We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival.
We have spent I don't know how many evenings in looking over
Herbert's plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain
efforts to cover with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms
which the Young Lady draws in her sketch of a small house.
I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite
modification, so that every house built in that style may be as
different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can
be adapted to our modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its
spirit instead of merely copying its old forms. But just now we are
taking the Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time,
or as we should probably have taken the Saracenic, if the Moors had
not been colored. Not even the cholera is so contagious in this
country as a style of architecture which we happen to catch; the
country is just now broken out all over with the Mansard-roof
epidemic.
And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our
climate any more than in ecclesiastic architecture we adopt that
which is suited to our religion.
We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we
Protestants, and as the most of them are ill adapted to our forms of
worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion
in order to save our investments. I am aware that this would be a
grave step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard Luther and
the right of private judgment without reflection. And yet, if it is
necessary to revive the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in
its spirit (that we nowhere do), but in the form which served another
age and another faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great
deal of money invested in this reproduction, it may be more prudent
to go forward than to go back. The question is, "Cannot one easier
change his creed than his pew?"
I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection,
but I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to
call the apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column,
right in front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as
Old Put's troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at
Bunker's Hill. I can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in
the arches overhead, and I recognize the tone, because he is a friend
of mine and an excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom
make out. If there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and
that would be something. I rather like the smell of incense, and it
has its holy associations. But there is no smell in our church,
except of bad air,--for there is no provision for ventilation in the
splendid and costly edifice. The reproduction of the old Gothic is
so complete that the builders even seem to have brought over the
ancient air from one of the churches of the Middle Ages,--you would
declare it had n't been changed in two centuries.
I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man,
who stands in the centre of the apse and has a sounding-board behind
him in order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space
(where the aitar used to stand, but now the sounding-board takes the
place of the altar) and scatter it over the congregation at large,
and send it echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a
minister who is unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice,
try to fill the edifice. The more he roars and gives himself with
vehemence to the effort, the more the building roars in
indistinguishable noise and hubbub. By the time he has said (to
suppose a case), "The Lord is in his holy temple," and has passed on
to say, "let all the earth keep silence," the building is repeating
"The Lord is in his holy temple" from half a dozen different angles
and altitudes, rolling it and growling it, and is not keeping silence
at all. A man who understands it waits until the house has had its
say, and has digested one passage, before he launches another into
the vast, echoing spaces. I am expected, as I said, to fix my eye
and mind on the minister, the central point of the service. But the
pillar hides him. Now if there were several ministers in the church,
dressed in such gorgeous colors that I could see them at the distance
from the apse at which my limited income compels me to sit, and
candles were burning, and censers were swinging, and the platform was
full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous ritual worship, and a bell
rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind the pillar at
all. I should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy it. But, as
I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like to look at
him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says something
worth hearing. I am on such terms with him, indeed we all are, that
it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social
nature, and more human. When we put him away off in the apse, and
set him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves at a distance,
scattered about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a
trifle unnatural. Though I do not mean to say that the congregations
do not "enjoy their religion " in their splendid edifices which cost
so much money and are really so beautiful.
A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic
architecture and Christianity are essentially one and the same thing.
Just as many regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or
to cushion a pulpit. It may be, and it may not be.
Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious
experience, bringing out many of the Christian virtues. It may have
had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good.
Of course I need n't explain that it is the thirteenth century
ecclesiastic Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it
has attacked the Congregational and the other non-ritual churches
more violently than any others. We have had it here in its most
beautiful and dangerous forms. I believe we are pretty much all of
us supplied with a Gothic church now. Such has been the enthusiasm
in this devout direction, that I should not be surprised to see our
rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches for their individual
amusement and sanctification. As the day will probably come when
every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth, five-story
granite insurance building, it may not be unreasonable to expect that
every man will sport his own Gothic church. It is beginning to be
discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to the
Congregational style of worship that has been prevalent here in New
England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private
devotion.
There isn't a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and
outside Gothic to the last. The elevation of the nave gives it even
that "high-shouldered" appearance which seemed more than anything
else to impress Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at Amiens. I fancy
that for genuine high-shoulderness we are not exceeded by any church
in the city. Our chapel in the rear is as Gothic as the rest of it,-
-a beautiful little edifice. The committee forgot to make any more
provision for ventilating that than the church, and it takes a pretty
well-seasoned Christian to stay in it long at a time. The Sunday-
school is held there, and it is thought to be best to accustom the
children to bad air before they go into the church. The poor little
dears shouldn't have the wickedness and impurity of this world break
on them too suddenly. If the stranger noticed any lack about our
church, it would be that of a spire. There is a place for one;
indeed, it was begun, and then the builders seem to have stopped,
with the notion that it would grow itself from such a good root. It
is a mistake however, to suppose that we do not know that the church
has what the profane here call a "stump-tail" appearance. But the
profane are as ignorant of history as they are of true Gothic. All
the Old World cathedrals were the work of centuries. That at Milan
is scarcely finished yet; the unfinished spires of the Cologne
cathedral are one of the best-known features of it. I doubt if it
would be in the Gothic spirit to finish a church at once. We can
tell cavilers that we shall have a spire at the proper time, and not
a minute before. It may depend a little upon what the Baptists do,
who are to build near us. I, for one, think we had better wait and
see how high the Baptist spire is before we run ours up. The church
is everything that could be desired inside. There is the nave, with
its lofty and beautiful arched ceiling; there are the side aisles,
and two elegant rows of stone pillars, stained so as to be a perfect
imitation of stucco; there is the apse, with its stained glass and
exquisite lines; and there is an organ-loft over the front entrance,
with a rose window. Nothing was wanting, so far as we could see,
except that we should adapt ourselves to the circumstances; and that
we have been trying to do ever since. It may be well to relate how
we do it, for the benefit of other inchoate Goths.
It was found that if we put up the organ in the loft, it would hide
the beautiful rose window. Besides, we wanted congregational sing-
ing, and if we hired a choir, and hung it up there under the roof,
like a cage of birds, we should not have congregational singing. We
therefore left the organ-loft vacant, making no further use of it
than to satisfy our Gothic cravings. As for choir,--several of the
singers of the church volunteered to sit together in the front
side-seats, and as there was no place for an organ, they gallantly
rallied round a melodeon,--or perhaps it is a cabinet organ,--a
charming instrument, and, as everybody knows, entirely in keeping
with the pillars, arches, and great spaces of a real Gothic edifice.
It is the union of simplicity with grandeur, for which we have all
been looking. I need not say to those who have ever heard a
melodeon, that there is nothing like it. It is rare, even in the
finest churches on the Continent. And we had congregational singing.
And it went very well indeed. One of the advantages of pure
congregational singing, is that you can join in the singing whether
you have a voice or not. The disadvantage is, that your neighbor can
do the same. It is strange what an uncommonly poor lot of voices
there is, even among good people. But we enjoy it. If you do not
enjoy it, you can change your seat until you get among a good lot.
So far, everything went well. But it was next discovered that it was
difficult to hear the minister, who had a very handsome little desk
in the apse, somewhat distant from the bulk of the congregation;
still, we could most of us see him on a clear day. The church was
admirably built for echoes, and the centre of the house was very
favorable to them. When you sat in the centre of the house, it
sometimes seemed as if three or four ministers were speaking.
It is usually so in cathedrals; the Right Reverend So-and-So is
assisted by the very Reverend Such-and-Such, and the good deal
Reverend Thus-and-Thus, and so on. But a good deal of the minister's
voice appeared to go up into the groined arches, and, as there was no
one up there, some of his best things were lost. We also had a
notion that some of it went into the cavernous organ-loft. It would
have been all right if there had been a choir there, for choirs
usually need more preaching, and pay less heed to it, than any other
part of the congregation. Well, we drew a sort of screen over the
organ-loft; but the result was not as marked as we had hoped. We
next devised a sounding-board,--a sort of mammoth clamshell, painted
white,--and erected it behind the minister. It had a good effect on
the minister. It kept him up straight to his work. So long as he
kept his head exactly in the focus, his voice went out and did not
return to him; but if he moved either way, he was assailed by a Babel
of clamoring echoes. There was no opportunity for him to splurge
about from side to side of the pulpit, as some do. And if he raised
his voice much, or attempted any extra flights, he was liable to be
drowned in a refluent sea of his own eloquence. And he could hear
the congregation as well as they could hear him. All the coughs,
whispers, noises, were gathered in the wooden tympanum behind him,
and poured into his ears.
But the sounding-board was an improvement, and we advanced to bolder
measures; having heard a little, we wanted to hear more. Besides,
those who sat in front began to be discontented with the melodeon.
There are depths in music which the melodeon, even when it is called
a cabinet organ, with a colored boy at the bellows, cannot sound.
The melodeon was not, originally, designed for the Gothic worship.
We determined to have an organ, and we speculated whether, by
erecting it in the apse, we could not fill up that elegant portion of
the church, and compel the preacher's voice to leave it, and go out
over the pews. It would of course do something to efface the main
beauty of a Gothic church; but something must be done, and we began a
series of experiments to test the probable effects of putting the
organ and choir behind the minister. We moved the desk to the very
front of the platform, and erected behind it a high, square board
screen, like a section of tight fence round the fair-grounds. This
did help matters. The minister spoke with more ease, and we could
hear him better. If the screen had been intended to stay there, we
should have agitated the subject of painting it. But this was only
an experiment.
Our next move was to shove the screen back and mount the volunteer
singers, melodeon and all, upon the platform,--some twenty of them
crowded together behind the minister. The,effect was beautiful. It
seemed as if we had taken care to select the finest-looking people in
the congregation,--much to the injury of the congregation, of course,
as seen from the platform. There are few congregations that can
stand this sort of culling, though ours can endure it as well as any;
yet it devolves upon those of us who remain the responsibility of
looking as well as we can.
The experiment was a success, so far as appearances went, but when
the screen went back, the minister's voice went back with it. We
could not hear him very well, though we could hear the choir as plain
as day. We have thought of remedying this last defect by putting the
high screen in front of the singers, and close to the minister, as it
was before. This would make the singers invisible,--"though lost to
sight, to memory dear,"--what is sometimes called an "angel choir,"
when the singers (and the melodeon) are concealed, with the most
subdued and religious effect. It is often so in cathedrals.
This plan would have another advantage. The singers on the platform,
all handsome and well dressed, distract our attention from the
minister, and what he is saying. We cannot help looking at them,
studying all the faces and all the dresses. If one of them sits up
very straight, he is a rebuke to us; if he "lops" over, we wonder why
he does n't sit up; if his hair is white, we wonder whether it is age
or family peculiarity; if he yawns, we want to yawn; if he takes up a
hymn-book, we wonder if he is uninterested in the sermon; we look at
the bonnets, and query if that is the latest spring style, or whether
we are to look for another; if he shaves close, we wonder why he
doesn't let his beard grow; if he has long whiskers, we wonder why he
does n't trim 'em; if she sighs, we feel sorry; if she smiles, we
would like to know what it is about. And, then, suppose any of the
singers should ever want to eat fennel, or peppermints, or Brown's
troches, and pass them round! Suppose the singers, more or less of
them, should sneeze!
Suppose one or two of them, as the handsomest people sometimes will,
should go to sleep! In short, the singers there take away all our
attention from the minister, and would do so if they were the
homeliest people in the world. We must try something else.
It is needless to explain that a Gothic religious life is not an idle
one.