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LAND AND WATER 
August 14, 1915. 
so great as to defy all the efforts of the P^fes^'"" '« 
explain it away. The Goth.c style .s one of thes^ 
suffers, of course, from serious drawbacks. It is essenti 
ally a spontaneous or semi-barbaric style ; that is to sa> , 
n altogether lacks the intellectual quality of Greek 
or Renaissance art. The rudeness of the media^va 
age itself is upon it. None the less, m Us spiritual and 
emotional aspects it acliieves results which scarcely an> 
other style has even attempted to achieve. 
Upward-Reaching Lines. 
These are largely due to an effect which is perfectly 
familiar to everyone, since it belongs to every Gotluc 
interior; 1 mean the effect of a concourse of up^^ard- 
rushing lines springing from the pavement lo «« ^ 
last in the apex of the roof, and in their upward flig t 
carrying ,he eve and mind of the spectator w.th ihem 
It has not been enough remarked by critics of architec- 
ture that Gothic interiors are the o"'>;. '"*^"°.'V on 
illustrate the power of conlinmty ot line, being com- 
posed, not of distinct and finite features but of a system 
of lines, or ribs, wliich start from the floor as a bundle 
■or sheaf, of slender, rod-like columns, and are thiust 
through, rather than stopped by, the encircling capita s, 
from which point thev ascend, some to form the mould- 
incs of the aisle arches, while others, mounting the 
clerestorv walls as vaulting shafts, diverge at last into 
the ribs'of the vaults. This upward flight of vertical 
lines, and especially the continuity ot their ascent, im- 
parts so aspiring a' character to the architecture that to 
Professor Freeman it seemed to be inspired with a visible 
ascending motion, as if the spiritual intention embodied 
in the " soaring " lines of the interior had communi- 
cated itself to the masonry and structural composition of 
the building. , • r -i- u . 
With this effect of Gothic the reader is familiar, but 
there is another, every whit as potent, whicli, in this 
countrv, is less often encountered. The enthusiasm with 
which 'our Puritan ancestors availed themselves of the 
perishable nature of glass to destroy the stained windows 
of ancient churches and cathedrals has resulted in the 
practical destruction of all that is best of that kind of art 
in England. Vestiges remains, but vestiges are of small 
account, since they fail to communicate the real aim of 
the mediaeval craftsman, which was to create an interior 
entirely suffused and penetrated with beams of un- 
paralleled colour. Such an interior was the facsimile 
of an inward mood. It uttered that profound emotion 
which always, in East and West, has reverted to 
monastic asceticism to deepen and confirm its reliance on 
the spiritual faculty. 
Priceless Stained Glass. 
Of such interiors — interiors which exhibit the full 
effect of stained glass at its best— we have none remain- 
ing in England. In France they are much more for- 
tunate, most of their great cathedrals containing large 
quantities of priceless early glass. In this respect 
Rheims was not perfect— at least, as Chartres is perfect 
—since its aisle windows had been during the eighteenth 
centurv, filled with cold white glass in such a way that 
the church was partly invaded with natural daylight 
which shone, not through, but upon, the stained 
windows, blackening, instead of illuminating, their 
colour. Nevertheless, enough of the original glass 
remained, especially in the clerestories, in the pairs of 
lancets, and in the great roses, to convey much of the 
emotional sensation which it was the purpose of the 
builders to express. In no feature of the Gothic style 
has the medianal soul so fully expressed itself as in these 
dim vet gorgeous suffusions of interior colour. The 
golden and azure beams which traverse the obscurity 
and rest upon prostrate forms of stone, much as the 
dreams and aspirations of those ages of faith liovered, 
perhaps, round the originals in their walk through life, 
seem to be endowed witii the lustre and depth of jewels 
■ or of those rich enamels of wliicli the secret was brought 
.^intQ France hy Venetian traders from the luLst, and ■ 
which, indeed, were imitated in the first glass stained by 
the craftsmen of Limoges. r .i •„ 
We must join the influence of colour of this 
character to the intention conveyed by the lines of Gothic 
architecture if we would correctly estimate its influence. 
Tlie dominant characteristic of this style, which was also 
the dominant characteristic of the age, was a profound 
spiritual consciousness, a susceptibility of the soul lead- 
ing rather to emotional than to intellectual expression. 
It is easv, in such an interior as Rheims was till ately, 
standing in the twilight of its transepts, with the 
jewelled light of the great north rose idling the spaces 
between the ascending siiafls, to feel over again the same 
emotion which inspired the original builders. 1-or 
indeed, the men of that age built in their own image, and 
their feelings have not to be imagined, but are here 
visibly embodied in colour and stone. So long as the 
spectator preserves within liimself a remnant of the 
spiritual facultv, and remains open, therefore, to im- 
pressions of that nature, so long will he naturally 
respond to tliis artistic appeal. Not till the soul is dead 
in him, not till all capacity for spiritual emotion has 
dried up in his nature, will he be able to gaze on these 
surroundings witli an indifferent or hostile eye. 
Germany and Medaeval Art. 
It is difficult in such a crisis as this to estimate 
correctly, and without bias, the currents of ideas that 
have been set flo\\ing. But judging, not by art alone 
but by the written and spoken words and tiioughts of 
the leaders of German opinion, it seems as if Germany, 
as a nation, had reached this positive degree of hostility 
to the mediajval point of view. It seems as if there 
were no longer anything in common between her and 
that age. No point of likeness remains, and because of 
that she is capable of no feeling of liking for anything 
in which the character of that age is expressed. For all 
liking is the sense of likeness, just as disliking is the 
sense'of unlikeness. There have been periods in history 
when this unlikeness to Gothic spirituality seemed com- 
plete—such, for instance, as the predominantly intel- 
lectual eighteenth century (during which colour, that 
language of the soul, was so generally banished); but 
from these moments Europe has emerged. In spite of 
intellectual obsessions, in spite of the Renaissance and 
the claims of exact knowledge. Europe has succeeded in 
maintaining that spiritual susceptibility which was the 
chief legacy of the mediicval epoch. 
Europe, on the whole, has done this, but not every 
nation of Europe has done it. It seems as if Prussia 
certainly (and Germany, in so far as she has passed 
under the control of Prussia) has learnt to rely so 
exclusively on purely mundane and material considera- 
tions that the spiritual faculty within her has become 
atrophied from disuse. It is to this atrophy of the 
spiritual faculty, to this exclusive devotion to material 
estimates, that modern German architecture (taken in con- 
junction, of course, with modern German philosophy, 
science, poetry, and literature generally) so unmistakably 
testifies. Modern German— or I had rather say modern 
Prussian— architecture is a really adequate and true 
embodiment of Prussian thought and the Prussian 
philosophy, h is the style of a nation cut off absolutely 
from the spiritual point of view, and which has replaced 
that point of view by a strict devotion to unmitigated 
materialism. It is, one might almost conjecture, such a 
slvle as would be evolved by a nation whose soul was 
dead. 
For the classic stvle in Germany, the reader must 
observe, widelv differs from that style elsewhere. We 
are all more or less imitators of the classic style in these 
davs, but our imitations all have a certain character of 
their' own. Englisli experiments in that line reveal little 
more than the innate antagonism between English and 
classic thought, wiiile French experiments, on the other 
hand, usually reveal the intellectual nimbleness and 
dexterity of the French mind. But the German experi- 
ments are different to these. They are not experiments 
at all. They exhibit in their ponderous uniformity of 
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