Much time and trouble have been spent in the endeavour to correct the current chronology of the cathedrals. The subject is a difficult one; suffice it to say that I have relied rather on architectural than on documentary evidence. “In the earlier days of archæological study the tendency was to discredit the former and to accept the latter; in these days the results of strict analytical investigation and comparison of the minor details of the buildings of the Middle Ages dispose us to place much more reliance upon this species of internal evidence than on even the most unequivocal assertions of ecclesiastical historians.” The inductive reasoning based on the former is safer than the possibly hearsay or downright mendacious testimony of the latter. In all cases, however, where I have departed from an accepted chronology, I have given my reasons: e.g., in the chapters on Hereford and Wells.
As a rule, I have refrained from describing architectural detail. The visitor to the cathedral does not need the description; the reader does not need it, if he has an illustration before him; if he has not, no amount of verbiage will make clear to him what, for instance, a bay of the Angel triforium of Lincoln is like.
SOUTHWELL CHAPTER-HOUSE.
On the other hand, I have ventured on perilous ground in attempting to criticise design. Where the old builders seem to me to have done bad design, I have not scrupled to say so. Indiscriminate admiration of old work is as bad as indiscriminate censure of new work: both are fatal to the training of a right perceptive faculty. The student of design must compare and weigh and judge; he must not be misled by local enthusiasm to put St. Hugh’s choir at Lincoln on the level of Ely presbytery, or York nave on the level of that of Exeter. I may add that I have laid more stress than, perhaps, is usual, on proportion, as a leading factor in architectural effect.
I have followed the convenient custom of ascribing the design of different parts of the cathedrals to various bishops and abbots and priors. Such names, however, are merely convenient chronological fixtures, not intended to signify that the dignitaries of the church personally designed and erected them, but simply that they were in office when the work was done.
On the vexed question of architect v. master-mason, I may say that, just as I find it easier to believe in one Homer than in many Homers, so, in contemplating such a poem in stone as the west front of Peterborough or the retro-choir of Wells, I find it easier to believe in one inspired architect than in a crowd of inspired clerks of the works.
I have gratefully to acknowledge my obligations to the “Cathedral Handbooks” of Mr. John Murray, and to the Builder series of cathedrals; and to the brilliant word-painting of Mrs. Van Rensselaer in her “Handbook of Twelve English Cathedrals.”
All the English cathedrals have been studied on the spot; but I had the misfortune to lose the whole of my notes and the greater part of the completed MS., so that the work must be less accurate than I had hoped. Complete accuracy, however, is impossible in dealing with a subject so vast. It is impossible even to know a single cathedral. As has been finely said by Mr. Fergusson: “Not only is there built into a mediæval cathedral the accumulated thought of all the men who had occupied themselves with building during the preceding centuries, but you have the dream and aspiration of the bishop, abbot, or clergy for whom it was designed; the master-mason’s skilled construction; the work of the carver, the painter, the glazier, the host of men who, each in his own craft, knew all that had been done before them, and had spent their lives in struggling to surpass the works of their forefathers. It is more than this: there is not one shaft, one moulding, one carving, not one chisel-mark in such a building, that was not designed specially for the place where it is found, and which was not the best that the experience of the age could invent for the purposes to which it is applied; nothing was borrowed; and nothing that was designed for one purpose was used for another. A thought or a motive peeps out through every joint; you may wander in such a building for weeks or for months together, and never know it all.”
