ROYAL WINDSOR
On a Saturday in March, when the sky was of dazzling brilliance and a wind of devilish malignancy blew from the Arctic regions, I went to Windsor, in order to compare the castle as it is with the castle as Turner saw it, and to see if it is true, as a landscape expert assures me, that the heightening of the towers has ruined it. Studying the castle from various points of view, I was consistently impressed by its adequacy, its mediæval dominance, and its satisfying solidity.
Spring being so bitterly cold, I left the streets, where there is no central heating, and where I could catch no glimpse of any one in the least like Mistress Anne Page, and took refuge first in St. George's Chapel and then in the State Apartments. The chapel as a whole grows in beauty, even though new monuments interrupt its lines. The light, coming from a sky scoured by the northern breeze, was of the most lucid, so that every detail of the lovely ceiling was unusually visible, while even in the sombre choir, with its dark stalls and hanging banners and memorials of the Knights of the Garter, one could see almost distinctly. It is interesting to have as near London as this a sacred building so like those which we normally do not enter until we have crossed the Channel.
I was alone in the chapel, but in the State Apartments made one of a party of thirty to forty, chiefly soldiers, led round by a guide. Anything less like Harrison Ainsworth than this guide I cannot imagine; or, indeed, the inside of any castle less like the fateful and romantic fortress of that storyteller's dream. Henry VIII's suit of armour we certainly saw, but the guide's hero is a later king, George IV., who subjected every room to his altering hand. Of Herne the Hunter there was not a sign. The most sinister thing there was the bed in the Council Chamber where visiting monarchs (referred to by the guide as "The Royals") sleep, one of whom not so very long ago was the Kaiser. "I wish he was in it now," a bloodthirsty tripper muttered darkly in my ear.
The King's furniture struck me as too ornate, but he has some wonderful pictures. The guide seemed to dwell with most affection upon a landscape by Benjamin West, but I remember with more vividness and pleasure a series of portraits of Henrietta, queen of Charles I., by Van Dyck: one by the door, and two others flanking the fire-place of the superb Van Dyck room. There is also a Rubens room containing, among many more pretentious things, a fascinating portrait of the painter's second wife and a family group devised on what was, to me, a new principle. The parents are here seen in the company of their ten children; but, if the guide is to be believed, on the original canvas only the parents and a small proportion of this brood were depicted, space being left for the insertion of the others as year by year they made their appearance. The scheme offers problems. Since the eldest child looks ten or eleven and the youngest is a baby, we must suppose (always if the guide is not misinformed) that the painter added ageing touches to the whole group at each new sitting.
When one hunts in packs there is little opportunity to examine crowded walls, and there were many pictures of which I should like to see more at leisure. Among them was a Rembrandt, a Correggio, a Titian, a Honthorst, and two Canalettos. There are the punctual carvings by Grinling Gibbons in Charles II.'s dining-room and elsewhere. Other outstanding articles are the jewelled throne once belonging to the King of Candy; the armour of the King's Champion, that obsolete but picturesque functionary; and the portraits of all the winners of Waterloo, at home and in the field, except any private soldiers.
On leaving the castle I walked an incredible number of miles down an impeccably straight road to the equestrian statue that stands out so bravely against the sky on the hill that closes the vista: Snow Hill. The statue is of George III., and it is a fine bold thing. Not in the same class with Verrocchio's bronze horseman in Venice, or Donatello's bronze horseman in Padua, but impressive by its bigness and superior to either of those masterpieces in its site, which is not, however, so commanding as that eminence at Valley Forge which is dominated by Anthony Wayne on his metal steed. And then I found a really good confectioner's, whose first two initials correspond startlingly to my own, and, in the company of frozen Etonians not less greedy than I, ate little pots of jam until it was time to catch the train.