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Bourges is the site of the last diary entry on the journey home. Ruskin there takes the opportunity to bring together many of the ideas he had developed over the preceding months in relation to the cathedral. The promise at the beginning of the tour was certainty, architectural laws, as opposed to what saw as the reliance on mere opinion by Woods and the critics of Seven Lamps of Architecture in their comments on St. Marks. However Notebook M2 p.176 suggests a different view, and one much closer to that of Woods which Ruskin had sought to challenge as a result of the reviews of Seven Lamps of Architecture. Compare the approach taken in Sheet No. 188 in Bourges Cathedral:
The general impression after Italian Gothic of confused structure - no sure support of anything - the whole curiously balanced and equipoised - held by cross thrusts here and side thrusts there - here tied and there wedged - the whole most ingenious but unnatural and uncomfortable. The want of proportion in the pillars painful. They have not the look of shafts doing their work but of material squeezed together and held tightly by a case of iron rods; the walls look bound together in the same way. The small shafts having a capital here and a band there, like gaspipes, and then a long run to the ground without anything at all and these being observe. only this - I believe necessary faults of a most blessed and glorious whole.
The faults can be defined and described; the glory has simply to be recognised.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]