We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York,
and our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we
had no other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all
but stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he
was represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office,
who asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken
from the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for
the races. I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but
I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were
limiting our proposed sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some
difficulty in keeping a head porter’s conventional respect for a formal
superior in answering that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week.
Then I said, “Oh yes,” and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week
which I resolved to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was
over.
But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town,
as soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still
the gray afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour
fortunate, and I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour
out of the whole twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the
glorious fane, the grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt
then and I feel now. If I were put to the question and were forced to
say in what its supreme grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in
its most ample simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no
sense of this from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered
pillars, and its measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage
in autumnal woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at
York, and I cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals,
like that of Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not
be satisfied with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand
in clumps, with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to
the sky, that let in the colored evening light.
You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such
architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some
cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so many other
Americans that you could easily have asked your way in your own dialect.
We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows,
which were like the gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and
lingered in a sumptuous delay from going into the choir, delighting in
the gray twilight which seemed to gather from the gray walls inward,
when suddenly what seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash
and the simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we
were shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that
began in the choir. We could not wholly regret the incident, for as
we recalled the like operation of religion in churches of our Italian
travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative the Church of England
and the Church of Home were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial
to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could
come into the Minster of York as into the basilica of St. Mark at Venice
for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of the place, and be
conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there were no
other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to your
devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you must
obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but somehow
the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at York
seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
[Illustration: YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND]
We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted
as “scatteringly noble outside.” By this I dare say I meant it had not
that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the inside.
They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with English
cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything,
than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes
of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age.
They were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
Doncaster Week.