III. NATURALISM VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 233

makes the fire as like real fire as he can; and in the porch of St. Maclou at Rouen¹ the sculptured flames burst out of the Hades gate, and flicker up, in writhing tongues of stone, through the interstices of the niches, as if the church itself were on fire. This is an extreme instance, but it is all the more illustrative of the entire difference in temper and thought between the two schools of art, and of the intense love of veracity which influenced the Gothic design.

§ 66. I do not say that this love of veracity is always healthy in its operation. I have above noticed the errors into which it falls from despising design; and there is another kind of error noticeable in the instance just given, in which the love of truth is too hasty, and seizes on a surface truth instead of an inner one. For in representing the Hades fire, it is not the mere from of the flame which needs most to be told, but its unquenchableness, its Divine ordainment and limitation, and its inner fierceness, not physical and material, but in being the expression of the wrath of God. And these things are not to be told by imitating the fire that flashes out of a bundle of sticks. If we think over his symbol a little, we shall perhaps find that the Romanesque builder told more truth in that likeness of a blood-red stream, flowing between definite shores, and out of God’s throne, and expanding, as if fed by a perpetual current, into the lake wherein the wicked are cast, ² than the Gothic builder in those torch-flickerings about his niches. But this is not to our immediate purpose; I am not at present to insist upon the faults into which the love of truth was led in the later Gothic times, but on the feeling itself, as a glorious and peculiar characteristic of the Northern builders. For, observe, it is not, even in the above instance, love of truth, but want of thought, which causes the fault. The love of truth, as such, is good, but

¹ [The Last Judgment is sculptured on the central tympanum; it is referred to again in Vol. IX. p. 275,and Vol. VIII. p. 212. For another reference to the church (built 1437-1480), see Vol. VIII. p. 41 n.]

² [See Revelation xix. and xx.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]