No; the peculiar Gothic buttress, with its double, triple, fourfold flights, while it makes such marvels possible, securing light and space and graceful effect, relieving the pillars within of their massiveness, is not a restful architectural feature. Consolidation of matter naturally on the move, security for settlement in a very complex system of construction--that is avowedly a part of the Gothic situation, the Gothic problem. With the genius which contended, though not always quite successfully, with this difficult problem, came also novel aesthetic effect, a whole volume of delightful aesthetic effects. For the mere melody of Greek architecture, for the sense as it were of music in the opposition of successive sounds, you got harmony, the richer music generated by opposition of sounds in one and the same moment; and were gainers. And then, in contrast with the classic manner, and the Romanesque survivals from it, the vast complexity of the Gothic style seemed, as if consciously, to correspond to the richness, the expressiveness, the thousandfold influence of the Catholic religion, in the thirteenth century still in natural movement in every direction. The later Gothic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tended to conceal, as it now took for granted, the structural use of the buttress, for [115] example; seemed to turn it into a mere occasion for ornament, not always pleasantly:--while the ornament was out of place, the structure failed. Such falsity is far enough away from what at Amiens is really of the thirteenth century. In this pre-eminently "secular" church, the execution, in all the defiance of its method, is direct, frank, clearly apparent, with the result not only of reassuring the intelligence, but of keeping one's curiosity also continually on the alert, as we linger in these restless aisles.