The English Cathedrals T HE Report -of the Cathedrals - Commission,
which was appointed by the• Church AsSembly, is extra- ordinarily bold. It deserves to be taken very seriously, and we hope that the main proposals for the upkeep and administration of the cathedrals will be adopted. The chief virtue of the Report is the emphasis laid upon the desirability of unification, whether in appeals for money or in the administrative system.
Since 1832 there have been four Commissions concerned with the cathedrals, and apart from the reorganization of finances there have not been many results. This new Report is one more justification of the Enabling Act. It is opportune, clear and practical. Independent appeals for repairing the fabric of cathedrals are invidious, and when more than one is before the public at the same time the appeals tend to become mutually destructive. The appeals for St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were enormously successful, but what other cathedrals, even in dire need, could compete against them ? The Commission calculate, after careful inquiry, that within the next few years £500,000 will be necessary for repairs. It is hinted that this is a large sum, but for our part we are surprised at its moderation. An appeal for the cathedrals of England will never go unheeded. Everyone of them awakes an emotional response, spiritual, historical or architectural, in all educated persons who are closely or even loosely attached to England. It is well known that appeals in the past have been liberally answered by Americans. The real need is for a single control over a general fund.
In postulating administrative unity the Commissioners propose a Permanent Cathedrals Commission. The general idea is to build up closer relations between the cathedrals and the dioceses of which they are the focus, and to reassert the significance of cathedrals as centres of learning. The Commission could greatly help, for though the picture of cathedral dignitaries nowadays as reposing in ease and comfort is quite false, it is obvious that deans and chapters have become rather too detached from the Episcopal organization of dioceses. Reform will hardly come unless it is watched over by an Intelligence Department.
The really controversial part of the Report is the document drawn up by the Sub-Commission which inquired into the congestion of monuments and memorials in Westminster Abbey. Here the controversy is likely to be very acute. The Sub-Commission see no way of providing for more monuments and memorials in West- minster Abbey except by new building, which would change, if it did not spoil, the appearance of the Abbey. It has been asked why new memorials should not be placed elsewhere—why there should not be a separate Hall of Fame, corresponding, for example, to the Panth6on in Paris. The Sub-Commission dismiss this as failing to satisfy spiritual feeling as to the proper place for monuments to departed great men. They would class a memorial in a Hall of Fame with the mere banging of a picture in the National Portrait Gallery or with the inclusion of a Life in a Dictionary of National Biography. They also follow the Commission of 1890 in rejecting the proposal that a good many monuments of mediocrities which now encumber the Abbey should be removed.
They deal carefully with two proposals for fresh building. One is that there should be a new North Aisle on the grass space stretching from the North Transept to the West Front. The other is that a new building should be erected on the site between the Chapter House and Old Palace Yard running parallel to Henry VII's Chapel, and consisting of an ambulatory round the Chapter House and a series of cloisters between it and Old Palace Yard. They strongly incline to this second proposal mainly on the ground that it would affect less than the other a very familiar view of the Abbey. We cannot help thinking that the popular dislike of any addition to the Abbey will be much stronger than the Sub-Commission supposes. It is true that such proposals are by no means new, but are, on the contrary, nearly forty years old. Past history, however, is forgotten and the public approaches such schemes as though they were new-fangled outrages. It may be said that " uninformed " opinion does not matter, but we think it does matter. National feeling should 'he respected and it repays respect.
Certainly the second proposal, which is preferred by the Sub-Commission, is much less open to objection than a new North Aisle. Low buildings would not ruin the general aspect of Henry VII. Chapel. All the same, the feeling against altering the Abbey in any way may be as potent and as well based as the feeling in favour of making the Abbey the one memorial place for the great. We should like to hear more discussion of such suggestions as that many of the present monu- ments could be removed to the triforium in the Abbey, or that Westminster Hall, now empty—gloriously empty, we must admit—might be used for memorials.
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