International studio (81.1925)

mceRnAcionAL

self if it were true. The walls in perfect condition.
Solid as the day they were built. Barely a scratch
on the marble. The very window frames un-
damaged. A miracle surely, for inside there is
nothing. Gutted completely. No matter. A paltry
thousand or so, a good plumber and carpenter, no
architect to show off his skill, and our palace were
complete. Even the marble Adam and Eve over
the door, the work of Italian sculptors, it is said,
unharmed. And what a view. Ingestre park
stretching to the left. And in front, at half a mile,
beyond the meadows the Trent, less girlish now
and full of dignity, as realizing the occasion. To
live amongst these associations. Where Michael
Drayton lived and wrote. In the very house from
which Mary Stuart was taken on her last journey
to Fotheringay.

Last Saturday Staffordshire and the Trent.
Today Warwickshire and the Avon. A complete
contrast, both in landscape and architecture.
Warwickshire is regal, with a fine sense of the
dramatic. Staffordshire, in spite of Cannock
Chase, cares little for royalty or drama. She is
the domestic type, conscious that her clothes are
made of good materials, but caring little how they
are cut. Contrast Lichfield, Tamworth and Rugely
with Stratford, Henley and Warwick. To the first
group a good house means a house built of good
brick with no nonsense about it. To the second
it means at the least, Tudor. Temperamentally
I am happier in Warwickshire. Staffordshire is
almost too English for me.

We heard Macbeth in the Memorial Theatre
at Stratford. A rousing performance in the
strangest and most un-Shakespearian theatre im-
aginable; 1879 Gothic applied to what evidently
attempts to be a reconstruction of the Globe. So
far from having any consciousness of being in
Stratford, my mind kept flying back to the Pres-
byterian church of my earliest memories. So
accurately does Gothic date.

It was only after the play, when we came out
into the gardens that flank the Avon, and still
more as we bowled along the high road to War-
wick and Kenilworth, with Warwickshire lying
below us to either side that I realized fully that
this was Shakespeare's country and very much
as he knew it.

To Lichfield today, where the treasures in the
Chedral library were brought out for my admira-
tion. The most precious, the famous St. Chad's
Gospel of—dit-on—the eighth century, a manu-
script of Irish origin and very beautiful. The four
illuminated title-pages of a curiously frigid excel-

lence, the frigidity enhanced doubtless by the fact
that their colors have faded. It is almost as
though the artist had applied a mosaic technique
to illumination. For my own more human pleas-
ure I had preferred a thirteenth-century manu-
script with decorated initials and grotesque deco-
rations running down the centre of the page.

Civil war and subsequent restoration have
wrought such havoc in the cathedral itself that
only small parts of the original building remain,
notably the north transept. Not a statue on the
facade but has been replaced, barely a stone but
has been renewed. The north portal, originally,
I imagine, a representation of the Apocalypse, is
the only one which has any sculpturesque feeling.
Undeniably fine, however, are the proportions of
the cathedral and its relation to the close. Spa-
cious, but not too spacious. Majesty, tempered
with intimacy.

London once more and the same old question:
Do you find much changed? Arriving at Padding-
ton and driving to Lancaster Gate, one answers
confidently, No. The trees and flowers in the
Gardens are looking their loveliest. From my
window I can see right over the Dutch Garden
on to the Serpentine. No change there. The
buses a little cheaper. The weather a little
better. That is all.

But half way down what used to -be Regent
Street one is less certain. "Change" seems too
mild a term. Long before I had reached Haddon
Street I was lost. The entrance to Vigo Street is
barely visible, and beyond, closing the vista, with
the evening sun full on it, was a church. A church
in Regent Street. It seemed almost incredible.
And then the answer dawned on me. St. James's
Piccadilly, made visible by the destruction of the
Crescent. So perfectly was it framed that I was
almost reconciled for the moment to the loss of
the loveliest street in London. A pity that it
cannot remain thus visible permanently, closing
Regent Street or a new road cut through. For the
charm of the Crescent has gone, I fear, for ever.
The new buildings at the top of Regent Street are
neither very bad, nor yet very good, but one thing
they lack, as compared with Nash's street, abso-
lutely. They retain no slightest whit of the
elegance of his plan. The very plan oi the road,
were there no single building on either side, has a
sense of majestic elegance, which Nash used by
respecting. His first care was to see that nothing
interrupted the perfect line of the Crescent. The
eye was continually carried on and around, on
and around. But now though the architects have
done their utmost to coordinate their plans,

three eighty-Jour

august 1925