CHAPTER XVIII

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CHARACTER OF THE WELSH.—THE CATHEDRAL: THE CLERGY, SERVICE, INTONING, THE LUDICROUS AND THE SUBLIME.—A REVERIE.—A REVELATION.—THE SERMON.—COMMUNIONS.—OTHER CHURCHES.—SUNDAY EVENING.—CHARACTER OF THE TOWNSPEOPLE.

_Sunday, June 2d._

We were awakened this morning by a sweet chiming of the cathedral bells.

After breakfast, Mrs. Jones introduced us to a young female relative who had come to visit her. She was intelligent and handsome, having a beautifully clear though dark complexion, thick, dark hair, and large swimming eyes. This style of beauty seems common hereabouts, and is probably the Welsh type.

She lived among the mountains near Snowdon, and told us the country there was bleak and sterile; agriculture confined mostly to grazing, small patches only of potatoes and oats being cultivated. She spoke highly of the character of the peasantry in many respects, but said they had very strong prejudices, usually despising the English and refusing to associate with them. Many of them could not speak English, and those who could would often affect not to understand if they were addressed by an Englishman. Among themselves they were very neighbourly, clannish, honest, and generous, but strangers they would impose upon most shamelessly. She had known very few to emigrate, and those that did usually went to Australia, she thought. In her neighbourhood they were mostly dissenters; Methodists, and Baptists, and with the exception of deceit to strangers, were of good moral character, much better than the English labourers. They had, however, many traditional superstitions.

[Sidenote: _THE CATHEDRAL. OLD MASONRY._]

We attended service in the morning at the cathedral. Its outline upon the ground is, with some irregularities, in the form of a cross. Its great breadths and lengths, the comparative lowness and depth of its walls, strengthened by thick, rude buttresses, and its short square massive tower, together with its general time-worn aspect, impressed me much as an expression of enduring, self-sustaining age. Like the stalwart trunk of a very old oak, stripped by the tempests of much of the burden of its over-luxuriant youth, its settled, compact, ungarnished grandeur, was vastly more imposing than the feeble grace and pliant luxuriance of more succulent structures. The raggedness of outline, the wrinkles and furrows and scars upon the face of all the old masonry, are very remarkable. The mortar has all fallen from the outside, and the edges of the stones are worn off deeply, but irregularly, as they vary in texture or are differently exposed. The effect of rain and snow and frost, and mossy vegetation and coal smoke, for six hundred years upon the surface, I know of no building in America that would give you an idea of. The material of construction is a brown stone, originally lighter than our Portland sandstone, but now darker than I have ever seen that become. It has had various repairs at long intervals of time, and is consequently in various stages of approach to ruin—some small parts, not noticeable in a cursory view, being in complete and irreparable demolishment, and others but yesterday restored to their original lines and angles, with clean-cut, bright-coloured stone and mortar—bad blotches, but fortunately not prominent.

It was once connected with an abbey, and other religious houses that stood near it, and by a long under-ground passage with the nunnery at the other side of the town. Think of the poor girls walking with a wailing chant, through that mile of darkness, to assist in the morning service at the cathedral.

Our approach to it this morning was by a something less gloomy and tedious way. We were accidentally in an alley in the vicinity, when we saw a gentleman in a white gown, and a square or university cap on his head, with a lady on his arm, enter an old, arched, and groined passage. We followed him adventurously, not being sure that it was not the entrance to his residence. After passing to the rear of the block of buildings that fronted on the alley, we found ourselves in a kind of gallery or covered promenade attached to the cathedral. (The cloisters.) From this we passed into the _nave_ (or long arm of the cross). Its length, its broad, flat stone floor, entirely free from obstruction, except by a row of thick clustered columns near the sides, and the great height and darkness of its oak-ceiled roof, produced a sensation entirely new to us, from architecture. Its dignity was increased by a general dimness, and by the breadth of the softened, coloured light, that flowed in one sheet through a very large stained-glass window at one end. In the end opposite this were wide piers that support the tower, and between the two central of these were the gilded organ-pipes that we had seen in our nocturnal visit.

[Sidenote: _A CLERICAL AND LAY PROCESSION_]

Under these was an arched door, on each side of which stood about thirty boys, from ten to fifteen years old, dressed in white robes; the “singing boys” or “choristers.” Walking leisurely up and down the otherwise vacant floor of the nave were “my Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells” (I believe that is the title), the dean and canons, &c. A lot of ecclesiastical dignitaries, whose very titles were all strange to me; but altogether forming, what Mrs. Jones said we should see, “a very pretty pack of priests.” The bishop was a thin man, with a mean face and crisp hair, brushed back from his forehead; dressed in a black gown with white lawn sleeves, and a cap on his head. The dean, a burly red-faced man, strikingly contrasting with the bishop, particularly when they laughed, in white gown with a sort of bag of scarlet silk, perhaps a degenerate cowl, tied around his neck, and dangling by strings down his back. The others had something of the same sort, of different colours. We were told afterwards, that these were university badges, and that the colour was a mark of rank, not in university honours, but in the scale of society—as nobleman or commoner—(a pretty thing to carry into the worship of the Father, is it not?) The others were in black.

We walked about for a few minutes outside the columns, reading the inscriptions on the stones of the floor, which showed that they covered vaults for the dead, and looking at the tablets and monumental effigies that were attached to the walls and columns. They were mostly of elaborate heraldic design, many with military insignia, and nearly all excessively ugly, and entirely inappropriate to a place of religious meditation and worship.

After a while the great bell ceased tolling, and some men in black serge loose gowns, two bearing maces of steel with silver cups on the ends, the rest carrying black rods, entered and saluted the bishop. A procession then formed, headed by the boys, in double file, followed by the bishop, dean, subdean, canons major and minor, archdeacon, prebendaries, &c., and closed by three Yankees in plain clothes; passed between the vergers, who bowed reverently and presented arms, through the door under the organ into the _choir_—a part of the edifice (in the centre of the cross) which is fitted up inconveniently for public worship.

It is a small, narrow apartment, having galleries, the occupants of which are hidden behind a beautiful open-work carved wood screen, and furnished below with three or four tiers of pews (_slips_), and a few benches. Under the organ loft were elevated armed seats, which were occupied indiscriminately by the unofficiating clergy and military officers in uniform: the governor of the castle; Lord Grosvenor (as “colonel of the militia,”) Lord de Tapley, and others. Stationing soldiers among the canons, it struck us, was well enough for a joke, but as part of a display of worshipping the God of peace, very objectionable. It is one of those incongruities that a state church must be constantly subject to.[14]

[14] I remember when I was a child, seeing on the Sunday preceding the first Monday in May—the annual _training day_—in one of the most old-fashioned villages in Connecticut, the officers of the militia come into the meeting-house in their uniforms. The leader of the choir was a corporal, and the red stripes on his pantaloons, the red facings and bell-buttons of his coat, as he stood up alone, and pitched the psalm tunes, was impressed irretrievably on my mind.

Half way between these elevated seats and the chancel was the reading desk and pulpit, and on each side of this the choristers were seated. Several persons rose to offer us their seats as we approached them, and when we were seated, placed prayer-books before us. The pews were all furnished with foot-stools, or hassocks, of straw rope made up like a straw bee-hive.

[Sidenote: _INTONING A DEVOUT EXPRESSION._]

Much of the service which in our churches is read, was sung, or, as they say, _intoned_. Intoning is what in school-children is called “_sing-song_” reading, only the _worst kind_, or most exaggerated sing-songing. I had never heard it before in religious service, except in a mitigated way from some of the old-fashioned Quaker and Methodist female exhorters, and I was surprised to hear it among the higher class of English clergy, and for a time perplexed to account for it. But I at length remembered that nearly all men in reading Scripture, or in oral prayer, or in almost any public religious exercises, use a very different tone and mode of utterance from that which is usual or natural with them, either in conversation or in ordinary reading. And this is more noticeable in persons of uncultivated minds; so it is probably an impulse to distinguish and disassociate religious exercises from the common duties of life, that induces it. The effect is, that the reading of the Bible, for instance, instead of being a study of truth, or an excitement to devotion and duty, as the individual may intend, becomes an _act of praise_ or prayer—the real, unconscious purpose of the reader, finding expression in his tone and manner. So we may often hear the most arrant nonsense in oral prayers; a stringing together of scriptural phrases and devout words in confusing and contradicting sentences, while the tone and gesture and the whole manner of the devotee show that he is most sincerely, feelingly, enthusiastically in earnest supplication. What for? Not for that which his words express, for they may express nonsense or utter blasphemy. It is simply an expression or manifestation by the _act_ of uttering words in a supplicating tone, of the sense of dependence on a superior Being—of love, of gratitude, and of reverence. David did the same thing by dancing and playing upon the harp. It is done now, as it seems to us, more solemnly, by the playing upon church organs. It is done by monuments, as in the decorations of churches. It is done by the Catholics, in listening and responding to prayers in a language which they don’t pretend to understand, and in mechanically repeating others, the number of them counted by beads, measuring the importance or intensity of their purpose. It is done by abstaining from meat on Friday, and by confession to one another, in the form prescribed by their church government. It is done by the Japanese, in twirling a teetotum; by the Chinese, in burning Joss-sticks; by the Fakirs, in standing on one leg; by the Methodists, in groans and inarticulate cries; by the Shakers, in their dance; by the Baptists, in ice-water immersions; by Churchmen, in kneeling; by Presbyterians, in standing; by New-Englanders, in eating a cold dinner and regularly going to meeting on Sunday; by the English, in feasting, and the Germans, in social intercourse on that day as well as by more distinctly devout exercises.

It was plain to me that the tone of the reader was meant to express—“Note ye that this reading is no common reading, but is the word derived from God, not now repeated for your instruction, plainly and with its true emphasis, but markedly otherwise, that we may show our faith in its sacred character, and through it acknowledge our God—I by repeating its words as men do not those of another book—you by your presence and reverent silence while I do so.”

It was evident, too, by the occasional difficulties and consequent embarrassment and confusion of our reader, causing blushing and stammering, that it was not with him a natural expression of this purpose as was the nasal tone of the Puritan, but a studied form, which had originated in some person more musically constituted.

[Sidenote: _THE COMICALITIES OF THE CATHEDRAL._]

Whether I was right with regard to the theory or not, there was no doubt that practically such was the operation of much of the service. The portion of the Old Testament read was one of those tedious genealogical registers that nobody but an antiquary or a blood nobleman would pretend to be interested in. The psalm, one of the most fearful of David’s songs of vengeance and imprecation, alternately sung by the choristers and intoned by the reader, one often running into the other with most unpleasant discord. The same with the Litany. Even the prayers could with difficulty be understood, owing partly to echoes, in which all distinctness was lost.

Despairing of being assisted by the words of the service, therefore, I endeavoured to “work up” in myself the solemnity and awe that seemed due to the place and the occasion by appropriate reflections. Under this vaulted ceiling, what holy thoughts, what heavenly aspirations have been kindled—what true praise of noble resolution has, like unconscious incense, grateful to God, ascended from these seats. On these venerable walls, for hundreds of years, have the eyes of good men rested, as from their firm and untottering consistency they gained new strength and courage to fight the good fight,—and again I raised _my_ eyes to catch communion with them. They fell upon a most infamous countenance, like to the representations of Falstaff’s,—a man with one eye closed and his tongue tucked out the side of his mouth,—his body tied up in a sack, his knees being brought up each side of his chin to make a snugger bundle. I turned away from it immediately; but there was another face in most doleful grimace, as if a man that had been buried alive had suddenly thrust his head out of his coffin, and was greatly perplexed and dismayed at his situation. Again I turned my eyes—they fell upon the face of a woman under the influence of an emetic—again upon a woman with the grin of drunkenness. Everywhere that any thing like a _knob_ would be appropriate to the architecture were faces sculptured on the walls that would be a fortune in a comic almanac.

I closed my eyes again, and tried to bring my mind to a reverent mood, but the more I tried the more difficult I found it. My imagination was taken possession of by the funny things, and refused to search out the sublime. Not but that the sublime, the grand, and the awful were not apparent also, all over and around—ay, and consciously within me; but, like a stubborn child, my mind would resist force. I gave it up, envying those who would have been so naturally elevated by all these incitements and aids to devotion.

I could not understand a sentence of the service, but sat, and rose, and kneeled, thus only being able to join in the prayer, and praise, and communion of the congregation.

Soon my thoughts, now wandering freely, fell to moving in those directions of reverie that I have found they are apt to take when I am hearing what those who listen with critical ear shall call fine music: doubtless it is the best and truest that can effect this; though when I listen attentively and try to appreciate it, my opinion would only be laughed at by them. I had been wandering in a deep, sad day-dream, far away, beyond the ocean—beyond the earth ... dark—lost to remembrance—when I was of a sudden brought back and awakened again in the dim old cathedral with such emotion, as if from eternity and infinity, I was remanded to mysterious identity and sense of time, that I choked and throbbed; and then, as the richest, deepest melody I must ever have heard passed away, softly swelling through the vaulted ceiling, caught up tenderly by mild echoes in the nave, and again and again faintly returning from its deepest distances, I kneeled and bowed my head with the worshippers around me, acknowledging in all my heart the beauty and sublimity of the place and the services.[15]

[15] I try in vain to express a sensation, which I have many times in my life experienced, and which, I presume, is common to other men, that forces on me a belief, strong at the time as knowledge, of immortality and eternity, both backward and forward, vastly stronger than all arguments can effect.

[Sidenote: _SERMON ON MODERN PHARISEEISM._]

The sermon was from an elderly man, with a voice slightly broken, and an impressive manner, whom we were afterwards told was Canon Slade, a somewhat distinguished divine. It was one of the best, plain, practical, Christ-like discourses I ever heard from a pulpit. It was delivered with emphasis and animation, in a natural, sometimes almost conversational tone, directly to _individuals_, high and low, then and there present, and of course was listened to with respectful attention. The main drift of it was to enforce the idea, that a knowledge of the truth of God was never to be arrived at by mere learning and dry study; that these were sometimes rather encumbrances; that love was of more value than learning. He had been describing the Pharisees of old, and concluded by saying, that the Pharisees, satisfied with their own notions, and scorning new light, were not scarce in our day. “There are some of them in our Church of England: would that there were fewer; that there were less parade and more reality of heavenly knowledge.” He made but little use of his notes, and pronounced an extemporaneous prayer at the conclusion with extreme solemnity.

I remained in company with a large proportion of the women present, and half a dozen men, at the communion service. The Church of England service, which has always seemed to me more effective than most others to the practical end of the ceremony, never was so solemn, impressive, and affecting. It was administered by the bishop, unassisted, with great feeling and simplicity. There was not the least unnecessary parade or affectation of sanctity; but a low, earnest voice, and a quiet, unprofessional manner that betokened a sense of the common brotherhood of us all united by God in Christ. The singing was “congregational,” the choristers having left, and without assistance from the organ.

A considerable proportion of the congregation were servants in livery; and besides these and the soldiers and clergy, the men present were generally plainly, and many shabbily, dressed. The women, many of them, seemed of a higher class, but were also simply dressed, generally in dark calicoes.

In the south transept (or short arm of the cross) of the cathedral another congregation were assembling as I came out. I followed in a company of boys, marching like soldiers, dressed in long-skirted blue coats, long waistcoats, breeches, and stockings, and with the clerical _bands_ from their cravats. Within were several other such companies—boys and girls in uniform, from charity schools, I suppose. The girls were dressed in the fashion of Goody-Two-Shoes, with high-backed white caps, and white “pinafores” over blue check gowns.

This transept is a large place of worship in itself, though but a small part of the cathedral, and is occupied by the parish of St. Oswald, morning and evening service being held in it immediately after that of the cathedral church. On the doors were notices, posted in placards, addressed to persons in certain circumstances, among others, to all who used hair-powder, to give notice to the appointed officers that they might be rightfully taxed.

In the afternoon we visited a Sunday-school of the Unitarians, where we saw about sixty well-behaved children,—the exercises, much the same as in ours. Afterwards we heard a sensible sermon, on faith and works, in the Independent chapel. The clergyman, who has been a missionary in the East, and has also travelled in America, was good enough to call on us and invite us to his house the next day. The congregation seemed to be of a higher grade than _most_ of that we had seen at the cathedral, more intelligent and animated, and more carefully dressed, yet very much plainer, more modestly and becomingly, and far less expensively than you could often see any congregation with us.

[Sidenote: _SUNDAY EVENING RECREATION._]

We had a delightful walk, later in the afternoon, on the walls, where we met a very large number of apparently very happy people. I never saw so many neat, quiet, ungenteel, happy, and healthy-looking women, all in plain clean dresses, and conversing in mild, pleasant tones; squads of children, too, all dressed ridiculously, bright and clean and stiff, not a dirty one among them, and as well behaved as dolls, most comically sober and stately. The walls form a good promenade, elevated and dry. The landscape view across the river, in the sunset haze, seemed in communion with the minds of the people, tranquil and loving. An hour later, and we found the streets lighted up and almost as crowded as on Saturday night, yet very quiet, and no impudence, blackguardism, or indecency shown us. On the whole, spite of the universal beer-drinking, we received a high opinion of the character of Chester people, quite as high, as respects morality and courtesy, as a stranger passing a Sunday in a New England town of the same size would be likely to obtain of it.

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