Chapter VI. The Lamp of Memory

John Ruskin

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Contents

List of Illustrations ......... xiii

Index to the Plates ......... xv

Introduction to This Volume ....... xix

Bibliographical Note ......... li

Author’s Preface to the first edition (1849) .... 3

Second Edition (1855) ... 7

Edition of 1880 ..... 15

The Seven Lamps of Architecture (containing the text of all the Editions):

Introductory . . . . . . . . .17

CHAP.

I. The Lamp of Sacrifice . . . . . 27

II. The Lamp of Truth . . . . . . .54

III. The Lamp of Power . . . . .100

IV. The Lamp of Beauty . . . .138

V. The Lamp of Life . . . . . . . . 190

VI. The Lamp of Memory . . . 221

VII. The Lamp of Obedience 248

Notes by the Author ... . 267

Appendix

I. Letters on The Seven Lamps of Architecture:

1. W. H. Harrison (APRIL 18, 1849) .... 275

2. to George Smith (JUNE 5, 1849) ..... 276

II. The MSS of “Seven Lamps” with additional passages ..... 278

Notes

1. LE note 1, p. 221: [The first note of the impressions recorded in this section occurs in Ruskin’s diary of 1846.]

2. LE note 1, p. 222: [Ruskin on his continental journeys must often have seen the processions of girls in white frocks with blue ribbons in honour of the Virgin with which every Catholic church, even in the poorest and most remote districts, celebrates the first of May. In later years he initiated a May Queen Festival at Whitelands Training College.]

3. LE note 1, p. 223: [All expression much in favour with Ruskin in his earlier pieces: see references collected at Vol. II. p. 62n.]

4. JR note, p. 223: Yet not all their light, nor all its music. Cf. Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. 1, chap. iv. sub. sec. 8. LE adds: This was note 15 at end of the book in eds 1 and 2; omitted in later editions. The note was an afterthought of the author; see letter to W. H. Harrison, in Appendix i., p. 276.]

5. LE note 2, p. 223: The MS. has, “things whose memorial is more precious than their being.” And below, “dyed and made sacred by . . .”]

6. LE note 1, p. 224: The present Fort de Joux erected in 1877 after the blowing up by dynamite of the old one commands the pass of La Cluse, on the line from Poutarlier to Neuchatel. The old fort was the prison (1803) of Toussaint 1'Ouverture, when carried off from St Domingo by command of Napoleon. For the Castle of Gransou (Grandson) now a cigar factory and its interest for Ruskin, see his Poems, Vol. II. p. 433 of this edition.]

7. LE note 2, p. 224: [The MS. adds “remember, that is to say, with the full revivifying sense of the past.”]

8. LE note 3, p. 224: Genesis xi. 4: “And they said, Go to, let us build us a city, and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”]

9. LE note 4, p. 224: So in all the editions; but Ruskin may have written “ever.”]

10. LE note 5, p. 224: [The MS. thus continues: “The desire for an individual, personal immortality in men’s memories is perhaps one of the most generally developed forms of human pride. Men sacrifice their lives to it continually. But the desire for a national immortality is with us as vague as the more selfish passion is distinct. Perhaps men doubt the liability of a nation to death, but if it have no architecture, it may be said to die daily. And if indeed . . .”]

11. LE note 1, p. 225: [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter iu the 1880 edition, is from “And if indeed there be any profit ...” down to the end of § 2.]

12. LE note 1, p. 226: [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from " I say that if men lived . . ." down to the end of § 3.]

13. LE note 2, p. 226: To the sentiment of this passage Ruskiu often recurred; see, for instance, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 50, and Lectures on Art, 122.]

14. LE note 1, p. 227: Cf. Cf. Sesame and Lilies, 68: “So far as it is a sacred place, a vestal temple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods, ... so far it vindicates the name, and fulfils the praise, of Home.”

15. LE note 1, p. 228: [The Palazzo Contarini-Fasau, remarkable "as showing how much beauty and dignity may be bestowed on a very small and unimportant dwelling-house ": see Stones of Venice, vol. iii., Venetian Index.]

16. LE note 2, p. 228: [The Casa Pigafetta, in the Contrada della Luna. The actual inscription is, “II n'est rose sans espines,” and “K. L. Augusti.” It was inhabited by the celebrated navigator Antonio Pigafetta, one of the companions of Magellan. The family still exists at Vicenza.]

17. LE note 1, p. 229: [See below, ch. vii.§ 3, pp. 251-252.]

18. LE note 2, p. 229: The inscription may be thus literally translated: “With heartfelt trust Have Johannes Mooter and Maria Rubi Had this house built. The dear God will shield us From all misfortune and danger, And let it stand in blessedness On the journey, through this time of sorrow, To the heavenly Paradise, Where all good people dwell, There will God reward them With the Crown' of Peace To all eternity.”]

19. LE note 1, p. 230: [The MS. continues: “Everything under such circumstances depends upon the beauty, and much on the simplicity of the emblem itself. The giglio rosso of Florence may be set as thick over a wall surface as lilies in their own field; so might our own rose, as richly as it studs its native briar, but we must beware of multiplying a Queen’s Arms.” See above, Chap. iv. § 8, p. 147.]

20. LE note 3, p. 230: [Cf., in the case of portrait painting, Modern Painters, vol. ii., Vol. IV. p. 189 of this edition.]

21. LE note 3, p. 230: [For further account of the capitals here described, see Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii.]

22. LE note 1, p. 231: [This is capital No. 36 in the Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 127, where the inscription is given as “Aristot * * che die lege” (“Aristotle who declares law”).]

23. LE note 2, p. 231: [The MS. continues (with reference to a further intended illustration): “1 have given one of the simplest of the first capitals in fig. . I am sorry that I have not a drawing of its opposite side, for the group of figs, which appear upon it are expressed with peculiar truth, though by few and simple lines. They look flaccid and breaking with ripeness. The peaches have tried the sculptor, but they are like peaches; and the modesty of the intitular inscription above is altogether unnecessary.”

The capital here referred to is No. 27 in the description in the Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. viii. § 125, where Ruskin says that the names of the various fruits are inscribed above them, “somewhat unnecessarily, and with certainly as much disrespect to the beholder’s intelligence as the sculptor’s art.”]

24. LE note 3, p. 231: [The old East India House in Leadenhall Street, pulled down in 1852, was in the classical style, with a portico of six large Ionic fluted columns on a raised basement. The pediment was an emblematic sculpture representing the commerce of the East protected by the King of Great Britain. The new Government Offices, including the India Office, were, it will be remembered, built — after a long “battle of the styles” — by Scott and Digby Wyatt in the Italian style. A good many sculptured figures were introduced representing in the case of the India Office, various Indian tribes, with busts of British Indian worthies. A characteristic letter from Ruskin (August 18, 1859) on the battle of the styles above referred to is included in the privately printed volume of Letters upon Subjects of General Interest to Various Correspondents, 1892, p. 23, reprinted in a later volume of this edition.]

Two photographs of the façade of the India Ofifice to which LE refers. [Click on thumbnails for larger images.]

25. LE note 1, p. 232: [A subject which would be of special interest to the author of Salsette and Elephanta: see Vol. II. p. 100.]

26. LE note 2, p. 232: [The MS. adds, “and make that be felt and beheld which words can only record?”]

27. LE note 2, p. 232: The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “The idea of self-denial . . .” down to the end of 9.]

28. LE note 1, p. 233: [It will be remembered that the general title chosen by Ruskin for the projected series, of which “The Bible of Amiens” was alone completed, was “Our Fathers have told us.”]

29. LE note 1, p. 234: [The MS. adds “,it is not in its fair columns or fine front.”] The initial comma appears in LE. — GPL.

30. LE note 2, p. 234: [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “For, indeed, the greatest glory . . .” down to the end of § 10. In his Notes on Prout and Hunt (1879), Ruskin reprinted in an Appendix this §10, and also § § 16, 17; and referring (Preface, § 23) to their justification of the love of ruggedness in buildings “dependent on just reverence for signs of antiquity,” added that “openness of joint and roughness of masonry are not exclusively signs of age or decay,” and that he “did not at that time enough insist on the propriety, and even the grace, of such forms of literal 'rustication' as are compelled by coarseness of materials.”]

LE appears to have omitted the aphorism, which seems to be something like “The greatest glory of a building is its age.” — GPL.

31. GPL note 1, p. 235: For a discussion of Ruskin’s theories of the picturesque and their relation to his views of sublimity, see Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theories, Chapter 3.

32. LE note 1, p. 235: [The passage as copied out in Ruskin’s diary is as follows: “Universal decay is the essence of the picturesque. In landscape, therefore, the picturesque stands in the same relation to the beautiful and sublime that the pathetic does to them in poetry.”]

33. LE note 1, p. 236: Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. § 35, and Modern Painters, vol. iv. ch. i.]

34. LE note 2, p. 236: [The MS. adds the following footnote: “I admit this distinction, however, only as between things included and including. High beauty cannot exist without, and includes, sublimity. Sublimity does not necessarily include beauty.”]

35. LE note 1, p. 237: 1 [A promise partly fulfilled in the Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iii. §§ 35-37, and in the later volumes of Modern Painters, but a good deal of Ruskin’s materials on the sublime was not embodied in his published works: see Vol. IV., Appendix i., pp. 368-371.]

36*. JR note, p. 239: This subordination was first remarked to me by a friend, to whose profound knowledge of Greek art I owe many obligations: Mr. C. Newton, now Consul at Mitylene.

LE annotates Ruskin’s note: [[Note 16 at the end of the book in eds. 1 and 2; omitted in later editions. In ed. 1 the note reads: “This subordination was first remarked to me by a friend, whose profound knowledge of Greek art will not, I trust, be reserved always for the advantage of his friends only: Mr. C. Newton, of the British Museum.”

For Ruskin’s friendship for Sir Charles Thomas Newton, D.C.L., LL.D., K.C.B., see Præterita, ii. ch. viii. 155. Newton entered the Museum in 1840 as assistant in the department of antiquities, and Ruskin often visited him there (see Vol. IV., Introduction, p. xx., and see Stones of Venice, vol. i., Appendix 21). In 1851 Newton was appointed Vice-Consul at Mitylene, and he remained in the East for ten years, carrying on his famous excavations. In ed. 2 Ruskin’s note was, therefore, altered as shown above. From 1861 to 1885 he was Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the Museum. In 1861 he married the distinguished painter, Ann Mary, daughter of Joseph Severn and sister of Mr. Arthur Severn; her portrait, painted by herself, is in the National Portrait Gallery.]

37. LE note 2, p. 239: LE note 1, p. 239: Herodotus, vii. 208. The Persian spy saw, among the Lacedaemonians, “some of the men practising athletic exercises and some combing their long hair.” Which things he reported to the King: “for they have a custom which is as follows; whenever they are about to put their lives in peril, then they attend to the arrangement of their hair.”]

38. LE note 2, p. 239: [For “in later sculpture” the MS. has “in Roman work, and in greater degree as that extreme of contrariety is approached,” and again in 16, for “the debased sculptor’s choice” the MS. has “the Roman choice.”]

39. LE note 1, p. 240: [For other references to the treatment of hair in art, see Vol. IV. p. 328.]

40. LE note 2, p. 240: [See above, § 11, p. 236.]

41. LE note 1, p. 241: [The MS. adds, “(and I am besides engaged at present with the proof of general principles only, which I hope to apply hereafter).”]

42. LE note 1, p. 242: [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “Neither by the public, . . .” down to “than ever will be out of re-built Milan” in § 19.]

43. JR note, p. 242: False, also, in the manner of parody, the most loathsome manner of falsehood. [1880.]

44. LE note 1, p. 243: [For the destructive “restoration” of the Baptistery at Pisa, see Ruskin’s letter of 1845, cited in Vol. IV. p. 38. In another letter he describes the process at the Casa d' Oro:

“(Venice, Sept. 23, 1845). You cannot imagine what an unhappy day I spent yesterday before the Casa d'Oro vainly attempting to draw it while the workmen were hammering it down before my face. It would have put me to my hardest possible shifts at any rate, for it is intolerably difficult, and the intricacy of it as a study of colour unconceivable. If I had had the whole Grand Canal to myself to do it, it would have been no more than I wanted, but fancy trying to work while one sees the cursed plasterers hauling up beams and dashing in the old walls and shattering the mouldings, and pulling barges across your gondola bows and driving you here and there, up and down and across; and all the while with the sense that now one’s art is not enough to be of the slightest service, but that in ten years more one might have done such glorious things."

Bannister-Fletcher’s drawing of the Ca d'oro.

Ruskin was at Lisieux in 1848; he mentions above the destructive restoration of the northern tower (p. 128).]

A recent photograph of Lisieux Cathedral with its restored northern (or left) tower,

45. LE note 2, p. 243: [The Palais de Justice, begun 1493, was restored, and added to, 1842-52. Some portion of the work done in those years is now (1903) being removed, and the building “restored” (in the better sense of the word) to its original design. See, for its history, Theodore Andrea Cook’s Story of Rouen, pp. 277 seq.]

GPL note: Like many buildings in Normandy, the Palais de Justice (shown in the photograph above), received heavy bomb damage in June 1944 and has just recently seen restoration.

46. LE note 1, p. 244: [The reference is to the destructive “restoration” of the church in the years, 1846-52, when the two flanking towers of the west front set diagonally and carried up only for 50 feet, with three deep-set portals were pulled down, and the front was rebuilt by Viollet-le-Duc, who made no attempt to follow the original design. A drawing of the original west front is given at p. 236 of T. A. Cook’s Story of Rouen, where also full particulars of the building and its history will be found.]

47. LE note 1, p. 245: [The MS. adds, “Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof” (Psalm cii.14).

48*. JR note, p. 245: No, indeed! any more wasted words than mine throughout life, or bread cast on more bitter waters, I never heard of. This closing paragraph of the sixth chapter is the best, I think, in the book, and the vainest. [1880.]

49. LE note 1, p. 246: [The old cathedral, one of the noblest in Normandy, was pulled down, to prevent its falling, in 1799. All traces of the church were swept away, except only a broken column, marking the spot where Henry II. of England did penance before the Papal Legates in 1172 for the murder of Becket.]

50. LE note 2, p. 246: [Cf. Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xxx. § 6, where this function of Architecture in modern life is further dwelt upon.]

51. LE note 1, p. 247: [For the first of these allusions to Dante, see Rogers’s Italy ("Florence") and Turner’s vignette; the second allusion is to Dante in exile, at the court of Can Grande, and to the tombs of the Scaligers (see Verona and its Rivers).]

GPL note: Turner’s illustration to “Florence ” in Roger’s Italy, a Poem. [Click upon the thumbnail for a larger image and the lines about Dante to which Ruskin alludes.]

§ 1. AMONG the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura.¹ It is a spot [221/222] which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stem expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into rebuke; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie,² the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges ivy as light and [222/223] lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes³ moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its music;^4* the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing.⁵ Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had [223/224] been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron walls of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.⁶

§2. It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.⁷ How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world:⁸ there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even⁹ from her sweet singers or soldier historians.¹⁰

Aphorism 27. Architecture is to be made historical and preserved as such..such ¹¹

And if indeed there be [224/225] any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two duties respecting Architecture national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day, historical; and, the second, such to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages.

§3. It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man’s house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathise in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering, that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to. be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever [225/226] treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust.

Aphorism 28. The sanctity of home, for good men. ¹²

I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father’s house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples — temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.¹³ And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone upon those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man’s aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man’s past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and the crowded [226/227] tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

§4. This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man’s dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes.¹⁴ It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their children what they had been, and from what, if. so it had been permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic [227/228] architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.

§ 5. I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful selfpossession, this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities depends, not on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite decoration of even the smallest tenements of their proud periods. The most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with two storeys above, three windows in the first, and two in the second.¹⁵

Left: The Palazzo Contarini Fasan, Venice. Right: The Palazzo Contarini-Fasan, Venice. John Ruskin. 1841. Graphite, watercolor, and bodycolor, with some scratching out, on grey paper, 42.8 x 31.5 cm. The Ashmolean Museum (WA.RS.REF.065) Presented by John Ruskin to the Ruskin Drawing School, University of Oxford, 1875.

Many of the most exquisite buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger dimensions. One of the most interesting pieces of fifteenth century architecture in North Italy, is a small house in a back street, behind the marketplace of Vicenza;¹⁶ it bears date 1481, and the motto,Il. n'est . rose . sans . épine .; it has also only a ground floor and two storeys, with three windows in each, separated by rich flowerwork, and with balconies, supported, the central one by an eagle with open wings, the lateral ones by winged griffins standing on cornucopias. The idea that a house must be large in order to be well built, is altogether of modern growth, and is parallel with the idea, that no picture can be historical, except of a size admitting figures larger than life.

§ 6. I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within and without; with what degree of likeness to each other in style and manner, I will say presently, under [228/229] another head;¹⁷ but, at all events, with such differences as might suit and express each man’s character and occupation, and partly his history. This right over the house, I conceive, belongs to its first builder, and is to be respected by his children; and it would be well that blank stones should be left in places, to be inscribed with a summary of his life and of its experience, raising thus the habitation into a kind of monument, and developing, into more systematic instructiveness, that good custom which was of old universal, and which still remains among some of the Swiss and Germans, of acknowledging the grace of God’s permission to build and possess a quiet resting-place, in such sweet words as may well close our speaking of these things. I have taken them from the front of a cottage lately built among the green pastures which descend from the village of Grindelwald to the lower glacier:

“Mit herzlichem Vertrauen
Hat Johannes Mooter und Maria Rubi
Dieses Haus bauen lassen.
Der liebe Gott woll uns bewahren
Vor allem Ungliick und Gefahren,
Und es in Segen lassen stehn
Auf der Reise durch diese Jammerzeit
Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese,
Wo alle Frommen wohnen,
Da wird Gott sie belohnen
Mit der Friedenskrone
Zu alle Ewigkeit.”¹⁸

§7. In public buildings the historical purpose should be still more definite. It is one of the advantages of Gothic architecture, I use the word Gothic in the most extended sense as broadly opposed to classical, that it admits of a richness of record altogether unlimited. Its minute and multitudinous sculptural decorations afford means of expressing, either symbolically or literally, all that need be known [229/230] of national feeling or achievement. More decoration will, indeed, be usually required than can take so elevated a character; and much, even in the most thoughtful periods, has been left to the freedom of fancy, or suffered to consist of mere repetitions of some national bearing or symbol.¹⁹ It is, however, generally unwise, even in mere surface ornament, to surrender the power and privilege of variety which the spirit of Gothic architecture admits; much more in important features capitals of columns or bosses, and string-courses, as of course in all confessed bas-reliefs. Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual intention. Actual representation of history has in modern times been checked by a difficulty, mean indeed, but steadfast; that of unmanageable costume:²⁰ nevertheless, by a sufficiently bold imaginative treatment, and frank use of symbols, all such obstacles may be vanquished; not perhaps in the degree necessary to produce sculpture in itself satisfactory, but at all events so as to enable it to become a grand and expressive element of architectural composition. Take, for example, the management of the capitals of the ducal palace at Venice. History, as such, was indeed entrusted to the painters of its mterior, but every capital of its arcades was filled with meaning.²¹ The large one, the corner stone of the whole, next the entrance, was devoted to the symbolisation of Abstract Justice; above it is a sculpture of the Judgment of Solomon, remarkable for a beautiful subjection in its treatment to its decorative purpose. The figures, if the subject had been entirely composed of them, would have awkwardly interrupted [230/231] the line of the angle, and diminished its apparent strength; and therefore in the midst of them, entirely without relation to them, and indeed actually between the executioner and interceding mother, there rises the ribbed trunk of a massy tree, which supports and continues the shaft of the angle, and whose leaves above overshadow and enrich the whole. The capital below bears among its leafage a throned figure of Justice, Trajan doing justice to the widow, Aristotle “che die legge,” and one or two other subjects now unintelligible from decay.²² The capitals next in order represent the virtues and vices in succession, as preservative or destructive of national peace and power, concluding with Faith, with the inscription “Fides optima in Deo est.” A figure is seen on the opposite side of the capital, worshipping the sun. After these, one or two capitals are fancifully decorated with birds (Plate V.), and then come a series representing, first the various fruits, then the national costumes, and then the animals of the various countries subject to Venetian rule.²³

Plate V. Capital from the Lower Arcade of the Doge’s Palace, Venice

§ 8. Now, not to speak of any more important public building, let us imagine our own India House²⁴ adorned in this way, by historical or symbolical sculpture: massively built in the [231/232] first place; then chased with bas-reliefs of our Indian battles, and fretted with carvings of Oriental foliage, or inlaid with Oriental stones; and the more important members of its decoration composed of groups of Indian life and landscape, and prominently expressing the phantasms of Hindoo worship in their subjection to the Cross.²⁵ Would not one such work be better than a thousand histories?²⁶ If, however, we have not the invention necessary for such efforts, or if, which is probably one of the most noble excuses we can offer for our deficiency in such matters, we have less pleasure in talking about ourselves, even in marble, than the Continental nations, at least we have no excuse for any want of care in the points which insure the building’s endurance. And as this question is one of great interest in its relations to the choice of various modes of decoration, it will be necessary to enter into it at some length.

§ 9. The benevolent regards and purposes of men in masses seldom can be supposed to extend beyond their own generation. They may look to posterity as an audience, may hope for its attention, and labour for its praise: they may trust to its recognition of unacknowledged merit, and demand its justice for contemporary wrong. But all this is mere selfishness, and does not involve the slightest regard to, or consideration of, the interest of those by whose numbers we would fain swell the circle of our flatterers, and by whose authority we would gladly support our presently disputed claims.

Aphorism 29.The earth is an entail, not a possession. Compare § 20.²⁷

The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practising present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may live under their shade, or raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognised motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; [232/233] nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave.

§10. Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect, for futurity. Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test. Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, " See! this our fathers did for us.”:²⁸ For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, [233/234] or in its gold.²⁹

Aphorism 30.³⁰

Its glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations: it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much as these possess, of language and of life.

§ 11. For that period, then, we must build; not, indeed, refusing to ourselves the delight of present completion, nor hesitating to follow such portions of character as may depend upon delicacy of execution to the highest perfection of which they are capable, even although we may know that in the course of years such details must perish; but taking care that for work of this kind we sacrifice no enduring quality, and that the building shall not depend for its impressiveness upon any thing that is perishable. This would, indeed, be the law of [234/235] good composition under any circumstances, the arrangement of the larger masses being always a matter of greater importance than the treatment of the smaller; but in architecture there is much in that very treatment which is skilful or otherwise in proportion to its just regard to the probable effects of time: and (which is still more to be considered) there is a beauty in those effects themselves, which nothing else can replace, and which it is our wisdom to consult and to desire. For though, hitherto, we have been speaking of the sentiment of age only, there is an actual beauty in the marks of it, such and so great as to have become not unfrequently the subject of especial choice among certain schools of art, and to have impressed upon those schools the character usually and loosely expressed by the term "picturesque."³¹ It is of some importance to our present purpose to determine the true meaning of this expression, as it is now generally used; for there is a principle to be developed from that use which, while it has occultly been the ground of much that is true and just in our judgment of art, has never been so far understood as to become definitely serviceable. Probably no word in the language, (exclusive of theological expressions,) has been the subject of so frequent or so prolonged dispute; yet none remain more vague in their acceptance, and it seems to me to be a matter of no small interest to investigate the essence of that idea which all feel, and (to appearance) with respect to similar things, and yet which every attempt to define has, as I believe, ended either in mere enumeration of the effects and objects to which the term has been attached, or else in attempts at abstraction more palpably nugatory than any which have disgraced metaphysical investigation on other subjects. A recent critic on Art, for instance, has gravely advanced the theory that the essence of the picturesque consists in the expression of "universal decay."³² It would be curious to see the result [235/236] of an attempt to illustrate this idea of the picturesque, in a painting of dead flowers and decayed fruit; and equally curious to trace the steps of any reasoning which, on such a theory, should account for the picturesqueness of an ass colt as opposed to a horse foal. But there is much excuse for even the most utter failure in reasonings of this kind, since the subject is, indeed, one of the most obscure of all that may legitimately be submitted to human reason; and the idea is itself so varied in the minds of different men, according to their subjects of study, that no definition can be expected to embrace more than a certain number of its infinitely multiplied forms.

§ 12. That peculiar character, however, which separates the picturesque from the characters of subject belonging to the higher walks of art (and this is all that it is necessary for our present purpose to define), may be shortly and decisively expressed. Picturesqueness, in this sense, is Parasitical Sublimity."³³ Of course all sublimity, as well as all beauty, is, in the simple etymological sense, picturesque, that is to say, fit to become the subject of a picture; and all sublimity is, even in the peculiar sense which I am endeavouring to develope, picturesque, as opposed to beauty; that is to say, there is more picturesqueness in the subject of Michael Angelo than of Perugino, in proportion to the prevalence of the sublime element over the beautiful.³⁴ But that character, of which the extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be degrading to art, is parasitical sublimity; i.e. a sublimity dependent on the accidents, or on the least essential characters, of the objects to which it belongs; and the picturesque is developed distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of thought of those points of character in which the sublimity is found. Two ideas, therefore, are essential to picturesqueness, the first, that of sublimity (for pure beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so only as the sublime [236/237] element mixes with it), and the second, the subordinate or parasitical position of that sublimity. Of course, therefore, whatever characters of line or shade or expression are productive of sublimity, will become productive of picturesqueness; what these characters are I shall endeavour hereafter to show at length;³⁵ but, among those which are generally acknowledged, I may name angular and broken lines, vigorous oppositions of light and shadow, and grave, deep, or boldly contrasted colour; and all these are in a still higher degree effective, when, by resemblance or association, they remind us of objects on which a true and essential sublimity exists, as of rocks or mountains, or stormy clouds or waves. Now if these characters, or any others of a higher and more abstract sublimity, be found in the very heart and substance of what we contemplate, as the sublimity of Michael Angelo depends on the expression of mental character in his figures far more than even on the noble lines of their arrangement, the art which represents such characters cannot be properly called picturesque: but, if they be found in the accidental or external qualities, the distinctive picturesque will be the result.

§ 13. Thus, in the treatment of the features of the human face by Francia or Angelico, the shadows are employed only to make the contours of the features thoroughly felt; and to those features themselves the mind of the observer is exclusively directed (that is to say, to the essential characters of the thing represented). All power and all sublimity rest on these; the shadows are used only for the sake of the features. On the contrary, by Rembrandt, Salvator, or Caravaggio, the features are used for the sake of the shadows; and the attention is directed, and the power of the painter addressed, to characters of accidental light and shade cast across or around those features. In the case of Rembrandt there is often an essential sublimity in invention and expression besides, and always a high degree of it in the light and shade itself; but it is, for [237/238] the most part, parasitical or engrafted sublimity as regards the subject of the painting, and, just so far, picturesque.

§ 14. Again, in the management of the sculptures of the Parthenon, shadow is frequently employed as a dark field on which the forms are drawn. This is visibly the case in the metopes, and must have been nearly as much so in the pediment. But the use of that shadow is entirely to show the confines of the figures; and it is to their lines, and not to the shapes of the shadows behind them, that the art and the eye are addressed. The figures themselves are conceived, as much as possible, in full light, aided by bright reflections; they are drawn exactly as, on vases, white figures on a dark ground; and the sculptors have dispensed with, or even struggled to avoid, all shadows which were not absolutely necessary to the explaining of the form. On the contrary, in Gothic sculpture, the shadow becomes itself a subject of thought. It is considered as a dark colour, to be arranged in certain agreeable masses; the figures are very frequently made even subordinate to the placing of its divisions: and their costume is enriched at the expense of the forms underneath, in order to increase the complexity and variety of the points of shade. There are thus, both in sculpture and painting, two, in some sort, opposite schools, of which the one follows for its subject the essential forms of things, and the other the accidental lights and shades upon them. There are various degrees of their contrariety: middle steps, as in the works of Correggio, and all degrees of nobility and of degradation in the several manners: but the one is always recognised as the pure and the other as the picturesque school. Portions of picturesque treatment will be found in Greek work, and of pure and unpicturesque in Gothic; and in both there are countless instances, as pre-eminently in the works of Michael Angelo, in which shadows become valuable as media of expression, and therefore take rank among essential characteristics. Into these multitudinous distinctions and exceptions I cannot now enter, desiring only to prove the broad applicability of the general definition. [237/238]

§ 15. Again, the distinction will be found to exist, not only between forms and shades as subjects of choice, but between essential and inessential forms. One of the chief distinctions between the dramatic and picturesque schools of sculpture is found in the treatment of the hair. By the artists of the time of Pericles ^36* it was considered as an excrescence, indicated by few and rude lines, and subordinated, in every particular, to the principality of the features and person. How completely this was an artistical, not a national idea, it is unnecessary to prove. We need but remember the employment of the Lacedaemonians, reported by the Persian spy on the evening before the battle of Thermopylae,³⁷ or glance at any Homeric description of ideal form, to see how purely sculpturesque was the law which reduced the markings of the hair, lest, under the necessary disadvantages of material, they should interfere with the distinctness of the personal forms. On the contrary, in later sculpture,³⁸ the hair receives almost the principal care of the workman; and, while the features and limbs are clumsily and bluntly executed, the hair is curled and twisted, cut into bold and shadowy projections, and arranged in masses elaborately [238/239] ornamental: there is true sublimity in the lines and the chiaroscuro of these masses, but it is, as regards the creature represented, parasitical and therefore picturesque.³⁹ In the same sense we may understand the application of the term to modern animal painting, distinguished as it has been by peculiar attention to the colours, lustre, and texture of skin; nor is it in art alone that the definition will hold. In animals themselves, when their sublimity depends upon their muscular forms or motions, or necessary and principal attributes, as perhaps more than all others in the horse, we do not call them picturesque, but consider them as peculiarly fit to be associated with pure historical subject. Exactly in proportion as their character of sublimity passes into excrescences; into mane and beard as in the lion, into horns as in the stag, into shaggy hide as in the instance above given of the ass colt,⁴⁰ into variegation as in the zebra, or into plumage, they become picturesque, and are so in art exactly in proportion to the prominence of these excrescential characters. It may be often most expedient that they should be prominent; often there is in them the highest degree of majesty, as in those of the leopard and boar; and in the hands of men like Tintoret and Rubens, such attributes become means of deepening the very highest and most ideal impressions. But the picturesque direction of their thoughts is always distinctly recognisable, as clinging to the surface, to the less essential character, and as developing out of this a sublimity different from that of the creature itself; a sublimity which is, in a sort, common to all the objects of creation, and the same in its constituent elements, whether it be sought in the clefts and folds of shaggy hair, or in the chasms and rents of rocks, or in the hanging of thickets or hill sides, or in the alternations of gaiety and gloom in the variegation of the shell, the plume, or the cloud.

§ 16. Now, to return to our immediate subject, it so happens that, in architecture, the superinduced and accidental beauty is most commonly inconsistent with the preservation [239/240] of original character, and the picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and supposed to consist in decay. Whereas, even when so sought, it consists in the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation, which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature, and bestow upon it those circumstances of colour and form which are universally beloved by the eye of man. So far as this is done, to the extinction of the true characters of the architecture, it is picturesque, and the artist who looks to the stem of the ivy instead of the shaft of the pillar, is carrying out in more daring freedom the debased sculptor’s choice of the hair instead of the countenance. But so far as it can be rendered consistent with the inherent character, the picturesque or extraneous sublimity of architecture has just this of nobler function in it than that of any other object whatsoever, that it is an exponent of age, of that in which, as has been said, the greatest glory of the building consists; and, therefore, the external signs of this glory, having power and purpose greater than any belonging to their mere sensible beauty, may be considered as taking rank among pure and essential characters; so essential to my mind, that I think a building cannot be considered as in its prime until four or five centuries have passed over it; and that the entire choice and arrangement of its details should have reference to their appearance after that period, so that none should be admitted which would suffer material injury either by the weatherstaining, or the mechanical degradation which the lapse of such a period would necessitate.

§ 17. It is not my purpose to enter into any of the questions which the application of this principle involves. They are of too great interest and complexity to be even touched upon within my present limits,⁴¹ but this is broadly to be noticed, that those styles of architecture which are picturesque in the sense above explained with respect to sculpture, that is to say, whose decoration depends on the arrangement of points of shade rather than on purity of outline, do not suffer, but [240/241] commonly gain in richness of effect when their details are partly worn away; hence such styles, pre-eminently that of French Gothic, should always be adopted when the materials to be employed are liable to degradation, as brick, sandstone, or soft limestone; and styles in any degree dependent on purity of line, as the Italian Gothic, must be practised altogether in hard and undecomposing materials, granite, serpentine, or crystalline marbles. There can be no doubt that the nature of the accessible materials influenced the formation of both styles; and it should still more authoritatively determine our choice of either.

Aphorism 31. Restoration, so called, is the worlst manner of Destruction.⁴²

§18. It does not belong to my present plan to consider at length the second head of duty of which I have above spoken; the preservation of the architecture we possess: but a few words may be forgiven, as especially necessary in modern times. Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word restoration understood. It is the means the most total destruction which a building worst manner can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing destroyed.^43* Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it is impossible, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That which I have above insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, can never be recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a new building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up, and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts. And as for direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can there be of surfaces that have been worn half an inch down? The [242/243] whole finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone; if you attempt to restore that finish, you do it eonjecturally; if you copy what is left, granting fidelity to be possible, (and what care, or watchfulness, or cost can secure it,) how is the new work better than the old? There was yet in the old some life, some mysterious suggestion of what it had been, and of what it had lost; some sweetness in the gentle lines which rain and sun had wrought. There can be none in the brute hardness of the new carving.

Plate XIV. Sculptures from the Bas-reliefs of the North door of the Cathedral of Rouen

Look at the animals which I have given in Plate XIV., as an instance of living work, and suppose the markings of the scales and hair once worn away, or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall ever restore them? The first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and that again and again seen it on the Baptistery of Pisa, seen it on the Casa d' Oro at Venice, seen it on the Cathedral of Lisieux [modern photographs],)⁴⁴ is to dash the old work to pieces; the second is usually to put up the cheapest and basest imitation which can escape detection, but in all cases, however careful, and however laboured, an imitation still, a cold model of such parts as can be modelled, with conjectural supplements; and my experience has as yet furnished me with only one instance, that of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, in which even this, the utmost degree of fidelity which is possible, has been attained, or even attempted.⁴⁵ [243/244]

§ 19. Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thingis a Lie from beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever will be out of re-built Milan. But, it is said, there may come a necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for destruction. Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place. And look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may prevent it. The principle of modern times, (a principle which, I believe, at least in France, to be systematically acted on by the masons, in order to find themselves work, as the abbey of St. Ouen was pulled down by the magistrates of the town by way of giving work to some vagrants,)⁴⁶ is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards. Take proper care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. A few sheets of lead put in time upon a roof, a few dead leaves and sticks swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you may, and at any cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at the gates of a besieged city; bind it together [244/245] with iron where it loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will still be born and pass away beneath its shadow. Its evil day must come at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.⁴⁷ 20. Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will not reach those who commit them,^48* and yet, be it heard or not, I must not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past times or not. We have no right whatever to touch them. They are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their right in them: that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to throw down; but what other men gave their strength and wealth and life to accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death; still less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us only. It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject of sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted our present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to dispense with. That sorrow, that loss, we have no right to inflict. Did the cathedral of Avranches belong [245/246] to the mob who destroyed it, any more than it did to us, who walk in sorrow to and fro over its foundation?⁴⁹ Neither does any building whatever belong to those mobs who do violence to it. For a mob it is, and must be always; it matters not whether enraged, or in deliberate folly; whether countless, or sitting in committees; the people who destroy anything causelessly are a mob, and Architecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair building is necessarily worth the ground it stands upon, and will be so until Central Africa and America shall have become as populous as Middlesex: nor is any cause whatever valid as a ground for its destruction. If ever valid, certainly not now, when the place both of the past and future is too much usurped in our minds by the restless and discontented present. The very quietness of nature is gradually withdrawn from us; thousands who once in their necessarily prolonged travel were subjected to an influence, from the silent sky and slumbering fields, more effectual than known or confessed, now bear with them even there the ceaseless fever of their life; and along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds upon the city gates. The only influence which can in any wise there take the place of that of the woods and fields, is the power of ancient Architecture.⁵⁰ Do not part with it for the sake of the formal square, or of the fenced and planted walk, nor of the goodly street nor opened quay. The pride of a city is not in these. Leave them to the crowd; but [246/247] emember that there will surely be some within the circuit of the disquieted walls who would ask for some other spots than these wherein to walk; for some other forms to meet their sight familiarly: like him who sat so often where the sun struck from the west, to watch the lines of the dome of Florence drawn on the deep sky, or like those, his Hosts, who could bear daily to behold, from their palace chambers, the places where their fathers lay at rest, at the meeting of the dark streets of Verona.⁵¹

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