Fuller, speaking of these, by a curious lapse falls into the vulgar error of believing Purbeck marble to be an artificial product melted and poured into moulds, says: "The cathedral is paramount of its kind, wherein the doors and chapels equal the months, the windows the days, the pillars and pillarets of fusile marble (an ancient art now shrewdly suspected to be lost) the hours of the year; so that all Europe affords not such an almanac of architecture. Once walking in this church (whereof then I was prebendary) I met a countryman wondering at the structure thereof. 'I once,' said he to me, 'admired that there could be a church that should have so many pillars as there be hours in the year, and now I admire more, that there should be so many hours in the year as I see pillars in this church.'"
The Nave.—The first glimpse as we enter by the west door is undoubtedly impressive, notwithstanding the absence of colour and the lack of mystery for which the complete vista obtained at such a cruel cost by Wyatt is insufficient compensation. The whole scheme of decoration in its pristine state must have been extremely beautiful. "If you can imagine it with the walls and piers exhibiting strong contrasts of colour in the dark and polished Purbeck shafts and the lighter freestones, the arches picked out with colours, the groining elaborately decorated, and the whole lighted by brilliantly painted windows with a preponderance of dark blue and ruby, together with a flood of white light showing through the lancet of the centre, we may be allowed a doubt whether Tintern or York could have compared with it." Add to this picture the movable hangings and decorations of its many altars, and we cannot honestly attribute the coldness of the present effect to any fault in the original design. Elsewhere this austerity of monochrome is modified to a great extent by the variety (anachronisms though they be) of later architectural insertions. Salisbury, through the very purity of its design, especially suffers from its translation from chromatic harmony to monotone, for although possibly the architectural details are thereby rendered more apparent, yet the exaggeration of what is after all but the skeleton of the building, destroys the effect of the whole as its architect imagined it.
Clustered columns of unpolished Purbeck marble on a quatrefoil plan, with smaller detached shafts of lustrous marble at the cardinal points, support, on either side, the ten great arches of the first story of the nave. These polished shafts are generally in two pieces, with a brass ring covering the joint; Francis Price discusses, at great length, this constant feature of the whole building, and points out, that although most of the shafts were probably not in place until after the masonry was fairly set, yet frequently subsequent settlement has crushed them; although, in the nave, the main piers in small blocks laid according to the natural bed of the stone, are still perfectly sound. The large arches are gracefully moulded with masses of carved foliage at the intersections.
THE NAVE—SOUTH SIDE.[ToList]
In the nave of this cathedral we have a very uncommon feature in the connected base of the main columns, which was doubtless introduced to aid in distributing the weight over a larger surface, and so to overcome the treacherous character of the foundation.
The triforium, which, from its style, naturally suggests comparison with Westminster, and the Angel Choir of Lincoln, is simple, but extremely beautiful. Each of its rather flat-pointed arches, equalling in span that of the main arch below, is subdivided into pairs, which again each inclose two smaller ones. These are decorated with trefoils and quatrefoils, alternately with cinquefoils and octofoils. Immediately above the carving, at the intersection of the main arches, is a corbelled head, from which rises a triple vaulting-shaft with foliated capitals, on a line with the base of the clerestory. This upper story has, in each bay of the vaulting, simple lancet windows grouped in threes. The arches here, as in almost every instance throughout the building, are supported by Purbeck marble shafts. The nave aisles are lighted by double lancet-windows in each bay. The most noticeable feature of these aisles is the stone bench which extends the whole length of the building on both the north and south sides.
