CHAPTER XIV
OLD CHURCHES OF LONDON
Sight-seeing, merely for its own sake, is not to be commended. Hundreds of persons roam through the storied places of England, carrying nothing away but the bare sense of travel. It is not the spectacle that benefits, but the meaning of the spectacle. In the great temples of religion, in those wonderful cathedrals that are the glory of the old world, we ought to feel, not merely the physical beauty but the perfect, illimitable faith, the passionate, incessant devotion, which alone made them possible. The cold intellect of a sceptical age, like the present, could never create such a majestic cathedral as that of Canterbury. Not till the pilgrim feels this truth has he really learned the lesson of such places,—to keep alive in his heart the capacity of self-sacrifice, of toil and of tears, for the grandeur and beauty of the spiritual life. At the tombs of great men we ought to feel something more than a consciousness of the crumbling clay that moulders within,—something more even than knowledge of their memorable words and deeds: we ought, as we ponder on the certainty of death and the evanescence of earthly things, to realise that art at least is permanent, and that no creature can be better employed than in noble effort to make the soul worthy of immortality. The relics of the past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array of ruined castles and of wasting graves; you sicken at the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, and you long to look again on roses and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. But not if the meaning of the past is truly within your sympathy; not if you perceive its associations as feeling equally with knowledge; not if you truly know that its lessons are not of death but of life! To-day builds over the ruins of yesterday, as well in the soul of man as on the vanishing cities that mark his course. There need be no regret that the present should, in this sense, obliterate the past.
Much, however, as London has changed, and constantly as it continues to change, many objects still remain, and long will continue to remain, that startle and impress the sensitive mind. Through all its wide compass, by night and day, flows and beats a turbulent, resounding tide of activity, and hundreds of trivial and vacuous persons, sordid, ignorant, and commonplace tramp to and fro amid its storied antiquities, heedless of their existence. Through such surroundings, but finding here and there a sympathetic guide or a friendly suggestion, the explorer must make his way,—lonely in the crowd, and walking like one who lives in a dream. Yet he never will drift in vain through a city like this. I went one night into the cloisters of Westminster Abbey—that part, the South Walk, which is still accessible after the gates have been closed. The stars shone down upon the blackening walls and glimmering windows of the great cathedral; the grim, mysterious arches were dimly lighted; the stony pathways, stretching away beneath the venerable building, seemed to lose themselves in caverns of darkness; not a sound was heard but the faint rustling of the grass upon the cloister green. Every stone there is the mark of a sepulchre; every breath of the night wind seemed the whisper of a gliding ghost. There, among the crowded graves, rest Anne Oldfield and Anne Bracegirdle,—in Queen Anne's reign such brilliant luminaries of the stage,—and there was buried the dust of Aaron Hill, poet and dramatist, once manager of Drury Lane, who wrote The Fair Inconstant for Barton Booth, and some notably felicitous love-songs. There, too, are the relics of Susanna Maria Arne (Mrs. Theo. Cibber), Mrs. Dancer, Thomas Betterton, and Spranger Barry. Sitting upon the narrow ledge that was the monks' rest, I could touch, close at hand, the tomb of a mitred abbot, while at my feet was the great stone that covers twenty-six monks of Westminster who perished by the Plague nearly six hundred years ago. It would scarcely be believed that the doors of dwellings open upon that gloomy spot; that ladies may sometimes be seen tending flowers upon the ledges that roof those cloister walks. Yet so it is; and in such a place, at such a time, you comprehend better than before the self-centred, serious, ruminant, romantic character of the English mind,—which loves, more than anything else in the world, the privacy of august surroundings and a sombre and stately solitude. It hardly need be said that you likewise obtain here a striking sense of the power of contrast. I was again aware of this, a little later, when, seeing a dim light in St. Margaret's church near by, I entered that old temple and found the men of the choir at their rehearsal, and presently observed on the wall a brass plate which announces that Sir Walter Raleigh was buried here, in the chancel,—after being decapitated for high treason in the Palace Yard outside. Such things are the surprises of this historic capital. This inscription begs the reader to remember Raleigh's virtues as well as his faults,—a plea, surely, that every man might well wish should be made for himself at last. I thought of the verses that the old warrior-poet is said to have left in his Bible, when they led him out to die—
"Even such is time; that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us nought but age and dust;
Which, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days.—
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up, I trust."
This church contains a window commemorative of Raleigh, presented by Americans, and inscribed with these lines, by Lowell—
"The New World's sons, from England's breast we drew
Such milk as bids remember whence we came;
Proud of her past, wherefrom our future grew,
This window we inscribe with Raleigh's name."
It also contains a window commemorative of Caxton, presented by the printers and publishers of London, which is inscribed with these lines by Tennyson—
"Thy prayer was Light—more Light—while Time shall last,
Thou sawest a glory growing on the night,
But not the shadows which that light would cast
Till shadows vanish in the Light of Light."