42 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

There is a dispute between French and English antiquaries as to the date of the building, the English being unwilling to admit its complete priority to all their own Gothic. I have no doubt of this priority myself; and I hope that the time will soon come when men will cease to confound vanity with patriotism,¹ and will think the honour of their nation more advanced by their own sincerity and courtesy, than by claims, however learnedly contested, to the invention of pinnacles and arches. I believe the French nation was, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the greatest in the world;² and that the French not only invented Gothic architecture, but carried it to a perfection which no other nation has approached, then or since: but, however this may be, there can be no doubt that the towers of Coutances, if not the earliest, are among the very earliest, examples of the fully developed spire. I have drawn one of them carefully for you (fig. 11), and you will see immediately that they are literally domestic roofs, with garret windows, executed on a large scale, and in stone. Their only ornament is a kind of scaly mail, which is nothing more than the copying in stone of the common wooden shingles of the house-roof; and their security is provided for by strong gabled dormer windows, of massy masonry, which, though supported on detached shafts, have weight enough completely to balance the lateral thrusts of the spires. Nothing can surpass the boldness or the simplicity of the plan; and yet, in spite of this simplicity, the clear detaching of the shafts from the slope of the spire, and their great height, strengthened by rude crossbars of stone, carried back to the wall behind, occasion so

Lichfield (the west front and spires), is given by Willis as about 1275. On the vexed questions, referred to in the text, of the priority between English and French Gothic, the reader may consult the works of M. de Caumont, J. H. Parker’s Introduction to the Study of Gothic Architecture, Part ii., and C. H. Moore’s Development and Character of Gothic Architecture, pp. 166-167, 310-313.]

¹ [Compare Val d’ Arno, § 247, where Ruskin speaks of “the mingling of mean rapacity with meaner vanity which Christian nations now call patriotism;” and see also A Joy for Ever, § 81. For Ruskin’s views upon patriotism, in a nobler sense of the word, see his article, entitled “Home and its Economies,” reprinted in a later volume of this edition.]

² [So Ruskin says again in Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. xx. § 23.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]