The Architect of Spears / Gilbert Keith Chesterton

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion

which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic

architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in

most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic

eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once

lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally

rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man

ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral

tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the

presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and

silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked

birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the

servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a

sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one

ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or,

again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use

of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting

than the Greek. There is more truth in this; indeed, there is real truth

in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the Censor

of Plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals; but

indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate. We

should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing "Bill

Bailey" in church. Yet that would be only doing in music what the

mediaevals did in sculpture. They put into a Miserere seat the very

scenes that we put into a music hall song: comic domestic scenes similar to

the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing. But though

the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it also is not the secret of

its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese

sketches. But delightful as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper

houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of

a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some

have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure

in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is

rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed

after the same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating

bristles, are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all

the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and

almost equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in

mediaevalism; and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and

simplicity, as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again,

the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the

ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such

as the Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of

these explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about

Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of

furniture-vans.

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the

smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall

cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the

yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across

that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the

more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it

like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this

ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly

coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond that

the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,

straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as

the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;

what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not

variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,

but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man

of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an

Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had

mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this

gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving

towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across

the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with the

clouds. Then I saw what it was.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is

on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting

architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are

stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the

arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and

numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial

elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into

battle; the silence was deafening with ail the mingled noises of a

military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its

thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all

the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core

of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of

brass,

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in

the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the

voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears.

I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew

indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the

trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had

marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.

Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the

desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke

at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall

pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every snake or

sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the

architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the

flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across

dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of music and darkness

and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill. So for some

hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic; then the

last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw only a church tower in a

quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating.