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light as air, as strong as iron—which all but den. Cloisters and chapter-house lie also to touched the clouds.

It is interesting too to remember, that new as Salisbury seems when compared with Stonehenge, the one can boast no earlier name than the other. The Druids may very well have built Stonehenge, but the barbarians whom the Druids ruled must have camped before the Romans on the hill of Sarum. Perhaps from this same spot, indeed, went forth the constructors of the undated temple and those of the thirteenth-century church.

III.

ONE can well understand how attractive their new site must have seemed to the emigrating priests-low and level, warm and fertile, and close to the silver Avon's banks. But its too-tempting unlikeness to their old position brought them new discomforts. The land lay so low as to be almost swampy, and the river ran so close that in times of flood it ran into the church —an even worse visitor than the wind of the hill-city, as it could enforce the discontinuance of services for days together. Even until comparatively recent years local grumblers called the close the sink of the city and the palace the sink of the close. But no hint of such discomforts appears to the eye. The close is simply one of the greenest, freshest, and sweetest of earthly spots; and outside of fairy-land there can be nothing lovelier than the palace and its gardens, except the incomparably fairy-like garden and palace at Wells. If Durham seems the petrified portrait and interpretation of the Church Militant, Salisbury is the very type and picture of the Church of the Prince of Peace. Nowhere else does a work of Christian architecture so express purity and repose and the beauty of holiness, while the green pastures which surround it might well be those of which the Psalmist wrote. When the sun shines on the pale gray stones and the level grass and the silent trees, and throws the long shadow of the spire across them, it is as though a choir of seraphs sang in benediction of that peace of God which passeth understanding. The men who built and planted here were sick of the temples of Baalim, tired of being cribbed and cabined, weary of quarrelsome winds and voices. They wanted space and sun and stillness, comfort and rest and beauty, and the quiet ownership of their own; and no men ever more perfectly expressed, for future times to read, the ideal which they had in mind.

The cathedral stands upon a great, unbroken, absolutely level lawn which sweeps around it to west and north and east, while close beyond it to the south rise the trees of the episcopal gar

the south, and upon the other sides nothing is visible except the lawn itself, the magnificent trees which circle at a distance, the low wall of the close, and over this the rows of the canons' vine-wreathed homes. The chief approach is through a gate-way at the northeast angle of the close, whence a path leads to the main door in the north side of the nave. Approaching thus, we see the whole church standing free and see it at its very best. For, as so often in England, the west front not only does not contain the entrance, but is the least beautiful part of the structure.

IV.

AS FATE had decreed that this should be the only great English church to be built all at once and to remain intact, it is fortunate that it was begun not in a time of transition but in the early years of a perfected style; and it is doubly fortunate that this style was one which only England practiced. Her earlier Norman and her later full-blown Gothic (or Decorated style) she practiced in common with the rest of northern Europe. But the intermediate Lancet-Pointed and the still later Perpendicular were of her own creation. Lancet-Pointed features, as has been already told, were used elsewhere, but were nowhere else developed into a homogeneous scheme of construction and decoration, and so long used as to come to full perfection. When the corner-stone of the choir of Salisbury was laid, the style had just thrown off the last trace of Norman thought. When the west front was finished, it was just beginning to develop certain ornamental motives which became characteristic of the Decorated period. If the church had been built with the express wish to show what the Lancet-Pointed style meant in its purest essence, what it could achieve without help from any other, its witness could not be plainer or more precise.

Its plan is the ideal plan of a great English church, free alike from Norman and from contemporary foreign influence. The immense length of the nave and choir (480 feet) and their comparative narrowness; the double pair of transepts, each with its single aisle; the great north porch; the square endings of all the six limbs and even of the apse (if so it may be called) which projects to the eastward- all these are thoroughly English features. When we look at the exterior we find it also typically English, by reason not only of the squareness of all its parts and the shape and finish of all its openings, but of the lowness of its roofs as well. It is this lowness which gives to central tower and spire their

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unmatched effectiveness. Tall though the spire of Salisbury is, two or three others exist which are still taller. Amiens, for example, stands 22 feet above it. But at Amiens the roof-ridge is 208 feet from the ground, while at Salisbury it is only 81. I need not speak again of the vast increase in interior majesty which the high French ceiling gives. But outside, I may repeat, the advantage is the other way. The body of the church is more beautiful if less imposing, and tower and spire are thrown into incomparable relief. Yet even at Salisbury they do not seem too high for the supporting structure. They do not dwarf the church while so imperially asserting themselves. The vast length of an English church and the wide spread of its transepts compensate as evidence of strength for the lowness of its walls, and amply sustain, to the aesthetic

sense, the loftiest ascending lines. In fact, no better church than Salisbury could be imagined as a preparation for one of the tallest spires in the world. Its successive portions so build themselves up from east to west in gradually increasing height that it has a graceful dignity, a buoyancy, a lifting, bearing, aspiring effect which we feel would be incomplete did a less aërial pinnacle surmount the whole.

This is the great beauty of Salisbury, the composition of its mighty body as a whole. So finely proportioned and arranged are its square masses of different heights and sizes, so splendid are the broad effects of light and shadow they produce, so appropriate is the slant of the roof lines, and so wisely placed and gracefully shaped are the simple windows, that for once we can give no thought

NORTH-EAST GATEWAY TO THE CLOSE.

VOL. XXXV.-95.

of regret either to the circling apses of Continental lands or to the rich traceries and surface carvings and figure-sculptures of later generations. The openings of the main story and the capitals of their shafts are merely molded. Traceries are employed above, but sparingly and in the simplest patterns. The buttresses are small and the flying ones which support the upper walls are few. The water-tables, which play a marvelously effective part in strengthening and enlivening the walls, are but a succession of unornamented though exquisitely profiled sharp projections and recesses;

EXTERIOR OF TRIFORIUM WINDOW, NORTH TRANSEPT.

and even the arcaded cornices are not elaborate. Except upon the western front there is nothing which properly can be called sculptured decoration. The whole effect is in the strictest sense architectural. Few large buildings teach so clearly the great lesson that beauty in a building depends first of all upon composition, not decoration; upon masses, not details; upon the use and the shaping, not the ornamentation of features: and very few show half so plainly that medieval architects could realize this fact. Gothic ideals so commonly reveal themselves through forms which are strikingly varied, or very complicated, or lavishly adorned, or all these things at once, that we are too apt to think them identical with such qualities. We are too apt to think that Gothic art cannot be individual without being eccentric, or interesting without being heterogeneous, or grand without being grandiose or half-barbaric, or lovely without the riotous charms of lace-like carving and ubiquitous

figure-sculpture. But Salisbury is both grand and lovely; and yet it is quiet, rational and all of a piece, clear and simple, and refined to the point of utmost purity. No building in the world is more logical, more lucid in expression, more restful to mind and eye.

Mr. Henry James, who is usually a sensitive observer, has called Salisbury a blonde beauty among churches. Certainly its chief charm is grace, not power. It is a distinctly feminine structure as compared with Ely or Durham, and we may grant that it is a blonde beauty as were those daughters of the gods who were "divinely tall and most divinely fair." But if by the term is meant any hint of weakness or mere prettiness it is a distinct misnomer. When the same pen writes that the beauty of Salisbury is a little banal, we are bound to dissent with emphasis. It may look so in a picture, for in architecture scale has much to do with the character of the impression we receive. The enormous size of Salisbury gives its design a force, a grandeur, an individuality which it would lack had it been executed on a smaller scale. In actual presence of its calm immensity most eyes will not find it commonplace or so lightly graceful as to want impressiveness. The truth is this, I repeat, with regard to Gothic architecture: we so often find imperfectly realized attempts that when we find completeness we are tempted to think the aim must have been an easy one to reach; we are so used to seeing virtues mixed with faults, or at least with different virtues, that when they are unmixed we hardly feel them precious; we are so cloyed with rich details that simplicity seems insipid; and we are so often met by an infinite picturesqueness that when it is absent we depreciate strict architectural beauty. It is strict architectural beauty that we find at Salisbury. If we think it feeble it will be because we cannot see strength when it has been brought to perfect poise and ease. If our verdict is banal, it will be because we cannot tell the commonplace from the simply and exactly right, or do not know how rare the latter is because we long for eccentricity as a proof of personality, and need what the French call emphase to impress us. There is no overemphasis about Salisbury - neither in its ef fect as a whole nor in any of its parts, neither in its design nor in its treatment. But just in this fact lies its greatest merit; and just by reason of this fact joined to its mighty size and its exceptional unity, it is intensely individual, personal, distinct from all other churches in the world. Here, for once, we find one phase of the medieval ideal of a great Christian church perfectly expressed by constructive forms alone, and find that it has extraordinary majesty, yet a still greater degree of loveliness.

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Is there nothing better to do than to turn away with the verdict: Perfect, but too perfect; simple, but too easily understood; grand, but not grandiose enough; entirely lovely, which is a fault; exquisitely complete, but therefore unexciting?

Gothic kinds, and that in its kind it stands unsurpassed, unrivaled, unapproached. If we put ornamentation out of the balance and judge for constructive beauty alone, it is one of the two or three great churches of the worldpartly because of its singular completeness, but largely for more intrinsic reasons.

v.

It is not a new idea of my own that if a classic Greek could come back to life he might like Salisbury better than any other medieval building. But it came to me as a new idea when I first saw the church, and the It is well to say at once, however, that in fact is perhaps worth citing as a line of thus estimating the merits of Salisbury I have

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evidence in a significant direction. If this building would seem exceptionally perfect and lucid to the eye of a Greek, if we should choose it as the first to show him when explaining what medieval builders understood by a temple of their faith,- if this is true or can by any colorable license be construed as truth, is not Salisbury magnificently praised? Meat that is fit for the gods must be good, though to our jaded appetites there may seem little spice in the dish.

I do not wish to be understood as saying that Salisbury is the most beautiful church in the world or in England, or even as saying that so it seems to me. Moods change, and with them estimates of perfection. Architectural beauty is of many kinds, and even within the limits of the Pointed styles we may judge for different virtues with differing priorities as the result. All I mean is that Salisbury's kind of beauty is the most purely lovely among

left its west front out of mind. This front is, indeed, one of the best of its kind, but its kind is indisputably bad.

The west façades of England offer a curious subject for study. Norman builders loved dominant central towers and English builders always persisted in this love. Across the Channel it was soon suppressed by a desire for lofty ceilings, and the west front profited by the change. Its towers became of chief importance, and their combination with the principal door-ways and with the great height of wall-curtain, which was justified by the high nave-walls behind, resulted in designs of extraordinary force and splendor-in designs which, as elevations, are by far the finest works of medieval genius. In England, where the western towers remained subordinate to the central, and where the body of the church was low and narrow, no such magnificence of front was logically possible. But great beauty

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