Lectures on the rise and development of medieval architecture; vol. 1

by Sir George Gilbert Scott

In respect of the metal-work and other kinds of decorative art, you will find great advantage from carefully reading Mr. Burges’s lectures, given some time back before the Society of Arts.

By thus following up your studies from all points of view, whether antiquarian, historical, artistic, ritual, utilitarian, or practical and mechanical, you will obtain that perfect understanding of Mediæval art which is necessary to enable you to carry on its revival and practice both with knowledge and intelligence.

I now come to the actual practice of the lessons learned by such a course of study as I have been endeavouring to shadow forth.

As I said on a former occasion, I will not go into the general question of the revival of Gothic architecture, but will assume it as a fait accompli, and proceed to consider some questions as to the practical carrying of it out.

One point which has given rise to much difference of opinion is the question of what period and variety of Mediæval architecture we should best take as the groundwork of our own developments.

When, during the long interval between the cessation of Mediæval architecture and our own day, it was temporarily returned to in any special instance, it seems to have been viewed rather as a dormant than an extinct art, and the style chosen was always its latest phase; as if it had only to be re-awakened at the point at which it had fallen asleep. And in the same manner, in our own day, nearly all the earlier works of the revival were in the latest form of the style, as if the revival was the mere prolongation of a chain, and to be attached to its last link.

This was the traditional phase in the revival. The interval had, however, been too lengthened to allow this imagined connection with the old but disused chain to hold good. People began to investigate and to philosophise and to write books about the style. All phases soon began to be equally known, and people could not help entertaining preferences. Rickman had awarded the palm to the Decorated; others preferred the Early English; and after a time all agreed that the latest link was the worst, and must not be adopted as the starting-point. Some tried Norman, some Early English, some Decorated. The Cambridge Camden Society seemed at first to favour Early English; but soon they laid their ban upon it, and preached a crusade against all but the sacred “Middle Pointed,” and even defined with minute accuracy the precise period of that style which they would stamp with their approval. It was to be the earliest phase of the later form of Middle Pointed; or, as a friend of mine jokingly defined it for them, the “Early late Middle Pointed.” Some, however, preferred the “late Early,” some the earliest Middle Pointed; and though a few still strayed into the heterodoxy of “First Pointed,” or even into deadlier errors, it came, after a time, to be a generally received opinion that the Middle style was the best groundwork for us to go upon, and that it might fairly be viewed that this had been so completely revived and re-adopted as to become the style of our Gothic Renaissance.

Though there was a good deal of nonsense current about it at the time, as if it were almost an article of religious faith, an “Articulus stantis aut cadentis Ecclesiæ,” there was, I must say, a great deal of common sense in the choice.

The early transitional style, though gloriously noble and vigorous, could not reasonably be re-adopted as a groundwork inasmuch as it was a transition, and that from a state of things with which we have a little or nothing in common. The developed Early Pointed had very strong claims, but failed of being what Dr. Whewell calls “complete Gothic.” Its fault was that there were certain features which, once known, could not be rejected, but which the Early Pointed had not. Its merits were positive and of the highest order; its defects were purely negative. The later Pointed had been pretty generally voted to be the production of the decline of the style, and the later half of the Middle Pointed showed unquestionable evidences that during its period the way for that decline had been preparing. The Early Middle Pointed was thus come to by an exhaustive process, as being at once “complete” and not on the decline, though some felt (and I confess to being of the number) that it might with advantage be invigorated by importing into it a good deal of the detail, and, even, perhaps, some whole features of the earlier style.