The Two Paths | Page 8

chain or that; it may design grotesques and
conventionalisms, build the simplest buildings, serve the most practical
utilities, yet all it does will be gloriously designed and gloriously done;
but let it once quit hold of the chain of natural fact, cease to pursue that
as the clue to its work; let it propose to itself any other end than
preaching this living word, and think first of showing its own skill or its
own fancy, and from that hour its fall is precipitate--its destruction sure;
nothing that it does or designs will ever have life or loveliness in it
more; its hour has come, and there is no work, nor device, nor
knowledge, nor wisdom in the grave whither it goeth.
Let us take for example that school of art over which many of you
would perhaps think this law had but little power--the school of Gothic
architecture. Many of us may have been in the habit of thinking of that
school rather as of one of forms than of facts--a school of pinnacles,
and buttresses, and conventional mouldings, and disguise of nature by
monstrous imaginings--not a school of truth at all. I think I shall be able,
even in the little time we have to-night, to show that this is not so; and
that our great law holds just as good at Amiens and Salisbury, as it does
at Athens and Florence.
I will go back then first to the very beginnings of Gothic art, and before
you, the students of Kensington, as an impanelled jury, I will bring two
examples of the barbarism out of which Gothic art emerges,

approximately contemporary in date and parallel in executive skill; but,
the one, a barbarism that did not get on, and could not get on; the other,
a barbarism that could get on, and did get on; and you, the impanelled
jury, shall judge what is the essential difference between the two
barbarisms, and decide for yourselves what is the seed of life in the one,
and the sign of death in the other.
The first,--that which has in it the sign of death,--furnishes us at the
same time with an illustration far too interesting to be passed by, of
certain principles much depended on by our common modern designers.
Taking up one of our architectural publications the other day, and
opening it at random, I chanced upon this piece of information, put in
rather curious English; but you shall have it as it stands--
"Aristotle asserts, that the greatest species of the beautiful are Order,
Symmetry, and the Definite."
I should tell you, however, that this statement is not given as
authoritative; it is one example of various Architectural teachings,
given in a report in the Building Chronicle for May, 1857, of a lecture
on Proportion; in which the only thing the lecturer appears to have
proved was that,--
The system of dividing the diameter of the shaft of a column into parts
for copying the ancient architectural remains of Greece and Rome,
adopted by architects from Vitruvius (circa B.C. 25) to the present
period, as a method for producing ancient architecture, _is entirely
useless_, for the several parts of Grecian architecture cannot be reduced
or subdivided by this system; neither does it apply to the architecture of
Rome.
Still, as far as I can make it out, the lecture appears to have been one of
those of which you will just at present hear so many, the protests of
architects who have no knowledge of sculpture--or of any other mode
of expressing natural beauty--against natural beauty; and their
endeavour to substitute mathematical proportions for the knowledge of
life they do not possess, and the representation of life of which they are
incapable.[Illustration] Now, this substitution of obedience to
mathematical law for sympathy with observed life, is the first
characteristic of the hopeless work of all ages; as such, you will find it
eminently manifested in the specimen I have to give you of the
hopeless Gothic barbarism; the barbarism from which nothing could

emerge--for which no future was possible but extinction. The
Aristotelian principles of the Beautiful are, you remember, Order,
Symmetry, and the Definite. Here you have the three, in perfection,
applied to the ideal of an angel, in a psalter of the eighth century,
existing in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge.[Footnote: I
copy this woodcut from Westwood's "Palaeographia Sacra."]
Now, you see the characteristics of this utterly dead school are, first the
wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;--for, however ignorant a
person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has a
mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or idealize
natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots in