y and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No
man ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a
cathedral tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India
there is the presence of something stiff and heartless, of something
tortured and silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers
and hunchbacked birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of
their colour the servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the
vision of a sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern.
Certainly no one ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens
to dislike it. Or, again, some will say that it is the liberty of the
Middle Ages in the use of the comic or even the coarse that makes the
Gothic more interesting than the Greek. There is more truth in this;
indeed, there is real truth in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals
would have passed the Censor of Plays. We talk of the inimitable
grandeur of the old cathedrals; but indeed it is rather their gaiety
that we do not dare to imitate. We should be rather surprised if a
chorister suddenly began singing "Bill Bailey" in church. Yet that would
be only doing in music what the mediaevals did in sculpture. They put
into a Miserere seat the very scenes that we put into a music hall
song: comic domestic scenes similar to the spilling of the beer and the
hanging out of the washing. But though the gaiety of Gothic is one of
its features, it also is not the secret of its unique effect. We see
a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese sketches. But delightful
as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper houses, and toddling,
infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of a kind quite
different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some have even been
so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure in medieval
building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is rough,
shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed after the
same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating bristles,
are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all the
same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and almost
equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in mediaevalism;
and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and simplicity, as
of a saint with his hands joined