themselves that the church itself sinks into insignificance beside them:
such, for example, as Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant statues in
the church at Innsbruck. Had there been anything of that kind here, few
people would have cared what happened to the church itself. But the
additions here have only been the ordinary things in marble, brass,
mosaic, painting, coloured glass; and they have made this rugged
moorland church look quite suburban.
There are two great monuments in Bovey church, one to Nicholas Eveleigh,
who died in 1620, and the other to Elizæus Hele, who died in 1635.
Elizæus was better known as Pious-Uses Hele, having given his estates
away for pious uses--amongst other things, Blue Maids’ Hospital at
Exeter had £50 a-year from Bovey mill. He married Eveleigh’s widow; and
she erected these monuments to her two husbands, though both of them
were buried elsewhere. There is a recumbent figure of each husband, and
in Hele’s case there are also kneeling figures of the wife and a former
wife and a young son who had died. Over the recumbent figure there is a
rounded arch with columns, architrave, etc., as if it were a gateway;
and in the earlier monument the style is pure Italian of a hundred years
before, whereas the later monument is what is called Jacobean, with the
Italian style debased by Flemish and German methods. The change is
curious: after the Italian of 1620, one would expect the Palladian of
Inigo Jones in 1635 rather than this belated Jacobean.
They stand on the north and south sides of the chancel, almost touching
the east end; and on the east wall between them there was mahogany
panelling with columns and festoons carved in the style of Grinling
Gibbons. The panelling just suited the monuments and enhanced their
merits; but there came a time when it was the ambition of the clergy to
make their chancels look like show-rooms in church-furnishers’ shops;
and then the panelling was taken down and thrown into a barn. The
present Vicar has brought it back, and put it at the west end of the
church; and I hope that it will some day go back to the east end, and
oust the rubbish that is there.
He has also brought back the royal-arms that were thrown out at the same
time, and has put them in the arch below the tower. These royal-arms are
a grand piece of wood-carving, set up at the Restoration together with
the arms of archbishop Laud and bishop Hall of Exeter, with suitable
inscriptions about “that wicked and bloody Parliment.” They stood on the
screen, with the royal shield just where the rood had been, and the Lion
and the Unicorn in the places of the Blessed Virgin and Saint John.
The rood-loft has been reconstructed (but without a rood) and I do not
think it has improved the church. However small a church may be, the
rood-loft must be large enough for people to pass along it to the rood,
and may thus be very much too large to suit the church. And this new
rood-loft looks too large, though Bovey church is not so very small.
Most churches, I suspect, looked all the better for the compromise of 10
October 1561, which took away their rood-lofts and left them their
screens.
By this compromise the rood-loft is to be “so altered that the upper
part of the same, with the soller, be quite taken down unto the upper
parts of the vaults and beam running in length over the said vaults ...
putting some convenient crest upon the said beam.” If the rood-loft has
already been removed and “there remain a comely partition betwixt the
chancel and the church,” no alteration is to be attempted; but “where no
partition is standing,” a partition must be built.
In this district the screens usually are woodwork, elaborately carved:
very few are stone. The beam is eight or ten feet from the ground, and
is supported by uprights three or four feet apart; and between the
uprights there is solid panelling to a height of about three feet, and
then open tracery for the rest of the height, making a sort of Gothic
window with its arched head touching the beam and springing from the
uprights two or three feet below. At the springing of these arched
window-heads there were segments of arches, springing out on each side
of the screen, and combining with the window-heads to form a kind of
vaulting underneath the soller, or rood-loft floor. The rood-loft was
approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall or in a little
turret outside, with entrance and exit both inside the church; and where
the rood-loft has been taken down, the exit leads out on to the little
pinnacles of the ‘crest’ of the beam; and then the effect is comic, as
no one but a rope-dancer could ever walk along them. It is so in
Lustleigh church and in many others. On the Lustleigh screen there are
carvings of pomegranates--the badge of Aragon--and possibly the screen
dates from the time of Catherine of Aragon or her daughter. But the
pomegranates have their sides cut open to show the grains inside, and
thus look very like bunches of grapes with leaves enclosing them. In
early Christian art palm-trees grew into candlesticks with candles in
them, the leaves becoming the flame; and I rather suspect a similar
transformation here.
Many rood-lofts were taken down by Henry VIII and Edward VI, but several
were put up again by Mary, and some were never taken down at all.
Opinion was divided; and this compromise of Elizabeth’s (which covered
many other points) was “for the avoiding of much strife and contention
that have heretofore arisen among the Queen’s subjects in divers parts
of the realm.” In this part of England the strife and contention had
taken the form of open rebellion in 1549; and the rebels came to Bovey.
In answer to some interrogatories, 4 January 1602, Richard Clannaborough
of Lustleigh, yeoman, “of the age of fowerscore and ten yeares or there
aboutes,” said he had known Bovey mill “ever synce the Commotion in the
tyme of the raigne of the late Kinge Edward the Sixth.”
This rebellion, usually called the Commotion, began on Whitmonday, 10
June, the new prayer-book having come into use on Whit-sunday; and it
went on until 6 August, when the King’s men defeated the rebels on Clyst
Heath and raised the siege of Exeter. The siege had lasted for five
weeks, and seemed likely to end in a capitulation, as supplies were
running short and many of the citizens were in favour of the rebels.
These rebels carried the Host with them on a wagon--as at the Battle of
the Standard in 1138--and these were some of their demands. ‘Wee wil
have al the general councels and holy decrees of our forefathers
observed kept and performed; and whosoever shal again-say them, we hold
them as hereticks.’ ‘We wil have the Bible and al books of Scripture in
English to be called in again.’ ‘We wil not receive the new service,
because it is but like a Christmas game; but we wil have our old service
of Mattins, Mass, Evensong and Procession in Latine, as it was before.
And so we the Cornish men, whereof certain of us understand no English,
utterly refuse this new English.’
Those rebels (or their leaders) showed great sense in their demands for
Latin prayers and books. They wanted something sonorous to which they
could give a general assent, and saw that if it were in English they
would soon be squabbling over details. And people have been squabbling
over details ever since.
Mesopotamia is notoriously a blessed word, but in some cases a
mistranslation. Parapotamia is less sonorous, but sometimes more
exact--the country on the west side of the Euphrates, not the east side.
But people do not care much where such places were, provided that the
names sound well. One day some foreigners were here; and somebody heard
me talking to them, and then went telling everybody else, “Strangers
come here from all parts to visit’n, and to each one of’n he speaketh in
their own tongues, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and all the rest
of’n.”
In some places in the south of Italy they still read the Gospels in
Greek on certain festivals; and I once heard this reading, but cannot
now remember where. I do not think the congregation understood a word of
it, but they mostly put on the expression of connoisseurs when sampling
a rare wine. In ancient times there was a ritual of that sort at
Pæstum--Athenæos quotes an account of it (XIV. 31) from one of the lost
works of Aristoxenos of Tarentum about 300 B.C. The descendants of the
old Greek settlers had become ‘barbarians,’ that is to say, they had
adopted the manners and customs and the language of their neighbours
there; but once a year they had a day of lamentation on which they spoke
Greek words in memory of the past. I have seen something like that in
Jerusalem, at the Place of Wailing at the foot of the great wall. Jews
go there to wail and pray; and I was told that many of them did not know
the meaning of the Hebrew words they used.
Whether it is understandable or not, the English of the Bible is very
fine indeed; but not, I think, so perfect as people generally say. It is
difficult to judge, as it has now become a standard, like the English of
Shakespeare’s plays. Ben Jonson thought that some of Shakespeare’s lines
might be improved; and he was a good judge. People now think the weakest
lines superb; and they admire the Bible also without discrimination.
There is no virtue in using a language that is ‘understanded of the
people,’ if it is used for saying things that will be misinterpreted. In
modern English ‘virgin’ means ‘virgo intacta,’ but that is not the
meaning of ‘almah’ in the Hebrew of Isaiah, VII. 14. Every schoolboy
knows (to his cost) that ‘deum’ is accusative, not vocative; and _Te
Deum_ is mistranslated--the older part may be heretical or even pagan.
There are hundreds and thousands of these mistranslations and
misinterpretations and statements that are unintelligible without long
explanation. Readers very often fail to see the meaning of it all, and
sometimes will not face the meaning when it is quite clear.
No doubt, Scripture is taught in every school; but there are many ways
of teaching it. Lustleigh has a County Council school, and the Scripture
teaching is regulated by a County Council syllabus. The syllabus says
what things the children are to read, and what they are to learn by
heart; and when people grumble at the Education Rate, I remind them that
every well-taught child in Devon can say the names of the Ten Plagues of
Egypt as glibly as a parrot. And then, of course, they feel that they
are getting value for their money.
Old folk used to search the Scriptures very diligently here, and picked
up words and phrases that they used in most embarrassing ways. One old
lady told me in sorrow and in wrath, “The Parson, he come here, and I
spoke Scripture to’n. And ‘good mornin’,’ he saith, ‘good mornin’,’ and
up he were and away over they steps ’fore I could say another word.” I
found that she had used some words the Parson had to read in church but
did not wish to hear elsewhere.
I have two volumes here of Miracles and Lives of Saints, with coloured
plates; and two small children who came to stay with me, used to call
them the Funny Books, as the pictures in them were so funny. By the time
these children came again, they had just learned to read; but I forgot
this when I let them have the Funny Books again, and presently a little
voice read out, “Now a certain nun became with child, and....” I stopped
the reading, but could not stop the questions that they asked.
A small boy of my acquaintance had duly learned to say his prayers and
was having a course of Scripture stories, but went on strike when he was
told of the creation of Eve. He said that it was mean of God to put Adam
to sleep and then take a rib away; and to show God what he thought of
it, he would stop off saying his prayers. The strike lasted for six
weeks.
The creation of Eve is sculptured in relief on the Campanile at Florence
and on the Façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and in these reliefs (and also
in some others) the sculptors have kept closely to their text, ‘God
created Man in his own image.’ Adam and the Creator are exactly alike,
even in the growth of the beard and the arrangement of the hair--the
same model served for both. Anthropomorphism is an artifice that must be
used, and I think those sculptors used it more effectively than
Michaelangelo. In his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he makes Adam a
young man of twenty and the Creator an old man of seventy, not the least
like Adam, and neither human nor divine. There is a picture by Pesellino
in the National Gallery (No. 727) portraying the three Persons of the
Trinity. An old lady told me, forty years ago, that she took one of her
maids there soon after this picture had arrived: the maid stared at the
First Person for some considerable time, and then said, “Lor’, mum,
d’you think it’s like?”
In King’s College Chapel at Cambridge the central figure in the great
east window, usually mistaken for God Almighty, is really Pontius
Pilate; and I am always pleased to see him on his judgement-seat up
there--it is some compensation for the ignorant abuse that is poured out
on him from pulpits. In the case before the Court the Prisoner had
pleaded guilty--‘thou sayest’--to the charge of claiming to be a King:
the Prosecution would not allow the charge to be withdrawn; and the
Judge was bound to pass the sentence which the Law prescribed.
I fancy Pilate may have misinterpreted a phrase. Julius Cæsar had been
canonized as ‘divus,’ and Augustus therefore styled himself ‘divi
filius,’ and afterwards was also canonized as ‘divus.’ But while ‘divi
filius’ and ‘dei filius’ were quite distinct in Latin, they were both
translated into Greek as ‘theou uios.’ (There is no question of
misreadings here: the phrase is in inscriptions and on coins.) Saint
Paul says that the Gentiles thought his doctrines ‘foolishness,’ and
Pilate might think it ‘foolishness’ for anyone to claim to be a son of
God; but it would be a serious matter for anyone to claim to be a son of
the late Emperor, especially if he also claimed to be a King.
The ancient portraits of Christ are of two different types, the oldest
portraits making him a beardless youth, and more recent portraits making
him a bearded man. The very old portraits agree with the tradition
(Luke, II. 2) that the Nativity was at the time of the census by
Quirinius. That was at the end of 6 or beginning of 7 A.D., and the
Crucifixion may have been as early as the spring of 27 A.D., as Pilate
was in office then: in which case there obviously could not be any
genuine portraits of Christ above the age of twenty. The more recent
portraits agree with the traditions that make Christ over thirty at the
Crucifixion. But in these portraits it is another kind of face, not the
same face in maturer years; and the youthful face is usually much
pleasanter, betokening a Deity who would delight in turning water into
wine.
I should account for the two heads by saying that the bearded head was
originally meant for John the Baptist, and mistaken afterwards for
Christ. At any rate, John has a bearded head like this in those early
representations of the Baptism where Christ is portrayed as a beardless
youth. But the bearded head is universally accepted now, and it has been
idealized. The greatest of these imaginary portraits is Leonardo da
Vinci’s in his fresco of the Last Supper--at any rate it was so when I
first saw it (1869) and for some years after that, but when I saw it
last (1913) the whole fresco had been washed over with some
preservative, and it did not seem the same. Perhaps Leonardo had read
more into the Gospels than is really there: one might think that Christ
was saying sorrowfully, those were the best disciples he could get, and
what a gang they were--if one of them did not betray him, another one
would. There is the gesture of the hands, and the face is full of
disappointment and disdain.
There is a stained-glass window in the Guildhall at Plymouth depicting
the inauguration of the building by the Prince of Wales in 1874; and
this is the only window I have seen in which a chimney-pot hat is
represented in stained glass. The hat has come out well--the stained
glass gives it all the lustre of hot-ironing. Designers of commemorative
windows might brighten up their works by putting in a few such hats; and
artistically this chimney-pot is every bit as good as the rectangular
haloes of a thousand years before. Charlemagne had a rectangular halo in
a mosaic in the Lateran: Theodora and Pope Paschal still have
rectangular haloes in the mosaics in saint Praxed’s church at Rome; and
the Prince of Wales would have had a rectangular halo, had he been
living then.
Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content
with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why
this was so, or what a halo really was--whether it was a thing like a
rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing
which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters
have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own
conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that
saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his
halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one
of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their
haloes were drying in the sun.
The rectangular halo is very useful for determining dates: it shows that
the fresco or mosaic was executed in the lifetime of the personage who
has the halo. But mosaics often need repairing--the little glass cubes
get loose and come away--and after centuries of small repairs there may
not be much of the original left, even if it has not all been taken down
at various times in order to repair the wall behind it. When I was in
Rome in 1876 the mosaics in the apse of the Lateran were lying on the
floor. One of the Canons explained to me that they were just taking down
the apse and rebuilding it a little further back, as the choir did not
give them space enough for ceremonial. (I thought the Canons might have
been content with what had satisfied the greatest Popes; and I tried to
tell him so.) When the apse had been rebuilt, the mosaics were put back
in it: a creditable bit of Nineteenth Century work, but still described
as Thirteenth in the guides.
One day in 1874 I was on the tower of the Pleissenburg at Leipzig
looking at the battlefield--it is a wide view, extending to Luetzen and
the battlefield of 1632. There was an old man up there who had been in
the great battle (1813) and I asked him whereabouts the windmill was,
from which Napoleon watched it. He pointed out the windmill, and added
with a grin, “Windmill burned down: man build another: man say it
same.”--When the Campanile at Venice was being built up again, the
brickwork ‘sweated’ and gave the red a curious tinge of white; and in
the evenings in the glare of the Piazza I could have sworn it was the
ghost of the old Campanile that I had seen there forty years before.
That was in 1909; but when I saw it in 1913, I felt that the old
Campanile had come to life again.
If buildings are burnt out or tumble down, there is no remedy but
reconstruction. But people are too fond of reconstructing buildings that
are still intact, and making them ‘as good as new.’ If they want to know
what a building looked like when it was new, they can surely build a
copy of it somewhere else, and go and look at that: instead of putting a
new front on the north transept of Westminster Abbey, they might have
stuck it on a building like Truro Cathedral which is completely new. And
the new front is not even a true copy of the original front--amongst
other things, it has eleven little arches where there could never have
been more than eight. When I go to see a historic building, I want to
see it as it really was, not as a modern architect may think it should
have been; and when I find a Thirteenth Century design just finished in
fresh stone, I feel the work is out of date or I am out of date
myself--instead of a black coat and chimney-pot, I ought to be in gold
brocade with crimson tights and a feather in my cap.
Judged by its architecture Truro Cathedral would be about two centuries
earlier than the old church which is built into it, and it really is
about four centuries later. The church may pass for an addition to an
older building, when the new stonework has lost its glare. No doubt, in
Burgos Cathedral the triforium is of an earlier style than the arches
underneath it, though they were built at the same time; but Gothic was
not indigenous in Spain, and Burgos was designed by German architects in
an eclectic way. I do not think that this absurdity exists elsewhere,
except as a result of alterations: at Furness Abbey, I feel sure, the
arches in the transepts originally were round (like those in the
triforium up above them) and were converted into pointed arches
afterwards. The walls were weakened by these alterations, and that was
why the central tower fell; at least, I think so.
The round archways in the cloisters show how splendid Furness Abbey
would have been with its original design. But the old church-builders
never knew when to stop: they ran after all the latest fashions in
design, and in fact were out (as we should say) to beat the record.
Their flying-buttresses were towers of force: at least, a verger told me
that a bishop said so. But their biggest efforts often failed--Amiens
Cathedral looks all right when you see it from the triforium, but you
generally see it from the floor, and then it looks too high. And there
were many problems that they never solved at all: for instance, they
built naves like tunnels and just walled them up at the west end,
whereas a nave requires a narthex or an apse or some such thing to
terminate it.
Gothic is never at its best except in ruins--Chartres does not equal
Tintern--and I have felt this even here. Lower Wreyland is an ordinary
bit of cottage architecture; but there was no roof on the north end of
it for several weeks in 1901, and then it looked quite grand with a
granite gable standing out against the sky, and moonlight streaming
through the empty windows. One’s appreciation of a building will always
be affected by the atmosphere in which one may have seen it. In going up
the Nile in 1882 my boat stuck in the mud close by Kom Ombo on a
brilliant moonlight night; and I thought the temple there as beautiful a
thing as I had ever seen, but changed my mind on seeing it by daylight
as I came down stream. So also at Granada, I was once in the Alhambra on
a rainy day, 22 September 1877, and could hardly believe it was the
building that looked so like a fairy palace when I had seen it in the
scorching sun. And with some pictures also, such as Tintoretto’s
_Bacchus and Ariadne_ in the Doge’s Palace or Michaelangelo’s _Last
Judgement_ in the Sistine Chapel, there is no life or beauty in them
unless the sun is strong enough to bring the colouring out.
We have not sun enough in England to justify the use of Classic
architecture or Palladian. These styles demand the glare of Greece and
Italy; and sometimes that is not enough--in bleak places, such as
Phigaleia or Segesta, I have found the old Greek temples too austere
without their ancient colouring. However, these styles are now
established here; and the only consolation is that they are all reduced
to rule, so that ambitious architects do not come to grief with them as
badly as with Gothic.
One of the worst faults of English architects is that when they have a
building of great width, they put a portico or some such ‘feature’ in
the centre and another at each end, and thus destroy the broad effect of
width without creating an effect of height. The old Museum at Berlin was
more imposing with its eighteen columns in a single line than the
British Museum with its forty-four in different lines projecting at the
centre and the ends; and with a colonnade the whole width of Trafalgar
Square, the National Gallery might not have been unworthy of its site.
At the Imperial Institute there is a tower in the middle and a tower
near each end. The towers would be commendable, if they stood out alone;
but the main building detracts from their effect of height, and they
detract from its effect of breadth: and this is waste. Yet a tower does
not impair the effect, if it divides a long front into two unequal
parts, like the Rath-haus tower at Leipzig, built in 1556. I cannot
understand why this is so, but observation has convinced me that it is a
fact.