Gothic romance

“ The Gothic romance served to show that literature is not merely utilitarian; even in its wildest forms, it retained certain marks of the realistic novel, and added testimony to the fact that realism and romance are, after all, inseparable. While not making a thorough study of mediæval times, it pointed the [19] way for Scott, in dealing with this period of the past. It also had an important effect on the novel of Roman life in its formative stage, as will be seen.
The so-called “Oriental” romance is really a development of the Gothic. ”

“ He excelled also in setting the persons of poem, drama, or romance in ornamented frames like the Gothic shrines with triple colonettes, arches, canopied and bracketed niches, with statuettes, figurines, emblematic animals, male and female saints on a background of gold. He entered so deeply into the sentiment of the old Gothic imagery that he could make a Lady of the Pillar in a brocade dalmatica, a Mater Dolorosa with the seven swords in her breast, a St. Christopher with the child Jesus on his shoulder and leaning on a palm tree, worthy to serve as types to the Byzantine painters of Epinal. ”

“ The impression that he swiftly flashes across our minds is deep and enduring.
CHAPTER XII - CONCLUSION. This book is an attempt to trace in outline the origin and development of the Gothic romance and the tale of terror. Such a survey is necessarily incomplete. For more than fifty years after the publication of The Castle of Otranto the Gothic Romance remained a definitely recognised kind of fiction; but, as the scope of the novel gradually came to include the whole range of human expression, it lost its individuality, and was merged into other forms. ”

“ This was Romance in its highest office, as Manzoni, Grossi, and D'Azeglio conceived it. Aesthetically, the new school struggled to overthrow the classic traditions; to liberate tragedy from the bondage of the unities, and let it concern itself with any tragical incident of life; to give comedy the generous scope of English and Spanish comedy; to seek poetry in the common experiences of men and to find beauty in any theme; to be utterly free, untrammeled, and abundant; to be in literature what the Gothic is in architecture. ”

“ You cannot make a Goth out of a Greek, nor can you change the blood in my veins by speaking to me of a something vague and gnostic and mystic which you deem superior to all that any Latin mind could conceive.
I grant the existence and the weird charm of the beauty that Gothic minds conceived; but I do not see less beauty in what was conceived by the passion and poetry of other races of mankind. This is a cosmopolitan art era: and you must not judge everything which claims art-merit by a Gothic standard. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is, of course, the peculiar glory of Gothic—or romantic—art, that while the parts combine to make a whole more wonderful than themselves, they yet have an independent beauty and completeness of their own. ”

“ I believe the masters of Gothic art got their ideas of molding through their understanding of the human body, and perhaps above all of the body of woman. The body, that human column, seen in profile is a line of projections and protuberances, of the nose, the chin, the breast, the flank. Thence springs the beautiful undulating line which is the outline of Gothic molding. For Gothic molding, like the Greek, is soft and swelling. The "doucine" (a molding, concave above, convex below) , a term of the trade, tender as the name of a woman, well expresses the charm of the beautiful French molding. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If he be an expert in such matters, he will remark a sort of classical harmony in its broad, very simple proportions, with a certain suppression of Gothic emphasis, more especially in that peculiarly Gothic feature, the buttresses, scarcely marking the unbroken, windowless walls, which rise very straight, taking the sun placidly. ”

“ At the same time the interest is of this grand kind—there is a sense of the immense and infinite, but no condescension to the love of detail and delight in dainty variety which undoubtedly strikes us in most good Gothic works, and makes them so enjoyable. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They will think that smooth cheeks, wavy hair, straight noses, limbs of such or such measure, attitude, and expression, set so, constitute the Antique; that clustered pillars, cross vaulting, spandrils, and Tudor roses make Gothic. But the Antique quality is the particular and all permeating relation between all its items; and Gothic the particular and all permeating relation between those other ones; and unless you aim at the specific emotion of Antique or Gothic, unless you feel the imperious call for the special harmony of either, all the measurements and all the formulas will not avail. ”

“ But the Gothic ornament stands out in prickly independence, and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, and freezing into pinnacles; here starting up into a monster, there germinating into a blossom; anon knitting itself into a branch, alternately thorny, bossy, and bristly, or writhed into every form of nervous entanglement; but, even when most graceful, never for an instant languid, always quickset ”

“ I understand this to be a similar judgment to that which I have been passing on the cultivation of Painting and Music. For myself, certainly I think that that style which, whatever be its origin, is called Gothic, is endowed with a profound and a commanding beauty, such as no other style possesses with which we are acquainted, and which probably the Church will not see surpassed till it attain to the Celestial City. No other architecture, now used for sacred purposes, seems to be the growth of an idea, whereas the Gothic style is as harmonious and as intellectual as it is graceful. ”

“ Thus, for instance, in the ages which we are pleased to call dark, to what magnitude and what exactness of beauty did not architecture reach, and that in a particularly inventive style—the Gothic—borrowing not from what had before been, and which had been held perfect, a style upon which we do not now even hope to improve, but content ourselves with admiring and copying. ”

“ And that the ascetic tendency, here happily absent, is not the inseparable penalty to be paid for a love of the Gothic forms of beauty, is evident enough, when we seen those forms everywhere rightly mingling with the artist's conceptions, as the natural breath of sacred art. With the true daring of genius, he has even introduced a Gothic cathedral in the background of the worshipping group in plate!, as the shape in which the very soul of worship is now for ever embodied for us. ”

“ Perhaps it is not my fault; you have always despised these Goths and valued these 'barbarians' lightly; that was my first impression; it is enduring. And I hate this crown, this kingdom of the Goths; it has taken the place of my father, of my brother, and of myself in your heart! The Gothic crown has never been anything to me but a hated and inimical power. ”

“ If our American poet would but pay 95a visit to Urd’s fountain, to Time’s morning in our Gothic history, and tarry there until the dawn tinges the horizon with crimson and scarlet and the sun breaks through the clouds and sends its inspiring rays into his soul,—then his poetry and compositions would reflect those auroral rays with intensified effulgence; it would shine upon and enlighten and gladden a whole nation. We need poets who can tell us, in words that burn, about our Gothic ancestors, in order that we may be better able to comprehend ourselves. ”

“ Now, observe, first, I do not mean by luxuriance of ornament, quantity of ornament. In the best Gothic in the world there is hardly an inch of stone left unsculptured. But I mean that character of extravagance in the ornament itself which shows that it was addressed to jaded faculties; a violence and coarseness in curvature, a depth of shadow, a lusciousness in arrangement of line, evidently arising out of an incapability of feeling the true beauty of chaste form and restrained power. ”

“ Gothic architecture and Gothic poetry are the children of the same mother; and if the true but unadorned language of the heart, the aspirations of a real faith, the sorrow and joy of a true love, are still listened to by the nations of Europe ”