A Laodicean

Chapter 1

GEORGE SOMERSET.

I.

The sun blazed down and down, till it was within half-an-hour

of its setting; but the sketcher still lingered at his

occupation of measuring and copying the chevroned doorway--a

bold and quaint example of a transitional style of

architecture, which formed the tower entrance to an English

village church. The graveyard being quite open on its western

side, the tweed-clad figure of the young draughtsman, and the

tall mass of antique masonry which rose above him to a

battlemented parapet, were fired to a great brightness by the

solar rays, that crossed the neighbouring mead like a warp of

gold threads, in whose mazes groups of equally lustrous gnats

danced and wailed incessantly.

He was so absorbed in his pursuit that he did not mark the

brilliant chromatic effect of which he composed the central

feature, till it was brought home to his intelligence by the

warmth of the moulded stonework under his touch when

measuring; which led him at length to turn his head and gaze

on its cause.

There are few in whom the sight of a sunset does not beget as

much meditative melancholy as contemplative pleasure, the

human decline and death that it illustrates being too obvious

to escape the notice of the simplest observer. The sketcher,

as if he had been brought to this reflection many hundreds of

times before by the same spectacle, showed that he did not

wish to pursue it just now, by turning away his face after a

few moments, to resume his architectural studies.

He took his measurements carefully, and as if he reverenced

the old workers whose trick he was endeavouring to acquire six

hundred years after the original performance had ceased and

the performers passed into the unseen. By means of a strip of

lead called a leaden tape, which he pressed around and into

the fillets and hollows with his finger and thumb, he

transferred the exact contour of each moulding to his drawing,

that lay on a sketching-stool a few feet distant; where were

also a sketching-block, a small T-square, a bow-pencil, and

other mathematical instruments. When he had marked down the

line thus fixed, he returned to the doorway to copy another as

before.

It being the month of August, when the pale face of the

townsman and the stranger is to be seen among the brown skins

of remotest uplanders, not only in England, but throughout the

temperate zone, few of the homeward-bound labourers paused to

notice him further than by a momentary turn of the head. They

had beheld such gentlemen before, not exactly measuring the

church so accurately as this one seemed to be doing, but

painting it from a distance, or at least walking round the

mouldy pile. At the same time the present visitor, even

exteriorly, was not altogether commonplace. His features were

good, his eyes of the dark deep sort called eloquent by the

sex that ought to know, and with that ray of light in them

which announces a heart susceptible to beauty of all kinds,--

in woman, in art, and in inanimate nature. Though he would

have been broadly characterized as a young man, his face bore

contradictory testimonies to his precise age. This was

conceivably owing to a too dominant speculative activity in

him, which, while it had preserved the emotional side of his

constitution, and with it the significant flexuousness of

mouth and chin, had played upon his forehead and temples till,

at weary moments, they exhibited some traces of being over-

exercised. A youthfulness about the mobile features, a mature

forehead--though not exactly what the world has been familiar

with in past ages--is now growing common; and with the advance

of juvenile introspection it probably must grow commoner

still. Briefly, he had more of the beauty--if beauty it ought

to be called--of the future human type than of the past; but

not so much as to make him other than a nice young man.

His build was somewhat slender and tall; his complexion,

though a little browned by recent exposure, was that of a man

who spent much of his time indoors. Of beard he had but small

show, though he was as innocent as a Nazarite of the use of

the razor; but he possessed a moustache all-sufficient to hide

the subtleties of his mouth, which could thus be tremulous at

tender moments without provoking inconvenient criticism.

Owing to his situation on high ground, open to the west, he

remained enveloped in the lingering aureate haze till a time

when the eastern part of the churchyard was in obscurity, and

damp with rising dew. When it was too dark to sketch further

he packed up his drawing, and, beckoning to a lad who had been

idling by the gate, directed him to carry the stool and

implements to a roadside inn which he named, lying a mile or

two ahead. The draughtsman leisurely followed the lad out of

the churchyard, and along a lane in the direction signified.

The spectacle of a summer traveller from London sketching

mediaeval details in these neo-Pagan days, when a lull has

come over the study of English Gothic architecture, through a

re-awakening to the art-forms of times that more nearly

neighbour our own, is accounted for by the fact that George

Somerset, son of the Academician of that name, was a man of

independent tastes and excursive instincts, who unconsciously,

and perhaps unhappily, took greater pleasure in floating in

lonely currents of thought than with the general tide of

opinion. When quite a lad, in the days of the French Gothic

mania which immediately succeeded to the great English-pointed

revival under Britton, Pugin, Rickman, Scott, and other

mediaevalists, he had crept away from the fashion to admire

what was good in Palladian and Renaissance. As soon as

Jacobean, Queen Anne, and kindred accretions of decayed styles

began to be popular, he purchased such old-school works as

Revett and Stuart, Chambers, and the rest, and worked

diligently at the Five Orders; till quite bewildered on the

question of style, he concluded that all styles were extinct,

and with them all architecture as a living art. Somerset was

not old enough at that time to know that, in practice, art had

at all times been as full of shifts and compromises as every

other mundane thing; that ideal perfection was never achieved

by Greek, Goth, or Hebrew Jew, and never would be; and thus he

was thrown into a mood of disgust with his profession, from

which mood he was only delivered by recklessly abandoning

these studies and indulging in an old enthusiasm for poetical

literature. For two whole years he did nothing but write

verse in every conceivable metre, and on every conceivable

subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-

kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His

discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired

works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the

eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a

severe hint from his father that unless he went on with his

legitimate profession he might have to look elsewhere than at

home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset junior then awoke to

realities, became intently practical, rushed back to his dusty

drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view of

regularly starting in practice on the first day of the

following January.

It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone

in which the soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his

descent again, is always narrated. But as has often been

said, the light and the truth may be on the side of the

dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones have may be his

at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common measure

be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called

lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and

round a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder

grows dizzy in looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the

animal concerned. During its progress the colt springs

upward, across the circle, stops, flies over the turf with the

velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of graceful

antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted

whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity

of a horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his

character of the bold contours which the fine hand of Nature

gave it. Yet the process is considered to be the making of

him.

Whether Somerset became permanently made under the action of

the inevitable lunge, or whether he lapsed into mere dabbling

with the artistic side of his profession only, it would be

premature to say; but at any rate it was his contrite return

to architecture as a calling that sent him on the sketching

excursion under notice. Feeling that something still was

wanting to round off his knowledge before he could take his

professional line with confidence, he was led to remember that

his own native Gothic was the one form of design that he had

totally neglected from the beginning, through its having

greeted him with wearisome iteration at the opening of his

career. Now it had again returned to silence; indeed--such is

the surprising instability of art 'principles' as they are

facetiously called--it was just as likely as not to sink into

the neglect and oblivion which had been its lot in Georgian

times. This accident of being out of vogue lent English

Gothic an additional charm to one of his proclivities; and

away he went to make it the business of a summer circuit in

the west.

The quiet time of evening, the secluded neighbourhood, the

unusually gorgeous liveries of the clouds packed in a pile

over that quarter of the heavens in which the sun had

disappeared, were such as to make a traveller loiter on his

walk. Coming to a stile, Somerset mounted himself on the top

bar, to imbibe the spirit of the scene and hour. The evening

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 the waggoner's whip: the team must have been at

least three miles off. From far over the hill came the faint

periodic yell of kennelled hounds; while from the nearest

village resounded the voices of boys at play in the twilight.

Then a powerful clock struck the hour; it was not from the

direction of the church, but rather from the wood behind him;

and he thought it must be the clock of some mansion that way.

But the mind of man cannot always be forced to take up

subjects by the pressure of their material presence, and

Somerset's thoughts were often, to his great loss, apt to be

even more than common truants from the tones and images that

met his outer senses on walks and rides. He would sometimes

go quietly through the queerest, gayest, most extraordinary

town in Europe, and let it alone, provided it did not meddle

with him by its beggars, beauties, innkeepers, police,

coachmen, mongrels, bad smells, and such like obstructions.

This feat of questionable utility he began performing now.

Sitting on the three-inch ash rail that had been peeled and

polished like glass by the rubbings of all the small-clothes

in the parish, he forgot the time, the place, forgot that it

was August--in short, everything of the present altogether.

His mind flew back to his past life, and deplored the waste of

time that had resulted from his not having been able to make

up his mind which of the many fashions of art that were coming

and going in kaleidoscopic change was the true point of

departure from himself. He had suffered from the modern

malady of unlimited appreciativeness as much as any living man

of his own age. Dozens of his fellows in years and

experience, who had never thought specially of the matter, but

had blunderingly applied themselves to whatever form of art

confronted them at the moment of their making a move, were by

this time acquiring renown as new lights; while he was still

unknown. He wished that some accident could have hemmed in

his eyes between inexorable blinkers, and sped him on in a

channel 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 familiar hymn, rising in subdued harmonies from a

valley below. He listened more heedfully. It was his old

friend the 'New Sabbath,' which he had never once heard since

the lisping days of childhood, and whose existence, much as it

had then been to him, he had till this moment quite forgotten.

Where the 'New Sabbath' had kept itself all these years--why

that sound and hearty melody had disappeared from all the

cathedrals, parish churches, minsters and chapels-of-ease that

he had been acquainted with during his apprenticeship to life,

and until his ways had become irregular and uncongregational--

he could not, at first, say. But then he recollected that the

tune appertained to the old west-gallery period of church-

music, anterior to the great choral reformation and the rule

of Monk--that old time when the repetition of a word, or half-

line of a verse, was not considered a disgrace to an

ecclesiastical 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, to learn whence the singing proceeded.