Diversity in Worship

Extract

“There is no reason in the world” wrote Augustus Welby Pugin, “why noble cities, combining all possible convenience of drainage, water-courses, and conveyance of gas, may not be erected in the most consistent and yet Christian character.” There is, in this engaging statement, an implication which Pugin, alas, did not see. “Our domestic architecture,” he had said very truly, “should have a peculiar expression illustrative of our manners and habits”; but these latter he chose unfortunately to regard as identical with those of earlier ages, despite the fact that the earlier ages were in no position to convey gas. “We are such men as our fathers were, and therefore should build as they built”; so his argument is summarized. Hence his campaign to revive an architectural form which centuries earlier was already played out; a campaign whose success resulted in that torrential and continuous downpour of brussels sprouts from which we are only now beginning to emerge. “The point,” Mr. Trappes-Lomax tells us, “was not whether St. Peter’s might be tolerable in Rome, and Notre Dame in Paris; it was whether the Church in England was to be English or Italianate.” The first tragedy was that Pugin identified Gothic with English; the second, that in the general struggle between English and Italianate parties, while in architecture Italy came out, in the event, defeated, in the sphere of worship she so largely carried the day.