Still, as far as I can make it out, the lecture appears to have been
one of those of which you will just at present hear so many, the
protests of architects who have no knowledge of sculpture--or of any
other mode of expressing natural beauty--_against_ natural beauty;
and their endeavour to substitute mathematical proportions for the
knowledge of life they do not possess, and the representation of life
of which they are incapable.[Illustration] Now, this substitution of
obedience to mathematical law for sympathy with observed life, is the
first characteristic of the hopeless work of all ages; as such, you
will find it eminently manifested in the specimen I have to give you of
the hopeless Gothic barbarism; the barbarism from which nothing could
emerge--for which no future was possible but extinction. The
Aristotelian principles of the Beautiful are, you remember, Order,
Symmetry, and the Definite. Here you have the three, in perfection,
applied to the ideal of an angel, in a psalter of the eighth century,
existing in the library of St. John's College, Cambridge.[Footnote: I
copy this woodcut from Westwood's "Palaeographia Sacra."]

Now, you see the characteristics of this utterly dead school are, first
the wilful closing of its eyes to natural facts;--for, however ignorant
a person may be, he need only look at a human being to see that it has
a mouth as well as eyes; and secondly, the endeavour to adorn or
idealize natural fact according to its own notions: it puts red spots
in the middle of the hands, and sharpens the thumbs, thinking to
improve them. Here you have the most pure type possible of the
principles of idealism in all ages: whenever people don't look at
Nature, they always think they can improve her. You will also admire,
doubtless, the exquisite result of the application of our great modern
architectural principle of beauty--symmetry, or equal balance of part