Highways and Byways in London Part 12

It is an effective contrast. But, perhaps the most vivid and pathetic sketch of the Submerged of the Great City is that of John Davidson's weird and haunting ballad: "The Loafer":

"I hang about the streets all day, At night I hang about; I sleep a little when I may, But rise betimes the morning's scout; For through the year I always hear Afar, aloft, a ghostly shout.

"My clothes are worn to threads and loops; My skin shows here and there; About my face like seaweed droops My tangled beard, my tangled hair; From cavernous and s.h.a.ggy brows My stony eyes untroubled stare.

"I move from eastern wretchedness Through Fleet Street and the Strand; And as the pleasant people press I touch them softly with my hand, Perhaps to know that still I go Alive about a living land.

"I know no handicraft, no art, But I have conquered fate; For I have chosen the better part, And neither hope, nor fear, nor hate.

With placid breath on pain and death, My certain alms, alone I wait."

[Ill.u.s.tration: _Speshul!_]

CHAPTER IX

WESTMINSTER

"The devout King destined to G.o.d that place, both for that it was near unto the famous and wealthy City of London, and also had a pleasant situation amongst fruitful fields lying round about it, with the princ.i.p.al river running hard by, bringing in from all parts of the world great variety of wares and merchandise of all sorts to the city adjoining; but chiefly for the love of the Chief Apostle, whom he reverenced with a special and singular affection."--_Contemporary Life of Edward the Confessor in Harleian M.S._

"The world-famed Abbey by the westering Thames."--_Matthew Arnold._

"Westminster Abbey," said Dean Stanley, "stands alone amongst the buildings of the world. There are, it may be, some which surpa.s.s it in beauty or grandeur; there are others, certainly, which surpa.s.s it in depth and sublimity of a.s.sociation; but there is none which has been entwined by so many continuous threads with the history of a whole nation."

The old Abbey of Westminster, is, indeed, in itself an epitome of English history. Elsewhere in London, you must dig and delve for it, study and reconstruct; here, you have it all together, a chain in a manner unbroken, from Edward the Confessor to the latest of our Hanoverian Kings, crowned here, so lately and so splendidly, in the place of his fathers.

The church has, in a manner, been founded many times; by tradition, by rebuilding, by frequent restoration and enlargement. The earliest church, or temple, on this ancient site is, indeed, almost lost in the semi-fabulous mists of early history. To all famous fanes, the after-years have a tendency to ascribe legendary and miraculous beginnings; thus, the magic haze that surrounds the primitive church of the doubtful Saxon King Lucius is hardly less than that covering the Temple of Apollo, the Sun-G.o.d, said to exist here in Roman times.

At any rate, it is clear that on this favoured spot, once the little sandy peninsula of "Thorney Island," was an early sanctuary and settlement, both Roman and Briton. In King Sebert's time the mists of antiquity lift, but still slightly. Sebert, King of the East-Saxons, was, early in the seventh century, the traditionary founder of a church here, dedicated to St. Peter. According to the story, Sebert, just returned from a Roman pilgrimage, was about to have his church consecrated by the bishop, Mellitus; when, one evening, a poor Saxon fisher, Edric, who was watching his nets along the sh.o.r.e, saw, on the opposite river bank, a gleaming light, and, approaching it in his boat, found a venerable man who desired to be ferried across the stream. There, the mysterious stranger landed, and proceeded to the church, where, transfigured with light, and attended by hosts of glittering angels, he consecrated it, being, indeed, no other than St.

Peter himself:

"Then all again is dark; And by the fisher's bark The unknown pa.s.senger returning stands.

_O Saxon fisher! thou hast had with thee_ _The fisher from the Lake of Galilee_--

"So saith he, blessing him with outspread hands; Then fades, but speaks the while: _At dawn thou to King Sebert shalt relate_ _How his St. Peter's Church in Thorney Isle,_ _Peter, his friend, with light did consecrate._"

The chronicle relates the story thus:

"Know, O Edric," said the stranger, while the fisherman's heart glowed within him, "know that I am Peter. I have hallowed the church myself. To-morrow I charge thee that thou tell these things to the Bishop, who will find a sign and token in the church of my hallowing. And for another token, put forth again upon the river, cast thy nets, and thou shalt receive so great a draught of fishes that there will be no doubt left in thy mind. But give one-tenth to this my holy church."

The story continues that Bishop Mellitus, on hearing Edric's miraculous tale, changed the name of the place from Thorney Isle to West Minster.

The tomb of the first traditionary founder of St. Peter's church of Westminster is still shown in the Abbey to-day, as it has been shown ever since the time of its erection. Through all the vicissitudes of the Abbey, its many alterations and restorations, this early relic has always been treated carefully and with respect. The King of the East-Saxons sleeps in peace in the choir, with his wife EthelG.o.da and his sister Ricula, first of a long line of kings and potentates.

But if Sebert was the traditional founder of the Abbey, Edward the Confessor was, unquestionably, its real founder. And, for that matter, the legends that surround the mysterious Sebert still linger, like a halo, round the Confessor's memory; he who was, we are told, so saintly, that being one day at ma.s.s in the ancient minster, he saw "the Saviour appear as a child, bright and pure as a spirit." Truly, a picturesque age to live in! The rebuilding of the Confessor's church was, as in the later time of Rahere, the outcome of a vision, and of a direct message from the saint. Edward, said St. Peter, must rebuild the ancient minster of Thorney. Edward rebuilt it, laying the foundation stone in 1049, and naming it "the Collegiate Church of St.

Peter of Westminster." It was the work of the King's life, and it was only consecrated eight days before his death. Of the Confessor's chapel and monastery all that now remains is the present "Chapel of the Pyx," with portions of the Westminster School Buildings and of the walls of the South Cloister. For Henry III., the Abbey's second founder, who had "a rare taste for building" pulled down, in 1245, most of his predecessor's work, and made the splendid miracle-working shrine that contains the relics of the royal saint. But it was Henry VII., in 1502, who was the great builder and transformer of the Abbey.

To him we owe the fine perpendicular chapel called by his name, "the most beautiful chapel in the world," the one building that impresses, at first sight, every visitor to London. Westminster Abbey, as we see it now, is probably in externals much as Henry VII. left it, except for the addition of Wren's two western towers, and "the fact that in the middle ages it was a magnificent apex to a royal palace,"

surrounded "by a train of subordinate offices and buildings, and with lands extending to the present Oxford Street, Fleet Street, and Vauxhall."

Yet, without any of its former palatial accessories, is not the gray fret-work of Henry VIIth's chapel, as it breaks on the delighted vision of the traveller down Whitehall, an ever-renewed joy and wonder? To Henry Tudor we owe the union of the houses of York and Lancaster; yet we remember him far more by this, the chapel that he has given us for all time. Truly, he too must have had "a rare taste in building!" "It is to the exaltation of the building art," says Mr.

Ruskin, in an eloquent pa.s.sage, "that we owe:

--"those vaulted gates ... those window-labyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light; those misty ma.s.ses of mult.i.tudinous pinnacle and diademed tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us of the faith and fear of nations. All else for which the builders sacrificed, has pa.s.sed away--all their living interests, and aims, and achievements. We know not for what they laboured, and we see no evidence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness--all have departed, though bought by many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evidence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought stone. They have taken with them to the grave their powers, their honours, and their errors; but they have left us their adoration."

But, apart from the beauty of its architecture, apart from the a.s.sociations and traditions of its early history, apart from its honour as the place of coronations, the feeling that every true Englishman has for the Abbey of Westminster must necessarily be strong; for it represents to him not only the essential spirit of his mother-city; it is also, in a sense, his national Valhalla,

--"place of tombs, Where lie the mighty bones of ancient men."--

Here, in this "cathedral close of Westminster," is his true fatherland. This, he may say, is his national Holy of Holies; the sacred spot:

"Wo meine Traume wandeln gehn, Wo meine Todten aufersteh'n."

Here he may feel all the reverence, all the love for his country, that is ever the birthright of the true citizen. For, not only kings, queens, and n.o.bles, but also the great and mighty in art, science, literature, are buried within this narrow s.p.a.ce. It is England's Temple of Fame, her crowing glory of a life of honour and merit. The "immortal dead" are thus in their death brought near to each one of us, and become part of our special family. They are our national inheritance.

Westminster Abbey is "the silent meeting-place of the dead of eight centuries," the "great temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried." Death is ever the great peacemaker. Round the mediaeval shrine of Edward the Confessor, in its faded and rifled splendour, lie, in a closely-joined circle, the peaceful Tombs of the Kings; st.u.r.dy Plantagenets, their warfare ended, the features of their effigies composed in an eternal calm.

They sleep well, after life's fitful fever! In Henry VIIth's chapel, Mary and Elizabeth, sisters of bitter hate and strange destiny, rest together in a contracted sepulchre, admitting of none other occupant but they two. "The sisters are at one; the daughter of Catherine of Aragon and the daughter of Anne Boleyn repose in peace at last." On their monument is the striking inscription: an inscription placed there by James I.; "closing," said Dean Stanley, "the long war of the English Reformation;" "Regno consortes et urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis." And those great statesmen of a later age, Pitt and Fox, their life-long rivalry ended, rest in the north transept, dying in the same year, and buried close together:

"Here--taming thought to human pride-- The mighty chiefs sleep side by side.

Drop upon Fox's grave the tear, 'Twill trickle to his rival's bier; O'er Pitt's the mournful requiem sound, And Fox's shall the notes rebound.

The solemn echo seems to cry-- 'Here let their discord with them die.'"

The figure of William Pitt, Lord Chatham, in parliamentary robes, his arm outstretched as if speaking, rises high above the surrounding monuments:

"High over those venerable graves," says Macaulay, "towers the stately monument of Chatham, and from above, his effigy, graven by a cunning hand, seems still, with eagle face and outstretched arm, to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes."

In another splendid pa.s.sage, Macaulay describes the later burial of the son near the father:

"The grave of Pitt had been made near to the spot where his great father lay, near also to the spot where his great rival was soon to lie.... Wilberforce, who carried the banner before the hea.r.s.e, described the awful ceremony with deep feeling. As the coffin descended into the earth, he said, the eagle face of Chatham from above seemed to look down with consternation into the dark house which was receiving all that remained of so much power and glory."

"The silence of death," says Dean Stanley, "breathes here the lesson which the tumult of life hardly suffered to be heard."

As, then, the Appian Way was to the Romans, so is Westminster Abbey to us, our "Highway of Tombs." As the stranger walks along the vast Nave and the Transepts, he pa.s.ses through a veritable City of the Dead, commemorated here by every kind of monument, statue, bust, tablet, cenotaph, tomb. Here are now no more the simple tombs and effigies of the earliest time, no more the rich, imposing magnificence of the mediaeval shrines, but a later efflorescence of sculpture and ornament, an efflorescence differing as widely from the severity of former ages, as the laudatory epitaphs differ from the simplicity and humility of the early inscriptions. Justice and Mercy, Neptune and Britannia, cherubs and clouds, are generally very painfully in evidence, and in their vast size and depressing ubiquity testify to the false taste of their day. Nor are the monuments always deserved. "Some day," said Carlyle, cynically, "there will be a terrible gaol-delivery in Westminster Abbey!" The worst of such theatrical sculpture is, also, that it always takes up so much room; we, in our day, should often be glad of the s.p.a.ce of one cloudlet,--of one unnecessary virtue,--for the modest perpetuation of a great man's memory. Who now recalls the merits of the forgotten magnates of past ages? but d.i.c.kens's humble grave-stone is ever freshly tended, bright with geranium or violet.

Ruskin's small tablet and bas-relief must hang in a dark, unnoticed, corner, and Tennyson's bust is relegated to a pillar of Poet's Corner.

And what is left, one may ask, of our National Valhalla, for the great names of a future age?

The solemn dignity of the Confessor's Chapel, and of Henry VIIth's beautiful chapel behind it, have, after the crude monuments of the Nave, all the calm of a secluded byway after the clamour of a noisy street.

Westminster Abbey is full of beautiful pictures. On a sunny day, especially, the play of light and shade on its pillars, the fretted tracery of its interlaced arches, the fine harmony of its proportions, the golden, mellowing, subdued light that enters through its "rose"

windows, the colour of its many tombs and rich marbles, that, on a day of London winter, so beautifully harmonises with the whole, may well tempt many an artist. To gain the full glory of the long aisles in their aerial perspective, the Abbey should be seen from the far end of the Nave. Everywhere is beauty; but perhaps one of the most lovely "bits" in the church is that furnished by the three canopied tombs of Henry III.'s family,--the tombs of Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster, Countess Aveline, his wife, and Aymer de Valence. These three tombs make a charming picture from the Sacrarium, where they stand; viewed, too, from the aisle just beneath them, two of them tower up grandly, to their full height; the third, however, that of Aveline, is hidden from the aisle by an ugly eighteenth-century monument. (Truly, the eighteenth century has much to answer for!) The lofty pinnacles of these tombs, the richness of their sculptured foliage and crockets, and the calmness of their supported effigies, are very impressive. Among other strikingly picturesque views is that of the small chapel, or rather, doorway, of St. Erasmus, dating from Richard II.'s time, a low arch supported by cl.u.s.tered pillars; and also that of the splendid "Chantry of Henry V.," towering at the entrance to Henry VIIth's Chapel, above the royal circle of tombs on either side. Over the Arch that canopies Henry's tomb, (an arch in the shape of the letter "H,") is the iron bar with the king's shield, saddle and helmet,--the helmet which we would fain for poetry's sake, think to be

--"that casque that did affright the air at Agincourt,"

--but which was, probably, merely a tilting-helmet made for the funeral. There is a sad humanity about these blackened accoutrements of the dead, standing out against the golden half-light of the dimly-seen chapel beyond, hanging so long in their lofty position as to seem a part of the Abbey itself. Have they not, before now, appealed to the imagination of many a Westminster school-boy, sitting below in the choir, and set him wondering about those old Plantagenets and Tudors, who seem here so much more alive and human than in the dull pages of a history book?

The best tombs of the Abbey are only free and open to inspection on Mondays and Tuesdays within certain hours; on all other days, they are locked up, and people are only "taken round" them at stated times and under supervision. On Mondays and Tuesdays there is, mostly, a good a.s.sembly of sightseers; and, whether one choses a free day, full of people, or whether one rather elects to be taken round on a sixpenny day in custody, in either case one inevitably loses much of the charm and feeling of the beautiful old church and its a.s.sociations. On free days, boys have a tendency to clatter distractingly up and down the wooden steps that lead to the Confessor's Chapel, with other diversions natural to the juvenile mind; on sixpenny days, you go in and out with the crowd in a depressing "queue," while each chapel in turn is unlocked and its monuments explained in a sad monotone. No other arrangement, no doubt, is possible; yet, who could penetrate to the soul of the Abbey under such conditions as these? It is perhaps not unnatural that the vergers, who have performed the office so often, should feel a certain satiety in the process, and that they should wish to hurry the visitor through the chapels as quickly and perfunctorily as may be; and yet, how charming would it be to spend a long afternoon here, in study or enjoyment, undisturbed! In an unwashed and noisy crowd, a crowd which seems to imagine that the Tombs of the Kings are a species of Waxworks, who can think, or enjoy, or remember? Moreover, when one is, so to speak, "in custody," one must always be very careful to do nothing which may draw down on one's self the suspicion of the custodian. In this connexion one is tempted to recall the story told of a certain too-conscientious verger in one of our provincial cathedrals. A devout visitor knelt down at an altar-tomb; an action for which the said verger promptly reprimanded him. "I was only praying," murmured the visitor, rising abashed. "Oh, that can't be allowed," said the verger; "we can't let people pray about wherever they like; _that would never do_."

In Westminster Abbey they are hardly so particular; and yet, something of this same sense of restriction the reverent visitor to the ancient edifice also experiences. His spirit recoils from locked entrance gates and tours of perfunctory inspection, and yearns for but one hour of the "bliss of solitude," to invoke, if not the shades of the mighty dead, at least something of the feeling that clings round their memorial chapels. It is this feeling that Froude has so well described: "Between us and the old English," he says in an eloquent pa.s.sage, "there lies a gulf of mystery which the prose of the historian will never adequately bridge. They cannot come to us, and our imagination can but feebly penetrate to them. Only among the aisles of the cathedral, only as we gaze upon their silent figures sleeping on their tombs, some faint conceptions float before us of what these men were when they were alive; and perhaps in the sound of church bells, that peculiar creation of mediaeval age, which falls upon the ear like the echo of a vanished world."