INTRODUCTION xxxi

Sometimes we see in the diaries the particular instances or accumulation of instances which first suggested a general principle to him:-

(COUTANCES.)-The pillars are built of narrow stones, irregular in size and have clumsy capitals, too square, and of very poor workmanship as thus [sketch]. This proportion, endurable on a low pillar, is abominable on a shaft. (Note this principle-I never thought of it before, that slender shafts must have spreading capitals.¹) But even were their capitals good, these pillars are themselves ugly, they have lost all pillar proportion, and yet not become shafts, and they reach just half way up the apse, whose height they destroy instead of raising. Outside of them is a low range of cylindrical pillars, one to each pair of choir columns-forming a double aisle-the innermost aisle is vaulted from and at the height of the choir columns, corresponding to the top of the clerestory of the nave, and this is the finest thing in the cathedral,-beautifully proportioned. The outer aisle is low and crypt-like-with recessed triple windows, lancet, instead of chapels, with detached shafts, as in Christ Church chapter house, very graceful, but the vaulting so complicated that its ribs fall below the capitals of the shafts, and are received on brackets from the shaft (p. 15, smallest note-book), and even this at various heights, so that in one or two cases only the outer roll of the rib comes below the capital, and that passes neatly through the roll at the capital top, like one ring morticed in another, and falls to a bracket just under the capital. The rude trefoil which joins the shafts to the wall is rather picturesque than graceful.

CAEN.-I have just come to-day (23rd Sept.) from the exceedingly simple and noble church of the Abbaye aux Hommes. It has taught me two things. First, that Norman work in purity of form is unsatisfactory, and must either be decorated with colour or wall sculptures; the second, that the peculiar rosette decoration which is characteristic more than anything else of Norman pointed Gothic-as at Coutances, Bayeux, Lisieux and here-originated immediately after the pointed arch was introduced, and may be considered a mark of an unformed Gothic, even in the elaboration in which it exists at Coutances and Bayeux. Here at Caen it co-exists, though crude, with pure Norman mouldings, round pointed arches.

Industrious and indefatigable though he was, Ruskin still felt at the end of his tour that he was only beginning to learn:-

“I still feel,” he writes to his father from Rouen (Oct. 15), when his sojourn there was drawing to a close, “that I leave this place Unseen; this is partly, however, owing to my slowness in taking in; I cannot

¹ On this point, see St. Mark’s Rest, § 16.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]