oad that ends in a
bridecake or a cucumber frame. A Gothic cathedral is a _tour de force_;
it is also a melodrama. Enter, and you will be impressed by the
incredible skill of the constructor; perhaps you will be impressed by a
sense of dim mystery and might; you will not be moved by pure form. You
may groan "A-a-h" and collapse: you will not be strung to austere
ecstasy. Walk round it, and take your pleasure in subtleties of the
builder's craft, quaint corners, gargoyles, and flying buttresses, but
do not expect the thrill that answers the perception of sheer rightness
of form. In architecture the new spirit first came to birth; in
architecture first it dies.

We find the spirit alive at the very end of the twelfth century in
Romanesque sculpture and in stained glass: we can see it at Chartres and
at Bourges. At Bourges there is an indication of the way things are
going in the fact that in an unworthy building we find glass and some
fragments of sculpture worthy of Chartres, and not unworthy of any age
or place. Cimabue and Duccio are the last great exponents in the West of
the greater tradition--the tradition that held the essential everything
and the accidental nothing. For with Duccio, at any rate, the sense of
form was as much traditional as vital: and the great Cimabue is _fin de
siecle_. They say that Cimabue died in 1302; Duccio about fifteen years
later. With Giotto (born 1276), a greater artist than either, we turn a
corner as sharp as that which had been turned a hundred years earlier
with the invention of Gothic architecture in France. For Giotto could be
intentionally second-rate. He was capable of sacrificing form to drama
and anecdote. He never left the essential out, but he sometimes knocked
its corners off. He was always more interested in art than in St.
Francis, but he did not always remember that St. Francis has nothing
whatever to do with art. In theory that is right enough; the Byzantines
had believed that they were more interested in dogmatic theology than in
form, and almost every great artist has had some notion of the sort.
Indeed, it seems that there is nothing so dangerous for an artist as
consciously to care about nothing but art. For an artist to believe that
his art is concerned with religion or politics or morals or psychology
or scientific truth is well; it keeps him alive and passionate and
vigorous: it keeps him up out of sentimental aestheticism: it keeps to
hand a suitable artistic pr