No woman has ever crossed the inner threshold, or shall ever cross it,
unless a queen, English or foreign, should claim her privilege.
Therefore, if a woman records here the slighter things visible of the
monastic life, it is only because she was not admitted to see more than
beautiful courtesy and friendliness were able to show her in guest-house
and garden.
The Monastery is of fresh-looking Gothic, by Pugin--the first of the
dynasty: it is reached by the white roads of a limestone country, and
backed by a young plantation, and it gathers its group of buildings in a
cleft high up among the hills of Wales. The brown habit is this, and
these are the sandals, that come and go by hills of finer, sharper, and
loftier line, edging the dusk and dawn of an Umbrian sky. Just such a
Via Crucis climbs the height above Orta, and from the foot of its final
crucifix you can see the sunrise touch the top of Monte Rosa, while the
encircled lake below is cool with the last of the night. The same order
of friars keep that sub-Alpine Monte Sacro, and the same have set the
Kreuzberg beyond Bonn with the same steep path by the same fourteen
chapels, facing the Seven Mountains and the Rhine.
Here, in North Wales, remote as the country is, with the wheat green over
the blunt hill-tops, and the sky vibrating with larks, a long wing of
smoke lies round the horizon. The country, rather thinly and languidly
cultivated above, has a valuable sub-soil, and is burrowed with mines;
the breath of pit and factory, out of sight, thickens the lower sky, and
lies heavily over the sands of Dee. It leaves the upper blue clear and
the head of Orion, but dims the flicker of Sirius and shortens the steady
ray of the evening star. The people scattered about are not mining
people, but half-hearted agriculturists, and very poor. Their cottages
are rather cabins; not a tiled roof is in the country, but the slates
have taken some beauty with time, having dips and dimples, and grass upon
their edges. The walls are all thickly whitewashed, which is a pleasure
to see. How willingly would one swish the harmless whitewash over more
than half the colour--over all the chocolate and all the blue--with which
the buildings of the world are stained! You could not wish for a better,
simpler, or fresher harmony than whitewash makes with the slight sunshine
and the bright grey of an English sky.
The grey-stone, grey-roofed monastery looks young in one sense--it is
modern; and the friars look young in another--they are like their
brothers of an earlier time. No one, except the journalists of
yesterday, would spend upon them those tedious words, "quaint," or "old
world." No such weary adjectives are spoken here, unless it be by the
excursionists.
With large aprons tied over their brown habits, the Lay Brothers work
upon their land, planting parsnips in rows, or tending a prosperous bee-
farm. A young friar, who sang the High Mass yesterday, is gaily hanging
the washed linen in the sun. A printing press, and a machine which
slices turnips, are at work in an outhouse, and the yard thereby is
guarded by a St Bernard, whose single evil deed was that under one of the
obscure impulses of a dog's heart--atoned for by long and self-conscious
remorse--he bit the poet; and tried, says one of the friars, to make
doggerel of him. The poet, too, lives at the monastery gates, and on
monastery ground, in a seclusion which the tidings of the sequence of his
editions hardly reaches. There is no disturbing renown to be got among
the cabins of the Flintshire hills. Homeward, over the verge, from other
valleys, his light figure flits at nightfall, like a moth.
To the coming and going of the friars, too, the village people have
become well used, and the infrequent excursionists, for lack of
intelligence and of any knowledge that would refer to history, look at
them without obtrusive curiosity. It was only from a Salvation Army girl
that you heard the brutal word of contempt. She had come to the place
with some companions, and with them was trespassing, as she was welcome
to do, within the monastery grounds. She stood, a figure for Bournemouth
pier, in her grotesque bonnet, and watched the son of the Umbrian
saint--the friar who walks among the Giotto frescoes at Assisi and
between the cypresses of Bello Sguardo, and has paced the centuries
continually since the coming of the friars. One might have asked of her
the kindness of a fellow-feeling. She and he alike were so habited as to
show the world that their life was aloof from its "idle business." By
some such phrase, at least, the friar would assuredly have attempted to
include her in any spiritual honours ascribed to him. Or one might have
asked of her the condescension of forbearance. "Only fancy," said the
Salvation Army girl, watching the friar out of sight, "only fancy making
such a fool of one's self!"
The great hood of the friars, which is drawn over the head in Zurbaran's
ecstatic picture, is turned to use when the friars are busy. As a pocket
it relieves the over-burdened hands. A bottle of the local white wine
made by the brotherhood at Genoa, and sent to this house by the West, is
carried in the cowl as a present to the stranger at the gates. The
friars tell how a brother resolved, at Shrovetide, to make pancakes, and
not only to make, but also to toss them. Those who chanced to be in the
room stood prudently aside, and the brother tossed boldly. But that was
the last that was seen of his handiwork. Victor Hugo sings in _La
Legende des Siecles_ of disappearance as the thing which no creature
is able to achieve: here the impossibility seemed to be accomplished by
quite an ordinary and a simple pancake. It was clean gone, and there was
an end of it. Nor could any explanation of this ceasing of a pancake
from the midst of the visible world be so much as divined by the
spectators. It was only when the brother, in church, knelt down to
meditate and drew his cowl about his head that the accident was
explained.
Every midnight the sweet contralto bells call the community, who get up
gaily to this difficult service. Of all duties this one never grows easy
or familiar, and therefore never habitual. It is something to have found
but one act aloof from habit. It is not merely that the friars overcome
the habit of sleep. The subtler point is that they can never acquire the
habit of sacrificing sleep. What art, what literature, or what life but
would gain a secret security by such a point of perpetual freshness and
perpetual initiative? It is not possible to get up at midnight without a
will that is new night by night. So should the writer's work be done,
and, with an intention perpetually unique, the poet's.
The contralto bells have taught these Western hills the "Angelus" of the
French fields, and the hour of night--_l'ora di notte_--which rings
with so melancholy a note from the village belfries on the Adriatic
littoral, when the latest light is passing. It is the prayer for the
dead: "Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord."
The little flocks of novices, on paschal evenings, are folded to the
sound of that evening prayer. The care of them is the central work of
the monastery, which is placed in so remote a country because it is
principally a place of studies. So much elect intellect and strength of
heart withdrawn from the traffic of the world! True, the friars are not
doing the task which Carlyle set mankind as a refuge from despair. These
"bearded counsellors of God" keep their cells, read, study, suffer, sing,
hold silence; whereas they might be "operating"--beautiful word!--upon
the Stock Exchange, or painting Academy pictures, or making speeches, or
reluctantly jostling other men for places. They might be among the
involuntary busybodies who are living by futile tasks the need whereof is
a discouraged fiction. There is absolutely no limit to the superfluous
activities, to the art, to the literature, implicitly renounced by the
dwellers within such walls as these. The output--again a beautiful
word--of the age is lessened by this abstention. None the less hopes the
stranger and pilgrim to pause and knock once again upon those monastery
gates.