(Eleventh Century.)
Fig. 310.—Capital of a Column in the Church of St. Julien the Poor (destroyed), Paris.
(Twelfth Century.)
space, and the landscape stretching out around them below; we must follow attentively with our eye the strikingly bold outlines which the turrets, the ornamented gables, the guivres, the tops of the bell-towers trace upon the sky. This done, we should yet have paid but a brief tribute of attention to these prodigious edifices. What, then, if we wished to devote sufficient time to the ornamentation of the details ([Figs. 309 to 312])? if we desired to obtain a tolerably exact idea of the people from the statues which swarm from the porch to the pinnacle, and of the flora and fauna, real or ideal, that give movement to every projection or animate every wall? if one counted on success in finding out the key to all the crossings and intersections of the lines, of the well-adjusted conceptions which, while they deceive the eye, contribute to the majesty or the solidity of the whole? if, finally, we were most careful not to lose any one of the multifarious thoughts that have been fixed in the stones of the gigantic edifice? The mind becomes confused; and certainly the effect produced by so much imagination and so much enterprise, by so much skill and taste, wonderfully elevates the soul, which searches with more love after the Creator when it sees such a work proceeding from the hands of the creature.
Fig. 311.—Vestige of the Architecture of the Goths at Toledo. (Seventh Century.)
Fig. 312.—Capital in the Church of the Célestins (destroyed), Paris. (Fourteenth Century.)
When you approach the Gothic church, when you stand beneath its lofty roof, it is as if a new country were receiving you, possessing you, casting around you an atmosphere of subduing reverie in which you feel your wretched servitude to worldly interests vanishing away, and you become conscious of more solid, more important ties, springing up in you. The Deity whom our finite nature can figure to ourselves seems in fact to inhabit this immense building, to be willing to put himself in direct communion with the humble Christian who approaches to bow down before Him. There is nothing in it of the human dwelling-place—all relating to our poor and miserable existence is here forgotten; He for whom this residence was constructed is the Strong, the Great, the Magnificent, and it is from a paternal condescension that He receives us into His holy habitation, as weak, little, miserable. It is the ideal of the faith which is realised; all the articles of the belief in which we have been brought up are here embodied before our eyes; it is, lastly, the chosen spot where the meeting of mortal nothingness and Divine Majesty is quietly accomplished.
The Christianity of the Middle Ages had then been able to find in the Gothic style a tongue as tractable as it was energetic, as simple as it was ingenious, which, for the pious excitement of souls, was to declare to the senses all its ineffable poetry. But as the unbounded faith, of which it was the faithful organ, was on the next dawn of its most ardent aspirations about to decline, so this splendid style was almost as soon to lose its vigour, and to exhaust itself in the unrestrained manifestation of its power.
Springing into existence with the warm enthusiasm of the first Crusades, the Pointed style seems to follow in its different phases the decline of faith in the time of these adventurous enterprises. It began by a sincere outburst, and was produced by a bold, unshackled genius; then a factitious or reflected ardour gave birth to elaborateness and mannerism; then the fervent zeal and the artistic sentiment dwindled away: this is the decadency.