Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/332

 314 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. temples. The Gothic cathedral strives for the im- mense. Its builders were too intelligent to seek this effect merely by the barbarous means of enormous dimensions. The immensity of a Gothic cathedral is in every way enhanced by the architecture. If actu- ally a Greek temple was large, there was nothing to indicate its size. It was a perfectly proportioned whole. The architectural proportionment of its mem- bers was absolute. Each feature was enlarged or les- sened with the general dimensions of the building; nothing marked the scale. Doors and steps, as well as columns, were proportioned to the size of the temple, larger and higher in a larger temple, proportionally diminished in a smaller one. A temple was not de- voted to practical purposes ; it was rather dedicated to the Greek love of proportion.^ Certain features of Gothic churches have the same dimensions whatever the size of the building. In a cathedral, as in a small church, the height of the doors and of the steps corresponds to the size of human beings. Likewise the height of the galleries and their balustrades remains nearly the same. These compara- tively unchanging dimensions at once afford a scale which renders the size of the building apparent. This is also indicated by the Gothic and Komanesque prac- tice of making the height of every architectural mem- ber, for example the capital of a pillar, a certain multiple of the courses of stones of which the pillars and the rest of the building are built. Moreover, in Gothic construction the materials are palpably sub- 1 This absolute proportionment probably did not hold in Greek civic and domestic buildings; see Choisy, op. cit., I| 400-422.