TRURO
Truro River runs straight up for two miles from Malpas, the cathedral
of Truro rising up from the valley ahead, and shining white amid a
setting of green trees and blue distant hills like some unearthly
building too beautiful to have been built by man. Very little else is
seen of Truro until quite close to the quays, where the navigation
ends, and it is something of a surprise to find the city a place large
enough to number 11,562 inhabitants. That is a small population, but it
is large compared with the expectations raised by distant views.
The name of Truro is said to derive from _Tru-Ru_, the "three streets,"
or roads; but there are four roads into Truro, and its streets are
many more than three. Bodmin is the county town of Cornwall, and
Launceston rivals it, but Truro has of late years risen into equal, if
not greater, importance, on account of its population, double that of
Bodmin, and by reason also of its more accessible situation. Bodmin
still keeps its assize business, and the county gaol is situated there,
giving a certain sinister significance to the information "he's gone
to Bodmin"; but Truro, as the capital city of a newly constituted
diocese, has a greater future, unless the Cornish folk become much more
criminal than they are now, which is not expected of them.
[Illustration: TRURO, FROM THE FAL.]
Truro lies down in a valley and the Great Western Railway stalks across
to the north of it on gigantic viaducts, the newer streets running up
towards the railway station. It is a clean, granite-built place, with
a well-defined aristocratic air, and down the gutters of its principal
streets, which are chiefly paved with granite setts and would thus be
very noisy if there were more traffic, run clear streams of water. As
an old county centre, the chief place of meeting for the landed and
leisured families of Cornwall in the old days before railways, when
Truro had a "season," and the society of Cornwall came hither to their
"town houses" to indulge in its gaieties, the aristocratic air it keeps
is by no means accidental. The "Red Lion" Hotel in the Market Place
was formerly one of these mansions, as its fine old unaltered front
shows. Foote, the actor, was born there.
Truro was raised to the dignity of a cathedral city in 1877, when the
new Cornish diocese was established, and the old parish church of
St. Mary in High Cross became automatically the Cathedral. But the
patriotic Cornish feeling which had thus at last again brought about
a bishopric and a cathedral in the West, about eight hundred years
after the see had been removed from St. Germans to Exeter, was not
content with making a mere parish church serve the occasion, and steps
were soon taken to build an entirely new cathedral. Such a thing as
the building of a cathedral in England had not been known for many
centuries; the full efforts of churchmen had been employed, ever
since the Reformation, in preserving and repairing those we already
possessed, not in creating new cathedrals. Moreover, most of our
cathedrals have been the products of centuries of growth. Even that of
Salisbury, the one example of an ancient cathedral finished according
to its original design, was not completed in less than a hundred and
forty years. Over £100,000 has gone to the building of Truro Cathedral,
begun in the laying of the foundation-stone by the Prince of Wales on
May 20th, 1880, and completed in the autumn of 1909, in the finishing
touches then put to the western towers.
The old church of St. Mary was demolished to provide the site, but the
fine Late Perpendicular south aisle was spared and incorporated with
the building, designed in the Early English style by J. L. Pearson,
that forms the cathedral to-day.
High Cross, in which the cathedral stands, is not a very roomy square
of houses and shops opening out of the Market Place in the centre of
the city, by a narrow passage, and upon other streets by somewhat
broader ways. But it is along this passage that the stranger usually
approaches. The cathedral is indeed new, but the old-established
cramped surroundings are quite characteristic of ancient cathedral
cities, and the calculated picturesqueness of the south side of
the building, viewed from this point, resembles that of some North
German cathedral. There the central tower and its stone spire, and
the lesser western towers and spires group richly together, with the
still smaller but very prominent south transept tower and its copper
spirelet, a very German importation. The poisonous oxidised green of
that copper spirelet is flagrant enough to spoil the whole day of an
artist. Down beneath it you see the surviving sixteenth century aisle
of old St. Mary's. I am glad they spared that aisle, for it is not
only beautiful in itself, but its venerable presence here serves to
illustrate that peculiarly English virtue, a continuity with the past,
a sense of history even in things new. But what will future generations
say about a late nineteenth-century cathedral whose general style is
that of the thirteenth century, and yet whose oldest part is genuine
sixteenth-century architecture? It could, perhaps, be wished that the
chimes of the cathedral clock had been harmonised to another tune
than the hackneyed "Westminster Chimes," that are noble enough in the
clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament, where they originated, but are
tiresome when repeated all over the country. The ancient proverb is
sadly at fault, for it _is_ possible to have too much of a good thing.
The new beauty of Truro Cathedral at present lacks those weatherings
that only time can give. The fine-grained granite and the Box stone
dressings have not attained the stains and bloom of years, and so
it is impossible to altogether judge the merits or drawbacks of the
exterior; but that the architect strove to be pictorial, and that he
rather overstrained in that direction, seems undeniable. The building,
only three hundred feet in its greatest length, from east to west, is
really one of our smallest cathedrals, six feet shorter than Rochester,
and it is ornamented to a degree that in places spoils the effect.
This is very noticeable in the south door, the usual entrance. It is
contrived in the south transept and is loaded with ornamentation that
emphasises the naturally squeezed-in appearance. The over-enrichment
was a mistake, but the cramped nature of this part seems to have been
unavoidable, considering the extreme narrowness of the site here.
[Illustration: TRURO CATHEDRAL.]
The interior discloses none of these limitations, and exhibits a noble
clerestoried nave of nine bays and of fine proportions. A very notable
feature is the beautiful baptistery close by the south door. Its many
slender columns and the artfully arranged half-light set off the rich
stained-glass with the effect of jewels. The choir is a light and
graceful and glorified continuation of the nave. Most of the windows
are already furnished with stained-glass, whose subjects include a
representation of Wesley preaching at Gwennap: a more liberal-minded
inclusion than any of which Hawker of Morwenstow would have been
capable, with his bitter remark that Wesley had made the Cornish
_change_ their sins; not get rid of them, you know.
A certain specious air of antiquity is given to the north transept by
the old monuments from St. Mary's, restored and built into the walls.
Notable among them is the Robartes monument of 1614. And history is
being quickly made here, for already Truro has come to its third bishop
and the cathedral is beginning to accumulate relics. Thus we see in
a case on the east wall of the south transept the pastoral staff
presented to Dr. Benson, the first Bishop.
There are also war memorials in the cathedral: tablets and flags
that tell eloquently of the latest great effort in the art of murder
by wholesale. It is a bitter commentary upon Christianity that in
twenty years from the beginning of the cathedral such things should
be necessary. But the fault was not ours, and no patriotic Englishman
would have those memorials away, for they show that we can still hold
our own against attack. "The men are splendid," as a famous dispatch
from those sun-scorched fields ran. Of their officers it were kinder
to keep silence, but perhaps their failure was merely the fault of the
system.
There is an interesting museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall
in Truro, with illustrations of South American scenes a good deal
too prominent on its walls; and there is a curious old inscription
carved in granite on a wall in the Market House. It belonged to an
older building, and runs thus: "Ienkin Daniel, Maior. Who seks to find
eternal tresvre, mvst vse no gvile in waight or measvre, 1615."
[Illustration: TABLET, TRURO MARKET HOUSE.]