This lecture is intended to be suggestive rather than didactic; to
set you thinking and inquiring for yourselves, rather than learning
at second-hand from me. Some among my audience, I doubt not, will
neither need to be taught by me, nor to be stirred up to inquiry for
themselves. They are already, probably, antiquarians; already better
acquainted with the subject than I am. But they will, I hope,
remember that I am only trying to excite a general interest in that
very architecture in which they delight, and so to make the public do
justice to their labours. They will therefore, I trust--
Be to my faults a little blind,
Be to my virtues very kind--
and if my architectural theories do not seem to them correct in all
details--well-founded I believe them myself to be--remember that if
it be a light matter to me, or to the audience, whether any special
and pet fancy of mine should be exactly true or not; yet it is not a
light matter that my hearers should be awakened--and too many just
now need an actual awakening--to a right, pure, and wholesome
judgment on questions of art, especially when the soundness of that
judgment depends, as in this case, on sound judgments about human
history, as well as about natural objects.
Now, it befell me that, fresh from the tropic forests, and with their
forms hanging always as it were in the background of my eye, I was
impressed more and more vividly the longer I looked, with the
likeness of those forest forms to the forms of our own Cathedral of
Chester. The grand and graceful Chapter-house transformed itself
into one of those green bowers, which, once seen, and never to be
seen again, make one at once richer and poorer for the rest of life.
The fans of groining sprang from the short columns, just as do the
feathered boughs of the far more beautiful Maximiliana palm, and just
of the same size and shape; and met overhead, as I have seen them
meet, in aisles longer by far than our cathedral nave. The free
upright shafts, which give such strength, and yet such lightness, to
the mullions of each window, pierced upward through those curving
lines, as do the stems of young trees through the fronds of palm;
and, like them, carried the eye and the fancy up into the infinite,
and took off a sense of oppression and captivity which the weight of
the roof might have produced. In the nave, in the choir, the same
vision of the tropic forest haunted me. The fluted columns not only
resembled, but seemed copied from the fluted stems beneath which I
had ridden in the primeval woods; their bases, their capitals, seemed
copied from the bulgings at the collar of the root, and at the spring
of the boughs, produced by a check of the redundant sap; and were
garlanded often enough, like the capitals of the columns, with
delicate tracery of parasite leaves and flowers; the mouldings of the
arches seemed copied from the parallel bundles of the curving bamboo
shoots; and even the flatter roof of the nave and transepts had its
antitype in that highest level of the forest aisles where the trees,
having climbed at last to the light-food which they seek, care no
longer to grow upward, but spread out in huge limbs, almost
horizontal, reminding the eye of the four-centred arch which marks
the period of perpendicular Gothic.
Nay, to this day there is one point in our cathedral which, to me,
keeps up the illusion still. As I enter the choir, and look upward
toward the left, I cannot help seeing, in the tabernacle work of the
stalls, the slender and aspiring forms of the "rastrajo;" the
delicate second growth which, as it were, rushes upward from the
earth wherever the forest is cleared; and above it, in the tall lines
of the north-west pier of the tower--even though defaced, along the
inner face of the western arch, by ugly and needless perpendicular
panelling--I seem to see the stems of huge cedars, or balatas, or
ceibas, curving over, as they would do, into the great beams of the
transept roof, some seventy feet above the ground.
Nay, so far will the fancy lead, that I have seemed to see, in the
stained glass between the tracery of the windows, such gorgeous
sheets of colour as sometimes flash on the eye, when, far aloft,
between high stems and boughs, you catch sight of some great tree
ablaze with flowers, either its own or those of a parasite; yellow or
crimson, white or purple; and over them again the cloudless blue.
Now, I know well that all these dreams are dreams; that the men who
built our northern cathedrals never saw these forest forms; and that
the likeness of their work to those of tropic nature is at most only
a corroboration of Mr. Ruskin's dictum, that "the Gothic did not
arise out of, but developed itself into, a resemblance to vegetation
. . . It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the
bending of a bough, but the gradual and continual discovery of a
beauty in natural forms which could be more and more transferred into
those of stone, which influenced at once the hearts of the people and
the form of the edifice." So true is this, that by a pure and noble
copying of the vegetable beauty which they had seen in their own
clime, the medieval craftsmen went so far--as I have shown you--as to
anticipate forms of vegetable beauty peculiar to tropic climes, which
they had not seen; a fresh proof, if proof were needed, that beauty
is something absolute and independent of man; and not, as some think,
only relative, and what happens to be pleasant to the eye of this man
or that.
But thinking over this matter, and reading over, too, that which Mr.
Ruskin has written thereon in his "Stones of Venice," vol. ii. cap.
vi., on the nature of Gothic, I came to certain further conclusions--
or at least surmises--which I put before you to-night, in hopes that
if they have no other effect on you, they will at least stir some of
you up to read Mr. Ruskin's works.
Now Mr. Ruskin says: "That the original conception of Gothic
architecture has been derived from vegetation, from the symmetry of
avenues and the interlacing of branches, is a strange and vain
supposition. It is a theory which never could have existed for a
moment in the mind of any person acquainted with early Gothic; but,
however idle as a theory, it is most valuable as a testimony to the
character of the perfected style."
Doubtless so. But you must remember always that the subject of my
lecture is Grots and Groves; that I am speaking not of Gothic
architecture in general, but of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture;
and more, almost exclusively of the ecclesiastical architecture of
the Teutonic or northern nations; because in them, as I think, the
resemblance between the temple and the forest reached the fullest
exactness.
Now the original idea of a Christian church was that of a grot--a
cave. That is a historic fact. The Christianity which was passed on
to us began to worship, hidden and persecuted, in the catacombs of
Rome, it may be often around the martyrs' tombs, by the dim light of
candle or of torch. The candles on the Roman altars, whatever they
have been made to symbolise since then, are the hereditary memorials
of that fact. Throughout the North, in these isles as much as in any
land, the idea of the grot was, in like wise, the idea of a church.
The saint or hermit built himself a cell; dark, massive, intended to
exclude light as well as weather; or took refuge in a cave. There he
prayed and worshipped, and gathered others to pray and worship round
him, during his life. There he, often enough, became an object of
worship in his turn, after his death. In after ages his cave was
ornamented, like that of the hermit of Montmajour by Arles; or his
cell-chapel enlarged, as those of the Scotch and Irish saints have
been, again and again; till at last a stately minster rose above it.
Still, the idea that the church was to be a grot haunted the minds of
builders.
But side by side with the Christian grot there was throughout the
North another form of temple, dedicated to very different gods,
namely, the trees from whose mighty stems hung the heads of the
victims of Odin or of Thor--the horse, the goat, and, in time of
calamity or pestilence, of men. Trees and not grots were the temples
of our forefathers.
Scholars know well--but they must excuse my quoting it for the sake
of those who are not scholars--the famous passage of Tacitus which
tells how our forefathers "held it beneath the dignity of the gods to
coop them within walls, or liken them to any human countenance; but
consecrated groves and woods, and called by the name of gods that
mystery which they held by faith alone;" and the equally famous
passage of Claudian, about "the vast silence of the Black Forest, and
groves awful with ancient superstition; and oaks, barbarian deities;"
and Lucan's "groves inviolate from all antiquity, and altars stained
with human blood."
To worship in such spots was an abomination to the early Christian.
It was as much a test of heathendom as the eating of horse-flesh,
sacred to Odin, and therefore unclean to Christian men. The Lombard
laws and others forbid expressly the lingering remnants of grove
worship. St. Boniface and other early missionaries hewed down in
defiance the sacred oaks, and paid sometimes for their valour with
their lives.
It is no wonder, then, if long centuries elapsed ere the likeness of
vegetable forms began to reappear in the Christian churches of the
North. And yet both grot and grove were equally the natural temples
which the religious instinct of all deep-hearted peoples, conscious
of sin, and conscious, too, of yearnings after a perfection not to be
found on earth, chooses from the earliest stage of awakening
civilisation. In them, alone, before he had strength and skill to
build nobly for himself, could man find darkness, the mother of
mystery and awe, in which he is reminded perforce of his own
ignorance and weakness; in which he learns first to remember unseen
powers, sometimes to his comfort and elevation, sometimes only to his
terror and debasement; darkness; and with it silence and solitude, in
which he can collect himself, and shut out the noise and glare, the
meanness and the coarseness of the world; and be alone awhile with
his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own conscience, his own soul.
But for awhile, as I have said, that darkness, solitude, and silence
were to be sought in the grot, not in the grove.
Then Christianity conquered the Empire. It adapted, not merely its
architecture, but its very buildings, to its worship. The Roman
Basilica became the Christian church; a noble form of building
enough, though one in which was neither darkness, solitude, nor
silence, but crowded congregations, clapping--or otherwise--the
popular preacher; or fighting about the election of a bishop or a
pope, till the holy place ran with Christian blood. The deep-hearted
Northern turned away, in weariness and disgust, from those vast
halls, fitted only for the feverish superstition of a profligate and
worn-out civilisation; and took himself, amid his own rocks and
forests, moors and shores, to a simpler and sterner architecture,
which should express a creed, sterner, and at heart far simpler,
though dogmatically the same.
And this is, to my mind, the difference, and the noble difference,
between the so-called Norman architecture, which came hither about
the time of the Conquest; and that of Romanised Italy.
But the Normans were a conquering race; and one which conquered, be
it always remembered, in England at least, in the name and by the
authority of Rome. Their ecclesiastics, like the ecclesiastics on
the Continent, were the representatives of Roman civilisation, of
Rome's right, intellectual and spiritual, to rule the world.
Therefore their architecture, like their creed, was Roman. They took
the massive towering Roman forms, which expressed domination; and
piled them one on the other, to express the domination of Christian
Rome over the souls, as they had represented the domination of
heathen Rome over the bodies of men. And so side by side with the
towers of the Norman keep rose the towers of the Norman cathedral--
the two signs of a double servitude.
But with the thirteenth century there dawned an age in Northern
Europe which I may boldly call an heroic age--heroic in its virtues
and in its crimes; an age of rich passionate youth, or rather of
early manhood; full of aspirations of chivalry, of self-sacrifice as
strange and terrible as it was beautiful and noble, even when most
misguided. The Teutonic nations of Europe--our own forefathers most
of all--having absorbed all that heathen Rome could teach them, at
least for the time being, began to think for themselves; to have
poets, philosophers, historians, architects, of their own. The
thirteenth century was especially an age of aspiration; and its
architects expressed, in building, quite unlike those of the
preceding centuries, the aspirations of the time.
The Pointed Arch had been introduced half a century before. It may
be that the Crusaders saw it in the East and brought it home. It may
be that it originated from the quadripartite vaulting of the Normans,
the segmental groins of which, crossing diagonally, produced to
appearance the pointed arch. It may be that it was derived from that
mystical figure of a pointed oval form, the vesica piscis. It may
be, lastly, that it was suggested simply by the intersection of
semicircular arches, so frequently found in ornamental arcades. The
last cause may perhaps be the true one; but it matters little whence
the pointed arch came. It matters much what it meant to those who
introduced it. And at the beginning of the Transition or semi-Norman
period, it seems to have meant nothing. It was not till the
thirteenth century that it had gradually received, as it were, a
soul, and had become the exponent of a great idea. As the Norman
architecture and its forms had signified domination, so the Early
English, as we call it, signified aspiration--an idea which was
perfected, as far as it could be, in what we call the Decorated
style.
There is an evident gap, I had almost said a gulf, between the
architectural mind of the eleventh and that of the thirteenth
century. A vertical tendency, a longing after lightness and freedom
appears; and with them a longing to reproduce the graces of nature
and art. And here I ask you to look for yourselves at the buildings
of this new era--there is a beautiful specimen in yonder arcade
{278}--and judge for yourselves whether they, and even more than they
the Decorated style into which they developed, do not remind you of
the forest shapes?
And if they remind you, must they not have reminded those who shaped
them? Can it have been otherwise? We know that the men who built
were earnest. The carefulness, the reverence, of their work have
given a subject for some of Mr. Ruskin's noblest chapters, a text for
some of his noblest sermons. We know that they were students of
vegetable form. That is proved by the flowers, the leaves, even the
birds, with which they enwreathed their capitals and enriched their
mouldings. Look up there, and see.
You cannot look at any good church-work from the thirteenth to the
middle of the fifteenth century, with out seeing that leaves and
flowers were perpetually in the workman's mind. Do you fancy that
stems and boughs were never in his mind? He kept, doubtless, in
remembrance the fundamental idea, that the Christian church should
symbolise a grot or cave. He could do no less; while he again and
again saw hermits around him dwelling and worshipping in caves, as
they had done ages before in Egypt and Syria; while he fixed, again
and again, the site of his convent and his minster in some secluded
valley guarded by cliffs and rocks, like Vale Crucis in North Wales.
But his minster stood often not among rocks only, but amid trees; in
some clearing in the primeval forest, as Vale Crucis was then. At
least he could not pass from minster to minster, from town to town,
without journeying through long miles of forest. Do you think that
the awful shapes and shadows of that forest never haunted his
imagination as he built? He would have cut down ruthlessly, as his
predecessors the early missionaries did, the sacred trees amid which
Thor and Odin had been worshipped by the heathen Saxons; amid which
still darker deities were still worshipped by the heathen tribes of
Eastern Europe. But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped
in those groves, and the glamour of them was upon him still. He
peopled the wild forest with demons and fairies; but that did not
surely prevent his feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening
loneliness. His ancestors had held the oaks for trees of God, even
as the Jews held the cedar, and the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara
pine is not only, botanists tell us, the same as the cedar of
Lebanon, but its very name--the Deodara--signifies naught else but
"the tree of God."
His ancestors, I say, had held the oaks for trees of God. It may be
that as the monk sat beneath their shade with his bible on his knee,
like good St. Boniface in the Fulda forest, he found that his
ancestors were right.
To understand what sort of trees they were from which he got his
inspiration, you must look, not at an average English wood,
perpetually thinned out as the trees arrive at middle age. Still
less must you look at the pines, oaks, beeches, of an English park,
where each tree has had space to develop itself freely into a more or
less rounded form. You must not even look at the tropic forests.
For there, from the immense diversity of forms, twenty varieties of
tree will grow beneath each other, forming a close-packed heap of
boughs and leaves, from the ground to a hundred feet and more aloft.
You should look at the North American forests of social trees--
especially of pines and firs, where trees of one species, crowded
together, and competing with equal advantages for the air and light,
form themselves into one wilderness of straight smooth shafts,
surmounted by a flat sheet of foliage, held up by boughs like the
ribs of a groined roof, while underneath the ground is bare as a
cathedral floor.
You all know, surely, the Hemlock spruce of America; which, while
growing by itself in open ground, is the most wilful and fantastic,
as well as the most graceful, of all the firs; imitating the shape,
not of its kindred, but of an enormous tuft of fern.
Yet if you look at the same tree, when it has struggled long for life
from its youth amid other trees of its own kind and its own age, you
find that the lower boughs have died off from want of light, leaving
not a scar behind. The upper boughs have reached at once the light
and their natural term of years. They are content to live, and
little more. The central trunk no longer sends up each year a fresh
perpendicular shoot to aspire above the rest, but, as weary of
struggling ambition as they are, is content to become more and more
their equal as the years pass by. And this is a law of social forest
trees, which you must bear in mind whenever I speak of the influence
of tree-forms on Gothic architecture.
Such forms as these are rare enough in Europe now.
I never understood how possible, how common they must have been in
medieval Europe, till I saw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few
oaks, like the oak of Charlemagne and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose
age I dare not guess, but whose size and shape showed them to have
once formed part of a continuous wood, the like whereof remains not
in these isles--perhaps not east of the Carpathian mountains. In
them a clear shaft of at least sixty, it may be eighty feet, carries
a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree. In such a grove, I
thought, the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank, worshipped beneath
"trees of God." Such trees, I thought, centuries after, inspired the
genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs.
Thus, at least, we can explain that rigidity, which Mr. Ruskin tells
us, "is a special element of Gothic architecture. Greek and Egyptian
buildings," he says--and I should have added, Roman building also, in
proportion to their age, i.e. to the amount of the Roman elements in
them--"stand for the most part by their own weight and mass, one
stone passively incumbent on another: but in the Gothic vaults and
traceries there is a stiffness analogous to that of the bones of a
limb, or fibres of a tree; an elastic tension and communication of
force from part to part; and also a studious expression of this
throughout every part of the building." In a word, Gothic vaulting
and tracery have been studiously made like to boughs of trees. Were
those boughs present to the mind of the architect? Or is the
coincidence merely fortuitous? You know already how I should answer.
The cusped arch, too, was it actually not intended to imitate
vegetation? Mr. Ruskin seems to think so. He says that it is merely
the special application to the arch of the great ornamental system of
foliation, which, "whether simple as in the cusped arch, or
complicated as in tracery, arose out of the love of leafage. Not
that the form of the arch is intended to imitate a leaf, "but to be
invested with the same characters of beauty which the designer had
discovered in the leaf." Now I differ from Mr. Ruskin with extreme
hesitation. I agree that the cusped arch is not meant to imitate a
leaf. I think with Mr. Ruskin, that it was probably first adopted on
account of its superior strength; and that it afterwards took the
form of a bough. But I cannot as yet believe that it was not at last
intended to imitate a bough; a bough of a very common form, and one
in which "active rigidity" is peculiarly shown. I mean a bough which
has forked. If the lower fork has died off, for want of light, we
obtain something like the simply cusped arch. If it be still living-
-but short and stunted in comparison with the higher fork--we obtain,
it seems to me, something like the foliated cusp; both likenesses
being near enough to those of common objects to make it possible that
those objects may have suggested them. And thus, more and more
boldly, the medieval architect learnt to copy boughs, stems, and at
last, the whole effect, as far always as stone would allow, of a
combination of rock and tree, of grot and grove.
So he formed his minsters, as I believe, upon the model of those
leafy minsters in which he walked to meditate, amid the aisles which
God, not man, has built. He sent their columns aloft like the boles
of ancient trees. He wreathed their capitals, sometimes their very
shafts, with flowers and creeping shoots. He threw their arches out,
and interwove the groinings of their vaults, like the bough-roofage
overhead. He decked with foliage and fruit the bosses above and the
corbels below. He sent up out of those corbels upright shafts along
the walls, in the likeness of the trees which sprang out of the rocks
above his head. He raised those walls into great cliffs. He pierced
them with the arches of the triforium, as with hermits' cells. He
represented in the horizontal sills of his windows, and in his
horizontal string-courses, the horizontal strata of the rocks. He
opened the windows into high and lofty glades, broken, as in the
forest, by the tracery of stems and boughs, through which was seen,
not merely the outer, but the upper world. For he craved, as all
true artists crave, for light and colour; and had the sky above been
one perpetual blue, he might have been content with it, and left his
glass transparent. But in that dark, dank, northern clime, rain and
snowstorm, black cloud and gray mist, were all that he was like to
see outside for nine months in the year. So he took such light and
colour as nature gave in her few gayer moods; and set aloft his
stained-glass windows, the hues of the noonday and the rainbow, and
the sunrise and the sunset, and the purple of the heather, and the
gold of the gorse, and the azure of the bugloss, and the crimson of
the poppy; and among them, in gorgeous robes, the angels and the
saints of heaven, and the memories of heroic virtues and heroic
sufferings, that he might lift up his own eyes and heart for ever out
of the dark, dank, sad world of the cold north, with all its
coarsenesses and its crimes, toward a realm of perpetual holiness,
amid a perpetual summer of beauty and of light; as one who--for he
was true to nature, even in that--from between the black jaws of a
narrow glen, or from beneath the black shade of gnarled trees,
catches a glimpse of far lands gay with gardens and cottages, and
purple mountain ranges, and the far-off sea, and the hazy horizon
melting into the hazy sky; and finds his heart carried out into an
infinite at once of freedom and of repose.
And so out of the cliffs and the forests he shaped the inside of his
church. And how did he shape the outside? Look for yourselves, and
judge. But look, not at Chester, but at Salisbury. Look at those
churches which carry not mere towers, but spires, or at least
pinnacled towers approaching the pyramidal form. The outside form of
every Gothic cathedral must be considered imperfect if it does not
culminate in something pyramidal.
The especial want of all Greek and Roman buildings with which we are
acquainted is the absence--save in a few and unimportant cases--of
the pyramidal form. The Egyptians knew at least the worth of the
obelisk; but the Greeks and Romans hardly knew even that: their
buildings are flat-topped. Their builders were contented with the
earth as it was. There was a great truth involved in that; which I
am the last to deny.
But religions which, like the Buddhist or the Christian, nurse a
noble self-discontent, are sure to adopt sooner or later an upward
and aspiring form of building. It is not merely that, fancying
heaven to be above earth, they point towards heaven. There is a
deeper natural language in the pyramidal form of a growing tree. It
symbolises growth, or the desire of growth. The Norman tower does
nothing of the kind. It does not aspire to grow. Look--I mention an
instance with which I am most familiar--at the Norman tower of Bury
St. Edmund's. It is graceful--awful, if you will--but there is no
aspiration in it. It is stately, but self-content. Its horizontal
courses, circular arches, above all, its flat sky-line, seem to have
risen enough, and wish to rise no higher. For it has no touch of
that unrest of soul which is expressed by the spire, and still more
by the compound spire, with its pinnacles, crockets, finials--which
are finials only in name; for they do not finish, and are really
terminal buds, as it were, longing to open and grow upward, even as
the crockets are bracts and leaves thrown off as the shoot has grown.
You feel, surely, the truth of these last words. You cannot look at
the canopy work or the pinnacle work of this cathedral without seeing
that they do not merely suggest buds and leaves, but that the buds
and leaves are there carven before your eyes. I myself cannot look
at the tabernacle work of our stalls without being reminded of the
young pine forests which clothe the Hampshire moors. But if the
details are copied from vegetable forms, why not the whole? Is not a
spire like a growing tree, a tabernacle like a fir-tree, a compound
spire like a group of firs? And if we can see that, do you fancy
that the man who planned the spire did not see it as clearly as we
do; and perhaps more clearly still?
I am aware, of course, that Norman architecture had sometimes its
pinnacle, a mere conical or polygonal capping. I am aware that this
form, only more and more slender, lasted on in England during the
thirteenth and the early part of the fourteenth century; and on the
Continent under many modifications, one English kind whereof is
usually called a "broach," of which you have a beautiful specimen in
the new church at Hoole.
Now, no one will deny that that broach is beautiful. But it would be
difficult to prove that its form was taken from a North European
tree. The cypress was unknown, probably, to our northern architects.
The Lombardy poplar--which has wandered hither, I know not when, all
the way from Cashmere--had not wandered then, I believe, farther than
North Italy. The form is rather that of mere stone; of the obelisk
or of the mountain-peak; and they, in fact, may have at first
suggested the spire. The grandeur of an isolated mountain, even of a
dolmen or single upright stone, is evident to all.
But it is the grandeur not of aspiration, but of defiance; not of the
Christian, not even of the Stoic, but rather of the Epicurean. It
says--I cannot rise. I do not care to rise. I will be contentedly
and valiantly that which I am; and face circumstances, though I
cannot conquer them. But it is defiance under defeat. The mountain-
peak does not grow, but only decays. Fretted by rains, peeled by
frost, splintered by lightning, it must down at last; and crumble
into earth, were it as old, as hard, as lofty as the Matterhorn
itself. And while it stands, it wants not only aspiration, it wants
tenderness; it wants humility; it wants the unrest which tenderness
and humility must breed, and which Mr. Ruskin so clearly recognises
in the best Gothic art. And, meanwhile, it wants naturalness. The
mere smooth spire or broach--I had almost said, even the spire of
Salisbury--is like no tall or commanding object in nature. It is
merely the caricature of one--it may be of the mountain-peak. The
outline must be broken, must be softened, before it can express the
soul of a creed which in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, far
more than now, was one of penitence as well as of aspiration, of
passionate emotion as well as of lofty faith. But a shape which will
express that soul must be sought, not among mineral, but among
vegetable, forms. And remember always, if we feel thus even now, how
much more must those medieval men of genius have felt thus, whose
work we now dare only copy line by line?
So--as it seems to me--they sought among vegetable forms for what
they needed: and they found it at once in the pine, or rather the
fir--the spruce and silver firs of their own forests. They are not,
of course, indigenous to England. But they are so common through all
the rest of Europe, that not only would the form suggest itself to a
continental architect, but to any English clerk who travelled, as all
did who could, across the Alps to Rome. The fir-tree, not growing on
level ground, like the oaks of Fontainebleau, into one flat roof of
foliage, but clinging to the hillside and the crag, old above young,
spire above spire, whorl above whorl--for the young shoots of each
whorl of boughs point upward in the spring; and now and then a whole
bough breaking away, as it were, into free space, turns upward
altogether, and forms a secondary spire on the same tree--this surely
was the form which the medieval architect seized, to clothe with it
the sides and roof of the stone mountain which he had built; piling
up pinnacles and spires, each crocketed at the angles; that, like a
group of firs upon an isolated rock, every point of the building
might seem in act to grow toward heaven, till his idea culminated in
that glorious Minster of Cologne, which, if it ever be completed,
will be the likeness of one forest-clothed group of cliffs,
surrounded by three enormous pines.
One feature of the Norman temple he could keep; for it was copied
from the same Nature which he was trying to copy--namely, the high-
pitched roof and gables. Mr. Ruskin lays it down as a law, that the
acute angle in roofs, gables, spires, is the distinguishing mark of
northern Gothic. It was adopted, most probably, at first from
domestic buildings. A northern house or barn must have a high-
pitched roof, or the snow will not slip off it. But that fact was
not discovered by man; it was copied by him from the rocks around.
He saw the mountain-peak jut black and bare above the snows of
winter; he saw those snows slip down in sheets, rush down in torrents
under the sun, from the steep slabs of rock which coped the hillside;
and he copied, in his roofs, the rocks above his town. But as the
love for decorations arose, he would deck his roofs as nature had
decked hers, till the gray sheets of the cathedral slates should
stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the gray
mountain-sides stood out amid knolls of feathery birch and towering
pine.
He failed, though he failed nobly. He never succeeded in attaining a
perfectly natural style.
The medieval architects were crippled to the last by the tradition of
artificial Roman forms. They began improving them into naturalness,
without any clear notion of what they wanted; and when that notion
became clear, it was too late. Take, as an instance, the tracery of
their windows. It is true, as Mr. Ruskin says, that they began by
piercing holes in a wall of the form of a leaf, which developed, in
the rose window, into the form of a star inside, and of a flower
outside. Look at such aloft there. Then, by introducing mullions
and traceries into the lower part of the window, they added stem and
bough forms to those flower forms. But the two did not fit. Look at
the west window of our choir, and you will see what I mean. The
upright mullions break off into bough curves graceful enough: but
these are cut short--as I hold, spoiled--by circular and triangular
forms of rose and trefoil resting on them as such forms never rest in
nature; and the whole, though beautiful, is only half beautiful. It
is fragmentary, unmeaning--barbaric, because unnatural.
They failed too, it may be, from the very paucity of the vegetable
forms they could find to copy among the flora of this colder clime;
and so, stopped short in drawing from nature, ran off into mere
purposeless luxuriance. Had they been able to add to their stock of
memories a hundred forms which they would have seen in the tropics,
they might have gone on for centuries copying nature without
exhausting her.
And yet, did they exhaust even the few forms of beauty which they saw
around them? It must be confessed that they did not. I believe that
they could not, because they dared not. The unnaturalness of the
creed which they expressed always hampered them. It forbade them to
look Nature freely and lovingly in the face. It forbade them--as one
glaring example--to know anything truly of the most beautiful of all
natural objects--the human form. They were tempted perpetually to
take Nature as ornament, not as basis; and they yielded at last to
the temptation; till, in the age of Perpendicular architecture, their
very ornament became unnatural again; because conventional, untrue,
meaningless.
But the creed for which they worked was dying by that time, and
therefore the art which expressed it must needs die too. And even
that death, or rather the approach of it, was symbolised truly in the
flatter roof, the four-centred arch, the flat-topped tower of the
fifteenth-century church. The creed had ceased to aspire: so did
the architecture. It had ceased to grow: so did the temple. And
the arch sank lower; and the rafters grew more horizontal; and the
likeness to the old tree, content to grow no more, took the place of
the likeness to the young tree struggling toward the sky.
And now--unless you are tired of listening to me--a few practical
words.
We are restoring our old cathedral stone by stone after its ancient
model. We are also trying to build a new church. We are building
it--as most new churches in England are now built--in a pure Gothic
style.
Are we doing right? I do not mean morally right. It is always
morally right to build a new church, if needed, whatever be its
architecture. It is always morally right to restore an old church,
if it be beautiful and noble, as an heirloom handed down to us by our
ancestors, which we have no right--I say no right--for the sake of
our children, and of our children's children, to leave to ruin.
But are we artistically, aesthetically right? Is the best Gothic fit
for our worship? Does it express our belief? Or shall we choose
some other style?
I say that it is; and that it is so because it is a style which, if
not founded on Nature, has taken into itself more of nature, of
nature beautiful and healthy, than any other style.
With greater knowledge of nature, both geographical and scientific,
fresh styles of architecture may and will arise, as much more
beautiful, and as much more natural, than the Gothic, as Gothic is
more beautiful and natural than the Norman. Till then we must take
the best models which we have; use them; and, as it were, use them up
and exhaust them. By that time we may have learnt to improve on
them; and to build churches more Gothic than Gothic itself, more like
grot and grove than even a northern cathedral.
That is the direction in which we must work. And if any shall say to
us, as it has been said ere now--"After all, your new Gothic churches
are but imitations, shams, borrowed symbols, which to you symbolise
nothing. They are Romish churches, meant to express Romish doctrine,
built for a Protestant creed which they do not express, and for a
Protestant worship which they will not fit." Then we shall answer--
Not so. The objection might be true if we built Norman or Romanesque
churches; for we should then be returning to that very foreign and
unnatural style which Rome taught our forefathers, and from which
they escaped gradually into the comparative freedom, the comparative
naturalness, of that true Gothic of which Mr. Ruskin says so well:
It is gladdening to remember that, in its utmost nobleness, the very
temper which has been thought most adverse to it, the Protestant
temper of self-dependence and inquiry, were expressed in every case.
Faith and aspiration there were in every Christian ecclesiastical
building from the first century to the fifteenth: but the moral
habits to which England in this age owes the kind of greatness which
she has--the habits of philosophical investigation, of accurate
thought, of domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-
reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth--were
only traceable in the features which were the distinctive creations
of the Gothic schools, in the varied foliage and thorny fretwork, and
shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, and fearless height of subtle
pinnacle and crested tower, sent "like an unperplexed question up to
heaven."
So says Mr. Ruskin. I, for one, endorse his gallant words. And I
think that a strong proof of their truth is to be found in two facts,
which seem at first paradoxical. First, that the new Roman Catholic
churches on the Continent--I speak especially of France, which is the
most highly-cultivated Romanist country--are like those which the
Jesuits built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, less and
less Gothic. The former were sham-classic; the latter are rather of
a new fantastic Romanesque, or rather Byzantinesque style, which is a
real retrogression from Gothic towards earlier and less natural
schools. Next, that the Puritan communions, the Kirk of Scotland and
the English Nonconformists, as they are becoming more cultivated--and
there are now many highly-cultivated men among them--are introducing
Gothic architecture more and more into their churches. There are
elements in it, it seems, which do not contradict their Puritanism;
elements which they can adapt to their own worship; namely, the very
elements which Mr. Ruskin has discerned.
But if they can do so, how much more can we of the Church of England?
As long as we go on where our medieval forefathers left off; as long
as we keep to the most perfect types of their work, in waiting for
the day when we shall be able to surpass them, by making our work
even more naturalistic than theirs, more truly expressive of the
highest aspirations of humanity; so long we are reverencing them, and
that latent Protestantism in them, which produced at last the
Reformation.
And if any should say: "Nevertheless your Protestant Gothic Church,
though you made it ten times more beautiful, and more symbolic than
Cologne Minster itself, would still be a sham. For where would be
your images? And still more, where would be your Host? Do you not
know that in the medieval church the vistas of its arcades, the
alternation of its lights and shadows, the gradations of its
colouring, and all its carefully subordinated wealth of art, pointed
to, were concentrated round, one sacred spot, as a curve, however
vast its sweep through space, tends at every moment toward a single
focus? And that spot, that focus was, and is still in every Romish
church, the body of God, present upon the altar in the form of bread?
Without Him, what is all your building? Your church is empty; your
altar bare; a throne without a king; an eye-socket without an eye."
My friends, if we be true children of those old worthies, whom
Tacitus saw worshipping beneath the German oaks, we shall have but
one answer to that scoff:
"We know it; and we glory in the fact. We glory in it, as the old
Jews gloried in it, when the Roman soldiers, bursting through the
Temple and into the Holy of Holies itself, paused in wonder and in
awe when they beheld neither God, nor image of God, but--blank yet
all-suggestive--the empty mercy-seat.
"Like theirs, our altar is an empty throne; for it symbolises our
worship of Him who dwelleth not in temples made with hands; whom the
heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain. Our eye-socket
holds no eye. For it symbolises our worship of that Eye which is
over all the earth; which is about our path, and about our bed, and
spies out all our ways. We need no artificial and material presence
of Deity. For we believe in That One Eternal and Universal Real
Presence--of which it is written 'He is not far from anyone of us;
for in God we live and move and have our being;' and again: 'Lo, I
am with you even to the end of the world;' and again: 'Wheresoever
two or three are gathered together in My Name there am I in the midst
of them.'
"He is the God of nature, as well as the God of grace. Forever He
looks down on all things which He has made, and behold, they are very
good. And, therefore, we dare offer to Him, in our churches, the
most perfect works of naturalistic art, and shape them into copies of
whatever beauty He has shown us, in man or woman, in cove or
mountain-peak, in tree or flower, even in bird or butterfly.
"But Himself?--Who can see Him? Except the humble and the contrite
heart, to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in
spirit and in truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold,
nor quintessential diamond."
So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers,
when they shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them
with the boughs of the woodland and the flowers of the field: but we
shall obey too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at
last cast out of their own temples, as misplaced and unnatural
things, the idols which they had inherited from Rome.
So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers when
they worshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval
forests: but we shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs,
which taught them this, at least, concerning God--That it was beneath
His dignity to coop Him within walls; and that the grandest forms of
nature, as well as the deepest consciousness of their own souls,
revealed to them a mysterious Being, who was to be beheld by faith
alone.