Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 995
Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest system of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified statue, of much more than ‘heroic size’. A façade is rightly called a face; it has something of the character of a huge human face fading or simplifying itself into the formality of a diagram; we see it in the childish sketches of a cottage with windows for eyes and the front-door for a mouth. We feel as if architecture were a simplified art of statuary and portraiture, just as the statuary and portraiture of ancient Egypt or Nineveh really were simplified and stiffened almost to the severity of architecture. It is as if a monolith were a headless body, or a dome were a hairless skull. Seen for a moment in this light, or this twilight, all architecture takes on mysterious lines of life and a movement as of signals. Nor is this merely fanciful, for it inheres in much of our habitual language on the subject. We say that a spire points to the sky, as if it really lifted a finger. We say that windows look over a landscape, as if windows were really eyes.
There is, then, a universal instinct that architecture has something to say; that it is, as it were, trying to say it. Some aesthetes still maintain that art is unmoral — or, in that it is unmeaning. But they ought really to be pursuing the opposite line of progress and finding more meanings instead of less. Instead of treating religious pictures as decorative patterns, they would have much better fun proving that even patterns are religious. They would have much better fun looking for their religion in the wallpaper or the Turkey carpet. But this is a digression. The point is that architecture also, like the more obvious arts of representation, has about it something that suggests a proclamation or a message; but that its speciality is the size or scale upon which the message can be given. The message is given on a megaphone; the proclamation is distributed by a loudspeaker. The size of a building is the most obvious thing to say about it; it is meant to be the most obvious thing to see in it. Mere size is meant to be self-evident and therefore simple; a colossal common ice. Yet, strangely enough, while this art presents its symbols on a vast scale, and staring at the sun, they remain in many ways more elusive and delicate than a drawing in silverpoint or a light tracery in lace. The hieroglyphs are as huge as Assyrian bulls; but they are not hieroglyphs that everybody can read. Strangely enough, they are not only things that few can read, they are sometimes things that few can see. It would almost seem that they are too large to be seen.
It is certainly strange that the historical lessons of architecture have not always been easily understood. Things have been dismissed as trifles when the very litter and leavings of them were terrific. Things have been neglected as naked or barbarous when the smallest scrap of them was complex and ornate. Civilizations have been loosely lumped together when the very skyline of their cities wrote the difference upon the sky. The vulgar example, a very vulgar example, is that of the insular English gentleman or still more frequently, I grieve to say, the insular English lady — who travels in India with out any idea about the Indian races and religions, except that they are all one dim mob to be described as ‘natives’. Yet one would fancy, for instance, that the difference between the Moslem and the Brahmin tradition was something almost as obvious to the eye as the difference between a wigwam and a Wimbledon villa. The one tradition prides itself on carrying through a scheme of the most colossal scale while remaining almost appallingly impersonal. All that ornament may be literally called featureless in the sense of faceless; it must contain no portraiture of man or beast or bird. We are not to look for it any more than for a human figure in the most complicated figures of Euclid. This element is emphasized wherever the Moslem creed is most emphatic. Round the great Mosque of Omar in Jerusalem the most apparently florid decoration consists only of handwriting, of elaborate Arabic script, defining the unity of God. The heraldic symbol of the Caliphate does not rival the eagle of Rome or the lion of England, or even the lilies of France, except with the cold horns of the hollow moon.
It is this austerity that makes a miracle even of Moslem luxury. The magnificence of a thing like the Taj Mahal is increased by a great abnegation. The other Eastern tradition is at the very opposite extreme. It boils, one might say it bubbles, with bodily representations. There are patterns made out of swaying figures with monstrous hips. There are gods many-headed as if everything were doubling and trebling; gods who wave wild arms to us like the numberless arms of a forest. Some have represented Asia as a nightmare of the over-population of the earth; and it would seem as if the very heavens were over populated. Taken by itself, this would be a superficial view of Indian polytheism. But the point is that the supercilious tourist could not see even the startling contrast between the iconoclast and the idolater. Therefore, he could never see the really reconciling truth about Islam — that it was much more of a war against the gods of Asia than against the God of Christendom.
It is hardly surprising that the superior person could learn no history from the architecture of Asia, for he could not learn it from the architecture of England. From the Renaissance to the Ruskinian epoch he went on talking of the Middle Ages as merely benighted and barbaric. Yet in every other English village a colossal contrast contradicted him flatly. A great medieval building stood up among the more modern buildings like a mountain among molehills. It stood up like a mountain; but people could not see it. They still went on saying that tumbledown cottages had been made in an age of progress and the eternal tower had been made in an age of ignorance. Perhaps that also was too large to be seen; and perhaps that also might be seen better in a smaller space or on a smaller model. But for that we must wait for another exhibition — not of the Empire, but of the English story; and perhaps it may be even more enlightening.
BAROQUE AND GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE
MUCH has been written recently about a revival of interest in what is called the Baroque — the rather riotous sort of Renaissance architecture which broke out all over Europe, largely in connexion with the Counter-Reformation and largely leading up to what the French call the Great Century, the noontide glory of the Roi Soleil. Critics are saying, with some justice, that the very medievalists who rightly condemned the reckless Renaissance contempt for the Gothic have since exhibited a quite equally reckless contempt for all the results of the Renaissance. As the one was called Gothic merely in the sense of the barbaric, so the other is called Rococo merely in the sense of florid or absurd. The classical foundations of Rome are not necessarily bad because the pointed shrines in Normandy are good; and if it is hard to imagine how anyone ever thought that a savage had designed St Ouen’s, we have even more detailed evidence that it was not exactly a fool who designed St Peter’s.
We all have our preferences, we all probably have our prejudices about these things; but even medievalists like myself may well admit that some of us have shown prejudice as well as preference. We may well admit that, even when we are illuminated with all the windows of Chartres, even when we are rejoicing in some glorious Gothic lantern of flamboyant glass, we are in a sense living in glass houses and should not throw stones. Certainly we should not cast the first stone at every stonemason who does not happen to be a medieval stonemason. To take that position is to be every bit as ignorant and stupid as those great Renaissance classicists who thought themselves so enlightened and so wise. Certainly they were Vandals when they thought they were attacking Goths. But the Gothicists are really Goths when they march only to sack the temples of Rome. So much even a man of medieval sympathies may well concede to those who condemn anything as Pagan if it is not Pugin. But we will probably add that the worst weakness of the medievalists is that they fall short of the medievals. The real trouble has been that even those who admired Gothic most could not revive the part of it that was most admirable. The most wonderful thing about Gothic was the spontaneous individual craftsmanship, especially in its sanctification of the grotesque. But there was nothing specially spontaneous, there was nothing specially individual, there was certainly nothing specially grotesque, about the pallid and pointed church architecture that began with the Victorian High Churchman and is now the pattern of every Wesleyan or Congregationalist chapel in Surbiton or Streatham. The worthy Wesleyan would be gravely surprised if he saw his pew decorated with some of the carvings found on the Miserere seats of the monks. The speculative builder in Surbiton would be distinctly pained if he found an ordinary bricklayer chipping a brick about to make a hideous face, certainly to suit the fancy of the labourer, and possibly to be a caricature of the foreman. This sort of variety within a framework of unity was the real merit of the medieval world, and it is nearly impossible in the modern world. Anyhow, it is quite as impossible in the Gothic chapel in Streatham as it is in the classical temple in Rome. That is what I mean by saying that the modern stained glass attitudinizer is living in a glass house or is open to a tu quoque; he is not really carving his own gargoyles any more than the classicist, and anybody who dared to cast a real stone devil among us might be killing two birds with one stone. He might be not only rebuking classicism for not being Gothic, but even more sharply rebuking Gothic for not being Gothic. In other words, the real objection to revivals of medievalism is that they are not medieval enough.
The Baroque in art and architecture, however, had its own sort of freedom and fantasy; and, as it was produced under social conditions more like our own; it is natural that some of us should turn to it with a new understanding and sympathy. Nevertheless, the understanding and sympathy are quite new, and that for a reason that is rather interesting in itself. It arises from the fact that the full civilization in which this expanded and even extravagant form of classicism flourished is one from which we in England have been cut off by a curious historical accident. The period which was most positive in French history was curiously negative in English history. It is like the case of one of those florid classical masks so often seen in the sculpture and decoration of the Baroque period. Only the French beheld it solid and in the round; a full and featured lace; the noble mask of Comedy or of Tragedy; for the smile was the smile of Molière and the frown was the frown of Racine. But we were on the concave and not the convex side of that mould or protuberance. At that particular period, we saw it as something hollow and empty; even when we imitated it, we used it as a mask and hardly saw it as a face.
Indeed, we imitated the French without admiring them — or, at any rate, we admired them without praising them. They were at once our enemies and our models; but that very fact shows that they were at that moment at their best and we almost at our worst. Wycherley wrote an English version of the noblest of all the plays of Molière, and it is pretty ignoble. It is almost enough to ask where Molière has stood among French writers and where Wycherley has stood among English. Anyhow, it will be agreed that our great period was rather the age of Shakespeare than the age of Wycherley. The reasons for this contrast are probably political and may be very roughly suggested by saying that the natural outcome and climax of the Renaissance, good or bad, was the thing which Charles I failed in achieving and which Henry VIII only seemed to achieve. It was the replacing of a strong Church by a strong State and even by a strong King.
In France this strong State was established, with such advantages as that conception has, in all sorts of things down to the leadership of fashion and the patronage of art and architecture. In England it was thwarted and broken up, for good or evil, by factions, and especially by the faction of the Whig aristocrats. Therefore, if we want to judge that strong State which was the spirit of the time, and balance its good and evil, England happens to be a very unfortunate corner of Europe in which to study it. The English Puritans had their own virtues; the English Whigs had their own case; but they do not tell us much of what was happening in the world just then, or of that positive and constructive culture whose architectural symbol was the Baroque. It seems to me very odd that internationalists, who rebuke the narrowness of national things, seldom sympathize with really international things. Thus the man who is always hoping that a Europe without flags or frontiers will exist in the future, is quite annoyed to discover that a Europe without flags or frontiers really existed in the past. He wants to get nearer to a World State and he hates the nearest that the world ever came to a World State — the Roman Empire. I find the most enlightened Englishmen strangely blind to the positive European importance of the Grand Siècle. They seem to be as jealous of Louis XIV as if he were still alive. But a good historian will feel something of the magnificence of the legend of Louis, just as he will feel something of the magnificence of the legend of Elizabeth. You can not understand France without one, or England without the other — or Europe without both.
ROBERT BRUCE AND HIS AGE
IN 1314, on the Vigil of John the Baptist, a long and magnificent war-array under the banner of the great Plantagenets, and of an epoch when chivalry was already a pageant, came rolling out of the south over the lowlands that lie around the crag and castle of Stirling. They reached a small and marshy brook called the Bannock, behind which were posted forces of uncertain but certainly far inferior numbers, clumps of spearmen, mainly infantry, under the command of a tall gentleman of Norman extraction whom many regarded as an adventurer. There was an unconscious creative quality in him and a simplicity in good and evil which is almost incomprehensible to those who have not the key of that older Christendom. He had become a sincere patriot by accident or (one might almost say) by mistake. He be came an excellent King by something like usurpation. He was probably prouder of his strong body than of his very strong brain. Murder and sacrilege and all sorts of indefensible things had brought him at last to the defence of his country — or, if you will, to the creation of it. The great host swept on and struck the smaller one here and there, but unsuccessfully; it was entangled in rude man-traps and muddy river banks and hung there, fighting heavily; and on the second day it broke.
There are three stages through which the mind of a modern man should pass in connexion with what may be called the romance of the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages were, in some ways, romantic. The Scots are wildly romantic. And the purely romantic aspect of the period has been excellently symbolized in the cult of Bannockburn. There are all the romantic ingredients — the triumph against odds, the defence of the soil, and above all, the bodily peril of the prince and leader. Yet even the Scots are not always romantic; nor were the Middle Ages. I repeat, therefore, that there are three stages through which a thinking man goes in his consideration of such a romance as that of Robert Bruce, ‘the third best knight in Christendom’. They say that second thoughts are best, but I incline to disagree. I think that third thoughts are sometimes best. But I think that first thoughts are much better than second thoughts, and have more resemblance to the real ripeness of third thoughts. In the first stage we act merely on instinct; and are sometimes right. In the second stage we act merely on reason, and are fairly frequently wrong. In the third and truly reasonable stage we use our reason until we understand our instincts. And if we do that with romance we shall come pretty near reality.
The first stage might be symbolized in Miss Jane Porter’s ‘Scottish Chiefs’, in which, as Thackeray said, William Wallace goes into battle with a tear in his eye and a cambric handkerchief in his hand. In other words, it is a romance of no particular age or country, but certainly more modern than medieval; and with no complexity of human nature, but only a war between heroes and villains. It is in this stage that boys die daily for Mary Queen of Scots, or girls make short work of the constitutional complications that enmeshed Charles I. But in so far as the feeling is idealistic, it really is medieval; and, what is much more important, right. And just as it associated loyalty with the House of Stuart, it associated liberty with the House of Bruce. Bruce drew the sword for Scottish freedom, and there is an end of it. It is true that most of those young people would be puzzled to define the position either of freedom or Scotland in connexion with the controversy about the Suzerainty. But all the same the young people are right, much more right than they are when they learn a little more.
The second stage begins about the time that we begin to read Carlyle and Kingsley. We learn that the great men of the Middle Ages were not waxwork heroes, but statesmen, and even diplomatists; that the wicked things they did were designed to great ends of policy and dominion. In this intellectual phase, and especially under these intellectual influences, it is common to consider the consolidation of great States, the spreading of unified systems, as the great triumph in politics. In this stage, therefore, it is common to regret the death of Edward I and the failure of Edward II; and to regard Bruce somewhat as a sentimental obstacle. It leads sometimes to that excusing of tyranny which is the weakest tendency in human nature. It even leads sometimes to maintaining that all wars were fought for economic and industrial reasons; but into that mire of mental decay we need not follow it. But certainly, if I have to choose between Miss Jane Porter and such historical philosophers as Carlyle and Froude, I am for Miss Jane Porter. Bring me my claymore — and my cambric handkerchief. Miss Porter may have been ignorant of the cruelties alleged against Wallace in his Northumbrian raid, or she may not have believed in them. But she would never have excused, still less admired them, as Froude does the cruelties of the Tudors. Nor would Wallace himself have admired them, even if he’d done them. Miss Jane Porter is more manly than Froude.
At the third stage the student, if he is lucky enough to get so far, comes to a view much more subtle and experienced than the first, but one by which he sees that the first had a great deal in it after all. He has learned that all men are mean, but especially great men. He knows that no valour and inspiration can save a man from the rebuke of Nathan; that no faith and holiness can insure him against the crowing of the cock. He knows that the best you can say of any man is to compare him to the curate’s egg. But though he will know that only parts of Bruce and Wallace were heroic, he will also know that such parts as were heroic were more akin to the hero-worship of ‘Frederick the Great’. Whatever the real knight held in his hand (a letter to a money-lender, as like as not), the ideal knight did hold the handkerchief of sensibility. And the student will conclude, though not with the old cut-and-dried conclusion, that there really was a meaning in fighting for the freedom of Scotland.
