Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with
peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness
of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago,
near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt
the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura.
It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savageness,
of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be
manifested in the earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in the rise
of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those
mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly
broken along the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet
restrained; and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed
each other, like the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet
waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness
pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces and the stern
expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No
frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft
Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her
forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and
changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear
green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark
quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such
company of joyful flowers as I know not the like of among all the
blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming
forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all,
but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to
be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star,
closing every now and then into nebulae; and there was the oxalis,
troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie,[162] the
dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy
snow, and touched with ivy on the edges--ivy as light and lovely as the
vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in
sunny places; and in the more open ground, the vetch, and comfrey, and
mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the
wild strawberry, just a blossom or two all showered amidst the golden
softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on
the edge of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly
from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine
boughs; and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it
was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off
their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, and with the shadows
of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall
of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the
green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam
globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a
scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own
secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden
blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in
order more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to
imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New
Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its
music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the
boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had
been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory
of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from
things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those
ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the
deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of
the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper
worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of
Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.
It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence,
that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious
thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we
cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all
imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the
uncorrupted marble bears!--how many pages of doubtful record might we
not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition
of the old Babel builders was well directed for this world:[163] there
are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and
Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is
mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have
thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength
wrought, and their eyes beheld, all the days of their life. The age of
Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not
so that of Pericles: and the day is coming when we shall confess, that
we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her
sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And
if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy
in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength
to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two
duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is
impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the
day, historical; and, the second, to preserve, as the most precious of
inheritances, that of past ages.
It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be
said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming
memorial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and
domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view,
built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are
consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.
As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain
limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the
hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people
when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a
sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every
tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would
generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and
honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that
the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to
sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their
suffering,--that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all
material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp
of themselves upon--was to be swept away, as soon as there was room
made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no
affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children;
that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm
monument in the hearth and house to them; that all that they ever
treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted
them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear
this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear
doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men
indeed, their houses would be temples--temples which we should hardly
dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to
live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a
strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents
taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our
fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our
dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to
himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.
And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring
up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our
capital--upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered
wood and imitated stone--upon those gloomy rows of formalized
minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as
solitary as similar--not merely with the careless disgust of an
offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but
with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must
be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native
ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs
of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark
the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere
than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn;
when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and
live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the
comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and
the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ
only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy
openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of
earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of
stability without the luxury of change.
This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious,
and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their
hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have
dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true
universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede
the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household
God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's
dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its
ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question
of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and
with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic
buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties,
not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them
depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our
dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent
completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a
period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be
supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of
local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every
possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate
rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments
at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as
long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to
their children what they had been, and from what, if so it had been
permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may
have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which
does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small
habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of
contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.
I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-possession,
this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief
sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as
the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and
France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities depends, not
on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite
decoration of even the smallest tenements of their proud periods. The
most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice is a small house at the
head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with two storeys
above, three windows in the first, and two in the second. Many of the
most exquisite buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger
dimensions. One of the most interesting pieces of fifteenth-century
architecture in North Italy, is a small house in a back street, behind
the market-place of Vicenza; it bears date 1481, and the motto, _Il.
n'est. rose. sans. épine_; it has also only a ground floor and two
storeys, with three windows in each, separated by rich flower-work, and
with balconies, supported, the central one by an eagle with open wings,
the lateral ones by winged griffins standing on cornucopiæ. The idea
that a house must be large in order to be well built, is altogether of
modern growth, and is parallel with the idea, that no picture can be
historical, except of a size admitting figures larger than life.
I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and
built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within
and without; with what degree of likeness to each other in style and
manner, I will say presently, under another head;[164] but, at all
events, with such differences as might suit and express each man's
character and occupation, and partly his history. This right over the
house, I conceive, belongs to its first builder, and is to be respected
by his children; and it would be well that blank stones should be left
in places, to be inscribed with a summary of his life and of its
experience, raising thus the habitation into a kind of monument, and
developing, into more systematic instructiveness, that good custom
which was of old universal, and which still remains among some of the
Swiss and Germans, of acknowledging the grace of God's permission to
build and possess a quiet resting-place, in such sweet words as may
well close our speaking of these things. I have taken them from the
front of a cottage lately built among the green pastures which descend
from the village of Grindelwald to the lower glacier:--
Mit herzlichem Vertrauen
Hat Johannes Mooter und Maria Rubi
Dieses Haus bauen lassen.
Der liebe Gott woll uns bewahren
Vor allem Unglück und Gefahren,
Und es in Segen lassen stehn
Auf der Reise durch diese Jammerzeit
Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese,
Wo alle Frommen wohnen,
Da wird Gott sie belohnen
Mil der Friedenskrone
Zu alle Ewigkeit.[165]
In public buildings the historical purpose should be still more
definite. It is one of the advantages of Gothic architecture,--I use
the word Gothic in the most extended sense as broadly opposed to
classical,--that it admits of a richness of record altogether
unlimited. Its minute and multitudinous sculptural decorations afford
means of expressing, either symbolically or literally, all that need be
known of national feeling or achievement. More decoration will, indeed,
be usually required than can take so elevated a character; and much,
even in the most thoughtful periods, has been left to the freedom of
fancy, or suffered to consist of mere repetitions of some national
bearing or symbol. It is, however, generally unwise, even in mere
surface ornament, to surrender the power and privilege of variety which
the spirit of Gothic architecture admits; much more in important
features--capitals of columns or bosses, and string-courses, as of
course in all confessed has-reliefs. Better the rudest work that tells
a story or records a fact, than the richest without meaning. There
should not be a single ornament put upon great civic buildings, without
some intellectual intention. Actual representation of history has in
modern times been checked by a difficulty, mean indeed, but steadfast;
that of unmanageable costume: nevertheless, by a sufficiently bold
imaginative treatment, and frank use of symbols, all such obstacles may
be vanquished; not perhaps in the degree necessary to produce sculpture
in itself satisfactory, but at all events so as to enable it to become
a grand and expressive element of architectural composition. Take, for
example, the management of the capitals of the ducal palace at Venice.
History, as such, was indeed entrusted to the painters of its interior,
but every capital of its arcades was filled with meaning. The large
one, the corner stone of the whole, next the entrance, was devoted to
the symbolization of Abstract Justice; above it is a sculpture of the
Judgment of Solomon, remarkable for a beautiful subjection in its
treatment to its decorative purpose. The figures, if the subject had
been entirely composed of them, would have awkwardly interrupted the
line of the angle, and diminished its apparent strength; and therefore
in the midst of them, entirely without relation to them, and indeed
actually between the executioner and interceding mother, there rises
the ribbed trunk of a massy tree, which supports and continues the
shaft of the angle, and whose leaves above overshadow and enrich the
whole. The capital below bears among its leafage a throned figure of
Justice, Trajan doing justice to the widow, Aristotle "che die legge,"
and one or two other subjects now unintelligible from decay. The
capitals next in order represent the virtues and vices in succession,
as preservative or destructive of national peace and power, concluding
with Faith, with the inscription "Fides optima in Deo est." A figure is
seen on the opposite side of the capital, worshipping the sun. After
these, one or two capitals are fancifully decorated with birds, and
then come a series representing, first the various fruits, then the
national costumes, and then the animals of the various countries
subject to Venetian rule.
Now, not to speak of any more important public building, let us imagine
our own India House adorned in this way, by historical or symbolical
sculpture: massively built in the first place; then chased with
has-reliefs of our Indian battles, and fretted with carvings of
Oriental foliage, or inlaid with Oriental stones; and the more
important members of its decoration composed of groups of Indian life
and landscape, and prominently expressing the phantasms of Hindoo
worship in their subjection to the Cross. Would not one such work be
better than a thousand histories? If, however, we have not the
invention necessary for such efforts, or if, which is probably one of
the most noble excuses we can offer for our deficiency in such matters,
we have less pleasure in talking about ourselves, even in marble, than
the Continental nations, at least we have no excuse for any want of
care in the points which insure the building's endurance. And as this
question is one of great interest in its relations to the choice of
various modes of decoration, it will be necessary to enter into it at
some length.
The benevolent regards and purposes of men in masses seldom can be
supposed to extend beyond their own generation. They may look to
posterity as an audience, may hope for its attention, and labour for
its praise: they may trust to its recognition of unacknowledged merit,
and demand its justice for contemporary wrong. But all this is mere
selfishness, and does not involve the slightest regard to, or
consideration of, the interest of those by whose numbers we would fain
swell the circle of our flatterers, and by whose authority we would
gladly support our presently disputed claims. The idea of self-denial
for the sake of posterity, of practising present economy for the sake
of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may
live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations to
inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly
recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties;
nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our
intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but
the successors, of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our
life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come
after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation,
as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to
involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits
which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is
one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in
proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the
fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we
place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of
what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure
of our success. Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can
benefit those who come after them; and of all the pulpits from which
human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so
far as from the grave.
Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect for futurity.
Every human action gains in honour, in grace, in all true magnificence,
by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the
quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes,
separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no
action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.
Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it
not be for present delight, nor for present use alone; let it be such
work as our descendants will thank us for, and let us think, as we lay
stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held
sacred because our hands have touched them, and that men will say as
they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, "See! this our
fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is
not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in
that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious
sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls
that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in
their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the
transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through
the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties,
and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the
sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable,
connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half
constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations:
it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real
light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture; and it is not
until a building has assumed this character, till it has been entrusted
with the fame, and hallowed by the deeds of men, till its walls have
been witnesses of suffering, and its pillars rise out of the shadows of
death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than that of the
natural objects of the world around it, can be gifted with even so much
as these possess, of language and of life.
For that period, then, we must build; not, indeed, refusing to
ourselves the delight of present completion, nor hesitating to follow
such portions of character as may depend upon delicacy of execution to
the highest perfection of which they are capable, even although we may
know that in the course of years such details must perish; but taking
care that for work of this kind we sacrifice no enduring quality, and
that the building shall not depend for its impressiveness upon anything
that is perishable. This would, indeed, be the law of good composition
under any circumstances, the arrangement of the larger masses being
always a matter of greater importance than the treatment of the
smaller; but in architecture there is much in that very treatment which
is skilful or otherwise in proportion to its just regard to the
probable effects of time: and (which is still more to be considered)
there is a beauty in those effects themselves, which nothing else can
replace, and which it is our wisdom to consult and to desire. For
though, hitherto, we have been speaking of the sentiment of age only,
there is an actual beauty in the marks of it, such and so great as to
have become not unfrequently the subject of especial choice among
certain schools of art, and to have impressed upon those schools the
character usually and loosely expressed by the term "picturesque."....
Now, to return to our immediate subject, it so happens that, in
architecture, the superinduced and accidental beauty is most commonly
inconsistent with the preservation of original character, and the
picturesque is therefore sought in ruin, and supposed to consist in
decay. Whereas, even when so sought, it consists in the mere sublimity
of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation, which assimilate
the architecture with the work of Nature, and bestow upon it those
circumstances of colour and form which are universally beloved by the
eye of man. So far as this is done, to the extinction of the true
characters of the architecture, it is picturesque, and the artist who
looks to the stem of the ivy instead of the shaft of the pillar, is
carrying out in more daring freedom the debased sculptor's choice of
the hair instead of the countenance. But so far as it can be rendered
consistent with the inherent character, the picturesque or extraneous
sublimity of architecture has just this of nobler function in it than
that of any other object whatsoever, that it is an exponent of age, of
that in which, as has been said, the greatest glory of the building
consists; and, therefore, the external signs of this glory, having
power and purpose greater than any belonging to their mere sensible
beauty, may be considered as taking rank among pure and essential
characters; so essential to my mind, that I think a building cannot be
considered as in its prime until four or five centuries have passed
over it; and that the entire choice and arrangement of its details
should have reference to their appearance after that period, so that
none should be admitted which would suffer material injury either by
the weather-staining, or the mechanical degradation which the lapse of
such a period would necessitate.
It is not my purpose to enter into any of the questions which the
application of this principle involves. They are of too great interest
and complexity to be even touched upon within my present limits, but
this is broadly to be noticed, that those styles of architecture which
are picturesque in the sense above explained with respect to sculpture,
that is to say, whose decoration depends on the arrangement of points
of shade rather than on purity of outline, do not suffer, but commonly
gain in richness of effect when their details are partly worn away;
hence such styles, pre-eminently that of French Gothic, should always
be adopted when the materials to be employed are liable to degradation,
as brick, sandstone, or soft limestone; and styles in any degree
dependent on purity of line, as the Italian Gothic, must be practised
altogether in hard and undecomposing materials, granite, serpentine, or
crystalline marbles. There can be no doubt that the nature of the
accessible materials influenced the formation of both styles; and it
should still more authoritatively determine our choice of either.
It does not belong to my present plan to consider at length the second
head of duty of which I have above spoken; the preservation of the
architecture we possess: but a few words may be forgiven, as especially
necessary in modern times. Neither by the public, nor by those who have
the care of public monuments, is the true meaning of the word
_restoration_ understood. It means the most total destruction which a
building can suffer: a destruction out of which no remnants can be
gathered: a destruction accompanied with false description of the thing
destroyed. Do not let us deceive ourselves in this important matter; it
is _impossible_, as impossible as to raise the dead, to restore
anything that has ever been great or beautiful in architecture. That
which I have above insisted upon as the life of the whole, that spirit
which is given only by the hand and eye of the workman, never can be
recalled. Another spirit may be given by another time, and it is then a
new building; but the spirit of the dead workman cannot be summoned up,
and commanded to direct other hands, and other thoughts. And as for
direct and simple copying, it is palpably impossible. What copying can
there be of surfaces that have been worn half an inch down? The whole
finish of the work was in the half inch that is gone; if you attempt to
restore that finish, you do it conjecturally; if you copy what is left,
granting fidelity to be possible (and what care, or watchfulness, or
cost can secure it,) how is the new work better than the old? There was
yet in the old _some_ life, some mysterious suggestion of what it had
been, and of what it had lost; some sweetness in the gentle lines which
rain and sun had wrought. There can be none in the brute hardness of
the new carving. Look at the animals which I have given in Plate XIV.,
as an instance of living work, and suppose the markings of the scales
and hair once worn away, or the wrinkles of the brows, and who shall
ever restore them? The first step to restoration, (I have seen it, and
that again and again--seen it on the Baptistery of Pisa, seen it on
the Casa d'Oro at Venice, seen it on the Cathedral of Lisieux,) is to
dash the old work to pieces; the second is usually to put up the
cheapest and basest imitation which can escape detection, but in all
cases, however careful, and however laboured, an imitation still, a
cold model of such parts as _can_ be modelled, with conjectural
supplements; and my experience has as yet furnished me with only one
instance, that of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, in which even this,
the utmost degree of fidelity which is possible, has been attained, or
even attempted.[166]
Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from
beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a
corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as
your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see
nor care: but the old building is destroyed, and that more totally and
mercilessly than if it had sunk into a heap of dust, or melted into a
mass of clay: more has been gleaned out of desolated Nineveh than ever
will be out of re-built Milan. But, it is said, there may come a
necessity for restoration! Granted. Look the necessity full in the
face, and understand it on its own terms. It is a necessity for
destruction. Accept it as such, pull the building down, throw its
stones into neglected corners, make ballast of them, or mortar, if you
will; but do it honestly, and do not set up a Lie in their place. And
look that necessity in the face before it comes, and you may prevent
it. The principle of modern times, (a principle which, I believe, at
least in France, to be _systematically acted on by the masons_, in
order to find themselves work, as the abbey of St. Ouen was pulled down
by the magistrates of the town by way of giving work to some vagrants,)
is to neglect buildings first, and restore them afterwards. Take proper
care of your monuments, and you will not need to restore them. A few
sheets of lead put in time upon the roof, a few dead leaves and sticks
swept in time out of a water-course, will save both roof and walls from
ruin. Watch an old building with an anxious care; guard it as best you
may, and at _any_ cost, from every influence of dilapidation. Count its
stones as you would jewels of a crown; set watches about it as if at
the gates of a besieged city; bind it together with iron where it
loosens; stay it with timber where it declines; do not care about the
unsightliness of the aid: better a crutch than a lost limb; and do this
tenderly, and reverently, and continually, and many a generation will
still be born and pass away beneath its shadow. Its evil day must come
at last; but let it come declaredly and openly, and let no dishonouring
and false substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.
Of more wanton or ignorant ravage it is vain to speak; my words will
not reach those who commit them, and yet, be it heard or not, I must
not leave the truth unstated, that it is again no question of
expediency or feeling whether we shall preserve the buildings of past
times or not. _We have no right whatever to touch them_. They are not
ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the
generations of mankind who are to follow us. The dead have still their
right in them: that which they laboured for, the praise of achievement
or the expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be
which in those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no
right to obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to
throw down; but what other men gave their strength and wealth and life
to accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death;
still less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us
only. It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject
of sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted
our present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to
dispense with. That sorrow, that loss, we have no right to inflict. Did
the cathedral of Avranches[167] belong to the mob who destroyed it, any
more than it did to us, who walk in sorrow to and fro over its
foundation? Neither does any building whatever belong to those mobs who
do violence to it. For a mob it is, and must be always; it matters not
whether enraged, or in deliberate folly; whether countless, or sitting
in committees; the people who destroy anything causelessly are a mob,
and Architecture is always destroyed causelessly. A fair building is
necessarily worth the ground it stands upon, and will be so until
Central Africa and America shall have become as populous as Middlesex:
nor is any cause whatever valid as a ground for its destruction. If
ever valid, certainly not now, when the place both of the past and
future is too much usurped in our minds by the restless and
discontented present. The very quietness of nature is gradually
withdrawn from us; thousands who once in their necessarily prolonged
travel were subjected to an influence, from the silent sky and
slumbering fields, more effectual than known or confessed, now bear
with them even there the ceaseless fever of their life; and along the
iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the
fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All
vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the
central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow
bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds upon the
city gates. The only influence which can in any wise _there_ take the
place of that of the woods and fields, is the power of ancient
Architecture. Do not part with it for the sake of the formal square, or
of the fenced and planted walk, nor of the goodly street nor opened
quay. The pride of a city is not in these. Leave them to the crowd; but
remember that there will surely be some within the circuit of the
disquieted walls who would ask for some other spots than these wherein
to walk; for some other forms to meet their sight familiarly: like
him[168] who sat so often where the sun struck from the west to watch the
lines of the dome of Florence drawn on the deep sky, or like those, his
Hosts, who could bear daily to behold, from their palace chambers, the
places where their fathers lay at rest, at the meeting of the dark
streets of Verona.
[162] May-day processions in honour of the Virgin.
[163] _Genesis_ xi, 4.
[164] See pp. 225 ff.
[165] In heartfelt trust Johannes Mooter and Maria Rubi had this
house erected. May dear God shield us from all perils and
misfortune; and let His blessing rest upon it during the journey
through this wretched life up to heavenly Paradise where the pious
dwell. There will God reward them with the Crown of Peace to all
eternity.
[166] Baptistery of Pisa, circular, of marble, with dome two
hundred feet high, embellished with numerous columns, is a notable
work of the twelfth century. The pulpit is a masterpiece of Nicola
Pisano. Casa d'Oro at Venice is noted for its elegance. It was
built in the fourteenth century. The Cathedral of Lisieux dates
chiefly from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and contains
many works of art. The Palais de Justice is of the fifteenth
century. It was built for the Parliament of the Province.
[167] This cathedral, destroyed in 1799, was one of the most
beautiful in all Normandy.
[168] Dante.