May heads of nations fear Thy name
And spread Thy honor through their lands,
Our nation’s laws, our arts proclaim
The beauty of Thy just commands.
Let kings the crown and sceptre hold
As pledge of Thy supremacy;
And Thou all lands, all tribes enfold
In one fair realm of charity.
—Vespers Hymn, Feast of Christ the King
Being back in Southern California is always a bit of a culture shock, and never more than in the Summer. Pasadena could not be further from Europe in so many ways. But of course, it does have a charm of its own, and a plethora of local institutions that give it a unique character. The Rose Parade, the Valley Hunt Club, the Langham Huntington Hotel, the Shakespeare Club, the Huntington Library, and ever so much more. But one of the most iconic elements of Pasadena are certainly the so-called California Bungalows; strangely enough, they also provide a connexion to St. John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement – of which more presently. These unique homes are the bulk of the structures in the neighbourhood called “Bungalow Heaven.” There are also a number of much larger “Ultimate Bungalows,” of which the much-filmed-at place called the Gamble House is a prime example. According to Wikipedia, what all of these have in common can be summed up thusly:
Bungalows are 1- or 1+1⁄2-story houses, with sloping roofs and eaves with unenclosed rafters, and typically feature a dormer window (or an attic vent designed to look like one) over the main portion of the house. Ideally, bungalows are horizontal in massing, and are integrated with the earth by use of local materials and transitional plantings. This helps create the signature look typically associated with the California bungalow.
To be fair, these houses are to found in many areas far from Pasadena. According to the same infallible source,
Examples of neighborhoods in Southern California with a high concentration of California bungalows include: Belmont Heights in Long Beach, the Wood Streets in Riverside, Bungalow Heaven, Highland Park in Los Angeles, and North Park (site of the “Dryden District”) in San Diego…Examples of neighborhoods in other U.S. states include: the Avenues District in Salt Lake City; Westwood Park, San Francisco; Midtown Columbus, Georgia; Virginia Highland and Candler Park, Atlanta; Houston Heights in Houston; Park Hill and Washington Park in Denver; Takoma Park, Maryland, and Takoma, Washington, D.C.; Cherrydale and other neighborhoods in Arlington County, Virginia; Del Ray in Alexandria, Virginia; Historic Kenwood in St. Petersburg, Florida; The Garden District in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and the West University Neighborhood in Tucson, Arizona.
Moreover, the style or variations of it can be found as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. What can account for this enormous pre-World War II popularity?
There are several reasons. They are certainly attractive and comfortable. They were also intended to be quite affordable when they were built. Many have built in amenities, such as closets and shelving, as well a great many attractive built-in details. In a word, in a very particular way, they were designed with the comfort and well-being of the future inhabitants in mind. Moreover, as they came about at a time when light rail was making suburban living feasible for many Middle-Class people there was an enormous demand for their quiet elegance in these leafy places.
But the intended link between homes and inhabitants was not a mere accident of design. The work of such designers as Greene and Greene, Bernard Maybeck, and Julia Morgan on the “Ultimate Bungalows” as well as that of scores of lesser designers of the humbler ones was actually powered by a definite ideology of sorts, which is commemorated by the alternate title of the strictures – “American Craftsmen Bungalows.”
Once again looking to our friends at Wikipedia, we see their definition:
American Craftsman is an American domestic architectural style, inspired by the Arts and Crafts movement, which included interior design, landscape design, applied arts, and decorative arts, beginning in the last years of the 19th century. Its immediate ancestors in American architecture are the Shingle style, which began the move away from Victorian ornamentation toward simpler forms, and the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright.
All of this was aroused by the rise of the factory, and the mass production in the 19th century of cheap goods. In the United States, chief proponents of the style and philosophy were Gustav Stickley, William Lightfoot Price, and Elbert Hubbard, although there were many others. Pasadena at the turn of the last century had a number of such concerns, whose members, clustered in the Arroyo Seco. There were the Judson Stained Glassed Studios (still in operation under the same family); Browne Publishers (the business is defunct, but the picturesque Abbey San Encino that housed it remains in the hands of the family); the Batchelder tile works; and a few others. These were typical of such folk around the country, who in similar spots formed various craft cooperatives, and were much inspired in terms of organisation, fitting form to function, and the relationship between craftsman and client by the example of the Arts and Crafts and Gothic Revival Movements in England. The latter also had a great many practitioners in the United States, most notably Ralph Adams Cram. Indeed, the two also influenced Art Nouveau; the influence of the three styles was felt throughout the West.
But in England the fathers of both movements were John Ruskin, William Morris, and Augustus Pugin. The last-named was Catholic, the first two Anglican, but all saw in the Medieval synthesis a guiding example in the arts. In a way not possible in the United States, the Catholic past was manifest in the very English countryside and townscapes. From long meditations on these, these three thinkers and their disciples derived a great deal of political as well as religious inspiration. Quite apart from what they built and fashioned, they had a tremendous intellectual effect. Chesterton and Belloc’s Distributism owed them a lot, as did Penty’s Guild Socialism. So too with the Neo-Jacobite Movement, and the “Celtic Twilight” Movement, which between them gave birth to both modern Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Manx Nationalism on one hand, the “Merrie England” Aesthetic, as well as the folk-song revival on the other.
But Morris and Ruskin themselves were influenced by the so-called Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner. Highly devoted to Medieval style, most of the artists were themselves heavily affected by the Oxford Movement and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism.
By the time of its foundation in 1848, however, three years had passed since St. John Henry Newman’s conversion had split the Oxford Movement. Nevertheless, its influence in reviving a Catholic and Sacramental life within the Church of England had had an influence on arts and architecture almost immediately after its commencement with John Keble’s 1833 sermon at Oxford on “The National Apostasy.” Not only were Catholic devotional practices revived, but so too were Eucharistic vestments, church furnishings, and the shape of churches themselves, dovetailing with the nascent Gothic Revival, which as we saw would have its own direct influence on the Arts and Crafts Movement.
But the Oxford Movement itself, which would on the one hand be the origin of Anglo-Catholicism, start one wing of the 19th century revival of the Catholic Church in England (of which the Oratories of Brompton and Birmingham and their daughter houses across the Anglosphere are one major and enduring fruit), and, as we saw, influence the beginning of the Arts and Crafts Movement and sundry other of its derivatives, did not appear out of nothing. It found its origin in the enthusiasm for all things Medieval generated in 1825 with the publication of Kenelm Digby’s The Broadstone of Honour; or Rules for the Gentlemen of England – which work and its author started a wave of direct conversions to Catholicism at Cambridge University. This, in turn, was inspired by the writings of Sir Walter Scott, who together with Chateaubriand in France and Novalis in Germany, was one of the great founders of Romanticism – whose deep connections to the post-French Revolutionary revival of Catholicism are integral, and which would reach our shores with Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and James Fenimore Cooper – and give rise to all the groups and movements we have looked at in this article.
At this point, the question might well be asked why all of this history matters. The answer is that something we take for granted as a relatively common if very pleasant style of architecture comes to us with an intricate history bound up with the Faith, and with the common cultural inheritance of Old Europe and her daughter countries. One could look at a great many other areas, from cuisine to painting to literature, and trace similar trails. But more importantly, we are also given a lens – a hermeneutic if you will – to look at current culture and society, and so politics.
We tend to wonder these days why our political leadership across the planet is so terrible – stupid at best, malicious at worst. One explanation is that culture produces leadership and leadership produces culture in its own image. Examining the one gives clues to the nature of the other. The California Bungalow is a late link in a chain that takes us back ultimately to Old Christendom; it had contemporary links with such styles as California Mission Revival, Storybook, and, as mentioned, Art Nouveau. The above-noted Folk Song Revival that came out of the Arts-and-Crafts had a relatively late blossoming on our side of the water in what was called until recently the Christmas Revels; these in turn played a part in the 1960s origin of the now nation-wide Renaissance Faires. These are of course escapist and niche phenomena, also connected with the 1960s Counter-Culture. But what were they trying to escape?
The late 19th, early 20th century Art Nouveau gave birth in the 1920s to Art Deco, as the curving lines of the former made way for the streamlined look of the latter. The dominant style of the 1930s, it reached perhaps a culminating moment in the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Then came World War II, and in the wake of that conflict’s brutality, Brutalism. The ugliness in architecture was mirrored in all the other arts, as slowly but surely the Christian inheritance of Western culture was progressively diminished. Similarly, as all that was True, Good, and Beautiful waned, so did our leadership in Church and State. Public buildings, whether governmental, ecclesiastical, academic, or commercial, came to reflect the False, the Evil, and the Ugly. As King Charles III said back in 2009, when Prince of Wales:
It was when I was a teenager in the 1960s that I became profoundly aware of the brutal destruction that was being wrought on so many of our towns and cities, let alone on our countryside, and that much of the urban realm was becoming de-personalized and defaced. The loss was immense, incalculable – an insane ‘Reformation’ that, I believe, went too far, particularly when so much could have been restored, converted or re-used, with a bit of extra thought, rather than knocked down.
While it would be hard to disagree with His Majesty on the one hand – and one cannot help but think it is at least as bad to be trapped at the apex of a political system one has no control over as it is to be one of its subjects – on the other, we have to be aware of the roots of the situation. Despite the valiant efforts of the sorts of people we have been looking at, and – as with both His Majesty the King, Ruskin, Morris, and etc. – despite the brilliant writing on their parts, we are where we are. Why?
My suspicion is that those who are interested in such things from an aesthetic point of view for the most part – at least in the Anglosphere – are not Catholic. They do not know the real reasons for their instinctive preference for the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. But on the other hand, many who do hold the True Faith are not at all sensible of the need to apply it in a concrete way in everyday life. Now, by this last, I do not mean to imply that there is only one Catholic art or architecture – there are many ways in which the Truth can be made concrete, as innumerable beautiful styles show. But we must be sensible that the Catholic Faith is not merely a set of abstract intellectual principles – although, to be sure, anything not rooted in the Four Creeds falls short of reality. It is something real; an incorporation of our fallen humanity into Christ, a “Divinisation” of ourselves, as it were. Although this process can only be entirely completed for the Saved at the Last Judgement, we can do our part in the here and now.
The Kingship of Christ is not something reserved for the devotional and political spheres. It is something which should be expressed in everything we do – in the arts and crafts, architecture, literature, the theatre, music, cuisine, agriculture, manufacturing, and all else. None of these can be ignored. Anything the Faith does not inform shall be informed by another spirit entirely – and we have entirely enough of that spirit in public life already.
