xxx INTRODUCTION

Switzerland, where we have the rose, the green is blacker and not so soft; the sweetest bits of all were the soft flat vale of the Abbaye de Bec, whence came our Archbishops Anselm and Lanfranc, and the approach to this place-rich to excess, with its wooden houses set so quaintly on the hillside, as if it had been all built for pigeons.”

So again, from Rouen (October 1), he writes:-

“We have now very completely seen the country of Normandy, and missed nothing celebrated in architecture except some provincial churches near Caen and the abbey of Jumièges, and although I have never been able to do anything like hard work, I have got as much as is necessary to enable me to speak with confidence of these Norman buildings. The only place that I left quite insufficiently seen was Caudebec, yesterday-where I expected only an interesting little village church and found the richest portals-for delicate workmanship on a small scale-I have yet seen: of a class however which it would have been in vain to have attempted drawing unless I had had another week to spare. Besides this, the scene from the riverside is perfectly glorious; the river as broad as the Rhine, but calm and glassy, with, on the opposite shore, a plain as level as that of Marengo, and as vast, with long lines of poplars and maples, of exquisitely graceful upright trees reflected stem for stem in the broad water, and on the Caudebec side a sweeping theatre of hills as high about as those of the Rhine, but covered, instead of vines, with one mantle of forest. All that I used to say of French trees¹ is far below their deserving. Such romantic, far-stretching, graceful successions of group and glade as cover the hills from here to Havre, I never saw in any land.”

The entries in his note-books are severely technical and laboriously detailed. Every church that he visited was described and measured, with accompanying sketches or memoranda. These diaries, note-books, and sketches show very forcibly that Ruskin’s generalisations were founded upon minute study of particular instances. The “personal observation” of which he spoke in the first preface to The Seven Lamps² as justifying his essay was long and minute. Either at the time of writing, or later when he was considering his architectural essays, he put marginal notes in his diaries indicating the points or principles which the several entries illustrated-such as, in the passage about Chambéry above quoted, “uninventive Gothic,” “decoration without unity,” “intersecting mouldings.”

¹ See Modern Painters, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 41; in this edition, Vol. III. p. 238.

² See below, p. 3, and cf. Appendix ii. p. 280.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]