Gothic Horror 



find in them than by references in pure fiction to 

 the awfulness of Gothic art, particularly by 

 one writer's confession that the interior of a 

 Gothic church, seen at night, gave him the idea 

 of being inside the skeleton of some monstrous 

 animal ; and by a far-famed comparison of the 

 windows of a cathedral to eyes, and of its door 

 to a great mouth, " devouring the people." 

 These imaginations explained little; they could 

 not be developed beyond the phase of vague 

 intimation: yet they stirred such emotional 

 response that I felt sure they had touched some 

 truth. Certainly the architecture of a Gothic 

 cathedral offers strange resemblances to the archi- 

 tecture of bone ; and the general impression that 

 it makes upon the mind is an impression of life. 

 But this impression or sense of life I found to be 

 indefinable, not a sense of any life organic, 

 but of a life latent and daemonic. And the mani- 

 festation of that life I felt to be in the pointing of 

 the structure. 



Attempts to interpret the emotion by effects of 

 altitude and gloom and vastness appeared to me 

 of no worth ; for buildings loftier and larger and 

 darker than any Gothic cathedral, but of a dif- 

 ferent order of architecture, Egyptian, for 



