Gothic script

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Gothic romance made much use of portents of the supernatural, which later fiction does as well, but differently and with greater skill. The modern stories for the most part abandon the conventional portents, the dear old clock forever striking twelve or one—there was no Gothic castle so impoverished as to lack such ghostly horologue!—the abbey bell that tolls at touch of spirit hands or wizard winds, the statuesque nose-bleed, the fire that burns blue at approach of a specter, and so forth. ”

“ Gothic art is not an art of barbarians, as the pseudo-classicists of the Renaissance would have us suppose. It is far otherwise. It is the art of that civilised people which grew up, through generations of conflict and mutual interchange of thought, out of the fusion of Northern and Southern blood. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ For here in the twelfth century we find men executing work which, both in design and execution, is so immeasurably in advance of anything that we ever see done now, that it seems almost vain to hope for a revival of the old spirit in our own days: vain it might be in any age to hope for better work, but more than vain in this day, if the flimsy conceit and impudent self-assertion which characterize so much modern (so-called) Gothic is still to be tolerated! ”

“ We are trying only to feel Gothic art. For us, the world is not a schoolroom or a pulpit, but a stage, and the stage is the highest yet seen on earth. In this church the old Romanesque leaps into the Gothic under our eyes; of a sudden, between the portal and the shrine, the infinite rises into a new expression, always a rare and excellent miracle in thought. The two expressions are nowhere far apart; not further than the Mother from the Son. The new artist drops unwillingly the hand of his father or his grandfather ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are hardly any of the magnificent and serene constructions of the early Gothic which have not, in the course of time, been gradually thinned and pared away into these skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their lines truly follow the structure of the original masses, have an interest like that of the fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance has been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as well as emaciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things that were; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the armed and living frame ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Introduce your Gothic line by line and stone by stone; never mind mixing it with your present architecture; your existing houses will be none the worse for having little bits of better work fitted to them; build a porch, or point a window, if you can do nothing else; and remember that it is the glory of Gothic architecture that it can do anything. Whatever you really and seriously want, Gothic will do for you; but it must be an earnest want. It is its pride to accommodate itself to your needs ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To others, the Gothic seems hoary with age and decrepitude, and its shadows mean death. What is curious to watch is the fanatical conviction of the Gothic enthusiast, to whom the twelfth century means exuberant youth, the eternal child of Wordsworth, over whom its immortality broods like the day ”

“ But we Northerns are not so easily to be talked out of the powerful, solemn impressions which seize upon the mind at entering a Gothic cathedral. We feel, on the contrary, a strong desire to investigate and to justify the source of this impression. A very slight attention will convince us, that the Gothic architecture displays not only an extraordinary degree of mechanical skill, but also a marvellous power of invention; and, on a closer examination, we recognize its profound significance, and perceive that as well as the Grecian it constitutes in itself a complete and finished system. ”

“ It is worth remarking that, even when Gothic and Renaissance canopies alternate at Auch in a single window, or where Gothic niches are built, as it were, into or on to larger Renaissance structures, there is no appearance of incongruity. Truth to tell, the Gothic is not so purely Gothic, nor the Renaissance so purely Renaissance, as that they should clash one with the other. Both are seen through the temperament of the artist. ”

“ For the fact is, that all good Gothic is nothing more than the developement, in various ways, and on every conceivable scale, of the group formed by the pointed arch for the bearing line below, and the gable for the protecting line above; and from the huge, gray, shaly slope of the cathedral roof, with its elastic pointed vaults beneath, to the slight crown-like points that enrich the smallest niche of its doorway, one law and one expression will be found in all. ”

“ Early in the twelfth century was brought about in Northern Gaul that fine balance of ethnologic, religious, social, and political influences of which the development of Gothic architecture is among the happiest results. But with the quickly succeeding disturbance of this nice adjustment of conditions the character of the art gradually changed, and a course of decline became inevitable and rapid. If we would truly know Gothic art we must study it in the vigour of its early life. ”

“ In this respect Gothic ornament is in striking contrast to what we find in the so-called revived classic art, where natural objects are treated inorganically, where fruits and flowers are represented as tied up into bunches, or are hung in formal festoons, and where even artificial objects enter largely, as leading elements, into the decorative composition. Everywhere in Gothic art is life, but life ordered by and obedient to the requirements of architectural congruity, so that the resulting conventional character becomes as conspicuous as the living naturalism. ”

“ Some Gothic buildings present with their fretted pinnacles, spires, flying buttresses, intersecting and pierced work, in flamboyant tracery, daring vaulting, and inter-penetrating mouldings, a worked-out solution of some intricate mathematical problem. In its complicated phases Gothic construction is more scientific than artistic, however much one may admire the grouping or design of the Gothic pile as a picturesque conception. ”

“ 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? ”