When twining round thy feet they fall
In that despairing agony.
THE STORY OF THE GOTHIC REVIVAL.
When, centuries hence, historians endeavor to delineate the characteristics of the present century, it is more than probable that the features that will most strike them will be those of innovation and change. Progress in every science, rapid advance in material prosperity, sweeping reforms in laws and governments, political and social changes not a few, will appear to have pretty well filled up the records of the busy century that is fast drawing to its close. To those, however, who look more closely into the minor though oftentimes important details that contribute in a great measure to influence the character of an age, it will be evident that, if change and revolution have to a large extent reigned paramount in this century, neither has it been altogether wanting in a just recognition of the past, and in a serious revival of some of the best features of that past.
These thoughts have been suggested by the perusal of Sir Charles Eastlake’s History of the Gothic Revival in England—a work in which is displayed a thorough knowledge of the subject combined with an agreeable style and a high artistic taste, which cannot fail to interest even those whose predilections are for other styles of architecture.
The revival which it describes has not been confined to England; in both France and Germany progress in Gothic art has made rapid strides during the last thirty years. In the production, indeed, on the history and theory of the pointed style France is perhaps in advance of England; but nowhere else has the revival been so universal and so practical as in the latter country, nowhere else has it reached a point which could justify an author in attempting its history. So many Catholic associations are linked with Gothic architecture, so many fond recollections of a glorious past are called up by the mere name, that it is only natural that Catholics should take a special interest in its revival, should feel justly proud of the large part that some of their co-religionists have had in that revival, and should refer with feelings of pleasure to the influence brought to bear upon it by the adoption of many Catholic doctrines and practices by their Protestant brethren.
American readers cannot be indifferent to the history and fortunes of edifices where their ancestors prayed in those happy days when unity of faith prevailed; nor can they fail to take an interest in the history, which we propose to sketch, of those years during which a handful of earnest men struggled, and struggled successfully, to revive the glories of a style that had been rendered for ever illustrious by such names as Cologne and Chartres, Amiens and Salisbury, Notre Dame and York Minster.
Many were the fair buildings that graced the broad lands of merry England at the commencement of the reign of Henry VIII.; stately churches and splendid monasteries adorned her towns and nestled among her wooded hills and valleys; the one same principle of art had presided over their structure—happy symbol of the one faith to whose service they ministered. Before the end of that reign what a transformation had come over the face of the land! One of the first acts of the Reformation had been the suppression of the monasteries and confiscation of their property. Cromwell and his band of impious followers but too faithfully carried out the orders of their royal master; the venerable and beauteous piles on which the pious munificence of ages had lavished their skill and their treasures were soon reduced to bare and crumbling ruins. Nor did the spoliation end here; the zealous reformers of God’s church were not slow in condemning as idolatrous the rich and brilliant decorations and ornaments that filled the cathedrals and churches, and thus these sacred edifices were shorn of all the costly treasures that devotion had accumulated to honor the abiding presence of a heavenly King, in order to fill the coffers of a licentious monarch.
It was not, however, the material ruin and desecration of its finest buildings that struck the severest blow at Gothic art; it was rather the loss of that faith which had witnessed its earliest efforts and had inspired its grandest works. When the cold blast of Protestantism swept away one after another each Catholic dogma and each Christian belief, the sources of Gothic inspiration were dried up, its very raison d’être ceased to exist. Not that the Catholic Church has in any way adopted one style of architecture as the only fitting one for her use; she has equally sanctified by her solemn ritual and her sacred ceremonies the colonnades of the Greek temple, the dome of the Italian basilica, and the pointed arch of the Gothic cathedral. But this last, if we may use a comparison, seems somehow more especially her own child; the others are but children of adoption—wayward children that she has rescued from pagan parents. She has not watched over them from their birth, nor seen them grow up under her fostering care to the vigor and strength of manhood.
It naturally took some time before the spirit of a form of art which was then the only form could completely disappear from the country; for we must recollect that in England at the time of the Reformation not only ecclesiastical but civil and domestic architecture was entirely Gothic. As there were for several centuries no new churches built—for the usurped edifices of Catholic days more than sufficed for the needs of Protestant piety—it was in domestic structures that the spirit of the style lingered longest in a practical form.