The study of archæology did not cease with Montalembert; since his day it has made enormous strides. We know now that he was right. The men who lived in the Middle Ages did not recognise, as we do now, the “omnipotence of numbers,” hence the glorious originality shown in their architecture, its dignity, its liberty, and its nobility. We have only to look a little way to note that “in those countries where the sovereignty of the State is most absolute, the originality of art is nearest to its vanishing point, diminished by the State, that despot who never dies, who already extends everywhere his irresistible and pitiless level, over prostrate human dust.” The music, poetry and painting, sculpture, as well as the architecture of the Middle Ages, all point with unerring finger to the individuality of the Middle Ages. The songs of the Gallegan _trovadors_, the _Cancionero Gallego_, are full of tales that bear witness to the liberties taken by individuals in those days even with their religion. Have we not already repeated in this very volume tales in which nuns and gallants freely appealed to the Virgin for her assistance in designs which they knew to be immoral! The age of cathedral-building is not over. We see new cathedrals rising in Russia, in England, in America. Huge and massive and costly they are, but have they the spiritual and subtle beauty of the Gothic or the charm of the Renaissant architecture? Can they be judged by the same standard? No; for, to use the words of Spain’s great architect, artistic collectivism has succeeded personal art, just as personal art once succeeded symbolic art.[98] And architecture, according to the eternal laws of its being essentially an interpretative, not an imitative art, it interprets the soul-language of the human beings amongst whom it rises into existence.