I.

The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour of its

setting; but the sketcher still lingered at his occupation of measuring

and copying the chevroned doorway--a bold and quaint example of a

transitional style of architecture, which formed the tower entrance to

an English village church. The graveyard being quite open on its western

side, the tweed-clad figure of the young draughtsman, and the tall mass

of antique masonry which rose above him to a battlemented parapet,

were fired to a great brightness by the solar rays, that crossed the

neighbouring mead like a warp of gold threads, in whose mazes groups of

equally lustrous gnats danced and wailed incessantly.

He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the brilliant

chromatic effect of which he composed the central feature, till it was

brought home to his intelligence by the warmth of the moulded stonework

under his touch when measuring; which led him at length to turn his head

and gaze on its cause.

There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as much

meditative melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the human decline and

death that it illustrates being too obvious to escape the notice of

the simplest observer. The sketcher, as if he had been brought to this

reflection many hundreds of times before by the same spectacle, showed

that he did not wish to pursue it just now, by turning away his face

after a few moments, to resume his architectural studies.

He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced the old

workers whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six hundred years

after the original performance had ceased and the performers passed into

the unseen. By means of a strip of lead called a leaden tape, which

he pressed around and into the fillets and hollows with his finger and

thumb, he transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing,

that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were also a

sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and other mathematical

instruments. When he had marked down the line thus fixed, he returned to

the doorway to copy another as before.

It being the month of August, when the pale face of the townsman and the

stranger is to be seen among the brown skins of remotest uplanders,

not only in England, but throughout the temperate zone, few of the

homeward-bound labourers paused to notice him further than by a

momentary turn of the head. They had beheld such gentlemen before, not

exactly measuring the church so accurately as this one seemed to be

doing, but painting it from a distance, or at least walking round the

mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even exteriorly, was

not altogether commonplace. His features were good, his eyes of the dark

deep sort called eloquent by the sex that ought to know, and with that

ray of light in them which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of

all kinds,--in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he

would have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore

contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was conceivably

owing to a too dominant speculative activity in him, which, while it

had preserved the emotional side of his constitution, and with it the

significant flexuousness of mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead

and temples till, at weary moments, they exhibited some traces of being

over-exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile features, a mature

forehead--though not exactly what the world has been familiar with

in past ages--is now growing common; and with the advance of juvenile

introspection it probably must grow commoner still. Briefly, he had more

of the beauty--if beauty it ought to be called--of the future human type

than of the past; but not so much as to make him other than a nice young

man.

His build was somewhat slender and tall; his complexion, though a little

browned by recent exposure, was that of a man who spent much of his time

indoors. Of beard he had but small show, though he was as innocent as

a Nazarite of the use of the razor; but he possessed a moustache

all-sufficient to hide the subtleties of his mouth, which could thus be

tremulous at tender moments without provoking inconvenient criticism.

Owing to his situation on high ground, open to the west, he remained

enveloped in the lingering aureate haze till a time when the eastern

part of the churchyard was in obscurity, and damp with rising dew.

When it was too dark to sketch further he packed up his drawing, and,

beckoning to a lad who had been idling by the gate, directed him to

carry the stool and implements to a roadside inn which he named, lying a

mile or two ahead. The draughtsman leisurely followed the lad out of the

churchyard, and along a lane in the direction signified.

The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaeval

details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study of

English Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms of

times that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact

that George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man

of independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, and

perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currents

of thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, in

the days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to the

great English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and

other mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire what

was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, Queen

Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be popular, he

purchased such old-school works as Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the

rest, and worked diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered

on the question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct, and

with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was not old enough

at that time to know that, in practice, art had at all times been as

full of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that ideal

perfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and

never would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust with

his profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklessly

abandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical

literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in every

conceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthian

sonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fall

of Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these

inspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the

eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hint

from his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession he

might have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset

junior then awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed back

to his dusty drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view

of regularly starting in practice on the first day of the following

January.

It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in which

the soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, is

always narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth may

be on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones

have may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common

measure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called

lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and round

a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy in

looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. During

its progress the colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, flies

over the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of

graceful antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted

whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity of a

horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of the

bold contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process is

considered to be the making of him.

Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of the

inevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with the

artistic side of his profession only, it would be premature to say; but

at any rate it was his contrite return to architecture as a calling that

sent him on the sketching excursion under notice. Feeling that something

still was wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his

professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his own

native Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglected

from the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisome

iteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned to

silence; indeed--such is the surprising instability of art ‘principles’

as they are facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sink

into the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times.

This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an additional

charm to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it the

business of a summer circuit in the west.

The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusually

gorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter of

the heavens in which the sun had disappeared, were such as to make

a traveller loiter on his walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted

himself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. The

evening was so still that every trifling sound could be heard for miles.

There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the smacks of the

waggoner’s whip: the team must have been at least three miles off. From

far over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds;

while from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play in

the twilight. Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from

the direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him; and he

thought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.

But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by the

pressure of their material presence, and Somerset’s thoughts were often,

to his great loss, apt to be even more than common truants from the

tones and images that met his outer senses on walks and rides. He would

sometimes go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most extraordinary

town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not meddle with him

by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen, mongrels, bad

smells, and such like obstructions. This feat of questionable utility he

began performing now. Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had been

peeled and polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothes

in the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot that it was

August--in short, everything of the present altogether. His mind flew

back to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had resulted

from his not having been able to make up his mind which of the many

fashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic change

was the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from the

modern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man

of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who had

never thought specially of the matter, but had blunderingly applied

themselves to whatever form of art confronted them at the moment of

their making a move, were by this time acquiring renown as new lights;

while he was still unknown. He wished that some accident could have

hemmed in his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in a

channel ever so worn.

Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future,

he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiar

hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened more

heedfully. It was his old friend the ‘New Sabbath,’ which he had never

once heard since the lisping days of childhood, and whose existence,

much as it had then been to him, he had till this moment quite

forgotten. Where the ‘New Sabbath’ had kept itself all these years--why

that sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the cathedrals,

parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that he had been

acquainted with during his apprenticeship to life, and until his ways

had become irregular and uncongregational--he could not, at first,

say. But then he recollected that the tune appertained to the old

west-gallery period of church-music, anterior to the great choral

reformation and the rule of Monk--that old time when the repetition of

a word, or half-line of a verse, was not considered a disgrace to an

ecclesiastical choir.

Willing to be interested in anything which would keep him out-of-doors,

Somerset dismounted from the stile and descended the hill before him, to

learn whence the singing proceeded.