ENGLISH HOMES: PERIOD II.
IN turning over the pages of this book one is almost tempted to wonder whether there may not perhaps be something in the late Mr. Ruskin's description of the Renaissance as a "foul torrent." We have grown so accustomed to thinking that Mr. Ruskin was always wrong when he made an architectural dictum that we are inclined to overlook the fact that, in spite of the immense increase in the artistic heritage and intellectual enlightenment of Europe which we owe to the Renaissance, its spread in England was for a certain period a disaster in the domain of the plastic arts. If proof is needed to back this opinion it will be found in the pages of this book. And yet the Renaissance details which appear tentatively in the buildings illustrated and described by Mr. Tipping show often the greatest refinement and sensitiveness. Why did these details degenerate and coarsen as they gradually spread over entire buildings ? Why is the work of the architectural sculptor in the time of Henry VIII. so superior to that of the time of Elizabeth ?
An examination of Mr. Tipping's book will illustrate, and to a certain extent explain, the phenomenon. In his intro- duction he shows us a photograph of Abbot Ripley's Gate- house at Saighton, Cheshire (1485-1492). This gatehouse, which is typical of the general state of the building art in England at the period, is magnificent in design and faultless in execution. English design, English masonry and English sculpture at the close of the Gothic period were at a high level. During the reign of Henry VIII. the Italian artists who came over to this country found workmen, probably trained in the monasteries, capable of assimilating and mat- erializing their ideas. It is, of course, exceedingly difficult to prove English authorship of all the fine carving produced at this time, but an Englishman, John Sparke, carved the porch at Hengrave, magnificently illustrated by Mr. Tipping, and before Sparke's time Abbot Chard's work at Forde was due to English hands. But it is in internal work that the greatest glories of the beginnings of the English Renaissance are found. If we must follow Mr. Tipping in rejecting the English author- ship of the oak panelling from Beckingham Hall, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, no doubts are cast on the Stalls at King's, on the vaulting of Bishop West's Chantry at Ely, on the Abbot's Parlour at Theme, on the woodwork at the Vyne, and Fulford, and on the wonderful tables, lire-place and chim- neys at Lacock.
All the domestic examples quoted above are illustrated and described by Mr. Tipping. But in addition to these great houses we are shown many smaller buildings of the period, chiefly in East Anglia, which are still purely Gothic in feeling or only tinged with the new ideas. The chantry priest's house at Denston, in Suffolk, the 'Marquis of Granby Inn at Colchester, and Paycocke's House in Great Coggeshall, Essex, all contain woodwork of the greatest vigour and interest. The panelling at Boughton Malherbe (is it there still ?) is illustrated in an admirable series of photographs It is impossible to name all the houses described in this repre- sentative collection, but to pick a few at random—Thornbury and Cowdray exemplify the splendid masonry of the period, Layer Marncy and Sutton Place its brickwork, Compton Wyn- yates and Parham Old Hill (with its lovely Willoughby gate- way) its general picturesqueness.
It is indeed an entrancing period, and Mr. Tipping's
knowledge and the unrivalled skill of the" Country Life" photo- graphers have produced a book worthy of it. But we have yet to tackle the problem of why the architectural Renaissance in England which began so hopefully should so soon, like a pretty child, have belied its promise.
The main reason for this early decay was the gradual death in the persons of the workmen of the great traditions of craftsmanship handed down in the monasteries. The Italians in the reign of Henry VIII. supplied ideas of impeccable taste, and found carvers sufficiently skilled to execute them. These carvers and other artisans survived the dissolution of the monasteries, but in the course of nature their numbers de- creased every year. In the reign of Elizabeth refugees poured over England from the low countries. Their influence on the building arts from 1550 to 1625 was profound and disastrous. They endeavoured to teach to ignorant and unskilled native workmen the rudiments of an artistic formula which they themselves understood but imperfectly. The crude woodcuts of Serlio and other Italian writers became even more barbarous when copied and reprinted at Antwerp. And thus began the most meretricious epoch in the history of English architecture, an epoch in which the growth of national wealth found expres- sion in overloaded ornament of inferior execution, which in great houses is vulgar, and in small quaint ; or, in other words, inept. But in the volume under review there is no vulgarity and little ineptitude.
GERALD WELLESLEY.
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