Page:Charles Moore--Development and Character of Gothic Architecture.djvu/47

I rise to a renewed animation and to extensive variation of types, by which the way was prepared for the further modifications of the Gothic artists, in whose hands they receive a living character, varied by a fertility of invention, altogether without precedent.

In connection with the qualities of vitality and likeness to nature, must be noticed the conventional character that coexists with them in Gothic design. This conventional character is a result, in part of the traditional elements on which their art was based, and in part also of the native feeling of the designers, who well understood that the difference between nature and art, especially in architecture, is one that ought never to be lost sight of. In its integrity Gothic art does not permit the limits of architectural propriety to be overstepped by imitative realisation. It is conventional in the strictest and truest sense; but it is never arbitrarily so. Its convention is the natural result of obedience to the limitations imposed by position, material, and architectural fitness. It is only in the decline of Gothic—a decline that sets in much earlier than has been commonly supposed—that anything like direct imitation of nature appears.

Throughout the period of its integrity the traditional principles of ornamentation are retained. They are often, indeed, applied in such new ways as almost to lose their identity; but they are never thrown aside. The ancient principles of ornamental design, the ancient grammatical forms of expression, are of universal propriety because they are based upon fundamental, and therefore authoritative, laws of relation and quantity. The combinations of elements may be endlessly varied, but the ruling principles may never be superseded.

And superseded they never are in true Gothic. Gothic sculpture being, as I have already said, like Gothic construction, an evolution out of older elements, it bears, through its whole duration, distinct traces of them. Thus in Amiens Cathedral there are string-courses adorned with running ornaments, the disposition of whose parts recalls the egg and dart design of the Greeks. Others are based upon the various conventional meanders and scrolls of classic design. But instead of the abstract forms of the antique details we have the generic types, and even many of the individual