This charm appears to lie in the mere grandeur of the edifice as a work of art, for we observe it to be most potent over persons who are least in sympathy with the feeling which cathedrals embody. Very religious people are as likely to be repelled as attracted by them; and, indeed, in England and Scotland there are large numbers of Dissenters who have avoided entering them all their lives on principle. It is Americans who enjoy them most; for they see in them a most captivating assemblage of novelties—vast magnitude, solidity of structure only inferior to nature's own work, venerable age, harmonious and solemn magnificence—all combined in an edifice which can not, on any principle of utility, justify its existence, and does not pay the least fraction of its expenses. Little do they know personally of the state of feeling which made successive generations of human beings willing to live in hovels and inhale pollution in order that they might erect those wondrous piles. The cost of maintaining them—of which cost the annual expenditure in money is the least important part—does not come home to us. We abandon ourselves without reserve to the enjoyment of stupendous works wholly new to our experience.
Engraved upon a Stall in Sherborne Minster, England.
It is Americans, also, who are most baffled by the attempt to explain the contradiction between the noble proportions of these edifices and the decorations upon some of their walls. How could it have been, we ask in amazement, that minds capable of conceiving the harmonies of these fretted roofs, these majestic colonnades, these symmetrical towers, could also have permitted their surfaces to be profaned by sculptures so absurd and so abominable that by no artifice of circumlocution can an idea of some of them be conveyed in printable words? In close proximity to statues of the Virgin, and in chapels whose every line is a line of beauty, we know not how to interpret what M. Champfleury truly styles "deviltries and obscenities unnamable, vice and passion depicted with gross brutality, luxury which has thrown off every disguise, and shows itself naked, bestial, and shameless." And these mediæval artists availed themselves of the accumulated buffooneries and monstrosities of all the previous ages. The gross conceptions of India, Egypt, Greece, and Rome appear in the ornamentation of Christian temples along with shapes hideous or grotesque which may have been original. Even the oaken stalls in which the officiating priests rested during the prolonged ceremonials of festive days are in many cathedrals covered with comic carving, some of which is pure caricature. A rather favorite subject was the one shown above, a whipping-scene in a school, carved upon an ancient stall in an English cathedral.
From a Manuscript of the Thirteenth Century.
It is not certain, however, that the artist had any comic intention in engraving this picture of retributive justice, with which the children of former ages were so familiar. It was a standard subject. The troops of Flemish carvers who roamed over Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, offering their services wherever a church was to be decorated, carried with them port-folios of stock subjects, of which this was one. Other carvings are unmistakable caricatures: a monk caught making love to a nun, a wife beating her husband, an aged philosopher ridden by a woman, monkeys wearing bishops' mitres, barbers drawing teeth in ludicrous attitudes, and others less describable. In the huge cathedral of English Winchester, which abounds in curious relics of the Middle Ages, there is a series of painted panels in the chapel of Our Lady, one of which is an evident caricature of the devil. He is having his portrait painted, and the Virgin Mary is near the artist, urging him to paint him blacker and uglier than usual. The devil does not like this, and wears an expression similar to that of a rogue in a modern police station who objects to being photographed. Often, however, in these old pictures the devil is master of the situation, and exhibits contempt for his adversaries in indecorous ways.
If we turn from the sacred edifices to the sacred books used in them—those richly illuminated missals, the books of "Hours," the psalters, and other works of devotion—we are amazed beyond expression to discover upon their brilliant pages a similar taste in ornamentation. The school scene on the previous page, in which monkey-headed children are playing school, dates back to the thirteenth century.