[In the following review, Salvesen declares the third edition of Clark's The Gothic Revival to be “concise” and “informative.”]

Sir Kenneth Clark's study [The Gothic Revival], first published in 1928, is worth its third edition, if only because it provides a concise and informative survey of a large and, it seems, increasingly popular subject—a subject which relates both to the visual sense and to a feeling for tradition, to an alertness about pinnacles and pointed arches and to the emotive overtones of gloomy, gas-lit decay which gather round churches and railway stations. The book, despite its rather clever-undergraduate style, brings a serious historical approach to the Gothic Revival—which itself was one of the original symptoms of our present highly developed sense of history. The revival grew from a general and ‘literary’ impulse, a sense of the past stirring in the minds of poets and country gentlemen in the second half of the 18th century: in particular, an awareness—hazy, delighted, horror-struck—of the Middle Ages. This historical consciousness has been growing ever since; it is by a sophistication of it that the author could see his work in its second edition (1949) as ‘a period piece, a document … in the history of taste which it sets out to anatomize.’ That is, he feels that by concentrating on the ideals and motives of the revival, he had failed to say enough about the visual and plastic qualities of some of its finest buildings.

Today, the architecture gets most of the appreciation it needs. The sustained interest in Victorian Gothic may, of course, belong to some entirely new impulse: but most likely it is part of the old continuity dating either from Horace Walpole or the great cathedrals themselves or even earlier: Gothic, is it style, or principle? The revival itself is ‘distanced’ and accepted: though by a taste which, becoming ever more eclectic, more accepting, is in danger of resuming that largely antiquarian spirit in which the movement began, of indiscriminate respect for the relatively old and the interestingly odd. But Victorian Gothic concerns both the everyday eye and the everyday heart; and it is relevant to many problems: for example, an understanding of the Gothic Revival—its architecture and the ideas behind it—is essential to any case (if there is one) for restoration, as the chapter here on Ruskin shows. After its literary start, the revival became conducted more and more in terms of social, religious, and moral issues. Today it seems to be the aesthetic and historical qualities which again hold attention—a perversion of the true impulse, or a return to it?