Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See — John Shaqi
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal SeeDearmer, Percy
History
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Wells: A Description of Its Fabric and a Brief History of the Episcopal See
Dearmer, Percy
Wells Cathedral
Mr Ruskin, whose admiration of the work at Amiens is so intense, has
given almost as high praise to the sculpture at Wells, and has
presented sets of photographs of the statuary to various art schools.
The verdict of enthusiastic approval is, in fact, unanimous. Flaxman,
to his credit, in spite of his classicalism, was one of the first to
draw attention to the work. Whoever was the general designer of the
whole arrangement, he deserves as great praise as the sculptors
themselves. There must have been several sculptors, both because no
one man could have carved three hundred and fifty subjects (of which
one hundred and fifty-two are life-size or colossal), and because a
certain number of the figures in the fourth and fifth tiers are of
obviously inferior design. But one master-mind must have conceived and
directed the work. The height and lightness which is given to the
gable by the tall row of the Apostles, the solemn prominence of the
figure of our Lord above, the rich cornice-like effect of the small
Resurrection tier, the difference in height between the fourth and
fifth tiers, the concentration of the three lower tiers, the breadth
which the seated figures give to the face of the buttresses, the
arrangement of the statues and groups round the buttresses, which
makes it impossible for them all to be seen at once, all show that one
mind was busy, carefully subordinating the parts to the whole.
It may well have been Jocelin himself who planned the subject-matter
of the statuary with such admirable breadth and balance of mind. It is
easy to produce sermons in stones, easy to sermonise in very many
ways; but Jocelin did not preach. He just tried to embody the
Christian spirit at work in the world: God made manifest in man, the
great truth of the Incarnation; and this he did in what we should call
the most modern manner, though in truth it is medieval as well as
modern. He did not conceive of Christianity as confined within the
covers of the Bible, but he took all history, as he knew it, the
patient education of man in the Old Testament, the fulfilment of man's
aspirations and God's purpose in the New, from the birth of our Lord
to the founding of the Church, and the continuation of this church up
to his own time, with especial regard to the heroes, saints and rulers
of the Church of England. He made a "kalendar for unlearned men,"
which is both a _Biblia Pauperum_ and _Annales Angliae_, because the
annals of England were to him a new Bible. "Slowly the Bible of the
race is writ," a modern writer has said, "each age, each kindred, adds
a word to it." That was the spirit of Jocelin's design; only that,
through the pomp of mighty kings and fair women and honoured bishops,
he looked to the naked truth of the judgment time, when mitres and
crowns would remain but as signs of an awful responsibility, and the
divine justice, so tried, so obscured on earth, would be vindicated
before the angels who are quick to do God's will, and the twelve plain
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