WESTMINSTER ABBEY

Hokitika Guardian, 15 March 1922, Page 4

WESTMINSTER ABBEY

j HOME OF ALL OUlt HISTORY. Since it was given, the task of guarding the remains of the Unknown Warrior, who stands to all our race as the sacrament of all our dead, Westminster Abbey has become more than ever a place of pilgrimage Tens and hundreds of thousands who had passed it by before with no more than a casual glance have been moved in the last fourteen months to enter its doors and to walk for a little while about its pillared spaces. And 1 will venture to assert that most of them go out again aware of disappointment and an anticlimax. They know, of course, that it is the place where all our Kings are crowned, the place which holds the memory of so many of those who i have made England—but they are vaguely conscious that there is something wrong. The Abbey worries them, and its splendour, of which they have read and heard so much, is hidden from their eyes. i Knowledge of this trouble which 1 haunts so great a majority of the Abbey’s pilgrims made me realise the necessity of this article. I am exploring j London and seeking to find those I places of which the average Briton I knows nothing, and so it may seem ! ridiculous to spend any time oyer a place which all the world knows so well. But the experience of many years has taught me that not one in a hundred of those who enter Westminster Alibey takes away anything but a muddled memory of monuments. They cannot see that great and splendid church because its floor is so crowded with terrible pieces of c ut stone, and if at any future time they think of it, they can only recall a stone politician in a . frock coat standing on a pedestal among other similar politicians. That is why I call it the undiscovered Abbey. The pilgrims come. They buy guide-books and blunder round the nave, round that dreadful area called the Poets’ Corner, and round the opposite area, one of whose chief ornaments is a statue to the gentleman who first carried an umbrella in England. Thereafter they produce sixpence and are shepherded by n> black-gowned individual with a recitation who leads them a straggling, bewildered band, into other wildernesses of carven stone, declaiming meanwhile the names of Kings and Q;iieens and forgotten statesmen. They come out with headaches and sense of escape. NORMAN AND SAXON.

.And that is so miserably, so pitifully wrong. For the Abbey is one of the major glories of the world, one of the

more splendid of the temples which have been made with hands. It lias been desecrated by those terrible stone politicians and by monuments which make even the Albert Memorial appear almost a work of art—blit the Abbey remains. It contains also many

beautiful and many wonderful things, treasures to delight the eye and to enrich the imagination. And it holds the heart of our race within its walls.

"When next you go there, pass at once to the .space before the altar rails and stand for a while looking east to the high blending of the arches beyond the altar, and west down the far line of the nave. At that point you are standing within the oldest part of tile building, within the space also which was covered by the great church which Edward the Confessor made on the Tslo of Thorns when London was still a lit. tie distant town. 'Edward the Saxon built that church. The Normans came and sought to bring the Saxon race into subjection ; the years of oppression and trouble passed slowly away, and at last 200, years after Edward’s death, a Norman King pulled down thp Saxon’s church to build it again more glori- j

°us]y in his honour. In praise of Edward the Confessor, whose shrine still stands behind the altar screen, Henry

HI raised the tall columns and the

roof which shelters you. The Norman paid homage to the Saxon; the centuries welded the two races as one so that they became the English. THE MEMORY OF A QUEEN. ■Standing in that place, pondering these things, with the foundations of the Confessor’s church beneath the pavement on which you stand, you become inevitably aware of the high splendour of the building. The Abbey possesses your mind. The whisper of history is in its dim spaces; the men who made it beautiful are telling yon that they too were English. Many other things, T might tell you to do. You might, for instance, go round behind the altar to find that excellent work in wrought iron, which ! guards the tomb of that Eleanor, wife I of a King, whose husband loved her I so dearly ihat- wo praise her memory ! every time we speak of Waltham Cross, | King’s Cross, Charing Cross. j

From that point it is only a few pnpes to the flight of wooden steps which lead up past the long, gaunt tomb of her 'husband Edward 1, to the level where stands the shrine of the Confessor, raised high on a mound of earth brought from Palestine guarded by the bodies of five Kings and six Queens where stands also that chair in which for thp past six hundred years every

King of England has been seated in the hour of his coronation.

This is the place where the history books assume in the presence of the unforgotten dead, the verity of life. Here are queer little pictures which tell what the Confessor did while he was still a King in England; there on a lofty beam is the helmet made to honour the courage of Henry V., who rode at Agincourt. Here are the niches round the shrine where sufferers knelt that they might be healed of their sickness there' are the hacked and battered monuments which tell of the devastating zeal of Cromwell’s Puritans. And that our own day may be joined to that resounding past, there hangs over the shrine a great cloth of crimson and gold which was the gift of Edward VII.

“DEAR CHILD®.” You might go if you would from that ancient and holy place to the chapel which Henry VII made to be his memorial and his tomb and you might( if you chose, pay a passing tribute to the grim humour which made James T, erect on the south aisle a memorial to Alary Queen of Scots, and in the north aisle a memorial to Elizabeth, who caused that unhappy lady’s head to be cut off. For my own part, T would prefer to wander out into the cloisters, where one may find that Chapter House in which the first House of Commons in the world held its first sessions, or look at that small tablet on which, nearly 250 years ago, some mourner was content to carve the words “Jane Lister. Dear Childe,” and to leave to all generations to come a memorial whose eloquence can never be surpassed.

All these things you might do and yet—l do not know. It is not well to try to see too much of the Abbey at one time. But I am very sure that if you will stand for ten minutes there bofore the altar and look at that great building and think, you will know more about it than you could learn in ten hours of plodding wearily round with a catalogue of tombs.