CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 91

the very last instant in which the reduction and thinning of the intervening stone was consummated, his eye had been on the openings only, on the stars of light. He did not care about the stone; a rude border of moulding was all he needed, it was the penetrating shape which he was watching. But when that shape had received its last possible expansion, and when the stone-work became an arrangement of graceful and parallel lines, that arrangement, like some form in a picture, unseen and accidentally developed, struck suddenly, inevitably, on the sight. It had literally not been seen before. It flashed out in an instant, as an independent form. It became a feature of the work. The architect took it under his care, thought over it, and distributed its members as we see.

Now, the great pause was at the moment when the space and the dividing stone-work were both equally considered. It did not last fifty years. The forms of the tracery were seized with a childish delight in the novel source of beauty; and the intervening space was cast aside, as an element of decoration, for ever. I have confined myself, in following this change, to the window, as the feature in which it is clearest. But the transition is the same in every member of architecture; and its importance can hardly be understood, unless we take the pains to trace it in the universality, of which illustrations, irrelevant to our present purpose, will be found in the third Chapter. I pursue here the question of truth, relating to the treatment of the mouldings.

APHORISM 16. Tracery must never be considered or imagined as flexible.¹

§ 24. The reader will observe that, up to the last expansion of the penetrations, the stone-work was necessarily considered, as it actually is, stiff, and unyielding. It was so, also, during the pause of which I have spoken, when the forms of the tracery were still severe and pure; delicate indeed, but perfectly firm.²

At the close of the period of pause, the first sign of serious

¹ [The aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is the whole of § 24.]

² [The MS. adds, “Take for one instance of a thousand the north transept of Rouen,” and refers to an intended plate. Four lines below for “cobweb” the MS. has “carpet,” and still further down, “spider’s web” for “net.”]

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