The interior is disfigured by some gaudy colouring under the new cupola,
and the effect of the west end is, as usual, ruined by the organ loft.
There are very fine stained-glass windows, some quite modern, but so
good both in colour and design, that we cannot look at them without
rebelling in our minds, against the conventionality of much of the
modern work in english churches.[20] It seems not unreasonable to look
forward to the time when it shall be accounted a sin to present
caricatures of scriptural subjects in memorial church-windows. Let us
rather have the kaleidescope a thousand times repeated, or the simplest
diaper pattern on ground glass, than 'Jonahs' or 'Daniels,' as they are
represented in these days; we are tired of the twelve apostles, so
smooth and clean, in their robes of red and blue (the particular red and
blue that will come best out of the melting-pot), of yellow glories and
impossible temples.
The long-neglected art of staining glass being once more revived, let us
hope that, with it, a taste will grow up for something better than a
repetition of the grotesque.
But it is the exterior of Bayeux Cathedral that will be remembered best,
the beauty and simplicity of its design; its 'sky line,' that we pointed
out at a distance, at the beginning of this chapter, which (like the
curve of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, and many an english
nineteenth-century church we could name), leaves an impression of beauty
on the mind that the more ornate work of the Renaissance fails to give
us.
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