A MOST WONDROUS SIGHT

Hokitika Guardian, 1 February 1929, Page 8

A MOST WONDROUS SIGHT

> GLOB Y OF LINCOLN CAT BED UAL. A SONG OF SONGS IN STONE. (By RICHARD CAP ELL.) The most wondrous sights a- traveller can see—Saharan mirages, or the Himalayas rising to fill the sky—cannot surpass one that is known in Lincolnshire on almost any misty day. You are travelling by rail or road , through the lower country, when hung in mid-air as it seems, there appears a towering group of buttresses and ■jimmies, high above the haze. It is ]ihe a mystic’s vision realised. it is St. Hugh’s vision, Lincoln Minster. Ely, in the Cambridgeshire, flats, is like a sailing-ship in mid-oceap. Durham lords it from tile cliff high above the river, with a frown of strength. Superb, both of them, in their ways. But Lincoln’s towers, assembled on that mountain (it is a mountain, compared with the general lie of the land), seem to me to have the rarestpoetry of them all—of all the churches of an older England which were indeed. the poetry of an age that knew no other and put all its soul into these stones. J know Amiens; I. know Siena and San Zeno at Verona. J have seen the green and gold mosaics of Ravenna, and the seraphim in the pendentivos of St. Sophia's dome. Each is unsurpassable in its way and not less so our wonderful aspiring Lincoln. Permit the fancy—it- seems,to me, springing there from its hill-top, to he peculiarly alive, to he more sentient and quiver:ng than any. more comfortably sheltered church, and certainly more so than anv church of anotinr period. THE ANGEL PERIOD. Its period is essentially one of eight-yoars--l 192-1200. The whole church was, of course, not built in that time, but practically all of its spring, s logically Irom the beginning then made. Westminister. I know soars to a greater height. York has, through the difficult centuries, pn served more of its glass and perhaps surpasses Lincoln in its very similar great transept. One would he dull not to feel Hie 1 grandeur of Norman Peterborough, or | an over-lively wonder at the audacious i and happy marirage of Romanesque and Gothic at Gloucester, and Tewkesbury. And dull, indeed—if an Englishman—not to hear the speaking stones of Canterbury choir. Lincoln is, for all that, surely the song of songs. Its style is what we call Early English—that is. a keen active and austere style—only growing, in the 1 Angel Choir into a more fascinating richness. The Angel Choir is, of course, one of the world’s wonders. It was finished quite early in the 'l3oo’s—the decadence was not to come for years and years. A ILARMOY IN GREY. Lincoln was practically speaking never touched by the decadence. It is all lithe and instinct with vigouralike in the shafting that springs 80 feet into the air and in the masses of its carven foliage. And then—lest it should he too austrer—there is the harmony of its delicate greys—whitish grey limestone and dark grey Purbick marble. And rielior colouring too. 1 would rather say nothing of the modern glass. Bui Lincoln has not lost all its old heritage of glass. See the sunlight through the flamboyant wheel window (the ‘•’Bishop’s Eye”) in the main south transept. The Englishman who has not wan- ! dered iu Lincoln’s aisles and galleries does not know England. Clamber into the triforium and see at close quarters the handiwork of- the old artists who made the Angel Choir. Go higher still, above the vaulting: and there between vaulting and roof .you find another and unsuspected cathedral. And Irom the tower halt England seems spread before you, as from an aeroplane. ALIVE, BIT.NOT AILING. A Gothic church does not stand like a rock. It (is posed. It maintains itself marvellously by thrust and coun-ter-thrust, and for that reason is like a living creature. Lincoln Minxlor is alive—hut not ailing. The fissures that have lately declared t honi'mlves in its masonry affect one like the sight of bleeding wounds. The story of the rescue work undertaken during the- last, six years should be told one day by someone will) an epic pen. The sum of £B-0,000 has been raised—and 030,000 more is necessary. They sing Nunc D ini it tis in Lincoln choir, hut Dean and Chanter must, one cannot help lancviiig, make a secret 'reservation, with the unhanixhabie thought in their minds ol the fissures in the sacred fabric around them. The Dean of Lincoln, who is 82, has in the last six years saved Lincoln s three towers, which if nothing had been done would by now have fallen as surely as the earlier tower tell in the earthquake of 1237. lo sing Nunc Dimittis without arriere-pensee the Chapter have to raise £3O,Pd to save the nave walls and the vaulting of nave and transepts.