Sir Ninian Comper, that great church architect, says that a church should bring you to your knees when first you enter it.Such a church is Blisland. For there before me as I open the door is the blue-grey granite arcade, that hardest of stones to carve. One column slopes outwards as though it was going to tumble down the hill and a carved wooden beam is fixed between it and the south wall to stop it falling. The floor is of blue slate and pale stone. Old carved benches of dark oak and a few chairs are the seating. The walls are white, the sun streams in through a clear west window and there—glory of glories!—right across the whole eastern end of the church is a richly-painted screen and rood loft. It is of wood. The panels at its base are red and green. Wooden columns, highly coloured and twisted like barley sugar, burst into gilded tracery and fountain out to hold a panelled loft. There are steps to reach this loft, in the wall. Our Lord and His Mother and St. John who form the rood are over the centre of the screen. I look up and there is the old Cornish roof, shaped like the inside of an upturned ship, all its ribs richly carved, the carving shown up by white plaster panels. Old roofs, beautifully restored, are to be seen throughout the church. They stretch away beyond the cross irregularly and down the aisles. I venture in a little further, there through this rich screen I mark the blazing gold of the altars and the medieval-style glass, some of the earliest work of Mr. Comper. In the nave is a pulpit shaped like a wineglass, in the Georgian style and encrusted with cherubs and fruit carved in wood.
The screen, the glory of the church, the golden altars, the stained glass and the pulpit are comparatively new, designed by F. C. Eden in 1897, who died a few years ago. He must have visualised this Cornish church as it was in medieval times. He did not do all the medieval things he might have done. He did not paint the walls with pictures of angels, saints and devils, he left the western windows clear that people might see their books; he put in a Georgian pulpit. He centred everything on the altar to which the screen is, as it were, a golden, red and green veil to the holiest mystery behind it.
What do dates and style matter in Blisland church?There is Norman work in it and there is fifteenth- and sixteenth-century work and there is sensitive and beautiful modern work. But chiefly it is a living church whose beauty makes you gasp, whose silent peace brings you to your knees, even if you kneel on the hard stone and slate of the floor, worn smooth by generations of worshippers.
The valley below the church was hot and warm when first I saw this granite cool interior. Valerian sprouted on the Vicarage wall. A fig tree traced its leaves against a western window. Grasshoppers and birds chirruped. St. Protus and St. Hyacinth, patron saints of Blisland church, pray for me! Often in a bus or train I call to mind your lovely church, the stillness of that Cornish valley and the first really beautiful work of man which my boyhood vividly remembers. MILDENHALL, WILTS
Ah let me enter, once again, the pew
Where the child nodded as the sermon grew;
Scene of soft slumbers! I remember now
The chiding finger; and the frowning brow
Of stern reprovers, when the ardent June
Flung through the glowing aisles the drowsy noon;
Till closed the learn’d harangue, with solemn look
Arose the chaunter of the sacred book—
The parish clerk (death-silenced) far-famed then
And justly, for his long and loud—Amen!
Rich was his tone, and his exulting eye
Glanced to the ready choir, enthroned on high,
Nor glanced in vain; the simple hearted throng
Lifted their voices, and dissolved in song;
Till in one tide, deep rolling, full and free
Rung through the echoing pile, old England’s psalmody.1
In all England there are probably hardly more than a hundred churches which have survived the tampering of the last ninety years.We talk of our churches as “old” but they are mainly Victorian—at any rate in their furniture. The West galleries were cut down. The old choir was dismissed and went disgruntled off to chapel or to form a village band or to appear self-consciously and surpliced in the chancel. That chancel was blocked by an organ or harmonium, its width was cluttered up with choirstalls, the pulpit was removed, the plaster taken off the walls, the ceiling stripped, the high pews chopped down, the clear windows filled with coloured glass, the old floor paved with red and shiny tiles. All the texture and atmosphere of the past were replaced by a sticky and glossy hardness which was wrongly, if piously, thought to be medieval.
Of all the churches which remain almost untouched by the Victorians, the loveliest I know is Mildenhall, near Marlborough. It stands in the Kennet water meadows, a simple four-square affair: three-storeyed tower, nave, aisles either side and a chancel. But as you approach it there
