It is a melancholy reflection that the men who sought most
devotedly and enthusiastically to restore our English churches
to their pristine glory were the very men, in the end, who completed
the destruction of their character and beauty. About the middle
of the nineteenth century there arose the ecclesiological movement,
following on the work of Pugin, which set itself to the great
ideal of making our churches the glorious centres of worship
they once had been. A famous pamphlet was issued, called Reformation
and Deformation, which gave telling pictures of what churches
had been like in the Middle Ages, and on the opposite page illustrations
of what they were like in the early Victorian era. Now those
slovely Victorian churches were neglected and overlaid, but they
were in great measure intact; if a few things--the high pews
especially--had been carefully removed, and the services carefully
improved without breaking with tradition, the old beauty would
have come back, and the people would not have become estranged
from their parish churches. This, alas, did not happen. Wholesale
destruction, under the guise of 'restoration,' began; and the
churches were filled with horrible travesties of mediaeval furniture.
They lost their home-like character. Worst of all, the central
feature of the church, the altar with its reredos, was distorted
out of all knowledge.
Few old churches escaped the new 'deformation,' so well-meant,
and so disastrous in its results. Chelsea Old Church and a score
or so of other churches in remote villages remain to show how
lovely and home-like our churches used to be. The altar in the
chancel was almost invariably spoilt. This is why the improvement
of altars is at the present time still mainly in the side-chapels,
which are generally not encumbered with bad reredoses. Every
one who travels about England must have noticed how, in one village
after another, the 'English altar' has reappeared, first in a
side chapel, and then, as people saw its points, in the chancel
as well. The process of recovery has begun in side chapels and
in new churches, as our illustrations show; but one by one high
altars also are now being modified or reconstructed.
People call these altars 'English altars,' because they must
have some name; but they are really Catholic altars--the type
which, in more than one form, persisted from early times over
the whole Church, and only succumbed, two centuries after the
Renaissance had begun, to the Baroque influence of the counter-Reformation.
There are many Flemish pictures in the National Gallery to show
this; and all over Italy from Giotto to Ghirlandaio and the painters
of the sixteenth century, the pictures show no other form of
altar.
The same is true even of fifteenth and sixteen century Spain
(where the sunlight was excluded by the retablo); and the miniatures
of France and Germany tell the same story as those of England.
What that story is our illustrations show.
It will be noticed how extremely convenient this Catholic
altar is for mission chapels, and for places (as on board ship)
where an altar is temporarily set up. The whole place at once
becomes church-like in the best sense. But it is equally admirable
in a great cathedral, as the high altar of Westminster Abbey
shows. It is also forced upon us (unless we do violence to all
architectural principles) by our old parish churches, just because
they were built for it, and their low east window requires a
reredos not more than about three feet high. Our illustrations
show how dignity is secured more surely in this way than in any
other.
Just as I am writing this, the last volume of Michel's great
Histoire de l'Art has arrived from Paris, and I notice
that among much condemnation of modern church architecture, an
exception is made for Mr. Comper, and for Mr. Howard, who is
honoured by a special illustration, and who has designed so many
of our Warham Guild altars and screens. [The screen by Wigan
illustrated in Michel's Histoire de l'Art was executed
by the Warham Guild.] Last year an interesting sign came from
another quarter; there is an ecclesiological Society in Spain
which has issued from Barcelona in its Anuari for 1925 a picture
of a frontal with 'Warham Guild' underneath it.
Indeed there is a general agreement nowadays among architects,
artists and ecclesiologists. Not in one restricted model (for
riddel-posts are not of course necessary, beautiful as they are--and
even riddels can be dispensed with--and altar-crosses also),
but in the general principle, the type of altar illustrated in
these pages is now agreed to be, with the ciborium type of basilican
churches, that required by our architecture, and by the traditions
and requirements of Catholic worship.
