The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-09-03 00:00:00

THE PLAGUE OF BELLS.

In an article under the above heading, the Pall Mall
Gazette remarks :

Bells, especially church bells, ought to be very much
obliged to poets. Had it not been for them it is pro-
bable that the large class whom suffering has driven to
submit the extensive and remarkable prerogatives
of those instruments to the cui bow test would by this
gine have made their position much more unstable
than it is. But the poets have gone on about bells in
such a way that it is almost a sacrilege for plain
people to question the unbounded benefits of bells.
All sorts ot bells have they glorified—matin bells,
evening bells' village bells, convent bells, marriage
bells, passing bells, even dinner bells. Of some of them
they have stated that many a tale their music tells, of
youth and hope, and that sweet time when last they
heard their soothing chime, as they call it. Others
they have praised for their soft music, falling at
intervals upon the ear in cadence sweet, if we are to
believe them. They have lamented the fate of people
who never heard the sound of the church-going bell,
or sighed at the sound of a knell. Soft bells, pensive
bells, sweet bells, and the like, is their general
talk on this topic. The bell invites me, says even
Shakespeare—indirectly. As for the curfew, the
tocsin, the alarum, the triple bob-major, and other
varieties, their enthusiasm has known no bounds, and
has occasionally led some of them to express themselves
in terms which in their cooler moments they have
probably regretted. Without impeaching whatever
charm there may be in the peal of a church bell float-
ing up some rural valley amid sunshine and morning
calm, it is undeniable that, in spite of poetry and
sentiment, bells are in several ways an extremely
afflictive institution. Take any average city Sunday,
for example, when it seems as if some privileged
bell-fiend had given the order of "Ring out, wild
bells, to the wild sky," and the wild bells had taken
him at nis word. One poet has affirmed that when
the bell strikes " One " we take no note of
time. Perhaps ; but we are compelled to do it
when the bell strikes not one, but one hundred, or one
thousand, and when one hundred or several hundred
bells commence striking all together. Horrible is the
result when note and clangour incalculable in number
and diversity, from the boom of a Big Ben to the
clatter of the meeting-house bell, are in a moment
hurled upon the human tympanum in one discordant
roar. Then is the time to realise the most excru-
ciating form of the corraptio oytirni pessima and learn
what sweet bells jangled out of tune can do. In vain
has the tan-bark or the straw has been spread upon
the street and the knocker wrapped in the glove; the
weary sufferer writhes upon his pillow as the tide of
church din surges in upon his brain and fills every
nerve with agony. And when it is remembered that
the three fierce choruses of universal "Ding-dong "
that call the leisured and the healthy to forenoon,
afternoon, and evening prayer are far from being all
that must be taken account of, but that from dawn to
twilight almost every quarter of an hour is made dole-
ful by some harsh and metal-throated solo rung out on
one ecclesiastical pretext or another, whether with
irritating slowness or harrowing rapidity, by some local
tormenter, it may be understood in what sense Sunday
is a day of rest to the invalid, the careworn, or the
stay-at-home population. Woe betide the man, too,
who dwells within ear-shot of a cemetery. "Silence
that dreadful bell !" must often rise to his lips as he
waits for the next blow of the hideous monotone that
never stops, while the figure of that melancholy priest,
in his dingy surplice, endlessly reciting burial services
over coffins that come and go, forces itself upon his
imagination and makes continuous thought or labour
a torture or an impossibility. By what argument can
the Church justify itself for visiting the community
with this plague of bells 9