CH. II THE LAMP OF TRUTH 97

for a space of some three thousand years,) in order that the arch mouldings might appear to emerge from the pillar, as at its base they had been lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of the capital; then they ran the mouldings across and through each other, at the point of the arch; and finally, not finding their natural directions enough to furnish as many occasions of intersection as they wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off their ends short, when they had passed the point of intersection. Fig. 2, Plate IV., is part of a flying buttress from the apse of St. Gervais at Falaise, in which the moulding whose section is rudely given above at f (taken vertically through the point f,) is carried thrice through itself, in the cross-bar and two arches; and the flat fillet is cut off sharp at the end of the cross-bar, for the mere pleasure of the truncation. Fig. 3 is half of the head of a door in the Stadthaus of Sursee,¹ in which the shaded part of the section of the joint, g g, is that of the arch moulding, which is three times reduplicated, and six times intersected by itself, the ends being cut off when they became unmanageable. This style is, indeed, earlier exaggerated in Switzerland and Germany,² owing to the imitation in stone of the dovetailing of wood, particularly of the intersecting of beams at the angles of châlets;³ but it only furnishes the more plain instance of the danger of the fallacious system which, from the beginning, repressed the German, and, in the end, ruined the French, Gothic. It would be too painful a task to follow further the caricatures of form and eccentricities of treatment, which grew out of this single abuse-the flattened arch, the shrunken pillar, the lifeless ornament, the liny moulding, the distorted and extravagant foliation, until the time came when, over these wrecks and remnants, deprived

¹ [Between Olten and Lucerne, one of the many old Swiss towns in which Ruskin had sketched.

² [See further on this point Ruskin’s review of Lord Lindsay’s Christian Art (On the Old Road, 1899, § 31).]

³ [See on this point the note from Ruskin’s diary of 1846, cited above in the Introduction, p. xxi.]

VIII. G

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