To-day I understand it. As a result of study, one truth after another comes to light. At the outset one is lost before these marvels. Where is one to begin studying? One's thoughts and one's admiration rise like clouds. The mind makes prodigious leaps to grasp again what it already knows, to combine it with the recently acquired knowledge, to attempt to draw conclusions which simplify and generalize the study, and thus to discern the fundamental law.
For a long time during my youth I thought, like many others, that Gothic art was poor. I was so ungrateful during the first enthusiasm of my liberty! I learned to understand its grandeur only through traveling. Observation and work led me back to the right road. In the course of my efforts I have grasped the meaning of the thoughts of the masters. My persistent work was not futile, and, like one of the Magi, I have at last come to bow in humble reverence before them.
A true artist must penetrate the primordial principles of creation; only by understanding the beautiful does he become inspired, and that not through a sudden awakening of his sensibilities, but by slow penetration and perception, by patient love. The mind need not be quick, for slow progress should imply precaution in every direction.
The Gothic builders are the greatest observers of nature that have ever existed, the greatest realists, despite all that professors and critics say to the contrary. They call them idealists. They say the same of the Greeks and of all artists whose profound knowledge has enabled them to borrow their effects and charm from nature. Idealists! That is a term which signifies nothing and merely confounds cause and effect.
Builders of the Middle Ages, you independent scholars, models of a profound intelligence, this is what our age has found as an explanation of your masterpieces!
I have devoted my whole life in endeavoring to catch a glimpse of the rules, the secrets of experience, which you transmitted to one another, and it is only now, when my days are numbered, that I am at last grasping the synthesis of beauty. To whom shall I confide the fruit of my research? Some future genius will gather it. The cathedral is eternal, rising toward the sky. When we think it has attained its ultimate height, it rises again higher still, like a mountain of truth.
PLANS AND OPPOSITIONS
The architects of our churches subordinated detail to arrive at a more effective whole. That is why our churches are so beautiful when seen from a distance. They sacrificed everything to the essential, the "plan."
The plan? Like all synthetic conceptions, this is difficult to define. It is the space that an object displaces in the atmosphere, its volume. When an artist is able to determine exactly the space an object occupies in the atmosphere, be he painter, sculptor, or architect, he possesses the real science of plans.