Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

more beautiful’ than the earlier attempts in the works of Browne Willis and Francis
Grose. 118 Both qualities, beauty and accuracy, were of the essence, ‘so far have the artists
been from sacrificing exactitude to picturesqueness’. 119 Southey also endorsed the
emotional, inspirational power of the Gothic in which ‘exactitude’ might be a flexible
concept. ‘Chatterton would have been a poet, wherever he might have been born and
bred, but it was Redcliff Church that made him call up the ghost of Rowley.’ 120 The
essay also illustrates the movement now underway towards the idea of the Gothic as a
national style, not merely in a loose associational way but as public, official policy. ‘It
should seem that these national monuments, for such pre-eminently they are, ought, as
such, to be under national superintendence’ Southey concluded. 121 Less than forty years
after Richard Gough’s suggestion that the clergy should not be allowed to alter medieval
buildings with impunity had been greeted as impertinence from a typically crack-brained
antiquary, the poet laureate was advocating state control as a civic responsibility.
Westminster Abbey, he wrote, in his final paragraph, had once been described as ‘part of
the constitution. We cannot conclude better than by leaving the reader to reflect upon the
serious truth which is conveyed in that lively expression’. 122
Southey extended this conception of the value of the Gothic quite naturally from
the conservation of historic buildings to the construction of new ones. Poets had been
more successful so far, he noted, in their emulation of medieval models. If architects had
failed to achieve as much that must, he thought, be due to lack of opportunity. ‘Otherwise
the same feeling which induces and enables antiquaries to describe and artists to delineate
the great monuments of elder times would surely take this direction.’ 123 Britton agreed.
While he was unable, or unwilling, to venture into architecture as a practitioner he was
concerned that his works should be read by architects and that the study of medieval
architecture should lead to its revival. In 1819 he was the moving force behind the
foundation of the Society of Architects and Antiquaries of London. As Honorary
118 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.315.
119 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.315.
120 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.308.
121 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.348.
122 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.349.
123 Southey, ‘Britton’s Cathedral Antiquities’, p.308.
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