"Love is greater than taste": the moral architecture of John Betjeman and John Piper.

Mitchell, Philip Irving

Abstract: Poet John Betjeman and painter John Piper shared an emphasis on visual attentiveness to place, which in its moral and aesthetic valuation, challenged contemporary standards of taste, especially those modern ones that excluded ornament and the picturesque. With regard to English Christianity, as I argue, both pursued forms of neo-Romantic, moral architectural praise and analysis, engaging the socio-cultural debate, not in terms of a set of frozen critical laws, but within a flexible practice of personal engagements that, nonetheless, set forth strong positions on sentiment, tradition, and sacrament. In doing so, both men reemphasized rootedness and love.

"[I]t wasn't a question of creating a taste for Gothick or anything else that JB makes fashionable because he, JB, is really, not just fashionably, in love with the subjects and that love is greater than taste.... JB doesn't satirize things because he doesn't hate them: what he does satirize is the absence of love which he does savagely."

--Myfanwy Piper to John Murray (Hillier, New Fame 401)

"[L]ook to the Victorians, not for a copy book but for an example: an example that in matters of colour it is better to be too vulgar than too nice; too fussy than too simple ... that marbling is still more attractive to the eye than marble veneer, that to express your taste in your shopfront, whether it is good or indifferent taste, is more laudable--and will ultimately attract more and better custom--than to adapt a fashion that forbids self-expression."

--John Piper, "Shops" (Mowl 101)

Introduction

The poet and critic John Betjeman and the visual artist John Piper were good friends for much of their adult lives. They shared an interest in the regional towns and locales of England, and did much in their own way to promote and to protect these. They also shared a love for English architecture, including ecclesial architecture, for both were practicing Anglicans throughout their mature careers. Their mutual influence is an inevitable aspect of the criticism of either man, and this is especially true in regard to how each worked out what he loved in his art. (1) Much of Betjemans work as a poet, as an architectural critic, and as a preservationist grew out of love of place, but not simply place. Betjeman believed he wrote out of reverence for people and for the places bound up with them (Letters 1.426-27). Locale for him was not just spatial, but also social and historical. (2) Architecture at its best represented historical accumulation, and what he repeatedly denounced was the removal of the accretion of the past in such a way that it rendered a place no longer itself. It was Piper in the late 1930s and '40s who helped Betjeman to see that love as a moral and aesthetic response was larger than models of taste, that attentiveness to a place was a wider, less judgmental category than critical absolutism. Piper's attentiveness as a visual artist recognized the contextual thickness of a building--its social use, its history, its location, its scenery--and yet did so in search of aesthetic form. Their shared method of response both influenced and was influenced by their Anglican faith, though often very differently. Despite the importance of their faith, Piper's chief biographers, David Fraser Jenkins and Frances Spalding, have expressed some discomfort with the artist's religious leanings and, thus, tend to downplay faith's importance to his aesthetics. This has not been the case with the chief scholars in Betjeman studies--the biographer Bevis Hillier, the anthologist Stephen Games, and the critic Kevin J. Gardner. Gardner, in particular, has done much to show the importance, even centrality, of Betjeman's faith to his poetry, his architectural preservationism, and his general topophilia. In this, I am persuaded by much of Gardner's work, though where Gardner tends toward an existential and personalist reading of the poet, I am interested in further exploring how Betjeman and Piper were part of a series of intellectual and cultural resistances.

Both men chiefly expressed a largess of affection and sentiment via their appropriations of the romantic and the picturesque, each an aesthetic with a long cultural heritage. With the latter, the poet and the painter were each drawing from an early twentieth-century renewal of the picturesque that defined itself as a response of moral valuation over against its distrust by many high modernist artists and critics. Within this context, such an appropriation had to carry with it a moral character, and this was so in regard to church architecture, especially in light of debates regarding the continuing role of English Christianity. Together, both men sought to practice a kind of moral architecture as cultural struggle, not in terms of hard-fast deontological rules, but by virtue of regular and attentive individual engagements that, nevertheless, took stands on the values of sentiment, tradition, and sacrament. By doing so, Betjeman and Piper were involved in an ethical and religious fight with both public and private ramifications.

The Neo-Romantic Particular

The romantic and humanistic response of Betjeman and Piper, by virtue of its historical valuation, had to be a moral and religious position because each appealed to what architectural historian John Summerson called "the root principle"; that is, a kind of master key that unlocks the ideological assumptions behind architectural and visual practice and criticism (Unromantic 258). Betjeman and Piper's interest in the works of A. W. N. Pugin, John Ruskin, and William Morris, among others, involved them in ethical questions, though ultimately less as hard-and-fast judgments and more as practices with public hopes. Piper wrote of Ruskin's moral architecture that, where Ruskin would have said "must," Piper and his own generation could only say "may," and this difference says much about the judgments of Betjeman and himself (Buildings 93). (3) What Betjeman and Piper shared was a certain Romantic sensibility regarding landscape and architecture, and both in their own ways can be credited with part of the sensibility's English revival in the '30s and '40s. English Neo-Romanticism was many things: a reaction against modernist abstraction; an attempt to uncover an authentically English tradition in art and literature; a return to an appreciation of landscape and Nature; and a loose search for something like native spirituality, often in place of waning orthodox Christianity; but above all, Neo-Romanticism was a search to revive what painter Paul Nash called the genius loci, "the spirit of place." In this sense, Neo-Romanticism was also an ethical sensibility and practice, for while visual art and architecture can certainly have profound differences between them, Neo-Romanticism was pushing back against the move toward the universal and abstract in both fields.

Piper, in his 1942 British Romantic Artists, analyzed the two broad streams of Romanticism in a way that helped to clarify its contemporary expressions. Following William Blake, Piper defined the Romantic as that which "deals with the particular," yet it does so with "the sense of drama in atmosphere, in the weather and the seasons" (7), the latter an emphasis equally in John Sell Cotman and in J. M. W. Turner. Both the particular and the dramatic were imaginative responses to the topography and architecture of place, and both sought to find the spiritual in the material. According to Piper, the visionary tradition of Blake and Samuel Palmer sought to make present the past, while the powerful scenery of Cotman and Turner uncovered the storms of the human soul amid the picturesque landscape and (for Cotman) the old parish churches (16-31). As Piper tells the story, the Victorian period of "honest doubt" cheapened and tamed these impulses of vision and drama with materialism and escapism, and it was understandably followed by the rebellion of the Pre-Raphaelites, who stressed a moral return to detail and truth-telling. In the current period, Piper would identify not only Nash but also Graham Sutherland and Frances Hodgkins as modern Romantic artists who had returned to the older authentic streams of Englishness, stressing in turn their attention to the prehistoric, the rural, and the natural object. Nonetheless, while Piper would praise Hodgkins for her attention to farms with their "furnishings of derelict gear" and see in Nash "the dry architecture of geology and antiquarianism" (47), it was really his own return in the late '30s and '40s to paintings of great houses, palaces, and ecclesial buildings that would renew an English Romantic vision of architecture. (4)

His vision was to be resisted on a number of fronts. Piper, who had been an abstract painter and member in the '30s of the Seven & Five artist collective, was soon to be considered a traitor. Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Herbert Read, each in their own ways, shared with the architectural theorists Nikolaus Pevsner and Le Corbusier, a belief in the abstract, formal simplicity of modernism, though Read also praised surrealism as authentically English. Piper, in their eyes, had turned from the formal purity and clarity that stood above historical and geographical particulars. As modernists and internationalists, the Seven & Five became a bastion of the ideal and universal. Not surprisingly, Pevsner could give only faint praise to Neo-Romanticism's "romantic topography," dismissing that of Piper because he added nothing to the long-term direction of modern art. The slow change of English art, Pevsner charged, was obviously not ready

to embrace Continental energy (Englishness 193-94). Yet Piper had come to believe that the goals of art were otherwise: "My aims in painting are to express a personal love of country and architecture, and the humanity that inhabits them, and to increase my own understanding and nourish my own love of the work of other painters past and present." Indeed, to be a truly English artist, he felt, one had to recognize the visual in the English love of words, which flowed out of emotional experience (Fowler-Wright 16). None of this could be done in an abstract medium aspiring to the purely Platonic. What he needed were the insights of abstraction embodied in recognizable landscape and architecture in an imaginative bond of affection and respect.

The love of the particular is likewise present in Betjemans writing. Harold Acton had nicknamed him "the genius of the genius loci "(Spalding 166). For Betjeman, even abstracting about the particular was one step removed from his praise of Freshwater or Bath or Cornwall. For Betjeman, Romanticism was the best English response to architecture and place; that is, if left free of the impersonal, "archeological" erudition of scholarship that he associated with Pevsner. Architectural history should be an individual and imaginative encounter with a place in all its eccentricities. The personal makes care possible. This love of the particular can even be seen in his praise of places just outside the English orbit, such as Scotland and the Isle of Man. For example, his 1947 talk "Aberdeen Granite," enthuses over Scottish architecture for its "mixture of the romantic and the severe," a combination of particular, austere honesty (First 22). Betjeman, a self-named "filthy Saxon" (24) has come to Aberdeen in part to experience a new place, in part to view the architecture, and in part simply because the abundant granite is such a draw. What he praises about Aberdeen is its repudiation of a bland, non-descript internationalism; that is, it refuses to sacrifice its particularity, which is formed by an architectural heritage that can be traced in its buildings. (5)

Betjeman shared with Piper a view of the visual as a way to frame and to position the audience before a place and to help them experience it; that is, to enter a relationship with it. For example, his meditation on the Isle of Man praises a historical juxtaposition of "Norse and Celtic ... a place of strong contrasts and great variety" (First 39), and this variety is to be praised because it brings together other places and their cultures--English, Scottish, Welsh, Cornish. Betjeman here is even more interested in the local and the miniature, and the microclimates of the island allow him to lose himself in short order in several flavors of world. During the height of the tourist season, he can not only experience solitude along the western shore and near solitude among the farms, but he can also go among the crowds at the Douglas Front and in the great dance halls. Betjeman's trademark approach is to emphasize the visuals:

 The boats arrive, the aeroplanes come down, young men and old in
 open shirts, sports coats and grey flannels, young girls and old in
 cheerful summer dresses, queue for ices, queue for shrimps, crowd
 round bars for glasses of delicious dry champagne, gaze from
 horse-trams over municipal flower beds to the Tower of Refuge and
 the sea, travel in luxury coaches round the island half asleep in
 one another's arms till the sun sets behind the boarding-houses of
 Douglas and all the lights go up and the dance halls begin to fill.
 It is nine o'clock. There is still light in the sky. (45-46)

And so on. By narrating in this fashion, Betjeman expects his audience to be visually present with him. They are invited to position themselves imaginatively within the narrative as both spectator and participant, and the irregular details are brought together to give a genius loci that harmonizes the diversity. Thus, sentiment becomes a means of, if not of ownership, of associative memory at least. Betjeman dramatizes place, and as a result, knowledge of the place becomes dependent upon emotional involvement with a picturesque unity.

The Picturesque, Ornament, and Loyalty to Place

The picturesque as Betjeman and Piper understood it was not exactly that of the eighteenth-century theorists William Gilpin and Uvedale Price. Gilpin and Price had both sought to absorb irregularity into a harmonious balance of pleasing differences, and this was shared by Piper and Betjeman. Yet there were more diverse options available to them. Christopher Hussey's The Picturesque (1927) in the early twentieth century had the virtue of not only explaining this English tradition to a new audience, but also making it a contemporary option. Hussey described its history as a movement from the regular to the irregular. In order to trace this movement in architecture, he insisted that one must pay attention to a number of visual qualities: dramatic distance, unitary effect with diversity, the "cult of the colossal," mystery and romance, irregularity, and the attention to texture and symbol (186ff.). Historically, according to Hussey, each of these criteria had shaped how a building and its surroundings were to be framed by visual expectations. At first, they had shaped a selection of what to exclude in a building or painting; then, a sentiment developed that encoded such locales with imaginative memory; finally, a craft arose that committed itself to perpetuating their values. These visual reference points can be treated as a continual chain of ever-new vistas, engaging the viewer's interest in one moment only to bore it in the next. This is, one suspects, picturesque travel's temptation in any age. Nonetheless, visual references can also provide the opportunity for prolonged meditation. Hussey's work had this kind of impact on both Betjeman and Piper. His attention to these qualities called Betjeman to appreciate the meditative prospects of eighteenth-century parks (Ghastly xxi) and gave Piper a contemporary vision of place (Spalding 133-34). What he taught them both was, ultimately, how the picturesque becomes a medium for encountering a locale in its visual distinctiveness. Rather than reducing the picturesque to a few rules, this understanding opened a series of familiar but still diverse tools. The picturesque, like the nostalgic or the sentimental, (6) can encode the particulars of a place with loyalty, investing it with certain emotional and moral commitments. This, of course, made it highly compatible with Romanticism. In the '30s, Piper, along with critic and poet Gregory Grigson, had feared that the loss of the human element in abstraction would lead to less humane works in general (Yorke 78). Betjeman's introduction of Hussey's book to Piper only solidified what the Piper had been sensing, a process he would come to call "feeling through the eyes" (Spalding 133-34, 180). (7)

Hussey's categories are in evidence in Piper's varied approaches to sketching and painting in the '40s. For example, the picturesque qualities of dramatic distance, the colossal, and unitary effect are evident in his war paintings, such as Seaton Delaval (1942), The Gatehouse, Knole (1942), Renishaw, the north front (1942-43), and Hardwick Hall (1942-43). Before each painting, which owes a debt to Cotman's approach, the viewer stands in the middle distance, able to take in the overall architectural wholeness, but close enough so that each building fills the majority of the canvas. Except for Renishaw, the sky and land are reduced to being background. All four paintings are dominated by dark reds, browns, greys, and golds, and in each case, walls are more luminous than the weather, the latter tending to chiaroscuro. On the other hand, irregularity and texture dominate in St. Mary-le-Port, Bristol (1940) and in The Cottage by Firth Wood, Hampshire (1941). In the former, the ruin of the bombed church is brought closer to the viewer so that the texture of the bricks and rubble is clearly present and the gateway is more human in scale. In the latter, the viewer is farther back, but the effect is to shrink the cottage, which is dominated by the textures of straw and plain wall, into a scene in which blues and whites predominate. These do not so much overpower the viewer as invite one to pathos and tenderness. (8)

Such emotional moorings were, in their various forms, what the functionalist position of modernism rejected, in part because modernist critics charged their appeals to sentiment with the dishonesty and elitism of nineteenth-century architectural moralism. But, then, this moralism was the very tradition in which Betjeman and Piper were choosing to work. Gardner has tended to stress how the fantasy and tension Betjeman felt in the English pastoral nonetheless spurred him on to public activism, (144-47), and while this is true, I would contend that his shared ideology with Piper also reinforced their resistance. The picturesque as a moral gesture was a visual perspective that was highly contested by the early twentieth century in part due to its abuses in the nineteenth. For example, the Anglo-Catholic Cambridge Camden Society in the 1840s, following Pugins views, had declaimed as unreal delusion attempts in churches to express individual, picturesque character. (9) Such positions, ironically, prompted the Gothic-inspired "restoration" of many English churches, which Morris, among others, decried. Ruskin, who for a season had been swayed by the Gothic Revival, in works like The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and Stones of Venice (1851-53), made even more popular a position that certain styles could be marked by truthfulness, sacrifice, sublimity, and obedience, and his moral criticism would continue to be emulated at the century's turn. (10) In contrast, Geoffrey Scott's much-discussed The Architecture of Humanism (1914) had located human involvement with architecture within the experience of line, space, form, and movement. For Scott, the imaginative perception was only an overlay added to the spatial. The imaginative had no ontologically significant reality for Scott. He condemned anything like the "romantic fallacy" or "moral fallacy" of Ruskin. Arthur Trystan Edwards, while an admirer of Scott, would reintroduce the moral approach in his defense of Regency architecture in his Good and Bad Manners in Architecture (1924), (11) as would Clough Williams-Ellis the same year with The Pleasures of Architecture--both early influences on Betjeman. In similar fashion, Kenneth Clark's first book, The Gothic Revival, which had such a noticeable impact on the early Betjeman, started out preaching the gospel of Geoffrey Scott only to end being swayed by the moral position of the Victorians. (12) It was within this debate, that Betjeman and Piper came to aesthetic maturity.

In many ways, as Timothy Mowl has explored, it was Betjemans cultural foil, (13) Pevsner, who would most embody the position that distrusted visual styles that looked back to or borrowed from past buildings. For Pevsner, the singular clarity of the Bauhaus aesthetic was where the modern age was headed. "[T]he glass walls are now clear and without mystery, the steel frame is hard, and its expression discourages all other worldly speculation. It is the creative energy of this world in which we live and work and which we want to master" (Pioneers 163). In similar fashion, he could admire the mixture of forward-looking modernism and social revolution preached by Le Corbusiers love for geometric mass and space. Thus, Pevsner's position had its own moral substructure, that of social utility, progress, and functional simplicity. However, this rejection of ornament did not mean that modernists were insensible to the claims of the picturesque as a human social need; rather, they would redefine the picturesque as a forward-looking abstract balance of irregularity in the modern style. The picturesque was to become again, in mid-twentieth-century Britain, a center of public debate about urban planning. In the 1940s and '50s Pevsner, in particular, would advocate a post-Romantic vision of the picturesque "garden city," which should offer principles of rational, spatial irregularity to new "visual planning" for urban townscapes (Macarthur and Aitchison 18). Popularized by the Architectural Review and the CIAM architectural consortium, such views culminated in the 1951 Festival of Britain exhibition (Atkinson 2008). Betjeman would later look back on the Festival as an example of the lack of historical longevity--"rather pointless and sad, [if] also infinitely romantic," the latter term a concession to the planners' original optimism (Hillier, Bonus 544). Rather than visual planning for what could be in the future, Piper and Betjeman were about visual framing of what already was and should be preserved, and to them this framing had the gesture of historical and imaginative truth-telling. The CIAM offered a soulless form of the picturesque without the dirt and weathering of history.

The modernist architectural credo of "form follows function," which Betjeman and Piper rejected, was comparable to the abstract painter's search for pure form. Modernists were seeking an aesthetic endemic to the medium itself which offered a clarity and simplicity of object or image. They charged the picturesque with a banal, wooden realism that disappeared into fantasy. Piper's commitment to the picturesque, however, did not obligate him to this caricature, nor did he ever aspire to pure "realism." Unlike the tradition of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, Piper's truth-telling in art was not limited to a strict imitation of Nature. He came to see the abstraction (14) of his early career as "classical exercises" that prepared him to better stress the character of place (Moore 185-86), and his turn to particularity and to the picturesque allowed him to continue to appropriate the language of abstraction as a servant to a visual sense of local distinctions, even in places that were distrustful of embellishment.

Piper's 1938 exhibition, The Nonconformist Record (or Welsh Nonconformist Chapels), consisted of five collages of cut paper, paint, and ink, and their balance of abstraction and figuration is manifested by the simple geometry of the chapels. He took advantage of their basic forms, offsetting them with sketched details of metal fences, windows, and rooflines, and combining a gestural language of planes and singular colors with energetic sketches of real objects. (15) Even these seemingly most abstract of Piper's drawings would come to be possessed of a Neo-Romantic sense of place. His later illustrations for Betjeman's essay Nonconformist Architecture have a similar approach, though in these he combines drawings of the chapels with various ornamental patterns--brick, music staffs, marbling, and hatchmarks. In effect, he re-ornaments the plain architecture of the preaching chapels. The use of ornament, like the picturesque, was judged as inauthentic by Piper's modernist opponents--to include ornament was to privilege the local. And in doing so, Piper almost makes these various Protestant forms Anglo-Catholic.

Though Summerson thought that Owen Jones was primarily to blame for creating a kind of ornamental pluralism that devalued it for moderns ("What is Ornament?" 5-6), Summerson also opined that the "fear of ornament is part of the Protestantism of modern architecture" (Heavenly 215). Piper in his chapel drawings was at least showing that ornament could be honest in its revelatory qualities rather than simply secondary or deceptive as the 7 & 5 under Nicholson had held. Ornament was other than mere addition; it could reveal the essential. Thus, Piper was implicitly denying the thesis of Adolf Loos that ornament was dishonest and unevolved. Instead, Piper sought to highlight Betjeman's key points about the chapels--their "architecture of enthusiasm," their tradition of hymn-singing, their function as preaching houses, their composite quality as buildings of the people, and their local, popular piety (First 90-119). These backgrounds continued to be merged with details that distinguish actual meeting houses. Even in a case such as the Methodist chapel at Mawgan-in-Meneage, Cornwall, in which the structure of the building is reduced to white space with a blackened arch, door, and paned window, Piper seeks to reveal the character essential to its special purpose and history by setting the chapel against backgrounds of sheet music. In doing so, he locates the formal essentials inside place, ornament, and observation, rather than outside them. (16)

As Piper sought in his illustrations, Betjeman sought to focus on certain essentials to a place to help his audience grasp its value. For Betjeman, the human need in building was more than the physical necessities of shelter, warmth, fresh air, and so on. The picturesque attention to locality is almost ubiquitous in his corpus, but it can be especially seen in both the 1949-1950 "Coast and Country" radio series and the 1955-1956 Shell film series, Discovering Britain with John Betjeman. Because they had limited airtime, these series tended to bring to the surface Betjemans assumption that historical and imaginative rootedness is at the heart of a healthy, tight community, (17) and he affirms this by the highlighted visual perspective. In Ventnor, the heightened perspective is the vertical nature of the town unexpectedly rising up near the sea with its history of sea-side villas, a home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and its varied colors of cliff wall. In Yarmouth, it is the Georgian proportion of a house called "The Mount" and the cry of the gulls. Hayling Island has rural fields and "two old country churches ... founded in agriculture" (First 196). Lyndhurst has wildness in its landscape and in its late Gothic architecture. Its church "is capital, full of originality and thought and care. It expresses the courage and conviction of the Victorians" (First 200). In each case, Betjeman invited his audience to expand their judgment of a place by combining a Romantic understanding of the landscape with a similar understanding of its buildings, ones that he regarded as products of human action and regular living. (18)

However, Betjemans love of the picturesque place had more than a tinge of dread, for it was precisely the personal embedded in place and tradition that Betjeman feared was threatened by rapid social and technological changes. "Weymouth still looks civilised. But how long will it be allowed to keep this asset of a civilised appearance?" (First 203), he asked in 1950. In 1969, he was still worried: "The developers have taken more than their fair share of the coast.... We must keep the rest of it for the good of our souls" (Betjemans England 72). Throughout his career, Betjeman placed his concerns about overdevelopment within an historical narrative of the waning of Christian belief, a story he tells in various and at times contradictory forms. He saw the two as deeply related: the senseless destruction of nature and of traditional architecture both stemming from a loss of theistic conviction and parish identity.

This was a position that Piper, though Anglican, did not hold entirely. While he began to paint churches in World War II in response to the bombing of Coventry, he had agreed to do so because he saw them as undergoing an "architectural ordeal" (Spalding 182). His own historical narrative of the rise and fall and renewal of English Romanticism was compatible with Betjemans, yet finally more concerned with particularity than the larger modulations of time and eternity. This can be seen in Pipers 1968 narrative of the history of stained glass. For Piper, what mattered was the loss and gain of original architectural freshness rather than a loss of faith per se: "It is not what it is about that matters to us; what matters is that it creates another little world within the world" (25). Nonetheless, to truly understand Betjeman's appropriation of Pipers sensibility, one must account for the deep structure of Betjemans religious fears. While Piper worked to restore a sense of place and history, Betjeman worked for these within a larger residual hope for Christendom.

The Loss of Christendom and Rootedness

While the emphasis changed in Betjeman's work between 1930 and 1970 from cultural judgmentalism to openness, the loss of Christendom was always present. In Ghastly Good Taste (1933), his second prose work, many of his characteristic views were already in evidence. As Mowl and Hillier have pointed out, Betjeman was still somewhat under the influence of the middle-of-the-road modernist position at the Architectural Review. Mowl, in particular, traces the evolution of Betjeman from seeking to please the modernist notions of architecture at AR to increasingly embracing his own instincts (chapter 2). Betjeman had clearly absorbed, too, something of the European milieu that feared the loss of Christendom. Betjeman is comparable in this to T. S. Eliot's cultural criticism, to the Order men associated with Christopher Dawson, to the Moot of J. H. Oldham, to The Christian News-Letter, to the Spirit of the Lord ecumenical movement, and so on; all were intensely engaged with the project of a broadly Christian cultural resistance and reconstruction. (19) For Betjeman, this naturally took the form of architectural history. He would later look back to Ghastly as full of arrogance and bravado, but he felt that it had had the virtue of relating architecture "to social life" rather than pure aesthetics alone (Letters 1.427). Betjeman was certainly aware of Catholic publishers Sheed and Ward and their interest in a cultural analysis of religion (Letters 1.73). Dawson, for example, was able to make very similar sociological and historical analyses of English architecture, family life, and technological change (Enquiries 30-33). In his narrative that he tells in the first chapter, Betjeman assumes a human way of life that is lived within architectural meanings. It centers on the historical changes to the great houses, but in his version, this is also a narrative of English religious changes--Puritanism, the Great Awakening, Nonconformist chapels, the Oxford Movement, and the rise of a pagan secularism. In a way, he is setting out an Anglican counterpart to the more wide-spread neo-medievalism of the Victorians, such as that of Pugin or Morris, as well as that of contemporary Catholic apologists.

Betjeman defends his satirical passion in Ghastly as arising from the "rooted love" of England and her architecture (16) and contends that one cannot so much offer a definition of architecture as a history (19). He thinks that only with a new Christendom will architectural coherence be regained (21-23): "The age has lost one faith, but it does not yet seem to have found another" (33). The "architecture of doubt" was the architecture of Tudor and Jacobean England, for the "architecture of faith" gave way to Geoffrey Scott's "architecture of humanism" (38). Thus, Betjeman tells a very neo-Tractarian story of the Protestant loss of the sacramental (39), of how English simplicity resisted the Continental rococo (55, 59-60, 66), and of how an educated ethic was retained in Regency period architecture, a holdover of a past vision of an ordered world. Chapter 7 follows with a stress on a spreading decorative decadence and the influx of manufactured elements without craft, and while he thinks that there were "good, vulgar mistakes" in the Victorian, what is left in the modern period is mostly a failure, with the exceptions of Morris and C.F.A. Voysey. The loss of craft and beauty and human-sized living all result from loss of parish and church. Without a vision of the eternal, Betjeman contends, there can be no tradition of craft nor any loyalty to a place and past. The book ends with a short summary of this cultural narrative. English history has moved from "religious unity" to a "reasoned unity," then to a "stranger order" in industrialism, and finally to a great loss that can be overturned only with "a new order and another Christendom" (112).

He tells a similar, if less sweeping, story in his 1937 essay "1837-1937: Spiritual Change is Our Only Hope," in which he traces one hundred years of architectural history within a single town--Boggleton, lamenting the loss of both craft due to mechanization and a Gothic Revival that was cut off from the Oxford Movement. Here again he holds out hope for a revitalized Christendom, for the period in question was already one marked by "absence of any unifying faith" (First 120). Betjemans language is surprisingly sacramental, seeing in architecture "the outward and visible form of inward and spiritual grace or disgrace" (121). The town's Georgian architecture and the well-made interior of its church reveal a period when hospitality, community, and craft were a singular worldview. In turn, loss of craft and thoroughness reveals a "loss of tradition," which only increased with the spread of machine-made mass production. Betjeman praises Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris for being opposed to this trend, however unsuccessfully, and while that tradition continued in the work of Macintosh and Voysey (First 128-30), it has since faltered before surrealist fashions and loss of local control to London.

It is hard to think that Betjeman was not even tangentially influenced in his choice of subtitle by the Oxford Conference on Church, Community, and State that same year. Hosted by the Church of England, the ecumenical (though mostly American and European) conference of over 400 representatives examined issues of politics, economics, ethical and social life, education, and the meaning of history. At the time, it was a remarkable event, especially in being held during the rise of the Nazi threat. Consider the following passage from the official report's section on church and community:

The Christian church is called upon to fulfill its mission today amid a distraught and disunited mankind. Divisions and conflicts there have always been, but the foundations of communal life in generally accepted systems of customs, social distinctions, moral and cultural values and religious beliefs have remained sufficiently firm to preserve the essential structure of the various communities in which men have lived their lives together. Today, however, as probably only once or twice before in human history, the foundations themselves are shaken. Traditional pieties and loyalties and standards of conduct have lost their unquestioned authority; no new ones have taken their place. As a result, the community life of mankind has been thrown into confusion and disintegration.... When society "goes to pieces" the individual tends also to "go to pieces" in suffering, frustration and a baffled sense of the futility and meaninglessness of his existence. (Oldham 55)

The language reflects a world picture that could easily describe not only Ghastly Good Taste and "A Spiritual Change" but also much of Betjeman's writing in the 40s and 50s. The Report's writers assume what Betjeman does--namely that, with the loss of piety, comes a loss of a parish center

and with that a general loss of community and shared values and a resulting hollow polis and ethos. What Betjeman added was the claim that, with the loss of a common faith, came the loss of a social bond that had made good craft possible.

Betjemans address Antiquarian Prejudice written that same year also tells a version of this narrative, one in which the modern "experts" on architecture reside in museums and never in the actual community. Architecture, Betjeman insists, has to be understood by its surroundings, the context of its social life, and the people who made it and live in it. "Research is the curse of our age," he charges, for with research there is less real art and the loss of craft in general. Tradition is "digested experience" (First 56). The "antiquarian impulse" in question here is not the antiquarian movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, Betjeman is addressing, admittedly quite unfairly, the historicist approach of those like Pevsner who would desire to place everything within carefully prescribed periods and culturally distinct units. For Betjeman, this approach dismantled the system of apprenticeship that once preserved a continuity of culture making. Historicism is judged by Betjeman to be a breaker of tradition, for it draws artists from the tacit school of master and student to that of the cold scholar claiming to look in on an amorphous past with a pure objectivity (First 61-65). This all is quite a stretch, but it does reveal again how deeply set were Betjemans basic narrative assumptions about place, parish, and craft.

It may be counter-intuitive for many that Betjeman quickly identified his own architectural opinions with Christendom, but this should not surprise us. Betjeman, like many Anglicans, assumed a close connection between the Church of England and English culture though he realized that this relationship was waning, even threatened (Gardner 2010, chapter 4; Letters 1.224). In a 1944 Home Service radio address, Betjeman recommended Leslie Paul's The Annihilation of Man for making clear "the faith that made the Europe for which men are fighting now" (Trains 151). Paul's slim volume is a good example of the state of the intellectual debate. He stressed the role of Christianity in human equality, human individuality, and human sinfulness. By connecting these political and social structures to Christianity, Paul was in the stream of thinkers who saw fascism as pagan worship of power over against a Christian culture of mercy and equality. Betjeman agreed with Paul on a number of fronts. Betjeman labeled the doctrine of progress as a dying myth, as Nazism and fascism are false credos, against which only a "Christian ethic" could stand, and he conjectured that that failure could be seen in the nineteenth-century despair of J. A. Froude before the rise of the machine. Betjeman recognized the incredulity his radio audience must feel toward any organized religion, and yet he wondered if "when we are bewildered by the present ... we may at any rate be conditioned to a state of willingness to believe.... that we are ready to turn again to that faith that made the Europe for which men are fighting now" (151).

Not surprisingly, then, a number of reviewers saw a continuity between Ghastly and Betjemans next full collection of architectural material, First and Last Loves (1952), which gathered together essays from 1937 to 1951(Hillier New Fame 481). Along with some of his "Country and Coast" radio addresses, his pieces on the Isle of Man and "Aberdeen Granite," Antiquarian Prejudice, "1837-1937" and Nonconformist Architecture, he included addresses on churches, railway stations, and a 1951 revaluation of Victorian architecture to compare to his earlier views. Even though Betjeman changed his evaluation of the specifics--he had come to value the Victorian Gothic, especially the houses, if not the restorationist impulse--his basic historical narrative remained. His provocative opening essay "Love is Dead," written that same year, decried the rootlessness and restlessness in modern life, the death of local communities, and the loss of unified faith (First 3-5). The impulse for material gain and even variety in cultural entertainment, Betjeman diagnosed as a replacement religion, one built on a "fool's paradise" of exotic places not nourished by English longevity. (20) "History," he complains, "must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side" (5)--an objectivist position he thoroughly discounted as even possible. His 1950 essay "The Architecture of Entertainment" also argued a similar claim: that modern movie houses are substitute churches of a new religion. Their very short-term impermanence had a double-edge. On one hand, they represented the responses of common people (much as the fairs and theatres did) and thus belonged in church; on the other hand, they also represented in Betjemans estimation a break from the parish center.

Over against Pevsners narrative of progress and modern improvement, then, Betjeman offered a theistic narrative of both historical continuity and disruption, at once celebratory and tragic. Yet, as Colin Rowe has pointed out, architecture as "a theatre of memory" and as "a theatre of prophecy" are conceivable only together (Collage City 49). Pevsners reliance upon the cultural Zeitgeist was not entirely at odds with the position of Betjeman, or with that of Piper. Hegelian models like Pevsner's tend to posit a deep spiritual, even eschatological direction underneath the flux of history. (21) In turn, Betjeman and Piper's impulse to look to local place and particularity can be accused of its own kind of historicist relativism, one that limits truth to the conditions, if not always a microhistory, at least of a very English one. Piper, in particular, has been accused of this limitation to the local. For Piper, art and religion needed a visual language, historically and culturally embodied. Thus, lasting art can be created "by the only artists who are humble enough to submit to an ideology dictated by, and characteristic of the times; artists who thereby allow themselves a chance of finding themselves as individuals" (Spalding, Lives in Art 82-83). His admiration of Chartres is for "the overall effect of iridescence, flame, and fantasy ... not the message" (Stained Glass 24). Thus, some read Piper's response as finally aesthetic and cultural rather than spiritual or doctrinal (Yorke 100-01; Spalding 345). (22) Yet Piper could be very concerned about the authentic relationship between art and faith. He organized the 1944 traveling exhibit The Artist and the Church upon realizing that his secular counterparts were taking on church commissions with only aesthetic concerns and no real sympathy for Christian theology. He brought together twenty screens of a broad range of work from painting and stained glass to textiles, lettering, mosaics, and new church architecture. Piper was particularly concerned with promoting in the Church arts that were grounded in its faith and craft as a living tradition rather than servile, uncreative reproduction of past models (Symondson 216-217), and he could warn of churches being merely "imitation art galleries" if care were not taken in how art was included (Stained Glass 37). (23) Piper was careful to insist that craft also had to be creative, and he or the exhibit was in no way to be seen as a simple survey. The exhibit was a credo for the right kind of tradition, a merging of the unfamiliar past with the present, "which is the only profitable way in which contemporary work by the artists for the Church can be looked at" (Symondson 217). Still, all this suggests that Piper was focused on a tradition being authentic rather than transcultural.

Betjeman's July 1, 1949, "Coast and Country" talk on St. Endellion's Church, on the other hand, is another good example of a move through the local to the eternal. The outside is "the usual Cornish church" constructed with grey slate and carved with attractive lettering. The building's inside is ordinary--its blue-grey plastered walls, oak furnishings, and lack of stained glass windows. Still, Betjeman senses holiness in the place, something beyond "the mystery of satisfying proportion." There is a presence of prayer even when no one is present and when the reserve sacrament is not kept there (First 210-211). Betjeman compares the church to the sea along the cliff wall, which he places in a prehistoric perspective, and yet he holds that human beings are eternal and in that church "the eternal comes week by week" (212-213). (24) Betjemans judgments, while not absolutely deontological, are nonetheless making broad gestures to the theological, even the sacramental. They are more sapiential, based in involvement with the specifics, and yet they assume that what is to be found is not merely culturally conditioned but transcends culture. It is this practice which shows why Betjeman was drawn to Pipers lessons in attentiveness.

The Necessity of Attentiveness

Attentiveness to diversity and the picturesque for Piper was a moral strategy of visual and historical preservation. In his essay "Pleasing Decay," he noted that there is an English tradition of pleasing decay, especially love of old buildings. Thus, town planners ought to take decay seriously, yet there is no one standard as to what pleasing decay entails. Restoration of old buildings may be considered in poor taste a generation later. The key, he insists, is to "rely on the eyes. The only hope is to open the eyes, and treat every building--every surface, even--on its individual merits" (Buildings 92). And to rely on the eyes, he felt, was an education in the appreciation of ruins. He felt, too, that the picturesque was guaranteed to be lost when the materials were designed to refuse weathering (80) or when restoration of stained glass removed the patina caused by centuries of pitting and dirt. The current "dirty" glass holds more romance and character than the glass did in its original state. He quotes Ruskin with approval: "[T]he epitome of all that makes the continent of Europe interesting ... the agedness in the midst of active life which binds the old and the new into harmony" (Stained Glass 21-22). (25) Decay, rather than being blight, could point to a larger historical continuity. Piper could, thus, praise Morris's work in stained glass as reopening new directions for contemporary craftsmen: "He is a precedent, to act on and to quote" (34).

Betjeman had a similar notion of the eyes' truth. He held that the purpose of the Shell and Murray travel guides had been to teach people to see differently: "To make the public see with a new eye" (Letters 1.394). For Betjeman, attentiveness was the first step back to a cultural center of stability. His 1939 essay "The Seeing Eye or How to like Everything" also shows the impact that Piper had on his thinking. He constructed the essay around four "types," or better said, three types and one actual ideal, that of Piper himself. One type is a clergyman who pines for the medieval past; another is a pragmatic architect who serves up without imagination what is required; and the third is a young modernist who advocates an ideal of technical sparseness. Piper, on the other hand, sees things as an artist and embodies an interest in the local uniqueness of places, their social history, and their visual interest. Betjeman says of him that "We will have to go further than good taste ... if we are to retain our senses. By following Mr. Piper, and by taking scenery as it is and not what we have been told it ought to be, we will be getting all the good we can out of the war" (202). Rather than crudely applied rules, Piper's approach is to see and see well, which requires a considered, internalized judgment. The distance between sight and knowledge is bridged by sustained involvement.

For Betjeman, "plain does not equal ugly" (Letters 1.176). Indeed, "nothing is ugly" and what matters is people and attentiveness (Trains 132). (26) Of course, this is not precisely true, Betjeman was quite willing to declare many things, even late in life, as truly ugly, especially the high rise flats typical of urban planning. What Betjeman had in mind in such denials of ugliness is, I suspect, another lesson he learned from Piper; namely, that standards of "good taste" were bound to be inevitably short-lived. Piper held that history cannot be simply constructed overnight and that the archaeological pettiness of such a limited "sense of history is an apology for the absence of a sense of beauty" (Yorke 73; Spalding 86-92). There is need for the informal and "the jumbled.... Less good taste" and "more individuals doing more as they like" (Buildings 126). In his "Fully Licensed," Piper held up the florid Gin Palace: good taste goes quickly out of date, while individual eccentric choices tend to survive. Piper makes the case for preserving the artificial "tasteless" formality of Victorian gin palaces, station hotels, and inn yards, in that all have a slightly tipsy quality marked by nostalgia (56), and the regulars, at present, may be the best judges of its long-term meaning.

The attentiveness for which he and Betjeman called was, in this sense, a moral qualification for the picturesque. The picturesque for many is easily reduced to cheap sentiment and satiated disgust. John Macarthur has suggested that Price's early theorization of the picturesque allowed for ugliness because disgust was reserved for scenes that offered either too little, a formless excess, or too much, an excess of ornament, the latter by myopic concentration crowding out other important elements (92-93). The ugly object may have its place in the aesthetic (and social) whole, and this can be argued to be true not only of eighteenth-century perceptions, but also of the twentieth-century ones of neo-Romantics. Betjeman and Pipers attention to the details of what advocates of internationalism would have judged as dishonest ornament was to show that the Victorian gin palace or the out-of-the-way parish church is not excessive or formless but rather, in its details, has essential beauties worth preserving. Betjeman in his 1938 "How to Look at a Church" argued that an older house that has passed through multigenerational use is marked by kindness and love in its very bric-a-brac: "It may be a bit inconvenient and muddled, but it is human" (Coming Home 76). In similar fashion, "the adornment of an old church" despite often being subject to Victorian restoration, is lived in still and therefore loved. Its various fixtures--glasswork, wood pews, corbels, archways, walls, brass crosses and altar furnishings--form lessons in a thick history of life and worship.

Buildings and Altars

The ugliness or beauty of churches may be the final test of Betjeman's sensibility, and perhaps Piper's; it certainly highlights the continued cultural resistance both men practiced. Betjeman's 1958 Collins Guide to English Churches presents a socio-cultural history that is implicitly Anglo-Catholic in its continuity of English worship across the centuries. He admitted as much to William Collins (Letters 2.36). He chooses to present the Church, social and embodied, as possessing continuity despite the restoration of many churches to their supposed medieval selves. Betjeman felt such attempts only removed traceable heritage. The best church building was not a purist past somehow recoverable, but the past accumulated in the present (26-50). (27) Most parish churches, Betjeman observed, were more "buildings," "gradual growths" than the vision of a single architect (17-18). He understood that the spiritual purpose of a church was not the same as that of aesthetic considerations, yet many a parishioner had left disgruntled over the "restored" loss of what they remembered (23). In a similar fashion Betjeman had argued that the buildings of Nonconformist chapels and the personal work of the church at Swindon were examples of a work of community (First 33-34, 38, 187-188). One must not disconnect architectural history from the "life of the people" (Letters 1.503), for churches are "living things" (Trains 29ff.).

In First and Last Loves Betjeman grouped three 1948 radio broadcasts together as "Three Churches." Each had a particular lesson: Blisland, Cornwall offered the picturesque; Mildenhall, Wilts, the heart of Austens England; and St. Mark's Swindon, a church of real faith and community. In some ways it was Swindon that had taught Betjeman the hardest lesson. His 1937 criticism of the city as "full of good hearts and ugly houses" with squalor and overcrowding like "a helpless octopus" had earned him letters of outrage (Trains 67-71; Hillier, New Fame 153). He had now come to see the Swindon church as "the most loved church in England." "Swindon, so ugly to look at to the eyes of the architectural student, glows golden as the New Jerusalem to eyes that look beyond brick and stone" (First 186). Swindon had taught him that it was wrong to judge "people by the houses they live in, nor churches only by their architecture" (188). Yet the lesson raises a particular difficulty in the moral architecture of Betjeman and Piper. If the neo-Romantic strategy is to draw the viewer closer to a beloved place and, likewise, if pleasing decay can offer a continuity of history, what does one do if a church as a sacramental center of faith and grace is simply not an obvious depository of craft or even of the tarnished picturesque?

Betjeman had to at least confront the problem. At times, he wanted to preserve parish churches for their simple beauty; at other times, because they embodied a past Christian civilization of value; and at still others, because they could yet serve as missions to a people without confirmed belief (cf. Letters 1.508). He feared that without these physical spaces, the faith would fade away, and he asserted that the consecrated host or a praying priest could be enough, even if the church remained otherwise empty (First 67-68). Betjemans letter to church architect Ninian Comper, whom Piper had featured in The Artist and the Church exhibit, is a good example of where the sacramental position could lead. Betjeman tells Comper that his work answered a dilemma for Betjeman as to why he liked very diverse objects and buildings--he concludes that when something is well made with a sense of purpose and therefore for the glory of God, it deserves his love (Letters 1.242-243). Betjeman opined that Comper's work has a missionary element in that its beauty draws others to Christianity. (28) Yet this pairing of craft and purpose is not simple. While Comper's own theological aesthetic was shared by Betjeman, ultimately Comper's commitments showed the tension at the heart of Betjeman's love of picturesque churches. (29) Comper set out a sacerdotalist position that placed the altar as the central action of Christian worship--church architecture should strive for beauty but not at the expense of liturgical orthodoxy: "While we cling to every loveliest form that mans work has produced just as we cling to every loveliest flower of nature, we must again make the architecture of our churches in complete harmony with the liturgy" (Atmosphere 235). This position perhaps reminded Betjeman of the limitations of the picturesque, as had Swindon. Betjeman came to realize that at times the picturesque could not recommend a place, only worship could: "Only by worshipping in the church, at an early Communion service, do I forget the restoration and learn to love the building" (English Cities 12). The Low Church form of such a service, one suspects, forced him away from the aesthetics to the most essential, thereby accomplishing the move of charity he needed, a move perhaps akin to Pipers Nonconformist chapel collages. Gardners excellent essay, "Betjeman and Nonconformity" (published in this issue of Christianity and Literature) offers further rationale for why such a service would offer the poet a point of spiritual access, for Nonconformity had a strain of candid populism and popular spirituality to which Betjeman was drawn for its offer of mercy.

Piper's stress on both form and the particular within an English tradition and Betjemans further addition of eternity and time gave them a sense of the longevity of what was valuable. Betjeman shared with T. S. Eliot a sense that the churches are places "where prayer has been valid," where Eternity has touched down in time. While Piper was concerned that eternal form be uncovered within a particular place and people and tradition, Betjeman went further. He valued the temporal past as accumulated in the present and, while pessimistic about the English future, still hoped for a renewed Christendom in which Anglicanism would again be acknowledged as the true Catholicism in England. Attentiveness became for both men a means of cultural resistance. Examining the detail of architecture offered a means of recovery, especially in the buildings that were the Church's spiritual centers. Yet even in his practiced attention, Betjeman had to admit that, at times, love might outstrip the picturesque in the most surprising of places.

Dallas Baptist University

NOTES

(1) Spalding 2009; Hillier New Fame, chapter 6; and Jenkins and Spalding 2003.

(2) Betjeman, for a time, rejected John Sparrows understanding of him as simply a "poet of place." Betjeman insisted that his poetry by being written with reverence for people and their places also assumed a view of the world in which "man is born to fulfill the purposes of his Creator" which implied in turn a social set of practices (Hillier, New Fame 396-402), yet later in life he could agree that "my verse is always about places" (Betjemans England 152) and leave it at that.

(3) Betjeman continued to love and champion Arts & Crafts architects and designers like C. R. Ashbee and Voysey, who had drawn inspiration from William Morris, and for a season Betjeman was drawn to the work of Conrad Noel, the socialist priest who had pulled ideas from Morris, and to the Thaxed Movement in general. He saw Morris as the true descendent of Pugin rather than Ruskin in that Pugin and Morris both valued craft, social values, and had utopian dreams of a revitalized culture (Collins 64-65); on several occasions, Betjeman reflected on the nature of Pugin and Morris as opposed to Ruskin (Trains 220; Coming Home 275; see also Hiller, New Fame 295). Piper, in turn, held a high regard for Ruskins criticism (Buildings 99-100) and admired St. Marie's Grange, one of Pugin's early homes, for its eccentricity, though not its refusal to "look its age" (Buildings 8081), as well as learning from Morris the lesson of "pleasing decay" (90).

(4) Piper was certainly aware of his place in a renewed British Romantic art, connecting the best in his own work to that of earlier English architecture and painting (Spalding, Lives 189).

(5)According to Betjeman, England is too diverse to have standardized materials: "England's beauty is in her variety" (Coming Home 307-309). Cf. a similar discussion on the diversity of London neighborhoods: "Facts tell you nothing, only people do." (Betjemans England 168-69).

(6) Betjeman at points preferred the word "sentimental" to "nostalgic" (Trains 319), yet was ultimately of two minds as to the concept (Gardner 2010,134). Unfortunately, Betjeman's willingness to employ sentiment and nostalgia did at times reduce what he wishes to valorize, what David Gervais has called the "almost quaint" (198).

(7) Hussey in turn would go on to later claim that Piper could draw forth the artistic essentials of the country house (Spalding 217).

(8) Here I am disagreeing with Stuart Sillars' reading of Piper's use of Hussey's picturesque as lacking in emotional, moral responsiveness (17-20, 31-33).

(9) Colin Rowe's discussion of this phenomenon is particularly insightful (Mathematics 69-76).

(10) This general history is discussed in a number of sources, including Atterbury 1995, Clark 1928, Triggs 2009, and Watkin 1980.

(11) Interestingly, it was Scott's stress on space that seems to have offered Williams-Ellis a language of architectural etiquette. Spatial adjacency became a means of public civility and discourse, so that one could identify "selfish buildings" as those that crowd the skyline; and thus, the new American skyscrapers were but a "counsel of despair" (7-21).

(12) Ironically, Piper and Betjeman would in turn draw Clark away from his too easy dismissal of the Gothic (Gothic 2-3, 5; Summerson, Victorian 16). In 1949, Clark recognized the influence that Geoffrey Scott (142,171,182,222-23) had on his book, but he had come to reject it (vii). He had come to realize that architecture inescapably has a moral concern. Clark, however, did fear at times that Betjemans enthusiasm for the Victorian was without discrimination (Taylor-Martin 164).

(13) Mowls Stylistic Cold Wars (2000) is the most sustained discussion of this ideological and personal rivalry. Mowl is particularly good at tracing the personal rivalry between the two men, especially Betjemans sense of threat at Pevsners success with the Penguin Buildings of England and their jealousy over their mutual interest in C. F. A. Voysey. Hillier also discusses the rivalry in volume 3, chapter 2. More recently Causey 2004 and Rosso 2004 have sought to offer a more moderate picture of Pevsner than Mowl.

(14) Piper also saw, perhaps ironically, the surrealism of his early period as a kind of classicism he was moving beyond, though he never lost an interest in its uses. Leena K. Schroder explores Betjeman and Piper's use of the surreal in their Shell Guides (16-20).

(15) The importance of the twelve Brighton aquatints (1938-39) to the shift in Pipers views should not be underestimated, in that they represent a turn to nostalgia, affection, and refiguration of the past for the present (Jenkins and Spalding 162-67). "Cheltenham Fantasia" is a good example of his bringing together various architectural sites and motifs into an image of his memory. There is something to be said, as well, for Griggs' early influence on the young Piper who collected Griggs' guides (Moore 179ff).

(16) Betjeman recognized this about Piper, stressing in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Painters volume on Piper that the artist's purpose is never to paint scenes as they are but as "what the place painted is like to a poet" (15). In this, then, Betjeman held his own Anglican goal to be Piper's as well: "It is his mission to weld closer together his deep, learned and poetic love for England with his clearly-formed principles of what a picture should be" (16).

(17) Betjeman held as a principle the need for accounting for human scale (Betjemans England, 40,133), and he shared this with Trystan Edwards's stress that English architecture should reflect a human size in its treatment of the skyline (Letters 2.168; Coming Home 282ff. Trains 263, cf. Harvey 74). There is something, too, in how Betjeman senses grace present in the land in these concerns (cf. Gardner 2010, chapter 1).

(18) One of Betjeman's last reflections on this strategy is his 1974 poem "Meditation on a Constable Picture." He holds up the pictorial values of Constable's painting not only to recall a large number of London locales, but to stress their variety: "No market nor High Street nor square was the same/ In that clusters of villages, London by name/... Let us keep what is left of the London we knew" (Collected Poems 314).

(19) For discussions of these see Birzer 2007, Kojecky 1971, and Taylor and Reeves 1999.

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(20) This later theme is still present late in his career: His 1969 program The Englishmans Home ends by mocking the multi-housing developments as a product of "new loneliness, new restlessness, new pressure, new tension ... people who have to find a God who fits in." In 1972, too, he can still mock the new social activism as a new liturgy "[t]o usher Sunday out" (Betjemans England, 53, 173).

(21) In all fairness to Pevsner, as co-chair of the Victorian Society from 1958 to 1976, worked to preserve threatened old buildings (Games 2002, xxx). It was new buildings in older historical patterns that Pevsner rejected throughout his career. He does consider the question as to whether the position, even the Betjeman-inspired typeface, of the Architectural Review might be responsible for the move away from the pure geometry of modernism in the '60s ("The Return of Historicism" 255-56). This position is not as far-fetched as it first seems, for Betjeman's, like Nicolete Gray's, interest in nineteenth-century typefaces suggested stylistic possibilities other than international modernism (Harris 29-30).

(22) Perhaps not surprisingly, Betjeman's Ghastly was read in a similar manner by some, charging that any vision of faith would do for Betjeman as long as England returned to one of them (Hillier, Young 362-64).

(23) Piper late in life would experience a growing loss of faith, and he admitted that his faith was more a "leaning" than a "conviction" (Spalding 496-97).

(24) In similar fashion, he could speak of "countless congregations as the generations pass/ ... praise Eternity contained in Time and coloured glass" (Letters 1.422). His letters to Siegfried Sassoon in volume 2 express similar concerns (2.24, 75, 90,211,246, 533). Gardner has argued that the central importance of the Incarnation to Anglicanism is a predominant theme in Betjeman's faith (2010, 103-15).

(25) Betjeman often used similar language (First 71; Coming Home 356).

(26) This sensibility was still present in his 1964 film Something about Diss. "Now remember this: nowhere in England is dull ..." (Betjemans England 190), and the town enjoys "the happy inconsequence of everything" (194). The total social and moral impact engenders a mysterum tremendum rather than simple disgust.

(27) Betjeman was even willing to use this principle when exploring additions to public buildings, which is the gradual growth of centuries, that is to say, by keeping the best bits of the old and getting rid of the "second-rate" (Letters 2.266).

(28) Of course, this is not to deny the complexity of Betjeman's treatment of Comper, whom Symondson points out, was something of a private joke for Betjeman whom he used against Pevsner and others (Symondson 219-23).

(29) The clearest statement of Comper's mature position are his 1947 pamphlet On the Atmosphere of a Church and his 1950 Of the Christian Altar and the Buildings which Contain It, both of which Betjeman supported.