Truro River runs straight up for two miles from Malpas, the cathedral of Truro rising up from the valley ahead, and shining white amid a setting of green trees and blue distant hills like some unearthly building too beautiful to have been built by man. Very little else is seen of Truro until quite close to the quays, where the navigation ends, and it is something of a surprise to find the city a place large enough to number 11,562 inhabitants. That is a small population, but it is large compared with the expectations raised by distant views.
The name of Truro is said to derive from Tru-Ru, the "three streets," or roads; but there are four roads into Truro, and its streets are many more than three. Bodmin is the county town of Cornwall, and Launceston rivals it, but Truro has of late years risen into equal, if not greater, importance, on account of its population, double that of Bodmin, and by reason also of its more accessible situation. Bodmin still keeps its assize business, and the county gaol is situated there, giving a certain sinister significance to the information "he's gone to Bodmin"; but Truro, as the capital city of a newly constituted diocese, has a greater future, unless the Cornish folk become much more criminal than they are now, which is not expected of them.
Truro lies down in a valley and the Great Western Railway stalks across to the north of it on gigantic viaducts, the newer streets running up towards the railway station. It is a clean, granite-built place, with a well-defined aristocratic air, and down the gutters of its principal streets, which are chiefly paved with granite setts and would thus be very noisy if there were more traffic, run clear streams of water. As an old county centre, the chief place of meeting for the landed and leisured families of Cornwall in the old days before railways, when Truro had a "season," and the society of Cornwall came hither to their "town houses" to indulge in its gaieties, the aristocratic air it keeps is by no means accidental. The "Red Lion" Hotel in the Market Place was formerly one of these mansions, as its fine old unaltered front shows. Foote, the actor, was born there.
Truro was raised to the dignity of a cathedral city in 1877, when the new Cornish diocese was established, and the old parish church of St. Mary in High Cross became automatically the Cathedral. But the patriotic Cornish feeling which had thus at last again brought about a bishopric and a cathedral in the West, about eight hundred years after the see had been removed from St. Germans to Exeter, was not content with making a mere parish church serve the occasion, and steps were soon taken to build an entirely new cathedral. Such a thing as the building of a cathedral in England had not been known for many centuries; the full efforts of churchmen had been employed, ever since the Reformation, in preserving and repairing those we already possessed, not in creating new cathedrals. Moreover, most of our cathedrals have been the products of centuries of growth. Even that of Salisbury, the one example of an ancient cathedral finished according to its original design, was not completed in less than a hundred and forty years. Over £100,000 has gone to the building of Truro Cathedral, begun in the laying of the foundation-stone by the Prince of Wales on May 20th, 1880, and completed in the autumn of 1909, in the finishing touches then put to the western towers.
The old church of St. Mary was demolished to provide the site, but the fine Late Perpendicular south aisle was spared and incorporated with the building, designed in the Early English style by J. L. Pearson, that forms the cathedral to-day.
High Cross, in which the cathedral stands, is not a very roomy square of houses and shops opening out of the Market Place in the centre of the city, by a narrow passage, and upon other streets by somewhat broader ways. But it is along this passage that the stranger usually approaches. The cathedral is indeed new, but the old-established cramped surroundings are quite characteristic of ancient cathedral cities, and the calculated picturesqueness of the south side of the building, viewed from this point, resembles that of some North German cathedral. There the central tower and its stone spire, and the lesser western towers and spires group richly together, with the still smaller but very prominent south transept tower and its copper spirelet, a very German importation. The poisonous oxidised green of that copper spirelet is flagrant enough to spoil the whole day of an artist. Down beneath it you see the surviving sixteenth century aisle of old St. Mary's. I am glad they spared that aisle, for it is not only beautiful in itself, but its venerable presence here serves to illustrate that peculiarly English virtue, a continuity with the past, a sense of history even in things new. But what will future generations say about a late nineteenth-century cathedral whose general style is that of the thirteenth century, and yet whose oldest part is genuine sixteenth-century architecture? It could, perhaps, be wished that the chimes of the cathedral clock had been harmonised to another tune than the hackneyed "Westminster Chimes," that are noble enough in the clock-tower of the Houses of Parliament, where they originated, but are tiresome when repeated all over the country. The ancient proverb is sadly at fault, for it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
The new beauty of Truro Cathedral at present lacks those weatherings that only time can give. The fine-grained granite and the Box stone dressings have not attained the stains and bloom of years, and so it is impossible to altogether judge the merits or drawbacks of the exterior; but that the architect strove to be pictorial, and that he rather overstrained in that direction, seems undeniable. The building, only three hundred feet in its greatest length, from east to west, is really one of our smallest cathedrals, six feet shorter than Rochester, and it is ornamented to a degree that in places spoils the effect. This is very noticeable in the south door, the usual entrance. It is contrived in the south transept and is loaded with ornamentation that emphasises the naturally squeezed-in appearance. The over-enrichment was a mistake, but the cramped nature of this part seems to have been unavoidable, considering the extreme narrowness of the site here.
The interior discloses none of these limitations, and exhibits a noble clerestoried nave of nine bays and of fine proportions. A very notable feature is the beautiful baptistery close by the south door. Its many slender columns and the artfully arranged half-light set off the rich stained-glass with the effect of jewels. The choir is a light and graceful and glorified continuation of the nave. Most of the windows are already furnished with stained-glass, whose subjects include a representation of Wesley preaching at Gwennap: a more liberal-minded inclusion than any of which Hawker of Morwenstow would have been capable, with his bitter remark that Wesley had made the Cornish change their sins; not get rid of them, you know.
A certain specious air of antiquity is given to the north transept by the old monuments from St. Mary's, restored and built into the walls. Notable among them is the Robartes monument of 1614. And history is being quickly made here, for already Truro has come to its third bishop and the cathedral is beginning to accumulate relics. Thus we see in a case on the east wall of the south transept the pastoral staff presented to Dr. Benson, the first Bishop.
There are also war memorials in the cathedral: tablets and flags that tell eloquently of the latest great effort in the art of murder by wholesale. It is a bitter commentary upon Christianity that in twenty years from the beginning of the cathedral such things should be necessary. But the fault was not ours, and no patriotic Englishman would have those memorials away, for they show that we can still hold our own against attack. "The men are splendid," as a famous dispatch from those sun-scorched fields ran. Of their officers it were kinder to keep silence, but perhaps their failure was merely the fault of the system.
There is an interesting museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall in Truro, with illustrations of South American scenes a good deal too prominent on its walls; and there is a curious old inscription carved in granite on a wall in the Market House. It belonged to an older building, and runs thus: "Ienkin Daniel, Maior. Who seks to find eternal tresvre, mvst vse no gvile in waight or measvre, 1615."