Gothic literature

“ 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. ”

“ It is unfortunate, but none the less true, that a very large majority of those who follow after Gothic art, both as students and admirers, have somehow or other been led into the belief that the first principle, the essence of the soul of Gothic, is irregularity. ”

“ But before the wonderful development of art through the reversion to classic lines, came a high perfection of the style called Gothic, and with that we are pleased to deal first. It is so full of beauty to the eye and interest to the intellect that sometimes we must be dragged away from it to regard the softer lines of later art, with the ingratitude and reluctance of childhood when torn from its fairy tales to read of real people in the commonplace of every day. ”

“ Gothic art, too, was a familiar art, intimate and sympathetic with human life in all its varieties.
In the beautiful illuminated Psalters, Missals, Books of Hours, and chronicles of the Middle Ages, the life of those days is presented in bright and vivid colours. We see the labourers at work in the fields, ploughing, sowing, reaping, threshing, treading the wine-press. We see the huntsman, the fisherman, and the shepherd; the scribe at his work, the saint at his prayers, the knight at arms. The splendour and pomp of jousts and tournaments, with all their bright colour and quaint heraldry ”

“ No well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as spacious as he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsion of human labour. ”

“ Rugged mountains with their concealed valleys, whispering forests which the eye cannot penetrate, Gothic ruins with vaulted chambers and subterranean passages, are the scenes of her stories; while event after event of her complicated plot happens either just as the mists of evening are obscuring the sun, or while the moonlight is throwing fantastic shadows over the landscape. It is an atmosphere of mystery in which one feels the weird presence of the supernatural. ”

“ There are not wanting signs that even in architecture, in which the greatest and most permanent traces of medieval genius are found, the world is growing a little impatient of Gothic buildings, whether as imitative creations or as the claimants of exclusive orthodoxy in their art ”

“ By a strange irony of fate the term Gothic, used in the last century merely as the opprobrious synonym of barbaric, has been specialised within the last sixty years in connection with that polished epoch of the Middle Ages which sheds most lustre upon our national art. ”

“ The evils that beset the lives and tempt the souls of men had to be in some way set forth, no less than the good things which he is permitted to enjoy. The unhappy lot of the wicked had to be figured as well as the felicities of the good. Hence conspicuous elements in Gothic sculpture, especially after the beginning of the thirteenth century, are the monstrous and the grotesque. Elements which, in true Gothic—though sometimes, perhaps, introduced in a playful spirit,—have, in the main, a serious purpose. ”

“ There is thus a marked difference between the adapted naturalism which gave life to early Gothic ornament, and the imitative naturalism which marks the decline of Gothic art.
How, it may be asked, are we justified in ascribing to this early Gothic ornament such supreme merit? Why is it, if the influence of nature adds anything of value to art, that direct and complete imitation, so far as possible, is not good? How can there be any such thing as over-naturalism in sculpture? ”

“ But the last phase of good Gothic has no room to spare; it rises as high as it can on narrowest foundation, stands in perfect strength with the least possible substance in its bars; connects niche with niche, and line with line, in an exquisite harmony, from which no stone can be removed, and to which you can add not a pinnacle ”

“ A remarkable quality of the grotesque creations of Gothic art is the close and accurate observation of nature which they, no less than the images of real things, display. However fabulous the imaged creature may be, the materials out of which he is made are derived from nature. ”

“ Of all known architectural forms the Gothic corresponds more nearly to the finest impulse in nature itself—that is, to produce the floreated form. The aisles of the trees are no more appealing artistically than those of a great cathedral, and the overhanging branches through which the light falls have not much more charm than some of these perfect Gothic ceilings sustained by their many branching arms of stone. ”

“ Even a likeness to individual species of vegetation soon makes its appearance in the growing style; and an extensive range of flora—answering, in some cases, to that of the locality in which the work was wrought—is used to adorn the Gothic building. But the life derived from nature which appears in Gothic sculpture is no more an independent development than is the constructive system. The elements of Gothic ornament may almost all be traced back to the arts of antiquity. ”

“ In every branch of art antiquity had proved itself a foe, until at last the Renascence was sufficiently mature to assimilate and overcome the antique inheritance so completely that it became an excellent fertiliser for the new art. The essence of the Gothic style is the dissolution of all that is heavy and material—the victory of spirit over matter. ”

“ I presume that the fallacy of regarding the Gothic style of Art as exclusively ecclesiastical in its associations and uses, or as no less necessarily inseparable from mediæval sentiments and general usages, is beginning to give way to more correct views, as the true nature of the Gothic and its original universal employment are better understood. ”

“ The Gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the Renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern, when we come close to them; but the Gothic gets away. No two men think alike about it, and no woman agrees with either man. ”

“ It would have been as absolutely impossible for even himself, had he been born in the daylight of this century, to have built those quaint, Gothic structures of imagination, and tinted them with their peculiar coloring of marvellousness and mystery, as for a modern artist to originate and execute the weird designs of an ancient cathedral. Both Gothic architecture and this perfection of Gothic poetry were the springing and efflorescence of that age, impossible to grow again. They were the forest primeval; other trees may spring in their room, trees as mighty and as fair, but not such trees. ”

“ Exactly in the same manner, we shall find that Gothic architecture has external forms, and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed arches, vaulted roofs, &c. And unless both the elements and the forms are there, we have no right to call the style Gothic. It is not enough that it has the Form, if it have not also the power and life. It is not enough that it has the Power, if it have not the form. ”

“ All these influences working together, and with them that of classical example and tradition, induced a delicacy of expression, a slightness of salience, a carefulness of touch, and refinement of invention, in all, even the rudest, Italian decorations, utterly unrecognized in those of Northern Gothic: which, however picturesquely adapted to their place and purpose, depend for most of their effect upon bold undercutting, accomplish little beyond graceful embarrassment of the eye, and cannot for an instant be separately regarded as works of accomplished art. ”

“ But the Gothic fullness of thought is not therefore left without expression; at the edge of each leaf is an animal, first a cicala, then a lizard, then a bird, moth, serpent, snail—all different, and each wrought to the very life—panting—plumy—writhing—glittering—full of breath and power. This harmony of classical restraint with exhaustless fancy, and of architectural propriety with imitative finish, is found throughout all the fine periods of the Italian Gothic, opposed to the wildness without invention, and exuberance without completion, of the North. ”

“ But rudeness is by no means a characteristic of Gothic, which is not a product of unmixed Northern genius. For, by the time that Gothic architecture had begun to take form, the mingling of races, that had long been going on, had produced,, in the locality where this art first appeared, a people in whose constitution were happily blended some of the finest characteristics of the Latin and Germanic stocks. It was this people who developed the Gothic style and gave to its marvellous constructive system an equally new and appropriate system of adornment. ”

“ The Gothic gripped life in its entirety, penetrated its most hidden corners. It created new men and a new world. From the idea of Catholicism to the state-theory of the Holy Roman Emperors, from the knightly tourney to the new city-form, from cathedral to cottage, from language-building to the village maiden’s bridal attire, from oil-painting to the Spielmann’s song, everything is hall-marked with the stamp of one and the same symbolism. ”

“ The mummeries of the pagan priests were childish, but the Gothic enchanters shook and alarmed all nature. . . You would not compare the Canidia of Horace with the witches in 'Macbeth.' And what are Virgil's myrtles, dropping blood, to Tasso's enchanted forest?. . . The fancies of our modern bards are not only more gallant, but . . . more sublime, more terrible, more alarming than those of the classic fables. In a word, you will find that the manners they paint, and the superstitions they adopt, are the more poetical for being Gothic. ”

“ Of the considerable number of more recent English writers on Gothic art few, if any, have contributed towards a more just apprehension of its principles. English writers generally have understood by Gothic merely a style of building in which pointed arches take the place of round ones, and in which mouldings and other details are treated in a peculiar way. Hence, in treating of the evolution of Gothic, English writers, with hardly an exception, confine themselves to the consideration of these subordinate things. ”

“ The origin of what is loosely called Gothic architecture—which is generally considered to include the styles, with their transitions, from Early English to late Perpendicular, or Tudor-Gothic—is not free from obscurity, but it is certain that it began to be employed in ecclesiastical edifices about the time that the Goths settled in Italy, although all the available evidence goes to prove that the style originated and underwent its earliest developments in the north-west of Europe, and penetrated by slow degrees to the south and east. ”

“ There are no spires, but pinnacles and statues, and all the rich detail of Gothic architecture, the whole of a venerable gray line. It is in perfect repair, and has not suffered externally, except by the loss of multitudes of statues, gargoyles, and miscellaneous eccentricities of sculpture, which used to smile, frown, laugh, and weep over the faces of these old fabrics. ”

“ The Gothic movement proper depended in no degree on the study of the antique, and in art the ornamental forms which express its spirit are naturalistic, not classical, while the fine figure sculpture above referred to is quite independent of ancient models, which hardly existed in the central regions of France where the Gothic movement had its being. Still the proto-Renaissance can be associated with it as another phase of the same awakening of intellectual life that marked the 12th century. ”

“ In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we notice Gothic architecture, the rise of universities, the scholastic philosophy, and a general interest in metaphysical inquiries. The fourteenth century witnessed chivalric heroism, courts of love, tournaments, and amorous poetry. In the fifteenth century we see the revival of classical literature and Grecian art. ”

“ English Gothic is quite distinct from its French ancestor, and while it has defects it has beauties, that are all its own, and a simplicity and grandeur, well suited to the more rugged character of the people among whom it developed. Italian Gothic has less merits, perhaps, than any of the other forms of the art that developed in the different nations. ”

“ Its highest glory is, that it has no corruption. It perishes in giving birth to another architecture as noble as itself.
C. Gothic: Architecture of the Gable. The daughter of the Romanesque; and, like the Romanesque, divided into two great branches, Western and Eastern, or pure Gothic and Arabian Gothic; of which the latter is called Gothic, only because it has many Gothic forms, pointed arches, vaults, &c., but its spirit remains Byzantine, more especially in the form of the roof-mask, of which, with respect to these three great families, we have next to determine the typical form. ”