Chapter L: De Fourcaud (2)

The Cathedral of Orvieto will illustrate these remarks. Its design is very simple. It consists of a parallelogram, from which three chapels of equal size project, one at the east end, and one at the north and south. The windows are small and narrow, the columns round, and the roof displays none of that intricate groining we find in English churches. The beauty of the interior depends on surface decoration, on marble statues, woodwork, and fresco-paintings. Outside, there is the same simplicity of design, the same elaborated local ornament. The sides of the Cathedral are austere, their narrow windows cutting horizontal lines of black and white marble. But the façade is a triumph of decorative art. It is strictly what Fergusson has styled a “frontispiece”; for it bears no relation whatever to the construction of the building. Its three gables rise high above the aisles. Its pinnacles and parapets and turrets are stuck on to look agreeable. It is a screen such as might be completed or left unfinished at will by the architect. Finished as it is, the façade of Orvieto is a wilderness of beauties. Its pure white marble has been mellowed by time to a rich golden hue, in which are set mosaics shining like gems or pictures of enamel. A statue stands on every pinnacle; each pillar has a different design; round some of them are woven wreaths of vine and ivy; acanthus leaves curl over the capitals, making nests for singing-birds or Cupids; the doorways are a labyrinth of intricate designs, in which the utmost elegance of form is made more beautiful by incrustations of precious agates and Alexandrine glasswork. On every square inch of this wonderful façade have been lavished invention, skill, and precious material. But its chief interest centres in the sculptures executed by Giovanni and Andrea, sons and pupils of Nicola Pisano. The names of these three men mark an era in the history of art. They first rescued Italian sculpture from the grotesqueness of the Lombard and the monotony of the Byzantine styles. Sculpture takes the lead of all the arts. And Nicola Pisano, before Cimabue, before Duccio, even before Dante, opened the gates of beauty, which for a thousand years had been shut up and overgrown with weeds. As Dante invoked the influence of Virgil when he began to write his mediæval poem, and made a heathen bard his hierophant in Christian mysteries, just so did Nicola Pisano draw inspiration from a Greek sarcophagus, which had been cast upon the shore at Pisa. He studied the bas-relief of Phædra and Hippolytus, which may still be seen upon the tomb of Countess Beatrice, in the Campo Santo, and so learned by heart the beauty of its lines, and the dignity expressed in its figures, that in all his subsequent works we trace the elevated tranquillity of Greek sculpture. This imitation never degenerated into servile copying; nor, on the other hand, did Nicola attain the perfect grace of an Athenian artist. He remained a truly mediæval carver, animated with a Christian, instead of a Pagan spirit, but caring for the loveliness of form which art in the Dark Ages failed to realize.

Whether it was Nicola or his sons who designed the bas-reliefs at Orvieto is of little consequence. Vasari ascribes them to the father; but we know that he completed his pulpit at Pisa in 1230, and his death is supposed to have taken place fifteen years before the foundation of the Cathedral. At any rate, they are imbued with his genius, and bear the strongest affinity to his sculptures at Pisa, Siena, and Bologna. To estimate the influence they exercised over the arts of sculpture and painting in Italy would be a difficult task. Duccio and Giotto studied here; Ghiberti closely followed them. Signorelli and Raphael made drawings from their compositions. And the spirit which pervades these sculptures may be traced in all succeeding works of art. It is not classic; it is modern, though embodied in a form of beauty modelled on the Greek.

The bas-reliefs are carved on four marble tablets placed beside the porches of the church, and corresponding in size and shape with the chief doorways. They represent the course of Biblical history, beginning with the creation of the world, and ending with the Last Judgment. If it were possible here to compare them in detail with the similar designs of Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, it might be shown that the Pisani established modes of treating sacred subjects from which those mighty masters never deviated, though each stamped upon them his peculiar genius, making them more perfect as time added to the power of art. It would also be not without interest to show that in their primitive conceptions of the earliest events in history, the works of the Pisan artists closely resemble some sculptures executed on the walls of Northern cathedrals, as well as early mosaics in the south of Italy. We might have noticed how all the grotesque elements which appear in Nicola Pisano, and which may still be traced in Ghiberti, are entirely lost in Michel Angelo, how the supernatural is humanized, how the symbolical receives an actual expression, and how intellectual types are substituted for mere local and individual representations. For instance, the Pisani represent the Creator as a young man, standing on the earth, with a benign and dignified expression, and attended by two ministering angels. He is the Christ of the Creed, “by whom all things were made.” In Ghiberti we find an older man, sometimes appearing in a whirlwind of clouds and attendant spirits, sometimes walking on the earth, but still far different in conception from the Creative Father of Michel Angelo. The latter is rather the Platonic Demiurgus than the Mosaic God. By every line and feature of his face and flowing hair, by each movement of his limbs, whether he ride on clouds between the waters and the firmament, or stand alone creating by a glance and by a motion of his hand Eve, the full-formed and conscious woman, he is proclaimed the Maker who from all eternity has held the thought of the material universe within his mind. Raphael does not depart from this conception. The profound abstraction of Michel Angelo ruled his intellect, and received from his genius a form of perhaps greater grace. A similar growth from the germinal designs of the Pisani may be traced in many groups.

But we must not linger at the gate. Let us enter the Cathedral and see some of the wonders it contains. Statues of gigantic size adorn the nave. Of these the most beautiful are the work of Ippolito Scalza, an artist whom Orvieto claims with pride as one of her own sons. The long line of saints and apostles whom they represent, conduct us to the high altar surrounded by its shadowy frescoes, and gleaming with the work of carvers in marble and bronze and precious metals. But our steps are drawn towards the chapel of the south transept, where now a golden light from the autumnal sunset falls across a crowd of worshippers. From far and near the poor people are gathered. Most of them are women. They kneel upon the pavement and the benches, sunburnt faces from the vineyards and the canebrakes of the valley. The old look prematurely aged and withered--their wrinkled cheeks bound up in scarlet and orange-coloured kerchiefs, their skinny fingers fumbling on the rosary, and their mute lips moving in prayer. The younger women have great listless eyes and large limbs used to labour. Some of them carry babies trussed up in tight swaddling-clothes. One kneels beside a dark-browed shepherd, on whose shoulder falls his shaggy hair; and little children play about, half-hushed, half heedless of the place, among old men whose life has dwindled down into a ceaseless round of prayers. We wonder why this chapel alone in the empty Cathedral, is so crowded with worshippers. They surely are not turned towards that splendid Pietà of Scalza--a work in which the marble seems to live a cold, dead, shivering life. They do not heed Angelico’s and Signorelli’s frescoes on the roof and walls. The interchange of light and gloom upon the stalls and carved work of the canopies can scarcely rivet so intense a gaze. All eyes seem fixed upon a curtain of red silk above the altar. Votive pictures and glass cases full of silver hearts, wax babies, hands and limbs of every kind, are hung around it. A bell rings. A jingling organ plays a little melody in triple time; and from the sacristy comes forth the priest. With much reverence, and with a show of preparation, he and the acolytes around him mount the altar steps, and pull a string which draws the curtain. Behind the curtain we behold Madonna and her child--a faint, old, ugly picture, blackened with the smoke and incense of five hundred years, a wonder-working image, cased in gold, and guarded from the common air by glass and draperies. Jewelled crowns are stuck upon the heads of the mother and the infant. In the efficacy of Madonna di San Brizio to ward off agues, to deliver from the pangs of childbirth or the fury of the storm, to keep the lover’s troth and make the husband faithful to his home, these pious women of the marshes and the mountains put a simple trust.

While the priest sings, and the people pray to the dance-music of the organ, let us take a quiet seat unseen, and picture to our minds how the chapel looked when Angelico and Signorelli stood before its plastered walls, and thought the thoughts with which they covered them. Four centuries have gone by since those walls were white and even to their brushes; and now you scarce can see the golden aureoles of saints, the vast wings of the angels, and the flowing robes of prophets through the gloom. Angelico came first, in monk’s dress, kneeling before he climbed the scaffold to paint the angry Judge, the Virgin crowned, the white-robed army of the Martyrs, and the glorious company of the Apostles. These he placed upon the roof, expectant of the Judgment. Then he passed away, and Luca Signorelli, the rich man who “lived splendidly and loved to dress himself in noble clothes,” the liberal and courteous gentleman, took his place upon the scaffold. For all the worldliness of his attire and the delicacy of his living, his brain teemed with stern and terrible thoughts. He searched the secrets of sin and of the grave, of destruction and of resurrection, of heaven and hell. All these he has painted on the walls beneath the saints of Fra Angelico. First come the troubles of the last days, the preaching of Antichrist, and the confusion of the wicked. In the next compartment we see the Resurrection from the tomb; and side by side with that is painted Hell. Paradise occupies another portion of the chapel.

After viewing these frescoes, we muse and ask ourselves why Signorelli’s fame is so inadequate to his deserts? Partly, no doubt because he painted in obscure Italian towns, and left few easel pictures. Besides the artists of the Sixteenth Century eclipsed all their predecessors, and the name of Signorelli has been swallowed up in that of Michel Angelo. Vasari said that “_esso Michel Angelo imitò l’andar di Luca, come può vedere ognuno_.” Nor is it hard to see that what the one began at Orvieto the other completed in the Vatican. These great men had truly kindred spirits. Both struggled to express their intellectual conceptions in the simplest and most abstract forms. The works of both are distinguished by contempt for adventitious ornaments and for the grace of positive colour. Both chose to work in fresco, and selected subjects of the gravest and most elevated character. The study of anatomy, and the correct drawing of the naked body, which Luca practised, were carried to perfection by Michel Angelo. Sublimity of thought and self-restraint pervade their compositions. He who would understand Buonarotti must first appreciate Signorelli. The latter, it is true, was confined to a narrower circle in his study of the beautiful and the sublime. He had not ascended to that pure idealism superior to all the accidents of place and time, which is the chief distinction of Michel Angelo’s work. At the same time, his manner had not suffered from too close a study of the antique. He painted the life he saw around him, and clothed his men and women in the dress of Italy.

Such reflections, and many more, pass through our mind as we sit and ponder in the chapel, which the daylight has deserted. The country-people are still on their knees, still careless of the frescoed forms around them, still praying to the Madonna of the Miracles. The service is well-nigh done. The benediction has been given, the organist strikes up his air of Verdi, and the congregation shuffles off, leaving the dimly-lighted chapel for the vast sonorous dusky nave. How strange it is to hear that faint strain of a feeble opera sounding where a short while since, the trumpet-blast of Signorelli’s angels seemed to thrill our ears!

THE BUILDINGS OF SHAH JEHAN

G. W. STEEVENS

The north-eastern approach to Agra is through a waste of land at the same time flat and broken. Formless hillocks and ditches, colourless sand and dead turf, the whole scene was mean and depressing. I raised my eyes, and there, on the edge of the ugly prairie, sat a fair white palace with domes and minarets. So exquisite in symmetry, so softly lustrous in tint, it could hardly be substantial, and I all but cried, “Mirage!” It was the Taj Mahal.

And now we were clanking over an iron bridge above a dark-green river that filled barely a quarter of its sandy bed; deep, broad staircases stepped down to its further bank with pillared pleasure-houses overlooking them. Now on the right rose a great mosque, its bellying domes zig-zagged with red and white; dawn from the left frowned the weather-worn battlements of a great red fortress. This was the city of Shah Jehan, emperor and devotee, artist and lover.

And this, in a few words, is the passionate story of Shah Jehan. He was the grandson of Akbar the Great, the first Mogul Emperor of Hindustan. While yet Prince Royal, conquering India for the Moguls, he married the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, called Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the chosen of the palace, and loved her tenderly beyond all his wives for fourteen years. But only a year after he became Sultan she died in travail of her eighth child. Shah Jehan in his grief swore that she should have the loveliest tomb the world ever beheld, and for seventeen years he built the Taj Mahal. Also he built the palace of Agra, the fort and palace of Delhi, and the great mosque of Agra; he took to wife many fair ladies, and lived in all luxuriousness, ministering abundantly to every sense, till he had reigned thirty years. Then his son Aurungzebe rose up and dethroned him, and kept him a close prisoner in his own private mosque, which he had built within the palace of Agra. There he lived seven years more, attended by his daughter Jehanara, who would not leave him, till at last, in 1645, being grown very feeble, he begged to be laid in a chamber of the palace wherefrom he could see the Taj Mahal. This was granted him, so that he died with his eyes upon the tomb of the love of his youth. There they buried him beside her. And his daughter, when her time came, wrote a Persian stanza begging that no monument should be set up to “the humble transitory Jehanara,” and praying only for her father’s soul.

Agra is the mirror of Shah Jehan. In the fort and palace you can read all the story of the warrior and the lover--in the fort so nakedly grim without and the palace so richly voluptuous within. Under the brow of the sheer sandstone walls you are dwarfed to a pigmy. Before and beneath the great gateway stands a double curtain of loophole and machicolation and tower: you go in through cavernous guard-houses, up a ramp between sky-closing walls. Only thus do you reach the real entrance--the great Elephant Gate--two jutting octagon towers supporting spacious chambers thrown across the passage. On the lower storey all is closed, and only white plaster designs relieve the savage masses of the sandstone; in the upper balconies are windows and recesses, all decked with white, and above all runs a gallery crowned with cupolas.

Under this arch you go, a dome above, deep and lofty recesses on either hand; now you are past the sternness. Shah Jehan is soldier no longer but artist and amorist at large. You come to the Pearl Mosque. There is a Pearl Mosque at Delhi, sandstone slabs without, marble within, as this is; but the Delhi mosque is a bauble to this. This is a broad court, paved with slabs of marble, veined with white and blue, gray and yellow. This is all marble--marble walls with moulded panels, marble cloisters of multifoliate arches, marble gateways breaking three walls of the square, marble columns supporting bell-cupolas above them and at each corner, a marble basin in the centre of the court, a marble sundial beside it. Along the west side of the court shines the glorious face of the mosque itself--only a roofed quarter of the whole space, a mere portico, but colonnaded with three rows of seven pillars apiece, each branching to right and left, to front and back, with eight-pointed, nine-leaved arches. Along the entablature above runs a Persian inscription in mosaic of black marble; on the roof, over each pillar of the front row is a cupola with four columns, and at each corner a cupola with eight columns. Three domes fold their broad white wings behind and above all.

Three steps for the mullah to preach from, and that is all the catalogue. No altar or shrine or image: there is no god but God. No carving or lattice-work: but the simple pillars and arches, the few cupolas and domes, are yet the richest of ornamentation. No paint or gems--only the clear harmonious veining of the marble. Only space and proportion, form and whispers of colour--and it is so beautiful that you can hardly breathe for rapture. The radiant marble ripples from shade to shade--snow-white, pearl-white, ivory-white--till it seems half alive. The bells and pinnacles are so light that they seem to float in the air. It cannot be a building, you whisper: it is enchantment.

But now go on to the palace. It has been battered and sacked--the Jats of Bhurtpur carried away the precious stones from the walls; but through the restorations you can dream of some of its delights when it held the houris of Shah Jehan. Dream this and it is all enchantment; you have arrived at last--at last, after so many years, after so many leagues--in the dear country of your earliest dreams, and the Arabian nights are come to life. Under this pillared hall the ambassadors of Shiraz and Samarkand are making their obeisance and displaying rich gifts. Above, in the marble alcove festooned with flowers and tendrils in pietra dura, reclines the Sultan of the Indies on a couch of white marble. Up the stairs--and here, enclosed by a colonnade of two storeys, is the fish-pond; on the upper terrace under that canopy, which is one block of creamy marble embossed with flowers, sits the lovely favourite Schemselnihar, and makes believe to angle. She rises and follows the other lights of the harem into the little square court and portico that miniature the great Pearl Mosque without. But some of the beauties turn aside to the gallery, where, below, is an enclosed bazaar; handsome young merchants of Baghdad tempt them with silks and brocades--and with looks that sigh and languish. They had best be prudent: eyes as fathomless as theirs have grown dim in the dungeons under the terraces, below the water. From lust to cruelty is only a step; and when the Sultan raised the marble and the gems he sank the dungeon, remote in a labyrinth of tunnels. Across it is a beam with a noose for soft necks and a shoot for frail bodies that tumbles them into the Jumna.

The Sultan has risen from his audience: he walks round the terrace, through the delicious Hall of Private Audience, whose walls are marble, whose pillars are festooned with creepers in agate and jasper, jade and cornelian, whose ends are profound and graceful recesses, half-arch, half-dome. He passes to the heavy slab of the black marble throne on the riverside brink of the quadrangle; in the pit below they let out buffaloes and tigers to fight before him; on the white seat behind him sits the court jester to make him merry.

And now--it is the full moon that rises from an arch of the pavilion to the right--the full moon, though it is still broad day? It is the Sultaness-in-Chief looking out at the fight from her abode in the Jasmine Tower. She has grown tired of throwing the dice, while her handmaidens stand for pieces on the pachisi-board that is let into her marble pavement--there, behind those duenna screens, the gauze of lattice-work that encloses her courtyard. She has grown tired of dabbling in the fountain that tinkles on the shallow basin of figured marble, weary of her bower of marble inlaid with gems. The Sultan rises, and it is the signal for the bath--the bath in the dark Mirror Palace, lighted with a score of flambeaux and walled with a million tiny mirrors, that reflect.... No; we must not think of it--nor of the feast in the Private Palace, under the ceiling emblazoned with blue and crimson and gold--nor yet of the disrobing in the Golden Pavilion, where the ladies thrust their jewels into holes in the wall too narrow for a man’s arm to follow them.... No; you should not listen to what the Jester is saying now.

But if you envy Shah Jehan, look again later into the tiny Gem Mosque and the cupboard at the side, too small to turn in, where he is the uncrowned prisoner of his son. No Mirror Palace now; the ceiling is black where they heat the water for his bath, in a hole of a cistern where he cannot stretch out his limbs. Look again into the little gilt-domed cupola, where he lies dying, and Jehanara’s voice sounds suddenly far away; and the very Taj, though he knows every angle and curve of it, swims in a grey-white blur; and nothing is left clear save the voice and face of the beautiful Persian, Arjmand Banu, whose palankeen followed all his campaigns in the days when empire was still a-winning, whose children called him father--Arjmand Banu, silent and unseen now for four-and-thirty years, the wife of his youth.

Now follow him to the Taj. Under the great gateway of strong sandstone ribbed with delicate marble, its vaulted red arch cobwebbed with white threads, and then before you--then the miracle of miracles, the final wonder of the world. In chaste majesty it stands suddenly before you, as if the magical word had called it this moment out of the earth. On a white marble platform it stands exactly four-square, but that the angles are cut off; nothing so rude as a corner could find place in its soft harmonies. Seen through the avenue, it looks high rather than broad; seen from the pavement below it, it looks broad rather than high; you doubt, then conclude that its proportions are perfect. Above its centre rises a full white dome, at each corner of whose base nestles a smaller dome, upheld on eight arches. The centre of each face is a lofty-headed gateway rising above the line of the roof; within it is again a pointed caving recess, half arch, half dome; within this, again, a screen of latticed marble. On each flank of these, and on the facets of the cut-off angles, are pairs of smaller, blind recesses of the same design, one above the other. From each junction of facets rises a slim pinnacle. Everywhere it is embellished with elaborate profusion. Moulding, sculpture, inlaid frets and scrolls of coloured marbles, twining branches and garlands of jade and agate and cornelian--here is every point of lavish splendour you saw in the palace combined in one supreme embodiment--superb dignity matched with graceful richness.

But it is vain to flounder amid epithets; the man who should describe the Taj must own genius equal to his who built it. Description halts between its mass and its fineness. It makes you giddy to look up at it, yet it is so delicate you feel that a brick would lay it in shivers at your feet. It is a rock temple and a Chinese casket together--a giant gem.

Nothing jars; for if the jewel were away the setting would still be among the noblest monuments on earth. The minarets at the four corners of the platform are a moment’s stumbling-block: they look irreverently like the military masts of a battleship, and the hard lines where the stones join remind you of a London subway. But look at the Taj itself, and the minarets fall instantly into place; they set off its glories, and, standing like acolytes, seem to be challenging you not to worship it. At each side, below the Taj, is a triple-domed building of sandstone and marble; the hot red throws up the pearl-and-ivory softness of the Taj. The cloisters round the garden, the lordly caravanserai outside the gate, the clustering domes and mosaic texts from the Koran on the great gate itself--all this you hardly notice; but when you do, you find that every point is perfection. As for the garden, with shady trees of every hue, from sprightly yellow to funereal cypress, with purple blossoms cascading from the topmost boughs, with roses and lilies, phloxes and carnations--and the channel of clear water with twenty fountains that runs through the garden, and the basin with the goldfish.... It is pure Arabian Nights! You listen for the speaking bird and the singing tree. And was it not hither that Prince Ahmed, leaving his brother Ali to cuddle Nuronnihar in the palace, followed his arrow? And is not that the fairy Peri-Banu coming out of the pleasure-house to welcome him? Surely man never made such a Paradise: it must be the fabric of a dream wafted through gates of silver and opal.

O Shah Jehan, Shah Jehan, you are bewitching a respectable newspaper-correspondent. The thought of you is strong wine. Shah Jehan, with your queens and concubines without number, their amber feet mirrored in marble, their ivory limbs mirrored in quicksilver; Shah Jehan, who starved them in the black oubliettes, and hung them from the mouldy beam, and sluiced their beautiful bodies into the cold river; Shah Jehan, with elephants and peacocks; Shah Jehan, returning from the conquered Dekhan, dismounting in the Armoury Square, hastening through the Grape Garden, hastening past the fair ones in the Golden Pavilion to the fairest within the Jasmine Tower!

Shah Jehan--Grape Garden--Golden Pavilion--Jasmine Tower--there is dizzy magic in the very names. And when I turn aside in your garden, shunning your fierce black-and-scarlet petals to bring back my senses with English stocks and pansies, the sight of your Taj through the trees sends my brain areel again. I go in and stand by your tomb. The jewel-creepers blossom more luxuriantly than ever in the trellised screen that encloses it, and the two oblong cenotaphs are embowered in gems. But here it is dark and cool: light comes in only through double lattices of feathery marble. You look up into a dome, obscure and mysterious, but mightily expansive, as it were the vault of the heaven of the dead. It is very well; it is the fit close. In this breathless twilight, after his battles and buildings, his ecstasies and torments, his love and his loss, Shah Jehan has come to his own again for ever.

THE PRIORY AND CHURCH OF ST. BARTHOLOMEW

CHARLES KNIGHT

Of all the persons whom the mighty business of providing sustenance for the population of London leads among the pens, and crowds, and filth of the great Metropolitan beast-market--of all those whom pleasure attracts to the gingerbread and shows, and gong-resounding din of the great Fair--or, lastly, of all those whom chance, or a dim remembrance of the popular memories of the place, its burnings, tournaments, etc., or any other motive, brings into Smithfield--we wonder how many, as they pass the south-western corner of the area, look through the ancient gateway which leads up to the still more ancient church of St. Bartholomew, with a kindly remembrance of the man (whose ashes there repose) from whom these, and most of the other interesting features and recollections of Smithfield, are directly or indirectly derived? We fear very few. Time has wrought strange changes in the scene around; and it is not at all surprising that we should forget what has ceased to be readily visible. Who could suppose, from a mere hasty glance at the comparatively mean-looking brick tower, and the narrow restricted site of St. Bartholomew, that that very edifice was once the centre only, of the splendid church of a splendid monastery--a church which extended its spacious transepts on either side, and sent up a noble tower high up into the air, to overlook, and, as it were, to guard, the stately halls, far-extending cloisters, and delightful gardens that surrounded the sacred edifice? Or, again, who would suspect that the site of this extensive establishment (now in a great measure covered with houses), and most probably the entire space of Smithfield, was, prior to the foundation of the former, nothing but a marsh “dunge and fenny,” with the exception of a solitary spot of dry land, occupied by the travellers’ token of civilization, a gallows? Yet such are the changes that have taken place, and for all that is valuable in them our gratitude is due to the one man to whom we have referred--Rahere.

The history of the Priory is indeed the history of this singular individual; and, by a fortunate coincidence, the historical materials we possess are as ample as they are important. Among the manuscripts of the British Museum is one entirely devoted to the life, character, and doings of Rahere, written evidently shortly after his death by a monk of the establishment, and which, for the details it also gives of the circumstances attending the establishment of a great religious house in the Twelfth Century, its glimpses into the manners and customs, the modes of thought and feeling of the time--and, above all, for its marked superiority of style to the writings that then generally issued from the cloister--forms one of the most extraordinary, as it certainly is one of the most interesting, of monastical documents.

Rahere, it appears, was a “man sprung and born from low _kynage_: when he attained the flower of youth, he began to haunt the households of noblemen and the palaces of princes; where under every elbow of them, he spread their cushions with japes and flatterings, delectably anointing their eyes, by this manner to draw to him their friendships. And he still was not content with this, but often haunted the King’s palace, and among the noiseful press of that tumultuous court informed himself with polity and cardinal suavity, by the which he might draw to him the hearts of many a one. There in spectacles, in meetings, in plays, and other courtly mockeries and trifles intruding, he led forth the business of all the day. This wise to the King and great men, gentle and courteous known, familiar and fellowly he was.” The King here referred to is Henry I. Stow says Rahere was “a pleasant-witted gentleman; and therefore in his time called the _king’s minstrel_.” To continue: “This manner of living he chose in his beginning, and in this excused his youth. But the _inward Seer_ and merciful God of all, the which out of Mary Magdalen cast out seven fiends, the which to the Fisher gave the Keys of Heaven, mercifully converted this man from the error of his way, and added to him so many gifts of virtue.” Foremost in repentance as he had been in sin, Rahere now “decreed himself to go to the court of Rome, coveting in so great a labour to do the works of penance. And while he tarried there, in that meanwhile, he began to be vexed with grievous sickness; and his dolours little and little taking their increase, he drew to the extreme of life. He avowed that if health God would him grant, that he might return to his country, he would make an hospital in recreation of poor men, and to them there so gathered, necessaries minister after his power.” And not long after the benign and merciful Lord beheld this weeping man, gave him his health, approved his vow.

When he would perfect his way that he had begun, in a certain night he saw a vision full of dread and sweetness. It seemed to him to be borne up on high of a certain beast, having four feet and two wings, and set him in a high place. To whom appeared a certain man, pretending in cheer the majesty of a king, of great beauty and imperial authority, and his eye on him fastened. “O man,” he said, “what and how much service shouldest thou give to him that in so great a peril hath brought help to thee?” Anon he answered to this saint, “Whatsoever might be of heart and of might diligently should I give in recompence to my deliverer.” And then, said he, “I am Bartholomew, the apostle of Jesus Christ, that come to succour thee in thine anguish and to open to thee the secret mysteries of Heaven. Know me truly, by the will and commandment of the Holy Trinity _and the common favour of the celestial court and council_, to have chosen a place in the suburbs of London, at Smithfield, where in my name thou shalt found a church.”

A man like this could not but succeed in whatever he essayed; and accordingly the work “prosperously succeeded, and after the Apostle’s word all necessaries flowed unto the hand. The church he made of comely stonework, tablewise. And an hospital-house, a little longer off from the church by himself he began to edify. The church was founded (as we have taken of our elders) in the month of March, 1113. President in the Church of England, William, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard, Bishop of London;” who “of due law and right,” hallowed a part of the adjoining field as a cemetery. “Clerks to live under regular institution were brought together, and Rahere, of course, was appointed Prior, who ministered unto his fellows necessaries, not of certain rents, but plenteously of oblations of faithful people.” The completion of the work, under such circumstances, evidently excited a large amount of wonder and admiration, not unmixed with a kind of superstitious awe. In 1410, during the prelacy perhaps of brother John the Priory was rebuilt. At this time, and perhaps before, it possessed within itself every possible convenience for the solace and comfort of its inmates. We read of Le Fermery, Le Dorter, Le Frater, Les Cloysters, Les Galleries, Le Hall, Le Kitchen, Le Buttry, Le Pantry, Le olde Kitchen, Le Woodehouse, Le Garnier, and Le Prior’s Stable, so late as the period of the dissolution in the Sixteenth Century. There was also the Prior’s house, the Mulberry-garden, the Chapel now the Church of St. Bartholomew the Less, etc., etc. It was entirely enclosed within walls, the boundaries of which have been carefully traced in the _Londini Illustrata_, and for which we abbreviate the following description:--The north wall ran from Smithfield, along the south side of Long Lane, to its junction with the east wall, about thirty yards west from Aldersgate Street. It is mentioned by Stow, and shown in Aggas’ plan, who represents a small gate or postern in it. This gate stood immediately opposite Charter House Lane, where is now the entrance into King Street or Cloth Fair. The west wall commenced at the south-west corner of Long Lane, and continued along Smithfield, and the middle of Duc Lane (or Duke Street) to the south gate, or Great Gate House, now the principal entrance into Bartholomew Close. The south wall, commencing from this gate, ran eastward in a direct line towards Aldersgate Street, where it formed an angle and passed southward about forty yards, enclosing the site of the present Alboin Buildings, then resumed its eastern direction and joined the corner of the eastern wall, which ran parallel with Aldersgate Street, at the distance of about twenty-six yards. This wall was fronted for the most part by houses in the street just mentioned, some of them large and magnificent, particularly London House, between which and the wall was a ditch. At first there were no houses in the immediate neighbourhood; but the establishment of the monastery, and the fair granted to it, speedily caused a considerable population to spring up all around, and ultimately within. This grant was obtained from Henry II. The fair was to be kept at Bartholomew tide for three days, namely, the eve, the next day, and the morrow; and unto it “the clothiers of England and the drapers of London repaired, and had their booths and standings within the churchyard of this priory, closed in with walls and gates, locked every night and watched, for safety of men’s goods and wares.” A Court of Pie-powders sat daily during the fair holden for debts and contracts.

Although the present church, which was the choir of the more ancient structure belonging to the Priory, stands some distance backwards from Smithfield, there is little doubt that its front was originally on a line with the small gateway yet remaining, and that the latter indeed was the entrance from Smithfield into the southern aisle of the nave, the part of the church now entirely lost. It is useless to inquire what kind of front was here presented to the open area before it; but if we may judge of it by this gateway, and by the general style of the interior parts of the choir, it must have been a grand work. The gateway is of a very beautiful character, with a finely pointed arch, consisting of four ribs, each with numerous mouldings, receding one within the other, and decorated with roses and zigzag ornaments. Straight before us as we pass through this gateway are the churchyard and church, the former having around it a range of large and very dingy-looking lath-and-plaster houses, which, however, derive somewhat of a picturesque appearance from their gable ends, and their windows scattered about in “most admired disorder.” The exterior of the church, as it here appears to us, consists of a brick tower, erected in 1628, and by its side the end of the church, from which the nave has been cut away, and the wall and large window erected to terminate the structure at this point. The foundations of the nave still lie below the soil of the churchyard some three or four feet. The wall of the latter, on the right or southern side, now faced with brick, is very ancient and of immense thickness, and forming most probably the original wall of the south aisle. On stepping into the apartments of the adjoining public-house, to which the wall now belongs, we find traces of a past very different from what we see at present. Rooms with arched ceilings, a cornice with a shield extending through two or three of them, and thus showing that they have formed but one room, and a chalk cellar below the house--all betoken that we are wandering among the ruins of the old Priory. By the side of this house is a yard, filled with costermongers and their donkeys, and surrounded by black and decayed sheds and habitations, with balconied galleries.

Entering the church by the gateway below the tower, we get the first glimpse of the new world as it were that opens upon us, or rather we should say the old world of seven hundred years ago that has passed away. Everything is solemn, grand, and apparently eternal. Those immense pillars that we look upon have lost nothing as yet of their original strength; there is no token that they will ever lose it. Within the porch are the remains of a very elegant pointed arch in the right wall, leading we presume into the cloisters, but of an older date than those glorious Norman pillars to which some, of as peculiarly slender make, belonging to another and opposite arch, appear to have been attached, somewhat we think to the injury of their simple character. One of the most interesting features of the choir is the long-continued aisle, or series of aisles, which entirely encircle it, opening into the former by the spaces between the flat and circular arch-piers of the body of the structure. It is about twelve feet wide, with a pure arched and vaulted ceiling in the simplest and truest Norman style, with windows of different sizes slightly pointed. The pillars against the wall opposite the entrance into the choir are flat. One of the most beautiful little architectural effects of a simple kind that we can conceive is to be found at the north-eastern corner of the aisle. Between two of the grand Norman pillars projecting from the wall is a low postern doorway; and above, rising on each side from the capitals, a peculiarly elegant arch, something like an elongated horse-shoe. The connexion between two styles so strikingly different in most respects as the Moorish, with its fantastic delicacy and variety and richness, and the Norman with its simple (occasionally uncouth) grandeur, was never more apparent. That little picture is alone worth a visit to St. Bartholomew’s.

Let us now enter the Choir, and, ascending the gallery to the side of the organ, gaze on the impressive and characteristic work before us, which seems scarcely less fresh and solid than when Rahere beheld in its vast piers and beautiful arches the realization of the vision for which he had so long yearned. We are standing in the centre of four arches of the most magnificent span, fit bearers of the great tower that they lifted so airily, as it were a thing of nought, into the air. Two of these are round and two slightly pointed. The last (which were originally open and formed the commencement of the transepts) have been referred to as among the various instances of the occasional use of pointed arches by the Normans before their systematic introduction as a style. In each of the spandrels formed by these arches is a small lozenge-shaped panel containing ornaments which bear a striking resemblance to the Grecian honeysuckle, and deserve notice from their singularity. Behind us are arches showing the original continuation of the church into the nave. The roof is very ancient, and not particularly handsome looking. It consists of massy timbers, some of them braced up in the middle, apparently to prevent their falling. Prior Bolton’s elegant oriel window in the second story appears to have been built as a kind of pew or seat, from which the Prior could overlook the canons when he pleased, without their being aware of his presence, as it communicated with his house at the eastern extremity of the church. The piers which support the range of pointed arches forming the uppermost story are pierced longitudinally, so as to leave open a passage all round the upper part of the building. The dimensions of the church are stated somewhat differently by different writers, and we have no means of reconciling the discrepancy. According to Malcolm, the height is about forty feet, the breadth sixty feet, and the length one hundred and thirty-eight feet; to which if we add eighty-seven feet for the length of the nave, we have two hundred and twenty-five feet as the entire length of the Priory church within the walls. Osborne, in his _English Architecture_, gives the height as forty-seven feet, the breadth fifty-seven feet, and the length of the present church one hundred and thirty-two feet. We may here observe that when the fire broke out in 1830, the interior of the church was much injured, and the entire pile had a narrow escape from destruction.

Lastly, and as we began, so should we end, with Rahere, who is the presiding spirit of the place, we find the monument of the founder in the north-eastern corner, almost immediately opposite the beautiful oriel window which Prior Bolton there erected, in order, perhaps that when he sat in it the home of the ashes of his illustrious predecessor might be forever before him. This is a work in every way worthy of the man whom it enshrines. It is one of the most elegant specimens of the pointed style of architecture, consisting mainly of a very highly wrought stonework screen, enclosing a tomb on which Rahere’s effigy extends at full length. The roof of the little chamber, as we may call it, is most exquisitely groined. At what period the monument was erected is uncertain; but the style marks it as of a later date than that of the founder’s decease. But it was most carefully restored by Bolton; and the fact is significant of its antiquity. As the latter found, no doubt, a labour of love in making these reparations, so Time itself seems to have seconded his efforts, and to have shared in the hopes of its builders that a long period of prosperity should be granted to it, by touching it very gently. Here and there the pinnacles have been somewhat diminished of their fair proportions, and that is pretty well the entire extent of the injury the work has experienced. The monument, it must be added, is richly painted as well as sculptured, and shows us the black robes of Rahere and of the monks who are kneeling at his side--the ruddy features of the former, and the splendid coats-of-arms on the front of the tomb below. Each of the monks has a Bible before him, open at the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. And often and often, no doubt, has Rahere, as he read such verses as that (the third) we are about to transcribe, received fresh accession of strength to complete his arduous task, until what he had first looked upon as holy words of encouragement only became to his rapt fancy a prophecy which he was chosen to fulfil. When others spoke of the all but impossible task (for such it was generally esteemed) he had undertaken, of cleaning and building upon the extensive marsh allotted, he smiled in his heart to think what One had said greater than they:--“The Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving and the voice of melody.”

KUTB MINAR

G. W. STEEVENS

Delhi is still seamed with the scars of her spoilers, and still jewelled with remnants of the gems they fought for. If you take them in order, you will go first, not into the city, but eleven miles south, to the tower Kutb Minar. Through the dust of the road, rising out of the springing wheat, among the mud-and-mat huts before which squat the brown-limbed peasants, you see the country a litter of broken walls, tumbling towers, rent domes. There are fragments of seven cities built by seven kings before the present Delhi was. Eleven miles of them bring you to the tower and mosque of Kutb.

Kutb-ed-Din was a slave who raised himself to Viceroy of Delhi when the Mussulmans took it, then to Emperor of Hindustan and founder of a dynasty. Whether he or his son or the last of the Hindu kings built the tower, antiquaries are undecided and others careless. It is enough that here is one landmark in Delhi’s history, one splendid monument reared for a symbol of triumph by a victor whom now nobody can certainly identify. It is a colossal, five-storied tower, two hundred and forty feet high, of nearly fifty feet diameter at the base, and tapering to nine feet at the top. Tiny balconies with balustrades mark the junctions of the stories: the three lower are red stone, the two upper--dwarfed just under the sky--faced with white marble. All the red part is fluted into alternate semicircles and right angles, netted all over with tracery, and belted with inscriptions under the balconies. But the details strike you little: the vertical lines of the fluting only give the impression that this is one huge pillar with a red shaft and a white capital--a pillar that might form part of the most tremendous temple in the world, yet stands quite seemly alone by reason of its surpassing bigness.

Pant to the top. It will do you good, though the view is nothing. The country is an infinite green-and-brown chess-board of young corn and fallow, dead-flat on every side, ugly with the complacent plainness of all very rich country. Beyond the sheeny ribbon of the Jumna, north, south, east, west, into the blurred horizon, you can see only land and land and land--a million acres with nothing on them to see--except the wealth of India and the secret of the greatness of Delhi.

Then look down past your toes and you will see the evidence of some of Delhi’s falls. From the ground you will have noticed ruins about you; but there the Kutb Minar dwarfs everything. Now you see that you stand above a field of broken arches, solitary pillars, stumps of towers, and in the middle of what must once have been a town of mosques and tombs. Before it was that, it was a town of Hindu temples and palaces. In the court of the ruined mosque stands a solid wrought-iron pillar--little enough to look at, but curious, because it is at least fifteen hundred years old, and there is nothing else quite like it in the world. It bears a Sanskrit inscription to the effect that this is “the Arm of Fame of Raja Dhava, who conquered his neighbours and won the undivided sovereignty of the earth.”

Poor Raja Dhava! The temples of generations that had already forgotten him are swept utterly away; the mosque of their conquerors stands now only as a few shattered red arches and pillars with defaced flowers wilting on them. Beyond that is the base of what was once to be a tower more than twice as high as the Kutb Minar, but was never even finished. The very tower you stand on has been buffeted by earthquake, and great part of it is mere restoration. And Delhi, which in the year One stood here, has drifted away almost out of sight from the summit and left these forlorn fragments to decay without even the consolation of neighbourhood.

KUTB MINAR

ANDRÉ CHÉVRILLON

I take a carriage to visit the Kutb Minar, the great tower that rears itself up about ten miles from Delhi.

This is Asia’s Appian Way. Ruins from every century, left by three races and three religions, are scattered over a large and dismal plain. The remains of ancient Hindu Delhi, of Afghan Delhi, and of Mogul Delhi, cover a dead expanse of seventy square miles. Slowly, during the flow of centuries, the city has changed its site, as a river changes its bed. As far as the eye can reach, dilapidated domes and broken columns reveal themselves in the midst of the dry brushwood. These yellowish hillocks are the ruins of Indra-Partha, the city of Indra, for which the five brothers of Mahabarata fought three thousand years ago. Farther away a granite pillar, covered with Pali characters, proclaims the edicts of the Buddhist King Asoka. Everywhere, like tombs in a cemetery, the _débris_ of Mongolian art, monumental mausoleums and domes surrounded by kiosks are heaped together, all corroded by time and merged into the uniform tint of the sad and dry vegetation that Nature provides. Several tombs are as large as those of Akbar at Secundra and rise up solitary upon the arid steppe. The blue peacocks that are roaming about are the only living things that haunt the place. Generations have swarmed here and of their living past this almost imperceptible residue is all that is left, just as ancient forests have had to exist in order to make a little piece of coal. The Vedic age, the Brahmanical age, the Buddhist age, the first Mussulman dynasties, the Mogul Empire,--each historical period has left here a small deposit.