saint paul’s.—anecdote of a female esquimaux.—defect of grecian architecture in cold climates.—nakedness of the church.—monuments.—pictures offered by sir joshua reynolds, &c., and refused.— ascent.—view from the summit.
the cathedral church of st paul’s is not more celebrated than it deserves to be. no other nation in modern times has reared so magnificent a monument of piety. i never behold it without regretting that such a church should be appropriated to heretical worship;—that, like a whited sepulchre, there should be death within.
in the court before the grand entrance stands a statue of queen anne, instead of a cross; a figure as ill-executed as it is ill-placed, which has provoked some epigrams 308even in this country, indifferent as the taste in sculpture is here, and little as is the sense of religious decorum. on entering the church i was impressed by its magnitude. a fine anecdote is related of the effect this produced upon a female esquimaux:—quite overpowered with wonder when she stood under the dome, she leaned upon her conductor, as if sinking under the strong feeling of awe, and fearfully asked him, “did man make it? or was it put here?” my own sensations were of the same character, yet it was wonder at human power unmingled with any other kind of awe; not that feeling which a temple should inspire; not so much a sense that the building in which i stood was peculiarly suitable for worship, as that it could be suitable for nothing else. gothic architecture produces the effect of sublimity, though always without simplicity, and often without magnitude; so perhaps does the saracenic; if the grecian ever produce the same effect it is by magnitude 309alone. but the architecture of the ancients is altered, and materially injured by the alteration, when adapted to cold climates, where it is necessary when the light is admitted to exclude the air: the windows have always a littleness, always appear misplaced; they are holes cut in the wall: not, as in the gothic, natural and essential parts of the general structure.
the air in all the english churches which i have yet entered is damp, cold, confined, and unwholesome, as if the graves beneath tainted it. no better proof can be required of the wisdom of enjoining incense. i have complained that the area in their ordinary churches is crowded; but the opposite fault is perceivable in this great cathedral. the choir is but a very small part of the church; service was going on there, being hurried over as usual in week-days, and attended only by two or three old women, whose piety deserved to meet with better instructors. the vergers, however, paid so much respect to 310this service, such as it is, that they would not show us the church till it was over. there are no chapels, no other altar than that in the choir;—for what then can the heretics have erected so huge an edifice? it is as purposeless as the pyramids.
here are suspended all the flags which were taken in the naval victories of the late war. i do not think that the natural feeling which arose within me at seeing the spanish colours among them influences me, when i say that they do not ornament the church, and that, even if they did, the church is not the place for them. they might be appropriate offerings in a temple of mars; but certainly there is nothing in the revealed will of god which teaches us that he should be better pleased with the blood of man in battle, than with that of bulls and of goats in sacrifice. the palace, the houses of legislature, the admiralty, and the tower where the regalia are deposited, should be decorated with these trophies; so also should greenwich be, the noble 311asylum for their old seamen; and even in the church a flag might perhaps fitly be hung over the tomb of him who won it and fell in the victory. monuments are erecting here to all the naval captains who fell in these actions; some of them are not finished; those which are do little honour to the artists of england. the artists know not what to do with their villainous costume, and, to avoid uniforms in marble, make their unhappy statues half naked. one of these represents the dying captain as falling into neptune’s arms;—a dreadful situation for a dying captain it would be—he would certainly take the old sea-god for the devil, and the trident for the pitchfork with which he tosses about souls in the fire. will sculptors never perceive the absurdity of allegorizing in stone!
there are but few of these monuments as yet, because the english never thought of making st paul’s the mausoleum of their great men, till they had crowded westminster abbey with the illustrious 312and the obscure indiscriminately. they now seem to have discovered the nakedness of this huge edifice, and to vote parliamentary monuments to every sea captain who falls in battle, for the sake of filling it as fast as possible. this is making the honour too common. it is only the name of the commander in chief which is always necessarily connected with that of the victory; he, therefore, is the only individual to whom a national monument ought to be erected. if he survives the action, and it be thought expedient, as i willingly allow it to be, that every victory should have its monument, let it be, like the stone at thermopyl?, inscribed to the memory of all who fell. the commander in chief may deserve a separate commemoration: the responsibility of the engagement rests upon him; and to him the merit of the victory, as far as professional skill is entitled to it, will, whether justly or not, be attributed, though assuredly in most cases with the strictest justice. but 313whatever may have been the merit of the subordinate officers, the rank which they hold is not sufficiently conspicuous. the historian will mention them, but the reader will not remember them because they are mentioned but once, and it is only to those who are remembered that statues should be voted; only to those who live in the hearts and in the mouths of the people. “who is this?” is a question which will be asked at every statue; but if after the verger has named the person represented it is still necessary to ask, “who is he?” the statue is misplaced in a national mausoleum.
these monuments are too few as yet to produce any other general effect than a wish that there were more; and the nakedness of these wide walls without altar, chapel, confessional, picture, or offering, is striking and dolorous as you may suppose. yet if such honours were awarded without any immediate political motive, there are many for whom they might justly 314be claimed; for cook for instance, the first navigator, without reproach; for bruce, the most intrepid and successful of modern travellers; for lady wortley montague, the best of all letter-writers, and the benefactress of europe. “i,” said w., who was with me, “should demand one for sir walter raleigh; and even you, spaniard as you are, would not, i think, contest the claim; it should be for introducing tobacco into christendom, for which he deserves a statue of pipe-makers’ clay.”
some five-and-twenty or thirty years ago the best english artists offered to paint pictures and give them to this cathedral;—england had never greater painters to boast of than at that time. the thing, however, was not so easy as you might imagine, and it was necessary to obtain the consent of the bishop, the chapter, the lord mayor, and the king. the king loves the arts, and willingly consented; the lord mayor and the chapter made no objection; but 315the bishop positively refused; for no other reason, it is said, than because the first application had not been made to him. perhaps some puritanical feeling may have been mingled with this despicable pride, some leven of the old iconoclastic and lutheran barbarism; but as long as the names of barry and of sir joshua reynolds are remembered in this country, and remembered they will be as long as the works and the fame of a painter can endure, so long will the provoking absurdity of this refusal be execrated.[17]
17. a story, even less honourable than this to the dean and chapter of st paul’s is current at this present time, which if false should be contradicted, and if true should be generally known. upon the death of barry the painter it was wished to erect a tablet to his memory in this cathedral, and the dean and chapter were applied to for permission so to do: the answer was, that the fee was a thousand pounds. in reply to this unexpected demand, it was represented that barry had been a poor man, and that the monument was designed by his friends as a mark of respect to his genius: that it would not be large, and consequently might stand in a situation where there was not room for a larger. upon this it was answered, that, in consideration of these circumstances, perhaps five hundred pounds might be taken. a second remonstrance was made, a chapter was convened to consider the matter, and the final answer was, that nothing less than a thousand pounds could be taken.
if this be false it should be publicly contradicted, especially as any thing dishonourable will be readily believed concerning st paul’s, since lord nelson’s coffin was shown there in the grave for a shilling a head.—tr.
the monuments and the body of the 316church may be seen gratuitously; a price is required for admittance to any thing above stairs, and for fourpenny, sixpenny, and shilling fees we were admitted to see the curiosities of the building;—a model something differing from the present structure, and the work of the same great architect; a geometrical staircase, at the top of which the door closes with a tremendous sound; the clock, whose huge bell in a calm day, when what little wind is stirring is from the east, may be heard 317five leagues over the plain at windsor; and a whispering gallery, the great amusement of children and wonder of women, and which is indeed at first sufficiently startling. it is just below the dome; and when i was on the one side and my guide on the other, the whole breadth of the dome being between us, he shut-to the door, and the sound was like a peal of thunder rolling among the mountains.—the scratch of a pin against the wall, and the lowest whisper, were distinctly heard across. the inside of the cupola is covered with pictures by a certain sir james thornhill: they are too high to be seen distinctly from any place except the gallery immediately under them, and if there were nothing else to repay the fatigue of the ascent it would be labour in vain.
much as i had been impressed by the size of the building on first entering it, my sense of its magnitude was heightened by the prodigious length of the passages which we traversed, and the seeming endlessness 318of the steps we mounted. we kept close to our conductor with a sense of danger: that it is dangerous to do otherwise was exemplified not long since by a person who lost himself here, and remained two days and nights in this dismal solitude. at length he reached one of the towers in the front; to make himself heard was impossible; he tied his handkerchief to his stick, and hung it out as a signal of distress, which at last was seen from below, and he was rescued. the best plan in such cases would be to stop the clock, if the way to it could be found.
in all other towers which i had ever ascended, the ascent was fatiguing, but no ways frightful. stone steps winding round and round a stone pillar from the bottom up to the top, with just room to admit you between the pillar and the wall, make the limbs ache and the head giddy, but there is nothing to give a sense of danger. here was a totally different scene: the ascent was up the cupola, by stair-cases 319and stages of wood, which had all the seeming insecurity of scaffolding. projecting beams hung with cobwebs and black with dust, the depth below, the extent of the gloomy dome within which we were enclosed, and the light which just served to show all this, sometimes dawning before us, sometimes fading away behind, now slanting from one side, and now leaving us almost in utter darkness: of such materials you may conceive how terrifying a scene may be formed, and you know how delightful it is to contemplate images of terror with a sense of security.
having at last reached the summit of the dome, i was contented. the way up to the cross was by a ladder; and as we could already see as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing above to reward me for a longer and more laborious ascent. the old bird’s-eye views which are now disused because they are out of fashion, were of more use than any thing which supplies their place: half plain, half picture, they gave an idea of the place which they represented 320more accurately than pictures, and more vividly than plans. i would have climbed st paul’s, if it had been only to see london thus mapped below me, and though there had been nothing beautiful or sublime in the view: few objects, however, are so sublime, if by sublimity we understand that which completely fills the imagination to the utmost measure of its powers, as the view of a huge city thus seen at once:—house-roofs, the chimneys of which formed so many turrets; towers and steeples; the trees and gardens of the inns of court and the distant squares forming so many green spots in the map; westminster abbey on the one hand with westminster hall, an object scarcely less conspicuous; on the other the monument, a prodigious column worthy of a happier occasion and a less lying inscription; the tower and the masts of the shipping rising behind it; the river with its three bridges and all its boats and barges; the streets immediately within view blackened with moving swarms of men and lines of carriages. to the 321north were hampstead and highgate on their eminences, southward the surrey hills. where the city ended it was impossible to distinguish: it would have been more beautiful if, as at madrid, the capital had been circumscribed within walls, and the open country had commenced immediately without its limits. in every direction the lines of houses ran out as far as the eye could follow them, only the patches of green were more frequently interspersed towards the extremity of the prospect, as the lines diverged further from each other. it was a sight which awed me and made me melancholy. i was looking down upon the habitations of a million of human beings; upon the single spot whereon were crowded together more wealth, more splendour, more ingenuity, more worldly wisdom, and, alas! more worldly blindness, poverty, depravity, dishonesty, and wretchedness, than upon any other spot in the whole habitable earth.
