Page:Archaeological Journal, Volume 7.djvu/321

 AND AFTER-GOTHIC STYLES IN GERMANY. 223 forms were no longer trefoils, quatrefoils, trifoliate and qiiatrefoliate circles, and the like, but flowing or inflected curves, in which the lines pass from conyex to concave. Such lines also enter copiously into German and French tracery, after its first period ; but there are material dif- ferences in the progress of tracery in the two countries. In France, the tracery becomes, almost universally, "flam- boyant," the compartments being of a flame-like form, and the design of the window, generally, unsjanmetrical with regard to a vertical line. The flame-shaped compartment is defined by Professor Wilhs (Architof M.A., p. 60) as "in- cluded between two wavy lines, and divided unsymmetrically by one or more wavy lines." This element thus described as " flame-shaped" appears to be what M. Kallenbach calls the " fish-bladder form," (Mi.) — a designation which, besides other objections to it, has the inconvenience of reminding us of the " vesica piscis," a name by which we designate a form quite difl'erent, bounded by two equal segments of circles, and therefore neither bounded by wavy lines nor unsym- metrical. The Flamboyant tracery of France is carried out with a most prodigal disj^lay of variety and caprice in the After- Gothic of that country. Tracery of this kind exists in the After-Gothic of Germany ; but the love of intricacy which shows itself in that style assumes a more especially German form in the stump tracery, of which I shall speak hereafter. III. Principle of Lateral Continuity. — I introduce this principle, in order to point out that the principles of which I have already spoken did not operate without something to interfere with them. If we have, in the structure of a building, several frames, mainly parallel, and one subordinated to another ; if we have, in the tracery of a window, bundles of flexible staves or bars, which form the larger and smaller lights by their windings, triple, double, or single ; the struc- ture will still be too loose to be satisfactory, except there be something to bind together the parallel supports of the frame, the staves of the bundle. The feeling of this neces- sity (as a matter of idea) shows itself in various wa^'s in the progress of Gothic architecture. In the Early English style, there were large clusters of slender sliafts, each really detached ; but these were bound to each other or the wall by horizontal rings in the middle of their height. The arch