he would say to himself, are requisite and sufficient: to do less would
be unskilful, to do more would be perverse. But the mediaeval craftsman
was irresponsible in his earnestness. The whole did not concern him, for
the whole was providential and therefore, to the artist, irrelevant. He
was only responsible inwardly, to his casual inspiration, to his
individual model, and his allotted block of stone. With these he carried
on, as it were, an ingenuous dialectic, asking them questions by a blow
of the hammer, and gathering their oracular answers experimentally from
the result. Art, like salvation, proceeded by a series of little
miracles; it was a blind work, half stubborn patience, half unmerited
grace. If the product was destined to fill a niche in the celestial
edifice, that was God's business and might be left to him: what
concerned the sculptor was to-day's labour and joy, with the shrewd
wisdom they might bring after them.

[Sidenote: Representation introduced.]

Gothic ornament was accordingly more than ornament; it was sculpture. To
the architect sculpture and painting are only means of variegating a
surface; light and shade, depth and elaboration, are thereby secured and
aid him in distributing his masses. For this reason geometrical or
highly conventionalised ornament is all the architect requires. If his
decorators furnish more, if they insist on copying natural forms or
illustrating history, that is their own affair. Their humanity will
doubtless give them, as representative artists, a new claim on human
regard, and the building they enrich in their pictorial fashion will
gain a new charm, just as it would gain by historic associations or by
the smell of incense clinging to its walls. When the arts superpose
their effects the total impression belongs to none of them in
particular; it is imaginative merely or in the broadest sense poetical.
So the monumental function of Greek sculpture, and the interpretations
it gave to national myths, made every temple a storehouse of poetic
memories. In the same way every great cathedral became a pious
story-book. Construction, by admitting applied decoration, offers a
splendid basis and background for representative art. It is in their
decorative function that construction and representation meet; they are
able to conspire in one ideal effect by virtue of the common appeal
which they unwittingly make to the senses. If construction were not
decorative it could never ally