ar nobles were not averse to encouraging a movement that
appeared to counteract the importance of their most dangerous
ecclesiastical rivals. So that religious and political motives came
together, just at this one momentous period, to produce an enthusiasm
for building which has never been equalled before or since. The
gradual development of the sacred edifice from the crypt, like that
catacomb of St. Gervais, through the form of the Roman basilica, with
its simple nave and round apse, to the new developments of choir and
chapels, introduced by Suger, had not proceeded without leaving on the
finished product--which has been called Gothic--the traces of its
growth. And this is one reason why, until the fourteenth century at
least, the Cathedral retained the mingled characteristics of a
building that was both civil and ecclesiastical, that was used both
for the divine offices and for political, even military assemblies.

In what I shall have to say of the architecture called Gothic,[26] I
would not have it thought that I exclude the praise of beauty from
every other form of building, for there are Renaissance buildings, for
instance, in Rouen alone that would contradict such barren dogmatism
at the outset. The reserve and the harmonious proportion of the Cour
des Comptes have a value of their own quite independent of the Gothic
unrestraint and revelry of carving in the Portail des Libraires. But I
cannot conceal my preference for one form of beauty over another, my
delight in the most organic form of art the world has ever seen, the
true "master art" of Gothic, as opposed to that "looking backward"
which was the Renaissance, to that defiance of the rule of progress
which bade men advance to different developments of organic living
forms in every single branch of life, except in the greatest art of
all. The Middle Ages had inherited a direct succession of harmonious
forms, one rising out of another until the perfection was attained.
Then came the Black Death, and the no less fatal scourges of
Commercialism and Bureaucracy. Men's thoughts apparently became so
riveted upon the grave that they must go back to the art of the dead
Romans and the formalism of classical examples to keep breath in their
bones at all. And even so, they informed the skeleton with a new life.
In such new creations of the aged spirit as the French Renaissance
Chateaux of Touraine, or Rouen's Hotel Bourgtheroulde, they showed
what vigour there was left