Creators (19 page)

Austen uses the device a third time, again from within, in
The Watsons
, written in 1804–1805, a fragment unfortunately abandoned when her father died, which promised to become a great work. The book opens with Emma Watson, “who was very recently returned from the care of an Aunt who had brought her up,” being taken to her first ball by her eldest sister, Elizabeth. Austen ingeniously uses Emma’s long absence from her family to allow Elizabeth, in the course of their conversation, to give Emma, and so the readers, inside facts about the neighborhood and its inhabitants (and, in the process, about their own family—one of their sisters, Penelope, is presented as a selfish manipulator, almost a she-devil, and the reader looks forward to meeting her). This brilliant and wholly natural—though sophisticated—beginning to the novel shows that Austen was already, by 1804, at her self-confident best, putting in the background economically and easily while also driving forward the story. The first big episode, at the ball, where Emma accidentally makes the acquaintance of the great folks by
taking pity on a ten-year-old boy whose elder sister has reneged on giving him a dance, is another device clearly based on an actual incident in Austen’s life. She uses it again and again, and I call it the “wallflower rescue.” She had already used it in
Northanger Abbey
; it crops up in
Pride and Prejudice
; it is glanced at in
Mansfield Park
; and it plays an important role in
Emma
, where Mr. Knightley’s pity in rescuing the slighted Harriet leads both Harriet and Emma to the dramatic conclusion that he is in love with the poor girl. Austen’s economy of means, her husbanding of her fictional capital, and the skill with which she uses and varies it, are among the aspects of her art I most admire. But art it is, not genius. There was no need for the demon or the magic: Austen’s entirely rational and professional methods of using her skill, and experience, were enough in themselves to create four works of art that have never been bettered in their class.

By the time
The Watsons
was written, Austen had already drafted
First Impressions
, an early version (1797) of what became
Pride and Prejudice
(1809). This wonderful work—to many, though not to the most discerning, her greatest achievement—she recognized as a masterpiece of its kind, and she thought it the most “brilliant” and “witty” of her novels. But Austen, though confined in self-imposed narrow limits that made repetition easy, had all the great artist’s distaste for formula. So she went to the opposite side of her creative territory and wrote
Mansfield Park
(1812–1813), her most “serious” novel, constructed with immense skill to achieve the formidable moral purpose of showing fragile, powerless virtue triumphing over brains, wealth, and position. Little Fanny emerges at the end as mistress of the entire Mansfield universe, in a way that is not only wholly plausible but enjoyable too. But the author, who easily tired of virtue (she once said it always made her want to be “wicked”), had, by the end of this novel, as she publicly announces, tired of having to describe distress. So she wrote
Emma
, a sunshine novel in which the only shades are caused by misunderstanding. Many readers find this their favorite, and with good reason. All of Austen’s novels repay rereading because they contain hidden felicities not always apparent on the first perusal. But none has so many hidden treasures as
Emma
, or can be read so often with genuine pleasure.
It is constructed with infinite art and has been rightly compared to a detective story, with cunning clues half-hidden in the text to adumbrate the denouement. But, like
Mansfield Park
, it left Jane anxious for novelty; and in
Persuasion
—a tale about what happened when the great war against Bonaparte ended and naval officers found themselves ashore, where girls were waiting—she wrote her finest tale influenced by the new, strong currents of romanticism, generated by Scott, Byron, and other spirits of the age. Anne is a romantic heroine in a way Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse decidedly are not—a figure of pathos and resignation most tenderly presented, rescued from the disaster of becoming an old maid (as, by then, Austen was herself) by her own steadfast heroism and the good fortune that Captain Wentworth is of similar nobility. The work is not without serious faults—unlike
Emma
, which is faultless—but yet has an emotional power that
Emma
cannot generate. Once again, however, Austen—as a great artist should—reacted against her creation, and the unfinished
Sanditon
is obviously intended to be a witty, funny satire on the new craze for the seaside: a return, though with a difference, to the glitter of
Pride and Prejudice
.

Thus Austen’s creative life ended, in the pain and distress of Addison’s disease. The knowledge that today this fatal complaint can easily be cured by modern medication heightens our sense of loss at her death at age forty-one. She left behind three admirable prayers, which contain not a hint of her satirical spirit but are of the strictest orthodoxy and conventional, if noble, expression—they might have been written by one of her heroes, Dr. Johnson—and demonstrate the high seriousness that was an essential part of her character. Her early death, like that of so many creative people of her era—Keats, Shelley, Mozart, Weber, Girtin, Géricault, Bonington—leaves us with a fierce longing for the works she would undoubtedly have produced to delight us. There is no other writer I know of who inspires this feeling so poignantly. That is testimony to her greatness as a creator.

T
HE
E
NGLISH
-
SPEAKING WORLD
has produced five architects of outstanding accomplishment: Sir Christopher Wren, A. W. N. Pugin, Louis Sullivan, Sir Edwin Lutyens, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Each was prodigiously creative; each left behind a huge body of work of the highest quality. But I am inclined to argue that, in this distinguished galaxy, Pugin was the brightest star, burning with an intense creative radiance the whole of his short life.

Pugin was born in 1812, the year when Bonaparte, the titan of Europe, met his nemesis in the snows of Russia, and England and the United States blundered into one of the most senseless wars in history, leading to the destruction by fire of the world’s first planned modern city, Washington. A grand year in which to be born, which he shared with Charles Dickens and Robert Browning.

However, while Dickens was a miserable child working at a Thames-side blacking factory, and Browning was a dreamy schoolboy learning to write Greek verse, Pugin was already giving full rein to his dazzling creative talents. He was an only child of adoring parents who recognized those talents from his infancy on and cosseted and nurtured them with devoted care. His father, Augustus-Charles Pugin (1762–1832), was a Parisian artist who came to London to escape the Terror, entered the
Royal Academy Schools, and then became assistant to the busy and superbly gifted architect John Nash. The father, strictly speaking, was not a professional architect (though he designed Kensal Green Cemetery, that fascinating city of the dead). But he was a superlative draftsman, especially of architectural subjects; a painter, illustrator, and designer; and above all a teacher of art.
¹
His house, in Great Russell Street, was only 50 yards from the British Museum, with its magnificent Print Room where artists like Turner and Girtin came to study its drawings, and which A. W. N. Pugin knew from the age of five. His father conducted, from his house, a school of architectural draftsmanship, and the child Pugin mingled with the pupils, some of notable talent. The father was a highly successful illustrator (and writer) of books for the great Rudolph Ackermann, often collaborating with other artists. In 1808 he and Rowlandson produced the highly successful Microcosm of London, Pugin Senior doing the topographical settings and “Rowly” the figures. Both men were watercolorists of the highest accomplishment, specializing in pure, luminous washes. Pugin’s gifts can be seen at their best in his brilliant watercolor of Westminster Abbey, at the Royal Institute of British Architects, done in the year of A. W. N. Pugin’s birth.
²

The child Pugin, then, grew up in a household that buzzed with activity—artists, publishers, engravers, and writers, all passionately determined to raise the banner of art, especially architectural art, high in an age when industry and commerce were transforming the most beautiful countryside in Europe, and overwhelming ancient towns, and the coal smoke from millions of chimneys, domestic and industrial, was tinting everything charcoal gray. The house was a fortress of cultural resistance, a defiant temple of beauty, and presiding over it was Pugin’s mother, Catherine Welby, daughter of a famous barrister, whose enchanting looks won her the title “Belle of Islington.” Her devotion to her gifted son helps to explain why he liked women so much, especially beautiful ones, and got on with them so well.
³

Pugin began drawing, like Dürer and Turner, at the age of three. He quickly progressed to watercolors, and he continued to use pencils and brushes every day of his life. Every summer his parents took him on tours of the continent, where father and son set
tled down each morning to draw churches and other Gothic buildings. As anyone who takes topographical drawing seriously will tell you, the way to understand architecture thoroughly is to draw buildings, with care and in great detail. You are obliged to look at a building closely, repeatedly, and for long periods. Only thus do you learn what the architect was doing in a particular case, and as a rule you are also able to identify the contributions of the masons, carpenters, and other craftsmen. Pugin, throughout his life, did a huge number of drawings of Gothic buildings, in Britain and on his annual continental tours. His close study and reproduction on paper of actual medieval creations were the key to designing his own, and helped him to enter the minds of medieval builders and decorators: they formed, as it were, his apprenticeship under experts who had lived hundreds of years before him, until he became a master mason himself.
⁴

Pugin drew not just buildings but the objects within them, of every kind and material. To him, from a very early age, art was ubiquitous; the world was, or could be, a continuum of beautiful artifacts; and craftsmen-artists were a collegial body of experts joining hands and skills to make everything that met the eye graceful and fitting. At eight he designed his first work, a chair. Thereafter there were few things in daily use, in the home or any other kind of building, that he did not re-create according to his own vision. In 1827, at age fifteen, he got his first professional commission—to design Gothic furniture for George IV at Windsor Castle; some of the furniture is still there, and in use.
⁵
At the same time he began to be employed by the royal goldsmiths, Rundell and Bridge, to design a variety of precious objects for the king. At seventeen he set up his own business, designing furniture, and the firm remained in continuous production from 1829 until his death in 1852. In his teens he was a passionate theatergoer, and by age nineteen he was creating scenery for Covent Garden theater, alongside such professional scene painters and designers as Clarkson Stanfield and David Roberts, both future Royal Academicians and outstanding landscapists, for in the nineteenth century set design and landscape were closely linked. Pugin was soon designing theatrical costumes too. Indeed, what did he not design? His creative attention turned in every direc
tion. The Victoria and Albert Museum, later founded as a depository and study center for the astonishing inventiveness of nineteenth-century designers and craftsmen, contains more objects by Pugin than by anyone else (though William Morris, who in some respects modeled himself on Pugin, comes close). These include countless wall tiles, a variety of materials, floor coverings of every kind, plates, trays, dessert dishes, stove tiles, flowerpots, tables, straight chairs, armchairs, cabinets, candlesticks, saltcellars, spoons, candelabras, dishes in metal, chalices, reliquaries, crosses, a chimneypiece, a roller blind, printed linen and cottons, curtains, and other textiles—and the collection at the Victoria and Albert represents only part of his output.
⁶

From his teens, too, Pugin was a prolific writer of art books, which he also illustrated profusely. The 1820s were for Pugin a decade of boyish enthusiasm and joie de vivre, marked by exuberant sporting activities, especially rowing and sailing small boats, of which he always possessed and constantly used at least one. His life oscillated between intense artistic activity at the design table, at the workbench, or in his studio; and ferocious exercise outdoors, often in stormy weather. With the 1830s, however, came increasing high seriousness, as the scene darkened. His father died in 1832, and Pugin’s first major literary activity was to complete his large-scale work
Examples of Gothic Architecture.
The same year Pugin, who had married young, lost his first wife, Anne Carnet, who died giving birth to a daughter. Seeking comfort and reassurance, Pugin moved toward Roman Catholicism, and in 1835 he was received into the church. Thereafter, his artistic principles and his spiritual beliefs were one, and he saw medieval Gothic style and culture not only as the natural, normative expression for Catholics and indeed all Christians in England but as the right moral aesthetic for all of northern Europe (and its overseas dependencies). He dismissed the classical revival—which was powerful, even dominant in the England of his childhood and youth—as an anomaly, an inappropriate input from the Mediterranean, suitable only for blue skies and hot sun. To him “Gothic north” was tautological: the north
was
Gothic, and Gothic stood for the north.
⁷

Pugin was thus one of the very few English architects, and the
only outstanding one, with a firm, at times ferocious, ideological posture. He not only despised but positively loathed the neoclassical architects of the previous generation, especially Decimus Burton. Writing to his greatest patron, the Catholic earl of Shrewsbury, from the North Euston Hotel at Fleetwood, which Burton had designed, Pugin gave full vent to his rage and disgust:

In his anxiety to rout the classicists (and others) and to make Gothic the dominant style, especially for all religious and public buildings, Pugin used the literary and illustrative skill he had inherited from his father—and had improved on by perpetual observation and studio exercises—to launch a series of propaganda works unique in the art history of the Anglo-Saxon world. They put a case, vehemently, but they were also practical manuals for followers and disciples, and wonderful works of artistry in their own right. In 1835 came
Gothic Furniture in the Style of the Fifteenth Century, Designed and Etched by A. W. N. Pugin
. The next year came his masterpiece,
Contrasts; or A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Showing the Present Decay of Taste
(a second volume appeared in 1841). Also in 1836 appeared two design books, one for goldsmiths and silversmiths, the other for iron and brass-work. In 1837 he published
Details of Ancient Timber Houses of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries…Drawn on the Spot and Etched by A. Welby Pugin
. The title speaks for itself: these were the fruits of his constant continental travels. In 1841 and 1843 he set out his aesthetic ideology in two magisterial volumes:
The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture
and
An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England
. He followed these key works with
his most complex and painstaking contribution to the revival, his
Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume,
later supplemented by
Floriated Ornament
and
Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts
.
⁹

This enormous output of aesthetic theory and practical guidance, based on on-the-spot studies, massive reading and research, uncannily exact observation, and tens of thousands of drawings, was without precedent in England (and has had no successor). Even in Italy, one would have to go back to Alberti to find anything remotely comparable. But unlike Alberti, Pugin was a practical architect and rapidly becoming a highly experienced one, who not only drew his own detailed plans but spent much time on-site to ensure that they were carried out exactly as he wished. He began by designing imaginary buildings and interiors; got two key commissions, one to remake an enormous Gothic house from Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire and another to fit out a Catholic school and seminary at St. Mary’s Oscott in Warwickshire in the Gothic manner; and at the same time gave striking public lectures on what he was doing. These works won him the enthusiastic approval of the English Catholic community, especially its old recusant gentry and aristocracy, who were beginning to lift their heads from the obscurity of the “penal years,” following the Act of Catholic Emancipation of 1829. Catholics were now free to spend their own wealth, or to collect funds by subscription, to endow churches and cathedrals, and Pugin became their master builder.

His first cathedral was St. Chad’s, Birmingham (1839–1841), built of brick to withstand the smoke and acid corrosion of the Black Country. He used motifs from the Baltic, where brick had been the basic material for Gothic architecture throughout the Middle Ages. St. Chad’s was a highly successful design, put up at great speed and minimum cost to suit the liturgical needs of the mother church in a vast industrial center. Pugin, in fact, was a functionalist, the first modern one, following two basic rules that he set down in his
True Principles
: first, that there “should be no features about a building which are not necessary, for convenience, construction, or propriety”; and, second, that “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building.” He followed St. Chad’s with major cathedrals in
Southwark in southeast London, Nottingham, and Newcastle upon Tyne; and many minor ones in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the empire, built under his direct supervision or according to his ideas. Indeed, no man in history was responsible for so many cathedrals. In addition there were dozens of churches—only Wren, with his total of seventy, built more.
¹⁰
Some churches by Pugin were comparatively simple, for he served poor communities, who could not afford big spaces or elaborate ornaments. In this respect he was at a grave disadvantage compared with his Anglican followers such as William Butterfield and George Gilbert Scott, who could draw on the almost bottomless resources of the Anglican church, often backed by money voted in Parliament. But, just occasionally, he was able to let himself go, as in the church of St. Giles, Cheadle, in Staffordshire, paid for by Lord Shrewsbury, and entirely built, decorated, and furnished to Pugin’s exacting standards. This must rank as the finest church built in England in the entire nineteenth century, and the brightest jewel in the Gothic revival. In the last decade of his life, Pugin also devoted a vast amount of time and trouble to designing, building, and decorating his own house in Ramsgate, and its accompanying church, both masterpieces of their kind, and now being properly looked after following decades of neglect. At the same time as these independent activities, Pugin was collaborating with Sir Charles Barry on the new Houses of Parliament, built following the fire of 1834. The role played by Pugin in this immense enterprise was for a long time minimized or even suppressed, because of his militant Catholicism. It is now acknowledged, however, that Pugin supplied many of the drawings for the building itself, since Barry was ignorant of important aspects of the Gothic style; and that Pugin was entirely responsible for all the best and innovative features of the interiors, including all the decoration, especially the superbly presented House of Lords, the central jewel in the entire structure. Only now, since it has had all its grime removed, is this great building, outside and in, being recognized as a masterpiece of European art (though, alas, thanks to terrorists and the demands of security, the public has only limited access to the interior); and we still have not developed the habit of crediting it to Barry
and
Pugin.
¹¹