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 LOS AiNGELES 
 LIBRARY
 
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 THE GOTHIC QUEST
 
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 GOTHIC Q 
 
 UEST 
 
 BY 
 
 
 RALPH ADAMS CRAM, F.A.I.A., F.R.G.S. 
 
 2-/336 
 
 
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 NEW YORK 
 
 
 THE BAKER AND TAYLOR COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 MDCCCCVII 
 
 ^^l 3-^4,
 
 Copyriglil, 1907, by 
 The Baker & Taylor Company 
 
 Published, May, igo? 
 
 The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 
 
 >> ^-/ i..
 
 ■>VT/^ 
 
 TO MY 
 
 FATHER AND MOTHER 
 
 FROM WHOM THROUGH INHERITANCE AND 
 
 TRAINING IS DERIVED ALL THAT 
 
 WHICH IS LEAST UNWORTHY 
 
 OF THEM IN THIS 
 
 VOLUME
 
 PREFACE 
 
 ' I ^HE several chapters that make up this book 
 consist of fugitive essays and occasional 
 addresses, written during the last fifteen years, 
 but prepared for different and widely separated 
 auditors. Bearing as they do on a single question 
 — the relationship between art and civilization — 
 and owing their existence to impulses widely 
 severed by time and space, they are not free from 
 repetitions which nevertheless may not be wholly 
 vain, for if a thing is true it will bear reiteration, 
 and the excuse for this volume is the author's 
 conviction that the ideas therein expressed are 
 just and true in spite of an appearance of novelty at 
 this time, and notwithstanding the inadequacy of 
 their presentation. 
 
 Two of the essays appeared originally in maga- 
 zines which no longer exist — the Knight Errant 
 and Modern Art. For permission to reprint cer- 
 S
 
 PREFACE 
 
 tain of the other papers, acknowledgments are 
 due to the Editors of the Catholic World, the 
 Architectural Review, The Magazine of Christian 
 Art, the Inland Architect and the Brickbuilder . 
 
 Boston, Mass. 
 Feast of St. Benedict, 1907.
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 TN the old legends that tell us so far more of 
 -*■ the truths of history than do those chronicles 
 that concern themselves with the doings and death 
 of Kings, we read of the mighty quest, the Quest 
 of the Holy Grail, and how, year after year, right 
 valorous and stainless Knights out of every land 
 in Christiantie rode into the four winds of heaven 
 searching for, and never finding, the sacred Chalice 
 wherein St. Joseph of Aramathie had gathered the 
 very Blood of God that had been shed for men on 
 Calvary. 
 
 So the search became a passion, and the ardour 
 thereof a consvmiing flame, driving men from their 
 own lands, their own kin, their own loves, out 
 into the paynim wildernesses: 
 
 " Desperate and done with (so a fool finds mirth, 
 Makes a thing and then mars it, 'till his mood 
 Changes, and off he goes!) within a rood — 
 
 Bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth."
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 And always the quest failed, for the Grail had 
 been taken up into heaven, and their eyes, seared 
 with blown sand and blind with long watching, 
 were to see it never again, nor their hands unclasp 
 from bridle or sword or spear to touch in reverence 
 the Wonder of their worship. The quest failed, 
 as men count failure, but it brought to all brave, 
 knightly adventure and the doing of great deeds 
 of chivalry, while over all the world it poured a 
 radiance of poetry and devotion such as men had 
 never seen nor were to see again. 
 
 In the Quest of the Grail is the type of the 
 Gothic Quest, which followed close upon and was, 
 indeed, its lawful heir. Here, also, the achieve- 
 ment was not for them that sought, for it was 
 none other than the Beatific Vision in quest of 
 which they rode: Beauty and Truth, absolute 
 and unmingled of any imperfection, and these are 
 attributes of God, not of man, and not to be 
 perceived by eyes of flesh and blood. 
 
 Yet, as before, the hopeless quest brought mar- 
 vellous adventure, and more, for it established
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 forever a type of beauty, a method of creation 
 and the mark of possible accompHshment never 
 before achieved. The wild riders rode in vain in 
 their quest of the unattainable, but they brought 
 back a wonderful thing in its place, none other 
 indeed than the mystical knowledge of Art, what 
 it is, and what it does, and what it signifies. 
 Therefore, the quest was not in vain, for Christian 
 Art was the guerdon gained. 
 
 This was the Gothic Quest, and if we think of 
 it as an historical episode, dead long since with 
 chivalry and faith and the fear of God, we think 
 foolishly. The Quest is never at an end for the 
 world is never at pause. Paynim and infidel roll 
 up in surging ranks, break, ebb, and are sucked 
 back into their night, or, as happens now and 
 again, sweep on in victory over fields won from 
 them once by the Knights of the Gothic Quest, 
 and all is to do again. There is neither rest nor 
 pause, neither final defeat, nor definite victory: 
 
 ..." We are here as on a darkling plain 
 Swept with confused alarms of struggle and fight 
 When ignorant armies clash by night."
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Well, the fight is good and the prize ennobles 
 all, but tlie fight is never ending, for true beauty 
 is too wonderful a thing to be lightly held and 
 without challenge. The quest to-day is the Gothic 
 Quest in a varied guise, as that was the Quest of 
 the Grail under another form. Set in wide deso- 
 lation, rampired about with scarp and intrench- 
 ment, looms the Dark Tower of Childe Roland's 
 pilgrimage: 
 
 "The round, squat turret, blind as the fool's 
 heart" the citadel of ugliness, emptiness, and 
 pretence, the first barrier that balks all those that 
 course on the Gothic Quest; and yet not one 
 draws rein, nor rides aside, but with imsheathed 
 sword rises in his stirrups and takes upon his lips 
 the words of Childe Roland: 
 
 "Not hear? when noise was everywhere! it tolled 
 Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears 
 Of all the lost adventurers my peers, — 
 How such an one was strong, and such was bold, 
 And such was fortunate, yet each of old 
 Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years."
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 "There they stood, ranged along the hill-sides, met 
 To view the last of me, a living frame 
 For one more picture! in a sheet of flame 
 I saw them and I knew them all. And yet 
 Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set 
 And blew. ' Childe Roland to the Dark Tower 
 
 II
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 On the Restoration of Idealism .... 17 
 
 Concerning Architectural Style .... ^3 
 
 The Gothic Ascendency ...... 53 
 
 Meeting -Houses or Churches 79 
 
 The Development of Ecclesiastical Archi- 
 tecture IN England 117 
 
 The Development of Ecclesiastical Archi- 
 tecture IN America 139 
 
 On the Building of Churches . . 167 
 
 The Interior Decoration of Churches . 209 
 The Contemporary Architecture ov the 
 
 Roman Catholic Church 233 
 
 One of the Lost Arts 263 
 
 The Case against the Ecole des Beaux 
 
 Arts 297 
 
 Architectural Education in the United States 323 
 
 13
 
 ON THE RESTORATION OF 
 IDEALISM
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ON THE RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 \ S the tendencies established during the six- 
 ^ teenth century have prolonged themselves 
 to their logical conclusion, many and wonderful 
 things have follov^fed therefrom, and of such 
 nature that we may well believe the zealous en- 
 thusiasts of that troubled time, could they have 
 seen as in a vision the things that were to follow 
 from their labours, would have faltered in their 
 A iconoclasm, confounded by the sight of the un- 
 V grateful issues of the reforms they held so admi- 
 'rj rable. 
 
 xj It is easy to start a movement; it is hard to 
 foresee its consequences; it is impossible to control 
 its progress. 
 
 To the bold spirits of the Renaissance and 
 Reformation, the revolution wrought at their hands 
 17
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 seemed, indeed, the birth of the new life, and of 
 the occasional honesty of their motives, of the 
 needfulness of certain of their reforms, it is im- 
 possible for us to doubt. Yet we who are reaping 
 the whirlwind can only ask if the benefits we have 
 received have been commensurate with the un- 
 foreseen evils which have followed from their 
 action. Men proposed, but the disposition was 
 not in their hands, therefore the event was other 
 than they had foreseen. 
 
 The impulse of the fifteenth century was, at 
 heart, the impulse towards individualism. Whether 
 we consider the new spirit in theology, in the lib- 
 eral arts, in sociology, we find the motive the 
 same. For a time it was indeed a new life, or 
 rather the next step in a life already noble; by its 
 action that which we call Mediaevahsm took on a 
 new aspect, and one of exceeding beauty and 
 graciousness; the early Renaissance was the very 
 flowering thereof. Could the development have 
 ended then, or could it have continued under 
 stern and rigid control, it is impossible to indicate
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 the golden age which might have followed. Un- 
 happily, nothing of this kind was to be, and the 
 fifteenth century showed at one and the same time 
 the last vestiges of the splendid springtime of the 
 new life, the first signs of the untimely winter. 
 
 If we inquire curiously into the genesis of things, 
 we shall find the beginnings of those conditions 
 that now surround us far back in centuries that 
 we have forgotten. Conditions do not happen; 
 they follow inevitably one from another, and we 
 can find the qualities of the nineteenth century 
 already determined in the sixteenth century, even 
 as Alexander Hamilton foresaw the nature of our 
 present political disaster, finding it bound to follow 
 inexorably from the popular theories he so power- 
 fully opposed. Yet none listened to him, as none 
 listened to those who, in the early Renaissance, 
 foretold the lamentable results destined to follow 
 from the newly established tendencies. The good 
 that lay in the system of the new regime, the good 
 that was sure to come and that the world so much 
 needed, blinded men's eyes to the strange and com- 
 19
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 plex misfortunes certain to follow when the control 
 had fallen into new and incompetent hands. 
 
 So it befell that the change from the spirit of 
 the fourteenth century to that of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury came softly and unnoticed, and a new era 
 had dawned on the world. 
 
 From then the history of the world has been 
 largely a record of just principles driven to excess; 
 of liberty changing into license; of license changing 
 into anarchy; of revolution and counter revolution; 
 and through it all has run the slow but determined 
 success of the less worthy cause, until at last the 
 old tendencies have won their goal, and life has 
 become a riot of individualism. 
 
 In England the climax of the new system came 
 with the close of the last century. It is generally 
 admitted that at that time England had sunk to 
 quite the lowest stage of civilization that had been 
 her fortune for very many centuries. The revul- 
 sion of feeling came slowly but surely, and day 
 by day in certain directions she is regaining the 
 position that she had utterly lost. The labour 
 20
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 legislation, the Oxford Movement, Preraphaelitism 
 and the new school of idealists, the new literature, 
 the growing conservatism, are all evidences of the 
 great reaction. With us the rise of the tide of mate- 
 rialism still continues, but we are not without signs 
 that even now it is nearly at the flood, and eager 
 eyes are watching for the ebb that is almost at hand. 
 
 To the complete dominance of individualism 
 over this country is due the fact that, with us, the 
 different views of the liberal arts which have been 
 so popular during the last half of the century are 
 being forced to their final limit. Realism in the 
 art of letters, in the art of painting, in dramatic 
 art, lawless individualism in architecture, find 
 perhaps their strongest defenders in America. 
 The condition is acknowledged, but it is not due, 
 as some would say, to the fact that we are, as a 
 nation, far in advance of other peoples, but to 
 the fact that we lag behind certain of them, for 
 that as yet the revulsion of feeling against individ- 
 uaHsm has hardly begun. 
 
 We have so blind a faith in our theory of evolu- 
 
 21
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 tion, and in our own manifest destiny, that we are 
 apt carelessly to assume that our last achievement 
 comes by virtue of our inevitable progress, and 
 must mark another stage in world-development. 
 In a measure this is true, but the progress is, let 
 us hope, only the last stage of a false, or rather, 
 ill-directed tendency, marking the end of an 
 epoch that can claim little honour. 
 
 Realism, naturalism, impressionism, eclecticism, 
 are really but the results of the powerful influence 
 of the contemporary spirit on art, exactly as agnos- 
 ticism and rationalism are its consequences in 
 another direction, as democracy and the com- 
 petitive system and mammonism are its results in 
 yet other fields. The influence is dominant, and, 
 it might almost seem, invincible, were it not for 
 the quiet testimony of recent history. 
 
 It is impossible to regard existing conditions 
 frankly and firmly and hold this belief; it is im- 
 possible not to acknowledge that the result of the 
 system established during the sixteenth century 
 has been the practical destruction of idealism,
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 the bringing into discredit of the imagination, the 
 forgetting of spiritual things, the dishonouring of 
 man's noblest faculties, the exaltation of those 
 that, if not less worthy, are more limited in their 
 scope, more material in their potency. 
 
 The general tendency of society for the last two 
 centuries and more has been away from the 
 spiritual and imaginative towards the mental, the 
 intellectual, and now, at last, towards the hope- 
 lessly material. The hero worship of ancient 
 peoples as shown in their various governments, 
 with its spirit of personal devotion and allegiance, 
 has given place to defiant democracy. The social 
 system has changed from the ancient regime where 
 men were not ashamed to acknowledge the supe- 
 riority of others than themselves, where a noble and 
 honourable lineage gave right of precedence, to a 
 perilous condition of fictitious social equality, itself 
 founded on a most abstract theory, and failing of 
 its desired result through making inevitable a 
 rigid inequality, the tests of which are both 
 irrational and sordid. 
 
 23
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 The conditions of life itself which once were 
 accepted as means to a clearly visible end, beauty 
 of living and environment, have come to be only 
 such as aid in the struggle for life that has now 
 grown so fmplacable, in the acquisition of useless 
 wealth, and in the furthering of purely material 
 and enervating bodily comfort. Religion, once 
 the impulse of ideahsm, the very abiding-place of 
 abstract beauty, the unconquered, immeasurable 
 realm of the imagination, has, among many 
 nations, degenerated through Protestantism to 
 Puritanism, and thus to agnosticism and final 
 materialism, by successive stages throwing off 
 some beautiful ideal, some tradition more nearly 
 true than history, until at last, expressed in the 
 mathematical forms of a totally different mani- 
 festation of the human mind, it stands discredited 
 and condemned, a mere phantasm of its former 
 self. 
 
 That there were evils under these dead systems 
 is, of course, true, but the revolt has been not so 
 much against these abuses as mistakenly against 
 24
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 the principles themselves; and therefore, while the 
 abuses are, if anything, more gross beneath the 
 new regime, we cannot keep in sight an ideal, true 
 in itself even if misused, but only a false theory 
 of life that is fast proving its incompetency. 
 
 The lamentable results of this radical change 
 are acknowledged by a few men in every depart- 
 ment of life, — acknowledged, and therefore as- 
 sailed. As yet, however, it seems very hard for 
 anyone, no matter how clearly he may understand 
 the catastrophe that has overtaken that phase of 
 life with which he is most familiar, to realize that 
 an equal fall has occurred elsewhere; or, seeing 
 this, to understand that the radical cause is one 
 and the same, whether it manifest itself in religion, 
 in the liberal arts, in politics, or in social life. 
 Nevertheless, Dante Rossetti fought in painting 
 the same disease that Cardinal Newman fought 
 in religion, that Wagner fought in music, that 
 Henry Irving fought in dramatic art, that Cardinal 
 Manning fought in economics. There have been, 
 indeed, at least three men who have realized that 
 25
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the decadence visible in so many places is due to 
 one and the same cause, and that cause the for- 
 saking of idealism and the discrediting of the 
 imagination through the immoderate following of 
 individualism; however much we may disagree 
 with certain details of their proffered reforms, we 
 can never forget that John Ruskin, Richard 
 Wagner, and William Morris have seen beyond 
 the accidents of existing conditions; beyond the 
 manifest reasons for these conditions, even to the 
 root of the great decadence itself. 
 
 It would be impossible to consider here the 
 various manifestations of this decadence; it is 
 enough to call to mind its results on the liberal 
 arts where it is, perhaps, most clearly and popu- 
 larly visible. Certainly the spectacle can scarcely 
 be considered comely to look upon, or gracious, 
 whether we regard the curious conclusions of 
 realism in the arts of painting, the drama and 
 fiction, where there is still some pretence of jus- 
 tifiable production, or the total collapse that has 
 taken place elsewhere, as, for example, in the 
 26
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 industrial arts. Were there nothing else to see 
 but the popular productions of the present idolized 
 system, the justification of the optimist would be 
 hard to find; but already many have turned with 
 repugnance from the manifest grossness and ma- 
 terialism of current conditions, seeking diligently ■ 
 for some clearer path, for the place, as it were, 
 where the roads diverged and the false following 
 began. And these men are called reactionists. 
 Perhaps, like the word " Gothic," the name given 
 in scorn may in a little time be held in honour 
 and reverence. What is it, indeed, this "reac- 
 tionism," but the natural return of men who find 
 the current theories and principles to be in reality 
 ephemeral and superficial, the results of the vain 
 speculations of an incompetent age, to the times 
 when the respective provinces of the intellect and 
 imagination were more clearly understood. Of 
 course there is danger in such return of affectation, 
 of exoticism, on the one hand, of cold formalism 
 and archaeological exactness on the other; but these 
 evil tendencies are in themselves only the outcome 
 27
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of the influence of a false and dominant system 
 on a movement in itself just and honourable. 
 
 It is sometimes said that the present tendencies 
 are of such a nature that effort is useless until 
 they have vi^orked out their inevitable destiny, 
 and have wrought the universal ruin which has 
 always followed in the past from the dominance 
 of similar conditions. This might have been said 
 with greater show of justice half a century ago, 
 before the movement for the restoration of idealism 
 had become as powerful and united as is now the 
 case. At that time the night was hardly lifting 
 from England, but in the light of the wonderful 
 dawn that has risen over this fortunate country, 
 other less favoured nations, although they may 
 still be complaining beneath the weight of un- 
 licensed individualism, have no right to predict 
 only ultimate ruin and chaos. A century that 
 has seen in one country such a group of prophets 
 of the New Life as Cardinal Newman and Cardinal 
 Manning, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, Dante 
 Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, 
 
 28
 
 RESTORATION OF IDEALISM 
 
 George Frederic Watts, William Morris, John D. 
 Sedding, Henry Irving, Robert Browning, and 
 Walter Pater, as well as a multitude of younger 
 men as yet less famous, cannot be a century that 
 knows alone the decay which leads to inevitable 
 death. And if the revulsion of feeling has been 
 less widespread in certain other countries, the 
 cause has nowhere been without its prophets, 
 standing alone, it may be, as Richard Wagner, in 
 some sense the greatest prophet of all, stood, 
 defiant through the courage of absolute conviction. 
 There is no longer rational cause for discour- 
 agement; dismay and surrender may have seemed 
 justifiable in the eighteenth century, but they can 
 seem so no longer. The new Reformation, the 
 second Renaissance, the Restoration, it might 
 justly be called, is firmly established, and it can 
 neither retreat nor collapse. The two movements 
 will develop side by side, the old system advancing 
 steadily, step by step, and with apparent triumph, 
 confidant of ultimate dominion, to its logical cul- 
 mination; the "Restoration" moving more quietly 
 29
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 by its side, gathering strength and power, until at 
 last, when that chaos has come which is the 
 reductio ad absurdum of current individuahsm, the 
 restored system of ideaHsm shall quietly take its 
 place, to build on the wide ruins of a mistaken 
 civilization a new life more in harmony with law 
 and justice. 
 
 30
 
 CONCERNING ARCHITECTURAL 
 STYLE
 
 CONCERNING ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 A RECRUDESCENCE of religion, a re- 
 assertion of the finality of the CathoHc 
 Faith and the indestructibihty of the visible 
 Church, formed no part of the simple and logical 
 scheme of those who, wearied of the superficial and 
 chaotic vagaries of nineteenth-century architecture, 
 promulgated the new gospel according to Paris. 
 Toleration for a dying superstition and a kindly 
 humouring of its moribund whimsies were, in- 
 deed, characteristic of this new evangel in the 
 place where it was first delivered to the saints, 
 and then and now concessions were and are 
 made to that purblind conservatism that balks 
 the rotund and robustious "Renaissance," plead- 
 ing for some earlier and less classical — or shall 
 we say pagan — mode of expression. In the 
 33
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 service of this dissolving but still operative super- 
 stition, the architectural artifice that flourished 
 in Europe, full-blown and plausible, when at 
 last the principles of Christian civilization had 
 gone down in cataclysmic defeat before the bar- 
 barism of the heathen revival, was laid aside, 
 and recourse was had to a more primitive type, 
 the style developed in France in the eleventh 
 tentury by the Christian leaders of a burgeon- 
 ing civilization, before it had reached or even 
 approached its flood-tide of glory. ^With the 
 transferring to the western continent of this new 
 revelation of the sole and singular basis of civil- 
 ized art, the tolerance of its Gallic protoevan- 
 gelists is abandoned, and, more French than the 
 French themselves, our own prophets proclaim 
 the sufficiency of pagan forms for all and sun- 
 dry the fields of architectural activity. 
 
 This whole-hearted and enthusiastic devo- 
 tion is not without embarrassing concomitants. 
 Instinctively it was felt that there was some 
 curious reason that made somewhat ludicrous 
 34
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 a village church of the "Episcopal" persuasion, 
 couched in the terms employed by the house 
 of Borgia for expressing its notable and original 
 alliance between Hottentot morals, cave-dweller 
 cruelty, and the Catholic Faith. This persist- 
 ent instinct drove the advocates of architectural 
 uniformity on the lines of neo-paganism to a 
 general denial of the possible endurance in the 
 scheme of existence of any organization or im- 
 pulse that would not submit itself to such ex- 
 pression. Most unfortunately, however, this 
 organization and this impulse proceeded to in- 
 crease in strength by leaps and bounds. The 
 demand for churches became unparalleled in 
 its clamorousness, for by some whim of chance 
 the Church refused to die, or even to yield in 
 the least to "Ethical Culture" and "natural 
 religion." In England and in America ap- 
 peared a most illogical reaction from free thought 
 to "mediaeval" dogma, from a liberalizing Prot- 
 estantism to a most illiberal Catholicism. Like 
 a tidal wave came the stupendous return to the 
 35
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 liturgies and the ceremonies and ritual of the 
 "dark ages"; monasticism, that "perfect mark 
 of ignorance and superstition," was restored, 
 and instantly took on the appearance of a gen- 
 uine revolution. Into the offices of architects 
 poured demands for ecclesiastical designs; ca- 
 thedrals, churches, monasteries, convents, church 
 schools, and, most ominous of all, for secular 
 buildings the style of which was prescribed, 
 and that style was — Gothic! 
 
 It was necessary that something should be 
 done to stay this tide of reaction and to retain 
 in the hands of the "regular," that is, the Clas- 
 sical practitioners, the commissions that would 
 otherwise go to the most irregular fellows, who 
 not only lacked the hall-mark of the schools, 
 but, as well, denied the primal necessity of their 
 cachit, and defied all law and order by juggling 
 with the dead bones of a barbarous, discredited, 
 and uncivilized epoch. With the invaluable 
 and unanimous assistance of the local archi- 
 tectural schools, a renewed effort wSs made to 
 36
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 beat back the absurd revolt of the dead who 
 declined to remain so. The effort failed com- 
 pletely, and now, it seems, a new scheme is to 
 be tried, no less, indeed, than a propaganda 
 for the instillation into the public mind of the 
 doctrine that, after all, there is no reason why 
 the style of "enlightenment" should not be quite 
 as apposite for the service of God as the service 
 of Mammon, and that no form of organized 
 religion that finds itself unable to accept the 
 new mode of structural and artistic expression 
 has any reason for further existence, but is, in- 
 stead, a ghost out of the dead past, vacant of 
 any living and contemporary soul. 
 
 It would seem that there was some chance 
 of success for a propaganda such as this. On 
 the one hand is the Roman Church, which did 
 for several centuries hold by the style now fashion- 
 able once more because of the growing rapproche- 
 ment between the twentieth and the sixteenth 
 centuries; on the other is the newest of all 
 denominations, which cannot in reason express 
 37
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 itself through forms that are the emanation of 
 superstition and priest-craft, — Rome and Chris- 
 tian Science, the oldest and the most modern, 
 the two extremes. If these can be won over 
 may they not prove an upper and a nether mill- 
 stone, grinding into dust all that lies between? 
 And the latter has yielded already. Really, 
 the case is not so bad. 
 
 Now, merely as an essay in empiricism, and 
 with no possible hope of meeting successfully 
 the cultured, scholarly, and highly trained ad- 
 vocates of neo-neo-paganism, I desire to pos- 
 tulate three aphorisms. 
 
 Number one. Classical architecture need not 
 be used as the visible expression of Cliristian 
 religion or Christian civilization. 
 
 Number two. Classical architecture should not 
 be used as the visible expression of Christian 
 religion or Christian civilization. 
 
 Number three. Classical architecture must not 
 be used as the visible expression of Christian 
 rehgion or Christian civilization. 
 38
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 Number one. The assumption is made that 
 a hard line divides pagan from Christian art. 
 This is true, but the Hne of demarkation lies 
 elsewhere than is currently assumed. It Js plaus- 
 ibly alleged, and we carelessly accept the allega- 
 tion, that Classical art is civiTized,~~based on 
 sound and eternal laws, refined, scholarly, scien- 
 tific, and couched in terms of absolute beauty, 
 while mediaeval art is crude, founded on indi- 
 vidual impulse, whim and fantasy; barbaric, 
 unlearned, illogical, and unbeautiful. Now it 
 seems to me that this discrimination is inexact. 
 It is not a question between the art of barbarism 
 and the art of civilization, but between the art 
 of paganism and the art of Christianity. Were 
 the hypotheses of the Classicists true, then in- 
 deed it might be necessary that we should forsake 
 barbarism for civilization; but if the two arts 
 be analyzed, I think it will appear that every 
 sound law that underlies the art of Greece, of 
 Rome and of the Renaissance is to be found 
 in the art of the Middle Ages, while these same 
 39
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 laws have been further perfected thereunder and 
 supplemented by others of equal verity and supe- 
 rior refinement. I think it will also appear that 
 the civilization of Mediaevalism was more nearly 
 perfect than that of Athens, far nobler than that 
 of Rome, and separated by the entire diameter 
 of being from the repulsive barbarism of the 
 High, or Pagan Renaissance, and that this dififer- 
 ence is quite apparent in the art of the several 
 , periods. ) Further, I feel quite certain that the 
 ^ refinement, the scholasticism and the science 
 1 manifested in Gothic art find their rivals only 
 
 \ in the art of Greece, while they match them 
 
 there and beat them on their own ground. Fi- 
 nally, I submit that the absolute beauty of Gothic 
 line, mouldings, details, ornament, proportion, 
 mass, and composition have no parallel in any 
 form of artistic expression yet devised by man, 
 while the greatest qualities of all architecture 
 — structural organization, development, and the 
 co-ordination of parts — are found in their per- 
 fection only in the Christian art of the Middle 
 40
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 Ages. \ For these reasons I hold that Classical 
 architecture need not be used as the visible ex- 
 fjression of Christian religion and Christian 
 civilization. 
 
 Number two. Is art a language or is it a form 
 of amusement? If the former, then each epoch 
 of the world develops its own proper form of 
 expression. I assume, — though it is pure as- 
 sumption, of course, — that this is a statement 
 of the function of art. Are we a Christian or 
 a pagan nation ? I assume, — though it is pure 
 assumption, of course, and I grant the manifold 
 contemporary evidences of the exact contrary, 
 — that we may still claim to be the former. From 
 the day when St. Benedict made possible, under 
 God, a logical development of Christian society, 
 this development continued without let or hin- 
 drance) until the end of the thirteenth century, 
 at which time art had been wholly re-cast on 
 Christian lines ^ losing nothing of its eternal 
 principles in the process — and had become, 
 and continued to remain for nearly two centuries 
 41
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 thereafto", die full, perfect, and supreme exponent 
 of Christian society. The vital principle of 
 ffagaral art transmigrated into the new body 
 the Church had brought into being, and so came 
 Christian art, the same in essence, infinitely 
 diverse in outward seining. The laws held; 
 the forms only we^e new, and they were forms 
 that belonged to the new epoch of development 
 with which pagan forms had, and could have, 
 nothing whatevo- to do. 
 
 Then came the Renaissance, which, by the 
 middle of the fourteenth century in Italy, had 
 become simply a brazen affectation of all the 
 vices and evils of paganism; to express this new 
 spirit in the world recourse was had quite properly 
 to the very forms of pagan art, and in another 
 hundred years almost the last vestige of Chris- 
 tian art had disappeared, keeping pace quite 
 closdy with the vanishing of Christian civiliza- 
 tion. Xlhitside Italy, and particulariy in England, 
 which was slow to accept the Renaissance, the 
 old traditions lingered long, and there they wctc 
 42
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 not destro}-ed until the year 1540, when Henry 
 \111 finally succeeded in crushing the last op- 
 position to paganism, and prepared the way for 
 the great debacle that befell the moment he was 
 out of the way and his son assumed to reign in 
 his stead. ^ 
 
 Now the question is, are we in America the 
 spiritual successors of the Medici, the Bof^gia, 
 the sixteenth-centun- despotisms of Europe and 
 the Inquisition, together with all the oiha- mani- 
 festations of the Pagan Renai^ance, a* do we 
 hark back to the_mighty glcaies of Church and 
 State in the thirteenth century in Italy. France, 
 Germany, and England? -In a word, are we 
 pagan or Christian ? If the kner, then we should 
 found our art on the unalterable laws c^ all axt 
 and base our forms on those devek^)ed by Chris- 
 tianity to express Christianity; if the icsmsx, then 
 there is no mere to be said, except this: if aodstx 
 is pagan, the Church is not; if Prote^antism 
 is willing to confess itself the successKx- of the 
 Medici i~t ±~ 'Bttz.:.. '-. hi? z -erff:: richt
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 to adopt their form of art, but the Catholic Church, 
 Roman or AngHcan, or American, cannot do this 
 if it would; it has sloughed off the paganism 
 that scurfed its body in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries, together with the resultant Calvinism 
 of the seventeenth, and it stands now boldly 
 and explicitly Christian. It is debarred abso- 
 lutely from any further masquerading in the 
 vestments of paganism, Classical or Renaissance, 
 as the case may be. For these reasons I hold 
 that Classical architecture should not be used as 
 the visible expression of Christian religion and 
 Christian civilization. 
 
 Number three. The revolution we call the 
 Renaissance began in the thirteenth century. / 
 At first it was simply an intensifying of the spirit 
 of creative Christianity. The "Babylonian Cap- 
 tivity" of the Popes at Avignon, followed as it 
 was by the "Great Schism," struck at the heart 
 of the Church, which was Christianity organized, 
 operative, and supreme. The fall of Constanti- 
 nople, the acquisition of classical literature by 
 44
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 laymen, and the discovery of the wonders of 
 classical art-remains started a fad for paganism 
 which became singularly popular, very largely 
 by reason of the fact that pagan morals were 
 found to be somewhat more attractive than those 
 formerly inculcated by the Church. A new 
 period of dark ages began, the dark ages of morals. 
 The Church, weakened and helpless, fell into the 
 hands of the paganizers, and from that moment 
 the doom of Christian civilization was sealed. 
 The early Renaissance, which was Christian 
 in spirit and beneficent, gave place to the high 
 Renaissance which was pagan and malefic. Hell 
 burst loose over all Europe, and during its dom- 
 inance was developed, among other things, that 
 architectural style which, modified and elaborated 
 by Paris, is now offered us for universal accept- 
 ance. The years which saw it come into being 
 were precisely the most immoral, abandoned, 
 and profligate years recorded in the history of 
 Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire. 
 If art is a language and not a form of amusement, 
 45
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 then there must be some kinship between a given 
 type of art and the epoch during which it came 
 into being. This being so, Classical architecture, 
 so far as it is classical and not universal, so far 
 as it differs in its forms from "Gothic" archi- 
 tecture, is bound hand and foot to the paganism 
 either of Greece, or Rome, or of the Renaissance. 
 St. Peter's is Alexander VI and Leo X in concrete 
 form, and any building modelled thereon ex- 
 presses the debauchery, the bloodthirstiness 
 and the grinning hypocrisy of the time of which, 
 equally with its architecture, they were the in- 
 carnation. On the one hand, the Medici, the 
 Borgia, Macchiavelli, the Inquisition; on the 
 other, St. Bernard, St. Francis, Dante, Giotto, 
 St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Louis, Stephen Lang- 
 ton, St, Thomas a Becket. Paganism or Chris- 
 tianity: which shall it be? For these reasons, 
 I hold that Classical architecture must not be 
 used as the visible expression of Christian reli- 
 gion or Christian civilization. 
 Here are three theses that may be debated, 
 46
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 certainly with propriety, possibly with profit. 
 Is the Classical form of art any higher than the 
 Christian ? Is art a language or a form of amuse- 
 ment? Are we the heirs of the Pagan Renais- 
 sance, or of the Great Thousand Years of 
 Christianity? 
 
 The advocates of Classical forms deserve very 
 surely the highest praise for their consistent 
 effort to lay down a body of sound laws for the 
 development of architectural style, and they 
 are the only men who, rationally organized, are 
 trying to do this in America to-day. They have 
 behind them schools which are equally well 
 organized, and teach, clearly and successfully, 
 these very laws. They are wrong, however, 
 I feel very sure, in holding that the forms are 
 inseparable from the laws; in looking on these 
 forms as the only ones possessing pure beauty, 
 in stigmatizing the Christian style as deficient 
 in beauty and its advocates as reactionaries; 
 in failing to grasp the essential nature of the 
 epoch that brought their favourite forms into 
 47
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 being; in ignoring the inevitable connotation 
 of paganism and evil in these forms; and in 
 maintaining that organized Christianity may 
 appropriately express itself through the show 
 of organized paganism. 
 
 It is probably true that a large proportion of 
 contemporary human life, particularly in France 
 and in the United States, is more closely akin 
 to the terrible sixteenth century than to the Chris- 
 tian era that preceded it; for all these domains 
 of human energy the forms of the Renaissance 
 remain the only fit mode of expression. On the 
 other hand there is much that revolts against 
 the unexampled immorality, the savage cruelty, 
 the crushing absolutism on the one hand, and the 
 insane rebellion against all law, order, and 
 authority on the other, which are the marks 
 of the High Renaissance. Education, mercy, 
 and charity, the arts, science, and letters, a 
 large section of domestic life, all these are out 
 of touch with the era of the Medici and the Borgia, 
 and its concomitant, the epoch of Luther, Calvin,
 
 ARCHITECTURAL STYLE 
 
 Cranmer, and Knox. Above all rests the Church, 
 Catholic, apostolic, and universal, unhappily 
 divided now, but, in the Providence of God, 
 we may hope, soon to be reunited. Purged of 
 the deadly disease that once threatened its very 
 existence, the Church now stands serene, con- 
 fident, penitent, and restored to its ancient estate. 
 Were it to return to the artistic modes and forms 
 that once marked its degradation it would be guilty 
 of false pretences, unfaithful, deceitful; it would 
 brand itself a liar. ^Not in the name of art, but 
 in the Name of God, must the Church accept and 
 employ the art of Christianity, refusing all others; 
 so will she stand frankly and explicitly before the 
 world, using art as a language and as a 
 mighty missionary influence, winning back the 
 world from heathenism, eradicating slowly 
 but surely the last of the tares sown by the 
 Enemy in fields once won and forever dedicated 
 to God. 
 
 Art is a language, not a form of amusement, 
 and therefore we cannot play with its highest 
 49
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 and noblest manifestation, which is architecture, 
 but follow it with prayer and fasting, acknowl- 
 edging ourselves as artists, but more than this, 
 as guardians and builders of Christian civili- 
 zation. 
 
 SO
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 "IT THAT, in exact terms, do we mean by 
 ' this phrase, "The Gothic Ascendency?" 
 We realize, of course, that after a certain date a 
 particular form of architectural design came most 
 conspicuously into being, in a few years super- 
 seding the rough, round-arched style that had 
 halted along with rather indeterminate results 
 through several centuries. We know that this 
 new and radical mode of building became popular 
 almost instantly, quickly discredited all that had 
 gone before, was accepted by all the nations of 
 Europe, and for three centuries was the only 
 recognized mode of architectural expression, 
 changing constantly, it is true, developing always, 
 taking on varied qualities and aspects in accord- 
 ance with the ethnic traditions and racial temper 
 53
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of the several peoples that accepted it, yet re- 
 maining always a definite style in spite of its 
 mutations, an easily recognized type, whether it 
 is reflected in the green Venetian lagoons or in 
 the ripples of the English rivers; whether it domi- 
 nates the level fields of the He de France or be- 
 comes one with the crags of the Rhine. 
 
 Now what does this signify, this sudden and 
 victorious advent of a style apparently without 
 
 traceable ancestry?; for in its structrual methods, 
 
 i. _ 
 
 its schemes of composition, the development of 
 its detail, the genius of its ornamentation, it is 
 utterly unlike anything that had gone before, 
 confessing in its ancestry far less kinship with the 
 Norman, Romanesque, and Lombard it had dis- 
 comfited and destroyed, than was so easily trace- 
 able between Greek and Egyptian, Byzantine 
 and Roman, for example. 
 
 Hitherto each recognized new style had been 
 but a development, an elaboration of some im- 
 mediate prototype, tinged by new blood perhaps, 
 but essentially the same. Even the adoption of 
 54
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 the arch by the Romans could not wipe out alto- 
 gether the memory of Hellenism, nor could Orien- 
 talism in its turn wholly emancipate the builders 
 of Byzantium. 
 
 Here, however, we are confronted by a new 
 condition, a style that, when it had fully found 
 itself, was utterly without psychological or struc- 
 tural antecedents. Fifty years served to blot out 
 the last trace of Roman memories in what we 
 call Norman work, and from then onward it was 
 like the visualizing of a dream. A new dispensa- 
 tion had taken form and shape. 
 
 I repeat, what does this mean ? With what are 
 we dealing when we confront the Gothic as- 
 cendency? A dialect of an assumed architectural 
 language which is actually an entity? A local patois 
 tinged by some subtle re-disposition of blood- 
 corpuscles ? A merely inevitable development from a 
 new fad in masonry construction ? A whim, a fancy, 
 a fluctuant fashion like our own flares for Richard- 
 sonian, Queen Anne, Colonial, and the latest gospel 
 according to the ficole des Beaux Arts ? 
 55
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Not one of any of these things, I think, though 
 we have the highest scholastic authority for hold- 
 ing that the development of the ribbed and pointed 
 vault was the beginning and the ending of Gothic. 
 Under correction I must maintain that the sys- 
 tem of construction is an accessory to the style, 
 and that what we call Gothic architecture could 
 and did exist when the vault was unthought of. 
 Until more convincing arguments are offered, I 
 for one must hold that Gothic architecture, as we 
 call it, is something greater than a structural inci- 
 dent. It is the trumpet blast of an awakening 
 world, a proclamation to the four winds of heaven 
 that man has found himself, that the years of 
 probation are accomplished, the dark ages ex- 
 tinguished in the glory of self-knowledge; in a 
 word, that Christianity has triumphed over 
 paganism, the Catholic faith over heresy. Man, 
 redeemed, emancipated, assured of salvation, has 
 attained his majority. 
 
 These revelations of the supreme dignity of 
 human nature through its contact with conscious 
 56
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 divinity had occurred before,j in varying degrees, 
 for as St. Thomas Aquinas says: "God has never 
 left Himself without a v^^itness." In Egypt, as 
 one realizes at Karnak; in Hellas as the Acropolis 
 testifies; in Byzantium, as witness Sta. Sophia and 
 the Venetian San Marco and the Capella Pala- 
 tina in Palermo; in China when Buddhism came 
 to lighten the great world of the far East. To 
 me, one and all, however, they lack the splendid 
 comprehensiveness, the utter emancipation, of 
 that immutable and supremely exalted style that 
 marked the majority of Christian Europe, the 
 cathedrals, churches, and monasteries, the castles, 
 courts, colleges, and dwellings that glorify Europe 
 from Sicily to Scotland, from Finisterre to the 
 frontiers of Muscovy. 
 
 "Gothic" as we call this great manifestation, 
 for lack of a better word, is less a method of 
 construction than it is a mental attitude, the 
 visualizing of a spiritual impulse. Masonry vaults 
 explain neither the awful majesty of Chartres nor 
 the fretted towers of Rouen; concentration of 
 57
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 loads and the grounding of thrusts never brought 
 into existence the arcades of the Venetian palaces 
 or the glimmering ceilings of Oxford, Westminster, 
 Windsor, and Sherborne. Far back of structural 
 expedients lay a determining force, a driving energy, 
 and the embodiment of these, the incarnation, was 
 the so-called Gothic art, or, since for the time 
 building was the chief of the arts, the favoured 
 \ method of artistic expression, Gothic architecture. 
 In a way, we may, if we like, describe Hellenic 
 architecture as a style of building developed from 
 the principle of dead loads. It was this, of course, 
 but I think we shall agree that really it was some- 
 thing beside this. It was far more the ultimate 
 refinement of every line, every proportion, every 
 curve, than it was the apotheosis of trabeate con- 
 struction. Still more was it the embodiment of 
 supreme calm, self-restraint, and immitigable lawJ 
 Most of all, and this I conceive to be its inmost 
 essence, was it the expression through another of 
 the arts, of exactly the same spiritual quality 
 that voiced itself in the Antigone and the (Edipus 
 58
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 of Sophokles, the Victory of Samothrake and the 
 metopes of the Parthenon. 
 
 We can no more reduce Gothic architecture to 
 the terms of a structural formula than we can 
 dismiss Greek architecture with a word on tra- 
 beate construction; the stone beams and the dead 
 loads are there in the one case, and [the pointed 
 vaults with their supporting ribs and resisting 
 buttresses in the other, but these are no more the 
 essence of the two styles than the leit-motifs are 
 all of Wagner, or verbal involutions the basic 
 principles of Browning and George Meredith 
 and Gilbert Chesterton. 
 
 Perhaps after all it is the eternal imbroglio of 
 definitions. This very clear and unmistakable 
 style we are considering is misrepresented by the 
 most undescriptive and misleading epithet imagi- 
 nable. "Gothic" as a title is perfectly and ex- 
 quisitely meaningless. The last of the Goths 
 had been in his unquiet grave centuries before 
 the style that bears his name was even thought of. 
 Gothic architecture rose and was developed among 
 59
 
 / 
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 peoples dwelling hundreds of miles from the 
 habitat of the Gothic tribes, and in whose veins 
 not a drop of Goth blood ever flowed. It was a 
 style which was not racial in any respect; it had 
 its manifestations in Italy, Spain, France, Ger- 
 many, the Low Countries and England.^, It was 
 the manifestation of an epoch, not of blood, of 
 the zeii geist, not of a clan. 
 
 Pass eastward, over the Empire of Rome, the 
 marches of the barbarian Goths, the dominions 
 of Alexander, the principalities of Hindustan; 
 when you arrive at the farthest East you will find 
 on the shore of the Pacific a style that, though it 
 differs from Gothic in its visible form as the East 
 differs from the West, is yet in its essence one 
 with the so-called Gothic, the wonderful archi- 
 tectural creations of China and Korea and Japan. 
 Each expresses the same things: the triumph of a 
 great religious ideal, the manifestation of fully 
 achieved self-knowledge, the rising of a people 
 out of barbarism, the development of the splendid 
 virtues of heroism, sacrifice, chivalry, and worship. \
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 The Buddhist temples of Japan are outwardly at 
 the antipodes from Amiens and Gloucester cathe- 
 drals, yet both show one thing, perfect freedom 
 for self-expression, and this the best and the 
 highest of the self that demands utterance. 
 / Hence the misnomer " Gothic, " first given in 
 scorn by the Pharisees of the so-called Renais- 
 sance, is hardly worth fighting for, and yet, like so 
 many epithets applied first in contempt, it has 
 gradually become a synonym of honour, and/for 
 several generations it has stood for a very definite 
 thing, — the whole body of art that was the visible 
 expression of the genius of Christian civilization 
 from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries^^It 
 has stood for life palpitating with action, for 
 emotional richness and complexity, for the ideals 
 of honour, duty, courage, adventure, heroism, 
 chivalry; above all for a dominating and con- 
 trolling religious sense and for the supremacy of 
 an undivided Church and all it signified. | 
 
 Because of this it seems to me most ill-advised 
 to endeavour to restrict the title to one of the 
 6i
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 component parts of the great mediaeval product. 
 The system of construction evolved during the 
 space of a century in the He de France was un- 
 questionably, as Professor Moore has shown, the 
 greatest single achievement in architecture in the 
 history of the world. I believe it was more than 
 this; no less indeed than one of the most marvel- 
 lous products of the mind of man in all times, all 
 countries, all categories. ,' It was absolute architec- 
 ture raised to the level of eternal law. ] Egypt, 
 Greece, Rome, the Renaissance, the Ecole des 
 Beaux Arts, never developed anything which in 
 comparison was more than elementary. Byzan- 
 tium might have done so had her day lasted 
 a little longer, but the night came down, and it 
 was many centuries before the North continued 
 the work of the frontiers of the Orient. The 
 monks and masons of France simply harnessed 
 the forces of nature, bound them in subjection to 
 almost superhuman intelligence, formulated there- 
 from a scientific proposition in absolute law, and 
 then vivified the whole magical fabric with the 
 62
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENC^ 
 
 r breath of supreme beauty and the inspirai 
 Divine worship. / 
 
 j Such a triumph as this demands a distinct 
 designation, but it seems to me rather curious to 
 adopt as a title for the most dehcate, scientific, 
 beautiful, even metaphysical product of the mind 
 of man, the name of a tribe of savages, a name 
 still linked with that of the Vandals as represent- 
 ing the quintessence of raw, sodden barbarism. _7 
 1 On the other hand, we must admit that but for 
 the accident of connotation the term applies quite 
 as inelegantly to the whole world-spirit of me- 
 diaeval Christianity of which the consiunmate 
 structural product of the He de France was one 
 manifestation. For my own part, I wish the term 
 "Gothic" — i.e., savage — might be forever dis- 
 carded, or applied exclusively to the architecture 
 of the nineteenth century, where it belongs, and 
 that we could all agree to call the style we are 
 considering the Christian style, while the mode 
 of building, development, and composition per- 
 fected in France in the thirteenth century should 
 63
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 be known by some title the discovery of which 
 is beyond my powers, but which would indicate 
 at once that it was the most perfect mode of build- 
 ing ever devised by man. 
 
 I put above it, however, the style itself, the 
 Christian style, for it is greater than any of its 
 parts. Those who have studied the French mode 
 of building, the living organism that stands second 
 only to the divine creation of man, have been so 
 overwhelmed with its delicacy and its majesty 
 that they are inclined to test all things by its 
 standards, rejecting all that falls short. This is 
 hardly surprising, but the fact remains that by so 
 doing they are driven to condemn much that, 
 inadequate to this extent, is yet equally worthy 
 of honour, equally expressive of human genius 
 and aspiration, equally and sometimes more per- 
 fectly beautiful and sublime. 
 
 The French mode of construction was not at 
 first understood in England, and even at last, in 
 the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, only par- 
 tially. In Italy, Spain, and Germany it was not 
 64
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 understood at all, and yet, in spite of this fact, and 
 while we must award to France the glory of ab- 
 solute perfection, we must remember that, though 
 it seems a paradox, the passion for perfection that 
 fails is sometimes more noble than the passion for 
 perfection that achieves. 
 
 Greece falls in the latter category: she set her 
 footsteps towards a height of architectural attain- 
 ment, and arrived, but it was not upon a dizzy 
 altitude. There was perfection though on a 
 comparatively low level of achievement. France 
 raised her eyes to the highest peak visible below 
 the clouds — and stood at last on the summit of 
 possible glory. England strove to rise into the 
 very clouds themselves, to leave the earth with 
 its hindering limitations. She failed, but the 
 splendour of her ambition, the inspiration of her 
 ideal, remain vital forever, and in her failure is 
 something of wonder and glory more appealing 
 than the consummate victory of France. 
 j I call it the Christian style of architecture, then, 
 first because it is Christian in its impulse; second 
 65
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 because it was the product of Catholic civilization, 
 /"'and of that alone. It was Christian in its impulse 
 \. because it was freedom itself, liberty subject to 
 law (which is the only liberty); because it was 
 bound by no code of hindering precedents, but 
 gave the fullest scope for personal expression; 
 because it was full of the love of nature, the passion 
 for perfect beauty, and, above all, the recognition 
 of God, the consciousness of the Redemption, and 
 the overriding impulse towards Christian service 
 and divine worship^ It was the product of 
 Christianity, for the civilization that used it as a 
 /means of expression was a Christian civilization, y 
 Paganism had fallen, and civilization had been 
 involved in its ruin. For centuries Christianity 
 worked slowly, sometimes blindly, to build another 
 world on the wreck of the old. As the builders of 
 the dark ages patched together the fragments of 
 shattered temples, raising fallen columns, insert- 
 ing riven cornices and capitals in rude walls of 
 lumbering brick and stone, so did the Church 
 work for a time with the makeshift spoil of a ruined 
 66
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 era. Little by little both began to do creative 
 work, still on the lines of pagan remains, — no 
 new ideas as yet, monastic conserving of perish- 
 able treasures against the spoiling of barbarians. 
 Then, almost in a day, an awakening, a sudden 
 consciousness that the night was over, and the 
 dawn at hand. Out of its dusky cloisters, as from 
 the ark, issued that which was saved from the 
 universal destruction; man had rested and re- 
 freshed himself, and there was a new day for 
 labour. 
 
 The monasteries became active agents, no 
 longer passive conservators. There was good 
 fighting in driving back invading savages instead 
 of retreating before them, there was the service 
 of God in converting and civilizing them when 
 once they were conquered. Christ was King, and 
 His service was good, therefore came the Crusades 
 with all they meant of self-sacrifice and heroism, 
 and, later, when their first glory had waned, of 
 adventure, excitement, wealth, glory. The world 
 opened out like a transformation scene; new lands, 
 67
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 peoples, ideas were revealed. Man was like a 
 child in a garden of enchantment, and like a child 
 he frequently broke the wonderful new toys that 
 came to his hand. 
 
 Then came the age of production; everyone 
 was busy, either in doing or working. Wealth 
 increased amazingly; on the continent men drew 
 together into cities; civic and diocesan pride came 
 into existence, and Bishop and commune raised 
 the wonderful cathedrals, half to the glory of God, J 
 half to the glory of their own special dwelling- 
 places. In England the monasteries remained 
 supreme, and the cathedrals were for a time a 
 secondary consideration. When the Benedictines, 
 who had sown the land with sumptuous abbeys, 
 fell away from their best ideals, the Cistercian 
 reformation came to instil new life into the insti- 
 tution of monachism. This was followed by 
 the Augustinians, they by the friars; Bishops and 
 Princes on the continent, monks and friars in 
 England led the van of civilization. 
 
 At one time unbridled fighting and the Black 
 68
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 Death threatened to bring the epoch to an end in 
 disaster, but the close of the fourteenth century saw 
 a marvellous recovery, and the fifteenth century 
 began in splendour, with a glory that waned almost 
 instantly, for Christian civilization was disin- 
 tegrating, becoming paganized under the malig- 
 nant influence of the Renaissance, and the root of 
 faith and sincerity had withered. 
 
 But three and a half centuries had taken their 
 place in history, as marking an era of achievement 
 that had had no parallel since the days of Perikles. 
 
 This is the epoch of the so-called "Gothic" 
 architecture, sculpture, and painting, and of more 
 than this. Not alone was it the time of mag- 
 nificent activity, manly fighting, chivalrous ideals, 
 passionate faith, — it takes in and includes all 
 that almost unimaginable period called the Early 
 Renaissance. Again by our clumsy nomenclature 
 we have fallen into the habit of counting this 
 period as solely the beginning of a new era. More 
 than this was it the end of an epoch, for the vitaliz- 
 ing spirit in the Early Renaissance was the spirit 
 69
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of Mediaevalism. All the art of this time was 
 the final and supreme flowering of Mediaevalism 
 itself. '■ In the art of the Early Renaissance, Chris- 
 tian civilization came full tide, but the poison of 
 neo- paganism was working; men and manners 
 were degenerating, had degenerated indeed, so 
 that we are confronted by the phenomenon of 
 supreme art in a period of utter moral obliquity. 
 The new power was stronger than the old; the 
 crested wave of perfect achievement broke, re- 
 treated, was sucked back into the abysses of the 
 sea, and the waves that followed were foul with the 
 mud and slime of the tide of the High or Classical 
 Renaissance.^' 
 
 From this moment architecture began to de- 
 cline, foreshowing so the imminent collapse of all 
 true art of every kind. It was not so much that 
 pagan details became the vogue, utterly super- 
 seding the exquisite products of Mediaevalism; it 
 was not even that this "classical" detail was used 
 uninteUigently, barbarously, without any regard 
 to its original function, and was, at the same time, 
 70
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 coarsened, vulgarized, degraded, step by step 
 until it became the unspeakable "rococo" and 
 "baroque"; but it was that the whole idea of 
 structural logic was submerged, and the architects 
 of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became 
 mere children, building up their invertebrate 
 block-houses for their own amazement and our — 
 wondering imitation. Not one new thought in 
 logical construction was evolved, while those 
 inherited from the past were discarded as bar- 
 barous and " Gothic." 
 In the light of this extraordinary degeneration, 
 
 r 
 
 I the achievement of the French masons of the 
 thirteenth century stands forward forever as one 
 of the crowning glories of man. j In its beginnings 
 it was pure logic; almost Greek in its consistency, 
 its superb self-restraint, its dependence on proved 
 and authoritative precedent. Later the self- 
 restraint began to disappear, though the splendid 
 logic still remained, until at the end this also 
 vanished, and the passion for pure decoration took 
 its place, artistic ingenuity confined to the develop- 
 71
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ment of exquisite, lace-like detail, until, law and 
 logic forgotten, nothing remained but a phantasma- 
 goria of dream-like decoration. ,- 
 
 In England, on the other hand, Gothic was 
 always a means of personal expression, a vehicle 
 for the manifestation of human imagination. No 
 British monk or mason would for a moment con- 
 sent to be bound by any system or precedent he 
 found hampering. The work done yesterday was 
 only a point of departure for the work of to-day, 
 which in its turn was but a stepping-stone towards 
 that of to-morrow. Almost every man who built, 
 invented some new scheme, but neither he himself, 
 nor any of his followers or successors, had the 
 patience — or was it the lack of genius ? — to 
 work any one of them out even to partial per- 
 fection. English Gothic is simply a collection 
 of dissociated themes, if we regard it narrowly 
 as a style, but in the larger view it is the splendid 
 record of the hopes and visions and wholesome 
 humours of a race of active, enthusiastic, healthy 
 Christian men. 
 
 72
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 And it is to these two great, national manifesta- 
 tions of lofty civilization that we who prefer Chris- 
 tian things to pagan and look on art as a language i 
 and not as a pastime, — it is to these that we return 
 for our inspiration and in order that we may learn 
 anew the basic laws of our art, forgotten now 
 these many centuries. Not because we believe 
 that through faithful copying and slavish mimicry 
 we may rebuild a fictitious but plausible simula- 
 crum of sound architecture, but for two very clear 
 and definite reasons that seem to us good. 
 
 The first reason is this: because we find the eter- 
 nal laws, first given in Greece, continued and 
 further elaborated and developed under Mediseval- 
 ism until they achieved perfect clarity and finality, 
 while as we look at the matter, these same Grgeco- 
 mediaeval laws were negatived and destroyed by 
 the architects of the pagan Renaissance. In the 
 second place, we are convinced after considerable 
 study that the pure beauty which was the object 
 of all Hellenic art was restored by the Christian 
 civilization of the Middle Ages and raised to a yet 
 73
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 loftier plane of perfection, while during the Renais- 
 sance beauty ceased to be operative and gradually 
 crumbled away until, with the final triumph of 
 this same Renaissance, it vanished utterly from 
 architecture, as later it was to vanish from the 
 other arts as well. 
 
 Now these two things must be restored, struc- 
 tural logic and absolute beauty, or rather the 
 sense of these things must be acquired again. If 
 oiu- contention is justified, viz., that in Hellenism 
 and in Mediaevalism these things come full tide, 
 the ebb following instantly after the fall of the 
 mediaeval system, then to these two periods must 
 we go for the knowledge and the inspiration we 
 so grievously need. 
 
 And then? Why then we can really begin, for 
 erudition and archaeology are useless save as 
 means to an end, and that end is creative expres- 
 sion. If we can steep ourselves in all the mar- 
 vellous logic and reason and law of Greece and 
 Mediaevalism; if by faithful and even passionate 
 study of absolute beauty as it is revealed to us 
 74
 
 THE GOTHIC ASCENDENCY 
 
 by them we can acquire again that instinct for 
 beauty that should be the heritage of man, — if 
 we can accomphsh this, then we shall be able, 
 perhaps, to use the mystical language of art to 
 some effect. And when this happens, if ever it 
 does, the result will be very different in its out- 
 ward seeming to the Greek or the Gothic of the 
 past. There is no exclusive sanctity to either, 
 and neither is the last and final word. The best 
 thus far beyond a doubt, but ages lie before us 
 and each must develop its own perfect tongue. 
 
 We return then to Gothic art, since it was Jhe 
 last word in point of time in the development of 
 sound_and honourable and significant and beau- 
 tiful architecture; but we return only for the 
 moment, and for the sake of getting a fresh start: 
 the road that opened invitingly so long ago has 
 led only into the wilderness; we will try again, 
 and whether or no we choose from the ramifying 
 roads the one that leadeth to salvation is a matter 
 altogether veiled in impenetrable cloud. 
 
 7S
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR 
 CHURCHES
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 ' I ^HE title I have chosen for the paper which 
 -*- I am to read before you this evening may 
 possibly seem a curious one for what is, avow- 
 edly, nothing more than a plea for beauty in our 
 churches, or at the most an argument for the vital 
 union of beauty and worship; but I think it is 
 justifiable, and," in a measure, accurate, for I 
 firmly believe that in the attempt to substitute 
 meeting-houses for churches, which was such a 
 pious enterprise in the earnest but oblique minds 
 of our Puritan ancestors, lay the cause, not only 
 of the very doleful structures reared by these 
 same worthy Puritans under the mistaken idea 
 that so they were doing God service, but as well, 
 of the very reprehensible religious edifices that we 
 are now building, and of the peculiar mental 
 79
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 condition which prevents us from realizing, as we 
 should, their unfortunate nature. 
 
 In other words, the temporarily successful at- 
 tempt to supersede churches by meeting-houses 
 resulted in utterly banishing beauty from our 
 houses of worship, while this lamentable condition 
 of things was, in its turn, one of the most potent 
 factors in creating the existing state of artistic 
 impotence and blindness. 
 
 Of course the dominant mental temper of the 
 seventeenth century, with its terrible earnestness, 
 its bitter bigotry, its lack of "sweetness and light," 
 taking its tone, as it did, from the new dominion 
 of the less favoured classes, with all their mistaken 
 views of the Holy Scriptures, their literalness, 
 their materialism, was at the root of it all, and 
 the fault must be charged to this rather than to 
 the unbeautiful structures which were the result 
 of an unbeautiful theory of religion; but the in- 
 fluence of art, whether good or bad, is enormous, 
 and not to be disregarded, and, therefore, as the 
 spread and glory and dominion of Catholic Chris- 
 80
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 tianity may be traced in a secondary measure to 
 its sublime artistic manifestations, so may we be 
 justified in attributing something of the artistic 
 dark ages of the eighteenth century, and of the 
 first half of the nineteenth, to the ugly and barren 
 work which expressed in material form the religion 
 for a time called "reformed." 
 
 A great many other causes are assigned for the 
 humiliating fact that the churches we now build 
 are unworthy, the most magnificent of them, to 
 stand for a moment with the humblest mediaeval 
 parish church, for the fact is humiliating, and 
 when it is not bravely and blindly denied point- 
 blank by those worthy men for whom there can 
 be neither retrogression nor immobility in life, it 
 must at least be explained. Yet no such expla- 
 nation is satisfactory; it is doubtful, even, if the 
 apologists themselves believe their excuses. It is 
 no explanation of the hideousness of life and the 
 puerile mimicry of art which exist to-day, to say 
 that we, in this country, have no time for art and 
 for the other amenities of life. On the contrary.
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 we all know that art is not a scientific or economic 
 product. We know that it is a mental temper, a 
 spiritual condition, and we know that it is just as 
 much an adjunct of wholesome life as is bodily 
 health. We have time enough for art, much more 
 than many peoples have possessed in the past. 
 Beauty takes no time. A good church can be 
 built as quickly as a bad church. It takes no 
 longer to paint a good than a poor picture — 
 much less in fact. We spend in a year more 
 money on what we are pleased to call art educa- 
 tion, more labour in our art schools and ateliers 
 and oflSces, than was spent in Italy during the 
 whole fourteenth century, — and yet, when the 
 result is nil — at the best — we cry pitifully, 
 "What would you have, we are so young yet?" 
 That is the excuse of a coward. When the Greeks 
 set fopt on the shores of the land they called 
 Magna Graecia, were they compelled to wait a 
 century or two before they could build temples as 
 beautiful as those they had left? By no means; 
 the lines of the temple of Poseidon at Paestum are 
 
 82
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 as subtle and as sensitive as those of the Parthenon. 
 When Roger the Norman conquered Sicily and 
 founded a new civilization, did a period of artistic 
 depravity ensue? On the contrary, the art of the 
 new Norman kingdom became in a short time 
 infinitely more beautiful than any then existing in 
 the land from which the conquerors had come. 
 When the Spaniards won Mexico and, Mr. Pres- 
 cott to the contrary notwithstanding, established 
 there a civilization in many ways more gentle, 
 more admirable, than that of the Aztecs, did 
 they build hideous boxes for churches? The 
 superb cathedrals, the finest architectural mon- 
 uments in the New World, the rough missions 
 of California, beautiful even in their rudeness 
 with a beauty we can no longer achieve, 
 give the answer. Finally, when our own Pu- 
 ritan ancestors came here, did eyen they build 
 such very vulgar and terrible structures, as, 
 for example, certain of our Boston churches and 
 meeting-houses? I very much fear that the 
 answer to these questions will show that our art 
 83
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 is bad, not because we are so young, but 
 because we are so old. 
 
 The plea, then, of our excessive youth is neither 
 excuse nor explanation; the true cause lies deeper, 
 nearer the roots of life itself. 
 
 It is sometimes acknowledged by those who are 
 seeking for the reason why this country, so bril- 
 liant in many ways, should be so barren artisti- 
 cally, that it looks as though we had lost the 
 artistic spirit. This is simply stating the condition 
 in another way. Of course we have lost the 
 artistic spirit, but why have we lost it, what has 
 been the cause? This is a far more pertinent 
 question, and is one more worthy of consideration. 
 Were the answer to this sought seriously, one or 
 two things would, I think, become apparent. In 
 the first place, we should find that all the art that 
 exists in the world at the present day, all the art, 
 that is, down to the sixteenth century, the art of 
 Egypt, Assyria, India, Japan, the art of every 
 country in Europe, whether created under pagan 
 or Christian influence, all this treasure of wondrous 
 84 ""
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 art owes its existence to one motive, one impulse, 
 — the passion of worship, the serving of God. 
 
 In the second place, we should find that all the 
 Christian art that exists, whether it be architec- 
 ture, sculpture, painting, music, craftsmanship, 
 owes its life and its glory to one power, the Catholic 
 Church, and we should find also that, although 
 Protestantism has held dominion in Germany, 
 England, Scandinavia, and the United States for 
 several hundred years, it has produced no vital 
 art of any kind; such sporadic instances as have 
 occurred possessing no connection whatever with 
 the dominant form of theology. We should also 
 find that the decadence of art has been almost 
 unbroken since the period called the Reformation. 
 I argue nothing from these facts, I wish only to 
 call attention to them. 
 
 In speaking of art in this way, I do not mean 
 that no art whatever has existed in the Christian 
 world since the sixteenth century. That would be 
 grotesque. I only mean that instinctive art, that 
 universal impulse which glorified the humblest 
 85
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 kitchen utensil in classical or Mediaeval or Renais- 
 sance times, has disappeared; the instinctive art 
 work of the people is now bad; such art as there is, 
 is the possession of a very few divinely inspired 
 or specially trained men, and if anything good is 
 to be done, application must be made to a " pro- 
 fessional artist." Let me call your attention to 
 the fact that for the first time since history began, 
 this thing can be said, the first time in thousands 
 of years. Is not this ominous? I think so, and 
 I think also that it is significant. 
 
 Now, is it merely a coincidence that this condi- 
 tion should obtain most vigorously in the country 
 which has seen the growth of the most unreligious, 
 materialistic system of life that the century has 
 produced? Is it merely a coincidence that, in 
 the period in the past with which ours has the 
 most in common — the decadence of Rome — we 
 should find what comes nearest to being a downfall 
 of art almost equal to our own ? 
 
 For myself, I doubt if coincidences occur very 
 frequently. I am disposed to think that there is 
 86
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 a close connection between the religious troubles 
 of the sixteenth century and the artistic troubles 
 that followed. In other words, that the substitu- 
 tion of meeting-houses for churches may perhaps 
 lie somewhere near the source of our artistic 
 decadence. 
 
 But however this may be, you will not, I am 
 sure, dispute the statement that the era of ugly 
 religious architecture and barren religious art 
 began with the period of the Reformation. The 
 documents in the case prove this. The enthu- 
 siastic reformers in England showed their devotion 
 to God by first burning, plundering, and razing 
 to the ground the monasteries and many of the 
 churches, by dashing into ruin all the statues and 
 carving and the splendid painted glass, and by 
 melting down all the gold and silver vessels, and 
 appropriating all the jewels which had been con- 
 secrated to God, and then proceeded to turn the 
 pitiful ruins of once holy and glorious fabrics into 
 whitewashed shells, or to build very terrible struc- 
 tures, square, empty, and forbidding, full of the 
 87
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 blind terror of fanatical ignorance and the phari- 
 saic contentment of incorrigible bigotry. And so 
 they have remained until a few years ago, when 
 suddenly rose that most extraordinary cry, "Go 
 to, let us have some High Art." Then the bareness 
 vanished, and that very inartistic man, the archi- 
 tect, plunged in a riot of aesthetic debauchery. 
 The whole world was ransacked for motives and 
 schemes, and now in this year of grace there is not a 
 Christian style, or pagan either, that has not been 
 dragged from its grave by this curious resurrec- 
 tion, and made a by-word and a reproach in the 
 sight of men; and yet we have not a real, vital, 
 spontaneous, genuine church in the whole fan- 
 tastic pageant, not one that says, "I was built in 
 the sweat of the brows of men who loved God, and 
 who brought here of their best that they might do 
 honour to Him with all the beauty and treasure 
 that lay in their hands." 
 
 We build churches enough, too many; but how 
 often do they rise, in their outward effect, above 
 the impression of a religious club, or a monument 
 8S
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 to the wealth of a special parish. Money in 
 plenty is lavished on them, and with a dim idea 
 that by such expenditure a beautiful result will be 
 obtained. But is it? All that glitters is not art. 
 The church may be carved into rivalry with a' 
 Japanese ivory ball, it may be painted with all 
 the colours of the paint box, all the patterns in 
 Owen Jones' Grammar of Ornament. Its win- 
 dows may blaze with intolerable light, it may 
 have a spire taller than the pinnacles of Cologne, 
 and yet it may not possess one breath of art, one 
 line of beauty. 
 
 As a matter of fact it mostly does not. Take 
 the ordinary Roman Catholic, Methodist, Baptist 
 structure: can it do otherwise than make the 
 judicious grieve ? Its building committee has worn 
 itself out trying to get something that would be 
 "rich and elegant"; its architect has ransacked 
 two hemispheres for inspiration; and the result? 
 — a self-conscious, afifected, bizarre monument to 
 the impotence of the age. And here again, for 
 the mental temper, for the spiritual condition 
 89
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 which makes this tyrrany of the ignorant architect 
 complete, which makes possible a serene content- 
 ment in the minds of the public with the grotesque 
 monstrosities we all know, we are justified in look- 
 ing to the meeting-house builders. Driven by the 
 fancied teachings of a woefully misread and mis- 
 understood Bible, and by the natural reaction 
 from the dominant religious system, weakened 
 and corrupted by the recrudescence of paganism, 
 they ruthlessly stamped out of their souls every 
 vestige of the love of beauty and art, not only the 
 love of the fine arts themselves, but of all beauty 
 of thought, and feeling, and emotion; and as a 
 result they gave to their children lives to which 
 the aristic idea was utterly foreign, lives from 
 which instinctive love of beauty and appreciation 
 thereof had been banished forever. 
 
 Now, this is a very serious matter, for the ab- 
 sence of all worship of beauty, of artistic impulse 
 from a people, means far more than that these 
 people will suffer from the loss of one of the 
 ornaments of civilization: it means that their whole 
 90
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 mental temper will be changed, that the results 
 will be seen in every domain of life, that the 
 absence of a saving impulse will be felt in the 
 counting-room and stock exchange, as well as in 
 the studio and picture gallery; in the police courts 
 and the reformatory institutions as well as in the 
 churches; in the whole system of living of a nation, 
 not alone in the productions of the painter and 
 the architect. It means that our minds will be- 
 come narrow, material, unbeautiful; our religion, 
 if it continues, crude, hard, unlovely. It means 
 that we shall flaunt and worship a barren and 
 fictitious civilization from which all elements of 
 real civilization have fled. So high I put art and 
 the influence of beauty and the just love of beauty, 
 and if you want my justification for stating these 
 things in this fashion I must refer you, not to the 
 histories of the past two thousand years, for they 
 are apt not to be historical, but to the history of 
 that time. 
 
 If we can look on art and the love of beauty in 
 this light, as one of the greatest engines of true 
 91
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 civilization in the world, the fact that this age, 
 so far as the United States is concerned, is essen- 
 tially an age without art, must seem almost the 
 most shocking and ominous fact that we have to 
 confront, and it will also seem that, although the 
 revision of the tariff, and the free coinage of 
 silver, and the income tax are matters of vital 
 importance, there is another that, judged by the 
 standard of actual necessity, becomes in a way 
 the most important and imperative of all, and 
 that is this: how can we change this from an 
 art-less to an art-full age, how can we restore to 
 the people the soul that is gone out of them ? 
 
 To this question the ordinary reply would be, 
 "By increasing the number and broadening the 
 influence of our schools of art; by multiplying art 
 lectures and strengthening art museums." At the 
 risk of ridicule I am going to confess to a belief 
 that, so far as changing the temper of the time is 
 concerned, or the increasing of the love of art, 
 the worship of beauty, and the production of 
 artistic and beautiful objects, the influence of the 
 92
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 accepted agencies is either nothing or of a nature 
 to be deplored. In almost every instance the 
 essence of art and the secret of beauty are utterly 
 ignored, and therefore we confront the phenome- 
 non of the most elaborate system of art education 
 ever evolved, existing simultaneously with the 
 most crudely inartistic conditions that have ever 
 been known. If we are to possess a civilization 
 which is worth expressing itself artistically, we 
 must do something besides establish art-lecture- 
 ships, we must change the conditions of life, the 
 temper of the people; and we must begin by 
 substituting churches for meeting-houses. 
 N. For art and true religion are united by the 
 bond of absolute life. Each strives for, each 
 achieves the same end, the realization of the 
 ideal, the idealization of the real. ' Art 
 trying to express through the mystic and 
 sensuous and spiritual symbolism of colour, 
 and form, and light and shade, and musical tone, 
 emotions and impressions otherwise inexpressible; 
 religion striving to voice the same things through 
 93
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the mediumship of art, to sway men's minds and 
 exalt their spiritual consciousness by means of the 
 subtle influence of solemn architecture, splendid 
 colour, majestic and sonorous music, stately, won- 
 derful ritual, /'^nd each succeeds, or has succeeded 
 in the past, and the reason for the present lament- 
 able failure lies, very largely, I believe, in their 
 separation, in the fact that art has been banished 
 from the Church, the Church from art, until so 
 long a time has passed that each has forgotten the 
 former union. /Now our churches here in America 
 have become either bare, ugly meeting-houses, 
 destitute of symbolism either in ritual or orna- 
 mentation, or else vulgar and offensive exhibitions 
 of tawdry wealth, striving to purchase for itself 
 the covering of art wherewith to hide its naked- 
 ness, failing utterly, only attaining a measure of 
 popular astonishment and gaping admiration; un- 
 satisfactory substitutes indeed for the devotion, 
 and reverence, and awe, which once raised with 
 loving hands mighty temples acceptable to God.\ 
 Not only this has happened, the direct result of 
 94
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 the substitution of the meeting-house for the 
 house of God, but also the destruction of sienifi- 
 cant and beautiful ceremonial. >< 
 
 And this question of ritual is as much a legiti- 
 mate part of our consideration as the question of 
 church architecture, perhaps in importance it 
 should take precedence, for beauty of ceremonial can 
 glorify a box of a church, while a cold and barren 
 service can destroy in great degree the effect of 
 any church, however good it may be as an archi- 
 tectural structure. I know of a square, hopelessly 
 "gly little church in Boston, built many years ago 
 A the meeting-house style of architecture and for 
 meeting-house purposes, where the worship of 
 God is conducted with a ceremonial so beautiful 
 in every detail, so full of deep and spiritual feeling, 
 that one absolutely forgets the dingy environment; 
 the art of ritual has done its work and has wrapped 
 the worshipper from out himself. 
 
 On the other hand I know a second church, in 
 the same city, which is, within, a gorgeous mass of 
 colour and gold and carving and blazing windows, 
 95
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 yet where the bald, cheerless service, possessing 
 nothing of beauty beyond the solemn words 
 of the Prayer Book, leaves one spiritually 
 cold, undoes the work of the architectural sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 For the question of ritual is not a question of 
 fashion or custom or expediency, or even wholly 
 of dogma. It is a matter of common sense. 
 Ritual is, in one aspect, simply a manifestation 
 of art, it is the using of the arts of sound and 
 colour and form and rhythm and harmony, or- 
 ganized by order and law, to influence the souls 
 of men through their senses, by means of their 
 capacity for artistic appreciation. It is as much a 
 branch of art as is architecture, and it will be 
 recognized as such, and its wonderful powers for 
 good made use of as we are trying now to use the 
 long-neglected powers of architecture, just as soon 
 as we have succeeded in wearing out the rooted 
 prejudice which sees in every liturgical vestment the 
 cloak of the devil, in every candle and whiff of 
 incense a snare of — in the words of the " escaped 
 96
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 nuns" — "the Scarlet Woman on her Seven Hills 
 of Sin." 
 
 This is, then, I think, one of the first necessities 
 of beauty in public worship that demands consider- 
 ation, the need of beauty of ceremonial. A noble 
 and imposing service, complete in its reverent and 
 solemn ritual, will, I suspect, do more good, have 
 a deeper spiritual effect, than many a sermon; and 
 if we are to see Christianity take the leadership in 
 extricating the world from the slough in which it 
 has lost itself, it will be well for us to recognize 
 the nobility of the emotions, their close connection 
 with religious feeling, and their instant sympathy 
 with all forms of art, particularly the art of 
 ritual. 
 
 And now let us come to a possibly more legiti- 
 mate subject of inquiry — for myself: the question 
 of art in houses of public worship. Why are 
 churches so almost universally bad as they are 
 now? I think it is, first of all, because during 
 the last two hundred years we have mixed up the 
 functions of a church very seriously, and to the 
 97
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 extreme injury of our churches, and of the Church 
 as well. 
 
 For sixteen hundred years, from the day of the 
 Apostles until that of Luther, a church had three 
 aspects: first, that of a Tabernacle, an earthly 
 abode of God; second, that of a Sanctuary, a place 
 for the solemnizing of the Church's Sacraments; 
 third, that of a meeting-house. So long as this 
 threefold function was recognized, so long as a 
 church was built in worship, made glorious with 
 all the treasure that might be lavished by devoted 
 hands, so long as it was in very truth a Gate of 
 Heaven where man and the invisible saints and 
 angels met in the awful presence of God, — just 
 so long did it remain a true church, the spiritual 
 home of a community. And while this age en- 
 dured, the church took another aspect, that of a 
 great, silent, irresistible agency for the influencing 
 of the souls of men through the ministry of exalted 
 art. But the moment misguided persons forgot 
 that a church was anything but a meeting- 
 house where any one of an hundred different sets 
 98
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 of men, each supremely satisfied with its own 
 trivial version of the teachings of the Bible, might 
 gather to feed its self-satisfaction with the agreeable 
 discourses of its chosen mouthpiece, the moment 
 meeting-houses, with their bare and forbidding 
 walls and their rented pews, their glorified pulpits 
 and insignificant Communion tables, and their 
 atmosphere of a country parlour, open one day 
 in the week, locked on the others, — the moment 
 these curious structures took the place of real 
 churches, that moment the dark ages of Chris- 
 tian art began; that moment the world which 
 accepted the new religion was absolved from its 
 allegiance to Christianity, and though strenuous 
 efiforts were made to browbeat the nations into 
 terrified subservience, though a more rigid union 
 of Church and state was attempted than had ever 
 been before, the effort was in vain, the legal con- 
 nection snapped, the spiritual tie was dissolved, 
 and henceforth religion was a thing apart, and, 
 as a result, art vanished in large measure from 
 the daily life of the people. 
 99
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Now how shall we be saved from the body of 
 this death, for saved we must be if art holds any- 
 thing of the position I have claimed for it, and if 
 through noble religious architecture may lie in 
 part the way of our deliverence from materialism 
 and scepticism and the ills we are now heir to? 
 In the first place, I should say, we must begin a 
 great movement which can best be called a begin- 
 ing of the Restoration, — for that I am sure is 
 the name by which the next epoch of the world 
 will be known. ^We must return to the ancient 
 idea of the functions of a church, and the order 
 of their precedence. J^e must cease looking on 
 the house of God as a Sunday club; we must give 
 as men gave in the fourteenth century; we must 
 give with the spirit with which they gave, for if 
 we give from motives of ostentation, emulation, 
 self-glorification, our work will be as hideous as 
 it is now, and we ourselves shall be deservedly 
 damned. We must build churches which are, 
 first of all, churches, and not meeting-houses. jiVe 
 must realize that art is the servant of God, and 
 
 lOO
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 that its place is in the church rather than in our 
 art museums. / We must make our churches all 
 glorious within, with all the pomp and majesty of 
 wonderful art, and if we honestly try to do this, 
 and with an honourable motive, we shall soon have 
 enough good art to do it with. Finally, we must 
 abandon forever our modern theories of church 
 planning. We must go back to mediaeval times,^ 
 back to the day when Luther killed all art but 
 music in Germany, when Calvin killed all right- 
 eous art in France, and when Henry VHI killed 
 all art of any kind whatever in England, and 
 take up the work where then it was broken ofif. 
 V We must realize that the first desideratum of a 
 church is not that from every seat therein the 
 occupant may be able to see the pulpit without 
 turning his head, but that, so far as man is con- 
 cerned, it is that he shall be filled with the righteous 
 sense of awe and mystery and devotion. And 
 if this result may be obtained by massive 
 columns and piers, by dim light and narrow, 
 shadowy aisles, by cavernous vaults and soaring 
 
 lOI
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 arches, then these things we must have, even if 
 some people have to sit behind pillars, and even 
 if we can't see every change in facial expression 
 of the preacher. 
 
 For by this course we may be enabled at last 
 to combat the destructive influences of contem- 
 porary social and political, artistic and religious 
 conditions, to mitigate in a measure their malign 
 effects on life, and so lay the foundations for the 
 restoration of the noble things that we have re- 
 jected, win back the old lamps we have foolishly 
 sold for new.y^We may cover the land with 
 ateliers and studios, add to the intolerable din 
 the clamour of innumerable "teachers of art," 
 and our labour will be wasted. Only through a 
 new vision of the mystery of life and its duties, 
 only through a restored knowledge of the essen- 
 tials of this world, can beauty and art be brought 
 back to a people that knows them not. Their 
 return will be the evidence of the victory of the 
 Restoration, showing that the fight is won, and 
 that the reign of materialism is at an end. With 
 
 I02
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 the dawn of this new Hfe, art and rehgion will 
 stand side by side, invincible in union, the fruit 
 of victory, the guaranty of its endurance. 
 
 And now for a close I want to describe to you 
 a meeting-house and a church that I know, as 
 they appear inside. One was built in a year, the 
 other in about five centuries. One represents the 
 sort of thing we have arrived at by way of meeting- 
 house-ism: the other what we have lost by the 
 same means. Here is the interior of the meeting- 
 house: 
 
 In plan it is a Greek cross with shallow arms, 
 a slight recess at one end serving in place of a 
 chancel; the floor slopes like that of a theatre, 
 and the curving lines of theatre chairs are uphol- 
 stered with imitation red leather; the walls are 
 very low, — you could almost touch the cornice 
 with your hand, but the roof rises with a steep 
 pitch, high in the middle, supported by elaborate, 
 but flimsy and unscientific trusses, lots of them, 
 until the roof is a confusion of unnecessary and 
 trivial timbers. The wood-work is of natural oak, 
 103
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 like a railway station, very yellow and very cheap; 
 the walls are painted a terra-cotta at the base 
 and a muddy olive above, with a border of yellow 
 between, stenciled with Saracenic patterns. In 
 each arm of the cross is a window, — one round, 
 one three-fold, one round arched, one with 
 a square head, and all are filled with tawdry and 
 virulent glass in absurd designs; for example, a 
 pink angel hanging over two small children, 
 clothed one in yellow and one in peacock blue, 
 who are chasing magenta butterflies, — a memo- 
 rial to two children, I believe. The kind of fur- 
 niture one finds in Odd Fellows' lodges is on the 
 platform, and the entire floor is covered with a 
 violent carpet of red and black. Everything is 
 very light, almost dazzling, and at night electric 
 lights in brass sockets blaze everywhere. But 
 how give an idea of the architectural horror of it 
 all? Not one fine line in it, not one artistic pro- 
 portion, not a bit of shadow, not a suspicion of 
 composition. The whole thing cut up by hun- 
 dreds of little columns and arches which one 
 104
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 could almost throw down with one's hand. Every- 
 where an effect of cheap and tawdry ostenta- 
 tiousness; everywhere the complexity of inane 
 elaboration and panic-stricken incapacity. 
 
 I heard public service here once, — for which 
 act I hope to be forgiven. It consisted of several 
 extemporaneous and rather explanatory prayers, 
 an anthem by a quartet of expensive singers, the 
 reading of some psalms, a solo — quite unintel- 
 ligible — by the soprano, and an address by the 
 minister. He was in evening dress, though it was 
 at half after ten in the morning. The subject of 
 the discourse was, "The Humanitarianism of 
 Browning's Caliban upon Setebos." 
 
 Such is the goal to which meeting-house-ism 
 has led us, and it is hardly to be wondered at if 
 my mind wandered back across the sea to a 
 mouldering monument of the time when a church 
 was God's holy temple, not man's Sunday club. 
 Will you come with me while we look upon that 
 which we have lost, and which we must labour 
 for the future to regain? 
 los
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 It is May-time and the air is very still. On the 
 heights over the little town, where the crowded 
 roofs that surge like dark waves against the rugged 
 cliffs break into a foam of living verdure, rise 
 the shadowy towers and pinnacles of a church. In 
 the still air the great bells boom sonorously, while 
 from every street and lane the people are gathering 
 to join in public worship of the God Who made 
 heaven and earth. With them we climb the clififs 
 and stand at last before the rugged walls and 
 massive buttresses that rise high into the pale sky, 
 growing richer and more delicate as they ascend, 
 until far above they are fretted into marvellous 
 delicacy of pinnacles and niches and slim gables, 
 rich with a wealth of carven foliage and knotted 
 crockets, and solemn figures of sculptured saints 
 and angels. 
 
 In the midst of the shadowy west front the wall 
 opens, and a great doorway is hollowed therein, 
 like a cavern in the living rock. On either side 
 are ranged the figures of saints in marshalled lines, 
 prophets and apostles, martyrs, kings and prel- 
 io6
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 ates, a Christian history, rising, rank above rank, 
 in the midst of tangled leafage and delicate cano- 
 pies, until they bend under the lofty arch and 
 meet in the midst where the Figure of the Lord 
 is enthroned. 
 
 From the dark door where hangs a great curtain 
 of leather wrought with tarnished gold figures and 
 nail-heads of old brass comes the low sound of 
 distant music, swelling a little as the curtain is 
 drawn aside, fading as it falls again. With the 
 other worshippers we will go within. There is a 
 faint, mellow light, mysterious shadow, solemn, 
 monotonous chanting, the odour of old incense; 
 and everywhere a silence that the distant singing 
 seems only to intensify. Where we stand there is 
 a vague, palpitating light from the great Catherine 
 window far above our heads, but on either hand 
 is almost impenetrable purple shadow, where fluted 
 shafts of hoary stone rise, forever, it would almost 
 seem, until they spread into great branching 
 arches, like the vast limbs of forest trees, where a 
 faint, fluctuant light, stained with dusky hues, 
 107
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 breaks through, and so upward until they lose 
 themselves in absolute gloom far overhead. 
 
 The stony floor is worn into hollows by the 
 feet of centuries, yet here and there a great slab is 
 left where one can dimly trace the outlines of the 
 figure of a recumbent knight, armoured, with 
 hands folded in prayer; here and there a dull 
 burnished space of brass shows a similar form, 
 with Latin texts chiselled in the yellow metal, a 
 chronicle in brass and stone. 
 
 Let us pass to one of the aisles where the shadow 
 is thickest. The vaults are lower, and by the dim 
 light of great windows where crowded years have 
 blotted the blazing colours and the vivid figures 
 into a mellow mosaic of translucent jewels, we 
 see how the rigid stone has been wrought into 
 fantastical forms, and how the hollow vaults are 
 covered with great pictures where the colour has 
 faded into a strange harmony, and the gold of the 
 aureoles is dusky and dim. 
 
 Down the wall of the aisle, beneath the tall 
 windows, are crowded tombs of carven stone and 
 io8
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 precious marbles, — armdd knights and vested 
 Bishops, rigid and still under their crumbling 
 canopies. The wall opens into a golden chapel, 
 where a small altar rises behind an iron screen 
 flecked with tarnished gilding. Over it is the 
 great shadow of a dim picture in its carven frame, 
 and from the vaulted roof hang lamps of iron and 
 wrought brass, each with its palpitating flame. 
 To one side is a great tomb of ivory-coloured 
 marble, where a long-dead Cardinal sleeps, his 
 scarlet hat with its pendant tassels hanging above 
 him. 
 
 Beyond the chapel the shadow deepens, and as 
 we approach the chancel the music grows louder, 
 and we hear the words of the Mass. From a 
 chapel to the right let us look into the choir. On 
 either side rise long lines of stalls of black oak 
 inlaid with olive wood, each with its gorgeous 
 canopy of intricate carving. The floor is paved 
 with a maze of precious marbles in tangled pat- 
 terns, and in the midst rises a vast lectern of 
 carved and gilded oak, where a priest in a long 
 109
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 alb of ancient yellow lace is chanting from a 
 gigantic volume bound in ivory-coloured pig-skin, 
 with silver clasps; its vellum pages stiff with 
 precious illuminations in gold and purple and 
 Vermillion. Behind him rise many steps and at 
 the summit is the great altar, beneath which lie 
 the venerated relics of a Christian martyr. Be- 
 hind and above looms the vast reredos. A 
 marvellous fabric of carven stone, crowded with 
 figures of saints, it rises through the lower shadow 
 and the drifting incense, high under the lofty 
 vault of bending stone to where the flush of painted 
 light from storied windows burns on its fretted 
 crest, staining the delicate stone with gules and 
 azure. Tall candlesticks of wrought gold bearing 
 slender candles gleam against its ancient surface, 
 around it hang lamps of silver and bronze, and 
 in the midst is lifted the Figure of the Crucified, 
 eternal Symbol of the Catholic Faith that wrought 
 this wondrous manifestation of love and adoration. 
 The cavernous church has filled with people, 
 who, standing in every part, follow the mighty 
 no
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 Sacrifice with reverence and devotion. A chiming 
 bell gives w^arning of the Canon of the Mass, so 
 unspeakably solemn, so vastly significant, and the 
 multitude falls upon its knees. In the Sanctuary, 
 before the gleaming altar, the Bishop, surrounded 
 by priests and acolytes, offers the Oblation for 
 the v^^hole people, pleading for them the Sacrifice 
 of Calvary: the gorgeous vestments, heavy with 
 gold and jewels, gleaming through the veil of 
 incense, as the splendid and awful ceremonies 
 move solemnly onward, even as they have moved 
 for centuries upon centuries. 
 
 A bell rings in the Sanctuary; the music has 
 grown very soft and beautiul; there is no sound 
 from the crowd of worshippers kneeling with 
 bowed heads as the awful Presence of God enters 
 into His holy temple, resting in benediction on 
 all those who worship therein. 
 
 '*Simvi& tiei. qui toU(0 peccata munlii. 
 mi0ttete no!ii0/' 
 
 By and by the Mass is finished, the people have 
 departed, each with some consolation, some help 
 III
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 for his troubled life. With a very different con- 
 ception of the nature of the ancient faith we sit 
 silent, awed a little by the overwhelming signifi- 
 cance of that which we have seen. The Catholic 
 Faith has become a larger thing to us, worship a 
 very different matter to what we had known 
 before. It is cool now and very still. Lost in 
 wonder and awe we could sit so for hours, while 
 the shadows gather and sleep like smoke in the 
 silent aisles and under the heavy arches. All day 
 like a flowing river the lights and shadows sweep 
 to and fro, gathering now in transept, now in 
 aisle, now in some silent vault, changing ever, 
 moving endlessly. Moving, changing, as they 
 have moved and changed for almost a thousand 
 years, while generations have lived and passed 
 away, kingdoms have risen and fallen, nations 
 disappeared from the earth. And all the while 
 the torch of the sacred flame has been given from 
 hand to hand, all the while the holy offices have 
 been repeated daily, pleading the Sacrifice of 
 Calvary for the sake of a world weary with sorrow
 
 MEETING-HOUSES OR CHURCHES 
 
 and sin. So, day by day, something of precious 
 memory, of sacred association, has been added 
 to this church, until it stands, beautiful with the 
 beauty of the Heavenly Jerusalem, sonorous with 
 the voice of living centuries, a treasure house, an 
 universal sermon, — more: a divine revelation, a 
 foreshadowing of the unspeakable glory of the 
 Kingdom of God. 
 
 "3
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLE- 
 SIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE 
 IN ENGLAND
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLESIAS- 
 TICAL ARCHITECTURE IN 
 ENGLAND 
 
 17^ VERY day and increasingly it is being borne 
 "*-^ in upon us that we are even now in the midst 
 of a great spiritual awakening, the fruition of which 
 no man may foretell; that when the nineteenth 
 century closed something more came to an end 
 than an arbitrary epoch of time; that the new 
 century is destined to be utterly and fundamentally 
 different to the last, an era of spiritual expansion 
 as that was an era of material achievement. Even 
 the absurd and ephemeral follies of the time, the 
 wild seeking for, and acceptance of, exaggerated 
 types of personal leadership, so long as they are 
 at the same time obscure, dogmatic, and emo- 
 tional, testify to the indestructible hunger in the 
 human soul for religion. This hunger is now, 
 after several centuries of doubt, denial, and vain 
 117
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 agnosticism, bursting all bonds, and clamouring 
 for the long denied spiritual food, seizing greedily 
 upon the noxious as upon the wholesome, so only 
 that it is food, and of the kind, apparently, so long 
 discredited and refused by a world unbalanced by 
 the destruction of the sane principles of law, order, 
 and obedience. 
 
 Another evidence of this remarkable movement 
 lies in the altogether extraordinary recrudescence 
 of interest in ecclesiastical architecture. Seventy- 
 five years ago this began in England, accompanying 
 the great spiritual awakening that was signalized 
 by the Oxford Movement. For nearly half a 
 century, however, the religious revival was con- 
 fined almost wholly within the Hmits of the Estab- 
 lished Church in England, and the Episcopal 
 Church in the United States. It worked slowly 
 and quietly, never taking on the aspect of a great 
 popular movement, for it was coeval with the 
 highest popularity of the ultra-scientific-agnostic 
 phase of fashion. The earlier revival of the 
 Wesleys, which was indeed a popular movement, 
 ii8
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 had apparently reached the limit of its possibilities, 
 and for fifty years little was done beyond the slow, 
 internal reformation of the Anglican branch of 
 the Catholic Church, — the English " counter- 
 reformation" it might well be called, since it was 
 aimed so largely towards undoing the evil half of 
 the notable achievements of the "Reformation." 
 In no respect a widespread uprising of the race, 
 it was a movement the vast potency of which we 
 are beginning now to understand, as, the old 
 superstitions of the last century sloughed off, we 
 find a strengthened and revivified Church ready 
 to lead in the truly popular awakening that is now 
 in progress. 
 
 The architectural revival incited by the immortal 
 Pugin was instantly and astoundingly victorious 
 in England. Ten years sufficed to see the last 
 shards of the classical fashion relegated to the 
 dust heap, and for almost seventy-five years Eng- 
 land has been steadily at work, labouring in very 
 varied ways to make Gothic or Christian archi- 
 tecture a living thing again. At one time it 
 119
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 seemed as if America were to follow suit, but 
 though Upjohn and Renwick did their best — 
 and it was quite as good as the then contemporary 
 work of England — the products of their disciples 
 were pretty bad, the seed fell on stony ground, 
 the progress lapsed, and when Richardson in- 
 jected his new and powerful vitality into the fer- 
 ment, the cause was lost, and after his death 
 chaos, utter and complete, supervened. 
 
 So thorough had been the failure of the Church 
 to demand and to develop a consistent style, so 
 utterly had she failed to impress on the people 
 her claims to consideration and the opportunities 
 afforded by her necessities, she was practically 
 disregarded by the great schools of architecture 
 growing up all over the country; no thought was 
 given to her needs, or even to the fact that religion 
 was to be reckoned with either historically or 
 practically; the entire mediaeval period was ignored 
 as of no architectural account; the style then 
 evolved, the one and only consistent and complete 
 mode of building developed by Christianity, was 
 1 20
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 rejected as barbarous and dead, and the only 
 style held up for admiration was one which did 
 violence to every Christian principle and impulse. 
 Even now, apart from a slight historical patronage 
 and a certain whimsical playing with Gothic 
 forms in the development of empirical architec- 
 tural problems, — as one might amuse one's self 
 in the effort to recreate on paper an Egyptian, or 
 Hindoo, or Buddhist temple, — the Christian style 
 of architecture is practically ignored, and if a man 
 would learn to serve the Church in stone he must 
 learn elsewhere than in a school of architecture. 
 
 But the conditions that made this sort of thing 
 possible no longer exist; the world is getting away 
 from the schools, men have learned something of 
 the wonder and the perfection and the persistent 
 vitality of the style the Church developed, and 
 now demands again, and it is impossible for neo- 
 paganism longer to exclude good Christian archi- 
 tecture from any recognition. In spite of its 
 efforts, Gothic, — if we must call it by so mean- 
 ingless a name — has come again to the front, 
 
 121
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 and its appearance alone is enough to win the 
 victory. So long as it was laughed or scorned into 
 the dark, all was well, but publicity settles the 
 question. The first school that establishes a chair 
 of "Christian Architecture" is the one that will 
 leap to the front beyond all rivals, and will be- 
 come the great agency in developing a logical and 
 living architectural style for America. 
 
 Precisely this, though the concrete school was 
 lacking, is what happened in England, and I 
 desire to note most briefly the course of events in 
 that country which is so absolutely ours that 
 Englishmen and Americans are simply like two 
 brothers, sojourning in different lands, but tied 
 together by all the heritage of family, the inde- 
 structible chain of an infinite sequence of common 
 ancestors. We sometimes fail to realize adequately 
 that American history goes back without a break 
 through the Revolution and Plymouth Rock, to the 
 Elizabethan age, the Reign of Terror under 
 Henry VIII, the Wars of the Roses, Magna Charta, 
 the Conquest, the Heptarchy, St. Augustine and 
 
 122
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Julius Caesar. We are not the Topsy of nations, 
 but the heirs of British history. 
 
 EngHsh civilization, from the time of St. Augus- 
 tine, St. Patrick, and St. Columba, was the child 
 of the Christian Church, and in a most extraordi- 
 nary degree was it the result of the activity of the 
 monastic orders. The Benedictines of the south, 
 the monks of lona, St. Cuthbert, and later the 
 Cistercians of the north, were the chief agents in 
 civilizing the barbarous races, knitting them to- 
 gether, preparing them to support such defenders 
 of human rights and absolute justice as the great 
 prelates St. Anselm, Stephen Langton, Theobald 
 of Canterbury, and St. Thomas a Becket. There- 
 fore from the earliest times the architecture of 
 England was monastic in its inception as distin- 
 guished from the essentially episcopal architecture 
 of the Continent. Until the Black Death, and 
 after in a lesser degree, the monastic orders in 
 England were the civilizing, educating, and char- 
 itable powers in the land. There were many 
 orders, severally independent amongst themselves; 
 123
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 that is, each house was a sovereign power in itself. 
 Racially, geologically, and climatically the many 
 subdivisions of England were widely different, 
 therefore English architecture became infinitely 
 varied in its detail, and through the virtual auton- 
 omy of the hundreds of abbots, almost completely 
 personal. As the monks gradually took to them- 
 selves, per force, vast numbers of the duties we 
 now postulate of the civil state, they became re- 
 sponsible for thousands of buildings of the most 
 varied types, not abbeys, priories, and cells alone, 
 but parish churches, chapels, chantries, hospitals, 
 asylums, almshouses, schools, colleges, castles, 
 manors, farmsteads, and barns. The styles de- 
 veloped by the abbots and their subordinate 
 priors, through the great guilds of masons and 
 craftsmen, thus percolated down through every 
 class of society, and the result was perfect unity 
 of impulse expressed through infinite variety of 
 personal genius and inspiration. Life in England 
 from the Conquest to the Suppression was crescent, 
 and as well turbulent in its strenuous onrushing 
 124
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 from one vantage point to the next. From all 
 over the Continent impulses of every kind rained 
 dov^rn on the little island; now the Benedictines 
 were the leaders, now the Cistercians, now the 
 Augustinians, now the friars; again the throne was 
 supreme, then the barons, then the knighthood 
 and gentry, then the merchants. There never 
 was time to work out any style or even any new 
 motive to absolute finality; Gladstonbury gave 
 place to Rievaulx and Whitby, these to York 
 Abbey, this to Gisburgh; Gisburgh yielded to 
 William of Wykeham and his amazing new style, 
 and before this had expressed itself in any com- 
 plete and consistent abbey or cathedral, Henry, 
 the Scourge of England, hurled the whole fabric 
 of splendid civilization crashing to the ground, 
 and brought in the awful anarchy of the reigns 
 of Edward VI and Mary I. J 
 
 From this two things follow that must always 
 
 be considered in studying English Gothic: first, 
 
 the incomplete nature of each epoch of the style; 
 
 second, the lamentable fact that through the de- 
 
 125
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 struction of the monasteries by Henry's cutthroats, 
 Cromwell, Layton, London, and the rest of the 
 "visitors," and his new-made and most evil 
 "nobles," to whom the fabulous spoil was granted, 
 most of the very noblest examples of Gothic in 
 England have utterly perished from the earth. 
 
 Bearing this first fact in mind we can under- 
 stand why there never was any one final and 
 finished "Gothic style" in England, i.e., any 
 point of time at which it might be said, "this 
 marks the culmination of an epoch," but rather 
 a swift sequence of brilliant and bewildering epi- 
 sodes wherein were commingled masterpieces and 
 failures, perfect Gothic and sadly imperfect. In 
 this respect France and England stand at opposite 
 poles, and to my mind the Gothic of England was 
 greater and more Gothic, even if far less final in 
 its logical perfection. Gothic as a style main- 
 tained, or rather rediscovered, all the subtleties 
 of proportion and composition inherent in Hellenic 
 architecture.^ 'it added to these a pure logic of 
 construction and design Rome never grasped, and 
 126
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 as well the passion for beauty in an infinity of 
 varied forms hitherto undreamed of by any peoples 
 of any race or clime; finally, as the culmination 
 of all, it exalted to the summit of its wonderful 
 fabric, personality, demanding of every man 
 the supreme best he individually could give, and 
 opening to him every conceivable source of in- 
 spiration that might operate to this end. France 
 stopped short at logic of design and construction, 
 and her Gothic is a wonder of consummate con- 
 sistency; England grasped at personality as the 
 perfect ideal, and achieved it, becoming so the 
 truest exponent of the great mediaeval period in 
 building, but failing always to bring any one 
 phase of her art to finality, and so falling under 
 the ban of those the logic of whose minds runs 
 with the logic of the great builders of the He de 
 France. 
 
 Bearing the second fact in mind, we can see 
 why English architecture is at so terrible a dis- 
 advantage when it comes to the test of archaeology; 
 the most noble buildings are gone, utterly, irre- 
 127
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 mediably. ' The reign of terror under " Henry the 
 Demon" wiped out the most perfect of the Gothic 
 monuments of England, and by some strange 
 fatahty these structures, which reached the level 
 of Paris, Amiens, and Rheims, were the very ones 
 to go, while the failures like Salisbury only too 
 often remained. We know this from the frag- 
 ments of Glastonbury, Rievaulx, Whitby, York, 
 and Gisburgh still remaining. What must have 
 been in the case of Beaulieu, St. Edmundsbury, 
 Evesham, and Osney, hardly one stone of which 
 remains upon another, is only matter for sorrowful 
 speculation. 
 
 The Suppression, and the half-century of 
 anarchy coupled with the swift down-rushing 
 towards barbarism that followed, brought art to 
 an end in England. When that monumental 
 statesman, Elizabeth Boleyn, finally succeeded in 
 bringing something of order out of chaos and 
 giving civilization another chance, there was no 
 longer either a powerful Church, a popular reli- 
 gious instinct, or an actual material demand that 
 128
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 might act as an incentive toward a rebirth of 
 religious art. The great fire of London under the 
 Stuarts offered a purely fictitious impulse, and it 
 was met by a purely fictitious style, devoid of the 
 slightest Christian spirit, and, as well, profoundly 
 artificial through its absolute ignoring of the 
 essential connection between construction and de- 
 sign. It was a mode of enclosing a certain space 
 from the weather and giving the shell a specious 
 grandiosity, but it was not a legitimate architec- 
 tural style. From then on was merely a sorry 
 tale of the progressive degradation of habits in 
 themselves none too exalted, and so matters stood 
 when the elder Pugin became the discoverer of 
 the interesting fact that England had once had a 
 national Christian architecture. The news spread 
 like wildfire. It was synchronous with Sir Walter 
 Scott's revelation of the old-time glory of British 
 character and British history, and the still greater 
 revelation of Pusey, Newman, and the Tractarians 
 that England once had had a national. Catholic, 
 and virile Church, the dry bones of which still 
 129
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 remained, and might perchance be raised up into 
 a new life, a fact somewhat forgotten since the 
 murder, two centuries before, of Archbishop Laud. 
 
 Reform was in the air, memory was at work 
 again, imagination roused itself from its long 
 sleep, and art and poetry came out into a new 
 day. But architecture alone concerns us here, 
 so it is enough to note the fact that the "Gothic 
 Revival" in England was not a sport of jaded 
 fashion, but an intrinsic part of a great movement 
 that is even now working steadily towards a des- 
 tiny, the nature of which we can only conjecture. 
 
 The history of the architectural "counter-refor- 
 mation" was about what we should expect. The 
 younger Pugin, the first Gilbert Scott, Street, 
 Pearson, saw at first only archaeological possibili- 
 ties; the thirteenth century was the idol of the 
 hour, and duplication of detail, copying with 
 scrupulous exactness, the ritual of its worship. 
 From this grew up on the one hand the Markheim 
 of "Victorian Gothic," on the other the absurdities 
 of "carpenter's Gothic." Neither was really 
 130
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 Gothic at all; but while the latter was the indelible 
 mark of a social barbarism and debasement that 
 would have disgraced the Maories of New Zealand 
 and the savages of Patagonia, the former was not 
 only vastly in advance of anything that had pre- 
 ceded it for two hundred years, it was really 
 good in itself; not very good, to be sure, but 
 earnest, enthusiastic, and possessed of no small 
 degree of fine proportion and noble and original 
 composition. Of course its ornament, particu- 
 larly its carving, was quite impossible, but only 
 a social revolution that will bring back the guilds, 
 the methods, and the faith of the middle ages will 
 give us back our heritage of architectural sculp- 
 ture. Until that day it is better to deal with 
 chiselled mouldings, or even the contemporary 
 jungle of acanthus. 
 
 When Mr. Bodley entered the fight he brought 
 in a new element; not only did he seek his inspira- 
 tion largely from the fourteenth century, he as 
 well began to indicate the great, underlying laws 
 of the Christian style that run changelessly through 
 131
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 all Gothic building from the thirteenth century 
 until the end. Others had worked in the style, 
 he thought in it, and so did those that came after 
 him; as a result his work had the spirit and the 
 life as well as the mouldings and the centring of 
 arches. By this time, also, a certain section of 
 the people had begim to think Gothic; Scott and 
 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Pusey, Newman, and 
 Manning, Ruskin, Turner, and Tennyson, were 
 making themselves felt. They had brought into 
 existence, or the Zeit-geist had done it for them, 
 such absolute yet varied types of the true artistic 
 Goth as William Morris, Dante Rossetti, and 
 Henry Irving. "Strawberry Hill Gothic" would 
 no longer do, for the consciousness had grown up 
 that the new school of architecture was supremely 
 foolish if it did not express an identical impulse 
 in human life, and this impulse proved as soon 
 as it arrived that shams and lies and affectations 
 and stage scenery were the final negation of the 
 spirit of life that had made mediaeval architecture 
 possible, and that had come again into the world, 
 132
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 not as a revenant, but as the product of a resur- 
 rection. 
 
 Gradually the consciousness grew up that good 
 architecture and sound civilization did not die of 
 inanition during the reign of Henry VIII, but that 
 they were done to death in most untimely fashion 
 and in the strength of their mature manhood, and 
 so men said, "Go to, we will return to the year 
 1537, take up the story where it was then brought 
 to a violent end, and go on thence, ignoring for 
 all practical purposes the long interregnum be- 
 tween then and now." The leader in this new 
 crusade for the "redemption of the holy places" 
 of architecture was John Sedding, and short as 
 was his life, he turned the whole stream of ten- 
 dency into new channels. Perpendicular Gothic 
 became the enormous quarry from which inspira- 
 tion was to be had for the digging, and "develop- 
 ment" the slogan of the war. The results were 
 brilliant and amazing; a score of able men allied 
 themselves with the cause, and for ten years the 
 output of vital, spontaneous, exhilarating, exquisite 
 133
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 work was almost incredible. I shall not attempt 
 to give a list of the names of those associated with 
 this splendid outburst of genius, for they are legion. 
 
 "Last stage of all" came the inevitable — 
 though I believe temporary — breakdown. Sed- 
 ding died, and many of his disciples got out of 
 hand. "Development" was too fast and too 
 facile; it began to see nothing but ingenuity before 
 it; the great principles of Gothic were forgotten 
 in the rush, and there came a carnival of riotous 
 invention. Bentley, in some ways perhaps the 
 greatest of all the new Goths of England, was 
 forced into an alien style for his hugest monument, 
 and presently died, cut off like Sedding and 
 Gilbert Scott II long before his time. Had he 
 lived, he might have stemmed the tide. 
 
 What remains? Is the cause lost? Has Eng- 
 lish architecture lived through in seventy-five years 
 a life identical with that which consumed four 
 centuries in its earlier development? Has the 
 Gothic Restoration come to an end? On the 
 contrary, it has only begun. One experiment 
 134
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN ENGLAND 
 
 after another has been tried, the re-creation of 
 the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the fifteenth 
 centuries; each has been only partially successful, 
 and for two reasons: first, because in each case 
 there was too much dependence on archaeology 
 and on the minutiae of art, not enough on sound 
 and basic principles; second, because the architects 
 were far in advance of society, and even in the 
 case of the Church (though here in less measure 
 than elsewhere) were trying to drag the world up 
 to a level for which it was not prepared. The 
 result was a state of things that was bad from an 
 economic standpoint: the supply was creating the 
 demand. There are signs now, clear and unmis- 
 takable, that all is reversed; the demand exists, 
 and it must inevitably create the supply. Chris- 
 tian society, in England at least, will tolerate no 
 return to classicism, whether Italian, French, or 
 English. It is now acquiring something to express 
 which can only be accurately voiced by some new 
 mode of its old national style. To fill this demand, 
 architects will return, not to one special period, 
 135
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 but to all: from the thirteenth century they will 
 learn the laws of proportion, relation, composition, 
 and restraint; from the fourteenth, breadth, large- 
 ness, grasp of mass, grouping of light and shade; 
 from the fifteenth, freedom, fearlessness, exuber- 
 ance of imagination, adaptation to new and con- 
 stantly changing requirements; from the three 
 centuries taken together, seriousness of purpose, 
 healthy joy in creation, the passion for pure 
 beauty, and a sane, manly, religious faith, confi- 
 dent and unashamed. J 
 
 In Gilbert Scott III and his Liverpool Cathe- 
 dral is perhaps an indication of this latest and 
 most lasting phase of the new life in English 
 architecture. 
 
 136
 
 / 
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLE- 
 SIASTICAL ARCHITECTURE 
 IN AMERICA 
 
 /
 
 THE DEVELOPMENT OF ECCLESIAS- 
 TICAL ARCHITECTURE IN 
 AMERICA 
 
 T^EW of the joys of the spirit are more thor- 
 ^ oughly pleasurable than the indulgence in 
 vain imaginings as to what might have happened 
 had matters otherwise befallen: if Luther had 
 possessed a more perfect control of his temper; 
 if Henry VHI had been less expensive in his tastes 
 and less expansive in his marital impulses; if 
 Oliver Cromwell had been permitted to emigrate 
 to America when still a young man; if Blucher 
 had failed to come up in time at Waterloo; if 
 Jackson had not fallen at Chancellorsville; if the 
 "Maine" had sailed scathless from Havana Har- 
 bour; if Russia had refrained from robbing Japan 
 of Port Arthur ten years ago. 
 
 The vistas opened by each supposition are 
 illimitable, and the possible list is practically 
 139
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 without bounds. Add yet another: suppose the 
 exodus from England "for conscience' sake" had 
 been dated just a century before. Assume that 
 the revolt had been against the last Henry of the 
 house of Tudor instead of against the first James 
 of the house of Stuart. There was infinitely 
 greater cause, for in the early fifteens a war to 
 the death was going on between the true and the 
 false, the sane and the mad, exponents of the 
 Renaissance. By 1520 the cause of the sound 
 defenders of the "new learning" was already lost, 
 and it was quite evident that the victory would lie 
 with Henry, Cranmer, and Cromwell, not Avith 
 Archbishop Warham, Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas 
 More, Dean Colet and Erasmus. 
 
 Now suppose that then such pilgrims as these 
 had forsaken a crumbling civilization and come 
 out to preserve in the new world the exalted 
 traditions and principles of Mediaevalism, revivi- 
 fied by all that was good in the Renaissance. 
 Warham was dead, and Erasmus, before the great 
 debdcle, but there were many indeed who would 
 140
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 have followed More and Fisher, and what might 
 they not have accomplished? One thing very 
 surely: they would have brought to the new world 
 all the architectural force and fire that were still 
 extant when the sixteenth century began its course, 
 and we should have had here, as our dearest 
 artistic treasures, churches built in the great Chris- 
 tian style, which by then" beauty might have 
 proved a bulwark against the subsequent fashions 
 that were to arise in England when the foundations 
 of society had been overturned, and art, as an 
 instinct, had ceased to be an appanage of the 
 race. 
 
 Well, the exodus was delayed another hundred 
 years. More went to the block, the Benedictine 
 abbots to the scaffold, and their principles with 
 them. When at last the transfer from East to 
 West was made, there was nothing left of the 
 architectural tradition, and the fashion of building 
 that was transplanted to America was that which 
 had been devised by ingenious men as a plausible 
 exponent of the new reign of classical "culture." 
 141
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 In the recrudescence, some years ago, of loud 
 admiration for "Colonial," or, as it should be 
 called, "Georgian" architecture, there was, I 
 think, a failure sufficiently to analyze emotions. 
 The building fashion of the seventies and early 
 eighties was of course unendurable, and the frank 
 simplicity and unquestioned good taste in detail 
 of the early eighteenth-century work was a wel- 
 come relief from the riotous reign of the jig saw. 
 A fine pride in history was coming into being, and 
 we confused archseology and the historic sentiment 
 with artistic assent. The building that had taken 
 place in what are now the United States up to 
 the Revolution was worthy of all respect. It 
 possessed certain elements in its domestic and 
 civil aspects that were sound and true; it was quite 
 as good as, if not better than, what was being 
 done at the time in England, for it was frank and 
 simple and restrained; but this fact should not 
 blind us to that other of equal importance, viz., 
 that the good was due to a dying instinct for 
 good taste, not to the style itself, which really 
 142
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 possessed no qualities of sound principle or abso- 
 lute beauty. It was all artifice and imitation; 
 many of its best qualities were the result of tricks 
 of memory; sense of scale was curiously persistent, 
 but of feeling for proportion and composition there 
 was little, while the sense of organic relationship 
 had utterly disappeared. 
 
 We feel this particularly in the church work of 
 the Colonial period. Little from the seventeenth 
 century remains, — a crag at Jamestown, one or 
 two "Swedish" churches in Delaware, St. Luke's, 
 Smithfield, Va., this last dating from 1632, and 
 retaining a pathetic reminiscence of Gothic in its 
 square tower, stepped buttresses, and pointed 
 windows. The churches and meeting-houses of 
 the eighteenth century are legion, but whether 
 they are of the rough, country type so familiar to 
 us in the villages of the East and South, of the 
 cautious and thrifty fashion shown in Christ 
 Church, Boston, or whether they approach the 
 elaborate and magnificent, as in Christ Church, 
 Philadelphia, they are all singularly artificial and 
 143
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 unimaginative: a square room with galleries on 
 three sides, with or without Corinthian columns 
 of wood, silly entablatures, and groined vaults of 
 lath and plaster. Sometimes a massive classical 
 portico of flimsy construction is backed up against 
 one end of the primal cube, and almost invariably 
 an imposing tower, of foolishly diminishing stages, 
 telescopes itself into the upper air. It is the 
 "volapuk" of Wren and Inigo Jones and their 
 school retranslated into the vernacular-, nothing 
 much remaining but a very pretty taste in delicate 
 detail and the profound and underlying devotion 
 to economical makeshifts. 
 
 With the early nineteenth century came several 
 more educated builders, and an influx of spirit 
 from France and England. Latrobe, Thornton, 
 Bulfinch, McComb, Peter Harrison, and scores of 
 others did their best to improve proportions and 
 develop design, though always on the established 
 lines. Jefferson, hot with the new French passion 
 for "pure classic," brought in the most absurd 
 fashion of all, that of copying Greek and Roman 
 144
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 temples in economical materials, and making them 
 do service as Christian churches. It would seem 
 that the reign of pure pretence could go no further, 
 but there was one step, the evidences of which 
 still remain, viz., the building of a clapboard 
 shanty and the applying to the front of a ponderous 
 "Doric" portico with pillars four feet in diameter 
 and built up of seven-eighths inch boards nailed 
 together, the whole being painted white, green 
 blinds shading the lofty windows in the slab 
 sides. 
 
 Here we stood about 1835, or lay, rather, pros- 
 trate in our total collapse from the days of Ralph 
 of Glastonbury, William of Canterbury, and Wil- 
 liam of Wykeham. Thus far had we fallen from 
 the fifteenth to the nineteenth century; from 
 Gloucester cathedral to St. Paul's, Boston. 
 
 There was no pit of fm"ther fall, and radical 
 change was inevitable. The Gothic revival had 
 begun in England under the Pugins, and it 
 promptly found its echo here. I should like to 
 know which was the first church that showed a 
 145
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 dawning consciousness of Gothic as the Christian 
 style. St. Stephen's, Philadelphia (1822), Christ 
 Church, Louisville, Ky. (1823), and St. Luke's 
 Rochester (1824), were certainly amongst the 
 pioneers. So ingrained had become the spirit of 
 architectural deceit and artistic substitution, the 
 first "Gothic" work was just as specious and 
 silly as that which it had come to destroy. The 
 general forms and the materials remained the 
 same, the windows became pointed and took to 
 themselves ridiculous muUions and grotesque tra- 
 cery of patched-up wood; sharp spikes took the 
 place of balls and urns; shapeless chunks of pine 
 were split out and nailed on all available angles 
 in simulation of crocketing; angled spires took 
 the place of the honoured telescope effects. Other- 
 wise there was no change. Honestly, I suppose 
 there is no more awful evidence of rampant bar- 
 barism than that which exists in the architecture 
 of the United States between the years 1820 and 
 1840. 
 Then came Upjohn, a great man, a sound 
 146
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 architect, a leader when the time was clamorous 
 for such an one. Trinity Church, New York, 
 marks the end of an era, the birth of an epoch. 
 Upjohn knew what Gothic meant, he felt it as an 
 inspiration, he began at the right end and he fixed 
 a style for three generations. Of course nothing 
 he did can be compared in any way with the 
 product of "the great thousand years," but the 
 fault was not his. By some miracle he got Gothic 
 feeling into his work, and induced the backward 
 public to accept it. From the moment Trinity 
 was built, the reign of paganism was at an end. 
 
 Also he raised up a line of able disciples that 
 carried on his work year after year: Renwick, who 
 loved French Gothic as Upjohn loved English; 
 Upjohn the younger. Withers, Congdon, and many 
 others of the same enthusiasm, though possibly 
 less well known. The greater work of these men 
 fails at many points, for it is too studiously imita- 
 tive, but in their smaller churches there is frank 
 simplicity, grave directness, and, above all, sin- 
 cerity. 
 
 147
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 So complete had been the downfall of so-called 
 classical methods in church design, so strong and 
 permanently good had been the style developed in 
 its place, it really might have seemed that the day 
 of good building had begun. There was one fact, 
 however, that showed how unstable was the basis 
 on which architecture was building, — the life did 
 not extend beyond the ecclesiastical province. 
 From 1830 to 1880 domestic architecture in the 
 United States became, and continued to be, worse 
 than at any time or in any place recorded in history, 
 while the public architecture of the time is well 
 represented by the awful output of the govern- 
 ment's pet, the late Mr. Mullet. There was no 
 general recognition of the depravity of the situa- 
 tion; here, as in England, a few strong men, with 
 Upjohn as leader, had furnished a supply, and so 
 brought into existence a fictitious demand. I say 
 "fictitious," for the Church was quite as likely to 
 accept a perfectly awful piece of work, so long as 
 it called itself "Gothic," as it was to employ 
 Upjohn or Ren wick or Congdon. Now the first 
 148
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 leaders were getting old; Congdon, Haight, and 
 others were still operative, but a restlessness de- 
 veloped, a demand for something new. Just at 
 this crisis came the sudden weakening, both in 
 England and America, which may, I think, be 
 traced in a measure to the writings of John Ruskin. 
 Here was a man of stupefying ability, an ex- 
 traordinary species of artistic Calvinist; invincibly 
 dogmatic, narrow as Geneva, honest, enthusiastic, 
 inspiring, and quite the most unreliable critic and 
 exponent of architecture that ever lived, but gifted 
 with a facility in the use of perfectly convincing lan- 
 guage such as is granted to few men in any given 
 thousand years. Fired by his inflammatory rhet- 
 oric, Blomfield, Butterfield, and others in England, 
 and a particular group in America, turned to detail 
 and decoration, the use of coloured bricks and terra 
 cotta, stone inlay, naturalistic carving, metal work, 
 as the essentials in constructive art, abandoning 
 the quest for efif active composition, thoughtful 
 proportion, and established precedents that had 
 characterized the work of their immediate prede- 
 149
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 cessors. Potter, Eidlitz, Sturgis, Cummings, Fur- 
 ness, and Hunt, all began the laudable labour of 
 developing Gothic on new lines, and others fol- 
 lowed them — at a distance — as has always been 
 and always will be the case. To me it seems that 
 of this school Cummings alone succeeded to any 
 marked degree; his New Old South Church in 
 Boston, while poor in mass and proportion, being 
 a very remarkable example of the enthusiastic and 
 conscientious study of creative design, particularly 
 in detail and decoration. 
 
 The new work did not meet the demand, how- 
 ever; the movement was discredited for a while 
 both in England and America, and at the psycho- 
 logical moment Richardson burst on the land with 
 his Trinity Church in Boston. He had begun 
 his career on established Gothic lines; suddenly 
 Trinity leaped from his amazing brain, and from 
 that moment the Gothic structure, already toppling 
 dangerously, was doomed to complete destruction. 
 
 Richardson was certainly an architect to be 
 ranked with the immortals. He grasped his art 
 150
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 with both hands; he devoured and assimilated it 
 as Michael Angelo sculpture, as Leonardo paint- 
 ing, as Wagner music, as Browning poetry. He 
 forged his mighty way across his brief span of 
 years, drawing the continent after him; but when 
 he died the style he had made his own died also, 
 and in ten years it had become a byword, not 
 because the men he had influenced were weak 
 men, — they are amongst the strongest who are 
 practising to-day, — but simply because his was 
 an alien style, out of touch with our race and time, 
 intrinsically aloof from our blood and impossible 
 of ethnic adaptation. The principles he fought 
 for are established, for they are the universal laws 
 that underlie all good architecture, classic or 
 Gothic. The language in which they were clothed 
 was an accident, ephemeral and transitory. 
 
 In ten years we had turned in derision from 
 those who were making a mock of " Romanesque," 
 and the question came, what next? It was 
 promptly answered. While we had been toiling 
 over random ashlar, vast voussoirs, and cavernous 
 151
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 reveals, Bodley and Sedding had been solving the 
 final problem in England, and their revelation 
 was brought to us by several men, chief of whom 
 is Mr. Vaughan. Mr. Haight and ]Mr. Congdon 
 had held steadfastly to their ideals through the 
 Richardsonian era, as had others. Mr. Gibson 
 came forward with his scheme for Albany Cathe- 
 dral, and of a sudden sprung as it were out of the 
 ground half a dozen young firms who began to 
 work in Gothic, and think in it as well. Simul- 
 taneously another group began to come back from 
 Paris with the new gospel according to the Beaux 
 Arts, but the style they brought with them was so 
 manifestly unsuited for religious purposes that they 
 took no interest in this field of design, which so 
 was handed over in toto to the "Gothic crowd." 
 
 And so matters stand to-day, the field of archi- 
 tecture unhappily divided into two camps, secular 
 and ecclesiastical, the style of each intolerant ot 
 the other, and, it would appear, impossible of 
 compromise or amalgamation. 
 
 I do not propose to enter here into a discussion 
 152
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 of the work done by the new school of Gothicists 
 that rose into view in the last decade of the nine- 
 teenth century, nor yet to marshal their names in 
 a catalogue. It would be impossible, and besides 
 we are even now in the midst of things; the work 
 of restoring and rivivifying Gothic is proceeding 
 with leaps and bounds, and it is too soon to form 
 correct judgments or venture on forecasts. Death 
 has removed many, and the cause is weakened 
 thereby. Halsey Wood we could ill spare; he 
 thought Gothic as instinctively as the best thir- 
 teenth-century master-mason of them all. Some- 
 times his passionate enthusiasm seemed almost to 
 drive him mad, but he had it in him to a most 
 astounding degree, and when he died, religious 
 architecture staggered under the blow. And no 
 man ever loved Gothic and worked for its victory 
 more strenuously than Charles Francis Wentworth. 
 I speak here of what I know. John Stewardson 
 and Walter Cope were two men whose importance 
 in the cause of sound art cannot possibly be over- 
 estimated, and Henry Randall, word of whose 
 153
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 untimely death has only just come to us: we halt 
 blind and dumb before the mystery of death that 
 takes these when scores of others could better have 
 been spared. Love and devotion, enthusiasm and 
 faith lay behind all these men as the mainspring 
 of their activity, and without these things nothing 
 whatever can be done. 
 
 Well, we must fight on with those that are left, 
 and they are neither few in number nor inadequate 
 in power. Where they come from heaven knows. 
 Not from the schools, for the very word " Gothic " 
 is anathema there. They must have sprung up 
 out of the persistent soil of inextinguishable inher- 
 itance, and under the sun of dawning spirituality. 
 They exist, however, in spite of fate and Paris, 
 and they can't be ridiculed into desuetude, for 
 they work on principle; they can't be starved into 
 abeyance, for the Church exists, taking on a new 
 lease of life since the close of the century that 
 fondly boasted its ability to do it to death, and 
 for the Church there is one language and one only. 
 
 But this is not the justification of Gothic, the 
 154
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 mere fact that it happens to be the only adequate 
 language for organized Christianity; of course it 
 is that, and there would always have to be men 
 who could build churches, but your true Goth 
 does not look on architecture as a kind of esthetic 
 department store. " College Buildings ? You will 
 find a complete line of Greco-Georgian articles 
 down the alley to the right. Yes, madam, great 
 sale of slightly shopworn Romanesque remnants 
 now going on: down-stairs, turn to the left. Post- 
 offices? Certainly, an enormous stock with con- 
 stant accessions, all guaranteed real Renaissance: 
 Tailoring department, second floor. No, madam, 
 we do not carry any chateauesque Fifth Avenue 
 palaces now; no call for them. M. Cartouche will 
 fit you splendidly, however, if you desire quite the 
 latest thing just from Paris; up one flight, entire 
 floor. An office building? We have the finest 
 line on earth, patent, extension styles, fitted while 
 you wait; take the elevator to the thirty-second 
 floor. Churches? Yes, sir, we cater especially 
 to the Cloth, all real Gothic and twenty yards 
 155
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 high, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth century, 
 French, Spanish, EngHsh: take the subway to 
 the mediaeval annex." No, your zealous Goth 
 believes there is only one style fit for Christians, 
 and that is Gothic; but nine times out of ten, if 
 you ask him you will find that what he means by 
 Gothic is something very different to, and far less 
 archaeological than, what you had supposed. 
 
 Let me try to put into a few words the creed of 
 the Gothicist. He believes these things: First, 
 that there are certain laws impossible to put into 
 words (but as easily distinguished as a harmony 
 from a discord in music), laws of proportion, 
 composition, organic relation and development, 
 that are fundamental, and that these laws underlie 
 all good architecture and are exactly and finally 
 the same, whether the work is Greek, Roman, 
 Gothic, Japanese, or Ecoledesbeauxartesque; sec- 
 ond, that archjeology isn't architecture, imitation 
 design, or orders and mouldings, whether jclaseic \ 
 or Gothic, a result of divine revelation. / He "holds i\^ 
 that architecture is a language, not a sequence of 
 156
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 fads, and that style is nonsense unless it develops 
 from historical and racial associations, expresses 
 construction, function, and contemporary ideas, 
 uses honest materials honestly, and is intrinsically 
 beautiful, both in detail and as a whole; third, 
 that Greek and Roman and early Renaissance and 
 modern French architecture possess many elements 
 of pure beauty, but that as a matter of fact this 
 beauty is actually inferior in every particular to 
 that which was evolved during the great thousand 
 years of Christian civilization from 600 to 1600 
 A.D., Gothic, so called, not only possessing in its 
 integrity the whole body of classical tradition of 
 proportion, composition, and development, but 
 having evolved as well detail, mouldings, and 
 carved ornament immeasurably more beautiful 
 in every particular than anything ever produced in 
 earlier times; fourth, that we of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race and the twentieth century have been cut ofif 
 from the classical succession by ten centuries of 
 splendid racial development with its own supreme 
 and perfect mode of artistic expression; that the 
 157
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 sixteenth-century break was temporary only, and 
 episodal; that the style then intruded was one of 
 a kind of cheap paganism, and that now, as we 
 awake again to higher ideals, we are bound in 
 consistency to reject the affected "classic" that 
 was the work of the neo-paganism of the sixteenth 
 century, and return to our own racial style that 
 was developed while we were yet consistent Chris- 
 tians. 
 
 The modern Goth is the defender of Christian 
 civilization against paganism. He is not in the 
 least ashamed to declare himself a Christian and 
 a Catholic. The moment he began to serve the 
 Church in his profession he realized that it was 
 nonsense to think of any form of classical archi- 
 tecture as a fitting material expression thereof; 
 first, because Christianity had definitely rejected 
 it after a fair trial, and had taken a thousand years 
 to develop a substitute, had succedeed in producing 
 a style retaining every basic principle of sound 
 design, while expressing in every detail the whole 
 body of the Christian faith with an unheard of 
 158
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 degree of delicacy, and had held to this style until 
 chaos and ruin and revolution wrecked everything 
 at the time of the Reformation; second, because 
 Renaissance architecture bears the mark of the 
 Beast, being the style developed in the sixteenth 
 century to voice accurately that element in the 
 Renaissance which triumphed over all that was 
 sane, sound, and Christian in the movement, and is 
 fitting only for such organizations, if they still 
 exist, which embody all the evils of paganism 
 without its virtues, and cloak beneath a Christian 
 vesture contempt of God, denial of law, and a 
 grinning negation of any essential difference be- 
 tween right and wrong. 
 
 It all began with the question of rightly express- 
 ing the Church through architectural forms; but 
 it went further, for in the study of principles and 
 affinities it gradually dawned on the student that 
 the whole question of modern society was in- 
 volved. On the one hand was the logical outcome 
 of the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century, — 
 materialism, savage individualism, political abso- 
 159
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 lutism transferred from the tyrant to the oHgarchy 
 of partisan bosses, financial brigandage, selfish 
 and unprincipled capital in a death grapple with 
 selfish and unprincipled labour, social corruption, 
 domestic immorality, and graft; on the other, 
 religion, recrudescent, fighting steadily against 
 the powers of hell. From being merely the only 
 logical and consistent expression of an organized 
 Christianity that simply refused to be killed, but 
 impossible of employment elsewhere, Gothic sud- 
 denly became a synonym for the fight of Christian 
 civilization against the paganism in society, politics, 
 trade, industry, and finance, so exquisitely ex- 
 pressed by the Renaissance style it had developed 
 early in the game for this particular purpose. 
 The Goth believes, therefore, that he insults the 
 Church if he tries to cloak her glory in the vesture 
 of heathendom. There is one Christian style and 
 only one; it did not die in the sixteenth century, 
 it only retreated to the sanctuary of the Island of 
 Avalon with King Arthur and all the other inex- 
 tinguishable truths, to lie there in a long day- 
 i6o
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 dream until the Sun of Righteousness should rise 
 again on the world. It is not day yet, but the 
 east is silver, and Gothic has come back and is at 
 work again. In it there is neither rest nor finality; 
 it grows from day to day, and it must change 
 insensibly but steadily, accepting new conditions, 
 adopting new expedients, fitting itself delicately 
 to every changing mood and movement in the 
 world. In time it will have become as different 
 to what is now called Gothic as that of the fifteenth 
 century is to that of the thirteenth, but it must 
 begin where it left off, and it must work at first 
 from precedent. It will always remain Gothic, 
 i.e., absolute beauty, absolute logic, absolute 
 reason, expressed through perfect personal liberty 
 under the stern control of inevitable law, rejecting 
 steadily every hint of classical forms because of 
 what they connote in Greek, Roman, and Renais- 
 sance life, namely, heathenism. 
 
 Those who accept Gothic on these grounds have 
 a clear field so far as the Church is concerned, 
 for here it is simply sufficient to state the case of 
 i6i
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the revived pagan style to send it hurrying out 
 of court. They propose to accept the whole body 
 of Gothic as it stood in the year 1500, and then 
 go on to modify and develop it until it expresses 
 every changing shade of the ever-changing, funda- 
 mentally immutable Church, precisely as historic 
 Gothic voiced Christian civilization in those ten 
 greatest of all centuries. Then they will try to 
 adapt it to all secular powers and activities that 
 have not become exponents of the dominant 
 modern paganism. They believe that evil is never 
 in the saddle for much more than four centuries 
 at a time, and they think its doom is already 
 sealed; that now the tide has turned, more and 
 more of life will escape from the thraldom of the 
 devil, accepting, as the badge of redemption. 
 Christian architecture, now carelessly nominated 
 "Gothic." 
 
 Some day they hope (oh, the iridescence of 
 
 childlike faith!) to get one, just only one, of the 
 
 schools of architecture to range itself boldly on 
 
 the side of Christian art and against pagan art, 
 
 162
 
 ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA 
 
 and then they will make of it a great missionary 
 college, breeding fanatical prophets of Christian 
 civilization and Christian art. And therein they 
 will teach that beneath Greek and Roman and 
 Renaissance and Parisian architecture lies a body 
 of eternal laws that are sound and true (taught 
 better in Paris now than in any other place), that 
 exactly these same laws are the basis of Christian 
 architecture, and must be learned first of all; that 
 the forms of pagan architecture possess no exclu- 
 sive sanctity whatever, and are much less beautiful 
 and highly developed than those of the Christian 
 style, while they are no more fit for Christians to 
 use than are the ritual and paraphernalia of the 
 worship of Diana of Ephesus or Jupiter Olympus. 
 They will first of all postulate eternal laws, then 
 they will teach that architecture with all other 
 forms of art is a language, and the most perfect 
 that exists. They will assert that in spite of ap- 
 pearances this is really a Christian civilization 
 under which we live, and that therefore it must 
 voice itself through a Christian tongue; they will 
 163
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 point to Gothic art as the most perfect manifesta- 
 tion of pure beauty the world has ever known, 
 and they will say, " Learn this, all of it, steep 
 yourselves in the solution of absolute beauty, let 
 it soak in until you are full of its medicinal power, 
 and then, sloughing off the pagan hide that has 
 grown over your bodies during four centuries of 
 barbarism, come forth men and Christians, and 
 speak with the tongue that is yours by inheritance, 
 the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the 
 Truth, and so help you, God." 
 
 164
 
 ON THE BUILDING OF 
 CHURCHES
 
 ON THE BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 TT is dangerous indeed for a practising architect 
 -*■ to talk about his profession, particularly when 
 his audience is so largely made up of his brother 
 architects, for the chances are ten to one that 
 whatever he may say has already been better said, 
 and many times. If this is not the case, and a 
 man comes forward with novel and revolutionary 
 ideas, he is repaying with scant courtesy the kind- 
 ness of those to whom he owes his invitation, for 
 the odds the world gives are heavy against the 
 validity of theories and principles that come in 
 the guise of novelty. 
 
 And yet, there are whole fields of architecture 
 
 that are very lightly touched upon nowadays; 
 
 here a man is not hampered by the better teaching 
 
 that has gone before, and he can speak freely 
 
 167
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 without fear of running counter to established 
 ideas. Of one of these almost forgotten fields of 
 our profession, I ask your permission to speak 
 to-night, — church building. 
 
 That this province of art should be left free is, 
 I think, a most singular and a most ominous fact, 
 and why this, almost the oldest branch of our art, 
 the one from which we know most fully the civiliza- 
 tion of the past, the one which has comprehended 
 the greatest work of all ages, as even now it offers 
 almost the most fertile field for our labour, — why 
 this should be ignored as it is, is a question I have 
 been trying to solve for a good many years. For 
 churches are built constantly, great numbers of 
 them, and for the first ten years, at least, of a 
 young architect's professional life, they will oflter 
 the only chances that come to him whereby he 
 can do lasting and monumental work. Yet what 
 preparation has he to help him avail himself of 
 his opportunities? Practically none; neither in 
 this country nor in France. As a result we are 
 compelled to lift up our voices and wail before 
 1 68
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 the innumerable ridiculous structures that, every 
 year, rise like mushrooms out of our too fertile 
 soil: scandals on the dignity of the profession, 
 insults to the God to Whose glory they should 
 have been raised. 
 
 So far as our best public work is concerned, 
 we have little to learn from the contemporary 
 architecture of the old world. Our domestic de- 
 signing is, at its best, immeasvu-ably superior to 
 similar work on the Continent, and almost equal 
 to that of England. Our commercial architecture, 
 much of which at present is not architecture at 
 all, but veneered engineering, is of course, beyond 
 criticism in its way. Our church building is utter 
 nonsense compared with English work, more triv- 
 ial and silly than that of France, even if it lacks 
 its large and imposing stupidity, while if I say 
 that it is quite as bad as modern German work, 
 I am only stating in an exaggerated way a condition 
 which really bids fair to exist. 
 
 Now this is all wrong, how desperately wrong I 
 hardly venture to say; by failing in this we condemn 
 169
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 all we do in other fields of architecture, confessing 
 it self-conscious, occasional, insincere. It is not 
 that the Church is dead and no longer clamorous 
 for fitting habiliments and modes of expression, 
 she is quick with life and eager for the best — 
 when something inferior is not offered plausibly 
 in its stead. It is not, heaven knows, that there 
 is any lack of precedent, of the splendid monuments 
 of the golden age of church building. England is 
 one vast graveyard of perished artistic glories. 
 It is not that religious architecture has worked 
 itself out to its perfect culmination, so passing 
 away forever, leaving us hopeless and helpless, 
 and the Church shut ofif for all time from the 
 possibility of further artistic honour. England 
 has shown the falsity of this last, as of each of 
 the other assumptions. 
 
 I do not hesitate to say that I believe the names 
 of Bodley and Garner, Austin and Paley, Scott 
 and Sedding, with many others as yet little known, 
 will last in the minds of men until they range 
 themselves with those of William the Englishman, 
 170
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 Alan of Walsingham, and William of Wykeham. 
 The most encouraging thing in architecture to-day 
 is, to me, not the civic architecture of France, not 
 the municipal architecture of England, not the 
 domestic work, nor yet the architectural engi- 
 neering of America, but church building in Eng- 
 land. 
 
 For in all but the latter is something too much 
 of ingenuity, of acknowledged erudition, of theat- 
 ricality, but in this, in English church architecture, 
 is something akin to real inspiration, to that 
 vitality for which we have sought so long, and 
 sought almost in vain. 
 
 You are, of course, familiar with the rise and 
 progress of modern religious architecture in Eng- 
 land, how it began with the labour of the elder 
 Pugin, the prophet of the new life, and developed 
 through the cautious and scholastic work of such 
 men as Pugin the younger, Street, and Scott into 
 the splendid and vital art of Bodley and Sedding. 
 The early work was, as I say, cautious, initiative, 
 archaeological; but, little by little, as men began 
 171
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 to know their materials, and to become familiar 
 with conditions and requirements, greater mobil- 
 ity showed itself, greater courage, more vital feel- 
 ing, until at last John Sedding rose at a bound 
 from the old hampering traditions and precedents, 
 and struck out, in brilliant flashes, conceptions of 
 religious architecture that hitherto had been in- 
 conceivable. It was not that he cast all precedent 
 .and history to the winds, striving to create a new 
 style, but it was that he realized how the glory and 
 nobility of English mediaeval architecture lay, not 
 in the contour of mouldings and the outline of 
 tracery, but in a certain confidence in the Church 
 at whose word the work was done; in a serene faith 
 in her claims and mission, in a love for her worship 
 and ritual, in a sudden realization that she was 
 Catholic and not Protestant. 
 
 I am afraid you will think I am mixing theology 
 with architecture, but the mixing was done long 
 ago, and very thoroughly. Until the time of the 
 movement known as the Reformation, art and 
 religion were inseparable; after that date there 
 172
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 was not much art, or religion either, for that 
 matter, although a good many people seemed to 
 think so, and were willing to fight for their theory. 
 However, all I mean to call your attention 
 to is the instructive fact that there was no 
 real church architecture in England after the 
 Reformation until the time of the Oxford move- 
 ment, the object of which was to wean the Anglican 
 Church away from Protestantism, and draw her 
 back to the Catholic faith. This wonderful new 
 hfe in religion was echoed in art, and as a result 
 a vitality manifested itself in church architecture 
 which had been wanting for centuries. 
 
 At last there was something to work for. Hither- 
 to, if churches were built at all in England, which 
 was unusual, they had been, almost all of them, 
 for the non-conformists, and here the require- 
 ments were necessarily different to those which 
 had held in the old days, and were not such as to 
 fire an architect with very great ardour. They 
 were really lecture halls, and artistically the de- 
 mands they made on an architect were not at all 
 173
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 different to those made by secular work. The 
 CathoHc restoration of the middle of the nineteenth 
 century brought a wholly new influence into play. 
 New churches were really needed now, and by 
 the established Church, and the demand was no 
 longer for lecture halls, but for temples of public 
 worship. Then it was that men began to try to 
 do work like that of the old church builders, first 
 by copying forms, details, mouldings, then later 
 by striking deeper still, by studying the old work 
 and finding therein the secret of its success, the 
 spirit that rested above moulding and tracery, the 
 soul of the work, if I may use a grievously mis- 
 handled phrase. 
 
 Well, they found this — some of the architects 
 — and they went to work to build churches which 
 should not pretend to be twelfth century when 
 really they were nineteenth, but should be modern, 
 sensitive, vital, and in a measure they succeeded. 
 They did not play with Romanesque or French 
 Renaissance, thank God, though they did at first 
 wander off after dead periods of Gothic, in the 
 174
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 mistaken idea that these were pure and perfect, 
 but ultimately they did the only wise thing for 
 Englishmen to do, they acknowledged that Early 
 Pointed and Geometrical and Decorated Gothic 
 were completed styles, and not for their century, 
 however beautiful they might be, since they rep- 
 resented social, religious, mental conditions that 
 no longer existed; but they discovered and accepted 
 another style of which this could not be said. 
 For the history of architecture in England did not 
 end with the House of Plantagenet, — it continued 
 under the Tudors, and was slowly developing into 
 a beautiful thing indeed when Henry VIII stamped 
 it out with his heel and brought art and religion 
 to their death with one and the same blow. 
 
 Examples of this work are not common, for the 
 years were very few which saw its brilliant be- 
 ginnings. In almost all of the architectural work 
 of the first years of the reign of Henry VIII it 
 shows itself, however, and particularly in the 
 chapel of Henry VII at Westminster, the great 
 chapels at Windsor and Kings College, Cambridge, 
 175
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 in Sherborne Abbey, in countless parish churches, 
 in various windows, shrines, and chantries, 
 and in the domestic architecture of the "Tudor" 
 period. In all these we find the root Gothic 
 rising into a tree of wonderful beauty, blossoming 
 with quite new flowers, covering its strong and 
 powerful limbs with efflorescence of the South, 
 with the blossoms of that "Early Renaissance" 
 which was so matchlessly beautiful in Italy, and 
 which was absolutely a logical development from 
 Mediaevalism, and incomparably better than its 
 bastard offspring, the "High Renaissance," which 
 succeeded to the honours of its dead progenitor. 
 
 Here was a new spirit in architecture, an alliance 
 of MedicBvalism with the "sweetness and light" of 
 the real, the honourable "Renaissance of learn- 
 ing," a spirit that promised to revitalize the old 
 Gothic which had almost died away in the for- 
 malities of rigid "Tudor." What might have 
 come had this movement been allowed to work 
 itself out, had Henry VIII not crushed it into 
 extinction, we can only wonder, and try to ascertain. 
 176
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 I say "try" to ascertain, for it seems to me that 
 so far as church building is concerned, we have 
 here a style ready to hand, which is not complete, 
 and which has a singular appropriateness for our 
 requirements. It is this style which the best 
 ecclesiastical architects in England have adopted 
 as the medium of their expression, and they have 
 set themselves to the gracious labour of trying to 
 develop it on the lines indicated by its fragmentary 
 remains. 
 
 And there is wonderful fitness in this, for the 
 following reasons. But before speaking of them 
 I want to explain two points that may not be 
 quite clear. 
 
 First, — in talking about church building, we 
 must remember that it is of two kinds, Catholic 
 and Protestant. The requirements of plan and 
 purpose are utterly different in the two cases, the 
 theory underlying each is equally antagonistic to 
 the other, and what might be postulated of 
 Protestant church building would be quite false 
 of Catholic work. 
 
 177
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Second, — that it is foolishness to talk about a 
 national style and to assert that we should work 
 in the same artistic fashion for every building 
 demanded on this continent. Art is a result, not 
 an attribute nor an accessory, and it is the result 
 of conditions that no longer exist anywhere in the 
 world, unless, perhaps, in rapidly vanishing form, 
 in that most perfect contemporary civilization 
 which we know, — the civilization of Japan. 
 
 If this theory is as accurate as I claim it to be 
 logical, our art schools must only serve as kinder- 
 gartens; from them we can not expect to 
 obtain really great artists or immortal art, and 
 therefore such art as we do receive must be spo- 
 radic, individual; neither ethnic nor popular in 
 any respect. The great mass of art will continue 
 to be, as it is now, self-conscious, the work of the 
 most inartistic creature the world ever saw, the 
 professional artist. Hence, the pleasing talk about 
 a national style of architecture is futile. We must 
 be content to remain self-conscious, and if we are 
 to do comparatively good work, do the best we 
 178
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 can to adapt the various styles of the artistically 
 happier days of the past to the varying nature 
 and requirements of modern conditions. The med- , 
 iaeval spirit and Gothic details would be ludicrous 
 if applied to a twenty-story office building. By- 
 zantine ornament is absurd in a Protestant meet- 
 ing-house. French Renaissance is sacrilegious in 
 an Anglican parish-church or cathedral. Ro- 
 manesque forms have nothing whatever to do 
 with American government, and are therefore 
 foolish when used in a city hall or court house. 
 We no longer have a civilization possessing any 
 single element of unity, and therefore our archi- 
 tecture should be just as individual, just as varied 
 as our civilization, for art that is not representative, 
 expressive, is not art, but artifice. 
 
 So returning, after this long parenthesis, to the 
 matter of the peculiar applicability of " Developed 
 Gothic" to modern church building, I think you 
 will admit that there is great kinship between the 
 style Henry destroyed, and the Church which now 
 demands our services as architects. I am speak- 
 179
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ing wholly of Catholic church work, Roman, 
 Anglican, American; Protestant or non-conformist 
 work is of an absolutely different nature, and here 
 for once I refuse to speaTc dogmatically, but I am 
 inclined to hold that a Congregational church ought 
 to be expressed in that Georgian style which is 
 its particular property, and which has such great 
 chances of development, while I cannot help feel- 
 ing that it is, in a way, inconsistent for the Metho- 
 dists and Baptists and Presbyterians to condemn 
 Catholic theology and the Mediaeval Church, and 
 then quietly assume the architectural forms that 
 express in every line and shadow the very things 
 they detest; but this may be a matter of taste. 
 All the same it seems to me that no conscientious 
 architect has any moral or artistic right to try to 
 build a meeting-house on church lines, for in so 
 doing he is false to the honesty of his art, and 
 untrue to his obligations to his chents. A meeting- 
 house is a clear and honourable subject for archi- 
 tectural study, but it is not a church, as churches 
 were held to be when they were built, and therefore 
 1 80
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 it should be treated honestly and respectfully on 
 its own lines. If a semicircular arrangement of 
 opera-chairs is desired in place of pews, put them 
 in, and big, bright windows likewise, galleries, 
 sloping floors, all the conveniences required by 
 the peculiar conditions. Do not insist on big, 
 inside columns, shadowy aisles, and all the emo- 
 tional adjuncts of Catholic worship. They are as 
 out of place here as square auditoriums and 
 curving rows of seats are intolerable in an Anglican 
 church. There are churches and meeting-houses. 
 For heaven's sake don't let us confound terms, 
 but let us recognize the fact that there is Catholic 
 and Protestant architecture as well as Catholic 
 and Protestant theology. 
 
 Confining ourselves now to Catholic architecture 
 proper, we certainly find that, however inappro- 
 priate the principles of medieval art might be 
 when applied to Protestant requirements, the same 
 does not hold true in the case of Anglican or 
 Roman Catholic work, for the most vital tendency 
 in the two branches of the Anglican Church to-day
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 is towards a restoration of much that was un- 
 wisely cast aside at the time of the Reformation, 
 while the Roman CathoHc Church, in the United 
 States is, or should be, a continuation of her 
 mediaeval tradition not a development of Ren- 
 aissance error. 
 
 For this large section of Christianity, then, there 
 can be no more logical and fitting style than that 
 which has suffered such untimely eclipse. It is in- 
 stinct with the very life of our ancestors, it holds 
 within itself those powers and potencies of won- 
 derful development that three hundred years ago 
 were shut out of life though fortunately preserved 
 until happier days. Perhaps these days have come 
 again. Certainly the awakening of Anglicanism 
 to a knowledge of its Catholic heritage gives good 
 promise of this, though elsewhere the hope is not 
 so clearly marked. We are returning to the part- 
 ing of the ways, that we may choose the right 
 path, abandoned for so long. Well, if this is done 
 in theology and ritual, why not also in their 
 material expression, — architecture ?
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 "But this is retrogression," you will say, "the 
 restoration of mediaeval forms is an anachronism." 
 Granted, but the Church is an anachronism; let 
 us admit that at the start. She is not yet in har- 
 mony with many modern conditions, thank God, 
 and let us pray that this may continue true. It is 
 almost her greatest glory. Art also is an anachro- 
 nism in our modern life, so unbeautiful is it in 
 almost every way, not only outwardly, but in its 
 methods of thought, its forms of activity, its am- 
 bitions, its principles. The architect who has to 
 design commercial structures, public buildings, 
 dwelling?, railroad stations, school-houses, is fight- 
 ing against Fate. He can't let himself go in any 
 of these directions, but the case is different in the 
 matter of churches. Here he is working for a 
 great institution that is a glorious survival from 
 times when all life and thought were more beauti- 
 ful than now, and when he enters her service he 
 is hampered by no restrictions, — except building 
 committees. So do not let us, as architects, say 
 a word against the anachronisms of the Church. 
 183
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 They should be the cause of our utmost thanks- 
 giving, since they give us opportunities such as are 
 offered by no other power in the world. 
 
 I am still speaking, of course, only of the Roman 
 Catholic and Anglican Churches for they can 
 claim more fully the honour of being abso- 
 lutely out of touch with what we are pleased to 
 call "Modern Civilization." If we are called 
 upon to build a meeting-house for one of the Prot- 
 testant denominations, we must, of course, build 
 a lecture-hall where the laws of sight and sound 
 are supreme, and we must not forget that the 
 kitchen and dining-hall, the gymnasium, bowling- 
 alley, and boys' club are as important as anything 
 else, and that the elements of mystery and awe 
 and solemn splendour are out of place. This is 
 not a criticism; — it is a statement of a condition, 
 and of the architect's limitations: — here he must 
 work in one way. But when he approaches a 
 problem set by some branch of the Church which 
 accepts Catholic theology, and uses a liturgical form 
 of worship, he must work in another, and in this
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 last case he obtains an opportunity such as is 
 offered nowhere else in the world, an opportunity to 
 treat architecture as an absolute art; to use all the 
 powers thereof in the fullest way; to call in the aid 
 of every other form of the allied arts, glass staining 
 and sculpture, mosaic and wall-painting, em- 
 broidery and wood-carving and inlaying, metal 
 work, tapestry weaving, and music. It is strange 
 indeed that architects fail to realize as con- 
 stantly as do rectors and building committees the 
 almost unlimited opportunities for creating the 
 most marvellous fabrics of art, that are offered 
 by church building. 
 
 Of course, there are limitations, grievous ones, 
 and I speak from the heart. There are gentlemen, 
 who have visited the English cathedral towns, 
 and read Parker's Glossary, and think they know 
 a great deal about architecture. There are parish 
 meetings and vestries, and senior and junior 
 wardens, and a great many other very terrible 
 things besides. It is not a case of one Scylla, and 
 one Charybidis, nor one frying-pan and one fire, — 
 185
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 it is a medley of all of them, with the devil and 
 the deep sea thrown in. Not that they do not 
 mean well, — the rectors, vestries, etc., not their 
 poetic similes, — they do, but sometimes I am 
 tempted to think that the only person one can 
 under no circumstances forgive is the person who 
 "means well." A brazen criminal is sometimes 
 easier to get along with. 
 
 Well, these are all powers that prevent an 
 architect from doing what is really his best work; 
 but here comes in the exercise of his proudest 
 power, — diplomacy. A man can pay others 
 to do his office work for him, to construct his 
 trusses, calculate his strains, keep his books — 
 if he is so fabulously wealthy as to possess books; 
 he can even, by suppressing his conscience, hire 
 men to do his designing for him, but he can never 
 employ a diplomatic representative. Here he is 
 thrown on Providence and his own resources; his 
 technical education gives him no aid, nor will 
 until our architectural schools establish chairs of 
 diplomacy. Incessant practice develops this 
 i86
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 quality rapidly, however, and I sometimes think 
 that if the President would appoint his ambas- 
 sadors and ministers from the ranks of the archi- 
 tectural profession, the United States would be 
 better represented abroad than any other civilized 
 power under the sun. 
 
 I speak of this quality of diplomacy here because 
 I really think it most important in this connection. 
 Building committees of city halls and public 
 libraries, and even prospective householders, are 
 very modest in the matter of architectural prefer- 
 ences, but church architecture seems to be a 
 subject on which every layman thinks himself 
 justified in pronouncing an opinion. Happily, 
 there are generally as many as there are members 
 ■ of the building committee, so now and then the 
 architect is left at peace while the wardens and the 
 vestry fight it out together. 
 
 So, as I say, when you have churches to build, 
 
 assume at the start that every individual with 
 
 whom you come in contact will believe that he 
 
 knows at least as much as you do about the artistic 
 
 187
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 side of your profession. Let him think it still, 
 and trust to your diplomacy, not your drawings, 
 to gain your end. 
 
 But the argument is not all on this side. Judg- 
 ing from the strange and surprising buildings that 
 excite our amazement every day through illustra- 
 tions published in architectural magazines, the 
 majority of men who try to design churches are 
 probably saved from a thing almost inconceivable, 
 — worse work, — by these very authorities whom 
 I have spoken of as sometimes whitening the hair 
 of the architects who fondly think they know 
 something about ecclesiastical architecture. Since 
 Trinity Church in New York was built, it is pretty 
 safe to say that until about ten years ago the re- 
 spectable examples of this class of architecture 
 that have come into existence could be numbered 
 on one's fingers. Church building was simply 
 the record of a steady degeneration, hardly appre- 
 ciated, I think, until the great competition for the 
 Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, 
 some fifteen years ago, showed to what a depth
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 we had fallen. If I remember aright, there were 
 sixty-seven designs sent in. Twenty or thirty 
 were published, and hardly one of these showed 
 the most rudimentary idea of cathedral require- 
 ments or the slightest suspicion of religious feeling, 
 historical study, or artistic spirit. To that com- 
 petition I sent a design, and one of the men with 
 whom I am now associated another. Heaven 
 knows which was the worse, still I really think the 
 others were Uttle better. The result of the com- 
 petition must have been a shock, for it showed at 
 once that so far as church architecture was con- 
 cerned, the profession in America was nowhere. 
 Since then there has been an improvement, in that 
 a few men have begun to do good work, but in 
 the meantime the general run of design has de- 
 teriorated until I doubt if anywhere on earth more 
 ridiculous buildings are designed than here in 
 America, excepting Germany always, of course, 
 where the state of things is an awful warning to 
 us of what will happen if we fail to mend our 
 ways. 
 
 189
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Now where does the trouble lie? Well, it 
 seems to me it lies just here. 
 
 First. We have nearly all fallen out of touch 
 with the Church, so that we no longer accept her 
 authority, obey her discipline, or love her worship. 
 
 Second. (^We have applied ourselves so studiously 
 to piu"ely commercial designing that we have lost 
 our feeling for the spiritual and religious side of 
 architecture. ) 
 
 Third. (We have utterly missed the old secret 
 of church building, which once made it possible 
 for men to do simple, noble, powerful work.) 
 
 Fourth. VThe Church authorities have so con- 
 fused the whole reason for building churches, have 
 come to demand such impossible and grotesque 
 features, and insist upon such destructive quah- 
 ties, that the inspiration for an architect is nearly 
 gone. 
 
 This is hardly the place to speak of the first two 
 
 of these reasons, except perhaps to say that I 
 
 firmly believe no man can build a good Roman 
 
 Catholic or Anglican church who is not himself in 
 
 190
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 loving sympathy with their motive and object, 
 and that we can't do good religious art of any kind 
 until we ourselves accept religion as the dominant 
 power in the world. Of the other reasons I do 
 want to say a word or two. 
 
 Look at the average church of the period. 
 What is its most grievous fault ? Picturesqueness. 
 Narrowed down to the last point, there is the 
 greatest trouble. Sprawling, irregular plans, 
 chaotic roofs, silly turrets and meaningless towers, 
 windows of a dozen shapes, united in only one 
 thing, — their incorrigible badness. No repose, 
 no simplicity, no self-respect; just a delirious at- 
 tempt at hectic picturesqueness through the use of 
 crazy elaboration. A sin we all commit is not 
 knowing enough to stop when we get through, and 
 bad as this is in secular work, it is doubly evil 
 where churches are concerned. To a great ex- 
 tent sectarianism is to blame, for the rivalry of 
 denominationalism drives the authorities to turn 
 their church buildings into architectural posters, 
 to lure the wandering and unwary stranger within 
 191
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 their walls. "Give us something that will be 
 unique and unlike anything in the neighbour- 
 hood." These are actual instructions that were 
 given to us not long ago by a religious society in 
 a Massachusetts town. And so an architect must 
 not be held wholly responsible for the horrors that 
 bear his name, but generally he can mitigate the 
 excessive demands for originality and "pictur- 
 esqueness" that are made on him, if he will. And 
 this is a pious duty. Only too often, however, he 
 himself is the sinner, and the clients are the vic- 
 tims Almost weekly you will see in the pages of 
 the architectural magazines and the Church pe- 
 riodicals, fantastic nightmares that cannot possibly 
 be satisfactory even to those for whom they are 
 built. The modes of committing crime are endless; 
 the motive is unchanging, and this motive is pictur- 
 esqueness. False picturesqueness, I mean, for 
 there is that which is good, but for the chromo 
 Christmas-card picturesqueness, which is the 
 result of endless elaboration, there is no justifica- 
 tion now, nor pardon hereafter. Through their 
 192
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 overloaded, chaotic design shines just one 
 dominant quality: irretrievable vulgarity. And 
 this is what the man achieves who tries 
 to be picturesque in his church building: vul- 
 garity. It does not matter whether the work 
 is that of a snide fellow in a western town, 
 who prints books of "tasty designs," or of an 
 officer of an august architectural society. In 
 the one case the vulgarity is ignorant, in the 
 other it is learned, and the latter is the harder 
 to forgive. 
 
 The development of this particularly gross and 
 offensive work is a matter of comparatively recent 
 years, and for a good deal of it I fear one of the 
 greatest geniuses of the last century, or of any 
 other, is responsible. I refer to H. H. Richardson. 
 Before his day, church work was dull and stolid; 
 bad enough in a clumsy way, but almost good 
 compared with what followed. For Richardson's 
 genius I have unbounded admiration; for the style 
 he brought into vogue I have little liking; while 
 for the nameless horror that it has engendered, I 
 193
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 have only feelings of mortal dismay. In Trinity 
 Church, Boston, there is much to admire, much 
 of which we can stand in awe; but, beautiful as it 
 is, it would have been better for the architecture 
 of this country if it had never come into existence. 
 From it have sprung nine tenths of the monstros- 
 ities that desolate the landscape, and add a new 
 horror to our towns and cities. Only a giant can 
 handle Romanesque, — and Richardson was a 
 giant. His imitators were dwarfs, and in their 
 hands the materials the master wielded with vast 
 and wonderful power became the very millstones 
 that drag them down into the sea of contempt. 
 If Richardson had foreseen what he was making 
 possible when he laid up walls of random, rock- 
 faced, granite ashlar, and trimmed them with 
 Longmeadow stone; when he swung gigantic 
 voussoirs about narrow, round-topped windows; 
 when he chopped barbaric ornament out of red 
 sandstone, and laid his coloured granite up in 
 rough, uncouth patterns; if he could have foreseen 
 what crimes would be committed by these means 
 194
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 and in his name, his hand must have faltered and 
 fallen to his side. 
 
 It will be years before we get rid of rock-faced 
 ashlar and Romanesque grotesques, of deep vous- 
 soirs and octagonal towers, of round windows and 
 gigantic arched doorways, and so long as they 
 remain we may look in vain for any improvement. 
 The trail of the serpent will be over all things, 
 and nothing short of the most rigid training can 
 work the poison out of our system. 
 
 Just such training as one receives in our archi- 
 tectural schools is the best antidote: hard labour 
 at solid classical design. Nothing is better calcu- 
 lated to curb one's unnecessary vitality, to estab- 
 lish a respect for law, for dignity, for sense of 
 proportion and for reserve. I can't for a moment 
 admit that this exclusive classical training is the 
 end of all things, as it certainly is the beginning. 
 But the laws of self-respect and dignity are taught 
 better by classical work than any other thing, and 
 so long as we do not stop there and try to translate 
 the Catholic Faith into the argot of the Ecole des 
 195
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Beaux Arts, but go on and learn the wonderful 
 language of mediaeval styles, that we may become 
 honourable servants of organized religion, we are 
 on the right way. 
 
 This then is the only thing that can save us from 
 the vulgarity that is dominant in our church 
 buildings: classical training first, and then, after 
 the ground is cleared, loving study of true, Chris- 
 tian work. A few weeks in some of the southern 
 English counties can only fill a thinking man with 
 horror of what we are doing now, a horror that 
 goes beyond expression. To the student returning 
 from England, the shoddy little shanties that 
 scream at one to come and look at them, the gaudy 
 and bedizened horrors that flaunt themselves on 
 the corners of city streets, can only seem the apoth- 
 eosis of vulgarity, fraught with vital danger to 
 society and to morality. I don't think this is too 
 strong language: the documents in the case justify 
 even worse invective. Over an ambitious office 
 building, a Romanesque town hall, a Colonial 
 cottage, it doesn't pay to get angry; but when 
 196
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 religion is insulted, as it is nowadays by the tawdry 
 phantasms of a diseased imagination, a little in- 
 dignation is, I think, allowable. For bad archi- 
 tecture is immoral, and its immorality is not based 
 on its violation of custom or civil law, but on its 
 defiance of the Divine Law that is at the base of 
 all art and religion. Now, religion cannot ex- 
 press itself fully, except through the symbolism of 
 art. What then can it do when its own mouthpiece 
 turns the words of reverence into blasphemy ? 
 
 Here is a great work for us to do; make our art 
 once more the handmaid of religion. By so doing 
 we honour architecture, help the glorious work of 
 the Church, advance civilization. 
 
 How shall we do this ? First of all, let us realize 
 that art, and pre-eminently our own art of archi- 
 tecture, is one of the greatest powers in the whole 
 world; not a means of making a living, but a tre- 
 mendous agency for expressing the loftiest emo- 
 tions of humanity, for arousing the dormant souls 
 of men, exciting their imagination to action, urg- 
 ing them to creative work, turning them from 
 197
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 single devotion to materialism to spiritual 
 activity. 
 
 We do not yet know half the awful power we 
 have in our hands. We feel it dimly, now and 
 then, in the golden caverns of St. Mark's in Venice, 
 in the rocky fastnesses of the French cathedrals, 
 in the shadowy, magical lands that lie within the 
 walls of Durham and York, Exeter and Canter- 
 bury. And from these flashes of dimly realized 
 power, power that is divine in its source and in its 
 influence, we come home and build — what ? 
 Look around and answer. 
 
 I remember once when a particularly impudent 
 and insignificant little piece of vulgarity was built 
 in Boston for an Unitarian society, the proud archi- 
 tect had himself interviewed, and published in a 
 daily paper a statement that this particular horror 
 was modelled on the lines of St. Mark's in Venice. 
 This was many years ago, and I was just home 
 from my first visit to that city of enchantment. 
 I was convinced in my own mind that murder in 
 this case was not an indictable offence, and I 
 iq8
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 have never ceased to regret that I did not follow 
 my righteous impulses. 
 
 Now, surely, it is not so hard a thing to build a 
 good church, I do not say a great church, for 
 frankly I doubt if we can do that now with things 
 as they are. But at least we can work soberly 
 and respectfully. 
 
 A good church ought to be the simplest thing in 
 the world, without straining for effect, without 
 affectation or elaboration. The old men knew 
 how to get results. They knew that a square 
 plan was just the very worst for acoustics con- 
 ceivable: so they made their naves long, narrow, 
 and high, and in them you can hear perfectly, as 
 you can in any modern church built on the same 
 lines. They knew that a church was not pri- 
 marily a lecture room, but a Tabernacle of God, 
 a place for public worship. What did they do, 
 these builders, in the creation of the wonderful 
 churches that are still the objects of our hopeless 
 envy and admiration ? Just this, — they mar- 
 shalled all the powers of art, first, for what they 
 199
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 considered to be the glory of God; and second, 
 as a great, silent, irresistible influence to work on 
 the minds of all who should come within their 
 sphere, lifting them out of the hard world with all 
 its narrowing, soiling agencies, up to the splen- 
 dour of the infinite God for Whose worship the 
 temple was raised. 
 
 They knew better than we, these monkish 
 craftsmen, how closely allied are art and religion; 
 knew that both burst into life from the same im- 
 pulse as this worked itself out in the world. They 
 knew that in a way religion cannot adequately ex- 
 press itself except through the agency of art, and 
 that when all the arts were united, as happened 
 in the cathedrals and abbeys of the Middle Ages, 
 the Church found its greatest champion, its most 
 eloquent mouthpiece. 
 
 Unless we can build in this way, we shall never 
 do work that will last as theirs has endured. 
 Can we do this? Can we, as architects, answer 
 enthusiastically to the call of men who desire a 
 Christian church, bringing to their assistance, not 
 200
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 the considerations of a tradesman, but the fire of 
 an artist? Can we realize that before this prob- 
 lem of all others we are not acting simply as a 
 client's professional adviser at five per cent com- 
 missions, but through him are serving God, and 
 to God are responsible for all that we do? Can 
 we come to look upon architecture as a part of 
 the vast language of art, the exalted privilege of 
 which is the expression of the emotions, of the 
 loftiest achievements of the soul of man, as they 
 can be expressed by no other human power? 
 
 I believe we can. At all events we must if we 
 care for our art at all except as a means of making, 
 or trying to make, a living. We shall have much 
 to fight against. We shall find opposing us a great 
 civilization that hates religion, or scorns it; a 
 civilization made up very largely of an un-Chris- 
 tian economic system, a sordid and unhonoured 
 society, venal and corrupt politics, rampant com- 
 mercialism, narrow ideals. Against this strange 
 mass of seething effort and mistaken action, — 
 which, by its very nature, is unfruitful of the least 
 
 20I
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 vestige of art, and inevitably destructive of it, — 
 we must contend, as our predecessors never were 
 called upon to do. There were evils enough in 
 the past, God knows, but they were not of the 
 peculiarly sordid nature of these that are dominant 
 now, and even from their own fierce vitality art 
 grew, as it cannot grow from conditions which 
 have in them incentive neither to beauty of thought 
 nor beauty of form. Whatever we do now, we 
 do consciously, and our art, if we have any, must 
 be an aHen, not a logical growth. By and by 
 conditions may change, and we may find our art 
 bursting forth of its own impulse. For the time 
 being, however, we must be, not the niouthpieces 
 of a generation, but voices crying in the wilderness. 
 As a result of this unfortunate state of things, 
 we must expect all manner of opposition and 
 obstruction; clergy who will have no east win- 
 dows in their churches lest some shade of expres- 
 sion on their faces be lost to the congregation; 
 who insist that there must be no columns, since 
 these might block the view of the pulpit from some 
 202
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 seat; who stipulate for clear light in every part 
 of the church, with no shadows, no mystery; who 
 demand a parish house with bowling alley and 
 gymnasium, kitchen, club rooms and "rummage- 
 sale room," a church being attached at one corner 
 in an unobtrusive way. We shall find clearly 
 defined theories as to the purity of " Early English" 
 types; the essential wickedness of altar-pieces, 
 candlesticks, and side chapels; the law of acoustics, 
 the beauty of quarry-faced stone and field boulders 
 as building material. These things must be; 
 they are part of an architect's experience; but if 
 he meets them as obstacles to be overcome, not as 
 conditions to be blindly accepted, they will in the 
 end vanish away. 
 
 For in our hands we hold, I firmly believe, a 
 power so vast in its possibilities that I hardly dare 
 formulate it. There are many men who hold that 
 our civilization is but one step removed from 
 anarchy and collapse, and that the Church, One, 
 Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, holds the key to 
 the situation; that she alone may gain the influence 
 203
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 over society that will turn back the tide of destiny, 
 and avert the catastrophe that now seems almost 
 inevitable. However this may be, most of you 
 will, I think, admit that without the influence of 
 Christianity, wreck would stare us in the face. 
 Well, without conceit or presumption, I say un- 
 hesitatingly that I believe from my soul that 
 architects have power second only to that of 
 Bishops, priests, and monks to extend that in- 
 fluence to its farthest bounds. He was a wise 
 man, and he knew the power of art who said: 
 "Let me make the songs of the nation, and I care 
 not who makes the laws." Through architecture 
 and its allied arts we have the power to bend men 
 and sway them, as few have who depend on spoken 
 words. The artist expresses the subtle emotions, 
 satisfies the strange hunger of the soul as speakers 
 fail to do. With art as her aid Christianity swept 
 over Europe. With art discarded, rejected, the 
 domain of the Church waned and fell away. It 
 is for us, as a part of our duty, as our highest 
 privilege, to act once more with the Church for 
 204
 
 BUILDING OF CHURCHES 
 
 the combating of false civilization, for the spread- 
 ing of that which is true. 
 
 This is what I conceive Church Architecture to 
 mean, and viewed so, that art which we have chosen 
 becomes almost a sacred trust, that portion of it 
 which is given to the service of God, through the 
 Christian Church, a religion. 
 
 Let us recognize the great and glorious fact that 
 the Church is, that persecution and spoliation, 
 heresy and schism, anarchy, atheism, and revo- 
 lution, have been powerless to effect her downfall. 
 She stands as she has stood for nineteen hundred 
 years, immutable, indestructible in her spirit and 
 her essence; the same yesterday, to-day, and to- 
 morrow. Civic ideals, industrial standards, com- 
 mercial methods, change and pass away, she alone 
 remains. 
 
 So let us, all of us who look farther than to-day, 
 who love our art as an eternal service of God, 
 begin our counter reformation, our glorious restora- 
 tion. Let us remember the name and services of 
 the immortal Architect-Bishop, William of Wyke- 
 205
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ham, and found our society pledged to work for 
 the eternal in architecture, not for the evanescent; 
 a society of men who in the fear of God are pledged 
 to work humbly and loyally for His glory in the 
 building of churches; bound in honour to follow 
 conscience, history and law, not fleeting fashion, 
 in the work we do, and so pledged to take up the 
 great and wonderful style he created, and develop 
 it as he would have done, so that every church so 
 built may say to all the world and to all future 
 time, "I was built in the fear of the Lord by the 
 Wykehamites, that God might be honoured in the 
 sight of men, and that His Church might stand 
 faultless before them, as the one great and inde- 
 structible power that rests above the vacillations 
 of fashion and the mutation of human society." 
 
 206
 
 THE INTERIOR DECORATION 
 OF CHURCHES
 
 THE INTERIOR DECORATION 
 OF CHURCHES 
 
 ' I ^HE whole question of the interior decoration 
 of houses of public worship is so intimately 
 connected with architecture that, except in the 
 case of doing over an old yet indestructible edifice, 
 it seems impossible to sever it from the greater 
 question of church architecture itself. Yet there 
 are certain principles underlying it all that main- 
 tain in every case, and these hold as well in the 
 renovation of a barn-like church or meeting-house 
 as in the creation of a cathedral. 
 
 That this question of the artistic expression of 
 concrete religious faith should come up at these 
 conferences on religious education is very sig- 
 nificant. Twenty years ago, when I first began 
 the study of church architecture, this particular 
 and most noble branch of my profession was, I 
 209
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 suppose, in about its most grievous case, so far as 
 America was concerned: the respectable and most 
 sincere colonial tradition had long since disap- 
 peared, the Jeffersonian Classical imitations had 
 followed suit, the Gothic revival which resulted 
 for a time in serious, dignified, and self-respecting 
 churches, such as Trinity in New York and the 
 Central Church here in Boston, had been utterly 
 submerged by Richardson's flaming but some- 
 what heterodox genius; and the results in the 
 hands of men who were not Richardsons — and 
 few were — were lamentable beyond expression. 
 There are examples not a thousand feet from 
 where I stand that make a mock of Christianity 
 and civilization. 
 
 Well, the result of all this was that the idea came 
 into being that chm"ch architecture was, after all, 
 simply a matter of fashion, to be changed pre- 
 cisely as one changed the bulge in the sleeves of a 
 gown, or the subtle curves in the brim of a silk 
 hat; and the result of that was, that the fatal 
 heresy inherent in the assumption that there was 
 
 2IO
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 no intimate connection between the art and the 
 thing expressed, a heresy that had maintained 
 itself for several centuries, received yet another 
 lease of life, and the day of the discovery that art 
 is a result and not a product, a language and not 
 an accessory, was still further delayed. We know 
 now that this long-established fiction is one of the 
 very falsest things in all the world, but our case is 
 still desperate, for the one institution into which 
 any inkling of the newly discovered truth has not 
 crept is the school of architecture, and however 
 much a religious society may desire a fitting out- 
 ward manifestation, how is it to obtain this so 
 long as the schools where architects are made 
 tacitly maintain that churches are of no importance 
 anyway, either socially or artistically. To them 
 it is important that their students should design 
 a five-million-dollar palace for the President of a 
 Republic, or a ten-million-dollar structure for the 
 housing of a school of fine arts, but that the pro- 
 spective practitioners who conceivably may never 
 be called upon to exercise their genius in the 
 
 211
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 designing of either, should have their minds turned 
 now and then to the problem of a village or city 
 church, is an idea that does not seem to appeal to 
 them forcibly. Nor is this surprising; there never 
 was, and there never will be, but one highly or- 
 ganized and perfectly developed style for building 
 a Christian Church, and that is Gothic; and Gothic 
 to the schools, though of some very slight interest 
 historically, is yet barbarism and anathema ma- 
 ranatha. Perhaps this is more nearly true of con- 
 ditions five years ago than it is now : I confess with 
 profound satisfaction to finding in school publica- 
 tions an increasing number of essays in ecclesias- 
 tical design, and I really think the day may be at 
 hand when Christianity will be recognized by the 
 architectural departments of our great schools as 
 a power of some slight moment in modern life. 
 
 That it is this, and increasingly, is a fact too 
 patent for comment, and as art has owed its very 
 existence to religion, and must continue doing so 
 to the end of time, so is the converse true, that 
 religion finds its visible expression through the 
 
 212
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 art it has created for its service. You cannot 
 dissociate the two without infinite injury to both. 
 Our Puritan ancestors and the emancipated 
 genius of the present age are at one in this, and the 
 painters and architects who think to survive, aloof 
 from all religious influence, will fail just as signally 
 as the iconoclasts and vandals of the sixteenth 
 century failed in their warfare against beauty and 
 its symbolism and its didacticism and its pro- 
 phetic faculty. 
 
 Religion simply cannot get along without art, 
 not because art is fashionable and a facile means 
 of emulation, but because it is at the one time both 
 a science and a manifestation. And by "art" I 
 do not mean such passing whimsy of society as 
 may for the moment be the vogue, but the eternal, 
 indestructible principle of beauty which is as 
 definite a thing as the procession of the equinoxes. 
 There was a time when an instinct for beauty was 
 the heritage of every human being: the effort to 
 separate religion from art, and man from religion, 
 has resulted in changing all that, and now there 
 213
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 is no art instinct among any civilized people except 
 the Japanese: hence, the lamentable falling back 
 upon professional artists, of whatever special call- 
 ing — who nine times out of ten, though perhaps 
 highly trained, are yet just as deficient in the 
 instinct for beauty as those who call them into 
 their service. We have, for instance, the eccle- 
 siastical decorator and furnisher, with his brass 
 pulpits, ingenious stained glass and tawdry em- 
 broidery, his egregious carved oak altars and spun 
 brass candlesticks, his glittering mosaics, and 
 above all his remarkable schemes for colour 
 decoration. He advertises copiously, and his 
 name stands perhaps for all that is "rich and 
 elegant," but really he is an aflfliction, for there is 
 neither religious feeling nor reliable instinct be- 
 hind him. And it is the same way with architects: 
 we claim to know it all, but the best of us could 
 not bring into existence a church that would be 
 worthy to stand beside some simple chapel, paced 
 out on the turf by a monk or friar, and built by 
 the common masons of the neighbourhood, built 
 214
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 and decorated too, for the carving we now pore 
 over with awe, the crocket or capital, bruised and 
 marred as it is, at the hands of Henry's or Crom- 
 well's destroyers, was carved by the journeyman or 
 the apprentice who at other times was hewing 
 blocks or mixing mortar. 
 
 Yet beauty in the service of God we must have: 
 must, and the need is absolute. Nothing we pos- 
 sess is really worthy to be used in God's service, 
 but by some miracle or other, some manifestation 
 of infinite Wisdom, it happens that the labour of 
 love and devotion, the pains spent to bring forth 
 absolute beauty, as well as that beauty itself, serve 
 to give a new value to a knot of wood or a knob 
 of stone; and this value is so great that if it were 
 possible the product thus obtained is in a way 
 worthy of the service to which it is called. Beauty, 
 then, and perfection, are utterly inseparable from 
 the idea of an acceptable church, and beauty and 
 perfection we must have. 
 
 "But how," you say, "since, if you do not lie, 
 these are things which no professional artist is 
 215
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 able to give?" The answer is easy: by demanding 
 the best, and taking nothing else. For art must 
 be good, or it is worse than nothing. It may be 
 fallible, partial, inadequate, but if it is following 
 the right lines, if it is sincere and whole-hearted, 
 it is at least tolerable, and tending in the right 
 direction. The cheap and showy abominations 
 that do duty in commerce as ecclesiastical decora- 
 tion are not this, and they lie beyond the pale: 
 they are impossible. 
 
 Art is a service and a factor in education: in 
 either of its aspects it must be of the best obtain- 
 able, or it is evil. Here is one place at least where 
 substitutes are out of the question. In its first 
 function it is the intrinsically precious, the labori- 
 ously fashioned, the exquisitely perfected, that 
 alone is admissible: makeshifts, imitations, are 
 ruled out of court, and economical devices for 
 obtaining fallacious appearances, labour-saving 
 expedients and cheap substitutes, are impious, and 
 tinged by sacrilege. This is not the place here to 
 elaborate this very sound doctrine, but it is 
 216
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 very surely the time to lay stress on the educational 
 value of art, and to say that here, as in all educa- 
 tion, the best obtainable is none too good. 
 
 Really, I believe that art — that is, concrete 
 and absolute beauty, acting as a system of 
 spiritual and psychological influence — 's per- 
 haps the greatest teaching agency, the greatest 
 because the most subtle and penetrating in its 
 power, man has ever developed. We try to 
 make our churches beautiful and intrinsically 
 precious because beauty and intrinsic worth are a 
 kind of sacrifice, an oblation poured out before 
 God; but we make them this as well because one 
 fact that runs through all earthly experience is that 
 the lasting lessons come through the mediumship 
 of the soul as well as through that of the mind. 
 Why else did we for thousands of years hold art 
 and religion to be inseparable terms ? The Spartan 
 doctrine of the Puritan propaganda for white- 
 wash made indeed a certain plausible appeal to 
 the intellect, but for once this latter attribute of 
 humanity was wrong, as we have found to our 
 217
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 cost. From the first rough "sgraffiti" sketched 
 on the walls of the catacombs, and the first simple 
 hymns sung softly within their gloom, there was a 
 steady and unbroken advance in recognition of 
 the infinite and indispensable powers of art in the 
 service of religion until the sixteenth century, 
 when, with the very first years, there came a 
 change, and, to its eternal disgrace, and the im- 
 measurable injury of the world, the great move- 
 ment for ethical reform became identified with 
 that other, which had nothing to do with the case, 
 the destruction of art. At that time, whatever we 
 may think of the ethical and theological conditions, 
 art in the service of religion, art as a great teach- 
 ing factor, had reached its highest point; archi- 
 tecture, painting, sculpture, music and handicraft, 
 guided and fostered by the Church, had become 
 things of wonder and amazement, and united, had 
 brought into existence the great and perfect cere- 
 monial which was one of the glories of the time. 
 The liturgies of Medisevalism, the splendid ritual 
 of the undivided Church, the majestic ceremonial- 
 218
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 ism that marked its every act, what were they? 
 Judging from the attitude of some most excellent 
 people nowadays, who manfully contend against 
 every effort to restore them again, they were some 
 very awful form of sorcery or magic that pos- 
 sessed a demoniac power of bending men's minds 
 in bondage to some kind of base obsession. Actu- 
 ally, however, they were simply art, a mark of 
 man's supremacy in creation, co-ordinated, blended, 
 composed into a great and consistent whole, and 
 employed for the glory of God and the teaching 
 of His children. There was once, and not so 
 long ago, furious opposition to the use of organ 
 music in churches, to trained and vested choirs, 
 to musical services, to painted windows, pictures 
 and statues of saints, even to the very Emblem 
 of Redemption; all this has passed, for common 
 sense has shown that the opposition was simply 
 to art in its highest form, and art is one of the 
 greatest blessings and marks of civilization. 
 Little by little, if we remain Christians, we shall 
 build up again the majestic liturgies of the past, 
 219
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 eliminate from them the corruptions and the 
 tawdriness that have taken the place of sound 
 principles among those who have retained the 
 forms, yet suffered from the universal artistic 
 degeneration that came when the reformers proved 
 themselves incompetent to discriminate between 
 a corrupted doctrine and an uncorrupted ritual, 
 involving both in a common condemnation. The 
 Anglican Church in England and America, 
 Presbyterianism in Scotland, and Lutheranism 
 on the Continent and with us, are all working 
 slowly and consistently toward this end, and in 
 almost all the denominations the leaven is work- 
 ing. The time is close at hand when this form 
 of co-ordinated art, and the highest form, will be 
 operative again, acting as a great educational 
 agency, and as well working silently but power- 
 fully towards this most desirable of consumma- 
 tions, the reunion of Christendom. 
 
 I speak of this here and at length, for I deliber- 
 ately broaden the scope of the subject given me, 
 until it covers the question of all the arts in their 
 220
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 relation to religion, for except we grasp the idea of 
 their indivisibility, we cannot establish any sound 
 basis for determining the nature of the art we must 
 use in making our houses of public worship, "all 
 beautiful within." We may paint and carve and 
 decorate them until they rival the vision of the 
 New Jerusalem, but if we refuse the final con- 
 centration and glory of a liturgy which is governed 
 and vitalized by the same artistic principles, we 
 have but an empty jewel box; exquisite, it may 
 be, but useless. 
 
 Here we reach a first and general principle; 
 the artistic treatment of a church interior must 
 depend, not upon the taste or the wealth of a given 
 congregation, but upon the nature of the visible 
 methods of worship, for the including of which 
 the building had been erected. Puritanism was 
 logical, granting its premises, logical and con- 
 sistent; it eliminated art from its public services, 
 and therefore it refused art in the treatment of its 
 temples. This was a sane and rational thing to 
 do. The white-washed meeting-house, void . of 
 
 221
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the least hint of art of every shape and kind, 
 fitted perfectly the Puritan service from which 
 art had been banished in equal measure. Now 
 conditions are changing. Art, scorned and hu- 
 miliated for several centuries, is coming once 
 more into favour. It is felt that, if the liturgical 
 churches are becoming once more redolent of 
 beauty, the non-liturgical should not fall behind, 
 and pictures, sculpture, carving, stained glass and 
 music are put under requisition as they were of 
 old. Good! but it seems to me there is danger 
 of misrepresentation here, a danger not always 
 avoided. To duplicate in a non-liturgical and 
 rigorously Evangelical church the ornamenta- 
 tion appropriate to another that is Sacramental 
 in its doctrine and liturgical in its worship, is at 
 least ungrammatical. Frank and honest exposi- 
 tion of principle and doctrine is one of the first of 
 the functions of art in relation to religion. For the 
 Roman and Anglican communions there is no 
 limit to what may possibly be done, but elsewhere, 
 it seems to me, good taste and consistency rather 
 
 222
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 demand a measure of restraint, for the time being 
 at least. 
 
 I do not for a moment mean that because art 
 was once cast away it must be denied forever. 
 Just as good art may be used logically to express 
 the function of a Congregational or Baptist or 
 Methodist church, as is the case with Rome or 
 Episcopalianism, it is different, that is all. 
 
 This seems to me, then, the first law : consistency, 
 honesty, courage of convictions, art recognized as 
 a language, and used as such to express definite 
 principles definitely. And the second law is the 
 law of fastidiousness; willingness to accept only 
 the best: — the best materials, the best workman- 
 ship, and above all the best art. Now it is easy 
 to get good materials by paying for them, and it is 
 better not to have anything at all if we are un- 
 willing to make the sacrifices necessary to obtain 
 the best. It is also possible, though I admit 
 difficult, to get the highest class of workmanship, 
 not such indeed as in the twelfth century, for 
 instance, the masons wrought in building the 
 223
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 great Abbey of Glastonbury; some day, under 
 different economic conditions, we may have 
 this again, but not now. Perfection, however, 
 is not imperative, but effort; if we demand and 
 pay for the best available, we have done honour- 
 ably and well, but if we try to make a show with 
 imitation marble, trick mosaics, make-believe 
 metals, papier mache and plaster casts; or if, in 
 order to get as much for our money as possible, 
 we accept any kind of cheap workmanship what- 
 ever, we are violating the laws of good art, and 
 therefore of good morals. 
 
 Now about the best art: I am not here to give 
 a few easy rules for testing the design of a pulpit, 
 or altar, or stained-glass window; to explain how 
 colours should be mixed or placed in juxtaposi- 
 tion; to demonstrate the proper principles and 
 limits of decoration in a Gothic church, a Georgian 
 meeting-house, or a Christian Science tabernacle. 
 These are the province of the architect employed 
 to do a given piece of work, and to the architect, 
 willy-nilly, must you go, until those happier times 
 224
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 are come again when art is once more so much a 
 part of civiHzation that the clergyman, the house- 
 holder, and the stone-mason all come once again 
 so fully into their heritage of the instinct for beauty 
 that each is himself an artist and architect, and a 
 better man than any to-day. Between 1500 and 
 1550 this condition ceased, for the first time in 
 recorded history. We are permitted to believe 
 the time may come again. Meanwhile — well, 
 meanwhile we must do our best with the rough 
 tools at hand, the architect, the painter, the sculp- 
 tor, the maker of stained glass, the craftsman in 
 metals, yes, and the " Ecclesiastical Decorator and 
 Furnisher;" but we must remember that these, and 
 the best of these, are blind leaders of the blind, 
 for they also walk in the darkness that fell when 
 the light of art went out. Yet they are trying, 
 and honestly, to come back into the light; by 
 thought and arduous labour, and, some of them, 
 by heartfelt prayers as well, they are striving for 
 their heritage, and if you hold them to their dim 
 ideals, they may achieve, and serve you not only 
 225
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 faithfully, but well. But the assumption of a 
 title, or the publication of an advertisement, is not 
 a guaranty of ability: there are good, bad, and 
 indifferent practitioners in every branch of art, 
 and no layman, even though he admits his igno- 
 rance, has any right to rely implicitly on the valu- 
 ation a man puts on himself. How then weigh 
 conflicting claims, and decide as between architect 
 and architect, or decorator and decorator? By a 
 competition of schemes and a vote of a building 
 committee, or a poll of the congregation ? Never ! 
 under any circumstances whatever. How, then? 
 simply by recognizing the fact that from the first 
 moment of recorded history, and whether in 
 Europe or Asia, the laws and principles of good 
 art were absolutely the same whether expressed 
 in the lines of a Greek or Buddhist temple, or a 
 Gothic cathedral, and the same is true of every 
 other form of art down to some ill-defined point 
 that severs Mediaevalism from the Renaissance, 
 and that after that the laws were entirely new, 
 and, except in music, literature, and the drama, 
 226
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 just as entirely bad. This, then, is the bar of 
 justice before which any artistic postulant for 
 favour must plead. If in his words and work he 
 shows that he understands, accepts, and tries to 
 follow the pre-Renaissance laws, then he is the 
 man to tie to. He may fail, and he will fail to 
 produce work that will rival that of the great years, 
 but he will not disgrace you, and through the 
 employment you give him, and the standards to 
 which you hold him, he will go on to better and 
 better things. 
 
 And lest you misunderstand me, let me say that 
 acceptance of the laws does not mean in my mind 
 acceptance of the forms. I can imagine a building 
 and its ornament, exterior and interior, in which 
 should appear no single form, moulding or piece 
 of carving, the genesis of which could be traced 
 to any given period of the past, which should, 
 nevertheless, be so dominated by the eternal laws 
 of beauty in composition, form, and decoration 
 that it would be equally good with the best that 
 ever was. Shifting and ever-changing modes are 
 227
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 one thing, underlying laws are quite another, and 
 the latter are the things that count. 
 
 You see it is, after all, and must be, a matter of 
 general principles: it is impossible to separate the 
 question of interior decoration of churches from 
 that of their outward and visible form and their 
 inward and spiritual grace. It is a great question, 
 perhaps architecturally the greatest, since a church 
 is the noblest structure that man may build; from 
 the standpoint of religion, doctrine, and education, 
 the problem is unparalleled in its importance. I 
 am only pleading for this priority, asserting the 
 persistence and immutability of law, and con- 
 demning the new doctrine that it is all a matter of 
 fashion or taste, and that in art every man has a 
 right to say that though he knows nothing of art, 
 he does know what he likes. This last statement 
 may be perfectly true, but it doesn't matter and 
 has no possible bearing on the case. It isn't what 
 one man or a congregation of men and women 
 likes, it is what is good, that is worthy of acceptance, 
 and to the determination of this question, personal 
 228
 
 DECORATION OF CHURCHES 
 
 predilections are inoperative. Probably the ma- 
 jority of people like Hoffman Bible pictures done 
 in opalescent glass, glittering and richly wrought 
 pulpits of lacquered brass, gold leaf and Dutch 
 metal gummed on jig-sawed fretwork, yet even 
 an unanimous consensus of opinion could not 
 make these things other than what they are, — 
 abominations. As things are now, the general 
 instinct in art is quite wrong, and the artist, what- 
 ever the category into which his labours fall, who 
 contents himself with filling a demand, is the last 
 man on earth in whom to trust. Test the 
 work of available men by the indestructible 
 laws that underlay the art of the race while 
 there was organic art. Choose any man who 
 seems to base his work on these laws, and then 
 say to him: "We demand your best, and the 
 best only; we will hold you rigidly to certain 
 material requirements and limits of cost, but 
 we will hamper and direct you otherwise in 
 no way whatsoever; you are to give us, not what 
 we think we want, hut what you know we ought 
 229
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 to have: history will hold your memory re- 
 sponsible for what you do." 
 
 If you do this you will get good results; but if 
 you go saying: "We want a French Romanesque 
 church, with transepts and a polygonal apse, 
 with no seats behind columns, with large windows 
 for picture glass, and space for a $20,000 organ, 
 where the sound will tell for every dollar it has 
 cost, and we want the exterior of rock-faced 
 ashlar, and the roof covered with red tiles," — 
 then you will get bad results, and they will be 
 well deserved. 
 
 230
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHI- 
 TECTURE OF THE ROMAN 
 CATHOLIC CHURCH
 
 THE CONTEMPORARY ARCHITECTURE 
 
 OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC 
 
 CHURCH 
 
 X~XURING the last quarter of this century has 
 ^-^ occurred a change in the fortune of the 
 Roman CathoHc Church in America, which is 
 almost a transformation; a change which possesses 
 certain of the outward aspects of the miraculous, 
 of the supernatural. Nor is this new fortune 
 visible in America alone; in England it has been 
 more brilliant, more spectacular, though no more 
 vital; and the same is true, in a minor measure, in 
 France* The tempest of materialism and agnos- 
 ticism and atheism has spent its force, and though 
 it has wrought ruin in many places, the sunlight 
 
 ♦Written, of course, before the present French persecu- 
 tions revealed the thinness of the shell of civilization above 
 the still smouldering fires of the Revolution. 
 
 233
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 already bursting through its drifting and exhausted 
 clouds, fleeing on the wind of their own suicidal 
 violence, is fast turning its flood and wreck into 
 enormous agencies for recuperation and renewed 
 life. Everywhere are the signs of freshened growth 
 and new and splendid strength, and nowhere are 
 these evidences more clear and convincing than in 
 the United States. 
 
 The Roman Catholicism of England, under the 
 exalted guidance of the four great cardinals, has 
 signalized her release from legal persecution by 
 stepping to the very front, not only in her first and 
 most glorious duty of winning back to the Faith 
 a world weary of the follies of materialism, but in 
 all vital matters of social and economic reform, 
 and of artistic education and direction. 
 
 Here also in the United States the torch of the 
 new life is passed from hand to hand, and already 
 the Roman Catholic Church is assuming her 
 prerogative of leadership. Within the last fifty 
 years she has advanced from a position of com- 
 parative numerical weakness to the primacy; she 
 234
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 is claiming the right of arbitration between capital 
 and labour; she is slowly solving the complex 
 question of Christian education, where the state 
 is confronted, after four decades of experiment, 
 with but partial success; she is even winning a 
 sullen respect from the sects, together with the 
 oblique tribute of their fear, where formerly was 
 only the hatred of bigotry and ignorance. Thus 
 far she goes hand-in-hand with the Church in 
 England; but in one important province she has 
 done and is doing nothing — less even than 
 nothing; for her influence thus far is unfortunate, 
 her action grievously injurious to herself. 
 
 In England, since the Cathohc Emancipation Act, 
 and especially since Newman's "second spring," 
 she has steadily striven to stand visibly beautiful 
 and august in the eyes of men; her churches have 
 been of the very best that the capacity of the 
 architects and artists of the country allowed, and 
 even in districts comparatively poor in worldly 
 wealth she has built sanctuaries which compare 
 as favorably with the glorious monuments of her 
 235
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 old life as was possible in an atmosphere weak- 
 ened and impoverished by three centuries of 
 aesthetic as well as ethic folly. Since the raising 
 of the present Archbishop of Westminster* to 
 the Sacred College, his Eminence has shown that 
 this quality of leadership was by no means to suffer 
 under his guidance, and that the destiny of the 
 Catholic Church as the restorer of Christian 
 beauty was, with the aid of God, soon to be ac- 
 complished; and such advance as England makes 
 in the next half century in the domain of art will 
 be, unless all signs prove futile, through the exer- 
 tions of the Roman Catholic Church and of the 
 Catholic party in the Established Church. 
 
 Therefore, one by one, in town or city, the new 
 chvurches of the old faith in England stand designed 
 by the most capable architects available, enriched 
 by the work of the most ingenious craftsmen that 
 ofifer, showing to the world in every noble line 
 and mass the devotion and the intelligence that 
 have created them. 
 
 * The late Cardinal Manning. 
 236
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 How utterly, how lamentably different is the 
 case in America! Advancing day by day towards 
 moral honour and dominion, the Roman Catholic 
 Church in our country is represented in her archi- 
 tecture and her art by the most inartistic and 
 unpardonable structures that anywhere arise as 
 insults to God and hindrances to spiritual progress. 
 
 This may seem violent language, but nothing 
 is to be gained by a sensitive glozing of facts; and 
 the truth is that, by her art as a whole, the Roman 
 Church in the United States of America verily 
 appears what Puritan bigotry declared her to be, 
 not what she is in fact. 
 
 It is true that ecclesiastical architecture is at a 
 lower ebb in America than anywhere else in the 
 world, Germany alone excepted. But we do not 
 ask for work which shall compare with the most 
 beautiful sanctuaries reared under different con- 
 ditions in England; we do expect, however, work 
 which shall at least equal that of the Episcopal 
 Church and the Protestant denominations, and 
 that we do not find. On the contrary, if a 
 237
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Roman Catholic who knows something of art 
 and loves beauty goes into an unfamiHar town or 
 city, he is perfectly well aware that he has but to 
 pick out the barest, commonest red brick and 
 granite structure that thrusts itself onto the side- 
 walk, and he will have found his own church. 
 It is possible to lament this fact, not to deny 
 or palliate it. 
 
 Let me describe two churches with which I am 
 acquainted in one of our eastern states; they repre- 
 sent very accurately the average in this region. The 
 first is in one of the largest cities of a vast diocese. 
 It is in no architectural style whatever, but of a 
 quality of design on which any educated archi- 
 tect would look with horror. It is shapeless and 
 monstrous, built of a smooth face-brick with 
 cheap brownstone trimmings; bands of black and 
 fancy brick deface its walls; the arches of its 
 gaunt windows are double segmental, in the 
 vulgar fashion of 1870; trivial buttresses, weak 
 and useless columns, ready-made carvings, insult 
 the intelligence at every point. Outwardly, it is 
 238
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 bald and vulgar; it has the appearance of a grain 
 elevator overlaid with ready-made impertinences 
 which delude themselves into thinking they are 
 ornaments. 
 
 Inside the effect is worse: the columns are cylin- 
 ders of polished Scotch granite and Quincy granite 
 alternately; the capitals are cast iron, painted with 
 bronze paint; the walls are stencilled in olive 
 green and a reddish magenta, in the foolish and 
 violent patterns which fifteen years ago were, in 
 some quarters, considered "high art"; the win- 
 dows are filled with loud Munich glass in colours, 
 which set one's teeth on edge. From the garishly 
 frescoed ceiling, which follows the slope of the 
 high-pitched roof, and is broken by frivolous 
 trusses, the iron portions of which are painted 
 with bronze powder, hang the chandeliers of 
 stamped brass, vividly lacquered; the pews are of 
 yellow chestnut, their ends sawed into fantastic 
 patterns, with discs of cheap, imitation marble 
 set in. In the sanctuary stands the high altar 
 of bluish-white marble, ready-made, and in its 
 239
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 frantic elaboration looking, alas! like a glorified 
 soda fountain. The altars of the Blessed Virgin 
 and St. Joseph are in the same foolish style, and 
 over each stands an image painted in the crudest 
 colours. 
 
 I took an Unitarian to this church once, for the 
 rector is a noble priest, eloquent and benign; while 
 the music, though excessively modern, is perfectly 
 rendered. Afterwards he said: "You may as 
 well stop trying to convert me from Unitarianisra 
 unless you can take me to some place where I am 
 not struck deaf and blind by artistic horrors." 
 And he would never go to this particular church 
 again. 
 
 The second example stands in one of the most 
 beautiful suburbs of Boston. Money was cer- 
 tainly not wanting for an excellent church; there 
 was an extraordinary amount appropriated. This 
 is what exists: a high, narrow barn of bright red 
 brick, laid in black mortar; the trimmings of white 
 granite, the jig-sawed window-tracery painted 
 grey and sanded. The roof is of red, green, and 
 240
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 black slate, laid in crazy patterns; the absurd 
 tower at the west end turns at the top into a frenzy 
 of galvanized iron; and the high spire is covered 
 with elaborate metallic shingles. The interior is 
 a desert, with its little iron columns, fantastical 
 arches, bare walls, all painted and kalsomined a 
 staring white, then lined off with black to repre- 
 sent marble. The Stations of the Cross are 
 inconceivably hideous. A large and most remark- 
 able copy of Titian's "Assumption" hangs over 
 the high altar, which is made of imitation marble, 
 picked out with gilding, and perenially desecrated 
 with artificial flowers. 
 
 As one drives through the green woods of the 
 village, the apparition of this monstrous structure, 
 standing in a dusty quadrangle, is simply shocking, 
 and the effect of the interior so garish that the 
 devotional spirit of the average mortal is instantly 
 extinguished. 
 
 In the city where the first example stands there 
 are many other religious edifices almost as bad; 
 notably a Baptist chapel, and two belonging to the 
 241
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Methodists. But these were all built twenty years 
 ago, while the other is but a few years old; built 
 at the very time when the local Episcopalians and 
 Presbyterians were testifying in stone to their 
 own sagacity and the supreme genius of their 
 architects. 
 
 In the village where the second example turns 
 the harmony of a beautiful landscape into grating 
 discord there is nothing comparable to it, while 
 there is an Episcopal church that might have been 
 built in the fifteenth century in Warwickshire, 
 and an Unitarian structure which is a perpetual 
 delight, and which draws every Sunday scores of 
 people who care nothing for the particular tenets 
 of the denomination, but who find a certain hap- 
 piness in its cool and chaste interior, and its i\y- 
 covered walls rising amid great elms. 
 
 These new churches are fair samples of what 
 one may find in New England, a section of country 
 which is weary of Puritanism and its reaction, and 
 is reaching out towards Catholicism again. Can 
 such temples help convince the searchers after 
 242
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 God of the majesty of the Catholic Faith? can 
 they draw the brilliantly educated, refined, trav- 
 elled infidels and agnostics through appeals to 
 their cramped and starved emotionalism? If the 
 Roman Catholic architecture of to-day represented 
 exactly the Roman Catholic Church of to-day, 
 silence might be commendable; but it is the very 
 fact that it does not do so, but that on the contrary 
 it misrepresents it maliciously and fatally, which 
 makes scorn and invective the only resort of a 
 critic with an honest heart. 
 
 To the traveller fresh from Europe, filled with 
 the memory of the immortal Gothic monuments 
 of the Catholic faith in the British Isles (empty, 
 swept, and garnished, it is true, but still ineffably 
 beautiful with the beauty of the sleeping princess 
 in the fairy tale), filled also with the memory of 
 the harmonious new structures, which the intel- 
 ligence of "Romanism" is building on every 
 hand; or to him who comes back with the vision 
 of Mass or vespers in St. Mark's at Venice, or in 
 the cathedrals of Seville or Sienna, still lingering 
 243
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 with him — to such an one the Roman CathoUc 
 churches of the United States are — let it be said 
 plainly — a fear and a scandal. He may go to 
 the cathedral in the city of New York, and find 
 much that he loved across the water: for St. Pat- 
 rick's, consecrated by real artistic reverence and 
 thoroughness, is no unworthy pile; or he may go 
 with great edification to St. Paul's, massive, rest- 
 ful, solemn, a memorial before God of human 
 honour and sense of beauty; he may find two or 
 three other churches where he can worship without 
 utterly shutting himself up, for duty's sake, from 
 outward impressions; but what will he suflfer in 
 nine cases out of ten ? A novel shock to his devo- 
 tion and veneration; an offence to every aesthetic 
 sense which God has given him. The same is 
 doubly true of Boston. The Cathedral has out- 
 ward dignity and reserve; and but for its gas-pipe 
 columns and very ugly windows and sad-coloured 
 walls would be passably majestic and beautiful. 
 Despite its unfortunate site, despite the fact 
 that, like every other Roman cathedral in 
 244
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 our Republic, it has no proper choir and chancel, 
 it is yet a noble and worthy building. But apart 
 from this, is there one Roman Catholic church in 
 all Boston which glorifies God by its material 
 worth, and spreads the faith by its charm? I do 
 not know of one; and I do know of many poor, 
 cultured souls who, attending High Mass here 
 and there, hungry for the food of spiritual 
 beauty, have sorrowfully gone away, repelled, 
 not more by the operatic music, the loud unlovely 
 vestments, than by the stucco and imitations, 
 the tawdry ornament, and the harsh, violent 
 decoration. 
 
 And as for the country churches, where can one 
 be found which can compare with those the Epis- 
 copal Church is building right and left? 
 
 Now this condition of things can only be looked 
 on as bad in the extreme, and for these reasons: 
 In the first place, it is disobedient, irreverent, 
 sometimes almost blasphemous; in the second 
 place, it is libellous and misleading; and in the 
 third place, it defeats in large measure the ends the 
 245
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Church prays for and labours to attain. Let me 
 say a word on each of these three points. 
 
 By divine command, as well as by all the higher 
 instincts of our nature, we are told to render unto 
 God of our best, to give Him of our treasure and 
 our riches; nor will He accept that on which we 
 lay little value, or which is inferior and second- 
 rate. The best that we have is poor and insuffi- 
 cient enough; how then can we come before Him 
 bringing in our hands those things which we our- 
 selves know to be merely expedient, and represent- 
 ing in no wise what we can afiford and obtain? 
 ^Moreover, does not our sense of fitness, our rational 
 instinct, teach us that in the tabernacle where 
 God Himself is content to enter and dwell, where 
 daily in the presence of saints and angels are 
 celebrated the divine mysteries of the Catholic 
 faith, where is repeated for the saving of man the 
 awful Sacrifice of Calvary — does not our instinct 
 teach us that hither should be brought only the 
 choicest that we possess, the highest art, the most 
 precious ornaments, the most costly treasure that 
 246
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 we can afford, all the wealth of noble art and 
 craftsmanship, the fruit of the ripe genius of the 
 truest architects and sculptors and painters alive? 
 Such was always the belief and the action of 
 the historic Church of God from the days of the 
 building of the Ark of the Covenant and the 
 Temple, down through the first years of Chris- 
 tianity, the splendours of Byzantium and the 
 solemn glories of Mediaevalism, unto the majesty 
 and luxury of the Renaissance. It was not until 
 the time of the so-called Reformation that the old 
 habits of the people, which had their natural 
 expression through loving sacrifice and precious 
 gifts, changed, in a portion of the world, to a 
 barbarous iconoclasm and a penurious selfishness. 
 As the house of God became the house of man, 
 there were born the bare and ugly meeting-houses, 
 the parsimony and grudging doles of money, 
 wrung from greedy purses, where once had been 
 eager generosity and noble emulation in doing 
 honour to the incarnate Lord. That in Protestant 
 countries Christian art should have ceased, and 
 247
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 anything in the way of architecture be found 
 good enough for God, is perhaps natural; but is 
 it logical that the CathoHc Church should adopt 
 the evil practices of the heresy and schism she 
 condemns? Since the reaction to a higher and 
 more spiritual religion, which began in England 
 with the Oxford movement, there has been a great 
 advance; and now the majority of the Established 
 churches, empty since the pestilence of Puritanism 
 swept through them, are daily growing rich and 
 sweet with new treasures of act, heralding the 
 return of a great people to the ancient Faith. The 
 Catholicism of the present century has wrought 
 exquisitely in England; Protestantism has fallen 
 far behind it. It is only in America that we find 
 the descendants of the iconoclastic schismatics 
 labouring together with the American representa- 
 tives of the Anglican Church to make their houses 
 of worship or religious instruction more acceptable 
 in the sight of God, more attractive to men, 
 while the Roman Catholic Church hangs in 
 the rear, content with shameful structures that 
 248
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 would be looked on as a disgrace by other 
 Christians. 
 
 Is not this a scandal and a reproach? 
 
 In the second place, the present condition of 
 Roman Catholic architecture is belying and mis- 
 leading. Art is always the gauge of civilization, 
 the flowering of an age, the culmination of its 
 highest power. "Show me the art of a time, and 
 I will tell you its .life." The gorgeous, semi- 
 oriental spirit of Byzantium, with all its splendid 
 mysticism, its splendid cruelty, is just as clearly 
 seen in Aya Sophia as are the noble emotionalism 
 and lofty justics of Venice found in St. Mark's, 
 the chivalry and faith of the thirteenth century in 
 Notre Dame de Paris, the dead formalism of the 
 post-Reformation in the London St. Paul's. "By 
 their fruits ye shall know them." We can read 
 the large, empty mockery of the seventeenth and 
 eighteenth centuries in the churches of Wren and 
 Inigo Jones: what should we judge the Roman 
 Catholic Church in America to be, were we to 
 judge her by her churches of the last ten years? 
 249
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 A conviction formed in this way would be very 
 far, would it not, from the truth? — for we all 
 agree that the Church is neither pretentious nor 
 tawdry, shallow nor false, cheap nor second-rate. 
 Yet judged as history justifies us in judging, these 
 would be her characteristics; and these are the 
 very characteristics attributed to her by those 
 who, through their own ignorance, know her only 
 from without. Therefore it is that her archi- 
 tecture is false and misleading, in no way repre- 
 sentative of her; unworthy of her glorious annals, 
 her fame as the mother and guardian of the arts, 
 or of her possible destiny as the director and 
 restorer of civilization. 
 
 How these conditions came about would be 
 hard to say, neither is it under consideration here; 
 the fact remains that the architecture of the Roman 
 Catholic Church slanders her in every detail, and 
 that she owes it to her own past — nay, more, to 
 her own future, to correct so grievous a misrepre- 
 sentation. 
 
 In the third place, contemporary Catholic archi- 
 250
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 tecture, through its visible contradictions of the 
 essential nature of the Church, defeats the very 
 end of missionary labours. 
 
 Art is the most powerful agency for the influence 
 of emotions in the world; it is indeed, in its highest 
 manifestation, the sensible expression of religion 
 itself. It has always been one of the most mobile 
 and potent factors in the advancement of religion; 
 and the failure of Protestantism, as a vital system, 
 has been due, not alone to the crudeness and 
 bitterness of its peculiar theology, but, as well, to 
 its short-sighted antagonism to beauty in all its 
 forms. Again, the great success of the "High- 
 Church" movement in England and America is 
 due as well to its restoration of sumptuous ritual 
 and inspiring architecture, as to its return to the 
 truths of religion, without which the world has 
 found it could not live. 
 
 For the Roman Catholic Church carelessly to 
 
 reject the gigantic and eager aid of art and beauty 
 
 is therefore not alone irreverent and misleading; 
 
 it is deliberately injurious as well. Thousands of 
 
 251
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 men and women, awaking from the illusions 
 of their brief fancy for the self-sufficiency of agnos- 
 ticism, are standing in hesitation, and looking 
 with wistful eyes toward the old Faith, but 
 repelled, at the first step of advance, by the sur- 
 roundings which their culture tells them are illiter- 
 ate, assuming often that behind the disenchanting 
 exterior is only an outworn or retrograde system. 
 Can we blame them ? 
 
 Is it not strange indeed to see the Roman 
 Catholic Church dehberately rejecting the means 
 the Established Chiu"ch in England, the Pres- 
 byterians in Scotland, and the Episcopalians in 
 America are finding so potent, to their great and 
 perpetual profit, blindly continuing to build 
 churches which outwardly repel the enthusiasm 
 of would-be converts? Not every brain can beat 
 out its path to truth by right reason, apart from 
 associations with its accidents. For we are all 
 fallible; we infer the unseen from what we see. 
 
 I have cited England as an example to be fol- 
 lowed. She has many advantages over our own 
 252
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 country. First of all, she has magnificent models 
 before her; she has Westminster and Wells, 
 Gloucester and St. Mary Redcliffe, Tintern and 
 Fountains; the eye which looks on these, the heart 
 which loves them, is already trained. Again, 
 English Roman Catholics have been, and are still 
 claimed to be, the flower of the nation; belonging 
 chiefly to the aristocratic classes, they have always 
 had influence, culture, and wealth, in striking 
 disproportion to their hmited number. They are 
 an illustrious and successful household, whose 
 methods, perfected by long thought and in peace, 
 are superior at every point to those here, inter- 
 rupted perforce by the crying problems of ignorance 
 and poverty, and hampered by the difficulty of 
 welding together the heterogeneous immigrated 
 flock of the present century. Why should not 
 American Catholicism be willing at last to admit 
 all this, and following the classic axiom, think it 
 expedient to learn something from an enemy? 
 For the English are infinitely to the fore in all 
 matters of church reform, thanks in a great meas- 
 253
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ure to the initiative of Cardinal Manning; their 
 prayer-books, their singing, their popular evening 
 devotions, above all their buildings, are beautiful 
 and right. The charm and distinction of their 
 modern churches are not to be realized by those 
 who have not examined them. They are quiet in 
 tone; the confessionals are usually retired in a 
 niche or behind a screen; wood is wood, bronze is 
 bronze; every stall, carving, mosaic, lectern is 
 what it professes to be — no more, no less; there 
 are no paper roses in the vases, no gas-jets in the 
 candelabra. The surpliced choir of men and 
 boys occupies its legitimate place. The pews, 
 or better yet the chairs, are thoroughly comfortable; 
 there is almost always a little shelf for the con- 
 venience of each person, and a small separate 
 kneeling-cushion, to be affixed afterwards to a 
 peg belonging to the seat in front. 
 
 Now, can any Roman Catholic familiar with his 
 
 own ill-constructed churches, especially with those 
 
 in seaside and rural districts, conceive of himself 
 
 as dwelling in such luxury of a Sunday morning? 
 
 254
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 as utterly free to give his whole mind, as he fain 
 would do, to the Divine Presence before him? 
 Would not his children maintain unconsciously 
 more attachment to a church where they do not 
 grow sore at Sunday school from the hard benches, 
 where they cannot kneel on the sharp angles of 
 the wood without at the same time sitting down, 
 and praying against nature in a perpetual fidget? 
 Is it not difficult to impress upon a none-too- 
 Spartan generation that "this is none other than 
 the house of God and the Gate of Heaven," while 
 it feels so much like another locality altogether? 
 In all seriousness, the time has come to consider 
 these things. Perhaps one vital cause of the dis- 
 comfort of such churches is the utter absence of lay 
 co-operation in their erection. It is to be observed 
 that the sanctuary chairs are generally soft and 
 ample enough! But in England, again, the building 
 of the church is the concern of an architect of 
 genius, chosen by the close and friendly conference 
 of priest and people; or better yet, it is the con- 
 cern of some one liberal and enlightened founder. 
 255
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 It is undeniable that piety is not the robust 
 thing it was of old. It endures less; it has to be 
 coaxed upon the way of life. The most seemly 
 and decorous circumstances are needed to-day to 
 support our public worship. Effeminate furnish- 
 ings are not asked for; only ordinary ease, and 
 freedom from distraction and sour moods; whereby 
 much benefit unto eternity would accrue to Chris- 
 tian souls, most of all to the casual soul who 
 hovers upon the threshold and has not the cor- 
 poral courage to come in. Inside, indeed, is 
 salvation. Inside also is an apotheosis of the 
 ugly and annoying. That it should be so is, with 
 no exaggeration, the greatest pity, the greatest 
 blunder in the world. 
 
 It is hard to urge any possible excuse for this 
 mournful condition of things. It is not because 
 competent architects and artisans are wanting, 
 for that they exist is proved by the occasional 
 good structures which appear in the midst of the 
 horrors that stand for Christian architecture in 
 America. It is not because no capacity exists in 
 256
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 the Roman Catholic Church for appreciating able 
 work. It is not because she is unable to purchase 
 the best, for she has always money to give to 
 God's service. Besides, it costs not one cent more 
 to build a fine church than a poor one. The best 
 churches, architecturally, in America are precisely 
 those that cost small sums of money; often it is 
 the very lavishing of money on unnecessary and 
 plebeian embellishment which spoils so many of 
 them. 
 
 Any architect will testify that skill, not dollars, 
 is the means whereby good work takes the place 
 of bad; and for this reason this last excuse is pre- 
 cisely the least defensible which may be offered. 
 Again, the fact that few of our noted architects are 
 Roman Catholics does not debar the Church from 
 availing herself of their talents; for it is surely 
 better to glorify the Almighty by the hands of 
 unbelievers than to wrong Him by the incom- 
 petence of those in the fold. In fact no apology 
 offers itself which can be listened to for a moment, 
 and the abuse certainly seems one which on 
 257
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 every account demands prompt and vigorous 
 battle. 
 
 Surely it is most desirable that the powerful 
 and noble alliance between the Church and 
 art should be restored, after its lapse of two or 
 three centuries. All over the Union, art, mate- 
 rialized and hardened by Puritanism and conse- 
 quent agnosticism, cries for the aid of faith and 
 idealism. By sagacious influence, judicious guid- 
 ance, it may be for the Catholic Church to create 
 in America not only a new religious art, but by 
 social and economic reform to make art once more 
 universal and omnipresent, the property of all 
 men. But even if this may not happen, yet the 
 Church can, nevertheless, hasten the final achieve- 
 ment of this great end by rejecting, once for all, 
 the present pitiable and mendacious makeshifts 
 wherewith she now hides her light, and by accept- 
 ing from none but the greatest architects, sculp- 
 tors, and painters nothing but their best work, and 
 by making her churches, however simple, worthy 
 tabernacles of the living God, visible manifesta- 
 258
 
 ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH 
 
 tions of the solemnity and primacy of the power 
 which has created them, irresistible agents, through 
 the ministry of their thoughtful and impassioned 
 beauty, of the reunion of Christendom and the 
 restoration of the Catholic faith. 
 
 259
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 /^NCE upon a time I made a phrase which 
 ^-^ pleased me then and pleases me now: " Art is 
 the symbolical expression of otherwise inexpress- 
 ible ideas." Like the categorical statements of 
 all great truths, it is, of course, hopelessly partial, 
 and equally incomplete, for that mystic, inex- 
 plicable, yet perfectly definite and determinable 
 thing we call beauty is the only mode of this 
 mysterious voicing, while this same beauty is in 
 itself a sufficient objective for art in many of its 
 phases, without postulating the higher and ulti- 
 mate object which is the communication of ideas 
 incommunicable, as between mind and mind, and 
 to be evoked and transferred only by the sym- 
 bolical language of beauty, which is art. 
 
 Now, as I say, this dual aspect of art has always 
 263
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 been accepted by all races of men from the begin- 
 ning until comparatively recent times, and though 
 of late curious heresies have arisen which have 
 endeavoured — and with some measure of tem- 
 porary success — to substitute weird theories as 
 to the desirability of "painting what one sees," 
 and to applying the same extraordinary principle 
 to the other forms of art (whereby the major part 
 of them have ceased to be art at all), still, the 
 methods and the implements have remained the 
 same, and the same also, with one single exception, 
 the accepted number of the artistic modes. Archi- 
 tecture, painting, sculpture, music, poetry, the 
 drama, — these are still called "Fine Arts," 
 though it is difficult to-day to find in several of 
 these categories any except an academic justifica- 
 tion for so arbitrary a nomenclature. Still, the 
 work is done, and the terminology endures, except 
 in one instance, where a very great art indeed, 
 whether judged from the standpoint of pure beauty 
 or from that of emotional incentive and expression, 
 has been wholly dropped from the category of the 
 264
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 arts. I refer to the Fine Art of religious cere- 
 monial. 
 
 Of course this remains, at least its forms and 
 its symbols, and even its details of visible expres- 
 sion; like architecture, painting, sculpture, and 
 the drama, the forms endure while the essence is 
 lost, but unlike them it has ceased to hold rank 
 as an art of equal grace and potency, and even 
 now, in spite of the reforms effected during the 
 last half century, I fancy that some may experience 
 a feeling of novelty and even of surprise on being 
 told that religious ceremonial is indeed a Fine 
 Art, and by no means the least of these. 
 
 It is simple enough, — the showing how it 
 happened that this became one of the "lost arts." 
 The inevitable outcome of the Renaissance was 
 the destruction of that sense of beauty and of 
 reverence therefor which, until then, had been the 
 inalienable heritage of every man. , The return to 
 barbarism which marked the time, together with the 
 substitution of precedent for proof as a test for 
 beauty, formed a combination that was irresistible. 
 265
 
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 Of the arts architecture succumbed first, in Italy, 
 painting last, and when in the end the glory that 
 had been Bellini and Leonardo, Botticelli and 
 Tintoretto, died in the silly sentimentalities and 
 the leaden inutilities of the seventeenth century, 
 beauty, the last treasure of Pandora's box, took 
 flight back to heaven from whence it came, and if 
 hope remained we were unaware of the fact for a 
 considerable space of time. 
 Then the Renaissance took on a different aspect 
 
 r 
 
 in the North, and became the Reformation, min- 
 gled of the original pagan impulse and the moral 
 revolt from its unendurable manifestationTj Art, 
 dishonoured in the South, acquired in Germany, 
 and later in France and England, the connotation 
 of corruption, and was banned by name; so, with 
 the passive horrors of what passed for art in 
 Rome, and the active repudiation of its very name 
 in the North, beauty was banished from Europe, 
 and the places that once knew it were to know it 
 no more, until after a space it sprang up again in 
 Germany in the guise of music, and, in the very 
 266
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 latest days of all, began to reappear sporadically, 
 here and there, and in many forms, in France 
 and Scandinavia and England. 
 
 And always the names of the great arts remained, 
 except in the case of ceremonial. In the Roman 
 Church the thing itself had endured, but as hardly 
 more than a series of obligatory forms. The 
 passionate impulse of a God-given art was gone, 
 and in its place was come a dutiful obedience to 
 law, and a cheerful acceptance of whatever the 
 world in its folly called beautiful. Worse by far 
 was the northern event, for here, incapable of 
 discriminating between essential evils and the 
 innocent habiliments with which they were clothed, 
 the reformers rejected good dogma with bad 
 morals, just order with its corrupt application, 
 and the eternal necessity of religious ceremonial 
 with the rank criminality of the Renaissance. 
 
 And the hunger for art denied was always there, 
 always in the hearts of men; a hunger inextin- 
 guishable, for art is like food and children, an 
 essential of life. Cast out of its highest heritage 
 267
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 and domain, the worship of God, it established 
 itself lower down in secular and pseudo-religious 
 affairs. As the Church grew cold and silent and 
 empty, unlighted of candle and no longer sweet 
 with the savour of swung incense; as the slow 
 beat of antiphonal chanting died away, as the 
 copes and chasubles and ceremonial vestments, 
 wrought of stiff brocades and heavy with jewels 
 and needlework, gave place to grim black and 
 white, and as the vast body of consecrated sym- 
 bolism and rhythmic movement and ordered act 
 vanished before the varying anarchy of "primi- 
 tive simpHcity" — as these things came to their 
 perfect fruition in the great Protestant Order of 
 Worship, wherefrom all beauty had utterly van- 
 ished, the rejected Art of Ceremonial found its 
 compensation elsewhere. At Court ceremonialism 
 achieved a scrupulous formality that would put to 
 shame a Pontifical High Mass in St. John Lateran. 
 Free Masonry, with its gorgeous ritual and in- 
 tricate symbolism, welcomed the thousands of 
 emancipated intellects that, once outside the 
 268
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 Lodge, would mob a priest who put on a vestment 
 or allowed two small candles on the altar of his 
 church. New secret orders sprung up, each vying 
 with the other in ceremonial elaboration to answer 
 the clamorous demand of the logical male for a 
 chance to participate in a ritual he scoffed at in 
 the Sanctuary. The high ritual of visiting cards, 
 the solemn ceremonial of the white cravat, the 
 silk hat, and the creased trousers, the stately litur- 
 gies of good society, all answered the cravings of 
 men for the union of form and law; even the 
 reformed and rationalized religionists themselves 
 worked out a kind of sad parody of the old dead 
 art. I myself remember, years ago, in an Unita- 
 rian meeting-house far away in the country, how, 
 when the last hymn was sung by the choir from 
 the rostrum at the back of the room, it was the 
 sacred custom that all the congregation should 
 rise, and, turning their backs on the minister, 
 "face the music," and so stand until the end of 
 the hymn. 
 Pure ritualism, of course, and pure ritualism 
 269
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the beautiful system, once in vogue, whereby 
 gentlemen, on going into church, sat, leaned for- 
 ward, placed their hats over their faces, and, 
 presumably, devoted themselves to prayer. Of a 
 piece, all of this, with the sign of the Cross, and 
 holy water, and genuflection, no different except 
 that the latter are significant in their symbolism, 
 and fired with beauty and the enormous potency 
 of ancient and changeless things, while the former 
 are empty and ugly and forlorn; the plated ice- 
 pitcher beside the jewelled chalice. 
 
 Men have not outlived ceremonial, religious or 
 secular: they hunger for it, fight for it, die for it, 
 but some maggot in their brains has told them to 
 deny it where it is imperative, demand it where it 
 is unessential, while the strange old Puritan loath- 
 ing for beautiful things bewrays them still, and 
 leads them to prefer a frock coat and white tie to 
 an embroidered cope and jewelled mitre, as it 
 leads their women-kind to blanch at the thought 
 of going to a Court at Buckingham Palace without 
 three white ostrich plumes in their hair, while 
 270
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 they regard with perfect equanimity the awesome 
 spectacle of a fancifully shaven clergyman cele- 
 brating the Holy Communion in a "nightgown 
 surplice" and black stole, worn easily over a black 
 "sack suit." 
 
 But why, you may ask, are cope and mitre 
 preferable to the justly celebrated "magpie'' of 
 the Anglican Bishop, or alb, amice, and chasuble 
 to a modest surplice, or indeed a seemly frock 
 coat? Why a tonsure rather than side whiskers? 
 Why Catholic liturgies and ceremonial to those of 
 the Plymouth Brethren, the Seventh Day Baptist 
 or the Christian Scientist? The question I have 
 placed on your lips is opportune, for the answer is 
 ready: because the old things are beautiful and 
 significant, the new ugly and insignificant. Let 
 us take the question of beauty and ugliness first. 
 
 Now, as I have tried to show elsewhere, * beauty, 
 as such, is a perfectly definite thing, but the cri- 
 teria whereby it is judged are not those of what is 
 
 * Impressions of Japanese Architecture and the Allied 
 Arts. Chapter VIII. 
 
 271
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 known as "reason," but those other which are 
 exactly as authoritative, and derive, not from the 
 workings of the physical mind, but from the pro- 
 cesses of the spiritual intelligence. Whether this, 
 which is the supreme intelligence of man, is the 
 result of inherited experience, or of that "elder 
 memory" which endures through myriads of 
 incarnations, being so true Karma, the indestruct- 
 ible through unending mutations, the soul of man, 
 is a question for East and West to determine 
 between themselves. The decision does not 
 touch the issue: the fact remains that beauty is a 
 thing which passes earthly experience, is not to 
 be tested by the standards the individual estab- 
 lishes in his progress between the cradle and the 
 grave, is indeed greater even than race or blood 
 or nationality, being in itself universal, and form- 
 ing almost the only definite and concrete and 
 visible link that binds men to the infinite. It 
 may almost be called a manifestation of the Ab- 
 solute. 
 
 Now this fact was perfectly well known in his- 
 272
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 tory down to very recent times. A beautiful thing 
 was beautiful, whether it came out of paganism or 
 Buddhism or Mohammedanism or Christianity. 
 The change came with the pagan Renaissance, 
 when a new standard was set up, that of artifice. 
 Since then it has been simply a question of fashion, 
 of precedent. Of course, the old instinct died 
 hard, and for years kept cropping up in the most 
 unexpected places, as for example, in the barbarous 
 Hanoverian epoch in England, with its really 
 exquisite silver and cabinet work; in the astonish- 
 ing Napoleonic episode, with its delicate brass 
 and its exquisite carvings; in the reign of the 
 Stuarts with their fine clothes and their courtly 
 manners. But always this weird recrudescence 
 was as sporadic as were the isolated painters that 
 blazed their pathway of fire, like unpredicted 
 comets, across the night of eclipse. They came 
 unheralded, they vanished unheeded, and the 
 sparks of their trail kindled no world conflagra- 
 tion behind them. 
 
 And the new standard continued unchallenged, 
 273
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 until now, when the thought of beauty as an abso- 
 lute thing is unfamiliar, unwelcome, and flatly 
 denied. Hence, the Shaker dance (to confine 
 ourselves only to the fine-art of ceremonial), the 
 trombones and calashes of the Salvation Army, 
 the negro camp-meeting, the " responsive readings " 
 of the Protestant denominations, the "magpie" 
 of the Episcopalian Bishop, the Munich glass, 
 and Paris brass, and operatic music and aniline 
 paper flowers of the Roman Church. — These 
 things are not beautiful, they are hideous, but one 
 can no more prove this than he can demonstrate 
 to the anxious inquirer why Bellini is better than 
 Bodenhausen, Brahms than Cherubini, Browning 
 than Sir Alfred Austin, William of Wykeham than 
 Sir Christopher Wren. How demonstrate in 
 words the beauty revealed by Tschaikovsky or 
 Dvorak? How accomplish the same for Rossetti 
 and Sargent and St. Gaudens? The thing is 
 impossible: the beauty is there, serene, supreme, 
 final; no casuistry can controvert it, as no ability 
 can establish its perfection beyond cavil: there 
 274
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 are chords and discords, — if the ear perceives no 
 difference it is useless to argue about it. 
 
 Hence, it is quite unnecessary for me to prove 
 that the ceremonial of Protestantism is ugly, that 
 of the Mediaeval Church beautiful. The fact may 
 be stated, but the statement is sufficient. 
 
 In the matter of significance (which you may 
 remember was the second point in the indictment 
 against the unceremoniousness of modern things), 
 while it is true that the old was indeed supremely 
 significant, being the absolutely adequate lan- 
 guage for the expression of the highest truths, it 
 is perhaps hardly fair to say that Protestant cere- 
 monial is not significant: insignificant it surely is, 
 using the word in its most common sense, for it 
 usually fails to express, either beautifully or con- 
 vincingly, the elements of dignity in the principles 
 it strives to manifest. "Experience meetings" 
 and "revivals" and camp-meetings do not pro- 
 claim freedom of conscience in such a way that it 
 would be noticed; the "exercises" of the evangel- 
 ical denominations fail in a way to express with 
 275
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 power and delicacy the doctrines of predestination 
 and salvation by faith. The lawn tie, worn with 
 a frock coat, while admittedly a lofty flight of the 
 ceremonial imagination, does not fully express 
 "the dissidence of Dissent and the protest of 
 Protestantism"; even the full beard and the shaven 
 upper lip are less perfectly lucid in their teaching 
 than the tonsure. One may even venture to say, 
 perhaps, that "praying into one's hat" fails in a 
 measure to express quite clearly the spirit of the 
 Reformation. If in the creation of a substitute 
 beauty Protestantism has failed, it has also fallen 
 short of perfect success in its endeavours to give 
 tongue to its essential principles. On the other 
 hand it is quite true that CathoHc ceremonial 
 would be even more out of place, for it was made 
 into a fine art for the single purpose of expressing 
 the idea of Sacramentalism, and Sacramentalism 
 has been quite abandoned by the emancipated 
 intellects of the new era, whether they call them- 
 selves Protestants or rationalists or ethical cultur- 
 ists or atheists. Now quite the most wonderful 
 276
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 thing about the CathoHc Church is that it pro- 
 claimed Sacramentalism as its essential quality 
 as an organization, thus discovering what is really 
 the secret of the Universe. The world of which 
 we have cognition is purely sacramental in its 
 nature and its manifestations, which is perhaps 
 why the Catholic Faith is the only scientific effort 
 at a solution of the great problem. Now beauty 
 is sacramental in essence, for it is "an outward 
 and visible sign" of a spiritual truth or a spiritual 
 experience that passes other expression, and cere- 
 monial, which, as a fine art, deals primarily with 
 beauty, came into existence to voice with 
 perfect potency this greatest of all scientific dis- 
 coveries, Sacramentalism. 
 
 Therefore, when those who deny this great 
 truth, hungering after beauty of form, yet unable 
 to accept the verity behind it, add to their some- 
 what frosty services the glory of painted glass, 
 and vested communion tables, mass music and 
 candles and Gothic architecture, we feel that while 
 this course demonstrates a welcome return of 
 277
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 aesthetic sense, it is perhaps a Httle superficial, 
 since it takes no count of the paramount signifi- 
 cance of ceremonial and of all other forms of art, 
 as language. 
 
 I think we may admit, then, that modern cere- 
 monial is in no exact sense a fine art, since it is 
 not beautiful, and is either unsignificant or signifi- 
 cant of the insignificant. We may admit also that 
 the denial of Sacramentalism rules out of the 
 argument such as avow this denial. The idea 
 must demand expression before we formulate the 
 language necessary for its communication. Of 
 course this elimination narrows the field con- 
 siderably, but there still remain the several branches 
 of the Catholic Church which are soundly Sacra- 
 mental whatever individuals may say, and which 
 must express themselves through ceremonial 
 whatever individuals may think; I desire to urge, 
 therefore, on the Roman and Anglican com- 
 munions the fact that religious ceremonial is a 
 fine art, with all the words imply, and on the 
 former a special attention to the meaning of the 
 278
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 word "fine," on the latter a special attention to 
 the word "art." 
 
 In the first case, while the whole body of cere- 
 monial is preserved in form, the realization leaves 
 something to be desired. It is perhaps somewhat 
 captious to call attention to the fact that the great 
 reform of music, even now in process, was not the 
 only one for which there was a demand in the name 
 of the sanctity of art. The shrilling choir boy 
 and the promiscuous assemblage in the west 
 gallery, who flaunted the saccharine obviousness 
 of the popular song composer, are yielding to the 
 choir of grown men and the decent Gregorian. 
 But there are other points as well: slurred, per- 
 functory ceremonial is just as bad as a slurred, 
 perfunctory picture: "fiddleback" chasubles, ex- 
 aggerated dalmatics, imitation lace, clumsy copes 
 and overgrown mitres, all "made in Germany," 
 of cheap and showy stufifs, embroidered in aniline 
 hues; censers without incense, cut paper flowers, 
 squabbling altar boys, — these are no fit substi- 
 tute for the matchless art of the Middle Ages. In 
 279
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the city in which I am writing, I must go for the 
 pure fine art of ceremonial, not to the Roman 
 cathedral, nor yet to the church of the Jesuits, 
 but to a forlorn old box of a meeting-house now 
 in the hands of a monastic order of the Anglican 
 Church. Therefore in this case I emphasize the 
 word "y^;ie," for the tendency in that part of the 
 Church which has not yielded in the least to 
 the Reformation is to lay stress on the word "art," 
 and to consider it even there in its secondary 
 sense of "artifice." The prescribed things are 
 done after a fashion, but without much apprecia- 
 tion of their significance and their power. When 
 one adds to this the co-ordinate fact that the 
 churches themselves are even worse, from the stand- 
 point of art, one comes to see why, surrounded by 
 myriads of souls sick of rationalism and "liberty 
 of conscience," the accessions from Protestantism 
 are few and far between. 
 
 And how sad it all is! There is no other work 
 of art more entirely perfect than a solemn High 
 Mass, forging its splendid way through the mys- 
 280
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 terious light and the veiHng incense of an old 
 Gothic cathedral, to the sonorous beating of deep 
 Gregorians. It takes rank with, and even above, 
 the other triumphs of art; Parsifal, a Bellini altar- 
 piece, Saul, the King Arthur of Innsbruck. The 
 Church created it as she created all Christian art, 
 and it was at the same time the flowering of faith, 
 the seed of myriad conversions. And now it has 
 become a dead thing, and sometimes ugly, for life 
 has gone from it; it bears the same relation to its 
 great mediaeval type that a Roman temple bears 
 to the Erechtheum. Patience, however; the first 
 step has been taken and church music is being 
 redeemed, perhaps by and by we shall find the 
 leaven working in the stagnant ceremonial itself. 
 
 "A fine ay/;" here we turn to another branch of 
 the Church, and lay stress on the second half of 
 the compound word. Here the case is different, the 
 thing itself was gone for generations, and now, 
 though the other arts are welcomed home with 
 outstretched hands, the greatest of all is given 
 the cold shoulder, except here and there, where the 
 281
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 warmth of the welcome is such as to prejudice 
 those who are ignorant of the real nature of the 
 returning prodigal. In a way this is quite logical, 
 for it must not be forgotten that through every 
 art, when called into the service of the Church, 
 shines a dominant thought, which alone justifies 
 the form. "Ritualism," as it is called, is quite 
 inexcusable if it is founded on a mere love of pretty 
 things: if it is used as a language the idea must lie 
 behind, and the idea that is voiced by Catholic 
 ceremonial is certainly Catholic and sacramental. 
 If there are any that deny that Sacramentalism is 
 the heart's blood of the Church, then they are 
 Protestant and not Catholic, and the established 
 type of Christian ceremonial is not for them. I 
 believe there are such, and if so, they are quite 
 right in being anti-ritualists. It would seem, 
 however, judging from history, the creeds, the 
 canons and the formularies, that the Episcopal 
 Church is sacramental and Catholic, therefore we 
 may ehminate the anti-ceremonial prejudice for 
 the time being, so far as it is based on a fear of 
 282
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 what it teaches. If the Episcopal Church were 
 Protestant, it would be another matter; being 
 Catholic, she is of course debarred from opposition 
 to ceremonial for what it expresses. Yet most 
 violent opposition does exist, largely it seems 
 because of the fact that in the re-acceptance of art 
 as a necessary part of life, it has been forgotten 
 that ceremonial is in itself a fine art. It is called 
 all sorts of strange things, "Romanizing," "mil- 
 linery," "superstition," "formalism." Of late 
 we have been told by an eminent educator that 
 it is a kind of bondage, a slavery of the soul, surely 
 the most curious accusation of them all. The 
 real truth appears to be that these varied epithets 
 are piled up to form the last barricade behind 
 which the defenders of materialism and — shall 
 we say — barbarism, strive desperately to withstand 
 the forces that fight for the restoration of art to 
 its patrimony. There is no slightest difference 
 between this fight and the others that preceded it, 
 and were successively lost; the resistance to good 
 architecture, to music, to painting, to sculpture. 
 283
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 It has taken almost a century of warfare to restore 
 these things, and in the earUer campaigns the 
 fathers and grandfathers of the present "em- 
 battled farmers" contended just as strongly against 
 the "steeple house" and the "kist o' whusles," as 
 do their doughty descendants against religious 
 ceremonial. And in the end the real reason is the 
 same: — *the old, old, Reformation old, hatred of 
 art in the service of religion. I It is a commonplace 
 of science that animosities last generations after 
 the moving cause has been utterly forgotten. I 
 remember a case in point, that of my grandfather. 
 Beginning in 1634, his paternal ancestors had 
 waged a war to the death against the great pine 
 forests of New England: every foot of ground for 
 tillage was won at the price of the life of a great 
 tree, and very soon there was definite enmity 
 between man and the forests that surged against 
 his hard- won acres. Well, two centuries passed, 
 the forests had dwindled to isolated groves, the 
 fields were threatened no more by pine or oak or 
 hemlock, but every year, to the day of his death, 
 284
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 something stirred in the blood of the scion of the 
 forest-fighters, and at fourscore and over he 
 would seize an axe and go forth, covertly but with 
 grim determination, and when he returned the 
 light of war was gone from his face, instinct had 
 achieved, and some cherished shade tree lay long 
 and still in the dust. 
 
 So persists the old hatred of the black days of 
 Edward VI, and Elizabeth and Cromwell, the 
 fierce animosity towards beauty in the service of 
 God, and, whatever the pretext, below is the 
 driving motive that actuated those who were set 
 upon the destruction of religion as it was, and 
 who realized, with a justice absent elsewhere from 
 their dealings, that beauty, tradition, ceremony, 
 and form are the four columns that uphold the 
 material fabric of the temple: shatter them, and 
 the whole wonderful creation crumbles and sinks 
 in dust and ruin, as was the case with the great 
 abbeys of England, when, after the Henrician Reign 
 of Terror, the destroyers undermined the four great 
 piers of the crossing, and so brought all to an end. 
 285
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Here again, however, we may have courage, for 
 as in the Roman Church the reform of music 
 foreshadows the reform of ceremonial, so in the 
 AngHcan Church the restoration of architecture, 
 painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts gives 
 reliable promise of the same restoration of cere- 
 monial. And how imperative is the need may 
 easily be seen. Of course, much of that which is 
 essential has been preserved, and a certain dignity 
 and self-respect have been retained when they have 
 vanished from amongst those who have preserved 
 more of the art itself: for this we are grateful, for 
 it might have befallen otherwise, but how far we 
 are yet from a restoration of religious art in its 
 completeness may be seen by a visit to any Eng- 
 lish cathedral of a Sunday or to the average parish 
 church in America. I cannot at the moment 
 recall any religious service which makes so many 
 pretensions and is yet so abhorrently void of 
 beauty as the late celebration of the Holy Com- 
 munion in the typical English cathedral. Apart 
 from the singing, which is marvellous in its tech- 
 286
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 nical perfection, there is nothing which can be 
 considered acceptable as an approximation to 
 true religious ceremonial, and the whole is typified 
 by the exit of the blazing and mace-laden beadles, 
 heading a dignified procession of canons, clergy, 
 choir, and congregation, after the close of Solemn 
 High Matins, and the "ante-communion service," 
 leaving three patient old clergymen to say, not to 
 sing, the remainder of the communion service 
 (the great organ so voiceful during matins now 
 being closed and locked), for the benefit of from 
 three to twelve stragglers, mostly strangers. 
 
 And when one looks around at those wonders 
 of perfect art, the cathedrals and churches of 
 England, and sees how they have been preserved, 
 embellished, enriched in their latter years with 
 new altars and windows and embroideries and 
 goldsmith's work: when one considers that almost 
 equal wonder of perfect art, the Prayer Book, and 
 realizes how the whole might be made to live and 
 breathe by the addition of a ceremonial in keeping 
 with fabric and with book, and how, also, such a 
 287
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 change would mean filling the naves of the ca- 
 thedrals again, where now the choir stalls alone 
 are adequate for the accommodation of worship- 
 pers even at a "sung matins," and filling the 
 parish churches too without the aid of the brilliant 
 and magnetic preacher, — when this idea develops 
 one comes to see that it is not at all a question of 
 taste in millinery or predilection in art, but a 
 really burning issue; not one of mere "ritualism," 
 but one of reason and logic and common sense. 
 
 For I return to my first postulate: religious cere- 
 monial is one of the greatest of the fine arts, and 
 when we mimimize it, or effect modern substi- 
 tutes, we are, to say the least, warring against the 
 cause of good art. And in the latter case we are 
 rituahsts still. The august university professor 
 who jeers at ceremonial in church, drapes himself 
 in a voluminous gown of heavy silk, bedecks his 
 back with the rainbow hues of academic hoods, 
 and crowns his head with remarkable gear in 
 which a great tassel of vivid silk is conspicuous. 
 He is quite right, this is art, — of sorts, — and to 
 288
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 be highly commended, but it is flagrant ritualism, 
 and if the head of an university were to do this, 
 how, it may be asked in innocence, should he 
 condemn a Bishop, who wears, instead of cap and 
 gown, a cope and mitre? No, ritualism is a 
 primal necessity of the human soul, but it must 
 grow, it cannot be made to order; when the latter 
 course is followed the result may be humorous, it 
 is certainly not edifying. For instance, to me, 
 the Procession of the Wardens with the "collec- 
 tion" is a thought less beautiful and impressive 
 than the Gospel procession: the incense in front, 
 then the processional crucifix between two candle- 
 bearers, then the sub-deacon, bearing the Gospels, 
 finally the Deacon, and all clothed in vestments 
 ancient in honour, reminiscent of centuries of 
 splendid history, beautiful in form, in colour, in 
 materials. Nor, I confess, do I find the "evening 
 communion" of the protesting Protestant "ad- 
 ministered" by some worthy gentleman whose 
 face, it may be, is diversified by tonsorial inepti- 
 tudes, who is robed in the ordinary choir garb, 
 289
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 with a wide black stole, and who fixes himself 
 evangelically at the north end of the "Holy Table," 
 the which is void of cross, light or flower, and is 
 backed by the dual Tables of the Law — and 
 flanked perhaps by the Forbidden Degrees of 
 Matrimony — the whole proceeding in an easy 
 conversational tone, — this, if I may venture to 
 say so, seems to fall short in a way, both in beauty 
 and in significance, of the early Mass, chanted in 
 the dim light of dawn by a proper priest in a 
 "Gothic" chasuble of splendid brocade wrought 
 with holy figures and symbols in exquisite needle- 
 work, while the tall candles flicker before the 
 reredos set with multitudinous saints, and beautiful 
 with the labours of many artificers. Or, for 
 another antithesis, consider the "Protestant Epis- 
 copal" Bishop as he manifests himself in a "re- 
 liable" Diocese. He is clothed in that amazing 
 portent, the traditional "magpie," with its ludi- 
 crous balloon -sleeves of lawn, inherited from the 
 days of the bag wig and "sound churchmanship," 
 and he enters the church of his visitation in a 
 2go
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 casual and easy manner, pacing, mayhap, behind 
 a "mixed choir," whereof the feminine members 
 are vested in the costume of an undergraduate of 
 a male university. On the other hand, your 
 Bishop who knows beauty and the significance of 
 it, and grasps the full moment of tradition, memory, 
 and association; — such an one enters in solemn 
 procession, enveloped in a splendid cope (the 
 most beautiful and dignified ceremonial vesture 
 ever devised) on his head the mitre of spiritual 
 authority, in his hand the great carved crozier of 
 his pastoral office, before him the processional 
 Crucifix with its flanking candles, and the sweet 
 incense that is almost the oldest spiritual symbol 
 in the world. 
 
 And as for the last great test of all, the Solemn 
 High Mass of Catholic tradition, who would 
 presume to put in comparison with it, "Morning 
 Prayer, Litany, and Sermon," or even, for a 
 fairer test, such a service of Holy Communion 
 as wins from judical Diocesans the high praise of 
 perfect "soundness." Surely this is the most 
 291
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 solemn single thing in all the world, demanding 
 every adjunct of perfect beauty that can be brought 
 to its environment, and in the consummate cere- 
 monies of crescent Mediajvalism we find just this, 
 and we do not find it in the modern substitute. 
 The established ceremonies of the High Mass take 
 their place amongst the few supreme triumphs 
 of art in all time: in a way the great artistic com- 
 position takes precedence of all in point of sheer 
 beauty and poignant significance. There is no 
 single building, no picture, no statue, no poem 
 that stands on the same level; even Parsifal is a 
 weak imitation and substitute. In the ceremonial 
 of the Mass, art comes full tide. 
 
 Yet this is denied by sincere and painstaking 
 prelates, rejected by prayerful and scrupulous 
 clergy; reviled by Doctors of Law and by Grand 
 Masters, Royal Arch-Potentates and Eminent Sir 
 Knights; by military gentlemen of some splendour 
 of raiment and of notable punctilio, and by the 
 less logical sex, whose rigidly prescribed vestments 
 match only with the minute and elaborate ritual 
 292
 
 ONE OF THE LOST ARTS 
 
 of their daily life. Why? Ostensibly, in the 
 case of the non-Roman moiety of the Church, and 
 in that of the still operative Protestants, because 
 these things, — pause, dear reader, for a moment, 
 that the full flavour of the explanation may reveal 
 itself to you, — because these things " lead to 
 Rome"! Well, in the face of this, there is nothing 
 to be said. Of course, the lack of them "leads to 
 Rome," for if this much maligned geographical 
 expression persists in answering an indestructible 
 hunger of the human soul, and no other eccle- 
 siastical entity, geographical or dogmatic, will do 
 so, then perforce "to Rome" we must go, not 
 alone because we are hungry for visible beauty 
 and must have it, but because we are starving for 
 the spiritual beauty we know lies behind the 
 outer show, and this we will have at any cost. 
 
 This is, as I say, the ostensible reason, but 
 however honestly it is alleged — and strange 
 things are honestly held nowadays -f- the real 
 reason is the inherited hatred of beauty as a min- 
 ister of God; the persistent fury of the Puritan 
 293
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 forest-fighter, recrudescent in the shame-faced 
 but helpless heir of animosities in which he had no 
 part. "The fathers ate sour fruit, and the chil- 
 dren's teeth are set on edge," therefore they gnash 
 them at poor pathetic Beauty when she comes to 
 do God service, even as they gnashed them once 
 at her ministrations in secular things. The fathers 
 prohibited bear-baiting, "not because it gave 
 pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to 
 the spectators," and the sons rise up against 
 beauty less because it is in itself a part of the ser- 
 vice of God enjoined on us, than because it gives 
 spiritual joy to travailing mankind, leading them 
 out of the paths of materialism into the sweet 
 pastures of spiritual enlightenment. 
 
 294
 
 THE CASE AGAINST THE ECOLE 
 DES BEAUX ARTS
 
 THE CASE AGAINST THE ECOLE DES 
 BEAUX ARTS 
 
 ^ I^HE title which I have selected for the very 
 short paper I am going to beg you to listen 
 to with such Christian charity as you possess, 
 is hardly descriptive. It is a little in the line of a 
 "scare-head," and I want to modify it. I do not 
 mean savagely to attack the ficole des Beaux Arts, 
 and by implication all other architectural schools 
 where the Academic system of instruction is in 
 vogue. If I wanted to I should not have the right, 
 for I have never had any practical experience in 
 any school of that kind. I should be adopting the 
 malodorous tactics of a certain notorious personage 
 in this city, who proceeded to damn the exquisite 
 statue of a Bacchante now flitting elusively through 
 the courts of the Library, before he had seen it. 
 What I do want to attempt, however, is an 
 297
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 inquiry into the methods and results of this sys- 
 tem of education, with a view to finding out if it 
 is not defective in certain directions. 
 
 Ever since I came to look upon church building 
 as one of the most promising fields of architecture, 
 and as one of the most dignified and satisfying as 
 well, I have been thinking more or less about the 
 present system of architectural instruction which 
 by implication denies that architecture existed 
 between the fall of Rome and the sixteenth cen- 
 tury, and also ignores the fact that churches are 
 ever built nowadays, or that they are a legitimate 
 subject for an architect's consideration. The 
 more I thought about this curious phenomenon 
 the more remarkable it appeared, but I set it down 
 to the rationalism that until a few years ago per- 
 vaded every department of life. Of course it was 
 impossible for atheism to acknowledge any beauty 
 in the work which owed its genius and its very 
 existence to an "exploded superstition," while 
 it was equally impossible that the buildings which 
 were grotesque anachronisms, the outward ex- 
 298
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 pression of a fast perishing folly, should be looked 
 on as matters of the least importance. Under the 
 circumstances, ancient and neo-pagan were the 
 only modes of civilization that offered anything 
 of value as models for contemporary architecture. 
 I still think this motive lay at the bottom of the 
 thing when the present method of architectural 
 education was evolved, but during the last year or 
 two various events have occurred which have led 
 me to think that other criticisms might be brought 
 against the accepted system besides this that it 
 ignored a very important branch of the art, and 
 did nothing to assist students to obtain some 
 knowledge that would be of use to them in this 
 field. Among other things I became convinced 
 that much time was wasted in acquiring useless 
 methods and information, that false canons of 
 taste were often laid down, that enormous labour 
 was lavished in cramming the minds of students 
 with the most minute details of construction, 
 strength of materials, etc., in order to fit them for 
 practical work, while almost nothing was done to 
 299
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 help them grasp only problems that in all 
 probability would come before them for the first 
 ten years of their practice. 
 
 I mean to speak of these things more explicitly 
 by and by, but first I want to tell you just what 
 the events were which brought me to my present 
 condition of partial antagonism to this system of 
 classical education. 
 
 Well, first of all: sometime ago I knew a young 
 draughtsman, who was enthusiastic and eager to 
 acquire all the useful information he could find. 
 He joined a class in planing, directed by a very 
 brilliant representative of that system which 
 prides itself enormously on its prowess in this 
 particular direction. There was trouble from the 
 start. This boy was practical to a degree, and 
 loaded with common sense. He soon found out 
 that the questions of convenience in arrangement 
 of rooms, economy of space, adaptation to function, 
 harmony with environment, stylistic significance, 
 were secondary considerations. There was one 
 great thing to be obtained, and that was a 
 300
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 decorative plan. The lights and darks must be 
 well proportioned. Formality and perfect balance 
 were indispensable, and a finely drawn piece of 
 mosaic flooring made amends for a deplorable 
 lack of light. In fact, he was really engaged in 
 decorative design, not in architectural planning. 
 
 Diplomatic relations finally ceased in this wise. 
 He grew weary of designing impossible city halls 
 and inadmissible Italian villas, and handed in — 
 horrible to relate — a scheme for a large village 
 church, English Perpendicular in style, and 
 carefully designed with reference to its function, 
 its connotation, and its significance. Of course, 
 he did very wrong to do this, — he should have 
 known that a country church is not to be spoken 
 of in academic society. The plans went in, 
 however, and there was war. When the instructor 
 got his breath, he confronted the awful situation 
 bravely — for he was a conscientious man. I saw 
 the result afterwards, when the smoke had cleared 
 a little. What had been a good plan, well adapted 
 to its function, and laid out with due regard to 
 301
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 cost and surroundings, irregular, of course, and 
 capable of very picturesque though quiet treat- 
 ment, had become a nice study in black lines and 
 spots, and white areas beautifully proportioned 
 to them. It was admirably done, and would 
 have made a charming figure in a formal wall 
 paper, but it would hardly have commended itself 
 to a building committee. So far as the exterior 
 was concerned, the revolution was complete. 
 Every vestige of English spirit was gone, 
 and Montmartian Romanesque had taken its 
 place. 
 
 A little later, a friend in whom I was very much 
 interested, and who was just about to graduate 
 from the architectural department of a prominent 
 school, asked me if I did not think it would be a 
 good idea for him to submit as his thesis a design 
 for a Gothic church. I remembered the expe- 
 rience of my friend, the draughtsman, and tried 
 to dissuade him from his insane idea. He per- 
 sisted and fought nobly. Day after day, with 
 tears in his eyes, and profanity on his lips, he told 
 302
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 me how his cherished plan was being maltreated, 
 until it was fast becoming the kind of thing one 
 finds in trade books on church building. At last 
 he gave up the unequal fight, for he had been 
 kindly but firmly advised that he was running an 
 awful risk in sending in such a thing as a thesis 
 drawing of a Gothic church. He began again, 
 and achieved a proud success with an Italian 
 villa, in which the toilet-room and breakfast- 
 room were beautiful oval apartments of equal 
 size, balancing nicely, while the library occupied 
 one projecting wing, the kitchen the other, the 
 external treatment being identical. 
 
 Finally, one of our boys wanted to take a course 
 in an architectural school, and asked my advice 
 as to where he should go. I did my best to study 
 up these schools, and in the process found out 
 things I had never known before. In one school 
 the academic rendering was something exquisite, 
 and the beauty of the transparent shadows and 
 the lovely smalt trees was only equalled by the 
 fabulous size of the sheets of paper on which a 
 3°3
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 little square of plan was magnificently surrounded 
 by the most wonderful gardens. I reflected, 
 however, that it took a month of a boy's life to 
 create one of these charming things, and that 
 after he left the school no conceivable circum- 
 stances could arise which would lead him to in- 
 dulge in this form of decorative art, and so 
 modified my admiration. 
 
 In another school I was assured that the system 
 of instruction was modelled with absolute fidelity 
 on that of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but I reflected 
 that in America a young architect's duties are 
 chiefly the designing of country houses and 
 churches, and that the results achieved in these 
 lines by the output of the Ecole — so far as France 
 is concerned — are not brilliantly successful. 
 
 The result of my experiences and investigations 
 was that I became convinced that the accepted 
 system of education, as we see it in the £lcole, and 
 in practically all but one or two of the schools in 
 America, did more harm than good, and I want 
 to justify this position if I can. 
 304
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 First of all, however, I must declare my intense 
 admiration for certain principles held in this 
 system, and my gratitude for the influence exerted. 
 It is unnecessary to plead for these things, however, 
 for everyone admits them. One is the steady 
 curbing of a student's tendencies towards fan- 
 tastic originality, silly picturesqueness, crazy 
 irregularity. I doubt if this work could be done 
 better than it is, and it is imperative. It is about 
 the only thing that can reform architecture in 
 America, and redeem it from its only too often 
 fantastic absurdity. There are many other fine 
 points in the system: the thorough grounding it 
 gives in the classical orders, the training it affords 
 in proportion and composition, the solid kernel 
 of good in its system of planning. But if none of 
 these existed, the first raison d'etre, the civiliza- 
 tion of barbaric impulses, would be cause for 
 praise and admiration. 
 
 On the other hand, the faults are, I think, quite 
 as clear and deserving of sincere condemnation. 
 
 Many of these faults, while not very grave in 
 305
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 themselves, have a mischievous effect, for the 
 reason that in too many cases young men are 
 subjected to them at just the wrong time. If a 
 man could have three or four years' experience in 
 an architect's office, then travel for a year or two 
 on the Continent and in England, he would be 
 proof against bad influence: his taste would be 
 formed, practical ideas and the nature of every- 
 day requirements would be instilled into him, and 
 he would then be in a position to reject the bad 
 and accept the good. And he would do this. 
 Very few men, after a little solid experience and a 
 fair acquaintance with the architecture of Europe, 
 could fail to see through some of the methods and 
 principles with which they would come in contact 
 in the Ecole. This course is seldom pursued, 
 however, and a raw, unformed youth goes through 
 an American architectural school, and then passes 
 directly to the Ecole, and the result is that in 
 many cases his taste is vitiated, and he is in no 
 position to choose from the great good that is 
 offered him together with much of what I think 
 306
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 very bad, and which if he would succeed he must 
 diligently forget. 
 
 I have had occasion to advise many boys as to 
 how they should educate themselves for the prac- 
 tice of the architectural profession, and in every 
 case I have urged them to get a little practical 
 experience first, then see all they can of the art of 
 the past, and then go to some academic school. 
 
 Admitting, then, that the students themselves 
 are largely to blame for the harm done them, 
 since they start at the wrong end, let us see just 
 what the harm is, — at least, let me suggest what 
 it seems to me to be, for I can only express my 
 own feelings in the matter, I have no right to 
 claim to represent anyone else. 
 
 In the first place, the education in design is not 
 practical, it does almost nothing to fit a man for 
 actual practice. In the American schools a 
 student is crammed with stores of information 
 that belong by rights to civil engineers, sanitary 
 engineers, specialists and experts. Judging from 
 the list of studies in any four-year course, one 
 307
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 would conclude that the object was to turn out 
 men who could start in practice the day after they 
 took their degree, armed at every point, and 
 absolutely independent of experts and engineers 
 for all time. Look at the artistic side, and you 
 find the exact reverse. In nine cases out of ten, 
 a man just through an architectural course has 
 never designed a country house, an eight-room 
 school-house, a village church, an apartment 
 house, or any other of the very things which alone 
 he can get a chance at for the first ten years of 
 his professional life. His custom houses, post- 
 offices, city halls, public baths, have been designed 
 for ten-acre lots, and with a ward politician's disre- 
 gard of expense. He has been taught to space 
 his voids and solids with exquisite delicacy, but in 
 almost no case can he yield to this instinct in the 
 future, for the building committee will not allow 
 it. If, by good luck, he gets a chance at some 
 big public building, he lays out the plan on a sys- 
 tem of units, and when it is too late he finds that 
 hot air ducts and exhaust flues have played tag 
 308
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 with the same. He has a twelve-story oflfice- 
 building sprung on him, and looks in vain for 
 scholastic precedent. Finally, in despair, he 
 takes a lot of school theses and pastes them to- 
 gether, one above the other, and trusts to the luck 
 of the Profession to carry him through. 
 
 Submit this statement to an advocate of the 
 schools, and he will wave it away. "We teach 
 the great, fundamental principles of the art, we 
 cannot concern ourselves with the details." But 
 this is just what the poor architect has to do, and, 
 until he has made his reputation designing houses 
 and churches, and his fortune building steel-framed 
 slices of office buildings, he must keep his mouth 
 shut as to the great principles of the art. 
 
 Of course it seems to me that it is little short of 
 a crime for any alleged system of architectural 
 instruction to ignore the great centuries of the 
 Middle Ages, to deny that there ever was such a 
 thing as Gothic architecture, and to forget that 
 churches are still to be built. I am an avowed 
 fanatic on these points, and so I dare not say very 
 309
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 much about them, but it is my solemn conviction 
 that if we ever succeed in civilizing ourselves, we 
 shall one day admit that Gothic architecture is 
 just as perfect in style, just as solidly based on 
 knowable laws, just as representative of high 
 civilization, as the architecture of corrupt and 
 tottering Rome and of the immoral Renaissance, 
 while in impulse, in spiritual power, in beauty of 
 line, and mass, and light and shade, it is incom- 
 parably more worthy of study and of admiration. 
 
 Nor is the argument that it is unfitted to modern 
 uses valid for a moment. It does not serve in the 
 matter of office buildings and synagogues and 
 railway stations and city halls, of course. It is 
 out of harmony with modern civilization, it is an 
 anachronism: that also is sure. But it is in har- 
 mony with the nature of that still vital institu- 
 tion, — the Christian Church, which, thank God, 
 still is a blazing anachronism. 
 
 Yet the great period of architecture, when it 
 was essentially Christian, that period which 
 expressed itself in a form which is incomparable 
 310
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 for splendour of imagination, loftiness of spirit, 
 sublimity of inspiration, absolute, abstract beauty 
 of form and composition and design, has no place 
 in the modern system of academic instruction, 
 and I propose to hold with all the vigour I can 
 command, that a system that wilfully shuts its 
 eyes to all this marvellous period of art, so in- 
 structive, so civilizing, so full of inspiration, is 
 a bad system. 
 
 Here is another criticism on a different line. In 
 nearly all the schools which follow the Ecole, a 
 vast amount of time is given to the matter of 
 academic rendering. I wish I knew just what 
 this training is supposed to accomplish. We live 
 in a period when an architect who knows how to 
 render his drawings is reduced to the level of 
 those who do not, and he must sacrifice his ability 
 for the good of a less competent man. Therefore, 
 a competition perspective is "rendered in line 
 only, without shadows or accessories, and with 
 one figure introduced to give scale." Under the 
 circumstances, the old fetish of academic render- 
 s'
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 ing would seem to be no longer potent, but it is 
 dominant just the same, and hundreds of valuable 
 hours are wasted by misled students, in making 
 wonderful drawings that are without the least 
 practical use whatever. Neither are they beau- 
 tiful. They are wonderful as examples of manual 
 dexterity, but I confess I cannot see that they are 
 anything more, and the time lavished on them 
 might, I think, be at least equally well employed 
 in learning that there are in existence buildings in 
 Chartres, and Amiens, and Gloucester, and 
 Venice which may possibly be worth looking at. 
 I have already referred to the defects in the 
 boasted academic system of planning. Let me 
 specify them a little more carefully. They appear 
 to me to be very serious. I have studied academic 
 plans a good deal, and it seems to me that the 
 majority of them show signs of having been 
 studied out as problems in decoration, not in 
 building. That is, the student has had in mind 
 the making of a decorative design which should 
 be pleasing to the eye, not necessarily compact 
 312
 
 EC OLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 in arrangement, convenient in disposition and 
 indicative of fine effects in actual construction. 
 Looked at as an ornamental figure, the typical 
 academic plan is very successful. In a competi- 
 tion it would receive no consideration. If used 
 as a working plan the resulting structure would be 
 a failure. 
 
 Again, in the Ecole at least, I know it to be a 
 fact that the only drawings that are considered 
 as important are the first-floor plan and the front 
 elevation. The former must be powerful and 
 imposing — on paper; the second-floor plan may 
 come any way, and as for the section, it is worked 
 out in the last day, principally by "niggers." I 
 believe the general experience is that it never 
 comes out right, but this doesn't matter, for con- 
 stantly designs are placed first, the sections of 
 which show that they could not be constructed, 
 while the second-floor plans show chimneys starting 
 from the ceilings of '^salles des fetes, ^' or anywhere 
 else, and partitions without any support whatever. 
 And here also i.s a point to be severely criticised, 
 3^3
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 the undeniable fact that in spite of the apparently 
 severe first year's training in construction, this 
 item is not considered at all in the design, and it 
 does not militate in the least against the success 
 of a plan that the partitions and chimneys on the 
 second floor depend for their support on the same 
 miraculous agency that held Mohammed's coffin 
 suspended in mid-air. 
 
 It is the same in the question of lighting and 
 ventilation. So far as studies are concerned, 
 students are taught enough about these things 
 theoretically, but are they induced to apply their 
 knowledge in actual design ? I am told not, and 
 I have known of innumerable cases where much 
 praised designs have had as features important 
 rooms with a single window in one corner, and 
 school buildings with no provision for ventilation 
 whatever. In the first case, the rooms had to be 
 where they could not be lighted, for the balance 
 of the plan demanded it; in the second, heating 
 and ventilating shafts were omitted because they 
 were ugly and hurt the unity of the plan. 
 314
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 It may be said that the idea of the system is not 
 to teach practical design, but to create in a stu- 
 dent's mind an ideal to which he will afterwards 
 always endeavour to approximate. This may be, 
 but if an ideal is utterly impracticable it is not of 
 much use as an ideal. 
 
 Then here is another criticism, — the last I 
 shall inflict upon you. I know for a fact that in 
 certain schools types of architecture which are 
 inherently and damnably bad are held up to 
 honour over types which are eternally good. 
 Here is an example which came under my notice. 
 The project was a doorway. Among the designs 
 was one rococo to a degree, the columns on either 
 side being of drums, alternating square and round 
 — you know the style. With it was handed in a 
 drawing equally well rendered, but in a pure and 
 delicate version of the early Italian Renaissance. 
 The first represented a style debased and cor- 
 rupted, the second that style while it was pure 
 and admirable. The rococo design was placed 
 first in the award. 
 
 315
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Now this is a small matter, but it is significant, 
 for if it is possible for the academic system to 
 become an agency for the debasing of a student's 
 taste instead of cultivating it, it is a legitimate 
 subject for savage criticism. 
 
 These are some of the reasons a certain class of 
 men have for distrusting the system at present in 
 vogue in architectural schools, and the prejudice 
 is growing, not lessening. Recently, we have 
 seen an honest and a courageous attempt made 
 by various men who have studied in the ficole, to 
 exalt its name and influence. But does this 
 method do away with the distrust of those who 
 cannot accept the teachings of the academic sys- 
 tem? On the contrary, it intensifies them. Un- 
 less I am mistaken, these zealous upholders of the 
 Ecole — nearly all of them masterly architects to 
 whose work one must look up with honest admira- 
 tion — inaugurated this movement with a com- 
 petition drawn on the most approved lines of the 
 ficole des Beaux Arts. I read the programme 
 with delight. Anglomania was not in it. This 
 316
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 was Gallomania, raised to the n"' power. Once 
 more our immortal old friend put in an appearance, 
 the "Wealthy Amateur," with the precious col- 
 umns and amazing tastes; and to prolong the in- 
 fluence of the academic system, draughtsmen 
 were urged to yield to the blandishments of the 
 aforesaid sociological fiction, and assist him to 
 dispose of his white-elephantine columns to 
 academic advantage and the glory of the system. 
 
 I am sure I was not the only one who wondered 
 where was the use of all this; of what possible 
 benefit could it be to young fellows who were 
 trying to earn a living out of architecture. Where 
 was the good ? I confess I could only think of the 
 lamented Mr. Pecksniff, who was such a shining 
 light in the profession, "Well, you might design a 
 pump: now a pump is very chaste practice." 
 
 I am told that the problem this year is on the 
 face of it a complete surrender to Americanism 
 and modernity, being nothing more nor less than 
 a harmless, necessary tavern. This is excellent. 
 Visions rise up at once of a host of drawings, 
 317
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 wrought out in varying styles. One perhaps with 
 the dignified walls and delicate details, the mag- 
 nificent chimneys and fine verandahs of colonial 
 Virginia. Or it may be one that brings back 
 the memory of jolly days in little English country 
 towns, with the amiable bar just behind, and a 
 "pint of bitter" at one's elbow. With this sub- 
 ject the chance for young architects to do work 
 that should be charming, and in every way appro- 
 priate, is infinite. But will any design on English 
 or American lines find favour? Hardly. One 
 would risk little in wagering that the prize plan 
 will be formal, well balanced, decorative, the major 
 and minor axes admirably accented, the foci of 
 interest powerfully "accused"; that its roof will 
 be low and covered with red tiles, and that 
 it would bask in the glare of a Connecticut 
 sun, in the midst of colonnades and pergolas and 
 fountains, and statues shown by little vermillion 
 cubes. 
 
 Well, here is where I bring to an end what you 
 will think a very unbridled tirade, but I assure 
 318
 
 ECOLE DES BEAUX ARTS 
 
 you I mean no harm by it. If anything can curb 
 the ardour of our untamed American spirit as it 
 expresses itself in architecture, it is the influence 
 of academic training. But just because it may 
 do this, it does not follow that the system is im- 
 peccable. For my own part I think it is peccable, 
 and I see no reason why I should not say so. If 
 instead of exalting to the skies the Ecole and all 
 its works, its advocates would try to see whether 
 or no the local and contemporary conditions here 
 in America might not modify its principles to 
 advantage, we might obtain a system which would 
 be above criticism — even of architects who never 
 had any academic training, whereas now we 
 have one which knocks the nonsense out of 
 students, but fails to put much sense in its place; 
 a system which strives to destroy, but does not 
 succeed in building up — in which respect it 
 curiously resembles this dissertation. 
 
 319
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 IN THE UNITED STATES
 
 \'i 'y 
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION IN THE 
 UNITED STATES 
 
 I "\URING the last decade, — since the lecture 
 -^^^ that forms the basis for the preceding 
 paper was written, in fact, — several new schools 
 of architecture have come into being, while in 
 those that then existed there seems a growing 
 consciousness of the fact that after all their pe- 
 culiar function is not the manufacture of special- 
 ists out of the raw material of the common school 
 and the night school and the Schools of Corre- 
 spondence, not the training of consummate 
 draughtsmen or past masters of steel construction, 
 but the making of gentlemen, broad of view, well 
 furnished in their knowledge of history, literature, 
 and comparative civilization, conversant with the 
 theory of art as beauty and as language, masters 
 of the deep principles of design. Such cultured 
 323
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 and scholarly men are then fitted to go on and 
 specialize if they will in the practice of architecture, 
 or any of the arts; but no actual and active work 
 can possibly give that which the schools can offer: 
 and recognizing this, there is a manifest tendency 
 towards a broadening and deepening of scholastic 
 curricula. As a consequence those schools which 
 still hold to the old idea of the breeding of special- 
 ists, which ignore the elements that go to the 
 founding of a broad base of culture, learning, and 
 refinement, harping still on the prior rights of 
 practice design, rendering, and building construc- 
 tion, are falling to the rear, and must continue 
 to do so until a more comprehensive grasp of the 
 situation is vouchsafed to them. 
 
 This is not to say that any one of the schools of 
 architecture has as yet achieved the great "uni- 
 versity" view of things which must come in time. 
 Columbia is well on the road, and possibly Har- 
 vard also, but even here there is too much of the 
 unfortunate "elective" idea, and a boy may 
 choose what he likes, not what he should have. 
 324
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 The old and sound conception of an university 
 as a place for the developing of gentlemen of a 
 culture adequate to fit them for specialization at a 
 later time in any given direction has largely 
 yielded to the time-serving spirit that leaps towards 
 the goal of the specialist, striving to save time by 
 turning out the illiterate expert, the savant cog- 
 nizant only of the working elements of his trade, 
 the essentially uncultivated man, since he knows 
 only one thing, be he veterinarian or bacteriologist. 
 It was this peculiarly nineteenth-century whim 
 that led to the old fashion of architectural training, 
 and whether it vanishes elsewhere or not, it must 
 cease in the school of architecture, for there is no 
 form of artistic activity where lack of the cultiva- 
 tion that belongs to a gentleman is more fatal and 
 disastrous, for the simple reason that architecture 
 has been found to be the one art in which the 
 element of inborn genius or divine inspiration is 
 not a prerequisite. The soul of a Wagner, a Brown- 
 ing, a Burne Jones, or a St. Gaudens is exempt 
 from the fostering influence of scholastic training, 
 325
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 as was the soul of a Bach, a Dante, a Leonardo, 
 and a Donatello; eternity spoke through them, 
 not they themselves; but the architect is, or may 
 be, less of an heaven-born genius: his is in many 
 ways the greatest of the arts, but it lies nearer 
 humanity, farther from the clouds: it is interpre- 
 tation, manifestation, rather than revelation and 
 prophecy. An architect, and a good architect, 
 can be made, but not by the methods one employs 
 to fabricate a stenographer or a dental surgeon. 
 
 There is every possible excuse for the fact that 
 in the beginning such were the sacred processes 
 of the schools of architecture. The "elective" 
 idea, and its concomitant, specialization, were in 
 the breath of our nostrils, and apart from them 
 was no consciousness whatever. Our fathers of 
 England had no precedents to offer us, no example 
 in time and space to which we could turn; France 
 alone had fashioned a scheme, and being France 
 had fashioned it of pure logic and singular un- 
 wisdom. Then and thereafter we seized them 
 both, unwisdom and logic, and wolfed them down. 
 326
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 Out of it all came a definite thing, an organized, 
 operative school, and this was much — more than 
 England has done even yet. From France we 
 have gained what we could not have found else- 
 where: our own good sense has held us from folly, 
 and from too merciless logic, and as a result 
 architecture is taught better to-day in America 
 than elsewhere in the world. 
 
 Not perfectly, however; in some respects quite 
 absurdly, but the methods can be amended, for 
 after all is said, the foundations are sound and 
 broadly built, the house is not toppling on shifting 
 sands. 
 
 Now as from France came the good, so also there- 
 from came the evil, and like a sea-severed colony 
 we have sent back, year by year, our best to be 
 made better by the perfecting and the final tri- 
 umphant cachet of the sovereign power of our 
 ultimate allegiance. Now the colony has become 
 an empire: "Home" is no longer infaUible, our 
 destiny looms big before us, and Independence is 
 declared, independence not alone of post-graduate 
 327
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 scholarship, but of the ideals that no longer hold 
 our sympathy, of the methods and the laws that 
 we, in our clearer air, confronting our own just 
 problems, realize are not, and cannot be, our 
 methods and our laws. 
 
 Let us apply this to the single question of archi- 
 tectural education. With all the good we have 
 borrowed from France, we have accepted, in vary- 
 ing degrees, three manifest and concrete evils: 
 disregard of the paramount necessity of general 
 cultivation and substitution in its place of a most 
 inordinate passion for specializing; the inability to 
 discriminate between sound principles and the bad 
 taste that frequently marks their manifestation; 
 and finally the ignoring of art in its function as 
 language, and the acquisition of a purely Gallic 
 contempt for all that greatest epoch of architecture 
 which marked the supreme years of Christian, as 
 opposed to pagan, civilization. 
 
 In spite of our formal and avowed concurrence 
 in these errors, we have most illogically failed 
 wholly to carry them into practice. It is a matter 
 328
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 of fact that those who have returned to us after 
 assimilating all that was offered in Paris have, 
 so far as the major part is concerned, gone de- 
 liberately to work to produce far better things 
 than happened in the land of the Ecole des Beaux 
 Arts. Almost without exception their work has 
 been marked by an equal logic, a superior grasp 
 of the problem, and a far greater feeling for beauty, 
 for scale, for composition; and all expressed with a 
 refinement and good taste that show themselves 
 seldom amongst the architects of France. The 
 good has endured, the bad has been sloughed off, 
 and in actual accomplishment America has beaten 
 France on her own ground. Still endure, how- 
 ever, the old superstitions in the schools them- 
 selves, and though, little by little, they are rising 
 to a higher level and to a more comprehensive view 
 of education as education, there is little evidence 
 as yet that the time is very near when the several 
 styles will be fairly and impartially judged on the 
 basis of beauty and interpretation. The classical 
 styles remain not only the beginning but the end 
 329
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of art, Christian architecture is despised and 
 rejected, and so long as this is true, the whole 
 system is vitiated, for the only tests of architectural 
 style are its quaUties as beauty, as language, and 
 as structural expression, and the peremptory denial 
 of the aesthetic existence of Gothic simply means 
 that art is judged neither as beauty nor as lan- 
 guage, but solely as dogma, as a series of forms 
 arbitrarily chosen from alien times and an alien 
 race, to serve us to-day, not as a noble, adequate, 
 and beautiful language, but as the implements of 
 an ingenius but insignificant game. 
 
 It is not, then, merely a cause of complaint on 
 the part of a few mediaevaUsts that Gothic should 
 be banished from the schools, it is not that these 
 same educational agencies do nothing, and de- 
 liberately, to fit their students for approaching 
 the problem of church building, it is not even that 
 in a Christian land Christian art is ignored and 
 denied. The question is far greater than this, 
 touching the very fundamentals of the educational 
 system itself. If we apply to Gothic architecture 
 330
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 the tests we bring to that of paganism, we find 
 that in every respect the ordeal is perfectly passed. 
 / The beauty of Gothic excels all others save only 
 Greek alone, and even here it stands on the same 
 high eminence^' In mass, composition, and the 
 interdependence and interrelation of parts, it 
 admits no rival whatever. Structurally it stands 
 at the head of all human material achievement, 
 and its design follows from this with a delicacy 
 and an exactness that only the Greek again can 
 rival, and even here a deep gulf opens between the 
 simple and even primitive classical scheme and the 
 marvellous complexity and supreme development 
 of the mediaeval idea. As a concrete architectural 
 style, Gothic is at the same time the most highly 
 developed and the most completely beautiful of all 
 those that have appeared in time and space, i As 
 language it is of course beyond cavil; it is the style 
 developed by Christianity to express Christianity, 
 and during the great centuries of civilization it 
 was sole and adequate, yielding only to the re- 
 crudescence of paganism. 
 33^
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Now if this is all true, are we not compelled to 
 postulate of scholastic agencies something ap- 
 proaching a false standard of judgment, in that 
 they accept, as the only possible style, the varied 
 versions of the primal pagan norm, not because 
 these alone possess beauty, logic, and expressive 
 value, but because some one they respect has 
 stated that this was the case. It is impossible 
 to blink the fact that so long as the schools of 
 architecture accept the Roman Renaissance as 
 sound and good, Christian Gothic as bad and 
 false, the standards of judgment that control this 
 choice are indefensible and their existence menacing 
 to the education that follows therefrom. 
 
 I doubt if the public is aware of the discrimina- 
 tion that actually exists. Architects know it, but 
 in the glamour of the ever-present Ecole, the fact 
 does not astound. The results are pubhcly 
 visible and brought soundly home when churches 
 or colleges or cathedrals are to be built, but to 
 those interested, the fact that a man who has 
 designed a Roman bank or a Renaissance railway 
 332
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 station or a Parisian library cannot possibly 
 design a country church that is cause for anything 
 save laughter or tears, — this anomalous but not 
 unusual fact is set down to the inherent and well- 
 known ineffectiveness of the architectural pro- 
 fession. The stigma is undeserved: the man 
 himself, he who handles the familiar pagan forms 
 with perfect and justifiable assurance, quails 
 before the simplest problem in ecclesiastical de- 
 sign. He is in the place of one who is master of 
 Greek and Latin, and who is set down in the 
 midst of Germany without a word of the local 
 tongue at his command. It is indeed just this: a 
 different language, and of the rudiments of this liv- 
 ing tongue he has been taught nothing. Claiming 
 to make architectural specialists, the schools fail 
 even here, for their graduates are fitted to cope 
 in no respect with the ever-present problem of 
 church building. 
 
 This is the sequence: Greek is taught, in theory 
 and in practice, as the basis, which is eternally 
 right; then comes Roman, not, I fear, as an example 
 333
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of structural development coincident with marked 
 artistic retrogression, but rather as another step 
 towards perfection. Then comes the amazing 
 and even laughable hiatus: from the Fall of Rome 
 on, century after century, down even to the out- 
 break of the Renaissance, a period of more than a 
 thousand years, everything is either ignored or 
 briefly considered in a perfunctory sort of way, 
 and purely from an archaeological standpoint. A 
 brief resume of history is offered, but, except in 
 one school perhaps, nothing is taught of the theory 
 and principles that formed the basis of the varied 
 art of this same thousand years. In the same 
 condemnation fall that exquisite art of Byzantium, 
 which was the result of an attempt to develop from 
 the actual barbarism of Rome a style that should 
 be logical in point of construction, beautiful in its 
 manifestation: the strange and ingratiating efforts 
 of the Lombard and the Norman and the Teuton 
 to fashion a fair and lovely architecture, and that 
 which followed at last as crown and climax of all, 
 the stupendous and triumphant achievement of all 
 334
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 Europe, when at last, the shackles of paganism 
 riven and cast away. Christian civilization rose 
 victorious over the dead past, and brought into 
 being the noblest epoch and the loftiest art of 
 which human history writes the record. The 
 scholar, the philosopher, the economist, the his- 
 torian, the ecclesiastic, all know what this thousand 
 years meant to the world: together they admit 
 that the fundamentals of our civilization are found 
 here, and not, as some have superficially held, in 
 the sequent Renaissance and Revolution. Monas- 
 ticism, the Crusades, feudalism, chivalry, the 
 mediaeval Church, these are foundation stones, 
 and the physical, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic 
 life that followed from them is at once the golden 
 beginning of civilization, the seed of all that is 
 good in modern life. But not of that which is ill; 
 we may trace the stains and the blots and the 
 marring elements back to that Renaissance which 
 brought the Great Thousand Years to an end, 
 while for the Reformation and Revolution we may 
 say this: that the reforms they encompassed were 
 335
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 reforms, not of the bad we had inherited from 
 Alediaevalism, but of that which came upon us 
 through the triumph of the vanquisher of Medi- 
 evalism. 
 
 And the schools forget all this: nothing is told of 
 the great epoch of Christian civilization, nothing 
 of the art it brought into the world. It is as 
 though we were Latin of blood and polytheistic 
 of faith; exiles from Mother Rome, hunted wor- 
 shippers of Jove and Venus and Pan; hating 
 Christ, hiding through the deep night of His 
 ephemeral reign, emerging at last into the new 
 light of rejuvenescent paganism. And when this 
 light dawns, and back to a world repentant of its 
 Gothic crudities come the forms of Roman art, 
 then the tale is taken up afresh, as though Chris- 
 tianity were not, and from Rome we pass without 
 a break to the Roman Renaissance, and here we 
 are fixed upon the only standard and eternal 
 types. Even the pale purity of Greece is forgotten, 
 the burly building of Rome, and from now on, 
 emancipated from all tests of absolute beauty, 
 33^
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 relieved from all the hampering dogmas of sound 
 construction, development of design and logic of 
 materials, we settle down on the facile foundation 
 of prescribed and conventional forms, into the 
 judgment of which enters no uneasy question of 
 beauty of design; which is established on the laws 
 of scene painting, and is marked by a lofty superi- 
 ority to the limitation of materials, since paint 
 and plaster, tie rods and clamps and chains are, as 
 everyone knows, an ever present help in time of 
 structural trouble. 
 
 And then, last phase of all, we turn to France 
 (being uneasy in our minds on certain points of 
 reason and common sense) to find how we can 
 escape from the manifold falsities and subterfuges 
 and pretences of this style which has been given 
 us as the true basis of our study, and France, 
 always logical at any cost, and unable to accept 
 the shams and the scene painting and the calmly 
 unchangeable forms, shows us the path. But 
 there is one thing the modern Gallic mind cannot 
 accept under any circumstances, and that is Chris- 
 337
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 tianity. And so, faulted for once in her logic, 
 instead of going back to her own greatest epoch, 
 her own greatest art, and accepting the pure reason 
 and logic and science and good sense of Gothic, 
 she strives to transmogrify the artificialities of the 
 Roman Renaissance, substitute for its ugly forms 
 something new and presumably more beautiful. 
 Her success is considerable, in view of the almost 
 insuperable difficulties, and we are right in giving 
 her honour for whatever she achieves; but her 
 course is unscientific, for she imposes on herself a 
 quite unnecessary task; the game is amusing and 
 ingenious, but the labour unnecessary', for the work 
 was done before, and perfectly, by her ancestors 
 of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 
 
 Now it seems to me there is something singularly 
 illogical in all this, something too closely suggest- 
 ive of the superficial methods of the nineteenth 
 century, and inconsistent with the broader and 
 deeper views that have begun to develop since that 
 century came to its close. Just here lies the point: 
 the schools are not to be condemned for following 
 33^
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 a course out of touch with the time spirit that saw 
 their birth; instead they should be criticised in 
 calm and even temper for lagging a little behind 
 the new movement that is bound to transform the 
 entire spirit of the age. In the nineteenth century 
 no other course than the one they followed was 
 possible; education, taking its colour inevitably 
 from the time, became both materialistic and 
 technical. The theory that an ethical system 
 could best be established on, and communicated 
 from, a non-religious basis, that spiritual signifi- 
 cancies were unimportant and unworthy the 
 attention of scientific pedagogy, that the true 
 function of education was in specialization, in the 
 communicating of minute technical knowledge in 
 some one of an infinite number of categories, — 
 all this, which followed directly from the general 
 scheme of things established by the Renaissance 
 — Reformation — Revolution, brought into being 
 a system from which of necessity dogmatic and 
 mystic religion was banished, with all it could 
 possibly connote; technical training took the place 
 339
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 of broad culture as the true function of the schools 
 and colleges and universities; the "elective system" 
 became currently popular, and as a result the old 
 idea of an university faded away, and august and 
 distinguished colleges took on the aspect of the 
 useful but wholly special " Polytechnical Institute." 
 That the latter is a distinct necessity is entirely 
 true, but it by no means takes the place of the true 
 university, and by just so far as the latter takes on 
 the qualities of the technical school, losing in the 
 process something of its university aspect, it 
 destroys the balance of education, leaving it 
 narrow, material, and inadequate. 
 
 Such was, however, the temper of the last cen- 
 tury, and it is not surprising that the schools of 
 architecture should have followed in the wake of 
 the dignified universities; the point is, however, 
 that the time has come for a clearer and wider 
 view. The elective system will disappear from 
 the university training, carrying with it the schools 
 of dentistrv and veterinary surgery and electrical 
 science, which will revert to their just place in the 
 340
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 technological schools: and back to its former 
 place will come the idea of the abstract value of 
 intellectual and spiritual things; for the scientific 
 method is changing; its singular dominance in the 
 last century is being curbed by the new psychology 
 and the new philosophy of which Prof. William 
 James is so lucid an interpreter: the day of ma- 
 terialism is over, the old pseudo-scientific test of 
 material demonstration is already discredited, 
 the vast import and the rational acceptability of 
 spiritual experience is on the way to full accept- 
 ance, and with its triumph a new epoch will dawn 
 on the world of men. 
 
 And the application of all this to the matter of 
 architectural education lies just here; we shall 
 come to realize, as did our Greek and Byzantine 
 and mediaeval forbears, that the primary tests 
 of art, whatever its special form, are beauty and 
 expression, not tradition and predilection: we shall 
 accept an architectural school, not as a place where 
 a green youth goes to cloak the rawness that still 
 endures with the easy garments of thin, technical 
 341
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 skill, but as the seat of a prescribed system of 
 spiritual and intellectual and physical training, 
 determined by the combination of past experience 
 and the wisdom of men already trained most 
 broadly and comprehensively: finally, 'we shall 
 understand — though the time for this is far away 
 perhaps, — that the artist, be he architect, painter, 
 sculptor, poet, or musician, is in his highest estate 
 neither a professional entertainer nor a tradesman, 
 but an interpreter of spiritual things, and that he 
 must be schooled and curbed and developed with 
 the subtlety, the breadth, and the comprehensive- 
 ness that are brought into play, for example, in 
 the making of a priest. For the artist is indeed a 
 consecrated member of a great and wonderful 
 priesthood, his" ministery is the sacred ministry of 
 art, and his function not the veiling of bare neces- 
 sity with a pleasant vesture, but the interpretation 
 and voicing of emotions and ideas too high and 
 too tenuous for other modes of human expression. 
 A true school of architecture should be half 
 college and half monastery, set in the midst of 
 342
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 beautiful surroundings and beautiful in itself. 
 Rule and order and implicit obedience should be 
 the primary essentials, relaxing slowly as the lesson 
 is learned until at the end liberty and the freedom 
 of personal development come as the reward of 
 faithful service. So far as possible every other 
 art should exert its influence; painting and sculp- 
 ture and music and ceremonial. The instinct for 
 beauty, long lost, must be built up again, and this 
 can come only through an environment of beauty, 
 the indirect influence of spiritual and intellectual 
 experience, and the direct influence of those men 
 who by the mercy of God or through their own 
 faithful efforts have obtained for themselves this 
 power of testing and of creating, which should be 
 the heritage of all, but is not. 
 
 For my own part, I cannot conceive of an 
 adequate training in art which does not involve 
 the element of worship, made visible through the 
 great fine-art of religious ceremonial. All good 
 art in the past has developed from organized 
 religion, whether this were pagan or Buddhist or 
 343
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 Catholic, and the results of the efforts of the last 
 three centuries to found art on some other basis, 
 have not met with a degree of success that is notably 
 encouraging. But with the art instinct went the 
 religious instinct, — or vice versa, — and though 
 we are no longer ashamed to confess our hunger- 
 ing desire for beauty and art, we are ashamed to 
 admit the equally natural craving for religion. 
 It will take generations to beat down the accumu- 
 lated prejudices and superstitions of rationalism 
 and infidelity, but the work has already begun, 
 and the brazen idols of the nineteenth century 
 topple on their unstable pedestals. The two 
 things are working together, interacting and inter- 
 penetrating : every step we make towards a restora- 
 tion of art to its place in life leads us nearer the 
 religious goal, and every step we take away from 
 irreligion leads us nearer the goal of art. The two 
 are inseparable, but confession of this is not to be 
 thought of now, and so for the time, while amal- 
 gamation is possible and imperative from the 
 standpoint of religion, it is not so from that of art, 
 344
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 and the two must be severed, the approximation 
 being left to time and development and the impulse 
 of the individual soul. 
 
 Dealing then only with possibilities, let us find 
 if possible at least a measure of amusement in 
 blocking out a revised, or rather modified, scheme 
 of architectural education, taking for the purpose 
 a four years' course in a school of architecture. 
 Before doing so, however, let us say that such a 
 course would be incomplete, and inevitably to be 
 supplemented by a post-graduate course in the 
 great and final school that some day must arise 
 in the capitol city of the nation. Let us also 
 admit that against a certain amount of specializa- 
 tion it would be useless and undesirable to con- 
 tend. As matters now stand, and the condition is 
 probably wholesome, a certain division must exist 
 between the artist and his alter ego, the con- 
 structor. It is too much to ask that one small 
 personality should master both so long as we con- 
 tinue rivalling the builders of Babel, and so long 
 as the element of aesthetic joy is eliminated from 
 345
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 humanity as a whole, rendering the building 
 contractor and the artisan and the workman a 
 kind of barbarian, incapable of initiative, unsus- 
 ceptible of other than sheer mechanical respon- 
 sibility. 
 
 This being so, we may admit that training 
 should be divided in its nature; for one man a 
 maximum of aesthetic education, with a definite 
 minimum of that which is structural, for the other 
 a maximum of structural training with an equally 
 definite and irreducible minimum of the artistic. 
 For the latter the education is more nearly that of 
 the technical school, and we need not consider 
 it here, except indirectly, confining ourselves to 
 the case of the student who aims at the interpre- 
 tation of the best civilization of his time, through 
 the application of the principles of organized 
 beauty to the material problems with which he 
 deals. What should we postulate of the scholastic 
 system which would best achieve the desired ends ? 
 
 In the first place, assuming as a prerequisite of 
 matriculation a working knowledge of Latin, 
 346
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 French or German, general history, descriptive 
 geometry and algebra, there would begin, with the 
 first year, the building up of the solid foundation 
 of general culture that is indispensable. This 
 would consist in the comparative history of Euro- 
 pean civilization; classical, mediaeval, Renaissance 
 and modern literature; the history and rationale 
 of the allied arts of sculpture, painting, music, 
 the drama and poetry; the theory, significance, and 
 standards of art as beauty and as language. These 
 things would be so arranged in point of time that 
 their several aspects would synchronize with the 
 history and practice of architectural styles, — a 
 different matter to the practice of design, of which 
 I shall speak later. This historical and theoretical 
 study of style would begin at once with Egyptian, 
 Assyrian and Persian which would occuy the 
 first half of the first year. With the second half 
 would begin the study of Greek, which would 
 continue a full year, Roman overlapping by one 
 quarter, and continuing to the end of the second 
 year, being overlapped in its turn by the Transi- 
 347
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 tion — Byzantine, Norman, Lombard — which 
 would continue through the first quarter of the 
 third year, the study and practice of Christian 
 architecture beginning with the third year, and 
 continuing to the end, the fourth year being given 
 to the architecture of the Renaissance and modem 
 times. 
 
 Meanwhile, the practice of design would be 
 largely eliminated, the practice work in the sev- 
 eral styles taking its place until the beginning of 
 the third year, when actual work would commence 
 in an atelier under the personal inspiration and 
 instruction of some practising architect. This 
 atelier work would continue until the middle of 
 the fourth year, when the student would devote 
 himself to his thesis design, and work at this until 
 graduation. In addition to practice work in the 
 several styles, and the work in an atelier, there 
 should be a course which might be called "The 
 Rationale of Architecture," which would begin 
 with the second year: this would be a course in 
 aixhitectural biology, and would aim to teach the 
 348
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 development and co-ordination of an architectural 
 entity, and it would show the relations which exist 
 between function, plan, materials, racial temper, 
 and climatic conditions, in the end becoming cen- 
 tralized about the questions of planning and the 
 development of mass, composition, and design, 
 merging into, or running parallel with, the fourth 
 year's work in pure design. This course would 
 provide the "definite minimum" of structural 
 education of which I have spoken above, as well as 
 that training in the art of planning, on the import- 
 ance of which such stress is justly laid by Paris 
 and by all our American schools. 
 
 In addition to some such general programme as 
 this, which should be obligatory, would be many 
 subjects which should, I think, be optional, or 
 contingent upon the possible inefficiency of each 
 student. Latin, French, and German, English 
 composition, mathematics, natural sciences: these 
 would form a body of electives or a series of alter- 
 nates from amongst which one or more would be 
 chosen by the student, because of personal in- 
 349
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 cliiiation, or required by the school for the purpose 
 of remedying deficiencies or developing certain 
 weak points that might appear, but they would 
 always be held as special possibilities, as a kind of 
 "army reserves," to be called on in case of neces- 
 sity. 
 
 Here is a rough outHne, offered, not as a care- 
 fully considered, definite, or even possible plan 
 but simply for the purpose of calling attention to 
 certain schemes of possibly desirable modification, 
 and to certain definite methods whereby amend- 
 ments might be accomplished. To establish a 
 system of fixed and obligatory training that should 
 modulate during the last year into the liberty that 
 should characterize the Post-Graduate School; to 
 set up as the chief aim of this scholastic work the 
 development of the culture and enlightenment 
 and broad sympathy that mark the gentleman, 
 as a prerequisite to technical training, to be ac- 
 quired through personal association with prac- 
 tising architects; to restore Christian art to its 
 rightful position, and generally to establish a 
 350
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 broader view of the comparative excellence of the 
 several architectural styles, relegating the Roman 
 Renaissance to the position it can claim on its 
 merits alone; to obtain recognition of the fact that 
 design as such, and as differentiated from prac- 
 tice work in the diflferent styles, can only be taught, 
 except so far as its rudiments are concerned, by 
 practising architects through the atelier system: — 
 these are the principles involved. 
 
 The method, roughly indicated above, contem- 
 plates a general co-ordination of all studies, so 
 that an historical and theoretical parallelism 
 would continue from the beginning to the end. 
 For example, in the first year, the student, after a 
 brief survey of Egyptian architecture and its allies, 
 would pass at once to the study of Greek archi- 
 tecture, taking up at the same time Greek sculpture, 
 the beginnings of classical civilization and classical 
 literature, comparative civilization, the rudiments 
 of art theory, the elements of design and the 
 primary principles of architectural biology. The 
 study of Greek architecture would continue a full 
 351
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 year, carrying with it its educational concomitants 
 as above, adding the classical drama and begin- 
 ning with the elements of architectural rendering. 
 Practice work in archaeological design would begin 
 with the second year, the work being confined to 
 Greek orders for the first half, then changing to 
 those of Rome as this epoch was taken up. With 
 the Roman period the study of history, art theory, 
 comparative civilization, literature, and archi- 
 tectural biology would take its colour, of course, 
 from the epoch then under consideration. 
 
 Towards the end of the second year the field 
 would change to the epoch of the Transition, 
 carrying with it a corresponding change in 
 the allied studies, and at this time would begin 
 the study of the , elements of Christian civili- 
 zation and the development of ecclesiasticism, 
 secular and monastic. With the third year 
 would begin the consideration of Gothic, 
 which would continue into the first quarter of the 
 fourth year, overlapping by so much the epoch of 
 the Renaissance, which would be taken up at the 
 352
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 start of this last year. In addition to the other 
 co-ordinate studies, which would take their colour 
 entirely from mediaeval civilization, would be 
 added a course in English history and civilization, 
 and with the mid-year would begin the atelier 
 work in actual design, which would continue until 
 graduation. During this year great stress would 
 naturally be laid on the history and theological 
 development of the Church in its bearings on 
 civilization, and the liturgies and ceremonials of 
 the mediaeval Church would be studied as having a 
 determining influence on the growth and develop- 
 ment of Christian architecture. 
 
 With the fourth year the period of the Renais- 
 sance would be taken up, and its consideration 
 continued during the year, all the other studies 
 bearing it company, and, of course, finding their 
 subject-matter in the records of the time. The 
 last half of this year would, in design, be devoted 
 to some problem in pure architecture, worked out 
 en loge and, with an essay on a subject intimately 
 associated with the style and subject of the thesis 
 353
 
 THE GOTHIC QUEST 
 
 design itself, form the test work for the student 
 for the entire course. 
 
 Again, I repeat, all this is not offered as a mature 
 project, but simply as an essay in empirical sug- 
 gestion. That architecture is, in a sense, the 
 noblest of the arts, is the only definite assumption 
 I desire to make, but believing this, and holding 
 firmly that, with all the arts, it is beauty and lan- 
 guage first and always, or it is nothing, I do not 
 hesitate to say that the problem of architectural 
 education is one of grave import, bound up in- 
 dissolubly with the question of civilization itself, 
 and that it demands, therefore, the eager sympathy 
 of every architect and the friendly co-operation 
 towards its final perfection, of every professor of 
 architecture. To the latter, both living and dead, 
 the profession owes more than it can ever repay: 
 it desires to add to this debt, and in no way could 
 this be more easily accomplished than by such 
 action on the part of the schools as would establish 
 general culture as their primal aim, admit archi- 
 tectural biology as a recognized study, hand over 
 354
 
 ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION 
 
 the teaching of pure design to the architect in his 
 atelier, proclaim the test of style and design to be 
 above all else pure beauty and perfect language, 
 relegate the artificialities of the Roman Renais- 
 sance to their proper place, and finally accept 
 Christianity as a fact, and ;Gothic as the most 
 highly organized, the most significant and ex- 
 pressive, and the most beautiful form of archi- 
 tecture that man has ever evolved^ 
 
 Eau0 ^to 
 
 355
 
 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 The several essays and lectures which make 
 up the foregoing volume first appeared in the 
 places and on the dates noted below : 
 
 1. On the Restoration of Idealism. The 
 
 Knight Errant, 1893. 
 
 2. Concerning Architectural Style. The 
 
 Architectural Review (Boston), 1905. 
 
 3. The Gothic Ascendency. A lecture 
 
 first delivered in 1904, and printed in 
 the Inland Architect in 1907. 
 
 4. Meeting-Houses or Churches. A lecture 
 
 first delivered in 1894, and printed in 
 Modern Art, 1895. 
 
 5. The Development of Ecclesiastical Archi- 
 
 tecture in England. The Brickbuilder, 
 
 1905. 
 
 357
 
 358 AUTHOR'S NOTE 
 
 6. The Development of Ecclesiastical Archi- 
 
 tecture in America. The Brickbuilder, 
 1905. 
 
 7. On the Building of Churches. A lecture 
 
 first dehvered in 1900. 
 
 8. The Interior Decoration of Churches. 
 
 A lecture first dehvered in 1903. 
 
 9. The Roman Catholic Church and Art. 
 
 The Catholic World, 1894. 
 
 10. One of the Lost Arts. 1907. 
 
 11. The Case against the Ecole des Beaux 
 
 Arts. A lecture first delivered in 
 1896. 
 
 12. Architectural Education in the United 
 
 States. The Magazine of Christian 
 Art, 1907.
 
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