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Second, the Gothic Revival took hold. Kenneth Clark's The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste (1928) is still the best introduction to this fascinating subject. Thanks to Pugin and Ruskin and Gilbert Scott (the Revival's most indefatigable architect, who designed the enormous St. Pancras Station and the Albert Memorial), gables, pointed arches, and vaulted roofs became all the rage.
A good deal of the architecture engendered by the Revival was of questionable merit. "The Albert Memorial," as Clark mordantly observed, "is the expression of pure philistinism, and as such is not a document of much value to the student of taste… . The conscious demands of the philistine are unvarying, and the Albert Memorial has always appealed in the same degree to the same class of people—the people who like a monument to be large and expensive-looking and to show much easily understood sculpture, preferably of animals." Ruskin was even more dismissive of the Revival. "I would rather, for my own part," he confessed, referring to his immensely influential The Stones of Venice, "that no architects had ever condescended to adopt one of the views suggested in this book, than that any should have made the partial use of it which has mottled our manufactory chimneys with black and red brick, dignified our bank and drapers' shops with Venetian tracery, and pinched our parish churches into dark and slippery arrangements for the advertisement of cheap coloured glass and pantiles." Indeed, Ruskin had nothing but contempt for what he called "the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making."
Meanwhile the Revival ran its course. When the vogue reached America, cathedrals soon followed—in Kentucky and Missouri, in Philadelphia and New York. And Protestants made no bones about how fascinating they found them. One Methodist minister visited the Cathedral of St. Peter in Cincinnati in 1847 and drew up an admiring catalogue of the place's "sacred furniture" before writing: "Look, now, upon all that brilliant scene—the brazen fence, the velvet-cushioned cathedra, the marble altar … and all that array of masterly and affecting pictures—and then ruminate on the design of all this splendor." Rumination led to emulation. In the Gothic style Protestants saw an ideal not only of piety but of refinement, and they were determined to make it their own. By the 1840s, Protestants could boast of Gothic churches that were as good as the best of their Catholic rivals, including Richard Upjohn's superb Trinity Episcopal Church in New York.
That "Gothic" became synonymous with refinement would have appalled Ruskin, who insisted that one of the indispensable elements of true Gothic was what he called "savageness." In his great essay "The Nature of Gothic," from The Stones of Venice, he described
this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the Cathedral and the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more energetically because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye dimmed by the moor-mist, or blinded by the hail; this outspeaking of the strong spirit of men who may not gather redundant fruitage from the earth, not bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for bread, and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew on them as they swung the axe or pressed the plough.
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