Val dArno | Page 6

little
to bear your book; space enough for you to speak from at ease,-- and
here is your first architecture of Gothic Christianity!
25. Indignant thunder of dissent from German doctors,--clamour from
French savants. 'What! and our Treves, and our Strasburg, and our
Poictiers, and our Chartres! And you call this thing the first architecture
of Christianity!' Yes, my French and German friends, very fine the
buildings you have mentioned are; and I am bold to say I love them far
better than you do, for you will run a railroad through any of them any
day that you can turn a penny by it. I thank you also, Germans, in the
name of our Lady of Strasburg, for your bullets and fire; and I thank

you, Frenchmen, in the name of our Lady of Rouen, for your new
haberdashers' shops in the Gothic town;--meanwhile have patience with
me a little, and let me go on.
26. No passion of fretwork, or pinnacle whatever, I said, is in this Pisan
pulpit. The trefoiled arch itself, pleasant as it is, seems forced a little;
out of perfect harmony with the rest (see Plate II.). Unnatural, perhaps,
to Niccola?
Altogether unnatural to him, it is; such a thing never would have come
into his head, unless some one had shown it him. Once got into his
head, he puts it to good use; perhaps even he will let this somebody
else put pinnacles and crockets into his head, or at least, into his son's,
in a little while. Pinnacles,--crockets,--it may be, even traceries. The
ground-tier of the baptistery is round-arched, and has no pinnacles; but
look at its first story. The clerestory of the Duomo of Pisa has no
traceries, but look at the cloister of its Campo Santo.
27. I pause at the words;--for they introduce a new group of thoughts,
which presently we must trace farther.
The Holy Field;--field of burial. The "cave of Machpelah which is
before Mamre," of the Pisans. "There they buried Abraham, and Sarah
his wife; there they buried Isaac, and Rebekah his wife; and there I
buried Leah."
How do you think such a field becomes holy,--how separated, as the
resting-place of loving kindred, from that other field of blood, bought
to bury strangers in?
When you have finally succeeded, by your gospel of mammon, in
making all the men of your own nation not only strangers to each other,
but enemies; and when your every churchyard becomes therefore a
field of the stranger, the kneeling hamlet will vainly drink the chalice
of God in the midst of them. The field will be unholy. No cloisters of
noble history can ever be built round such an one.
28. But the very earth of this at Pisa was holy, as you know. That
"armata" of the Tuscan city brought home not only marble and ivory,
for treasure; but earth,--a fleet's burden,--from the place where there
was healing of soul's leprosy: and their field became a place of holy
tombs, prepared for its office with earth from the land made holy by
one tomb; which all the knighthood of Christendom had been pouring
out its life to win.

29. I told you just now that this sculpture of Niccola's was the
beginning of Christian architecture. How do you judge that Christian
architecture in the deepest meaning of it to differ from all other?
All other noble architecture is for the glory of living gods and men; but
this is for the glory of death, in God and man. Cathedral, cloister, or
tomb,--shrine for the body of Christ, or for the bodies of the saints. All
alike signifying death to this world;--life, other than of this world.
Observe, I am not saying how far this feeling, be it faith, or be it
imagination, is true or false;--I only desire you to note that the power of
all Christian work begins in the niche of the catacomb and depth of the
sarcophagus, and is to the end definable as architecture of the tomb.
30. Not altogether, and under every condition, sanctioned in doing such
honour to the dead by the Master of it. Not every grave is by His
command to be worshipped. Graves there may be--too little guarded,
yet dishonourable;--"ye are as graves that appear not, and the men that
walk over them are not aware of them." And graves too much guarded,
yet dishonourable, "which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but are
within full of all uncleanness." Or graves, themselves honourable, yet
which it may be, in us, a crime to adorn. "For they indeed killed them,
and ye build their sepulchres."
Questions, these, collateral; or to be examined in due time; for the
present it is enough for us to know that all Christian architecture, as
such, has been