Turning now to sculpture, the circumstance common to the Greek temple with its marbles and the French Gothic cathedral with its stone decorations, strikes us at once. In both cases, the prime impulse was civic pride. This is important. But it is even more necessary to realize the essential difference—that the Gothic cathedral owed even more to the inspiration of a great church and an all-powerful priesthood. At the very outset we come upon the fact that whereas the growth of Greek sculpture largely depended upon such a purely human feeling as the passion for physical beauty, sculpture in the Middle Ages was required to incarnate an entirely extra-mundane emotion—the craving for an all-ruling and ever-living deity. It was to this Coleridge referred when he said that “the principle of Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable.” Just as the Doric temple—“Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime”—was an echo of the Greek spirit; so the Gothic cathedral, with its vast spaces and its complex schemes of columns, aisles and chapels, ministered to that mysticism which distinguished the Christian religion of Western Europe from the crystal clear faith of Ancient Greece.
Some will remember William Watson’s lines “Upon a prelude or a fugue of Bach.”
“Contentedly, with strictest strands confined, Sports in the Sun that oceanic mind; To leap their bourn these waves did never long, Or roll against the stars their rock-bound song.”
That is the Greek view. How different is the Gothic. Again we turn to William Watson—four lines upon “The Gothic Spire”:
“It soars like hearts of hapless men who dare To sue for gifts the gods refuse to allot; Who climb for ever toward they know not where, Baffled for ever by they know not what.”
It is not an exaggeration to say that no great sculpture was produced under the influence of the Gothic passion for mystic communion with the Unseen. No one now remembers the name of a single Gothic sculptor. Certainly, no one can recall a single statue of the period as a “joy for ever,”—the test of a work of art of the first order. May we not infer that the art by which the religious instinct most naturally finds expression is architecture, or, as experience has since shown, music?
The absence of sculpture of real beauty was not due to any lack of opportunity. There were thousands of stone workers. As had been the case with the Greek temples, the great Gothic cathedrals provided abundant opportunities for sculptural decoration. In France the façades of the great churches were often literally covered with carved reliefs, and rows upon rows of statues. The purely architectural work served merely as a background to one huge composition of statuary. The deeply recessed portals and the galleries and columns of the interior were equally designed to receive a profusion of sculptural decoration. The triple portal of the west front at Chartres contained some 720 figures, large and small, the tympanum in the centre depicting Our Lord in Glory. Attached to the pillars of the doorways were numerous large carvings representing the ancestors of Christ. The transept porches were decorated with a similar profusion of statuary.
But whereas the sculpture of the Parthenon not only served perfectly as an architectural decoration, but was also “a thing of beauty” in itself, it was otherwise with the plastic decoration of a Gothic cathedral. The Gothic architect had not the slightest scruple in sacrificing the beauty of any statue for the architectural effect as a whole. At times the Gothic sculptor’s deviations from nature were almost uncanny. In his choice of a subject, and in his method of representation, he was only concerned with the realistic presentation of the beliefs of the Roman Church. His task was to translate the mysteries of life and death into a language which the humblest worshipper could not misunderstand. The well-known alto-relievo in Bourges Cathedral affords a fine illustration of this phase of Gothic art. The scene represents the torturing of the souls of the damned. We are spared nothing. Everything is set down in all its naked horror. The Gothic sculptor had his virtues. One was that he always told his story clearly. He sought to suggest the ideals revealed by the Man Christ as he understood them. His only aim was to give form to the new emotions and thoughts which he believed arose from the teachings of the Church. Can we help admiring the grand sincerity with which he kept his aim ever in the foreground, and the wonderful fertility of his invention in presenting the ideas he had to portray?
GOTHIC PANEL
