The pleasantest thing in life is doubtless ever the pleasantness that
has found one off one’s guard—though if I was off my guard in arriving
at Wells it could only have been by the effect of a frivolous want of
information. I knew in a general way that this ancient little town
had a great cathedral to produce, but I was far from suspecting the
intensity of the impression that awaited me. The immense predominance
of the Minster towers, as you see them from the approaching train over
the clustered houses at their feet, gives you indeed an intimation of
its character, suggests that the city is nothing if not sanctified;
but I can wish the traveller no better fortune than to stroll forth
in the early evening with as large a reserve of ignorance as my own,
and treat himself to an hour of discoveries. I was lodged on the edge
of the Cathedral lawn and had only to pass beneath one of the three
crumbling Priory gates which enclose it, and cross the vast grassy
oval, to stand before a minster-front which ranks among the first
three or four in England. Wells Cathedral is extremely fortunate in
being approached by this wide green level, on which the spectator may
loiter and stroll to and fro and shift his standpoint to his heart’s
content. The spectator who does not hesitate to avail himself of his
privilege of unlimited fastidiousness might indeed pronounce it too
isolated for perfect picturesqueness—too uncontrasted with the profane
architecture of the human homes for which it pleads to the skies. But
Wells is in fact not a city with a cathedral for central feature; it is
a cathedral with a little city gathered at the base and forming hardly
more than an extension of the spacious close. You feel everywhere the
presence of the beautiful church; the place seems always to savour of
a Sunday afternoon; and you imagine every house tenanted by a canon, a
prebendary, or a precentor, with “backs” providing for choristers and
vergers.
The great façade is remarkable not so much for its expanse as for its
elaborate elegance. It consists of two great truncated towers, divided
by a broad centre bearing, beside its rich fretwork of statues, three
narrow lancet windows. The statues on this vast front are the great
boast of the cathedral. They number, with the lateral figures of the
towers, no less than three hundred; it seems densely embroidered
by the chisel. They are disposed, in successive niches, along six
main vertical shafts; the central windows are framed and divided by
narrower shafts, and the wall above them rises into a pinnacled screen
traversed by two superb horizontal rows. Add to these a close-running
cornice of images along the line corresponding with the summit of
the aisles and the tiers which complete the decoration of the towers
on either side, and you have an immense system of images governed by
a quaint theological order and most impressive in its completeness.
Many of the little high-lodged effigies are mutilated, and not a few
of the niches are empty, but the injury of time is not sufficient to
diminish the noble serenity of the building. The injury of time is
indeed being actively repaired, for the front is partly masked by a
slender scaffolding. The props and platforms are of the most delicate
structure, and look in fact as if they were meant to facilitate
no more ponderous labour than a fitting-on of noses to disfeatured
bishops and a rearrangement of the mantle-folds of strait-laced queens
discomposed by the centuries. The main beauty of Wells Cathedral, to
my mind, is not its more or less visible wealth of detail, but its
singularly charming tone of colour. An even, sober, mouse-like grey
invests it from summit to base, deepening nowhere to the melancholy
black of your truly romantic gothic, but showing as yet none of the
spotty brightness of renovation. It is a wonderful fact that the great
towers, from their lofty outlook, see never a factory chimney—those
cloud-compelling spires which so often break the charm of the softest
English horizons; and the general atmosphere of Wells seemed to me, for
some reason, peculiarly luminous and sweet. The cathedral has never
been discoloured by the moral malaria of a city with an independent
secular life. As you turn back from its portal and glance at the open
lawn before it, edged by the mild grey seventeenth-century deanery
and the other dwellings, hardly less stately, which seem to reflect
in their comfortable fronts the rich respectability of the church, and
then up again at the beautiful clear-hued pile, you may fancy it less
a temple for man’s needs than a monument of his pride—less a fold for
the flock than for the shepherds; a visible token that, besides the
actual assortment of heavenly thrones, there is constantly on hand a
“full line” of cushioned cathedral stalls. Within the cathedral this
impression is not diminished. The interior is vast and massive, but it
lacks incident—the incident of monuments, sepulchres, and chapels—and
it is too brilliantly lighted for picturesque, as distinguished from
strictly architectural, interest. Under this latter head it has, I
believe, great importance. For myself, I can think of it only as I
saw it from my place in the choir during afternoon service of a hot
Sunday. The Bishop sat facing me, enthroned in a stately gothic alcove
and clad in his crimson band, his lawn sleeves and his lavender gloves;
the canons, in their degree, with still other priestly forms, reclined
comfortably in the carven stalls, and the scanty congregation fringed
the broad aisle. But though scanty, the congregation was select; it
was unexceptionably black-coated, bonneted and gloved. It savoured
intensely in short of that inexorable gentility which the English
put on with their Sunday bonnets and beavers, and which fills me—as
a mere taster of produced tastes—with a sort of fond reactionary
remembrance of those animated bundles of rags which one sees kneeling
in the churches of Italy. But even here, as taster of tastes, I found
my account. You always do if you throw yourself confidently enough, in
England, on the chapter of accidents. Before me and beside me sat a row
of the comeliest young men, clad in black gowns and wearing on their
shoulders long hoods trimmed with white fur. Who and what they were I
know not, for I preferred not to learn, lest by chance they should not
be so mediæval as they looked.
[Illustration: THE MARKET-PLACE, WELLS]
My fancy found its account even better in the singular quaintness of
the little precinct known as the Vicars’ Close. It directly adjoins
the Cathedral Green, and you enter it beneath one of the solid old
gate-houses which form so striking an element in the ecclesiastical
furniture of Wells. It consists of a narrow, oblong court, bordered
on each side with thirteen small dwellings and terminating in a
ruinous little chapel. Here formerly dwelt a congregation of minor
priests, established in the thirteenth century to do curates’ work
for the canons. The little houses are very much modernised; but they
retain their tall chimneys, with carven tablets in the face, their
antique compactness and neatness, and a certain little sanctified
air as of cells in a cloister. The place is adorably of another
world and time, and, approaching it as I did in the first dimness of
twilight, it looked to me, in its exaggerated perspective, like one
of those conventional streets represented on the stage, down whose
impossible vista the heroes and confidants of romantic comedies come
swaggering arm-in-arm and hold amorous converse with heroines perched
at second-story windows. But though the Vicars’ Close is a curious
affair enough, the great boast of Wells is its episcopal Palace. The
Palace loses nothing from being seen for the first time in the kindly
twilight, and from being approached with an uncautioned mind. To reach
it (unless you go from within the cathedral by the cloisters), you pass
out of the Green by another ancient gateway into the market-place, and
thence back again through its own peculiar portal. My own first glimpse
of it had all the felicity of a _coup de théâtre_. I saw within the
dark archway an enclosure bedimmed at once with the shadows of trees
and heightened with the glitter of water. The picture was worthy of
this agreeable promise. Its main feature is the little grey-walled
island on which the Palace stands, rising in feudal fashion out of a
broad, clear moat, flanked with round towers and approached by a proper
drawbridge. Along the outer side of the moat is a short walk beneath a
row of picturesquely stunted elms; swans and ducks disport themselves
in the current and ripple the bright shadows of the overclambering
plants from the episcopal gardens and masses of wall-flower lodged on
the hoary battlements. On the evening of my visit the haymakers were
at work on a great sloping field in the rear of the Palace, and the
sweet perfume of the tumbled grass in the dusky air seemed all that
was wanting to fix the scene for ever in the memory. Beyond the moat
and within the grey walls dwells my lord Bishop, in the finest seat
of all his order. The mansion dates from the thirteenth century; but,
stately dwelling though it is, it occupies but a subordinate place in
its own grounds. Their great ornament, picturesquely speaking, is the
massive ruin of a banqueting-hall erected by a free-living mediæval
bishop and more or less demolished at the Reformation. With its still
perfect towers and beautiful shapely windows, hung with those green
tapestries so stoutly woven by the English climate, it is a relic
worthy of being locked away behind an embattled wall. I have among my
impressions of Wells, besides this picture of the moated Palace, half a
dozen memories of the romantic sort, which I lack space to transcribe.
The clearest impression perhaps is that of the beautiful church of
St. Cuthbert, of the same date as the cathedral, and in very much the
same style of elegant, temperate early English. It wears one of the
high-soaring towers for which Somersetshire is justly celebrated, as
you may see from the window of the train in rolling past its almost
topheavy hamlets. The beautiful old church, surrounded with its green
graveyard, and large enough to be impressive, without being too large
(a great merit, to my sense) to be easily compassed by a deplorably
unarchitectural eye, wore a native English expression to which certain
humble figures in the foreground gave additional point. On the edge of
the churchyard was a low-gabled house, before which four old men were
gossiping in the eventide. Into the front of the house was inserted an
antique alcove in stone, divided into three shallow little seats, two
of which were occupied by extraordinary specimens of decrepitude. One
of these ancient paupers had a huge protuberant forehead, and sat with
a pensive air, his head gathered painfully upon his twisted shoulders
and his legs resting across his crutch. The other was rubicund,
blear-eyed, and frightfully besmeared with snuff. Their voices were
so feeble and senile that I could scarcely understand them, and only
just managed to make out the answer to my enquiry of who and what they
were—“We’re Still’s Almhouse, sir.”
One of the lions, almost, of Wells (whence it is but five miles
distant) is the ruin of the famous Abbey of Glastonbury, on which
Henry VIII, in the language of our day, came down so heavily. The
ancient splendour of the architecture survives but in scattered and
scanty fragments, among influences of a rather inharmonious sort. It
was cattle-market in the little town as I passed up the main street,
and a savour of hoofs and hide seemed to accompany me through the easy
labyrinth of the old arches and piers. These occupy a large back yard,
close behind the street, to which you are most prosaically admitted by
a young woman who keeps a wicket and sells tickets. The continuity of
tradition is not altogether broken, however, for the little street of
Glastonbury has rather an old-time aspect, and one of the houses at
least must have seen the last of the abbots ride abroad on his mule.
The little inn is a capital bit of character, and as I waited for the
’bus under its low dark archway (in something of the mood, possibly,
in which a train was once waited for at Coventry), and watched the
barmaid flirting her way to and fro out of the heavy-browed kitchen and
among the lounging young appraisers of colts and steers and barmaids,
I might have imagined that the merry England of the Tudors had not
utterly passed away. A beautiful England this must have been as well,
if it contained many such abbeys as Glastonbury. Such of the ruined
columns and portals and windows as still remain are of admirable
design and finish. The doorways are rich in marginal ornament—ornament
within ornament, as it often is; for the dainty weeds and wild flowers
overlace the antique tracery with their bright arabesques and deepen
the grey of the stonework as it brightens their bloom. The thousand
flowers which grow among English ruins deserve a chapter to themselves.
I owe them, as an observer, a heavy debt of satisfaction, but I am too
little of a botanist to pay them in their own coin. It has often seemed
to me in England that the purest enjoyment of architecture was to be
had among the ruins of great buildings. In the perfect building one
is rarely sure that the impression is simply architectural: it is more
or less pictorial and romantic; it depends partly upon association and
partly upon various accessories and details which, however they may be
wrought into harmony with the architectural idea, are not part of its
essence and spirit. But in so far as beauty of structure is beauty of
line and curve, balance and harmony of masses and dimensions, I have
seldom relished it as deeply as on the grassy nave of some crumbling
church, before lonely columns and empty windows where the wild flowers
were a cornice and the sailing clouds a roof. The arts certainly hang
together in what they do for us. These hoary relics of Glastonbury
reminded me in their broken eloquence of one of the other great ruins
of the world—the Last Supper of Leonardo. A beautiful shadow, in each
case, is all that remains; but that shadow is the soul of the artist.
[Illustration: SALISBURY CATHEDRAL]
Salisbury Cathedral, to which I made a pilgrimage on leaving Wells,
is the very reverse of a ruin, and you take your pleasure there on
very different grounds from those I have just attempted to define. It
is perhaps the best-known typical church in the world, thanks to its
shapely spire; but the spire is so simply and obviously fair that when
you have respectfully made a note of it you have anticipated æsthetic
analysis. I had seen it before and admired it heartily, and perhaps
I should have done as well to let my admiration rest. I confess that
on repeated inspection it grew to seem to me the least bit _banal_,
or even _bête_, since I am talking French, and I began to consider
whether it does not belong to the same range of art as the Apollo
Belvedere or the Venus de’ Medici. I am inclined to think that if I
had to live within sight of a cathedral and encounter it in my daily
comings and goings, I should grow less weary of the rugged black front
of Exeter than of the sweet perfection of Salisbury. There are people
by temperament easily sated with beauties specifically fair, and the
effect of Salisbury Cathedral architecturally is equivalent to that
of flaxen hair and blue eyes physiognomically. The other lions of
Salisbury, Stonehenge and Wilton House, I revisited with undiminished
interest. Stonehenge is rather a hackneyed shrine of pilgrimage. At the
time of my former visit a picnic-party was making libations of beer
on the dreadful altar-sites. But the mighty mystery of the place has
not yet been stared out of countenance; and as on this occasion there
were no picnickers we were left to drink deep of all its ambiguities
and intensities. It stands as lonely in history as it does on the
great plain whose many-tinted green waves, as they roll away from
it, seem to symbolise the ebb of the long centuries which have left
it so portentously unexplained. You may put a hundred questions to
these rough-hewn giants as they bend in grim contemplation of their
fallen companions; but your curiosity falls dead in the vast sunny
stillness that enshrouds them, and the strange monument, with all its
unspoken memories, becomes simply a heart-stirring picture in a land
of pictures. It is indeed immensely vague and immensely deep. At a
distance you see it standing in a shallow dell of the plain, looking
hardly larger than a group of ten-pins on a bowling-green. I can fancy
sitting all a summer’s day watching its shadows shorten and lengthen
again, and drawing a delicious contrast between the world’s duration
and the feeble span of individual experience. There is something in
Stonehenge almost reassuring to the nerves; if you are disposed to
feel that the life of man has rather a thin surface, and that we soon
get to the bottom of things, the immemorial grey pillars may serve to
represent for you the pathless vaults beneath the house of history.
Salisbury is indeed rich in antiquities. Wilton House, a delightful
old residence of the Earls of Pembroke, contains a noble collection of
Greek and Roman marbles. These are ranged round a charming cloister
occupying the centre of the house, which is exhibited in the most
liberal fashion. Out of the cloister opens a series of drawing-rooms
hung with family portraits, chiefly by Vandyck, all of superlative
merit. Among them hangs supreme, as the Vandyck _par excellence_, the
famous and magnificent group of the whole Pembroke family of James
the First’s time. This splendid work has every pictorial merit—design,
colour, elegance, force, and finish, and I have been vainly wondering
to this hour what it needs to be the finest piece of portraiture, as
it surely is one of the most ambitious, in the world. What it lacks,
characteristically, in a certain uncompromising veracity, it recovers
in the beautiful dignity of its position—unmoved from the stately house
in which its author sojourned and wrought, familiar to the descendants
of its noble originals.
1872.
[Illustration: STONEHENGE]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]