Caroline van Eck, ‘Longinus’s essay on the sublime and the “Most Solemn and Awfull Appearance” of Hawksmoor’s churches’, The Georgian Group Journal, Vol. XV, 2006, pp. 1–7 TEXT © THE AUTHORS 2006 LONGINUS’S ESSAY ON THE SUBLIME AND THE ‘MOST SOLEMN AND AWFULL APPEARANCE’ OF HAWKSMOOR’S CHURCHES CAROLINE VAN ECK ccording to still wide-spread prejudice, the Architectural historians have always found it AEnglish did not produce any architectural difficult to deal with this phase of British architecture. theory before the advent of neo-Palladianism after Sir John Summerson, still the most influential . No theory accounted for the idiosyncratic historian of English architecture in this period, English Baroque, distinguished by personal handling explained Hawksmoor’s plans as a visual conundrum. of the classical style. For instance, Hawksmoor In Hawksmoor’s churches Summerson detected an covered the entire façade of St Mary Woolnoth with unresolved conflict between Gothic dynamic axiality rustication, instead of limiting it to the ground floor, for a Christian liturgical orientation on the one hand, where it would otherwise have expressed strength and a classical, square and static plan on the other. and the uncouth character of the users and In Christ Church, Spitalfields, for instance, the inhabitants of such floors: soldiers, peasants and underlying square plan is marked by the four main craftsmen. Hawksmoor also enlarged normal and columns in the aisle, which provide the visual and unobtrusive elements of the classical style so that constructional orientation point in an interior which they were not recognisable as building elements, but is otherwise axial. This way of looking at Hawksmoor’s instead came very close to abstract sculpture. Such churches was useful in drawing attention to one elements are no longer integrated and subordinated puzzling aspect of their design; but it did not explain into a larger whole as the laws of classical design that puzzle. It also suffers from the absence of any dictate. In St George-in-the-East the keystones, indication that Hawksmoor or his contemporaries though outsized, still perform a structural function thought about their designs in such terms. More by keeping the stones of the vault over the door in recently, Vaughan Hart has shown how elements or place. But the giant keystones on the ground floor of parts of Hawksmoor’s designs can be traced back to the north façade of St George, Bloomsbury, have no examples in treatises or pattern books, but this does constructive function, because they do not keep a not explain his aesthetic either. vault in place. Through their size they transform the Summerson’s defence was that there is so little door frame into an abstract form, like Michelangelo’s seventeenth-century evidence of what architects Mannerist extravaganzas in the Biblioteca Laurenziana. thought: there are no treatises, only a few scattered Hawksmoor’s work is also distinguished by what he remarks by Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh and Wren, and called ‘Emminencys’, conspicuous towers and other very little contemporary comment, most of it ornaments on the roof-line, and his work in the City unfavourable. But there is one treatise on composition of London can now be recognised by the highly that was widely translated and read in Britain during individual spires of the post-Fire churches. the entire seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME XV LONGINUS ’ S ESSAY ON THE SUBLIME Longinus’s On the sublime. The attribution to the composition and style be of relevance for third-century Cassius Longinus was in fact a guess understanding the idiosyncracies of Baroque made in Byzantine times, but followed by Boileau architects like Hawksmoor? In the first place we and later by Gibbon. The manuscript refers once to have abundant evidence, collected recently by Dionysius Longinus, and once to Dionysius or Sophie Ploeg, that many persons involved in the Longinus. The other Byzantine guess was the first- major building programme of the English Baroque century Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and were familiar with Longinus. A number of the chronological hints in the text suggest at least that Commissioners of the Fifty New Churches possessed this was the right date. His treatise was translated one or more versions of Longinus or were closely into French by Boileau in , but one English acquainted with one or more of his translators. And translation and a number of Latin and Greek Vanbrugh, himself a Commissioner as well as a close editions had been published in England earlier. Even associate of Hawksmoor, wrote a memorandum on before these had appeared, Longinus was quoted by church design that shows awareness of the Sublime George Chapman, the translator of Homer, in his On aesthetic. He recommended, for instance, that ‘the Translating and Defending Homer of , and Reverend look of a Temple it self [...] shou’d ever Longinus’s treatise had been included in Milton’s have the most Solemn and Awfull Appearance both ideal curriculum for the Christian poet in – . without and within, that is possible’. The first English translation was by John Hall Secondly, Longinus’s language uses visual ( – ), a Cambridge-educated pamphlet writer imagery and even architectural metaphor to illustrate for Cromwell. He died attempting to cure his obesity his points. This visuality is stressed and even by eating pebbles, while working on a translation of elaborated in the English translations which Procopius’s Buildings . His translation of Longinus, Vanbrugh and his circle may have known. That in published in , is stylistically the best, and has a itself makes it a congenial document for architects preface in which he calls eloquence and those thinking about architectural design. Longinus defined the supreme quality of what ... a distilling our notions into a Quintessence or we now call the sublime in intensely visual terms. forming all our thoughts in a Cone, and smiting with the Point ... ‘tis Empire wholly commanding, yet These have been somewhat obscured by the general never to be commanded. acceptance of Boileau’s translation as ‘le sublime’. But his English translations, more faithful to the Four other English translations followed Boileau’s, original, called it ‘the Height of Eloquence’, in itself but all preceded Burke’s famous treatise on the a visual metaphor. As John Hall put it, ‘Height sublime. The first was an anonymous Essay on the whenever it seasonably breaks forth, bears down all Sublime. Translated from the Greek of Dionysius before it like a whirlwind, and presently evidences Longinus Cassius, the Rhetorician . Compar’d with the strength and ability of the speaker’. ‘Evidences’ the French of the sieur Despreaux-Boileau , published is also a visual term, etymologically derived from in Oxford in . In the same year John Pulteney’s videre , to see. In the previous sentence he had was published in London. Leonard Wellsted’s compared the structure of a speech to the fabric of Dionysius Longinus’ Treatise on the Sublime . architecture: Translated from the Greek , was published in . And when the vivacity of Invention, the harmony and William Smith’s Dionysius Longinus On the Sublime , order of Disposition cannot be discerned out of one or saw the light in London in . two clauses, but difficultly make themselves appear a Why would a late classical treatise on prose generall Survey of the whole fabrick. THE GEORGIAN GROUP JOURNAL VOLUME XV LONGINUS ’ S ESSAY ON THE SUBLIME Similarly he evoked the overwhelming effect of sublime And, to obtain a sense of the degree to which these eloquence by comparing it with the light of the sun: early English translations stress and elaborate Longinus’s visual metaphors, I will also quote the For see how like a small gleam approach’t by the sun in its full lustre presently disappears, so the sophistry standard modern translation by D.A. Russell: of rhetoric is wholly overshadowed, being so circumfused and covered by Height. Not unlike this is The combination and variety of its sounds convey the an observation we find in pictures; for after that Lines speaker’s emotions to the minds of those around him are drawn upon a plain and colours laid on and and make the hearers share them. It fits great thoughts shadowed and enlivened, thrust in the light [that] into a coherent structure by the way in which it builds projects a pleasant brightnesse, which is so much the up patterns of words. more visible by how much you nearer approach it: even so Heights and Passions of speech neighbouring Longinus also offered an approach to composition to our souls, as knit thereunto by a straight allyance, different to the architectural treatises of the outshine the figures, and only stand in sight, Renaissance, but not so different to Hawksmoor’s. overshadowing their art and clouding it in obscurity. Whereas Summerson’s analysis and Hart’s This use of visual analogy also extends to Longinus’s comparisons and parallels can only account for some views on life in general. Life is a theatre, in which of the elements of Hawksmoor’s buildings, Longinus’s man is both a spectator and a performer. In the advice accounts for his handling of them, for instance words of the anonymous translation of : his oversizing them or using them out of their ... Nature has not design’d Man to be a Creature of a structural context. None of the architectural treatises, low Rank, of an ignoble Standard, but has given him Life, neither Vitruvius, nor his Renaissance successors, and brought him into the world, as unto a great Theatre, Alberti, Serlio, Palladio and Vignola, offer advice on like a curious Observer of all that passes in it; and not composition. What they offer instead is instruction only so, but on this mighty stage, to be an high-spirited in the correct handling of the classical orders, the actor, breathing after nothing but glory and renown.