travel and by close study of the facts of building before he embarked on his career. Wren, on the other hand, was essentially an amateur, if the word be understood in its most favourable sense and not in the least contemptuously. 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.

It must plainly be said that Wren suffered frequent lapses of taste, and it does no service to his great memory to gloss over these faults. 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. But it is impossible to say that even of St. Paul’s Cathedral: there are elements in its design which are weak and confused. Even in the steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow, which is very nearly perfect, the diameter of the cylinder enclosed by the ring of columns is hardly right. This sort of criticism is even more true of the majority of the City churches. The cause for this lack of perfection is not difficult to find. Wren was an amateur, not only by the cast of his mind, but by the circumstances of his entry into architecture: he was imperfectly trained for his work.

If he had followed the example of Inigo Jones and studied the Italian Renaissance on the spot, not only in respect of design, but also of the facts of building, he would have avoided many pitfalls. Great as is the part which the knowledge of mathematics and geometry plays in his art, nothing did and nothing could take the place of the practical knowledge of the art of building which Jones possessed and Wren lacked, at least until his later years.

It is possible, for example, that the present trouble at St. 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. These would have prevented the perpendicular settlement of the rubble that has now disturbed the relation between the rubble and the ashlar casing. The professional Inigo Jones would not have made that mistake. The amateur Wren did. And there is little excuse for this fault. In his Report on St. Paul’s, written before the Fire, Wren is very contemptuous of his Gothic predecessor: “The work was both ill design’d and ill built from the Beginning: ill design’d, because the Architect gave not Butment enough to counterpoise and resist the weight of the Roof from spreading the Walls; for the Eye alone will discover to any man that those Pillars, as vast as they are, even eleven Foot diameter, are bent outwards at least six inches from their first position. This bending of the Pillars was facilitated by their ill Building, for they are only cased without, and that with small stones, not one greater than a Man’s Burden; but within it is nothing but a Core of small Rubbish-stone, and much mortar, which easily crushes and yields to the weight.” 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.

Yet, in spite of all his technical ignorance, he succeeded because of the essential greatness of his mind. In succeeding, he carried architecture forward, not by a normal development, but by leaps and bounds, so far indeed, that there was found no one to follow him in that line of development. Hawksmoor was an exceedingly capable architect who had benefited, so far as his capacity would allow, by thirty-two years of close association with the master; but, as Sir Reginald Blomfield has said, he was always trying to interpret Vanbrugh in terms of Wren. While he was under the influence of Wren he designed like Wren, when he came under the influence of Vanbrugh he designed like Vanbrugh.

Of Wren’s own outlook on his art we fortunately possess illuminating notes, not only in his printed Tracts, but in a MS. bound up with the heirloom Parentalia. It was printed by Miss Phillimore, and forms the text of Professor Lethaby’s enchanting essay on “The Architecture of Adventure,”[E] from which I have borrowed the heading of this chapter—an acknowledgment, trivial though it be, of the debt I owe to its author.

Wren’s paper is no more than a fragment, but it is a noble fragment and begins thus:

And then Wren goes off into musings on the construction of the Ark, the Tower of Babel, the Pyramids, and the Sepulchre of Porsenna as described by Pliny, finishing with this luminous phrase:

This was the core of Wren’s claim as an architect, the reliance upon scientific rather than traditional elements in design. He develops the idea in his first Tract printed in Parentalia:

Wren’s acute judgment noted the great part played by such factors as historical association, one of the “other causes,” in the public appreciation of architecture.

Earlier in the Tract he makes obeisance to the three principles which had been laid down by earlier writers, but with a characteristic rider:

Scholarly though Wren was in his art, he took nothing for granted, but examined the common-places with a desire to establish reasons for them or reject them:

There is a very modern ring about the following moralising:

But for all his contempt of the pedantry of rules of proportion, which the greatest architects of antiquity did not observe unless it suited them, he saw in the Orders themselves something eternal:

Wren rises to his greatest height in the opening of his first Tract, and shows that if his life had fallen out otherwise, he might have left a reputation as a writer:

I have quoted at what may seem to be inordinate length, but Wren is justified alike by the content of his thought and the aptness of his phrase, and I am concerned rather to reveal the man than my idea of him.

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. This is the final and, as I believe, the effective reply to the puritan theorist, who cries aloud for the discarding of traditional features in art. Sir Joshua Reynolds warned his students that the business of a painter is to paint a fine picture, and that he is not to be cheated of his materials by specious arguments. Wren was clear-sighted enough to see that the Orders have a definite beauty value: his only trouble was that he was not fully equipped to bend them wholly to his will. The western front of St. Paul’s may be taken as an instance. As a Whole it is a magnificent composition, and a source of inspiration to everyone with any feeling for architecture, but can it be pretended that the segmental vault of the upper portico does not belie the entablature and pediment in front of it? Wren could cut away architrave and frieze inside for the benefit of his great arches, and refer his critics to the Temple of Peace (now the Basilica of Maxentius) at Rome for his authority, but he lacked the insight or the courage to deal with the external problem in the same fashion. The fact is that the great architect of any age is both leader and led, and cannot wholly escape the limitations of his time. But there are valid compensations. His work could not be justly representative of the age, one of the significant values of architecture, if he could entirely dissociate himself from his age. When it is remembered that Sir William Chambers can actually say in his Civil Architecture (1759) that every time he passes St. Paul’s he regrets that the pilasters have no entasis—probably few know it—we can form an idea of the limitations of thought that Wren would have to encounter. Vitruvius,[F] with all his imperfections, was still enthroned, and few, if any, had yet divined the real relation of that retired military engineer to the arts of Greece and Rome. 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 left a sufficiently feeble suggestion of curtains and seated apostles, occupying the tribunes (three in each presumably), as a means of veiling the defect. But the difficulty goes deeper than that: the octagon is peculiarly troublesome to handle in terms of the Orders, as a number of failures exist to show.

Wren’s work was always improving. The last, and westernmost, bay of St. Paul’s inside shows more breadth and grandeur, but the carving of the spandrels is so strange that one wonders if it can really be original. This brings us to a characteristic of Wren which probably accounts for some of his lapses of taste. It seems likely that he was not hard-hearted enough with the people who worked under him, that he was too generous, too ready to accept things on his assistants’ and craftsmen’s assurance that they were the best that could be produced. He may thus have been led into an occasional acquiescence, both in design and construction, in things which he must have well known were not really right. Confronted with every sort of difficulty, and none too well backed, he must have been desperately anxious to avoid delays. His very ingenuity, moreover, would lead him to make the most of what was available. Unfortunately in works of eternity—architecture aims at eternity—such compromises meet with a stern Nemesis.

In the two centuries that have elapsed since his death Wren has been admired and followed from very different points of view. It has been justly said that he has been in fashion and out of fashion and is now above fashion. 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. There is a vast gap between Wren at Hampton Court and Talman at Chatsworth.

Thus it is that in this Bicentenary Year there 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.

Sir Christopher Wren was the very fulfilment of Wotton’s prophecy—“Architecture can want no commendation, where there are Noble Men or Noble mindes.”