Part 5

He could have given the school a larger income by putting his £325 into the Three per Cents. at the price they stood at then. As he did not do that, he would hardly have approved of selling the land and putting the proceeds into Funding Loan, though this will give a larger income than the rent in recent years. The present rent is not the only thing to be considered in trusts that are in perpetuity. Harrow accepted a fixed annual sum in lieu of the rent of land that then was farms and now is part of London.

At the Parish Meeting there was an overwhelming majority against the sale--only five people voting for it--and nearly the same majority for a resolution calling on the trustees to resign. But the sale was carried through by a majority of the trustees in spite of every protest. Three of the trustees in the majority were people who had only lately come to live in Lustleigh, and the most active of them was a new arrival who soon went away. Things have changed since Parson Davy’s time. He was here for forty years himself: the living of Lustleigh was held by two Rectors for ninety-six years, 1791 to 1887; and the living of Bovey was held by two Vicars for a hundred years, 1735 to 1835. In the present century there have already been four Rectors of Lustleigh, and the vacancies have not been caused by death.

These people who come and go, will never take the same amount of interest in a place as those who spend the best part of their lives there; and they may even take delight in doing some lasting damage to a place that has not quite appreciated them. That is a kindly view to take. Unkind people called the sale a job; and nobody believed the talk of getting more money for school prizes--Lustleigh is some miles from Buncombe. If more money was wanted for the prizes, there were plenty of people who would have subscribed the few pounds’ difference between the rent of the meadow and the interest on the Funding Loan.

The new-comers at Lustleigh always call the old school-house ‘the old vestry’ for some reason that I cannot comprehend--vestry-meetings were held in one of the rooms there, but the building was always called the school. What they call ‘the new vestry’ is an excrescence from the church: it is in the angle between the chancel and south transept, spoiling the exterior of the church, and making the interior dark by blocking windows up. It contains the organ; and organs are not always worth the space they take and the disfigurement they cause. The south transept of Exeter Cathedral is disfigured by a row of 32-foot pipes, standing by themselves; and this bit of hideousness only gives a dozen extra notes. I do not think the extra notes are worth the sacrifice.

Churches suffer badly from additions and improvements and injudicious gifts, and Lustleigh church has suffered very badly in that way--there is always something being done. A pavement of coloured marbles has just been laid down in the chancel there, to replace a pavement of encaustic tiles that was laid down sixty years ago in place of the old pavement of rough granite slabs. The tiles were an Albert Memorial, and had the monogram of V. and A.; but they were very slippery, and it looked undignified for any cleric to sit down unexpectedly upon the chancel floor. The marble pavement is a gift, and people consider it unmannerly to look a gift-horse in the mouth, even if the beast is not worth stabling. Nevertheless, there is a way of saying courteously that your stable is unworthy of such a noble steed, and the steed might find some better stabling in another place.

When a building has a character of its own, you ought not merely to abstain from putting in things that are out of character with it: you ought to put in things that will bring its character out. Siena cathedral is a gorgeous building, and it has the finest pavement in the world; and the pavement makes the building look more gorgeous still. You can tell exactly how much the building is indebted to the pavement, as the pavement is covered over with boarding (to protect it) during a great part of the year, and then the building looks comparatively poor. If the Siena pavement could be laid in Lustleigh church, it would not give splendour to the church: it would only make you discontented with the roughness of the pillars and arches and the effigies of the old knights who held the place six centuries ago. The old pavement of rough granite slabs was far more suited to the rugged grandeur of the church.

There may, of course, be additions to a church which are so splendid in themselves that the church itself sinks into insignificance beside them: such, for example, as Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant statues in the church at Innsbruck. Had there been anything of that kind here, few people would have cared what happened to the church itself. But the additions here have only been the ordinary things in marble, brass, mosaic, painting, coloured glass; and they have made this rugged moorland church look quite suburban.

There are two great monuments in Bovey church, one to Nicholas Eveleigh, who died in 1620, and the other to Elizæus Hele, who died in 1635. Elizæus was better known as Pious-Uses Hele, having given his estates away for pious uses--amongst other things, Blue Maids’ Hospital at Exeter had £50 a-year from Bovey mill. He married Eveleigh’s widow; and she erected these monuments to her two husbands, though both of them were buried elsewhere. There is a recumbent figure of each husband, and in Hele’s case there are also kneeling figures of the wife and a former wife and a young son who had died. Over the recumbent figure there is a rounded arch with columns, architrave, etc., as if it were a gateway; and in the earlier monument the style is pure Italian of a hundred years before, whereas the later monument is what is called Jacobean, with the Italian style debased by Flemish and German methods. The change is curious: after the Italian of 1620, one would expect the Palladian of Inigo Jones in 1635 rather than this belated Jacobean.

They stand on the north and south sides of the chancel, almost touching the east end; and on the east wall between them there was mahogany panelling with columns and festoons carved in the style of Grinling Gibbons. The panelling just suited the monuments and enhanced their merits; but there came a time when it was the ambition of the clergy to make their chancels look like show-rooms in church-furnishers’ shops; and then the panelling was taken down and thrown into a barn. The present Vicar has brought it back, and put it at the west end of the church; and I hope that it will some day go back to the east end, and oust the rubbish that is there.

He has also brought back the royal-arms that were thrown out at the same time, and has put them in the arch below the tower. These royal-arms are a grand piece of wood-carving, set up at the Restoration together with the arms of archbishop Laud and bishop Hall of Exeter, with suitable inscriptions about “that wicked and bloody Parliment.” They stood on the screen, with the royal shield just where the rood had been, and the Lion and the Unicorn in the places of the Blessed Virgin and Saint John.

The rood-loft has been reconstructed (but without a rood) and I do not think it has improved the church. However small a church may be, the rood-loft must be large enough for people to pass along it to the rood, and may thus be very much too large to suit the church. And this new rood-loft looks too large, though Bovey church is not so very small. Most churches, I suspect, looked all the better for the compromise of 10 October 1561, which took away their rood-lofts and left them their screens.

By this compromise the rood-loft is to be “so altered that the upper part of the same, with the soller, be quite taken down unto the upper parts of the vaults and beam running in length over the said vaults ... putting some convenient crest upon the said beam.” If the rood-loft has already been removed and “there remain a comely partition betwixt the chancel and the church,” no alteration is to be attempted; but “where no partition is standing,” a partition must be built.

In this district the screens usually are woodwork, elaborately carved: very few are stone. The beam is eight or ten feet from the ground, and is supported by uprights three or four feet apart; and between the uprights there is solid panelling to a height of about three feet, and then open tracery for the rest of the height, making a sort of Gothic window with its arched head touching the beam and springing from the uprights two or three feet below. At the springing of these arched window-heads there were segments of arches, springing out on each side of the screen, and combining with the window-heads to form a kind of vaulting underneath the soller, or rood-loft floor. The rood-loft was approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall or in a little turret outside, with entrance and exit both inside the church; and where the rood-loft has been taken down, the exit leads out on to the little pinnacles of the ‘crest’ of the beam; and then the effect is comic, as no one but a rope-dancer could ever walk along them. It is so in Lustleigh church and in many others. On the Lustleigh screen there are carvings of pomegranates--the badge of Aragon--and possibly the screen dates from the time of Catherine of Aragon or her daughter. But the pomegranates have their sides cut open to show the grains inside, and thus look very like bunches of grapes with leaves enclosing them. In early Christian art palm-trees grew into candlesticks with candles in them, the leaves becoming the flame; and I rather suspect a similar transformation here.

Many rood-lofts were taken down by Henry VIII and Edward VI, but several were put up again by Mary, and some were never taken down at all. Opinion was divided; and this compromise of Elizabeth’s (which covered many other points) was “for the avoiding of much strife and contention that have heretofore arisen among the Queen’s subjects in divers parts of the realm.” In this part of England the strife and contention had taken the form of open rebellion in 1549; and the rebels came to Bovey. In answer to some interrogatories, 4 January 1602, Richard Clannaborough of Lustleigh, yeoman, “of the age of fowerscore and ten yeares or there aboutes,” said he had known Bovey mill “ever synce the Commotion in the tyme of the raigne of the late Kinge Edward the Sixth.”

This rebellion, usually called the Commotion, began on Whitmonday, 10 June, the new prayer-book having come into use on Whit-sunday; and it went on until 6 August, when the King’s men defeated the rebels on Clyst Heath and raised the siege of Exeter. The siege had lasted for five weeks, and seemed likely to end in a capitulation, as supplies were running short and many of the citizens were in favour of the rebels. These rebels carried the Host with them on a wagon--as at the Battle of the Standard in 1138--and these were some of their demands. ‘Wee wil have al the general councels and holy decrees of our forefathers observed kept and performed; and whosoever shal again-say them, we hold them as hereticks.’ ‘We wil have the Bible and al books of Scripture in English to be called in again.’ ‘We wil not receive the new service, because it is but like a Christmas game; but we wil have our old service of Mattins, Mass, Evensong and Procession in Latine, as it was before. And so we the Cornish men, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English.’

Those rebels (or their leaders) showed great sense in their demands for Latin prayers and books. They wanted something sonorous to which they could give a general assent, and saw that if it were in English they would soon be squabbling over details. And people have been squabbling over details ever since.

Mesopotamia is notoriously a blessed word, but in some cases a mistranslation. Parapotamia is less sonorous, but sometimes more exact--the country on the west side of the Euphrates, not the east side. But people do not care much where such places were, provided that the names sound well. One day some foreigners were here; and somebody heard me talking to them, and then went telling everybody else, “Strangers come here from all parts to visit’n, and to each one of’n he speaketh in their own tongues, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and all the rest of’n.”

In some places in the south of Italy they still read the Gospels in Greek on certain festivals; and I once heard this reading, but cannot now remember where. I do not think the congregation understood a word of it, but they mostly put on the expression of connoisseurs when sampling a rare wine. In ancient times there was a ritual of that sort at Pæstum--Athenæos quotes an account of it (XIV. 31) from one of the lost works of Aristoxenos of Tarentum about 300 B.C. The descendants of the old Greek settlers had become ‘barbarians,’ that is to say, they had adopted the manners and customs and the language of their neighbours there; but once a year they had a day of lamentation on which they spoke Greek words in memory of the past. I have seen something like that in Jerusalem, at the Place of Wailing at the foot of the great wall. Jews go there to wail and pray; and I was told that many of them did not know the meaning of the Hebrew words they used.

Whether it is understandable or not, the English of the Bible is very fine indeed; but not, I think, so perfect as people generally say. It is difficult to judge, as it has now become a standard, like the English of Shakespeare’s plays. Ben Jonson thought that some of Shakespeare’s lines might be improved; and he was a good judge. People now think the weakest lines superb; and they admire the Bible also without discrimination.

There is no virtue in using a language that is ‘understanded of the people,’ if it is used for saying things that will be misinterpreted. In modern English ‘virgin’ means ‘virgo intacta,’ but that is not the meaning of ‘almah’ in the Hebrew of Isaiah, VII. 14. Every schoolboy knows (to his cost) that ‘deum’ is accusative, not vocative; and _Te Deum_ is mistranslated--the older part may be heretical or even pagan. There are hundreds and thousands of these mistranslations and misinterpretations and statements that are unintelligible without long explanation. Readers very often fail to see the meaning of it all, and sometimes will not face the meaning when it is quite clear.

No doubt, Scripture is taught in every school; but there are many ways of teaching it. Lustleigh has a County Council school, and the Scripture teaching is regulated by a County Council syllabus. The syllabus says what things the children are to read, and what they are to learn by heart; and when people grumble at the Education Rate, I remind them that every well-taught child in Devon can say the names of the Ten Plagues of Egypt as glibly as a parrot. And then, of course, they feel that they are getting value for their money.

Old folk used to search the Scriptures very diligently here, and picked up words and phrases that they used in most embarrassing ways. One old lady told me in sorrow and in wrath, “The Parson, he come here, and I spoke Scripture to’n. And ‘good mornin’,’ he saith, ‘good mornin’,’ and up he were and away over they steps ’fore I could say another word.” I found that she had used some words the Parson had to read in church but did not wish to hear elsewhere.

I have two volumes here of Miracles and Lives of Saints, with coloured plates; and two small children who came to stay with me, used to call them the Funny Books, as the pictures in them were so funny. By the time these children came again, they had just learned to read; but I forgot this when I let them have the Funny Books again, and presently a little voice read out, “Now a certain nun became with child, and....” I stopped the reading, but could not stop the questions that they asked.

A small boy of my acquaintance had duly learned to say his prayers and was having a course of Scripture stories, but went on strike when he was told of the creation of Eve. He said that it was mean of God to put Adam to sleep and then take a rib away; and to show God what he thought of it, he would stop off saying his prayers. The strike lasted for six weeks.

The creation of Eve is sculptured in relief on the Campanile at Florence and on the Façade of Orvieto Cathedral; and in these reliefs (and also in some others) the sculptors have kept closely to their text, ‘God created Man in his own image.’ Adam and the Creator are exactly alike, even in the growth of the beard and the arrangement of the hair--the same model served for both. Anthropomorphism is an artifice that must be used, and I think those sculptors used it more effectively than Michaelangelo. In his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel he makes Adam a young man of twenty and the Creator an old man of seventy, not the least like Adam, and neither human nor divine. There is a picture by Pesellino in the National Gallery (No. 727) portraying the three Persons of the Trinity. An old lady told me, forty years ago, that she took one of her maids there soon after this picture had arrived: the maid stared at the First Person for some considerable time, and then said, “Lor’, mum, d’you think it’s like?”

In King’s College Chapel at Cambridge the central figure in the great east window, usually mistaken for God Almighty, is really Pontius Pilate; and I am always pleased to see him on his judgement-seat up there--it is some compensation for the ignorant abuse that is poured out on him from pulpits. In the case before the Court the Prisoner had pleaded guilty--‘thou sayest’--to the charge of claiming to be a King: the Prosecution would not allow the charge to be withdrawn; and the Judge was bound to pass the sentence which the Law prescribed.

I fancy Pilate may have misinterpreted a phrase. Julius Cæsar had been canonized as ‘divus,’ and Augustus therefore styled himself ‘divi filius,’ and afterwards was also canonized as ‘divus.’ But while ‘divi filius’ and ‘dei filius’ were quite distinct in Latin, they were both translated into Greek as ‘theou uios.’ (There is no question of misreadings here: the phrase is in inscriptions and on coins.) Saint Paul says that the Gentiles thought his doctrines ‘foolishness,’ and Pilate might think it ‘foolishness’ for anyone to claim to be a son of God; but it would be a serious matter for anyone to claim to be a son of the late Emperor, especially if he also claimed to be a King.

The ancient portraits of Christ are of two different types, the oldest portraits making him a beardless youth, and more recent portraits making him a bearded man. The very old portraits agree with the tradition (Luke, II. 2) that the Nativity was at the time of the census by Quirinius. That was at the end of 6 or beginning of 7 A.D., and the Crucifixion may have been as early as the spring of 27 A.D., as Pilate was in office then: in which case there obviously could not be any genuine portraits of Christ above the age of twenty. The more recent portraits agree with the traditions that make Christ over thirty at the Crucifixion. But in these portraits it is another kind of face, not the same face in maturer years; and the youthful face is usually much pleasanter, betokening a Deity who would delight in turning water into wine.

I should account for the two heads by saying that the bearded head was originally meant for John the Baptist, and mistaken afterwards for Christ. At any rate, John has a bearded head like this in those early representations of the Baptism where Christ is portrayed as a beardless youth. But the bearded head is universally accepted now, and it has been idealized. The greatest of these imaginary portraits is Leonardo da Vinci’s in his fresco of the Last Supper--at any rate it was so when I first saw it (1869) and for some years after that, but when I saw it last (1913) the whole fresco had been washed over with some preservative, and it did not seem the same. Perhaps Leonardo had read more into the Gospels than is really there: one might think that Christ was saying sorrowfully, those were the best disciples he could get, and what a gang they were--if one of them did not betray him, another one would. There is the gesture of the hands, and the face is full of disappointment and disdain.

There is a stained-glass window in the Guildhall at Plymouth depicting the inauguration of the building by the Prince of Wales in 1874; and this is the only window I have seen in which a chimney-pot hat is represented in stained glass. The hat has come out well--the stained glass gives it all the lustre of hot-ironing. Designers of commemorative windows might brighten up their works by putting in a few such hats; and artistically this chimney-pot is every bit as good as the rectangular haloes of a thousand years before. Charlemagne had a rectangular halo in a mosaic in the Lateran: Theodora and Pope Paschal still have rectangular haloes in the mosaics in saint Praxed’s church at Rome; and the Prince of Wales would have had a rectangular halo, had he been living then.

Saints and angels had round haloes, but other people had to be content with square or oblong haloes while they were alive. I do not know why this was so, or what a halo really was--whether it was a thing like a rainbow which always faces you, or whether it was a flat and rigid thing which you saw obliquely when the wearer turned aside: the Old Masters have depicted it both ways. For want of higher authority I draw my own conclusions from such things as Toto Maidalchini says: namely, that saint Cassian, being puzzled, scratched his head, and thereby put his halo all awry; or that saints Pancras and Sebastian went bathing in one of the rivers of Paradise, and then sat upon the river bank while their haloes were drying in the sun.

The rectangular halo is very useful for determining dates: it shows that the fresco or mosaic was executed in the lifetime of the personage who has the halo. But mosaics often need repairing--the little glass cubes get loose and come away--and after centuries of small repairs there may not be much of the original left, even if it has not all been taken down at various times in order to repair the wall behind it. When I was in Rome in 1876 the mosaics in the apse of the Lateran were lying on the floor. One of the Canons explained to me that they were just taking down the apse and rebuilding it a little further back, as the choir did not give them space enough for ceremonial. (I thought the Canons might have been content with what had satisfied the greatest Popes; and I tried to tell him so.) When the apse had been rebuilt, the mosaics were put back in it: a creditable bit of Nineteenth Century work, but still described as Thirteenth in the guides.

One day in 1874 I was on the tower of the Pleissenburg at Leipzig looking at the battlefield--it is a wide view, extending to Luetzen and the battlefield of 1632. There was an old man up there who had been in the great battle (1813) and I asked him whereabouts the windmill was, from which Napoleon watched it. He pointed out the windmill, and added with a grin, “Windmill burned down: man build another: man say it same.”--When the Campanile at Venice was being built up again, the brickwork ‘sweated’ and gave the red a curious tinge of white; and in the evenings in the glare of the Piazza I could have sworn it was the ghost of the old Campanile that I had seen there forty years before. That was in 1909; but when I saw it in 1913, I felt that the old Campanile had come to life again.