The other day,in the town of Lincoln,I suffered an optical illusion which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic architecture.Its secret is not,I think,satisfactorily explained in most of the discussions on the subject.It is said that the Gothic eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity,at once lively and mysterious.This is true;but Oriental decoration is equally rich and complex,yet it awakens a widely different sentiment.No man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral tower.Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the presence of something stiff and heartless,of something tortured and silent.Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents,heavy flowers and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes.It is like the vision of a sneering sage,who sees the whole universe as a pattern.Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic,even if he happens to dislike it.
Or,again,some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting than the Greek.There is more truth in this;indeed,there is real truth in it.Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the Censor of Plays.We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals;but indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate.We should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing "Bill Bailey"in church.Yet that would be only doing in music what the mediaevals did in sculpture.They put into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a musichall song:comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing.
But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features,it also is not the secret of its unique effect.We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches.But delightful as these are,with their fairy tree-tops,paper houses,and toddling,infantile inhabitants,the pleasure they give is of a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles.Some have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric,in what is rough,shapeless,or crumbling like the rocks.This can be dismissed after the same fashion;South Sea idols,with painted eyes and radiating bristles,are a delight to the eye;but they do not affect it in at all the same way as Westminster Abbey.Some again (going to another and almost equally foolish extreme)ignore the coarse and comic in mediaevalism;and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity,as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer.Here,again,the uniqueness is missed.There are Renaissance things (such as the ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael),there are even pagan things (such as the Praying Boy)which express as fresh and austere a piety.None of these explanations explain.And I never saw what was the real point about Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln,and saw it behind a row of furniture-vans.
