Part 6

If buildings are burnt out or tumble down, there is no remedy but reconstruction. But people are too fond of reconstructing buildings that are still intact, and making them ‘as good as new.’ If they want to know what a building looked like when it was new, they can surely build a copy of it somewhere else, and go and look at that: instead of putting a new front on the north transept of Westminster Abbey, they might have stuck it on a building like Truro Cathedral which is completely new. And the new front is not even a true copy of the original front--amongst other things, it has eleven little arches where there could never have been more than eight. When I go to see a historic building, I want to see it as it really was, not as a modern architect may think it should have been; and when I find a Thirteenth Century design just finished in fresh stone, I feel the work is out of date or I am out of date myself--instead of a black coat and chimney-pot, I ought to be in gold brocade with crimson tights and a feather in my cap.

Judged by its architecture Truro Cathedral would be about two centuries earlier than the old church which is built into it, and it really is about four centuries later. The church may pass for an addition to an older building, when the new stonework has lost its glare. No doubt, in Burgos Cathedral the triforium is of an earlier style than the arches underneath it, though they were built at the same time; but Gothic was not indigenous in Spain, and Burgos was designed by German architects in an eclectic way. I do not think that this absurdity exists elsewhere, except as a result of alterations: at Furness Abbey, I feel sure, the arches in the transepts originally were round (like those in the triforium up above them) and were converted into pointed arches afterwards. The walls were weakened by these alterations, and that was why the central tower fell; at least, I think so.

The round archways in the cloisters show how splendid Furness Abbey would have been with its original design. But the old church-builders never knew when to stop: they ran after all the latest fashions in design, and in fact were out (as we should say) to beat the record. Their flying-buttresses were towers of force: at least, a verger told me that a bishop said so. But their biggest efforts often failed--Amiens Cathedral looks all right when you see it from the triforium, but you generally see it from the floor, and then it looks too high. And there were many problems that they never solved at all: for instance, they built naves like tunnels and just walled them up at the west end, whereas a nave requires a narthex or an apse or some such thing to terminate it.

Gothic is never at its best except in ruins--Chartres does not equal Tintern--and I have felt this even here. Lower Wreyland is an ordinary bit of cottage architecture; but there was no roof on the north end of it for several weeks in 1901, and then it looked quite grand with a granite gable standing out against the sky, and moonlight streaming through the empty windows. One’s appreciation of a building will always be affected by the atmosphere in which one may have seen it. In going up the Nile in 1882 my boat stuck in the mud close by Kom Ombo on a brilliant moonlight night; and I thought the temple there as beautiful a thing as I had ever seen, but changed my mind on seeing it by daylight as I came down stream. So also at Granada, I was once in the Alhambra on a rainy day, 22 September 1877, and could hardly believe it was the building that looked so like a fairy palace when I had seen it in the scorching sun. And with some pictures also, such as Tintoretto’s _Bacchus and Ariadne_ in the Doge’s Palace or Michaelangelo’s _Last Judgement_ in the Sistine Chapel, there is no life or beauty in them unless the sun is strong enough to bring the colouring out.

We have not sun enough in England to justify the use of Classic architecture or Palladian. These styles demand the glare of Greece and Italy; and sometimes that is not enough--in bleak places, such as Phigaleia or Segesta, I have found the old Greek temples too austere without their ancient colouring. However, these styles are now established here; and the only consolation is that they are all reduced to rule, so that ambitious architects do not come to grief with them as badly as with Gothic.

One of the worst faults of English architects is that when they have a building of great width, they put a portico or some such ‘feature’ in the centre and another at each end, and thus destroy the broad effect of width without creating an effect of height. The old Museum at Berlin was more imposing with its eighteen columns in a single line than the British Museum with its forty-four in different lines projecting at the centre and the ends; and with a colonnade the whole width of Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery might not have been unworthy of its site. At the Imperial Institute there is a tower in the middle and a tower near each end. The towers would be commendable, if they stood out alone; but the main building detracts from their effect of height, and they detract from its effect of breadth: and this is waste. Yet a tower does not impair the effect, if it divides a long front into two unequal parts, like the Rath-haus tower at Leipzig, built in 1556. I cannot understand why this is so, but observation has convinced me that it is a fact.

Architecture is not to be picked up from books: you have to go to see the buildings for yourself. There are books condemning the corners of the Valmarana Palace at Vicenza, and these certainly look feeble in Palladio’s design. The design just shows the building by itself; but really it is in a street, with lower buildings on each side of it. The corners carry your eyes down to these, and are exactly right.

In contrast with the Valmarana, the Casa del Diavolo has a most uncompromising corner, as if Palladio meant the building to look higher than it really is, and dwarf all its surroundings. Apparently, it was to have six columns along the front with five narrow windows squeezed in between them, but it has only three columns and two windows: the rest was never built. They are gigantic columns on high pedestals; and these vertical lines do as much for the effect of height here as the horizontal lines of the Basilica for its effect of breadth. There is also a house at Exeter (84, Queen Street) which I always call the Casa del Diavolo, with no aspersions on the occupier or the owner, but just because it is a little like that building at Vicenza. It has only four columns, though wide enough for five or six: its windows are too wide, and the columns have no pedestals; and thus it misses most of the effect of the real thing.

In ‘this sweete towne,’ as Evelyn describes Vicenza, ‘full of gentlemen and splendid palaces,’ the Teatro Olimpico was completed from Palladio’s designs in 1584 and was inaugurated with a play of Sophocles. (I have often wondered what Shakespeare would have made of it, had he been present there.) The scenery is solid architecture, built according to perspective so that you may think that you are looking down long streets. But when a man goes down the street, you see him growing bigger and bigger in proportion to the houses on each side of him; and all illusion is dispelled. I feel the actors should be life-size marionettes that could be dwarfed down by deflation when they make their exits at the back. This scenery that does not shift, has never been a real success; nor has the auditorium. Palladio was copying Vitruvius, and made it pseudo-Roman; and a modern audience looks as foolish there as in the Bradfield theatre, which is pseudo-Greek.

In these theatres and in those that really are antique, a great effect might be attained with audience as well as actors in antique costume. If the modern audience does not care to dress in Greek or Roman style, there might at least be labels. I have seen people going to rehearsals of a Pageant in plain clothes with cards pinned on them--courtier, soldier, buccaneer, etc.; and the audience might have cards as well--archon, quæstor, trierarch, etc. Imagination might then do the rest, though costumes would be better. But such costumes are usually a compromise of what the ancients really wore and what can now be worn. I remember a lady going to a ball in fancy dress as Cæsar’s Wife; and a newspaper described her dress as safety-pins and gauze, but chiefly safety-pins. However, safety-pins are quite a good defence against snap-shots. There is ‘halation’ from the metal of the pins, so that the photograph is blurred and looks as if they were continuous, like pieces of chain-mail.

Not long ago a Lustleigh boy was going to be a Roman Senator in some theatricals in town, and he wrote home to his mother to send him the materials for making up a Toga. Not knowing what a Toga was, she sent him the materials for making up a Toque--an inadequate costume for Roman Senators, even at the Lupercalia.

There are childrens’ recitations at Christmas time in Rome in the church of Ara Coeli. A platform is erected in the nave; and every afternoon there is a crowd of children, and they go up, one by one, and recite their pieces with as much assurance as if they were accustomed to addressing public meetings every day. When listening to them, I have thought of May Day here and the overpowering shyness of the boys who have to make the little speech at the crowning of the Queen. I cannot remember more than one boy here who spoke as well as any of the children there; and he was so full of his speech that he put the crown on upside down, enveloping her eyes and nose in flowers that were intended to stand up above the rest. However, older people may do worse. Archbishop Temple was an octogenarian, and yet he all but put King Edward’s crown on with the hinder part in front.

The southern races have a greater gift of oratory than is customary here, and they seem to pass from childhood into manhood at a very much earlier age. John XII was only eighteen when he was elected Pope in 956, and four-and-twenty when he crowned Otho as Emperor; and at two-and-twenty he confirmed Saint Dunstan in the see of Canterbury and made him Papal Legate here, with what results we know. No doubt, a young man might become a Pope by influence or simony, but never an Heresiarch except on his own merits; and some of the great heretics were very young. Clement of Alexandria says in his _Stromateis_, III. 428, that Epiphanes the son of Carpocrates was only seventeen when he died: yet he had imperilled Christianity by his doctrine of Free Love. This young scamp of an Heresiarch was a contemporary of Antinoos; and it is one of the puzzles of ancient history why Christians or Pagans ever took such people seriously. But we must look at the paintings in the Catacombs rather than the writings of the Fathers, if we would understand the blithe life of the early Christians when Erôs was Patriarch of Antioch and Anterôs was Pope.

Leo X went into residence at Rome in 1492, being then a Cardinal and aged sixteen; and he had a letter from his father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, telling him how to behave there and above all things (una regola sopra l’altre) to get up early in the morning and set to work upon the business of the day. According to Domenichi, _Facetie_, p. 129, ed. 1581, Ugolino Martelli asked Lorenzo why he did not get up early himself, whereupon Lorenzo asked him what he did when he got up, and then told him that it was not worth while getting up to do such trivial things. That was an answer to Ugolino, but not an answer to the question that he asked, as Lorenzo certainly had weighty things to do; but it acknowledges that early rising is merely a means to an end, not an end in itself, as some fanatics say. In his _Duty and Advantages of Early Rising_ John Wesley says that (by the grace of God) he rose at four and had done so for sixty years, but he also says that he could not subsist with less than six hours and a half of sleep: so he must have gone to bed by half past nine. He does not show that it is any better to be awake at four or five in the morning than at ten or eleven at night; and in winter it certainly is worse, as vitality is at its lowest in the hours before dawn.

Wesley took the sleep he needed, six hours and a half; but many saintly men have given themselves so little time for sleep that they can never have been healthily awake, unless they got some sleep at unappointed times. Bonaventura says of Francis of Assisi that his prayers were sometimes mingled with indescribable groans, ‘gemitibus inenarrabilibus.’ That is in the _Legenda Sancta_, ‘the life of a saint, written by a saint, to be read in the spirit of a saint’; but the Devil has sometimes tempted me to think that those indescribable groans were snores.

My uncle, Cecil King, strayed into a Wesleyan chapel between Charlestown and Holmbush on 17 April 1843, and this is his account of it. “I found them singing, and took the opportunity of entering an empty seat. Soon after, the congregation turned round to pray, and I followed their example. There were no lights in the chapel, so that one could scarcely discern anything. They had not commenced the prayer when a woman gave a deep groan. I turned round, thinking she might be ill, and just then a man cried out ‘Lord have mercy upon us.’ I could not tell what was the matter, and began to look about me in astonishment, but I now heard the prayer beginning, and was preparing to pay attention, when cries of ‘Praised be the Lord,’ ‘Blessed be the name of the Lord,’ arose in wild confusion. ‘Amens’ and other exclamations assailed my ears each moment, and presently I could hear one raising his voice above all others to let them know that he was praying. ’Twas a scene too ridiculous for one accustomed to the meekness of the Church.” He was sixteen then--he died when he was twenty--and he was on a walking tour in Cornwall with a friend of his, Tom Oliver. They both kept careful journals of the tour, and Oliver’s was printed afterwards. It gives the opening of the hymn they heard, “We most of us can pray aloud, | we all of us can groan, | but God can tell,” etc.

They had a letter of introduction from one of my great-uncles to Mr Joseph Treffry, and found him at home in the old palace at Fowey. He was then a man of sixty. He showed them round, but rather chilled them. “A man inhabiting perhaps not more than one room or two in that magnificent building, the locks of whose doors grated with rust.... A man who seems to care for nobody, whose only happiness consists in spending money.” But his money was well spent. He built the breakwater at Par harbour entirely at his own expense, and likewise the great Treffry viaduct, which was near completion then. He made mines pay, got railroads built, and brought prosperity to everything he touched--he was doing as much for that part of Cornwall as King Smith was doing for the Scillies; and, like him, he was autocratic. I remember an old man in the islands quoting the Song of Solomon in speaking to me of their former King, “He was terrible as an army with banners.”

People say that there was too much luxury in England in the years before the War, but I doubt if there was much. I could only see people doing small things in an ostentatious way, whereas real luxury consists in doing big things as a matter of course. It was real luxury, I think, to keep the sea out with a breakwater, and bridge a great big valley with a granite viaduct, and then go on with other schemes, as Treffry did: also, perhaps, to build an arch of polished jasper thirty feet high, eleven feet wide and eight feet thick. But he was not a Nero with a Golden House, and he built his jasper archway into medieval walls at Fowey.

Nero made much the same mistake, not with the Golden House itself, but with his landscape-gardening there: it took up too much space right in the heart of Rome, and the site was quite unsuitable. He might have done his gardening so much better in the Alban hills, or better still at Capri, where Tiberius had already done so much. Look round that island from its highest point, and then look down from the Palatine on to the slopes below: it makes you feel that Nero was a fool to take to gardening there.

I have seen a ribald pamphlet accusing Mrs Grundy of the gravest improprieties. Tiberius was the Mrs Grundy of his generation--she might have written his message to the Senate in 22 A.D. with its condemnation of men and women dressing so much alike, ‘promiscas viris et feminis vestes.’ It is in Tacitus, _Annales_, III. 53; and in Suetonius, _Tiberius_, 35, there are instances enough of his severity to ladies who were not respectable. The fast set paid him out by inventing tales about him. No such tales were current till he tried to pull these people up; and the tales were only about his life at Capri. He was respectable at Rome and Rhodes and every other place; and nobody could really know what happened at Capri, as the public was shut out.

Tiberius must have gone to heaven, as Dante met him there, _Paradiso_, VI. 86; and if people won’t take Dante’s word for it, I may refer them to a former Vicar of Widdicombe, the Rev. John Rendle. He was a Wrangler in 1781 and got a Fellowship, and was Vicar of Widdicombe from 1790 till his death in 1815; and in 1814 he produced a _History of Tiberius, the first Defender of the true Faith_. The book shows perfect mastery of the evidence, and an adroitness in destructive criticism that might have made his fortune at the Bar. And his contention is that all those tales about Tiberius were invented out of spite: not, however, because he was a Mrs Grundy, but because he was at heart a Christian.

If he was a Christian, he must have been a very early Christian; and by all accounts the early Christians were very much pleasanter people than some of their successors. But, whether he was a Christian or not, he certainly was one of the three men who made Christianity possible. Augustus and he kept the world at peace during the whole period of Gospel history; and Christ looked to Cæsar--that is, Tiberius--to manage all the rough work of the world, and let people in Judæa have peace and quietness and no responsibilities. Herod was the other of those three great men. People make a fuss about his massacring some Innocents: they forget that there might not have been any Bethlehem or any Innocents there to massacre, if he had not governed the country so successfully during his long reign.

Whitewashing goes on apace. Dean Milman whitewashed Savonarola in 1855, and in 1905 Baron Corvo whitewashed the entire Borgia family; and in due season all the villains of history will be arrayed in shining white. Meanwhile it is hard on those whose turn is yet to come, as they are suffering by comparison now. Dreyfus has been whitewashed, and Bazaine has not: yet he was the worse treated of the two--a packed tribunal, with charges framed in such a way that the accused could not put in his real defence.

Whitewash is an admirable thing, but people always lay it on too thick; and Rendle not only makes Tiberius ‘a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ’ but makes him ‘the nursing father of the infant Catholic Church.’ Tacitus calls Christianity an ‘exitiabilis superstitio,’ and says that it arose in the reign of Tiberius, was kept down for a time, and then broke out again, _Annales_, XV. 44; and he also says that a ‘gravissimum exitium’ was brought in very artfully by Tiberius himself, was kept down for a time, and then broke out again, _Annales_, I. 73. Rendle argues that this ‘exitium’ must have been the ‘exitiabilis superstitio’ of Christianity, and not Espionage, as the context would lead one to suppose. Having satisfied himself of this by a careful examination of Tacitus and other good authorities, he goes on to admit inferior authorities without any examination at all, if only they concur in this. And thus he admits Tertullian, _Apologeticus_, 5, which says that Tiberius sent a Message to the Senate, recommending Christianity; and although the Senate rejected it, Tiberius did not change his mind, but used his powers to protect the Christians.

According to Rendle, Tiberius sent this message to the Senate in the fourteenth year of his reign, whereas the Gospel of Luke says that Christ was not baptized until the fifteenth. Of course, the fifteenth is impossible if Christ was born before the death of Herod and was then in his thirtieth year, for this (as Athanasius saw) is the real meaning of the phrase ‘about thirty years old, beginning,’ which is translated so ridiculously in the Authorised version and so evasively in the Revised. But instead of saying that ‘fifteenth’ is a slip of the pen or something of the sort, Rendle takes the view that Luke is using ‘fifteenth’ in a Lucasian or Pickwickian sense for ‘tenth.’ It is a pity we have no more of this chronology. The book announces “a similar Volume by the same Author--a Chronological Arrangement of all the Events recorded in the New Testament.” But he died the year after, and the new book never came out.

He was contemporary at Widdicombe with Parson Davy here; but Davy was the older man, and had finished printing his great work before Rendle brought out his. It is curious that these lonely parishes had parsons then with so much industry and learning; but a book like Davy’s _System of Divinity_ was a thing that might have been expected from a country parsonage, whereas the _History of Tiberius_ was not, especially in such a place as Widdicombe.

Although it is within a walk of here, I seldom go there for the Fair. Last time I went, a dozen years ago, I found a poor show of sheep, nothing else for sale except some gingerbread, and very few people there. When the _Cloches de Corneville_ came out, my brother thought that there must be some very fine bells at Corneville, to give rise to the tale; and he made inquiries, as he was in Normandy soon afterwards. People were telling him that he would only find some church bells of the usual kind there, ‘comme dans toutes les paroisses,’ and then a man struck in, ‘Aha, monsieur, c’est une pièce de théâtre.’ I think of that when people ask me questions about Widdicombe Fair, and I tell them that it is a comic song.

The song about Widdicombe Fair is probably an adaptation of a Somerset song, ‘Midsummer Fair,’ and there are several versions. The theme is briefly this:--Mr Pearse was not going to the Fair himself, and lent his old grey mare to some neighbours who were going, namely, Messrs Brewer, Stewer, Gurney, Davy, Whiddon, Hawk, Cobley and others. (Excepting Whiddon these are not Devonshire names.) As the mare did not return, he went up to the top of a hill to look round, and caught sight of her from there. She was then making her will, and died soon afterwards. Her ghost may be seen on the moor on stormy nights, looking ghastly white and rattling her bones. One may assume that she died from being ridden too hard, but the song does not distinctly say so.