Westminster Abbey

The Speaker, August 4, 1900

The Shrine of the English: Westminster Abbey. By G. E. Troutbeck. London: Methuen.

There is undoubtedly a certain fascination about this little book, due chiefly to its complete difference in form to the common guide. Simple as it is, it has something of the picturesqueness of a missal: it has Gothic compactness and Gothic variety. As good an example as could be given is the pen-and-ink plan at the beginning, a plan more poetical than many landscapes, in which the lettering, drawn by hand in true mediaeval spirit, has that mystic touch of imperfection which makes the dead alphabet alive.

We are not commonly inclined to judge of books by their format, and we doubt whether culture has really gained much by the erection of a sensual love of books in the place of a spiritual. Despite the lamentations poured out over the cheapness of paper literature, we confess that we prefer the Penny Poets to the six-shilling poetasters. But if there is a class of book in which we think the element of ornament seriously needed it, it is in such works as the one before us. The bald utilitarian character of guide-books does much to increase that heavy, materialistic, conscientious view of travel which makes thousands pour into Rouen and Canterbury essentially in the same belief in which they pour into Lourdes, the belief that a mere physical contact has a talismanic power over wisdom and virtue. But it is only at the psychological moment, when some chain of association is struck, as it may be struck, by the quaintness of a book like this, that a niche with mouldering carvings is really the grave of Chaucer, or a rusty bar of iron hung in the roof the terrible sword of Edward I.

Mr. Troutbeck's work does not profess to be complete even as a practical text-book: such a thing was indeed impossible, and Mr. Troutbeck is to be congratulated on the amount of knowledge he succeeds in imparting as it is. Far less can it do justice to the historic and moral significance of its great subject. It would be an interesting but an endless inquiry to ask what has steeped these ancient stones in the affections of all Englishmen and why that affection has never equally gone out to St. Paul's Cathedral, so much more central, dominant and imposing. One reason, however, may be considered to lie on the surface: it is contained in the very words of the fine epitaph of Wren. From the most obscure craftsman to the most arrogant of the Angevins no man ever lived who could say that Westminster Abbey was monumentum ejus. Like our Constitution and our common law it is formless, beginningless, endless, alive. St. Paul's is the work of a great man; Westminster Abbey the work of a great nation. For this reason we do not at all agree with those sensitive mediaevalists who wish the Abbey to be purged of its vulgarities and anachronisms, the turgid eighteenth century monuments, and the whole horror of that Regency art and poetry, from which we are further removed than from Beowulf and Phidias. Between the Roundhead, who destroyed antiquities for the love of God, and the aesthete, who destroys them for the love of Gothic, the superiority, such as it is, in taste and imagination seems to us very much on the side of the Roundhead. Westminster Abbey is something immeasurably better than a work of art. We should as soon think of destroying all records of the reign of James I., on the ground that it was an anticlimax in the romance of history, as of cutting away half a historic building in order to give it an aesthetic unity which nothing historic can ever possibly possess. But, although we think the worst vandalism is the vandalism of a bloodless culture, we do not think that any self-deception should be indulged in as regards the artistic question itself. Mr. Troutbeck is a little too much inclined to speak smooth things about all parts of his beloved abbey. Henry VII.'s Chapel, he tells us, is counted one of the "Wonders of the World" (orbis miraculum). If it is, we have no hesitation in describing it as one of the "lying wonders" prophesied in the New Testament. Mr. Troutbeck, in fact, gives its case away himself by saying that its chief features are "its delicate pendants and lace-like design," as if there were any more sense in stone arches looking like lace than there is in lace looking like stone arches. As for the "delicate pendants," they may be admired by those who think that art is a tour de force, a sort of juggling, but to any one who thinks for three minutes of the nature of building, a lamppost hanging head downwards from Holborn Viaduct would be a sight infinitely more dignified and rational. But, indeed, the whole matter is a striking example of the false orbis miraculum sentiment, the sentiment that has solemnly collected seven wonders in a world of ten million wonders, or rather in a world which is itself the only wonder, and in which all that is honourably wonderful must be produced, like trees and flowers, by observance, not defiance of its essential laws. The fact is that Henry VII.'s Chapel is a miracle, a miracle of degraded architecture. Instead of the endless variety of carving which enshrined the sentiment, satire, reverence, ribaldry of a thousand mediaeval workmen, we see staring at us on every side, like an army of State spies and officials, the endless ranks of the rose and portcullis, the broad arrow of that soulless despotism. Undoubtedly it is a gorgeous sight- and quite worthy to be named after the only one of our Kings who was as rich and as mean as itself.

Mr. Troutbeck's greatest merit, as we have indicated, is in his immersion in the spirit of the Abbey- an immersion which extends to the very plan and ornament of his book. The almost pre-Raphaelite line illustration, the modern landscapes made ancient by their mere treatment, all contribute to this effect. The author has carried it out well by prefixing to most of his chapters quotations from those old masters of our language who improve, like wine, with age- Spenser, Beaumont, Shirley, and their like. In this matter however it is well to avoid errors, and Mr. Troutbeck has misquoted the first line of Shirley's most famous poem, making it run:

"The glories of our birth and state,"

We do not care for quarrels about trivial misquotations, but this happens to be one of the four or five poems in the world in which, in a rhythmic sense, it is impossible to alter one word without altering it for the worse. If Mr. Troutbeck will compare the line as he has written it with the real line:—

"The glories of our blood and state,"

he will see that he has broken a musical instrument. Finally, Mr. Troutbeck has done well in rising into a higher literary atmosphere in the general motto of the volume- that ancient cry of all patriots which begins, "When I forget thee, O Jerusalem." Indeed the Abbey is as healing and ennobling a refuge as a lover of England could wish for in evil times. We doubt whether even wearing a small pasteboard Union Jack in the buttonhole can produce equally exalted consolation. For in this one place it is difficult not to feel the presence of that secret national strength of which no conquests are a guarantee, and a profound historic impression, more easily felt than demonstrated, that ,whatever blunders or brutalities may have marked our record, few nations have been, upon the whole, so free from essential corruption of the heart.