44 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 



my opinion, one of the most striking examples of what I have 

 described as the parabola of art. Wherever Romans estab- 

 lished themselves during the period of the Empire, they 

 introduced one style of architecture, so that France, Germany, 

 England, Spain, and of course Italy, possessed a common 

 Romanesque style of building. After the absorption of 

 Christianity by the Occidental races and the decay of the old 

 Western Empire, this style was handled by the Teutonic 

 tribes, who succeeded to the Latin heritage, upon practically 

 the same lines of treatment. Local and national differences 

 are of course powerfully manifested; nor should these be 

 neglected in the problem I am going to propound, for they 

 render the phenomenon in question all the more remarkable. 

 What I wish to insist upon is, that from this common material 

 of Romanesque architecture there speedily emerged in all the 

 sections of the sub-divided Western Empire one manner of 

 building, with novel and distinctive attributes. This we are 

 accustomed to call Gothic; and the name, though derived 

 from a false conception of ethnology, is useful in so far as it 

 reminds us of the fact that the style was one which peoples of 

 Teutonic origin developed from the monuments of their old 

 masters. It fixes attention on the corresponding fact that, 

 although the Romans carried their architecture to Greece and 

 Turkey, to Asia Minor and Palestine, to the North of Africa 

 and Persia, no such novel growth as the Gothic type emerged 

 from it there. This form, then, we have a right to regard as 

 a product of the Teutonic mind, exhibited with characteristic 

 diversities, in all parts of Europe simultaneously. The dis- 

 tinctive features of the new style are the pointed arch and 

 the adoption of piers instead of pillars. After the tentative 

 beginnings of its earliest period, the finest examples of Gothic 

 display a chaste and exquisitely graceful scheme of lancet 

 windows, with restrained parsimony of ornamentation in the 

 mouldings, bosses, pinnacles, crockets, and other subsidiary 

 parts of architecture. This is what has sometimes been called 

 the Early Pointed style. But it could not arrest itself at that 

 pure and comparatively unambitious stage of development. 

 It passed imperceptibly over into the Decorated style, where 



