less and
unprofitable" adventures of the spirit. They conquered the world and
built roads and bridges but they borrowed their art wholesale from the
Greeks. They invented certain practical forms of architecture which
answered the demands of their day and age. But their statues and their
histories and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imitations
of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to-define something
which the world calls "personality," there can be no art and the Roman
world distrusted that particular sort of personality. The Empire needed
efficient soldiers and tradesmen. The business of writing poetry or
making pictures was left to foreigners.

Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the proverbial bull in
the china-shop of western Europe. He had no use for what he did not
understand. Speaking in terms of the year 1921, he liked the magazine
covers of pretty ladies, but threw the Rembrandt etchings which he had
inherited into the ash-can. Soon he came to learn better. Then he tried
to undo the damage which he had created a few years before. But the
ash-cans were gone and so were the pictures.

But by this time, his own art, which he had brought with him from the
east, had developed into something very beautiful and he made up for his
past neglect and indifference by the so-called "art of the Middle
Ages" which as far as northern Europe is concerned was a product of the
Germanic mind and had borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins
and nothing at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria, not
to speak of India and China, which simply did not exist, as far as the
people of that time were concerned. Indeed, so little had the northern
races been influenced by their southern neighbours that their own
architectural products were completely misunderstood by the people of
Italy and were treated by them with downright and unmitigated contempt.

You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably associate it with the
picture of a lovely old cathedral, lifting its slender spires towards
high heaven. But what does the word really mean?

It means something "uncouth" and "barbaric"--something which one might
expect from an "uncivilised Goth," a rough backwoods-man who had no
respect for the established rules of classical art and who built his
"modern horrors" to please his own low tastes without a decent regard
for the examples of the Forum and the Acropolis.

And yet for several c