THE LAMP OF MEMORY.
I. Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with
peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary fulness
of joy or 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ranges are alike withdrawn.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 forests; 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,
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-colored 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 a
fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the
green river gliding and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam
globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a
scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its own
secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden
blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavored, in order
more strictly to arrive at the sources of its impressiveness, to imagine
it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New
Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its
music[15]; 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 colors of human endurance, valor, and virtue; and the crests of the
sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship,
because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux and
the four-square keep of Granson.
II. It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred
influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most
serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but
we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history how lifeless all
imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the
uncorrupted marble bears! how many pages of doubtful record might we not
often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the
old Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two
strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture;
and the latter in some sort includes the former, and is mightier in its
reality; it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt,
but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their
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.
III. 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 honorably, they would be grieved at
the close of them to think that the place of their earthly abode, which
had seen, and seemed almost to sympathise in all their honor, their
gladness, or their suffering,--that this, with all the record it bare of
them, and all of 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 heart 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'
honor, 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 formalised minuteness, alike without
difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar--not merely
with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for
a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of
our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus
loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and
unhonored 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.
IV. 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 dishonored 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
have 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.
V. I look to this spirit of honorable, 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 stories
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. epine_; it has also only a ground floor and two
stories, 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 cornucopiae. 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.
VI. I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and
built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within
and without; with what degree of likeness to each other in style and
manner, I will say presently, under another head; 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 Unglueck und Gefahren,
Und es in Segen lassen stehn
Auf der Reise durch diese Jammerzeit
Nach dem himmlischen Paradiese,
Wo alle Frommen wohnen,
Da wird Gott sie belohnen
Mit der Friedenskrone
Zu alle Ewigkeit."
VII. 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
bas-reliefs. Better the rudest work that tells a story or records a
fact, than the richest without meaning. There should not be a single
ornament put upon great civic buildings, without some intellectual
intention. Actual representation of history has in modern times been
checked by a difficulty, mean indeed, but steadfast: that of
unmanageable costume; 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
symbolisation of Abstract Justice; above it is a sculpture of the
Judgment of Solomon, remarkable for a beautiful subjection in its
treatment to its decorative purpose. The figures, if the subject had
been entirely composed of them, would have awkwardly interrupted 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 (Plate V.), and then come a
series representing, first the various fruits, then the national
costumes, and then the animals of the various countries subject to
Venetian rule.
VIII. Now, not to speak of any more important public building, let us
imagine our own India House adorned in this way, by historical or
symbolical sculpture: massively built in the first place; then chased
with bas-reliefs of our Indian battles, and fretted with carvings of
Oriental foliage, or inlaid with Oriental stones; and the more important
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.
IX. The benevolent regards and purposes of men in masses seldom can be
supposed to extend beyond their own generation. They may look to
posterity as an audience, may hope for its attention, and labor for its
praise: they may trust to its recognition of unacknowledged merit, and
demand its justice for contemporary wrong. But all this is mere
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 recognised
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 labor 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 labored
for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success. Men
cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those who
come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever
sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the
grave.
X. Nor is there, indeed, any present loss, in such respect, for
futurity. Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true
magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far
sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other
attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there
is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test.
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 labor and wrought substance of them, "See! this our
fathers did for us." For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is
not in its stones, or 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 color,
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.
XI. 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." It is of some importance to
our present purpose to determine the true meaning of this expression, as
it is now generally used; for there is a principle to be developed from
that use which, while it has occultly been the ground of much that is
true and just in our judgment of art, has never been so far understood
as to become definitely serviceable. Probably no word in the language
(exclusive of theological expressions), has been the subject of so
frequent or so prolonged dispute; yet none remained more vague in their
acceptance, and it seems to me to be a matter of no small interest to
investigate the essence of that idea which all feel, and (to appearance)
with respect to similar things, and yet which every attempt to define
has, as I believe, ended either in mere enumeration of the effects and
objects to which the term has been attached, or else in attempts at
abstraction more palpably nugatory than any which have disgraced
metaphysical investigation on other subjects. A recent critic on Art,
for instance, has gravely advanced the theory that the essence of the
picturesque consists in the expression of "universal decay." It would be
curious to see the result of an attempt to illustrate this idea of the
picturesque, in a painting of dead flowers and decayed fruit, and
equally curious to trace the steps of any reasoning which, on such a
theory, should account for the picturesqueness of an ass colt as opposed
to a horse foal. But there is much excuse for even the most utter
failure in reasonings of this kind, since the subject is, indeed, one
of the most obscure of all that may legitimately be submitted to human
reason; and the idea is itself so varied in the minds of different men,
according to their subjects of study, that no definition can be expected
to embrace more than a certain number of its infinitely multiplied
forms.
XII. That peculiar character, however, which separates the picturesque
from the characters of subject belonging to the higher walks of art (and
this is all that is necessary for our present purpose to define), may be
shortly and decisively expressed. Picturesqueness, in this sense, is
_Parasitical Sublimity_. Of course all sublimity, as well as all beauty,
is, in the simple etymological sense, picturesque, that is to say, fit
to become the subject of a picture; and all sublimity is, even in the
peculiar sense which I am endeavoring to develope, picturesque, as
opposed to beauty; that is to say, there is more picturesqueness in the
subject of Michael Angelo than of Perugino, in proportion to the
prevalence of the sublime element over the beautiful. But that
character, of which the extreme pursuit is generally admitted to be
degrading to art, is _parasitical_ sublimity; _i.e._, a sublimity
dependent on the accidents, or on the least essential characters, of the
objects to which it belongs; and the picturesque is _developed
distinctively exactly in proportion to the distance from the centre of
thought of those points of character in which the sublimity is found_.
Two ideas, therefore, are essential to picturesqueness,--the first, that
of sublimity (for pure beauty is not picturesque at all, and becomes so
only as the sublime element mixes with it), and the second, the
subordinate or parasitical position of that sublimity. Of course,
therefore, whatever characters of line or shade or expression are
productive of sublimity, will become productive of picturesqueness; what
these characters are I shall endeavor hereafter to show at length; but,
among those which are generally acknowledged, I may name angular and
broken lines, vigorous oppositions of light and shadow, and grave, deep,
or boldly contrasted color; and all these are in a still higher degree
effective, when, by resemblance or association, they remind us of
objects on which a true and essential sublimity exists, as of rocks or
mountains, or stormy clouds or waves. Now if these characters, or any
others of a higher and more abstract sublimity, be found in the very
heart and substance of what we contemplate, as the sublimity of Michael
Angelo depends on the expression of mental character in his figures far
more than even on the noble lines of their arrangement, the art which
represents such characters cannot be properly called picturesque: but,
if they be found in the accidental or external qualities, the
distinctive picturesque will be the result.
XIII. Thus, in the treatment of the features of the human face by
Francia or Angelico, the shadows are employed only to make the contours
of the features thoroughly felt; and to those features themselves the
mind of the observer is exclusively directed (that is to say, to the
essential characters of the thing represented). All power and all
sublimity rest on these; the shadows are used only for the sake of the
features. On the contrary, by Rembrandt, Salvator, or Caravaggio, the
features are used _for the sake of the shadows_; and the attention is
directed, and the power of the painter addressed to characters of
accidental light and shade cast across or around those features. In the
case of Rembrandt there is often an essential sublimity in invention and
expression besides, and always a high degree of it in the light and
shade itself; but it is for the most part parasitical or engrafted
sublimity as regards the subject of the painting, and, just so far,
picturesque.
XIV. Again, in the management of the sculptures of the Parthenon, shadow
is frequently employed as a dark field on which the forms are drawn.
This is visibly the case in the metopes, and must have been nearly as
much so in the pediment. But the use of that shadow is entirely to show
the confines of the figures; and it is to _their lines_, and not to the
shapes of the shadows behind them, that the art and the eye are
addressed. The figures themselves are conceived as much as possible in
full light, aided by bright reflections; they are drawn exactly as, on
vases, white figures on a dark ground: and the sculptors have dispensed
with, or even struggled to avoid, all shadows which were not absolutely
necessary to the explaining of the form. On the contrary, in Gothic
sculpture, the shadow becomes itself a subject of thought. It is
considered as a dark color, to be arranged in certain agreeable masses;
the figures are very frequently made even subordinate to the placing of
its divisions: and their costume is enriched at the expense of the forms
underneath, in order to increase the complexity and variety of the
points of shade. There are thus, both in sculpture and painting, two, in
some sort, opposite schools, of which the one follows for its subject
the essential forms of things, and the other the accidental lights and
shades upon them. There are various degrees of their contrariety: middle
steps, as in the works of Correggio, and all degrees of nobility and of
degradation in the several manners: but the one is always recognised as
the pure, and the other as the picturesque school. Portions of
picturesque treatment will be found in Greek work, and of pure and
unpicturesque in Gothic; and in both there are countless instances, as
pre-eminently in the works of Michael Angelo, in which shadows become
valuable as media of expression, and therefore take rank among essential
characteristics. Into these multitudinous distinctions and exceptions I
cannot now enter, desiring only to prove the broad applicability of the
general definition.
XV. Again, the distinction will be found to exist, not only between
forms and shades as subjects of choice, but between essential and
inessential forms. One of the chief distinctions between the dramatic
and picturesque schools of sculpture is found in the treatment of the
hair. By the artists of the time of Pericles it was considered as an
excrescence,[16] indicated by few and rude lines, and subordinated in
every particular to the principality of the features and person. How
completely this was an artistical, not a national idea, it is
unnecessary to prove. We need but remember the employment of the
Lacedaemonians, reported by the Persian spy on the evening before the
battle of Thermopylae, or glance at any Homeric description of ideal
form, to see how purely _sculpturesque_ was the law which reduced the
markings of the hair, lest, under the necessary disadvantages of
material, they should interfere with the distinctness of the personal
forms. On the contrary, in later sculpture, the hair receives almost the
principal care of the workman; and while the features and limbs are
clumsily and bluntly executed, the hair is curled and twisted, cut into
bold and shadowy projections, and arranged in masses elaborately
ornamental: there is true sublimity in the lines and the chiaroscuro of
these masses, but it is, as regards the creature represented,
parasitical, and therefore picturesque. In the same sense we may
understand the application of the term to modern animal painting,
distinguished as it has been by peculiar attention to the colors,
lustre, and texture of skin; nor is it in art alone that the definition
will hold. In animals themselves, when their sublimity depends upon
their muscular forms or motions, or necessary and principal attributes,
as perhaps more than all others in the horse, we do not call them
picturesque, but consider them as peculiarly fit to be associated with
pure historical subject. Exactly in proportion as their character of
sublimity passes into excrescences;--into mane and beard as in the lion,
into horns as in the stag, into shaggy hide as in the instance above
given of the ass colt, into variegation as in the zebra, or into
plumage,--they become picturesque, and are so in art exactly in
proportion to the prominence of these excrescential characters. It may
often be most expedient that they should be prominent; often there is in
them the highest degree of majesty, as in those of the leopard and boar;
and in the hands of men like Tintoret and Rubens, such attributes become
means of deepening the very highest and most ideal impressions. But the
picturesque direction of their thoughts is always distinctly
recognizable, as clinging to the surface, to the less essential
character, and as developing out of this a sublimity different from that
of the creature itself; a sublimity which is, in a sort, common to all
the objects of creation, and the same in its constituent elements,
whether it be sought in the clefts and folds of shaggy hair, or in the
chasms and rents of rocks, or in the hanging of thickets or hill sides,
or in the alternations of gaiety and gloom in the variegation of the
shell, the plume, or the cloud.
XVI. 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 color and form which are universally beloved by the eye
of man. So far as this is done, to the extinction of the true characters
of the architecture, it is picturesque, and the artist who looks to the
stem of the ivy instead of the shaft of the pillar, is carrying out in
more daring freedom the debased sculptor's choice of the hair instead of
the countenance. But so far as it can be rendered consistent with the
inherent character, the picturesque or extraneous sublimity of
architecture has just this of nobler function in it than that of any
other object whatsoever, that it is an exponent of age, of that in
which, as has been said, the greatest glory of a 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 character; 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.
XVII. It is not my purpose to enter into any of the questions which the
application of this principle involves. They are of too great interest
and 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.
XVIII. 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 14, 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 labored, 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.
XIX. Do not let us talk then of restoration. The thing is a Lie from
beginning to end. You may make a model of a building as you may of a
corpse, and your model may have the shell of the old walls within it as
your cast might have the skeleton, with what advantage I neither see nor
care; but 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 dishonoring and false
substitute deprive it of the funeral offices of memory.
XX. 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 labored for, the praise of achievement or the
expression of religious feeling, or whatsoever else it might be which in
those buildings they intended to be permanent, we have no right to
obliterate. What we have ourselves built, we are at liberty to throw
down; but what other men gave their strength, and wealth, and life to
accomplish, their right over does not pass away with their death; still
less is the right to the use of what they have left vested in us only.
It belongs to all their successors. It may hereafter be a subject of
sorrow, or a cause of injury, to millions, that we have consulted our
present convenience by casting down such buildings as we choose to
dispense with. That sorrow, that loss we have no right to inflict. Did
the cathedral of Avranches belong 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 exertions, 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 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.