f the great French facades is wanting.
But the size of the west window has other disastrous effects. It would
have been difficult, almost impossible, to assimilate an opening so
large, and of such an elaborate pattern, to the rest of the design, and
hardly an effort even has been made to do so. It appears, therefore,
like the porches, to have been cut bodily out of the front without
regard for the rest of the plan, and its acute arch harmonises badly
with the gable above it. No doubt the designer saw the fault; he placed
an acute ornamental gable above the window, rising to the top of the
front, and he covered the actual gable of the roof with flamboyant
tracery of the same character as that on the window; but, by so doing,
he merely weakened the contrast between tracery and bare spaces of
masonry so necessary to every great design.

The weakness of the central division is not made up for by any
excellence in the towers. These, though fine on their lower storeys, are
strangely feeble above. They are, in fact, the worst part of the
minster, and have been condemned by all critics, from Mr Ruskin
downwards. In most towers of this kind there are two windows above and a
single one below. At York the three storeys of single windows give the
design an air of monotony and weakness. Further, the highest window is
not only far too large, but is placed too low. Like the great west
window, it appears to have been cut out of the wall. It is also
peculiarly unfortunate that the buttresses should die into the wall
below the pinnacles. Where a tower is buttressed, it is a natural and
logical device to make the pinnacles a continuation of the buttresses.
Here both pinnacles and buttresses, unusually prominent and elaborate,
do not seem to be an integral part of the design. They have been called
a kind of architectural confectionery, and the criticism is just. The
fact that the battlements and pinnacles project a few inches over the
walls of the towers, only adds to the air of weakness and instability of
the whole. Nowhere else surely has a Gothic architect approached so
closely to the ideals of his "churchwarden" imitators of the beginning
of this century.

But these faults, though serious enough, do not include everything that
can be said against the west front of the minster. Gothic churches have
often been noble and triumphant works of art in spite of errors almost
as grave. Unfortunately the west front suffers from a tendency first