CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 65

I do not know any thing more strange or unwise than the praise lavished upon this lantern;¹ it is one of the basest pieces of Gothic in Europe; its flamboyant traceries being of the last and most degraded forms:* and its entire plan and decoration resembling, and deserving little more credit than, the burnt sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery. There are hardly any of the magnificent and serene methods of construction in the early Gothic, which have not, in the course of time, been gradually thinned and pared away into these skeletons, which sometimes indeed, when their lines truly follow the structure of the original masses, have an interest like that of the fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance has been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as well as emaciated, and remain but the sickly phantoms and mockeries of things that were; they are to true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the armed and living frame; and the very winds that whistle through the threads of them, are to the diapasoned echoes

* They are noticed by Mr. Whewell2 as forming the figure of the fleur-de-lys, always a mark, when in tracery bars, of the most debased flamboyant. It occurs in the central tower of Bayeux, very richly in the buttresses of St. Gervais at Falaise, and in the small niches of some of the domestic buildings at Rouen. Nor is it only the tower of St. Ouen which is overrated. Its nave is a base imitation, in the flamboyant period, of an early Gothic arrangement; the niches on its piers are barbarisms; there is a huge square shaft run through the ceiling of the aisles to support the nave piers, the ugliest excrescence I ever saw on a Gothic building; the traceries of the nave are the most insipid and faded flamboyant; those of the transept clerestory present a singularly distorted condition of perpendicular; even the elaborate door of the south transept is, for its fine period, extravagant and almost grotesque in its foliation and pendants. There is nothing truly fine in the church but the choir, the light triforium, and tall clerestory, the circle of Eastern chapels, the details of sculpture, and the general lightness of proportion; these merits being seen to the utmost advantage by the freedom of the body of the church from all incumbrance.3

¹ [As, for instance, in Murray’s Handbook for France, where it is praised as “a model of grace and delicacy,” and in E. A. Freeman’s History of Architecture, 1849, p. 397, where it is pronounced “inimitable.”]

² [See p. 168 of Architectural Notes on German Churches ... To which is now added, Notes written during an Architectural Tour in Picardy and Normandy, by the Rev. W. Whewell: Cambridge, 1835. Ruskin afterwards compared notes in person with the Master of Trinity; see Introduction above, p. xl.]

³ [This was Note 5 in eds. 1 and 2. Note 2 in Appendix ii. of the 1880 edition.]

VIII. E

[Version 0.04: March 2008]