VI.
ARCHITECTURE.

[From “The Oxford Museum,” by H. W. Acland and J. Ruskin. 1859. pp. 44-56.]
GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE AND THE OXFORD MUSEUM.[122]

Dear Acland: I have been very anxious, since I last heard from you, respecting the progress of the works at the Museum, as I thought I could trace in your expressions some doubt of an entirely satisfactory issue.

Entirely satisfactory very few issues are, or can be; and when the enterprise, as in this instance, involves the development of many new and progressive principles, we must always be prepared for a due measure of disappointment,—due partly to human weakness, and partly to what the ancients would have called fate,—and we may, perhaps, most wisely call the law of trial, which forbids any great good being usually accomplished without various compensations and deductions, probably not a little humiliating.

Perhaps in writing to you what seems to me to be the bearing of matters respecting your Museum, I may be answering a few of the doubts of others, as well as fears of your own.

I am quite sure that when you first used your influence to advocate the claims of a Gothic design, you did so under the conviction, shared by all the seriously-purposed defenders of the Gothic style, that the essence and power of Gothic, properly so called, lay in its adaptability to all need; in that perfect and unlimited flexibility which would enable the architect to provide all that was required, in the simplest and most convenient way; and to give you the best offices, the best lecture-rooms, laboratories, and museums, which could be provided with the sum of money at his disposal.

So far as the architect has failed in doing this; so far as you find yourself, with the other professors, in anywise inconvenienced by forms of architecture; so far as pillars or piers come in your way, when you have to point, or vaults in the way of your voice, when you have to speak, or mullions in the way of your light, when you want to see—just so far the architect has failed in expressing his own principles, or those of pure Gothic art. I do not suppose that such failure has taken place to any considerable extent; but so far as it has taken place, it cannot in justice be laid to the score of the style, since precedent has shown sufficiently, that very uncomfortable and useless rooms may be provided in all other styles as well as in Gothic; and I think if, in a building arranged for many objects of various kinds, at a time when the practice of architecture has been somewhat confused by the inventions of modern science, and is hardly yet organized completely with respect to the new means at his disposal; if, under such circumstances, and with somewhat limited funds, you have yet obtained a building in all main points properly fulfilling its requirements, you have, I think, as much as could be hoped from the adoption of any style whatsoever.

But I am much more anxious about the decoration of the building; for I fear that it will be hurried in completion, and that, partly in haste and partly in mistimed economy, a great opportunity may be lost of advancing the best interest of architectural, and in that, of all other arts. For the principles of Gothic decoration, in themselves as simple and beautiful as those of Gothic construction, are far less understood, as yet, by the English public, and it is little likely that any effective measures can be taken to carry them out. You know as well as I, what those principles are; yet it may be convenient to you that I should here state them briefly as I accept them myself, and have reason to suppose they are accepted by the principal promoters of the Gothic revival.

I. The first principle of Gothic decoration is that a given quantity of good art will be more generally useful when exhibited on a large scale, and forming part of a connected system, than when it is small and separated. That is to say, a piece of sculpture or painting, of a certain allowed merit, will be more useful when seen on the front of a building, or at the end of a room, and therefore by many persons, than if it be so small as to be only capable of being seen by one or two at a time; and it will be more useful when so combined with other work as to produce that kind of impression usually termed “sublime,”—as it is felt on looking at any great series of fixed paintings, or at the front of a cathedral,—than if it be so separated as to excite only a special wonder or admiration, such as we feel for a jewel in a cabinet.

The paintings by Meissonier in the French Exhibition of this year were bought, I believe, before the Exhibition opened, for 250 guineas each. They each represented one figure, about six inches high—one, a student reading; the other, a courtier standing in a dress-coat. Neither of these paintings conveyed any information, or produced any emotion whatever, except that of surprise at their minute and dextrous execution. They will be placed by their possessors on the walls of small private apartments, where they will probably, once or twice a week, form the subject of five minutes’ conversation while people drink their coffee after dinner. The sum expended on these toys would have been amply sufficient to cover a large building with noble frescoes, appealing to every passer-by, and representing a large portion of the history of any given period. But the general tendency of the European patrons of art is to grudge all sums spent in a way thus calculated to confer benefit on the public, and to grudge none for minute treasures of which the principal advantage is that a lock and key can always render them invisible.

I have no hesitation in saying that an acquisitive selfishness, rejoicing somewhat even in the sensation of possessing what can NOT be seen by others, is at the root of this art-patronage. It is, of course, coupled with a sense of securer and more convenient investment in what may be easily protected and easily carried from place to place, than in large and immovable works; and also with a vulgar delight in the minute curiosities of productive art, rather than in the exercise of inventive genius, or the expression of great facts or emotions.

The first aim of the Gothic Revivalists is to counteract, as far as possible, this feeling on all its three grounds. We desire (A) to make art large and publicly beneficial, instead of small and privately engrossed or secluded; (B) to make art fixed instead of portable, associating it with local character and historical memory; (C) to make art expressive instead of curious, valuable for its suggestions and teachings, more than for the mode of its manufacture.

II. The second great principle of the Gothic Revivalists is that all art employed in decoration should be informative, conveying truthful statements about natural facts, if it conveys any statement. It may sometimes merely compose its decorations of mosaics, checkers, bosses, or other meaningless ornaments: but if it represents organic form (and in all important places it will represent it), it will give that form truthfully, with as much resemblance to nature as the necessary treatment of the piece of ornament in question will admit of.

This principle is more disputed than the first among the Gothic Revivalists themselves. I, however, hold it simply and entirely, believing that ornamentation is always, cÆteris paribus, most valuable and beautiful when it is founded on the most extended knowledge of natural forms, and conveys continually such knowledge to the spectator.[123]

III. The third great principle of the Gothic Revival is that all architectural ornamentation should be executed by the men who design it, and should be of various degrees of excellence, admitting, and therefore exciting, the intelligent co-operation of various classes of workmen; and that a great public edifice should be, in sculpture and painting, somewhat the same as a great chorus of music, in which, while, perhaps, there may be only one or two voices perfectly trained, and of perfect sweetness (the rest being in various degrees weaker and less cultivated), yet all being ruled in harmony, and each sustaining a part consistent with its strength, the body of sound is sublime, in spite of individual weaknesses.

The Museum at Oxford was, I know, intended by its designer to exhibit in its decoration the working of these three principles; but in the very fact of its doing so, it becomes exposed to chances of occasional failure, or even to serious discomfitures, such as would not at all have attended the adoption of an established mode of modern work. It is easy to carve capitals on models known for four thousand years, and impossible to fail in the application of mechanical methods and formalized rules. But it is not possible to appeal vigorously to new canons of judgment without the chance of giving offence; nor to summon into service the various phases of human temper and intelligence, without occasionally finding the tempers rough and the intelligence feeble. The Oxford Museum is, I believe, the first building in this country which has had its ornamentation, in any telling parts, trusted to the invention of the workman: the result is highly satisfactory, the projecting windows of the staircases being as beautiful in effect as anything I know in civil Gothic: but far more may be accomplished for the building if the completion of its carving be not hastened; many men of high artistic power might be brought to take an interest in it, and various lessons and suggestions given to the workmen which would materially advantage the final decoration of leading features. No very great Gothic building, so far as I know, was ever yet completed without some of this wise deliberation and fruitful patience.

I was in hopes from the beginning that the sculpture might have been rendered typically illustrative of the English Flora: how far this idea has been as yet carried out I do not know; but I know that it cannot be properly carried out without a careful examination of the available character of the principal genera, such as architects have not hitherto undertaken. The proposal which I heard advanced the other day, of adding a bold entrance-porch to the faÇade, appeared to me every way full of advantage, the blankness of the faÇade having been, to my mind, from the first, a serious fault in the design. If a subscription were opened for the purpose of erecting one, I should think there were few persons interested in modern art who would not be glad to join in forwarding such an object.

I think I could answer for some portions of the design being superintended by the best of our modern sculptors and painters; and I believe that, if so superintended, the porch might and would become the crowning beauty of the building, and make all the difference between its being only a satisfactory and meritorious work, or a most lovely and impressive one.

The interior decoration is a matter of much greater difficulty; perhaps you will allow me to defer the few words I have to say about it till I have time for another letter: which, however, I hope to find speedily.

Believe me, my dear Acland, ever affectionately yours,

J. Ruskin[124]

[From “the Oxford Museum,” pp. 60-90.]
Gothic Architecture and the Oxford Museum.

January 20, 1859.

My Dear Acland: I was not able to write, as I had hoped, from Switzerland, for I found it impossible to lay down any principles respecting the decoration of the Museum which did not in one way or other involve disputed points, too many, and too subtle, to be discussed in a letter. Nor do I feel the difficulty less in writing to you now, so far as regards the question occurring in our late conversations, respecting the best mode of completing those interior decorations. Yet I must write, if only to ask that I may be in some way associated with you in what you are now doing to bring the Museum more definitely before the public mind—that I may be associated at least in the expression of my deep sense of the noble purpose of the building—of the noble sincerity of effort in its architect—of the endless good which the teachings to which it will be devoted must, in their ultimate issue, accomplish for mankind. How vast the range of that issue, you have shown in the lecture which I have just read, in which you have so admirably traced the chain of the physical sciences as it encompasses the great concords of this visible universe.[125] But how deep the workings of these new springs of knowledge are to be, and how great our need of them, and how far the brightness and the beneficence of them are to reach among all the best interests of men—perhaps none of us can yet conceive, far less know or say. For, much as I reverence physical science as a means of mental education (and you know how I have contended for it, as such, now these twenty years, from the sunny afternoon of spring when Ehrenberg and you and I went hunting for infusoria in Christchurch meadow streams, to the hour when the prize offered by Sir Walter Trevelyan and yourself for the best essay on the Fauna of that meadow, marked the opening of a new era in English education[126])—much, I say, as I reverence physical science in this function, I reverence it, at this moment, more as the source of utmost human practical power, and the means by which the far-distant races of the world, who now sit in darkness and the shadow of death, are to be reached and regenerated. At home or far away—the call is equally instant—here, for want of more extended physical science, there is plague in our streets, famine in our fields; the pest strikes root and fruit over a hemisphere of the earth, we know not why; the voices of our children fade away into silence of venomous death, we know not why; the population of this most civilized country resists every effort to lead it into purity of habit and habitation—to give it genuineness of nourishment, and wholesomeness of air, as a new interference with its liberty; and insists vociferously on its right to helpless death. All this is terrible; but it is more terrible yet that dim, phosphorescent, frightful superstitions still hold their own over two-thirds of the inhabited globe, and that all the phenomena of nature which were intended by the Creator to enforce His eternal laws of love and judgment, and which, rightly understood, enforce them more strongly by their patient beneficence, and their salutary destructiveness, than the miraculous dew on Gideon’s fleece, or the restrained lightnings of Horeb—that all these legends of God’s daily dealing with His creatures remain unread, or are read backwards, into blind, hundred-armed horror of idol cosmogony.

How strange it seems that physical science should ever have been thought adverse to religion! The pride of physical science is, indeed, adverse, like every other pride, both to religion and truth; but sincerity of science, so far from being hostile, is the path-maker among the mountains for the feet of those who publish peace.

Now, therefore, and now only, it seems to me, the University has become complete in her function as a teacher of the youth of the nation to which every hour gives wider authority over distant lands; and from which every rood of extended dominion demands new, various, and variously applicable knowledge of the laws which govern the constitution of the globe, and must finally regulate the industry, no less than discipline the intellect, of the human race. I can hardly turn my mind from these deep causes of exultation to the minor difficulties which beset or restrict your undertaking. The great work is accomplished; the immediate impression made by it is of little importance; and as for my own special subjects of thought or aim, though many of them are closely involved in what has been done, and some principles which I believe to be, in their way, of great importance, are awkwardly compromised in what has been imperfectly done—all these I am tempted to waive, or content to compromise when only I know that the building is in main points fit for its mighty work. Yet you will not think that it was matter of indifference to me when I saw, as I went over Professor Brodie’s[127] chemical laboratories the other day, how closely this success of adaptation was connected with the choice of the style. It was very touching and wonderful to me. Here was the architecture which I had learned to know and love in pensive ruins, deserted by the hopes and efforts of men, or in dismantled fortress-fragments recording only their cruelty—here was this very architecture lending itself, as if created only for these, to the foremost activities of human discovery, and the tenderest functions of human mercy. No other architecture, as I felt in an instant, could have thus adapted itself to a new and strange office. No fixed arrangements of frieze and pillar, nor accepted proportions of wall and roof, nor practised refinement of classical decoration, could have otherwise than absurdly and fantastically yielded its bed to the crucible, and its blast to the furnace; but these old vaultings and strong buttresses—ready always to do service to man, whatever his bidding—to shake the waves of war back from his seats of rock, or prolonged through faint twilights of sanctuary, the sighs of his superstition—he had but to ask it of them, and they entered at once into the lowliest ministries of the arts of healing, and the sternest and clearest offices in the service of science.

And the longer I examined the Museum arrangements, the more I felt that it could be only some accidental delay in the recognition of this efficiency for its work which had caused any feeling adverse to its progress among the members of the University. The general idea about the Museum has perhaps been, hitherto, that it is a forced endeavor to bring decorative forms of architecture into uncongenial uses; whereas, the real fact is, as far as I can discern it, that no other architecture would, under the required circumstances, have been possible; and that any effort to introduce classical types of form into these laboratories and museums must have ended in ludicrous discomfiture. But the building has now reached a point of crisis, and it depends upon the treatment which its rooms now receive in completion, whether the facts of their propriety and utility be acknowledged by the public, or lost sight of in the distraction of their attention to matters wholly external.

So strongly I feel this, that, whatever means of decoration had been at your disposal, I should have been inclined to recommend an exceeding reserve in that matter. Perhaps I should even have desired such reserve on abstract grounds of feeling. The study of Natural History is one eminently addressed to the active energies of body and mind. Nothing is to be got out of it by dreaming, not always much by thinking—everything by seeking and seeing. It is work for the hills and fields,—work of foot and hand, knife and hammer,—so far as it is to be afterwards carried on in the house, the more active and workmanlike our proceedings the better, fresh air blowing in from the windows, and nothing interfering with the free space for our shelves and instruments on the walls. I am not sure that much interior imagery or color, or other exciting address to any of the observant faculties, would be desirable under such circumstances. You know best; but I should no more think of painting in bright colors beside you, while you were dissecting or analyzing, than of entertaining you by a concert of fifes and cymbals.

But farther: Do you suppose Gothic decoration is an easy thing, or that it is to be carried out with a certainty of success at the first trial, under new and difficult conditions? The system of the Gothic decorations took eight hundred years to mature, gathering its power by undivided inheritance of traditional method, and unbroken accession of systematic power; from its culminating point in the Sainte Chapelle, it faded through four hundred years of splendid decline; now for two centuries it has lain dead—and more than so—buried; and more than so, forgotten, as a dead man out of mind; do you expect to revive it out of those retorts and furnaces of yours, as the cloud-spirit of the Arabian sea rose from beneath the seals of Solomon? Perhaps I have been myself faultfully answerable for this too eager hope in your mind (as well as in that of others) by what I have urged so often respecting the duty of bringing out the power of subordinate workmen in decorative design. But do you think I meant workmen trained (or untrained) in the way that ours have been until lately, and then cast loose on a sudden, into unassisted contentions with unknown elements of style? I meant the precise contrary of this; I meant workmen as we have yet to create them: men inheriting the instincts of their craft through many generations, rigidly trained in every mechanical art that bears on their materials, and familiarized from infancy with every condition of their beautiful and perfect treatment; informed and refined in manhood, by constant observation of all natural fact and form; then classed, according to their proved capacities, in ordered companies, in which every man shall know his part, and take it calmly and without effort or doubt,—indisputably well, unaccusably accomplished, mailed and weaponed cap-À-pie for his place and function. Can you lay your hand on such men? or do you think that mere natural good-will and good-feeling can at once supply their place? Not so: and the more faithful and earnest the minds you have to deal with, the more careful you should be not to urge them towards fields of effort, in which, too early committed, they can only be put to unserviceable defeat.

Nor can you hope to accomplish by rule or system what cannot be done by individual taste. The laws of color are definable up to certain limits, but they are not yet defined. So far are they from definition, that the last, and, on the whole, best work on the subject (Sir Gardiner Wilkinson’s) declares the “color concords” of preceding authors to be discords, and vice versÂ.[128]

Much, therefore, as I love color decoration when it is rightly given, and essential as it has been felt by the great architects of all periods to the completion of their work, I would not, in your place, endeavor to carry out such decoration at present, in any elaborate degree, in the interior of the Museum. Leave it for future thought; above all, try no experiments. Let small drawings be made of the proposed arrangements of color in every room; have them altered on the paper till you feel they are right; then carry them out firmly and simply; but, observe, with as delicate execution as possible. Rough work is good in its place, three hundred feet above the eye, on a cathedral front, but not in the interior of rooms, devoted to studies in which everything depends upon accuracy of touch and keenness of sight.

With respect to this finishing, by the last touches bestowed on the sculpture of the building, I feel painfully the harmfulness of any ill-advised parsimony at this moment. For it may, perhaps, be alleged by the advocates of retrenchment, that so long as the building is fit for its uses (and your report is conclusive as to its being so), economy in treatment of external feature is perfectly allowable, and will in nowise diminish the serviceableness of the building in the great objects which its designs regarded. To a certain extent this is true. You have comfortable rooms, I hope sufficient apparatus; and it now depends much more on the professors than on the ornaments of the building, whether or not it is to become a bright or obscure centre of public instruction. Yet there are other points to be considered. As the building stands at present, there is a discouraging aspect of parsimony about it. One sees that the architect has done the utmost he could with the means at his disposal, and that just at the point of reaching what was right, he has been stopped for want of funds. This is visible in almost every stone of the edifice. It separates it with broad distinctiveness from all the other buildings in the University. It may be seen at once that our other public institutions, and all our colleges—though some of them simply designed—are yet richly built, never pinchingly. Pieces of princely costliness, every here and there, mingle among the simplicities or severities of the student’s life. What practical need, for instance, have we at Christchurch of the beautiful fan-vaulting under which we ascend to dine? We might have as easily achieved the eminence of our banquets under a plain vault. What need have the readers in the Bodleian of the ribbed traceries which decorate its external walls? Yet, which of those readers would not think that learning was insulted by their removal? And are there any of the students of Balliol devoid of gratitude for the kindly munificence of the man who gave them the beautiful sculptured brackets of their oriel window, when three massy projecting stones would have answered the purpose just as well? In these and also other regarded and pleasant portions of our colleges, we find always a wealthy and worthy completion of all appointed features, which I believe is not without strong, though untraced effect, on the minds of the younger scholars, giving them respect for the branches of learning which these buildings are intended to honor, and increasing, in a certain degree, that sense of the value of delicacy and accuracy which is the first condition of advance in those branches of learning themselves.

Your Museum, if you now bring it to hurried completion, will convey an impression directly the reverse of this. It will have the look of a place, not where a revered system of instruction is established, but where an unadvised experiment is being disadvantageously attempted. It is yet in your power to avoid this, and to make the edifice as noble in aspect as in function. Whatever chance there may be of failure in interior work, rich ornamentation may be given, without any chance of failure, to just that portion of the exterior which will give pleasure to every passer-by, and express the meaning of the building best to the eyes of strangers. There is, I repeat, no chance of serious failure in this external decoration, because your architect has at his command the aid of men, such as worked with the architects of past times. Not only has the art of Gothic sculpture in part remained, though that of Gothic color has been long lost, but the unselfish—and, I regret to say, in part self-sacrificing—zeal of two first-rate sculptors, Mr. Munro and Mr. Woolner, which has already given you a series of noble statues, is still at your disposal, to head and systematize the efforts of inferior workmen.

I do not know if you will attribute it to a higher estimate than yours of the genius of the O’Shea family,[129] or to a lower estimate of what they have as yet accomplished, that I believe they will, as they proceed, produce much better ornamental sculpture than any at present completed in the Museum. It is also to be remembered that sculptors are able to work for us with a directness of meaning which none of our painters could bring to their task, even were they disposed to help us. A painter is scarcely excited to his strength, but by subjects full of circumstance, such as it would be difficult to suggest appropriately in the present building; but a sculptor has room enough for his full power in the portrait statues, which are necessarily the leading features of good Gothic decoration. Let me pray you, therefore, so far as you have influence with the delegacy, to entreat their favorable consideration of the project stated in Mr. Greswell’s appeal—the enrichment of the doorway, and the completion of the sculpture of the West Front. There is a reason for desiring such a plan to be carried out, of wider reach than any bearing on the interests of the Museum itself. I believe that the elevation of all arts in England to their true dignity, depends principally on our recovering that unity of purpose in sculptors and architects, which characterized the designers of all great Christian buildings. Sculpture, separated from architecture, always degenerates into effeminacies and conceits; architecture, stripped of sculpture, is at best a convenient arrangement of dead walls; associated, they not only adorn, but reciprocally exalt each other, and give to all the arts of the country in which they thus exist, a correspondent tone of majesty.

But I would plead for the enrichment of this doorway by portrait sculpture, not so much even on any of these important grounds, as because it would be the first example in modern English architecture of the real value and right place of commemorative statues. We seem never to know at present where to put such statues. In the midst of the blighted trees of desolate squares, or at the crossings of confused streets, or balanced on the pinnacles of pillars, or riding across the tops of triumphal arches, or blocking up the aisles of cathedrals—in none of these positions, I think, does the portrait statue answer its purpose. It may be a question whether the erection of such statues is honorable to the erectors, but assuredly it is not honorable to the persons whom it pretends to commemorate; nor is it anywise matter of exultation to a man who has deserved well of his country to reflect that he may one day encumber a crossing, or disfigure a park gate. But there is no man of worth or heart who would not feel it a high and priceless reward that his statue should be placed where it might remind the youth of England of what had been exemplary in his life, or useful in his labors, and might be regarded with no empty reverence, no fruitless pensiveness, but with the emulative, eager, unstinted passionateness of honor, which youth pays to the dead leaders of the cause it loves, or discoverers of the light by which it lives. To be buried under weight of marble, or with splendor of ceremonial, is still no more than burial; but to be remembered daily, with profitable tenderness, by the activest intelligences of the nation we have served, and to have power granted even to the shadows of the poor features, sunk into dust, still to warn, to animate, to command, as the father’s brow rules and exalts the toil of his children. This is not burial, but immortality.

There is, however, another kind of portraiture, already richly introduced in the works of the Museum; the portraiture, namely, of flowers and animals, respecting which I must ask you to let me say a few selfish, no less than congratulatory words—selfish, inasmuch as they bear on this visible exposition of a principle which it has long been one of my most earnest aims to maintain. We English call ourselves a practical people; but, nevertheless, there are some of our best and most general instincts which it takes us half-centuries to put into practice. Probably no educated Englishman or Englishwoman has ever, for the last forty years, visited Scotland, with leisure on their hands, without making a pilgrimage to Melrose; nor have they ever, I suppose, accomplished the pilgrimage without singing to themselves the burden of Scott’s description of the Abbey. Nor in that description (may it not also be conjectured) do they usually feel any couplets more deeply than the—

And yet, though we are raising every year in England new examples of every kind of costly and variously intended buildings,—ecclesiastical, civil, and domestic,—none of us, through all that period, had boldness enough to put the pretty couplets into simple practice. We went on, even in the best Gothic work we attempted, clumsily copying the rudest ornaments of previous buildings; we never so much as dreamed of learning from the monks of Melrose, and seeking for help beneath the dew that sparkled on their “gude kail” garden.[130]

Your Museum at Oxford is literally the first building raised in England since the close of the fifteenth century, which has fearlessly put to new trial this old faith in nature, and in the genius of the unassisted workman, who gathered out of nature the materials he needed. I am entirely glad, therefore, that you have decided on engraving for publication one of O’Shea’s capitals;[131] it will be a complete type of the whole work, in its inner meaning, and far better to show one of them in its completeness than to give any reduced sketch of the building. Nevertheless, beautiful as that capital is, and as all the rest of O’Shea’s work is likely to be, it is not yet perfect Gothic sculpture; and it might give rise to dangerous error, if the admiration given to these carvings were unqualified.

I cannot, of course, enter in this letter into any discussion of the question, more and more vexed among us daily, respecting the due meaning and scope of conventionalism in treatment of natural form; but I may state briefly what, I trust, will be the conclusion to which all this “vexing” will at last lead our best architects.

The highest art in all kinds is that which conveys the most truth; and the best ornamentation possible would be the painting of interior walls with frescos by Titian, representing perfect Humanity in color; and the sculpture of exterior walls by Phidias, representing perfect Humanity in form. Titian and Phidias are precisely alike in their conception and treatment of nature—everlasting standards of the right.

Beneath ornamentation, such as men like these could bestow, falls in various rank, according to its subordination to vulgar uses or inferior places, what is commonly conceived as ornamental art. The lower its office, and the less tractable its material, the less of nature it should contain, until a zigzag

becomes the best ornament for the hem of a robe, and a mosaic of bits of glass the best design for a colored window. But all these forms of lower art are to be conventional only because they are subordinate—not because conventionalism is in itself a good or desirable thing. All right conventionalism is a wise acceptance of, and compliance with, conditions of restraint or inferiority: it may be inferiority of our knowledge or power, as in the art of a semi-savage nation; or restraint by reason of material, as in the way the glass painter should restrict himself to transparent hue, and a sculptor deny himself the eyelash and the film of flowing hair, which he cannot cut in marble: but in all cases whatever, right conventionalism is either a wise acceptance of an inferior place, or a noble display of power under accepted limitation; it is not an improvement of natural form into something better or purer than Nature herself.

Now this great and most precious principle may be compromised in two quite opposite ways. It is compromised on one side when men suppose that the degradation of a natural form which fits it for some subordinate place is an improvement of it; and that a black profile on a red ground, because it is proper on a water-jug, is therefore an idealization of Humanity, and nobler art than a picture of Titian. And it is compromised equally gravely on the opposite side, when men refuse to submit to the limitation of material and the fitnesses of office—when they try to produce finished pictures in colored glass, or substitute the inconsiderate imitation of natural objects for the perfectness of adapted and disciplined design.

There is a tendency in the work of the Oxford Museum to err on this last side; unavoidable, indeed, in the present state of our art-knowledge—and less to be regretted in a building devoted to natural science than in any other: nevertheless, I cannot close this letter without pointing it out, and warning the general reader against supposing that the ornamentation of the Museum is, or can be as yet, a representation of what Gothic work will be, when its revival is complete. Far more severe, yet more perfect and lovely, that work will involve, under sterner conventional restraint, the expression not only of

natural form, but of all vital and noble natural law. For the truth of decoration is never to be measured by its imitative power, but by its suggestive and informative power. In the annexed spandril of the iron-work of our roof, for instance, the horse-chestnut leaf and nut are used as the principal elements of form: they are not ill-arranged, and produce a more agreeable effect than convolutions of the iron could have given, unhelped by any reference to natural objects. Nevertheless, I do not call it an absolutely good design; for it would have been possible, with far severer conventional treatment of the iron bars, and stronger constructive arrangement of them, to have given vigorous expression, not of the shapes of leaves and nuts only, but of their peculiar radiant or fanned expansion, and other conditions of group and growth in the tree; which would have been just the more beautiful and interesting, as they would have arisen from deeper research into nature, and more adaptive modifying power in the designer’s mind, than the mere leaf termination of a riveted scroll.

I am compelled to name these deficiencies, in order to prevent misconception of the principles we are endeavoring to enforce; but I do not name them as at present to be avoided; or even much to be regretted. They are not chargeable either on the architect, or on the subordinate workmen; but only on the system which has for three centuries withheld all of us from healthy study; and although I doubt not that lovelier and juster expressions of the Gothic principle will be ultimately aimed at by us, than any which are possible in the Oxford Museum, its builders will never lose their claim to our chief gratitude, as the first guides in a right direction; and the building itself—the first exponent of the recovered truth—will only be the more venerated the more it is excelled.

Believe me, my dear Acland,
Ever affectionately yours,
J. Ruskin.

[From “The Witness” (Edinburgh), September 16, 1857.]
THE CASTLE ROCK.

Dunbar, 14th September, 1857.

To the Editor of “The Witness.”

My Dear Sir: As I was leaving Edinburgh this morning, I heard a report which gave me more concern than I can easily express, and very sufficiently spoiled the pleasure of my drive here. If there be no truth in the said report, of course take no notice of this letter; but if there be real ground for my fears, I trust you will allow me space in your columns for a few words on the subject.

The whisper—I hope I may say, the calumny—regarded certain proceedings which are taking place at the Castle. It was said to be the architect’s intention to cut down into the brow of the Castle rock, in order to afford secure foundation for some new buildings.[132]

Now, the Castle rock of Edinburgh is, as far as I know, simply the noblest in Scotland conveniently approachable by any creatures but sea-gulls or peewits. Ailsa and the Bass are of course more wonderful; and, I suppose, in the West Highlands there are masses of crag more wild and fantastic; but people only go to see these once or twice in their lives, while the Castle rock has a daily influence in forming the taste, or kindling the imagination, of every promising youth in Edinburgh. Even irrespectively of its position, it is a mass of singular importance among the rocks of Scotland. It is not easy to find among your mountains a “craig” of so definite a form, and on so magnificent a scale. Among the central hills of Scotland, from Ben Wyvis to the Lammermuirs, I know of none comparable to it; while, besides being bold and vast, its bars of basalt are so nobly arranged, and form a series of curves at once so majestic and harmonious, from the turf at their base to the roots of the bastions, that, as long as your artists have that crag to study, I do not see that they need casts from Michael Angelo, or any one else, to teach them the laws of composition or the sources of sublimity.

But if you once cut into the brow of it, all is over. Disturb, in any single point, the simple lines in which the walls now advance and recede upon the tufted grass of its summit, and you may as well make a quarry of it at once, and blast away rock, Castle, and all. It admits of some question whether the changes made in the architecture of your city of late years are in every case improvements; but very certainly you cannot improve the architecture of your volcanic crags by any explosive retouches. And your error will be wholly irremediable. You may restore Trinity Chapel, or repudiate its restoration, at your pleasure, but there will be no need to repudiate restoration of the Castle rock. You cannot re-face nor re-rivet that, nor order another in a “similar style.” It is a dangerous kind of engraving which you practise on so large a jewel. But I trust I am wasting my time in writing of this: I cannot believe the report, nor think that the people of Edinburgh, usually so proud of their city, are yet so unaware of what constitutes its chief nobleness, and so utterly careless of the very features of its scenery, which have been the means of the highest and purest education to their greatest men, as to allow this rock to be touched. If the works are confined to the inside of the wall, no harm will be done; but let a single buttress, or a single cleft, encumber or divide its outer brow, and there is not a man of sensibility or sense in Edinburgh who will not blush and grieve for it as long as he lives.

Believe me, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours,
J. Ruskin.

[From “The Witness” (Edinburgh), September 30, 1857.]
EDINBURGH CASTLE.

Penrith, 27th September.

To the Editor of “The Witness”

My Dear Sir: I see by some remarks in the Literary Gazette[133] on the letter of mine to which you gave a place in your columns of the 16th, that the design of the proposed additions to Edinburgh Castle is receiving really serious consideration. Perhaps, therefore, a few words respecting the popular but usually unprofitable business of castle-building may be of some interest to your readers. We are often a little confused in our ideas respecting the nature of a castle—properly so called. A “castle” is a fortified dwelling-house containing accommodation for as many retainers as are needed completely to defend its position. A “fortress” is a fortified military position, generally understood to be extensive enough to contain large bodies of troops. And a “citadel,” a fortified military position connected with a fortified town, and capable of holding out even if the town were taken.

It is as well to be clear on these points: for certain conditions of architecture are applicable and beautiful in each case, according to the use and character of the building; and certain other conditions are in like manner inapplicable and ugly, because contrary to its character, and unhelpful to its use.

Now this helpfulness and unhelpfulness in architectural features depends, of course, primarily on the military practice of the time; so that forms which were grand, because rational, before gunpowder was invented, are ignoble, because ridiculous, in days of shell and shot. The very idea and possibility of the castle proper have passed away with the arms of the middle ages. A man’s house might be defended by his servants against a troop of cavalry, if its doors were solid and its battlements pierced. But it cannot be defended against a couple of field-pieces, whatever the thickness of its oak, or number of its arrow-slits.

I regret, as much as any one can regret, the loss of castellated architecture properly so called. Nothing can be more noble or interesting than the true thirteenth or fourteenth century castle, when built in a difficult position, its builder taking advantage of every inch of ground to gain more room, and of every irregularity of surface for purposes of outlook and defence; so that the castle sate its rock as a strong rider sits his horse—fitting its limbs to every writhe of the flint beneath it; and fringing the mountain promontory far into the sky with the wild crests of its fantastic battlements. Of such castles we can see no more; and it is just because I know them well and love them deeply that I say so. I know that their power and dignity consists, just as a soldier’s consists, in their knowing and doing their work thoroughly; in their being advanced on edge or lifted on peak of crag, not for show nor pride, but for due guard and outlook; and that all their beautiful irregularities and apparent caprices of form are in reality their fulfilments of need, made beautiful by their compelled association with the wild strength and grace of the natural rock. All attempts to imitate them now are useless—mere girl’s play. Mind, I like girl’s play, and child’s play, in its place, but not in the planning of military buildings. Child’s play in many cases is the truest wisdom. I accept to the full the truth of those verses of Wordsworth’s[134] beginning—

But I cannot apply the same principles to more serious matters, and vary the reading of the verses into application to the works on Edinburgh Castle, thus:

Therefore, though I do not know exactly what you have got to do in Edinburgh Castle, whatever it may be, I am certain the only right way to do it is the plain way. Build what is needed—chapel, barracks, or dwelling-house—in the best places, in a military point of view, of dark stone, and bomb-proof, keeping them low, and within the existing line of ramparts. That is the rational thing to do; and the inhabitants of Edinburgh will find it in the end the picturesque thing. It would be so under any circumstances; but it is especially so in this instance; for the grandeur of Edinburgh Castle depends eminently on the great, unbroken, yet beautifully varied parabolic curve in which it descends from the Round Tower on the Castle Hill to the terminating piece of impendent precipice on the north. It is the last grand feature of Edinburgh left as yet uninjured. You have filled up your valley with a large chimney, a mound, and an Institution; broken in upon the Old Town with a Bank, a College, and several fires; dwarfed the whole of Princes Street by the Scott Monument; and cut Arthur’s Seat in half by the Queen’s Drive. It only remains for you to spoil the curve of your Castle, and your illustrations of the artistic principle of breadth will be complete.

It may appear at first that I depart from the rule of usefulness I have proposed, in entreating for the confinement of all buildings undertaken within the existing ramparts, in order to preserve the contour of the outside rock. But I presume that in the present state of military science, and of European politics, Edinburgh Castle is not a very important military position; and that to make it a serviceable fortress or citadel, many additional works would be required, seriously interfering with the convenience of the inhabitants of the New Town, and with the arrangements of the Railroad Company. And, as long as these subordinate works are not carried out, I do not see any use in destroying your beautiful rock, merely to bring another gun to bear, or give accommodation to another company. But I both see, and would earnestly endeavor to advocate, the propriety of keeping the architecture of the building within those ramparts masculine and simple in style, and of not allowing a mistaken conception of picturesqueness to make a noble fortress look like a child’s toy.

Believe me, my dear Sir, very faithfully yours,
J. Ruskin.

[From “The Daily Telegraph,” December 22, 1871.]
CASTLES AND KENNELS.

To the Editor of “The Daily Telegraph.”

Sir: I was astonished the other day by your article on taverns, but never yet in my life was so much astonished by anything in print as by your to-day’s article on castles.[135]

I am a castle-lover of the truest sort. I do not suppose any man alive has felt anything like the sorrow or anger with which I have watched the modern destruction by railroad and manufacture, helped by the wicked improvidence of our great families, of half the national memorials of England, either actually or in effect and power of association—as Conway, for instance, now vibrating to ruin over a railroad station. For Warwick Castle, I named it in my letter of last October, in “Fors Clavigera,”[136] as a type of the architectural treasures of this England of ours known to me and beloved from childhood to this hour.

But, Sir, I am at this hour endeavoring to find work and food for a boy of seventeen, one of eight people—two married couples, a woman and her daughter, and this boy and his sister—who all sleep together in one room, some 18 ft. square, in the heart of London; and you call upon me for a subscription to help to rebuild Warwick Castle.

Sir, I am an old and thoroughbred Tory, and as such I say, “If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle, in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.”

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin

Denmark Hill, Dec. 20.

[From “The Daily Telegraph,” December 25, 1871.]
VERONA v. WARWICK.

To the Editor of “The Daily Telegraph.”

Sir: Of lodging for poor and rich you will perhaps permit a further word or two from me, even in your close columns for Christmas morning. You think me inconsistent because I wanted to buy Verona, and do not want to restore Warwick.[137]

I wanted, and still want, to buy Verona. I would give half my fortune to buy it for England, if any other people would help me. But I would buy it, that what is left of it might not be burned, and what is lost of it not restored. It would indeed be very pleasant—not to me only, but to many other sorrowful persons—if things could be restored when we chose. I would subscribe willingly to restore, for instance, the manger wherein the King of Judah lay cradled this day some years since, and not unwillingly to restore the poorer cradle of our English King-maker, were it possible. But for the making of a new manger, to be exhibited for the edification of the religious British public, I will not subscribe. No; nor for the building of mock castles, or mock cathedrals, or mocks of anything. And the sum of what I have to say in this present matter may be put in few words.

As an antiquary—which, thank Heaven, I am—I say, “Part of Warwick Castle is burnt—’tis pity. Take better care of the rest.”

As an old Tory—which, thank Heaven, I am—I say, “Lord Warwick’s house is burned. Let Lord Warwick build a better if he can—a worse if he must; but in any case, let him neither beg nor borrow.”

As a modern renovator and Liberal—which, thank Heaven, I am not—I would say, “By all means let the public subscribe to build a spick-and-span new Warwick Castle, and let the pictures be touched up, and exhibited by gaslight; let the family live in the back rooms, and let there be a table d’hÔte in the great hall at two and six every day, 2s. 6d. a head, and let us have Guy’s bowl for a dinner bell.”

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
John Ruskin.

Denmark Hill, S.E., 24th (for 25th) December.

[From “The Daily Telegraph,” January 19, 1871.]
“NOTRE DAME DE PARIS.”

To the Editor of “The Daily Telegraph.”

Sir: It may perhaps be interesting to some of your readers, in the present posture of affairs round Paris, to know, as far as I am able to tell them, the rank which the Church of Notre Dame holds among architectural and historical monuments.

Nearly every great church in France has some merit special to itself; in other countries, one style is common to many districts; in France, nearly every province has its unique and precious monument.

But of thirteenth-century Gothic—the most perfect architectural style north of the Alps—there is, both in historical interest, and in accomplished perfectness of art, one unique monument—the Sainte Chapelle of Paris.

As examples of Gothic, ranging from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, the cathedrals of Chartres, Rouen, Amiens, Rheims, and Bourges, form a kind of cinque-foil round Notre Dame of Paris, of which it is impossible to say which is the more precious petal; but any of those leaves would be worth a complete rose of any other country’s work except Italy’s. Nothing else in art, on the surface of the round earth, could represent any one of them, if destroyed, or be named as of any equivalent value.

Central among these, as in position, so in its school of sculpture; unequalled in that specialty but by the porch of the north transept of Rouen, and, in a somewhat latter school, by the western porches of Bourges; absolutely unreplaceable as a pure and lovely source of art instruction by any future energy or ingenuity, stands—perhaps, this morning, I ought rather to write, stood[138]—Notre Dame of Paris.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.

[From “The Pall Mall Gazette,” March 16, 1872.]
MR. RUSKIN’S INFLUENCE: A DEFENCE.

To the Editor of “The Pall Mall Gazette.”

Sir: I receive many letters just now requesting me to take notice of the new theory respecting Turner’s work put forward by Dr. Liebreich in his recent lecture at the Royal Institution.[139] Will you permit me to observe in your columns, once for all, that I have no time for the contradiction of the various foolish opinions and assertions which from time to time are put forward respecting Turner or his pictures? All that is necessary for any person generally interested in the arts to know about Turner was clearly stated in “Modern Painters” twenty years ago, and I do not mean to state it again, nor to contradict any contradictions of it. Dr. Liebreich is an ingenious and zealous scientific person. The public may derive much benefit from consulting him on the subject of spectacles—not on that of art.

As I am under the necessity of writing to you at any rate, may I say further that I wish your critic of Mr. Eastlake’s book[140] on the Gothic revival would explain what he means by saying that my direct influence on architecture is always wrong, and my indirect influence right; because, if that be so, I will try to exercise only indirect influence on my Oxford pupils. But the fact to my own notion is otherwise. I am proud enough to hope, for instance, that I have had some direct influence on Mr. Street; and I do not doubt but that the public will have more satisfaction from his Law Courts[141] than they have had from anything built within fifty years. But I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this[142] and Bromley; and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles. And one of my principal notions for leaving my present house is that it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
John Ruskin.

March 15.

[From “The Pall Mall Gazette,” March 21, 1872.]
MR. RUSKIN’S INFLUENCE: A REJOINDER.

To the Editor of “The Pall Mall Gazette.”

Sir: I am obliged by your critic’s reply to my question, but beg to observe that, meaning what he explains himself to have meant, he should simply have said that my influence on temper was right, and on taste wrong; the influence being in both cases equally “direct.” On questions of taste I will not venture into discussion with him, but must be permitted to correct his statement that I have persuaded any one to prefer Venetian to English Gothic. I have stated that Italian—chiefly Pisan and Florentine—Gothic is the noblest school of Gothic hitherto existent, which is true; and that one form of Venetian Gothic deserves singular respect for the manner of its development. I gave the mouldings and shaft measurements of that form,[143] and to so little purpose, that I challenge your critic to find in London, or within twenty miles of it, a single Venetian casement built on the sections which I gave as normal. For Venetian architecture developed out of British moral consciousness I decline to be answerable. His accusation that I induced architects to study sculpture more, and what he is pleased to call “expressional character” less, I admit. I should be glad if he would tell me what, before my baneful influence began to be felt, the expressional character of our building was; and I will reconsider my principles if he can point out to me, on any modern building either in London or, as aforesaid, within twenty miles round, a single piece of good sculpture of which the architect repents, or the public complains.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.

March 21.

[From “The Liverpool Daily Post,” June 9, 1877.]
MODERN RESTORATION[144]

Venice, 15th April, 1877.

My Dear Sir: It is impossible for any one to know the horror and contempt with which I regard modern restoration—but it is so great that it simply paralyzes me in despair,—and in the sense of such difference in all thought and feeling between me and the people I live in the midst of, almost makes it useless for me to talk to them. Of course all restoration is accursed architect’s jobbery, and will go on as long as they can get their filthy bread by such business. But things are worse here than in England: you have little there left to lose—here, every hour is ruining buildings of inestimable beauty and historical value—simply to keep stone-lawyers[145] at work. I am obliged to hide my face from it all, and work at other things, or I should die of mere indignation and disgust.

Ever truly yours,
J. Ruskin.

[From “The Kidderminster Times,” July 28, 1877.]
RIBBESFORD CHURCH.

Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire,
July 24, 1877.

To the Editor of “The Kidderminster Times.”

Sir: It chanced that, on the morning of the Sunday, when the appearances of danger in the walls of Ribbesford Church began seriously to manifest themselves (according to the report in your columns of the 21st inst.),[146] I was standing outside of the church, listening to the singing of the last hymn as the sound came through the open door (with the Archer Knight sculptured above it), and showing to the friend who had brought me to the lovely place the extreme interest of the old perpendicular traceries in the freehand working of the apertures.

Permit me to say, with reference to the proposed restoration of the church, that no modern architect, no mason either, can, or would if they could, “copy” those traceries. They will assuredly put up with geometrical models in their place, which will be no more like the old traceries than a Kensington paper pattern is like a living flower. Whatever else is added or removed, those traceries should be replaced as they are, and left in reverence until they moulder away. If they are already too much decayed to hold the glass safely (which I do not believe), any framework which may be necessary can be arranged to hold the casements within them, leaving their bars entirely disengaged, and merely kept from falling by iron supports. But if these are to be “copied,” why in the world cannot the congregation pay for a new and original church, to display the genius and wealth of the nineteenth century somewhere else, and leave the dear old ruin to grow gray by Severn side in peace?

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,
J. Ruskin.

CIRCULAR[147] RESPECTING MEMORIAL STUDIES OF ST. MARK’S,
VENICE, NOW IN PROGRESS UNDER MR. RUSKIN’S DIRECTION.

This circular will be given to visitors to the Old Water-color Society’s Exhibition, Pall Mall East, or on application to the Fine Art Society, 148 New Bond Street.

My friends have expressed much surprise at my absence from the public meetings called in defence of St. Mark’s. They cannot, however, be too clearly certified that I am now entirely unable to take part in exciting business, or even, without grave danger, to allow my mind to dwell on the subjects which, having once been dearest to it, are now the sources of acutest pain. The illness which all but killed me two years ago[148] was not brought on by overwork, but by grief at the course of public affairs in England, and of affairs, public and private alike, in Venice; the distress of many an old and deeply regarded friend there among the humbler classes of the city being as necessary a consequence of the modern system of centralization, as the destruction of her ancient civil and religious buildings.

How far forces of this national momentum may be arrested by protest, or mollified by petition, I know not; what in either kind I have felt myself able to do has been done two years since, in conjunction with one of the few remaining representatives of the old Venetian noblesse.[149] All that now remains for me is to use what time may be yet granted for such record as hand and heart can make of the most precious building in Europe, standing yet in the eyes of men and the sunshine of heaven.

The drawing of the first two arches of the west front, now under threat of restoration, which, as an honorary member of the Old Water-color Society, I have the privilege of exhibiting in its rooms this year, shows with sufficient accuracy the actual state of the building, and the peculiar qualities of its architecture.[150] The principles of that architecture are analyzed at length in the second volume of the “Stones of Venice,” and the whole faÇade described there with the best care I could, in hope of directing the attention of English architects to the forms of Greek sculpture which enrich it.[151] The words have been occasionally read for the sound of them; and perhaps, when the building is destroyed, may be some day, with amazement, perceived to have been true.

In the mean time, the drawing just referred to, every touch of it made from the building, and left as the color dried in the spring mornings of 1877, will make clear some of the points chiefly insisted on in the “Stones of Venice,” and which are of yet more importance now.[152] Of these, the first and main ones are the exquisite delicacy of the work and perfection of its preservation to this time. It seems to me that the English visitor never realizes thoroughly what it is that he looks at in the St. Mark’s porches: its glittering confusion in a style unexampled, its bright colors, its mingled marbles, produce on him no real impression of age, and its diminutive size scarcely any of grandeur. It looks to him almost like a stage scene, got up solidly for some sudden festa. No mere guide-book’s passing assertion of date—this century or the other—can in the least make him even conceive, and far less feel, that he is actually standing before the very shafts and stones that were set on their foundations here while Harold the Saxon stood by the grave of the Confessor under the fresh-raised vaults of the first Norman Westminster Abbey, of which now a single arch only remains standing. He cannot, by any effort, imagine that those exquisite and lace-like sculptures of twined acanthus—every leaf-edge as sharp and fine as if they were green weeds fresh springing in the dew, by the Pan-droseion[153]—were, indeed, cut and finished to their perfect grace while the Norman axes were hewing out rough zigzags and dentils round the aisles of Durham and Lindisfarne. Or nearer, in what is left of our own Canterbury—it is but an hour’s journey in pleasant Kent—you may compare, almost as if you looked from one to the other, the grim grotesque of the block capitals in the crypt with the foliage of these flexile ones, and with their marble doves—scarcely distinguishable from the living birds that nestle between them. Or, going down two centuries (for the fillings of the portico arches were not completed till after 1204), what thirteenth-century work among our gray limestone walls can be thought of as wrought in the same hour with that wreath of intertwined white marble, relieved by gold, of which the tenderest and sharpest lines of the pencil cannot finely enough express the surfaces and undulations? For indeed, without and within, St. Mark’s is not, in the real nature of it, a piece of architecture, but a jewelled casket and painted reliquary, chief of the treasures in what were once the world’s treasuries of sacred things, the kingdoms of Christendom.

A jewelled casket, every jewel of which was itself sacred. Not a slab of it, nor a shaft, but has been brought from the churches descendants of the great Seven of Asia, or from the Christian-Greek of Corinth, Crete, and Thrace, or the Christian-Israelite in Palestine—the central archivolt copied from that of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the opposing lions or phoenixes of its sculptures from the treasury of Atreus and the citadel of Tyre.

Thus, beyond all measure of value as a treasury of art, it is also, beyond all other volumes, venerable as a codex of religion. Just as the white foliage and birds on their golden ground are descendants, in direct line, from the ivory and gold of Phidias, so the Greek pictures and inscriptions, whether in mosaic or sculpture, throughout the building, record the unbroken unity of spiritual influence from the Father of light—or the races whose own poets had said “We also are his offspring”—down to the day when all their gods, not slain, but changed into new creatures, became the types to them of the mightier Christian spirits; and Perseus became St. George, and Mars St. Michael, and Athena the Madonna, and Zeus their revealed Father in Heaven.

In all the history of human mind, there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so eventful, as this spiritual change. So inextricably is it interwoven with the most divine, the most distant threads of human thought and effort, that while none of the thoughts of St. Paul or the visions of St. John, can be understood without our understanding first the imagery familiar to the Pagan worship of the Greeks; on the other hand, no understanding of the real purport of Greek religion can be securely reached without watching the translation of its myths into the message of Christianity.

Both by the natural temper of my mind, and by the labor of forty years given to this subject in its practical issues on the present state[154] of Christendom, I have become, in some measure, able both to show and to interpret these most precious sculptures; and my health has been so far given back to me that if I am at this moment aided, it will, so far as I can judge, be easily possible for me to complete the work so long in preparation. There will yet, I doubt not, be time to obtain perfect record of all that is to be destroyed. I have entirely honest and able draughtsmen at my command; my own resignation[155] of my Oxford Professorship has given me leisure; and all that I want from the antiquarian sympathy of England is so much instant help as may permit me, while yet in available vigor of body and mind, to get the records made under my own overseership, and registered for sufficient and true. The casts and drawings which I mean to have made will be preserved in a consistent series in my Museum at Sheffield, where I have freehold ground enough to build a perfectly lighted gallery for their reception. I have used the words “I want,” as if praying this thing for myself. It is not so. If only some other person could and would undertake all this, Heaven knows how gladly I would leave the task to him. But there is no one else at present able to do it: if not now by me, it can never be done more.—And so I leave it to the reader’s grace.

J. Ruskin.

All subscriptions to be sent to Mr. G. Allen, Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent.

POSTSCRIPT.[156]

By the kindness of the Society of Painters in Water-colors I am permitted this year, in view of the crisis of the fate of the faÇade of St. Mark’s, to place in the exhibition-room of the Society ten photographs, illustrative of its past and present state. I have already made use of them, both in my lectures at Oxford and in the parts of Fors Clavigera intended for Art-teaching at my Sheffield Museum; and all but the eighth are obtainable from my assistant, Mr. Ward (2 Church Terrace, Richmond), who is my general agent for photographs, either taken under my direction (as here, Nos. 4, 9, and 10), or specially chosen by me for purposes of Art Education. The series of views here shown are all perfectly taken, with great clearness, from the most important points, and give, consecutively, complete evidence respecting the faÇade.

They are arranged in the following order:

This last photograph is not of St. Mark’s but is of the inscription which I discovered, in 1877, on the Church of St. James of the Rialto. It is of the 9th or 10th century (according to the best antiquarians of Venice), and is given in this series, first, to confirm the closing paragraph in my notes on the Prout drawings in Bond Street;[157] and secondly to show the perfect preservation even of the hair-strokes in letters carved in the Istrian marble used at Venice a thousand years ago. The inscription on the cross is—

And on the band beneath—

The bearing of this inscription on the relations of Antonio to Shylock may perhaps not be perceived by a public which now—consistently and naturally enough, but ominously—considers Shylock a victim to the support of the principles of legitimate trade, and Antonio a “speculator and sentimentalist.” From the series of photographs of St. Mark’s itself, I cannot but think even the least attentive observer must receive one strong impression—that of the singular preservation of the minutest details in its sculpture. Observe, this is a quite separate question from the stability of the fabric. In our northern cathedrals the stone, for the most part, moulders away; and the restorer usually replaces it by fresh sculpture, on the faces of walls of which the mass is perfectly secure. Here, at St. Mark’s, on the contrary, the only possible pretence for restoration has been, and is, the alleged insecurity of the masses of inner wall—the external sculptures remaining in faultless perfection, so far as unaffected by direct human violence. Both the Greek and Istrian marbles used at Venice are absolutely defiant of hypÆthral influences, and the edges of their delicatest sculpture remain to this day more sharp than if they had been cut in steel—for then they would have rusted away. It is especially, for example, of this quality that I have painted the ornament of the St. Jean d’Acre pillars, No. 107, which the reader may at once compare with the daguerreotype (No. 108) beside it, which are exhibited, with the Prout and Hunt drawings, at the Fine Art Society’s rooms.[158] These pillars are known to be not later than the sixth century, yet wherever external violence has spared their decoration it is sharp as a fresh-growing thistle. Throughout the whole faÇade of St. Mark’s, the capitals have only here and there by casualty lost so much as a volute or an acanthus leaf, and whatever remains is perfect as on the day it was set in its place, mellowed and subdued only in color by time, but white still, clearly white; and gray, still softly gray; its porphyry purple as an Orleans plum, and the serpentine as green as a greengage. Note also, that in this throughout perfect decorated surface there is not a loose joint. The appearances of dislocation, which here and there look like yielding of masonry, are merely carelessness in the replacing or resetting of the marble armor at the different times when the front has been retouched—in several cases quite wilful freaks of arrangement. The slope of the porphyry shaft, for instance, on the angle at the left of my drawing, looks like dilapidation. Were it really so, the building would be a heap of ruins in twenty-four hours. These porches sustain no weight above—their pillars carry merely an open gallery; and the inclination of the red marble pilasters at the angle is not yielding at all, but an originally capricious adjustment of the marble armor. It will be seen that the investing marbles between the arch and pilaster are cut to the intended inclination, which brings the latter nearly into contact with the upper archivolt; the appearance of actual contact being caused by the projection of the dripstone. There are, indeed, one or two leaning towers in Venice whose foundations have partly yielded; but if anything were in danger on St. Mark’s Place, it would be the campanile—three hundred feet high—and not the little shafts and galleries within reach—too easy reach—of the gaslighter’s ladder. And the only dilapidations I have myself seen on this porch, since I first drew it forty-six years ago, have been, first, those caused by the insertion of the lamps themselves, and then the breaking away of the marble net work of the main capital by the habitual clattering of the said gaslighter’s ladder against it. A piece of it which I saw so broken off, and made an oration over to the passers-by in no less broken Italian, is in my mineral cabinet at Brantwood.

Before leaving this subject of the inclined angle, let me note—usefully, though not to my present purpose—that the entire beauty of St. Mark’s campanile depends on this structure, there definitely seen to be one of real safety. This grace and apparent strength of the whole mass would be destroyed if the sides of it were made vertical. In Gothic towers, the same effect is obtained by the retiring of the angle buttresses, without actual inclination of any but the coping lines.

In the Photograph No. 5 the slope of the angles in the correspondent portico, as it stood before restoration, is easily visible and measurable, the difference being, even on so small a scale, full the twentieth of an inch between the breadth at base and top, at the angles, while the lines bearing the inner arch are perfectly vertical.

There was, indeed, as will be seen at a glance, some displacement of the pillars dividing the great window above, immediately to the right of the portico. But these pillars were exactly the part of the south front which carried no weight. The arch above them is burdened only by its own fringes of sculpture; and the pillars carried only the bit of decorated panelling, which is now bent—not outwards, as it would have been by pressure, but inwards. The arch has not subsided; it was always of the same height as the one to the right of it (the Byzantine builders throwing their arches always in whatever lines they chose); nor is there a single crack or displacement in the sculpture of the investing fringe.

In No. 3 (to the right hand in the frame) there is dilapidation and danger enough certainly; but that is wholly caused by the savage and brutal carelessness with which the restored parts are joined to the old. The photograph bears deadly and perpetual witness against the system of “making work,” too well known now among English as well as Italian operatives; but it bears witness, as deadly, against the alleged accuracy of the restoration itself. The ancient dentils are bold, broad, and cut with the free hand, as all good Greek work is; the new ones, little more than half their size, are cut with the servile and horrible rigidity of the modern mechanic.

This quality is what M. Meduna, in the passage quoted from his defence of himself[159] in the Standard, has at once the dulness and the audacity actually to boast of as “plus exacte”!

Imagine a Kensington student set to copy a picture by Velasquez, and substituting a Nottingham lace pattern, traced with absolute exactness, for the painter’s sparkle and flow and flame, and boasting of his improvements as “plus exacte”! That is precisely what the Italian restorer does for his original; but, alas! he has the inestimable privilege also of destroying the original as he works, and putting his student’s caricature in its place! Nor are any words bitter or contemptuous enough to describe the bestial stupidities which have thus already replaced the floor of the church, in my early days the loveliest in Italy, and the most sacred.

In the Photograph No. 7 there is, and there only, one piece of real dilapidation—the nodding pinnacle propped on the right. Those pinnacles stand over the roof gutters, and their bracket supports are, of course, liable to displacement, if the gutters get choked by frost or otherwise neglected. The pinnacle is not ten feet high, and can be replaced and secured as easily as the cowl on a chimney-pot. The timbers underneath were left there merely to give the wished-for appearance of repairs going on. They defaced the church front through the whole winter of 1876. I copied the bills stuck on them one Sunday, and they are printed in the 78th number of Fors Clavigera, the first being the announcement of the Reunited agencies for information on all matters of commercial enterprise and speculation, and the last the announcement of the loss of a cinnamon-colored little bitch, with rather long ears (coll’ orecchie piÙtosto lunghe). I waited through the winter to see how much the Venetians really cared for the look of their church; but lodged a formal remonstrance in March with one of the more reasonable civic authorities, who presently had them removed. The remonstrance ought, of course, to have come from the clergy; but they contented themselves with cutting flower-wreaths on paper to hang over the central door at Christmas-time. For the rest, the pretence of rottenness in the walls is really too gross to be answered. There are brick buildings in Italy by tens of thousands, Roman, Lombardic, Gothic, on all scales and in all exposures. Which of them has rotted or fallen, but by violence? Shall the tower of Garisenda stand, and the Campanile of Verona, and the tower of St. Mark’s, and, forsooth, this little fifty feet of unweighted wall be rotten and dangerous?

Much more I could say, and show; but the certainty of the ruin of poor Bedlamite Venice is in her own evil will, and not to be averted by any human help or pleading. Her Sabba delle streghe has truly come; and in her own words (see Fors, letter 77th): “Finalmente la Piazza di S. Marco sarÀ invasa e completamente illuminata dalle Fiamme di BelzebÙ. PerchÈ il Sabba possa riuscire piÙ completo, si raccomanda a tutti gli spettatori di fischiare durante le fiamme come anime dannate.”

Meantime, in what Saturday pause may be before this Witches’ Sabbath, if I have, indeed, any English friends, let them now help me, and my fellow-workers, to get such casts, and colorings, and measurings, as may be of use in time to come. I am not used to the begging tone, and will not say more than that what is given me will go in mere daily bread to the workers, and that next year, if I live, there shall be some exposition of what we have got done, with the best account I can render of its parts and pieces. Fragmentary enough they must be,—poor fallen plumes of the winged lion’s wings,—yet I think I can plume a true shaft or two with them yet.