The Complete Writings of Charles Dudley Warner — Volume 1

by Charles Dudley Warner

SEVENTH STUDY

We have been much interested in what is called the Gothic revival. We have spent I don't know how many evenings in looking over Herbert's plans for a cottage, and have been amused with his vain efforts to cover with Gothic roofs the vast number of large rooms which the Young Lady draws in her sketch of a small house.

I have no doubt that the Gothic, which is capable of infinite modification, so that every house built in that style may be as different from every other house as one tree is from every other, can be adapted to our modern uses, and will be, when artists catch its spirit instead of merely copying its old forms. But just now we are taking the Gothic very literally, as we took the Greek at one time, or as we should probably have taken the Saracenic, if the Moors had not been colored. Not even the cholera is so contagious in this country as a style of architecture which we happen to catch; the country is just now broken out all over with the Mansard-roof epidemic.

And in secular architecture we do not study what is adapted to our climate any more than in ecclesiastic architecture we adopt that which is suited to our religion.

We are building a great many costly churches here and there, we Protestants, and as the most of them are ill adapted to our forms of worship, it may be necessary and best for us to change our religion in order to save our investments. I am aware that this would be a grave step, and we should not hasten to throw overboard Luther and the right of private judgment without reflection. And yet, if it is necessary to revive the ecclesiastical Gothic architecture, not in its spirit (that we nowhere do), but in the form which served another age and another faith, and if, as it appears, we have already a great deal of money invested in this reproduction, it may be more prudent to go forward than to go back. The question is, "Cannot one easier change his creed than his pew?"

I occupy a seat in church which is an admirable one for reflection, but I cannot see or hear much that is going on in what we like to call the apse. There is a splendid stone pillar, a clustered column, right in front of me, and I am as much protected from the minister as Old Put's troops were from the British, behind the stone wall at Bunker's Hill. I can hear his voice occasionally wandering round in the arches overhead, and I recognize the tone, because he is a friend of mine and an excellent man, but what he is saying I can very seldom make out. If there was any incense burning, I could smell it, and that would be something. I rather like the smell of incense, and it has its holy associations. But there is no smell in our church, except of bad air,—for there is no provision for ventilation in the splendid and costly edifice. The reproduction of the old Gothic is so complete that the builders even seem to have brought over the ancient air from one of the churches of the Middle Ages,—you would declare it had n't been changed in two centuries.

I am expected to fix my attention during the service upon one man, who stands in the centre of the apse and has a sounding-board behind him in order to throw his voice out of the sacred semicircular space (where the aitar used to stand, but now the sounding-board takes the place of the altar) and scatter it over the congregation at large, and send it echoing up in the groined roof I always like to hear a minister who is unfamiliar with the house, and who has a loud voice, try to fill the edifice. The more he roars and gives himself with vehemence to the effort, the more the building roars in indistinguishable noise and hubbub. By the time he has said (to suppose a case), "The Lord is in his holy temple," and has passed on to say, "let all the earth keep silence," the building is repeating "The Lord is in his holy temple" from half a dozen different angles and altitudes, rolling it and growling it, and is not keeping silence at all. A man who understands it waits until the house has had its say, and has digested one passage, before he launches another into the vast, echoing spaces. I am expected, as I said, to fix my eye and mind on the minister, the central point of the service. But the pillar hides him. Now if there were several ministers in the church, dressed in such gorgeous colors that I could see them at the distance from the apse at which my limited income compels me to sit, and candles were burning, and censers were swinging, and the platform was full of the sacred bustle of a gorgeous ritual worship, and a bell rang to tell me the holy moments, I should not mind the pillar at all. I should sit there, like any other Goth, and enjoy it. But, as I have said, the pastor is a friend of mine, and I like to look at him on Sunday, and hear what he says, for he always says something worth hearing. I am on such terms with him, indeed we all are, that it would be pleasant to have the service of a little more social nature, and more human. When we put him away off in the apse, and set him up for a Goth, and then seat ourselves at a distance, scattered about among the pillars, the whole thing seems to me a trifle unnatural. Though I do not mean to say that the congregations do not "enjoy their religion " in their splendid edifices which cost so much money and are really so beautiful.

A good many people have the idea, so it seems, that Gothic architecture and Christianity are essentially one and the same thing. Just as many regard it as an act of piety to work an altar cloth or to cushion a pulpit. It may be, and it may not be.

Our Gothic church is likely to prove to us a valuable religious experience, bringing out many of the Christian virtues. It may have had its origin in pride, but it is all being overruled for our good. Of course I need n't explain that it is the thirteenth century ecclesiastic Gothic that is epidemic in this country; and I think it has attacked the Congregational and the other non-ritual churches more violently than any others. We have had it here in its most beautiful and dangerous forms. I believe we are pretty much all of us supplied with a Gothic church now. Such has been the enthusiasm in this devout direction, that I should not be surprised to see our rich private citizens putting up Gothic churches for their individual amusement and sanctification. As the day will probably come when every man in Hartford will live in his own mammoth, five-story granite insurance building, it may not be unreasonable to expect that every man will sport his own Gothic church. It is beginning to be discovered that the Gothic sort of church edifice is fatal to the Congregational style of worship that has been prevalent here in New England; but it will do nicely (as they say in Boston) for private devotion.

There isn't a finer or purer church than ours any where, inside and outside Gothic to the last. The elevation of the nave gives it even that "high-shouldered" appearance which seemed more than anything else to impress Mr. Hawthorne in the cathedral at Amiens. I fancy that for genuine high-shoulderness we are not exceeded by any church in the city. Our chapel in the rear is as Gothic as the rest of it,- -a beautiful little edifice. The committee forgot to make any more provision for ventilating that than the church, and it takes a pretty well-seasoned Christian to stay in it long at a time. The Sunday- school is held there, and it is thought to be best to accustom the children to bad air before they go into the church. The poor little dears shouldn't have the wickedness and impurity of this world break on them too suddenly. If the stranger noticed any lack about our church, it would be that of a spire. There is a place for one; indeed, it was begun, and then the builders seem to have stopped, with the notion that it would grow itself from such a good root. It is a mistake however, to suppose that we do not know that the church has what the profane here call a "stump-tail" appearance. But the profane are as ignorant of history as they are of true Gothic. All the Old World cathedrals were the work of centuries. That at Milan is scarcely finished yet; the unfinished spires of the Cologne cathedral are one of the best-known features of it. I doubt if it would be in the Gothic spirit to finish a church at once. We can tell cavilers that we shall have a spire at the proper time, and not a minute before. It may depend a little upon what the Baptists do, who are to build near us. I, for one, think we had better wait and see how high the Baptist spire is before we run ours up. The church is everything that could be desired inside. There is the nave, with its lofty and beautiful arched ceiling; there are the side aisles, and two elegant rows of stone pillars, stained so as to be a perfect imitation of stucco; there is the apse, with its stained glass and exquisite lines; and there is an organ-loft over the front entrance, with a rose window. Nothing was wanting, so far as we could see, except that we should adapt ourselves to the circumstances; and that we have been trying to do ever since. It may be well to relate how we do it, for the benefit of other inchoate Goths.