The earliest style which may fairly be called Christian was the Byzantine. In the East no sudden revolution had affected art or civilisation, but the Greek empire, founded at the moment when Christianity became the established religion, went on quietly adapting its arts and institutions to its new religion. Art having already degenerated under the later Pagan emperors, and difficulties both from without and from within gradually weakening and undermining the power of the State, it was natural that the changing style should not have that full scope which would have been afforded it had the purifying influences of Christianity acquired full sway during the Augustan age. Painting, sculpture, and architectural carving had lamentably fallen off before they were transferred from the Heathen temple to the Christian church, and even the more mechanical features of Roman architecture had departed widely from their original purity of form. The task prescribed to the new religion was not to take the highest form of Pagan art as it had existed under Pericles or Augustus, and to mould it to its own uses and its own purer and holier sentiments: what she had to deal with was a mere wreck of its former self: all its early simplicity destroyed, its vigour enervated, its magic instinct for beauty gone, its artists fast falling back into barbarism; and that not the savageness of early but untutored art, but the effete and nerveless heartlessness of a race whose glory had departed. It was this lifeless body which Christianity had to awaken to new energy—this dull and spiritless lump out of which she had to mould her future arts, and that at a time when the western half of the empire was about to be crushed to powder by the mighty storm of Northern barbarism, and the eastern portion itself weakened by gradual decay and by the incursions of the Goths, Huns, Persians, etc., and eventually by the tremendous inundation of the followers of Mahomet. That such a glorious result as Byzantine architecture should have been produced out of materials so lifeless, and through the agency of a decaying nation, speaks volumes for the power of religion over art.
Let us turn, however, to the Western empire. There the case is still stronger. With the same decayed and lifeless art as their nucleus, the people of Christian Rome had the additional disadvantage caused by the removal of the seat of government, and with it of the seat of art, to Constantinople; nevertheless, their first efforts were so successful, that though, in the words of Thomas Hope, “The architecture of the Heathen Romans, in its deterioration, followed so regular a course, that that which most nearly preceded the conversion of its rulers to Christianity is also the worst,”—the same author tells us that “the early Christian buildings, from their simplicity, the distinctness, the magnificence, the harmony of their component parts, had a grandeur which we seek in vain in the complicated architecture of modern churches.”
What course art would have taken had the Roman empire continued it is impossible to judge. It was destined to share the fate of the empire itself, and to be utterly overwhelmed by that mighty deluge which severs the ancient from the modern world; so that its Christianisation, instead of being gradual and progressive, as in the East, became a complete reconstruction by the successors of those who had destroyed it, though aided in their work by the friendly hands of those who, in the Eastern empire, had kept alight the lamp of civilisation.[1] The architecture of the West, therefore, instead of being a mere translation of the old style from Pagan to Christian uses and expression, was a new creation, formed, it is true, out of the ancient débris, but nevertheless originated, carried on, and perfected by Christian nations and for Christian uses, and may, consequently, be said, even in a stronger sense than that of Byzantium, to be a distinct Christian style; and I suppose none would doubt that its culminating point, and that to which all its progress tended, was the Pointed architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
An argument against its claim to the title has been founded on the theory that the Pointed arch, which is, in some respects, the culminating feature of the style, was not developed spontaneously by our Christian forefathers, but learned by them from the Saracens. As well might it be attempted to sever Grecian architecture from the mythology and traditions of the Greeks, merely because some of its details may find their prototypes in Egypt or Assyria, or to disconnect the native architecture of India from their religion, because its first inspiration seems traceable to the Fire-worshippers of ancient Persia! Even Saracenic architecture itself was an emanation from that of Christian Greece; so that if we are indebted to it for the Pointed arch (a question which I will not now attempt to investigate), she only paid back to the religion from which she had borrowed. No one, however, can study the tendencies of the late Romanesque without seeing that the Pointed arch was becoming every day more necessary to the development of the germ which the rising style contained. The gradually increasing predominance of the vertical over the horizontal, the increase in the height of pillars and jambs demanding a proportionate addition to the arch; the necessities of groined vaulting over oblong spaces, and a hundred other evidences, proved the Pointed arch to be the inevitable result of the already attained developments; and often had it, almost unconsciously, appeared in intersecting arcades. If its systematic adoption can with certainty be traced to the suggestive architecture of the East, surely this does not unchristianise the already Christian architecture of the soldiers of the Cross, who brought the idea home among the spoils won from their unbelieving foes! Is it not rather in the spirit of our religion to receive tribute and homage from all the nations of the earth? And if it may be said of the Christian Church that
“Eastern Java there
Kneels with the native of the farthest west;
And Æthiopia spreads abroad the hand,
And worships,”
it is equally reasonable to expect of her material temples that
“The looms of Ormus, and the mines of Ind,
And Saba’s spicy groves, pay tribute there.”
The character of a style of art does not depend upon the mere material from which it has been fabricated, but upon the sentiments under which it has been developed. Were not this the case, all styles, excepting, perhaps, those in China and Central America, with a few others still more obscure, would be more or less connected with the religion of Egypt or of Nineveh; whereas, in fact, every race up to the sixteenth century, had so moulded the original materials upon which its arts had been founded as to render them expressive, in a great degree, of their own sentiments, and especially of their own religion; and more strongly than in any other case was it so with our own forefathers, when developing the latest of all styles of genuine architecture, and moulding it to harmonise with the sentiment of our holy religion.
The last of the historical claims of Pointed architecture to which I will call your attention is, that it is the native architecture of our own country, and that of our own forefathers. Here, again, I must define my meaning for the sake of meeting a class of objectors who delight to attach a false and exaggerated meaning to an expression.
I do not, then, mean that Pointed architecture belongs to us in any different sense from that in which it belongs to France or Germany: I do not mean to revive the claims of our country to its origination, nor to assert in its behalf any pre-eminent share in its development. All I mean to urge is the simple fact that, by whatever members of our family of nations it was shared, it was, nevertheless, the architecture of our own country—just as much English as we are ourselves—as indigenous to our country as are our wild flowers, our family names, our customs, or our political constitution.