Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/44

20 buildings of three or more aisles, it was natural to employ a simpler form of it in the construction of buildings of simpler plan. But it is unlikely that architecture like that of the Sainte Chapelle would ever have come into being had buildings of so simple plan only been required. It was the need of vast stone-roofed churches, such as could not be constructed without aisles, that stimulated the genius of the Gothic builders, and led to the remarkable results that fill us to-day with wonder and admiration.

Such is the structural character of Gothic architecture. But it was not in constructive invention alone that the genius of its builders found expression. Before the time of Gothic art, a genuine artistic aptitude,—an aptitude which found expression in graphic and plastic, no less than in constructive art, had been manifested in the Northern genius. But the painting and sculpture of the Northman were at first rude and uncouth, often extremely so; and this rudeness has been widely held to characterise Gothic art also. But rudeness is by no means a characteristic of Gothic, which is not a product of unmixed Northern genius. For, by the time that Gothic architecture had begun to take form, the mingling of races, that had long been going on, had produced,, in the locality where this art first appeared, a people in whose constitution were happily blended some of the finest characteristics of the Latin and Germanic stocks. It was this people who developed the Gothic style and gave to its marvellous constructive system an equally new and appropriate system of adornment. Gothic art is not an art of barbarians, as the pseudo-classicists of the Renaissance would have us suppose. It is far otherwise. It is the art of that civilised people which grew up, through generations of conflict and mutual interchange of thought, out of the fusion of Northern and Southern blood. This fusion produced a superior artistic race,—a race in which the genius of the North supplied an active imagination and a daring spirit of invention, while that of the South supplied a disciplined feeling for beauty and the traditions of ancient art.

The artistic genius of the Gothic builders showed itself not only in the proportions of the great masses and com-