The seven lamps of architecture. Reprinted from the 6th English ed

\

THE

SEVEN LAMPS

OF

ARCHITECTURE.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND
HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS CHKISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD, ETC.

mittstrati'ons,

DRAWN BY THE AUTHOR.

Reprinted from the Sixth English Edition.

NEW YORK

THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.

PUBLISHERS

hif]

?15 R A iv
.. ,.19 1265

tc

I'i f^ r-- ■

--, p^ r^ ■ rt

NOTE.

I FIND that, by grotesque mischance, the new
preface takes no notice of my reason for printing
some passages in the book in a larger type, and
numbering them as " aphorisms." If the reader
will attend to them, he will find their serviceableness
and security justify this preference ; and, these being
first well understood, the rest of the book will become
also lucid and cogent : — else it might be taken for a
mere mist of fine words, and read — practically — in
vain.

Brantwood, Coniston, May 26, 1880.

I

PREFACE TO THE EDITION
OF 1880.

I NEVER intended to have republished this book,
which has become the most useless I ever wrote ;
the buildings it describes with so much delight being
now either knocked down, or scraped and patched
up into smugness and smoothness more tragic than
uttermost ruin.

But I find the public still like the book — and will
read it, when they won't look at what would be really
useful and helpful to them ; — and as the germ of
what I have since written is indeed here, — however
overlaid with gilding, and overshot, too splashily and
cascade-fashion, with gushing of words, — here it is
given again in the old form ; all but some pieces of
rabid and utterly false Protestantism, which are cut
out from text and appendix alike, and may serve
still to give the old editions some value yet, in the
eyes of book collectors and persons studious (as the
modern reviewing mind mostly is — to its large
profit) of mistakes in general.

The quite first edition, with the original plates, will
always, I venture to say, bear a high price in the
market ; for its etchings were not only, every line of

vi PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1880.

them, by my own hand, but bitten also (the last
of them in my washhand basin at " La Cloche " of
Dijon) by myself, with savage carelessness (I being
then, as now, utterly scornful of all sorts of art
dependent on blotch, or burr, or any other " process"
than that of steady hand and true line) : — out of
which disdain, nevertheless, some of the plates came
into effects both right and good for their purpose,
and will, as I say, be always hereafter valuable.

The copies of them, made for the second edition
by Mr. Cuff, and here reprinted, are quite as good for
all practical illustration, and much more admirable
as pieces of careful and singular engraver's skill. For
the original method of etching was not easily imitated
by straightforward engraving. When I use the needle-
point directly on the steel, I never allow any burr or
mystery of texture ; — (see the plates by my own
hand in " Modern Painters " ; — ) but, in these archi-
tectural notes of shadow, I wanted mere spaces of
gloom got easily ; and so used a process shown me
(I think, by a German engraver — my memory fails
me about it now — ) in which, the ground being laid
very soft, a piece of tissue-paper is spread over it, on
which one draws with a hard pencil — seeing, when
the paper is lifted, approximately what one has got
of shadow. The pressure of the point removes the
wax which sticks to the tissue-paper, and leaves the
surface of the plate in that degree open to the acid.
The effect thus obtained is a kind of mixture of
mezzotint — etching — and lithograph; and, except
by such skill as Mr. CuiT possessed in a peculiar de-
gree, not to be imitated in any other manner. The

PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1880. vu

vignette frontispiece is also an excellent piece of work
by Mr. Armytage, to whose skill the best illustrations
of "Modern Painters " owe not only their extreme
delicacy but their permanence. Some of his plates,
which I am about to re-issue with portions of the
book separately, arranged according to their subjects,
show scarcely any loss of brightness for any use
hitherto made of them.

But, having now all my plates in my own posses-
sion, I will take care that none are used past the time
they will properly last ; and even the present editions
of these old books can never become cheap — though
they will be, I trust, in time, all sufficiently accessible.

Some short notes are added to the text of " The
Seven Lamps," now reprinted ; but the text itself
(the passages above mentioned being alone omitted),
is given word for word, and stop for stop : it may
confirm the reader's assurance on that matter, to
know that I have not even revised the proofs, but
left all toil of that kind to my good publisher, Mr.
Allen, and his helpful children, who have every claim,
for what good the reader may get out of the book, to
his thanks no less than to mine.

Brantwood, Feb. 25, 1880.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST
EDITION.

The memoranda which form the basis of the fol-
lowing Essay have been thrown together during the
preparation of one of the sections of the third volume
of " Modern Painters."* I once thought of giving
them a more expanded form ; but their utility, such
as it maybe, would probably be diminished by farther
delay in their publication, more than it would be in-
creased by greater care in their arrangement. Ob-
tained in every case by personal observation, there
may be among them some details valuable even to
the experienced architect ; but with respect to the
opinions founded upon them I must be prepared to
bear the charge of impertinence which can hardly but
attach to the writer who assumes a dogmatical tone
in speaking of an art he has never practised. There

* The inordinate delay in the appearance of that supplementary
volume has, indeed, been chiefly owing to the necessity under which
the writer felt himself, of obtaining as many memoranda as possible of
mediaeval buildings in Italy and Normandy, now in process of destruc-
tion, before that destruction should be consummated by the Restorer,
or Revolutionist. His whole time has been lately occupied in taking
drawings from one side of buildings, of which masons were knocking
down the other; nor can he yet pledge himself to any time for the pub-
lication of the conclusion of " Modem Painters; " he can only promise
that its delay shall not be owing to any indolence on his part.

ix

X PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

are, however, cases in which men feel too keenly to
be silent, and perhaps too strongly to be wrong ; I
have been forced into this impertinence ; and have
suffered too much from the destruction or neglect of
the architecture I best loved, and from the erection of
that which I cannot love, to reason cautiously respect-
ing the modesty of my opposition to the principles
which have induced the scorn of the one, or directed
the design of the other. And I have been the less
careful to modify the confidence of my statements of
principles, because, in the midst of the opposition and
uncertainty of our architectural systems, it seems to
me that there is something grateful in ^iuy positive
opinion, though in many points wrong, as even weeds
are useful that grow on a bank of sand.

Every apology is, however, due to the reader for
the hasty and imperfect execution of the plates.
Having much more serious work in hand, and de-
siring merely to render them illustrative of my mean-
ing, I have sometimes very completely failed even of
that humble aim ; and the text, being generally writ-
ten before the illustration was completed, sometimes
naively describes as sublime or beautiful, features
which the plate represents by a blot. I shall be
grateful if the reader will in such cases refer the ex-
pressions of praise to the Architecture, and not to
the illustration.

So far, however, as their coarseness and rudeness
admit, the plates are valuable ; being either copies
of memoranda made upon the spot, or (Plates IX.
and XI.) enlarged and adapted from Daguerreotypes,
taken under my own superintendence. Unfortu-

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, xi

nately, the great distance from the ground of the
window which is the subject of Plate IX. renders
even the Daguerreotype indistinct ; and I cannot
answer for the accuracy of any of the mosaic details,
more especially of those surrounding the window,
which I rather imagine, in the original, to be sculp-
tured in relief. The general proportions are, how-
ever, studiously preserved ; the spirals of the shafts
are counted, and the effect of the whole is as near
that of the thing itself, as is necessary for the pur-
poses of illustration for which the plate is given.
For the accuracy of the rest I can answer, even to
the cracks in the stones, and the number of them;
and though the looseness of the drawing, and the
picturesque character which is necessarily given by
an endeavor to draw old buildings as they actually
appear, may perhaps diminish their credit for archi-
tectural veracity, they will do so unjustly.

The system of lettering adopted in the few instances
in which sections have been given, appears somewhat
obscure in the references, but it is convenient upon
the whole. The line which marks the direction of
any section is noted, if the section be symmetrical,
by a single letter, as a ; and the section itself by the
same letter with a line over it, — a. But if the sec-
tion be unsymmetrical, its direction is noted by two
letters, a. ao, at its extremities ; and the actual section
by the same letters with lines over them, a. a^, at the
correspondent extremities.

The reader will perhaps be surprised by the small
number of buildings to which reference has been
made. But it is to be remembered that the following

Xll PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

chapters pretend only to be a statement of principles,
illustrated each by one or two examples ; not an
Essay on European architecture ; and those examples
I have generally taken either from the buildings which
I love best, or from the schools of architecture which,
it appeared to me, have been less carefully described
than they deserved. I could as fully, though not
with the accuracy and certainty derived from per-
sonal observation, have illustrated the principles
subsequently advanced, from the architecture of
Egypt, India, or Spain, as from that to which the
reader will find his attention chiefly directed, the
Italian Romanesque and Gothic. But my aifections,
as well as my experience, led me to that line of richly
varied and magnificently intellectual schools, which
reaches, like a high watershed of Christian archi-
tecture, from the Adriatic to the Northumbrian seas,
bordered by the impure schools of Spain on the one
hand, and of Germany on the other : and as cul-
minating points and centres of this chain, I have
considered, first, the cities of the Val d'Arno, as
representing the Italian Romanesque and pure
Italian Gothic ; Venice and Verona as representing
the Italian Gothic colored by Byzantine elements ;
and Rouen, with the associated Norman cities, Caen,
Bayeux, and Coutances, as representing the entire
range of Northern architecture from the Romanesque
to Flamboyant.

I could have wished to have given more examples
from our early English Gothic ; but I have always
found it impossible to work in the cold interiors of
our cathedrals ; while the daily services, lamps, and

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, xill

fumigation of those upon the Continent, render them
perfectly safe. In the course of last summer I under-
took a pilgrimage to the English Shrines, and began
with Salisbury, where the consequence of a few days'
work was a state of weakened health, which I may be
permitted to name among the causes of the slightness
and imperfection of the present Essay.

CONTENTS.

PAGE

Introductory i

Chapter I. The Lamp of Sacrifice .... lo

II. The Lamp of Truth 38

III. The Lamp of Power 90

IV. The Lamp of Beauty 134

V. The Lamp of Life 195

VI. The Lamp of Memory 232

VII. The Lamp of Obedience .... 262

Appendix 1 283

II 288

III 290

IV 291

V 297

XV

LIST OF PLATES.

PLATE PAGE

I. Ornaments from Rouen, St. Lo, and Venice

tofacepage 35

II. Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo, Normandy, 69
III. Traceries from Caen, Bayeux, Rouen, and

Beauvais 76

IV, Intersectional Mouldings 87

V. Capital from the Lower Arcade of the

Doge's Palace, Venice 116

VI. Arch from the Fagade of the Church of San

Michele at Lucca 120

VII. Pierced Ornaments from Lisieux, Bayeux,

Verona, and Padua 124

i^III. Window from the Ca' Foscari, Venice . . 127
IX. Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto, at

Florence Frontispiece

X. Tracery and Mouldings from Rouen and

Salisbury 166

XL Balcony in the Campo St. Benedetto, Venice, 179
XII. Fragments from Abbeville, Lucca, Venice,

and Pisa 205

XIII. Portions of an Arcade on the South Side of

the Cathedral of Ferrara 222

XIV. Sculptures from the Cathedral of Rouen . 227

xvii

THE SEVEN LAMPS OF
ARCHITECTURE.

INTRODUCTORY.

Some years ago, in conversation with an artist ^
whose works, perhaps, alone, in tlie present day,
unite perfection of drawing with rssplendence of
color, the writer made some inquiry respecting the
general means by which this latter quality was most
easily to be attained. The reply was as concise as it
was comprehensive — " Know what you have to do,
and do it '' — comprehensive, not only as regarded
the branch of art to which it temporarily applied, but
as expressing the great principle of success in every
direction of human effort ; for I believe that failure is
less frequently attributable to either insufficiency of
means or impatience of labor, than to a confused
understanding of the thing actually to be done ; and
therefore, while it is properly a subject of ridicule, and
sometimes of blame, that men propose to themselves
a perfection of any kind, which reason, temperately
consulted, might have shown to be impossible with
the means at their command, it is a more dangerous

1 Mulready.
I

2 INTR OD UC TOR V.

error to permit the consideration of means to interfere .
with our conception, or, as is not impossible, even
hinder our acknowledgment of goodness and perfec-
tion in themselves. And this is the more cautiously
to be remembered ; because, while a man's sense
and conscience, aided by Revelation, are always
enough, if earnestly directed, to

Aphorism i. , T •■ • , •,. , .

enable him to discover what is

We may always .

know what is ^ight, neither his sense, nor con-
right: but not ai- sciencc, nor feeling, is ever enough,
ways what is pos- because they are not intended, to
determine for him what is possible.
He knows neither his own strength nor that of his
fellows, neither the exact dependence to be placed
on his allies nor resistance to be expected from his
opponents. These are questions respecting which
passion may warp his conclusions, and igo ranee
must limit them; but it is his own fault if either
interfere with the apprehension of duty, or the
acknowledgment of right. And, as far as I have
taken cognizance of the causes of the many fail-
ures to which the efforts of intelligent men are
liable, more especially in matters political, they
seem to me more largely to spring from this single
error than from all others, that the inquiry into
the doubtful, and in some sort inexplicable, rela-
tions of capability, chance, resistance, and incon-
venience, invariably precedes, even if it do not
altogether supersede, the determination of what is
absolutely desirable and just. Nor is it any won-
der that sometimes the too cold calculation of our
powers should reconcile us too easily to our short-

INTRODUCTORY. 3

comings, and even lead us into the fatal error of
supposing that our conjectural utmost is in itself
well, or, in other words, that the necessity of
offences renders them inoffensive.

What is true of human polity seems to me not less
so of the distinctively political art of Architecture.
I have long felt convinced of the necessity, in order
to its progress, of some determined effort to extricate
from the confused mass of partial traditions and dog-
mata with which it has become encumbered during
imperfect or restricted practice, those large principles
of right which are applicable to every stage and style
of it. Uniting the technical and imaginative ele-
ments as essentially as humanity does soul and body,
it shows the same infirmly balanced liability to the
prevalence of the lower part over the higher, to the in-
terference of the constructive, with the purity and
simplicity of the reflective, element. This tendency,
like every other form of materialism, is increasing
with the advance of the age ; and the only laws
which resist it, based upon partial precedents, and
already regarded with disrespect as decrepit, if not
with defiance as tyrannical, are evidently inapplicable
to the new forms and functions of the art, which the
necessities of the day demand. How many these
necessities may become, cannot be conjectured ; they
rise, strange and impatient, out of every modern
shadow of change. How far it may be possible to
meet them without a sacrifice of the essential char-
acters of architectural art, cannot be determined by
specific calculation or observance. There is no law,
no principle, based on past practice, which may not

4 INTR OD UCTOR Y.

be overthrown in a moment, by the arising of a new
condition, or the invention of a new material ; and
the most rational, if not the only, mode of averting
the danger of an utter dissolution of all that is system-
atic and consistent in our practice, or of ancient
authority in our judgment, is to cease, for a little
while, our endeavors to deal with the multiplying
host of particular abuses, restraints, or requirements ;
and endeavor to determine, as the guides of every
effort, some constant, general, and irrefragable laws
of right — laws, which based upon man's nature, not
upon his knowledge, may possess so far the un-
changeableness of the one, as that neither the in-
crease nor imperfection of the other may be able to
assault or invalidate them.

There are, perhaps, no such laws peculiar to any
one art. Their range necessarily includes the entire
horizon of man''s action. But they have modified
forms and operations belonging to each of his pur-
suits, and the extent of their authority cannot surely
be considered as a diminution of its weight. Those
peculiar aspects of them which belong to the first of
the arts, I have endeavored to trace in the following
pages ; and since, if truly stated, they must neces-
sarily be, not only safeguards against every form of
error, but sources of every measure of success, I do
not think that I claim too much for them in calling
them the Lamps of Architecture,^ nor that it is indo-
lence, in endeavoring to ascertain their true nature
and nobility of their fire, to refuse to enter into any

2 "The Law is light."
"Thy Word is a lamp unto my feet."

INTRODUCTORY. 5

curious or special questioning of the innumerable
hindrances by which their Hght has been too often
distorted or overpowered.

Had this farther examination been attempted, the
work would have become certainly more invidious,
and perhaps less useful, as liable to errors which are
avoided by the present simplicity of its plan. Simple
though it be, its extent is too great to admit of any
adequate accomplishment, unless by a devotion of
time which the writer did not feel justified in with-
drawing from branches of inquiry in which the prose-
cution of works already undertaken has engaged him.
Both arrangement and nomenclature are those of con-
venience rather than of system ; the one is arbitrary
and the other illogical ; nor is it pretended that all,
or even the greater number of, the principles neces-
sary to the well-being of the art, are included in the
inquiry. Many, however, of considerable importance
will be found to develop themselves incidentally from
those more specially brought forward.

Graver apology is necessary for an apparently
graver fault. It has just been said, that there is no
branch of human work whose con- aphorism i.
stant laws have not close analogy ah practical laws
with those which govern every mode ^'"'^ '^^ exponents

- , ^. T\ ^ ii of moral ones.

of man's exertion. But, more than
this, exactly as we reduce to greater simplicity and
surety any one group of these practical laws, we
shall find them passing the mere condition of con-
nection or analogy, and becoming the actual ex-
pression of some ultimate nerve or fibre of the
mighty laws which govern the moral world. How-

6 INTR OD UCTOR V.

ever mean or inconsiderable the act, there is some-
thing in the well doing of it, which has fellow-
ship with the noblest forms of manly virtue ; and
the truth, decision, and temperance, which we
reverently regard as honorable conditions of the
spiritual being, have a reprcse'^t-^.tive or derivative
influence over the works of the hr-^d, the move-
ments of the frame, and the action of the intel-
lect.

And as thus every action, down even to the draw-
ing of a line or utterance of a syllable, is capable ^^
a peculiar dignity in the manner l/ it, which wc
sometimes express by saying it is truly done (a.z a
line or tone is true), so also i. is capiblj cf dignity
still higher in the motive of it. For there is no
action so slight, nor so mean, but it may be done to
a great purpose, and ennobled therefore ; nor is any
purpose so great but that slight actions may help it,
and may be so done as to help it much, most espe-
cially that chief of all purposes, the pleasing of God.
Hence George Herbert ^ —

"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws.
Makes that and the action fine."

Therefore, in the pressing or recommending of any
act or manner of acting, we have choice of two sepa-

* George Herbert was too much of an Englishman (and of an
Elizabethan tempered Englishman) to conceive that drudgery could
ever be divine in its own nature, and sometimes, more divine if forced
than voluntary, e. g., John Knox's labor as a galley slave.

INTRODUCTORY. J

rate lines of argument : one based on representation
of the expediency or inherent value of the work, which
is often small, and always disputable ; the other based
on proofs of its relations to the higher orders of human
virtue, and of its acceptableness, so far as it goes, to
Him who is the origin of virtue. The former is
commonly the more persuasive method, the latter
assuredly the more conclusive ; only it is liable to
give oflfence, as if there were irreverence in adducing
considerations so weighty in treating subjects of small
temporal importance. 1 believe, however, that no
error is more thoughtless than this. We treat God
with irreverence by banishing Him from our thoughts,
not by referring to His will on slight occasions. His
is not the finite authority or intelligence which cannot
be troubled with small things. There is nothing so
small but what we may honor God by asking His
guidance of it, or insult Him by taking it into our
own hands ; and what is true of the Deity is equally
true of His Revelation. We use it most reverently
when most habitually : our insolence is in ever acting
without reference to it, our true honoring of it is in
its universal application. I have been blamed for
the familiar introduction of its sacred words. I am
grieved to have given pain by so doing ; but my
excuse must be my wish that those words were made
the ground of every argument and the test of every
action. We have them not often enough on our
lips, nor deeply enough in our memories, nor loyally
enough in our lives. The snow, the vapor, and the
stormy wind fulfil His word. Are our acts and

8 INTR OD UCTOR V.

thoughts lighter and wilder than these — that we
should forget it?

I have therefore ventured, at the risk of giving to
some passages the appearance of irreverence, to take
the higher line of argument wherever it appeared
clearly traceable : and this, I would ask the reader
especially to observe, not merely because I think it
the best mode of reaching ultimate truth, still less
because I think the subject of more importance than
many others ; but because every subject should surely,
at a period like the present, be taken up in this spirit,
or not at all.

The aspect of the years that approach us is as
solemn as it is full of mvsterv ;

Aphorism 3. . j j '

and the weight of evil against

The arts of our , . , , , , . .

day must not be WhlCh WC have tO COHtCnd, IS in-
luxurious, nor its cteasing like the letting out of

metaphysics idle. .^^^^gj._ j^ jg ^^ ^^^^ f^j. ^^^ .^jg_

ness of metaphysics, or the entertainment of the
arts. The blasphemies of the earth are sounding
louder, and its miseries heaped heavier every day ;
and if, in the midst of the exertion which every
good man is called upon to put forth for their re-
pression or relief, it is lawful to ask for a thought,
for a moment, for a lifting of the finger, in any
direction but that of the immediate and overwhelm-
ing need, it is at least incumbent upon us to ap-
proach the questions in which we would engage him,
in the spirit which has become the habit of his
mind, and in the hope that neither his zeal nor his
usefulness may be checked by the withdrawal of
an hour, which has shown him how even those

TNTR OD UC TOR Y. 9

things which seemed mechanical, indifferent, or
contemptible, depend for their perfection upon the
acknowledgment of the sacred principles of faith,
truth, and obedience, for which it has become the
occupation of his life to contend.

lo THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

I . Architecture is the art which so disposes and
adorns the edifices raised by man,

Aphorism 4. ■' '

for whatsoever uses, that the sight
All architecture ^^ ^^^^ ^ Contribute to his men-

proposes an enect •'

on the human tal health, power, and pleasure.

mind, not merely It jg yg^y nccessarv in the outset

a service to the r n • • i- •' ■ 1 r ,.

human frame. 01 all inquiry, to distinguish carefully

between Architecture and Building.''
To build, — literally, to conform, — is by common
understanding to put togetlier and adjust the several
pieces of any edifice or receptacle of a considerable
size. Thus we have church buiklinLr, house buildingr,
ship building, and coach building. That one edifice
stands, another floats, and another is suspended on
iron springs, makes no difference in the nature of the
art, if so it may be called, of building or edification.
The persons who profess that art, are severally builders,
ecclesiastical, naval, or of whatever other name their
work may justify : but building does not become

* This distinction is a little stiff and awkward in terms, but not in
thought. And it is perfectly accurate, though stiff, even in terms. It
is the addition of the mental apxT\ — in the sense in which Plato uses
that word in the "Laws" — which separates architecture from a
wasp's nest, a rat hole, "Dr a railway station.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. ii

architecture merely by the stability of what it erects ;
and it is no more architecture which raises a church,
or which fits it to receive and contain with comfort a
required number of persons occupied in certain reli-
gious offices, than it is architecture which makes a
carriage commodious, or a ship swift. I do not, of
course, mean that the word is not often, or even may
not be legitimately, applied in such a sense (as we
speak of naval architecture) ; but in that sense archi-
tecture ceases to be one of the fine arts, and it is
therefore better not to run the risk, by loose nomen-
clature, of the confusion which would arise, and has
often arisen, from extending principles which belong
altogether to building, into the sphere of architecture
proper.

Let us, therefore, at once confine the name to that
art which, taking up and admitting, as conditions of
its working, the necessities and common uses of the
building, impresses on its form certain characters
venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unnecessary.
Thus, I suppose, no one would call the laws archi-
tectural which determine the height of a breastwork
or the position of a bastion. But if to the stone fa-
cing of that bastion be added an unnecessary feature,
as a cable moulding, that is Architecture. It would
be similarly unreasonable to call battlements or
machicolations architectural features, so long as they
consist only of an advanced gallery snpported on
projecting masses, with open intervals beneath for
offence. But if these projecting masses be carved
beneath into rounded courses, which are useless, and
if the headings of the intervals be arched and trefoiled,

12 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

which is useless, that is Architecture. It may not be
always easy to draw the line so sharply, because
there are few buildings which have not some pre-
tence or color of being architectural ; neither can
there be any architecture which is not based on
building, nor any good architecture which is not
based on good building ; but it is perfectly easy, and
very necessary, to keep the ideas distinct, and to
understand fully that Architecture concerns itself
only with those characters of an edifice which are
above and beyond its common use. I say common ;
because a building raised to the honor of God, or in
memory of men, has surely a use to which its archi-
tectural adornment fits it ; but not a use which limits,
by any inevitable necessities, its plan or details.

II. Architecture proper, then, naturally arranges
itself under five heads : —

Devotional ; including all buildings raised for God's
service or honor.

Memorial ; including both monuments and tombs.

Civil ; including every edifice raised by nations x
or societies, for purposes of common business or
pleasure.

Military ; including all private and public architec-
ture of defence.

Domestic ; including every rank and kind of dwell-
ing-place. Now, of the principles which I would
endeavor to develop, while all must be, as I have
said, applicable to every stage and style of the art,
some, and especially those which are exciting rather
than directing, have necessarily fuller reference to
one kind of building than another ; and among these

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 13

I would place first that spirit which, having influence
in all, has nevertheless such especial reference to de-
votional and memorial architecture — the spirit which
offers for such work precious things, simply because
they are precious ; not as being necessary to the
building, but as an offering, surrendering, and sacri-
fice of what is to ourselves desirable. It seems to
me, not only that this feeling is in niost cases wholly
wanting in those who forward the devotional build-
ings of the present day ; ^ but that it would even be
regarded as a dangerous, or perhaps criminal, princi-
ple by many among us. I have not space to enter
into dispute of all the various objections which may
be urged against it — they are many and specious;
but I may, perhaps, ask the reader's patience while I
set down those simple reasons which cause me to be-
lieve it a good and just feeling, and as well-pleasing
to God and honorable in men, as it is beyond all
dispute necessary to the production of any great
work in the kind with which we are at present con-
cerned.

III. Now, first, to define this Lamp, or Spirit, of
Sacrifice, clearly. I have said that it prompts us to
the offering of precious things, merely because they
are precious, not because they are useful or necessary.
It is a spirit, for instance, which, of two marbles,
equally beautiful, applicable and durable, would
I choose the more costly, because it was so, and of

* The peculiar manner of selfish and impious ostentation, provoked
by the glassmakers, for a stimulus to trade, of putting up painted win-
dows to be records of private affection, instead of universal religion,
is one of the worst, because most plausible and proud, hypocrisies of
our day.

u

14 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

two kinds of decoration, equally effective, would
choose the more elaborate because it was so, in
order that it might in the same compass present
more cost and more thought. It is therefore most
unreasoning and enthusiastic, and perhaps less nega-
tively defined, as the opposite of the prevalent feel-
ing of modern times, which desires to produce the
largest results at the least cost.

Of this feeling, then, there are two distinct forms :
the first, the wish to exercise self-denial for the sake
of self-discipline merely, a wish acted upon in the
abandonment of things loved or desired, there being
no direct call or purpose to be answered by so do-
ing ; and the second, the desire to honor or please
some one else by the costliness of tlie sacrifice.
The practice is, in the first case, either private or
public ; but most frequently, and perhaps most prop-
erly, private ; while, in the latter case, the act is
commonly, and with greatest advantage, public.
Now, it cannot but at first appear futile to assert the
expediency of self-denial for its own sake, when, for
so many sakes, it is every day necessary to a far
greater degree than any of us practise it. But I be-
lieve it is just because we do not enough acknowledge
or contemplate it as a good in itself, that we are apt
to fail in its duties when they become imperative,
and to calculate, with some partiality, whether the
good proposed to others measures or warrants the
amount of grievance to ourselves, instead of accept-
ing with gladness the opportunity of sacrifice as a
personal advantage. Be this as it may, it is not
necessary to insist upon the matter here ; since there

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 15

are always higher and more useful channels of self-
sacrifice, for those who choose to practise it, than
any connected with the arts.

While in its second branch, that which is espe-
cially concerned with the arts, the justice of the feel-
ing is still more doubtful ; it depends on our answer
;o the broad question. Can the Deity be indeed
honored by the presentation to Him of any material
objects of value, or by any direction of zeal or wis-
dom which is not immediately beneficial to men ?

For, observe, it is not now the question whether
the fairness and majesty of a building may or may
not answer any moral purpose ; it is not the result of
labor in any sort of which we are speaking, but the
bare and mere costliness — the substance and labor
and time themselves : are these, we ask, indepen-
dently of their result, acceptable offerings to God,
and considered by Him as doing Him honor? So
long as we refer this question to the decision of feel-
ing, or of conscience, or of reason merely, it will be
contradictorily or imperfectly answered ; it admits of
entire answer only when we have met another and a
far different question, whether the Bible be indeed
one book or two, and whether the character of God
revealed in the Old Testament be other than His
character revealed in the New.

IV. Now, it is a most secure truth, that, although
the particular ordinances divinely appointed for spe-
cial purposes at any given period of man's history,
may be by the same divine authority abrogated, at
another, it is impossible that anv character of God,
appealed to or described in any ordinance past or

1 6 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

present, can ever be changed, or understood as
changed, by the abrogation of that ordinance. God
is one and the same, and is pleased or displeased by
the same things forever, although one part of His
pleasure may be expressed at one time rather than
another, and although the mode in which His pleas-
ure is to be consulted may be by Him graciously
modified to the circumstances of men. Thus, for
instance, it was necessary that, in order to the under-
standing by man of the scheme of Redemption, that
scheme should be foreshown from the beginning by
the type of bloody sacrifice. But God had no more
pleasure in such sacrifice in the time of Moses than
He has now ; He never accepted, as a propitiation
for sin, any sacrifice but the single one in perspec-
tive : and that we may not entertain any shadow of
doubt on this subject, the worthlessness of all other
sacrifice than this is proclaimed at the very time when
typical sacrifice was most imperatively demanded.
God was a spirit, and could be worshipped only in
spirit and in truth, as singly and exclusively when
every day brought its claim of typical and material
service or offering, as now when He asks for none but
that of the heart.

So, therefore, it is a most safe and sure principle
that, if in the manner of performing any rite at any
time, circumstances can be traced which we are
either told or may legitimately conclude, pleased
God at that time, those same circumstances will
please Him at all times, in the performance of all
rites or offices to which they may be attached in like
manner ; unless it has been afterwards revealed that,

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 17

for some special purpose, it is now His will that such
circumstances should be withdrawn. And this argu-
ment will have all the more force if it can be shown
that such conditions were not essential to the com-
pleteness of the rite in its human uses and bearings,
and only were added to it as being in themselves
pleasing to God.

V. Now, was it necessary to the completeness, as
a type, of the Levitical sacrifice, or to its utility as an
explanation of divine purposes, that it should cost
anything to the person in whose belialf it was offered ?
On the contrary, the sacrifice which it foreshowed,
was to be (jod's free gift ; and the cost of, or difficulty
of obtaining, the sacrificial type, could only render
that type in a measure obscure, and less expressive
of the offering which God would in the end provide
for all men. Yet this costliness wz.?, generally a con-
dition of the acceptableness of the sacrifice. " Neither
will 1 offer unto the Lord my God of that which doth
cost me nothing."' * That costliness, therefore, must
be an acceptable condition in all human offerings at
all times ; for if it was pleasing to God once, it must
please Him always, unless directly forbidden by Him
afterwards, which it has never been.

Again, was it necessary to the typical perfection of
the Levitical offering, that it should be the best of the
flock.'' Doubtless, the spotlessness of the sacrifice
renders it more expressive to the Christian mind ;
but was it because so expressive that it was actually,
and in so many words, demanded by God? Not at
all. It was demanded by Him expressly on the same

• Sam. xxiv. 24. Deut. xvi. t6, 17.

1 8 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

grounds on which an earthly governor would demand
it, as a testimony of respect. " Offer it now unto thy
governor." * And the less valuable offering was
rejected, not because it did not image Christ, nor
fulfil the purposes of sacrifice, but because it indicated
a feeling that would grudge the best of its possessions
to Him who gave them ; and because it was a bold
dishonoring of God in the sight of man. Whence
it may be infallibly concluded, that in whatever offer-
ings we may now see reason to present unto God (I
say not what these may be), a condition of their
acceptableness will be now, as it was then, that they
should be the best of their kind.

VI. But farther, was it necessary to the carrying
out of the Mosaical system, that there should be either
art or splendor in the form or services of the taber-
nacle or temple ? Was it necessary to the perfection
of any one of their typical offices, that there should
be that hanging of blue, and purple, and scarlet?
those taches of brass and sockets of silver? that
working in cedar and overlaying with gold? One
thing at least is evident : there was a deep and awful
danger in it ; a danger that the God whom they so
worshipped, might be associated in the minds of the
serfs of Egypt with the gods to whom they had seen
similar gifts offered and similar honors paid. The
probability, in our times, of fellowship with the feel-
ings of the idolatrous Romanist is absolutely as
nothing, compared with the danger to the Israelite of
a sympathy with the idolatrous Egyptian ; no specu-
lative, no unproved danger ; but proved fatally by
• Mai. i. 8.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. ig

their fall during a month's abandonment to their own
will ; a fall into the most servile idolatry ; yet marked
by such offerings to their idol as their leader was, in
the close sequel, instructed to bid them offer to God.
This danger was imminent, perpetual, and of the most
awful kind : it was the one against which God made
provision, not only by commandments, by threaten-
ings, by promises, the most urgent, repeated, and
impressive ; but by temporary ordinances of a severity
so terrible as almost to dim for a time, in the eyes of
His people. His attribute of mercy. The principal
object of every instituted law of that Theocracy, of
every judgment sent forth in its vindication, was to
mark to the people His hatred of idolatry ; a hatred
written under their advancing steps, in the blood of
the Canaanite, and more sternly still in the darkness
of their own desolation, when the children and the
sucklings swooned in the streets of Jerusalem, and
the lion tracked his prey in the desert of Samaria.*
Yet, against this mortal danger, provision was not
made in one way, (to man's thoughts the simplest,
the most natural, the most effective,) by withdrawing
from the worship of the Divine Being whatever could
delight the sense, or shape the imagination, or limit
the idea of Deity to place. This one way God re-
fused, demanding for Himself such honors, and
accepting for Himself such local dwelling, as had been
paid and dedicated to idol gods by heathen worship-
pers. And for what reason? Was the glory of the
tabernacle necessary to set forth or image His divine
glory to the minds of His people ? What ! purple or

* Lam. ii. «. 2 Kings xvii. 25.

20 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

scarlet necessary, to the people who had seen the
great river of Egypt run scarlet to the sea, under His
condemnation ? What ! golden lamp and cherub
necessary, for those who had seen the fires of heaven
falling like a mantle on Mount Sinai, and its golden
courts opened to receive their mortal lawgiver ?
What ! silver clasp and fillet necessary, when they
had seen the silver waves of the Red Sea clasp in
their arched hollows the corpses of the horse and his
rider? Nay — not so.' There was but one reason,
and that an eternal one ; that as the covenant that
He made with men was accompanied with some ex-
ternal sign of its continuance, and of His remem-
brance of it, so the acceptance of that covenant
might be marked and signified by men, in some
external sign of their love and obedience, and surren-
der of themselves and theirs to His will ; and that
their gratitude to Him and continual remembrance
of Him, might have at once their expression, and
their enduring testimony, in the presentation to Him,
not only of the firstlings of the herd and fold, not
only of the fruits of the earth and the tithe of time,
but of all treasures of wisdom and beauty ; of the
thought that invents, and the hand that labors ; of
wealth of wood, and weight of stone ; of the strength
of iron, and the light of gold.

And let us not now lose sight of this broad and un-
abrogated principle — I might say, incapable of being

^ Yes, — very much so. The impression of all temporary vision
wears off next day in the minds of the common people. Continual
splendor is necessary and wholesome for them : and the sacrifices re-
quired by Heaven were never useless.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 2 1

abrogated, so long as men shall receive earthly gifts
from God. Of all that they have, His tithe must be
rendered to Him, or in so far and in so much He is
forgotten : of the skill and of the treasure, of the
strength and of the mind, of the time and of the toil,
offering must be made reverently ; and if there be
any difference between the Levitical and the Christian
offering, it is that the latter may be just so much the
wider in its range as it is less typical in its meaning,
as it is thankful instead of sacrificial. There can be
no excuse accepted because the Deity does not now
visibly dwell in His temple ; if He is invisible it is
only through our failing faith : nor any excuse because
other calls are more immediate or more sacred ; this
ought to be done, and not the other left undone.
Yet this objection, as frequent as feeble, must be
more specifically answered.

VII. It has been said — it ought always to be said,
for it is true, — that a better and more honorable
offering is made to our Master in ministry to the
poor, in extending the knowledge of His name, in
the practice of the virtues by which that name is
hallowed, than in material presents to His temple.
Assuredly it is so : woe to all who think that any
other kind or manner of offering may in any wise
take the place of these ! Do the people need place
to pray, and calls to hear His word ? Then it is no
time for smoothing pillars or carving pulpits ; let us
have enough first of walls and roofs. Do the people
need teaching from house to house, and bread from
day to day? Then they are deacons and ministers
we want, not architects. I insist on this, I plead for

2 2 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

this ; but let us examine ourselves, and see if this be
indeed the reason for our backwardness in the lesser
work. The question is not between God's house and
His poor : it is not between God's house and His
Gospel. It is between God's house and ours. Have
we no tessellated colors on our floors? no frescoed
fancies on our roofs? no niched statuary in our
corridors? no gilded furniture in our chambers? no
costly stones in our cabinets ? Has even the tithe of
these been offered? They are, or they ought to be,
the signs that enough has been devoted to the great
purposes of human stewardship, and that there re-
mains to us what we can spend in luxury ; but there
is a greater and prouder luxury than this selfish one
— that of bringing a portion of such things as these
into sacred service, and presenting them for a memo-
rial * that our pleasure as well as our toil has been
hallowed by the remembrance of Him who gave both
the strength and the reward. And until this has
been done, I do not see how such possessions can be
retained in happiness. I do not understand the feel-
ing which would arch our own gates and pave our
own thresholds, and leave the church with its narrow
door and foot-worn sill ; the feeling which enriches
our own chambers with all manner of costliness, and
endures the bare wall and mean compass of the
temple. There is seldom even so severe a choice to
be made, seldom so much self-denial to be exercised.
There are isolated cases, in which men's happiness
and mental activity depend upon a certain degree of
luxury in their houses ; but then this is true luxury,

* Num. xxxi. 54. Psa. Ixxvi. 11.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 23

felt and tasted, and profited by. In the plurality of
instances nothing of the kind is attempted, nor can
be enjoyed ; men's average resources cannot reach
it; and that which \\\&y cati reach, gives them no
pleasure, and might be spared. It will be seen, in
the course of the following chap- aphorism 5.
ters, that I am no advocate for ^ . ,

Domestic luxury

meanness of private habitation. I is to be sacrificed
would fain introduce into it all mag- to national mag-
nificence, care, and beauty, where "licence.
they are possible ; but I would not have that use-
less expense in unnoticed fineries or formalities ;
cornicing of ceilings and graining of doors, and
fringing of curtains, and thousands such ; things
which have become foolishly and apathetically
habitual — things on whose common appliance
hang whole trades, to which there never yet
belonged the blessing of giving one ray of real
pleasure, or becoming of the remotest or most
contemptible use — things which cause half the
expense of life, and destroy more than half its
comfort, manliness, respectability, freshness and
facility. I speak from experience : I know what
it is to live in a cottage with a deal floor and roof,
and a hearth of mica slate ; and I know it to be in
many respects healthier and happier than living
between a Turkey carpet and gilded ceiling, beside
a steel grate and polished fender. I do not say
that such things have not their place and pro-
priety ; but I say this, emphatically, that the
tenth part of the expense which is sacrificed in
domestic vanities, if not absolutely and meaning-

24 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

lessly lost in domestic discomforts and incum-
brances, would, if collectively offered and wisely
employed, build a marble church for every town
in England ; such a church as it should be a joy
and a blessing even to pass near in our daily ways
and walks, and as it would bring the light into the
eyes to see from afar, lifting its fair height above
the purple crowd of humble roofs.

VIII. I have said for every town: I do not want a
marble church for every village ; nay, I do not want
marble churches at all for their own sake, but for the
sake of the spirit that would build them. The Church
has no need of any visible splendors : her power is
independent of them, her purity is in some degree
opposed to them. The simplicity of a pastoral
sanctuary is lovelier than the majesty of an urban
temple; and it may be more than questioned whether,
to the people, such majesty has ever been the source
of any increase of effective piety ; '' but to the builders
it has been, and must ever be. It is not the church
we want, but the sacrifice ; not the emotion of admi-
ration, but the act of adoration ; not the gift, but the
giving. And see how much more charity the full
understanding of this might admit, among classes of
men of naturally opposite feelings ; and how much
more nobleness in the work. There is no need
to offend by importunate, self-proclaimant splendor.
Your gift may be given in an unpresuming way.

7 Yes, it may be more than questioned ; it maybe angrily — or sor-
rowfully— denied: but never by entirely humble and thoughtful
persons. The subject was first placed by me, without any remains of
Presbyterian prejudice, in the aspect which it must take on purely
rational grounds, in my second Oxford inaugural lecture.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 25

Cut one or two shafts out of a porphyry whose
preciousness those only would know who would de-
sire it to be so used ; add another month's labcr to
the under-cutting of a few capitals, whose delicacy
will not be seen nor loved by one beholder of ten
thousand ; see that the simplest masonry of the edi-
fice be perfect and substantial ; and to those who re-
gard such things, their witness will be clear and
impressive ; to those who regard them not, all will
at least be inoffensive. But do not think the feeling
itself a folly, or the act itself useless. Of what use
was that dearly bought water of the well of Bethlehem
with which the king of Israel slaked the dust of
Adullam ? yet was it not thus better than if he had
drunk it? Of what use was that passionate act of
Christian sacrifice, against which, first uttered by the
false tongue, the very objection we would now con-
quer took a sullen tone forever.'* * So also let us not
ask of what use our offering is to the church : it is at
least better for its than if it had been retained for our-
selves. It may be better for others also : there is, at
any rate, a chance of this ; though we must always
fearfully and widely shun the thought that the mag-
nificence of the temple can materially add to the
efficiency of the worship or to the power of the
ministry. Whatever we do, or whatever we offer, let
it not interfere with the simplicity of the one, or
abate, as if replacing, the zeal of the other. ^

* John xii. 5.

8 Thirteen lines of vulgar attack on Roman-Catholicism are here —
with much gain to the chapter's grace, and purification of its truth —
omitted.

26 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

IX. While, however, I would especially deprecate
the imputation of any other acceptableness or useful-
ness to the gift itself than that which it I'eceives from
the spirit of its presentation, it may be well to ob-
serve, that there is a lower advantage which never
fails to accompany a dutiful observance of any right
abstract principle. While the first fruits of his pos-
sessions were required from the Israelite as a testi-
mony of fidelity, the payment of those first fruits was
nevertheless rewarded, and that connectedly and
specifically, by the increase of those possessions.
Wealth, and length of days, and peace, were the
promised and experienced rewards of his offering,
though they were not to be the objects of it. The
tithe paid into the storehouse, was the express condi-
tion of the blessing which there should not be room
enough to receive. And it will be thus always : God
never forgets any work or labor of love ; and what-
ever it may be of which the first and best portions or
powers have been presented to Him, He will multi-
ply and increase sevenfold. Therefore, though it
may not be necessarily the interest of religion to
admit the service of the arts, the arts will never
flourish until they have been primarily devoted to
that service — devoted, both liy architect and em-
ployer; by the one in scrupulous, earnest, affection-
ate design ; by the other in expenditure at least more
frank, at least less calculating, than that which he
would admit in the indulgence of his own private
feelings. Let this principle be but once fairly ac-
knowledged among us ; and however it may be chilled
and repressed in practice, however feeble may be its

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 27

real influence, however the sacredness of it may be
diminished by counter-workings of vanity and self-
interest, yet its mere acknowledgment would bring a
reward ; and with our present accumulation of means
and of intellect, there would be such an impulse and
vitality given to art as it has not felt since the thir-
teenth century. And I do not assert this as other
than a natural consequence : 1 should, indeed, expect
a larger measure of every great and spiritual faculty
to be always given where those faculties had been
wisely and religiously employed ; but the impulse to
which I refer, would be, humanly speaking, certain ;
and would naturally result from obedience to the two
great conditions enforced by the Spirit of Sacrifice,
first, that we should in everything do our best ; and,
secondly, that we should consider increase of appar-
ent labor as an increase of beauty in the building. A
few practical deductions from these two conditions,
and I have done.

X. For the first : it is alone enough to secure suc-
cess, and it is for want of observing it that we con-
tinually fail. We are none of us so good architects
as to be able to work habitually be- aphorism 6
neath our strength : and yet there ,, ,

, ., ,. , ■, , , Modem builders

IS not a building that I know of , are capable of lit-

lately raised, wherein it is not tie; and don't
sufficiently evident that neither even do the Kttie
architect nor builder has done ' ^^ ^^°'
his best. It is the especial characteristic of mod-
em work. All old work nearly has been hard
work. It may be the hard work of children, of
barbarians, of rustics ; but it is always their ut-

28 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

most Ours has as constantly the look of money's
worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever
we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions ;
never of a fair putting forth of our strength. Let
us have done with this kind of work at once : cast
off every temptation to it : do not let us degrade
ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn
over our shortcomings ; let us confess our poverty
or our parsimony, but not belie our human intellect.
It is not even a question of how 7nuch we are to do,
but of how it is to be done ; it is not a question of
doing more, but of doing better. Do not let us boss
our roofs with wretched, half-worked, blunt-edged
rosettes ; do not let us flank our gates with rigid imi-
tations of mediceval statuary. Such things are mere
insults to common sense, and only unfit us for feeling
the nobility of their prototypes. We have so much,
suppose, to be spent m decoration ; let us go to the
Flaxman of his time, whoever he may be ; and bid
him carve for us a single statue, frieze, or capital, or
as many as we can afford, compelling upon him the
one condition, that they shall be the best he can do ;
place them where they will be of the most value, and
be content. Our other capitals may be mere blocks,
and our other niches empty. No matter : better our
work unfinished than all bad. It may be that we do
not desire ornament of so high an order : choose,
then, a less developed style, as also, if you will,
rougher material ; the law which we are enforcing
requires only that what we pretend to do and to give,
shall both be the best of their kind ; choose, there-
fore, the Norman hatchet work, instead of the Flax-

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 29

man frieze and statue, but let it be the best hatchet
work; and if you cannot aifbrd marble, use Caen
stone, but from the best bed ; and if not stone, brick,
but the best brick ; preferring always what is good
of a lower order of work or material, to what is bad
of a higher ; for this is not only the way to improve
every kind of work, and to put every kind of material
to better use ; but it is more honest and unpretend-
ing, and is in harmony with other just, upright, and
manly principles, whose range we shall have pres-
ently to take into consideration.

XI. The other condition which we had to notice,
was the value of the appearance of labor upon archi-
tecture. I have spoken of this before ; * and it is,
indeed, one of the most frequent sources of pleasure
which belong to the art, always, however, within cer-
tain somewhat remarkable limits. For it does not at
first appear easily to be explained why labor, as rep-
resented by materials of value, should, without sense
of wrong or error, bear being wasted ; while the
waste of actual workmanship is always painful, so soon
as it is apparent. But so it is, that, while precious
materials may, with a certain profusion and negli-
gence, be employed for the magnificence of what is
seldom seen, the work of man cannot be carelessly
and idly bestowed, without an immediate sense of
wrong ; as if the strength of the living creature were
never intended by its Maker to be sacrificed in vain,
though it is well for us sometimes to part with what
we esteem precious of substance, as showing that in

* " Mod. Painters," Part I. Sec i. Chap. 3.

30 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

such service it becomes but dross and dust. And in
the nice balance between the straitening of effort or
enthusiasm on the one hand, and vainly casting it
avi^ay upon the other, there are more questions than
can be met by any but very just and watchful feeling.
In general it is less the mere loss of labor that offends
us, than the lack of judgment implied by such loss ;
so that if men confessedly work for work's sake,^ and
it does not appear that they are ignorant where or
how to make their labor tell, we shall not be grossly
offended. On the contrary, we shall be pleased if
the work be lost in carrying out a principle, or in
avoiding a deception. It, indeed, is a law properly
belonging to another part of our subject, but it may
be allowably stated here, that, whenever, by the con-
struction of a building, some parts of it are hidden
from the eye which are the continuation of others
bearing some consistent ornament, it is not well that
the ornament should cease in the parts concealed ;
credit is given for it, and it should not be deceptively
withdrawn : as, for instance, in the sculpture of the
backs of the statues of a temple pediment ; never,
perhaps, to be seen, but yet not lawfully to be left
unfinished. And so in the working out of ornaments
in dark or concealed places, in which it is best to err
on the side of completion ; and in the carrying round
of string courses, and other such continuous work ;

9 Obscurely expressed. I meant, if they worked to show their
respect for what they are doing, and gladness in doing all they can —
not in the idea of producing impossible effects, or impressing the
spectator with a quantity of bad, when they can do nothing that's
good. " Sacrificed," in the next sentence, would have keen abetter
word than "lost."

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 31

not but that they may stop sometimes, on the point
of going into some palpably impenetrable recess, but
then let them stop boldly and markedly, on some
distinct terminal ornament, and never be supposed
to exist where they do not. The arches of the towers
which flank the transepts of Rouen Cathedral have
rosette ornaments on their spandrels, on the three
visible sides ; none on the side towards the roof.
The right of this is rather a nice point for question.

XII. Visibility, however, we must remember, de-
pends, not only on situation, but on distance ; and
there is no way in which work is more painfully and
unwisely lost than in its over delicacy on parts dis-
tant from the eye. Here, again, the principle of
honesty must govern our treatment: we must not
work any kind of ornament which is, perhaps, to cover
the whole building (or at least to occur on all parts
of it) delicately where it is near the eye, and rudely
where it is removed from it. That is trickery and
dishonesty. 1'^ Consider, first, what kinds of orna-
ments will tell in the distance and what near, and so
distribute them, keeping such as by their nature are
delicate, down near the eye, and throwing the bold and
-ough kinds of work to the top ; and if there be any

1" There is too much stress laid, throughout this volume, on probity
in picturesque treatment, and not enough on probity in material con-
struction. No rascal will ever build a pretty building, — but the
common sense, which is the root of virtue, will have more to say in a
strong man's design than his finer sentiments. In the fulfilment of
his contract honorably, there will be more test of his higher feelings
than in his modes of sculpture. But the concluding sentences of the
chapter from this point forward are all quite right, and can't be much
better put.

32 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

kind which is to be both near and far off, take care
that it be as boldly and rudely wrought where it is
well seen as where it is distant, so that the spectator
may know exactly what it is, and what it is worth.
Thus checkered patterns, and in general such orna-
ments as common workmen can execute, may extend
over the whole building; but bas-reliefs, and fine
niches and capitals, should be kept down ; and the
common sense of this will always give a building dig-
nity, even though there be some abruptness or awk-
wardness in the resulting arrangements. Thus at San
Zeno at Verona, the bas-reliefs, full of incident and
interest, are confined to a parallelogram of the front,
reaching to the height of the capitals of the columns
of the porch. Above these, we find a simple, though
most lovely, little arcade ; and above that, only blank
wall, with square face shafts. The whole effect is
tenfold grander and better than if the entire fa9ade
had been covered with bad work, and may serve for
an example of the way to place little where we cannot
afford much. So again, the transept gates of Rouen *
are covered with delicate bas-reliefs (of which I shall
speak at greater length presently) up to about once
and a half a man's height ; and above that come the
usual and more visible statues and niches. So in the
campanile at Florence, the circuit of bas-reliefs is on
its lowest story ; above that come its statues ; and
above them all is pattern mosaic, and twisted col-
umns, exquisitely finished, like all Italian work of the

* Henceforward, for the sake of convenience, when I name any
cathedral town in this manner, let me be understood to speak of its
cathedral church.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. Zl

time, but still, in the eye of the Florentine, rough
and commonplace by comparison with the bas-reliefs.
So generally the most delicate niche work and best
mouldings of the French Gothic are in gates and low
windows well within sight; although, it being the
very spirit of that style to trust to its exuberance for
effect, there is occasionally a burst upwards and blos-
soming unrestrainably to the sky, as in the pediment
of the west front of Rouen, and in the recess of the
rose window behind it, where there are some most
elaborate flower-mouldings, all but invisible from
below, and only adding a general enrichment to the
deep shadows that relieve the shafts of the advanced
pediment. It is observable, however, that this very
work is bad flamboyant, and has corrupt renaissance
characters in its detail as well as use ; while in the
earlier and grander north and south gates, there is a
very noble proportioning of the work to the distance,
the niches and statues which crown the northern one,
at a height of about one hundred feet from the ground,
being alike colossal and simple ; visibly so from
below, so as to induce no deception, and yet honestly
and well finished above, and all that they are expected
to be ; the features very beautiful, full of e.xpression,
and as delicately wrought as any work of the period.
XIII. It is to be remembered, however, that while
the ornaments in every fine ancient building, without
exception so far as I am aware, are most delicate at
the base, they are often in greater effective quantity
on the upper parts. In high towers this is perfectly
natural and right, the solidity of the foundation being
as necessary as the division and penetration of the

34 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

superstructure ; hence the Hghter work and richly
pierced crowns of late Gothic towers. The campanile
of Giotto at Florence, already alluded to, is an ex-
quisite instance of the union of the two principles,
delicate bas-reliefs adorning its massy foundation,
while the open tracery of the upper windows attracts
the eye by its slender intricacy, and a rich cornice
crowns the whole. In such truly fine cases of this
disposition the upper work is effective by its quantity
and intricacy only, as the lower portions by delicacy ;
so also in the Tour de Beurre at Rouen, where, how-
ever, the detail is massy throughout, subdividing into
rich meshes as it descends. In the bodies of build-
ings the principle is less safe, but its discussion is not
connected with our present subject.

XIV. Finally, work may be wasted by being too
good for its material, or too fine to bear exposure ;
and this, generally a characteristic of late, especially
of renaissance, work, is perhaps the worst fault of
all. I do not know anything more painful or pitiful
than the kind of ivory carving with which the Certosa
of Pavia, and part of the Colleone sepulchral chapel
at Bergamo, and other such buildings are incrusted,
of which it is not possible so much as to think with-
out exhaustion ; and a heavy sense of the misery it
would be, to be forced to look at it all. And this is
not from the quantity of it, nor because it is bad
work — much of it is inventive and able ; but because
it looks as if it were only fit to be put in inlaid cab-
inets and velveted caskets, and as if it could not bear
one drifting shower or gnawing frost. We are afraid
for it, anxious about it, and tormented by it ; and we

Plate I.

p ly ^

^ i §

c'i* # ''"

•^^'">4

Ornaments from Rouen, St. Lo and Venice.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 35

feel that a massy shaft and a bold shadow would be
worth it all. Nevertheless, even in cases like these,
much depends on the accomplishment of the great
ends of decoration. If the ornament does its duty —
if it is ornament, and its points of shade and light
tell in the general effect, we shall not be offended by
finding that the sculptor in his fulness of fancy has
chosen to give much more than these mere points of
light, and has composed them of groups of figures.
But if the ornament does not answer its purpose, if
it have no distant, no truly decorative power ; if, gen-
erally seen, it be a mere incrustation and meaningless
roughness, we shall only be chagrined by finding
when we look close, that the incrustation has cost
years of labor, and has millions of figures and his-
tories in it ; and would be the better of being seen
through a Stanhope lens. Hence the greatness of
the northern Gothic as contrasted with the latest
Italian. It reaches nearly the same extreme of detail ;
but it never loses sight of its architectural purpose,
never fails in its decorative power ; not a leaflet in it
but speaks, and speaks far off too ; and so long as
this be the case, there is no limit to the luxuriance in
which such work may legitimately and nobly be be-
stowed.

XV. No limit : it is one of the affectations of arch-
itects to speak of overcharged ornament. Ornament
cannot be overcharged if it be good, and is always
overcharged when it is bad. I have given, on the
opposite page (fig. i ) , one of the smallest niches of the
central gate of Rouen. That gate I suppose to be
the most exquisite piece of pure flamboyant work

36 THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE.

existing ; for though I have spoken of the upper por-
tions, especially the receding window, as degenerate,
the gate itself is of a purer period, and has hardly any
renaissance taint. There are four strings of these
niches (each with two figures beneath it) round the
porch, from the ground to the top of the arch, with
three intermediate rows of larger niches, far more
elaborate ; besides the six principal canopies of each
outer pier. The total number of the subordinate
niches alone, each worked like that in the plate, and
each with a different pattern of traceries in each com-
partment,* is one hundred and seventy-six. Yet in
all this ornament there is not one cusp, one finial,
that is useless — not a stroke of the chisel is in vain ;
the grace and luxuriance of it all are visible — sensi-
ble rather — even to the uninquiring eye; and all its
minuteness does not diminish the majesty, while it
increases the mystery, of the noble and unbroken
vault. It is not less the boast of some styles that
they can bear ornament, than of others that they can
do without it ; but we do not often enough reflect that
those very styles, of so haughty simplicity, owe part
of their pleasurableness to contrast, and would be
wearisome if universal. They are but the rests and
monotones of the art ; it is to its far happier, far
higher, exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of
variegated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and
dark hosts of imagery, thicker and quainter than ever
filled the depth of midsummer dream ; those vaulted
gates, trellised with close leaves ; those window-laby-
rinths of twisted tracery and starry light ; those misty

* See Appendix II.

THE LAMP OF SACRIFICE. 37

masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed
tower; the only witnesses, perhaps, that remain to us
of the faith and fear of nations. All else for which
the builders sacrificed, has passed away — all their
living interests, and aims, and achievements. We
know not for what they labored, and we see no evi-
dence of their reward. Victory, wealth, authority,
happiness — all have departed, though bought by
many a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their life
and their toil upon the earth, one reward, one evi-
dence, is left to us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought
stone. They have taken with them to the grave their
powers, their honors, and their errors ; but they have
left us their adoration.

38 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

CHAPTER II.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

I. There is a marked likeness between the virtue
of man and the enlightenment of the globe he in-
habits — the same diminishing gradation in vigor up
to the limits of their domains, the same essential
separation from their contraries — the same twilight
at the meeting of the two : a something wider belt
than the line where the world rolls into night, that
strange twilight of the virtues ; that dusky debatable
land, wherein zeal becomes impatience, and temper-
ance becomes severity, and justice becomes cruelty,
and faith superstition, and each and all vanish into
gloom.

Nevertheless, with the greater number of them,
though their dimness increases gradually, we may
mark the moment of their sunset; and, happily, may
turn the shadow back by the way by which it had
gone down : but for one, the line of the horizon is
irregular and undefined ; and this, too, the very equa-
tor and girdle of them all — Truth ; that only one of
which there are no degrees, but breaks and rents con-
tinually; that pillar of the earth, yet a cloudy pillar;
that golden and narrow line, which the very powers
and virtues that lean upon it bend, which policy and

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 39

prudence conceal, which kindness and courtesy mod-
ify, which courage overshadows with his shield, im-
agination covers with her wings, and charity dims
with her tears. How difficult must the maintenance
of that authority be, which, while it has to restrain
the hostility of all the worst principles of man, has
also to restrain the disorders of his best — which is
continually assaulted by the one and betrayed by the
other, and which regards with the same severity the
lightest and the boldest violations of its law ! There
are some faults slight in the sight of love, some
errors slight in the estimate of wisdom ; but truth
forgives no insult, and endures no stain.

We do not enough consider this ; nor enough dread
the slight and continual occasions of

rr ■ , Txr APHORISM 7.

oiience aranist her. We are too

, . * The guilt and

much in the habit of looking at harm of amiable

falsehood in its darkest associa- and well meant
tions, and through the color of its 'y'"^-
worst purposes. That indignation which we pro-
fess to feel at deceit absolute, is indeed only at
deceit malicious. We resent calumny, hypocrisy,
and treachery, because they harm us, not because
they are untrue. Take the detraction and the mis-
chief from the untruth, and we are little offended
by it ; turn it into praise, and we may be pleased
with it. And yet it is not calumny nor treachery
that do 11 the largest sum of mischief in the world;

" " Do," — in the old edition, more grammatically, " does," — but,
as I get old, I like to make my own grammar at home. The sentence
following, "they are continually crushed, and are felt only in being
conquered," must be missed out of the aphorism. I did not know the

40 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

they are continually crushed, and are felt only in
being conquered. But it is the glistening and
softly spoken lie ; the amiable fallacy ; the patri-
otic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the
politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the mer-
ciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each
man to himself, that cast that black mystery over
humanity, through which we thank any man who
pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a
desert ; happy, that the thirst for truth still
remains with us, even when we have wilfully left
the fountains of it.

It would be well if moralists less frequently con-
fused the greatness of a sin with its unpardonable-
ness. The two characters are altogether distinct.
The greatness of a fault depends partly on the nature
of the person against whom it is committed, partly
upon the extent of its consequences. Its pardon-
ableness depends, humanly speaking, on the degree
of temptation to it. One class of circumstances
determines the weight of the attaching punishment ;
the other, the claim to remission of punishment : and
since it is not always easy for men to estimate the
relative weight, nor always possible for them to
know the relative consequences, of crime, it is usually
wise in them to quit the care of such nice measure-
ments, and to look to the other and clearer condition
of culpability, esteeming those faults worst which are
committed under least temptation. I do not mean to

world, when I wrote it, as well as Sandro Botticelli ; but the entire
substance of the aphorism is sound, nevertheless, and most useful.
Calumny is, indeed, more invincible than praise : but, at its worst,
less mischievous than lying praise, and that by a long way.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 41

diminish the blame of the injurious and malicious
sin, of the selfish and deliberate falsity ; yet it seems
to me, that the shortest way to check the darker
forms of deceit is to set watch more scrupulous
against those which have mingled unregarded and
unchastised with the current of our life. Do not
let us lie at all. Do not think of one falsity as harm-
less, and another as slight, and another as unintended.
Cast them all aside : they maybe light and accidental ;
but they are an ugly soot from the smoke of the pit,
for all that ; and it is better that our hearts should be
swept clean of them, without over care as to which
is largest or blackest. Speaking truth is like writing
fair, and comes only by practice ; it is less a matter
of will than of habit, and I doubt if any occasion can
be trivial which permits the practice and formation of
such a habit. To speak and act apho.ism s.
truth with constancy and precision .pj.^(^ ^^^^^^ ^^
is nearly as difficult, and perhaps as persisted in with-
meritorious, as to speak it under out pains; but is
intimidation or penalty ; and it is a ''°"'' "'^'"•
strange thought how many men there are, as I
trust, who would hold to it at the cost of fortune
or life, for one who would hold to it at the cost of
a little daily trouble. And seeing that of all sin
there is, perhaps, no one more flatly opposite to
the Almighty, no one more " wanting the good of
virtue and of being," than this of lying, it is
surely a strange insolence to fall into the foulness
of it on light or on no temptation, and surely be-
coming an honorable man to resolve, that, v/hat-
ever semblances or fallacies the necessary course of

42 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

his life may compel him to bear or to believe, none
shall disturb the serenity of his voluntary actions,
nor diminish the reality of his chosen delights,

II. If this be just and wise for truth's sake, much
more is it necessary for the sake of the delights over
which she has influence. For, as I advocated the
expression of the Spirit of Sacrifice in the acts and
pleasures of men, not as if thereby those acts could
further the cause of religion, but because most assur-
edly they might therein be infinitely ennobled them-
selves, so I would have the Spirit or Lamp of Truth
clear in the hearts of our artists and handicraftsmen,
not as if the truthful practice of handicrafts could
far advance the cause of truth, but because I would
fain see the handicrafts themselves urged by the spurs
of chivalry : and it is. indeed, marvellous to see what
power and universality there are in this single princi-
ple, and how in the consulting or forgetting of it lies
half the dignity or decline of every art and act of man.
I have before endeavored to show its range and power
in painting ; and I believe a volume, instead of a chap-
ter, might be written on its authority over all that is
great in architecture. But I must be content with the
force of few and familiar instances, believing that the
occasions of its manifestation may be more easily
discovered by a desire to be true, than embraced by
an analysis of truth.

Only it is very necessary in the outset to mark
clearly wherein consists the essence of fallacy, as dis-
tinguished from fancy .^'^

12 " Fancy; " before "supposition," — which was a curiously im-
perfect word. " Fancy," short for "fantasy," now must be taken as

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 43

III. For it might be at first thought that
the whole kingdom of imagination was one of
deception also. Not so : the action aphorism 9.
of the imagination is a voluntary The nature and
summoning of the conceptions of dignity of imagi-
things absent or impossible ; and °=i"°"-

the pleasure and nobility of the imagination partly
consist in its knowledge and contemplation of them
as such, i.e., in the knowledge of their actual
absence or impossibility at the moment of their
apparent presence or reality. When the imagina-
tion deceives, it becomes madness. It is a noble
faculty so long as it confesses its own ideality ;
when it ceases to confess this, it is insanity. All
the difference lies in the fact of the confession, in
there being no deception. It is necessary to our
rank as spirtiual creatures, that we should be able
to invent and to behold what is not ; and to our
rank as moral creatures, that we should know and
confess at the same time that it is not.

IV. Again, it might be thought, and has been
thought, that the whole art of painting i.s nothing else
than an endeavor to deceive. Not so : it is, on the
contrary, a statement of certain facts, in the clearest
possible way. For instance : I desire to give an
account of a mountain or of a rock ; I begin by telling
its shape. But words will not do this distinctly, and
I draw its shape and say, "This was its shape."

including not only great imaginations, but fond ones, or even foolish
and diseased ones — which are nevertheless as true as the healthiest,
so long as we know them to be diseased. A dream is as real a fact as
a vision of reality : deceptive only if we do not recognize it as a
dream.

44 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

Next : I would fain represent its color : but words
will not do this either, and I dye the paper, and say,
"This was its color." Such a process may be car-
ried on until the scene appears to exist, and a high
pleasure may be taken in its apparent existence.
This is a communicated act of imagination, but no
lie. The lie can exist only in an assertion of its ex-
istence (which is never for one instant made, implied,
or beheved), or else in false statements of forms and
colors (which are, indeed, made and believed to our
great loss, continually). And observe, also, that so
degrading a thing is deception in even the approach
and appearance of it, that all painting which even
reaches the mark of apparent realization is degraded
in so doing. I have enough insisted on this point in
another place.

V. The violations of truth, which dishonor poetry
and painting, are thus for the most part confined to
the treatment of tlieir subjects. But in architecture
another and a less subtle, more contemptible, viola-
tion of truth is possible ; a direct falsity of assertion
respecting the nature of material, or the quantity of
labor. And this is, in the full sense of the word,
wrong ; it is as truly deserving of reprobation as any
other moral delinquency ; it is unworthy alike of
architects and of nations ; and it has been a sign,
wherever it has widely and with toleration existed, of
a singular debasement of the arts ; that it is not a sign
of worse than this, of a general want of severe prob-
ity, can be accounted for only by our knowledge of
the strange separation which has for some centuries
existed between the arts and all other subjects oi

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 45

human intellect, as matters of conscience. This
withdrawal of conscientiousness from among the fac-
ulties concerned with art, while it has destroyed the
arts themselves, has also rendered in a measure nuga-
tory the evidence which otherwise they might have
presented respecting the character of the respective
nations among whom they have been cultivated ; other-
wise, it might appear more than strange that a nation
so distinguished for its general uprightness and faith
as the English, should admit in their architecture
more of pretence, concealment, and deceit, than any
other of this or of past time.

They are admitted in thoughtlessness, but with
fatal effect upon the art in which they are practised.
If there were no other causes for the failures which of
late have marked every great occasion for architec-
tural exertion, these petty dishonesties would be
enough to account for all. It is the first step, and
not the least, towards greatness, to do away with
these ; the first, because so evidently and easily in our
power. We may not be able to command good, or
beautiful, or inventive, architecture ; but we can com-
mand an honest architecture : the meagreness of
poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility re-
spected ; but what is there but scorn for the meanness
of deception ?

VI. Architectural Deceits are broadly to be con-
sidered under three heads : —

1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or sup-
port, other than the true one ; as in pendants of late
Gothic roofs.

2d. The painting of surfaces to represent some

46 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

other material than that of which they actually con-
sist (as in the marbling of wood), or the deceptive
representation of sculptured ornament upon them.

3d. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments
of any kind.

Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture
will be noble exactly in the degree in which all these
false expedients are avoided. Nevertheless, there are
certain degrees of them, which, owing to their fre-
quent usage, or to other causes, have so far lost the
nature of deceit as to be admissible ; as, for instance,
gilding, which is in architecture no deceit, because it
is therein not understood for gold ; while in jewellery
it is a deceit, because it is so understood, and there-
fore altogether to be reprehended. So that there
arise, in the application of the strict rules of right,
many exceptions and niceties of conscience ; which
let us as briefly as possible examine.

VII. 1st. Structural Deceits. ^^ I have limited
these to the determined and purposed suggestion of
a mode of support other than the true one. The
architect is not boiind to exhibit structure ; nor are
we to complain of him for concealing it, any more
than we should regret that the outer surfaces of the
human frame conceal much of its anatomy ; never-
theless, that building will generally be the noblest,
which to an intelligent eye discovers the great secrets
of its structure, as an animal form does, although
from a careless observer they may be concealed. In
the vaulting of a Gothic roof it is no deceit to throw

'•' /'Esthetic deceits, to the eye and mind, being all that are con-
sidered in this chapter — not practical roguery. See note 10, p. 31.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 47

the strength into the ribs of it, and make the inter-
mediate vault a mere shell. Such a structure would
be presumed by an intelligent observer, the first time
he saw such a roof; and the beauty of its traceries
would be enhanced to him if they confessed and fol-
lowed the Hnes of its main strength. If, however,
the intermediate shell were made of wood instead of
stone, and whitewashed to look like the rest, — this
would, of course, be direct deceit, and altogether un-
pardonable.

There is, however, a certain deception necessarily
occurring in Gothic architecture, which relates, not
to the points, but to the manner, of support. The
resemblance in its shafts and ribs to the external
relations of stems and branches, which has been the
ground of so much foolish speculation, necessarily
induces in the mind of the spectator a sense or belief
of a correspondent internal structure ; that is to say,
of a fibrous and continuous strength from the root
into the limbs, and an elasticity communicated up-
wards, sufficient for the support of the ramified por-
tions. The idea of the real conditions, of a great
weight of ceiling thrown upon certain narrow, jointed
lines, which have a tendency partly to be crushed,
and partly to separate and be pushed outwards, is
with difficulty received ; and the more so when the
pillars would be, if unassisted, too slight for the
weight, and are supported by external flying but-
tresses, as in the apse of Beauvais, and other such
achievements of the bolder Gothic. Now, there is a
nice question of conscience in this, which we shall
hardly settle but by considering that, when the mind

48 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

is informed beyond the possibility of mistake as tft
the true nature of things, the affecting it witli a con-
trary impression, however distinct, is no dishonesty,
but, on the contrary, a legitimate appeal to the ima-
gination. For instance, the greater part of the happi-
ness which we have in contemplating clouds, results
from the impression of their having massive, lumi-
nous, warm, and mountain-like surfaces ; and our
delight in the sky frequently depends upon our con-
sidering it as a blue vault. But, if we choose, we
may know the contrary, in both instances ; and easily
ascertain the cloud to be a damp fog, or a drift of
snow-liakes ; and the sky to be a lightless abyss.
There is, therefore, no dishonesty, while there is
much delight, in the irresistibly contrary impression.
In the same way, so long as we see the stones and
joints, and are not deceived as to the points of sup-
port in any piece of architecture, we may rather praise
than regret the dexterous artifices which compel us to
feel as if there were fibre in its shafts and life in its
branches. Nor is even the concealment of the sup-
port of the external buttress reprehensible, so long as
the pillars are not sensibly inadequate to their duty.
For the weight of a roof is a circumstance of which
:he spectator generally has no idea, and the provis-
ions for it, consequently, circumstances whose neces-
sity or adaptation he could not understand. It is no
deceit, therefore, when the weight to be borne is
necessarily unknown, to conceal also the means of
bearing it, leaving only to be perceived so much of
the support as is indeed adequate to the weight sup-
posed. For the shafts do, indeed, bear as much as

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 49

they are ever imagined to bear, and the system of
added support is no more, as a matter of conscience,
to be exhibited, than, in the human or any other
form, mechanical provisions for those functions which
are themselves unperceived.

But the moment that the conditions of weight are
comprehended, both truth and feeling require that
the conditions of support should be also compre-
hended. Nothing can be worse, either as judged by
the taste or the conscience, than affectedly inadequate
supports — suspensions in air, and other such tricks
and vanities. ^^

VI 11. With deceptive concealments of structure are
to be classed, though still more blamable, deceptive
assumptions of it, — the introduction of members
which should have, or profess to have, a duty, and
have none. One of the most general instances of
this will be found in the form of the flying buttress
in late Gothic. The use of that member is, of course,
to convey support from one pier to another when the
plan of the building renders it necessary or desirable
that the supporting masses should be divided into
groups ; the most frequent necessity of this kind
arising from the intermediate range of chapels or
aisles between the nave or choir walls and their sup-
porting piers. The natural, healthy, and beautiful
arrangement is that of a steeply sloping bar of stone,

14 Four lines are here suppressed, of attack by Mr, Hope on St.
Sophia, which I do not now choose to ratify, because I have never
seen St. Sophia; and of attack by myself on King's College Chapel,
at Cambridge, — which took no account of the many charming quali-
ties possessed through its faults, nor of its superiority to everything else
in its style.

so THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

sustained by an arch with its spandrel carried farthest
down on the lowest side, and dying into the vertical
of the outer pier; that pier being, of course, not
square, but rather a piece of wall set at right angles
to the supported walls, and, if need be, crowned by a
pinnacle to give it greater weight. The whole arrange-
ment is exquisitely carried out in the choir of Beau-
vais. In later Gothic the pinnacle became gradually
a decorative member, and was used in all places merely
for the sake of its beauty. There is no objection to
this ; it is just as lawful to build a pinnacle for its
beauty as a tower ; but also the buttress became a
decorative member ; and was used, first, where it was
not wanted, and, secondly, in forms in which it could
be of no use, becoming a mere tie, not between the
pier and wall, but between the wall and the top of
the decorative pinnacle, thus attaching itself to the
very point where its thrust, if it made any, could not
be resisted. The most flagrant instance of this bar-
barism that I remember, (though it prevails partially
in all the spires of the Netherlands,) is the lantern of
St. Ouen at Rouen, where the pierced buttress, having
an ogee curve, looks about as much calculated to bear
a thrust as a switch of willow ; and the pinnacles, huge
and richly decorated, have evidently no work to do
whatsoever, but stand round the central tower, like
four idle servants, as they are — heraldic supporters,
that central tower being merely a hollow crown, which
needs no more buttressing than a basket does. In
fact, I do not know any thing more strange or unwise
than the praise lavished upon this lantern ; it is one
of the basest pieces of Gothic in Europe ; its flam-

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 51

boyant traceries being of the last and most degraded
forms : * and its entire plan and decoration resem-
bling, and deserving little more credit than the burnt
sugar ornaments of elaborate confectionery. There
are hardly any of the magnificent and serene methods
of construction in the early Gothic, which have not,
in the course of time, been gradually thinned and
pared away into these skeletons, which somietimes
indeed, when their lines truly follow the structure of
the original masses, have an interest like that of the
fibrous framework of leaves from which the substance
has been dissolved, but which are usually distorted as
well as emaciated, and remain but the sickly phan-
toms and mockeries of things that were ; they are to
true architecture what the Greek ghost was to the
armed and living frame ; and the very winds that
whistle through the threads of them are to the dia-
pasoned echoes of the ancient walls, as to the voice
of the man was the pining of the spectre.

IX. Perhaps the most fruitful sources of these
kings of corruption which we have to guard against
in recent times, is one which, nevertheless, comes in
a "questionable shape," and of which it is not easy
to determine the proper laws and limits ; I mean the
use of iron. The definition of the art of architecture,
given in the first chapter, is independent of its mate-
rials. Nevertheless, that art having been, up to the
beginning of the present century, practised for the
most part in clay, stone, or wood, it has resulted that
the sense of proportion and the laws of structure have
been based, the one altogether, the other in great

* See Appendix II.

52 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

part, on the necessities consequent on the employ-
ment of those materials ; and that the entire or prin-
cipal employment of metallic framework would,
therefore, be generally felt as a departure from the
first principles of the art. Abstractedly there ap-
pears no reason why iron should not be used as well
as wood ; and the time is probably near when a
new system of architectural laws will be developed,
adapted entirely to metallic construction. But I be-
lieve that the tendency of all present ^^ sympathy and
association is to limit the idea of architecture to non-
metallic work ; and that not without reason. For
architecture being in its perfection the earliest, as in
its elements it is necessarily the first, of arts, will
always precede, in any barbarous nation, the posses-
sion of the science necessary either for the obtaining
or the management of iron. Its first existence and
its earliest laws must, therefore, depend upon the use
of materials accessible in quantity, and on the surface
of the earth ; that is to say, clay, wood, or stone :
and as I think it cannot but be generally felt that
one of the chief dignities of architecture is its histori-
cal use, and since the latter is partly dependent on
consistency of style, it will be felt right to retain as
far as may be, even in periods of more advanced
science, the materials and principles of earlier ages.

X. But whether this be granted me or not, the
fact is, that every idea respecting size, proportion,

15 " Present" {i.e. of the day in which I wrote), as opposed to the
ferruginous temper which I saw rapidly developing itself, and which,
since that day, has changed our merry England into the Man in the
Iron Mask.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 53

decoration, or construction, on which we are at
present in the habit of acting or judging, depends on
presupposition of such materials : and as I both feel
myself unable to escape the influence of these preju-
dices, and believe that my readers will be equally so,
it may be perhaps permitted to me to assume that
true architecture does not admit iron as a constructive
material, and that such works as the cast-iron central
spire of Rouen Cathedral, or the iron roofs and pillars
of our railway stations, and of some of our churches,
are not architecture at all. Yet it is evident that
metals may, and sometimes must, enter into the con-
struction to a certain extent, as nails in wooden arch-
itecture, and therefore, as legitimately, rivets and
solderings in stone ; neither can we well deny to the
Gothic architect the power of supporting statues,
pinnacles, or traceries by iron bars ; and if we grant
this, I do not see how we can help allowing Brunel-
leschi his iron chain around the dome of Florence, or
the builders of Salisbury their elaborate iron binding
of the central tower. If, however, we would not fall
into the old sophistry of the grains of corn and the
heap, we m.ust find a rule which may enable us to
stop somewhere. This rule is, I think, that metals
may be used as a cefnent, but not as aphorism 10.
a support. For as cements of other The proper struc-
kinds are often so strong that the turai use of iron.
stones may easier be broken than separated, and
the wall becomes a solid mass, without for that
reason losing the character of architecture, there
is no reason why, when a nation has obtained the
knowledge and practice of iron work, metal rods

54 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

or rivets should not be used in the place of cement,
and establish the same or a greater strength and
adherence, without in any wise inducing departure
from the types and system of architecture before
established ; nor does it make any difference, ex-
cept as to sightliness, whether the metal bands or
rods so employed be in the body of the wall or on
its exterior, or set as stays and cross-bands ; so
only that the use of them b. always and distinctly
one which might be superseded by mere strength
of cement ; as for instance if a pinnacle or mullion
be propped or tied by an iron band, it is evident
that the iron only prevents the separation of the
stones by lateral force, which the cement would
have done, had it been strong enough. But the
moment that the iron in the least degree takes the
place of the stone, and acts by its resistance to
crushing, and bears superincumbent weight, or if it
acts by its own weight as a counterpoise, and so
supersedes the use of pinnacles or buttresses in re-
sisting a lateral thrust, or if, in the form of a rod
or girder, it is used to do what wooden beams
would have done as well, that instant the building
ceases, so far as such applications of metal extend,
to be true architecture.^*^

"^ Again the word " architecture," used as implying perfect '<^PX'\,
or authority over materials. No builder has true command over the
changes in the crystalline structure of iron, or over its modes of decay.
The definition of iron by the Delphic oracle, " calamity upon calam-
ity " (meaning iron on the anvil) has only been in these last days en-
tirely interpreted: and from the sinking of the "Vanguard" and
" London " to the breaking Woolwich Pier into splinters — two days
before I write this note, — the " anarchy of iron ' is the most notable
fact concerning it. See Appendix III.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 55

XI. The limit, however, thus determined, is an
ultimate one, and it is well in all things to be cau-
tious how we approach the utmost limit of lawful-
ness ; so that, although the employment of metal
within this limit cannot be considered as destroying
the very being and nature of architecture, it will, if
extravagant and frequent, derogate from the dignity
of the work, as well as (which is especially to our
present point) from its honesty. For although the
spectator is not informed as to the quantity or
strength of the cement employed, he will generally
conceive the stones of the building to be separable ;
and his estimate of the skill of the architect will be
based in great measure on the supposition of this
condition, and of the difficulties attendant upon it :
so that it is always more honorable, and it has a ten-
dency to render the style of architecture both more
masculine and more scientific, to employ stone and
mortar simply as such, and to do as much as possible
with their mere weight and strength, and rather
sometimes to forego a grace, or to confess a weak-
ness, than attain the one, or conceal the other, by
means verging upon dishonesty.

Nevertheless, where the design is of such delicacy
and slightness as, in some parts of very fair and fin-
ished edifices, it is desirable that it should be ; and
where both its completion and security are in a meas-
ure dependent on the use of metal, let not such use
be reprehended ; so only that as much is done as
may be, by good mortar and good masonry ; and no
slovenly workmanship admitted through confidence
in the iron helps ; for it is in this license as in that of

56 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

wine, a man may use it for his infirmities, but not for
Iris nourishment.

XII. And, in order to avoid an over use of this
liberty, it would be well to consider what application
may be conveniently made of the dovetailing and
various adjusting of stones ; for when any artifice is
necessary to help the mortar, certainly this ought to
come before the use of metal, for it is both safer and
more honest. I cannot see that any objection can be
made to the fitting of the stones in any shapes the
architect pleases ; for although it would not be desir-
able to see buildings put together like Chinese puz-
zles, there must always be a check upon such an
abuse of the practice in its difficulty ; nor is it neces-
sary that it should be always exhibited, so that it be
understood by the spectator as an admitted help, and
that no principal stones are introduced in positions
apparently impossible for them to retain, although a
riddle here and there, in unimportant features, may
sometimes serve to draw the eye to the masonry, and
make it interesting, as well as to give a delightful
sense of a kind of necromantic power in the architect.
There is a pretty one in the lintel of the lateral door
of the cathedral of Prato (Plate IV. fig. 4) ; where
the maintenance of the visibly separate stones, alter-
nate marble and serpentine, cannot be understood
until their cross-cutting is seen below. Each block
is, of course, of the form given in fig. 5.

XIII. Lastly, before leaving the subject of struc-
tural deceits, I would remind the architect who thinks
that I am unnecessarily and narrowl}- limiting his re-
sources or his art, that the highest greatness and

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. $7

the highest wisdom are shown, the first by a noble
submission to, the second by a thoughtful provi-
dence for, certain voluntarily ad- aphorism h.
mitted restraints. Nothing is more The inviolability
evident than this, in that supreme of Divine Law
$rovernment which is the example, ""' °* necessity

•^ . ,-,■,, r,^, but of ordinance.

as it is the centre, of all others. The
Divine Wisdom is, and can be, shown to us only in
its meeting and contending with the difficulties
which are voluntarily, oxi^ for the sake of that contest,
admitted by the Divine Omnipotence : and these
difficulties, observe, occur in the form of natural
laws or ordinances, which might, at many times
and in countless ways, be infringed with apparent
advantage, but which are never infringed, whatever
costly arrangements or adaptations their obser-
vance may necessitate for the accomplishment of
given purposes. The example most opposite to
our present subject is the structure of the bones of
animals. No reason can be given, I believe, why
the system of the higher animals should not have
been made capable, as that of the Infusoria is, of
secreting flint, instead of phosphate of lime, or,
more naturally still, carbon ; so framing the bones
of adamant at once. The elephant and rhinoceros,
had the earthy part of their bones been made of
diamond, might have been as agile and light as
grasshoppers, and other animals might have been
framed, far more magnificently colossal than any
that walk the earth. In other worlds we may,
perhaps, see such creations ; a creation for every
element, and elements infinite. But the architect-

58 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

ure of animals hae is appointed by God to be a
marble architecture, not a flint nor adamant archi-
tecture ; and all manner of expedients are adopted
to attain the utmost degree of strength and size
possible under that great limitation. The jaw ol
the ichthyosaurus is pieced and riveted, the leg ci
the megatherium is a foot thick, and the head of the
myodon has a double skull ; we, in our wisdom,
should, doubtless, have given the lizard a steel jaw,
and the myodon a cast-iron headpiece, and forgot-
ten the great principle to which all creation bears
witness, that order and system are nobler things
than power. But God shows us in Himself, strange
as it may seem, not only authoritative perfection,
but even the perfection of Obedience — an obedience
to His own laws : and in the cumbrous movement
of those unwieldiest of His creatures, we are re-
minded, even in His divine essence, of that attribute
of uprightness in the human creature ; *' that swear-
eth to his own hurt, and changeth not."

XIV. 2nd. Surface Deceits. These may be gen-
erally defined as the inducing the supposition of some
form of material which does not actually exist ; as
commonly in the painting of wood to represent mar-
ble, or in the painting of ornaments in deceptive re-
lief, etc. But we must be careful to observe, that the
evil of them consists always in definitely attempted
deception, and that it is a matter of some nicety to
mark the point where deception begins or ends.

Thus, for instance, the roof of Milan Cathedral is
seemingly covered with elaborate fan tracery, forcibly
enough painted to enable it, in its dark and removed

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 59

position, to deceive a careless observer. This is, of
course, gross degradation ; it destrovs much of the
dignity even of the rest of the building, and is in the
very strongest terms to be reprehended.

The roof of the Sistine Chapel has much architect-
ural design in grisaille mingled with the figures of
its frescoes : and the effect is increase of dignity.

In what lies the distinctive character?

In two points, principally: — The first, that the
architecture is so closely associated with the figures,
and has so grand fellowship with them in its forms and
cast shadows, that both are at once felt to be of a
piece ; and as the figures must necessarily be painted,
the architecture is known to be so too. There is
thus no deception.

The second, that so great a painter as Michael
Angelo would always stop short, in such minor
parts of his design, of the degree of aphorism 12.
vulgar force which would be ne- Q^eat painting

CeSSary to induce the supposition of never deceives.

their reality ; and, strangely as it Compare, and

, , • i^ 1. 11 add to this aphor-

may sound, would never pamt badly j^^^ ^^ ^^^^ ^^ -^

enough to deceive. the fourth para-

But though right and wrong are §'"2?^ oi this
thus found broadly opposed in works '^ ^p'®'''
severally so mean and so mighty as the roof of
Milan and that of the Sistine, there are works
neither so great nor so mean, in which the limits
of right are vaguely defined, and will need some
care to determine ; care only, however, to apply
accurately the broad principle with which we set
out, that no form nor material is to be deceptively
represented.

OO THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

XV. Evidently, then, painting, confessedly such,
is no deception ; it does not assert any material wliat^
ever. Whether it be on wood or on stone, or, as
naturally will be supposed, on plaster, does not mat-
ter. Whatever the material, good painting makes it
more precious ; nor can it ever be said to deceive
respecting the ground of which it gives us no infor-
mation. To cover brick with plaster, and this plas-
ter with fresco, is, therefore, perfectly legitimate ; and
as desirable a mode of decoration, as it is constant in
the great periods. Verona and Venice are now seen
deprived of more than half their former splendor ; it
depended far more on their frescoes than their mar-
bles. The plaster, in this case, is to be considered
as the gesso ground on panel or canvas. But to
cover brick with cement, and to divide this cement
with joints that it may look like stone, is to tell a false-
hood ; and is just as contemptible a procedure as the
other is noble.

It being lawful to paint then, is it lawful to paint
everything? So long as the painting is confessed —
yes ; but if, even in the slightest degree, the sense of
it be lost, and the thing painted be supposed real —
no. Let us take a few instances. In the Campo
Santo at Pisa, each fresco is surrounded with a border
composed of flat colored patterns of great elegance —
no part of it in attempted relief. The certainty of
flat surface being thus secured, the figures, though
the size of life, do not deceive, and the artist thence-
forward is at liberty to put forth his whole power, and
to lead us through fields, and groves, and depths of
pleasant landscape, and soothe us with the sweet clear-

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 6 1

ness of far-off sky, and yet never lose the severity of
his primal purpose of architectural decoration.

In the Camera di Correggio of San Lodovico at
Parma, the trellises of vine shadow the walls, as if
with an actual arbor ; and the groups of children,
peeping through the oval openings, luscious in color
and faint in light, may well be expected every instant
to break through, or hide behind the covert. The
grace of their attitudes, and the evident greatness of
the whole work, mark that it is painting, and barely
redeem it from the charge of falsehood ; but even so
saved, it is utterly unworthy to take a place among
noble or legitimate architectural decoration.

In the cupola of the cluomo of Parma the same
painter has represented the Assumption with so much
deceptive power, that he has made a dome of some
thirty feet diameter look like a cloud-wrapt opening
in the seventh heaven, crowded with a rushing sea
of angels. Is this wrong? Not so: for the subject
at once precludes the possibility of deception. We
might have taken the vines for a veritable pergola,
and the children for its haunting ragazzi ; but we
know the stayed cloud and moveless angels must be
man's work ; let him put his utmost strength to it,
and welcome ; he can enchant us, but cannot betray.

We may thus apply the rule to the highest, as well
as the art of daily occurrence, always remembering
that more is to be forgiven to the great painter than
to the mere decorative workman ; and this especially,
because the former, even in deceptive portions, will
not trick us so grossly ; as we have just seen in Cor-
reggio, where a worse painter would have made the

62 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

thing look like life at once. There is, however, in
room, villa, or garden decoration, some fitting admis-
sion of trickeries of this kind, as of pictured land-
scapes at the extremities of alleys and arcades, and
ceilings like skies, or painted with prolongations up-
wards of the architecture of the walls, which things
have sometimes a certain luxury and pleasurableness
in places meant for idleness, and are innocent enough
as long as they are regarded as mere toys.

XVI . Touching the false representation of material,
the question is infinitely more simple, and the law
more sweeping ; all such imitations are utterly base
and inadmissible. It is melancholy to think of the
time and expense lost in marbling the shop fronts of
London alone, and of the waste of our resources in ab-
solute vanities, in things about which no mortal cares,
by which no eye is ever arrested, unless painfully, and
which do not add one whit to comfort, or cleanliness,
or even to that great object of commercial art — con-
spicuousness. But in architecture of a higher rank,
how much more is it to be condemned ! I have made
it a rule in the present work not to blame specifically ;
but I may, perhaps, be permitted, while I express my
sincere admiration of the very noble entrance and
general architecture of the British Museum, to ex-
i;ress also my regret that the noble granite foundation
.<f the staircase should be mocked at its landing by
an imitation, the more blamable because tolera.bly
successful. The only effect of it is to cast a suspi-
cion upon the true stones below, and upon every bit
of granite afterwards encountered. One feels a doubt,
after it, of the honesty of Memnon himself. But even

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 63

this, however derogatory to the noble architecture
around it, is less painful than the want of feeling with
which, in our cheap modern churches, we suffer the
wall decorator to erect about the altar frameworks and
pediments daubed with mottled color, and to dye ir
the same fashion such skeletons or caricatures of col-
umns as may emerge above the pews : this is not
merely bad taste ; it is no unimportant or excusable
error which brings even these shadows of vanity and
falsehood into the house of prayer. The first condi-
tion which just feeling requires in church furniture is,
that it should be simple and unaffected, not fictitious
nor tawdry. It may not be in our power to make it
beautiful, but let it at least be pure ; and if we cannot
permit much to the architect, do not let us permit
anything to the upholsterer ; if we keep to solid stone
and solid wood, whitewashed, if we like, for cleanli-
ness" sake, (for whitewash has so often been used as
the dress of noble things that it has thence received
a kind of nobility itself,) it must be a bad design in-
deed, which is grossly offensive. I recollect no in-
stance of a want of sacred character, or of any marked
and painful ugliness, in the simplest or the most awk-
wardly built village church, where stone and wood
were roughly and nakedly used, and the windows lat-
ticed with white glass. But the smoothly stuccoed
walls, the flat roofs with ventilator ornaments, tlie
barred windows \\ith jaundiced borders and dead
ground square panes, the gilded or bronzed wood, the
painted iron, the wretched upholstery of curtains and
cushions, and pew heads, and altar railings, and Bir-
mingham metal candlesticks, and, above all, the green

64 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

and yellow sickness of the false marble — disguises
all, observe; falsehoods all — who are they who like
these things? who defend them? who do them? I
have never spoken to any one who did like them,
thqugh to many who thought them matters of no con-
sequence. Perhaps not to religion ; (though 1 can-
rot but believe that there are many to whom, as to
myself, such things are serious obstacles to the repose
of mind and temper which should precede devotional
exercises ;) but to the general tone of our judgment
and feeling — yes ; for assuredly we shall regard, with
tolerance, if not with affection, whatever forms of
material things we have been in the habit of associ-
ating with our worship, and be little prepared to de-
tect or blame hypocrisy, meanness, and disguise in
other kinds of decoration, when we suffer objects be-
longing to the most solemn of all services to be
tricked out in a fashion so fictitious and unseemly.

XVII. Painting, however, is not the only mode in
which material may be concealed, or rather simulated ;
for merely to conceal is, as we have seen, no wrong.
Whitewash, for instance, though often (by no means
always) to be regretted as a concealment, is not to be
blamed as a falsity. It shows itself for what it is, and
asserts nothing of what is beneath it. Gilding has be-
come, from its frequent use, equally innocent. It is un-
derstood for what it is, a film merely, and is, therefore,
allowable to any extent : I do not say expedient : it is
one of the most abused means of magnificence we pos-
sess, and I much doubt whether any use we ever make
of it, balances that loss of pleasure, which, from the
frequent sight and perpetual suspicion of it, we suffer

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 65

in the contemplation of any thing that is verily of
gold. I think gold was meant to be seldom seen,
and to be admired as a precious thing ; and I some-
times wish that truth should so far literally prevail
as that all should be gold that glittered, or rather
that nothing should glitter that was not gold. Nev-
ertheless, Nature herself does not dispense with such
semblance, but uses light for it ; and I have too great
a love for old and saintly art to part with its burn-
ished field, or radiant nimbus ; only it should be used
with respect, and to express magnificence, or sacred-
ness, and not in lavish vanity, or in sign painting.
Of its expedience, however, any more than that of
color, it is not here tlie place to speak ; we are en-
deavoring to determine what is lawful, not what is
desirable. Of other and less common modes of dis-
guising surface, as of powder of lapis lazuli, or mosaic
imitations of colored stones, I need hardly speak.
The rule will apply to all alike, that whatever is pre-
tended, is wrong; commonly enforced also by the
exceeding ugliness and insufficient appearance of such
methods, as lately in the style of renovation by which
half the houses in Venice have been defaced, the
brick covered first with stucco, and this painted with
zigzag veins in imitation of alabaster. But there is
one more form of architectural fiction, which is so
constant in the great periods that it needs respectful
judgment. I mean the facing of brick with precious
stone.

XVIII. It is well known, that what is meant by
a church's being built of marble is, in nearly all
cases, only that a veneering of marble has been

66 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

fastened on the rough brick wall, built with cer-
tain projections to receive it ; and that what
Aphorism .3. appear to be massy stones, are
(Expanded after- nothing more than external slabs.
wardsin" Stones Now, it is evident, that, in this
of Venice.") The ^ase, the question of right is on the

facing brick with , • .1 . /■ -ij-

° , same ground as in that of gilding.

marble is only => & &

a great form of If it be clearly understood that a
Mosaic, and per- marble facing does not pretend or
fectiy admissible. -^^^^^ ^ marble Wall, there is no
harm in it ; and as it is also evident that, when
very precious stones are used, as jaspers, and
serpentines, it must become, not only an extrav-
agant and vain increase of expense, but sometimes
an actual impossibility, to obtain mass of them
enough to build with, there is no resource but this
of veneering ; nor is there anything to be alleged
against it on the head of durability, such work
having been by experience found to last as long,
and in as perfect condition, as any kind of ma-
sonry. It is, therefore, to be considered as simply
an art of mosaic on a large scale, the ground being
of brick, or any other material ; and when lovely
stones are to be obtained, it is a manner which should
be thoroughly understood, and often practised.
Nevertheless, as we esteem the shaft of a column
more highly for its being of a single block, and as
we do not regret the loss of substance and value
which there is in things of solid gold, silver, agate,
or ivory ; so I think that walls themselves may be
regarded with a more just complacency if they are
known to be all of noble substance ; and that rightly

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 67

weighing the demands of the two principles of which
we have hitherto spoken — Sacrifice and Truth, —
we should sometimes rather spare external ornament
than diminish the unseen value and consistency of
what we do ; and I believe that a better manner of
design, and a more careful and studious, if less
abundant, decoration would follow, upon the con-
sciousness of thoroughness in the substance. And,
indeed, this is to be remembered, with respect to all
the points we have examined ; that while we have traced
the limits of license, we have not fixed those of that
high rectitude which refuses license. It is thus true
that there is no falsity, and much beauty, in the use
of external color, and that it is lawful to paint either
pictures or patterns on whatever surfaces may seem
to need enrichment. But it is not less true, that such
practices are essentially unarchitectural ; and while we
cannot say that there is actual danger in an over use
of them, seeing that they have been always used most
lavishly in the times of most noble art, yet they di-
vide the work into two parts and kinds, one of less
durability than the other, which dies away from it in
process of ages, and leaves it, unless it have noble
qualities of its own, naked and bare. That enduring
noblesse I should, therefore, call truly architectural :
and it is not until this has been secured, that the ac-
cessory power of painting may be called in. for the
delight of the immediate time ; nor this, as I think,
until every resource of a more stable kind has
been exhausted. The true colors of architecture
are those of natural stone, and I would fain see
these taken advantage of to the full. Every

68 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

variety of hue, from pale yellow to purple, pass-
ing through orange, red, and brown, is entirely
at our command : nearly every kind

Aphorism 14. . . , ,

of green and gray is also attainable ;

The proper colors o o ^

of Architecture ^'^^ with thcse, and pure white,
are those of nat- what harmonies might we not
urai stones. acMeve ? Of Stained and Variegated

stone, the quantity is unlimited, the kinds in-
numerable ; where brighter colors are required,
let glass, and gold protected by glass, be used
in mosaic — a kind of work as durable as the
solid stone, and incapable of losing its lustre
by time — and let the painter's work be reserved
for the shadowed loggia and inner chamber. This
is the true and faithful way of building; where
this cannot be, the device of external coloring may,
indeed, be employed without dishonor ; but it must
be with the warning reflection, that a time will come
when such aids must pass away, and when the
building will be judged in its lifelessness, dying the
death of the dolphin. Better the less bright, more
enduring fabric. The transparent alabasters of San
Miniato, and the mosaics of St. Mark's, are more
warmly filled, and more brightly touched, by every
return of morning and evening rays ; while the
hues of our cathedrals have died like the iris out of
the cloud ; and the temples whose azure and purple
once flamed above the Grecian promontories, stand
in their faded whiteness, like snows which the sun-
set has left cold.

XIX. The last form of fallacy which it will be re-
membered we had to deprecate, was the substitution

Plate II.

Part of the Cathedral of St. Lo Normandy.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 69

of cast or machine work for that of the hand, gener-
ally expressible as Operative Deceit.

There are two reasons, both weighty, against this
practice : one, that all cast and machine work is bad,
as work ; the other, that it is dishonest. Of its bad-
ness I shall speak in another place, that being evi-
dently no efficient reason against its use when other
cannot be had. Its dishonesty, however, which, to
my mind, is of the grossest kind, is, I think, a suffi-
cient reason to determine absolute and unconditional
rejection of it.

Ornament, as I have often before observed, has two
entirely distinct sources of agreeableness : one, that
of the abstract beauty of its forms, which, for the
present, we will suppose to be the same whether they
come from the hand or the machine ; the other, the
sense of human labor and care spent upon it. How
great this latter influence we may perhaps judge,
by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds
growing in any cranny of ruin i'' which has not a
beauty in all respects nearly equal, and, in some,
immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate
sculpture of its stones : and that all our interest in
the carved work, our sense of its richness, though
it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside
it ; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less

'' I do not see any reference to the intention of the opposite plate.
It is a piece of pencil sketch from an old church at St Lo (I believe
the original drawing is now in America, belonging to my dear friend,
Charles Eliot Norton), and it was meant to show the greater beauty
of the natural weeds than of the carved crockets, and the tender har-
mony of both. Some further notice is taken of this plate in the
eighteenth paragraph of Chap. V.

70 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

delicate ; of its admirableness, though a millionfold
less admirable; results from our consciousness of its
being the work of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its
true delightfulness depends on our discovering in it
the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and
heart-breakings — of recoveries and joyfulnesses of
success : all this caji be traced by a practised eye ; but,
granting it even obscure, it is presumed or under-
stood ; and in that is the worth '^ of the thing, just as
much as the worth of any thing else we call precious.
The worth of a diamond is simply the understanding
of the time it must take to look for it before it is
found ; and the worth of an ornament is the time it
must take before it can be cut. It has an intrinsic
value besides, which the diamond has not ; (for a
diamond has no more real beauty than a piece of
glass ;) but I do not speak of that at present ; I place
the two on the same ground ; and I .suppose that
hand-wrought ornament can no more be generally
known from machine work, than a diamond can
be known from paste ; nay, that the latter may deceive,
for a moment, the mason's, as the other the jewellers',
eye ; and that it can be detected only by the closest
examination. Yet exactly as a woman of feeling
would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of
honor disdain false ornaments. The using of them
is just as downright and inexcusable a lie. You use
that which pretends to a worth which it has not ;
which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did

1' Worth is, of course, used here in the vulgar economists' sense,
"cost of production," intrinsic value being distinguished from it in the
next sentence.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 71

not, and is not ; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an
impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to the ground,
grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the
wall, rather; you have not paid for it, you have no
business with it, you do not want it. Nobody wants
ornaments in this world, but everybody wants integ-
rity. All the fair devices that ever were fancied, are
not worth a lie. Leave your walls as bare as a planed
board, or build them of baked mud and chopped
straw, if need be ; but do not rough-cast them with
falsehood.

This, then, being our general law, and I hold it
for a more imperative one than any other I have as-
serted ; and this kind of dishonesty, the meanest, as
the least necessary ; '^ for ornament is an extravagant
and inessential thing; and therefore, if fallacious
utterly base — this, I say, being our general law,
there are, nevertheless, certain exceptions respecting
particular substances and their uses.

XX. Thus in the use of brick : since that is known
to be originally moulded, there is no reason why it
should not be moulded into diverse forms. It will
never be supposed to have been cut, and, therefore,
will cause no deception ; it will have only the credit
it deserves. In flat countries, far from any quarry
of stone, cast brick may be legitimately, and most

"* Again too much fuss and metaphysics about a perfectly simple
matter ; inconclusive besides, for the dishonesty of machine work
would cease, as soon as it became universally practised, of which
universality there seems every likelihood in these days. The sub-
ject was better treated subsequently in my address to the art-students
of Mansfield, now reprinted in Vol. XI. of my " Works " series
(" A Joy for Ever"jL

72 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

successfully, used in decoration, and that elaborate,
and even refined. The brick mouldings of the Pa-
lazzo Pepoli at Bologna, and those which run round
the market-place of Vercelli, are among the richest
in Italy. So also, tile and porcelain work, of which
the former is grotesquely, but successfully, employed
in the domestic architecture of France, colored tiles
being inserted in the diamond spaces between the
crossing timbers ; and the latter admirably in Tuscany,
in external bas-reliefs, by the Robbia family, in which
works, while we cannot but sometimes regret the
useless and ill-arranged colors, we would by no means
blame the employment of a material which, whatever
its defects, excels every other in permanence, and,
perhaps, requires even greater skill in its manage-
ment than marble. For it is not the material, but
the absence of the human labor, which makes the
thing worthless ; and a piece of terra cotta, or of
plaster of Paris, which has been wrought by the human
hand, is worth all the stone in Carrara, cut by ma-
chinery. It is, indeed, possible, and even usual, for
men to sink into machines themselves, so that even
hand-work has all the characters of mechanism ; of
the difference between living and dead hand-work I
shall speak presently; all that I ask at present is,
what it is always in our power to secure — the con-
fession of what we have done, and what we have
given ; so that when we use stone at all, 2° (since all

20 The sentence now put in a parenthesis is the false assumption
which destroys all the force of the arguments in the last couple of
pages. The conclusion given in Aphorism 15 is, however, wide-
based enough, and thoroughly sound.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 73

stone is naturally supposed to be carved by hand,)
we must not carve it by machinery ; neither must we
use any artificial stone cast into shape, nor any stucco
ornaments of the color of stone, or which might in
any wise be mistaken for it, as the stucco mouldings
in the cortile of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence,
which cast a shame and suspicion over every part of
the building. But for ductile and fusible materials,
as clay, iron, and bronze, since these will usually be
supposed to have been cast or stamped, it is at our
pleasure to employ them as we will ; remembering
that they become precious, or otherwise, just in pro-
portion to the hand-work upon them, or to the clear-
ness of their reception of the hand-work of their
mould. But I believe no cause to have been more
active in the degradation of our aphor.sm 15.
national feeling for beauty than cast-iron oma-
the constant use of cast-iron orna- mentation bar-
ments. The common iron work of Parous.
the middle ages was as simple as it was effective,
composed of leafage cut flat out of sheet-iron
and twisted at the workman's will. No orna-
ments, on the contrary, are so cold, clumsy, and
vulgar, so essentially incapable of a fine line or
shadow, as those of cast-iron ; and while, on the
score of truth, we can hardly allege anything
against them, since they are always distinguish-
able, at a glance, from wrought and hammered
work, and stand only for what they are, yet I feel
very strongly that there is no hope of the progress
of the arts of any nation which indulges in these
vulgar and cheap substitutes for real decoration.

74 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

Their inefficiency and paltriness I shall endeavor to
show more conclusively in another place ; enforcing
only, at present, the general conclusion that, if
even honest or allowable, they are things in which
we can never take just pride or pleasure, and must
never be employed in any place wherein they might
either themselves obtain the credit of being other
and better than they are, or be associated with the
thoroughly downright work to which it would be a
disgrace to be found in their company.

Such are, I believe, the three principal kinds of
fallacy by which architecture is liable to be corrupted ;
there are, however, other and more subtle forms of
it, against w-hich it is less easy to guard by definite
law, than by the watchfulness of a manly and unaf-
fected spirit. For, as it has been above noticed,
there are certain kinds of deception which extend to
impressions and ideas only; of which some are, in-
deed, of a noble use, as that above referred to, the
arborescent look of lofty Gothic aisles ; but of which
the most part have so much of legerdemain and
trickery about them, that they will lower any style in
which they considerably prevail ; and they are likely
to prevail when once they are admitted, being apt to
catch the fancy alike of uninventive architects and
feelingless spectators ; just as mean and shallow
minds are, in other matters, delighted with the sense
of over-reaching, or tickled with the conceit of
detecting the intention to over-reach : and when
subtleties of this kind are accompanied by the dis-
play of such dexterous stone-cutting, or architectu-
ral sleight of hand, as may become, even by itself, a

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 75

subject of admiration, it is a great chance if the pur-
suit of them do not gradually draw us away from all
regard and care for the nobler character of the art,
and end in its total paralysis or extinction. And
against this there is no guarding, but by stern dis-
dain of all display of dexterity and ingenious device,
and by putting the whole force of our fancy into the
arrangement of masses and forms, caring no more
how these masses and forms are wrought out, than
a great painter cares which way his pencil strikes. '^^
It would be easy to give many instances of the
danger of these tricks and vanities ; but I shall con-
fine myself to the examination of one which has, as
I think, been the cause of the fall of Gothic archi-
tecture throughout Europe. I mean the svstem of
intersectional mouldings, which, on account of its
great importance, and for the sake of the general
reader, I may, perhaps, be pardoned for explaining
elementarily.

XXI. I must, in the first place, however, refer to
Professor Willis's account of the origin of tracery,
given in the sixth chapter of his "Architecture of
the Middle Ages ; '' since the publication of which I
have been not a little amazed to hear of any attempts
made to resuscitate the inexcusably absurd theory of
its derivation from imitated vegetable form — inex-
cusably, I say, because the smallest acquaintance
with early Gothic architecture would have informed

'* A great painter does care very much, however, which way his
pencil strilces ; and a good sculptor which way his mallet ; but in
neither of them is the care that their action may be admired, but
that it may be just.

76 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

the supporters of that theory of the simple fact, that,
exactly in proportion to the antiquity of the work, the
imitation of such organic forms is less, and in the
earliest examples does not exist at all. There can-
not be the shadow of a question, in the mind of a
person familiarized with any single series of consecu-
tive examples, that tracery arose from the gradual
enlargement of the penetrations of the shield of stone
which, usually supported by a central pillar, occupied
the head of early windows. Professor Willis, per-
haps, confines his observations somewhat too abso-
lutely to the double sub-arch. I have given, in Plate
VII. fig. 2, an interesting case of rude penetration
of a high and simply trefoiled shield, from the church
of the Eremitani at Padua. But the more frequent
and typical form is that of the double sub-arch, dec-
orated with various piercings of the space between
it and the superior arch ; with a simple trefoil under
a round arch, in the Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen
(Plate III. fig. i) ; with a very beautifully propor-
tioned quatrefoil, in the triforium of Eu, and that of
the choir of Lisieux ; with quatrefoils, sixfoils, and
septfoils, in the transept towers of Rouen (Plate III.
fig. 2) ; with a trefoil awkwardly, and very small
quatrefoil above, at Coutances (Plate III. fig. 3) :
then, with multiplications of the same figures, pointed
or round, giving very clumsy shapes of the interme-
diate stone, (fig. 4, from one of the nave chapels of
Rouen, fig. 5, from one of the nave chapels of Bayeux,)
and finally, by thinning out the stony ribs, reaching
conditions like that of the glorious typical form of
the clerestory of the apse of Beauvais (fig. 6).

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 77

XXII. Now, it will be noticed that, during the
whole of this process, the attention is kept fixed on
the forms of the penetrations, that is to say, of the
lights as seen from the interior, not of the interme-
diate stone. All the grace of the window is in the
outline of its light ; and I have drawn all these tra-
ceries as seen from within, in order to show the eiTect
of the light thus treated, at first in far off and separate
stars, and then gradually enlarging, approaching,
until they come and stand over us, as it were, filling
the whole space with their effulgence. And it is in
this pause of the star, that we have the great, pure,
and perfect form of French Gothic ; it was at the
instant when the rudeness of the intermediate space
had been finally conquered, when the light had ex-
panded to its fullest, and yet had not lost its radiant
unity, principality, and visible first causing of the
whole, that we have the most exquisite feeling and
most faultless judgments in the management alike of
the tracery and decorations. I have given, in Plate
X., an exquisite example of it, from a panel decora-
tion of the buttresses of the north door of Rouen ;
and in order that the reader may understand what
truly fine Gothic work is, and how nobly it unites
fantasy and law, as well as for our immediate purpose,
it will be well that he should examine its sections and
mouldings in detail (they are described in the fourth
Chapter, § xxvii.), and that the more carefully, be-
cause this design belongs to a period in which the
most important change took place in the spirit of
Gothic architecture, which, perhaps, ever resulted
from the natural progress of any art. That tracery

78 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

marks a pause between the laying aside of one great
ruling principle, and the taking up of another ; a
pause as marked, as clear, as conspicuous to the dis-
tant view of after times, as to the distant glance of
the traveller is the culminating ridge of the mountain
chain over which he has passed. It was the great
watershed of Gothic art. Before it, all had been
ascent ; after it, all was decline ; both, indeed, by
winding paths and varied slopes : both interrupted,
like the gradual rise and fall of the passes of the
Alps, by great mountain outliers, isolated or branch-
ing from the central chain, and by retrograde or
parallel directions of the valley of access. But the
track of the human mind is traceable up to that glori-
ous ridge, in a continuous line, and thence down-
wards. Like a silver zone —

•' Flung about carelessly, it shines afar,
Catching the e^'e in many a broken link,
In many a turn and traverse, as it glides.
And oft above, and oft below appears —
* * * * to him who journeys up,
As though it were another."

And at that point, and that instant, reaching the
place that was nearest heaven, the builders looked
back, for the last time, to the way by which they had
come, and the scenes through which their early course
had passed. They turned away from them and their
morning light, and descended towards a new hori-
zon, for a time in the warmth of western sun. but
plunging with every forward step into more cold and
melancholy shade.

Plate III.

Traceries from Caeu, Bayeux, Rouen, and Beauvais.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 79

XXIII. The change of which I speak, is express-
ible in few words ; but one more important, more
radically influential, could not be. It was the sub-
stitution of the li7ie for the i7tass, as the element of
decoration. -2

We have seen the mode in which the openings or
penetration of the window expanded, until what were,
at first, awkward forms of intermediate stone, be-
came delicate lines of tracery ; and I have been care-
ful in pointing out the peculiar attention bestowed on
the proportion and decoration of the mouldings of the
window at Rouen, in Plate X., as compared with
earlier mouldings, because that beauty and care are
singularly significant. They mark that the traceries
had caught the eye of the architect. Up to that time,
up to the very last instant in which the reduction and
thinning of the intervening stone was consummated,
his eye had been on the openings only, on the stars
of light. He did not care about the stone ; a rude
border of moulding was all he needed, it was the pen-
etrating shape which he was watching. But when
that shape had received its last possible expansion,
and when the stone-work became an arrangement of
graceful and parallel lines, that arrangement, like
some form in a picture, unseen and accidentally devel-
oped, struck suddenly, inevitably, on the sight. It
had literally not been seen before. It flashed out in
an instant, as an independent form. It became a

" So completely was this the case, that M. VioUet le Due, in liis
article on tracery in the " Dictionnaire d'Architecture," has confined
his attention exclusively to the modifications of the tracery bar.
The subject is examined exhaustively in my sixth lecture in " Val
d'Anio."

8o THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

feature of the work. The architect took it under his
care, thought over it, and distributed its members as
we see.

Now, the great pause was at the moment when the
space and the dividing stone-work were both equally
considered. It did not last fifty years. The forms
of the tracery were seized with a childish delight in
the novel source of beauty ; and the intervening space
was cast aside, as an element of decoration, for ever.
I have confined myself, in following this change, to
the window, as the feature in which it is clearest.
But the transition is the same in every member of
architecture ; and its importance can hardly be under-
stood, unless we take the pains to trace it in the uni-
versality, of which illustrations, irrelevant to our
present purpose, will be found in the third Chapter.
I pursue here the question of truth, relating to the
treatment of the mouldings.

XXIV. The reader will observe that, up to the

last expansion of the penetrations, the stone-work

was necessarily considered, as it

Aphorism i6. ■'

„ actually is, stiff, and unyielding.

Tracery must j i ^ i j e>

never be consid- It was SO, also, during the pause of
ered or imagined which I have spokeu, when the
as flexible. forms of the tracery were still se-

vere and pure ; delicate indeed, but perfectly firm.
At the close of the period of pause, the first sign
of serious change was like a low breeze, passing
through the emaciated tracery, and making it trem-
ble. It began to undulate like the threads of a
cobweb lifted by the wind. It lost its essence as
a structure of stone. Reduced to the slendemess

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 8 1

of threads, it began to be considered as possessing
also their flexibility. The architect was pleased
with this his new fancy, and set himself to carry
it out ; and in a little time, the bars of tracery were
caused to appear to the eye as if they had been woven
together like a net. This was a change which
sacrificed a great principle of truth ; it sacrificed
the expression of the qualities of the material ;
and, however delightful its results in their first
developments, it was ultimately ruinous.

For, observe the difference between the suppo-
sition of ductility, and that of elastic structure
noticed above in the resemblance to tree form.
That resemblance was not sought, but necessary ;
it resulted from the natural conditions of strength
in the pier or trunk, and slenderness in the ribs
or branches, while many of the other suggested
conditions of resemblance were perfectly true. A
tree branch, though in a certain sense flexible, is
not ductile ; it is as firm in its own form as the
rib of stone ; both of them will yield up to certain
limits, both of them breaking when those limits
are exceeded; while the tree trunk will bend no
more than the stone pillar. But when the tracery
is assumed to be as yielding as a silken cord ; when
the whole fragility, elasticity, and weight of the
material are to the eye, if not in terms, denied ;
when all the art of the architect is applied to dis-
prove the first conditions of his working, and the
first attributes of his materials ; this is a deliberate
treachery, only redeemed from the charge of direct
falsehood by the visibility of the stone surface, and

82 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

degrading all the traceries it affects exactly in the
degree of its presence.'-^

XXV. But the declining and morbid taste of the
later architects was not satisfied with thus much de-
ception. They were delighted with the subtle charm
they had created, and thought only of increasing its
power. The next step was to consider and represent
the tracery, as not only ductile, but penetrable ; and
when two mouldings met each other, to manage their
intersection, so that one should appear to pass through
the other, retaining its independence ; or when two
ran parallel to each other, to represent the one as
partly contained within the other, and partly apparent
above it. This form of falsity was that which crushed
the art. The flexible traceries were often beautiful,
though they were ignoble ; but the penetrated tra-
ceries, rendered, as they finally were, merely the means
of exhibiting the dexterity of the stone-cutter, anni-
hilated both the beauty and dignity of the Gothic
types. A system so momentous in its consequences
deserves some detailed examination.

XXVI. In the drawing of the shafts of the door at
Lisieux, under the spandril, in Plate VII., the reader
will see the mode of managing the intersection of
similar mouldings, which was universal in the great
periods. They melted into each other, and became
one at the point of crossing, or of contact ; and even

^ I beg that grave note be taken of this just condemnation of the
essential character — "the flamboyant "ness — of the architecture
which up to this time I had chiefly, and most affectionately, studied.
It is an instance of breaking through prejudice by reason, of which I
have a right to be proud, and which it is fitting that I should point out,
for justification of the trust I constantly expect from the reader.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 83

the suggestion of so sharp intersection as this of
Lisieux is usually avoided, (this design being, of
course, only a pointed form of the earlier Norman ar-
cade, in which the arches are interlaced, and lie each
over the preceding, and under the following one, as
in Anselm's tower at Canterbury,) since, in the plu-
rality of designs, when mouldings meet each other,
they coincide through some considerable portion of
their curves, meeting by contact, rather than by in-
tersection ; and at the point of coincidence the section
of each separate moulding becomes common to the
two thus melted into each other. Thus, in the junc-
tion of the circles of the window of the Palazzo Fos-
cari, Plate VIII., given accurately in fig. 8, Plate IV.,
the section across the line s, is exactly the same as
that across any break of the separated moulding above,
as s. It sometimes, however, happens, that two dif-
ferent mouldings meet each other. This was seldom
permitted in the great periods, and, when it took
place, was most awkwardly managed. Fig. i, Plate
IV. gives the junction of the mouldings of the gable
and vertical, in the window of the spire of Salisbury.
That of the gable is composed of a single, and that
of the vertical, of a double cavetto, decorated with
ball flowers ; and the larger single moulding swallows
up one of the double ones, and pushes forward among
the smaller balls with the most blundering and clumsy
simplicity. In comparing the sections it is to be ob-
served that, in the upper one, the line a b represents
an actual vertical in the plane of the window ; while,
in the lower one, the line e d represents the horizon-
tal, in the plane of the window, indicated by the per-
spective line d e.

84 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

XXVII. The very awkwardness with which such
occurrences of difficulty are met by the earlier builder,
marks his dislike of the system, and unwillingness to
attract the eye to such arrangements. There is an-
other very clumsy one, in the junction of the upper
and sub-arches of the triforium of Salisbury ; but it is
kept in the shade, and all the prominent junctions
are of mouldings like each other, and managed with
perfect simplicity. But so soon as the attention of
the builders became, as we have just seen, fixed upon
the lines of mouldings instead of the enclosed spaces,
those lines began to preserve an independent exist-
ence wherever they met ; and different mouldings
were studiously associated, in order to obtain variety
of intersectional line. We must, however, do the
late builders the justice to note that, in one case, the
habit grew out of a feeling of proportion, more refined
than that of earlier workmen. It shows itself first in
the bases of divided pillars, or arch mouldings, whose
smaller shafts had originally bases formed by the
continued base of the central, or other larger, col-
umns with which they were grouped; but it being
felt, when the eye of the architect became fastidious,
that the dimension of moulding which was right for
the base of a large shaft, was wrong for that of a small
one, each shaft had an independent base ; at first,
those of the smaller died simply down on that of
the larger ; but when the vertical sections of both
became complicated, the bases of the smaller shafts
were considered to exist within those of the larger,
and the places of their emergence, on this suppo-
sition, were calculated with the utmost nicety, and

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 85

cut VI ith singular precision ; so that an elaborate
late base of a divided column, as, for instance, o£
those in the nave of Abbeville, looks exactly as if its
smaller shafts had all been tinished to the ground
first, each with its complete and intricate base, and
then the comprehending base of the central pier had
been moulded over them in clay, leaving their points
and angles sticking out here and there, like the edges
of sharp crystals out of a nodule of earth. The exhi-
bition of technical dexterity in work of this kind, is
often marvellous, the strangest possible shapes of
sections being calculated to a hair's breadth, and the
occurrence of the under and emergent forms being
rendered, even in places where they are so slight
that they can hardly be detected but by the touch.
It is impossible to render a very elaborate example of
this kind intelligible, without some fifty measured
sections ; but fig. 6, Plate IV. is a very interesting
and simple one, from the west gate of Rouen.-* It
is part of the base of one of the narrow piers between
its principal niches. The square column k, having a
base with the profile p r, is supposed to contain
within itself another similar one, set diagonally, and
lifted so far above the enclosing one, as that the
recessed part of its profile p r shall fall behind the

'< Professor Willis was, I believe, the first modern who observed
and ascertained the lost structural principles of Gothic architecture.
His book above referred to (§ 21) taught me all my grammar of central
Gothic, but this grammar of the flamboyant I worked out for myself,
and wrote it here, supposing the statements new : all had, however,
been done previously by Professor Willis, as he afterwards pointed
out tome, in his work " On the Characteristic Interpenetrations of the
Flamboyant Style."

86 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

projecting part of the outer one. The angle of Its
upper portion exactly meets the plane of the side of
the upper enclosing shaft 4, and would, therefore, not
be seen, unless two vertical cuts were made to exhibit
it, which form two dark lines the whole way up the
shaft. Two small pilasters are run, liice fastening
stitches, through the junction, on the front of the
shafts. The sections k, n, taken respectively at the
levels k, n, will explain the hj'pothetical construction
of the whole. Fig. 7 is a base, or joint rather, (for
passages of this form occur again and again, on the
shafts of flamboyant work,) of one of the smallest
piers of the pedestals which supported the lost statues
of the porch ; its section belovv' would be the same as
n, and its construction after what has been said of
the other base, will be at once perceived.^s

XXVIII. There was, however, in this kind of in-
volution, much to be admired as well as reprehended ;
the proportions of quantities were always as beautiful
as they were intricate ; and, though the lines of in-
tersection were harsh, they v/ere exquisitely opposed
to the flower-work of the interposing mouldings. But
the fancy did not stop here ; it rose from the bases
into the arches ; and there, not finding room enough
?or its exhibition, it withdrew the capitals from the

^ I cannot understand how, in the subsequent illustrations of tbt
principle I had, during the arrangement of this volume, most promi-
nently in my mind, on the founding of all beautiful design on natural
form, I omitted so forcible a point as the exact correspondence of
these mouldings to the stnicture of involved crystals- Perhaps it was
because I knew the builders had never looked at, or thought of, a crys«
tal ; but then I ought to have said so. The omission is the more
strange because i caught the resemblance in the Pisan Gothic — see
below, Chap- IV., § 7 — where it is not half so distinct !

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 87

heads ieven of cylindrical shafts, (we cannot but ad-
mire, while we regret, the boldness of the men who
could defy the authority and custom of all the nations
of the earth for a space of some three thousand
years,) in order that the arch mouldings might appear
to emerge from the pillar, as at its base they had been
lost in it, and not to terminate on the abacus of the
capital ; then they ran the mouldings across and
through each other, at the point of the arch ; and
finally, not finding their natural directions enough to
furnish as many occasions of intersection as they
wished, bent them hither and thither, and cut off their
ends short, when they had passed the point of intersec-
tion. Fig. 2, Plate IV. is part of a flying buttress from
the apse of St. Gervais at Falaise, in which the mould-
ing whose section is rudely given above at f (taken
vertically through the point /",) is carried thrice
through itself, in the cross-bar and two arches ; and
the flat fillet is cut off sharp at the end of the cross-
bar, for the mere pleasure of the truncation. Fig. 3
is half of the head of a door in the Stadthaus of Sur-
see, in which the shaded part of the section of the
joint, ^^, is that of the arch moulding, which is three
times reduplicated, and six times intersected by it-
self, the ends being cut off when they became un-
manageable. This style is, indeed, earlier, exag-
gerated in Switzerland and Germany, owing to the
imitation in stone of the dovetailing of wood, par-
ticularly of the intersecting of beams at the angles of
chalets ; but it only furnishes the more plain instance
of the danger of the fallacious system which, from the
beginning, repressed the German, and, in the end,

88 THE LAMP OF TRUTH.

ruined the French, Gothic. It would be too lainfui
a task to follow further the caricatures of forn and
eccentricities of treatment, which grew out of this
single abuse — the flattened arch, the shrunken pillar,
the lifeless ornament, the liny moulding, the distorted
and extravagant foliation, until the time came when,
over these wrecks and remnants, deprived of all unity
and principle, rose the foul torrent of the Renais-
sance, and swept them all away.

So fell the great dynasty of mediceval architecture. ■^''
It was because it had lost its own strength, and dis-
obeyed its own laws — because its order, and consis-
tency, and organization, had been broken through —
that it could oppose no resistance to the rush of over-
whelming innovation. And this, observe, all because
it had sacrificed a single truth. From that one sur-
render of its integrity, from that one endeavor to
assume the semblance of what it was not, arose the
multitudinous forms of disease and decrepitude,
which rotted away the pillars of its supremacy. It
was not because its time was come ; it was not because
it was scorned by the classical Romanist, or dreaded
by the faithful Protestant. That scorn and that fear
it might have survived, and lived ; it would have stood
forth in stern comparison with the enervated sensuality
of the Renaissance ; it would have risen in renewed
and purified honor, and with a new soul, from the

26 The closing paragraph is very pretty — but, unfortunately —
nonsense. The want of truth was only a part, and by no means an
influential one, of general disease. All possible shades of human
folly and licentiousness meet in late Gothic and Renaissance architec-
ture, and corrupt, in all directions at once, the arts which are their
exponents.

Plate IV.

>ec;tioiuil Moiildinars.

THE LAMP OF TRUTH. 89

ashes into which it sank, giving up its glory, as it had
received it, for the honor of God — but its own truth
was gone, and it sank for ever. There was no wis-
dom nor strength left in it, to raise it from the dust ;
and the error of zeal, and the softness of luxury,
smote it down and dissolved it away. It is good for
us to remember this, as we tread upon the bare
ground of its foundations, and stumble over its scat-
tered stones. Those rent skeletons of pierced wall,
through which our sea-winds moan and murmur,
strewing them joint by joint, and bone by bone, along
the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights
came once from houses of prayer — those gray arches
and quiet aisles under which the sheep of our valleys
feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars
— those shapeless heaps, that are not of the Earth,
which lift our fields into strange and sudden banks of
flowers, and stay our mountain streams with stones
that are not their own, have other thoughts to ask
from us than those of mourning for the rage that de-
spoiled, or the fear that forsook them. It was not
the robber, not the fanatic, not the blasphemer, who
sealed the destruction that they had wrought ; the
war, the wrath, the terror, might have worked their
worst, and the strong walls would have risen, and
the slight pillars would have started again, from under
the hand of the destroyer. But they could not rise
out of the ruins of their own violated truth.

90 THE LAMP OF POWER.

CHAPTER III.

THE LAMP OF POWER.

I. In recalling the impressions we have received
from the works of man, after a lapse of time long
enoueh to involve in obscuritv all but the most vivid,
it often happens that we find a strange pre-eminence
and durability in many upon whose strength we had
little calculated, and that points of character which
had escaped the detection of the judgment, become de-
veloped under the waste of memory ; as veins of
harder rock, whose places could not at first have been
discovered by the eye, are left salient under the action
of frosts and streams. The traveller who desires to
correct tlie errors of his judgment, necessitated by
inequalities of temper, infelicities of circumstance,
and accidents of association, has no other resource
than to wait for the calm verdict of interposing years ;
and to watch for the new arrangements of eminence
and shape in the images which remain latest in his
memory; as in the ebbing of a mountain lake, he
would watch the varying outline of its successive
shore, and trace, in the form of its departing waters,
the true direction of the forces which had cleft, or the
currents which had excavated, the deepest recesses
of its primal bed.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 91

In thus reverting to the memories of those works
of architecture by which we have been most pleasur-
ably impressed, it will generally happen that they fall
into two broad classes : the one characterized by an
exceeding preciousness and delicacy, to which we
recur with a sense of affectionate admiration ; and the
other by a severe, and, in many cases, mysterious,
majesty, which we remember with an undiminished
awe, like that felt at the presence and operation of
some great Spiritual Power. From about these two
groups, more or less harmonized by intermediate ex-
amples, but always distinctively marked by features of
beauty or of power, there will be swept away, in mul-
titudes, the memories of buildings, perhaps, in their
first address to our minds, of no inferior pretension,
but owing their impressiveness to characters of less
enduring nobility — to value of material, accumulation
of ornament, or ingenuity of mechanical construction.
Especial interest may, indeed, have been awakened
by such circumstances, and the memory may have
been, consequently, rendered tenacious of particular
parts or effects of the structure ; but it will recall even
these only by an active effort, and then without
emotion ; while in passive moments and with thrill-
ing influence, the images of purer beauty, and of
more spiritual power, will return in a fair and solemn
company ; and while the pride of many a stately
palace, and the wealth of many a jewelled shrine,
perish from our thoughts in a dust of gold, there will
rise, through their dimness, the white image of some
secluded marble chapel, by river or forest side, with
the fretted flower-work shrinking under its arches, as

92 THE LAMP OF POWER.

if under vaults of late-fallen snow ; or the vast weari-
ness of some shadowy wall whose separate stones are
like mountain foundations, and yet numberless.

II. Now. the difference between these two orders
of building is not merely that which there is in

nature between things beautiful and

Aphorism 17.

sublime. It is, also, the difference

Ine two intel-
lectual powers between what is derivative and

of Architecture, Original in man's work ; for what-
veneration and gygj. jg jjj architecture fair or beauti-
ful, is imitated from natural forms;
and what is not so derived, but depends for its dig-
nity upon arrangement and government received from
human mind, becomes the expression of the power of
that mind, and receives a sublimity high in propor-
tion to the power expressed. All building, therefore,
shows man either as gathering or governing ; and
the secrets of his success are his knowing what to
gather, and hov/ to rule. These are the two great
intellectual Lamps of Architecture; the one consist-
ing in a just and humble veneration for the works
of God upon the earth, and the other in an under-
standing of the dominion over those works which
has been vested in man.

III. Besides this expression of living authority and
power, there is, however, a sympathy in the forms of
noble building, with what is most sublime in natural
things ; and it is the governing Power directed by this
sympathy, whose operation I shall at present en-
deavor to trace, abandoning all inquiry into the more
abstract fields of Invention : for this latter faculty, and
the questions of proportion and arrangement con-

THE LAMP OF POWER. 93

nected with its discussion, can only be rightly ex-
amined in a general view of all the arts ; but its
sympathy, in architecture, with the vast controlling
powers of Nature herself, is special, and may shortly
be considered ; and that with the more advantage,
that it has, of late, been little felt or regarded by
architects. I have seen, in recent efforts, much
contest between two schools, one affecting originality,
and the other legality — many attempts at beauty of
design — many ingenious adaptations of construction ;
but I have never seen any aim at the expression of
abstract power ; never any appearance of a conscious-
ness that, in this primal art of man, there is room for
the marking of his relations with the mightiest, as
well as the fairest, works of God ; and that those
works themselves have been permitted, by their Mas-
ter and his, to receive an added glory from their as-
sociation with earnest efforts of human thought. In
the edifices of Man there should be found reverent
worship and following, not only of the spirit which
rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault
of the avenue — which gives veining to the leaf, and
polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that
agitates animal organization, — but of that also which
reproves the pillars of the earth, and builds up her
barren precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and
lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the
pale arch of the sky ; for these, and other glories more
than these, refuse not to connect themselves, in his
thoughts, with the work of his own hand ; the gray
cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of
some Cyclopean waste of mural stone ; the pinnacles

94 THE LAMP OF POWER.

of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, unde-
graded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers ;
and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has
a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude,
which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on
white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay,
into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.

IV. Let us, then, see what is this power and maj-
esty, which Nature herself does not disdain to accept
from the works of man ; and what that sublimity in
the masses built up by his coralline-like energy, which
is honorable, even when transferred by association
to the dateless hills, which it needed earthquakes to
lift, and deluges to mould.

And, first, of mere size : It might not be thought
possible to emulate the sublimity of natural objects
in this respect ; nor would it be, if the architect con-
tended with them in pitched battle. It would not be
well to build pyramids in the valley of Chamouni ;
and St. Peter's, among its many other errors, counts
for not the least injurious its position on the slope of
an inconsiderable hill. But imagine it placed on the
plain of Marengo, or like the Superga of Turin, or
like La Salute at Venice ! The fact is, that the ap-
prehension of the size of natural objects, as well as
of architecture, depends more on fortunate excite-
ment of the imagination than on measurements by
the eye ; and the architect has a peculiar advantage in
being able to press close upon the sight such magni-
tude as he can command. There are few rocks, even
among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall as high
as the choir of Beauvais ; and if we secure a good

THE LAMP OF POWER. 95

precipice of wall, or a sheer and unbroken flank of
tower, and place them where there are no enormous
natural features to oppose them, we shall feel in them
no want of sublimity of size. And it may be matter
of encouragement in this respect, though one also of
regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys
natural sublimity, than nature crushes human power.
It does not need much to humiliate a mountain. A
hut will sometimes do it ; I never look up to the Col
de Balme from Chamouni, without a violent feeling
of provocation against its hospitable little cabin,
whose bright white walls form a visibly four-square
spot on the green ridge, and entirely destroy all idea
of its elevation. A single villa will often mar a whole
landscape, and dethrone a dynasty of hills ; and the
Acropolis of Athens, Parthenon and all, has, I be-
lieve, been dwarfed into a model by the palace lately
built beneath it. The fact is, that hills are not so
high as we fancy them, and, when to the actual
impression of no mean comparative size, is added
the sense of the toil of manly hand and thought, a
sublimity is reached, which nothing but gross error
in arrangement of its parts can destroy.

V. While, therefore, it is not to be supposed that
mere size will ennoble a mean design, yet every
Increase of magnitude will bestow upon it a certain
degree of nobleness : so that it is well to determine
at first, whether the building is to be markedly
beautiful, or markedly sublime ; and if the latter, not
to be withheld by respect to smaller parts from reach-
ing largeness of scale ; provided only, that it be evi-
dently ia the architect's DOwer to reach at least that

96 THE LAMP OF POWER.

degree of magnitude which is the lowest at which
sublimity begins, rudely definable as that which will
make a living figure look less than life beside it. It
is the misfortune of most of our modern buildings
that we would fain have an universal excellence in
them ; and so part of the funds must go in painting,
part in gilding, part in fitting up, part in painted
windows, part in small steeples, part in ornaments
here and there ; and neither the windows, nor the
steeple, nor the ornaments, are worth their materials.
For there is a crust about the impressible part of
men's minds, which must be pierced through before
they can be touched to the quick : and though we
may prick at it and scratch it in a thousand separate
places, we might as well have let it alone if we do
not come through somewhere with a deep thrust :
and if we can give such a thrust anywhere, there is
no need of another; it need not be even so " wide
as a church door," so that it be enoitgh. And mere
weight will do this ; it is a clumsy way of doing it,
but an effectual one, too ; and the apathy which can-
not be pierced through by a small steeple, nor shone
through by a small window, can be broken through
in a moment by the mere weight of a great wall.
Let, therefore, the architect who has not large re-
sources, choose his point of attack first, and, if he
chooses size, let him abandon decoration ; for, unless
they are concentrated, and numerous enough to make
their concentration conspicuous, all his ornaments
together will not be worth one huge stone. And the
choice must be a decided one, without compromise.
It must be no question whether his capitals would

THE LAMP OF POWER. 97

not look better with a little carving — let him leave
them huge as blocks ; or whether his arches should
not have richer architraves — let him throw them a
foot higher, if he can ; a yard more across the nave
will be worth more to him than a tessellated pave-
ment ; and another fathom of outer wall, than an
army of pinnacles. ^'^ The limitation of size must be
only in the uses of the building, or in the ground at
his disposal.

VI. That limitation, however, being by such cir-
cumstances determined, by what means, it is to be
next asked, may the actual magnitude be best dis-
played ; since it is seldom, perhaps never, that a
building of any pretension to size looks so large
as it is. The appearance of a figure in any distant,
more especially in any upper, parts of it will almost
always prove that we have under-estimated the mag-
nitude of those parts.

It has often been observed that a building, in order
to show its magnitude, must be seen all at once ; —
it would, perhaps, be better to say, must be bounded
as much as possible by continuous lines, and that its
extreme points should be seen all at once ; or we
may state, in simpler terms still, that it must have
one visible bounding line from top to bottom, and
from end to end. This bounding line from top to
bottom may either be inclined inwards, and the

27 1 admire the simplicity with which all this good advice was
tendered to a body of men whose occupation for the next fifty years
would be the knocking down every beautiful building they could lay
hands on ; and building the largest quantities of rotten brick wall they
could get contracts for.

98 THE LAMP OF POWER.

mass therefore, pyramidical ; or vertical, and the
mass form one grand cliff; or inclined outwards, as
in the advancing fronts of old houses, and, in a sort,
in the Greek temple, and in all buildings with heavy
cornices or heads. Now, in all these cases, if the
bounding line be violently broken ; if the cornice
project, or the upper portion of the pyramid recede,
too violently, majesty will be lost ; not because the
building cannot be seen all at once, — for in the case
of a heavy cornice no part of it is necessarily con-
cealed — but because the continuity of its terminal
line is broken, and the length of that li)ie, therefore,
cannot be estimated. But the error is, of course,
more fatal when much of the building is also con-
cealed ; as in the well-known case of the recession of
the dome of St. Peter's, and from the greater num-
ber of points of view, in churches whose highest
portions, whether dome or tower, are over their
cross. Thus there is only one point from which the
size of the Cathedral of Florence is felt ; and that is
from the corner of the Via de' Balestrieri, opposite
the south-east angle, where it happens that the dome
is seen rising instantly above the apse and transepts.
In all cases in which the tower is over the cross, the
grandeur and height of the tower itself are lost, be-
cause there is but one line down which the eye can
trace the whole height, and that is in the inner angle
of the cross, not easily discerned. Hence, while, in
symmetry and feeling, such designs may often have
pre-eminence, yet, where the height of the tower itself
is to be maae apparent, it must be at the west end,
or, better still, detached as a campanile. Imagine

THE LAMP OF POWER. 99

the loss to the Lombard churches if their campaniles
were carried only to their present height over their
crosses ; or to the Cathedral of Rouen, if the Tour
de Beurre were made central, in the place of its
present debased spire !

VII. Whether, therefore, we have to do with tower
or wall, there must be one bounding line from base
to coping ; and I am much inclined, myself, to love
the true vertical, or the vertical, with a solemn frown
of projection, (not a scowl,) as in the Palazzo Vecchio
of Florence. This character is always given to rocks
by the poets ; with slight foundation indeed, real
rocks being little given to overhanging — but with
excellent judgment ; for the sense of threatening con-
veyed by this form is a nobler character than that
of mere size. And, in buildings, this threatening
should be somewhat carried down into their mass.
A mere projecting shelf is not enough ; the whole
wall must, Jupiter like, nod as well as frown. Hence,
I think the propped machicolations of the Palazzo
Vecchio and Duomo of Florence far grander head-
ings than any form of Greek cornice. Sometimes
the projection may be thrown lower, as in the Doge's
palace of Venice, where the chief appearance of it is
above the second arcade ; or it may become a grand
swell from the ground, as the head of a ship of the
line rises from the sea. This is very nobly attained
by the projection of the niches in the third storey ol
the Tour de Beurre at Rouen.

VIII. What is needful in the setting forth of mag-
nitude in height, is right also in the marking it in area
— let it be gathered well together. It is especially

loo THE LAMP OF POWER.

lo be noted with respect to the Palazzo Vecchio and

other mighty buildings of its order, how mistakenly
it has been stated that dimension, in order to become
impressive, should be expanded either in height or
length, but not equally: whereas, rather it will be
found that those buildings seem on the whole the
vastest which have been gathered up into a mighty
square, and which look as if they had been measured
by the angel's rod, " the length, and the breadth, and
the height of it are equal ; " and herein something is
to be taken notice of, which I believe not to be suf-
ficiently, if at all, considered among our architects.

Of the many broad divisions under which archi-
tecture may be considered, none appears to me more
significant than that into buildings whose interest is
in their walls, and those whose interest is in the lines
dividing their walls. In the Greek temple the wall
is as nothing ; the entire interest is in the detached
columns and the frieze they bear ; in French Flam-
boyant, and in our detestable Perpendicular, the
object is to get rid of the wall surface, and keep the
eye altogether on tracery of line : in Romanesque
work and Egyptian, the wall is a confessed and hon-
ored member, and the light is often allowed to fall
on large areas of it, variously decorated. Now, both
these principles are admitted by Nature, the one in
her woods and thickets, the other in her plains, and
cliffs, and waters ; but the latter is pre-eminently the
principle of power, and, in some sense, of beauty
also. For, whatever infinity of fair form there may
be in the maze of the forest, there is a fairer, as I
think, in the surface of the quiet lake ; and I hardly

THE LAMP OF POWER. lOi

know that association of shaft or tracery, for which I
would exchange the warm sleep of sunshine on some
smooth, broad, human-like front of marble. Never-
theless, if breadth is to be beautiful, its substance
must in some sort be beautiful ; and we must not
hastily condemn the exclusive resting of the northern
architects in divided lines, until at least we have
remembered the difference between a blank surface
of Caen stone, and one mixed from Genoa and Car-
rara, of serpentine with snow : but as regards abstract
power and awfulness, there is no question ; without
breadth of surface it is in vain to seek them, and it
matters little, so that the surface be wide, bold, and
unbroken, whether it be of brick or of jasper ; the
light of heaven upon it, and the weight of earth in it,
are all we need : for it is singular how forgetful the
mind may become both of material and workman-
ship, if only it have space enough over which to
range, and to remind it, however feebly, of the joy
that it has in contemplating the flatness and sweep
of great plains and broad seas. And it is a noble
thing for men to do this with their cut stone or
moulded clay, and to make the face of a wall look
infinite, and its edge against the sky like an horizon :
or even if less than this be reached, it is still delight-
ful to mark the play of passing light on its broad
surface, and to see by how many artifices and grada-
tions of tinting and shadow, time and storm will set
their wild signatures upon it ; and how in the rising
or declining of the day the unbroken twilight rests
long and luridly on its high lineless forehead, and
fades away untraceably down its tiers of confused
and countless stone.

I02 THE LAMP OF POWER.

IX. This, then, being, as I think, one of the pe-
culiar elements of sublime architecture, it may be
easily seen how necessarily consequent upon the love
of it 28 will be the choice of a form approaching to the
square for the main outline.

For, in whatever direction the building is con-
tracted, in that direction the eye will be drawn to its
terminal lines ; and the sense of surface will only be
at its fullest when those lines are removed, in every
direction, as far as possible. Thus the square and
circle are pre-eminently the areas of power among
those bounded by purely straight or curved lines ;
and these, with their relative solids, the cube and
sphere, and relative solids of progression, (as in the
investigation of the laws of proportion I shall call
those masses which are generated by the progression
of an area of given form along a line in a given direc-
tion,) the square and cylindrical column, are the
elements of utmost power in all architectural arrange-
ments. On the other hand, grace and p:?rfect pro-
portion require an elongation in some one direction :
and a sense of power may be communicated to this
form of magnitude by a continuous series of any
marked features, such as the eye may be unable to
number; while yet we feel, from their boldness,
decision, and simplicity, that it is indeed their multi-
tude which has embarrassed us, not any confusion or
indistinctness of form. This expedient of continued

28 Yes — I daresay ! but how are you first to get the love of it ? To
love sublime architecture is one thing ; to love a sublime dividend or
a sublime percentage is another — and to love a large smoking room
or billiard room, yet another.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 103

series forms the sublimity of arcades and aisles, of
all ranges of columns, and, on a smaller scale, of those
Greek mouldings, of which, repeated as they now
are in all the meanest and most familiar forms of our
furniture, it is impossible altogether to weary. Now,
it is evident that the architect has choice of two types
of form, each properly associated with its own kind
of interest or decoration : the square, or greatest
area, to be chosen especially when the stirface is to
be the subject of thought ; and the elongated area,
when the divisions of the surface are to be subjects
of thought. Both these orders of form, as I think
nearly every other source of power and beauty, are
marvellously united in that building which I fear to
weary the reader by bringing forward too frequently,
as a model of all perfection — the Doge's palace at
Venice : its general arrangemeht, a hollow square ;
its principal fapade, an oblong, elongated to the eye
by a range of thirty-four small arches, and thirty-five
columns, while it is separated by a richly canopied
window in the centre, into two massive divisions,
whose height and length are nearly as four to five ;
the arcades which give it length being confined to
the lower stories, and the upper, between its broad
windows, left a mighty surface of smooth marble,
checkered with blocks of alternate rose-color and
white. It would be impossible, I believe, to invent
a more magnificent arrangement of all that is in
building most dignified and most fair.

X. In the Lombard Romanesque, the two princi-
ples are more fused into each other, as most char-
acteristically in the cathedral of Pisa : length of

I04 THE LAMP OF POWER.

proportion, exhibited by an arcade of twenty-one
arches above, and fifteen below, at the side of the
nave ; bold square proportion in the front ; that front
divided into arcades, placed one above the other,
the lowest with its pillars engaged, of seven arches,
the four uppermost thrown out boldly from the re-
ceding wall, and casting deep shadows ; the first,
above the basement, of nineteen arches ; the second,
of twenty-one ; the third and fourth of eight each ;
sixty-three arches in all ; all circular headed, all with
cylindrical shafts, and the lowest with square panel'
lings, set diagonally under their semicircles, an uni-
versal ornament in this style (Plate XII., fig. 7) ;
the apse a semicircle, with a semidome for its roof,
and three ranges of circular arches for its exterior
ornament ; in the interior of the nave, a range ol
circular arches below a circular-arched triforium, and
a vast flat S2irface, observe, of wall decorated with
striped marble above ; the whole arrangement (not
a peculiar one, but characteristic of every church ol
the period ; and, to my feeling, the most majestic ;
not perhaps the fairest, but the mightiest type of
form which the mind of man has ever conceived -'•')
based exclusively on associations of the circle and
the square.

I am now, however, trenching upon ground which
I desire to reserve for more careful examination, in
connection with other aesthetic questions : but I be-
lieve the examples I have given will justify my vindi-

29 I have never for a moment changed from this judgment, but 1
have since seen a mightier type of the same form, — St. Paul's, out.
side the walls, at Rome. It is a restored building, but nobly and faith
fully done ; and, so far as I know, the grandest mterior in Europe.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 105

cation of the square form from the reprobation which
has been lightly thrown upon it ; nor might this be
done for it only as a ruling outline, but as occurring
constantly in the best mosaics, and in a thousand
forms of minor decoration, which I cannot now ex-
amine ; my chief assertion of its majesty being ahva3S
as It is an exponent of space and surface, and there-
fore to be chosen, either to rule in their outlines, or
to adorn by masses of light and shade those portions
of buildings in which surface is to be rendered pre-
cious or honorable.

XI. Thus far, then, of general forms, and of the
modes in which the scale of architecture is best to be
exhibited. Let us next consider the manifestations of
power which belong to its details and lesser divisions.

The first division we have to regard, is the inevi-
table one of masonry. It is true that this division
may, by great art, be concealed ; but I think it un-
wise (as well as dishonest) to do so ; for this reason,
that there is a very noble character always to be ob-
tanied by the opposition of large stones to divided
masonry, as by shafts and columns of one piece, or
massy lintels and architraves, to wall work of bricks
or smaller stones ; and there is a certain organization
in the management of such parts, like that of the
■continuous bones of the skeleton, opposed .to the
vertebrae, which it is not well to surrender. I hold,
therefore, that for this and other reasons, the masonry
of a building is to be shown : and also that, with cer-
tain rare exceptions, (as in the cases of chapels and
shrines of most finished workmanship,) the smaller
the. building, the more necessary it is that its masonry

io6 THE LAMP OF POWER.

should be bold, and vice versd. For if a building be
under the mark of average magnitude, it is not in our
power to increase its apparent size (too easily meas-
urable) by any proportionate diminution in the scale
of its masonry. But it may be often in our power to
give it a certain nobility by building it of massy
stones, or, at all events, introducing such into its
make. Thus it is impossible that there should ever
be majesty in a cottage built of brick ; but there is a
marked element of sublimity in the rude and irregular
piling of the rocky walls of the mountain cottages of
Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland. Their size is not
one whit diminished, though four or five stones reach
at their angles from the ground to the eaves, or though
a native rock happen to project conveniently, and to
be built into the framework of the wall. On the other
hand, after a building has once reached the mark of
majestic size, it matters, indeed, comparatively little
whether its masonry be large or small, but if it be
altogether large, it will sometimes diminish the mag-
nitude for want of a measure ; if altogether small, it
will suggest ideas of poverty in material, or defi-
ciency in mechanical resource, besides interfering
in many cases with the lines of the design, and
delicacy of the workmanship. A very unhappy
instance of such interference exists in the facade
of the church of St. Madeleine at Paris, where the
columns, being built of very small stones of nearly
equal size with visible joints, look as if they were
covered with a close trellis. So, then, that masonry
will be generally the most magnificent which, without
the use of materials systematically small or large, aC'

THE LAMP OF POWER. 107

commodates itself, naturally and frankly, to the con-
ditions and structure of its work, and displays alike
its power of dealing with the vastest masses, and of
accomplishing its purpose with the smallest, some-
times heaping rock upon rock with Titanic command-
ment, and anon binding the dusty remnants and edgy
splinters into springing vaults and swelling domes.
And if the nobility of this confessed and natural
masonry were more commonly felt, we should not lose
the dignity of it by smoothing surfaces and fitting
joints. The sums which we waste in chiselling
and polishing stones which would have been better
left as they came from the quarry, would often raise a
building a story higher. Only in this there is to be
a certain respect for material also : for if we build in
marble, or in any limestone, the known ease of the
workmanship will make its absence seem slovenly ; it
will be well to take advantage of the stone's softness,
and to make the design delicate and dependent upon
smoothness of chiselled surfaces : but if we build in
granite or lava, it is a folly, in most cases, to cast
away the labor necessary to smooth it ; it is wiser to
make the design granitic itself, and to leave the blocks
rudely squared. I do not deny a certain splendor
and sense of power in the smoothing of granite, and
in the entire subduing of its iron resistance to the
human supremacy. But in most cases, I believe, the
labor and time necessary to do this would be better
spent in another way ; and that to raise a building to
a height of a hundred feet with rough blocks, is better
than to raise it to seventy with smooth ones. There
is also a magnificence in the natural cleavage of the

io8 THE LAMP OF POWER.

stone to which the art must indeed be great that pre-
tends to be equivalent; and a stern expression of
brotherhood with the mountain heart from which it
has been rent, ill-exchanged for a glistering obedience
to the rule and measure of men. His eye must be
delicate indeed, who would desire to see the Pitti
palace polished.

XII. Next to those of the masonry, we have to con-
sider the divisions of the design itself. Those divis-
ions are, necessarily, either into masses of light and
shade, or else by traced lines ; which latter must be,
indeed, themselves produced by incisions or projec-
tions which, in some lights, cast a certain breadth of
shade, but which may, nevertheless, if finely enough
cut, be always true lines, in distant eflfect. I call, for
instance, such panelling as that of Henry the Seventh's
chapel, pure linear division.

Now, it does not seem to me sufficiently recollected,
that a wall surface is to an architect simply what a
white canvas is to a painter, with this only difference,
that the wall has already a sublimity in its height, sub-
stance, and other characters already considered, on
which it is more dangerous to break than to touch
with shade the canvas surface. And, for my own part,
I think a smooth, broad, freshly laid surface of gesso
a fairer thing than most pictures I see painted on it ;
much more, a noble surface of stone than most archi-
tectural features which it is caused to assume. But
however this may be, the canvas and wall are sup-
posed to be given, and it is our craft to divide them.

And the principles on which this division is to be
made, are, as regards relation of quantities, the same

HE LAMP OF POWER. 109

in architecture as in painting, or indeed in any otiier
art whatsoever, only the painter is by his varied sub-
ject partly permitted, partly compelled, to dispense
with the symmetry of architectural light and shade,
and to adopt arrangements apparently free and acci-
dental. So that in modes of grouping there is much
difference (though no opposition) between the two
arts ; but in rules of quantity, both are alike, so far forth
as their commands of means are alike. For the archi-
tect not being able to secure always the same depth
or decision of shadow, nor to add to its sadness by
color, (because even when color is employed, it cannot
follow the moving shade,) is compelled to make many
allowances, and avail himself of many contrivances,
which the painter needs neither consider nor employ.
XIII. Of these limitations the first consequence is,
that positive shade is a more necessary and more
sublime thing in an architect's hands than in a paint-
er's. For the latter being able to temper his light
with an undertone throughout, and to make it de-
lightful with sweet color, or awful with lurid color,
and to represent distance, and air, and sun, by the
depth of it, and fill its whole space with expression,
can deal with an enormous, nay, almost with an uni-
versal, extent of it, and the best painters most delight
in such extent ; but as light, with the architect, is
nearly always liable to become full and untempered
sunshine seen upon solid surface, his only rests, and
his chief means of sublimity, are definite shades. So
that, after size and weight, the Power of architecture
may be said to depend on the quantity (whether
measured in space or intenseness) of its shadow ; and

no THE LAMP OF POWER.

it seems to me, that the reality of its works, and the
use and influence they have in the daily life of men,
(as opposed to those works of art with which we
have nothing to do but in times of rest or of pleas-
ure,) require of it that it should express a kind of
human sympathy, by a measure of darkness as great
as there is in human life : and that as the great poem
and great fiction generally affect us most by the maj-
esty of their masses of shade, and cannot take hold
upon us if they affect a continuance of lyric sprightli-
ness, but must be often serious, and sometimes mel-
ancholy, else they do not express the truth of this
wild world of ours ; so there must be, in this mag-
nificently human art of architecture, some equivalent
expression for the trouble and wrath of life, for its
sorrow and its mystery : and this it can only give by
depth or diffusion of gloom, by the frown upon its
front, and the shadow of its recess. So that Rem-
brandtism is a noble manner in architecture, though
a false one in painting ; and I do not believe that ever
any building was truly great, unless it had mighty
masses, vigorous and deep, of shadow mingled with
its surface. And among the first habits that a young
architect should learn, is that of thinking in shadow,
not looking at a design in its miserable liny skeleton ;
but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn lights
it, and the dusk leaves it ; when its stones will be hot,
and its crannies cool ; when the lizards will bask on
the one, and the birds build in the other. Let him
design^' with the sense of cold and heat upon him ;

30 " Let him — let him." All very fine ; but all the while, there
wasn't one of the architects for whom this was written — nor is there

THE LAMP OF POWER. Ill

let him cut out the shadows, as men dig wells in un-
watered plains ; and lead along the lights, as a founder
does his hot metal ; let him keep the full command
of both, and see that he knows how they fall, and
where they fade. His paper lines and proportions are
of no value : all that he has to do must be done by
spaces of light and darkness ; and his business is to
see that the one is broad and bold enough not to be
swallowed up by twilight, and the other deep enough
not to be dried like a shallow pool by a noon-day sun.

And, that this may be, the first necessity is that
the quantities of shade or light, whatever they may
be, shall be thrown into masses, either of something
like equal weight, or else large masses of the one
relieved with small of the other ; but masses of one
or other kind there must be. No design that is di-
vided at all, and yet not divided into masses, can
ever be of the smallest value : this great law respect-
ing breadth, precisely the same in architecture and
painting, is so important, that the examination of its
two principal applications will include most of the
conditions of majestic design on which I would at
present insist.

XIV. Painters are in the habit of speaking loosely
of masses of light and shade, meaning thereby any
large spaces of either. Nevertheless, it is conven-
ient sometimes to restrict the term " mass " to the
portions to which proper form belongs, and to call
the field on which such forms are traced, interval.
Thus, in foliage with projecting boughs or stems, we

one alive now — who could, or can, so much as shade an egg, or a tal-
low candle ; how much less an egg-moulding or a shaft !

112 THE LAMP OF POWER.

have masses of light, with intervals of shade ; and, in
Ught skies with dark clouds upon them, masses of
shade, with intervals of light.

This distinction is, in architecture, still more
necessary ; for there are two marked styles depend-
ent upon it : one in which the forms are drawn with
light upon darkness, as in Greek sculpture and pil-
lars ; the other in which they are drawn with dark-
ness upon light, as in early Gothic foliation. Now,
it IS not in the designer's power determinately to
vary degrees and places of darkness, but it is alto-
gether in his power to vary in determined directions
his degrees of light. Hence the use of dark mass
characterizes, generally, a trenchant style of design,
in which the darks and lights are both flat, and ter-
minated by sharp edges ; while the use of the light
mass is in the same way associated with a softened
and full manner of design, in which the darks are
much warmed by reflected lights, and the lights are
rounded and melt into them. The term applied by
Milton to Doric bas-relief — " bossy," is, as is gen-
erally the case with Milton's epithets, the most com-
prehensive and expressive of this manner, which the
English language contains ; while the term which
specifically describes the chief member of early
Gothic decoration, feuille, foil or leaf, is equally sig-
nificative of a flat space of shade.

XV. We shall shortly consider the actual modes
in which these two kinds of mass have been treated.
And, first, of the light, or rounded, mass. The
modes in which relief was secured for the more pro-
jecting forms of bas-relief, by the Greeks, have been

THE LAMP OF POWER. 113

too well described by Sir Charles Eastlake * to need
recapitulation ; the conclusion which forces itself
upon us from the facts he has remarked, being one
on which I shall have occasion farther to insist pres-
ently, that the Greek workman cared for shadow only
as a dark field wherefrom his light figure or design
might be intelligibly detached : his attention was
concentrated on the one aim at readableness and
clearness of accent: and all composition, all har-
mony, nay, the very vitality and energy of separate
groups were, when necessary, sacrificed to plain
speaking, Nor was there any predilection for one
kind of form rather than another. Rounded forms
were, in the columns and principal decorative mem-
bers, adopted, not for their own sake, but as char-
acteristic of the things represented. They were
beautifully rounded, because the Greek habitually
did well what he had to do, not because he loved
roundness more than squareness ; severely rectilinear
forms were associated with the curved ones in the
cornice and triglyph, and the mass of the pillar was
divided by a fluting, which, in distant effect, de-
stroyed much of its breadth. What power of light
these primal arrangements left, was diminished in
successive refinements and additions of ornament ;
and continued to diminish through Roman work,
until the confirmation of the circular arch as a decor-
ative feature. Its lovely and simple line taught the
eye to ask for a similar boundary of solid form ; the
dome followed, and necessarily the decorative masses
were thenceforward managed with reference to, and

* " Literature of the Fine Arts." — Essay on Bas-relief.

114 THE LAMP OF POWER.

in sympathy with, the cliief feature of the building.
Hence arose, among the Byzantine architects, a sys-
tem of ornament, entirely restrained within the su-
perficies of curvilinear masses, on which the light fell
with as unbroken gradation as on a dome or column,
while the illumined surface was nevertheless cut into
details of singular and most ingenious intricacy.
Something is, of course, to be allowed for the less
dexterity of the workmen ; it being easier to cut
down into a solid block, than to arrange the project-
ing portions of leaf on the Greek capital : such leafy
capitals are nevertheless executed by the Byzantines
with skill enough to show that their preference of the
massive form was by no means compulsory, nor can
I think it unwise. On the contrary, while the ar-
rangements of litie are far more artful in the Greek
capital, the Byzantine light and shade are as incon-
testably more grand and masculine, based on that
quality of pure gradation, which nearly all natural
objects possess, and the attainment of which is, in
fact, the first and most palpable purpose in natural
arrangements of grand form. The rolling heap of
the thunder-cloud, divided by rents, and multi-
plied by wreaths, yet gathering
Aphorism i8. ^^^^ ^^j .^^^^ j^^ \ix(ia.^, torrid, and
The religious no- toweriug zoue, and its midnight

bleness of Bvzan- , , ., ,i 11

tine architecture. ^arkness Opposite; the scarcely less
majestic heave of the mountain
side, all torn and traversed by depth of defile and
ridge of rock, yet never losing the unity of its
illumined swell and shadowy decline; and the head
of every mighty tree, rich with tracery of leaf and

THE LAMP OF POWER. 115

bough, yet terminated against the sky by a true
line, and rounded by a green horizon, which, mul-
tiplied in the distant forest, makes it look bossy
from above; all these mark, for a great and hon-
ored law, that diffusion of light for which the
Byzantine ornaments were designed; and show us
that those builders had truer sympathy with what
God made majestic, than the self-contemplating
and self-contented Greek. I know that they are
barbaric in comparison; but there is a power in
their barbarism of sterner tone, a power not sophis-
tic nor penetrative, but embracing and mysterious;
a power faithful more than thoughtful, which con-
ceived and felt more than it created; a power that
neither comprehended nor ruled itself, but worked
and wandered as it listed, like mountain streams
and winds; and which could not rest in the expres-
sion or seizure of finite form. It could not bury
itself in acanthus leaves. Its imagery was taken
from the shadows of the storms and hills, and had
fellowship with the night and day of the earth
itself.31

XVI. I have endeavored to give some idea of one
of the hollow balls of stone which, surrounded by

'1 This estimate of Byzantine architecture had been previously
formed by Lord Lindsay — and, I think, by him only;— and it re-
mains, though entirely true, his and mine only, in written statement,
though shared with us by all persons who have an eye for color, and
sympathy enough with Christianity to care for its fullest interpreta-
tion by Art only , in this sentence of mine, the bit about self-con-
tented Greeks must be omitted. A noble Greek was as little content
without God, as George Herbert, or St. Francis ; and a Byzantine
was nothing else than a Greek, — recognizing Christ for Zeus.

Ii6 THE LAMP OF POWER.

flowing leafage, occur in varied succession on the
architrave of the central gate of St. Mark's at Venice,
in Plate I., fig. 3. It seems to me singularly beauti-
ful in its unity of lightness, ana delicacy of detail,
with breadth of light. It looks as if its leaves had
been sensitive, and had risen and shut themselves
into a bud at some sudden touch, and would presently
fall back again into their wild flow. The cornices of
San Michele of Lucca, seen above and below the arch,
in Plate VI., show the effect of heavy leafage and thick
stems arranged on a surface whose curve is a simple
quadrant, the light dying from ofl" them as it turns.
It would be difficult, as I think, to invent any thing
more noble : and 1 insist on the broad character of
their arrangement the more earnestly, because, after-
wards modified by greater skill in its management, it
became characteristic of the richest pieces of Gothic
design. The capital, given in Plate V., is of the
noblest period of the Venetian Gothic ; and it is in-
teresting to see the play of leafage so luxuriant, abso-
lutely subordinated to the breadth of two masses of
light and shade. What is done by the Venetian
architect, with a power as irresistible as that of the
waves of his surrounding sea, is done by the masters
of the Cis-Alpine Gothic, more timidly, and with a
manner somewhat cramped and cold, but not less ex-
pressing their assent to the same great law. The
ice spiculae of the North, and its broken sunshine,
seem to have image in, and influence on, the work;
and the leaves which, under the Italian's hand, roll,
and flow, and bow down over their black shadows,
as in the weariness of noon-day heat, are, in the

Plate V.

Capital, from tlie Lower Arcade of the
Doge's Palace, Veuice.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 117

North, crisped and frost-bitten, wrinkled on the
edges, and sparkling as if with dew. But the round-
ing of the ruling form is not less sought and felt. In
the lower part of Plate I. is the finial of the pediment
given in Plate 11., from the cathedral of St. Lo. It
is exactly similar in feeling to the Byzantine capital,
being rounded under the abacus by four branches of
thistle-leaves, whose stems, springing from the angles,
bend outwards and fall back to the head, throwing
their jaggy spines down upon the full light, forming
two sharp quatrefoils. I could not get near enough
to this finial to see with what degree of delicacy the
spines were cut ; but I have sketched a natural group
of thistle-leaves beside it, that the reader may com-
pare the types, and see with what mastery they are
subjected to the broad form, of the whole. The
small capital from Coutances, Plate XIII., fig. 4,
which is of earlier date, is of simpler elements, and
exhibits the principle still more clearly ; but the St. Lo
finial is only one of a thousand instances which
might be gathered even from the fully developed
flamboyant, the feeling of breadth being retained in
minor ornaments, long after it had been lost in the
main design, and sometimes capriciously renewing
tself throughout, as in the cylindrical niches and
pedestals which enrich the porches of Caudebec and
Rouen. Fig. i, Plate I. is the simplest of those of
Rouen ; in the more elaborate there are four project-
ing sides, divided by buttresses into eight rounded
compartments of tracery ; even the whole bulk of the
outer pier is treated with the same feeling; and
though composed partly of concave recesses, partly

Ii8 THE LAMP OF POWER.

of square shafts, partly of statues and tabernacle work,
arranges itself as a whole into one richly rounded
tower.

XVII. I cannot here enter into the curious ques-
tions connected with the management of larger curved
surfaces ; into the causes of the difference in propor-
tion necessary to be observed between round and
square towers ; nor into the reasons why a column
or ball may be richly ornamented, while surface dec-
oration would be inexpedient on masses like the
Castle of St. Angelo, the tomb of Cicilia Aletella, or
the dome of St. Peter's. But what has been above
said of the desirableness of serenity in plane surfaces,
applies still more forcibly to those which are curved ;
and it is to be remembered tliat we are, at present,
considering how this serenity and power may be
carried into minor divisions, not how the ornamental
character of the lower form may, upon occasion, be
permitted to fret the calmness of the higher. Nor,
though the instances we have examined are of globu-
lar or cylindrical masses chiefly, is it to be thought
that breadth can only be secured by such alone :
many of the noblest forms are of subdued curvature,
sometimes hardly visible : but curvature of some de-
gree there must be, in order to secure any measure of
grandeur in a small mass of light. One of the most
marked distinctions between one artist and another,
in the point of skill, will be found in their relative
delicacy of perception of rounded surface ; the full
power of expressing the perspective, foreshortening,
and various undulation of such surface is, perhaps,
the last and most difficult attainment of the hand and

THE LAMP OF POWER. 1,19

eye. For instance : there is, perhaps, no tree which
has baffled the landscape painter more than the
common black spruce fir. It is rare that we see any
representation of it other than caricature. It is con-
ceived as if it grew in one plane, or as a section of a
tree, with a set of boughs symmetrically dependent
on opposite sides. It is thought formal, unmanage-
able, and ugly. It would be so, if it grew as it is
drawn. But the Power of the tree is not in that
chandelier-like section. It is in the dark, flat, solid
tables of leafage, which it holds out on its strong
arms, curved slightly over them like shields, and
spreading towards the extremity like a hand. It is
vain to endeavor to paint the sharp, grassy, intricate
leafage, until this ruling form has been secured ; and
in the boughs that approach the spectator, the fore-
shortening of it is like that of a wide hill country,
ridge just rising over ridge in successive distances ;
and the finger-like extremities, foreshortened to ab-
solute bluntness, require a delicacy in the rendering
of them like that of the drawing of the hand of the
Magdalene upon the vase in Mr. Rogers's Titian.
Get but the back of that foliage, and you have the
tree ; but I cannot name the artist who has thoroughly
felt it. So, in all drawing and sculpture, it is the
power of rounding, softly and perfectly, every inferior
mass which preserves the serenity, as it follows the
truth, of Nature, and which demands the highest
knowledge and skill from the workman. A noble
design may always be told by the back of a single
leaf, and it was the sacrifice of this breadth and re-
finement of surface for sharp edges and extravagant

I20 THE LAMP OF POWER.

undercutting, which destroyed the Gothic mouldings,
as the substitution of the line for the light destroyed
the Gothic tracery. This change, however, we shall
better comprehend after we have glanced at the chief
conditions of arrangement of the second kind of
mass ; that which is flat, and of shadow only.

XVIII. We have noted above how the wall surface,
composed of rich materials, and covered with costjy
work, in modes which we shall examine in the next
Chapter, became a subject of peculiar interest to the
Christian architects. Its broad flat lights could only
be made valuable by points or masses of energetic
shadow, which were obtained by the Romanesque
architect by means of ranges of recessed arcade, in
the management of which, however, though all the
effect depends upon the shadow so obtained, the eye
is still, as in classical architecture, caused to dwell
upon the projecting columns, capitals, and wall, as
in Plate VI. But with the enlargement of the
window, which, in the Lombard and Romanesque
churches, is usually little more than an arched slit,
came the conception of the simpler mode of decora-
tion, by penetrations which, seen from within, are
forms of light, and, from without, are forms of shade.
In Italian traceries the eye is exclusively fixed upon
the ■ dark forms of the penetrations, and the whole
proportion and power of the design are caused to
depend upon them. The intermediate spaces are,
indeed, in the most perfect early examples, filled with
elaborate ornament ; but this ornament was so sub-
dued as never to disturb the simplicity and force of
the dark masses ; and in many instances is entirely

Plate VI.

Arch from the Facade of the Church of
Sau Michele at Lucca.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 121

wanting. The composition of the whole depends on
the proportioning and shaping of the darks ; and it
is impossible that any thing can be more exquisite
than their placing in the head window of the Giotto
campanile, Plate IX., or the Church of Or San
Michele. So entirely does the effect depend upon
them, that it is quite useless to draw Italian tracery
in outline ; if with any intention of rendering its
effect, it is better to mark the black spots, and let the
rest alone. Of course, when it is desired to obtain
an accurate rendering of the design, its lines and
mouldings are enough ; but it often happens that
works on architecture are of little use, because they
afford the reader no means of judging of the effective
intention of the arrangements which they state. No
person, looking at an architectural drawing of the
richly foliaged cusps and intervals of Or San Michele,
would understand that all this sculpture was extrane-
ous, was a mere added grace, and had nothing to do
with the real anatomy of the work, and that by a few
bold cuttings through a slab of stone he might reach
the main effect of it all, at once. I have, therefore,
in the plate of the design of Giotto, endeavored espe-
cially to mark these points of purpose ; there, as in
every other instance, black shadows of a graceful
form lying on the white surface of the stone, like
dark leaves laid upon snow. Hence, as before ob-
served, the universal name of foil applied to such
ornaments.

XIX. In order to the obtaining their full effect, it
is evident that much caution is necessary in the
management of the glass. In the finest instances,

122 THE LAMP OF POWER.

the traceries are open lights, either in towers, as in
this design of Giotto's, or in external arcades like
that of the Campo Santo at Pisa or the Doge's
Palace at Venice ; and it is thus only that their full
beauty is shown. In domestic buildings, or in win-
dows of churches necessarily glazed, the glass was usu-
ally withdrawn entirely behind the traceries. Those
of the Cathedral of Florence stand quite clear of it,
casting their shadows in well detached lines, so as in
most lights to give the appearance of a double tracery.
In those few instances in which the glass was set in
the tracery itself, as in Or San Michele, the eflfect of
the latter is half destroyed : perhaps the especial at-
tention paid by Orcagna to his surface ornament, was
connected with the intention of so glazing them. It
is singular to see, in late architecture, the glass,
which tormented the bolder architects, considered
as a valuable means of making the lines of tracery
more slender ; as in the smallest intervals of the win-
dows of Merton College, Oxford, where the glass is
advanced about two inches from the centre of the
tracery bar, (that in the larger spaces being in the
middle, as usual,) in order to prevent the depth of
shadow from farther diminishing the apparent inter-
val.'- Much of the lightness of the effect of the

2' Well noticed ; and, I think, at that time by me only. I do not
think this question of the advance or retreat of the glass has been
touched even in M. Viollet-le-Duc's long article on tracery, and I am
more pertinacious now in showing what I have really seen and said,
because it has all been so useless. Had it been acted on, I need not
have vindicated my guidance — now, I can only say — • " I showed you
the right way, though you would not walk in it." See the following
note.

THE LAMP OF POWER. 123

traceries is owing to this seemingly unimportant ar-
rangement. But, generally speaking, glass spoils
all traceries ; and it is much to be wished that it
should be kept well within them, when it cannot be
dispensed with, and that the most careful and beauti-
ful designs should be reserved for situations where
no glass would be needed. ^^

XX. The method of decoration by shadow was, as
far as we have hitherto traced it, common to the north-
ern and southern Gothic. But in the carrying out of
the system they instantly diverged. Having marble
at his command, and classical decoration in his sight,
the southern architect was able to carve the inter-
mediate spaces with exquisite leafage, or to vary his
wall surface with inlaid stones. The northern arch-
itect neither knew the ancient work, nor possessed
the delicate material ; and he had no resource but to
cover his walls with holes, cut into foiled shapes like
those of the windows. This he did, often with great
clumsiness, but always with a vigorous sense of com-
position, and always, observe, depending on the
shadows for effect. Where the wall was thick, and
could not be cut through, and the foilings were large,
those shadows did not fill the entire space ; but the
form was, nevertheless, drawn on the eye by means
of them, and when it was possible, they were cut
clear through, as in raised screens of pediment, like
ihose of the west front of Bayeux : cut so deep in

" Cloisters, for instance. The only fruit I have seen of this
exhortation is the multiplication of the stupidest traceries that can be
cut cheapest, as in the cloisters of the missionary school at Canter-
bury.

124 THE LAMP OF POWER.

every case, as to secure, in all but a direct low front
light, great breadth of shadow.

The spandrel, given at the top of Plate VII., is
from the south-western entrance of the Cathedral of
Lisieux ; one of the most quaint and interesting
doors in Normandy, probably soon to be lost for ever,
by the continuance of the masonic operations which
have already destroyed the northern tower. Its work
is altogether rude, but full of spirit ; the opposite
spandrels have different, though balanced, orna-
ments very inaccurately adjusted, each rosette or
star (as the five-rayed figure, now quite defaced, in
the upper portion appears to have been) cut on its
own block of stone and fitted in with small
nicety, especially illustrating the point I have
above insisted upon — the architect's utter neglect
of the forms of intermediate stone, at this early
period.

The arcade, of which a single arch and shaft are
given on the left, forms the flank of the door ; three
outer shafts bearing three orders within the spandrel
which I have drawn, and each of these shafts carried
over an inner arcade, decorated above with quatre-
foils, cut concave and filled with leaves, the whole
disposition exquisitely picturesque and full of strange
play of light and shade.

For some time the penetrative ornaments, if so
they may be for convenience called, maintained their
bold and independent charact.er. Then they multi-
plied and enlarged, becoming shallower as they did
so ; then they began to run together, one swallow-
ing up, or hanging on to, another, like bubbles in

THE LAMP OF POWER. 125

expiring foam — fig. 4, from a spandrel at Bayeux,
looks as if it had been blown from a pipe ; finally,
they lost their individual character altogether, and
the eye was made to rest on the separating lines of
tracery, as we saw before in the window ; and then
came the great change and the fall of the Gothic
power.

XXI. Figs. 2 and 3, the one a quadrant of the star
window of the little chapel close to St. Anastasia at
Verona, and the other a very singular example from
the church of the Eremitani at Padua, compared with
fig. 5, one of the ornaments of the transept towers
of Rouen, show the closely correspondent conditions
of the early northern and southern Gothic. But, as
we have said, the Italian architects, not being em-
barrassed for decoration of wall surface, and not being
obliged, like the Northmen, to multiply their pene-
trations, held to the system for some time longer;
and while they increased the refinement of the orna-
ment, kept the purity of the plan. That refinement
of ornament was their weak point however, and
opened the way for the renaissance attack. They
fell, like the old Romans, by their luxury, except in
the separate instance of the magnificent school of
Venice. That architecture began with the luxuriance
in which all others expired : it founded itself on the
Byzantine mosaic and fretwork ; and laying aside its
ornaments, one by one, while it fixed its forms by
laws more and more severe, stood forth, at last, a
model of domestic Gothic, so grand, so complete, so
nobly systematized, that, to my mind, there never
existed an architecture with so stern a claim to our

126 THE LAMP OF POWER.

reverence. ^^ I do not except even the Greek Doric :
the Doric had cast nothing away ; the fourteenth
century Venetian had cast away, one by one, for a
succession of centuries, every splendor that art and
wealth could give it. It had laid down its crown and
its jewels, its gold and its color, like a king disro-
bing ; it had resigned its exertion, like an athlete re-
posing ; once capricious and fantastic, it had bound
itself bylaws inviolable and serene as those of Nature
herself. It retained nothing but its beauty and its
power; both the highest, but both restrained. The
Doric liutings were of irregular number — the Vene-

^ I • have written many passages that are one-sided or incom-
plete ; and which therefore are misleading if read without their
contexts or development. But I know of no other paragraph in
any of my books so definitely false as this. I did not know the
history of Venice when I wrote it ; and mistook the expression of
the conspiring pride of her later aristocracy, for the temper of the
whole nation. The real strength of Venice was in the twelfth, not
the fourteenth century : and the abandonment of her Byzantine arch-
itecture meatit her ruin. See the notes on the destruction of the
Ziani Palace in the " Stones of Venice." Farther, although render-
ing all this respect to what I suppose to be the self-restraint of Vene-
tian-Gothic, I had carefully guarded the reader from too high an
estimate of it, in relation to originally purer styles. The following
passage, from the preface to the second edition, has been much too
carelessly overlooked by the general reader: — "I must here also
deprecate an idea which is often taken up by hasty readers of the
' .Stones of Venice ; ' namely, that I suppose Venetian architecture
file most noble of the schools of Gothic. I have great respect for
Venetian-Gothic, but only as one among many early schools. My
reason for devoting so much time to Venice, was not that her arch-
itecture is the best in existence, but that it exemplifies, in the smallest
compass, the most interesting facts of architectural history. The
Gothic of Verona is far nobler than tliat of Venice ; and that of
Florence nobler than that of Verona. For our own immediate pur-
poses that of Notre Dame of Paris is noblest of all."

Plate VII.

Pierced ornameuts from Lisieux. Bayenx,
Verona, and Padua.

Plate Vril.

From the Ca' Foscari, Venice.

Plate IX.

Tracery from the Campanile of Giotto

THE LAMP OF POWER. 127

tian mouldings were unchangeable. The Doric man-
ner of ornament admitted no temptation ; it was the
fasting of an anchorite — the Venetian ornament
embraced, while it governed, all vegetable and animal
forms ; it was the temperance of a man, the command
of Adam over creation. I do not know so magnifi-
cent a marking of human authority as the iron grasj)
of the Venetian over his own exuberance of imagina-
tion ; the calm and solemn restraint with which, his
mind filled with thoughts of flowing leafage and fiery
life, he gives those thoughts expression for an instant,
and then withdraws within those massy bars and
levelled cusps of stone.*

And his power to do this depended altogether on
his retaining the forms of the shadows in his sight.
Far from carrying the eye to the ornaments, upon the
stone, he abandoned these latter one by one ; and
while his moulding received the most shapely order
and symmetry, closely correspondent with that of the
Rouen tracery, (compare Plates IV. and VIII.,) he
kept the cusps within them perfectly flat, decorated,
if at all, with a trefoil (Palazzo Foscari), or fillet
(Doge's Palace), just traceable and no more, so that
the quatrefoil, cut as sharply through them as if it
had been struck out by a stamp, told upon the eye,
with all its four black leaves, miles away. No knots
of flowerwork, no ornaments of any kind, were suf-
fered to interfere with the purity of its form : the
cusp is usually quite sharp; but s'.ightly truncated in
the Palazzo Foscari, and charged with a simple ball
in that of the Doge : and the glass of the window,

* See Appendix IV.

128 THE LAMP OF POWER.

where there was any, was, as we have seen, thrown
back behind the stonework, that no flashes of Hght
might interfere with its depth. Corrupted forms, Hke
those of the Casa d"Oro and Palazzo Pisani, and sev-
eral others, only serve to show the majesty of the
common design.

XXII. Such are the principal circumstances trace-
able in the treatment of the two kinds of masses of
light and darkness, in the hands of the earlier archi-
tects ; gradation in the one, flatness in the other, and
breadth in both, being the qualities sought and ex-
hibited by every possible expedient, up to the period
when, as we have before stated, the line was substi-
tuted for the mass, as the means of division of sur-
face. Enough has been said to illustrate this, as
regards tracery ; but a word or two is still necessary
respecting the mouldings.

Those of the earlier times were, in the plurality of
instances, composed of alternate square and cylin-
drical shafts, variously associated and proportioned.
Where concave cuttings occur, as in the beautiful west
doors of Bayeux, they are between cylindrical shafts,
which they throw out into broad light. The eye in
all cases dwells on broad surfaces, and commonly
upon few. In course of time, a low ridgy process is
seen emerginsj alon^; the outer edge of the cvlindrical
shaft, forming a line of light upon it and destroying
its gradation. Hardly traceable at first, (as on the
alternate rolls of the north door of Rouen,) it grows
and pushes out as gradually as a budding plant : sharp
at first on the edge; but, becoming prominent, it
receives a truncation, and becomes a definite fillet on

THE LAMP OF POWER. 129

the face of the roll. Not yet to be checked, it pushes
forward until the roll itself becomes subordinate to
it, and is finally lost in a slight swell upon its sides.
while the concavities have all the time been deepen-
ing and enlarging behind it, until, from a succession
of square or cylindrical masses, the whole moulding
has become a series of concavities edged by delicate
fillets, upon which, (sharp li7ies of light, observe,)
the eye exclusively rests. While this has been taking
place, a similar, though less total, change has affected
the flowerwork itself. In Plate I., fig. 2 {a), I have
given two from the transepts of Rouen. It will be
observed how absolutely the eye rests on the forms
of the leaves, and on the three berries in the angle,
being in light exactly what the trefoil is in darkness.
These mouldings nearly adhere to the stone ; and
are very slightly, though sharply, cut. In process of
time, the attention of the architect, instead of resting
on the leaves, went to the stalks. These latter were
elongated {b, from the south door of St. Lo ;) and to
exhibit them better, the deep concavity was cut
behind, so as to throw them out in lines of light.
The system was carried out into continuall}' increas-
ing intricacy, until, in the transepts of Beauvais, we
have brackets and flamboyant traceries, composed of
twigs without any leaves at all. This, however, is
a partial, though a sufficiently characteristic caprice,
the leaf being never generally banished, and in the
mouldings round those same doors, beautifully man-
aged, but itself rendered liny by bold marking of its
ribs and veins, and by turning up, and crisping
its edges, large intermediate spaces being always left

I30 THE LAMP OF POWER.

to be occupied by intertwining stems, {c, from Cau-
debec). The trefoil of light formed by berries or
acorns, though diminished in value, was never lost
up to the last period of living Gothic.

XXIII. It is interesting to follow into its many
ramifications, the influence of the corrupting princi-
ple ; but we have seen enough of it to enable us to
draw our practical conclusion — a conclusion a thou-
sand times felt and reiterated in the experience and
advice of every practised artist, but never often enough
repeated, never profoundly enough felt. Of com-
position and invention much has been written, it
seems to me vainly, for men cannot be taught to com-
pose or to invent ; of these, the highest elements of
Power in architecture, I do not, therefore, speak ; nor,
here, of that peculiar restraint in the imitation of
natural forms, which constitutes the dignity of even
the most luxuriant work of the great periods. Of this
restraint, I shall say a word or two in the next chap-
ter: pressing now only the conclusion, as practically
useful as it is certain, that the relative majesty of
buildings depends more on the weight and vigor
of their masses, than on any other attribute of their
design : mass of everything, of bulk, of light, of dark-
ness, of color, not mere sum of any of these, but
breadth of them ; not broken light, nor scattered
darkness, nor divided weight, but solid stone, broad
sunshine, starless shade. Time would fail me alto-
gether, if I attempted to follow out the range of the
principle; there is not a feature, however apparently
trifling, to which it cannot give power. The wooden
fillings of belfry lights necessary to protect their in-

THE LAMP OF POWER. 131

teriors from rain, are in England usually divided into
a number of neatly executed cross-bars, like those of
Venetian blinds, which, of course, become as con-
spicuous in their sharpness as they are uninteresting
in their precise carpentry, multiplying, moreover, the
horizontal lines which directly contradict those of the
architecture. Abroad, such necessities are met by
three or four downright penthouse roofs, reaching
each from within the window to the outside shafts of
its mouldings ; instead of the horrible row of ruled
lines, the space is thus divided into four or five grand
masses of shadow, with gray slopes of roof above,
bent or vielding into all kinds of delicious swells and
curves, and covered with warm tones of moss and
lichen. Very often the thing is more delightful than
the stone-v.ork itself, and all because it is broad,
dark, and simple. It matters not how clumsy, how
common, the means are, that get weight and shadow
— slooping roof, jutting porch, projecting balcony,
hollow niche, massy gargoyle, frowning parapet : get
but gloom and simplicity, and all good things will
follow in their place and time ; do but design with
the owl's eyes first, and you will gain the falcon's
afterwards.

XXIV. I am grieved to have to insist upon what
seems so simple : it looks trite and commonplace
when it is written, but pardon me this : for it is
anything but an accepted or understood principle in
practice, and the less excusably forgotten, because it
is, of all the great and true laws of art, the easiest to
obey. The executive facility of complying with its
demands cannot be too earnestlv, too franklv asserted.

132 THE LAMP OF POWER.

There are not five men in the kingdom who could
compose, not twenty who could cut, the foliage with
which the windows of Or San Alichele are adorned ;
but there is many a village clergyman who could
invent and dispose its black openings, and not a
village mason who could not cut them. Lay a few
clover or woodroof leaves on white paper, and a little
alteration in their positions will suggest figures which,
cut boldly through a slab of marble, would be worth
more window traceries than an architect could draw
in a summer's day. But I know not how it is, unless
that our English hearts have more oak than stone in
them, and have more filial sympathy with acorns than
Alps; but all that we do is small and mean, if not
worse — thin, and wasted, and unsubstantial. It is
not modern work only ; we have built like frogs and
mice since the thirteenth century (except only in our
castles). What a contrast between the pitiful little
pigeon-holes which stand for doors in the east front
of Salisbury, looking like the entrances to a beehive
or a wasp's nest, and the soaring arches and kingly
crowning of the gates of Abbeville, Rouen, and
Rheims, or the rock-hewn piers of Chartres, or the
dark and vaulted porches and writhed pillars of Ve-
rona ! Of domestic architecture what need is there
to speak? How small, how cramped, how poor, how
miserable in its petty neatness is our best ! how be-
neath the mark of attack, and the level of contempt,
that which is common with us ! What a strange
sense of formalized deformity, of shrivelled precision,
of starved accuracy, of minute misanthropy have we
as we leave even the rude streets of Picardy for the

THE LAMP OF POWER. 133

market towns of Kent ! Until that street architecture
of ours is bettered, until we give it some size and
boldness, until we give our windows recess, and our
walls thickness, I know not how we can blame our
architects for their feebleness in more important
work ; their eyes are inured to narrowness and slight-
ness : can we expect them at a word to conceive and
deal with breadth and solidity? They ought not to
live in our cities ; there is that in their miserable
walls which bricks up to death men's imaginations,
as surely as ever perished forsworn nun. An archi-
tect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send
hmi to our hills, and let him study there what nature
understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.
There was something in the old power of architecture,
which it had from the recluse more than from the
citizen. The buildings of which I have spoken with
chief praise, rose, indeed, out of the war of the piazza,
and above the fury of the populace : and Heaven for-
bid that for such cause we should ever have to lay a
larger stone, or rivet a firmer bar, in our England !
But we have other sources of power, in the imagery
of our iron coasts and azure hills ; of power more
pare, nor less serene, than that of the hermit spirit
which once lighted with white lines of cloisters the
glades of the Alpine pine, and raised into ordered
spires the wild rocks of the Norman sea ; which gave
to the temple gate the depth and darkness of Elijah's
Horeb cave ; and lifted, out of the populous city, gray
cliffs of lonely stone, into the midst of sailing birds
and silent air.

134 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

J

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

I. It was stated, in the outset of the preceding
chapter, that the value of architecture depended on
two distinct characters : the one, the impression it
receives from human power ; the other, tne image it
bears of the natural creation. I have endeavored to
show in what manner its majesty was attributable to a
sympathy with the effort and trouble of human life ^
(a sympathy as distinctly perceived in the gloom and
mystery of form, as it is in the melancholy tones of
sounds) . I desire now to trace that happier element
of its excellence, consisting in a noble rendering of
images of Beauty, derived chiefly from the external
appearances of organic nature.

•*= Yes, but that is not what is meant in the 17th Aphorism, by
'• Dominion " or Government : though, on the embossed cover of the
book, I partly implied it to be, in substituting " Auctoritas " for " Po-
testas." The intellectual " Domniion " of Architecture is treated of
partly in the coiirse of the present chapter, under the heads of Propor-
tion and Abstraction ; and partly in the fifth chapter, (of which see the
opening paragraph, Aphorism 23), — a confusion induced partly by
haste and mismanagement, and partly by excess of management, and
the difficulty I have before confessed, (though I forget where,) of keep-
ing my Seven Lamps from becoming Eight — or Nine — or even quite
a vulgar row of foot-lights.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. I35

It is irrelevant to our present purpose to enter into
any inquiry respecting the essential causes of impres-
sions of beauty. I have partly expressed my thoughts
on this matter in a previous work, and I hope to de-
velop them hereafter. But since all such inquiries
can only be founded on the ordinary understanding
of what is meant by the term Beauty, and since they
presume that the feeling of mankind on this subject
is universal and instinctive, I shall base my present
investigation on this assumption ; and only asserting
that to be beautiful which I believe will be granted
me to be so without dispute, I would endeavor shortly
to trace the manner in which this element of delight
is to be best engrafted upon architectural design,
what are the purest sources from which it is to be
derived, and what the errors to be avoided in its.
pursuit.

II. It will be thought that I have somewhat rashly
limited the elements of architectural beauty to imita-
tive forms. I do not mean to assert that every happy
arrangement of line is directly suggested by a natural
object ; but that all beautiful lines are adaptations of
those which are commonest in the external creation ;
that, in proportion to the richness of their associa-
tion, the resemblance to natural w^ork, as a type and
help, must be more closely attempted, and more
clearly seen ; and that beyond a certain point, and
that a very low one, man cannot advance in the in-
vention of beauty, without directly imitating natural
form. Thus, in the Doric temple the triglyph and
cornice are unimitative ; or imitative only of artificial
cuttings of wood. No one would call these members

136 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

beautiful. Their influence over us is in their severity
and simplicity. The fluting of the column, which I
doubt not was the Greek symbol of the bark of the
tree, was imitative in its origin, and feebly resembled
many canaliculated organic structures. Beauty is
instantly felt in it, but of a low order. The decora-
lion proper was sought in the true forms of organic
life, and those chiefly human. Again : the Doric
capital was unimitative ; but all the beauty it had was
dependent on the precision of its ovolo, a natural
curve of the most frequent occurrence. The Ionic
capital (to my mind, as an architectural invention,
exceedingly base,) nevertheless depended for all the
beauty that it had on its adoption of a spiral line,
perhaps the commonest of all that characterize the
inferior orders of animal organism and habitation.
Farther progress could not be made without a direct
imitation of the acanthus leaf.

Again : the Romanesque arch is beautiful as an ab-
stract line. Its type is always before us in that of the
apparent vault of heaven, and horizon of the earth.
The cylindrical pillar is always beautiful, for God has
so moulded the stem of every tree that is pleasant to
the eyes. The pointed arch is beautiful ; it is the
termination of every leaf that shakes in summer wind,
and its most fortunate associations are directly bor-
rowed from the trefoiled grass of the field, or from
the stars of its flowers. Farther than this, man's in-
vention could not reach without frank imitation. His
next step was to gather the flowers themselves, and
wreathe them in his capitals.

III. Now, I would insist especially on the fact,

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 137

of which I doubt not that farther illustrations will
occur to the mind of every reader,

•^ Aphorism ig.

that all most lovely forms and ,„ ,

•' All beauty is

thoughts are directly taken from founded on the
natural objects ; because I would laws of nmumi
fain be allowed to assume also the ^°''"^-
converse of this, namely, that forms which are //('/
taken from natural objects Jimst be ugly.'^' I know
this is a bold assumption ; but as I have not space
to reason out the points wherein essential beauty of
form consists, that being far too serious a work to be
undertaken in a by way, I have no other resource
than to use this accidental mark or test of beauty, of
whose truth the considerations which I hope here-
after to lay before the reader may assure him. I say
an accidental mark, since forms are not beautiful be-
cause they are copied from nature ; only it is out of
the power of man to conceive beauty without her aid.
I believe tlie reader will grant me this, even from the
examples above advanced ; the degree of confidence
with which it is granted must attach also to his accept-
ance of the conclusions which will follow from it ;
but if it be granted frankly, it will enable me to de-
termine a matter of very essential importance, namely,
what is or is not ornament. For there are many
forms of so-called decoration in architecture, habit-
ual, and received, therefore, with approval, or at all
events without any venture at expression of dislike,
which I have no hesitation in asserting to be not
ornament at all, but to be ugly things, the expense

3^ The Aphorism is wholly true : but the following application of it,
often trivial or false. See the subsequent notes.

138 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

of which ought in truth to be set down in the archi-
tect's contract, as " For Monstrification." I believe
that we regard these customary deformities with a
savage complacency, as an Indian does his flesh pat-
terns and paint (all nations being in certain degrees
and senses savage). I believe that I can prove them
to be monstrous, and I hope hereafter to do so con-
clusively ; but, meantime, I can allege in defence of
my persuasion nothing but this fact of their being un-
natural, to which the reader must attach such weight
as he thinks it deserves. There is, however, a pecul-
iar difficulty in using this proof; it requires the writer
to assume, very impertinently, that nothing is natural
but what he has seen or supposes to exist. I would
not do this ; for I suppose there is no conceivable
form or grouping of forms but in some part of the
universe an example of it may be found. But I
think I am justified in considering

Aphorism 20. '

^^ those forms to be most natural

That IS most

" natural " which which are most frequent; or,
is most easily rather, that on the shapes which
and ordinarily -^^ ^^^ everv-day world are famil-

seen.

iar to the eyes of men, God has
stamped those characters of beauty which He has
made it man's nature to love ; while in certain
exceptional forms He has shown that the adoption
of the others was not a matter of necessity, but
part of the adjusted harmony of creation. I be-
lieve that thus we may reason from Frequency to
Beauty, and vice versa ,• that, knowing a thing to
be frequent, we may assume it to be beautiful ;
and assume that which is most frequent to be most

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 139

beautiful : I mean, of course, visibly frequent ; for
the forms of things which are hidden in caverns of
the earth, or in the anatomy of animal frames, are
evidently not intended by their Maker to bear the
habitual gaze of man.-" And, again, by frequency I
mean that limited and isolated frequency which is
characteristic of all perfection ; not mere multitude ;
as a rose is a common flower, but yet there are not
so many roses on the tree as there are leaves. In
this respect Nature is sparing of her highest, and
lavish of her less, beauty ; but I call the flower as
frequent as the leaf, because, each in its allotted
quantity, where the one is, there will ordinarily be
the other.

IV. The first so-called ornament, then, which I
would attack is that Greek fret, now, I believe, usually
known by the Italian name Guilloche, which is ex-
actly a case in point. It so happens that in crystals
of bismuth, formed by the unagitated cooling of the
melted metal, there occurs a natural resemblance of
it almost perfect. But crystals of bismuth not only
are of unusual occurrence in every-day life, but their
form is, as far as I know, unique among minerals ;
and not only unique, but only attainable by an arti-
ficial process, the metal itself never being found pure.
I do not remember any other substance or arrange-
ment which presents a resemblance to this Greek
ornament ; and I think that I may trust my remem-
brance as including most of the arrangements which

" This is an excellent Aphorism ; and I am proud of having so
early seen the danger of anatomical study, so often dwelt on in my
later works.

I40 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

occur in the outward forms of common and familiar
things. On this ground, then, I allege that ornament
to be ugly ; or, in the literal sense of the word, mon-
strous ; diiferent from anything which it is the nature
of man to admire: and I think an uncarved fillet or
plinth infinitely preferable to one covered with this
vile concatenation of straight lines : ^^ unless indeed
it be employed as a foil to a true ornament, which it
may, perhaps, sometimes with advantage ; or exces-
sively small, as it occurs on coins, the harshness of
its arrangement being less perceived.

V. Often in association with this horrible design we
find, in Greek works, one which is as beautiful as
this is painful — that egg and dart moulding, whose
perfection, in its place and way, has never been sur-
passed. And why is this? Simply because the form
of which it is chiefly composed is one not only fa-
miliar to us in the soft iiousing of the bird's nest, but
happens to be that of nearly every pebble that rolls
and murmurs under the surf of the sea, on all its
endless shore. And that with a peculiar accuracy ;
for the mass which bears the light in this moulding is
not in good Greek work, as in the frieze of the Erech-
theum, merely of the shape of an egg. \\.\?, flattened
on the upper surface, with a delicacy and keen sense
of variety in the curve which it is impossible too
highly to praise, attaining exactly that flattened, im-
perfect oval, which, in nine cases out of ten, will be

^* All this is true ; but I had not enough observed when I wrote,
the use of the Greek fret in contrast to curved forms ; as especially
on vases, and in the borders of drapery itself. The use of it large, as
on the base of Sanmicheli's otherwise very noble design of the Casa
Grimani, is always a sign of failing instinct for beauty.

7^11 E LAMP OF BEAUTY. 141

the form of the pebble lifted at random from the
rolled beach. Leave out this flatness, and the mould-
ing is vulgar instantly. It is singular also that the
insertion of this rounded form in the hollowed recess
has a pahited type in the plumage of the Argus
pheasant, the eyes of whose feathers are so shaded
as exactly to represent an oval form placed in a
hollow.

VI. It will evidently follow, upon our application
of this test of natural resemblance, that we shall at
once conclude that all perfectly beautiful forms must
be composed of curves ; since there is hardly any
common natural form in which it is possible to dis-
cover a straight line. Nevertheless, Architecture,
having necessarily to deal with straight Imes essen-
tial to its purposes in many instances and to the
expression of its power in others, must frequently be
content with that measure of beauty which is consist-
ent with such primal forms ; and we may presume
that utmost measure of beauty to have been attained
when the arrangements of such lines are consistent
with the most frequent natural groupings of them we
can discover, although, to find right lines in nature
at all, we may be compelled to do violence to her
finished work, break through the sculptured and
colored surfaces of her crags, and examine the pro-
cesses of their crystallization.

VII. I have just convicted the Greek fret of ugli-
ness, because it has no precedent to allege for its
arrangement except an artificial form of a rare metal.
Let us bring into court an ornament of the Lombard
architects, Plate XII., fig. 7, as exclusively composed

142 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

of right lines as the other, only, observe, with the
noble element of shadow added. This ornament,
taken from the front of the Cathedral of Pisa, is
universal throughout the Lombard churches of Pisa,
Lucca, Pistoja, and Florence ; and it will be a grave
stain upon them if it cannot be defended. Its first
apology for itself, made in a hurry, sounds marvel-
lously like the Greek one, and highly dubious. It says
that its terminal contour is the very image of a care-
fully prepared artificial crystal of common salt. Salt
being, however, a substance considerably more fa-
miliar to us than bismuth, the chances are somewhat
in favor of the accused Lombard ornament already.
But it has more to say for itself, and more to the
purpose : namely, that its main outline is one not
only of natural crystallization, but among the very
first and commonest of crystalline forms, being the
primal condition of the occurrence of the oxides of
iron, copper, and tin, of the sulphurets of iron and
lead, of fluor spar, etc. ; and that those projecting
forms in its surface represent the conditions of struc-
ture which effect the change into another relative and
equally common crystalline form, the cube. This is
quite enough. We may rest assured it is as good
a combination of such simple right lines as can be
put together, and gracefully fitted for every place
in which such lines are necessary.

VIII. The next ornament whose cause I would try
is that of our Tudor work, the portcullis. Reticula-
tion is common enough in natural form, and very
beautiful ; but it is either of the most delicate, and
gauzy texture, or of variously sized meshes and un-

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 143

dulating lines. There is no family relation between
portcullis and cobwebs or beetles' wings ; something
like it, perhaps, may be found in some kinds of croco-
dile armor and on the backs of the Northern divers,
but always beautifully varied in size of mesh. There
is a dignity in the thing itself, if its size were exhibited,
and the shade given through its bars ; but even these
merits are taken away in the Tudor diminution of it,
set on a solid surface. It has not a single syllable, I
believe, to say in its defence. It is another monster,
absolutely and unmitigatedly frightful. All that carv-
ing on Henry the Seventh's Chapel simply deforms
the stones of it.-^^

In the same clause with the portcullis, we may
condemn all heraldic decoration, so far as beauty is
its object. Its pride and significance have their
proper place, fitly occurring in prominent parts of
the building, as over its gates ; and allowably in
places where its legendry may be plainly read, as in
painted windows, bosses of ceilings, etc. And some-
times, of course, the forms which it presents may be
beautiful, as of animals, or simple symbols like the
fleur-de-lis ; but, for the most part, heraldic simil-
itudes and arrangements are so professedly and
pointedly unnatural, that it would be difficult to in-
vent anything uglier ; and the use of them as a re-
peated decoration will utterly destroy both the power
and beauty of any building. Common sense and

'^ True, again ; but a very small matter in comparison with the
main faults of Tudor architecture : and the difference between the
rigid bars of the portcullis and the flexible filaments of Byzantine net-
work is not enough explained.

144 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

courtesy also forbid their repetition. It is right to tell
those who enter your doors that you are such a one,
and of such a rank ; but to tell it to them again and
again, wherever they turn, becomes soon imperti-
nence, and at last folly. Let, therefore, the entire
bearings occur in a few places, and these not con-
sidered as an ornament, but as an inscription ; and
for frequent appliance, let any single and fair symbol
be chosen out of them. Thus we may multiply as
much as we choose the French or the Florentine lily,
or the English rose ; but we must not multiply a
King's arms.*^

IX. It will also follow, from these considerations,
that if any one part of heraldic decoration be worse
than another, it is the motto ; since, of all things un-
like nature, the forms of letters are, perhaps, the
most so. Even graphic tellurium and felspar look,
at their clearest, anything but legible. All letters
are, therefore, to be considered as frightful things,
and to be endured only upon one occasion ; that is
to say, in places where the sense of the inscription is
of more importance than external ornament. In-
scriptions in churches, in rooms, and on pictures, are
often desirable, but they are not to be considered as
architectural or pictorial ornaments : they are, on the
contrary, obstinate offences to the eye, not to be
suffered except when their intellectual office intro-

*" This paragraph is wholly false, and curiously so, for I had seen
and loved good heraldic decoration in Italy before writing it ; but let
my detestation of our Houses of Parliament carry me too far, and
without noticing where. Enough is said in praise of heraldry in my
later books to atone for this piece of nonsense.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 145

duces them. Place them, therefore, where they will
be read, and there only ; and let them be plainly
written, and not turned upside down, nor wrong end
first. It is an ill sacrifice to beauty to make that
illegible whose only merit is in its sense. Write it as
you would speak it, simply ; and do not draw the eye
to it when it would fain rest elsewhere, nor recom-
mend your sentence by anything but a little openness
of place and architectural silence about it. Write
the Commandments on the church walls where they
may be plainly seen, but do not put a dash and a tail
to every letter ; and remember that you are an archi-
tect, not a writing master.*'

X. Inscriptions appear sometimes to be introduced
for the sake of the scroll on which they are writ-
ten ; and in late and modern painted glass, as well
as in architecture, these scrolls are flourished and
turned hither and thither as if they were ornamental.
Ribands occur frequently in arabesques, — in some
of a high order, too, — tying up flowers, or flitting
in and out among the fixed forms. Is there any-
thing like ribands in nature? It might be thought
that grass and seaweed afforded apologetic types.
They do not. There is a wide difference between
their structure and that of a riband. They have a
skeleton, an anatomy, a central rib, or fibre, or frame-
work of some kind or another, which has a begin-

«' AH this ninth paragraph is again extremely and extraordinarily,
wrong : and it is curious to me, in reviewing the progress of ray own mind
to see that while everybody thought me imaginative and enthusiastic,
my only fatal errors were in over-driving conditions of common sense !
These two paragraphs about heraldry and writing might have been
Mr. Cobden's mistakes — or Mr. John Bright's.

146 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

ning and an end, a root and head, and whose make
and strength affect every direction of their motion,
and every line of their form-yHThe loosest weed that
drifts and waves under the heaving of the sea, or
hangs heavily on the brown and slippery shore, has
a marked strength, structure, elasticity, gradation cf
substance ; its extremities are more finely fibred than
its centre, its centre than its root : every fork of its
ramification is measured and proportioned ; every
wave of its languid lines is lovely. It has its allotted
size, and place, and function; it is a specific creature.
What is there like this in a riband? It has no struc-
ture : it is a succession of cut threads all alike ; it
has no skeleton, no make, no form, no size, no will
of its own. You cut it and crush it into what you
will. It has no strength, no languor. It cannot
fall into a single graceful form. It cannot wave, in
the true sense, but only flutter : it cannot bend, in the
true sense, but only turn and be wrinkled. It is a
vile thing ; it spoils all that is near its wretched film
of an existence. Never use it. Let the flowers come
loose if they cannot keep together without being tied ;
leave the sentence unwritten if you cannot write it
on a tablet or book, or plain roll of paper. I know
what authority there is against me. I remember
the scrolls of Perugino's angels, and the ribands
of Raphael's arabesques and of Ghiberti's glorious
bronze flowers : no matter ; they are every one of
them vices and uglinesses. Raphael usually felt this,
and used an honest and rational tablet, as in the
Madonna di Fuligno. I do not say there is any type
of such tablets in nature, but all the diiTerence lies ia

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 147

the fact that the tablet is not considered as an orna-
ment, and the riband, or flying scroll, is. The tab-
let, as in Albert Durer's Adam and Eve, is introduced
for the sake of the writing, understood and allowed
as an ugly but necessary interruption. The scroll is
extended as an ornamental form, which it is not, nor
ever can be.*-

XI. But it will be said that all this want of organ-
ization and form might be affirmed of drapery also,
and that this latter is a noble subject of sculpture.
By no means. When was drapery a subject of sculp-
ture by itself, except in the form of a handkerchief
on urns in the seventeenth century and in some of
the baser scenic Italian decorations ? Drapery, as
such, is always ignoble ; it becomes a subject of inter-
est only by the colors it bears, and the impressions
which it receives from some foreign form or force.
All noble draperies, either in painting or sculpture
(color and texture being at present out of our con-
sideration), have, so far as they are anything more
than necessities, one of two great functions : they
are the exponents of motion and of gravitation.
They are the most valuable means of expressing past
as well as present motion in the figure, and they are
almost the only means of indicating to the eye the
lorce of gravity which resists such motion. The
Greeks used drapery in sculpture for the most part as
an ugly necessity, but availed themselves of it gladly

^2 I had never, at this period, seen any of Sandro Botticelli's
scroll work : but even in him, its use is part of the affectations of his
day, — affectation itself becommg lovely in him, without justifying it
in his neighbors.

148 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

in all representation of action, exaggerating the ar-
rangements of it which express lightness in the mate-
rial, and follow gesture in the person. The Christian
Sculptors, caring little for the body, or disliking
it, and depending exclusively on the countenance,
received drapery at first contentedly as a veil, but
soon perceived a capacity of expression in it which
the Greek had not seen or had despised. The
principal element of this expression was the entire
removal of agitation from what was so pre-eminently
capable of being agitated. It fell from their human
forms plumb down, sweeping the ground heavily,
and concealing the feet ; while the Greek drapery
was often blown away from the thigh. The thick
and coarse stuffs of the monkish dresses, so absolutely
opposed to the thin and gauzy web of antique mate-
rial, suggested simplicity of division as well as weight
of fall. There was no crushing nor subdividing them.
And thus the drapery gradually came to represent
the spirit of repose as it before had of motion, repose
saintly and severe. The wind had no power upon
the garment, as the passion none upon the soul ;
and the motion of the figure only bent into a softer
line the stillness of the falling veil, followed by it
like a slow cloud by drooping rain : only in links of
lighter undulation it followed the dances of the angels.
Thus treated, drapery is indeed noble ; but it is
as an exponent of other and higher things. As that
of gravitation, it has especial majesty, being literally
the only means we have of fully representing this
mysterious natural force of earth (for falling water is
less passive and less defined in its lines). So, again.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 149

in sails it is beautiful because it receives the forms
of solid curved surface, and expresses the force of
another invisible element. But drapery trusted to
its own merits, and given for its own sake, — drapery
like that of Carlo Dolci and the Caraccis, — is always
base.

XII. Closely connected with the abuse of scrolls
and bands, is that of garlands and festoons of flowers
as an architectural decoration, for unnatural arrange-
ments are just as ugly as unnatural forms ; and archi-
tecture, in borrowing the objects of Nature, is bound
to place them, as far as may be in her power, in such
associations as may befit and express their origin.
She is not to imitate directly the natural arrange-
ment ; she is not to carve irregular stems of ivy up
her columns to account for the leaves at the top, but
she is nevertheless to place her most exuberant vege-
table ornament just where Nature would have placed
it, and to give some indication of that radical and
connected structure which Nature would have given
it. Thus the Corinthian capital is beautiful, because
it expands under the abacus just as Nature would
have expanded it ; and because it looks as if the
leaves had one root, though that root is unseen. And
the flamboyant leaf mouldings are beautiful, because
they nestle and run up the hollows, and fill the
angles, and clasp the shafts which natural leaves
would have delighted to fill and to clasp. They are
no mere cast of natural leaves: they are counted,
orderly, and architectural : but they are naturally,
and therefore beautifully, placed.

XIII. Now I do not mean to sav that Nature never

r5o THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

uses festoons : she loves them, and uses them lavishly ;
and though she does so only in those places of exces-
sive luxuriance wherein it seems to me that architect-
ural types should seldom be sought, yet a falling
tendril or pendent bough might, if managed with
freedom and grace, be well introduced into luxuriant
decoration (or if not, it is not their want of beauty,
but of architectural fitness, which incapacitates them
for such uses) . But what resemblance to such exam-
ple can we trace in a mass of all manner of fruit and
flowers, tied heavily into a long bunch, thickest in
the middle, and pinned up by both ends against a
dead wall? For it is strange that the wildest and
most fanciful of the builders of truly luxuriant archi-
tecture never ventured, so far as I know, even a
pendent tendril ; while the severest masters of the
revived Greek permitted this extraordinary piece of
luscious ugliness to be fastened in the middle of their
blank surfaces. So surely as this arrangement is
adopted, the whole value of the flowerwork is lost.
Who among the crowds that gaze upon the building
ever pause to admire the flowerwork of St. Paul's?
It is as careful and as rich as it can be, yet it adds
no delightfulness to the edifice. It is no part of it.
!t is an ugly excrescence. We always conceive the
building without it, and should be happier if our
conception were not disturbed by its presence. It
makes the rest of the architecture look poverty-
stricken, instead of sublime ; and yet it is never
enjoyed itself. Had it been put, where it ought, into
the capitals, it would have been beheld with never-
ceasing delight. I do not mean that it could have

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 151

been so in the present building, for such kind of
architecture has no business with rich ornament in
any place ; but that if those groups of iiowers had
been put into natural places in an edifice of another
style, their value would have been felt as vividly as
now their uselessness. What applies to festoons is
still more sternly true of garlands. A garland is
meant to be seen upon a head. There it is beautiful,
because we suppose it newly gathered and joyfully
worn. But it is not meant to be hung upon a wall.
If you want a circular ornament, put a flat circle of
colored marble, as in the Casa Dario and other such
palaces at Venice; or put a star, or a medallion, or
if you want a ring, put a solid one, but do not carve
the images of garlands, looking as if they had been
used in the last procession, and been hung up to dry
and serve next time withered. Why not also carve
pegs, and hats upon them?

XIV. One of the worst enemies of modern Gothic
architecture, though seemingly an unimportant fea-
ture, is an excrescence, as oifensive by its poverty as
the garland by its profusion, the dripstone in the
shape of the handle of a chest of drawers, which is
used over the square-headed windows of what we
call Elizabethan buildings. In the last chapter, it
will be remembered that the square form was shown
to be that of pre-eminent Power, and to be properly
adapted and limited to the exhibition of space or sur-
face. Hence, when the window is to be an exponent
of power, as for instance in those by M. Angelo in
the lower story of the Palazzo Ricardi at Florence,
the square head is the most noble form they can

152 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

assume ; but then either their space must be un-
broken, and their associated mouldings the most
severe, or else the square must be used as a final out-
line, and is chiefly to be associated with forms of
tracery, in which the relative form of power, the cir-
cle, is predominant, as in Venetian, and Florentine,
and Pisan Gothic. But if you break upon your ter-
minal square, or if you cut its lines off at the top and
turn them outwards, you have lost its unity and
space. It is an including form no longer, but an
added, isolated line, and the ugliest possible. Look
abroad into the landscape, and see if you can dis-
cover any one so bent and fragmentary as that of
this strange windlass-looking dripstone. You can-
not. It is a monster. It unites every element of
ugliness, its line is harshly broken in itself, and
unconnected with every other ; it has no harmony
either with structure or decoration, it has no archi-
tectural support, it looks glued to the wall, and the
only pleasant property it has, is the appearance of
some likelihood of its dropping off.

I might proceed, but the task is a weary one, and
I think I have named those false forms of decoration
which are most dangerous in our modern architect-
ure as being legal and accepted. The barbarisms of
individual fancy are as countless as they are con-
temptible ; they neither admit attack nor are worth
it ; but these above named are countenanced, some
by the practice of antiquity, all by high authority :
they have depressed the proudest, and contaminated
the purest schools, and are so established in recent
practice that I write rather for the barren satisfac-

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 153

tion of bearing witness against them, than with hope
of inducing any serious convictions to their prejudice.

XV. Thus far of what is 7iot ornament. What
ornament is, will without difficulty be determined by
the application of the same test. It must consist of
such studious arrangements of form as are imitative
or suggestive of these which are commonest among
natural existences, that being of course the noblest
ornament which represents the highest orders of ex-
istence. Imitated flowers are nobler than imitated
stones ; imitated animals, than flowers ; imitated
human form, of all animal forms the noblest. But all
are combined in the richest ornamental work ; and
the rock, the fountain, the flowing river with its peb-
bled bed, the sea, the clouds of Heaven, the herb of
the field, the fruit-tree bearing fruit, the creeping
thing, the bird, the beast, the man, and the angel,
mingle their fair forms on the bronze of Ghiberti.

Everything being then ornamental that is imita-
tive, I would ask the readers attention to a few gen-
eral considerations, all that can here be ofl'ered
relating to so vast a subject ; which, for convenience'
sake, may be classed under the three heads of in-
quiry : — What is the right place for architectural
ornament ? What is the peculiar treatment of orna-
ment which renders it architectural ? and what is the
right use of color as associated with architectural
imitative form ?

XVI. What is the place for ornament ? Consider
first that the characters of natural objects which the
architect can represent are few and abstract. The
greater part of those delights by which Nature recom-

154 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

mends herself to man at all times, cannot be con-
veyed by him into his imitative work. He cannot
make his grass green and cool and good to rest upon,
which in nature is its chief use to man ; nor can he
make his flowers tender and full of color and of
scent, which in nature are their chief powers of giv-
ing joy. Those qualities which alone he 'can secure
are certain severe characters of form, such as men
only see in nature on deliberate examination, and by
the full and set appliance of sight and thought : a
man must lie down on the bank of grass on his
breast and set himself to watch and penetrate the
intertwining of it, before he finds that which is good
to be gathered by the architect. So then while Na-
ture is at all times pleasant to us, and while the sight
and sense of her work may mingle happily with all
our thoughts, and labors, and times of existence,
that image of her which the architect carries away
represents what we can only perceive in her by direct
intellectual exertion, and demands from us, wherever
it appears, an intellectual -exertion of a similar kind
in order to understand it and feel it. It is the writ-
ten or sealed impression of a thing sought out, it is
the shaped result of inquiry and bodily expression of
thought.

XVII. Now let us consider for an instant what
would be the effect of continually repeating an ex-
pression of a beautiful thought to any other of the
senses at times when the mind could not address
that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that
in time of serious occupation, of stern business,
a companion should repeat in our ears continually

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. ISS

some favorite passage of poetry, over and over again
all day long. We should not only soon be utterly
sick and weary of the sound of it, but that sound
vifould at the end of the day have so sunk into the
habit of the ear that the entire meaning of the pas-
sage would be dead to us, and it would ever thence-
forward require some effort to fix and recover it. The
music of it would not meanwhile have aided the busi-
ness in hand, while its own delightfulness would
thenceforward be in a measure destroyed. It is the
same with every other form of definite thought. If
you violently present its expression to the senses, at
times when the mind is otherwise engaged, that ex-
pression will be ineffective at the time, and will have
its sharpness and clearness destroyed for ever. Much
more if you present it to the mind at times when it is
painfully affected or disturbed, or if you associate the
expression of pleasant thought with incongruous cir-
cumstances, you will affect that expression thencefor-
ward with a painful color for ever.

XVIII. Apply this to expressions of thought re-
ceived by the eye. Remember that the eye is at
your mercy more than the ear. " The eye, it cannot
choose but see." Its nerve is not so easily numbed
as that of the ear, and it is often busied in tracing
and watching forms when the ear is at rest. Now if
you present lovely forms to it when it cannot call the
mind to help it in its work, and among objects of
vulgar use and unhappy position, you will neither
please the eye nor elevate the vulgar object. But
you will fill and weary the eye with the beautiful
form, and vou will infect that form itself with the

156 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

vulgarity of the thing to which you have violeni-ly
attached it. It will never be of much use to you any
more ; you have killed, or defiled it ; its freshness
and purity are gone. You will have to pass it
through the fire of much thought before you will
cleanse it, and v/arm it with much love before it will
revive.

XIX. Hence then a general law, of singular impor-
tance in the present day, a law of simple common
sense, — not to decorate things belonging to pur-
poses of active and occupied life. Wherever you
can rest, there decorate ; where rest is forbidden, so
is beauty. You must not mix ornament with busi-
ness, any more than you may mix play. Work first,
and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not
use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
Do not thrash with sculptured flails : ''" nor put bas-
reliefs on millstones. What I it will be asked, are
we in the habit of doing so ? Even so ; always and
everywhere. The most familiar position of Greek
moukhngs is in these days on shop fronts. There is
not a tradesman's sign nor shelf nor counter in all
the streets of all our cities, which has not upon it
ornaments which were invented to adorn temples and
beautify kings' palaces. There is not the smallest ad-
i-antage in them where they are. Absolutely value-
rs " Nor fight with jewelled swords " should have been added.
The principle is partial and doubtful, however. One of the most
beautiful bits of ironwork I ever saw was an apothecary's pestle and
mortar (of the fourteenth century), at Messina : and a day may come
when we shall wisely decorate the stilt of the plough. The error,
however, — observe, — is again on the side of common sense! See
41st and 44th notes.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 157

less — utterly without the power of giving pleasure,
they only satiate the eye, and vulgarize their own
forms. Many of these are in themselves thoroughly
good copies of fine things, which things themselves
we shall never, in consequence, enjoy any more.
Many a pretty beading and graceful bracket there is
in wood or stucco above our grocers' and cheese-
mongers' and hosiers' shops : how is it that the
tradesmen cannot understand that custom is to be
had only by selling good tea and cheese and cloth,
and that people come to them for their honesty, and
their readiness, and their right wares, and not be-
cause they have Greek cornices over their windows,
or their names in large gilt letters on their house
fronts? How pleasurable it would be to have the
power of going through the streets of London, pulling
down those brackets and friezes and large names, re-
storing to the tradesmen the capital they had spent in
architecture, and putting them on honest and equal
terms, each with his name in black letters over his
door, not shouted down the street from the upper
stories, and each with a plain wooden shop casement,
with small panes in it that people would not think of
breaking in order to be sent to prison ! How much
better for them would it be — how much happier,
how much Vviser, to put their trust upon their own
truth and industry, and not on the idiocy of their
customers. It is curious, and it says little for our
national probity on the one hand, or prudence on the
other, to see the whole system of our street decora-
tion based on the idea that people must be baited to
a shop as moths are to a candle.

158 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

XX. But it will be said that much of the best
wooden decoration of the Middle Ages was in shop
fronts. No ; it was in house fronts, of which the shop
was a part, and received its natural and consistent
portion of the ornament. In those days men lived,
and intended to live, by their shops, and over them,
all their days. They were contented with them and
happy in them : they were their palaces and castles.
They gave them therefore such decoration as made
themselves happy in their own habitation, and they
gave it for their ov.n sake. The upper stories were
always the richest, and the shop was decorated chiefly
about the door, which belonged to the house more
than to it. And when our tradesmen settle to their
shops in the same way, and form no plans respecting
future villa architecture, let their whole houses be
decorated, and their shops too, but with a national
and domestic decoration. (I shall speak more of
this point in the sixth chapter.) However, our cities
are for the most part too large to admit of contented
dwelling in them throughout life : and I do not say
there is harm in our present system of separating the
shop from the dwelling-house • only where they are
so separated, let us remember that the only reason
for shop decoration is removed, and see that the dec-
oration be removed also.

XXI. Another of the strange and evil tendencies of
the present day is to the decoration of the railroad
station.** Now, if there be any place in the world in

** Common sense ftill ! — and, this time, indisputable. Well had
it beer>| fnr -npiiy a cDmpary and many a traveller, had this page of
the " Seven ^y.ays ' ocea taken for a railway signal.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 159

which people are deprived of that portion of temper
and discretion which is necessary to the contempla-
tion of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of
discomfort, and the only charity that the builder can
extend to us is to show us, plainly as may be, how
soonest to escape from it. The whole system of rail-
road travelling is addressed to people who, being in
a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable.
No one v.ould travel in that manner who could help
It — who had time to go leisurely over hills and be-
tween hedges, instead of through tunnels and between
banks : at least those who would, have no sense of
beauty so acute as that we need consult it at the
station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter
of earnest business, to be got through as soon as
possible. It transmutes a man from a traveller into
a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the
nobler characteristics of his humanity for the sake of
a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him
to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind.
Carry him safely, dismiss him soon : he will thank
you for nothing else. All attempts to please him in
any other way are mere mockery, and insults to the
things by which you endeavor to do so. There never
was more flagrant nor impertinent folly than the
smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned
with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the
way, take them through the ugliest country you can
find, confess them the miserable things they are, and
spend nothing upon them but for safety and speed.
Give large salaries to efficient servants, large prices
to good manufacturers, large wages to able workmen ;

l6o THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

let the iron be tough, and the brickwork soHd, and
the carriages strong. The time is perhaps not dis-
tant when these first necessities may not be easily
met : and to increase expense in any other direction
is madness. Better bury gold in the embankments,
than put it in ornaments on the stations. Will a
single traveller be willing to pay an increased fare on
the South Western, because the columns of the ter-
minfts are covered with patterns from Nineveh ? — he
will only care less for the Ninevite ivories in the
British Museum : or on the North Western, because
there are old English-looking spandrels to the roof
of the station at Crewe ? — he will only have less
pleasure in their prototypes at Crewe House. Rail-
road architecture has, or would have, a dignity of its
own if it were only left to its work. You would not
put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.

XXII. It is not however only in these marked sit-
uations that the abuse of which I speak takes place.
There is hardly, at present, an application of orna-
mental work, which is not in some sort liable to
blame of the same kind. We have a bad habit of
trying to disguise disagreeable necessities by some
form of sudden decoration, which is, in all other
places, associated with such necessities. I will name
only one instance, that to which I have alluded be-
fore — the roses which conceal the ventilators in the
flat roofs of our chapels. Many of those roses are of
very beautiful design, borrowed from fine works : all
their grace and finish are invisible when they are so
placed, but their general form is afterwards associated
with the ugly buildings in which they constantly

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. i6i

occur ; and all the beautiful roses of the early French
and English Gothic, especially such elaborate ones
as those of the triforium of Coutances, are in conse-
quence deprived of their pleasurable influence : and
this without our having accomplished the smallest
good by the use we have made of the dishonored
form. Not a single person in the congregation ever
receives one ray of pleasure from those roof roses ;
they are regarded with mere indifference, or lost in
the general impression of harsh emptiness.

XXIII. Must not beauty, then, it will be asked, be
sought for in the forms which we associate with our
every-day life? Yes, if you do it consistently, and in
places where it can be calmly seen ; but not if you
use the beautiful form only as a mask and covering of
the proper conditions and uses of things, nor if you
thrust it into the places set apart for toil. Put it in
the drawing-room, not into the workshop ; put it upon
domestic furniture, not upon tools of handicraft. All
men have sense of what is right in this matter, if they
would only use and apply that sense ; every man
knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure, if
he would only ask for it when it does so, and not
allow it to be forced upon him when he does not
want it. Ask any one of the passengers over London
Bridge at this instant whether he cares about the
forms of the bronze leaves on its lamps, and he will
tell you. No. Modify these forms of leaves to a less
scale, and put them on his milk-jug at breakfast, and
ask him whether he likes them, and he will tell you.
Yes. People have no need of teaching if they could
only think and speak truth, and ask for what they like

1 62 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

and want, and for nothing else : nor can a right dis-
position of beauty be ever arrived at except by this
common sense, and allowance for the circumstances
of the time and place. It does not follow, because
bronze leafage is in bad taste on the lamps of London
Bridge, that it would be so on those of the Ponte deila
Trinita ; nor, because it would be a folly to decorate
the house fronts of Gracechurch Street, that it would
be equally so to adorn those of some quiet provincial
town. The question of greatest external or internal
decoration depends entirely on the conditions of prob-
able repose. It was a wise feeling which made the
streets of Venice so rich in external ornament, for
there is no couch of rest like the gondola. So, again,
there is no subject of street ornament so wisely
chosen as the fountain, where it is a fountain of use ;
for it is just there that perhaps the happiest pause
takes place in the labor of the day, when the pitcher
is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the
bearer is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the
forehead, and the uprightness of the form decUned
against the marble ledge, and the sound of the kind
word or light laugh mixes with the trickle of the fall-
ing water, heard shriller and shriller as the pitcher
fills. What pause is so sweet as that — so full of the
depth of ancient days, so softened with the calm of
pastoral solitude ?

XXIV. II. Thus far, then, of the place for beauty.
We were next to inquire into the characters which
fitted it peculiarly for architectural appliance, and
into the principles of choice and of arrangement •*''

45 Choice, and arrangement; — the " dominion " of the 17th Aphor-
ism. See above, note 35.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 163

which best regulate the imitation of natural forms in
which it consists. The full answering of these ques-
tions would be a treatise on the art of design : I in-
tend only to say a few words respecting the two
conditions of that art which are essentially architect-
ural, — Proportion and Abstraction. Neither of these
qualities is necessary, to the same extent, in other
fields of design. The sense of proportion is, by the
landscape painter, frequently sacrificed to character
and accident ; the power of abstraction to that of
complete realization. The flowers of his foreground
must often be unmeasured in their quantity, loose in
their arrangement : what is calculated, either in quan-
tity or disposition, must be artfully concealed. That
calculation is by the architect to be prominently ex-
hibited. So the abstraction of few characteristics
out of many, is shown only in the painter's sketch ;
in his finished work it is concealed or lost i.i com-
pletion. Architecture, on the contrary, delights in
Abstraction and fears to complete her forms. Pro-
portion and Abstraction, then, are the two especial
marks of architectural design as distinguished from
all other. Sculpture must have them in inferior de-
grees ; leaning:, on the one hand, to an architectural
manner, when it is usually greatest (becoming, in-
deed, a part of Architecture), and, on the other, to a
pictorial manner, when it is apt to lose its dignity,
and sink into mere ingenious carving.

XXV. Now, of Proportion so much has been written,
that I believe the only facts which are of practical use
nave been overwhelmed and kept out of sight by vain
accumulations of particular instances and estimates.

164 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

Proportions are as infinite (and that in all kinds ol
things, as severally in colors, lines, shades, lights,
and forms) as possible airs in music: and it is just
as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how
to proportion truly and well by calculating for him
the proportions of fine works, as it would be to teach
him to compose melodies by calculating the mathe-
matical relations of the notes in Ikethoven's " Ade-
laide " or Mozart's " Requiem." The man who has
eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions,
and cannot help it ; but he can no more tell iis how
to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write
a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to
plan a romance. But there are one or two general
laws which can be told : they are of no use, indeed,
except as preventives of gross mistakes, but they are
so far worth telling and remembering ; and the more
so because, in the discussion of the subtle laws of
Proportion (which will never be either numbered or
known), architects are perpetually forgetting and
transgressing the very simplest of its necessities.

XXVI. Of which the first is, that wherever Pro-
portion exists at all, one member of the composition
must be either larger than, or in some way supreme
over, the rest. There is no proportion between
equal things. They can have symmetry only, and
symmetry without proportion is not composition. It
is necessary to perfect beauty, but it is the least ne-
cessary of its elements, nor of course is there any
difiiculty in obtaining it. Any succession of equal
things is agreeable ; but to compose is to arrange
unequal things, and the first thing to be done in

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 165

beginning a composition is to determine which is to be
the principal thing. I beheve that all that has been
written and taught about proportion, put together, is
not to the architect worth the single rule, well en-
forced, " Have one large thing and several smaller
things, or one principal thing and several inferior
things, and bind them well together." Sometimes
there may be a regular gradation, as between the
heights of stories in good designs for houses ; some-
times a monarch with a lowly train, as in the spire with
its pinnacles : the varieties of arrangement are in-
finite, but the law is universal — have one thing above
the rest, either by size, or office, or interests. Don't
put the pinnacles without the spire. What a host of
ugly church towers have we in England, with pinna-
cles at the corners, and none in the middle ! How
many buildings like King's College Chapel at Cam-
bridge, looking like tables upside down, with their
four legs in the air ! What ! it will be said, have not
beasts four legs? Yes, but legs of different shapes,
and with a head between them. So they have a pair
of ears : and perhaps a pair of horns : but not at both
ends. Knock down a couple of pinnacles at either
end in King's College Chapel, and you will have a
kind of proportion instantly. So in a cathedral you
may have one tower in the centre, and two at the
west end ; or two at the west end only, though
a worse arrangement : but you must not have
two at the west and two at the east end, unless
you have some central member to connect them ;
and even then, buildings are generally bad which
have large balancing features at the extremities,

1 66 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

and small connecting ones in the centre, because
it is not easy then to make the centre dominant.
The bird or moth may indeed have wide wings, be-
cause the size of the wing does not give supremacy to
the wing. The head and life are the mighty things,
and the plumes, however wide, are subordinate. In
fine west fronts with a pediment and two towers, the
centre is always the principal mass, both in bulk and
interest (as having the main gateway), and the
towers are subordinated to it, as an animal's horns are
to its head. The moment the towers rise so high
as to overpower the body and centre, and become
themselves the principal masses, they will destroy
the proportion, unless they are made unequal, and
one of them the leading feature of the cathedral, as
at Antwerp and Strasburg. But the purer method is
to keep them down in due relation to the centre, and
to throw up the pediment into a steep connecting
mass, drawing the eye to it by rich tracery. This is
nobly done in St. Wulfran of Abbeville, and attempted
partly at Rouen, though that west front is made up of
so many unfinished and supervening designs that it is
impossible to guess the real intention of any one of
its builders.

XXVII. This rule of supremacy applies to the
smallest as well as to leading features : it is interest-
ingly seen in the arrangement of all good mouldings.
1 have given one, on the opposite page, from Rouen
Cathedral : that of the tracery before distinguished
as a type of the noblest manner of Northern Gothic
(Chap. II. § XXII.). It is a tracery of three orders,
of which the first is divided into a leaf moulding,

Plate X.

Traceries and Mouldings from Rouen
and Salisbury.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 167

fig. 4 and b in the section, and a plain roll, also seen
in fig. 4, c in the section ; these two divisions surround
the entire window or panelling, and are carried by
two-face shafts of corresponding sections. The sec-
ond and third orders are plain rolls following ths
line of the tracery ; four divisions of moulding in all :
of these four, the leaf moulding is, as seen in the
sections, much the largest ; next to it the outer roll ;
then, by an exquisite alternation, the innermost roll
(^), in order that it may not be lost in the recess,
and the intermediate (^), the smallest. Each roll
has its own shaft and capital ; and the two smaller,
which in effect upon the eye, owing to the retirement
of the innermost, are nearly equal, having smaller
capitals than the two larger, Hfted a little to bring
them to the same level. The wall in the trefoiled
lights is curved, as from e to/"in the section; but in
the quatrefoil it is flat, only thrown back to the full
depths of the recess below so as to get a sharp
shadow instead of a soft one, the mouldings falling
back to it in nearly a vertical curve behind the roll e.
This could not, however, be managed with the
simpler mouldings of the smaller quatrefoil above,
whose half section is given from g to g.^^ ; but the
architect was evidently fretted by the heavy look of
its circular foils as opposed to the light spring of the
arches below ; so he threw its cusps obhquely clear
from the wall, as seen in fig. 2, attached to it where
they meet the circle, but with their finials pushed out
from their natural level {Ji, in the section) to that of
the first order {gi), and supported by stone props
behind, as seen in the profile, fig. 2, which I got from

168 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

the correspondent panel on the buttress face (fig. I
being on its side), and of which the lower cusps,
being broken away, show the remnant of one of their
props projecting from the wall. The oblique curve
thus obtained in the profile is of singular grace.
Take it all in all, I have never met with a more ex-
quisite piece of varied, yet severe, proportion and
general arrangement (though all of the windows of
the period are fine, and especially delightful in the
subordinate proportioning of the smaller capitals to
the smaller shafts). The only fault it has is the
inevitable misarrangement of the central shafts ; for
the enlargement of the inner roll, though beautiful
in the group of four divisions at the side, causes,
in the triple central shaft, the very awkwardness of
heavy lateral members which has just been in most
instances condemned. In the windows of the choir,
and in most of the period, this difficulty is avoided
by making the fourth order a fillet which only follows
the foliation, while the three outermost are nearly
in arithmetical progression of size, and the central
triple shaft has of course the largest roll in front.
The moulding of the Palazzo Foscari (Plate VIII.
and Plate IV., fig. 8) is, for so simple a group, the
grandest in effect I have ever seen ; it is composed
of a large roll with two subordinates.

XXVIII. It is of, course impossible to enter into
details of instances belonging to so intricate a division
of our subject, in the compass of a general essay. I
can but rapidly name the chief conditions of right.
Another of these is the connection of Symmetry with
horizontal, and of Proportion with vertical, division.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 1 69

Evidently there is in symmetry a sense not merely of
equality, but of balance ; now a thing cannot be
balanced by another on thetop of it, though it may
by one at the side of it. Hence, while it is not only
allowable, but often necessary, to divide buildings,
or parts of them, horizontally into halves, thirds, or
other equal parts, all vertical divisions of this kind are
utterly wrong ; worst into half, next worst in the
regular numbers which more betray the equality. I
should have thought this almost the first principle of
proportion which a young architect was taught : and
yet I remember an important building, recently erected
in England, in which the columns are cut in half by
the projecting architraves of the central windows ;
and it is quite usual to see the spires of modern
Gothic churches divided by a band of ornament half
way up. In all fine spires there are two bands and
three parts, as at Salisbury. The ornamented por-
tion of the tower is there cut in half, and allowably,
because the spire forms the third mass to which the
other two are subordinate : two stories are also equal
in Giotto's campanile, but dominant over smaller
divisions below, and subordinated to the noble third
above. Even this arrangement is difficult to treat ;
and it is usually safer to increase or diminish the
height of the divisions regularly as they rise, as in
the Doge's Palace, whose three divisions are in a bold
geometrical progression ; or, in towers, to get an
alternate proportion between the body, the belfry,
and the crown, as in the campanile of St. Mark's.
But, at all events, get rid of equality ; leave that to
children and their card houses: the laws of nature

170 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

and the reason of man are alike against it, in arts, as
in politics. There is but one thoroughly ugly tower
in Italy that I know of, and that is so because it is
divided into vertical equal parts : — the tower of Pisa.
XXIX. One more principle of Proportion I have
to name, equally simple, equally neglected. Propor-
tion is between three terms at least. Hence, as the
pinnacles are not enough without the spire, so neither
the spire without the pinnacles. All men feel this,
and usually express their feeling by saying that the
pinnacles conceal the junction of the spire and tower.
This is one reason ; but a more influential one is,
that the pinnacles furnish the third term to the spire
and tower. So that it is not enough, in order to
secure proportion, to divide a building unequally ;
it must be divided into at least three parts ; it may
be into more (and in details with advantage), but on
a large scale I find three is about the best number of
parts in elevation, and five in horizontal extent, with
freedom of increase to five in the one case and seven
in the other ; but not to more without confusion (in
architecture, that is to say ; for in organic structure
the numbers cannot be limited). I purpose, in the
course of works which are in preparation, to give
copious illustrations of this subject, but I will take
at present only one instance of vertical proportion,
from the flower stem of the common water plantain,
Alisma Plantago. Fig. 5, Plate XII., is a reduced
profile of one side of a plant gathered at random ; it
is seen to have five masts, of which, however, the
uppermost is a mere shoot, and we can consider only
their relations up to the fourth. Their lengths are

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 17 1

measured on the line A B, which is the actual length
of the lowest mast a b, A C = b c, A T) = c d, and
AE = </^. If the reader will take the trouble to
measure these lengths and compare them he will find
that, within half a line, the uppermost, A E = f of
A D, A D = I of A C, and A C = i of A B ; a
most subtle diminishing proportion. From each
of the joints spring three major and three minor
branches, each between each ; but the major branches,
at any joint, are placed over the minor branches at
the joint below, by the curious arrangement of the
joint itself — the stem is bluntly triangular ; fig. 6
shows the section of any joint. The outer darkened
triangle is the section of the lower stem ; the inner,
left light, of the upper stem ; and the three main
branches spring from the ledges left by the recession.
Thus the stems diminish in diameter just as they
diminish in height. The main branches (falsely
placed in the profile over each other to show their
relations) have respectively seven, six, five, four, and
three arm-bones, like the masts of the stem ; these
divisions being proportioned in the same subtle man-
ner. From the joints of these, it seems to be the
plan of the plant that three major and three minor
branches should again spring, bearing the flowers :
but in these infinitely complicated members, vege-
tative nature admits much variety ; in the plant from
which these measures were taken, the full comple-
ment appeared only at one of the secondary joints.

The leaf of this plant has five ribs on each side, as
its flower generally five masts, arranged with the most
exquisite grace of curve ; but of lateral proportion I

17^ THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

shall rather take illustrations from architecture : the
reader will find several in the accounts of the Duomo
of Pisa and St. Mark's at Venice, in Chap. V. §§
XIV.-XV^I. I give these arrangements merely as
illustrations, not as precedents ; all beautiful pro-
portions are unique, they are not general formulae.

XXX. The other condition of architectural treat-
ment which we proposed to notice was the abstraction
of imitated form. But there is a peculiar difficulty in
touching within these narrow limits on such a subject
as this, because the abstraction of which we find
examples in existing art, is partly involuntary; and
it is a matter of much nicety to determine where it
begins to be purposed. In the progress of national
as well as of individual mind, the first attempts at
imitation are always abstract and incomplete. Greater
completion marks the progress of art, absolute com-
pletion usually its decline ; whence absolute comple-
tion of imitative form is often supposed to be in itself
wrong. But it is not wrong always, only dangerous.
Let us endeavor briefly to ascertain wherein its
danger consists, and wherein its dignity.

XXXI. I have said that all art is abstract in its
beginnings ; that is to say, it expresses only a small
number of the qualities of the thing represented.
Curved and complex lines are represented by straight
and simple ones ; interior markings of forms are few,
and much is symbolical and conventional. There is
a resemblance between the work of a great nation, in
this phase, and the work of childhood and ignorance,
which, in the mind of a careless observer, might
attach something like ridicule to it. The form of a

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 173

tree on the Ninevite sculptures is much like that
which, some twenty years ago, was familiar upon
samplers ; and the types of the face and figure in
early Italian art are susceptible of easy caricature.
On the signs which separate the infancy of magnifi-
cent manhood from every other, I do not pause to
insist (they consist entirely in the choice of the sym-
bol and of the features abstracted) ; but I pass to the
next stage of art, a condition of strength in which
the abstraction which was begun in incapability is
continued in free will. This is the case, however, in
pure sculpture and painting, as well as in architect-
ure ; and we have nothing to do but with that greater
severity of manner which fits either to be associated
with the more realist art. I believe it properly con-
sists only in a due expression of their subordination,
an expression varying according to their place and
office. The question is first to be clearly determined
whether the architecture is a frame for the sculpture.
or the sculpture an ornament of the architecture. If
the latter, then the first office of that sculpture is not
to represent the things it imitates, but to gather out
of them those arrangements of form which shall be
pleasing to the eye in their intended places. So
soon as agreeable lines and points of shade have
been added to the mouldings which were meagre, 01:
to the lights which were unrelieved, the architectural
work of the imitation is accomplished ; and how far
it shall be wrought towards completeness or not, will
depend upon its place, and upon other various cir-
cumstances. If, in its particular use or position, it
is symmetrically arranged, there is, of course, an

174 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

instant indication of architectural subjection. But
Aphorism 2i. Symmetry Is Hot abstraction. Leaves
Symmetry is "^^1 ^^ carved In the most regular
not abstrac- Order, and yet be meanly imitative ;
*'°"- or, on the other hand, they may be

thrown wild and loose, and yet be highly architect-
ural in their separate treatment.*^ Nothing can be
less symmetrical than the group of leaves which joins
the two columns in Plate XIII. ; yet, since nothing
of the leaf character is given but what is necessary
for the bare suggestion of its image and the attain-
ment of the lines desired, their treatment is highly
abstract. It shows that the workman only wanted
so much of the leaf as he supposed good for his archi-
tecture, and would allow no more : and how much is
to be supposed good, depends, as I have said, much
more on place and circumstance than on general laws.
I know that this is not usually thought, and that
many good architects would insist on abstraction in
all cases : the question is so wide and so difficult that
I express my opinion upon it most diffidently ; but
my own feeling is, that a purely abstract manner, like
that of our earliest English work, does not afford
room for the perfection of beautifiil form, and that
its severity is wearisome after the eye has been long
accustomed to it. I have not done justice to the
Salisbury dog-tooth moulding, of which the effect is
sketched in fig. 5, Plate X., but I have done more
justice to it nevertheless than to the beautiful French
one above it; and I do not think that any candid
reader would deny that, piquant and spirited as is

*'> This short Aphorism is one of the most important in the book.

. THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 175

that from Salisbury, the Rouen moulding is, in every
respect, nobler. It will be observed that its svm-
metry is more complicated, the leafage being divided
into double groups of two lobes each, each lobe of
different structure. With exquisite feeling, one of
these double groups is alternately omitted on the
other side of the moulding (not seen in the Plate,
but occupying the cavetto of the section), thus giv-
ing a playful lightness to the whole ; and if the reader
will allow for a beauty in the flow of the curved out-
lines (especially on the angle), of which he cannot
in the least judge from my rude drawing, he will not,
I think, expect easily to find a nobler instance of
decoration adapted to the severest mouldings.

Now it will be observed, that there is in its treat-
ment a high degree of- abstraction, though not so
conventional as that of Salisbury : that is to say, the
leaves have little more than their flow and outline
represented ; they are hardly undercut, but their
edges are connected by a gentle and most studied
curve with the stone behind ; they have no serra-
tions, no veinings, no rib or stalk on the angle, only
an incision gracefully made towards their extremities,
indicative of the central rib and depression. The
whole style of the abstraction shows that the archi-
tect could, if he had chosen, have carried the imita-
tion much farther, but stayed at this point of his own
free will ; and what he has done is also so perfect in
its kind, that I feel disposed to accept his authority
without question, so far as I can gather it from his
works, on the whole subject of abstraction.

XXXII. Happily, his opinion is frankly expressed.

176 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

This moulding is on the lateral buttress, and on a
level with the top of the north gate : it cannot there-
fore be closely seen except from the wooden stairs of
the belfry ; it is not intended to be so seen, but cal-
culated for a distance of, at least, forty to fifty feet
from the eye. In the vault of the gate itself, half as
near again, there are three rows of mouldings, as I
think, by the same designer, at all events part of the
same plan. One of them is given in Plate I . , fig. 2 a.
It will be seen that the abstraction is here infinitely
less ; the ivy leaves have stalks and associated fruit,
and a rib for each lobe, and are so far undercut as to
detach their forms from the stone ; while in the vine-
leaf moulding above, of the same period, from the
south gate, serration appears added to other purely
imitative characters. Finally, in the animals which
form the ornaments of the portion of the gate which
is close to the eye, abstraction nearly vanishes into
perfect sculpture.

XXXIII. Nearness to the eye, however, is not the
only circumstance which influences architectural ab-
straction. These very animals are not merely better
cut because close to the eye ; they are put close to
the eye that they may, without indiscretion, be better
cut, on the noble principle, first, I think, clearly
enunciated by Sir Charles Eastlake, that the closest
imitation shall be of the noblest object. Farther,
since the wildness and manner of growth of vegeta-
tion render a bouA fide imitation of it impossible in
sculpture — since its members must be reduced in
number, ordered in direction, and cut away from
their roots, even under the most earnestly imitative

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 177

treatment, — it becomes a point, as I think, of good
judgment, to proportion the completeness of execu-
tion of parts to the formaUty of the whole ; and since
five or six leaves must stand for a tree, to let also five
or six touches stand for a leaf. But since the ani-
mal generally admits of perfect outline — since its
form is detached, and may be fully represented, its
sculpture may be more complete and faithful in all
its parts. And this principle will be actually found, I
believe, to guide the old workmen. If the animal
form be in a gargoyle, incomplete, and coming out of
a block of stone, or if a head only, as for a boss or
other such partial use, its sculpture will be highly ab-
stract. But if it be an entire animal, as a lizard, or
a bird, or a squirrel, peeping among leafage, its sculp-
ture will be much farther carried, and I think, if
small, near the eye, and worked in a fine material,
may rightly be carried to the utmost possible comple-
tion. Surely we cannot wish a less finish bestowed
on those which animate the mouldings of the South
door of the cathedral of Florence ; nor desire that the
birds in the capitals of the Doge's palace should be
stripped of a single plume.

XXXIV. Under these limitations, then, I think
that perfect sculpture may be ^' made a part of the
severest architecture ; but this per-

. Aphorism 22.

fection was said in the outset to be „ ,

Periect sculpture

dangerous. It is so in the highest should be a part
degree ; for the moment the archi- of the severest
tect allows himself to dwell on the ^--c'^tecture.

^' I have written, it will be observed, " should he:,^'' in the marginal
definition of the Aphorism, and I ought to have written it in the text.
See the next note.

178 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

imitated portions, there is a chance of his losing
sight of the duty of his ornament, of its "business
as a part of the composition, and sacrificing its
points of shade and effect to the delight of delicate
carving. And then he is lost. His architecture
has become a mere framework for the setting of
delicate sculpture, which had better be all taken
down and put into cabinets. It is well, therefore,
that the young architect should be taught to think
of imitative ornament as of the extreme of grace in
language ; not to be regarded at first, not to be ob-
tained at the cost of purpose, meaning, force or
conciseness, yet, indeed, a perfection — the least of
all perfections, and yet the crowning one of all —
one which by itself, and regarded in itself, is an
architectural coxcombry ,^8 but is yet the sign of
the most highly-trained mind and power when it is
associated with others. It is a safe manner, as I
think, to design all things at first in severe ab-
straction, and to be prepared, if need were, to carry
them out in that form ; then to mark the parts
where high finish would be admissible, to complete
these always with stern reference to their general
effect, and then connect them by a graduated scale
of abstraction with the rest. And there is one
safeguard against danger in this process on which
I would finally insist. Never imitate anything
but natural forms, and those the noblest, in the
completed parts. The degradation of the cinque

♦' By no means. I much understated the truth in this matter, and
ihould now say that sculpture should precede and govern all else.
The pediment of i^^gina determines the right — and ends controversy.

Plate XI.

Balcony in the Carapo St. Benedetto, Venice.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 179

cento manner of decoration was not owing to its
naturalism, to its faithfulness of imitation, but to
its imitation of ugly, i.e., unnatural things. So
long as it restrained itself to sculpture of animals
and flowers, it remained noble. The balcony, on
the opposite page (Plate XI.), from a house in the
Campo St. Benedetto at Venice, shows one of the
earliest occurrences of the cinque cento arabesque,
and a fragment of the pattern is given in Plate XII.
fig. 8. It is but the arresting upon the stone-work
of a stem or two of the living flowers, which are
rarely wanting in the window above (and which,
by the by, the French and Italian peasantry often
trellis with exquisite taste about their casements).
This arabesque, relieved as it is in darkness from
the white stone by the stain of time, is surely both
beautiful and pure ; and as long as the renaissance
ornament remained in such forms it may be beheld
with unreserved admiration. But the moment that
unnatural objects were associated with these, and
armor, and musical instrumcr.ts, and wild mean-
ingless scrolls and curled shields, and other such
fancies, became principal in its subjects, its doom
was sealed, and with it that of the architecture of
the world.

XXXV. III. Our final inquiry was to be into the
use of color as associated with architectural orna-
ment.

I do not feel able to speak with any confidence
respecting the touching of sctdptio-e with color. I
would only note one point, that sculpture is the repre-
sentation of an idea, while architecture is itself a

l8o THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

real thing. The idea may, as I think, be left color-
less, and colored by the beholders mind : but a real-
ity ought to have reality in all its attributes : its color
should be as fixed as its form. I cannot, therefore,
consider architecture as in anywise perfect without
color. Farther, as I have above noticed, I think the
colors of architecture should be those of natural
stones ; partly because more durable, but also be-
cause more perfect and graceful. For to conquer
the harshness and deadness of tones laid upon stone
or on gesso, needs the management and discretion
of a true painter ; and on this co-operation we must
not calculate in laying down rules for general prac-
tice. If Tintoret or Giorgione are at hand, and ask
us for a wall to paint, we will alter our whole design
for their sake, and become their servants ; but we
must, as architects, e.xpect the aid of the common
workman only ; and the laying of color by a mechan-
ical hand, and its toning under a vulgar eye, are far
more offensive than rudeness in cutting the stone.
The latter is imperfection only ; the former deadness
or discordance. At the best, such color is so inferior
to the lovely and mellow hues of the natural stone,
that it is wise to sacrifice some of the intricacy of
d;isign, if by so doing we may employ the nobler
material. And if as we looked to Nature for instruc-
tion respecting form, we look to her also to learn the
management of color, we shall, perhaps, find that this
sacrifice of intricacy is for other causes expedient.

XXXVI. First, then, I think that in making this
reference we are to consider our building as a kind
of organized creature ; in coloring which we must

THE LAMP OF BEAUT/. i8l

look to the single and separately organized creatures
of Nature, not to her landscape combinations. Our
building, if it is well composed, is one thing, and is
to be colored as Nature would color one thing —
a shell, a flower, or an animal ; not as she colors
groups of things.

And the first broad conclusion we shall deduce
from observation of natural color in such cases will
be, that it never follows form, but is arranged on an
entirely separate system. What mysterious connec-
tion there may be between the shape of the spots on
an animaPs skin and its anatomical system, I do not
know, nor even if such a connection has in anywise
been traced : but to the eye the systems are entirely
separate, and in many cases that of color is accident-
ally variable. The stripes of a zebra do not follow
the lines of its body or limbs, still less the spots of
a leopard. In the plumage of birds, each feather
bears a part of the pattern which is arbitrarily carried
over the body, having indeed certain graceful har-
monies with the form, diminishing or enlarging in
directions which sometimes follow, but also not un-
frequently oppose, the directions of its muscular lines.
Whatever harmonies there may be, are distinctly like
those of two separate musical parts, coinciding here
and there only — never discordant, but essentially
different. 1 hold this, then, for the first great prin-
ciple of architectural color. Let it be visibly inde-
pendent of form. Never paint a column with verti-
cal lines, but always cross it. Never give separate
mouldings separate colors (I know this is heresy,
but I never shrink from any conclusions, however

l82 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

contrary to human authority, to which I am led by
observance of natural principles) ; and in sculptured
ornaments do not paint the leaves or figures (I can-
not help the Elgin frieze) of one color and their
ground of another, but vary both the ground and the
figures with the same harmony. Notice how Nature
does it in a variegated flower ; not one leaf red and
another white, but a point of red and a zone of white,
or whatever it may be, to each. In certain places
you may run your two systems closer, and here and
there let them be parallel for a note or two, but see
that the colors and the forms coincide only as two
orders of mouldings do ; the same for an instant, but
each holding its own course. So single members
may sometimes have single colors : as a bird's head
is sometimes of one color and its shoulders another,
you may make your capital one color and your shaft
another ; but in general the best place for color is
on broad surfaces, not on the points of interest in
form. An animal is mottled on its breast and back,
rarely on its paws or about its eyes ; so put your
variegation boldly on the flat wall and broad shaft,
but be shy of it in the capital and moulding ; in all
cases it is a safe rule to simplify color when form is
rich, and vice vejsd ; and I think it would be well
in general to carve all capitals and graceful orna-
ments in white marble, and so leave them.

XXXVII. Independence then being first secured,
what kind of limiting outlines shall we adopt for the
system of color itself ?

I am quite sure that any person familiar with nat-
ural objects will never be surprised at any appear-

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 183

ance of care or finish in them. That is the condition
of the Universe. But there is cause both for surprise
and inquiry whenever we see anything Ulce careless-
ness or incompletion : that is not a common condi-
tion ; it must be one appointed for some singular
purpose. I believe that such surprise will be forcibly
felt by anyone who, after studying carefully the lines
of some variegated organic form, will set himself to
copy with similar diligence those of its colors. The
boundaries of the forma he will assuredly, whatever
the object, have found drawn with a delicacy and
precision which no human hand can follow. Those
of its colors he will find in many cases, though gov-
erned always by a certain rude symmetry, yet ir-
regular, blotched, imperfect, liable to all kinds of
accidents and awkwardnesses. Look at the tracery
of the lines on a camp shell, and see how oddly and
awkwardly its tents are pitched. It is not indeed
always so : there is occasionally, as in the eye of the
peacock's plume, an apparent precision, but still a
precision far inferior to that of the drawing of the
filaments which bear that lovely stain ; and in the
plurality of cases a degree of looseness and variation,
and, still m.ore singularly, of harshness and violence
in arrangement, is admitted in color which would be
monstrous in form. Observe the difference in the
precision of a fish's scales and of the spots on them.
XXXVIII. Now, why it should be that color is
best seen under these circumstances I will not here
endeavor to determine ; nor whether the lesson we
are to learn from it be that it is God's will that all
manner of delights should never be combined in one

l84 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

thing. But the fact is certain, that color is always
by Him arranged in these simple or rude forms, and
as certain that, therefore, it must be best seen in
them, and that we shall never mend by refining
its arrangements. Experience teaches us the same
thing. Infinite nonsense has been written about the
union of perfect color with perfect form. They never
will, never can be united. Color, to be perfect, must
have a soft outline or a simple one : (it cannot have
a refined one ;)*^ and you will never produce a good
painted window with good figure-drawing in it. You
will lose perfection of color as you give perfection of
line. Try to put in order and form the colors of a
piece of opal.

XXXIX. I conclude, then, that all arrangements of
color, for its own sake, in graceful forms, are barbar-
ous ; and that, to paint a color pattern with the lovely
lines of a Greek leaf moulding, is an utterly savage
procedure. 1 cannot find anything in natural color
like this : it is not in the bond. I find it in all natural
form — never in natural color. If, then, our archi-
tectural color is to be beautiful as its form was, by
being imitative, we are limited to these conditions —
to simple masses of it, to zones, as in the rainbow
and the zebra ; cloudings and flamings, as in marble
shells and plumage, or spots of various shapes and
dimensions. All these conditions are susceptible of

** Omit the sentence in parenthesis. I meant, a sharp or aWined
(not refined) edge ; but even so understanding it, great part of the
thirty-eighth and thirtj'-ninth paragraphs must be received under
much exception and protest, and might be omitted wholly with no
harm to the book.

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 185

various degrees of sharpness and delicacy, and of
complication in arrangement. The zone may become
a delicate line, and arrange itself in checkers and zig-
zags. The flaming may be more or less defined, as
on a tulip leaf, and may at last be represented by a
triangle of color, and arrange itself in stars or other
shapes ; the spot may be also graduated into a stain,
or defined into a square or circle. The most exquisite
harmonies may be composed of these simple ele-
ments : some soft and full of flushed and melting
spaces of color ; others piquant and sparkling, or
deep and rich, formed of close groups of the fiery
fragments : perfect and lovely proportion may be
exhibited in the relation of their quantities, infinite
invention in their disposition : but, in all cases, their
shape will be effective only as it determines their
quantity, and regulates their operation on each other ;
points or edges of one being introduced between
breadths of others, and so on. Triangular and
barred forms are therefore convenient, or others
the simplest possible ; leaving the pleasure of the
spectator to be taken in the color, and in that only.
Curved outlines, especially if refined, deaden the
color, and confuse the mind. Even in figure painting
the greatest colorists have either melted their outline
away, as often Correggio and Rubens ; or purposely
made their masses of ungainly shape, as Titian ; or
placed their brightest hues in costume, where they
could get quaint patterns, as Veronese, and especially
Angelico, with whom, however, the absolute virtue
of color is secondary to grace of line. Hence, he
never uses the blended hues of Correggio, like those

1 86 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

on the wing of the little cupid, in the "Venus and
Mercury,'" but always the severest type — the peacock
plume. Any of these men would have looked with
infinite disgust upon the leafage and scroll-work
which forms the ground of color in our modern
painted windows, and yet all whom I have named
were much infected with the love of renaissance
designs. We must also allow for the freedom of ths
painter's subject, and looseness of his associated
lines : a pattern being severe in a picture, which is
over-luxurious upon a building. I believe, therefore,
that it is impossible to be over-quaint or angular in
architectural coloring ; and thus many dispositions
which I have had occasion to reprobate in form, are,
in color, the best that can be invented. I have al-
wa3's, for instance, spoken with contempt of the
Tudor style, for this reason, that, having surrendered
all pretence to spaciousness and breadth, — having
divided its surfaces by an infinite number of lines,
it yet sacrifices the only characters which can make
lines beautiful ; sacrifices all the varietv and grace
which long atoned for the caprice of the Flamboyant,
and adopts, for its leading feature, an entanglement
of cross bars and verticals, showing about as much
invention or skill of design as the reticulation of tlie
bricklayer's sieve. Yet this very reticulation would
in color be highly beautiful ; and all the heraldry, and
other features which, in form, are monstrous, may
be delightful as themes of color (so long as there are
no fluttering or overtwisted lines in them) ; and this,
observe, because, when colored, they take the place
of a mere pattern, and the resemblance to nature,

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 187

which could not be found in their sculptured forms,
is found in their piquant variegation of other surfaces.
There is a beautiful and bright bit of wall painting
behind the Duomo of Verona, composed of coats of
arms, whose bearings are balls of gold set in bars
of green (altered blue?) and white, with cardinals'
hats in alternate squares. This is of course, how-
ever, fit only for domestic work. The front of the
Doge's palace at Venice is the purest and most chaste
model that I can name (but one) of the fit applica-
tion of color to public buildings. The sculpture and
mouldings are all white ; but the wall surface is
checkered with marble blocks of pale rose, the check-
ers being in no wise harmonized, or fitted to the
forms of the windows ; but looking as if the surface
had been completed first, and the windows cut out
of it. In Plate XII., fig. 2, the reader will see two
of the patterns used in green and white, on the col-
umns of San Michele of Lucca ; every column having
a different design. Both are beautiful, but the upper
one certainly the best. Yet in sculpture its lines
would have been perfectly barbarous, and those even
of the lower not enough refined.

XL. Restraining ourselves, therefore, to the use of
3uch simple patterns, so far forth as our color is sub-
ordinate either to architectural structure, or sculptural
form, we have yet one more manner of ornamentation
to add to our general means of effect, — monochrome
design, the intermediate condition between coloring
and carving. The relations of the entire system
of architectural decoration may then be thus ex-
pressed :

l88 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

1. Organic form dominant. True, independent sculp-

ture, and alto-relievo : rich capitals, and mould-
ings ; to be elaborate in completion of form, not
abstract, and either to be left in pure white
marble, or most cautiously touched with color m
points and borders only, in a system not con-
current with their forms.

2. Organic form sub-dominant. Basso-relievo or

intaglio. To be more abstract in proportion
to the reduction of depth ; to be also more
rigid and simple in contour ; to be touched with
color more boldly and in an increased degree,
exactly in proportion to the reduced depth
and fulness of form, but still in a system non-
concurrent with their forms.

3. Organic form abstracted to outline. Monochrome

design, still farther reduced to simplicity of
contour, and therefore admitting for the first
time the color to be concurrent with its out-
line ; that is to say, as its name imports, the
entire figure to be detached in one color from
a ground of another.

4. Organic forms entirely lost. Geometrical pat-

terns or variable cloudings in the most vivid
color .

On the opposite side of this scale, ascending from
the color pattern, I would place the various forms of
painting which may be associated with architecture :
primarily, and as most fit for such purpose, the mo-
saic, highly abstract in treatment, and introducing
brilliant color in masses ; the Madonna of Torcello

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 189

being, as I think, the noblest type of the manner, and
the Baptistery of Parma the richest ; next, the purely
decorative fresco, like that of the Arena Chapel ;
finally, the fresco becoming principal, as in the Vati-
can and Sistine. But I cannot, with any safety,
follow the principles of abstraction in this pictorial
ornament ; since the noblest examples of it appear to
me to owe their architectural applicability to their
archaic manner ; and I think that the abstraction and
admirable simplicity which render them fit media of
the most splendid coloring, cannot be recovered by
a voluntary condescension. The Byzantines them-
selves would not, I think, if they could have drawn
the figure better, have used it for a color decoration ;
and that use, as peculiar to a condition of childhood,
however noble and full of promise, cannot be in-
cluded among those modes of adornment which are
now legitimate or even possible. There is a difficulty
in the management of the painted window for the
same reason, which has not yet been met, and we
must conquer that first, before we can venture to
consider the wall as a painted window on a large
scale. Pictorial subject, without such abstraction,
becomes necessarily principal, or, at all events, ceases
to be the architect's concern ; its plan must be left
to the painter after the completion of the building, as
in the works of Veronese and Giorgione on the palaces
of Venice.

XLI. Pure architectural decoration, then, may be
considered as limited to the four kinds above speci-
fied ; of which each glides almost imperceptibly into
the other. Thus, the Elgin frieze is a monochrome ^
^ Rather, dichrom or dichroit — flesh color on blue.

tgo THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

in a state of transition to sculpture, retaining, as I
think, the half-cast skin too long. Of pure mono-
chrome, I have given an example in Plate VI., from
the noble front of San Michele of Lucca. It contains
forty such arches, all covered with equally elaborate
ornaments, entirely drawn by cutting out their ground
to about the depth of an inch in the flat white marble,
and filling the spaces with pieces of green serpentine ;
a most elaborate mode of sculpture, requiring exces-
sive care and precision in the fitting of the edges,
and of course double work, the same line needing to be
cut both in the marble and serpentine. The excessive
simplicity of the form.s will be at once perceived ; the
eyes of the figures or animals, for instance, being in-
dicated only by a round dot, formed by a little inlet
circle of serpentine, about half an inch over : but,
though simple, they admit often mucli grace of curva-
ture, as in the neck of the bird seen above the right-
hand pillar. The pieces of serpentine have fallen out
in many places, giving the black shadows, as seen
under the horseman's arm and bird's neck, and in
the semi-circular line round the arch, once filled with
some pattern. It would have illustrated my point
better to have restored the lost portions, but 1 always
draw a thing exactly as it is, hating restoration of any
kind ; and I would especially direct the reader's atten-
"lion to the completion of the forms in the sculptured
ornament of the marble cornices, as opposed to the
abstraction of the monochrome figures, of the ball and
cross patterns between the arches, and of the triangu-
lar ornament round the arch on the left.

XLII. I have an intense love for these monochrome

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 191

figures, owing to their wonderful life and spirit in all
the works on which I have found them ; nevertheless,
I believe that the excessive degree of abstraction
which they imply necessitates our placing them in
the rank of a progressive or imperfect art, and that a
perfect building should rather be composed of the
highest sculpture, (organic form dominant and sub-
dominant,) associated with pattern colors on the flat
or broad surfaces. And we find, in fact, that the
cathedral of Pisa, which is a higher type than that
of Lucca, exactly follows this condition, the color
being put in geometrical patterns on its surfaces, and
animal forms and lovely leafage used in the sculptured
cornices and pillars. And I think that the grace of
the carved forms is best seen when it is thus boldly
opposed to severe traceries of color, while the color
itself is, as we have seen, always most piquant when
it is put into sharp and angular arrangements. Thus
the sculpture is approved and set off by the color,
and the color seen to the best advantage in its op-
position both to the whiteness and the grace of the
carved marble.

XLIII. In the course of this and the preceding
chapters, I have now separately enumerated most of
the conditions of Power and Beauty, which, in the
outset, 1 stated to be the grounds of the deepest im-
pressions with which architecture could affect the
human mind ; but I would ask permission to recapit-
ulate them, in order to see if there be any building
which I may offer as an example of the unison, in
such manner as is possible, of them all. Glancing
back, then, to the beginning of the third chapter.

192 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

and introducing in their place the conditions in-
cidentally determined in the two previous sections,
we shall have the following list of noble characters :

Considerable size, exhibited by simple terminal
lines (Chap. III. § 6). Projection towards the top
(§ 7). Breadth of flat surface (§ 8). Square com-
partments of that surface (§ 9) . Varied and visible
masonry (§ 11). Vigorous depth of shadow (§ 13),
exhibited especially by pierced traceries (§ 18).
Varied proportion in ascent (Chap. IV. § 28). Lat-
eral symmetry (§ 28). Sculpture most delicate at
the base (Chap. I. § 12). Enriched quantity of orna-
mentatthetop (§ 13). Sculpture abstract in inferior
ornaments and mouldings (Chap. IV. § 31), complete
in animal forms (§ 33). Both to be executed in
white marble (§ 40). Vivid color introduced in
flat geometrical patterns (§ 39), and obtained by the
use of naturally colored stone (§ 35).

These characteristics occur more or less in different
buildingSj some in one and some in another. But
all together, and all in their highest possible relative
degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one
building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto at
Florence. The drawing of the tracery of its upper
story, which heads this chapter, rude as it is, will
nevertheless give the reader some better conception
of that tower's magnificence than the thin outlines in
which it is usually portrayed. In its first appeal to
the stranger's eye there is something unpleasing ; a
mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity witii
over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he
should to all other consummate art. I remember

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY. 193

well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Cam-
panile, and think it meanly smooth and finished.
But I have since lived beside it many a day, and
looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and
moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound
and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the
Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the
first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The con-
trast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, be-
tween the rising of those gray walls out of their quiet
swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a
green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained
shafts, and triple lights, without tracery or other or-
nament than the martins' nests in the height of them,
and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing
jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so
white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes
are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the
Eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster,
colored like a morning cloud, and chased like a sea
shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and
mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something
to be learned by looking back to the early life of
him who raised it? I said that the Power of human
mind had its growth in the Wilderness ; much more
must the love and the conception of that beauty,
whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the
best, a faded image of God's daily work, and an ar-
rested ray of some star of creation, be given chiefly
in the places which He has gladdened by planting
there the fir tree and the pine. Not within the walls
of Florence, but among the far away fields of her

194 THE LAMP OF BEAUTY.

lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that
headstone of Beauty above her towers of watch and
war. Remember all that he became ; count the sacred
thoughts with which he filled the heart of Italy ; ask
those who followed him what they learned at his
feet ; and when you have numbered his labors, and
received their testimony, if it seem to you that God
had verily poured out upon this His servant no com-
mon nor restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he
was indeed a king among the children of men, re-
member also that the legend upon the crown was
that of David's : — "I took thee from the sheep-cote,
and from following the sheep."

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 195

CHAPTER V.

THE LAMP OF LIFE.

I. Among the countless analogies by which the
nature and relations of the human soul are illustrated
in the material creation, none are more striking than
the impressions inseparably connected with the active
and dormant states of matter. I have elsewhere en-
deavored to show, that no inconsiderable part of the
essential characters of Beauty depended on the ex-
pression of vital energy in organic things, or on the
subjection to such energy, of things naturally passive
and powerless. I need not here repeat, of what was
then advanced, more than the statement which I
believe will meet with general acceptance, that
things in other respects alike, as in their substance,
or uses, or outward forms, are noble or ignoble in
proportion to the fulness of the life aphorism 23.
which either they themselves enjoy, ^.n things are
or of whose action they bear the noWe in propor-
evidence, as sea sands are made """ '° '"jf "■ *"''

, .,.,•■ ... . , , ness of Life.

beautiful by their bearing the seal
of the motion of the waters. And this is espe-
cially true of all objects which bear upon them the
impress of the highest order of creative life, that

196 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

is to say, of the mind of man : they become noble
or ignoble in proportion to the amount of the
energy of that mind which has visibly been em-
ployed upon them. But most peculiarly and
imperatively does the rule hold vi^ith respect to
the creations of Architecture, which being properly
capable of no other life than this, and being not
essentially composed of things pleasant in them-
selves,— as music of sweet sounds, or painting
of fair colors, but of inert substance, — depend, for
their dignity and pleasurableness in the utmost
degree, upon the vivid expression of the intel-
lectual life which has been concerned in their
production.*

II. Now in all other kind of energies except that of
man's mind, there is no question as to what is life,
and what is not. Vital sensibility, whether vegetable
or animal, may, indeed, be reduced to so great feeble-
ness, as to render its existence a matter of question,
but when it is evident at all, it is evident as such :
there is no mistaking any imitation or pretence of it
for the life itself; no mechanism nor galvanism can
take its place ; nor is any resemblance of it so strik-
ing as to involve even hesitation in the judgment ;
although many occur which the human imagination
takes pleasure in exalting, without lor an instant
losing sight of the real nature of the dead things it
animates ; but rejoicing rather in its own excessive
life, which puts gesture into clouds, and joy into
waves, and voices into rocks.

III. But when we begin to be concerned with the

* See note 35.

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 197

energies of man, we find ourselves instantly dealing
with a double creature. Most part of his being seems
to have a fictitious counterpart, which it is at his peril
if he do not cast off and deny. Thus he has a true
and false (otherwise called a living and dead, or a
feigned or unfeigned) faith. He has a true and a false
hope, a true and a false charity, and, finally, a true and
a false life. His true life is like that of lower organic
beings, the independent force by which he moulds
and governs external things ; it is a force of assimila-
tion which converts everything around him into food,
or mto instruments ; and which, however humbly or
obediently it may listen to or follow the guidance of
superior intelligence, never forfeits its own authority
as a judging principle, as a will capable either of
obeying or rebelling. His false life is, indeed, but
one of the conditions of death ^i or stupor, but it acts,
even when it cannot be said to animate, and is not
always easily known from the true. It is that life of
custom and accident in which many of us pass much
of our tune in the world ; that life in which we do
what we have not proposed, and speak what we do
not mean, and assent to what we do not understand ;
that life which is overlaid by the weight of things ex-
ternal to it, and is moulded by them, instead of
assimilating them ; that, which instead of growing
and blossoming under any wholesome dew, is crys-

"1 Yes; aud therefore had been much better called so simply, with-
out all this metaphor and inaccurate metaphysics. What we carelessly
call False hope, or False charity, is only mistaken hope and mistaken
charity. The real question is only — are we dead or alive? — for, if
dead at heart and having only a name to live in all our actions, we are
sowing seeds of death.

igS THE LAMP OF LIFE.

tallized over with it, as with hoar-frost, and becomes
to the true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a
candied agglomeration of thoughts and habits foreign
to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which can neither
bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to
bits, if it stand in our way. All men are liable to be
in some degree frost-bitten in this sort ; all are partly
encumbered and crusted over with idle matter ; only,
if they have real life in them, they are always break-
ing this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes,
like the black strips upon the birch tree, only a
witness of their own inward strength. But, with all
the efforts that the best men make, much of their
being passes in a kind of dream, in which they indeed
move, and play their parts sufficiently, to the eyes of
their fellow dreamers, but have no clear consciousness
of what is around them, or within them ; blind to the
one, insensible to the other, vwQcfoi. I would not
press the definition into its darker application to the
dull heart and heavy ear ; I have to do with it only as
it refers to the too frequent condition of natural
existence, whether of nations or individuals, settling
commonly upon them in proportion to their age.
The life of a nation is usually, like the flow of a lava
stream, first bright and fierce, then languid and
covered, at last advancing only by the tumbling over
and over of its frozen blocks. And that last con-
dition is a sad one to look upon. All the steps are
marked most clearly in the arts, and in Architecture
more than in any other ; for it, being especially de-
pendent, as we have just said, on the warmth of the
true life, is also peculiarly sensible of the hemlock

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 199

cold of the false : and I do not know anything more
oppressive, when the mind is once awakened to its
characteristics, than the aspect of a dead architecture.
The feebleness of childhood is full of promise and of
interest, — the struggle of imperfect knowledge full
of energy and continuity, — but to see impotence and
rigidity settling upon the form of the d2veloped man ;
to see the types which once had the die of thought
struck fresh upon them, worn flat by over use; to
see the shell of the living creature in its adult form,
when its colors are faded, and its inhabitant perished,
— this is a sight more humiliating, more melancholy,
than the vanishing of all knowledge, and the return
to confessed and helpless infancy.

Nay, it is to be wished that such return were al-
ways possible. There would be hope if we could
change palsy into puerility ; but I know not how far
we can become children again, and renew our lost
life. The stirring which has taken place in our archi-
tectural aims and interests within these few years, is
thought by many to be full of promise : I trust it is,
but it has a sickly look to me. 5- I cannot tell
'whether it be indeed a springing of seed or a shak-
ing amons: bones : and I do not think the time will
be lost which I ask the reader to spend in the in-

'- I .im glad to see I had so much sense, thus early ; — if only I had
had just a little more, and stopped talking, how much life — of the
vividest — I might have saved from expending itself in useless sputter,
and kept for careful pencil work I I might have had every bit of St.
Mark's and Ravenna drawn by this time. What good this wretched
rant of a book can do still, since people ask for it let them make of it ;
but / don't see what it's to be. The only living art now left in Eng-
land is Bill-sticking.

200 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

quiry, how far all that we have hitherto ascertained or
conjectured to be best in principle, may be formally
practised without the spirit or the vitality which alone
could give it influence, value, or delightfulness.

IV^. Now, in the first place — and this is rather an
important point — it is no sign of deadness in a
present art that it borrows or imitates, but only if it
borrows without paying interest, or if it imitates
without choice. The art of a great nation, which is
developed without any acquaintance with nobler ex-
amples than its own early eft'orts furnish, exhibits al-
ways the most consistent and comprehensible growth,
and perhaps is regarded usually as peculiarly vener-
able in its self-origination. But there is something
to my mind more majestic yet in the life of an archi-
tecture like that of the Lombards, rude and infantine
in itself, and surrounded by fragments of a nobler art
of which it is quick in admiration and ready in imita-
tion, and yet so strong in its own new instincts that
it re-constructs and re-arranges every fragment that
it copies or borrows into harmony with its own
thoughts, — a harmony at first disjointed and awk-
ward, but completed in the end, and fused into perfect
organization ; all the borrowed elements being sub-
ordinated to its own primal, unchanged life. 1 do
not know any sensa'tion more exquisite than the dis-
covering of the evidence of this magnificent struggle
into independent existence ; the detection of the
borrowed thoughts, nay, the finding of the actual
blocks and stones carved by other hands and in other
ages, wrought into the new walls, with a new expres-
sion and purpose given to them, like the blocks of

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 201

unsubdued rocks (to go back to our former simile)
which we find in the heart of the lava current, great
witnesses to the power which has fused all but those
calcined fragments into the mass of its homogeneous
fire.

V. It will be asked, How is imitation to be ren-
dered healthy and vital? Unhappily, while it is easy
to enumerate the signs of life, it is impossible to de-
fine or to communicate life ; and while every intelligent
writer on Art has insisted on the difference between
the copying found in an advancing or recedent period,
none have been able to communicate, in the slightest
degree, the force of vitality to the copyist over whom
they might liave influence. Yet it is at least inter-
esting, if not profitable, to note that two very distin-
2:uishin<r characters of vital imitation are, its Frankness
and its Audacity: its Frankness is especially sin-
gular ; there is never any effort to conceal the
degree of the sources of its borrowing. Rafifaelle
carries off a whole figure from Masaccio, or borrows
an entire composition from Perugino, with as much
tranquillity and simplicity of innocence as a young
Spartan pickpocket ; and the architect of a Roman-
esque basilica gathered his columns and capitals
where he could find them, as an ant picks up sticks.
There is at least a presumption, when we find this
frank acceptance, that there is a sense within the
mind of power capable of transforming and renewing
whatever it adopts; and too conscious, too exalted,
to fear the accusation of plagiarism, — too certain
that it can prove, and has proved, its independence,
to be afraid of expressing its homage to what it ad-

s'

202 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

mires in the most open and indubitable way ; and the
necessary consequence of tliis sense of power is the
other sign I have named — the Audacity of treatmeni:
when it finds treatment necessary, the unhesitating
and sweeping sacrifice of precedent where precsdent
becomes inconvenient. For instance, in the charac-
teristic forms of Italian Romanesque, in which thu
hypaethral portion of the heathen temple was re-
placed by the towering nave, and where, in conse-
quence, the pediment of the west front became
divided into three portions, of which the central one,
like the apex of a ridge of sloping strata lifted by a
sudden fault, was broken away from and raised above
the wings ; there remained at the extremities of the
aisles two triangular fragments of pediment, which
could not now be filled by any of the modes of deco-
ration adapted for the unbroken space ; and the diffi-
culty became greater, when the central portion of the
front was occupied by columnar ranges, which could
not, without painful abruptness, terminate short of
the extremities of the wings. 1 know not what ex-
pedient would have been adopted by architects who
had much respect for precedent, under such circum-
stances, but it certainly would not have been that of
the Pisan, — to continue the range of columns into
the pedimental space, shortening them to its extrem-
ity until the shaft of the last column vanished alto-
gether, and there remained only its capital resting in
the angle on its basic plinth. I raise no question at
present whether this arrangement be graceful or
otherwise ; I allege it only as an instance of a bold-
ness almost without a parallel, casting aside every

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 203

received principle that stood in its way, and strug-
gling through every discordance and difficulty to the
fulfilment of its own instincts.

VI. Frankness, however, is in itself no excuse for
repetition, nor Audacity for innovation, when the
one is indolent and the other unwise. Nobler and
surer signs of vitality must be sought, — signs inde-
pendent alike of the decorative or original character
of the style, and constant in every style that is deter-
minedly progressive.

Of these, one of the most important I believe to
be a certain neglect or contempt of refinement in exe-
cution, or, at all events, a visible subordination of
execution to conception, commonly involuntary, but
not unfrequently intentional. This is a point, how-
ever, on which, while I speak confidently, I must at
the same time speak reservedly and carefully, as there
would otherwise be much chance of mv beins: dan-
gerously misunderstood. It has been truly observed,
and well stated, by Lord Lindsay, that the best de-
signers of Italy were also the most careful in their
workmanship ; and that the stabil-

., 1 j^ • , J- i, • Aphorism 24.

ity and finish of their masonry,

•^ . , , , , •" Perfect finish

mosaic, or other work whatsoever, characterizes
were always perfect in proportion alike the best ar-
to the apparent improbability of the chitecture and the
great designers condescending to best panumg.
the care of details among us so despised. Fot only
do I fully admit and re-assert this most important
fact, but I would insist upon perfect and most deli-
cate finish in its right place, as a characteristic of
all the highest schools of architecture, as much as

204 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

it is of those of painting. But on the other hand,
as perfect finish belongs to the perfected art, a pro-
gressive finish belongs to progressive art ; and I
do not think that any more fatal sign of a stupor
or numbness settling upon that undeveloped art
could possibly be detected, than that it had been
taken aback by its own execution, and that the
workmanship had gone ahead of the design ; while,
even in my admission of absolute finish in the right
place, as an attribute of the perfected school, I must
reserve to myself the right of answering in my
own way the two very important questions — what
is finish ? and what is its right place ?

VII. But in illustrating either of these points, we
must remember that the correspondence of work-
manship with thought is, in existent examples, inter-
fered with by the adoption of the designs of an
advanced period by the workmen of a rude one. All
the beginnings of Christian architecture are of this
kind, and the necessary consequence is of course an
increase of the visible interval between the power of
realization and the beauty of the idea. We have at
first an intimation, almost savage in its rudeness, of
a classical design ; as the art advances, the design is
modified by a mixture of Gothic grotesqueness, and
the execution more complete, until a harmony is
established between the two, in which balance they
advance to new perfection. Now during the whole
period in which the ground is being recovered, there
will be found in the living architecture marks, not
to be mistaken, of intense impatience ; a struggle
towards something unattained, which causes all mi-

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 205

nor points of handling to be neglected ; and a rest-
less disdain of all qualities which appear either to
confess contentment, or to require a time and care
which might be better spent. And, exactly as a
good and earnest student of drawing will not lose
time in ruling lines or finishing backgrounds about
studies which, while they have answered his immedi-
ate purpose, he knows to be imperfect and inferior to
what he will do hereafter, — so the vigor of a true
school of early architecture, which is either working
under the influence of high example or which is itself
in a state of rapid development, is very curiously
traceable, among other signs, in the contempt of
exact symmetry and measurement, which in dead
architecture are the most painful necessities.

VIII. In Plate XII., fig. i, I have given a most
singular instance both of rude execution and defied
symmetry, in the little pillar and spandrel from a
panel decoration under the pulpit of St. Mark's at
Venice. The imperfection (not merely simplicity,
but actual rudeness and ugliness) of the leaf orna-
ment will strike the eye at once : this is general in
works of the time, but it is not so common to find a
capital which has been so carelessly cut ; its imper-
fect volutes being pushed up one side far higher than
on the other, and contracted on that side, an addi-
tional drill hole being put in to fill the space ; besides
this, the member a of the moulding, is a roll where
it follows the arch, and a flat fillet at a ; the one
being slurred into the other at the angle d, and
finally stopped short altogether at the other side by
the most uncourteous and remorseless interference of

2o6 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

the outer moulding: and in spite of all this, the
grace, proportion, and feeling of the whole arrange-
ment are so great, that, in its place, it leaves nothing
to be desired ; all the science and symmetry in the
world could not beat it. In fig. 4 I have endeavored
to give some idea of the execution of the subordinate
portions of a much higher work, the pulpit of St.
Andrea at Pistoja, by Nicolo Pisano. It is covered
with figure sculptures, executed with great care and
delicacy ; but when the sculptor came to the simple
arch mouldings, he did not choose to draw the eye to
them by over precision of work or over sharpness of
shadow. The section adopted, k, in, is peculiarly
simple, and so slight and obtuse in its recessions as
never to produce a sharp line ; and it is worked with
what at first appears slovenliness, but it is in fact
sculptural sketchiii^^; exactly correspondent to a
painter's light execution of a background : the lines
appear and disappear again, are sometimes deep,
sometimes shallow, sometimes quite broken off; and
the recession of the cusp joins that of the external
arch at n, in the most fearless defiance of all mathe-
matical laws of curvilinear contact.

IX. There is something very delightful in this bold
expression of the mind of the great master. I do
not say that it is the " perfect work " of patience, but
I think that impatience is a glorious character in an
advancing school ; and I love the Romanesque and
early Gothic especially, because they afford so much
room for it ; accidental carelessnesses of measure-
ment or of execution being mingled undistinguish-
ably with the purposed departures from symmetrical

Plate XII.

Fragments from Abbeville, Lucca, Veuice,
aud Pisa.

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 207

regularity, and the luxuriousness of perpetually vari-
able fancy, which are eminently characteristic of
both styles. How great, how frequent they are, and
how brightly the severity of architectural law is
relieved by their grace and suddenness, has not, I
chink, been enough observed ; still less, the unequal
measurements of even important features professing
to be absolutely symmetrical. I am not so familial
with modern practice as to speak with confidence
respecting its ordinary precision ; but I imagine that
the following measures of the western front of the
cathedral of Pisa, would be looked upon by present
architects as very blundering approximations. That
front is divided into seven arched compartments, of
which the second, fourth or central, and sixth con-
tain doors ; the seven are in a most subtle alternat-
ing proportion ; the central being the largest, next to
it the second and sixth, then the first and seventh,
lastly the third and fifth. By this arrangement, of
course, these three pairs should be equal ; and they
are so to the eye, but I found their actual measures
to be the following, taken from pillar to pillar, in
Italian braccia, palmi (four inches each), and
inches : —

1. Central door

2. Northern door

3. Southern door

4. Extreme northern space

5. Extreme southern space '

6. Northern intervals between "I

the doors i

7. Southern intervals between j

the doors 1

iccia.

, Palmi.

Inchei

Total in
5. Iiichts.

8
6
6

5
6

0
3
4

5

I

0
3,

°2

= ,92

5

2

I

= 129

5

2

li

= i29i

2oS THE LAMP OF LIFE.

There is thus a difference, severally, between 2, 3,
and 4, 5, of live inches and a half in the one case,
and five inches in the other.

X. This, however, may perhaps be partly attribut-
able to some accommodation of the accidental distor-
tions which evidently took place in the walls of the
cathedral during their building, as much as in those
of tlie campanile. To my mind, those of the Duomo
are far the more wonderful of the two ; I do not be-
lieve that a single pillar of its walls is absolutely ver-
tical : the pavement rises and falls to different heights,
or rather the plinth of the walls sinks into it continu-
ally to different depths, the whole west front literally
overhangs, (I have not plumbed it ; but the inclina-
tion may be seen by the eye, by bringing it into
visual contact with the upright pilasters of the Campo
Santo :) and a most extraordinary distortion in the
masonry of the southern wall shows that this inclina-
tion had begun when the first story was built. The
cornice above the first arcade of that wall touches
the tops of eleven out of its fifteen arches ; but it
suddenly leaves the tops of the four westernmost ;
the arches nodding westward and sinking into the
ground, while the cornice rises (or seems to rise),
leaving at any rate, whether by the rise of the one or
the fall of the other, an interval of more than two
feet between it and the top of the western arch, filled
by added courses of masonry. There is another
very curious evidence of this struggle of the architect
with his yielding wall in the columns of the main
entrance. (These notices are perhaps somewhat
irrelevant to our immediate subject, but they appear

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 209

to me highly interesting ; and they, at all events,
prove one of the points on which I would insist, —
how much of imperfection and variety in things pro-
fessing to be symmetrical the eyes of those eager
builders could endure : they looked to loveliness in
detail, to nobility in the whole, never to petty meas-
urements.) Those columns of the principal entrance
are among the loveliest in Italy; cylindrical, and
decorated with a rich arabesque of sculptured foliage,
which at the base extends nearly all round them, up
to the black pilaster in which they are lightly en-
gaged : but the shield of foliage, bounded by a severe
line, narrows to their tops, where it covers their
frontal segment only ; thus giving, when laterally
seen, a terminal line sloping boldly outwards, which,
as I think, was meant to conceal the accidental lean-
ing of the western walls, and, by its exaggerated
inclination in the same direction, to throw them by
comparison into a seeming vertical.

XI. There is another very curious instance of
distortion above the central door of the west front.
All the intervals between the seven arches are filled
with black marble, each containing in its centre a
white parallelogram filled with animal mosaics, and
the whole surmounted by a broad white band, which,
generally, does not touch the parallelogram below.
But the parallelogram on the north of the central
arch has been forced into an oblique position, and
touches the white band ; and, as if the architect was
determined to show that he did not care whether it
did or not, the white band suddenly gets thicker at
that place, and remains so over the next two arches.

2IO THE LAMP OF LIFE.

And these differences are the more curious because
the workmanship of them all is most finished and
masterly, and the distorted stones are fitted with as
much neatness as if they tallied to a hair's breadth.
There is no look of slurring or blundering about it ;
it is all coolly filled in, as if the builder had no sense
of anything being wrong or extraordinary ; I only
wish we had a little of his impudence.

XII. Still, the reader will say that all these varia-
tions are probably dependent more on the bad foun-
dation than on the architect's feelings. Not so the
exquisite delicacies of change in the proportions and
dimensions of the apparently symmetrical arcades
of the west front. It will be remembered that I said
the tower of Pisa was the only ugly tower in Italy,
because its tiers were equal, or nearly so, in height;
a fault this, so contrary to the spirit of the builders
of the time, that it can be considered only as an un-
lucky caprice. Perhaps the general aspect of the
west front of the cathedral may then have occurred
to the reader's mind, as seemingly another contradic-
tion of the rule I had advanced. It would not have
been so, however, even had its four upper arcades
been actually equal ; as they are subordinated to the
great seven-arched lower story, in the manner before
noticed respecting the spire of Salisbury, and as is
actually the case in the Duomo of Lucca and Tower
of Pistoja. But the Pisan front is far more subtly
proportioned. Not one of its four arcades is of like
height with another. The highest is the third,
counting upwards ; and they diminish in nearly
arithmetical proportion alternately ; in the order 3d,

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 2li

1st, 2d, 4th. The inequalities in their arches are
not less remarkable : they at first strike the eye as all
equal ; but there is a grace about them which equality
never obtained : on closer observation, it is perceived
that in the first row of nineteen arches, eighteen are
equal, and the central one larger than the rest ; in
the second arcade, the nine central arches stand over
the nine below, having, like them, the ninth central
one largest. But on their flanks, where is the slope
of the shoulder-like pediment, the arches vanish, and
a wedge-shaped frieze takes their place, tapering out-
wards, in order to allow the columns to be carried
to the extremity of the pediment ; and here, where
the heights of the shafts are so fast shortened, they
are set thicker ; five shafts, or rather four and a capi-
tal, above, to four of the arcade below, giving twenty-
one intervals instead of nineteen. In the next or
third arcade, — which, remember, is the highest, —
eight arches, all equal, are given in the space of the
nine below, so that there is now a central shaft in-
stead of a central arch, and the span of the arches is
increased in proportion to their increased height.
Finally, in the uppermost arcade, which is the low-
est of all, the arches, the same in number as those
below, are narrower than any of the fagade ; the
whole eight going very nearly above the six below
them, while the terminal arches of the lower arcade
are surmounted by flanking masses of decorated wall
with projecting figures.

XIII. Now I call //m/ Living Architecture. There
is sensation in every inch of it. and an accommoda-
tion to everv architectural necessity, with a deter-

2 12 IHE LAMP OF LIFE.

mined variation in arrangement, which is exactly
like the related proportions and provisions in the
structure of organic form. I have not space to ex-
amine the still lovelier proportioning of the external
shafts of the apse of this marvellous building. I pre-
fer, lest the reader should think it a peculiar example,
to state the structure of another church, the most
graceful and grand piece of Romanesque work, as a
fragment, in north Italy, that of San Giovanni Evan-
gelista, at Pistoja.

The side of that church has three stories of arcade,
diminishing in height in bold geometrical propor-
tion, while the arches, for the most part, increase in
number in arithmetical, i.e., two in the second ar-
cade, and three in the third, to one in the first.
Lest, however, this arrangement should be too for-
mal, of the fourteen arches in the lowest series, that
which contains the door is made larger than the rest,
and is not in the middle, but the sixth from the West,
leaving five on one side and eight on the other.
Farther : this lowest arcade is terminated by broad
flat pilasters, about half the width of its arches ; but
the arcade above is continuous ; only the two ex-
treme arches at the west end are made larger than
all the rest, and instead of coming, as they should,
into the space of the lower extreme arch, take in both
it and its broad pilaster. Even this, however, was
not out of order enough to satisfy the architect's eye ;
for there were still two arches above to each single
one below: so, at the east end, where there were
more arches, and the eye might be more easily
cheated, what does he do but narrow the two ex-

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 213

treme lower arches by half a braccio ; while at the
same time slightly enlarged the upper ones, so as to
get only seventeen upper to nine lower, instead of
eighteen to nine. The eye is thus thoroughly con-
fused, and the whole building thrown into one mass,
by the curious variations in the adjustments of the
superimposed shafts, not one of which is either ex-
actly in, or positively out of, its place ; and to get
this managed the more cunningly, there is from an
inch to an Inch and a half of gradual gain in the space
of the four eastern arches, besides the confessed half
braccio. Their measures, counting from the east,
I found as follows : —

Braccia. Palmi. Inches.
1st . . 3 o I

2d . . 3 O 2

3d • ■ 3 32

4th .. 3 3 3i

The upper arcade is managed on the same princi-
ple : it looks at first as if there were three arches to
each under pair : but there are, in reality, only thirty-
eight (or thirty-seven, I am not quite certain of this
number) to the twenty-seven below ; and the columns
get into all manner of relative positions. Even then,
the builder was not satisfied, but must needs carry
the irregularity into the spring of the arches, and
actually, while the general effect is of a symmetrical
arcade, there is not one of the arches the same in
height as another ; their tops undulate all along the
wall like waves along a harbor quay, some nearly
toucliing the string course above, and others falling
from it as much as five or six inches.

214 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

XIV. Let us next examine the plan of the west
front of St. Mark's at Venice, which, though in many
respects imperfect, is in its proportions, and as a
piece of rich and fantastic color, as lovely a dream as
ever filled human imagination. It may, perhaps,
however, interest the reader to hear one opposite
opinion upon this subject ; and after what has been
urged in the preceding pages respecting proportion
in general, more especially respecting the wrongness
of balanced cathedral towers and other regular de-
signs, together with my frequent references to the
Doge's palace, and campanile of St. Mark's as models
of perfection, and my praise of the former especially
as projecting above its second arcade, the following
extracts from the journal of Wood the architect,
written on his arrival at Venice, may have a pleasing
freshness in them, and may show that I have not
been stating principles altogether trite or accepted.

"The strange looking church, and the great ugly
campanile, could not be mistaken. The exterior of
this church surprises you by its extreme ugliness,
more than by anything else."

"The Ducal Palace is even more ugly than any
thing I have previously mentioned. Considered in
detail, I can imagine no alteration to make it toler-
able ; but if this lofty wall had been sd back behind
the two stories of little arches, it would have been a
very noble production."

After more observation^ on "a certain justness of
proportion," and on the appearance of riches and
power in the church, to which he ascribes a pleasing
effect, he goes on: "Some persons are of opinion

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 215

that irregularity is a necessary part of its excellence.
I am decidedly of a contrary opinion, and am con-
vinced that a regular design of the same sort would
be far superior. Let an oblong of good architecture,
but not very showy, conduct to a fine cathedral,
which should appear between two lofty toivcrs and
have two obelisks in front, and on each side of this
cathedral let other squares partially open into the
first, and one of these extend down to a harbor or
sea shore, and you would have a scene which might
challenge any thing in existence."

Why Mr. Wood was unable to enjoy the color of
St. Mark's, or perceive the majesty of the Ducal
palace, the reader will see after reading the two fol-
lowing extracts regarding the Caracci and Michael
Angelo.

" The pictures here (Bologna) are to my taste far
preferable to those of Venice, for if the Venetian
school surpass in coloring and, perhaps, in composi-
tion, the Bolognese is decidedly superior in drawing
and expression, and the Caraccis shine here like
gods.''''

" What is it that is so much admired in this artist
(M. Angelo) ? Some contend for a grandeur of com-
position in the lines and disposition of the figures ;
this, I confess, I do not comprehend ; yet, while I
acknowledge the beauty of certain forms and propor-
tions in architecture, I cannot consistently deny that
similar merits may exist in painting, though I am
unfortunately unable to appreciate them."

I think these passages very valuable, as showing
the effect of a contracted knowledge and false taste

2i6 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

in painting upon an architect's understanding of his
own art ; and especially with what curious notions, or
lack of notions, about proportion, that art has been
sometimes practised. For Mr. Wood is by no means
unintelligent in his observations generally, and his crit-
icisms on classical art are often most valuable. But
those who love Titian better than the Caracci, and who
see something to admire in Michael Angelo, will, per-
haps, be willing to proceed with me to a charitable
examination of St. Mark's. For, although the pres-
ent course of European events aflfords us some chance
of seeing the changes proposed by Mr. Wood carried
into execution, we may still esteem ourselves fortu-
nate in having first known how it was left by the
builders of the eleventh century.

XV. The entire front is composed of an upper and
lower series of arches, enclosing spaces of wall dec-
orated with mosaic, and supported on ranges of shafts
of which, in the lower series of arches, there is an
upper range superimposed on a lower. Thus we have
five vertical divisions of the facade ; i.c, two tiers of
shafts, and the arched wall they bear, below ; one
tier of shafts, and the arched wall they bear, above.
In order, however, to bind the two main divisions
together, the central lower arch (the main entrance)
rises above the level of the gallery and balustrade
which crown the lateral arches.

The proportioning of the columns and walls of the
lower story is so lovely and so varied, that it would
need pages of description before it could be fully
understood; but it may be generally stated thus:
The height of the lower shafts, upper shafts, and

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 217

wall, being severally expressed by a, b, and c, then
a: c :: c : b {a being the highest) ; and diameter of
shaft b is generally to the diameter of shaft a as
height b is to height a, or something less, allowing
for the large plinth which diminishes the apparent
height of the upper shaft : and when this is their
proportion of width, one shaft above is put above
one below, with sometimes another upper shaft inter-
posed : but in the extreme arches a single under shaft
bears two upper, proportioned as truly as the boughs
of a tree ; that is to say, the diameter of each upper
= I of lower. There being thus the three terms of
proportion gained in the lower story, the upper, while
it is only divided into two main members, in order
that the whole height may not be divided into an
even number, has the third term added in its pin-
nacles. So far of the vertical division. The lateral
is still more subtle. There are seven arches in the
lower story ; and, calling the central arch a, and
counting to the extremity, they diminish in the alter-
nate order, a, c, b, d. The upper story has five
arches, and two added pinnacles ; and these diminish
in regular order, the central being the largest, and
the outermost the least. Hence, while one propor-
tion ascends, another descends, like parts in music;
and yet the pyramidal form is secured for the wliole,
and, which was another great point of attention, none
of the shafts of the upper arches stand over those of
the lower.

XVI. It might have been thought that, by this
plan, enough variety had been secured, but the
builder was not satisfied even thus ; for — and this

2l8 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

is the point bearing on the present part of our sub-
ject— always calling the central arch a, and the
lateral ones b and c in succession, the northern b and
c are considerably wider than southern b and c, but
the southern d is as much wider than the northern d,
and lower beneath its cornice besides ; and, more
than this, I hardly believe that one of the effectively
symmetrical members of the fa9ade is actually sym-
metrical with any other. I regret that I cannot state
the actual measures. I gave up the taking them
upon the spot, owing to their excessive complexity,
and the embarrassment caused by the yielding and
subsidence of the arches.

Do not let it be supposed that I imagine the Byzan-
tine workmen to have had these various principles
in their minds as they built. I believe they built
altogether from feeling, and that it was because they
did so, that there is this marvellous life, changeful-
ness, and subtlety running through their every ar-
rangement ; and that we reason upon the lovely
building as we should upon some fair growth of the
trees of the earth, that know not their own beauty.

XVII. Perhaps, however, a stranger instance than
any I have yet given, of the daring variation of pre-
tended symmetry, is found in the front of the Cathe-
dral of Bayeux. It consists of five arches with steep
pediments, the outermost filled, the three central
with doors ; and they appear, at first, to diminish in
regular proportion from the principal one in the cen-
tre. The two lateral doors are very curiously man-
aged. The tympana of their arches are filled with
bas-reliefs in four tiers ; in the lowest tier there i,s in

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 219

each a little temple or gate containing the principal
figure (in that on the right, it is the gate of Hades
with Lucifer). This little temple is carried, like a
capital, by an isolated shaft which divides the whole
arch at about | of its breadth, the larger portion out-
most ; and in that larger portion is the inner entrance
door. This exact correspondence, in the treatment
of both gates, might lead us to expect a correspond-
ence in dimension. Not at all. The small inner
northern entrance measures, in English feet and
inches, 4 ft. 7 in. from jamb to jamb, and the south-
ern, 5 ft. exactly. Five inches in five feet is a
considerable variation. The outer northern porch
measures, from face shaft to face shaft, 13 ft. 11 in.,
and the southern, 14 ft. 6 in. ; giving a difference of
7 in. on \\\ ft. There are also variations in the
pediment decorations not less extraordinary.

XVIII. I imagine I have given instances enough,
though I could multiply them indefinitely, to prove
that these variations are not mere blunders, nor care-
lessnesses, but theresult of a fixed scorn, if not dislike,
of accuracy in measurements ; and, in most cases, I
believe, of a determined resolution to work out an
effective symmetry by variations as subtle as those
of Nature. To what lengths this principle was some-
times carried, we shall see by the very singular man-
agement of the towers of Abbeville. 1 do not say it is
right, still less that it is wrong, but it is a wonderful
proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture ; for,
say what we will of it, that Flamboyant of France,
however morbid, was as vivid and intense in its anima-
tion as ever any phase of mortal mind ; and it would

220 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

have lived till now, if it had not taken to telling lies
I have before noticed the general difficulty of mana-
ging even lateral division, when it is into two equal
parts, unless there be some tliird reconciling mem-
ber. I shall give, hereafter, more examples of the
modes in which this reconciliation is effected in
towers with double lights : the Abbeville architect
put his sword to the knot perhaps rather too sharpl}-.
Vexed by the want of unity between his two windows,
he literally laid their heads together, and so distorted
their ogee curves, as to leave only one of the trefoiled
panels above, on the inner side, and three on the
outer side of each arch. The arrangement is given
in Plate XII., fig. 3. Associated with the various
undulation of flamboyant curves below, it is in the
real tower hardly observed, while it binds it into one
mass in general effect. Granting it, however, to be
ugly and wrong, I like sins of the kind, for the sake
of the courage it requires to commit them. In Plate
II. (part of a small chapel attached to the West front
of the Cathedral of St. Lo), the reader will see an
instance, from the same architecture, of a violation
of its own principles for the sake of a peculiar mean-
ing. If there be any one feature which the flamboy-
ant architect loved to decorate richly, it was the niche
— it was what the capital is to the Corinthian order ;
yet in the case before us there is an ugly beehive put
in the place of the principal niche of the arch. I am
not sure if I am right in my interpretation of its
meaning, but I have little doubt that two figures
below, now broken away, once represented an An-
nunciation ; and on another part of the same cathe-

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 221

dral, I find the descent of the Spirit, encompassed
by rays of Hght, represented very nearly in the form
of the niche in question; which appears, therefore,
to be intended for a representation of this effulgence,
while at the same time it was made a canopy for the
delicate figures below. Whether this was its mean-
ing or not, it is remarkable as a daring departure
from the common habits of the time.

XIX. Far more splendid is a license taken with the
niche decoration of the portal of St. Maclou at Rouen.
The subject of the tympanum bas-relief is the Last
Judgment, and the sculpture of the Inferno side is
carried out with a degree of power whose fearful
grotesqueness I can only describe as a mingling of
the minds of Orcagna and Hogarth. The demons
are perhaps even more awful than Orcagna's ; and,
in some of the expressions of debased humanity in
its utmost despair, the English painter is at least
equalled. Not less wild is the imagination which
gives fury and fear even to the placing of the figures.
An evil angel, poised on the wing, drives the con-
demned troops from before the Judgment seat ; with
his left hand he drags behind him a cloud, which he
is spreading like a winding-sheet over them all ; but
they are urged by him so furiously, that they are
driven not merely to the extreme limit of that scene,
which the sculptor confined elsewhere within the
tympanum, but out of the tympanum and into the
niches of the arch, while the flames that follow them,
bent by the blast, as it seems, of the angePs wings,
rush into the niche's also, and burst up throjigh their
tracery, the three lowermost niches being represented

222 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

as all on fire, while, instead of their usual vaulted and
ribbed ceiling, there is a demon in the roof of each,
with his wings folded over it, grinning down out of
the black shadow.

XX. I have, however, given enough instances of
dtality shown in mere daring, whether wise, as surely
in this last instance, or inexpedient ; but, as a single
example of the Vitality of Assimilation, the faculty
which turns to its purposes all material that is sub-
mitted to it, I would refer the reader to the extraor-
dinary columns of the arcade on the south side of the
Cathedral of Ferrara. A single arch of it is given in
Plate XIII. on the right. Four such arches forming
a group, there are interposed two pairs of columns,
as seen on the left of the same plate ; and then come
another four arches. It is a long arcade of, I suppose,
not less than forty arches, perhaps of many more ;
and in the grace and simplicity of its stilted Byzantine
curves I hardly know its equal. Its like, in fancy of
column, I certainly do not know ; there being hardly
two correspondent, and the architect having been
ready, as it seems, to adopt ideas and resemblances
from any sources whatsoever. The vegetation grow-
ing up the two columns is fine, though bizarre ; the
distorted pillars beside it suggest images of less agree-
able character ; the serpentine arrangements founded
on the usual Byzantine double knot are generally
graceful ; but I was puzzled to account for the ex-
cessively ugly type of the pillar, fig. 3, one of a group
of four. It so happened, fortunately for me, that
there had been a fair in Ferrara ; and, when I had
finished my sketch of the pillar, I had to get out 0/

r3

01

O

3
O

03

c

■a
o

o
.9

O
Ph

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 223

the way of some merchants of miscellaneous wares,
who were removing their stall. It had been shaded
byan awning supported by poles, which, in order that
the covering might be raised or lowered according to
the height of the sun, were composed of two separate
pieces, fitted to each other by a rack, in which I
beheld the prototype of my ugly pillar. It will not
be thought, after what I have above said of the inex-
pedience of imitating anything but natural form, that
I advance this architect's practice as altogether ex-
emplary ; yet the humility is instructive, which con-
descended to such sources for motives of thought,
the boldness, which could depart so far from all
established types of form, and the life and feeling,
which out of an assemblage of such quaint and
uncouth materials, could produce an harmonious piece
of ecclesiastical architecture.

XXI I have dwelt, however, perhaps, too long
upon that form of vitality which is known almost as
much by 'ts errors as by its atonements for them.
We must briefly note the operation of it, which is
always rignt, and always necessary, upon those lesser
details, where it can neither be superseded by prece-
dents, nor repressed by proprieties.

I said, early in this essay, that hand-work might
always be known from machine-work ; observing,
however, at the same time, that it

' Aphorism 25.

was possible for men to turn them- ^j, ^^^^ ^^^^
selves into machines, and to reduce must be free
their labor to the machine level ; iiand-work.
but so long as men work .7^ men. Compare § 24.
putting their heart into what they do, and doing

224 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

their best, it matters not how bad workmen they
may be, there will be that in the handling which is
above all price : it will be plainly seen that some
places have been delighted in more than others —
that there have been a pause, and a care about them ;
and then there will come careless bits, and fast
bits ; and here the chisel will have struck hard,
and there lightly, and anon timidly ; and if the
man's mind as well as his heart went with his
work, all this will be in the right places, and each
part will set off the other ; and the effect of the
whole, as compared with the same design cut by a
machine or a lifeless hand, will be like that of
poetry well read and deeply felt to that of the same
verses jangled by rote. There are many to whom
the difference is imperceptible ; but to those who
love poetry it is everything — they had rather not
hear it at all, than hear it ill read ; and to those
who love Architecture, the life and accent of the
hand are everything. They had rather not have
ornament at all, than see it ill cut — deadly cut,
that is. I cannot too often repeat, it is not coarse
cutting, it is not blunt cutting, that is necessarily
bad ; but it is cold cutting — the look of equal
trouble everywhere — the smooth, diffused tran-
quillity of heartless pains — the regularity of a
plough in a level field. The chill is more likely,
indeed, to show itself in finished work than in any
other — men cool and tire as they complete : and if
completeness is thought to be vested in polish, and
to be attainable by help of sand paper, we may as
well give the work to the engine lathe at once.

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 225

but right finish is simply the full rendering of the
intended impression ; and high finish is the render-
ing of a well intended and vivid impression; and it
is oftener got by rough than fine handling. I am

not sure whether it is frequently enough observed
that sculpture is not the mere cutting of \.\\& form of
any thing in stone ; it is the cutting of the effect
of it. Very often the true form, in the marble, would
not be in the least like itself. The sculptor must
paint with his chisel : half his touches are not to
realize, but to put power into, the form : they are
touches of light and shadow; and raise a ridge, or
sink a hollow, not to represent an actual ridge or
hollow, but to get a line of light, or a spot of darkness.
In a coarse way, this kind of execution is very marked
in old French woodwork ; the irises of the eyes of its
chimeric monsters being cut boldly into holes, which,
variously placed, and always dark, give all kinds of
strange and startling expressions, averted and askance,
to the fantastic countenances. Perhaps the highest
examples of this kind of sculpture-painting are the
works of Mino da Fiesole ; their best eifects being
reached by strange angular, and seemingly rude,
touches of the chisel. The lips of one of the chil-
dren on the tombs in the church of the Badia, appear
only half finished when they are seen close ; yet the
expression is farther carried, and more ineffable, than
in any piece of marble 1 have ever seen, especially
considering its delicacy, and the softness of the child-
features. In a sterner kind, that of the statues in the
sacristy of St. Lorenzo equals it, and there again by
incompletion. 1 know no example of work in which

226 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

the forms are absolutely true and complete where
such a result is attained ; (in Greek sculptures it is
not even attempted.^')

XXII. It is evident that, for architectural appli-
ances, such masculine handling, likely as it must be
to retain its effectiveness when higher finish would be
injured by time, must always be the most expedient;
and as it is impossible, even were it desirable, that
the highest finish should be given to the quantity of
work which covers ?. large building, it will be under-
stood how precious the Intelligence must become,
which renders incompletion itself a means of addi-
tional expression; and how great must be the differ-
ence, when the touches are rude and few, between
those of a careless and those of a regardful mind. It
is not easy to retain anything of their character in a
copy ; yet the reader will find one or two illustrative
points in the examples, given in Plate XIV., from the
bas-reliefs of the north door of Rouen Cathedral.
There are three square pedestals under the three
main niches on each side of it, and one in the centre ;
each of these being on two sides decorated with five
quatrefoiled panels. There are thus seventy quatre-
foils in the lower ornament of the gate alone, without
counting those of the outer course round it, and of
the pedestals outside : each quatrefoil is filled with
a bas-relief, the whole reaching to something above a
man's height. A modern architect would, of course,
have made all the five quatrefoils of each pedestal-
s' The sentence in parenthesis i^ entirely false : all the rest of the
paragraph true and important. The manner of the Greek in chiselling
has since been examined at length i < my " Aratra Pentelid."

THE LA Mr OF LIFE. 227

side equal : not so the Mediaeval. The general form
being apparently a quatrefoil composed of semicircles
on the sides of a square, it will be found on examin-
ation that none of the arcs are semicircle, and none of
the basic figures squares. The latter are rhomboids,
liaving their acute or obtuse angles uppermost accord-
ing to their larger or smaller size ; and the arcs upon
their sides slide into such places as they can get in
the angles of the enclosing parallelogram, leaving
intervals, at each of the four angles, of various shapes,
which are filled each by an animal. The size of the
whole panel being thus varied, the lowest two of the
five are tall, the next two short, and the uppermost a
little higher than the lowest ; while in the course of
bas-reliefs which surrounds the gate, calling either
of the lowest two (which are equal) a, and either of
the next two b, and the fifth and sixth c and d, then
d (the largest) : c : : c : a :: a : b. It is wonderful
how much of the grace of the whole depends on these
variations.

XXIII. Each of the angles, it was said, is filled by
an animal. There are thus 70 x 4 = 280 animals,
all different, in the mere fillings of the intervals of the
bas-reliefs. Three of these intervals, with their
beasts, actual size, the curves being traced upon the
stone, I have given in Plate XIV.

I say nothing of their general design, or of the
lines of the wings and scales, which are perhaps,
unless in those of the central dragon, not much
above the usual commonplaces of good ornamental
work ; but there is an evidence in the features of
thoughtfulness and fancy which is not common, at

228 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

least now-a-days. The upper creature on the left is
biting something, the form of which is hardly trace-
able in the defaced stone — but biting he is ; and the
reader cannot but recognize in the peculiarly re\erted
eye the expression which is never seen, as I think,
but in the eye of a dog gnawing something in jest,
and preparing to start away with it : the meaning of
the glance, so far as it can be marked by the mere
incision of the chisel, will be felt by comparing it with
the eye of the couchant figure on the right, in its
gloomy and angry brooding. The plan of this head,
and the nod of the cap over its brow, are fine ; but
there is a little touch above the hand especially
well meant : the fellow is vexed and puzzled in his
malice ; and his hand is pressed hard on his cheek
bone, and the flesh of the cheek is wrinkled under
the eye by the pressure. The whole, indeed, looks
wretchedly coarse, when it is seen on a scale in
which it is naturally compared with delicate figure
etchings ; but considering it as a mere filling of an
interstice on the outside of a cathedral gate, and as
one of more than three hundred (for in my estimate
I did not include the outer pedestals), it proves very
noble vitality in the art of the time.

XXIV. I believe the right question to ask, respect-
ing all ornament, is simply this : Was it done with
enjoyment — was the carver happy while he was
about it? It may be the hardest work possible, and
the harder because so much pleasure was taken in it ;
but it must have been happy too, or it will not be
living. How much of the stone mason's toil this
condition would exclude I hardlv venture to consider.

!>

I— (

X

P-l

a

3
02

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 229

but the condition is absolute. There is a Gothic
church lately built near Rouen, vile enough, indeed,
in its general composition, but excessively rich in
detail ; many of the details are designed with taste,
and all evidently by a man who has studied old work
closely. But it is all as dead as leaves in December ;
there is not one tender touch, not one warm stroke,
on the whole facade. The men who did it hated it,
and were thankful when it was done. And so long
as they do so they are merely loading your walls with
shapes of clay : the garlands of everlastings in P6re
la Chaise are more cheerful ornaments. You cannot
get the feeling by paying for it — money will not buy
life. I am not sure even that you can get it by watch-
ing or waiting for it. It is true that here and there a
workman may be found who has it in him, but he
does not rest contented in the inferior work — he
struggles forward into an Academician ; and from the
mass of available handicraftsmen the power is gone
— how recoverable I know not : this only I know,
that all expense devoted to sculptural ornament, in
the present condition of that power, comes literally
under the head of Sacrifice for the sacrifice's sake, or
worse. I believe the only manner of rich ornament
that is open to us is the geometrical color-mosaic,
and that much might result from our strenuously tak-
ing up this mode of design. But, at all events, one
thing we have in our power — the doing without
machine ornament and cast-iron work. All the
stamped metals, and artificial stones, and imitation
woods and bronzes, over the invention of which we
hear daily exultation — all the short, and cheap, and

230 THE LAMP OF LIFE.

easy ways of doing that whose difficulty is its honor
— are just so many new obstacles in our already encum-
bered road. The}' will not make one of us happier or
wiser — they will extend neither the pride of judgment
nor the privilege of enjoyment. They will only make
us shallower in our understandings, colder in our
hearts, and feebler in our wits. And most justly. For
we are not sent into this world to do any thing into
which we cannot put our hearts. We have certain
Aphorism 26. work to do for our bread, and that is
"Whatsoever thy to be done strenuously ; other work
^r\ ^^.^"-1 //° to do for our delight, and that is to

do, do It with thy ° '

might ; " and no be done heartily : neither is to be
other might. done by halves and shifts, but with

a will ; and what is not worth this effort is not
to be done at all. Perhaps all that we have to
do is meant for nothing more than an exercise of
the heart and of the will, and is useless in itself ;
but, at all events, the little use it has may well be
spared if it is not worth putting our hands and our
strength to. It does not become our immortality to
take an ease inconsistent with its authority, nor
to suffer any instruments to which it can dispense,
to come between it and the things it rules : and he
who would form the creations of his own mind by
any other instrument than his own hand, would
also, if he might, give grinding organs to Heaven's
angels, to make their music easier. There is
dreaming enough, and earthiness enough, and sen-
suality enough in human existence, without our
turning the few glowing moments of it into mech-
anism ; and since our life must at the best be but

THE LAMP OF LIFE. 231

a vapor that appears for a little time and then van-
ishes away, let it at least appear as a cloud in the
height of Heaven, not as the thick darkness that
broods over the blast of the Furnace, and rolling of
the Wheel.

232 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

CHAPTER VI.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

I. 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 clear-
ness 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. It is a spot
which has all the solemnity, with none of the savage-
ness, 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 stern ex-
pression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn.
No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 233

glacier fret the soft Jura pastures ; no splintered heaps
of ruin break the fair ranlvs of her forest ; no pale,
defiled, or furious rivers send their rude and change-
ful 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 undis-
turbed 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 to each other.
There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing
every now and then into nebulae ; and there was the
oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of
the Mois de Marie, 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
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 Poly-
gala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom
or two, all showered amidst the golden softness of
deep, warm, amber-colored moss. I came out pres-
ently 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 gray cliffs of limestone, there was
a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them

234 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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 globes
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
endeavored, 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 ; the hills became oppres-
sively 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 renew-
ing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing
streams had been dyed by the deep colors of human
endurance, valor, and virtue ; and the crests of the
sable hills that rose against the evening sky received
a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell east-
ward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square
keep of Granson.

II. It is as the centralization and protectress of
this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be re-
garded by us with the most serious thought. We
may live without her, and worship without her, but

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 235

we cannot remember without her. 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 : 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 cy ; '^eheld, 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 con-
fess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the
crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from
her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if in-
deed there be any profit in our aphorism 27.
knowledge of the past, or any joy Architecture is to
in the thought of being remembered be made historical
hereafter, which can give strength ^^^ preserved as
to present exertion, or patience to
present endurance, there are two duties respecting
national architecture whose importance it is im-
possible to overrate : the first, to render the archi-
tecture of the day, historical : and, the second, to
preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that
of past ages.

III. It is in the first of these two directions that
Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of

236 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

Architecture ; for it is in becoming memorial or mon-
umental 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 gen-
erally feel this ; and that having spent their lives
happily and honorably, 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 sympathize in, all their honor, 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 treasured was despised, and the
places that had sheltered and comforted them were
dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man
would fear this ; and that, far more, a good son, a noble

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 2^J

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 aphorism 28.
would make us holy to be per- The sanctity of
mitted to live; and there must be home for good
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' honor, or that our own lives are not such
as would make our dwellings sacred to our chil-
dren, when each man would fain build to himself,
and build for the little revolution of his own life
only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of
lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed for-
wardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capi-
tal— upon those thin, tottering, foundationless
shells of splintered wood and imitated stone — upon
those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike
without difference and without fellowship, as soli-
tary as similar — not merely with the careless dis-
gust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow
for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful fore-
boding 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 unhonored dwellings are the signs
of a great and spreading spirit of popular discon-
tent ; 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 habit'

238 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

ual 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 tenements of a
struggling and restless population differ only from
the tents of the Arab or the Gypsy by their less
healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less
happy choice of their spot of earth ; by their sac-
rifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of
stability without the luxury of change.

iV. This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it
is ominous, mfectious, 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 dishonored both, and that they have never ac-
knowledged the true universality of that Christian wor-
ship 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. It is not a
question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of in-
tellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how,
and with what aspect of durability and of complete-
ness, the domestic buildings of a nation shall be raised.
It is one of those moral duties, not with more impu-
nity to be neglected because the perception of them
depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientious-
ness, 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 239

ordinary course of national revolutions, might be sup-
posed likelv 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 architecture, the beginning
of all other, which does not disdain to treat with re-
spect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well
as the large, and which invests with the dignity of
contented manhood the narrowness of worldly cir-
cumstance.

V. I look to this spirit of honorable, proud, peace-
ful self-possession, this abiding wisdom of contented
life, as probably one of the chief sources of great in-
tellectual 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 rich-
ness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquis-
ite decoration of even the smallest tenements of their
proud periods. The most elaborate piece of archi-
tecture in Venice is a small house at the head of
the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with
two stories above, three windows in the first, and
two in the second. Many of the most exquisite

240 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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 market-
place of Vicenza; it bears date 1481, and the motto,
// . rCest . rose . sans . epine . ; it has also only a
ground floor and two stories, with three windows in
each, separated by rich flower-work, and with bal-
conies, supported, the central one by an eagle with
open wings, the lateral ones by winged griffins stand-
ing on cornucopice. The idea that a house must be
large in order to be well built, is altogether of mod-
ern growth, and is parallel with the idea, that no
picture can be historical, except of a size admitting
figures larger than life.

VI. 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 man-
ner, I will say presently, under another head ; but, at
all events, with such diflferences as might suit and
express each man''s character and occupation, and
partly his history. This right over the house, I con-
ceive, belongs to its first builder, and is to be re-
spected 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, rais-
ing 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 241

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 woU uns bewahren
Vor allem Ungliick und Gefahren,
Und es in Segen lassen stehn
Auf der Raise durch diese Jammerzeit
Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese,
Wo alle Frommen wohnen,
Da wird Gott sie belohnen
Mit der Friedenskrone
Zu alle Ewigkeit."

VII. In public buildings the historical purpose
should be still more definite. It is one of the advan-
tages 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 al-
together unlimited. Its minute and multitudinous
sculptural decorations afford means of expressing,
either symbolically or literally, all that need be
known 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. It is, however,
generally unwise, even in mere surface ornament, to

242 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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 inten-
tion. Actual representation of history has in modern
times been checked by a difficulty, mean indeed, but
steadfast ; that of unmanageable costume ; neverthe-
less, by a sufficiently bold imaginative treatment, and
frank use of symbols, all such obstacles may be van-
quished ; not perhaps in the degree necessary to pro-
duce sculpture in itself satisfactory, but at all events
so as to enable it to become a grand and expressive ele-
ment of architectural composition. Take, for example,
the management of the capitals of the ducal palace at
Venice. History, as such, was indeed intrusted to the
painters of its interior, but every capital of its arcades
was filled with meaning. The large one, the corner
stone of the whole, next the entrance, was devoted
to the symbolization of Abstract Justice ; above it is
a sculpture of the Judgment of Solomon, remarkable
for a beautiful subjection in its treatment to its deco-
rative purpose. The figures, if the subject had been
entirely composed of them, would have awkwardly in-
terrupted 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 243

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 sub-
jects now unintelligible from decay. The capitals
next in order represent the virtues and vices in suc-
cession, 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 fanci-
fully 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.

VIII. Now, not to speak of any more important
public building, let us imagine our own India House
adorned in this way, by historical or symbolical
sculpture : massively built in the 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 mem-
bers 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. Would not one such work be better than
a thousand histories? 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 pleas-
ure in talking about ourselves, even in marble, than

244 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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.

IX. 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 labor
for its praise : they may trust to its recognition of
unacknowledged merit, and demand its justice for
contemporary wrong. But all this is mere selfish-
ness, and does not involve the slightest regard to, or
consideration of, the interest of those by whose num-
bers we would fain swell the circle of our flatterers,
and by whose authority we would gladly support our
presently disputed claims. The idea of self-denial
for the sake of posterity, of prac-

Aphorism 29- tising present economy for the sake
The earth Is an ^^ debtots yet unbom, of planting

entail, not a pos- •' ire.

session. fotcsts that our descendants may

Compare § 20. live Under their shade, or of raising
cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I sup-
pose, efficiently takes place among publicly recog-
nized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the
less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon
the earth, unless the range of our intended and
deliberate usefulness include, not only the com-
panions 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 245

come after us, and whose names are already writ-
ten in the ])ook of creation, as to us; and we have
no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to in-
volve 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 labor of men that,
in proportion to the time between the seed-sow-
ing 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 labored 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.

X. Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such
respect, for futurity. Every human action gains in
honor, 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. There-
fore, when we build, let us think that we build for
ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for pres-
ent 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

246 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

them, and that men will say as they look upon the

labor and wrought substance of them, " See ! this

our fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest

glory of a building is not in its

Aphorism 30. ° ■' . . °

stones, nor in its gold. Its glory
is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voiceful-
ness, 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 shapeli-
ness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and
following ages with each other, and half consti-
tutes 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 color, and
preciousness of architecture; and it is not until
a building has assumed this character, till it has
been intrusted 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.

XI. For that period, then, we must build ; not,
indeed, refusing to ourselves the delight of present

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 247

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 impres-
siveness upon any thing that is perishable. This
would, indeed, be the law of 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 architec-
ture 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 ex-
pressed by the term " picturesque." It is of some
importance to our present purpose to determine the
true meaning of this expression, as it is now gener-
ally 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 Ian-

248 THE LAMP 01< MEMORY.

^'uage, (exclusive of theological expressions,) has
been the subject of so frequent or so prolonged dis-
pute ; yet none remain more vague in their accept-
ance, 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 w-hich the term has been
attached, or else in attemps at abstraction more pal-
pably nugatory than any which have disgraced meta-
physical 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." It would be
curious to see the result 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 reason-
ings 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.

XII. That peculiar character, however, which sep-
arates the picturesque from the characters of subject
belonging to the higher walks of art (and this is all

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 249

that it is necessary for our present purpose to define),
may be shortly and decisively expressed. Pictu-
resqueness, in this sense, is Parasitical Sublimity . 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 sub-
limity is, even in the peculiar sense which I am en-
deavoring to develop, 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. But that character, of which the
extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be degrading
to art, is parasitical sublimity ; i.e., a sublimity de-
pendent 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 pictu-
resqueness, — the first, that of sublimity (for pure
beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so only
as the sublime element mixes with it), and the second,
the subordinate or parasitical position of that sublim-
ity. Of course, therefore, whatever characters of
line or shade or expression are productive of sublim-
ity, will become productive of picturesqueness ; what
these characters are I shall endeavor hereafter to show
at length ; 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 color ; and all these are in

250 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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 ab-
stract sublimity, be found in the very heart and sub-
stance of what we contemplate, as the sublimity o^
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 repre-
sents such characters cannot be properly called pic-
turesque : but, if they be found in the accidental or
external qualities, the distinctive picturesque will be
the result.

XIII. 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 repre-
sented). 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 Cara-
vaggio, 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 acci-
dental light and shade cast across or around those
features. In the case of Rembrandt there is often an
essential sublimity in invention and expression be-
sides, and always a high degree of it in the light
and shade itself; but it is, for the most part, parasiti-
cal or engrafted sublimity as regards the subject of
the painting, and, just so far, picturesque.

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 251

XIV. Again, in the management of the sculptures
of the Parthenon, shadow is frequently empIo\ed as
a dark field on which tlie 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 re-
flections ; they are drawn e.xactly 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 color, 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 contra-
riety : 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 recognized as
the pure, and the other as the picturesque school.
Portions of picturesque treatment will be found in

252 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

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 expres-
sion, and therefore take rank among essential charac-
teristics. Into these multitudinous distinctions and
exceptions I cannot now enter, desiring only to
prove the broad applicability of the general definition.
XV. 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 it was considered as an excrescence, indi-
cated 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 Lacedae-
monians, reported by the Persian spy on the evening
before the battle of Thermopyl^, or glance at any
Homeric description of ideal form, to see how purely
sculpturesque was the law which reduced the mark-
ings of the hair, lest, under the necessary disadvan-
tages of material, they should interfere with the
distinctness of the personal forms. On the contrary,
in later sculpture, the hair receives almost the princi-
pal 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 pro-
jections, and arranged in masses elaborately orna-

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 253

mental : there is true sublimity in the Hnes and the
chiaroscuro of these masses, but it is, as regards the
creature represented, parasitical, and therefore pictu-
resque. 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 colors, lustre, and texture of skin ; nor is it in art
alone that the definition will hold. In animals them-
selves, when their sublimity depends upon their
muscular forms or motions, or necessary and princi-
pal 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 his-
torical subject. Exactly in proportion as their char-
acter 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, 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 direc-
tion of their thoughts is always distinctly recognizable,
as clino-ing: to the surface, to the less essential
character, and as developing out of this a sub-
limity different from that of the creature itself; a
sublimity which is, in a sort, common to all the ob-

254 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

jects of creation, and the same in its constituent ele-
ments, 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 al-
ternations of gayety and gloom in the variegation of
the shell, the plume, or the cloud.

XVI. Now, to return to our immediate subject, it
so happens that, in architecture, the superinduced
and accidental beauty is most commonly inconsist-
ent with the preservation of original character, and
the picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and sup-
posed 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 assimi-
late the architecture with the work of Nature, and
bestow upon it those circumstances of color 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 ex-
ponent 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 255

among pure and essential characters ; so essential to
my mind, that I think a building cannot be consid-
ered as in its prime until four or five centuries have
passed over it ; and that the entire choice and ar-
rangement 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 weather-staining, or the mechan-
ical degradation which the lapse of such a period
would necessitate.

XVII. 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 com-
plexity to be even touched upon within my present
limits, 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 commonly gain in rich-
ness 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 Ital-
ian 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.

256 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

XVIII. It does not belong to my present plan to
consider at length \\\i second head of duty of which
I have above spoken ; the preservation of the archi-
tecture 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 pub-
lic monuments, is the true meaning of the word
restoration understood. It means

Aphorism 31.

the most total destruction which a

Restoration, s o

called, is the building cau suffer: a destruction
worst maimer of out of which no remnants can be
Destruction. gathered : a destruction accompa-

nied with false description of the thing destroyed.^*
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. An-
other 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 impos-
sible. "What copying can there be of surfaces that
have been worn half an inch down ? The whole fin-
ish of the work was in the half inch that is gone ;
if you attempt to restore that finish, you do it con-
jecturally ; if you copy v/hat is left, granting fidel-

'* False, also, in the manner of parody, — the most loathsome
manner of falsehood.

TJiE LAMP OF MEMORY. 257

ity 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. Look at the animals which I have given
in Plate 14, as an instance of living work, and sup-
pose 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,)
is to dash the old work to pieces ; the second is
usually to put up the cheapest and basest imita-
tion which can escape detection, but in all cases,
however careful, and however labored, an imita-
tion still, a cold model of such parts as can be mod-
elled, 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 fidel-
ity which is possible, has been attained, or even
attempted.

XIX. Do not let us talk then of restoration. The
thing is 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

258 THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

the old building is destroyed, and that more to-
tally 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 rebuilt 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 ?/iasotis, 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,) 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 atty cost, from every influ-
ence 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 with iron
where it loosens ; stay it with timber where it de-
clines ; do not care about the unsightliness of the
aid : better a crutch than a lost limb ; and do this

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 259

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 dishonor-
ing and false substitute deprive it of the funeral of-
fices of memory.

XX. Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain
to speak ; my words will not reach those who com-
mit them,®^ 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 the past times or not. IVe 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 labored for, the praise of achieve-
ment or the expression of religious feeling, or what-
soever else it might be which in those buildings they
intended to be permanent, we have no right to obliter-
ate. 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 pres-

55 No, indeed ! — any more wasted words than mine throughout Ufe,
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.

26o THE LAMP OF MEMORY.

ent convenience by casting down such buildings as
we clioose to dispense witli. That sorrow, that loss,
we liave no right to inflict. Did the cathedral of
Avranches belong to the mob who destroyed it, any
more than it did to us, who walk in sorrow to and
fro over its foundation ? 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 Archi-
tecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair build-
ing 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

THE LAMP OF MEMORY. 261

which can in any wise there take the place of that of
the woods and fields, is the power of ancient Archi-
tecture. 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
remember 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
couid bear daily to behold, from their palace cham-
bers, the places where their fathers lay at rest, at the
meeting of the dark streets of Verona.

262 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

CHAPTER VII.

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

I. It has been my endeavor to show in the pre-
ceding pages how every form of noble architecture is
in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life,
History, and Religious Faith of nations. Once or
twice in doing this, I have named a principle to
which I would now assign a definite place among
those which direct that embodiment ; the last place,
not only as that to which its own humility would
incline, but rather as belonging to it in the aspect of
the crowning grace of all the rest ; that principle, I
mean, to which Polity owes its stability. Life its
happiness. Faith its acceptance. Creation its con-
tinuance, — Obedience.

Nor is it the least among the sources of more
serious satisfaction which I have found in the pur-
suit of a subject that at first ap-

Aphorism 32. peared to bear but slightly on the
There is no such ^ interests of mankind, that

thing as hberty. =» . r ^ •

the conditions of material perfection
which it leads me in conclusion to consider, furnish
a strange proof how false is the conception, how
frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom
which men call Liberty : most treacherous, indeed,

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 263

of all phantoms ; for the feeblest ray of reason
might surely show us, that not only its attain-
ment, but its being, was impossible. There is no
such thing in the universe. There can never be.
The stars have it not ; the earth has it not ; the
sea has it not ; and we men have the mockery and
semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.

In one of the noblest poems * for its imagery and
its music belonging to the recent school of our litera-
ture, the writer has sought in the aspect of inanimate
nature the expression of that Liberty which, having
once loved, he has seen among men in its true dyes
of darkness. But with what strange fallacy of inter-
pretation! since in one noble line of his invocation
he has contradicted the assumptions of the rest, and
acknowledged the presence of a subjection, surely
not less severe because eternal. How could he other-
wise ? since if there be any one principle more widely
than another confessed by every utterance, or more
sternly than another imprinted on every atom, of the
visible creation, that principle is not Liberty, but
Law.

II. The enthusiast would reply that by Liberty he
meant the Law of Liberty. Then why use the single
and misunderstood word? If by liberty you mean
chastisement of the passions, discipline of the intel-
lect, subjection of the will ; if you mean the fear of
inflicting, the shame of committing a wrong ; if you
mean respect for all who are in authority, and con-
sideration for all who are in dependence ; veneration
for the good, mercy to the evil, sympathy with the

* See Appendix V.

264 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

weak ; if you mean watchfulness over all thoughts,
temperance in all pleasures, and perseverance in all
toils ; if you mean, in a word, that Service which is
defined in the liturgy of the English Church to be
perfect Freedom, why do you name this by the same
word by which the luxurious mean license, and the
reckless mean change ; by which the rogue means
rapine, and the fool, equality ; by which the proud
mean anarchy, and the malignant mean violence?
Call it by any name rather than this, but its best and
truest is Obedience. Obedience is, indeed, founded
on a kind of freedom, else it would become mere
subjugation, but that freedom is only granted that
obedience may be more perfect ; and thus, while a
measure of license is necessary to exhibit the indi-
vidual energies of things, the fairness and pleasant-
ness and perfection of them all consist in their
Restraint. Compare a river that has burst its banks
with one that is bound by them, and the clouds that
are scattered over the face of the whole heaven with
those that are marshalled into ranks and orders by its
winds. So that though restraint, utter and unrelax-
ing, can never be comely, this is not because it is in
itself an evil, but only because, when too great, it
overpowers the nature of the thing restrained, and
so counteracts the other laws of which that nature is
itself composed. And the balance wherein consists
the fairness of creation is between the laws of life and
being in the things governed, and the laws of general
sway to which they are subjected ; and the suspen-
sion or infringement of either kind of law, or, literally,
disorder, is equivalent to, and synonymous with,

THE LAMP or OBEDIENCE. 265

disease ; while the increase of both honor and beauty
is habitually on the side of restraint (or the action of
superior law) rather than of character (or the action
of inherent law). The noblest word in the catalogue
of social virtue is " Loyalty," and the sweetest which
men have learned in the pastures of the wilderness is
"Fold."

111. Nor is this all; but we may obsei-ve, that
exactly in proportion to the majesty of things in
the scale of being, is the completeness of their obedi-
ence to the laws that are set over them. Gravitation
is less quietly, less instantly obeyed by a grain of
dust than it is by the sun and moon ; and the ocean
fiills and flows under influences which the lake and
river do not recognize. So also in estimating the
dignity of any action or occupation of men, there is
perhaps no better test than the question " are its
laws strait ? " For their severity will probably be
commensurate with the greatness of the numbers
whose labor it concentrates or whose interest it
concerns.

This severity must be singular, therefore, in the
case of that art, above all others, whose productions
are the most vast and the most common ; which
requires for its practice the co-operation of bodies of
men, and for its perfection the perseverance of suc-
cessive generations. And, taking into account also
what we have before so often observed of Architec-
ture, her continual influence over the emotions of
daily life, and her realism, as opposed to the two
sister arts which are in comparison but the pictur-
ing of stories and of dreams, we might beforehand

266 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

expect that we should find her healthy state and
action dependent on far more severe laws than theirs :
that the license which they extend to the workings
of individual mind would be withdrawn by her ; and
that, in assertion of the relations which she holds
with all that is universally important to man, she
would set forth, by her own majestic subjection,
some likeness of that on which man's social happi-
ness and power depend. We might, therefore, with-
out the light of experience, conclude, that Architec-
ture never could flourish except when it was subjected
to a national law as strict and as minutely authorita-
tive as the laws which regulate religion, policy, and
social relations ; nay, even more authoritative than
these, because both capable of more enforcement,
as over more passive matter ; and needing more en-
forcement, as the purest type not of one law nor of
another, but of the common authority of all. But
in this matter experience speaks more loudly than
reason. If there be any one condition which, in
watching the progress of architecture, we see distinct
and general ; if, amidst the counter-evidence of suc-
cess attending opposite accidents of character and
circumstance, any one conclusion may be constantly
and indisputably drawn, it is this ; that the architec-
ture of a nation is great only when it is as universal
and as established as its language ; and when provin-
cial differences of style are nothing more than so
many dialects. Other necessities are matters of
doubt : nations have been alike successful in their
architecture in times of poverty and of wealth ; in
times of war and of peace ; in times of barbarism and

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 267

of refinement ; under governments the most liberal
or the most arbitrary ; but this one condition has
been constant, this one requirement clear in all places
and at all times, that the work shall be that of a
school, that no individual caprice shall dispense with,
or materially vary, accepted types and customary
decorations ; and that from the cottage to the palace,
and from the chapel to the basilica, and from the
garden fence to the fortress wall, every member and
feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as
commonly current, as frankly accepted, as its lan-
guage or its coin.

IV. A day never passes without our hearing our
English architects called upon to be original, and to
invent a new style : about as sensible and necessary
an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had
rags enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent
a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole
coat first, and let him concern himself about the
fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of
architecture. Who wants a new style of painting or
sculpture? But we want some style. It is of mar-
vellously little importance, if we have a code of laws
and they be good laws, whether they be new or old,
foreign or native, Roman or Saxon, or Norman, or
English laws. But it is of considerable importance
that we should have a code of laws of one kind or
another, and that code accepted and enforced from
one side of the island to another, and not one law
made ground of judgment at York and another in
Exeter. And in like manner it does not matter one
marble splinter whether we have an old or new archi-

268 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

tecture, but it matters everything whether we have
an architecture truly so called or not ; that is, whether
an architecture whose laws might be taught at our
schools from Cornwall to Northumberland, as we
teach English spelling and English grammar, or an
architecture which is to be invented fresh every time
we build a workhouse or a parish school. There
seems to me to be a wonderful misunderstanding
among the majority of architects of the present day
as to the very nature and meaning of Originality,
and of all wherein it consists. Originality in expres-
sion does not depend on invention of new words ;
nor originality in poetry on invention of new meas-
ures ; nor, in painting, on invention of new colors,
or new modes of using them. The chords of music,
the harmonies of color, the general principles of the
arrangement of sculptural masses, have been deter-
mined long ago, and, in all probability, cannot be
added to any more than they can be altered. Grant-
ing that they may be, such additions or alterations
are much more the work of time and of multitudes
than of individual inventors. We may have one
Van Eyck, who will be known as the introducer of
a new style once in ten centuries, but he himself will
trace his invention to some accidental by-play or
pursuit ; and the use of that invention will depend
altogether on the popular necessities or instincts of
the period. Originality depends on nothing of the
kind. A man who has the gift, will take up any
style that is going, the style of his day, and will work
in that, and be great in that, and make everything
that he does in it look as fresh as if every thought of

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 269

it had just come down from heaven. I do not say
that he will not take liberties with his materials, or
with his rules : I do not say that strange changes
will not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his
fancies, in both. But those changes will be instruc-
tive, natural, facile, though sometimes marvellous ;
they will never be sought after as things necessary
to his dignity or to his independence ; and those
liberties will be like the liberties that a great speaker
takes with the language, not a defiance of its rules
for the sake of singularity ; but inevitable, uncal-
culated, and brilliant consequences of an effort to
express what the language, without such infraction,
could not. There may be times when, as I have
above described, the life of an art is manifested in
its changes, and in its refusal of ancient limitations :
so there are in the life of an insect ; and there is great
interest in the state of both the art and the insect at
those periods when, by their natural progress and
constitutional power, such changes are about to be
wrought. But as that would be both an uncomfort-
able and foolish caterpillar which, instead of being
contented with a caterpillar's life and feeding on
caterpillar's food, was always striving to turn itself
into a chrysalis ; and as that would be an unhappy
chrysalis which should lie awake at night and roll
restlessly in its cocoon, in efforts to turn itself pre-
maturely into a moth ; so will that art be unhappy
and unprosperous which, instead of supporting itself
on the food, and contenting itself with the customs,
which have been enough for the support and guid-
ance of other arts before it and like it, is struggling

270 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

and fretting under the natural limitations of its exist-
ence, and striving to become something other than
it is. And though it is the nobility of the highest
creatures to look forward to, and partly to under-
stand the changes which are appointed for them,
preparing for them beforehand ; and if, as is usual
with appointed changes, they be into a higher state,
even desiring them, and rejoicing in the hope of them,
yet it is the strength of every creature, be it change-
ful or not, to rest, for the time being, contented
with the conditions of its existence, and striving only
to bring about the changes which it desires, by fulfill-
ing to the uttermost the duties for which its present
state is appointed and continued.

V. Neither originality, therefore, nor change, good
though both may be, and this is commonly a most
merciful and enthusiastic supposition with respect to
either, is ever to be sought in itself, or can ever be
healthily obtained by any struggle or rebellion against
common laws. We want neither the one nor the
other. The forms of architecture already known are
good enough for us, and for far better than any of
us ; and it will be time enough to think of changing
them for better when we cannot use them as they are.
But there are some things which we not only want,
but cannot do without ; and which all the struggling
and raving in the world, nay more, which all the
real talent and resolution in England, will never
enable us to do without : and these are Obedience,
Unity, Fellowship, and Order. And all our schools
of design, and committees of taste ; all our academies
and lectures, and journalisms, and essays ; all the sac-

THE LAMr OF OBEDIENCE. 2yi

rifices which we are beginning to make, all the troth
which there is in our English nature, all the power
of our English will, and the life of our English intel-
lect, will in this matter be as useless as efforts and
emotions in a dream, unless we are contented to
submit architecture and all art, like other things, to
English law.
/ VI. I say architecture and all art; for I believe
architecture must be the beginning of arts, and that
the others must follow her in their time and order ;
and I think the prosperity of our schools of painting
and sculpture, in which no one will deny the life,
though many the health, depends upon that of our
architecture. I think that all will languish until that
^akes the lead, and (this I do not t/i/nk, but I pro-
claim, as confidently as I would assert the necessity,
for the safety of society, of an understood and strongly
administered legal government) our architecture w///
languish, and that in the very dust, until the first
principle of common sense be manfully obeyed, and
an universal system of form and workmanship be
everywhere adopted and enforced. It may be said
that this is impossible. It may be so — I fear it is so :
I have nothing to do with the possibility or impossi-
bility of it ; I simply know and assert the necessity
of it. If it be impossible, English art is impossible.
Give it up at once. You are wasting time, and
money, and energy upon it, and though you exhaust
centuries and treasuries, and break hearts for it. you
will never raise it above the merest dilettanteism.
Think not of it. It is a dangerous vanity, a mere
gulf in which genius after genius will be swallowed

272 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

up, and it will not close. And so it will continue t<5
be, unless the one bold and broad step be taken at
the beginning. We shall not manufacture art out
of pottery and printed stuffs : we shall not reason out
art by our philosophy ; we shall not stumble upon
art by our experiments, nor create it by our fancies :
I do not say that we can even build it out of brick
and stone ; but there is a chance for us in these, and
there is none else : and that chance rests on the
bare possibility of obtaining the consent, both of
architects and of the public, to choose a style, and
to use it universally.

VII. How surely its principles ought at first to be
limited, we may easily determine by the considera-
tion of the necessary modes of teaching any other
branch of general knowledge. When we begin to
teach children writing, we force them to absolute
copyism, and require absolute accuracy in the
formation of the letters ; as they obtain command
of the received modes of literal expression, we can-
not prevent their falling into such variations as are
consistent with their feeling, their circumstances,
or their characters. So, when a boy is first taught
to write Latin, an authority is required of him for
every expression he uses ; as he becomes master
of the language he may take a license, and feel his
right to do so without any authority, and yet write
better Latin than when he borrowed every separate
expression. In the same way our architects would
have to be taught to write the accepted style. We
must determine what buildings are to be considered
Augustan in their authority ; their modes of construe-

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 273

tion and laws of proportion are to be studied with
the most penetrating care ; then the different forms
and uses of their decorations are to be classed and
catalogued, as a German grammarian classes the
powers of prepositions ; and under this absolute,
irrefragable authority, we are to l)egin to work ; ad-
mitting not so much as an alteration in the depth of
a cavetto, or the breadth of a fillet. Then, when our
sight is once accustomed to the grammatical forms
and arrangements, and our thoughts familiar with
the expression of them all ; when we can speak this
dead language naturally, and apply it to whatever
ideas we have to render, that is to say, to every
practical purpose of life; then, and not till then,
a license might be permitted, and individual authority
allowed to change or to add to the received forms,
always within certain limits ; the decorations, espe-
cially, might be made subjects of variable fancy, and
enriched with ideas either original or taken from
other schools. And thus, in process of time and by
a great national movement, it might come to pass
that a new style should arise, as language itself
changes ; we might perhaps come to speak Italian
instead of Latin, or to speak modern instead of old
English ; but this would be a matter of entire in-
difference, and a matter, besides, which no determi-
nation or desire could either hasten or prevent.
That alone which it is in our power to obtain, and
which it is our duty to desire, is an unanimous style
of some kind, and such comprehension and practice
of it as would enable us to adapt its features to the
peculiar character of every several building, large or

274 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

small, domestic, civil, or ecclesiastical. I have said
that it was immaterial what style was adopted, so far
as regards the room for originality which its develop-
ment would admit : it is not so, however, when we
take into consideration the far more important ques-
tions of the facility of adaptation to general purposes,
and of the sympathy with which this or that style
would be popularly regarded. The choice of Classi-
cal or Gothic, again using the latter term in its
broadest sense, may be questionable when it regards
some single and considerable public building ; but I
cannot conceive it questionable, for an instant, when
it regards modern uses in general : I cannot conceive
any architect insane enough to project the vulgariza-
tion of Greek architecture. Neither can it be ration-
ally questionable whether we should adopt early or
late, ori"-inal or derivative Gothic ; if the latter were
chosen, it must be either some impotent and ugly
degradation, like our own Tudor, or else a style
whose grammatical laws it would be nearly impossible
to limit or arrange, like the French Flamboyant.
We are equally precluded from adopting styles es-
sentially infantine or barbarous, however Herculean
their infancy, or majestic their outlawry, such as our
own Norman, or the Lombard Romanesque. The
choice would lie I think between four styles : — i .
The Pisan Romanesque ; 2. The early Gothic of the
Western Italian Republics, advanced as far and as
fast as our art would enable us to the Gothic of
Giotto ; 3. The Venetian Gothic in its purest devel-
opment; 4. The English earliest decorated. The
most natural, perhaps the safest choice, would be of

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 275

the last, well fenced from chance of again stiffening
into the perpendicular ; and perhaps enriched by some
mingling of decorative elements from the exquisite
decorated Gothic of France, of which, in such cases,
it would be needful to accept some well-known exam-
ples, as the North door of Rouen and the church of
St. Urbain at Troyes, for final and limiting authori-
ties on the side of decoration.

VIII. It is almost impossible for us to conceive,
in our present state of doubt and ignorance, the
sudden dawn of intelligence and aphorism 33.
fancy, the rapidly increasing sense The glory and
of power and facility, and, in "se of restraint.
its proper seiise^ of Freedom, which such whole-
some restraint would instantly cause throughout
the whole circle of the arts. Freed from the agita-
tion and embarrassment of that liberty of choice
which is the cause of half the discomforts of the
world ; freed from the accompanying necessity of
studying all past, present, or even possible styles ;
and enabled, by concentration of individual, and
co-operation of multitudinous energy, to penetrate
into the uttermost secrets of the adopted style, the
architect would find his whole understanding en-
larged, his practical knowledge certain and ready
to hand, and his imagination playful and vigorous,
as a child's would be within a walled garden, who
would sit down and shudder if he were left free in
a fenceless plain. How many and how bright
would be the results in every direction of interest,
not to the arts merely, but to national happiness
and virtue, it would be as difficult to preconceive

276 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

as it would seem extravagant to state: but the
first, perhaps the least, of them would be an in-
creased sense of fellowship among ourselves ; a
cementing of every patriotic bond of union, a proud
and happy recognition of our affection for and
sympathy with each other, and our willingness in
all things to submit ourselves to every law that
could advance the interest of the community ; a
barrier, also, the best conceivable, to the unhappy
rivalry of the upper and middle classes, in houses,
furniture, and establishments ; and even a check
to much of what is as vain as it is painful in the
oppositions of religious parties respecting matters
of ritual. These, I say, would be the first conse-
quences. Economy increased tenfold, as it would
be by the simplicity of practice ; domestic comforts
uninterfered with by the caprice and mistakes of
architects ignorant of the capacities of the styles
they use, and all the symmetry and sightliness of
our harmonized streets and public buildings, are
things of slighter account in the catalogue of bene-
fits. But it would be mere enthusiasm to endeavor
to trace them farther.* I have suffered myself too
long to indulge in the speculative statement of re-
quirements which perhaps we have more immediate
and more serious work than to supply, and of feelings
which it may be only contingently in our power to

* I am well content to close my thirty-three aphorisms with this
most comprehensive one; — and my fifty-five notes with this still more
comprehensive reduction of them to practice for the modern reader :
— Build nothing that you can possibly help, — and let no land on
building leases.

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 277

recover. I should be unjustly thought unaware of
the difficulty of what I have proposed, or of the unim-
portance of the whole subject as compared with many
which are brought home to our interests and fixed
upon our consideration by the wild course of the
present century. But of difficulty and of importance
it is for others to judge. I have limited myself to the
simple statement of what, if we desire to have archi-
tecture, we MUST primarily endeavor to feel and do :
but then it may not be desirable for us to have archi-
tecture at all. There are many who feel it to be
so ; many who sacrifice much to that end ; and I am
sorry to see their energies wasted and their lives
disquieted in vain. I have stated, therefore, the
only ways m which that end is attainable, without
venturing even to express an opinion as to its real
desirableness. I have an opinion, and the zeal with
which 1 have spoken may sometimes have betrayed
it, but I hold to it with no confidence. I know too
well the undue importance which the study that
every man follows must assume in his own eyes, to
trust my own impressions of the dignity of that of
Architecture ; and yet I think I cannot be utterly
mistaken in regarding it as at least useful in the
sense of a National employment. I am confirmed in
this impression by what I see passing among the
states of Europe at this instant. All the horror, dis-
tress, and tumult which oppress the foreign nations,
are traceable, among the other secondary causes
through which God is working out His will upon
them, to the simple one of their not having enough
to do. I am not blind to the distress among their

278 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

operatives ; nor do I deny the nearer and visibly
active causes of the movement : the recklessness of
villany in the leaders of revolt, the absence of com-
mon moral principle in the upper classes, and of
common courage and honesty in the heads of govern
ments. But these causes themselves are ultimately
traceable to a deeper and simpler one : the reckless-
ness of the demagogue, the immorality of the middle
class, and the effeminacy and treachery of the noble,
are traceable in all these nations to the commonest
and most fruitful cause of calamity in households —
idleness. We think too much in our benevolent
efforts, more multiplied and more vain day by day,
of- bettering men by giving them advice and instruc-
tion. There are few who will take either: the chief
thing they need is occupation. I do not mean work
in the sense of bread, — I mean work in the sense of
mental interest; for those who either are placed
above the necessity of labor for their bread, or who
will not work although they should. There is a vast
quantity of idle energy among European nations at
this time, which ought to go into handicrafts ; there
are multitudes of idle semi-gentlemen who ought to
be shoemakers and carpenters : but since they will
not be these so long as they can help it, the business
of the philanthropist is to find them some other em-
ployment than disturbing governments. It is of no
use to tell them tliey are fools, and that they will
only make themselves miserable in the end as well
as others : if they have nothing else to do, they
will do mischief; and the man who will not work,
and who has no means of intellectual pleasure, is as

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 279

sure to become an instrument of evil as if he had sold
himself bodily to Satan. I have myself seen enough
of the daily life of the young educated men of France
and Italy, to account for, as it deserves, the deepest
national suffering and degradation ; and though, for
the most part, our commerce and our national habits
of industry preserve us from a similar paralysis, yet
it would be wise to consider whether the forms of
employment which we chiefly adopt or promote, are
as well calculated as they might be to improve and
elevate us.

We have just spent, for instance, a hundred and
fifty millions, with which we have paid men for dig-
ging ground from one place and depositing it in
another. We have formed a large class of men, the
railway navvies, especially reckless, unmanageable,
and dangerous. We have maintained besides (let
us state the benefits as fairly as possible) a number
of ironfounders in an unhealthy and painful employ-
ment ; we have developed (this is at least good) a
very large amount of mechanical ingenuity ; and we
have, m fine, attained the power of going fast from
one place to another. Meantime we have had no
mental interest or concern ourselves in the operations
we have set on foot, but have been left to the usual
vanities and cares of our existence. Suppose, on the
other hand, that we had employed the same sums in
building beautiful houses and churches. We should
have maintained the same number of men, not in
driving wheelbarrows, but in a distinctly technical,
if not intellectual employment ; and those who were
more intelligent among them would have been espe-

28o THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

daily happy in that employment, as having room in
it for the development of their fancy, and being
directed by it to that observation of beauty which,
associated with the pursuit of natural science, at
present forms the enjoyment of many of the more
intelligent manufacturing operatives. Of mechanical
ingenuity, there is, I imagine, at least as much
required to build a cathedral as to cut a tunnel or
contrive a locomotive : we should, therefore, have
developed as much science, while the artistical ele-
ment of intellect would have been added to the gain.
Meantime we should ourselves have been made hap-
pier and wiser by the interest we should have taken
in the work with which we were personally concerned ;
and when all was done, instead of the very doubtful
advantage of the power of going fast from place to
place, we should have had the certain advantage of
increased pleasure in stopping at home.

IX. There are many other less capacious, but more
constant, channels of expenditure, quite as disputable
in their beneficial tendency; and we are, perhaps,
hardly enough in the habit of inquiring, with respect
to any particular form of luxury or any customary
appliance of life, whether the kind of employment it
gives to the operative or the dependant be as healthy
and fitting an employment as we might otherwise
provide for him. It is not enough to find men abso-
lute subsistence : we should think of the manner of
life which our demands necessitate ; and endeavor,
as far as may be, to make all our needs such as may,
in the supply of them, raise, as well as feed, the poor.
It is far better to give work which is above the men,

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE. 281

than to educate the men to be above their work. It
may be doubted, for instance, whether the habits ol
luxury, which necessitate a large train of men ser-
vants, be a wholesome form of expenditure ; and
more, whether the pursuits which have a tendency to
enlarge the class of the jockey and the groom be a
philanthropic form of mental occupation. So again,
consider the large number of men whose lives are
employed by civilized nations in cutting facets upon
jewels. There is much dexterity of hand, patience,
and ingenuity thus bestowed, which are simply
burned out in the blaze of the tiara, without, so far
as I see, bestowing any pleasure upon those who
wear or who behold, at all compensatory for the loss
of life and mental power which are involved in the
employment of the workman. He would be far more
healthily and happily sustained by being set to carve
stone ; certain qualities of his mind, for which there
is no room in his present occupation, would develop
themselves in the nobler ; and I believe that most
women would, in the end, prefer the pleasure of hav-
ing built a church, or contributed to the adornment
of a cathedral, to the pride of bearing a certain quan-
tity of adamant on their foreheads.

X. I could pursue this subject willingly, but I have
some strange notions about it which it is perhaps
wiser not loosely to set down. I content myself with
finally reasserting, what has been throughout the
burden of the preceding pages, that whatever rank,
or whatever importance, may be attributed or at-
tached to their immediate subject, there is at least
some value in the analogies with which its pursuit

282 THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE.

has presented us, and some instruction in the fre-
quent reference of its commonest necessities to the
mighty laws, in the sense and scope of which all men
are Builders, whom every hour sees laying the stubble
or the stone.

I have paused, not once nor twice, as I wrote, and
often have checked the course of what might oth-
erwise have been importunate persuasion, as the
thought has crossed me, how soon all Architecture
may be vain, except that which is not made with
hands. There is something ominous in the light
which has enabled us to look back with disdain upon
the ages among whose lovely vestiges we have been
wandering. I could smile when I hear the hopeful
exultation of many, at the new reach of worldly
science, and vigor of worldly effort ; as if we were
again at the beginning of days. There is thunder
on the horizon as well as dawn. The sun was risen
upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.

APPENDIX I.

The Four Modes of Admiration. — (This piece of
analysis, which I find to be entirely accurate, was given in
the preface to the second edition. I now place it, without
interference from other topics, at the close of the volume,
where it may be read, I hope, with clearer understanding
than it could have been at the beginning, — and to better
purpose.)

I HAVE found, after carefully investigating the character
of the emotions which were generally felt by well-educated
people respecting various forms of good architecture, that
these emotions might be separated into four general
heads : —

1 . Sentimental Admiration . — The kind of feeling which
most travellers experience on first entering a cathedral by
torchlight and hearing a chant from concealed choristers;
or in visiting a ruined abbey by moonlight, or any building
with which interesting associations are connected, at any
time when they can hardly see it.

2. Proud Admiration. — The delight which most worldly
people take in showy, large, or complete buildings, for
the sake of the importance which such buildings confer on
themselves, as their possessors, or admirers.

283

284 APPENDICES.

3. Workmanly Admiration. — The delight of seeing
good and neat masonry, together with that belonging to
incipient developments of taste; as, for instance, a percep-
tion of proportion in lines, masses, and mouldings.

4. Artistic and Rational Admiration. — The delight taken
in reading the sculpture or painting on walls, capitals,
friezes, &c.

Of these four kinds of feeling I found, on farther in-
quiry, that the first, or sentimental kind, was instinctive
and simple; excitable in nearly all persons, by a certain
amount of darkness and slow music in a minor key. That
it had good uses and was of a dignified character in some
minds; but that on the whole it was apt to rest in theatri-
cal effect, and to be as well satisfied with the incantation
scene in " Robert le Diable," provided there were enough
gauze and feux-foUets, as by the Cathedral of Rheims.
That it might generally be appealed to with advantage as
a judge of the relative impressiveness of two styles of art,
but was wholly unable to distinguish truth from affectation
in the style it preferred. Even in its highest manifesta-
tion, in the great mind of Scott, while it indeed led him
to lay his scenes in Melrose Abbey and Glasgow Cathe-
dral, rather than in St. Paul's or St. Peter's, it did not
enable him to see the difference between true Gothic at
Glasgow and false Gothic at Abbotsford. As a critical
faculty, I found it was hardly to be taken into consider-
ation in any reasoning on the higher merits of architecture.

2. Proud Admiration. — This kind of applause, so far
from being courted, I found ought altogether to be depre-
cated by the noble architect, and that no building could be
really admirable which was not admirable to the poor. So
that there was an essential baseness in the Renaissance (i.e.

APPENDICES. 285

the modern Italian and Greek style), and an essential noble-
ness in the Gothic, consisting simply in the pride of the
one, and the humility of the other. I found the love of large-
ness, and especially of symmetry, invariably associated with
vulgarity and narrowness of mind, so that the person most
intimately acquainted with the mind of the monarch to
whom the Renaissance architecture owed its principal
impulse, describing his principles of religion, states that
he "was shocked to be told that Jesus Christ spoke the
language of the humble and the poor;" and, describing
his taste in architecture, says that he " thought of nothing
but grandeur, magnificence, and symmetry." *

3. Workmanly Admiration. — This, of course, though
right within certain limits, is wholly uncritical, being as
easily satisfied with the worst as with the best building, so
that the mortar be laid smoothly. As to the feeling with
which it is usually united, namely, a delight in the intelli-
gent observance of the proportions of masses, it is good in
all the affairs of life, whether regulating the disposition
of dishes at a dinner table, + of ornaments on a dress, or of
pillars in a portico. But it no more constitutes the true
power of an architect, than the possession of a good ear
for metre constitutes a poet; and every building whose
excellence consists merely in the proportion of masses is
to be considered as nothing more than an architectural
doggerel, or rhyming exercise.

* Madame de Maintenon, quoted in Quarterly Review, March,
1S55, pp. 423-428. She says, afterwards, " He prefers to endure all
the draughts from the doors, in order that they may be opposite one
another — yon }tmst perish in syTiimetry ."

t " At the chateau of Madame V., the white-headed butler begged
madame to apologize for the central flower-basket on the table : ' He
had not had time to study the composition.' " — Mrs. Siowe's "Sutmy
Metnories," lett. 44.

286 APPENDICES

4. Artistic and Rational Admiration. — I found, finally,
that this, the only admiration worth having, attached itself
■wholly to the meaning of the sculpture and color on the
building. That it was very regardless of general form and
size; but intensely observant of the statuary, floral mould-
ings, mosaics, and other decorations. Upon which, little
by little, it gradually became manifest to me that the sculp-
ture and painting were, in fact, the all in all of the thing
to be done; that these, which I had long been in the
careless habit of thinking subordinate to the architecture,
were in fact the entire masters of the architecture; and
that the architect who was not a sculptor or a painter, was
nothing better than a frame-maker on a large scale. Hav-
ing once got this clew to the truth, every question about
architecture immediately settled itself without farther diffi-
culty. I saw that the idea of an independent architectural
profession was a mere fallacy, the thought of which had
never so much as entered the heads of the great nations of
earlier times; but that it had always, till lately, been un-
derstood, that in order to have a Parthenon, one had to
get a preliminary Phidias; and to have a Cathedral of
Florence, a preliminary Giotto; and to have even a Saint
Peter's at Rome, a preliminary Michael Angelo. And as,
with this new light, I examined the nobler examples of
our Gothic cathedrals, it became apparent to me that the
master workman must have been the person who carved
the bas-reliefs in the porches; that to him all others must
have been subordinate, and by him all the rest of the
cathedral essentially arranged; but that in fact the whole
company of builders, always large, were more or less
divided into two great flocks of stone-layers, and sculp-
tors; and that the number of sculptors was so great, and
their average talent so considerable, that it would no more

APPENDICES. 287

have been thought necessary to state respecting the master
builder that he could carve a statue, than that he could
measure an angle, or strike a curve.*

If the reader will think over this statement carefully he
will find that it is indeed true, and a key to many things.
The fact is, there are only two fine arts possible to the
human race, sculpture and painting. What we call archi-
tecture is only the association of these in noble masses, or
the placing them in fit places. All architecture other than
this is, in fact, mere building; and though it may some-
times be graceful, as in the groinings of an abbey roof; or
subHme, as in the battlements of a border tower; there is,
in such examples of it, no more exertion of the powers of
high art, than in the gracefulness of a well-ordered cham-
ber, or the nobleness of a well-built ship of war.

All high art consists in the carving or painting natural
objects, chiefly figures : it has always subject and meaning,
never consisting solely in arrangement of lines, or even of
colors. It always paints or carves something that it sees
or believes in; nothing ideal or uncredited. For the most
part, it paints and carves the men and things that are visi-
ble around it. And as soon as we possess a body of
sculptors able, and willing, and having leave from the
English public, to carve on the fa9ades of our cathedrals
portraits of the living bishops, deans, canons, and choris-
ters, who are to minister in the said cathedrals; and on
the fa9ades of our public buildings, portraits of the men
chiefly moving or acting in the same; and on our build-
ings, generally, the birds and flowers which are singing

* The name by which the architect of Cologne Cathedral is desig-
nated in the contracts for the work, is " magisterlapicida," the" master
stone-cutter ; " and I believe this was the usual Latin term throughout
the middle ages. The architect of the fourteenth century portions ol
Notre-Dame, Paris, is styled in French merely " premier masson."

288 APPENDICES.

and budding in the fields around them, we shall have a
school of English architecture. Not till then.

The greatest service which can at present be rendered
to architecture, is the careful delineation of its details
from the beginning of the twelfth to the close of the
fourteenth century, by means of photography. I would
particularly desire to direct the attention of amateur pho-
tographers to this task; earnestly requesting them to bear
in mind that while a photograph of landscape is merely an
amusing toy, one of early architecture is a precious histor-
ical document; and that this architecture should be taken,
not merely when it presents itself under picturesque gen-
eral forms, but stone by stone, and sculpture by sculpture;
seizing every opportunity afforded by scaffolding to ap-
proach it closely, and putting the camera in any position
that will command the sculpture, wholly without regard to
the resultant distortions of the vertical lines; such distor-
tion can always be allowed for, if once the details are
completely obtained.

It would be still more patriotic in lovers of architecture
to obtain casts of the sculptures of the thirteenth century,
wherever an opportunity occurs, and to place them where
they would be easily accessible to the ordinary workman.
The Architectural Museum at Westminster is one of the
institutions which it appears to me most desirable to enrich
in this manner.

APPENDIX II.

The following two notes — fourth and fifth in the old
edition — are worth preserving.

P. 36. " With different pattern of traceries in each.^^
■ — I have certainly not examined the seven hundred and

APPENDICES. 289

four traceries (four to each niche) so as to be sure that
none are alike; but they have the aspect of continual
variation, and even the roses of the pendants of the small
groined 7iiche roofs 2SQ. 2\\ of different patterns. (I now
italicize this last sentence, — for it is the best illustration
in the whole book, of the loving and religious labor on
which it so frequently insists.)

P. 51. " Its fla7nboyant traceries of the last and most de-
graded formsy — They are noticed by Mr. Whewell as
forming the figure of the fleur-de-lis, always a mark, when
in tracery bars, of the most debased flamboyant. It occurs
in the central tower of Bayeux, very richly in the but-
tresses of St. Gervais at Falaise, and in the small niches of
some of the domestic buildings at Rouen. Nor is it only
the tower of St. Ouen which is overrated. Its nave is a
base imitation, in the flamboyant period, of an early Gothic
arrangement; the niches on its piers are barbarisms; there
is a huge square shaft run through the ceiling of the aisles
to support the nave piers, the ugliest excrescence I ever
saw on a Gothic building; the traceries of the nave are
the most insipid and faded flamboyant; those of the tran-
sept clerestory present a singularly distorted condition of
perpendicular; even the elaborate door of the south tran-
sept is, for its fine period, extravagant and almost grotesque
in its foliation and pendants. There is nothing truly fine
in the church but the choir, the light triforium, and tall
clerestory, the circle of Eastern chapels, the details of
sculpture, and the general lightness of proportion; these
merits being seen to the utmost advantage by the freedom
of the body of the church from all incumbrance.

290 APPENDICES.

APPENDIX III.

P. 54- '^ Does not admit iron as a constructive matt'
rial." — Except in Chaucer's noble temple of Mars,

In the former editions, a note on the structural use of
iron quoted Chaucer's description of the temple of Mars;
but only in the Chaucer English, which few readers quite
understand, and which I certainly do not always myself.
I re-write it now in as familiar spelling as may be, with a
little bit of needful explanation.

" And downward from a hill under a bent
There stood the temple of Mars armipotent,
Wrought all of burned steel ; of which th' entree
Was long, and strait, and ghastly for to see.
5. And thereout came a rage, and such a vise
That it made all the gates for to rise.
The Northern light in at the door shone,
For window on the wall ne was there none,
Through which men mighten any light discerne.

10. The door was all of adamant eterne,
Yclenched overthwart and endelong
With iron tough, and for to make it strong,
Every pillar, the temple to sustene,

14. Was tun-great, of iron bright and sheene."

{The Knighfs Tale, I. 19S3 of" The Canterbury Tales!'')

Line i. "Bent." In glossary, the 'bending,' or de-
clivity, of a hill. Properly, I believe, the hollow cut out
by the sweep of a stream. Just the place where they put
milldams or chimneys on the streams above Sheffield, for
grinding knives or bayonets.

APPENDICES. 291

Line 3. " Burned steel." Twice hardened in the fire.

Line 5. "Vise." I am not sure what the word means;
but the general sense is, that such a blast came out of the
building, that it lifted the gates, underneath, as a port-
cullis is lifted.

Line 7. "The Northern light." Flickering, furious,
and cheerless — the only light that is ever seen by the
soul purposed for war.

Line 10. "Adamant." Diamond: the jewel which
means sable in heraldry. The Northern light is con-
ceived as shining through it.

Line 14. "Tun-great." As large round as a cask.

Note, finally, the absolute carelessness of all great poets,
whether their images be common or not, — so only they
be clear.

There is, by the bye, an exquisite piece of architectural
color just before :

" And northward, in a turret on the wall
Of alabaster white, and red cor all.
An oratorie riche for to see,
In worship of Diane of Chastitee."

APPENDLX IV.

P. 127. '■'■And levelled cusps of stone.'''' — The plate
represents one of the lateral windows of the third story of
the Palazzo Foscari. It was drawn from the opposite side
of the Grand Canal, and the lines of its traceries are there-
fore given as they appear in somewhat distant effect. It
Shows only segments of the characteristic quatrefoils of
the central windows. I found by measurement their con'

292 APPENDICES.

struction exceedingly simple. Four circles are drawn in

contact within the large circle. Two tangential lines are
then drawn to each opposite pair, enclosing the four circles
in a hollow cross. An inner circle struck through the in-
tersections of the circles by the tangents, truncates the
cusps.

a-t2)

APPENDIX V-

P.-236.'"/« one of the noblest poems.'''' — Coleridge's
Ode to France: —

" Ye Clouds ! that far above me float and pause,

Whose pathless march no mortal may control ! a
Ye Ocean-Waves ! that wheresoe'er ye roll,
Yield homage only to eternal laws ! h
Ye Woods ! that listen to the night-birds singing, c

Midway the smooth and perilous slope reclined, d
Save when your own imperious branches swinging, e

Have made a solemn music of the wind !
Where, like a man beloved of God, f
Through glooms, which never woodman trod, g

How oft, pursuing fancies holy.
My moonlight way o'er flowering weeds I wound,

a If controlled by God, are they therefore more free ?

b Is the ship they bear less noble in obeying those, and her
captain also? — and does she gain dignity in disobeying her
helm ?

c Pure nonsense.

d Why midway, any more than at the top, or the bottom?

e Is it honorable then to be imperious, but not to be obedient
— and what are the branches imperative of? to what?

/ Nonsense again. We are not more like " men beloved of
God," when we walk in a wood, than when we walk out of one.

g Are woodmen naturally profane persons ?

APPENDICES. 293

Inspired, beyond the guess of folly, h
By each rude shape and wild unconquerable sound '
O ye loud Waves ! and O ye Forests high !

And O ye Clouds that far above me soared I
Thou rising Sun ! thou blue rejoicing Sky ! i k
Yea, every thing that is and will be free !
Bear witness for me, whereso'er ye be.
With what deep worship I have still adored
The spirit of divinest Liberty."

Noble verse, but erring thought : contrast George Her-
bert:—

" Slight those who say amidst their sickly healths,
Thou livest by rule. What doth not so but man .-'
Houses are built by rule, and Commonwealths.
Entice the trusty sun, if that you can.
From his ecliptic line ; beckon the sky.
Who lives by rule then, keeps good company."

" Who keeps no guard upon himself is slack,
And rots to nothing at the next great thaw ;
Man is a shop of rules ; a well-truss'd pack
Whose every parcel underwrites a law.
Lose not thyself, nor give thy humors way :
God gave them to thee under lock and key,"

h Holiness, and Inspiration of an unguessable height, claimed
perhaps too confidently, for the fancies of a moonlight walk
among rude shapes and unconquerable noises.

i k The rising sun has not been before noticed ; nor does it
appear why the author considers it more " free " in rising than
setting. Of all objects in Creation, the sun is the last which any
rational person would think of as moving in " the spirit of divin-
est Liberty," or could wish that it should be permitted to do so.

The End.

/

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY

j

i

i

']

i

1

i

" I i i'

lill!l!'"!i!

!!!!

liiiilli

lilt jjiii

Hii

I

!!!!!!!

!i 1

iiil !!

iillliii

iiiiiii

M

liillllliilll

;!il! U

iniiuti;tijliill

TTyTTTTTTUTTTTTr

!

:|