IV

There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I

rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which

I could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted

for my associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine’s

scholarly and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason

why the better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit

fully equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied

that I got a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window,

which was, at any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was

a long walk, almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after

supper for one’s health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for

staring up at the many restorations going on. From point to point the

incomparable Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles

of the caves and towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles,

which lay in open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the

church. While I stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I

should never look on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang

of it, a verger in a skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and

parley long and pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went

on around; people going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar

noises came from the little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring

streets; there seemed to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and

there was certainly the misaspirated talk about them. I could not have

asked better material for the humble emotions I love; and I was more

than content on my way home to find myself one of the congregation

at the loud devotions of a detachment of the Salvation Army. After a

battering of drums and a clashing of cymbals and a shouting of hymns,

the worship settled to the prayer of a weak brother, who was so long in

supplication that the head exhorter covered a yawn with his hand, and at

the first sign of relenting in the supplicant bade the drums and cymbals

strike up. Then, after a hymn, a sister, such a very plain, elderly

sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch in her head, began to relate her

religious history. It appeared that she had been a much greater sinner

than she looked, and that the mercy shown her had been proportionate.

She was vain both of her sins and mercies, poor soul, and in her scrimp

figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on.

I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of

listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat

sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him,

on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so

Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must

always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and

respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have

been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the

performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have

done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;

but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud

side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.

V

Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day’s

sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking

workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after

the pale debility of labor’s looks in Sheffield. From the

chocolate-factories or the railroad-shops, which are the chief

industries of York, they would be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the

famous stream on which the Romans had their town, and which suggested to

the Anglicans to call their Eboracum Eurewic--a town on a river. In due

time the Danes modified this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by

the name of our own New York, called after the old York, as soon as the

English had robbed the Dutch of it, and the King of England had given

the province to his brother the Duke of York. Both cities are still

towns on rivers, but the Ouse is no more an image or forecast of the

Hudson than Old York is of New York. For that reason, the bridge over

it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn Bridge, or even to any bridge

which is yet to span the Hudson. The difference is so greatly in our

favor that we may well yield our city’s mother the primacy in her city

wall. We have ourselves as yet no Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet

got a mediaeval gate through which the traveller passes in returning

from the Flatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station.

We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the

mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments

which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent

railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than

even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more

largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading

edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome,

but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended

in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of

the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis

before Constantine was elected emperor there.

I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is

not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is

very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan

is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or

those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound;

but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any

place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge.

The event of Constantine’s presence and election is so spacious as to

leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in

it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in

the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a

railroad hotel garden in _New_ York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons

before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch

a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work,

realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the

race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are

in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like

the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake

very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your

impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise

reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it

bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs

in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of

foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such

is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of

trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise

than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with

modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in

their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and

then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from

the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them

naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and

in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course

still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so

quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway

celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have

crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the

English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions,

of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections

and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are

full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are

entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,

“I pray you let us satisfy our eyes

With the memorials and things of fame,

That do renown this city,”

where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors

abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.

[Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER]