432 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

21. I make this appeal at the risk of incurring only contempt for my Utopianism. But I should for ever reproach myself if I were prevented from making it by such a risk;¹ and I pray those who may be disposed in any wise to favour it to remember that it must be answered at once or never. The next five years determine what is to be saved-what destroyed. The restorations have actually begun like cancers on every important piece of Gothic architecture in Christendom; the question is only how much can yet be saved. All projects, all pursuits, having reference to art, are at this moment of less importance than those which are simply protective. There is time enough for everything else. Time enough for teaching-time enough for criticising-time enough for inventing. But time little enough for saving. Hereafter we can create, but it is now only that we can preserve. By the exertion of great national powers, and under the guidance of enlightened monarches, we may raise magnificent temples and gorgeous cities; we may furnish labour for the idle, and interest for the ignorant. But the power neither of emperors, nor queens, nor kingdoms, can ever print again upon the sands of time the effaced footsteps of departed generations, or gather together from the dust the stones which had been stamped with the spirit of our ancestors.

¹ [See above, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 33, p. 56.]

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