During my own experience I could perceive that certain feelings
commingled in the wave of delight,--feelings related to ideas of power
and splendor and triumph,--were accompanied by a faint sense of
religious awe. Perhaps our modern aesthetic sentiments are so interwoven
with various inherited elements of religious emotionalism that the
recognition of beauty cannot arise independently of reverential
feeling. Be this as it may, such a feeling defined itself while I
gazed;--and at once the great grey trunks were changed to the pillars of
a mighty aisle; and from altitudes of dream there suddenly descended
upon me the old dark thrill of Gothic horror.
Even before it died away, I recognized that it must have been due to
some old cathedral-memory revived by the vision of those giant trunks
uprising into gloom. But neither the height nor the gloom could account
for anything beyond the memory. Columns tall as those palms, but
supporting a classic entablature, could evoke no sense of disquiet
resembling the Gothic horror. I felt sure of this,--because I was able,
without any difficulty, to shape immediately the imagination of such a
facade. But presently the mental picture distorted. I saw the architrave
elbow upward in each of the spaces between the pillars, and curve and
point itself into a range of prodigious arches;--and again the sombre
thrill descended upon me. Simultaneously there flashed to me the
solution of the mystery. I understood that the Gothic horror was a
_horror of monstrous motion_,--and that it had seemed to belong to the
points of the arches because the idea of such motion was chiefly
suggested by the extraordinary angle at which the curves of the arching
touched.
* * * * *
To any experienced eye, the curves of Gothic arching offer a striking
resemblance to certain curves of vegetal growth;--the curves of the
palm-branch being, perhaps, especially suggested. But observe that the
architectural form suggests more than any vegetal comparison could
illustrate! The meeting of two palm-crests would indeed form a kind of
Gothic arch; yet the effect of so short an arch would be insignificant.
For nature to repeat the strange impression of the real Gothic arch, it
were necessary that the branches of the touching crests should vastly
exceed, both in length of curve and strength of spring, anything of
their kind existing in the vegetable world. The effect of the Gothic
arch depends altogether upon the intimation of energy. An arch formed by
the intersection of two short sprouting lines could suggest only a
feeble power of growth; but the lines of the tall mediaeval arch seem to
express a crescent force immensely surpassing that of nature. And the
horror of Gothic architecture is not in the mere suggestion of a
growing life, but in the suggestion of an energy supernatural and
tremendous.
* * * * *
Of course the child, oppressed by the strangeness of Gothic forms, is
yet incapable of analyzing the impression received: he is frightened
without comprehending. He cannot divine that the points and the curves
are terrible to him because they represent the prodigious exaggeration
of a real law of vegetal growth. He dreads the shapes because they
seem alive; yet he does not know how to express this dread. Without
suspecting why, he feels that this silent manifestation of power,
everywhere pointing and piercing upward, is not natural. To his startled
imagination, the building stretches itself like a phantasm of
sleep,--makes itself tall and taller with intent to frighten. Even
though built by hands of men, it has ceased to be a mass of dead stone:
it is infused with Something that thinks and threatens;--it has become
a shadowing malevolence, a multiple goblinry, a monstrous fetish!