of vine, which completes the floral symbolism of the whole. The plant
which I have called a lily is not the Fleur de Lys, nor the Madonna’s,
but an ideal one with bells like the crown Imperial (Shakespeare’s
type of “lilies of all kinds”), representing the _mode of growth_ of
the lily of the valley, which could not be sculptured so large in its
literal form without appearing monstrous, and is exactly expressed
in this tablet--as it fulfils, together with the rose and vine, its
companions, the triple saying of Christ, “I am the Rose of Sharon, and
the Lily of the Valley.” “I am the true Vine.”
On the side of the upper stone are supporters of a different character.
Supporters,--not captives nor victims; the Cockatrice and Adder.
Representing the most active evil principles of the earth, as in their
utmost malignity; still Pedestals of Christ, and even in their deadly
life, accomplishing His final will.
Both creatures are represented accurately in the mediæval traditional
form, the cockatrice half dragon, half cock; the deaf adder laying one
ear against the ground and stopping the other with her tail.
The first represents the infidelity of Pride. The cockatrice--king
serpent or highest serpent--saying that he _is_ God, and _will be_ God.
The second, the infidelity of Death. The adder (nieder or nether snake)
saying that he _is_ mud and _will be_ mud.
Lastly, and above all, set under the feet of the statue of Christ
Himself, are the lion and dragon; the images of Carnal sin, or _Human_
sin, as distinguished from the Spiritual and Intellectual sin of Pride,
by which the angels also fell.
_The Bible of Amiens_ (_Our Fathers Have Told Us_), (Sunnyside,
Orpington, Kent, 1884).
THE MOSQUE OF SANTA SOFIA.
EDMONDO DE AMICIS.
The external aspect has nothing worthy of note. The only objects that
attract the eye are the four high white minarets that rise at the four
corners of the edifice, upon pedestals as big as houses. The famous
cupola looks small. It appears impossible that it can be the same
dome that swells into the blue air, like the head of a Titan, and is
seen from Pera, from the Bosphorus, from the Sea of Marmora, and from
the hills of Asia. It is a flattened dome, flanked by two half domes,
covered with lead, and perforated with a wreath of windows, supported
upon four walls painted in stripes of pink and white, sustained in
their turn by enormous bastions, around which rise confusedly a number
of small mean buildings, baths, schools, mausoleums, hospitals, etc.,
which hide the architectural forms of the basilica. You see nothing
but a heavy, irregular mass, of a faded colour, naked as a fortress,
and not to all appearance large enough to hold within it the immense
nave of Santa Sofia’s church. Of the ancient basilica nothing is really
visible but the dome, which has lost the silvery splendour that once
made it visible, according to the Greeks, from the summit of Olympus.
All the rest is Mussulman. One summit was built by Mahomet the
Conqueror, one by Selim II., the other two by Amurath III. Of the same
Amurath are the buttresses built at the end of the Sixteenth Century to
support the walls shaken by an earthquake, and the enormous crescent
in bronze planted upon the top of the dome, of which the gilding alone
cost fifty thousand ducats.
[Illustration: THE MOSQUE OF SANTA-SOFIA.]
On every side the mosque overwhelms and masks the church, of which the
head only is free, though over that also the four imperial minarets
keep watch and ward. On the eastern side there is a door ornamented by
six columns of porphyry and marble; at the southern side another door
by which you enter a court, surrounded by low, irregular buildings,
in the midst of which bubbles a fountain for ablution, covered by an
arched roof with eight columns. Looked at from without, Santa Sofia can
scarcely be distinguished from the other mosques of Stamboul, unless by
its inferior lightness and whiteness; much less would it pass for the
“greatest temple in the world after Saint Peter’s.” ...
Between the four enormous pilasters which form a square in the middle
of the basilica, rise, to the right and left as you enter, eight
marvellous columns of green _breccia_ from which spring the most
graceful arches, sculptured with foliage, forming an elegant portico
on either side of the nave, and sustaining at a great height two vast
galleries, which present two more ranges of columns and sculptured
arches. A third gallery which communicates with the two first, runs
along the entire side where the entrance is, and opens upon the nave
with three great arches, sustained by twin columns. Other minor
galleries, supported by porphyry columns, cross the four temples
posted at the extremity of the nave and sustain other columns bearing
tribunes. This is the basilica. The mosque is, as it were, planted
in its bosom and attached to its walls. The _Mirab_, or niche which
indicates the direction of Mecca, is cut in one of the pilasters of the
apse. To the right of it and high up is hung one of the four carpets
which Mahomet used in prayer. Upon the corner of the apse, nearest the
_Mirab_, at the top of a very steep little staircase, flanked by two
balustrades of marble sculptured with exquisite delicacy, under an
odd conical roof, between two triumphal standards of Mahomet Second,
is the pulpit where the _Ratib_ goes up to read the Koran, with a
drawn scimetar in his hand, to indicate that Santa Sofia is a mosque
acquired by conquest. Opposite the pulpit is the tribune of the Sultan,
closed with a gilded lattice. Other pulpits or platforms, furnished
with balustrades sculptured in open work, and ornamented with small
marble columns and arabesque arches, extend here and there along the
walls, or project towards the centre of the nave. To the right and
left of the entrance, are two enormous alabaster urns, brought from
the ruins of Pergamo, by Amurath III. Upon the pilasters, at a great
height are suspended immense green disks, with inscriptions from the
Koran in letters of gold. Underneath, attached to the walls, are large
cartouches of porphyry inscribed with the names of Allah, Mahomet,
and the first four Caliphs. In the angles formed by the four arches
that sustain the cupola, may still be seen the gigantic wings of four
mosaic cherubim, whose faces are concealed by gilded rosettes. From
the vaults of the domes depend innumerable thick silken cords, to which
are attached ostrich eggs, bronze lamps, and globes of crystal. Here
and there are seen lecterns, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and copper,
with manuscript Korans upon them. The pavement is covered with carpets
and mats. The walls are bare, whitish, yellowish, or dark grey, still
ornamented here and there with faded mosaics. The general aspect is
gloomy and sad.
The chief marvel of the mosque is the great dome. Looked at from the
nave below, it seems indeed, as Madame de Staël said of the dome of
Saint Peter’s, like an abyss suspended over one’s head. It is immensely
high, has an enormous circumference, and its depth is only one-sixth
of its diameter; which makes it appear still larger. At its base a
gallery encircles it, and above the gallery there is a row of forty
arched windows. In the top is written the sentence pronounced by
Mahomet Second, as he sat on his horse in front of the high altar on
the day of the taking of Constantinople: “Allah is the light of heaven
and of earth;” and some of the letters, which are white upon a black
ground, are nine yards long. As every one knows, this aërial prodigy
could not be constructed with the usual materials; and it was built of
pumice-stone that floats on water, and with bricks from the island of
Rhodes, five of which scarcely weigh as much as one ordinary brick....
When you have visited the nave and the dome, you have only begun to see
Santa Sofia. For example, whoever has a shade of historic curiosity
may dedicate an hour to the columns. Here are the spoils of all the
temples in the world. The columns of green _breccia_ which support the
two great galleries, were presented to Justinian by the magistrates
of Ephesus, and belonged to the Temple of Diana that was burned by
Erostratus. The eight porphyry columns that stand two and two between
the pilasters belonged to the Temple of the Sun built by Aurelian
at Balbek. Other columns are from the Temple of Jove at Cizicum,
from the Temple of Helios of Palmyra, from the temples of Thebes,
Athens, Rome, the Troad, the Ciclades, and from Alexandria; and they
present an infinite variety of sizes and colours. Among the columns,
the balustrades, the pedestals, and the slabs which remain of the
ancient lining of the walls, may be seen marbles from all the ruins
of the Archipelago; from Asia Minor, from Africa and from Gaul. The
marble of the Bosphorus, white spotted with black, contrasts with the
black Celtic marble veined with white; the green marble of Laconia is
reflected in the azure marble of Lybia; the speckled porphyry of Egypt,
the starred granite of Thessaly, the red and white striped stone of
Jassy, mingle their colours with the purple of the Phrygian marble, the
rose of that of Synada, the gold of the marble of Mauritania, and the
snow of the marble of Paros....
From above can be embraced at once with the eye and mind all the
life of the mosque. There are to be seen Turks on their knees, with
their foreheads touching the pavement; others erect like statues with
their hands before their faces, as if they were studying the lines
in their palms; some seated cross-legged at the base of columns, as
if they were reposing under the shadow of trees; a veiled woman on
her knees in a solitary corner; old men seated before the lecterns,
reading the Koran; an _imaum_ hearing a group of boys reciting sacred
verses; and here and there, under the distant arcades and in the
galleries, _imaum_, _ratib_, _muezzin_, servants of the mosque in
strange costumes, coming and going silently as if they did not touch
the pavement. The vague harmony formed by the low, monotonous voices
of those reading or praying, those thousand strange lamps, that clear
and equal light, that deserted apse, those vast silent galleries, that
immensity, those memories, that peace, leave in the soul an impression
of mystery and grandeur which words cannot express, nor time efface.
_Constantinople_ (London, 1878, translation by C. Tilton).
WESTMINSTER ABBEY.
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY.
It is said that the line in Heber’s “Palestine” which describes the
rise of Solomon’s temple originally ran--
“Like the green grass, the noiseless fabric grew;”
and that, at Sir Walter Scott’s suggestion, it was altered to its
present form--
“Like some tall palm, the noiseless fabric sprung.”
Whether we adopt the humbler or the grander image, the comparison of
the growth of a fine building to that of a natural product is full of
instruction. But the growth of an historical edifice like Westminster
Abbey needs a more complex figure to do justice to its formation: a
venerable oak, with gnarled and hollow trunk, and spreading roots, and
decaying bark, and twisted branches, and green shoots; or a coral reef
extending itself with constantly new accretions, creek after creek,
and islet after islet. One after another, a fresh nucleus of life is
formed, a new combination produced, a larger ramification thrown out.
In this respect Westminster Abbey stands alone amongst the edifices of
the world. There are, it may be, some which surpass it in beauty or
grandeur; there are others, certainly, which surpass it in depth and
sublimity of association; but there is none which has been entwined by
so many continuous threads with the history of a whole nation....
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]
If the original foundation of the Abbey can be traced back to Sebert,
the name, probably, must have been given in recollection of the great
Roman sanctuary, whence Augustine, the first missionary, had come.
And Sebert was believed to have dedicated his church to St. Peter in
the Isle of Thorns, in order to balance the compliment he had paid
to St. Paul on Ludgate Hill: a reappearance, in another form, of the
counterbalancing claims of the rights of Diana and Apollo--the earliest
stage of that rivalry which afterwards expressed itself in the proverb
of “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
This thin thread of tradition, which connected the ruinous pile in the
river-island with the Roman reminiscences of Augustine, was twisted
firm and fast round the resolve of Edward; and by the concentration
of his mind on this one subject was raised the first distinct idea of
an Abbey, which the Kings of England should regard as their peculiar
treasure....
The Abbey had been fifteen years in building. The King had spent upon
it one-tenth of the property of the kingdom. It was to be a marvel of
its kind. As in its origin it bore the traces of the fantastic childish
character of the King and of the age, in its architecture it bore the
stamp of the peculiar position which Edward occupied in English history
between Saxon and Norman. By birth he was a Saxon, but in all else he
was a foreigner. Accordingly, the Church at Westminster was a wide
sweeping innovation on all that had been seen before. “Destroying the
old building,” he says in his Charter, “I have built up a new one from
the very foundation.” Its fame as “a new style of composition” lingered
in the minds of men for generations. It was the first cruciform church
in England, from which all the rest of like shape were copied--an
expression of the increasing hold which the idea of the Crucifixion in
the Tenth Century had laid on the imagination of Europe. Its massive
roof and pillars formed a contrast with the rude rafters and beams of
the common Saxon churches. Its very size--occupying, as it did, almost
the whole area of the present building--was in itself portentous. The
deep foundations, of large square blocks of grey stone, were duly
laid. The east end was rounded into an apse. A tower rose in the
centre crowned by a cupola of wood. At the western end were erected
two smaller towers, with five large bells. The hard strong stones were
richly sculptured. The windows were filled with stained glass. The
roof was covered with lead. The cloisters, chapter-house, refectory,
dormitory, the infirmary, with its spacious chapel, if not completed by
Edward, were all begun, and finished in the next generation on the same
plan. This structure, venerable as it would be if it had lasted to our
time, has almost entirely vanished. Possibly one vast dark arch in the
southern transept--certainly the substructures of the dormitory, with
their huge pillars, “grand and regal at the bases and capitals”--the
massive low-browed passage leading from the great cloister to Little
Dean’s Yard--and some portions of the refectory and of the infirmary
chapel, remain as specimens of the work which astonished the last age
of the Anglo-Saxon and the first age of the Norman monarchy....
In the earliest and nearly the only representation which exists of
the Confessor’s building--that in the Bayeux Tapestry--there is the
figure of a man on the roof, with one hand resting on the tower of the
Palace of Westminster, and with the other grasping the weathercock
of the Abbey. The probable intention of this figure is to indicate
the close contiguity of the two buildings. If so, it is the natural
architectural expression of a truth valuable everywhere, but especially
dear to Englishmen. The close incorporation of the Palace and the
Abbey from its earliest days is a likeness of the whole English
Constitution--a combination of things sacred and things common--a union
of the regal, legal, lay element of the nation with its religious,
clerical, ecclesiastical tendencies, such as can be found hardly
elsewhere in Christendom. The Abbey is secular because it is sacred,
and sacred because it is secular. It is secular in the common English
sense, because it is “sæcular” in the far higher French and Latin
sense: a “sæcular” edifice, a “sæcular” institution--an edifice and an
institution which has grown with the growth of ages, which has been
furrowed with the scars and cares of each succeeding century.
A million wrinkles carve its skin;
A thousand winters snow’d upon its breast,
From cheek, and throat, and chin.
The vast political pageants of which it has been the theatre, the
dust of the most worldly laid side by side with the dust of the most
saintly, the wrangles of divines or statesmen which have disturbed its
sacred peace, the clash of arms which has pursued fugitive warriors
and princes into the shades of its sanctuary--even the traces of
Westminster boys who have played in its cloisters and inscribed their
names on its walls--belong to the story of the Abbey no less than its
venerable beauty, its solemn services, and its lofty aspirations....
The Chapel of Henry VII. is indeed well called by his name, for it
breathes of himself through every part. It is the most signal example
of the contrast between his closeness in life, and his “magnificence
in the structures he had left to posterity”--King’s College Chapel,
the Savoy, Westminster. Its very style was believed to have been a
reminiscence of his exile, being “learned in France,” by himself and
his companion Fox. His pride in its grandeur was commemorated by the
ship, vast for those times, which he built, “of equal cost with his
Chapel,” “which afterwards, in the reign of Queen Mary, sank in the sea
and vanished in a moment.”
It was to be his chantry as well as his tomb, for he was determined
not to be behind the Lancastrian princes in devotion; and this unusual
anxiety for the sake of a soul not too heavenward in its affections
expended itself in the immense apparatus of services which he provided.
Almost a second Abbey was needed to contain the new establishment of
monks, who were to sing in their stalls “as long as the world shall
endure.” Almost a second Shrine, surrounded by its blazing tapers,
and shining like gold with its glittering bronze, was to contain his
remains.
To the Virgin Mary, to whom the chapel was dedicated he had a special
devotion. Her “in all his necessities he had made his continual
refuge;” and her figure, accordingly, looks down upon his grave from
the east end, between the apostolic patrons of the Abbey, Peter and
Paul, with “the holy company of heaven--that is to say, angels,
archangels, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, evangelists, martyrs,
confessors and virgins,” to “whose singular mediation and prayers he
also trusted,” including the royal saints of Britain, St. Edward,
St. Edmund, St. Oswald, St. Margaret of Scotland, who stand, as he
directed, sculptured, tier above tier, on every side of the Chapel;
some retained from the ancient Lady Chapel; the greater part the
work of his own age. Around his tomb stand his “accustomed Avours or
guardian saints” to whom “he calls and cries”--“St. Michael, St. John
the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. George, St. Anthony, St.
Edward, St. Vincent, St. Anne, St. Mary Magdalene, and St. Barbara,”
each with their peculiar emblems,--“so to aid, succour, and defend him,
that the ancient and ghostly enemy, nor none other evil or damnable
spirit, have no power to invade him, nor with their wickedness to
annoy him, but with holy prayers to be intercessors to his Maker and
Redeemer.” These were the adjurations of the last mediæval King, as
the Chapel was the climax of the latest mediæval architecture. In the
very urgency of the King’s anxiety for the perpetuity of these funeral
ceremonies, we seem to discern an unconscious presentiment lest their
days were numbered.
But, although in this sense the Chapel hangs on tenaciously to the
skirts of the ancient Abbey and the ancient Church, yet that solemn
architectural pause between the two--which arrests the most careless
observer, and renders it a separate structure, a foundation “adjoining
the Abbey” rather than forming part of it--corresponds with marvellous
fidelity to the pause and break in English history of which Henry
VII.’s reign is the expression. It is the close of the Middle Ages:
the apple of Granada in its ornaments shows that the last Crusade was
over; its flowing draperies and classical attitudes indicate that
the Renaissance had already begun. It is the end of the Wars of the
Roses, combining Henry’s right of conquest with his fragile claim of
hereditary descent. On the one hand, it is the glorification of the
victory of Bosworth. The angels, at the four corners of the tomb, held
or hold the likeness of the crown which he won on that famous day.
In the stained-glass we see the same crown hanging on the green bush
in the fields of Leicestershire. On the other hand, like the Chapel
of King’s College at Cambridge, it asserts everywhere the memory of
the “holy Henry’s shade”; the Red Rose of Lancaster appears in every
pane of glass: and in every corner is the Portcullis--the “Alters
securitas,” as he termed it, with an allusion to its own meaning, and
the double safeguard of his succession--which he derived through John
of Gaunt from the Beaufort Castle in Anjou, inherited from Blanche of
Navarre by Edmund Crouchback; whilst Edward IV. and Elizabeth of York
are commemorated by intertwining these Lancastrian symbols with the
Greyhound of Cecilia Neville, wife of Richard, Duke of York, with the
Rose in the Sun, which scattered the mists at Barnet, and the Falcon
on the Fetterlock, by which the first Duke of York expressed to his
descendants that “he was locked up from the hope of the kingdom, but
advising them to be quiet and silent, as God knoweth what may come to
pass.”
It is also the revival of the ancient, Celtic, British element in the
English monarchy, after centuries of eclipse. It is a strange and
striking thought, as we mount the steps of Henry VII.’s Chapel, that we
enter there a mausoleum of princes, whose boast it was to be descended,
not from the Confessor or the Conqueror, but from Arthur and Llewellyn;
and that round about the tomb, side by side with the emblems of the
great English Houses, is to be seen the Red Dragon of the last British
king, Cadwallader--“the dragon of the great Pendragonship” of Wales,
thrust forward by the Tudor king in every direction, to supplant the
hated White Boar of his departed enemy--the fulfilment, in another
sense than the old Welsh bards had dreamt, of their prediction that the
progeny of Cadwallader should reign again....
We have seen how, by a gradual but certain instinct, the main groups
have formed themselves round particular centres of death: how the Kings
ranged themselves round the Confessor; how the Prince and Courtiers
clung to the skirts of Kings; how out of the graves of the Courtiers
were developed the graves of the Heroes; how Chatham became the centre
of the Statesmen, Chaucer of the Poets, Purcell of the Musicians,
Casaubon of the Scholars, Newton of the Men of Science: how, even in
the exceptional details, natural affinities may be traced; how Addison
was buried apart from his brethren in letters, in the royal shades of
Henry VII.’s Chapel, because he clung to the vault of his own loved
Montague; how Ussher lay beside his earliest instructor, Sir James
Fullerton, and Garrick at the foot of Shakespeare, and Spelman opposite
his revered Camden, and South close to his master Busby, and Stephenson
to his fellow-craftsman Telford, and Grattan to his hero Fox, and
Macaulay beneath the statue of his favourite Addison.
These special attractions towards particular graves and monuments may
interfere with the general uniformity of the Abbey, but they make us
feel that it is not a mere dead museum, that its cold stones are warmed
with the life-blood of human affections and personal partiality. It is
said that the celebrated French sculptor of the monument of Peter the
Great at St. Petersburg, after showing its superiority in detail to
the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius at Rome, ended by the
candid avowal, “_Et cependant cette mauvaise bête est vivante, et la
mienne est morte._” Perhaps we may be allowed to reverse the saying,
and when we contrast the irregularities of Westminster Abbey with the
uniform congruity of Salisbury or the Valhalla, may reflect, “_Cette
belle bête est morte, mais la mienne est vivante._”
_Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey_ (London, 1866).
THE PARTHENON.
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.