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 GOTHIC

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GOTHIO

and, finally, parish churches of all sizes and almost without number, are indicative of the surprising new life in art and therefore of the strength of the sound Catholic civilization of England. The beauty of the new style, its structural integrity, and its fecund variety are worthy of high admiration. What it lacked of the majesty of form and the serene reserve of an earlier time is almost made up for by a fineness of line, a rich- ness of design without opulence, and a splendour of colour that find few antecedents in history, while the fan vault takes its place as one of the very great inven- tions of architecture. " In these splendid vaultings of the fifteenth century we have indeed the last work of English monastic art" (Prior, op. cit., VII, 95).

Step by step, diverging steadily from her point of departure from the Gothic of France, England had worked out to the full her own form of Gothic artistic expression. French precedents sat lightly upon her, and she was not favourably disposed to coercion. In plan the Norman and Burgundian type had been ad- hered to, and instead of that concentration which had produced in France a parallelogram with one end semicircular, there had been an expansion which re- sulted in the episcopal or archiepiscopal cross plans of Lincoln, Beverley, and Salisbury — long, narrow naves, equally long choirs, widely-spreading, aisled transepts, and frequently choir transepts as well, with a deep Lady Chapel prolonging the main axis still further to the east. The plan of a French cathedral such as Paris or Amiens announces its ordonance but indiffer- ently; that of an English cathedral, exactly. Out- wardly, the former is hardly more than a mountainous mass without composition; vast and awe-inspiring, but without emphasis or variety, except in regard to its western front when taken by itself. The latter — with its long, lateral fagade, its building-up by succes- sive planes, both horizontal and vertical, its Lady Chapel, choir, central tower, and west towers, its bold transepts, porches, and chapels — becomes an elabo- rate yet monumental composition of brilliant masses and infinitely varied light and shade. With the ex- ception of Hales, Lincoln, and Beaulieu (now des- troyed), Tewkesbury, and Westminster, the chevet gained no hold in England, nor did the apsidal termi- nation widely commend itself; instead, the square east end became the established type, and when to this was added a retro-clioir with a still lower Lad}^ Chapel still further to the east, the result was an independent architectural scheme equally admirable to that com- plex glory of the French chevet. — Mr. Prior advances the interesting theory that the square east end was a fixed feature of both Saxon and Celtic church-build- ing, that it was taken to Burgundy by St. Stephen Harding, the Englishman, who had been a monk of Sherborne in Dorset, where the old national tradition had survived the Norman invasion, and that it came back with the Cistercians, who, by their sheer dynamic force, were able to impose it at last on Benedictine ab- bey and secular cathedral alike, so bringing an origi- nally local device to its own again. He says further: " In this matter the Canterbury choir of William of Sens was a survival rather than a pattern for English use. By the end of the twelfth century the small Kel- tic sanctuary had impo.sed itself on the choirs of our great Norman churches still more decisively than it has in the basilican introduction of St. Augustine " (A History of Gothic Art in England, II, 79). — In height, as related to breadth, the earlier and more reserved PVench relations were never exceeded, while they were often discounted; until Tudor times the elimination of the wall in favour of skeleton construction combined with glass screens, found little following, and a grave and conservative relationship was preserved between solids and voids. The central tower, the culmination and concentration of the composition, was almost invariable, while the west front was usually .subordi- nated to the design as a whole. The elaborate articu-

lation of piers and archivolts, until both became compositions of fine lines of lightand shade, wascarried further in England than elsewhere, and the introduc- tion of tiercerons, or accessory vault ribs, with the ridge ribs to receive them, was in keeping with an in- stinct that felt the subtle beauty of these multiplied lines. The logical sense, that demanded the ground- ing of every downward thrust of vault rib either at the pavement or on the abacus of the pier or column caps, was not operative, and in most cases the vaulting shafts were stopped on corbels above the level of the arcade capitals. From the Cistercian aversion to or- nament, and perhaps also in part from the use of turned shafts of dark marble applied to the piers and bonded in by stone rings or bronze dowels, came the turned and moulded cap with the circular abacus. In its polygonal chapter houses England developed a bril- liant conception all its own, and almost the same might be said of the parish church, while in the design- ing of tomlis, chantries, reredoses, choir-screens, and chanc('l-fittinL;s of wood, the delicate fancy of the English had full play in the creation of a mass of ex- quisite sculpture and joinery that has no counterpart elsewhere. If logic and consistency are the note of French Gothic, personality and daring are those of the Gothic of England. The west fronts of Peterborough, Bury St. Edmunds, Wells, Ely, and Lincoln; the chapter houses of York, Salisbury, Lincoln, and West- minster ; the octagon of Ely, the fan vaulting of Glouces- ter, Sherborne, Oxford, and Westminster — all are examples of a vitality of impulse, a fertility in concep- tion, a soaring imagination, and a cheerful disregard of scholastic precedent that give English Gothic a quality of its own as important in the make-up of the art- expression of Catholic Europe during the Middle Ages as is the masterly and final structural achievement of the Ile-de-F ranee.

Outside France and England the racial adaptations of the Gothic impulse are much less vital and distinc- tive. Wales early evolved a school which had great influence in the development of style in the West of England, but it soon became merged therein and did not long preserve its identity: Ireland shows in its minor monastic work peculiar and very individual qualities hitherto unnoticed, but to which attention is being called at last by Mr. Champneys (cf. "The Architectural Review", London, 1906; also "The Magazine of Christian Art", 1908). In Scotland French influence was more pronounced than in the South, and the Norman of Jedburgh and Kelso, the Gothic of Dryburgh, Melrose, and Edinburgh deserve more careful study than has yet been given them. In all essential particulars, however, they are of the Eng- lish school, and show no radical departures from the type established in the South by the Benedictines, Cluniacs, Cistercians, Augustinians, and Friars. In Germany the Gothic expression was slow in establish- ing itself, few evidences appearing before the Gothic style had reached perfection in France and England. " A reason for this, may perhaps be found in the fact that Germany in the twelfth century possessed a Romanesque architecture which, especially in the im- portant churches along the Rhine, was of a very ad- mirable character and was well suited to the needs and tastes of the German people" (Moore, op. cit., VII, 237). Another reason may also be discovered in the further fact that the pressure of Cistercian influence during its great formative period was towards France and Kiigland rallier than in the direction of Germany, while the impulscof creative civilization in the twelfth century was from Norman and Prankish rather than Teutonic blood. When, about the middle of the thirteenth century, French architects began the con- struction of the cathedral of Cologne after the ex- aggerated manner of Beauvais, they might almost have claimed that theirs was the first Gothic structure in Germany. Pointed arches and ribbed vaults had