Pugin and His Circle

Extract

The renascence of Christian art brought about by the Gothic Revival of the last century did not come easily. There were still those who quibbled and spoke of pasticheurs, as though architects who raised Doric town halls and Corinthian façades in the nineteenth century were not pasticheurs.

Earlier, Constable, the painter, had said acidly: ‘A new Gothic building, or a new missal, is in reality little less absurd than a new ruin. The Gothic architecture, sculpture, and painting, belong to peculiar ages. The feelings that guided their inventors are unknown to us.’ Coleridge, however, with a nobler vision, had said: ‘The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is, no doubt, a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. ‘ The Classicists continued to murmur. Some suggested that Gothic was a mummy exhumed for exhibition in market-places already slowly greying with the first smoke of industrialism; others said that Gothic was an entirely new, a Victorian, product.