A Laodicean : A Story of To-day Read online

  The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching mediaevaldetails in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has come over the study ofEnglish Gothic architecture, through a re-awakening to the art-forms oftimes that more nearly neighbour our own, is accounted for by the factthat George Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a manof independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously, andperhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in lonely currentsof thought than with the general tide of opinion. When quite a lad, inthe days of the French Gothic mania which immediately succeeded to thegreat English-pointed revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, andother mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire whatwas good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as Jacobean, QueenAnne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles began to be popular, hepurchased such old-school works as Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and therest, and worked diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewilderedon the question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct, andwith them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was not old enoughat that time to know that, in practice, art had at all times been asfull of shifts and compromises as every other mundane thing; that idealperfection was never achieved by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, andnever would be; and thus he was thrown into a mood of disgust withhis profession, from which mood he was only delivered by recklesslyabandoning these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poeticalliterature. For two whole years he did nothing but write verse in everyconceivable metre, and on every conceivable subject, from Wordsworthiansonnets on the singing of his tea-kettle to epic fragments on the Fallof Empires. His discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that theseinspired works were not jumped at by the publishers with all theeagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a severe hintfrom his father that unless he went on with his legitimate profession hemight have to look elsewhere than at home for an allowance. Mr. Somersetjunior then awoke to realities, became intently practical, rushed backto his dusty drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a viewof regularly starting in practice on the first day of the followingJanuary.

  It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone in whichthe soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his descent again, isalways narrated. But as has often been said, the light and the truth maybe on the side of the dreamer: a far wider view than the wise oneshave may be his at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to commonmeasure be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation calledlunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and rounda horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder grows dizzy inlooking at them, is a very unhappy one for the animal concerned. Duringits progress the colt springs upward, across the circle, stops, fliesover the turf with the velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts ofgraceful antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knottedwhipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity of ahorizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his character of thebold contours which the fine hand of Nature gave it. Yet the process isconsidered to be the making of him.

  Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of theinevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling with theartistic side of his profession only, it would be premature to say; butat any rate it was his contrite return to architecture as a calling thatsent him on the sketching excursion under notice. Feeling that somethingstill was wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take hisprofessional line with confidence, he was led to remember that his ownnative Gothic was the one form of design that he had totally neglectedfrom the beginning, through its having greeted him with wearisomeiteration at the opening of his career. Now it had again returned tosilence; indeed--such is the surprising instability of art 'principles'as they are facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sinkinto the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian times.This accident of being out of vogue lent English Gothic an additionalcharm to one of his proclivities; and away he went to make it thebusiness of a summer circuit in the west.

  The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the unusuallygorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile over that quarter ofthe heavens in which the sun had disappeared, were such as to makea traveller loiter on his walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mountedhimself on the top bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. Theevening was so still that every trifling sound could be heard for miles.There was the rattle of a returning waggon, mixed with the smacks of thewaggoner's whip: the team must have been at least three miles off. Fromfar over the hill came the faint periodic yell of kennelled hounds;while from the nearest village resounded the voices of boys at play inthe twilight. Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not fromthe direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him; and hethought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.

  But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up subjects by thepressure of their material presence, and Somerset's thoughts were often,to his great loss, apt to be even more than common truants from thetones and images that met his outer senses on walks and rides. He wouldsometimes go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most extraordinarytown in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not meddle with himby its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police, coachmen, mongrels, badsmells, and such like obstructions. This feat of questionable utility hebegan performing now. Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had beenpeeled and polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothesin the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot that it wasAugust--in short, everything of the present altogether. His mind flewback to his past life, and deplored the waste of time that had resultedfrom his not having been able to make up his mind which of the manyfashions of art that were coming and going in kaleidoscopic changewas the true point of departure from himself. He had suffered from themodern malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living manof his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and experience, who hadnever thought specially of the matter, but had blunderingly appliedthemselves to whatever form of art confronted them at the moment oftheir making a move, were by this time acquiring renown as new lights;while he was still unknown. He wished that some accident could havehemmed in his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in achannel ever so worn.

  Thus balanced between believing and not believing in his own future,he was recalled to the scene without by hearing the notes of a familiarhymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a valley below. He listened moreheedfully. It was his old friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had neveronce heard since the lisping days of childhood, and whose existence,much as it had then been to him, he had till this moment quiteforgotten. Where the 'New Sabbath' had kept itself all these years--whythat sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the cathedrals,parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that he had beenacquainted with during his apprenticeship to life, and until his wayshad become irregular and uncongregational--he could not, at first,say. But then he recollected that the tune appertained to the oldwest-gallery period of church-music, anterior to the great choralreformation and the rule of Monk--that old time when the repetition ofa word, or half-line of a verse, was not considered a disgrace to anecclesiastical choir.

  Willing to be interested in anything which would keep him out-of-doors,Somerset dismounted from the stile and descended the hill before him, tolearn whence the singing proceeded.