[Decoration]
I
LONG before I had arrived at what catechisms call the age of reason, I
was frequently taken, much against my will, to church. The church was
very old; and I can see the interior of it at this moment just as
plainly as I saw it forty years ago, when it appeared to me like an evil
dream. There I first learned to know the peculiar horror that certain
forms of Gothic architecture can inspire.... I am using the word
"horror" in a classic sense,--in its antique meaning of ghostly fear.
On the very first day of this experience, my child-fancy could place the
source of the horror. The wizened and pointed shapes of the windows
immediately terrified me. In their outline I found the form of
apparitions that tormented me in sleep;--and at once I began to imagine
some dreadful affinity between goblins and Gothic churches. Presently,
in the tall doorways, in the archings of the aisles, in the ribbings and
groinings of the roof, I discovered other and wilder suggestions of
fear. Even the facade of the organ,--peaking high into the shadow above
its gallery,--seemed to me a frightful thing.... Had I been then
suddenly obliged to answer the question, "What are you afraid of?" I
should have whispered, "_Those points!_" I could not have otherwise
explained the matter: I only knew that I was afraid of the "points."
Of course the real enigma of what I felt in that church could not
present itself to my mind while I continued to believe in goblins. But
long after the age of superstitious terrors, other Gothic experiences
severally revived the childish emotion in so startling a way as to
convince me that childish fancy could not account for the feeling. Then
my curiosity was aroused; and I tried to discover some rational cause
for the horror. I read many books, and asked many questions; but the
mystery seemed only to deepen.
Books about architecture were very disappointing. I was much less
impressed by what I could find in them than by references in pure
fiction to the awfulness of Gothic art,--particularly by one writer's
confession that the interior of a Gothic church, seen at night, gave him
the idea of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous animal; and by a
far-famed comparison of the windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its
door to a great mouth, "devouring the people." These imaginations
explained little; they could not be developed beyond the phase of vague
intimation: yet they stirred such emotional response that I felt sure
they had touched some truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic
cathedral offers strange resemblances to the architecture of bone; and
the general impression that it makes upon the mind is an impression
of life. But this impression or sense of life I found to be
indefinable,--not a sense of any life organic, but of a life latent and
daemonic. And the manifestation of that life I felt to be in the
_pointing_ of the structure.
Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of altitude and gloom and
vastness appeared to me of no worth; for buildings loftier and larger
and darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a different order of
architecture,--Egyptian, for instance,--could not produce a like
impression. I felt certain that the horror was made by something
altogether peculiar to Gothic construction, and that this something
haunted the tops of the arches.
"Yes, Gothic architecture is awful," said a religious friend, "because
it is the visible expression of Christian faith. No other religious
architecture symbolizes spiritual longing; but the Gothic embodies it.
Every part climbs or leaps; every supreme detail soars and points
like fire...." "There may be considerable truth in what you say," I
replied;--"but it does not relate to the riddle that baffles me. Why
should shapes that symbolize spiritual longing create horror? Why should
any expression of Christian ecstasy inspire alarm?..."
* * * * *
Other hypotheses in multitude I tested without avail; and I returned to
the simple and savage conviction that the secret of the horror somehow
belonged to the points of the archings. But for years I could not find
it. At last, at last, in the early hours of a certain tropical morning,
it revealed itself quite unexpectedly, while I was looking at a glorious
group of palms.
Then I wondered at my stupidity in not having guessed the riddle before.