in need of interpretation. He makes the
fire as like real fire as he can; and in the porch of St. Maclou at
Rouen 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.

Sec. LXVI. 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 _form_ 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,
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 when it is
misdirected by thoughtlessness or over-excited by vanity, and either
seizes on facts of small value, or gathers them chiefly that it may
boast of its grasp and apprehension, its work may well become dull or
offensive. Yet let us not, therefore, blame the inherent love of facts,
but the incautiousness of their selection, and impertinence of their
statement.

Sec. LXVII. I said, in the second place, that Gothic work, when referred
to the arrangement of all art, as purist, natur