problem was
scientifically carried out, but the given problem was itself fantastic.
To vault at such heights and to prop that vault with external buttresses
was a gratuitous undertaking. The result was indeed interesting, the
ingenuity and method exhibited were masterly in their way; yet the
result was not proportionate in beauty to the effort required; it was
after all a technical and a vain triumph.

[Sidenote: The result here romantic.]

The true magic of that very architecture lay not in its intelligible
structure but in the bewildering incidental effects which that structure
permitted. The part in such churches is better than the symmetrical
whole; often incompleteness and accretions alone give grace or
expression, to the monument. A cross vista where all is wonder, a side
chapel where all is peace, strike the key-note here; not that
punctilious and wooden repetition of props and arches, as a builder's
model might boast to exhibit them. Perhaps the most beautiful Gothic
interiors are those without aisles, if what we are considering is their
proportion and majesty; elsewhere the structure, if perceived at all, is
too artificial and strange to be perceived intuitively and to have the
glow of a genuine beauty. There is an over-ingenious mechanism, redeemed
by its colour and the thousand intervening objects, when these have not
been swept away. Glazed and painted as Gothic churches were meant to be,
they were no doubt exceedingly gorgeous. When we admire their structural
scheme we are perhaps nursing an illusion like that which sentimental
classicists once cherished when they talked about the purity of white
marble statues and the ideality of their blank and sightless eyes. What
we treat as a supreme quality may have been a mere means to mediaeval
builders, and a mechanical expedient: their simple hearts were set on
making their churches, for God's glory and their own, as large, as high,
and as rich as possible. After all, an uninterrupted tradition attached
them to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass and
the goldsmith's love of intricate fineness--which the Saracens also had
shown--that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. The
structure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display.
If these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us their
admirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton,
imposed by material conditions on an art wh