Part 2

The Tower has an attraction for us akin to that of the house in which we were born, the school in which we were trained. Go where we may, that grim old edifice on the Pool goes with us; a part of all we know, and of all we are. Put seas between us and the Thames, this Tower will cling to us like a thing of life. It colours Shakespeare’s page. It casts a momentary gloom over Bacon’s story. Many of our books were written in its vaults; the Duke of Orleans’ “Poesies,” Raleigh’s “Historie of the World,” Eliot’s “Monarchy of Man,” and Penn’s “No Cross, No Crown.”

Even as to the length of days, the Tower has no rival among palaces and prisons; its origin, like that of the Iliad, that of the Sphinx, that of the Newton Stone, being lost in the nebulous ages, long before our definite history took shape. Old writers date it from the days of Cæsar; a legend taken up by Shakespeare and the poets, in favour of which the name of Cæsar’s Tower remains in popular use to this very day. A Roman wall can even yet be traced near some parts of the ditch. The Tower is mentioned in the Saxon Chronicle, in a way not incompatible with the fact of a Saxon stronghold having stood upon this spot. The buildings as we have them now in block and plan were commenced by William the Conqueror; and the series of apartments in Cæsar’s tower,--hall, gallery, council-chamber, chapel,--were built in the early Norman reigns, and used as a royal residence by all our Norman kings. What can Europe show to compare against such a tale?

Set against the Tower of London--with its eight hundred years of historic life, its nineteen hundred years of traditional fame--all other palaces and prisons appear like things of an hour. The oldest bit of palace in Europe, that of the west front of the Burg in Vienna, is of the time of Henry the Third. The Kremlin in Moscow, the Doge’s Palazzo in Venice, are of the Fourteenth Century. The Seraglio in Stamboul was built by Mohammed the Second. The oldest part of the Vatican was commenced by Borgia, whose name it bears. The old Louvre was commenced in the reign of Henry the Eighth; the Tuileries in that of Elizabeth. In the time of our Civil War Versailles was yet a swamp. Sans Souci and the Escurial belong to the Eighteenth Century. The Serail of Jerusalem is a Turkish edifice. The palaces of Athens, of Cairo, or Tehran, are all of modern date.

Neither can the prisons which remain in fact as well as in history and drama--with the one exception of St. Angelo in Rome--compare against the Tower. The Bastile is gone; the Bargello has become a museum; the Piombi are removed from the Doge’s roof. Vincennes, Spandau, Spilberg, Magdeburg, are all modern in comparison with a jail from which Ralph Flambard escaped so long ago as the year 1100, the date of the First Crusade.

Standing on Tower Hill, looking down on the dark lines of wall--picking out keep and turret, bastion and ballium, chapel and belfry--the jewel-house, the armoury, the mounts, the casemates, the open leads--the Bye-ward gate, the Belfry, the Bloody tower--the whole edifice seems alive with story; the story of a nation’s highest splendour, its deepest misery, and its darkest shame. The soil beneath your feet is richer in blood than many a great battlefield; for out upon this sod has been poured, from generation to generation, a stream of the noblest life in our land. Should you have come to this spot alone, in the early day, when the Tower is noisy with martial doings, you may haply catch, in the hum which rises from the ditch and issues from the wall below you--broken by roll of drum, by blast of bugle, by tramp of soldiers--some echoes, as it were, of a far-off time; some hints of a May-day revel; of a state execution; of a royal entry. You may catch some sound which recalls the thrum of a queen’s virginal, the cry of a victim on the rack, the laughter of a bridal feast. For all these sights and sounds--the dance of love and the dance of death--are part of that gay and tragic memory which clings around the Tower.

[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON]

From the reign of Stephen down to that of Henry of Richmond, Cæsar’s tower (the great Norman keep, now called the White tower) was a main part of the royal palace; and for that large interval of time, the story of the White tower is in some sort that of our English society as well as of our English kings. Here were kept the royal wardrobe and the royal jewels; and hither came with their goodly wares, the tiremen, the goldsmiths, the chasers and embroiderers, from Flanders, Italy, and Almaigne. Close by were the Mint, the lions’ dens, the old archery-grounds, the Court of King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Queen’s gardens, the royal banqueting-hall; so that art and trade, science and manners, literature and law, sport and politics, find themselves equally at home.

Two great architects designed the main parts of the Tower; Gundul the Weeper and Henry the Builder; one a poor Norman monk, the other a great English king....

Henry the Third, a prince of epical fancies, as Corffe, Conway, Beaumaris, and many other fine poems in stone attest, not only spent much of his time in the Tower, but much of his money in adding to its beauty and strength. Adam de Lamburn was his master mason; but Henry was his own chief clerk of the works. The Water gate, the embanked wharf, the Cradle tower, the Lantern, which he made his bedroom and private closet, the Galleyman tower, and the first wall, appear to have been his gifts. But the prince who did so much for Westminster Abbey, not content with giving stone and piles to the home in which he dwelt, enriched the chambers with frescoes and sculpture, the chapels with carving and glass; making St. John’s chapel in the White tower splendid with saints, St. Peter’s church on the Tower Green musical with bells. In the Hall tower, from which a passage led through the Great hall into the King’s bedroom in the Lantern, he built a tiny chapel for his private use--a chapel which served for the devotion of his successors until Henry the Sixth was stabbed to death before the cross. Sparing neither skill nor gold to make the great fortress worthy of his art, he sent to Purbeck for marble, and to Caen for stone. The dabs of lime, the spawls of flint, the layers of brick, which deface the walls and towers in too many places, are of either earlier or later times. The marble shafts, the noble groins, the delicate traceries, are Henry’s work. Traitor’s gate, one of the noblest arches in the world, was built by him; in short, nearly all that is purest in art is traceable to his reign....

The most eminent and interesting prisoner ever lodged in the Tower is Raleigh; eminent by his personal genius, interesting from his political fortune. Raleigh has in higher degree than any other captive who fills the Tower with story, the distinction that he was not the prisoner of his country, but the prisoner of Spain.

Many years ago I noted in the State Papers evidence, then unknown, that a very great part of the second and long imprisonment of the founder of Virginia was spent in the Bloody tower and the adjoining Garden house; writing at this grated window; working in the little garden on which it opened; pacing the terrace on this wall, which was afterwards famous as Raleigh’s Walk. Hither came to him the wits and poets, the scholars and inventors of his time; Johnson and Burrell, Hariot and Pett; to crack light jokes; to discuss rabbinical lore; to sound the depths of philosophy; to map out Virginia; to study the ship-builder’s art. In the Garden house he distilled essences and spirits; compounded his great cordial; discovered a method (afterwards lost) of turning salt water into sweet; received the visits of Prince Henry; wrote his political tracts; invented the modern warship; wrote his History of the World....

The day of Raleigh’s death was the day of a new English birth. Eliot was not the only youth of ardent soul who stood by the scaffold in Palace Yard, to note the matchless spirit in which the martyr met his fate, and walked away from that solemnity--a new man. Thousands of men in every part of England who had led a careless life became from that very hour the sleepless enemies of Spain. The purposes of Raleigh were accomplished, in the very way which his genius had contrived. Spain held the dominion of the sea, and England took it from her. Spain excluded England from the New World, and the genius of that New World is English.

The large contest in the new political system of the world, then young, but clearly enough defined, had come to turn upon this question--Shall America be mainly Spanish and theocratic, or English and free? Raleigh said it should be English and free. He gave his blood, his fortune, and his genius, to the great thought in his heart; and, in spite of that scene in Palace Yard, which struck men as the victory of Spain, America is at this moment English and free.

_Her Majesty’s Tower_ (London, 1869).

THE CATHEDRAL OF ANTWERP.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.

I was awakened this morning with the chime which the Antwerp Cathedral clock plays at half hours. The tune has been haunting me ever since, as tunes will. You dress, eat, drink, walk, and talk to yourself to their tune; their inaudible jingle accompanies you all day; you read the sentences of the paper to their rhythm. I tried uncouthly to imitate the tune to the ladies of the family at breakfast, and they say it is “the shadow dance of _Dinorah_.” It may be so. I dimly remember that my body was once present during the performance of that opera, while my eyes were closed, and my intellectual faculties dormant at the back of the box; howbeit, I have learned that shadow dance from hearing it pealing up ever so high in the air at night, morn, noon.

How pleasant to lie awake and listen to the cheery peal, while the old city is asleep at midnight, or waking up rosy at sunrise, or basking in noon, or swept by the scudding rain which drives in gusts over the broad places, and the great shining river; or sparkling in snow, which dresses up a hundred thousand masts, peaks, and towers; or wrapped round with thunder--cloud canopies, before which the white gables shine whiter; day and night the kind little carillon plays its fantastic melodies overhead. The bells go on ringing. _Quot vivos vocant, mortuos plangunt, fulgura frangunt_; so on to the past and future tenses, and for how many nights, days, and years! While the French were pitching their _fulgura_ into Chassé’s citadel, the bells went on ringing quite cheerfully. While the scaffolds were up and guarded by Alva’s soldiery, and regiments of penitents, blue, black, and grey, poured out of churches and convents, droning their dirges, and marching to the place of the Hôtel de Ville, where heretics and rebels were to meet their doom, the bells up yonder were chanting at their appointed half hours and quarters, and rang the _mauvais quart d’heure_ for many a poor soul. This bell can see as far away as the towers and dikes of Rotterdam. That one can call a greeting to St. Ursula’s at Brussels, ind toss a recognition to that one at the town hall of Oudenarde, and remember how, after a great struggle there a hundred and fifty years ago, the whole plain was covered with flying French chivalry--Burgundy, and Berri, and the Chevalier of St. George flying like the rest. “What is your clamour about Oudenarde?” says another bell (Bob Major _this_ one must be). “Be still thou querulous old clapper! _I_ can see over to Hougoumont and St. John. And about forty-five years since, I rang all through one Sunday in June, when there was such a battle going on in the cornfields there as none of you others ever heard tolled of. Yes, from morning service until after vespers, the French and English were all at it, ding-dong!” And then calls of business intervening, the bells have to give up their private jangle, resume their professional duty, and sing their hourly chorus out of _Dinorah_.

What a prodigious distance those bells can be heard! I was awakened this morning to their tune, I say. I have been hearing it constantly ever since. And this house whence I write, Murray says, is two hundred and ten miles from Antwerp. And it is a week off; and there is the bell still jangling its shadow dance out of _Dinorah_. An audible shadow, you understand, and an invisible sound, but quite distinct; and a plague take the tune!

[Illustration: CATHEDRAL OF ANTWERP]

Who has not seen the church under the bell? Those lofty aisles, those twilight chapels, that cumbersome pulpit with its huge carvings, that wide grey pavement flecked with various light from the jewelled windows, those famous pictures between the voluminous columns over the altars which twinkle with their ornaments, their votive little silver hearts, legs, limbs, their little guttering tapers, cups of sham roses, and what not? I saw two regiments of little scholars creeping in and forming square, each in its appointed place, under the vast roof, and teachers presently coming to them. A stream of light from the jewelled windows beams slanting down upon each little squad of children, and the tall background of the church retires into a greyer gloom. Pattering little feet of laggards arriving echo through the great nave. They trot in and join their regiments, gathered under the slanting sunbeams. What are they learning? Is it truth? Those two grey ladies with their books in their hands in the midst of these little people have no doubt of the truth of every word they have printed under their eyes. Look, through the windows jewelled all over with saints, the light comes streaming down from the sky, and heaven’s own illuminations paint the book! A sweet, touching picture indeed it is, that of the little children assembled in this immense temple, which has endured for ages, and grave teachers bending over them. Yes, the picture is very pretty of the children and their teachers, and their book--but the text? Is it the truth, the only truth, nothing but the truth? If I thought so, I would go and sit down on the form _cum parvulis_, and learn the precious lesson with all my heart.

But I submit, an obstacle to conversions is the intrusion and impertinence of that Swiss fellow with the baldric--the officer who answers to the beadle of the British islands--and is pacing about the church with an eye on the congregation. Now the boast of Catholics is that their churches are open to all; but in certain places and churches there are exceptions. At Rome I have been into St. Peter’s at all hours: the doors are always open, the lamps are always burning, the faithful are forever kneeling at one shrine or the other. But at Antwerp it is not so. In the afternoon you can go to the church and be civilly treated, but you must pay a franc at the side gate. In the forenoon the doors are open, to be sure, and there is no one to levy an entrance fee. I was standing ever so still, looking through the great gates of the choir at the twinkling lights, and listening to the distant chants of the priests performing the service, when a sweet chorus from the organ-loft broke out behind me overhead, and I turned round. My friend the drum-major ecclesiastic was down upon me in a moment. “Do not turn your back to the altar during divine service,” says he, in very intelligible English. I take the rebuke, and turn a soft right-about face, and listen a while as the service continues. See it I cannot, nor the altar and its ministrants. We are separated from these by a great screen and closed gates of iron, through which the lamps glitter and the chant comes by gusts only. Seeing a score of children trotting down a side aisle, I think I may follow them. I am tired of looking at that hideous old pulpit, with its grotesque monsters and decorations. I slip off to the side aisle; but my friend the drum-major is instantly after me--almost I thought he was going to lay hands on me. “You mustn’t go there,” says he; “you mustn’t disturb the service.” I was moving as quietly as might be, and ten paces off there were twenty children kicking and chattering at their ease. I point them out to the Swiss. “They come to pray,” says he. “_You_ don’t come to pray; you--” “When I come to pay,” says I, “I am welcome,” and with this withering sarcasm I walk out of church in a huff. I don’t envy the feelings of that beadle after receiving point blank such a stroke of wit.

_Roundabout Papers_ (London, 1863).

THE TAJ MAHAL.

ANDRÉ CHEVRILLON.

It is well known that the Taj is a mausoleum built by the Mogul Shah-Jehan to the Begum Mumtaz-i-Mahal. It is a regular octagon surmounted by a Persian dome, which is surrounded by four minarets. The building, erected upon a terrace which dominates the enclosing gardens, is constructed of blocks of the purest white marble, and rises to a height of two hundred and forty-three feet. We step from the carriage before a noble portico of red sandstone, pierced by a bold arch and covered with white arabesques. After passing through this arch, we see the Taj looming up before us eight hundred metres distant. Probably no masterpiece of architecture calls forth a similar emotion.

[Illustration: THE TAJ MAHAL.]

At the back of a marvellous garden and with all of its whiteness reflected in a canal of dark water, sleeping inertly among thick masses of black cypress and great clumps of red flowers, this perfect tomb rises like a calm apparition. It is a floating dream, an aërial form without weight, so perfect is the balance of the lines, and so pale, so delicate the shadows that float across the virginal and translucent stone. These black cypresses which frame it, this verdure through the openings of which peeps the blue sky, and this sward bathed in brilliant sunlight and on which the sharply-cut silhouettes of the trees are lying,--all these real objects render more unreal the delicate vision, which seems to melt away into the light of the sky. I walk towards it along the marble bank of the dark canal, and the mausoleum assumes sharper form. On approaching you take more delight in the surface of the octagonal edifice. This consists of rectangular expanses of polished marble where the light rests with a soft, milky splendour. One would never imagine that so simple a thing as surface could be so beautiful when it is large and pure. The eye follows the ingenious and graceful scrolls of great flowers, flowers of onyx and turquoise, incrusted with perfect smoothness, the harmony of the delicate carving, the marble lace-work, the balustrades of a thousand perforations,--the infinite display of simplicity and decoration.

The garden completes the monument, and both unite to form this masterpiece of art. The avenues leading to the Taj are bordered with funereal yews and cypresses, which make the whiteness of the far-away marble appear even whiter. Behind their slender cones thick and massive bushes add richness and depth to this solemn vegetation. The stiff and sombre trees, standing out in relief from this waving foliage, rise up solemnly with their trunks half-buried in masses of roses, or are surrounded by clusters of a thousand unknown and sweet-scented flowers which are blossoming in great masses in this solitary garden. He must have been an extraordinary artist who conceived this place. Sweeps of lawn, purple-chaliced flowers, golden petals, swarms of humming bees, and diapered butterflies give light and joy to the gloom of the burial-ground. This place is both luminous and solemn; it contains the amorous and religious delights of the Mussulman paradise, and the poem in trees and flowers unites with the poem in marble to sing of splendour and peace.

The interior of the mausoleum is at first as dark as night, but through this darkness a grille of antique marble is faintly gleaming, a mysterious marble-lace, which drapes the tombs, and which seems to wind and unwind forever, shedding on the splendour of the vault a yellow light, which seems to be ancient, and to have rested there for ages. And the pale web of marble wreathes and wreathes until it loses itself in the darkness.

In the centre are the tombs of the lovers; two small sarcophagi upon which a mysterious light falls, but whence it comes no one knows. There is nothing more. They sleep here in the silence, surrounded by perfect beauty which celebrates their love that has lasted even through death, and which is still isolated from everything by the mysterious marble-lace which enfolds them and which floats above them like a dream.

Very high overhead, as if through a thick vapour, we see the dome loom through the shadows, although its entire outlines are not perceptible; its walls seem made of mist, and its marble blocks appear to have no solidity. Everything is aërial here, nothing is substantial or real: this is a world of shadowy visions. Even sounds are unearthly. A note sung under this vault is echoed above our heads in an invisible region. First, it is as clear as the voice of Ariel, then it grows fainter and fainter until it dies away and then is re-echoed very far above, but glorified, spiritualized, and multiplied indefinitely as if repeated by a distant company, a choir of unseen angels who soar with it aloft until all is lost save a faint murmur which never ceases to vibrate over the tomb of the beloved, as if it were the very soul of a musician.

I have seen the Taj again; this time at noon. Under the vertical sun the melancholy phantom has vanished, the sweet sadness of the mausoleum has gone. The great marble table on which it stands is blinding. The light, reflected back and forth from the immense surfaces of white marble, is increased a hundred-fold in intensity, and some of the sides are like burning plaques. The incrustations seem to be sparks of magic fire; their hundreds of red flowers gleam like burning coals. The religious texts and the hieroglyphs, inlaid with black marble, stand out as if traced by the lightning-finger of a savage god. All the mystical rows of lotus and lilies unfolding in relief, which just now had the softness of yellowed ivory, spring forth like flames.--I retrace my steps, passing out of the entrance, and for an instant I have a dazzling view of the lines and incandescent surfaces of the building with its unchanging virgin whiteness.--Indeed, this severe simplicity and intensity of light give it something of a Semitic character: we think of the flaming and chastening sword of the Bible. The minarets lift themselves into the blue like pillars of fire.