Letters from England/The Pilgrim Visits Cathedrals
The Pilgrim Visits Cathedrals
CATHEDRAL towns are small towns with large cathedrals, in which immoderately long services are held; and the sacristan comes up and enjoins the tourist not to look at the ceiling and the pillars, but to sit down in a pew and listen to what is being sung by the choir. This is the custom of the sacristans in Ely, Lincoln, York and Durham; I do not know what they do elsewhere, as I have not been elsewhere. I heard a huge quantity of litanies, psalms, anthems and hymns, and I perceived that English cathedrals usually have wooden ceilings, in consequence of which the buttress system of continental Gothic has not been developed in them; that the Perpendicular pillars in England have the appearance of complicated water-pipes; that the Protestant sacristans are dourer than the Catholic ones and are just as addicted to tips as the Italian sacristans, except that—being gentlemen—the tips they get must be bigger; that the Reformation accomplished a very swinish piece of work when it knocked off the heads of statues and removed pictures and other pagan idolatries from the churches. As a result the English cathedrals are bare and strange, as if nobody had been placed in charge of them. And what is worse, in the middle of the chief nave there is an enclosed choir for the parsons, ministrants and the élite of the diocese; the rest of the people are seated below and see nothing but the more or less carved walls of the choir and the back of the organ; the chief nave is thus thoroughly spoilt, the whole of the space is cut into two; never have I seen anything so absurd. But as they are still singing something there in the choir, I must arise and depart.
Ely, Ely, lama sabachtanil You betrayed me, Ely, dead town, lying at the foot of a 
romanesque cathedral, when, tired and thirsty at five o’clock in the afternoon, I knocked at the doors of tea-rooms and taverns, beer shops, tobacconists and stationers, but it was not opened unto me. At five o’clock in the afternoon Ely is asleep; unhappily I had no time to investigate what Ely does at three o’clock in the afternoon or at ten o’clock in the morning; perhaps it just does nothing else but sleep. So I sat down amid the cow-manure in the public park and gazed at the venerable cathedral, which stands there for the praise of God. The jackdaws round the towers are perhaps the souls of sacristans who during their lifetime haunted the church. Ely is asleep.
Lincoln runs up a little hill, has a castle and a cathedral, as well as some relic of the Romans—I have forgotten what it is; the cathedral is grey and beautiful, and choral services are held there for three sacristans who watch me with enmity. What can I do? Farewell, sacristans, I am going to have a peep at York.
At York the cathedral is still more beautiful; I wanted to look over it, but the sacristan said I should desist from this, as a service would be held shortly. So I went for a stroll on the ramparts, and from there I made a drawing of York Minster, although they were holding a service in it; perhaps I shall go to the English hell for so doing. Around is the fair region of Yorkshire, a landscape of massive cows and renowned pigs, the head-quarters of all English hams and bacons; and the streets in York are old and pretty, with projecting gables and black rafters. I could say a great deal about the history of York, but I must go to Durham.
The cathedral at Durham is very ancient, and towers up from a high rock; inside, they are holding a service with sermon, song and sacristans; nevertheless, I saw the grave of the Venerable Bede, thick-set pillars and cloisters, and a detachment of pretty American girls; the pillars are covered with a deeply engraved fluting which produces a curious, almost polychromatic effect. Besides this, there is also the grave of St. Cuthbert, an old castle and old stone cottages, as well as a pretty little town running from hill to hill; but more than this I do not know.
Thus English ecclesiastical architecture is on the whole less picturesque and less plastic than that of the Continent. When the ancient Britons had once contrived to build enormous church naves with a wooden ceiling, they kept to it in Gothic as well, evidently prompted by a primitive conservatism; and so their churches are large halls with broad windows, without vaultage or groins, without any huge system of buttresses, arches, cornices and the whole of that plastic riot; and they have two rectangular towers by the gateway and one above the cross-ties, statues flung out by the Reformation and scanty sculptural adornment, the inner space spoilt by the choir and the general impression considerably upset by the presence of sacristans.
But just one word about you, tiny churches without choirs and sacristans, bare and cold ante-rooms of God, with an oaken roof, a grassy graveyard around, and a rectangular belfry among the trees, which is as typical of the English country-side as the onion shaped church domes are of ours; belfries which mark the passage of time with an eternally changeless chant over the eternally changeless graves of the departed.
