Since that visit to Salisbury, described in a former chapter, when I
watched and listened to the doves in those cold days in early spring, I
have been there a good many times, but never at the time when the bird
colony is most interesting to observe, just before and during the early
part of the breeding-season. At length, in the early days of June, 1908,
the wished opportunity was mine--wished yet feared, seeing that it
was possible some disaster had fallen upon that unique colony of
stock-doves. It is true they appeared to be long established and well
able to maintain their foothold on the building in spite of malicious
persecuting daws, but there was nothing to show that they had been long
there, seeing that it had been observed by no person but myself that the
cathedral doves were stock-doves and not the domestic pigeon found on
other large buildings. Great was my happiness to find them still there,
as well as the daws and all the other feathered people who make this
great building their home; even the kestrels were not wanting. There
were three there one morning, quarrelling with the daws in the old way
in the old place, halfway up the soaring spire. The doves were somewhat
diminished in number, but there were a good many pairs still, and I
found no dead young ones lying about, as they were now probably grown
too large to be ejected, but several young daws, about a dozen I think,
fell to the ground during my stay. Undoubtedly they were dragged out
of their nests and thrown down, perhaps by daws at enmity with their
parents, or it may be by the doves, who are not meek-spirited, as we
have seen, or they would not be where they are, and may on occasion
retaliate by invading their black enemies' nesting-holes.
Swallows, martins, and swifts were numerous, the martins especially, and
it was beautiful to see them for ever wheeling about in a loose swarm
about the building. They reminded me of bees and flies, and sometimes
with a strong light on them they were like those small polished black
and silvery-white beetles (Gyrinus) which we see in companies on the
surface of pools and streams, perpetually gliding and whirling about
in a sort of complicated dance. They looked very small at a height of a
couple of hundred feet from the ground, and their smallness and numbers
and lively and eccentric motions made them very insect-like.
The starlings and sparrows were in a small minority among the breeders,
but including these there were seven species in all, and as far as I
could make out numbered about three hundred and fifty birds--probably
the largest wild bird colony on any building in England.
Nor could birds in all this land find a more beautiful building to nest
on, unless I except Wells Cathedral solely on account of its west front,
beloved of daws, and where their numerous black company have so fine an
appearance. Wells has its west front; Salisbury, so vast in size, is yet
a marvel of beauty in its entirety; and seeing it as I now did every
day and wanting nothing better, I wondered at my want of enthusiasm on a
previous visit. Still, to me, the bird company, the sight of their airy
gambols and their various voices, from the deep human-like dove tone
to the perpetual subdued rippling, running-water sound of the aerial
martins, must always be a principal element in the beautiful effect.
Nor do I know a building where Nature has done more in enhancing the
loveliness of man's work with her added colouring. The way too in which
the colours are distributed is an example of Nature's most perfect
artistry; on the lower, heavier buttressed parts, where the darkest hues
should be, we find the browns and rust-reds of the minute aerial alga,
mixed with the greys of lichen, these darker stainings extending upwards
to a height of fifty or sixty feet, in places higher, then giving place
to more delicate hues, the pale tender greens and greenish greys, in
places tinged with yellow, the colours always appearing brightest on
the smooth surface between the windows and sculptured parts. The effect
depends a good deal on atmosphere and weather: on a day of flying clouds
and a blue sky, with a brilliant sunshine on the vast building after a
shower, the colouring is most beautiful. It varies more than in the
case of colour in the material itself or of pigments, because it is a
"living" colour, as Crabbe rightly says in his lumbering verse:
The living stains, which Nature's hand alone,
Profuse of life, pours out upon the stone.
Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the colours of
a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens and the aerial alga
called iolithus.
Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would not have
fascinated me as it did during this last visit. It would have left me
cold though all the architects and artists had assured me that it was
the most perfectly beautiful building on earth.
I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the discovery
that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this cathedral without
a sense of fatigue or depression than in any other one known to me,
because it has less of that peculiar character which we look for and
almost invariably find in our cathedrals. It has not the rich sombre
majesty, the dim religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the
other great fanes. So airy and light is it that it is almost like being
out of doors. You do not experience that instantaneous change, as of a
curtain being drawn excluding the light and air of day and of being
shut in, which you have on entering other religious houses. This is due,
first, to the vast size of the interior, the immense length of the nave,
and the unobstructed view one has inside owing to the removal by the
"vandal" Wyatt of the old ponderous stone screen--an act for which I
bless while all others curse his memory; secondly, to the comparatively
small amount of stained glass there is to intercept the light. So
graceful and beautiful is the interior that it can bear the light, and
light suits it best, just as a twilight best suits Exeter and Winchester
and other cathedrals with heavy sculptured roofs. One marvels at a
building so vast in size which yet produces the effect of a palace
in fairyland, or of a cathedral not built with hands but brought into
existence by a miracle.
I began to think it not safe to stay in that place too long lest it
should compel me to stay there always or cause me to feel dissatisfied
and homesick when away.
But the interior of itself would never have won me, as I had not
expected to be won by any building made by man; and from the inside I
would pass out only to find a fresh charm in that part where Nature had
come more to man's aid.
Walking on the cathedral green one morning, glancing from time to time
at the vast building and its various delicate shades of colour, I asked
myself why I kept my eyes as if on purpose away from it most of the
time, now on the trees, then on the turf, and again on some one walking
there--why, in fact, I allowed myself only an occasional glance at the
object I was there solely to look at. I knew well enough, but had never
put it into plain words for my own satisfaction.
We are all pretty familiar from experience with the limitations of
the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable odours please us only
fitfully; the sensation comes as a pleasing shock, a surprise, and is
quickly gone. If we attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately
smelling a fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of
failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a moment ago.
There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the sensation can
be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is the same, though in a
less degree, with the more important sense of sight. We look long and
steadily at a thing to know it, and the longer and more fixedly we look
the better, if it engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic
pleasure cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again, with
intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we receive the
"nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is all the brighter for
coming intermittently. In a large prospect we are not conscious of
this limitation because of the wideness of the field and the number and
variety of objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series of
pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most beautiful object
in nature or art does but diminish the pleasure. Practically it ceases
to be beautiful and only recovers the first effect after we have given
the mind an interval of rest.
Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I began to pay
attention to the movements of a man who was manifestly there with the
same object as myself--to look at the cathedral. I had seen him there
for quite half an hour, and now began to be amused at the emphatic
manner in which he displayed his interest in the building. He walked
up and down the entire length and would then back away a distance of
a hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then slowly
approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when quite near the
wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed aloft, the back of his
head almost resting on his back between his shoulders. His hat somehow
kept on his head, but his attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs
who, to give an idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object,
say that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off. The Americans,
when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different expression; they said
that to look up at so tall a thing caused the tobacco juice to run down
your throat.
His appearance when I approached him interested me too. His skin was
the color of old brown leather and he had a big arched nose, clear light
blue very shrewd eyes, and a big fringe or hedge of ragged white beard
under his chin; and he was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown
tweeds, evidently home-made. When I spoke to him, saying something about
the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch. It was, he
said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen and he had never seen
anything made by man to equal it in beauty. He had come, he told me,
straight from his home and birthplace, a small village in the north of
Scotland, shut out from the world by great hills where the heather grew
knee-deep. He had never been in England before, and had come directly to
Salisbury on a visit to a relation.
"Well," I said, "now you have looked at it outside come in with me and
see the interior."
But he refused: it was enough for one day to see the outside of such a
building: he wanted no more just then. To-morrow would be soon enough
to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath and he would go and worship
there.
"Are you an Anglican?" I asked.
He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village. They had two
Churches--the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.
"And what," said I, "will your minister say to your going to worship in
a cathedral? We have all denominations here in Salisbury, and you will
perhaps find a Presbyterian place to worship in."
"Now it's strange your saying that!" he returned, with a dry little
laugh. "I've just had a letter from him the morning and he writes on
this varra subject. 'Let me advise you,' he tells me in the letter, 'to
attend the service in Salisbury Cathedral. Nae doot,' he says, 'there
are many things in it you'll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps,
and I'd like ye to go.'"
I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an ordination service,
very long, complicated, and, I should imagine, exceedingly difficult to
follow by a wild Presbyterian from the hills. He probably disapproved of
most of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything
more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day. His method was
better than that of an American (from Indiana, he told me) I met the
following day at the hotel. He gave two hours and a half, including
attendance at the morning service, to the cathedral, inside and out,
then rushed off for an hour at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a
hired bicycle. I advised him to take another day--I did not want to
frighten him by saying a week--and he replied that that would make him
miss Winchester. After cycling back from Stonehenge he would catch a
train to Winchester and get there in time to have some minutes in the
cathedral before the doors closed. He was due in London next morning.
He had already missed Durham Cathedral in the north through getting
interested in and wasting too much time over some place when he was
going there. Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it
would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!