The Decline of Gothic

Progress, Volume XII, Issue 3, 1 November 1916, Page 775

The Decline of Gothic

The life of a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava stream, first bright and fierce, then languid and covered, at last advancing only by the tumbling over and over of its frozen blocks. And that last condition is a sad one to look upon. All the steps are marked most clearly in the arts, and in architecture more than in any other; for it, being especially dependent, as we have just said, on the warmth of true life, is also peculiarly sensible of the hemlock cold of the false; and I do not know anything more oppressive when the mind is once awakened to its characteristics than the aspect of a dead architecture. The feebleness of childhood is full of promise and interest struggle of imperfect knowledge, full of energy and continuitybut to see impotence and rigidity settling upon the form of the developed man ; to sec the types which once had the die of thought struck fresh upon them, worn flat by over use; to sec the shell of the living creature in its adult form, when its colours are faded and its inhabitant perished is a sight more humiliating, more melancholy, than the vanishing of all knowledge and the return to confessed and helpless infancy. —“ Buskin,