Afoot in England: Chapter 20

Chapter 20

Salisbury Revisited

Since that visit to Salisbury, described in a former chapter,
when I watched and listened to the doves in those cold days in
early spring, I have been there a good many times, but never
at the time when the bird colony is most interesting to
observe, just before and during the early part of the
breeding-season. At length, in the early days of June, 1908,
the wished opportunity was mine--wished yet feared, seeing
that it was possible some disaster had fallen upon that unique
colony of stock-doves. It is true they appeared to be long
established and well able to maintain their foothold on the
building in spite of malicious persecuting daws, but there was
nothing to show that they had been long there, seeing that it
had been observed by no person but myself that the cathedral
doves were stock-doves and not the domestic pigeon found on
other large buildings. Great was my happiness to find them
still there, as well as the daws and all the other feathered
people who make this great building their home; even the
kestrels were not wanting. There were three there one
morning, quarrelling with the daws in the old way in the old
place, halfway up the soaring spire. The doves were somewhat
diminished in number, but there were a good many pairs still,
and I found no dead young ones lying about, as they were now
probably grown too large to be ejected, but several young
daws, about a dozen I think, fell to the ground during my
stay. Undoubtedly they were dragged out of their nests and
thrown down, perhaps by daws at enmity with their parents, or
it may be by the doves, who are not meek-spirited, as we have
seen, or they would not be where they are, and may on occasion
retaliate by invading their black enemies' nesting-holes.

Swallows, martins, and swifts were numerous, the martins
especially, and it was beautiful to see them for ever wheeling
about in a loose swarm about the building. They reminded me
of bees and flies, and sometimes with a strong light on them
they were like those small polished black and silvery-white
beetles (Gyrinus) which we see in companies on the surface of
pools and streams, perpetually gliding and whirling about in a
sort of complicated dance. They looked very small at a height
of a couple of hundred feet from the ground, and their
smallness and numbers and lively and eccentric motions made
them very insect-like.

The starlings and sparrows were in a small minority among the
breeders, but including these there were seven species in all,
and as far as I could make out numbered about three hundred
and fifty birds--probably the largest wild bird colony on any
building in England.

Nor could birds in all this land find a more beautiful
building to nest on, unless I except Wells Cathedral solely on
account of its west front, beloved of daws, and where their
numerous black company have so fine an appearance. Wells has
its west front; Salisbury, so vast in size, is yet a marvel of
beauty in its entirety; and seeing it as I now did every day
and wanting nothing better, I wondered at my want of
enthusiasm on a previous visit. Still, to me, the bird
company, the sight of their airy gambols and their various
voices, from the deep human-like dove tone to the perpetual
subdued rippling, running-water sound of the aerial martins,
must always be a principal element in the beautiful effect.
Nor do I know a building where Nature has done more in
enhancing the loveliness of man's work with her added
colouring. The way too in which the colours are distributed
is an example of Nature's most perfect artistry; on the lower,
heavier buttressed parts, where the darkest hues should be, we
find the browns and rust-reds of the minute aerial alga, mixed
with the greys of lichen, these darker stainings extending
upwards to a height of fifty or sixty feet, in places higher,
then giving place to more delicate hues, the pale tender
greens and greenish greys, in places tinged with yellow, the
colours always appearing brightest on the smooth surface
between the windows and sculptured parts. The effect depends
a good deal on atmosphere and weather: on a day of flying
clouds and a blue sky, with a brillaint sunshine on the vast
building after a shower, the colouring is most beautiful. It
varies more than in the case of colour in the material itself
or of pigments, because it is a "living" colour, as Crabbe
rightly says in his lumbering verse:

The living stains, which Nature's hand alone,
Profuse of life, pours out upon the stone.

Greys, greens, yellows, and browns and rust-reds are but the
colours of a variety of lowly vegetable forms, mostly lichens
and the aerial alga called iolithus.

Without this colouring, its "living stains," Salisbury would
not have fascinated me as it did during this last visit. It
would have left me cold though all the architects and artists
had assured me that it was the most perfectly beautiful
building on earth.

I also found an increasing charm in the interior, and made the
discovery that I could go oftener and spend more hours in this
cathedral without a sense of fatigue or depression than in any
other one known to me, because it has less of that peculiar
character which we look for and almost invariably find in our
cathedrals. It has not the rich sombre majesty, the dim
religious light and heavy vault-like atmosphere of the other
great fanes. So airy and light is it that it is almost like
being out of doors. You do not experience that instantaneous
change, as of a curtain being drawn excluding the light and
air of day and of being shut in, which you have on entering
other religious houses. This is due, first, to the vast size
of the interior, the immense length of the nave, and the
unobstructed view one has inside owing to the removal by the
"vandal" Wyatt of the old ponderous stone screen--an act for
which I bless while all others curse his memory; secondly, to
the comparatively small amount of stained glass there is to
intercept the light. So graceful and beautiful is the
interior that it can bear the light, and light suits it best,
just as a twilight best suits Exeter and Winchester and other
cathedrals with heavy sculptured roofs. One marvels at a
building so vast in size which yet produces the effect of a
palace in fairyland, or of a cathedral not built with hands
but brought into existence by a miracle.

I began to think it not safe to stay in that place too long
lest it should compel me to stay there always or cause me to
feel dissatisfied and homesick when away.

But the interior of itself would never have won me, as I had
not expected to be won by any building made by man; and from
the inside I would pass out only to find a fresh charm in that
part where Nature had come more to man's aid.

Walking on the cathedral green one morning, glancing from time
to time at the vast building and its various delicate shades
of colour, I asked myself why I kept my eyes as if on purpose
away from it most of the time, now on the trees, then on the
turf, and again on some one walking there--why, in fact, I
allowed myself only an occasional glance at the object I was
there solely to look at. I knew well enough, but had never
put it into plain words for my own satisfaction.

We are all pretty familiar from experience with the
limitations of the sense of smell and the fact that agreeable
odours please us only fitfully; the sensation comes as a
pleasing shock, a surprise, and is quickly gone. If we
attempt to keep it for some time by deliberately smelling a
fragrant flower or any perfume, we begin to have a sense of
failure as if we had exhausted the sense, keen as it was a
moment ago.

There must be an interval of rest for the nerve before the
sensation can be renewed in its first freshness. Now it is
the same, though in a less degree, with the more important
sense of sight. We look long and steadily at a thing to know
it, and the longer and more fixedly we look the better, if it
engages the reasoning faculties; but an aesthetic pleasure
cannot be increased or retained in that way. We must look,
merely glancing as it were, and look again, and then again,
with intervals, receiving the image in the brain even as we
receive the "nimble emanation" of a flower, and the image is
all the brighter for coming intermittently. In a large
prospect we are not conscious of this limitation because of
the wideness of the field and the number and variety of
objects or points of interest in it; the vision roams hither
and thither over it and receives a continuous stream or series
of pleasing impressions; but to gaze fixedly at the most
beautiful object in nature or art does but diminish the
pleasure. Practically it ceases to be beautiful and only
recovers the first effect after we have given the mind an
interval of rest.

Strolling about the green with this thought in my mind, I
began to pay attention to the movements of a man who was
manifestly there with the same object as myself--to look at
the cathedral. I had seen him there for quite half an hour,
and now began to be amused at the emphatic manner in which he
displayed his interest in the building. He walked up and down
the entire length and would then back away a distance of a
hundred yards from the walls and stare up at the spire, then
slowly approach, still gazing up, until coming to a stop when
quite near the wall he would remain with his eyes still fixed
aloft, the back of his head almost resting on his back between
his shoulders. His hat somehow kept on his head, but his
attitude reminded me of a saying of the Arabs who, to give an
idea of the height of a great rock or other tall object, say
that to look up at it causes your turban to fall off. The
Americans, when they were chewers of tobacco, had a different
expression; they said that to look up at so tall a thing
caused the tobacco juice to run down your throat.

His appearance when I approached him interested me too. His
skin was the color of old brown leather and he had a big
arched nose, clear light blue very shrewd eyes, and a big
fringe or hedge of ragged white beard under his chin; and he
was dressed in a new suit of rough dark brown tweeds,
evidently home-made. When I spoke to him, saying something
about the cathedral, he joyfully responded in broadest Scotch.
It was, he said, the first English cathedral he had ever seen
and he had never seen anything made by man to equal it in
beauty. He had come, he told me, straight from his home and
birthplace, a small village in the north of Scotland, shut
out from the world by great hills where the heather grew
knee-deep. He had never been in England before, and had come
directly to Salisbury on a visit to a relation.

"Well," I said, "now you have looked at it outside come in
with me and see the interior."

But he refused: it was enough for one day to see the outside
of such a building: he wanted no more just then. To-morrow
would be soon enough to see it inside; it would be the Sabbath
and he would go and worship there.

"Are you an Anglican?" I asked.

He replied that there were no Anglicans in his village. They
had two Churches--the Church of Scotland and the Free Church.

"And what," said I, "will your minister say to your going to
worship in a cathedral? We have all denominations here in
Salisbury, and you will perhaps find a Presbyterian place to
worship in."

"Now it's strange your saying that!" he returned, with a dry
little laugh. "I've just had a letter from him the morning
and he writes on this varra subject. 'Let me advise you,' he
tells me in the letter, 'to attend the service in Salisbury
Cathedral. Nae doot,' he says, 'there are many things in it
you'll disapprove of, but not everything perhaps, and I'd like
ye to go.'"

I was a little sorry for him next day when we had an
ordination service, very long, complicated, and, I should
imagine, exceedingly difficult to follow by a wild
Presbyterian from the hills. He probably disapproved of most
of it, but I greatly admired him for refusing to see anything
more of the cathedral than the outside on the first day. His
method was better than that of an American (from Indiana, he
told me) I met the following day at the hotel. He gave two
hours and a half, including attendance at the morning service,
to the cathedral, inside and out, then rushed off for an hour
at Stonehenge, fourteen miles away, on a hired bicycle. I
advised him to take another day--I did not want to frighten
him by saying a week--and he replied that that would make him
miss Winchester. After cycling back from Stonehenge he would
catch a train to Winchester and get there in time to have some
minutes in the cathedral before the doors closed. He was due
in London next morning. He had already missed Durham
Cathedral in the north through getting interested in and
wasting too much time over some place when he was going there.
Again, he had missed Exeter Cathedral in the south, and it
would be a little too bad to miss Winchester too!

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