CHAPTER XVI.
FLOCKS, DOGS, AND SHEPHERDS OF SALISBURY PLAIN.—VILLAGE ALMSHOUSES.—OSTENTATION IN ALMS-GIVING.—A FORCED MARCH.—AT HOME IN SALISBURY.—THE STREET BROOKS.—THE CATHEDRAL.—ARCHITECTURAL REMARKS AND ADVICE.—VILLAGE CHURCHES.
The chalk-hills, or downs, (known also in local parlance as beak-land,) are unenclosed or divided, and rarely separated from the cultivated land by more than a low turf-wall, and often not at all. Once, in the course of the morning, I came near a flock of about two hundred sheep, feeding close to the road, and stopped a few moments to look at them. They were thorough-bred South-downs; the shepherd sat at a little distance, upon a knoll, and the dog was nearer the flock. Growing close up to the edge of the road, opposite the sheep, was a heavy piece of wheat; one of them strayed over to it. The dog cocked his ears and turned quickly several times towards his master, as if knowing there was business for him, and waiting for orders. But the shepherd was looking another way, and others of the flock, lifting their heads as I approached them, and seeing their comrade on the other side of the road, began to rush after him, as is the manner of sheep; and directly there were a dozen eagerly nipping the wheat, and more following: the dog, sitting up very erect, and on the qui vive, still waited for orders, till the shepherd, turning quickly, gave the signal in a monosyllable. Right over the heads of the flock, bounding from head to head, sprang the dog, yelping sharply as he reached the road; the truants returned, and the whole flock broke at once into a hard run,—dog dashing first one side, then the other—closing them rapidly up, and keeping them in a dense mass, until, at another shout from the shepherd, who had not risen, all at once halted, and, turning heads out, went to feeding, soon closing around the dog, leaving only a space of a few feet vacant about him. The dogs used by most of the shepherds seem to be mongrels, generally low in the legs, with great heads, short necks, and rather shaggy. One that was said to be very sagacious and well-trained, and for which I was asked thirty dollars, appeared as if a cross of a spaniel with a terrier. Generally, the dogs were valued at only from two to five dollars.
It cleared about noon, and after the rain ceased the air was calm, hot, and steamy. I recollect but one village, two rows of ugly, glaring, red brick houses, relieved by a church rectory and two other buildings, cool and pleasing, under shade of ivy; and a large, old establishment, with cupola and clock, and a square, green, shady court in front of it—devoted, as appeared by an inscription on its front, by somebody’s bequest, two hundred years ago, to the maintenance, in comfort, of a certain number of aged widowers and bachelors of the parish. Such retreats for various denominations of the poor and unfortunate, called almshouses and hospitals, (vulgarly, “’spittals,”) are to be seen in almost every town in England. They are of all degrees of comfort—some stately and luxurious—others, and these quite common, mere cottages—hovels sometimes,—generally very old, and nearly always of ancient foundation. With more or less ostentation, the name of the founder is displayed on the front,—sometimes with his bust, statue, arms, or a ridiculous allegorical sculpture. This plan for sending a dying sinner’s name down to future generations, with the grateful embalmment of charity, seems latterly out of fashion. What improved type of character does it indicate, that the rich oftener prefer now to make their tribute to public opinion, by having their gift-money used while they yet live, and the amount of it paraded with their names in the newspapers. Their “left hands,” probably, do not read the newspapers.
I was disappointed in not finding my friends at this village, but soon after leaving it met two Germans travelling on foot, who said they had met, at three hours back, two gentlemen who wore hats and, knapsacks like mine. I feared that, not hearing from me at Salisbury, they would conclude I had gone on by Cirencester, to spend Sunday on the Isle of Wight, and would go by the five-o’clock train to overtake me. It was therefore necessary that I should hasten in to arrest them. I yet made two or three stoppages, once to converse with a shepherd, and once to sketch the outlines of a group of cottages, intending to take the coach, which I was told would be passing in a few minutes. But when coming up a hill, I rose the fine spire of the cathedral, and found that it was three miles distant, and the coach still not in sight, I strapped tight my knapsack and went the rest of the way at “double quick.” Teamsters stopped their wagons as I met them, children at the cottage-doors called their mothers to help look at me, and at the office of the “Wilts Game Law Reporter,” as I entered the town, taking the middle of the street, a fat old gentleman in top-boots eagerly took out his watch and timed me, evidently supposing it was some interesting affair on a wager. Finding the post-office, but not finding any note for me, I hastened on still to the station, which was well out of the town on the other side, and which I reached at the same moment with the delaying stage-coach. The train started a moment after. The policeman in attendance was certain that no persons such as I described had entered the station-house, and I returned to the town, and going first to the cathedral, there found J. and C. lying under the trees in delighted contemplation of its beauty.
We spent Sunday at Salisbury. We were fortunate in finding a comfortable, quiet, old inn, in which we were the only lodgers. After once getting acquainted with the crooked, elaborate stairways and passages, and learning the relative position of our chambers and the common rooms, we were as much at home, as quiet, and as able to command whatever we had occasion for, as if we had leased the house, furnished, and manned it. The landlady was our housekeeper, the servants our domestics. We saw no one but them, (till night, when we happened to discover, in a remote subterranean corner, a warm, smoky, stone-cavern, in which a soldier, a stage-coachman, and others, were making merry with ladies, beer, and song,) and them we saw only as we chose to. We had a large, comfortable parlour, with dark-coloured furniture, of an age in which ease was not sacrificed to elegance; a dais and bow-window, old prints of Nelson’s victories and Garrick and Siddons in Shakspearian characters, a smouldering sea-coal fire, several country newspapers, and a second-hand last week’s Times. Preposterous orders were listened to without a smile, receipts for novel Yankee dishes distinctly understood in all their elaboration without impatience, and to the extent of the resources of the establishment faithfully executed. Only once was the mild business-manner of our hostess disturbed by an appearance of surprise; when we told her that we were Americans, she raised her eyes in blank incredulity, and asked, “You don’t mean you were born in America, sir?” The servants kept out of sight; our room was “put to rights,” our clothes arranged in a bureau, while we were at breakfast; and when we were seated, and had got fairly under way with an excellent home-like dinner, the girl who acted for waiter, seeming to understand our humour put a hand-bell on the table and withdrew, saying that we “would please to call her when we wanted any thing.”
Along the sides of many of the streets of Salisbury there flows, in little canals some six feet wide by two or three deep, with frequent bridges to the houses, a beautifully clear, rapid stream of water. Otherwise, the general appearance of the town is of meagre interest compared with others we have been in. But it has one crowning glory—the cathedral.
The cathedral, in many of its parts, and from certain positions, as a whole, is very beautiful; the clear, cutting, symmetrical spire, especially against an evening sky, is very fine. It is taller by several feet than any other in England, though overtopped by several of the Continental churches.
We have more pleasure in contemplating it, and enjoy more to wander around and through it, than any we have seen before. It is more satisfactory to us. This, I believe, is partly because of its greater size, partly because of its completeness, its unity: though six hundred years old, you would not readily perceive in approaching it that it was not entirely a new edifice; no repairs, no additions, especially no meddlesome restorations, which are almost always offensive to me. Its history is worthy of note with respect to this: it was only thirty-eight years in construction; except the spire, which was added rather later, and is more florid, which is to be regretted.
We admire and enjoy it, and yet not nearly so much as we should have expected to from an imagination of what such a great, expensive, and artistic pile would be. You will wonder why. I don’t know that I can tell you. It fails in massiveness and grandeur. From some quarters it appears a mere clutter of wall, windows, buttresses, and pinnacles, each of which may be fine enough in itself, but gaining nothing from their combination. There is nowhere a sufficient breadth and mass of wall, I suspect, to be grand. Once or twice only did it awaken any thing like a sense of sublimity, and then it did not appear to me to be due to any architectural intention.
Once, late in the day, and alone, I was walking from the end of one transept towards the other, when an emotion came over me, partaking for a moment of awe. Afterwards in trying to analyze what had occasioned it, I found that my face was turned towards two great, dark windows, a considerable space of unbroken wall about them, and a square, massive buttress, all in the deep shade between the two transepts. From the simple, solitary grandeur and solemnity of the dark recess, there had come a sermon on humility and endurance to me, more eloquent than all else of the great cathedral.
The wall over and behind this, in an equal space, was broken up by three of the triple windows, which, look at the cathedral from any direction you will, you see every where repeated, until the form becomes tiresome and ugly. Not ugly in itself, but ugly, small, and paltry, by so much repetition in an edifice of such grandeur. If all these windows, with all their form, proportion, colour, and fashion of carving, had been the work of one man, they were evidently that man’s one idea; if of many men, then they were servile imitations. One would be, perhaps, a worthy and beautiful design—a hundred are paltry, ignominious, mechanical copies; they might be iron-castings, for all the value the chisel has given them. Why should there not be, with sufficient regard to symmetrical uniformity, evidence in the details of every part of an edifice of such magnitude?
There is nothing original in these ideas, but they came upon me freshly and forcibly in trying to see why it was I did not feel more respect for such a monument of architecture. I could not help thinking—It is very fine, but it is a failure. Yet the simple beauty of proportion and the breadth of light and shade, in that little unimportant space, I did feel truly and spontaneously.
From all the little, but not unloving, study that I was able to give the Old-World architecture, my advice to all building-committee gentlemen of no more cultivated taste than my own, (that to such these crude thoughts may give hints of value, is my apology for printing them,) would be, Stick to simplicity. The grand effect of architecture must be from form and proportion. Favour designs, therefore, which, in their grand outlines, are at once satisfactory; then beware of enfeebling their strong features by childish ornaments and baby-house appendages. Simplicity of form is especially necessary to any thing like dignity in an edifice of moderate size. There is a church in New York, a cathedral in cabinet size, that one could hardly look at without being reminded of a grand dinner confectionary. The smallest parish churches of the old Saxon architecture, with thick, rude, unchiselled walls, strong enough to have needed no buttresses, and therefore having none—a low square tower or belfry, with flat lead, roof, and a very few irregularly-placed, deep, round-arched windows and portals, I have found far more inspiring of the solemnity of humility which should accompany the formal worship of the Almighty, than most of the very large churches that have been built with the greater wealth and more finical taste of later generations.