A Search for Right Relationships: The Twentieth-Century Medievalism of Eric Gill

117 A SEARCH FOR RIGHT RELATIONSHIPS; THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MEDIEVALISM OF ERIC GILL By Maureen Corrigan (University of Pennsylvania) In the Chichester Observer of April I9OI, Eric Gill initiated a tempestuous career of letter writing to the press by protesting current plans to restore Chichester Cross as a memorial to Queen Victoria and generally condemning the sham Gothicism that had dominated architecture in the past century; Is it not absurd to imagine that twentieth century workmen can, however skillful they are, transport themselves back into the sixteenth century and do the work which only exists at all because the sixteenth century existed? ... If it be found necessary to replace carved stones let us cut them into our own design so that they will harmonize with and carry on the old weathered stones on either side. Such work would be no deception . . . But do not let us pretend to be Gothic workmen when we are not.1 Two years later the controversy was rekindled by a suggestion to reconstruct the Cross in the center of Jubilee Park away from traffic. Sarcasm replaced earnestness in Gill's second letter to the Observer. Responding to the provoking absurdity of the proposal, Gill pretended to applaud the move and advocated that the Cross be rebuilt as a bandstand or moved within the Cathedral yard so tourists might economically squeeze the two monuments into one photograph.^ This fierce reverence for the products of the past was a virtue Gill's employers, the architects to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, encouraged only by negative example: that office was then one of England 's largest suppliers of gargoyles, tracery, and similar neomedieval church furnishings. The nineteen-year-old apprentice, however , had been converted by breakfast readings of The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Unto This Last to share Ruskin's conviction that good architecture directly reflects the communal life of a particular society. "For the smallest telephone callbox the whole resources of our civilization are drawn upon,"3 was Gill's post-industrial translation of the principle. As the Chichester episode illustrates, Gill primarily respected the art and architecture of the Middle Ages as symbols of their informing truths. His medievalism consequently sought to revive the once vital philosophical and political structures of that culture rather than its romantic outer trappings. Unfortunately , his attempts to base modern reform upon the ideals represented by the Middle Ages earned Gill his popular image of religious eccentric and reactionary. Similarly, his singular lifestyle, which included a three-year residency at an abandoned Welsh monastary, his working garb of monk's cassock, golf socks, and biretta, and his series of stone carvings and illustrations that were alternately condemned as pornographic or smugly devout, reduced his potency as a 118 social critic. The notoriety of Gill's increasing opposition to the modern world, however, obscured its motives - the rediscovery of the moral roots of action and art.1+ In his attempt to revive the cultural conditions of the Middle Ages, Gill consciously adopted Pugin, Carlyle, Ruskin, and Morris as his Victorian mentors. Their influence is most obvious in his essays. Gill was admittedly the type of writer who could only stick to a point by repeating it,5 and the Victorians' respective arguments on architectural functionalism, Mammonism, social affection, the degradation of the modem workman into a mere hand, crafts guilds and socialism are the staples of his own writings. Furthermore, Gill's historical perspective derived from the Victorians' view of their own time as the historical inversion of* an idealized Middle Ages. Less easily identified are the diverse group of contemporaries who, with Gill, compose medievalism's line of descent into the twentieth century. Because W. B. Yeats, William Lethaby, Edward Johnston, Ananda Coomaraswamy, G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, Jacques Maritain, Herbert Read, David Jones, T. S. Eliot, and Eric Gill share a common quest for the grounds of coherence in the Middle Ages rather than an allegiance to its appearances, they have been largely ignored in studies of the medieval movement's extended influence. Their modern awareness of cultural fragmentation is not unique; however, the aesthetic , religious and political solutions they proposed derive from a peculiar use of the Middle Ages as...