[Plate XXX] shows the cathedral of Chartres seen over the houses of the town, from the southeast. The two great towers on the left of the picture are those which flank the west front: one of them, the simpler one, seen on the extreme left and flanking the west front on the south is the most famous tower in France and the most important single piece of work in the history of Gothic tower-building, because it shows in a faultless way the transition from Romanesque to Gothic in those forms which are immediately caused by the necessity of vaulting the interiors. These secondary parts (for the vaulted interior alone can be called a primary and essential part of the Gothic church) sympathize with that vaulted interior in the soaring character of the design, as has been said above. The other tower was rebuilt at a much later period and typifies perfectly the florid Gothic of the fifteenth century. We are to imagine, then, two towers at the west end, each very like the earlier one: and, as the picture shows, two others flanked the south transept. In the Plate, one of them is covered by scaffolding, some repairs being in progress. Two similar towers were intended to flank the north transept: and a tower, undoubtedly planned for a larger and higher mass than any one of the flanking towers just described, was to have risen from that part of the church where the transept crosses the great nave—the “crossing” as it is commonly called. Looking at this view of Chartres cathedral, we are to imagine it then as not having that high-shouldered look caused by the level line of the ridge of the church, because that roof would not be seen except in small patches, the seven great spires rising high above it and the seven square towers which support them concealing the roof except here and there as the spectator moves about the church. Now it is an unquestioned reproach to the Gothic style that no one of these great churches was ever completed. Certain towers there were which have been so shattered by the burning of the roofs that they have been taken down. Spires have existed which have now disappeared, but the greater part of the magnificent towers conceived by the builders of the early years of the thirteenth century have remained incomplete, and the churches which were to have had them are only to be judged by an effort of the mind akin to that effort we have to make in considering the buildings of classical antiquity. We are better off with Gothic art than with Greek art, because we have the details: and also because we have that which no Greek building can be said to have had, the splendid and impressive interiors: but nowhere is there a great Gothic church complete in its intended exterior effect. The nearest approach to completion is undoubtedly to be found in England, and, for a choice, in the lovely cathedral of Salisbury. The architecture is not nearly as splendid as on the Continent; it is more tranquil, more unpretending; it is less extraordinary in scale, surpassing in a less formidable fashion the buildings of residence and of government: and partly as a result of this it has been easier to build and easier to maintain these buildings in their intended completion. [Plate XXXI] shows this cathedral amid the trees of its close and well explains that peculiarity of position in which some English cathedrals are so much differentiated from those of the Continent. In spite of the trees, however, the great peculiarity is seen of two transepts—one crossing the nave at the point where the tower rises, as was the intention in the Chartres cathedral, [Plate XXX]: the other, to the eastward of that, and flanking the choir in a curious way, without example on the Continent.
