228 THE STONES OF VENICE CONSTRUCTION

§ 14. Of these the first arose, by the most delicate and natural transitions, out of the perfect school. It was an endeavour to introduce more grace into its lines, and more change into its combinations; and the ćsthetic results are so beautiful that for some time after the right road had been left, the aberration was more to be admired than regretted. The final conditions became fantastic and effeminate, but, in the country where they had been invented, never lost their peculiar grace until they were replaced by the Renaissance. The copies of the school in England and Italy have all its faults and none of its beauties; in France, whatever it lost in method or in majesty, it gained in fantasy; literally Flamboyant, it breathed away its strength into the air; but there is not more difference between the commonest doggerel that ever broke prose into unintelligibility, and the burning mystery of Coleridge,¹ or spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett,² than there is between the dissolute dulness of English Flamboyant, and the flaming undulations of the wreathed lines of delicate stone, that confuse themselves with the clouds of every morning sky that brightens above the valley of the Seine.³

below, § 16 and ch. xxi. § 29, p. 303; Seven Lamps, Vol. VIII. p. 108; and Val d’ Arno, § 140. By “the Stump Tracery of Germany” Ruskin means the intersectional system, described below (§ 15) and more fully in Seven Lamps (Vol. VIII. pp. 94-98), with its stumpy and truncated forms. The term was invented by Willis: “The After Gothic of Germany has tracery in which the ribs are made to pass through each other, and are then abruptly cut off. This may be called Stump Tracery.”-(Remarks on the Architecture of the Middle Ages, 1835, p. 61.)]

¹ [For Ruskin’s appreciation of Coleridge, see Vol. IV. p. 391, and cf. Vol. VIII. pp. 249, 271.]

² [For other instances of Ruskin’s admiration for Mrs. Browning’s poetry, see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. § 77 n.; Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi. § 10; A Joy for Ever, § 78 n.; Elements of Drawing, § 258. Mrs. Browning, on her side, was an appreciative, though critical, reader of the first two volumes of Modern Painters (see Vol. III. p. xxxviii.). It was in the year following the publication of the present volume that Ruskin made her acquaintance (see Introduction to next volume).]

³ [The variations in the MS. may here be given as an instance of Ruskin’s careful consideration of his words. Thus, he first wrote “dreariest doggerel,” but afterwards sacrificed the alliteration (owing, no doubt, to the two d’s below); for “spirituality of Elizabeth Barrett,” he first wrote (a) “the wild, bright spirituality,” then (b) “bright spirituality,” and next (c) “disembodied spirituality.” For “dissolute dulness,” he first wrote “the dull, unbalanced, purposeless dissoluteness and stupidity;” for “flaming undulations,” “undulating threads;” and for the last words of the passage, “that confuse themselves in light with the interwoven clouds of the morning sky when they form above the valley of Seine.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]