14 - PREFACE BY WILLIAM MORRIS TO CHAP. VI. (‘THE NATURE OF GOTHIC’)

Summary

The chapter which is here put before the reader can be well considered as a separate piece of work, although it contains here and there references to what has gone before in The Stones of Venice. To my mind, and I believe to some others, it is one of the most important things written by the author, and in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. To some of us when we first read it, now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel. And in spite of all the disappointments of forty years, and although some of us, John Ruskin amongst others, have since learned what the equipment for that journey must be, and how many things must be changed before we are equipped, yet we can still see no other way out of the folly and degradation of civilisation.