<h3><SPAN name="chap_30"></SPAN>CHAPTER XXX.</h3>
<h5>THE VESTIBULE.</h5>
<p><span class="scs">I</span>. <span class="sc">I have</span> hardly kept my promise. The reader has decorated
but little for himself as yet; but I have not, at least,
attempted to bias his judgment. Of the simple forms of decoration
which have been set before him, he has always been
left free to choose; and the stated restrictions in the methods
of applying them have been only those which followed on the
necessities of construction previously determined. These having
been now defined, I do indeed leave my reader free to
build; and with what a freedom! All the lovely forms of the
universe set before him, whence to choose, and all the lovely
lines that bound their substance or guide their motion; and
of all these lines,—and there are myriads of myriads in every
bank of grass and every tuft of forest; and groups of them
divinely harmonized, in the bell of every flower, and in every
several member of bird and beast,—of all these lines, for the
principal forms of the most important members of architecture,
I have used but Three! What, therefore, must be the
infinity of the treasure in them all! There is material enough
in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals,
but suppose we were satisfied with less exhaustive appliance,
and built a score of cathedrals, each to illustrate a single
flower? that would be better than trying to invent new
styles, I think. There is quite difference of style enough, between
a violet and a harebell, for all reasonable purposes.</p>
<p><span class="scs">II</span>. Perhaps, however, even more strange than the struggle
of our architects to invent new styles, is the way they commonly
speak of this treasure of natural infinity. Let us take
our patience to us for an instant, and hear one of them, not
among the least intelligent:—</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page350"></SPAN>350</span></p>
<p class="quote">“It is not true that all natural forms are beautiful. We may hardly
be able to detect this in Nature herself; but when the forms are separated
from the things, and exhibited alone (by sculpture or carving), we then see
that they are not all fitted for ornamental purposes; and indeed that very
few, perhaps none, are so fitted without correction. Yes, I say <i>correction</i>,
for though it is the highest aim of every art to imitate nature, this is not to
be done by imitating any natural form, but by <i>criticising</i> and <i>correcting</i> it,—criticising
it by Nature’s rules gathered from all her works, but never completely
carried out by her in any one work; correcting it, by rendering it
more natural, <i>i.e.</i> more conformable to the general tendency of Nature, according
to that noble maxim recorded of Raffaelle, ‘that the artist’s object
was to make things not as Nature makes them, but as she <span class="scs">WOULD</span> make
them;’ as she ever tries to make them, but never succeeds, though her aim
may be deduced from a comparison of her efforts; just as if a number of
archers had aimed unsuccessfully at a mark upon a wall, and this mark
were then removed, we could by the examination of their arrow marks
point out the most probable position of the spot aimed at, with a certainty
of being nearer to it than any of their shots.”<SPAN name="FnAnchor_92" href="#Footnote_92"><span class="sp">92</span></SPAN></p>
<p><span class="scs">III</span>. I had thought that, by this time, we had done with
that stale, second-hand, one-sided, and misunderstood saying
of Raffaelle’s; or that at least, in these days of purer Christian
light, men might have begun to get some insight into the
meaning of it: Raffaelle was a painter of humanity, and assuredly
there is something the matter with humanity, a few
<i>dovrebbe’s</i>, more or less, wanting in it. We have most of us
heard of original sin, and may perhaps, in our modest moments,
conjecture that we are not quite what God, or nature, would
have us to be. Raffaelle <i>had</i> something to mend in Humanity:
I should have liked to have seen him mending a daisy!—or a
pease-blossom, or a moth, or a mustard seed, or any other of
God’s slightest works. If he had accomplished that, one
might have found for him more respectable employment,—to
set the stars in better order, perhaps (they seem grievously
scattered as they are, and to be of all manner of shapes and
sizes,—except the ideal shape, and the proper size); or to give
us a corrected view of the ocean; that, at least, seems a very
irregular and improveable thing; the very fishermen do not
know, this day, how far it will reach, driven up before the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page351"></SPAN>351</span>
west wind:—perhaps Some One else does, but that is not our
business. Let us go down and stand by the beach of it,—of
the great irregular sea, and count whether the thunder of it is
not out of time. One,—two:—here comes a well-formed wave
at last, trembling a little at the top, but, on the whole, orderly.
So, crash among the shingle, and up as far as this grey pebble;
now stand by and watch! Another:—Ah, careless wave! why
couldn’t you have kept your crest on? it is all gone away into
spray, striking up against the cliffs there—I thought as much—missed
the mark by a couple of feet! Another:—How now,
impatient one! couldn’t you have waited till your friend’s reflux
was done with, instead of rolling yourself up with it in
that unseemly manner? You go for nothing. A fourth, and
a goodly one at last. What think we of yonder slow rise, and
crystalline hollow, without a flaw? Steady, good wave; not
so fast; not so fast; where are you coming to?—By our architectural
word, this is too bad; two yards over the mark, and
ever so much of you in our face besides; and a wave which we
had some hope of, behind there, broken all to pieces out at sea,
and laying a great white table-cloth of foam all the way to the
shore, as if the marine gods were to dine off it! Alas, for
these unhappy arrow shots of Nature; she will never hit her
mark with those unruly waves of hers, nor get one of them,
into the ideal shape, if we wait for a thousand years. Let us
send for a Greek architect to do it for her. He comes—the
great Greek architect, with measure and rule. Will he not
also make the weight for the winds? and weigh out the waters
by measure? and make a decree for the rain, and a way for the
lightning of the thunder? He sets himself orderly to his work,
and behold! this is the mark of nature, and this is the thing
into which the great Greek architect improves the sea—</p>
<table class="nobctr" style="clear: both; " summary="Illustration">
<tr>
<td class="figcenter1">
<ANTIMG src="images/img351.jpg" width-obs="650" height-obs="99" alt="the sea" title="the sea" /></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class="noind"><span class="grk" title="Th�latta, th�latta:">Θάλαττα Θάλαττα:</span> Was it this, then, that they wept to see
from the sacred mountain—those wearied ones?</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page352"></SPAN>352</span></p>
<p><span class="scs">IV</span>. But the sea was meant to be irregular! Yes, and
were not also the leaves, and the blades of grass; and, in a sort,
as far as may be without mark of sin, even the countenance of
man? Or would it be pleasanter and better to have us all
alike, and numbered on our foreheads, that we might be known
one from the other?</p>
<p><span class="scs">V</span>. Is there, then, nothing to be done by man’s art? Have
we only to copy, and again copy, for ever, the imagery of the
universe? Not so. We have work to do upon it; there is
not any one of us so simple, nor so feeble, but he has work to
do upon it. But the work is not to improve, but to explain.
This infinite universe is unfathomable, inconceivable, in its
whole; every human creature must slowly spell out, and long
contemplate, such part of it as may be possible for him to
reach; then set forth what he has learned of it for those beneath
him; extricating it from infinity, as one gathers a violet
out of grass; one does not improve either violet or grass in
gathering it, but one makes the flower visible; and then the
human being has to make its power upon his own heart visible
also, and to give it the honor of the good thoughts it has raised
up in him, and to write upon it the history of his own soul.
And sometimes he may be able to do more than this, and to
set it in strange lights, and display it in a thousand ways before
unknown: ways specially directed to necessary and noble purposes,
for which he had to choose instruments out of the wide
armory of God. All this he may do: and in this he is only
doing what every Christian has to do with the written, as well
as the created word, “rightly <i>dividing</i> the word of truth.”
Out of the infinity of the written word, he has also to gather
and set forth things new and old, to choose them for the season
and the work that are before him, to explain and manifest them
to others, with such illustration and enforcement as may be in
his power, and to crown them with the history of what, by
them, God has done for his soul. And, in doing this, is he
improving the Word of God? Just such difference as there is
between the sense in which a minister may be said to improve
a text, to the people’s comfort, and the sense in which an
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page353"></SPAN>353</span>
atheist might declare that he could improve the Book, which,
if any man shall add unto, there shall be added unto him the
plagues that are written therein; just such difference is there
between that which, with respect to Nature, man is, in his
humbleness, called upon to do, and that which, in his insolence,
he imagines himself capable of doing.</p>
<p><span class="scs">VI</span>. Have no fear, therefore, reader, in judging between
nature and art, so only that you love both. If you can love
one only, then let it be Nature; you are safe with her: but do
not then attempt to judge the art, to which you do not care to
give thought, or time. But if you love both, you may judge
between them fearlessly; you may estimate the last, by its
making you remember the first, and giving you the same kind
of joy. If, in the square of the city, you can find a delight,
finite, indeed, but pure and intense, like that which you have
in a valley among the hills, then its art and architecture are
right; but if, after fair trial, you can find no delight in them,
nor any instruction like that of nature, I call on you fearlessly
to condemn them.</p>
<p>We are forced, for the sake of accumulating our power and
knowledge, to live in cities; but such advantage as we have
in association with each other is in great part counterbalanced
by our loss of fellowship with nature. We cannot all have
our gardens now, nor our pleasant fields to meditate in at
eventide. Then the function of our architecture is, as far as
may be, to replace these; to tell us about nature; to possess us
with memories of her quietness; to be solemn and full of tenderness,
like her, and rich in portraitures of her; full of delicate
imagery of the flowers we can no more gather, and of the
living creatures now far away from us in their own solitude.
If ever you felt or found this in a London Street,—if ever it
furnished you with one serious thought, or one ray of true and
gentle pleasure,—if there is in your heart a true delight in its
grim railings and dark casements, and wasteful finery of shops,
and feeble coxcombry of club-houses,—it is well: promote the
building of more like them. But if they never taught you
anything, and never made you happier as you passed beneath
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page354"></SPAN>354</span>
them, do not think they have any mysterious goodness nor
occult sublimity. Have done with the wretched affectation,
the futile barbarism, of pretending to enjoy: for, as surely as
you know that the meadow grass, meshed with fairy rings, is
better than the wood pavement, cut into hexagons; and as
surely as you know the fresh winds and sunshine of the upland
are better than the choke-damp of the vault, or the gas-light of
the ball-room, you may know, as I told you that you should,
that the good architecture, which has life, and truth, and joy
in it, is better than the bad architecture, which has death, dishonesty,
and vexation of heart in it, from the beginning to the
end of time.</p>
<p><span class="scs">VII</span>. And now come with me, for I have kept you too
long from your gondola: come with me, on an autumnal
morning, through the dark gates of Padua, and let us take the
broad road leading towards the East.</p>
<p>It lies level, for a league or two, between its elms, and vine
festoons full laden, their thin leaves veined into scarlet hectic,
and their clusters deepened into gloomy blue; then mounts an
embankment above the Brenta, and runs between the river
and the broad plain, which stretches to the north in endless
lines of mulberry and maize. The Brenta flows slowly, but
strongly; a muddy volume of yellowish-grey water, that
neither hastens nor slackens, but glides heavily between its
monotonous banks, with here and there a short, babbling eddy
twisted for an instant into its opaque surface, and vanishing,
as if something had been dragged into it and gone down.
Dusty and shadeless, the road fares along the dyke on its
northern side; and the tall white tower of Dolo is seen trembling
in the heat mist far away, and never seems nearer than
it did at first. Presently you pass one of the much vaunted
“villas on the Brenta:” a glaring, spectral shell of brick and
stucco, its windows with painted architraves like picture-frames,
and a court-yard paved with pebbles in front of it, all
burning in the thick glow of the feverish sunshine, but fenced
from the high road, for magnificence sake, with goodly posts
and chains; then another, of Kew Gothic, with Chinese variations,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page355"></SPAN>355</span>
painted red and green; a third composed for the greater
part of dead-wall, with fictitious windows painted upon it,
each with a pea-green blind, and a classical architrave in bad
perspective; and a fourth, with stucco figures set on the top
of its garden-wall: some antique, like the kind to be seen at
the corner of the New Road, and some of clumsy grotesque
dwarfs, with fat bodies and large boots. This is the architecture
to which her studies of the Renaissance have conducted
modern Italy.</p>
<p><span class="scs">VIII</span>. The sun climbs steadily, and warms into intense
white the walls of the little piazza of Dolo, where we change
horses. Another dreary stage among the now divided
branches of the Brenta, forming irregular and half-stagnant
canals; with one or two more villas on the other side of them,
but these of the old Venetian type, which we may have
recognised before at Padua, and sinking fast into utter ruin,
black, and rent, and lonely, set close to the edge of the dull
water, with what were once small gardens beside them, kneaded
into mud, and with blighted fragments of gnarled hedges and
broken stakes for their fencing; and here and there a few
fragments of marble steps, which have once given them
graceful access from the water’s edge, now settling into the
mud in broken joints, all aslope, and slippery with green weed.
At last the road turns sharply to the north, and there is an
open space, covered with bent grass, on the right of it: but do
not look that way.</p>
<p><span class="scs">IX</span>. Five minutes more, and we are in the upper room of
the little inn at Mestre, glad of a moment’s rest in shade.
The table is (always, I think) covered with a cloth of nominal
white and perennial grey, with plates and glasses at due intervals,
and small loaves of a peculiar white bread, made with oil,
and more like knots of flour than bread. The view from its
balcony is not cheerful: a narrow street, with a solitary brick
church and barren campanile on the other side of it; and some
coventual buildings, with a few crimson remnants of fresco
about their windows; and, between them and the street, a
ditch with some slow current in it, and one or two small houses
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page356"></SPAN>356</span>
beside it, one with an arbor of roses at its door, as in an English
tea-garden; the air, however, about us having in it nothing
of roses, but a close smell of garlic and crabs, warmed by
the smoke of various stands of hot chestnuts. There is much
vociferation also going on beneath the window respecting certain
wheelbarrows which are in rivalry for our baggage: we
appease their rivalry with our best patience, and follow them
down the narrow street.</p>
<p><span class="scs">X</span>. We have but walked some two hundred yards when
we come to a low wharf or quay, at the extremity of a canal,
with long steps on each side down to the water, which latter
we fancy for an instant has become black with stagnation;
another glance undeceives us,—it is covered with the black
boats of Venice. We enter one of them, rather to try if they
be real boats or not, than with any definite purpose, and glide
away; at first feeling as if the water were yielding continually
beneath the boat and letting her sink into soft vacancy. It is
something clearer than any water we have seen lately, and of
a pale green; the banks only two or three feet above it, of
mud and rank grass, with here and there a stunted tree; gliding
swiftly past the small casement of the gondola, as if they
were dragged by upon a painted scene.</p>
<p>Stroke by stroke we count the plunges of the oar, each
heaving up the side of the boat slightly as her silver beak
shoots forward. We lose patience, and extricate ourselves
from the cushions: the sea air blows keenly by, as we stand
leaning on the roof of the floating cell. In front, nothing to
be seen but long canal and level bank; to the west, the tower
of Mestre is lowering fast, and behind it there have risen purple
shapes, of the color of dead rose-leaves, all round the horizon,
feebly defined against the afternoon sky,—the Alps of
Bassano. Forward still: the endless canal bends at last, and
then breaks into intricate angles about some low bastions, now
torn to pieces and staggering in ugly rents towards the water,—the
bastions of the fort of Malghera. Another turn, and
another perspective of canal; but not interminable. The
silver beak cleaves it fast,—it widens: the rank grass of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page357"></SPAN>357</span>
banks sinks lower, and lower, and at last dies in tawny knots
along an expanse of weedy shore. Over it, on the right, but
a few years back, we might have seen the lagoon stretching to
the horizon, and the warm southern sky bending over Malamocco
to the sea. Now we can see nothing but what seems a
low and monotonous dock-yard wall, with flat arches to let the
tide through it;—this is the railroad bridge, conspicuous
above all things. But at the end of those dismal arches, there
rises, out of the wide water, a straggling line of low and confused
brick buildings, which, but for the many towers which
are mingled among them, might be the suburbs of an English
manufacturing town. Four or five domes, pale, and apparently
at a greater distance, rise over the centre of the line;
but the object which first catches the eye is a sullen cloud of
black smoke brooding over the northern half of it, and which
issues from the belfry of a church.</p>
<p>It is Venice.</p>
<hr class="foot" />
<div class="note">
<p><SPAN name="Footnote_92" href="#FnAnchor_92"><span class="fn">92</span></SPAN> Garbett on Design, p. 74.</p>
</div>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page358"></SPAN>358</span></p>
<hr class="art" />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page359"></SPAN>359</span></p>
<h3>APPENDIX.</h3>
<hr class="short" />
<h5><SPAN name="app_1"></SPAN>1. FOUNDATION OF VENICE.</h5>
<p><span class="sc">I find</span> the chroniclers agree in fixing the year 421, if any:
the following sentence from De Monaci may perhaps interest the
reader.</p>
<p>“God, who punishes the sins of men by war sorrows, and
whose ways are past finding out, willing both to save the innocent
blood, and that a great power, beneficial to the whole world,
should arise in a spot strange beyond belief, moved the chief
men of the cities of the Venetian province (which from the
border of Pannonia, extended as far as the Adda, a river of Lombardy),
both in memory of past, and in dread of future distress,
to establish states upon the nearer islands of the inner gulphs of
the Adriatic, to which, in the last necessity, they might retreat
for refuge. And first Galienus de Fontana, Simon de Glauconibus,
and Antonius Calvus, or, as others have it, Adalburtus
Falerius, Thomas Candiano, Comes Daulus, Consuls of Padua,
by the command of their King and the desire of the citizens,
laid the foundations of the new commonwealth, under good
auspices, on the island of the Rialto, the highest and nearest to
the mouth of the deep river now called the Brenta, in the year
of Our Lord, as many writers assure us, four hundred and twenty-one,
on the 25th day of March.”<SPAN name="FnAnchor_93" href="#Footnote_93"><span class="sp">93</span></SPAN></p>
<p>It is matter also of very great satisfaction to know that Venice
was founded by good Christians: “La qual citade stada hedificada
da veri e boni Christiani:” which information I found in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page360"></SPAN>360</span>
the MS. copy of the Zancarol Chronicle, in the library of St.
Mark’s.</p>
<p>Finally the conjecture as to the origin of her name, recorded
by Sansovino, will be accepted willingly by all who love Venice:
“Fu interpretato da alcuni, che questa voce <span class="sc">Venetia</span> voglia dire
<i>VENI ETIAM</i>, cio�, vieni ancora, e ancora, percioche quante
volte verrai, sempre vedrai nuove cose, enuove bellezze.”</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_2"></SPAN>2. POWER OF THE DOGES.</h5>
<p>The best authorities agree in giving the year 697 as that of
the election of the first doge, Paul Luke Anafeste. He was
elected in a general meeting of the commonalty, tribunes, and
clergy, at Heraclea, “divinis rebus procuratis,” as usual, in all
serious work, in those times. His authority is thus defined by
Sabellico, who was not likely to have exaggerated it:—“Penes
quem decus omne imperii ac majestas esset: cui jus concilium
cogendi quoties de republica aliquid referri oporteret; qui tribunos
annuos in singulas insulas legeret, a quibus ad Ducem
esset provocatio. C�terum, si quis dignitatem, ecclesiam, sacerdotumve
cleri populique suffragio esset adeptus, ita demum id
ratum haberetur si dux ipse auctor factus esset.” (Lib. I.) The
last clause is very important, indicating the subjection of the
ecclesiastical to the popular and ducal (or patrician) powers,
which, throughout her career, was one of the most remarkable
features in the policy of Venice. The appeal from the tribunes
to the doge is also important; and the expression “decus omne
imperii,” if of somewhat doubtful force, is at least as energetic
as could have been expected from an historian under the influence
of the Council of Ten.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_3" id="app_3"></SPAN>3. SERRAR DEL CONSIGLIO.</h5>
<p>The date of the decree which made the right of sitting in the
grand council hereditary, is variously given; the Venetian historians
themselves saying as little as they can about it. The thing
was evidently not accomplished at once, several decrees following
in successive years: the Council of Ten was established without
any doubt in 1310, in consequence of the conspiracy of Tiepolo.
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page361"></SPAN>361</span>
The Venetian verse, quoted by Mutinelli (Annali Urbani di
Venezia, p. 153), is worth remembering.</p>
<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td>
<div class="poemr">
<p class="ind03">“Del mille tresento e diese</p>
<p>A mezzo el mese delle ceriese</p>
<p>Bagiamonte passel ponte</p>
<p>E per esso fo fatto el Consegio di diese.”</p>
</div>
</td></tr></table>
<p>The reader cannot do better than take 1297 as the date of the
beginning of the change of government, and this will enable him
exactly to divide the 1100 years from the election of the first doge
into 600 of monarchy and 500 of aristocracy. The coincidence
of the numbers is somewhat curious; 697 the date of the establishment
of the government, 1297 of its change, and 1797 of its fall.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_4"></SPAN>4. S. PIETRO DI CASTELLO.</h5>
<p>It is credibly reported to have been founded in the seventh
century, and (with somewhat less of credibility) in a place where
the Trojans, conducted by Antenor, had, after the destruction
of Troy, built “un castello, chiamato prima Troja, poscia Olivolo,
interpretato, luogo pieno.” It seems that St. Peter appeared in
person to the Bishop of Heraclea, and commanded him to found
in his honor, a church in that spot of the rising city on the
Rialto: “ove avesse veduto una mandra di buoi e di pecore pascolare
unitamente. Questa fu la prodigiosa origine della Chiesa
di San Pietro, che poscia, o rinovata, o ristaurata, da Orso Participazio
IV Vescovo Olivolense, divenne la Cattedrale della
Nuova citta.” (Notizie Storiche delle Chiese e Monasteri di
Venezia. Padua, 1758.) What there was so prodigious in oxen
and sheep feeding together, we need St. Peter, I think, to tell
us. The title of Bishop of Castello was first taken in 1091: St.
Mark’s was not made the cathedral church till 1807. It may be
thought hardly fair to conclude the small importance of the old
St. Pietro di Castello from the appearance of the wretched
modernisations of 1620. But these modernisations are spoken
of as improvements; and I find no notice of peculiar beauties in
the older building, either in the work above quoted, or by Sansovino;
who only says that when it was destroyed by fire (as everything
in Venice was, I think, about three times in a century), in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page362"></SPAN>362</span>
the reign of Vital Michele, it was rebuilt “with good thick walls,
maintaining, <i>for all that</i>, the order of its arrangement taken
from the Greek mode of building.” This does not seem the
description of a very enthusiastic effort to rebuild a highly ornate
cathedral. The present church is among the least interesting in
Venice; a wooden bridge, something like that of Battersea on a
small scale, connects its island, now almost deserted, with a
wretched suburb of the city behind the arsenal; and a blank level
of lifeless grass, rotted away in places rather than trodden, is extended
before its mildewed fa�ade and solitary tower.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_5"></SPAN>5. PAPAL POWER IN VENICE.</h5>
<p>I may refer the reader to the eleventh chapter of the twenty-eighth
book of Daru for some account of the restraints to which
the Venetian clergy were subjected. I have not myself been able
to devote any time to the examination of the original documents
bearing on this matter, but the following extract from a letter
of a friend, who will not at present permit me to give his name,
but who is certainly better conversant with the records of the
Venetian State than any other Englishman, will be of great value
to the general reader:—</p>
<p>“In the year 1410, or perhaps at the close of the thirteenth
century, churchmen were excluded from the Grand Council and
declared ineligible to civil employment; and in the same year,
1410, the Council of Ten, with the Giunta, decreed that whenever
in the state’s councils matters concerning ecclesiastical
affairs were being treated, all the kinsfolk of Venetian beneficed
clergymen were to be expelled; and, in the year 1434, the <span class="scs">RELATIONS</span>
of churchmen were declared ineligible to the post of ambassador
at Rome.</p>
<p>“The Venetians never gave possession of any see in their
territories to bishops unless they had been proposed to the pope
by the senate, which elected the patriarch, who was supposed, at
the end of the sixteenth century, to be liable to examination by
his Holiness, as an act of confirmation of installation; but of
course, everything depended on the relative power at any given
time of Rome and Venice: for instance, a few days after the
accession of Julius II., in 1503, he requests the Signory, cap in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page363"></SPAN>363</span>
hand, to <span class="scs">ALLOW</span> him to confer the archbishopric of Zara on a
dependant of his, one Cipico the Bishop of Famagosta. Six
years later, when Venice was overwhelmed by the leaguers of
Cambrai, that furious pope would assuredly have conferred Zara
on Cipico <span class="scs">WITHOUT</span> asking leave. In 1608, the rich Camaldolite
Abbey of Vangadizza, in the Polesine, fell vacant through the
death of Lionardo Loredano, in whose family it had been since
some while. The Venetian ambassador at Rome received the
news on the night of the 28th December; and, on the morrow,
requested Paul IV. not to dispose of this preferment until he
heard from the senate. The pope talked of ‘poor cardinals’
and of his nephew, but made no positive reply; and, as Francesco
Contarini was withdrawing, said to him: ‘My Lord ambassador,
with this opportunity we will inform you that, to our very great
regret, we understand that the chiefs of the Ten mean to turn
sacristans; for they order the parish priests to close the church
doors at the Ave Maria, and not to ring the bells at certain hours.
This is precisely the sacristan’s office; we don’t know why their
lordships, by printed edicts, which we have seen, choose to interfere
in this matter. This is pure and mere ecclesiastical jurisdiction;
and even, in case of any inconvenience arising, is there
not the patriarch, who is at any rate your own; why not apply
to him, who could remedy these irregularities? These are matters
which cause us very notable displeasure; we say so that they
may be written and known: it is decided by the councils and
canons, and not uttered by us, that whosoever forms any resolve
against the ecclesiastical liberty, cannot do so without incurring
censure: and in order that Father Paul [Bacon’s correspondent]
may not say hereafter, as he did in his past writings, that our
predecessors assented either tacitly or by permission, we declare
that we do not give our assent, nor do we approve it; nay, we
blame it, and let this be announced in Venice, so that, for the
rest, every one may take care of his own conscience. St. Thomas
Becket, whose festival is celebrated this very day, suffered
martyrdom for the ecclesiastical liberty; it is our duty likewise
to support and defend it.’ Contarini says: ‘This remonstrance
was delivered with some marks of anger, which induced me to
tell him how the tribunal of the most excellent the Lords chiefs
of the Ten is in our country supreme; that it does not do its
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page364"></SPAN>364</span>
business unadvisedly, or condescend to unworthy matters; and
that, therefore, should those Lords have come to any public
declaration of their will, it must be attributed to orders anterior,
and to immemorial custom and authority, recollecting that, on
former occasions likewise, similar commissions were given to
prevent divers incongruities; wherefore an upright intention,
such as this, ought not to be taken in any other sense than its
own, especially as the parishes of Venice were in her own gift,’
&c. &c. The pope persisted in bestowing the abbacy on his
nephew, but the republic would not give possession, and a compromise
was effected by its being conferred on the Venetian
Matteo Priuli, who allowed the cardinal five thousand ducats per
annum out of its revenues. A few years before this, this very
same pope excommunicated the State, because she had imprisoned
two churchmen for heinous crimes; the strife lasted for
more than a year, and ended through the mediation of Henry
IV., at whose suit the prisoners were delivered to the French
ambassador, who made them over to a papal commissioner.</p>
<p>“In January, 1484, a tournament was in preparation on St.
Mark’s Square: some murmurs had been heard about the distribution
of the prizes having been pre-arranged, without regard to
the ‘best man.’ One of the chiefs of the Ten was walking along
Rialto on the 28th January, when a young priest, twenty-two
years old, a sword-cutlers son, and a Bolognese, and one of
Perugia, both men-at-arms under Robert Sansoverino, fell upon
a clothier with drawn weapons. The chief of the Ten desired
they might be seized, but at the moment the priest escaped; he
was, however, subsequently retaken, and in that very evening
hanged by torch-light between the columns with the two soldiers.
Innocent VIII. was less powerful than Paul IV.; Venice weaker
in 1605 than in 1484.</p>
<p>“* * * The exclusion from the Grand Council, whether at
the end of the fourteenth or commencement of the following
century, of the Venetian ecclesiastics, (as induced either by the
republic’s acquisitions on the main land then made, and which,
through the rich benefices they embraced, might have rendered
an ambitious churchman as dangerous in the Grand Council as a
victorious condottiere; or from dread of their allegiance being
divided between the church and their country, it being acknowledged
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page365"></SPAN>365</span>
that no man can serve two masters,) did not render them
hostile to their fatherland, whose interests were, with very few
exceptions, eagerly fathered by the Venetian prelates at Rome,
who, in their turn, received all honor at Venice, where state receptions
given to cardinals of the houses of Correr, Grimani,
Cornaro, Pisani, Contarini, Zeno, Delfino, and others, vouch for
the good understanding that existed between the ‘Papalists’ and
their countrymen. The Cardinal Grimani was instrumental in
detaching Julius II. from the league of Cambrai; the Cardinal
Cornaro always aided the state to obtain anything required of
Leo X.; and, both before and after their times, all Venetians
that had a seat in the Sacred College were patriots rather than
pluralists: I mean that they cared more for Venice than for their
benefices, admitting thus the soundness of that policy which denied
them admission into the Grand Council.”</p>
<p>To this interesting statement, I shall add, from the twenty-eighth
book of Daru, two passages, well deserving consideration
by us English in present days:</p>
<p>“Pour �tre parfaitement assur�e contre les envahissements
de la puissance eccl�siastique, Venise commen�a par lui �ter
tout pr�texte d’intervenir dans les affaires de l’Etat; elle resta
invariablement fid�le au dogme. Jamais aucune des opinions
nouvelles n’y prit la moindre faveur; jamais aucun h�r�siarque
ne sortit de Venise. Les conciles, les disputes, les guerres de
religion, se pass�rent sans qu’elle y prit jamais la moindre part.
In�branlable dans sa foi, elle ne fut pas moins invariable dans
son syst�me de tol�rance. Non seulement ses sujets de la religion
grecque conserv�rent l’exercise de leur culte, leurs �v�ques et
leurs pr�tres; mais les Protestantes, les Arm�niens, les Mahomitans,
les Juifs, toutes les religions, toutes les sectes qui se trouvaient
dans Venise, avaient des temples, et la s�pulture dans les
�glises n’�tait point refusaux h�r�tiques. Une police vigilante
s’appliquait avec le m�me soin �teindre les discordes, et emp�cher
les fanatiques et les novateurs de troubler l’Etat.”</p>
<p style="letter-spacing: 3em; " class="center">********</p>
<p>“Si on consid�re que c’est dans un temps opresque toutes
les nations tremblaient devant la puissance pontificale, que les
V�nitiens surent tenir leur clergdans la d�pendance, et braver
souvent les censures eccl�siastiques et les interdits, sans encourir
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page366"></SPAN>366</span>
jamais aucun reproche sur la puretde leur foi, on sera forcde
reconna�tre que cette r�publique avait d�vancde loin les autres
peuples dans cette partie de la science du gouvernement. La
fameuse maxime, ‘Siamo veneziani, poi christiani,’ n’�tait qu’une
formule �nergique qui ne prouvait point quils voulussent placer
l’int�r�t de la religion apr�s celui de l’Etat, mais qui annon�ait
leur invariable r�solution de ne pas souffrir qu’un pouvoir
�tranger port�t atteinte aux droits de la r�publique.</p>
<p>“Dans toute la dur�e de son existence, an milieu des revers
comme dans la prosp�ritcet in�branlable gouvernement ne fit
qu’une seule fois des concessions la cour de Borne, et ce fut
pour d�tacher le Pape Jules II. de la ligue de Cambrai.</p>
<p>“Jamais il ne se rel�cha du soin de tenir le clergdans une
nullitabsolue relativement aux affaires politiques; on peut en
juger par la conduite qu’il tint avec l’ordre religieux le plus redoutable
et le plus accoutums’immiscer dans les secrets de
l’Etat et dans les int�r�ts temporels.”</p>
<p>The main points, next stated, respecting the Jesuits are,
that the decree which permitted their establishment in Venice
required formal renewal every three years; that no Jesuit could
stay in Venice more than three years; that the slightest disobedience
to the authority of the government was instantly punished
by imprisonment; that no Venetian could enter the order without
express permission from the government; that the notaries
were forbidden to sanction any testamentary disposal of property
to the Jesuits; finally, that the heads of noble families were forbidden
to permit their children to be educated in the Jesuits’
colleges, on pain of degradation from their rank.</p>
<p>Now, let it be observed that the enforcement of absolute exclusion
of the clergy from the councils of the state, dates exactly
from the period which I have marked for the commencement of
the decline of the Venetian power. The Romanist is welcome
to his advantage in this fact, if advantage it be; for I do not
bring forward the conduct of the senate of Venice, as Daru does,
by way of an example of the general science of government.
The Venetians accomplished therein what we ridiculously call a
separation of “Church and State” (as if the State were not, in
all Christendom, necessarily also the Church<SPAN name="FnAnchor_94" href="#Footnote_94"><span class="sp">94</span></SPAN>), but <i>ought</i> to call
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page367"></SPAN>367</span>
a separation of lay and clerical officers. I do not point out this
separation as subject of praise, but as the witness borne by the
Venetians against the principles of the Papacy. If they were to
blame, in yielding to their fear of the ambitious spirit of Rome
so far as to deprive their councils of all religious element, what
excuse are we to offer for the state, which, with Lords Spiritual
of her own faith already in her senate, permits the polity of
Rome to be represented by lay members? To have sacrificed
religion to mistaken policy, or purchased security with ignominy,
would have been no new thing in the world’s history; but to be
at once impious and impolitic, and seek for danger through dishonor,
was reserved for the English parliament of 1829.</p>
<p>I am glad to have this opportunity of referring to, and farther
enforcing, the note on this subject which, not without deliberation,
I appended to the “Seven Lamps;” and of adding to it the
following passage, written by my father in the year 1839, and
published in one of the journals of that year:—a passage remarkable
as much for its intrinsic value, as for having stated, twelve
years ago, truths to which the mind of England seems but now,
and that slowly, awakening.</p>
<p>“We hear it said, that it cannot be merely the Roman religion
that causes the difficulty [respecting Ireland], for we were once
all Roman Catholics, and nations abroad of this faith are not as
the Irish. It is totally overlooked, that when we were so, our
government was despotic, and fit to cope with this dangerous
religion, as most of the Continental governments yet are. In
what Roman Catholic state, or in what age of Roman Catholic
England, did we ever hear of such agitation as now exists in
Ireland by evil men taking advantage of an anomalous state of
things—Roman Catholic ignorance in the people, Protestant
toleration in the government? We have yet to feel the tremendous
difficulty in which Roman Catholic emancipation has involved
us. Too late we discover that a Roman Catholic is wholly
incapable of being safely connected with the British constitution,
as it now exists, <i>in any near relation</i>. The present constitution
is no longer fit for Catholics. It is a creature essentially Protestant,
growing with the growth, and strengthening with the
strength, of Protestantism. So entirely is Protestantism interwoven
with the whole frame of our constitution and laws, that I
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page368"></SPAN>368</span>
take my stand on this, against all agitators in existence, that the
Roman religion is totally incompatible with the British constitution.
We have, in trying to combine them, got into a maze of
difficulties; we are the worse, and Ireland none the better. It
is idle to talk of municipal reform or popular Lords Lieutenant.
The mild sway of a constitutional monarchy is not strong enough
for a Roman Catholic population. The stern soul of a Republican
would not shrink from sending half the misguided population
and all the priests into exile, and planting in their place an industrious
Protestant people. But you cannot do this, and you
cannot convert the Irish, nor by other means make them fit to
wear the mild restraints of a Protestant Government. It was,
moreover, a strange logic that begot the idea of admitting
Catholics to administer any part of our laws or constitution.
It was admitted by all that, by the very act of abandoning the
Roman religion, we became a free and enlightened people. It
was only by throwing off the yoke of that slavish religion that
we attained to the freedom of thought which has advanced us in
the scale of society. We are so much advanced by adopting and
adhering to a reformed religion, that to prove our liberal and
unprejudiced views, we throw down the barriers betwixt the two
religions, of which the one is the acknowledged cause of light
and knowledge, the other the cause of darkness and ignorance.
We are so much altered to the better by leaving this
people entirely, and giving them neither part nor lot amongst
us, that it becomes proper to mingle again with them. We have
found so much good in leaving them, that we deem it the best
possible reason for returning to be among them. No fear of
their Church again shaking us, with all our light and knowledge.
It is true, the most enlightened nations fell under the spell of
her enchantments, fell into total darkness and superstition; but
no fear of us—we are too well informed! What miserable reasoning!
infatuated presumption! I fear me, when the Roman
religion rolled her clouds of darkness over the earlier ages, that
she quenched as much light, and knowledge, and judgment as
our modern Liberals have ever displayed. I do not expect a
statesman to discuss the point of Transubstantiation betwixt
Protestant and Catholic, nor to trace the narrow lines which divide
Protestant sectarians from each other; but can any statesman
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page369"></SPAN>369</span>
that shall have taken even a cursory glance at the face of
Europe, hesitate a moment on the choice of the Protestant religion?
If he unfortunately knew nothing of its being the true
one in regard to our eternal interests, he is at least bound to see
whether it be not the best for the worldly prosperity of a people.
He may be but moderately imbued with pious zeal for the salvation
of a kingdom, but at least he will be expected to weigh the
comparative merits of religion, as of law or government; and
blind, indeed, must he be if he does not discern that, in neglecting
to cherish the Protestant faith, or in too easily yielding to
any encroachments on it, he is foregoing the use of a state engine
more powerful than all the laws which the uninspired legislators
of the earth have ever promulgated, in promoting the happiness,
the peace, prosperity, and the order, the industry, and the wealth,
of a people; in forming every quality valuable or desirable in a
subject or a citizen; in sustaining the public mind at that point
of education and information that forms the best security for the
state, and the best preservative for the freedom of a people,
whether religious or political.”</p>
<table class="nobctr" style="clear: both; " summary="Illustration">
<tr>
<td class="caption1">XX.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="figcenter">
<SPAN name="plate_20"><ANTIMG src="images/img369.jpg" width-obs="650" height-obs="209" alt="WALL VEIL DECORATION." title="WALL VEIL DECORATION." /></SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="caption">WALL VEIL DECORATION.<br/>
<span class="f80">CA’ TREVISAN.</span></td>
</tr>
</table>
<h5><SPAN name="app_6"></SPAN>6. RENAISSANCE ORNAMENTS.</h5>
<p>There having been three principal styles of architecture in
Venice,—the Greek or Byzantine, the Gothic, and the Renaissance,
it will be shown, in the sequel, that the Renaissance itself
is divided into three correspondent families: Renaissance engrafted
on Byzantine, which is earliest and best; Renaissance engrafted
on Gothic, which is second, and second best; Renaissance
on Renaissance, which is double darkness, and worst of all. The
palaces in which Renaissance is engrafted on Byzantine are those
noticed by Commynes: they are characterized by an ornamentation
very closely resembling, and in some cases identical with,
early Byzantine work; namely, groups of colored marble circles
inclosed in interlacing bands. I have put on the opposite page
one of these ornaments, from the Ca’ Trevisan, in which a most
curious and delicate piece of inlaid design is introduced into a
band which is almost exactly copied from the church of Theotocos
at Constantinople, and correspondent with others in St.
Mark’s. There is also much Byzantine feeling in the treatment
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page370"></SPAN>370</span>
of the animals, especially in the two birds of the lower compartment,
while the peculiar curves of the cinque cento leafage are
visible in the leaves above. The dove, alighted, with the olive-branch
plucked off, is opposed to the raven with restless expanded
wings. Beneath are evidently the two sacrifices “of every
clean fowl and of every clean beast.” The color is given with
green and white marbles, the dove relieved on a ground of greyish
green, and all is exquisitely finished.</p>
<p>In <SPAN href="#plate_1">Plate I.</SPAN>, <SPAN href="#page013"></SPAN>, the upper figure is from the same palace
(Ca’ Trevisan), and it is very interesting in its proportions. If
we take five circles in geometrical proportion, each diameter
being <span class="correction" title="originally 'two-thsrds'">two-thirds</span> of the diameter next above it, and arrange the
circles so proportioned, in contact with each other, in the manner
shown in the plate, we shall find that an increase quite imperceptible
in the diameter of the circles in the angles, will enable
us to inscribe the whole in a square. The lines so described will
then run in the centre of the white bands. I cannot be certain
that this is the actual construction of the Trevisan design, because
it is on a high wall surface, where I could not get at its
measurements; but I found this construction exactly coincide
with the lines of my eye sketch. The lower figure in <SPAN href="#plate_1">Plate I.</SPAN> is
from the front of the Ca’ Dario, and probably struck the eye
of Commynes in its first brightness. Salvatico, indeed, considers
both the Ca’ Trevisan (which once belonged to Bianca
Cappello) and the Ca’ Dario, as buildings of the sixteenth century.
I defer the discussion of the question at present, but have,
I believe, sufficient reason for assuming the Ca’ Dario to have
been built about 1486, and the Ca’ Trevisan not much later.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_7"></SPAN>7. VARIETIES OF THE ORDERS.</h5>
<p>Of these phantasms and grotesques, one of some general importance
is that commonly called Ionic, of which the idea was
taken (Vitruvius says) from a woman’s hair, curled; but its lateral
processes look more like rams’ horns: be that as it may, it
is a mere piece of agreeable extravagance, and if, instead of rams’
horns, you put ibex horns, or cows’ horns, or an ass’s head at
once, you will have ibex orders, or ass orders, or any number of
other orders, one for every head or horn. You may have heard
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page371"></SPAN>371</span>
of another order, the Composite, which is Ionic and Corinthian
mixed, and is one of the worst of ten thousand forms referable
to the Corinthian as their head: it may be described as a spoiled
Corinthian. And you may have also heard of another order,
called Tuscan (which is no order at all, but a spoiled Doric): and
of another called Roman Doric, which is Doric more spoiled,
both which are simply among the most stupid variations ever invented
upon forms already known. I find also in a French pamphlet
upon architecture,<SPAN name="FnAnchor_95" href="#Footnote_95"><span class="sp">95</span></SPAN> as applied to shops and dwelling houses,
a sixth order, the “Ordre Fran�ais,” at least as good as any of
the three last, and to be hailed with acclamation, considering
whence it comes, there being usually more tendency on the other
side of the channel to the confusion of “orders” than their multiplication:
but the reader will find in the end that there are in
very deed only two orders, of which the Greek, Doric, and Corinthian
are the first examples, and <i>they</i> not perfect, nor in anywise
sufficiently representative of the vast families to which they belong;
but being the first and the best known, they may properly
be considered as the types of the rest. The essential distinctions
of the two great orders he will find explained in �<span class="scs">XXXV</span>. and
<span class="scs">XXXVI</span>. of <SPAN href="#chap_27">Chap. XXVII.</SPAN>, and in the passages there referred to;
but I should rather desire that these passages might be read in the
order in which they occur.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_8" id="app_8"></SPAN>8. THE NORTHERN ENERGY.</h5>
<p>I have sketched above, in the First Chapter, the great events
of architectural history in the simplest and fewest words I could;
but this indraught of the Lombard energies upon the Byzantine
rest, like a wild north wind descending into a space of rarified
atmosphere, and encountered by an Arab simoom from the south,
may well require from us some farther attention; for the differences
in all these schools are more in the degrees of their impetuosity
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page372"></SPAN>372</span>
and refinement (these qualities being, in most cases, in
inverse ratio, yet much united by the Arabs) than in the style of
the ornaments they employ. The same leaves, the same animals,
the same arrangement, are used by Scandinavians, ancient Britons,
Saxons, Normans, Lombards, Romans, Byzantines, and
Arabians; all being alike descended through classic Greece from
Egypt and Assyria, and some from Phœnicia. The belts which
encompass the Assyrian bulls, in the hall of the British Museum,
are the same as the belts of the ornaments found in Scandinavian
tumuli; their method of ornamentation is the same as that of the
gate of Mycen�, and of the Lombard pulpit of St. Ambrogio of
Milan, and of the church of Theotocos at Constantinople; the
essential differences among the great schools are their differences
of temper and treatment, and science of expression; it is absurd
to talk of Norman ornaments, and Lombard ornaments, and
Byzantine ornaments, as formally distinguished; but there is
irreconcileable separation between Arab temper, and Lombard
temper, and Byzantine temper.</p>
<p>Now, as far as I have been able to compare the three schools,
it appears to me that the Arab and Lombard are both distinguished
from the Byzantine by their energy and love of excitement,
but the Lombard stands alone in his love of jest: Neither
an Arab nor Byzantine ever jests in his architecture; the Lombard
has great difficulty in ever being thoroughly serious; thus
they represent three conditions of humanity, one in perfect rest,
the Byzantine, with exquisite perception of grace and dignity;
the Arab, with the same perception of grace, but with a restless
fever in his blood; the Lombard, equally energetic, but not
burning himself away, capable of submitting to law, and of enjoying
jest. But the Arabian feverishness infects even the Lombard
in the South, showing itself, however, in endless invention,
with a refreshing firmness and order directing the whole of it.
The excitement is greatest in the earliest times, most of all shown
in St. Michele of Pavia; and I am strongly disposed to connect
much of its peculiar manifestations with the Lombard’s habits of
eating and drinking, especially his carnivorousness. The Lombard
of early times seems to have been exactly what a tiger
would be, if you could give him love of a joke, vigorous imagination,
strong sense of justice, fear of hell, knowledge of northern
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page373"></SPAN>373</span>
mythology, a stone den, and a mallet and chisel; fancy him pacing
up and down in the said den to digest his dinner, and striking
on the wall, with a new fancy in his head, at every turn, and you
have the Lombardic sculptor. As civilisation increases the supply
of vegetables, and shortens that of wild beasts, the excitement
diminishes; it is still strong in the thirteenth century at Lyons
and Rouen; it dies away gradually in the later Gothic, and is
quite extinct in the fifteenth century.</p>
<p>I think I shall best illustrate this general idea by simply
copying the entries in my diary which were written when, after
six months’ close study of Byzantine work in Venice, I came
again to the Lombard work of Verona and Pavia. There are
some other points alluded to in these entries not pertaining to the
matter immediately in hand; but I have left them, as they will be
of use hereafter.</p>
<p>“(Verona.) Comparing the arabesque and sculpture of the
Duomo here with St. Mark’s, the first thing that strikes one is
the low relief, the second, the greater motion and spirit, with
infinitely less grace and science. With the Byzantine, however
rude the cutting, every line is lovely, and the animals or men are
placed in any attitudes which secure ornamental effect, sometimes
impossible ones, always severe, restrained, or languid. With the
Romanesque workmen all the figures show the effort (often successful)
to express energetic action; hunting chiefly, much fighting,
and both spirited; some of the dogs running capitally,
straining to it, and the knights hitting hard, while yet the faces
and drawing are in the last degree barbarous. At Venice all is
graceful, fixed, or languid; the eastern torpor is in every line,—the
mark of a school formed on severe traditions, and keeping to
them, and never likely or desirous to rise beyond them, but
with an exquisite sense of beauty, and much solemn religious
faith.</p>
<p>“If the Greek outer archivolt of St. Mark’s is Byzantine, the
law is somewhat broken by its busy domesticity; figures engaged
in every trade, and in the preparation of viands of all kinds; a
crowded kind of London Christmas scene, interleaved (literally)
by the superb balls of leafage, unique in sculpture; but even this
is strongly opposed to the wild war and chase passion of the
Lombard. Farther, the Lombard building is as sharp, precise,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page374"></SPAN>374</span>
and accurate, as that of St. Mark’s is careless. The Byzantines
seem to have been too lazy to put their stones together; and, in
general, my first impression on coming to Verona, after four
months in Venice, is of the exquisitely neat masonry and perfect
<i>feeling</i> here; a style of Gothic formed by a combination of Lombard
surface ornament with Pisan Gothic, than which nothing
can possibly be more chaste, pure, or solemn.”</p>
<p>I have said much of the shafts of the entrance to the crypt of
St. Zeno;<SPAN name="FnAnchor_96" href="#Footnote_96"><span class="sp">96</span></SPAN> the following note of the sculptures on the archivolt
above them is to our present purpose:</p>
<p>“It is covered by very light but most effective bas-reliefs of
jesting subject:—two cocks carrying on their shoulders a long
staff to which a fox (?) is tied by the legs, hanging down between
them: the strut of the foremost cock, lifting one leg at right
angles to the other, is delicious. Then a stag hunt, with a centaur
horseman drawing a bow; the arrow has gone clear through
the stag’s throat, and is sticking there. Several capital hunts
with dogs, with fruit trees between, and birds in them; the
leaves, considering the early time, singularly well set, with the
edges outwards, sharp, and deep cut: snails and frogs filling up
the intervals, as if suspended in the air, with some saucy puppies
on their hind legs, two or three nondescript beasts; and, finally,
on the centre of one of the arches on the south side, an elephant
and castle,—a very strange elephant, yet cut as if the carver had
seen one.”</p>
<p>Observe this elephant and castle; we shall meet with him
farther north.</p>
<p>“These sculptures of St. Zeno are, however, quite quiet and
tame compared with those of St. Michele of Pavia, which are
designed also in a somewhat gloomier mood; significative, as I
think, of indigestion. (Note that they are much earlier than
St. Zeno; of the seventh century at latest. There is more of
nightmare, and less of wit in them.) Lord Lindsay has described
them admirably, but has not said half enough; the state of mind
represented by the west front is more that of a feverish dream,
than resultant from any determined architectural purpose, or
even from any definite love and delight in the grotesque. One
capital is covered with a mass of grinning heads, other heads
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page375"></SPAN>375</span>
grow out of two bodies, or out of and under feet; the creatures
are all fighting, or devouring, or struggling which shall be uppermost,
and yet in an ineffectual way, as if they would fight for
ever, and come to no decision. Neither sphinxes nor centaurs
did I notice, nor a single peacock (I believe peacocks to be purely
Byzantine), but mermaids with <i>two</i> tails (the sculptor having
perhaps seen double at the time), strange, large fish, apes, stags
(bulls?), dogs, wolves, and horses, griffins, eagles, long-tailed
birds (cocks?), hawks, and dragons, without end, or with a dozen
of ends, as the case may be; smaller birds, with rabbits, and small
nondescripts, filling the friezes. The actual leaf, which is used
in the best Byzantine mouldings at Venice, occurs in parts of
these Pavian designs. But the Lombard animals are all <i>alive</i>,
and fiercely alive too, all impatience and spring: the Byzantine
birds peck idly at the fruit, and the animals hardly touch it with
their noses. The cinque cento birds in Venice hold it up daintily,
like train-bearers; the birds in the earlier Gothic peck at
it hungrily and naturally; but the Lombard beasts gripe at it
like tigers, and tear it off with writhing lips and glaring eyes.
They are exactly like Jip with the bit of geranium, worrying
imaginary cats in it.”</p>
<p>The notice of the leaf in the above extract is important,—it
is the vine-leaf; used constantly both by Byzantines and Lombards,
but by the latter with especial frequency, though at this
time they were hardly able to indicate what they meant. It
forms the most remarkable generality of the St. Michele decoration;
though, had it not luckily been carved on the fa�ade,
twining round a stake, and with grapes, I should never have
known what it was meant for, its general form being a succession
of sharp lobes, with incised furrows to the point of each.
But it is thrown about in endless change; four or five varieties
of it might be found on every cluster of capitals: and not content
with this, the Lombards hint the same form even in their
griffin wings. They love the vine very heartily.</p>
<p>In St. Michele of Lucca we have perhaps the noblest instance
in Italy of the Lombard spirit in its later refinement. It is
some four centuries later than St. Michele of Pavia, and the
method of workmanship is altogether different. In the Pavian
church, nearly all the ornament is cut in a coarse sandstone, in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page376"></SPAN>376</span>
bold relief: a darker and harder stone (I think, not serpentine,
but its surface is so disguised by the lustre of ages that I could
not be certain) is used for the capitals of the western door, which
are especially elaborate in their sculpture;—two devilish apes,
or apish devils, I know not which, with bristly moustaches and
edgy teeth, half-crouching, with their hands impertinently on
their knees, ready for a spit or a spring if one goes near them;
but all is pure bossy sculpture; there is no inlaying, except of
some variegated tiles in the shape of saucers set concave (an ornament
used also very gracefully in St. Jacopo of Bologna): and
the whole surface of the church is enriched with the massy reliefs,
well preserved everywhere above the reach of human
animals, but utterly destroyed to some five or six feet from the
ground; worn away into large cellular hollows and caverns, some
almost deep enough to render the walls unsafe, entirely owing to
the uses to which the recesses of the church are dedicated by
the refined and high-minded Italians. But St. Michele of Lucca
is wrought entirely in white marble and green serpentine; there
is hardly any relieved sculpture except in the capitals of the
shafts and cornices, and all the designs of wall ornament are
inlaid with exquisite precision—white on dark ground; the
ground being cut out and filled with serpentine, the figures left
in solid marble. The designs of the Pavian church are encrusted
on the walls; of the Lucchese, incorporated with them; small
portions of real sculpture being introduced exactly where the
eye, after its rest on the flatness of the wall, will take most delight
in the piece of substantial form. The entire arrangement is
perfect beyond all praise, and the morbid restlessness of the old
designs is now appeased. Geometry seems to have acted as a
febrifuge, for beautiful geometrical designs are introduced amidst
the tumult of the hunt; and there is no more seeing double,
nor ghastly monstrosity of conception; no more ending of everything
in something else; no more disputing for spare legs among
bewildered bodies; no more setting on of heads wrong side foremost.
The fragments have come together: we are out of the
Inferno with its weeping down the spine; we are in the fair
hunting-fields of the Lucchese mountains (though they had their
tears also),—with horse, and hound, and hawk; and merry blast
of the trumpet.—Very strange creatures to be hunted, in all
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page377"></SPAN>377</span>
truth; but still creatures with a single head, and that on their
shoulders, which is exactly the last place in the Pavian church
where a head is to be looked for.</p>
<p>My good friend Mr. Cockerell wonders, in one of his lectures,
why I give so much praise to this “crazy front of Lucca.” But
it is not crazy; not by any means. Altogether sober, in comparison
with the early Lombard work, or with our Norman.
Crazy in one sense it is: utterly neglected, to the breaking of
its old stout heart; the venomous nights and salt frosts of the
Maremma winters have their way with it—“Poor Tom’s a
cold!” The weeds that feed on the marsh air, have twisted
themselves into its crannies; the polished fragments of serpentine
are spit and rent out of their cells, and lie in green ruins
along its ledges; the salt sea winds have eaten away the fair
shafting of its star window into a skeleton of crumbling rays.
It cannot stand much longer; may Heaven only, in its benignity,
preserve it from restoration, and the sands of the Serchio give it
honorable grave.</p>
<p>In the “Seven Lamps,” <SPAN href="#plate_6">Plate VI.</SPAN>, I gave a faithful drawing
of one of its upper arches, to which I must refer the reader; for
there is a marked piece of character in the figure of the horseman
on the left of it. And in making this reference, I would say a few
words about those much abused plates of the “Seven Lamps."”
They are black, they are overbitten, they are hastily drawn, they
are coarse and disagreeable; how disagreeable to many readers
I venture not to conceive. But their truth is carried to an extent
never before attempted in architectural drawing. It does
not in the least follow that because a drawing is delicate, or looks
careful, it has been carefully drawn from the thing represented;
in nine instances out of ten, careful and delicate drawings are
made at home. It is not so easy as the reader, perhaps, imagines,
to finish a drawing altogether on the spot, especially of details
seventy feet from the ground; and any one who will try the
position in which I have had to do some of my work—standing,
namely, on a cornice or window sill, holding by one arm round
a shaft, and hanging over the street (or canal, at Venice), with
my sketch-book supported against the wall from which I was
drawing, by my breast, so as to leave my right hand free—will
not thenceforward wonder that shadows should be occasionally
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page378"></SPAN>378</span>
carelessly laid in, or lines drawn with some unsteadiness. But,
steady, or infirm, the sketches of which those plates in the
“Seven Lamps” are fac-similes, were made from the architecture
itself, and represent that architecture with its actual shadows at
the time of day at which it was drawn, and with every fissure
and line of it as they now exist; so that when I am speaking of
some new point, which perhaps the drawing was not intended to
illustrate, I can yet turn back to it with perfect certainty that
if anything be found in it bearing on matters now in hand, I may
depend upon it just as securely as if I had gone back to look again
at the building.</p>
<p>It is necessary that my readers should understand this
thoroughly, and I did not before sufficiently explain it; but I
believe I can show them the use of this kind of truth, now that
we are again concerned with this front of Lucca. They will find a
drawing of the entire front in Gally Knight’s “Architecture of
Italy.” It may serve to give them an idea of its general disposition,
and it looks very careful and accurate; but every bit of the
ornament on it is <i>drawn out of the artist’s head</i>. There is not
<i>one line</i> of it that exists on the building. The reader will therefore,
perhaps, think my ugly black plate of somewhat more value,
upon the whole, in its rough veracity, than the other in its delicate
fiction.<SPAN name="FnAnchor_97" href="#Footnote_97"><span class="sp">97</span></SPAN></p>
<table class="nobctr" style="clear: both; " summary="Illustration">
<tr>
<td class="caption1">XXI.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="figcenter">
<SPAN name="plate_21"><ANTIMG src="images/img378.jpg" width-obs="419" height-obs="650" alt="WALL VEIL DECORATION." title="WALL VEIL DECORATION." /></SPAN></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="caption">WALL VEIL DECORATION.</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class="mb">As, however, I made a drawing of another part of the church
somewhat more delicately, and as I do not choose that my favorite
church should suffer in honor by my coarse work, I have had
this, as far as might be, fac-similied by line engraving (<SPAN href="#plate_21">Plate
XXI.</SPAN>). It represents the southern side of the lower arcade of the
west front; and may convey some idea of the exquisite finish and
grace of the whole; but the old plate, in the “Seven Lamps,”
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page379"></SPAN>379</span>
gives a nearer view of one of the upper arches, and a more faithful
impression of the present aspect of the work, and especially
of the seats of the horsemen; the limb straight, and well down
on the stirrup (the warrior’s seat, observe, not the jockey’s), with
a single pointed spur on the heel. The bit of the lower cornice
under this arch I could not see, and therefore had not drawn;
it was supplied from beneath another arch. I am afraid, however,
the reader has lost the thread of my story while I have been
recommending my veracity to him. I was insisting upon the
healthy tone of this Lucca work as compared with the old spectral
Lombard friezes. The apes of the Pavian church ride without
stirrups, but all is in good order and harness here: civilisation
had done its work; there was reaping of corn in the Val d’Arno,
though rough hunting still upon its hills. But in the north,
though a century or two later, we find the forests of the Rhone,
and its rude limestone cotes, haunted by phantasms still (more
meat-eating, then, I think). I do not know a more interesting
group of cathedrals than that of Lyons, Vienne, and Valencia:
a more interesting indeed, generally, than beautiful; but there
is a row of niches on the west front of Lyons, and a course of
panelled decoration about its doors, which is, without exception,
the most exquisite piece of Northern Gothic I ever beheld, and
with which I know nothing that is even comparable, except the
work of the north transept of Rouen, described in the “Seven
Lamps,” p. 159; work of about the same date, and exactly the same
plan; quatrefoils filled with grotesques, but somewhat less finished
in execution, and somewhat less wild in imagination. I wrote
down hastily, and in their own course, the subjects of some of
the quatrefoils of Lyons; of which I here give the reader the
sequence:—</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 1. Elephant and castle; less graphic than the St. Zeno one.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 2. A huge head walking on two legs, turned backwards,
hoofed; the head has a horn behind, with drapery
over it, which ends in another head.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 3. A boar hunt; the boar under a tree, very spirited.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 4. A bird putting its head between its legs to bite its own
tail, which ends in a head.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 5. A dragon with a human head set on the wrong way.</p>
<p class="nomarg"><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page380"></SPAN>380</span></p>
<p class="nomarg"> 6. St. Peter awakened by the angel in prison; full of spirit,
the prison picturesque, with a trefoiled arch, the angel
eager, St. Peter startled, and full of motion.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 7. St. Peter led out by the angel.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 8. The miraculous draught of fishes; fish and all, in the
small space.</p>
<p class="nomarg"> 9. A large leaf, with two snails rampant, coming out of nautilus
shells, with grotesque faces, and eyes at the ends
of their horns.</p>
<p class="nomarg">10. A man with an axe striking at a dog’s head, which comes
out of a nautilus shell: the rim of the shell branches
into a stem with two large leaves.</p>
<p class="nomarg">11. Martyrdom of St. Sebastian; his body very full of arrows.</p>
<p class="nomarg">12. Beasts coming to ark; Noah opening a kind of wicker
cage.</p>
<p class="nomarg">13. Noah building the ark on shores.</p>
<p class="nomarg">14. A vine leaf with a dragon’s head and tail, the one biting
the other.</p>
<p class="nomarg">15. A man riding a goat, catching a flying devil.</p>
<p class="nomarg">16. An eel or muraena growing into a bunch of flowers, which
turns into two wings.</p>
<p class="nomarg">17. A sprig of hazel, with nuts, thrown all around the quatrefoils
with a squirrel in centre, apparently attached to
the tree only by its enormous tail, richly furrowed into
hair, and nobly sweeping.</p>
<p class="nomarg">18. Four hares fastened together by the ears, galloping in a
circle. Mingled with these grotesques are many <i>sword</i>
and <i>buckler</i> combats, the bucklers being round and
conical like a hat; I thought the first I noticed,
carried by a man at full gallop on horseback, had been
a small umbrella.</p>
<p class="mt">This list of subjects may sufficiently illustrate the feverish
character of the Northern Energy; but influencing the treatment
of the whole there is also the Northern love of what is called the
Grotesque, a feeling which I find myself, for the present, quite
incapable either of analysing or defining, though we all have a
distinct idea attached to the word: I shall try, however, in the
next volume.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page381"></SPAN>381</span></p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_9"></SPAN>9. WOODEN CHURCHES OF THE NORTH.</h5>
<p>I cannot pledge myself to this theory of the origin of the
vaulting shaft, but the reader will find some interesting confirmations
of it in Dahl’s work on the wooden churches of Norway.
The inside view of the church of Borgund shows the timber construction
of one shaft run up through a crossing architrave, and
continued into the clerestory; while the church of Urnes is in
the exact form of a basilica; but the wall above the arches is
formed of planks, with a strong upright above each capital. The
passage quoted from Stephen Eddy’s Life of Bishop Wilfrid, at
p. 86 of Churton’s “Early English Church,” gives us one of the
transformations or petrifactions of the wooden Saxon churches.
“At Ripon he built a new church of <i>polished stone</i>, with columns
variously ornamented, and porches.” Mr. Churton adds: “It
was perhaps in bad imitation of the marble buildings he had seen
in Italy, that he washed the walls of this original York Minster,
and made them ‘whiter than snow.’”</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_10"></SPAN>10. CHURCH OF ALEXANDRIA.</h5>
<p>The very cause which enabled the Venetians to possess themselves
of the body of St. Mark, was the destruction of the church
by the caliph for the <i>sake of its marbles</i>: the Arabs and
Venetians, though bitter enemies, thus building on the same
models; these in reverence for the destroyed church, and those
with the very pieces of it. In the somewhat prolix account of
the matter given in the Notizie Storiche (above quoted) the main
points are, that “il Califa de’ Saraceni, per fabbricarsi un Palazzo
presse di Babilonia, aveva ordinato che dalle Chiese d’ Cristiani
si togliessero i piscelti marmi;” and that the Venetians, “videro
sotto i loro occhi flagellarsi crudelmente un Cristiano per aver
infranto un marmo.” I heartily wish that the same kind of
punishment were enforced to this day, for the same sin.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_11"></SPAN>11. RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPE.</h5>
<p>I am glad here to re-assert opinions which it has grieved me
to be suspected of having changed. The calmer tone of the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page382"></SPAN>382</span>
second volume of “Modern Painters,” as compared with the
first, induced, I believe, this suspicion, very justifiably, in the
minds of many of its readers. The difference resulted, however,
from the simple fact, that the first was written in great haste
and indignation, for a special purpose and time;—the second,
after I had got engaged, almost unawares, in inquiries which
could not be hastily nor indignantly pursued; my opinions remaining
then, and remaining now, altogether unchanged on the
subject which led me into the discussion. And that no farther
doubt of them may be entertained by any who may think them
worth questioning, I shall here, once for all, express them in the
plainest and fewest words I can. I think that J. M. W. Turner
is not only the greatest (professed) landscape painter who ever
lived, but that he has in him as much as would have furnished all
the rest with such power as they had; and that if we put Nicolo
Poussin, Salvator, and our own Gainsborough out of the group, he
would cut up into Claudes, Cuyps, Ruysdaels, and such others, by
uncounted bunches. I hope this is plainly and strongly enough
stated. And farther, I like his later pictures, up to the year
1845, the best; and believe that those persons who only like his
early pictures do not, in fact, like him at all. They do <i>not</i> like
that which is essentially <i>his</i>. They like that in which he resembles
other men; which he had learned from Loutherbourg, Claude,
or Wilson; that which is indeed his own, they do not care for.
Not that there is not much of his own in his early works; they are
all invaluable in their way; but those persons who can find no
beauty in his strangest fantasy on the Academy walls, cannot
distinguish the peculiarly Turneresque characters of the earlier
pictures. And, therefore, I again state here, that I think his
pictures painted between the years 1830 and 1845 his greatest;
and that his entire power is best represented by such pictures as
the Temeraire, the Sun of Venice going to Sea, and others,
painted exactly at the time when the public and the press were
together loudest in abuse of him.</p>
<p style="width: 20%; margin-bottom: 2em; margin-top: 2em; margin-left: 2em;
float: right; clear: right; text-align: left; text-indent: 0;">
Turner. Tintoret.<br/>
Massaccio.<br/>
John Bellini.<br/>
Albert Durer.<br/>
Giorgione.<br/>
Paul Veronese.<br/>
Titian.<br/>
Rubens.<br/>
Correggio.<br/>
Orcagna.<br/>
Benozzo Gozzoli.<br/>
Giotto.<br/>
Raffaelle.<br/>
Perugino.</p>
<p>I desire, however, the reader to observe that I said, above,
<i>professed</i> landscape painters, among whom, perhaps, I should
hardly have put Gainsborough. The landscape of the great
figure painters is often majestic in the highest degree, and Tintoret’s
especially shows exactly the same power and feeling as
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page383"></SPAN>383</span>
Turner’s. If with Turner I were to rank the historical painters
as landscapists, estimating rather the power they show, than
the actual value of the landscape they
produced, I should class those, whose
landscapes I have studied, in some such
order as this at the side of the page:—associating
with the landscape of Perugino
that of Francia and Angelico, and
the other severe painters of religious
subjects. I have put Turner and Tintoret
side by side, not knowing which is,
in landscape, the greater; I had nearly
associated in the same manner the noble
names of John Bellini and Albert Durer;
but Bellini must be put first, for his
profound religious peace yet not separated
from the other, if but that we
might remember his kindness to him in
Venice; and it is well we should take note of it here, for it furnishes
us with a most interesting confirmation of what was said
in the text respecting the position of Bellini as the last of the
religious painters of Venice. The following passage is quoted in
Jackson’s “Essay on Wood-engraving,” from Albert Durer’s
Diary:</p>
<p>“I have many good friends among the Italians who warn me
not to eat or drink with their painters, of whom several are my
enemies, and copy my picture in the church, and others of mine,
wherever they can find them, and yet they blame them, <i>and say
they are not according to ancient art, and therefore not good</i>.
Giovanni Bellini, however, has praised me highly to several gentlemen,
and wishes to have something of my doing: he called on
me himself, and requested that I would paint a picture for him,
for which, he said, he would pay me well. People are all surprised
that I should be so much thought of by a person of his
reputation: he is very old, but is still the best painter of them
all.”</p>
<p>A choice little piece of description this, of the Renaissance
painters, side by side with the good old Venetian, who was soon
to leave them to their own ways. The Renaissance men are seen
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page384"></SPAN>384</span>
in perfection, envying, stealing, and lying, but without wit
enough to lie to purpose.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_12"></SPAN>12. ROMANIST MODERN ART.</h5>
<p>It is of the highest importance, in these days, that Romanism
should be deprived of the miserable influence which its pomp and
picturesqueness have given it over the weak sentimentalism of
the English people; I call it a miserable influence, for of all
motives to sympathy with the Church of Rome, this I unhesitatingly
class as the basest: I can, in some measure, respect the other
feelings which have been the beginnings of apostasy; I can respect
the desire for unity which would reclaim the Romanist by love,
and the distrust of his own heart which subjects the proselyte to
priestly power; I say I can respect these feelings, though I cannot
pardon unprincipled submission to them, nor enough wonder at
the infinite fatuity of the unhappy persons whom they have betrayed:—Fatuity,
self-inflicted, and stubborn in resistance to
God’s Word and man’s reason!—to talk of the authority of the
Church, as if the Church were anything else than the whole
company of Christian men, or were ever spoken of in Scripture<SPAN name="FnAnchor_98" href="#Footnote_98"><span class="sp">98</span></SPAN>
as other than a company to be taught and fed, not to teach and
feed.—Fatuity! to talk of a separation of Church and State, as
if a Christian state, and every officer therein, were not necessarily
a part of the Church,<SPAN name="FnAnchor_99" href="#Footnote_99"><span class="sp">99</span></SPAN> and as if any state officer could do his
duty without endeavoring to aid and promote religion, or any
clerical officer do his duty without seeking for such aid and accepting
it:—Fatuity! to seek for the unity of a living body of
truth and trust in God, with a dead body of lies and trust in
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page385"></SPAN>385</span>
wood, and thence to expect anything else than plague, and consumption
by worms undying, for both. Blasphemy as well as
fatuity! to ask for any better interpreter of God’s Word than
God, or to expect knowledge of it in any other way than the
plainly ordered way: if <i>any</i> man will do he shall know. But
of all these fatuities, the basest is the being lured into the Romanist
Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by
broken glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine
of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on
priests’ petticoats; jangled into a change of conscience by the
chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark
as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible.
I had hardly believed that it was a thing possible, though vague
stories had been told me of the effect, on some minds, of mere
scarlet and candles, until I came on this passage in Pugin’s
“Remarks on articles in the Rambler”:—</p>
<p>“Those who have lived in want and privation are the best
qualified to appreciate the blessings of plenty; thus, those who
have been devout and sincere members of the separated portion
of the English Church; who have prayed, and hoped, and loved,
through all the poverty of the maimed rites which it has retained—to
them does the realisation of all their longing desires appear
truly ravishing. * * * Oh! then, what delight! what joy
unspeakable! when one of the solemn piles is presented to them,
in all its pristine life and glory!—the stoups are filled to the
brim; the rood is raised on high; the screen glows with sacred
imagery and rich device; the niches are filled; the altar is replaced,
sustained by sculptured shafts, the relics of the saints
repose beneath, the body of Our Lord is enshrined on its consecrated
stone; the lamps of the sanctuary burn bright; the
saintly portraitures in the glass windows shine all gloriously; and
the albs hang in the oaken ambries, and the cope chests are
filled with orphreyed baudekins; and pix and pax, and chrismatory
are there, and thurible, and cross.”</p>
<p>One might have put this man under a pix, and left him, one
should have thought; but he has been brought forward, and
partly received, as an example of the effect of ceremonial splendor
on the mind of a great architect. It is very necessary, therefore,
that all those who have felt sorrow at this should know at once
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page386"></SPAN>386</span>
that he is not a great architect, but one of the smallest possible
or conceivable architects; and that by his own account and
setting forth of himself. Hear him:—</p>
<p>“I believe, as regards architecture, few men have been so unfortunate
as myself. I have passed my life in thinking of fine
things, studying fine things, designing fine things, and realising
very poor ones. I have never had the chance of producing a
single fine ecclesiastical building, except my own church, where I
am both paymaster and architect; but everything else, either
for want of adequate funds or injudicious interference and
control, or some other contingency, is more or less a failure.<span style="letter-spacing: 2em; "> ***</span></p>
<p>“St. George’s was spoilt by the very instructions laid down
by the committee, that it was to hold 3000 people on the floor at
a limited price; in consequence, height, proportion, everything,
was sacrificed to meet these conditions. Nottingham was spoilt by
the style being restricted to lancet,—a period well suited to a
Cistercian abbey in a secluded vale, but very unsuitable for the
centre of a crowded town.<span style="letter-spacing: 2em; "> ***</span></p>
<p>“Kirkham was spoilt through several hundred pounds being
reduced on the original estimate; to effect this, which was a
great sum in proportion to the entire cost, the area of the church
was contracted, the walls lowered, tower and spire reduced, the
thickness of walls diminished, and stone arches omitted.” (Remarks,
&c., by A. Welby Pugin: Dolman, 1850.)</p>
<p>Is that so? Phidias can niche himself into the corner of a
pediment, and Raffaelle expatiate within the circumference of a
clay platter; but Pugin is inexpressible in less than a cathedral?
Let his ineffableness be assured of this, once for all, that no difficulty
or restraint ever happened to a man of real power, but his
power was the more manifested in the contending with, or conquering
it; and that there is no field so small, no cranny so contracted,
but that a great spirit can house and manifest itself
therein. The thunder that smites the Alp into dust, can gather
itself into the width of a golden wire. Whatever greatness there
was in you, had it been Buonarroti’s own, you had room enough
for it in a single niche: you might have put the whole power of
it into two feet cube of Caen stone. St. George’s was not high
enough for want of money? But was it want of money that
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page387"></SPAN>387</span>
made you put that blunt, overloaded, laborious ogee door into
the side of it? Was it for lack of funds that you sunk the tracery
of the parapet in its clumsy zigzags? Was it in parsimony that
you buried its paltry pinnacles in that eruption of diseased
crockets? or in pecuniary embarrassment that you set up the
belfry foolscaps, with the mimicry of dormer windows, which
nobody can ever reach nor look out of? Not so, but in mere incapability
of better things.</p>
<p>I am sorry to have to speak thus of any living architect; and
there is much in this man, if he were rightly estimated, which
one might both regard and profit by. He has a most sincere
love for his profession, a heartily honest enthusiasm for pixes
and piscinas; and though he will never design so much as a pix
or a piscina thoroughly well, yet better than most of the experimental
architects of the day. Employ him by all means, but on
small work. Expect no cathedrals from him; but no one, at
present, can design a better finial. That is an exceedingly beautiful
one over the western door of St. George’s; and there is
some spirited impishness and switching of tails in the supporting
figures at the imposts. Only do not allow his good designing of
finials to be employed as an evidence in matters of divinity, nor
thence deduce the incompatibility of Protestantism and art. I
should have said all that I have said above, of artistical apostasy,
if Giotto had been now living in Florence, and if art were still
doing all that it did once for Rome. But the grossness of the
error becomes incomprehensible as well as unpardonable, when
we look to what level of degradation the human intellect has
sunk at this instant in Italy. So far from Romanism now producing
anything greater in art, it cannot even preserve what has
been given to its keeping. I know no abuses of precious inheritance
half so grievous, as the abuse of all that is best in art
wherever the Romanist priesthood gets possession of it. It
amounts to absolute infatuation. The noblest pieces of medi�val
sculpture in North Italy, the two griffins at the central (west)
door of the cathedral of Verona, were daily permitted to be brought
into service, when I was there in the autumn of 1849, by a
washerwoman living in the Piazza, who tied her clothes-lines to
their beaks: and the shafts of St. Mark’s at Venice were used
by a salesman of common caricatures to fasten his prints upon
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page388"></SPAN>388</span>
(Compare <SPAN href="#app_25">Appendix 25</SPAN>); and this in the face of the continually
passing priests: while the quantity of noble art annually destroyed
in altarpieces by candle-droppings, or perishing by pure
brutality of neglect, passes all estimate. I do not know, as I
have repeatedly stated, how far the splendor of architecture, or
other art, is compatible with the honesty and usefulness of religious
service. The longer I live, the more I incline to severe
judgment in this matter, and the less I can trust the sentiments
excited by painted glass and colored tiles. But if there be indeed
value in such things, our plain duty is to direct our strength
against the superstition which has dishonored them; there are
thousands who might possibly be benefited by them, to whom
they are now merely an offence, owing to their association with
idolatrous ceremonies. I have but this exhortation for all who
love them,—not to regulate their creeds by their taste in colors,
but to hold calmly to the right, at whatever present cost to their
imaginative enjoyment; sure that they will one day find in
heavenly truth a brighter charm than in earthly imagery, and
striving to gather stones for the eternal building, whose walls
shall be salvation, and whose gates shall be praise.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_13"></SPAN>13. MR. FERGUSSON’S SYSTEM.</h5>
<p>The reader may at first suppose this division of the attributes of
buildings into action, voice, and beauty, to be the same division
as Mr. Fergusson’s, now well known, of their merits, into technic,
�sthetic and phonetic.</p>
<p>But there is no connection between the two systems; mine,
indeed, does not profess to be a system, it is a mere arrangement
of my subject, for the sake of order and convenience in its treatment:
but, as far as it goes, it differs altogether from Mr. Fergusson’s
in these two following respects:—</p>
<p>The action of a building, that is to say its standing or consistence,
depends on its good construction; and the first part
of the foregoing volume has been entirely occupied with the consideration
of the constructive merit of buildings: but construction
is not their only technical merit. There is as much of
technical merit in their expression, or in their beauty, as in
their construction. There is no more mechanical or technical
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page389"></SPAN>389</span>
admirableness in the stroke of the painter who covers them with
fresco, than in the dexterity of the mason who cements their
stones: there is just as much of what is technical in their beauty,
therefore, as in their construction; and, on the other hand, there
is often just as much intellect shown in their construction as
there is in either their expression or decoration. Now Mr.
Fergusson means by his “Phonetic” division, whatever expresses
intellect: my constructive division, therefore, includes part of
his phonetic: and my expressive and decorative divisions include
part of his technical.</p>
<p>Secondly, Mr. Fergusson tries to make the same divisions fit
the <i>subjects</i> of art, and art itself; and therefore talks of technic,
�sthetic, and phonetic, <i>arts</i>, (or, translating the Greek,) of artful
arts, sensitive arts, and talkative arts; but I have nothing to
do with any division of the arts, I have to deal only with the
merits of <i>buildings</i>. As, however, I have been led into reference
to Mr. Fergusson’s system, I would fain say a word or two to
effect Mr. Fergusson’s extrication from it. I hope to find in him
a noble ally, ready to join with me in war upon affectation, falsehood,
and prejudice, of every kind: I have derived much instruction
from his most interesting work, and I hope for much more
from its continuation; but he must disentangle himself from his
system, or he will be strangled by it; never was anything so ingeniously
and hopelessly wrong throughout; the whole of it is
founded on a confusion of the instruments of man with his capacities.</p>
<p>Mr. Fergusson would have us take—</p>
<p class="nomarg">“First, man’s muscular action or power.” (Technics.)</p>
<p class="nomarg">“Secondly, those developments of sense <i>by</i> which <i>he does!!</i>
as much as by his muscles.” (�sthetics.)</p>
<p class="nomarg">“Lastly, his intellect, or to confine this more correctly to its
external action, <i>his power of speech!!!</i>” (Phonetics.)</p>
<p>Granting this division of humanity correct, or sufficient, the
writer then most curiously supposes that he may arrange the arts
as if there were some belonging to each division of man,—never
observing that every art must be governed by, and addressed to,
one division, and executed by another; executed by the muscular,
addressed to the sensitive or intellectual; and that, to be an
art at all, it must have in it work of the one, and guidance from
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page390"></SPAN>390</span>
the other. If, by any lucky accident, he had been led to arrange
the arts, either by their objects, and the things to which they
are addressed, or by their means, and the things by which they
are executed, he would have discovered his mistake in an instant.
As thus:—</p>
<table class="nobctr" style="margin-left: 1em; " summary="Contents">
<tr><td style="text-align: right; vertical-align: top; ">
<p>These arts are addressed to the,—</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>or executed by,—</p>
</td>
<td>
<p>Muscles!!</p>
<p>Senses,</p>
<p>Intellect;</p>
<p>Muscles,</p>
<p>Senses!!</p>
<p>Intellect.</p>
</td></tr></table>
<p>Indeed it is true that some of the arts are in a sort addressed to
the muscles, surgery for instance; but this is not among Mr.
Fergusson’s technic, but his politic, arts! and all the arts may,
in a sort, be said to be performed by the senses, as the senses guide
both muscles and intellect in their work: but they guide them
as they receive information, or are standards of accuracy, but
not as in themselves capable of action. Mr. Fergusson is, I believe,
the first person who has told us of senses that act or do, they
having been hitherto supposed only to sustain or perceive. The
weight of error, however, rests just as much in the original division
of man, as in the endeavor to fit the arts to it. The slight
omission of the soul makes a considerable difference when it
begins to influence the final results of the arrangement.</p>
<p>Mr. Fergusson calls morals and religion “Politick arts” (as if
religion were an art at all! or as if both were not as necessary to
individuals as to societies); and therefore, forming these into a
body of arts by themselves, leaves the best of the arts to do without
the soul and the moral feeling as rest they may. Hence
“expression,” or “phonetics,” is of intellect only (as if men
never expressed their <i>feelings!</i>); and then, strangest and worst
of all, intellect is entirely resolved into talking! There can be
no intellect but it must talk, and all talking must be intellectual.
I believe people do sometimes talk without understanding; and I
think the world would fare ill if they never understood without
talking. The intellect is an entirely silent faculty, and has nothing
to do with parts of speech any more than the moral part has.
A man may feel and know things without expressing either the
feeling or knowledge; and the talking is a <i>muscular</i> mode of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page391"></SPAN>391</span>
communicating the workings of the intellect or heart—muscular,
whether it be by tongue or by sign, or by carving or writing,
or by expression of feature; so that to divide a man into muscular
and talking parts, is to divide him into body in general, and
tongue in particular, the endless confusion resulting from which
arrangement is only less marvellous in itself, than the resolution
with which Mr. Fergusson has worked through it, and in spite
of it, up to some very interesting and suggestive truths; although
starting with a division of humanity which does not in the least
raise it above the brute, for a rattlesnake has his muscular, �sthetic,
and talking part as much as man, only he talks with his tail,
and says, “I am angry with you, and should like to bite you,”
more laconically and effectively than any phonetic biped could,
were he so minded. And, in fact, the real difference between
the brute and man is not so much that the one has fewer means
of expression than the other, as that it has fewer thoughts to express,
and that we do not understand its expressions. Animals
can talk to one another intelligibly enough when they have anything
to say, and their captains have words of command just as
clear as ours, and better obeyed. We have indeed, in watching
the efforts of an intelligent animal to talk to a human being, a
melancholy sense of its dumbness; but the fault is still in its intelligence,
more than in its tongue. It has not wit enough to
systematise its cries or signs, and form them into language.</p>
<p>But there is no end to the fallacies and confusions of Mr.
Fergusson’s arrangement. It is a perfect entanglement of gun-cotton,
and explodes into vacuity wherever one holds a light to
it. I shall leave him to do so with the rest of it for himself, and
should perhaps have left it to his own handling altogether, but for
the intemperateness of the spirit with which he has spoken on a
subject perhaps of all others demanding gentleness and caution.
No man could more earnestly have desired the changes lately introduced
into the system of the University of Oxford than I did
myself: no man can be more deeply sensible than I of grievous
failures in the practical working even of the present system: but
I believe that these failures may be almost without exception
traced to one source, the want of evangelical, and the excess of
rubrical religion among the tutors; together with such rustinesses
and stiffnesses as necessarily attend the continual operation
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page392"></SPAN>392</span>
of any intellectual machine. The fault is, at any rate, far
less in the system than in the imperfection of its administration;
and had it been otherwise, the terms in which Mr. Fergusson
speaks of it are hardly decorous in one who can but be imperfectly
acquainted with its working. They are sufficiently answered
by the structure of the essay in which they occur; for if
the high powers of mind which its author possesses had been
subjected to the discipline of the schools, he could not have
wasted his time on the development of a system which their simplest
formulof logic would have shown him to be untenable.</p>
<p>Mr. Fergusson will, however, find it easier to overthrow his
system than to replace it. Every man of science knows the difficulty
of arranging a <i>reasonable</i> system of classification, in any
subject, by any one group of characters; and that the best classifications
are, in many of their branches, convenient rather than
reasonable: so that, to any person who is really master of his
subject, many different modes of classification will occur at different
times; one of which he will use rather than another, according
to the point which he has to investigate. I need only
instance the three arrangements of minerals, by their external
characters, and their positive or negative bases, of which the first
is the most useful, the second the most natural, the third the
most simple; and all in several ways unsatisfactory.</p>
<p>But when the subject becomes one which no single mind can
grasp, and which embraces the whole range of human occupation
and enquiry, the difficulties become as great, and the methods as
various, as the uses to which the classification might be put; and
Mr. Fergusson has entirely forgotten to inform us what is the
object to which his arrangements are addressed. For observe:
there is one kind of arrangement which is based on the rational
connection of the sciences or arts with one another; an arrangement
which maps them out like the rivers of some great country,
and marks the points of their junction, and the direction and
force of their united currents; and this without assigning to any
one of them a superiority above another, but considering them
all as necessary members of the noble unity of human science
and effort. There is another kind of classification which contemplates
the order of succession in which they might most usefully be
presented to a single mind, so that the given mind should obtain
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page393"></SPAN>393</span>
the most effective and available knowledge of them all: and,
finally, the most usual classification contemplates the powers of
mind which they each require for their pursuit, the objects to
which they are addressed, or with which they are concerned; and
assigns to each of them a rank superior or inferior, according to
the nobility of the powers they require, or the grandeur of the
subjects they contemplate.</p>
<p>Now, not only would it be necessary to adopt a different
classification with respect to each of these great intentions, but
it might be found so even to vary the order of the succession
of sciences in the case of every several mind to which they were
addressed; and that their rank would also vary with the power
and specific character of the mind engaged upon them. I once
heard a very profound mathematician remonstrate against the
impropriety of Wordsworth’s receiving a pension from government,
on the ground that he was “only a poet.” If the study
of mathematics had always this narrowing effect upon the sympathies,
the science itself would need to be deprived of the rank
usually assigned to it; and there could be no doubt that, in the
effect it had on the mind of this man, and of such others, it was
a very contemptible science indeed. Hence, in estimating the
real rank of any art or science, it is necessary for us to conceive
it as it would be grasped by minds of every order. There are
some arts and sciences which we underrate, because no one has
risen to show us with what majesty they may be invested; and
others which we overrate, because we are blinded to their general
meanness by the magnificence which some one man has thrown
around them: thus, philology, evidently the most contemptible
of all the sciences, has been raised to unjust dignity by Johnson.<SPAN name="FnAnchor_100" href="#Footnote_100"><span class="sp">100</span></SPAN>
And the subject is farther complicated by the question of usefulness;
for many of the arts and sciences require considerable intellectual
power for their pursuit, and yet become contemptible
by the slightness of what they accomplish: metaphysics, for instance,
exercising intelligence of a high order, yet useless to the
mass of mankind, and, to its own masters, dangerous. Yet, as it has
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page394"></SPAN>394</span>
become so by the want of the true intelligence which its inquiries
need, and by substitution of vain subtleties in its stead, it may
in future vindicate for itself a higher rank than a man of common
sense usually concedes to it.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, the mere attempt at arrangement must be useful,
even where it does nothing more than develop difficulties.
Perhaps the greatest fault of men of learning is their so often
supposing all other branches of science dependent upon or inferior
to their own best beloved branch; and the greatest deficiency of
men comparatively unlearned, their want of perception of the
connection of the branches with each other. He who holds the
tree only by the extremities, can perceive nothing but the separation
of its sprays. It must always be desirable to prove to
those the equality of rank, to these the closeness of sequence, of
what they had falsely supposed subordinate or separate. And,
after such candid admission of the co-equal dignity of the truly
noble arts and sciences, we may be enabled more justly to estimate
the inferiority of those which indeed seem intended for
the occupation of inferior powers and narrower capacities. In
<SPAN href="#app_14">Appendix 14</SPAN>, following, some suggestions will be found as to
the principles on which classification might be based; but the
arrangement of all the arts is certainly not a work which could
with discretion be attempted in the Appendix to an essay on a
branch of one of them.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_14"></SPAN>14. DIVISIONS OF HUMANITY.</h5>
<p>The reader will probably understand this part of the subject
better if he will take the trouble briefly to consider the actions
of the mind and body of man in the sciences and arts, which
give these latter the relations of rank usually attributed to them.</p>
<p>It was above observed (<SPAN href="#app_13">Appendix 13</SPAN>) that the arts were
generally ranked according to the nobility of the powers they
require, that is to say, the quantity of the being of man which
they engaged or addressed. Now their rank is not a very important
matter as regards each other, for there are few disputes
more futile than that concerning the respective dignity of arts,
all of which are necessary and honorable. But it is a very important
matter as regards themselves; very important whether
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page395"></SPAN>395</span>
they are practised with the devotion and regarded with the respect
which are necessary or due to their perfection. It does not
at all matter whether architecture or sculpture be the nobler art;
but it matters much whether the thought is bestowed upon buildings,
or the feeling is expressed in statues, which make either
deserving of our admiration. It is foolish and insolent to imagine
that the art which we ourselves practise is greater than any other;
but it is wise to take care that in our own hands it is as noble as
we can make it. Let us take some notice, therefore, in what
degrees the faculties of man may be engaged in his several arts:
we may consider the entire man as made up of body, soul, and
intellect (Lord Lindsay, meaning the same thing, says inaccurately—sense,
intellect, and spirit—forgetting that there is a moral
sense as well as a bodily sense, and a spiritual body as well as a
natural body, and so gets into some awkward confusion, though
right in the main points). Then, taking the word soul as a
short expression of the moral and responsible part of being, each
of these three parts has a passive and active power. The body
has senses and muscles; the soul, feeling and resolution; the
intellect, understanding and imagination. The scheme may be
put into tabular form, thus:—</p>
<table class="nobctr" summary="data">
<tr class="f80"> <td class="tc1"> </td>
<td class="tc1">Passive or Receptive Part.</td>
<td class="tc1">Active or Motive Part.</td></tr>
<tr> <td class="tc5">
<p>Body</p>
<p>Soul</p>
<p>Intellect</p> </td>
<td class="tc5">
<p>Senses.</p>
<p>Feeling.</p>
<p>Understanding.</p> </td>
<td class="tc5">
<p>Muscles.</p>
<p>Resolution.</p>
<p>Imagination.</p>
</td></tr></table>
<p>In this scheme I consider memory a part of understanding, and
conscience I leave out, as being the voice of God in the heart,
inseparable from the system, yet not an essential part of it. The
sense of beauty I consider a mixture of the Senses of the body
and soul.</p>
<p>Now all these parts of the human system have a reciprocal
action on one another, so that the true perfection of any of them
is not possible without some relative perfection of the others, and
yet any one of the parts of the system may be brought into a
morbid development, inconsistent with the perfection of the
others. Thus, in a healthy state, the acuteness of the senses
quickens that of the feelings, and these latter quicken the understanding,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page396"></SPAN>396</span>
and then all the three quicken the imagination, and
then all the four strengthen the resolution; while yet there is a
danger, on the other hand, that the encouraged and morbid feeling
may weaken or bias the understanding, or that the over
shrewd and keen understanding may shorten the imagination, or
that the understanding and imagination together may take place
of, or undermine, the resolution, as in Hamlet. So in the mere
bodily frame there is a delightful perfection of the senses, consistent
with the utmost health of the muscular system, as in the
quick sight and hearing of an active savage: another false delicacy
of the senses, in the Sybarite, consequent on their over indulgence,
until the doubled rose-leaf is painful; and this inconsistent
with muscular perfection. Again; there is a perfection of
muscular action consistent with exquisite sense, as in that of the
fingers of a musician or of a painter, in which the muscles are
guided by the slightest feeling of the strings, or of the pencil:
another perfection of muscular action inconsistent with acuteness
of sense, as in the effort of battle, in which a soldier does not
perceive his wounds. So that it is never so much the question,
what is the solitary perfection of a given part of the man, as
what is its balanced perfection in relation to the whole of him:
and again, the perfection of any single power is not merely to
be valued by the mere rank of the power itself, but by the harmony
which it indicates among the other powers. Thus, for
instance, in an archer’s glance along his arrow, or a hunter’s
raising of his rifle, there is a certain perfection of sense and
finger which is the result of mere practice, of a simple bodily
perfection; but there is a farther value in the habit which results
from the resolution and intellect necessary to the forming of it:
in the hunter’s raising of his rifle there is a quietness implying
far more than mere practice,—implying courage, and habitual
meeting of danger, and presence of mind, and many other such
noble characters. So also in a musician’s way of laying finger on
his instrument, or a painter’s handling of his pencil, there are
many qualities expressive of the special sensibilities of each,
operating on the production of the habit, besides the sensibility
operating at the moment of action. So that there are three distinct
stages of merit in what is commonly called mere bodily
dexterity: the first, the dexterity given by practice, called command
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page397"></SPAN>397</span>
of tools or of weapons; the second stage, the dexterity or
grace given by character, as the gentleness of hand proceeding
from modesty or tenderness of spirit, and the steadiness of it
resulting from habitual patience coupled with decision, and the
thousand other characters partially discernible, even in a man’s
writing, much more in his general handiwork; and, thirdly, there
is the perfection of action produced by the operation of <i>present</i>
strength, feeling, or intelligence on instruments thus <i>previously</i>
perfected, as the handling of a great painter is rendered more
beautiful by his immediate care and feeling and love of his subject,
or knowledge of it, and as physical strength is increased by
strength of will and greatness of heart. Imagine, for instance,
the difference in manner of fighting, and in actual muscular
strength and endurance, between a common soldier, and a man
in the circumstances of the Horatii, or of the temper of Leonidas.</p>
<p class="mb">Mere physical skill, therefore, the mere perfection and power
of the body as an instrument, is manifested in three stages:</p>
<table class="nobctr" summary="data"><tr><td>
<p>First, Bodily power by practice;</p>
<p>Secondly, Bodily power by moral habit;</p>
<p>Thirdly, Bodily power by immediate energy;</p>
</td></tr></table>
<p class="mt noind">and the arts will be greater or less, c�teris paribus, according to
the degrees of these dexterities which they admit. A smith’s
work at his anvil admits little but the first; fencing, shooting,
and riding, admit something of the second; while the fine arts
admit (merely through the channel of the <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'bodly'">bodily</span> dexterities) an
expression almost of the whole man.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, though the higher arts <i>admit</i> this higher bodily
perfection, they do not all <i>require</i> it in equal degrees, but can
dispense with it more and more in proportion to their dignity.
The arts whose chief element is bodily dexterity, may be classed
together as arts of the third order, of which the highest will be
those which admit most of the power of moral habit and energy,
such as riding and the management of weapons; and the rest may
be thrown together under the general title of handicrafts, of
which it does not much matter which are the most honorable,
but rather, which are the most necessary and least injurious to
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page398"></SPAN>398</span>
health, which it is not our present business to examine. Men
engaged in the practice of these are <span class="correction" title="changed from 'calld'">called</span> artizans, as opposed
to artists, who are concerned with the fine arts.</p>
<p>The next step in elevation of art is the addition of the intelligences
which have no connection with bodily dexterity; as, for
instance, in hunting, the knowledge of the habits of animals
and their places of abode; in architecture, of mathematics; in
painting, of harmonies of color; in music, of those of sound; all
this pure science being joined with readiness of expedient in
applying it, and with shrewdness in apprehension of difficulties,
either present or probable.</p>
<p>It will often happen that intelligence of this kind is possessed
without bodily dexterity, or the need of it; one man directing
and another executing, as for the most part in architecture, war,
and seamanship. And it is to be observed, also, that in proportion
to the dignity of the art, the bodily dexterities needed even
in its subordinate agents become less important, and are more
and more replaced by intelligence; as in the steering of a ship,
the bodily dexterity required is less than in shooting or fencing,
but the intelligence far greater: and so in war, the mere swordsmanship
and marksmanship of the troops are of small importance
in comparison with their disposition, and right choice of the
moment of action. So that arts of this second order must be
estimated, not by the quantity of bodily dexterity they require,
but by the quantity and dignity of the knowledge needed in their
practice, and by the degree of subtlety needed in bringing such
knowledge into play. War certainly stands first in the general
mind, not only as the greatest of the arts which I have called of
the second order, but as the greatest of all arts. It is not, however,
easy to distinguish the respect paid to the Power, from
that rendered to the Art of the soldier; the honor of victory
being more dependent, in the vulgar mind, on its results, than
its difficulties. I believe, however, that taking into consideration
the greatness of the anxieties under which this art must be
practised, the multitude of circumstances to be known and regarded
in it, and the subtleties both of apprehension and stratagem
constantly demanded by it, as well as the multiplicity of
disturbing accidents and doubtful contingencies against which it
must make provision on the instant, it must indeed rank as far
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page399"></SPAN>399</span>
the first of the arts of the second order; and next to this great
art of killing, medicine being much like war in its stratagems
and watchings against its dark and subtle death-enemy.</p>
<p>Then the arts of the first order will be those in which the
Imaginative part of the intellect and the Sensitive part of the
soul are joined: as poetry, architecture, and painting; these
forming a kind of cross, in their part of the scheme of the human
being, with those of the second order, which wed the Intelligent
part of the intellect and Resolute part of the soul. But the
reader must feel more and more, at every step, the impossibility
of classing the arts themselves, independently of the men by
whom they are practised; and how an art, low in itself, may
be made noble by the quantity of human strength and being
which a great man will pour into it; and an art, great in itself,
be made mean by the meanness of the mind occupied in it. I do
not intend, when I call painting an art of the first, and war an art
of the second, order, to class Dutch landscape painters with good
soldiers; but I mean, that if from such a man as Napoleon we
were to take away the honor of all that he had done in law and
civil government, and to give him the reputation of his soldiership
only, his name would be less, if justly weighed, than that
of Buonarroti, himself a good soldier also, when need was. But
I will not endeavor to pursue the inquiry, for I believe that of all
the arts of the first order it would be found that all that a man
has, or is, or can be, he can fully express in them, and give to
any of them, and find it not enough.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_15"></SPAN>15. INSTINCTIVE JUDGMENTS.</h5>
<p>The same rapid judgment which I wish to enable the reader
to form of architecture, may in some sort also be formed of
painting, owing to the close connection between execution and
expression in the latter; as between structure and expression
in the former. We ought to be able to tell good painting by a
side glance as we pass along a gallery; and, until we can do so,
we are not fit to pronounce judgment at all: not that I class this
easily visible excellence of painting with the great expressional
qualities which time and watchfulness only unfold. I have again
and again insisted on the supremacy of these last and shall
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page400"></SPAN>400</span>
always continue to do so. But I perceive a tendency among
some of the more thoughtful critics of the day to forget that the
business of a painter is to <i>paint</i>, and so altogether to despise
those men, Veronese and Rubens for instance, who were painters,
par excellence, and in whom the expressional qualities are subordinate.
Now it is well, when we have strong moral or poetical
feeling manifested in painting, to mark this as the best part of
the work; but it is not well to consider as a thing of small
account, the painter’s language in which that feeling is conveyed,
for if that language be not good and lovely, the man may indeed
be a just moralist or a great poet, but he is not a <i>painter</i>, and it
was wrong of him to paint. He had much better put his morality
into sermons, and his poetry into verse, than into a language of
which he was not master. And this mastery of the language is
that of which we should be cognizant by a glance of the eye;
and if that be not found, it is wasted time to look farther: the
man has mistaken his vocation, and his expression of himself
will be cramped by his awkward efforts to do what he was not
fit to do. On the other hand, if the man be a painter indeed,
and have the gift of colors and lines, what is in him will come
from his hand freely and faithfully; and the language itself is
so difficult and so vast, that the mere possession of it argues the
man is great, and that his works are worth reading. So that I
have never yet seen the case in which this true artistical excellence,
visible by the eye-glance, was not the index of some true
expressional worth in the work. Neither have I ever seen a good
expressional work without high artistical merit: and that this is
ever denied is only owing to the narrow view which men are apt
to take both of expression and of art; a narrowness consequent
on their own especial practice and habits of thought. A man
long trained to love the monk’s visions of Fra Angelico, turns
in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens
which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he
right in his indignation? He has forgotten, that while Angelico
prayed and wept in his <i>olive shade</i>, there was different work
doing in the dank fields of Flanders;—wild seas to be banked
out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be
drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful
breeding of stout horses and fat cattle; close setting of brick
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page401"></SPAN>401</span>
walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands
and gross stoutening of bodies in all this; gross jovialities of
harvest homes and Christmas feasts, which were to be the reward
of it; rough affections, and sluggish imagination; fleshy, substantial,
ironshod humanities, but humanities still; humanities
which God had his eye upon, and which won, perhaps, here and
there, as much favor in his sight as the wasted aspects of the
whispering monks of Florence (Heaven forbid it should not be
so, since the most of us cannot be monks, but must be ploughmen
and reapers still). And are we to suppose there is no nobility in
Rubens’ masculine and universal sympathy with all this, and with
his large human rendering of it, Gentleman though he was, by
birth, and feeling, and education, and place; and, when he
chose, lordly in conception also? He had his faults, perhaps
great and lamentable faults, though more those of his time and
his country than his own; he has neither cloister breeding nor
boudoir breeding, and is very unfit to paint either in missals or
annuals; but he has an open sky and wide-world breeding in him,
that we may not be offended with, fit alike for king’s court, knight’s
camp, or peasant’s cottage. On the other hand, a man trained here
in England, in our Sir Joshua school, will not and cannot allow
that there is any art at all in the technical work of Angelico.
But he is just as wrong as the other. Fra Angelico is as true a
master of the art necessary to his purposes, as Rubens was of that
<span class="correction" title="changed from 'necesary'">necessary</span> for his. We have been taught in England to think there
can be no virtue but in a loaded brush and rapid hand; but if
we can shake our common sense free of such teaching, we shall
understand that there is art also in the delicate point and in the
hand which trembles as it moves; not because it is more liable
to err, but because there is more danger in its error, and more
at stake upon its precision. The art of Angelico, both as a colorist
and a draughtsman, is consummate; so perfect and beautiful,
that his work may be recognised at any distance by the rainbow-play
and brilliancy of it: However closely it may be surrounded
by other works of the same school, glowing with enamel and
gold, Angelico’s may be told from them at a glance, like so many
huge pieces of opal lying among common marbles. So again
with Giotto; the Arena chapel is not only the most perfect expressional
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page402"></SPAN>402</span>
work, it is the prettiest piece of wall decoration and
fair color, in North Italy.</p>
<p>Now there is a correspondence of the same kind between the
technical and expressional parts of architecture;—not a true or
entire correspondence, so that when the expression is best, the
building must be also best; but so much of correspondence as
that good building is necessary to good expression, comes before
it, and is to be primarily looked for: and the more, because
the manner of building is capable of being determinately estimated
and classed; but the expressional character not so: we
can at once determine the true value of technical qualities, we can
only approximate to the value of expressional qualities: and
besides this, the looking for the technical qualities first will
enable us to cast a large quantity of rubbish aside at once, and
so to narrow the difficult field of inquiry into expression: we
shall get rid of Chinese pagodas and Indian temples, and Renaissance
Palladianisms, and Alhambra stucco and filigree, in one
great rubbish heap; and shall not need to trouble ourselves about
their expression, or anything else concerning them. Then taking
the buildings which have been rightly put together, and which
show common sense in their structure, we may look for their
farther and higher excellences; but on those which are absurd
in their first steps we need waste no time.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_16"></SPAN>16. STRENGTH OF SHAFTS.</h5>
<p>I could have wished, before writing this chapter, to have given
more study to the difficult subject of the strength of shafts of
different materials and structure; but I cannot enter into every
inquiry which general criticism might suggest, and this I believe
to be one which would have occupied the reader with less profit
than many others: all that is necessary for him to note is, that
the great increase of strength gained by a tubular form in iron
shafts, of given solid contents, is no contradiction to the general
principle stated in the text, that the strength of materials is
most available when they are most concentrated. The strength
of the tube is owing to certain properties of the arch formed by
its sides, not to the dispersion of its materials: and the principle
is altogether inapplicable to stone shafts. No one would think of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page403"></SPAN>403</span>
building a pillar of a succession of sandstone rings; however
strong it might be, it would be still stronger filled up, and the
substitution of such a pillar for a solid one of the same contents
would lose too much space; for a stone pillar, even when solid,
must be quite as thick as is either graceful or convenient, and
in modern churches is often too thick as it is, hindering sight of
the preacher, and checking the sound of his voice.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_17"></SPAN>17. ANSWER TO MR. GARBETT.</h5>
<p>Some three months ago, and long after the writing of this
passage, I met accidentally with Mr. Garbett’s elementary Treatise
on Design. (Weale, 1850.) If I had cared about the reputation
of originality, I should have been annoyed—and was so, at first,
on finding Mr. Garbett’s illustrations of the subject exactly the
same as mine, even to the choice of the elephant’s foot for the
parallel of the Doric pillar: I even thought of omitting, or rewriting,
great part of the chapter, but determined at last to let it
stand. I am striving to speak plain truths on many simple and
trite subjects, and I hope, therefore, that much of what I say has
been said before, and am quite willing to give up all claim to
originality in any reasoning or assertion whatsoever, if any one
cares to dispute it. I desire the reader to accept what I say, not
as mine, but as the truth, which may be all the world’s, if they look
for it. If I remember rightly, Mr. Frank Howard promised at
some discussion respecting the “Seven Lamps,” reported in the
“Builder,” to pluck all my borrowed feathers off me; but I did
not see the end of the discussion, and do not know to this day
how many feathers I have left: at all events the elephant’s foot
must belong to Mr. Garbett, though, strictly speaking, neither
he nor I can be quite justified in using it, for an elephant in
reality stands on tiptoe; and this is by no means the expression
of a Doric shaft. As, however, I have been obliged to speak of
this treatise of Mr. Garbett’s, and desire also to recommend it
as of much interest and utility in its statements of fact, it is
impossible for me to pass altogether without notice, as if unanswerable,
several passages in which the writer has objected to
views stated in the “Seven Lamps.” I should at any rate have
noticed the passage quoted above, (<SPAN href="#chap_30">Chap. 30th</SPAN>,) which runs
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page404"></SPAN>404</span>
counter to the spirit of all I have ever written, though without
referring to me; but the references to the “Seven Lamps” I
should not have answered, unless I had desired, generally, to
recommend the book, and partly also, because they may serve
as examples of the kind of animadversion which the “Seven
Lamps” had to sustain from architects, very generally; which
examples being once answered, there will be little occasion for
my referring in future to other criticisms of the kind.</p>
<p>The first reference to the “Seven Lamps” is in the second
page, where Mr. Garbett asks a question, “Why are not convenience
and stability enough to constitute a fine building?”—which
I should have answered shortly by asking another, “Why
we have been made men, and not bees nor termites:” but Mr.
Garbett has given a very pretty, though partial, answer to it
himself, in his 4th to 9th pages,—an answer which I heartily beg
the reader to consider. But, in page 12, it is made a grave
charge against me, that I use the words beauty and ornament interchangeably.
I do so, and ever shall; and so, I believe, one
day, will Mr. Garbett himself; but not while he continues to
head his pages thus:—“Beauty not dependent on ornament, <i>or
superfluous</i> features.” What right has he to assume that ornament,
rightly so called, ever was, or can be, superfluous? I have
said before, and repeatedly in other places, that the most beautiful
things are the most useless; I never said superfluous. I said
useless in the well-understood and usual sense, as meaning, inapplicable
to the service of the body. Thus I called peacocks and
lilies useless; meaning, that roast peacock was unwholesome
(taking Juvenal’s word for it), and that dried lilies made bad
hay: but I do not think peacocks superfluous birds, nor that the
world could get on well without its lilies. Or, to look closer,
I suppose the peacock’s blue eyes to be very useless to him; not
dangerous indeed, as to their first master, but of small service,
yet I do not think there is a superfluous eye in all his tail; and
for lilies, though the great King of Israel was not “arrayed”
like one of them, can Mr. Garbett tell us which are their superfluous
leaves? Is there no Diogenes among lilies? none to be
found content to drink dew, but out of silver? The fact is, I
never met with the architect yet who did not think ornament
meant a thing to be bought in a shop and pinned on, or left off,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page405"></SPAN>405</span>
at architectural toilets, as the fancy seized them, thinking little
more than many women do of the other kind of ornament—the
only true kind,—St. Peter’s kind,—“Not that outward adorning,
but the inner—of the heart.” I do not mean that architects
cannot conceive this better ornament, but they do not understand
that it is the <i>only</i> ornament; that <i>all</i> architectural ornament is
this, and nothing but this; that a noble building never has any
extraneous or superfluous ornament; that all its parts are necessary
to its loveliness, and that no single atom of them could be
removed without harm to its life. You do not build a temple
and then dress it.<SPAN name="FnAnchor_101" href="#Footnote_101"><span class="sp">101</span></SPAN> You create it in its loveliness, and leave it,
as her Maker left Eve. Not unadorned, I believe, but so well
adorned as to need no feather crowns. And I use the words
ornament and beauty interchangeably, in order that architects
may understand this: I assume that their building is to be a perfect
creature capable of nothing less than it has, and needing
nothing more. It may, indeed, receive additional decoration
afterwards, exactly as a woman may gracefully put a bracelet on
her arm, or set a flower in her hair: but that additional decoration
is <i>not</i> the <i>architecture</i>. It is of curtains, pictures, statues,
things that may be taken away from the building, and not hurt
it. What has the architect to do with these? He has only to
do with what is part of the building itself, that is to say, its own
inherent beauty. And because Mr. Garbett does not understand
or acknowledge this, he is led on from error to error; for we
next find him endeavoring to define beauty as distinct from ornament,
and saying that “Positive beauty may be produced by a
studious collation of whatever will display design, order, and
congruity.” (<SPAN href="#page014"></SPAN>.) Is that so? There is a highly studious
collation of whatever will display design, order, and congruity,
in a skull, is there not?—yet small beauty. The nose is a decorative
feature,—yet slightly necessary to beauty, it seems to me;
now, at least, for I once thought I must be wrong in considering
a skull disagreeable. I gave it fair trial: put one on my bed-room
chimney-piece, and looked at it by sunrise every morning,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page406"></SPAN>406</span>
and by moonlight every night, and by all the best lights I could
think of, for a month, in vain. I found it as <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'sugly'">ugly</span> at last as I
did at first. So, also, the hair is a decoration, and its natural
curl is of little use; but can Mr. Garbett conceive a bald beauty;
or does he prefer a wig, because that is a “<i>studious</i> collation”
of whatever will produce design, order, and congruity? So the
flush of the cheek is a decoration,—God’s painting of the temple
of his spirit,—and the redness of the lip; and yet poor Viola
thought it beauty truly blent; and I hold with her.</p>
<p>I have answered enough to this count.</p>
<p>The second point questioned is my assertion, “Ornament
cannot be overcharged if it is good, and is always overcharged
when it is bad.” To which Mr. Garbett objects in these terms:
“I must contend, on the contrary, that the very best ornament
may be overcharged by being misplaced.”</p>
<p>A short sentence with two mistakes in it.</p>
<p>First. Mr. Garbett cannot get rid of his unfortunate notion
that ornament is a thing to be manufactured separately, and fastened
on. He supposes that an ornament may be called good in
itself, in the stonemason’s yard or in the ironmonger’s shop:
Once for all, let him put this idea out of his head. We may say
of a thing, considered separately, that it is a pretty thing; but
before we can say it is a good ornament, we must know what it
is to adorn, and how. As, for instance, a ring of gold is a pretty
thing; it is a good ornament on a woman’s finger; not a good
ornament hung through her under lip. A hollyhock, seven feet
high, would be a good ornament for a cottage-garden; not a good
ornament for a lady’s head-dress. Might not Mr. Garbett have
seen this without my showing? and that, therefore, when I said
“<i>good</i>” ornament, I said “well-placed” ornament, in one word,
and that, also, when Mr. Garbett says “it may be overcharged
by being misplaced,” he merely says it may be overcharged by
being <i>bad</i>.</p>
<p>Secondly. But, granted that ornament <i>were</i> independent of
its position, and might be pronounced good in a separate form,
as books are good, or men are good.—Suppose I had written to
a student in Oxford, “You cannot have too many books, if they
be good books;” and he had answered me, “Yes, for if I have
many, I have no place to put them in but the coal-cellar.”
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page407"></SPAN>407</span>
Would that in anywise affect the general principle that he could
not have too many books?</p>
<p>Or suppose he had written, “I must not have too many, they
confuse my head.” I should have written back to him: “Don’t
buy books to put in the coal-hole, nor read them if they confuse
your head; you cannot have too many, if they be good: but if
you are too lazy to take care of them, or too dull to profit by
them, you are better without them.”</p>
<p>Exactly in the same tone, I repeat to Mr. Garbett, “You
cannot have too much ornament, if it be good: but if you are
too indolent to arrange it, or too dull to take advantage of it,
assuredly you are better without it.”</p>
<p>The other points bearing on this question have already been
stated in the close of the 21st chapter.</p>
<p>The third reference I have to answer, is to my repeated assertion,
that the evidence of manual labor is one of the chief sources
of value in ornament, (“Seven Lamps,” p. 49, “Modern
Painters,” 1, Chap. III.,) to which objection is made in these
terms: “We must here warn the reader against a remarkable
error of Ruskin. The value of ornaments in architecture depends
<i>not in the slightest degree</i> on the <i>manual labor</i> they contain. If
it did, the finest ornaments ever executed would be the stone
chains that hang before certain Indian rock-temples.” Is that
so? Hear a parallel argument. “The value of the Cornish
mines depends not in the slightest degree on the quantity of copper
they contain. If it did, the most valuable things ever produced
would be copper saucepans.” It is hardly worth my while
to answer this; but, lest any of my readers should be confused
by the objection, and as I hold the fact to be of great importance,
I may re-state it for them with some explanation.</p>
<p>Observe, then, the appearance of labor, that is to say, the
evidence of the past industry of man, is always, in the abstract,
intensely delightful: man being meant to labor, it is delightful
to see that he <i>has</i> labored, and to read the record of his active
and worthy existence.</p>
<p>The evidence of labor becomes painful only when it is a <i>sign
of Evil greater, as Evil, than the labor is great, as Good</i>. As,
for instance, if a man has labored for an hour at what might
have been done by another man in a moment, this evidence of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page408"></SPAN>408</span>
his labor is also evidence of his weakness; and this weakness is
greater in rank of evil, than his industry is great in rank of
good.</p>
<p>Again, if a man have labored at what was not worth accomplishing,
the signs of his labor are the signs of his folly, and his
folly dishonors his industry; we had rather he had been a wise
man in rest than a fool in labor.</p>
<p>Again, if a man have labored without accomplishing anything,
the signs of his labor are the signs of his disappointment; and
we have more sorrow in sympathy with his failure, than pleasure
in sympathy with his work.</p>
<p>Now, therefore, in ornament, whenever labor replaces what
was better than labor, that is to say, skill and thought; wherever
it substitutes itself for these, or <i>negatives these by its existence</i>,
then it is positive evil. Copper is an evil when it alloys gold, or
poisons food: not an evil, as copper; good in the form of pence,
seriously objectionable when it occupies the room of guineas.
Let Danacast it out of her lap, when the gold comes from
heaven; but let the poor man gather it up carefully from the
earth.</p>
<p>Farther, the evidence of labor is not only a good when added
to other good, but the utter absence of it destroys good in human
work. It is only good for God to create without toil; that which
man can create without toil is worthless: machine ornaments
are no ornaments at all. Consider this carefully, reader: I could
illustrate it for you endlessly; but you feel it yourself every hour
of your existence. And if you do not know that you feel it,
take up, for a little time, the trade which of all manual trades
has been most honored: be for once a carpenter. Make for
yourself a table or a chair, and see if you ever thought any table
or chair so delightful, and what strange beauty there will be in
their crooked limbs.</p>
<p>I have not noticed any other animadversions on the “Seven
Lamps” in Mr. Garbett’s volume; but if there be more, I must
now leave it to his own consideration, whether he may not, as in
the above instances, have made them incautiously: I may, perhaps,
also be permitted to request other architects, who may
happen to glance at the preceding pages, not immediately to
condemn what may appear to them false in general principle. I
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page409"></SPAN>409</span>
must often be found deficient in technical knowledge; I may
often err in my statements respecting matters of practice or of
special law. But I do not write thoughtlessly respecting principles;
and my statements of these will generally be found worth
reconnoitring before attacking. Architects, no doubt, fancy
they have strong grounds for supposing me wrong when they
seek to invalidate my assertions. Let me assure them, at least,
that I mean to be their friend, although they may not immediately
recognise me as such. If I could obtain the public ear,
and the principles I have advocated were carried into general
practice, porphyry and serpentine would be given to them instead
of limestone and brick; instead of tavern and shop-fronts
they would have to build goodly churches and noble dwelling-houses;
and for every stunted Grecism and stucco Romanism,
into which they are now forced to shape their palsied thoughts,
and to whose crumbling plagiarisms they must trust their doubtful
fame, they would be asked to raise whole streets of bold, and
rich, and living architecture, with the certainty in their hearts
of doing what was honorable to themselves, and good for all men.</p>
<p>Before I altogether leave the question of the influence of labor
on architectural effect, the reader may expect from me a word or
two respecting the subject which this year must be interesting to
all—the applicability, namely, of glass and iron to architecture
in general, as in some sort exemplified by the Crystal Palace.</p>
<p>It is thought by many that we shall forthwith have great part
of our architecture in glass and iron, and that new forms of
beauty will result from the studied employment of these materials.</p>
<p>It may be told in a few words how far this is possible; how
far eternally impossible.</p>
<p>There are two means of delight in all productions of art—color
and form.</p>
<p>The most vivid conditions of color attainable by human art
are those of works in glass and enamel, but not the most perfect.
The best and noblest coloring possible to art is that attained by
the touch of the human hand on an opaque surface, upon which
it can command any tint required, without subjection to alteration
by fire or other mechanical means. No color is so noble as
the color of a good painting on canvas or gesso.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page410"></SPAN>410</span></p>
<p>This kind of color being, however, impossible, for the most
part, in architecture, the next best is the scientific disposition of
the natural colors of stones, which are far nobler than any abstract
hues producible by human art.</p>
<p>The delight which we receive from glass painting is one altogether
inferior, and in which we should degrade ourselves by
over indulgence. Nevertheless, it is possible that we may raise
some palaces like Aladdin’s with colored glass for jewels, which
shall be new in the annals of human splendor, and good in their
place; but not if they superseded nobler edifices.</p>
<p>Now, color is producible either on opaque or in transparent
bodies: but form is only expressible, in its perfection, on opaque
bodies, without lustre.</p>
<p>This law is imperative, universal, irrevocable. No perfect or
refined form can be expressed except in opaque and lustreless
matter. You cannot see the form of a jewel, nor, in any perfection,
even of a cameo or bronze. You cannot perfectly see the
form of a humming-bird, on account of its burnishing; but you
can see the form of a swan perfectly. No noble work in form can
ever, therefore, be produced in transparent or lustrous glass or
enamel. All noble architecture depends for its majesty on its
form: therefore you can never have any noble architecture in
transparent or lustrous glass or enamel. Iron is, however,
opaque; and both it and opaque enamel may, perhaps, be rendered
quite lustreless; and, therefore, fit to receive noble form.</p>
<p>Let this be thoroughly done, and both the iron and enamel
made fine in paste or grain, and you may have an architecture
as noble as cast or struck architecture even can be: as noble,
therefore, as coins can be, or common cast bronzes, and such
other multiplicable things;<SPAN name="FnAnchor_102" href="#Footnote_102"><span class="sp">102</span></SPAN>—eternally separated from all
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page411"></SPAN>411</span>
good and great things by a gulph which not all the tubular
bridges nor engineering of ten thousand nineteenth centuries
cast into one great bronze-foreheaded century, will ever overpass
one inch of. All art which is worth its room in this world, all
art which is not a piece of blundering refuse, occupying the foot
or two of earth which, if unencumbered by it, would have grown
corn or violets, or some better thing, is <i>art which proceeds from
an individual mind, working through instruments which assist,
but do not supersede, the muscular action of the human hand,
upon the materials which most tenderly receive, and most securely
retain, the impressions of such human labor</i>.</p>
<p>And the value of every work of art is exactly in the ratio of
the quantity of humanity which has been put into it, and legibly
expressed upon it for ever:—</p>
<p>First, of thought and moral purpose;</p>
<p>Secondly, of technical skill;</p>
<p>Thirdly, of bodily industry.</p>
<p>The quantity of bodily industry which that Crystal Palace expresses
is very great. So far it is good.</p>
<p>The quantity of thought it expresses is, I suppose, a single
and very admirable thought of Mr. Paxton’s, probably not a bit
brighter than thousands of thoughts which pass through his
active and intelligent brain every hour,—that it might be possible
to build a greenhouse larger than ever greenhouse was built before.
This thought, and some very ordinary algebra, are as
much as all that glass can represent of human intellect. “But
one poor half-pennyworth of bread to all this intolerable deal of
sack.” Alas!</p>
<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td>
<div class="poemr">
<p class="ind03">“The earth hath bubbles as the water hath:</p>
<p>And this is of them.”</p>
</div>
</td></tr></table>
<h5><SPAN name="app_18"></SPAN>18. EARLY ENGLISH CAPITALS.</h5>
<p>The depth of the cutting in some of the early English capitals
is, indeed, part of a general system of attempts at exaggerated
force of effect, like the “<i>black</i> touches” of second-rate
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page412"></SPAN>412</span>
draughtsmen, which I have noticed as characteristic of nearly
all northern work, associated with the love of the grotesque: but
the main section of the capital is indeed a dripstone rolled round,
as above described; and dripstone sections are continually found
in northern work, where not only they cannot increase force of
effect, but are entirely invisible except on close examination; as,
for instance, under the uppermost range of stones of the foundation
of Whitehall, or under the slope of the restored base of All
Souls College, Oxford, under the level of the eye. I much doubt
if any of the Fellows be aware of its existence.</p>
<p>Many readers will be surprised and displeased by the disparagement
of the early English capital. That capital has, indeed,
one character of considerable value; namely, the boldness with
which it stops the mouldings which fall upon it, and severs them
from the shaft, contrasting itself with the multiplicity of their
vertical lines. Sparingly used, or seldom seen, it is thus, in its
place, not unpleasing; and we English love it from association,
it being always found in connection with our purest and loveliest
Gothic arches, and never in multitudes large enough to satiate
the eye with its form. The reader who sits in the Temple church
every Sunday, and sees no architecture during the week but that
of Chancery Lane, may most justifiably quarrel with me for what
I have said of it. But if every house in Fleet Street or Chancery
Lane were Gothic, and all had early English capitals, I would
answer for his making peace with me in a fortnight.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_19"></SPAN>19. TOMBS NEAR ST. ANASTASIA.</h5>
<p>Whose they are, is of little consequence to the reader or to
me, and I have taken no pains to discover; their value being not
in any evidence they bear respecting dates, but in their intrinsic
merit as examples of composition. Two of them are within the
gate, one on the top of it, and this latter is on the whole the best,
though all are beautiful; uniting the intense northern energy in
their figure sculpture with the most serene classical restraint in
their outlines, and unaffected, but masculine simplicity of construction.</p>
<p>I have not put letters to the diagram of the lateral arch at page
154, in order not to interfere with the clearness of the curves, but
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page413"></SPAN>413</span>
I shall always express the same points by the same letters, whenever
I have to give measures of arches of this simple kind, so that the
reader need never have the diagrams lettered at all. The base
or span of the centre arch will always be <i>a b</i>; its vertex will always
be V; the points of the cusps will be <i>c c</i>; <i>p p</i> will be the
bases of perpendiculars let fall from V and <i>c</i> on <i>a b</i>; and <i>d</i> the
base of a perpendicular from the point of the cusp to the arch
line. Then <i>a b</i> will always be a span of the arch, V <i>p</i> its perpendicular
height, V <i>a</i> the chord of its side arcs, <i>d c</i> the depth of
its cusps, <i>c c</i> the horizontal interval between the cusps, <i>a c</i> the
length of the chord of the lower arc of the cusp, V <i>c</i> the length
of the chord of the upper arc of the cusp, (whether continuous
or not,) and <i>c p</i> the length of a perpendicular from the point of
the cusp on <i>a b</i>.</p>
<p>Of course we do not want all these measures for a single arch,
but it often happens that some of them are attainable more easily
than others; some are often unattainable altogether, and it is
necessary therefore to have expressions for whichever we may be
able to determine.</p>
<p>V <i>p</i> or V <i>a</i>, <i>a b</i>, and <i>d c</i> are always essential; then either <i>a c</i>
and V <i>c</i> or <i>c c</i> and <i>c p</i>: when I have my choice, I always take <i>a b</i>,
V <i>p</i>, <i>d c</i>, <i>c c</i>, and <i>c p</i>, but <i>c p</i> is not to be generally obtained so
accurately as the cusp arcs.</p>
<p>The measures of the present arch are:</p>
<table class="nobctr" summary="data">
<tr><td class="tc2">
<p> </p>
<p><i>a b</i>,</p>
<p>V <i>p</i>,</p>
<p>V <i>c</i>,</p>
<p><i>a c</i>,</p>
<p><i>d c</i>,</p>
</td>
<td class="tc5" style="padding-left: 1em; ">
<p class="f80">Ft. In.</p>
<p>3 ,, 8</p>
<p>4 ,, 0</p>
<p>2 ,, 4½</p>
<p>2 ,, 0¼</p>
<p>0 ,, 3½</p>
</td></tr></table>
<h5><SPAN name="app_20"></SPAN>20. SHAFTS OF DUCAL PALACE.</h5>
<p>The shortness of the thicker ones at the angles is induced by
the greater depth of the enlarged capitals: thus the 36th shaft is
10 ft. 4⅓ in. in circumference at its base, and 10 ,, 0½<SPAN name="FnAnchor_103" href="#Footnote_103"><span class="sp">103</span></SPAN> in circumference
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page414"></SPAN>414</span>
under the fillet of its capital; but it is only 6 ,, 1¾
high, while the minor intermediate shafts, of which the thickest
is 7 ,, 8 round at the base, and 7 ,, 4 under capital, are yet on the
average 7 ,, 7 high. The angle shaft towards the sea (the 18th)
is nearly of the proportions of the 36th, and there are three
others, the 15th, 24th, and 26th, which are thicker than the
rest, though not so thick as the angle ones. The 24th and 26th
have both party walls to bear, and I imagine the 15th must in
old time have carried another, reaching across what is now the
Sala del Gran Consiglio.</p>
<p>They measure respectively round at the base,</p>
<table class="nobctr" summary="data">
<tr><td class="tc2">
<p>The 15th,</p>
<p>24th,</p>
<p>26th,</p>
</td>
<td class="tc5" style="padding-left: 1em; ">
<p>8 ,, 2</p>
<p>9 ,, 6½</p>
<p>8 ,, 0½</p>
</td></tr></table>
<p>The other pillars towards the sea, and those to the 27th inclusive
of the Piazzetta, are all seven feet round at the base, and then
there is a most curious and delicate crescendo of circumference
to the 36th, thus:</p>
<table class="nobctr" summary="data">
<tr><td class="tc2">
<p>The 28th,</p>
<p>29th,</p>
<p>30th,</p>
<p>31st,</p>
<p>32nd,</p>
</td>
<td class="tc5" style="padding-left: 1em; ">
<p>7 ,, 3</p>
<p>7 ,, 4</p>
<p>7 ,, 6</p>
<p>7 ,, 7</p>
<p>7 ,, 5</p>
</td>
<td class="tc2" style="padding-left: 5em; vertical-align: top; ">
<p>The 33rd,</p>
<p>34th,</p>
<p>35th,</p>
<p>36th,</p>
</td>
<td class="tc5" style="padding-left: 1em; vertical-align: top; ">
<p> 7 ,, 6</p>
<p> 7 ,, 8</p>
<p> 7 ,, 8</p>
<p>10 ,, 4⅓</p>
</td></tr></table>
<p>The shafts of the upper arcade, which are above these thicker
columns, are also thicker than their companions, measuring on the
average, 4 ,, 8½ in circumference, while those of the sea fa�ade,
except the 29th, average 4 ,, 7½ in circumference. The 29th,
which is of course above the 15th of the lower story, is 5 ,, 5 in
circumference, which little piece of evidence will be of no small
value to us by-and-by. The 35th carries the angle of the palace,
and is 6 ,, 0 round. The 47th, which comes above the 24th and
carries the party wall of the Sala del Gran Consiglio, is strengthened
by a pilaster; and the 51st, which comes over the 26th, is
5 ,, 4½ round, or nearly the same as the 29th; it carries the party
wall of the Sala del Scrutinio; a small room containing part of
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page415"></SPAN>415</span>
St. Mark’s library, coming between the two saloons; a room
which, in remembrances of the help I have received in all my inquiries
from the kindness and intelligence of its usual occupant,
I shall never easily distinguish otherwise than as “Mr. Lorenzi’s.”<SPAN name="FnAnchor_104" href="#Footnote_104"><span class="sp">104</span></SPAN></p>
<p>I may as well connect with these notes respecting the arcades
of the Ducal Palace, those which refer to <SPAN href="#plate_14">Plate XIV.</SPAN>, which
represents one of its spandrils. Every spandril of the lower
arcade was intended to have been occupied by an ornament resembling
the one given in that plate. The mass of the building
being of Istrian stone, a depth of about two inches is left within
the mouldings of the arches, rough hewn, to receive the slabs of
fine marble composing the patterns. I cannot say whether the
design was ever completed, or the marbles have been since removed,
but there are now only two spandrils retaining their fillings,
and vestiges of them in a third. The two complete spandrils
are on the sea fa�ade, above the 3rd and 10th capitals (<i>vide</i>
method of numbering, Chap. I., page 30); that is to say, connecting
the 2nd arch with the 3rd, and the 9th with the 10th.
The latter is the one given in <SPAN href="#plate_14">Plate XIV.</SPAN> The white portions
of it are all white marble, the dental band surrounding the circle
is in coarse sugary marble, which I believe to be Greek, and never
found in Venice to my recollection, except in work at least anterior
to the fifteenth century. The shaded fields charged with
the three white triangles are of red Verona marble; the inner
disc is green serpentine, and the dark pieces of the radiating
leaves are grey marble. The three triangles are equilateral. The
two uppermost are 1 ,, 5 each side, and the lower 1 ,, 2.</p>
<p>The extreme diameter of the circle is 3 ,, 10½; its field is
slightly raised above the red marbles, as shown in the section at
A, on the left. A <i>a</i> is part of the red marble field; <i>a b</i> the section
of the dentil moulding let into it; <i>b c</i> the entire breadth
of the rayed zone, represented on the other side of the spandril
by the line C <i>f</i>; <i>c d</i> is the white marble band let in, with the
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page416"></SPAN>416</span>
dogtooth on the face of it; <i>b c</i> is 7¾ inches across; <i>c d</i> 3¾; and at
B are given two joints of the dentil (mentioned above, in the
chapter on dentils, as unique in Venice) of their actual size. At
C is given one of the inlaid leaves; its measure being (in inches)
C <i>f</i> 7¾; C <i>h</i> ¾; <i>f g</i> ¾; <i>f e</i> 4¾, the base of the smaller leaves being
of course <i>f e</i> - <i>f g</i> = 4. The pattern which occupies the other
spandril is similar, except that the field <i>b c</i>, instead of the intersecting
arcs, has only triangles of grey marble, arranged like
rays, with their bases towards the centre. There being twenty
round the circle, the reader can of course draw them for himself;
they being isosceles, touching the dentil with their points,
and being in contact at their bases: it has lost its central boss.
The marbles are, in both, covered with a rusty coating, through
which it is excessively difficult to distinguish the colors (another
proof of the age of the ornament). But the white marbles are
certainly, in places (except only the sugary dentil), veined with
purple, and the grey seem warmed with green.</p>
<p>A trace of another of these ornaments may be seen over the
21st capital; but I doubt if the marbles have ever been inserted
in the other spandrils, and their want of ornament occasions the
slight meagreness in the effect of the lower story, which is almost
the only fault of the building.</p>
<p>This decoration by discs, or shield-like ornaments, is a marked
characteristic of Venetian architecture in its earlier ages, and
is carried into later times by the Byzantine Renaissance, already
distinguished from the more corrupt forms of Renaissance, in
<SPAN href="#app_6">Appendix 6</SPAN>. Of the disc decoration, so borrowed, we have already
an example in <SPAN href="#plate_1">Plate I.</SPAN> In <SPAN href="#plate_7">Plate VII.</SPAN> we have an earlier
condition of it, one of the discs being there sculptured, the
others surrounded by sculptured bands: here we have, on the
Ducal Palace, the most characteristic of all, because likest to
the shield, which was probably the origin of the same ornament
among the Arabs, and assuredly among the Greeks. In Mr.
Donaldson’s restoration of the gate of the treasury of Atreus,
this ornament is conjecturally employed, and it occurs constantly
on the Arabian buildings of Cairo.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page417"></SPAN>417</span></p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_21"></SPAN>21. ANCIENT REPRESENTATIONS OF WATER.</h5>
<p>I have long been desirous of devoting some time to an enquiry
into the effect of natural scenery upon the pagan, and
especially the Greek, mind, and knowing that my friend, Mr. C.
Newton, had devoted much thought to the elucidation of the
figurative and symbolic language of ancient art, I asked him to
draw up for me a few notes of the facts which he considered
most interesting, as illustrative of its methods of representing
nature. I suggested to him, for an initiative subject, the representation
of water; because this is one of the natural objects
whose portraiture may most easily be made a test of treatment,
for it is one of universal interest, and of more closely similar
aspect in all parts of the world than any other. Waves, currents,
and eddies are much liker each other, everywhere, than
either land or vegetation. Rivers and lakes, indeed, differ
widely from the sea, and the clear Pacific from the angry Northern
ocean; but the Nile is liker the Danube than a knot of Nubian
palms is to a glade of the Black Forest; and the Mediterranean
is liker the Atlantic than the Campo Felice is like Solway
moss.</p>
<p>Mr. Newton has accordingly most kindly furnished me with
the following data. One or two of the types which he describes
have been already noticed in the main text; but it is well that
the reader should again contemplate them in the position which
they here occupy in a general system. I recommend his special
attention to Mr. Newton’s definitions of the terms “figurative”
and “symbolic,” as applied to art, in the beginning of the paper.</p>
<hr class="short" />
<p>In ancient art, that is to say, in the art of the Egyptian,
Assyrian, Greek, and Roman races, water is, for the most part,
represented conventionally rather than naturally.</p>
<p>By natural representation is here meant as just and perfect
an imitation of nature as the technical means of art will allow:
on the other hand, representation is said to be conventional,
either when a confessedly inadequate imitation is accepted in default
of a better, or when imitation is not attempted at all, and
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page418"></SPAN>418</span>
it is agreed that other modes of representation, those by figures
or by symbols, shall be its substitute and equivalent.</p>
<p>In figurative representation there is always <i>impersonation</i>;
the sensible form, borrowed by the artist from organic life, is
conceived to be actuated by a will, and invested with such mental
attributes as constitute personality.</p>
<p>The sensible <i>symbol</i>, whether borrowed from organic or from
inorganic nature, is not a personification at all, but the conventional
sign or equivalent of some object or notion, to which it
may perhaps bear no visible resemblance, but with which the
intellect or the imagination has in some way associated it.</p>
<p>For instance, a city may be figuratively represented as a
woman crowned with towers; here the artist has selected for the
expression of his idea a human form animated with a will and
motives of action analogous to those of humanity generally. Or,
again, as in Greek art, a bull may be a figurative representation
of a river, and, in the conception of the artist, this animal form
may contain, and be ennobled by, a human mind.</p>
<p>This is still impersonation; the form only in which personality
is embodied is changed.</p>
<p>Again, a dolphin may be used as a symbol of the sea; a man
ploughing with two oxen is a well-known symbol of a Roman
colony. In neither of these instances is there impersonation.
The dolphin is not invested, like the figure of Neptune, with
any of the attributes of the human mind; it has animal instincts,
but no will; it represents to us its native element, only as a part
may be taken for a whole.</p>
<p>Again, the man ploughing does not, like the turreted female
figure, <i>personify</i>, but rather <i>typifies</i> the town, standing as the
visible representation of a real event, its first foundation. To
our mental perceptions, as to our bodily senses, this figure seems
no more than man; there is no blending of his personal nature
with the impersonal nature of the colony, no transfer of attributes
from the one to the other.</p>
<p>Though the conventionally imitative, the figurative, and the
symbolic, are three distinct kinds of representation, they are
constantly combined in one composition, as we shall see in the
following examples, cited from the art of successive races in
chronological order.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page419"></SPAN>419</span></p>
<p>In Egyptian art the general representation of water is the
conventionally imitative. In the British Museum are two frescoes
from tombs at Thebes, Nos. 177 and 170: the subject of the
first of these is an oblong pond, ground-plan and elevation being
strangely confused in the design. In this pond water is represented
by parallel zigzag lines, in which fish are swimming about.
On the surface are birds and lotos flowers; the herbage at the
edge of the pond is represented by a border of symmetrical fan-shaped
flowers; the field beyond by rows of trees, arranged round
the sides of the pond at right angles to each other, and in defiance
of all laws of perspective.</p>
<table style="float: right; width: auto;" summary="Illustration">
<tr>
<td class="caption1">Fig. LXXI.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="figright2">
<SPAN name="fig_71"><ANTIMG src="images/img419.jpg" width-obs="130" height-obs="90" alt="Fig. LXXI." title="Fig. LXXI." /></SPAN></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>In the fresco, No. 170, we have the representation of a river
with papyrus on its bank. Here the water is rendered by zigzag
lines arranged vertically and in parallel lines, so
as to resemble herring-bone masonry, thus.
There are fish in this fresco as in the preceding,
and in both each fish is drawn very distinctly,
not as it would appear to the eye viewed through
water. The mode of representing this element
in Egyptian painting is further abbreviated in their hieroglyphic
writing, where the sign of water is a zigzag line; this line is, so
to speak, a picture of water written in short hand. In the
Egyptian Pantheon there was but one aquatic deity, the god of
the Nile; his type is, therefore, the only figurative representation
of water in Egyptian art. (Birch, “Gallery of British Museum
Antiquities,” Pl. 13.) In Assyrian sculpture we have very curious
conventionally imitative representations of water. On
several of the friezes from Nimroud and Khorsabad, men are
seen crossing a river in boats, or in skins, accompanied by horses
swimming (see Layard, ii. p. 381). In these scenes water is represented
by masses of wavy lines somewhat resembling tresses
of hair, and terminating in curls or volutes; these wavy lines
express the general character of a deep and rapid current, like
that of the Tigris. Fish are but sparingly introduced, the idea
of surface being sufficiently expressed by the floating figures and
boats. In the representation of these there is the same want of
perspective as in the Egyptian fresco which we have just cited.</p>
<p>In the Assyrian Pantheon one aquatic deity has been discovered,
the god Dagon, whose human form terminates in a fish’s
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page420"></SPAN>420</span>
tail. Of the character and attributes of this deity we know but
little.</p>
<p>The more abbreviated mode of representing water, the zigzag
line, occurs on the large silver coins with the type of a city or a
war galley (see Layard, ii. p. 386). These coins were probably
struck in Assyria, not long after the conquest of it by the Persians.</p>
<p>In Greek art the modes of representing water are far more
varied. Two conventional imitations, the wave moulding and
the M�ander, are well known. Both are probably of the most
remote antiquity; both have been largely employed as an architectural
ornament, and subordinately as a decoration of vases,
costume, furniture and implements. In the wave moulding we
have a conventional representation of the small crisping waves
which break upon the shore of the Mediterranean, the sea of the
Greeks.</p>
<p>Their regular succession, and equality of force and volume,
are generalised in this moulding, while the minuter varieties
which distinguish one wave from another are merged in the
general type. The character of ocean waves is to be “for ever
changing, yet the same for ever;” it is this eternity of recurrence
which the early artist has expressed in this hieroglyphic.</p>
<p>With this profile representation of water may be compared
the sculptured waves out of which the head and arms of Hyperion
are rising in the pediment of the Parthenon (Elgin Room,
No. (65) 91, Museum Marbles, vi. pl. 1). Phidias has represented
these waves like a mass of overlapping tiles, thus generalising
their rippling movement. In the M�ander pattern the
graceful curves of nature are represented by angles, as in the
Egyptian hieroglyphic of water: so again the earliest representation
of the labyrinth on the coins of the Cnossus is rectangular;
on later coins we find the curvilinear form introduced.</p>
<p>In the language of Greek mythography, the wave pattern and
the M�ander are sometimes used singly for the idea of water,
but more frequently combined with figurative representation.
The number of aquatic deities in the Greek Pantheon led to the
invention of a great variety of beautiful types. Some of these
are very well known. Everybody is familiar with the general
form of Poseidon (Neptune), the Nereids, the Nymphs and River
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page421"></SPAN>421</span>
Gods; but the modes in which these types were combined with
conventional imitation and with accessory symbols deserve careful
study, if we would appreciate the surpassing richness and beauty
of the language of art formed out of these elements.</p>
<p>This class of representations may be divided into two principal
groups, those relating to the sea, and those relating to fresh
water.</p>
<p>The power of the ocean and the great features of marine
scenery are embodied in such types as Poseidon, Nereus and the
Nereids, that is to say, in human forms moving through the
liquid element in chariots, or on the back of dolphins, or who
combine the human form with that of the fish-like Tritons. The
sea-monsters who draw these chariots are called Hippocamps, being
composed of the tail of a fish and the fore-part of a horse,
the legs terminating in web-feet: this union seems to express
speed and power under perfect control, such as would characterise
the movements of sea deities. A few examples have been here
selected to show how these types were combined with symbols
and conventional imitation.</p>
<p>In the British Museum is a vase, No. 1257, engraved (Lenormant
et De Witte, Mon. C�ram., i. pl. 27), of which the subject
is, Europa crossing the sea on the back of the bull. In this design
the sea is represented by a variety of expedients. First, the
swimming action of the bull suggests the idea of the liquid
medium through which he moves. Behind him stands Nereus,
his staff held perpendicularly in his hand; the top of his staff
comes nearly to the level of the bull’s back, and is probably
meant as the measure of the whole depth of the sea. Towards
the surface line thus indicated a dolphin is rising; in the middle
depth is another dolphin; below a shrimp and a cuttle-fish, and
the bottom is indicated by a jagged line of rocks, on which are
two echini.</p>
<p>On a mosaic found at Oudnah in Algeria (Revue Arch�ol., iii.
pl. 50), we have a representation of the sea, remarkable for the
fulness of details with which it is made out.</p>
<p>This, though of the Roman period, is so thoroughly Greek in
feeling, that it may be cited as an example of the class of mythography
now under consideration. The mosaic lines the floor
and sides of a bath, and, as was commonly the case in the baths
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page422"></SPAN>422</span>
of the ancients, serves as a figurative representation of the water
it contained.</p>
<p>On the sides are hippocamps, figures riding on dolphins, and
islands on which fishermen stand; on the floor are fish, crabs,
and shrimps.</p>
<p>These, as in the vase with Europa, indicate the bottom of the
sea: the same symbols of the submarine world appear on many
other ancient designs. Thus in vase pictures, when Poseidon
upheaves the island of Cos to overwhelm the Giant Polydotes,
the island is represented as an immense mass of rock; the parts
which have been under water are indicated by a dolphin, a
shrimp, and a sepia, the parts above the water by a goat and a
serpent (Lenormant et De Witte, i., tav. 5).</p>
<p>Sometimes these symbols occur singly in Greek art, as the
types, for instance, of coins. In such cases they cannot be interpreted
without being viewed in relation to the whole context
of mythography to which they belong. If we find, for example,
on one coin of Tarentum a shell, on another a dolphin, on a
third a figure of Tarus, the mythic founder of the town, riding
on a dolphin in the midst of the waves, and this latter group
expresses the idea of the town itself and its position on the
coast, then we know the two former types to be but portions of
the greater design, having been detached from it, as we may detach
words from sentences.</p>
<p>The study of the fuller and clearer examples, such as we have
cited above, enables us to explain many more compendious forms
of expression. We have, for instance, on coins several representations
of ancient harbors.</p>
<p>Of these, the earliest occurs on the coins of Zancle, the modern
Messina in Sicily. The ancients likened the form of this harbor
to a sickle, and on the coins of the town we find a curved object,
within the area of which is a dolphin. On this curve are four
square elevations placed at equal distances. It has been conjectured
that these projections are either towers or the large stones
to which galleys were moored still to be seen in ancient harbors
(see Burgon, Numismatic Chronicle, iii. p. 40). With this
archaic representation of a harbor may be compared some examples
of the Roman period. On a coin of Sept. Severus struck at
Corinth (Millingen, Sylloge of Uned. Coins, 1837, p. 57, Pl. II.,
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page423"></SPAN>423</span>
No. 30) we have a female figure standing on a rock between two
recumbent male figures holding rudders. From an arch at the
foot of the rock a stream is flowing: this is a representation of
the rock of the Acropolis of Corinth: the female figure is a
statue of Aphrodite, whose temple surmounted the rock. The
stream is the fountain Pirene. The two recumbent figures are
impersonations of the two harbors, Lechreum and Cenchreia,
between which Corinth was situated. Philostratus (Icon. ii., c.
16) describes a similar picture of the Isthmus between the two
harbors, one of which was in the form of a youth, the other of
a nymph.</p>
<p>On another coin of Corinth we have one of the harbors in a
semicircular form, the whole arc being marked with small equal
divisions, to denote the archways under which the ancient galleys
were drawn, <i>subduct�</i>; at the either horn or extremity of
the harbor is a temple; in the centre of the mouth, a statue of
Neptune. (Millingen, M�dailles In�d., Pl. II., No. 19. Compare
also <span class="correction" title="originally 'Milligen'">Millingen</span>, Ancient Coins of Cities and Kings, 1831, pp.
50-61, Pl. IV., No. 15; Mionnet, Suppl. vii. p. 79, No. 246;
and the harbor of Ostium, on the large brass coins of Nero, in
which there is a representation of the Roman fleet and a reclining
figure of Neptune.)</p>
<p>In vase pictures we have occasionally an attempt to represent
water naturally. On a vase in the British Museum (No. 785),
of which the subject is Ulysses and the Sirens, the Sea is rendered
by wavy lines drawn in black on a red ground, and something
like the effect of light playing on the surface of the water
is given. On each side of the ship are shapeless masses of rock
on which the Sirens stand.</p>
<p>One of the most beautiful of the figurative representations of
the sea is the well-known type of Scylla. She has a beautiful
body, terminating in two barking dogs and two serpent tails.
Sometimes drowning men, the <i>rari nantes in gurgite vasto</i>, appear
caught up in the coils of these tails. Below are dolphins.
Scylla generally brandishes a rudder to show the manner in
which she twists the course of ships. For varieties of her type
see Monum. dell’Inst. Archeol. Rom., iii. Tavv. 52-3.</p>
<p>The representations of fresh water may be arranged under the
following heads—rivers, lakes, fountains.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page424"></SPAN>424</span></p>
<p>There are several figurative modes of representing rivers very
frequently employed in ancient mythography.</p>
<p>In the type which occurs earliest we have the human form
combined with that of the bull in several ways. On an archaic
coin of Metapontum in Lucania, (see frontispiece to Millingen,
Ancient Coins of Greek Cities and Kings,) the river Achelous is
represented with the figure of a man with a shaggy beard and
bull’s horns and ears. On a vase of the best period of Greek
art (Brit. Mus. No. 789; Birch, Trans. Roy. Soc. of Lit., New
Series, Lond. 1843, i. p. 100) the same river is represented with
a satyr’s head and long bull’s horns on the forehead; his form,
human to the waist, terminates in a fish’s tail; his hair falls down
his back; his beard is long and shaggy. In this type we see a
combination of the three forms separately enumerated by Sophocles,
in the commencement of the Trachini�.</p>
<table class="reg" summary="poem"><tr><td>
<div class="poemr">
<p class="grk" style="padding-left: 12em;" title="Achel�on leg�,">
<i>᾽Αχελῷον λέγω,</i></p>
<p class="grk" title="os m’ en trisin morphaisin ex�tei patros,">
<i>ος μ᾽ ἐν τρισἰν μορφαῖσιν
ἐξῄει πατρὸς,</i></p>
<p class="grk" title="phoit�n enarg�s auros allot’ aiolos,">
<i>φοιτῶν ἐναργὴς αῦρος
ἄλλοτ᾽ αἰόλος,</i></p>
<p class="grk" title="draj�n heliktos, allot’ andreikytei">
<i>δράκων ἑλικτὸς, ἄλλοτ᾽
ἄνδρειῳ κύτεί</i></p>
<p class="grk" title="boupr�ros, ek de daskiou geneiados">
<i>βουπρῳρος, ἐκ δὲ
δασκίου γενειάδος</i></p>
<p class="grk" title="krounoi dierrainonto kr�naiou potou.">
<i>κρουνοὶ διεῤῥαίνοντο
κρηναίου ποτοῦ.</i></p>
</div>
</td></tr></table>
<p>In a third variety of this type the human-headed body is
united at the waist with the shoulders of a bull’s body, in which
it terminates. This occurs on an early vase. (Brit. Mus., No.
452.) On the coins of Œniadin Acarnia, and on those of Ambracia,
all of the period after Alexander the Great, the Achelous
has a bull’s body, and head with a human face. In this variety
of the type the human element is almost absorbed, as in the first
variety cited above, the coin of Metapontum, the bull portion of
the type is only indicated by the addition of the horns and ears
to the human head. On the analogy between these, varieties in
the type of the Achelous and those under which the metamorphoses
of the marine goddess Thetis are represented, see
Gerhard, Auserl. Vasenb. ii. pp. 106-113. It is probable that,
in the type of Thetis, of Proteus, and also of the Achelous, the
singular combinations and transformations are intended to express
the changeful nature of the element water.</p>
<p>Numerous other examples may be cited, where rivers are
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page425"></SPAN>425</span>
represented by this combination of the bull and human form,
which maybe called, for convenience, the Androtauric type. On
the coins of Sicily, of the archaic and also of the finest period
of art, rivers are most usually represented by a youthful male
figure, with small budding horns; the hair has the lank and
matted form which characterises aquatic deities in Greek mythography.
The name of the river is often inscribed round the
head. When the whole figure occurs on the coin, it is always
represented standing, never reclining.</p>
<p>The type of the bull on the coins of Sybaris and Thurium,
in Magna Gr�cia, has been considered, with great probability,
a representation of this kind. On the coins of Sybaris, which
are of a very early period, the head of the bull is turned round;
on those of Thurium, he stoops his head, butting: the first of
these actions has been thought to symbolise the winding course
of the river, the second, its headlong current. On the coins of
Thurium, the idea of water is further suggested by the adjunct
of dolphins and other fish in the exergue of the coin. The
ground on which the bull stands is indicated by herbage or pebbles.
This probably represents the river bank. Two bulls’ head
occur on the coins of Sardis, and it has been ingeniously conjectured
by Mr. Burgon that the two rivers of the place are expressed
under this type.</p>
<p>The representation of river-gods as human figures in a reclining
position, though probably not so much employed in earlier
Greek art as the Androtauric type, is very much more familiar
to us, from its subsequent adoption in Roman mythography.
The earliest example we have of a reclining river-god is in the
figure in the Elgin Room commonly called the Ilissus, but more
probably the Cephissus. This occupied one angle in the western
pediment of the Parthenon; the other Athenian river, the
Ilissus, and the fountain Callirrhoe being represented by a male
and female figure in the opposite angle; this group, now destroyed,
is visible in the drawing made by Carrey in 1678.</p>
<p>It is probable that the necessities of pedimental composition
first led the artist to place the river-god in a reclining position.
The head of the Ilissus being broken off, we are not sure whether
he had bull’s horns, like the Sicilian figures already described.
His form is youthful, in the folds of the drapery behind him
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page426"></SPAN>426</span>
there is a flow like that of waves, but the idea of water is not
suggested by any other symbol. When we compare this figure
with that of the Nile (Visconti, Mus. Pio Clem., i., Pl. 38), and
the figure of the Tiber in the Louvre, both of which are of the
Roman period, we see how in these later types the artist multiplied
symbols and accessories, ingrafting them on the original
simple type of the river-god, as it was conceived by Phidias in
the figure of the Ilissus. The Nile is represented as a colossal
bearded figure reclining. At his side is a cornucopia, full of the
vegetable produce of the Egyptian soil. Round his body are
sixteen naked boys, who represent the sixteen cubits, the height
to which the river rose in a favorable year. The statue is
placed on a basement divided into three compartments, one above
another. In the uppermost of these, waves are flowing over in
one great sheet from the side of the river-god. In the other two
compartments are the animals and plants of the river; the bas-reliefs
on this basement are, in fact, a kind of abbreviated symbolic
panorama of the Nile.</p>
<p>The Tiber is represented in a very similar manner. On the
base are, in two compartments, scenes taken from the early
Roman myths; flocks, herds, and other objects on the banks of
the river. (Visconti, Mus. P. Cl. i., Pl. 39; Millin, Galerie Mythol.,
i. p. 77, Pl. 74, Nos. 304, 308.)</p>
<p>In the types of the Greek coins of Camarina, we find two interesting
representations of Lakes. On the obverse of one of these
we have, within a circle of the wave pattern, a male head, full
face, with dishevelled hair, and with a dolphin on either side; on
the reverse a female figure sailing on a swan, below which a wave
moulding, and above, a dolphin.</p>
<p>On another coin the swan type of the reverse is associated with
the youthful head of a river-god, inscribed “Hipparis” on the
obverse. On some smaller coins we have the swan flying over
the rippling waves, which are represented by the wave moulding.
When we examine the chart of Sicily, made by the Admiralty
survey, we find marked down at Camarina, a lake through which
the river Hipparis flows.</p>
<p>We can hardly doubt that the inhabitants of Camarina represented
both their river and their lakes on their coins. The swan
flying over the waves would represent a lake; the figure associated
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page427"></SPAN>427</span>
with it being no doubt the Aphrodite worshipped at that place:
the head, in a circle of wave pattern, may express that part of
the river which flows through the lake.</p>
<p>Fountains are usually represented by a stream of water issuing
from a lion’s head in the rock: see a vase (Gerhard, Auserl.
Vasenb., taf. <span class="scs">CXXXIV</span>.), where Hercules stands, receiving a
shower-bath from a hot spring at Thermin Sicily. On the
coins of Syracuse the fountain Arethusa is represented by a
female head seen to the front; the flowing lines of her dishevelled
hair suggest, though they do not directly imitate, the bubbling
action of the fresh-water spring; the sea in which it rises is
symbolized by the dolphins round the head. This type presents
a striking analogy with that of the Camarina head in the circle
of wave pattern described above.</p>
<p>These are the principal modes of representing water in Greek
mythography. In the art of the Roman period, the same kind
of figurative and symbolic language is employed, but there is a
constant tendency to multiply accessories and details, as we have
shown in the later representations of harbors and river-gods cited
above. In these crowded compositions the eye is fatigued and
distracted by the quantity it has to examine; the language of art
becomes more copious but less terse and emphatic, and addresses
itself to minds far less intelligent than the refined critics who
were the contemporaries of Phidias.</p>
<p>Rivers in Roman art are usually represented by reclining
male figures, generally bearded, holding reeds or other plants in
their hands, and leaning on urns from which water is flowing.
On the coins of many Syrian cities, struck in imperial times, the
city is represented by a turreted female figure seated on rocks,
and resting her feet on the shoulder of a youthful male figure,
who looks up in her face, stretching out his arms, and who is
sunk in the ground as high as the waist. See M�ller (Denkm�ler
d. A. Kunst, i., taf. 49, No. 220) for a group of this kind in
the Vatican, and several similar designs on coins.</p>
<p>On the column of Trajan there occur many rude representations
of the Danube, and other rivers crossed by the Romans in
their military expeditions. The water is imitated by sculptured
wavy lines, in which boats are placed. In one scene (Bartoli,
Colonna Trajana, Tav. 4) this rude conventional imitation is
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page428"></SPAN>428</span>
combined with a figure. In a recess in the river bank is a reclining
river-god, terminating at the waist. This is either meant
for a statue which was really placed on the bank of the river,
and which therefore marks some particular locality, or we have
here figurative representation blended with conventional imitation.</p>
<p>On the column of Antoninus (Bartoli, Colon. Anton., Tav.
15) a storm of rain is represented by the head of Jupiter Pluvius,
who has a vast outspread beard flowing in long tresses. In the
Townley collection, in the British Museum, is a Roman helmet
found at Ribchester in Lancashire, with a mask or vizor attached.
The helmet is richly embossed with figures in a battle scene;
round the brow is a row of turrets; the hair in the forehead is so
treated as to give the idea of waves washing the base of the
turrets. This head is perhaps a figurative representation of a
town girt with fortifications and a moat, near which some great
battle was fought. It is engraved (Vetusta Monum. of Soc. Ant.
London, iv., Pl. 1-4).</p>
<p>In the Galeria at Florence is a group in alto relievo (Gori,
Inscript. Ant. Flor. 1727, p. 76, Tab. 14) of three female
figures, one of whom is certainly Demeter Kourotrophos, or the
earth; another, Thetis, or the sea; the centre of the three seems
to represent Aphrodite associated, as on the coins of Camarina,
with the element of fresh water.</p>
<p>This figure is seated on a swan, and holds over her head an
arched veil. Her hair is bound with reeds; above her veil grows
a tall water plant, and below the swan other water plants, and a
stork seated on a <i>hydria</i>, or pitcher, from which water is flowing.
The swan, the stork, the water plants, and the <i>hydria</i> must all
be regarded as symbols of fresh water, the latter emblem being
introduced to show that the element is fit for the use of man.</p>
<p>Fountains in Roman art are generally personified as figures
of nymphs reclining with urns, or standing holding before them
a large shell.</p>
<p>One of the latest representations of water in ancient art is
the mosaic of Palestrina (Barth�lemy, in Bartoli, Peint. Antiques)
which may be described as a kind of rude panorama of
some district of Upper Egypt, a bird’s-eye view, half man, half
picture, in which the details are neither adjusted to a scale, nor
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page429"></SPAN>429</span>
drawn according to perspective, but crowded together, as they
would be in an ancient bas-relief.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_22"></SPAN>22. ARABIAN ORNAMENTATION.</h5>
<p>I do not mean what I have here said of the Inventive power
of the Arab to be understood as in the least applying to the detestable
ornamentation of the Alhambra.<SPAN name="FnAnchor_105" href="#Footnote_105"><span class="sp">105</span></SPAN> The Alhambra is no
more characteristic of Arab work, than Milan Cathedral is of
Gothic: it is a late building, a work of the Spanish dynasty in
its last decline, and its ornamentation is fit for nothing but to
be transferred to patterns of carpets or bindings of books, together
with their marbling, and mottling, and other mechanical
recommendations. The Alhambra ornament has of late been
largely used in shop-fronts, to the no small detriment of Regent
Street and Oxford Street.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_23"></SPAN>23. VARIETIES OF CHAMFER.</h5>
<p>Let B A C, <SPAN href="#fig_72">Fig. LXXII.</SPAN>, be the original angle of the wall.
Inscribe within it a circle, <i>p</i> Q N <i>p</i>, of the size of the bead
required, touching A B, A C, in <i>p</i>, <i>p</i>; join <i>p</i>, <i>p</i>, and draw B C
parallel to it, touching the circle.</p>
<p>Then the lines B C, <i>p p</i> are the limits of the possible chamfers
constructed with curves struck either from centre A, as the
line Q <i>q</i>, N <i>d</i>, <i>r u</i>, <i>g c</i>, &c., or from any other point chosen as a
centre in the direction Q A produced: and also of all chamfers
in straight lines, as <i>a b</i>, <i>e f</i>. There are, of course, an infinite
number of chamfers to be struck between B C and <i>p p</i>, from
every point in Q A produced to infinity; thus we have infinity
multiplied into infinity to express the number of possible chamfers
of this species, which are peculiarly Italian chamfers; together
with another singly infinite group of the straight chamfers,
<i>a b</i>, <i>e f</i>, &c., of which the one formed by the line <i>a b</i>,
passing through the centre of the circle, is the universal early
Gothic chamfer of Venice.</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page430"></SPAN>430</span></p>
<p>Again. Either on the line A C, or on any other lines A <i>l</i> or
A <i>m</i>, radiating from A, any number of centres may be taken,
from which, with any radii not greater than the distance between
such points and Q, an infinite number of curves may be
struck, such as <i>t u</i>, <i>r s</i>, N <i>n</i> (all which are here struck from
centres on the line A C). These lines represent the great class
of the northern chamfers, of which the number is infinity
raised to its fourth power, but of which the curve N <i>n</i> (for
northern) represents the average condition; the shallower chamfers
of the same group, <i>r s</i>, <i>t u</i>, &c., occurring often in Italy.
The lines <i>r u</i>, <i>t u</i>, and <i>a b</i> may be taken approximating to the
most frequent conditions of the southern chamfer.</p>
<table class="nobctr" style="clear: both; " summary="Illustration">
<tr>
<td class="caption1">Fig. LXXII.</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="figcenter2">
<SPAN name="fig_72"><ANTIMG src="images/img430.jpg" width-obs="500" height-obs="427" alt="Fig. LXXII." title="Fig. LXXII." /></SPAN></td>
</tr>
</table>
<p>It is evident that the chords of any of these curves will give
a relative group of rectilinear chamfers, occurring both in the
North and South; but the rectilinear chamfers, I think, invariably
fall within the line Q C, and are either parallel with it, or
inclined to A C at an angle greater than A C Q, and often perpendicular
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page431"></SPAN>431</span>
to it; but never inclined to it at an angle less than
A C Q.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_24"></SPAN>24. RENAISSANCE BASES.</h5>
<p>The following extract from my note-book refers also to some
features of late decoration of shafts.</p>
<p>“The Scuola di San Rocco is one of the most interesting
examples of Renaissance work in Venice. Its fluted pillars are
surrounded each by a wreath, one of vine, another of laurel,
another of oak, not indeed arranged with the fantasticism of
early Gothic; but, especially the laurel, reminding one strongly
of the laurel sprays, powerful as well as beautiful, of Veronese
and Tintoret. Their stems are curiously and richly interlaced—the
last vestige of the Byzantine wreathed work—and the
vine-leaves are ribbed on the surfaces, I think, nearly as finely as
those of the Noah,<SPAN name="FnAnchor_106" href="#Footnote_106"><span class="sp">106</span></SPAN> though more injured by time. The capitals
are far the richest Renaissance in Venice, less corrupt and more
masculine in plan, than any other, and truly suggestive of support,
though of course showing the tendency to error in this
respect; and finally, at the angles of the pure Attic bases, on
the square plinth, are set couchant animals; one, an elephant
four inches high, very curiously and cleverly cut, and all these
details worked with a spirit, finish, fancy, and affection quite
worthy of the middle ages. But they have all the marked fault
of being utterly detached from the architecture. The wreaths
round the columns look as if they would drop off the next
moment, and the animals at the bases produce exactly the effect
of mice who had got there by accident: one feels them ridiculously
diminutive, and utterly useless.”</p>
<p>The effect of diminutiveness is, I think, chiefly owing to
there being no other groups of figures near them, to accustom
the eye to the proportion, and to the needless choice of the
largest animals, elephants, bears, and lions, to occupy a position
so completely insignificant, and to be expressed on so contemptible
a scale,—not in a bas-relief or pictorial piece of sculpture,
but as independent figures. The whole building is a most
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page432"></SPAN>432</span>
curious illustration of the appointed fate of the Renaissance
architects,—to caricature whatever they imitated, and misapply
whatever they learned.</p>
<h5><SPAN name="app_25"></SPAN>25. ROMANIST DECORATION OF BASES.</h5>
<p>I have spoken above (<SPAN href="#app_12">Appendix 12</SPAN>) of the way in which the
Roman Catholic priests everywhere suffer their churches to be
desecrated. But the worst instances I ever saw of sacrilege and
brutality, daily permitted in the face of all men, were the uses
to which the noble base of St. Mark’s was put, when I was last
in Venice. Portions of nearly all cathedrals may be found
abandoned to neglect; but this base of St. Mark’s is in no
obscure position. Full fronting the western sun—crossing the
whole breadth of St. Mark’s Place—the termination of the most
noble square in the world—the centre of the most noble city—its
purple marbles were, in the winter of 1849, the customary
<i>gambling tables</i> of the idle children of Venice; and the parts
which flank the Great Entrance, that very entrance where
“Barbarossa flung his mantle off,” were the counters of a common
bazaar for children’s toys, carts, dolls, and small pewter
spoons and dishes, German caricatures and books of the Opera,
mixed with those of the offices of religion; the caricatures being
fastened with twine round the porphyry shafts of the church.
One Sunday, the 24th of February, 1850, the book-stall being
somewhat more richly laid out than usual, I noted down the
titles of a few of the books in the order in which they lay, and I
give them below. The irony conveyed by the juxtaposition of
the three in Italics appears too shrewd to be accidental; but the
fact was actually so.</p>
<p>Along the edge of the white plinth were a row of two kinds
of books,</p>
<p class="l1">Officium BeatVirg. M.; and Officium Hebdomad�
sanct�, juxta Formam Missalis et Breviarii Romani
sub Urbano VIII. correcti.</p>
<p>Behind these lay, side by side, the following:</p>
<p class="l1">Don Desiderio. Dramma Giocoso per Musica.</p>
<p class="l1">Breve Esposizione della Carattere di vera Religione.</p>
<p>On the top of this latter, keeping its leaves open,</p>
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page433"></SPAN>433</span></p>
<p class="l1">La Figlia del Reggimento. Melodramma comica.</p>
<p class="l1"><i>Carteggio di Madama la Marchesa di Pompadour, ossia raccolta di Lettere scritte della Medesima.</i></p>
<p class="l1"><i>Istruzioni di morale Condotta per le Figlie.</i></p>
<p class="l1"><i>Francesca di Rimini. Dramma per Musica.</i></p>
<p>Then, a little farther on, after a mass of plays:—</p>
<p class="l1">Orazioni a Gesu Nazareno e a Maria addolorata.</p>
<p class="l1">Semiramide; Melodramma tragico da rappresentarsi nel Gran Teatro il Fenice.</p>
<p class="l1">Modo di orare per l’Acquisto del S. Giubileo, conceduto a tutto il Mondo Cattolico da S. S. Gregorio XVI.</p>
<p class="l1">Le due illustre Rivali, Melodramma in Tre Atti, da <span class="correction" title="space between 'rappresent'
and 'arsi' removed">rappresentarsi</span> nel nuovo Gran Teatro il Fenice.</p>
<p class="l1">Il Cristiano secondo il Cuore di Gesu, per la Pratica delle sue Virtu.</p>
<p class="l1">Traduzione <span class="correction" title="corrected from 'del'">dell</span>’ Idioma Italiana.</p>
<p class="l1">La chiava Chinese; Commedia del Sig. Abate Pietro Chiari.</p>
<p class="l1">La Pelarina; Intermezzo de Tre Parti per Musica.</p>
<p class="l1">Il Cavaliero e la Dama; Commedia in Tre Atti in Prosa.</p>
<p>I leave these facts without comment. But this being the
last piece of Appendix I have to add to the present volume, I
would desire to close its pages with a question to my readers—a
statistical question, which, I doubt not, is being accurately
determined for us all elsewhere, and which, therefore, it seems
to me, our time would not be wasted in determining for ourselves.</p>
<p>There has now been peace between England and the continental
powers about thirty-five years, and during that period the
English have visited the continent at the rate of many thousands
a year, staying there, I suppose, on the average, each two or
three months; nor these an inferior kind of English, but the
kind which ought to be the best—the noblest born, the best
taught, the richest in time and money, having more leisure,
knowledge, and power than any other portion of the nation.
These, we might suppose, beholding, as they travelled, the condition
of the states in which the Papal religion is professed, and
being, at the same time, the most enlightened section of a great
Protestant nation, would have been animated with some desire
<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="page434"></SPAN>434</span>
to dissipate the Romanist errors, and to communicate to others
the better knowledge which they possessed themselves. I doubt
not but that He who gave peace upon the earth, and gave it by
the hand of England, expected this much of her, and has
watched every one of the millions of her travellers as they crossed
the sea, and kept count for him of his travelling expenses, and
of their distribution, in a manner of which neither the traveller
nor his courier were at all informed. I doubt not, I say, but
that such accounts have been literally kept for all of us, and
that a day will come when they will be made clearly legible to
us, and when we shall see added together, on one side of the
account book, a great sum, the certain portion, whatever it may
be, of this thirty-five years’ spendings of the rich English,
accounted for in this manner:—</p>
<p>To wooden spoons, nut-crackers, and jewellery, bought at
Geneva, and elsewhere among the Alps, so much; to shell
cameos and bits of mosaic bought at Rome, so much; to coral
horns and lava brooches bought at Naples, so much; to glass
beads at Venice, and gold filigree at Genoa, so much; to pictures,
and statues, and ornaments, everywhere, so much; to avant-couriers
and extra post-horses, for show and magnificence, so
much; to great entertainments and good places for seeing sights,
so much; to ball-dresses and general vanities, so much. This, I
say, will be the sum on one side of the book; and on the other
will be <span class="correction" title="originally 'written,'">written:</span></p>
<p>To the struggling Protestant Churches of France, Switzerland,
and Piedmont, so much.</p>
<p>Had we not better do this piece of statistics for ourselves, in
time?</p>
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