ertical law of pressure downwards, or to its Lombard,
Rhenish, or Norman derivatives. Here, rather, you are conscious
restlessly of that sustained equilibrium of oblique pressure on all
sides, which is the essence of the hazardous Gothic construction, a
construction of which the "flying buttress" is the most significant
feature. Across the clear glass of the great windows of the triforium
you see it, feel it, at its Atlas-work audaciously. "A pleasant thing
it is to behold the sun" those first Gothic builders would seem to have
said to themselves; and at Amiens, for instance, the walls have
disappeared; the entire building is composed of its windows. Those who
built it [114] might have had for their one and only purpose to enclose
as large a space as possible with the given material.

No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold
flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and space
and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their massiveness,
is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter
naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very complex system
of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic situation, the
Gothic problem. With the genius which contended, though not always
quite successfully, with this difficult problem, came also novel
aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful aesthetic effects. For
the mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of
music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, the
richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same
moment; and were gainers. And then, in contrast with the classic
manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of
the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the
richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence of the
Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still in natural movement
in every direction. The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, the structural
use of the buttress, for [115] example; seemed to turn it into a mere
occasion for ornament, not always pleasantly:--while the ornament was
out of place, the structure failed. Such falsity is far enough away
from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth century. In this
pre-eminently "secular" church, the execution, in all the defiance of
its method, is dir