I wish this lecture to be suggestive, rather that 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. They come hither, therefore, as critics; I trust not
as unkindly critics. They will, I hope, remember that I am 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 it is a
slight matter to me, or to the audience, whether any special and pet
fancy of mine should be exactly true or not: but 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 befel 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 a
while with his own thoughts, his own fancy, his own conscience, his own
soul.
But for a while, 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 Romanized 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 buildings 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 {304}--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, without 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 nought 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 buildings 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 mediaeval 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 grey 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 pyrmidal 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, further 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 hill-side 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 mediaeval 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,
surmounted 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 hill-side; and he copied, in his roofs, the rocks above his
town. But as the love for decoration arose, he would deck his roofs as
nature had decked hers, till the grey sheets of the cathedral slates
should stand out amid pinnacles and turrets rich with foliage, as the
grey 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 averse 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 alternations 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 though 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 any one 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. For ever 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 cave 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 forest: 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 consciousnesses of their own souls, revealed to them a mysterious
Being, who was to be beheld by faith alone.