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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
The threatened closure of London's City churches at the turn of the nineteenth century gave rise to a movement in which artists and writers voiced their opposition. Eliot is at the end of a tradition that starts as an important aspect of the aesthetic movement in England, particularly through the work and writing of the Century Guild. The issue of city churches raises important questions about the autonomy of art, and this is a formative influence upon the literature of the decadence. Particular poems by Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, and Ernest Dowson are then considered as possible attempts to effect reconciliation between literary aestheticism and religious orthodoxy through the image of the City church.
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Apart from John Betjeman, probably the most prominent literary figure to speak up for the threatened heritage of London's churches is T. S. Eliot, with his contribution to The Rock. The idea of putting on a pageant play as a fundraising effort towards the erection of forty-five churches in the north London suburbs came from E. Martin Browne, director of religious drama in Chichester, who also formulated the basic scenario; the play was first performed at Sadler's Wells by an amateur cast between 28 May and 9 June 1934. Yet this was not Eliot's first contribution to such a debate. He had also spoken up for London's churches over ten years earlier, in 1921, in a 'London Letter' for The Dial, where he questioned the conclusions of a Commission set up by the Bishop of London, whose report had appeared the previous year. The Commission's principal recommendation was that the number of ecclesiastical parishes in the City should be drastically reduced and that nineteen inner-city churches should be knocked down. Eliot complained: 'As the prosperity of London has increased, the City Churches have fallen into desuetude; for their destruction the lack of congregation is the ecclesiastical excuse, and the need for money the ecclesiastical reason.' (1) It was during this period that Eliot was at work on The Waste Land, where two churches threatened with demolition are mentioned: in 'The Burial of the Dead' St Mary Woolnoth's bell keeps time amidst the ghostly impermanence of brown fogs and flowing crowds; and in 'The Fire Sermon' the dignified and 'inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold' of St Magnus is contrasted unfavourably with the meaningless 'clatter and chatter' of an adjacent bar in Lower Thames Street. (2) In the event both churches were to survive. But this was a subject that evidently continued to preoccupy Eliot as the year went on, for in October 1921 he wrote in a letter to Richard Aldington that 'I should love to write a book on Wren, or at least on the eglises assassinees of London'. (3)
By 1934 and The Rock, much had changed in Eliot's life, not least his formal reception into the Anglican Church. Nevertheless, his contribution to the pageant seems, on the face of it, to be a continuation of the policy established by his initial intervention on the subject. At the beginning of the pageant the Chorus journeys first to the City, where he is told that 'we have too many churches, | And too few chop houses', and is respectfully directed to the suburbs, only to find these churches equally neglected--'If the weather is foul we stay at home and read the papers'. (4) But there was a historical conflict between the later aim--to erect new churches in the London suburbs--and the earlier one--the preservation of already existing churches in the City. Indeed, the Union of Benefices Act of 1860 had been specifically designed to allow the Church to sell the latter in order to fund the former. If the City churches were indeed being assassinated, it was the growth of suburban churches that were murdering them, or at least providing the pretext. A report published by the London County Council in 1920, to which Eliot refers his readers in the 'London Letter', pleaded against the Commission's findings, pointing out that, whereas between the partial rebuilding of the inner-city churches following the Great Fire of London and the passing of the Act in 1860, only five additional buildings had been removed, the sixty years between the passing of the Act and the present day had seen eighteen taken down. (5) The impetus towards church building in the London suburbs that Eliot was to go on to support in The Rock in 1934 was actually generating--and, what is more, was seen to be generating--the project of demolition against which he was protesting in 1921.
My aim in this essay is not merely to suggest that these two moments in Eliot's career are more discrete from one another than they first appear, but also to locate the original protest as a late echo of what I shall call the 'churches for art's sake' movement, a largely unorthodox, self-consciously aesthetic response, originating in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, to the symbol of the City church. It began with objections to the demolition of inner-city churches, was to become a notable aspect in the later phases of the aesthetic movement, and had a formative effect upon the English decadence.
Three principal lines of defence tend to be pursued with regard to the erection and preservation of church buildings: first, justification on religious grounds--churches are required in order to bear physical witness to a nation's Christian traditions and way of life; secondly, the more utilitarian view--church buildings represent a triumph of co-operation and construction, their value being to unite men in the harmony of physical work whose ultimate goal is spiritual; thirdly, aesthetic grounds--churches are outposts of beauty in an environment that naturally tends towards materialism and ugliness. Often these categories blend into one another, but Eliot gives significant emphasis only to the third in his 1921 Dial article: inner-city churches impart 'to the bustling quarter of London a beauty which its hideous banks and commercial houses have not quite defaced'. By contrast, The Rock weaves the first two together, while notably downplaying the aesthetic defence. The continuing refrain of the pageant is:
A Church for all And a job for each And every man to his work. (p. 10)
Building a church provides an ideal of universal co-operation on a social level, but it also creates a place of worship designed to unite society in a Christian tradition. Compare this with Eliot's earlier, rather testy impatience with the closure of the City churches on what he saw as the spurious grounds (the 'ecclesiastical excuse') that no one was actually going into them. In the battle to gain a Church for all and a job for each, the old and empty City churches should be deemed necessary, if regrettable, casualties, but this is an idea that seems to have held little weight ten years earlier, when the aesthetic defence is all but exclusively used, and moreover in the service of church preservation, not of building. In the second Chorus of The Rock, Eliot argues for the need for both. First, he exhorts that:
Of all that was done in the past, you eat the fruit, either rotten or ripe. And the Church must be forever building, and always...
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