all art schools. It is just as manifest in each and every school that
ever has had life in it at all. Wheresoever the search after truth
begins, there life begins; wheresoever that search ceases, there life
ceases. As long as a school of art holds any chain of natural facts,
trying to discover more of them and express them better daily, it may
play hither and thither as it likes on this side of the chain or that;
it may design grotesques and conventionalisms, build the simplest
buildings, serve the most practical utilities, yet all it does will be
gloriously designed and gloriously done; but let it once quit hold of
the chain of natural fact, cease to pursue that as the clue to its
work; let it propose to itself any other end than preaching this living
word, and think first of showing its own skill or its own fancy, and
from that hour its fall is precipitate--its destruction sure; nothing
that it does or designs will ever have life or loveliness in it more;
its hour has come, and there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor
wisdom in the grave whither it goeth.

Let us take for example that school of art over which many of you would
perhaps think this law had but little power--the school of Gothic
architecture. Many of us may have been in the habit of thinking of that
school rather as of one of forms than of facts--a school of pinnacles,
and buttresses, and conventional mouldings, and disguise of nature by
monstrous imaginings--not a school of truth at all. I think I shall be
able, even in the little time we have to-night, to show that this is
not so; and that our great law holds just as good at Amiens and
Salisbury, as it does at Athens and Florence.

I will go back then first to the very beginnings of Gothic art, and
before you, the students of Kensington, as an impanelled jury, I will
bring two examples of the barbarism out of which Gothic art emerges,