Nevertheless, in spite of this archiepiscopal reasoning, the pilgrims seem to be largely a godless crew whom, if my reader has come in their company to Canterbury, he will do better to avoid while there, and betake himself at once to the cathedral when he has had his luncheon. It is easily of such interest, historical and architectural, that he may spend in it not only all that is left him of his fourth of May, but many and many days of other months before he has exhausted it. The interest will rather exhaust him if he forms one of that troop of twentieth-century pilgrims who are led sheeplike through the edifice under the rod of the verger. We fell to a somewhat severe verger, though the whole verger tribe is severe, for that matter, and were snubbed if we ventured out of the strict order of our instruction at the shrine where Thomas à Becket, become a saint by his passive participation in the act, was murdered. One lady who trespassed upon the bounds pointed out as worn in the stone by the knees of more pious pilgrims, in former ages, was bidden peremptorily “Step back,” and complied in a confusion that took the mind from the arrogant churchman slain by the knights acting upon their king’s passionate suspiration, “Is there no one to deliver me from this turbulent priest?”
Perhaps it was not the verger alone that at Canterbury caused the vital spirits to sink so low. There was also the sense of hopelessness with which one recalled a few shadowy details of the mighty story of the church, including, as it does, almost everything of civility and art in the successive centuries which have passed, eight of them, since it began to be the prodigious pile it is. St. Thomas, who, since he was so promptly canonized, must be allowed a saint in everything but meekness, is the prime presence that haunts the thought of the visitor, and yet it is no bad second if the French Protestant refugees, whom Elizabeth allowed to hold their services in the crypt, and who lived where they worshipped in their exile, possess it next; the Black Prince’s armor and effigy are not in it, with these. The crypt is no longer their dwelling-place, but their rites (I suppose Calvinistic) are still solemnized there; and who knows but if the savage Puritans, who imagined they were abolishing episcopacy when they were destroying beauty, had been a little less barbarous they might not now enter third among the associations of the cathedral? We cannot doubt the sincerity of their self-righteousness, and there is a fine thrill in the story of how they demolished “the great idolatrous window standing on the left hand as you go up into the choir,” if you take it in the language of the minister Richard Culmer, luridly known to neighboring men as “Blue Dick.” He himself bore a leading part in the vandalism, being moved by especial zeal to the work, not only because “in that window were seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary, in seven large glorious appearances,” but because “their prime cathedral saint, Archbishop Becket, was most rarely pictured in that window, in full proportion, with cope, rochet, crozier, and his pontificalibus.... A minister,” the godly Blue Dick tells us, modestly forbearing to name himself, “was on top of the city ladder, near sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand, rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones, when others present would not venture so high.”
Of course, of course, it is all abominable enough, but it is not contemptible. The Puritans were not doing this sort of thing for fun, though undoubtedly they got fun out of it. They believed truly they were serving God in the work, and they cannot be left out of any count that sums up the facts making the English churches so potent upon the imagination. These churches were of a powerfuler hold upon my age than those that charmed my youth in Italy, because they bore witness not only to the great political changes in the life about them, but also to the succession of religious events. The order of an unbroken Catholicism is not of so rich a picturesqueness or so vital an importance as the break from the Roman Church, and then the break from the English Church, the first protestantism obeying the king’s will and the second the people’s conscience. Each was effected with ruinous violence, but ruin for ruin, that wrought by Henry VIII. is of twice the quantity and quality of that wrought by the zealots of the Commonwealth. When they tell you in these beautiful old places that Cromwell did so and so to devastate or desecrate them, you naturally, if you are a true American, and inherit in spirit the Commonwealth, take shame to yourself for brave Oliver; but you need not be in such haste. There was a Thomas Cromwell, who failed to “put away ambition,” when bidden by the dying Wolsey, and who served his king better than his God; and it was this Cromwell far more than Oliver Cromwell who spoiled the religious houses and the churches. A hundred years before the righteous Blue Dick “rattled down proud Becket’s glassy bones,” there were royal commissioners who rattled out the same martyr’s real bones, and profaned his tomb in such wise that one cannot now satisfy the piety which drew the pilgrims in such multitude to his knee-worn shrine. It is to be said for the first Cromwell and his instruments, who were not too good to stable their horses in a church here and there, like the Puritan troopers who hardly bettered their instruction, that they would forbear their conscientious violence if the churchmen would pay enough, whereas no bribe could stay the hands of such followers of the second Cromwell as Blue Dick when once they lifted their hands against “cathedral saints.”
We revered whatever was venerable in the cathedral, and then came rather wearily out and sat down to rest on a friendly bench commanding a view of as much of the edifice as the eye can take in at a glance. That was much more than the pen could tell in a chapter, and I will only generalize the effect as such rich repose for soul and body as I should not know where else to find again. We sat there in a moment of positive sunshine, which poured itself from certain blue spaces in a firmament of soft white clouds. The towers and pinnacles of the mighty bulk, which was yet too beautiful to seem big, soared among the tender forms, the English sky is so low and the church was so high; and in and out of the coigns and crevices of its Norman, and early English, and Gothic, the rooks doing duty as pigeons, disappeared and appeared again. Naturally, there were workmen doing something to the roofs and towers, but as if their scaffolding was also Norman, and Gothic, and early English, it did not hurt the harmony of the architecture. When we could endure no more of the loveliness, we rose, and went about peering among the noble ruins of the cathedral cloisters, the work of the first Cromwell who tried to fear God in honoring the king, not the second Cromwell, who tried to honor God without fearing the king.
These are somehow more appealing than the ruins of St. Augustine’s monastery, which is still a school for missionaries in its habitable parts. He began to build it while King Ethelbert yet mourned, in his conversion for his Christian Queen Bertha, but it was a thousand years growing to the grandeur which Henry VIII. spared and appropriated, and in which it remained to be the sojourn of all the sovereigns visiting Canterbury from his time till that of Charles II. It is not clear how it fell into its present dignified dilapidation, through the hands to which it was granted from age to age; but it could not be a more sightly or reverently kept monument. The missionary school is like some vigorous growth clothing with new sap the flank of a mouldering trunk long since dead. It is interesting, it is most estimable; it tenderly preserves and uses such portions of the ancient monastery as it may; but the spirit turns willingly from it, and goes and hangs over some shoulder of orchard wall, and gloats upon the picturesqueness of broken, sky-spanning arches, ivied from their pillar bases to the tops of their mutilated spandrels.
It was here, I think, that we first saw that curious flintwork which so abounds in the parts of Kent: the cloven pebbles of black-rimmed white set in walls of such pitiless obduracy that the sense bruises itself against them, and comes away bleeding. The monks who wove these curtains of checkered masonry, what an adamantine patience they must have had! But the labor was the least part of their bleak life, which was well put an end to, soon after it was corrupted into something tolerable by the vices attributed to them. Vicious they could not have been in the measure that the not over-virtuous destroyers of their monasteries pretended, and I think that amid the ruins of their houses one may always rather fitly offer their memory the oblation of a pitying tear. I am not sure whether it was before or after we had visited the still older scene of St. Augustine’s missionary effort at the church of St. Martin, that I paid some such tribute to his successors at the monastery; but the main thing is to have visited St. Martin’s at any time. It is so old as to have forgotten not only its founders, who are dimly conjectured to have been some Christian soldiers of the Roman garrison in about the year 187, but also the name of its first tutelary saint, for St. Martin was not yet born when St. Martin’s was built. He died about 395, and his fame crossed over from France with the good Bertha, when she came to wed the heathen King Ethelbert, of whose heathenism, with St. Augustine’s help, she made such short and thorough work that after her death he became a Christian himself, and after his own death a saint. She dedicated the little Roman church to St. Martin, and she lies buried in a recess of the wall beside the chancel. The verger who showed us her stone coffin in its nook said, with a seeking glance from the corner of his eye: “This is where she is supposed to be buried. They say she is buried in two other places, but I think, as there is nothing to prove it, they might as well let her rest here.”
He was probably right, and he was of a subacid saturnine humor which suited so well with the fabulous atmosphere of the place, or else with our momentary mood, that we voted him upon the whole the most sympathetic sexton we had yet known. He made, doubtless not for the first time, demurely merry with the brass of a gentleman interred beneath the chancel, who, being the father of three sons and ten daughters, was recorded to have had “many joys and some cares,” and with the monumental stone of a patriarch who had died at a hundred and of whom he conjectured grimly that if he had not so many joys as his neighbor, he had fewer cares, since he had never married. If these jokes
ST. MARTIN’S CHURCH, CANTERBURY