The English Church in the Eighteenth Century Part 38

The bible 'of larger volume,' as directed in Lord Cromwell's injunctions, and in the Canons of 1751[906], venerable with age, might sometimes be seen still chained to its desk[907], as in the old days. In Pope's time, church bibles were very commonly in black-letter type[908].

Litany desks were a great rarity. One in Exeter Cathedral appears to have been disused about 1740[909].

Everyone knows what a neglected aspect the font usually bore during the whole of the Georgian period; how it was often thrust into some corner of the church, as if it were a kind of enc.u.mbrance that could not be absolutely done away with, and very frequently supplanted by some basin or pewter vessel placed inside it. In 1799 Carter recorded with indignation that in Westminster Abbey the font had been altogether removed, to make s.p.a.ce for some new monument, and was lying topsy-turvy in a side room[910]. In this, however, as in other respects, the neglect that was too generally prevalent must of course not be spoken of as if it were by any means universal.

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, and in the reign of Queen Anne, there was some little discussion, in which Bishop Beveridge and others took part[911], as to the propriety of retaining or renovating chancel screens. In mediaeval times, these 'cancelli,' from which the chancel took its name, had been universal; and a few had been put up under the Stuart sovereigns, notwithstanding the offence with which they were regarded by those who looked upon them as one of 'the hundred points of popery.'

We find Archbishop Secker expressing his regret, not without cause, that chancels were not, as a rule, kept in much better order than other parts of the building. Inc.u.mbents were by no means so careful as they should be, and lay impropriators, whether private or collegiate, were generally strangely neglectful. 'It is indispensably requisite,' he added, 'to preserve them not only standing and safe, but clean, neat, decent, agreeable; and it is highly fit to go further, and superadd, not a light and trivial finery, but such degrees of proper dignity and grandeur as we are able, consistently with other real obligations[912].'

The condition and decoration of the Lord's Table differed widely, especially in the earlier years of the period, in accordance with varieties of opinion and feeling in clergymen and in their congregations. For the most part it was insignificantly and meanly furnished, and hemmed closely in by the Communion rails. At the beginning of the century, it would appear that in the London churches a great deal of care and cost had been lately expended on 'altar-pieces.'

In one church after another, Paterson records the attraction of a 'fine'--a 'beautiful'--a 'stately'--a 'costly' altar-piece[913]. Many of these, however, would by no means approve themselves to a more cultivated taste than that which then prevailed. Instead of the Greek marbles and rich baldachino which Wren had intended for the east end of St. Paul's, the authorities subst.i.tuted imitation marble, and fluted pilasters painted with ultramarine and veined with gold[914]. The Vicar of Leeds, writing to Ralph Th.o.r.esby in 1723, tells him that a pleasing surprise awaits his return, 'Our altar-piece is further adorned, since you went, with three flower-pots upon three pedestals upon the wainscot, gilt, and a hovering dove upon the middle one; three cherubs over the middle panel, the middle one gilt, a piece of open carved work beneath, going down towards the middle of the velvet.' If, however, the reader cannot altogether admire the picture thus summoned before his eyes, he will at all events agree with the words that follow: 'But the greatest ornament is a choir well filled with devout communicants[915].' The painted 'crimson curtains' at the east end of Battersea Church, 'trimmed with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold ta.s.sels,'[916] may serve as another representative example of the kind of 'altar-piece'

which commended itself to eighteenth-century Churchmen.

Nothing, it might be imagined, could be more inoffensive than the use of the sacred monogram. But there were some at the beginning of the period, both Dissenters and Puritan Churchmen, who looked very suspiciously at it. They ranked it, together with bowing at the name of Jesus and turning eastward at the Creed, among Romish proclivities. 'What mean,'

Barnes had said towards the close of the previous century, 'these rich altar-cloths, with the Jesuits' cypher embossed upon them?'[917] So also that worthy man, Ralph Th.o.r.esby, had expressed himself 'troubled' to see at Durham, among other 'superst.i.tions' 'richly embroidered I.H.S. upon the high altar.'[918]

In Charles the First's time the Ritualistic party in the Church of England used sometimes to place upon the altars of their churches crucifixes and an array of candlesticks.[919] After the Restoration the former were never replaced. The two candles, however, interpreted as symbolical of the divine and human nature of the Lord, were by no means unfrequent in the churches of the last century, especially during its earlier years. Mr. Beresford Hope speaks of an old picture in his possession, of Westminster Abbey, referred to the beginning of the eighteenth century, in which candles are represented burning upon the altar.[920] This, at all events, was most unusual. Bishop Hoadly, writing against the Ritualistic practices of some congregations, speaks of 'the over-altars and the never-lighted candles upon them.'[921] In Durham Cathedral, which by traditional custom retained throughout the century a higher Ritual in some respects than was to be found elsewhere, the 'tapers' of which Th.o.r.esby speaks[922] were probably more than two in number.

The credence, or side table, upon which the sacramental elements are placed previously to being offered, in accordance with the rubric, upon the Lord's Table, had been objected to by many Puritan Churchmen.

Provision was rarely made for this in eighteenth-century churches. It is mentioned as somewhat exceptional on the part of Bishop Bull, that 'he always offered the elements upon the Holy Table himself before beginning the Communion service.'[923]

Puritan feeling had very unreasonably regarded the cross with almost as much jealousy as the crucifix. This idea had, in the last century, so far gained ground, that the Christian emblem was not often to be seen, at all events in the interior of churches, and that those who did use it in their churches or churchyards were likely to incur a suspicion of Popery. An anonymous a.s.sailant of Bishop Butler in 1767, fifteen years after the death of that prelate, made it a special charge against him that he had 'put up the Popish insignia of the cross in his chapel at Bristol.'[924]

Steele, speaking, in one of his papers in the 'Guardian,' of Raphael's picture of our Saviour appearing to His disciples after His resurrection, makes some remarks upon religion and sacred art. 'Such endeavours,' he says, 'as this of Raphael, and of all men not called to the altar, are collateral helps not to be despised by the ministers of the Gospel.... All the arts and sciences ought to be employed in one confederacy against the prevailing torrent of vice and impiety; and it will be no small step in the progress of religion, if it is as evident as it ought to be, that he wants the best sense a man can have, who is cold to the "Beauty of Holiness."'[925] Tillotson, and other favourite writers of Steele's generation, had dwelt forcibly, and with much charm of language, upon the moral beauty of a virtuous and holy life. But there had never been a time when the English Church in general, as distinguished from any party in it, had cared less to invest religious worship with outward circ.u.mstances of attractiveness and beauty. As to the particular point which gave occasion to Steele's remarks, whatever might be said for or against the propriety of painting in churches, there was in his time little disposition to open the question at all.[926] One of the very few instances where a painting of the kind is spoken of, was connected with a very discreditable scandal. At a time when party feeling ran very high, White Kennet, Bishop of Peterborough, the well-known author of 'Parochial Antiquities,' had made himself exceedingly obnoxious to some of the more extreme members of the High Church section, by his answer to Sacheverell's sermon upon 'false brethren.'[927] Dr. Welton, Rector of Whitechapel, put up at this juncture in his church a painted altar-piece in representation of the Last Supper, with Bishop Kennet conspicuous in it as Judas Iscariot. 'To make it the more sure, he had the doctor's great black patch put under his wig upon the forehead.'[928] It need hardly be added that the Bishop of London ordered the picture to be taken down.[929]

Sir Christopher Wren had intended to adorn the dome of St. Paul's with figures from sacred history, worked in mosaic by Italian artists. He was overruled. It was thought unusual, and likely also to be tedious and expensive.[930] But there were some who cherished a hope that some such embellishment was postponed only, not abandoned. Walter Harte, for example, the Nonjuror, in his poem upon painting, trusted that 'the cold north' would not always remain insensible to the claims of religious art. The time would yet come when we should see in our churches,

Above, around, the pictured saints appear,

and when especially the metropolitan cathedral would be radiant with the pictorial glory which befitted it.

Thy dome, O Paul, which heavenly views adorn, Shall guide the hands of painters yet unborn; Each melting stroke shall foreign eyes engage, And shine unrivalled through a future age.[931]

The question was brought forward in a practical shape in 1773. Two years earlier the State apartments at old Somerset Palace had been granted by the King to the Royal Academy. The chapel was included in the gift; and it was soon after suggested, at a general meeting of the society, 'that the place would afford a good opportunity of convincing the public of the advantages that would arise from ornamenting churches and cathedrals with works of art.'[932] This proposal was highly approved of by the society, and many of its members at once volunteered their services.

Their president, however, Sir Joshua Reynolds, proposed a bolder scheme.

He thought they should 'undertake St. Paul's Cathedral.' The amendment was carried unanimously. Application was accordingly made to the Dean and Chapter, who were pleased with the offer. Dean Newton, Bishop of Bristol, a great lover of pictures, was particularly favourable to the scheme, and warmly advocated it.[933] Sir Joshua promised 'The Nativity'; West offered his picture of 'Moses with the Laws'; Barry, Dance, Cipriani, and Angelica Kauffman engaged to present other paintings; and four other artists were afterwards added to the number.

But the trustees of the building--Cornwallis, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Terrick of London--disapproved. Terrick was especially hostile to the idea, and when the Dean waited upon him and told him, with some exultation, of the progress that had been made, put an absolute veto upon the whole project. 'My good Lord Bishop of Bristol,' he said, 'I have been already distantly and imperfectly informed of such an affair having been in contemplation; but as the sole power at last remains with myself, I therefore inform your lordship that, whilst I live and have the power, I will never suffer the doors of the metropolitan church to be opened for the introduction of Popery into it.'[934]

Bishop Newton says, in his 'Memoirs,' that though there were some objectors, opinion was generally in favour of the offer made by the Academy, and that some churches and chapels adopted the idea. But St.

Paul's probably suffered no loss through the further postponement of the decorations designed for it. In the first place, paintings--for these, rather than frescoes, appear to have been intended--were not the most appropriate kind of art for such an interior. Besides this, those 'earthly charms and graces,' which made Reynolds' style such an abomination to the delicate spiritual perceptions of the artist-poet Blake,[935] were by no means calculated to create any elevated ideal among his countrymen of what Christian art should be. And if the President of the Academy, the most renowned English painter of his age, was scarcely competent to such a work, what must be said of his proposed coadjutors? 'I confess,' said Dean Milman, 'I shudder at the idea of our walls covered with the audacious designs and tawdry colouring of West, Barry, Cipriani, Dance, and Angelica Kauffman.'[936] Such criticism would be very exaggerated if it were understood as a general condemnation of painters, whose merits in their own province of art were great. But it will universally be allowed that not to them, and scarcely to any other painters of the eighteenth century, could we look for the grandeur of thought or the elevated sentiment which an undertaking of the kind proposed so specially demanded.

Puritanism had been very destructive of the gla.s.s paintings which had added so much glory of colour to mediaeval churches. The art had begun to decline, from a variety of causes, at the beginning of the Reformation.

In Elizabeth's reign, few coloured windows of any note were executed.

Under James I. and Charles I. the taste to some degree revived. A new style of colouring was introduced by Van Linge,[937] a skilful Flemish artist, who appears to have settled in England about 1610, and found many liberal patrons. It was an interval when much activity was displayed throughout the kingdom in the work of repairing and beautifying churches. When he died, or left the country, the art became all but dormant. The Restoration did little to resuscitate it. Religious taste and feeling were at a low ebb. Not only in England, but throughout the Continent also, the gla.s.s painters had no encouragement, and were continually obliged to maintain themselves by practising the ordinary profession of a glazier. And besides, long after the time when painted windows had become secure from Puritanic violence, a feeling lingered on that there was something un-Protestant in them--something inconsistent, it might be, with the pure light of truth. For many years more, few were put up; nor these, for the most part, without much difference of opinion, and sometimes a great deal of angry controversy.[938] It may have stirred the irony of men who had no sympathy with these suspicions, that corporations and private persons who would by no means[939] admit into their churches windows in which scenes from our Saviour's life were pictured in hues that vied with those of the ruby and the sapphire had often no scruples in emblazoning upon them, to their own glorification, the arms of their family or their guild.[940] Winslow speaking of the east window[941] in University College, Oxford, done by Giles of York in 1687, the earliest example of a stained-gla.s.s window after the Restoration, remarks how much the art had deteriorated even in its most mechanical departments.[942] In the first quarter, however, of the eighteenth century, there was some improvement in it. Joshua Price, in the east window of St. Andrew's, Holborn, has 'rivalled the rich colouring of the Van Linges. The painting is deficient in brilliancy, and some of the shadows are nearly opaque; yet these defects may almost be overlooked in the excellence of its composition, and in its immense superiority over all other works executed between the commencement of the eighteenth century and the revival of the mosaic system.'[943]

Joshua Price also executed some of the side windows in Magdalene College, and restored, in 1715, those in Queen's College, Oxford, the work of Van Linge, which had been broken by the Puritans.[944] William Price painted, in 1702, the scenes from the life of Christ, depicted on the lower lights of Merton College Chapel. They are 'weak as regards colour, enamel being used almost to the subst.i.tution of coloured gla.s.s,'[945] and lose in beauty and effect by the glaring yellow in which they are framed. He also painted the windows which were put up in Westminster Abbey by order of Parliament in 1722,[946] and repaired with considerable skill the Flemish windows of Rubens's time, which he purchased and put up on the south side of New College Chapel.[947] It is remarkable that the Prices appear to have been the last who possessed the old secret of manufacturing the pure ruby gla.s.s.[948] After their time, until its rediscovery some forty years ago in France, it was a familiar instance of a 'lost art.'

When nearly fifty years had pa.s.sed, some little attention began to be once more turned, chiefly in colleges and cathedrals, to the adornment of churches with coloured windows. The most memorable examples are in New College Chapel. Pickett, of York, painted between 1765 and 1777 the lower lights of the northern windows in the choir, with much brilliancy of colour, but in a style very inferior to the work of the Flemings and William Price on the other side.[949] The great window in the antechapel, erected a few year later, certainly avoided that uniformity of gaudiness[950] which Warton so greatly complained of in Pickett's work. Its design employed for several years[951] the genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The central picture of the Nativity, after Correggio's 'Notte' at Modena, was exceedingly fine as a sketch in colours.

Unfortunately, it was wholly unsuited to gla.s.s, and remains a standing proof that oil and gla.s.s paintings cannot be rivals, their principles being essentially different. A competent critic p.r.o.nounces that had it been executed in coloured gla.s.s, it would still have been unsatisfactory.[952] As it is, the dull stains and enamels employed by Jarvis give it what Horace Walpole called 'a washed-out' effect.

Reynolds has introduced into it likenesses both of himself and Jarvis, as shepherds worshipping. Of the allegorical figures beneath, Hartley Coleridge justly remarks that personifications which are nowhere found in Scripture are not well adapted for a church window.[953]

Another gla.s.s painting of something the same character, and showing the same futile attempt at impossible effects of light and shade,[954] was a picture of the Resurrection, executed by Edgington, from a design by Sir Joshua Reynolds, for the Lady Chapel of Salisbury Cathedral. Mention should also be made of the great eastern window in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, by Jarvis and Forrest, and designed by West. The three last examples quoted by Dallaway are Pearson's windows in Brasenose Chapel, his scenes from St. Paul's life, at St. Paul's, Birmingham, and his 'Christ bearing the Cross,' at Wanstead, Ess.e.x.[955] All these were produced towards the close of the century. They have merit, but they show also how much had to be learnt before the slowly reviving art of gla.s.s painting could recover anything of its ancient splendour.

Many ancient church bells disappeared in the general wreck of monastic property at the commencement of the Reformation. Many more were broken up and sold during the Civil Wars. In the eighteenth century another danger awaited them. They were not converted into money for spendthrift courtiers, nor disposed of for State necessities, nor cast into cannons and other implements of war; but they came to be considered a useful fund which the guardians of churches could fall back upon. 'Very numerous were the instances in which four bells out of five have been sold by the parish to defray churchwardens' accounts.'[956] On the other hand, a great number of new bells were cast during the period, among which may be mentioned the great bell of St. Paul's, 1716, and those of the University Church, Cambridge, a peal particularly admired by Handel. The single family of Rudall of Gloucester, cast during the ninety years ending with 1774 no less than 3,594 church bells.

Bell-ringing is often spoken of as an exercise and recreation of educated men. Hearne, the famous Oxford antiquary, was pa.s.sionately fond of it. In his diary there are constant allusions to the feats of bell-ringing which took place in Oxford, and to the intricacies and technicalities of the art.[957] The learned Samuel Parr is said to have been excessively fond of church bells,[958] and so was Robert Southey the poet.

The old superst.i.tions connected with the inauguration of bells, and the services expected from them, had become exchanged in either case for a great deal of coa.r.s.e rusticity and vulgarity. Some pious aspiration was still in many cases graved upon the border of the metal; but often, instead of the old 'funera plango, fulgura frango,' &c., or the dedication to Virgin or saint, the churchwarden who ordered the bell would order also an inscription, composed by himself, commemorative of his work and office. The doggerel was sometimes absurd enough:--

Samuel Knight made this ring In Binstead Steeple for to ding;

or,

Thomas Eyer and John Winslade did contrive To cast from four bells this peal of five;

or,

At proper times my voice I'll raise, And sound to my subscribers' praise.[959]

And when the new bell was placed in the steeple, instead of the priestly unctions and quaint ceremonies of a past age, there was too often a heathenish scene of drunkenness and revelry. A common custom, alluded to by White of Selborne, was to fix it bottom upwards, and fill it with strong liquor. At Checkendon, in Oxfordshire, this was attended with fatal results. There is a tradition that one of the ringers helped himself so freely from the extemporised ale cask that he died on the spot, and was buried underneath the tower. Bells were still sometimes rung to dissipate thunderstorms, and perhaps to drive away contagion, under the notion that their vibrations purified the air. They were often rung on other occasions when they would have been much better silent.

At Bath no stranger of the smallest pretension to fashion could arrive without being welcomed by a peal of the Abbey bells.[960]

The curfew has not even yet fallen entirely into disuse. In the last century it was oftener heard to 'toll the knell of parting day.' At Ripon its place was supplied by a horn sounded every evening at nine.[961]

'If,' said Robert Nelson, 'his senses hold out so long, he can hear even his pa.s.sing bell without disturbance.' Towards the beginning of the century, this old custom seems to have been tolerably general. Its original object had been to invite prayers in behalf of a departing soul, and to summon the priest, if he had had no other admonition, to his last duty of extreme unction. It was retained by the sixty-seventh canon as a solemn reminder of mortality. But towards the end of the century it was fast becoming obsolete. Pennant, writing in 1796, says that though the practice was still punctually kept up in some places, it had fallen into general desuetude in the towns.[962]

Churches neglected and in disrepair were not likely to be surrounded by well-kept churchyards. During the Georgian period it was common enough to see churchyards which might have served as pictures of dreariness and gloom. Webb's collection of epitaphs, published in 1775, is prefaced by some introductory verses which intimate, without any idea of censure, a condition of things which was clearly not very exceptional in the churchyards of towns and populous villages:--

Here nauseous weeds each pile surround, And things obscene bestrew the ground; Skulls, bones, in mouldering fragments lie, All dreadful emblems of mortality.[963]

Secker hopes the clergy of his diocese will keep their churchyards 'neat and decent, taking the profits of the herbage in such manner as may rather add beauty to the place.' But he implies that there were many inc.u.mbents who turned their cattle into the sacred precincts, 'to defile them, and trample down the gravestones; and make consecrated ground such as you would not suffer courts before your own doors to be.'[964] And there were some who were not satisfied with turning in their cow and horse.[965] Practices lingered within the recollections of living men which would nowadays cause a parochial rebellion. While, for example, the transition from licence to order was in progress, a certain rector had sown an unoccupied strip of the burial-ground with turnips. The archdeacon at his visitation admonished this gentleman not to let him see turnips when he came there next year. The rebuked inc.u.mbent could so little comprehend these decorous scruples that he supposed Mr.

Archdeacon to be inspired by a zeal for agriculture, and the due rotation of crops. 'Certainly not, sir,' said he, ''twill be _barley_ next year.'[966]

For the most part, however, there was nothing to give gross offence to the eye. Gray, in his charming elegy, used words exactly expressive of the ordinary truth, when he called it 'this neglected spot.' It was tranquil enough, and suggestive of pensive meditation, shaded perhaps by rugged elms or melancholy yews; but the gra.s.s was probably rank and untended, and the ground a confused medley of shapeless heaps. Except in epitaphs, there were no particular signs of tenderness and care; no flowers, no shrubs, no crosses. The revival of care for our beauty and comeliness of churches, and the example of well-kept cemeteries, have combined, since the time of the last of the Georges, to effect an improvement in the general aspect of our churchyards, which was certainly very much needed. Culpable neglect, it may be added, was sometimes shown in the admission of jesting or profane epitaphs. The inscription on Gay's monument in Westminster Abbey is a well-known example. One other instance, in ill.u.s.tration, will be abundantly sufficient. Imagine the carelessness of supervision which could allow the following buffoonery to be set up (1764) in the cathedral churchyard of Winchester:--

Here rests in peace a Hampshire grenadier Who kill'd himself by drinking poor small beer; Soldier, be warned by his untimely fall, And when you're hot, drink strong, or none at all.[967]

In Wales, and in a few places in the south and west of England, the custom still lingered of planting graves with flowers and sweet herbs:--

Two whitened flintstones mark the feet and head; While there between full many a simple flower, Pansy and pink, with languid beauty smile; The primrose opening at the twilight hour, And velvet tufts of fragrant camomile.[968]

Pepys makes mention of a churchyard near Southampton where the graves were accustomed to be all sown with sage.[969]

Before leaving the subject of church fabrics and their immediate surroundings, some little mention should be made of the effort made at the beginning of the century to supply the deficiency of churches in London. 'After some pause,' writes Addison, in one of his Roger de Coverley papers, 'the old knight, turning about his head twice or thrice to take a survey of the great metropolis, bid me observe how thick the City was set with churches, and that there was scarce a single steeple on this side Temple Bar. "A most heathenish sight!" said Sir Roger.

"There is no religion at this end of the town. The fifty new churches will very much mend the prospect, but church work is slow, very slow."'[970] That growth of London, which was to bring within its vast embrace village after village and hamlet after hamlet, was already fast progressing, and in the early part of the century had greatly outstripped all church provision. Dean Swift, it is said, has the credit of having first aroused public attention to this want. In a paragraph of his 'Project for the Advancement of Religion,' he had said 'that five parts out of six of the people are absolutely hindered from hearing divine service, particularly here in London, where a single minister with one or two curates has the care sometimes of about 20,000 souls inc.u.mbent on him.'[971] A resolution was carried in the House of Commons (May 1711), that fifty new churches were necessary within the bills of mortality, and 350,000_l._ were granted for the purpose, 'which was a very popular thing.'[972] Of the proposed fifty, twelve were built; the money for which was raised by a duty on coal--2_s._ per chaldron from 1716 to 1720, and 3_s._ from 1720 to 1724.[973] After this exertion the work of church-building seems to have pretty nearly ended for the century. Towards the middle of it, the bishops complained in their Charges that there was no spirit for building churches, and that the occasional briefs issued for the purpose brought in very little.[974]

Fifty years later the question had again become too serious to be overlooked, and with the revival of deeper religion in the Church, there was little likelihood of its being allowed to rest. In large towns, the disproportion between the population and the number and size of churches had become so great 'that not a tenth of the inhabitants could be received into them were they so disposed.'[975] A return made in 1811 showed that in a thousand large parishes in different parts of the kingdom there was church accommodation for only a seventh part of their aggregate population.[976] Parliament granted a million for the erection of new churches, and large subscriptions were raised by the societies.

But Polwhele, writing in 1819, said there were two large London parishes, with a joint population of above 120,000, which kept their village churches with room for not more than 200; and that in 1812, Dr.

Middleton tried in vain to build a new church for St. Pancras, where the population was 100,000, and the church would only accommodate 300.[977]

These facts seem almost incredible; probably the writer from whom they are quoted overlooked subsidiary chapels attached to the parish church.

It is, however, very clear that in London and many of the large towns no energetic efforts had for a long time been made to meet necessities of very crying urgency.