Project Gutenberg's Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432, by Various

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Title: Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432
Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852

Author: Various

Editor: Robert Chambers and William Chambers

Release Date: December 18, 2005 [EBook #17348]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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CHAMBERS' EDINBURGH JOURNAL

CONDUCTED BY WILLIAM AND ROBERT CHAMBERS, EDITORS OF 'CHAMBERS'S
INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE,' 'CHAMBERS'S EDUCATIONAL COURSE,' &c.

NO. 432. NEW SERIES. SATURDAY, APRIL 10, 1852. PRICE 1-1/2_d._

THE MEDIAEVAL MANIA.

History is said to be a series of reactions. Society, like a pendulum,
first drives one way, and then swings back in the opposite direction.
At present, we may be said to be returning at full speed towards a
taste for everything old, neglected, and for ages despised. Science
and refinement have had their day, and now rude nature and the
elemental are to be in the ascendant. In our boyhood, we learned the
Roman alphabet; but youngsters now had need to add a knowledge of
black-letter, which is rapidly getting back into fashion. Perfection
is only to be found in the darkness and ignorance of the middle ages.

It is proper, no doubt, to get rid of what is tame and spiritless in
art; and it must be owned that nearly everything that was done in
architecture and decoration during the Georgian era was detestable.
But it is one thing to reform, and another to revolutionise. Let us by
all means go to nature for instruction; but nature under the exercise
of cultivated feeling--selecting what tends to ennoble and refine, not
that which degrades and sends us back to forms and ideas totally out
of place in the nineteenth century, and which, for that very reason,
can have nothing but a temporary reign, to be followed in the
succeeding age by a violent reaction.

On a former occasion, we drew attention to this tendency towards
mediaevalism as regards ornamental design, and took the Great