Art & Creativity Quote by Goldwin Smith

Smith skewers medieval nostalgia with the impatience of a liberal Victorian watching tasteful escapism harden into politics. The sentence itself performs the phenomenon it mocks: it starts with a “spell,” then drifts through a chain of increasingly diluted motives - trying, wishing, pretending to wish, pretending to pretend. That cascading syntax is the point. He’s not arguing with a serious restoration project so much as diagnosing a mood: a self-flattering aesthetic trance in which people mistake atmosphere for argument.

As a historian writing in an era of Gothic Revival architecture, Pre-Raphaelite medievalism, and romanticized chivalry, Smith is alert to how the Middle Ages could be repackaged as moral therapy for modernity. Industrial Britain produced soot, dislocation, and class anxiety; medieval art offered stained-glass consolation and a story that society once had coherence, hierarchy, and “authentic” faith. Smith’s subtext is that this longing isn’t innocent. The desire to “bring back the Middle Ages” is a way to launder reactionary impulses - deference, clerical authority, feudal social order - through beauty. Call it politics in costume jewelry.

He also needles the modern ego hiding inside the medieval pose. To “make believe” you want the past is a kind of cultural cosplay: you get the romance without the plague, the guild without the servitude, the cathedral without the theocracy. Smith’s intent is prophylactic. He’s warning that art can be an ideological gateway drug, and that historical periods are not buffet tables. You don’t get to curate a century the way you curate a gallery wall.