rule, in having its principal decoration at the top; but it is on a
scale of perfect power and effectiveness; while in the base modern
Gothic of Milan Cathedral the statues are cut delicately everywhere, and
the builders think it a merit that the visitor must climb to the roof
before he can see them; and our modern Greek and Italian architecture
reaches the utmost pitch of absurdity by placing its fine work _at the
top only_. So that the general condition of the thing may be stated
boldly, as in the text; the principal ornaments of Gothic buildings
being in their porches, and of modern buildings, in their parapets.
68. Proposition 4th.--_Ornamentation should be natural_,--that is to
say, should in some degree express or adopt the beauty of natural
objects. This law, together with its ultimate reason, is expressed in
the statement given in the "Stones of Venice," vol. i. p. 211: "All
noble ornament is the expression of man's delight in God's work."
Observe, it does not hence follow that it should be an exact imitation
of, or endeavor in anywise to supersede, God's work. It may consist only
in a partial adoption of, and compliance with, the usual forms of
natural things, without at all going to the point of imitation; and it
is possible that the point of imitation may be closely reached by
ornaments, which nevertheless are entirely unfit for their place, and
are the signs only of a degraded ambition and an ignorant dexterity. Bad
decorators err as easily on the side of imitating nature, as of
forgetting her; and the question of the exact degree in which imitation
should be attempted under given circumstances, is one of the most subtle
and difficult in the whole range of criticism. I have elsewhere examined
it at some length, and have yet much to say about it; but here I can
only state briefly that the modes in which ornamentation _ought_ to fall
short of pure representation or imitation are in the main three,
namely:--
A. Conventionalism by cause of color.
B. Conventionalism by cause of inferiority.
C. Conventionalism by cause of means.
69. A. Conventionalism by cause of color.--Abstract color is not an
imitation of nature, but _is_ nature itself; that is to say, the
pleasure taken in blue or red, as such, considered as hues merely, is
the same, so long as the brilliancy of the hue is equal, whether it be
produced by the chemistry of man, or the chemistry of flowers, or the
chemistry of skies. We deal with color as with sound--so far ruling the
power of the light, as we rule the power of the air, producing beauty
not necessarily imitative, but sufficient in itself, so that, wherever
color is introduced, ornamentation may cease to represent natural
objects, and may consist in mere spots, or bands, or flamings, or any
other condition of arrangement favorable to the color.
70. B. Conventionalism by cause of inferiority.--In general,
ornamentation is set upon certain services, subjected to certain
systems, and confined within certain limits; so that its forms require
to be lowered or limited in accordance with the required relations. It
cannot be allowed to assume the free outlines, or to rise to the
perfection of imitation. Whole banks of flowers, for instance, cannot be
carved on cathedral fronts, but only narrow moldings, having some of the
characters of banks of flowers. Also, some ornaments require to be
subdued in value, that they may not interfere with the effect of others;
and all these necessary _inferiorities_ are attained by means of
departing from natural forms--it being an established law of human
admiration that what is most representative of nature shall, _caeteris
paribus_, be most attractive.
All the various kinds of ornamentation, consisting of spots, points,
twisted bands, abstract curves, and other such, owe their peculiar
character to this conventionalism "by cause of inferiority."
71. C. Conventionalism by cause of means.--In every branch of art, only
so much imitation of nature is to be admitted as is consistent with the
ease of the workman and the capacities of the material. Whatever
shortcomings are appointed (for they are more than permitted, they are
in such cases appointed, and meritorious) on account of the
untractableness of the material, come under the head of "conventionalism
by cause of means."
These conventionalities, then, being duly understood and accepted, in
modification of the general law, that law will be, that the glory of all
ornamentation consists in the adoption or imitation of the beauties of
natural objects, and that no work can be of high value which is not full
of this beauty. To this fourth proposition, modern architects have not
ventured to make any serious resistance. On the contrary, they seem to
be, little by little, gliding into an obscure perception of the fact,
that architecture, in most periods of the world, had sculpture upon it,
and that the said sculpture generally did represent something
intelligible. For instance, we find Mr. Huggins, of Liverpool, lately
lecturing upon architecture "in its relations to nature and the
intellect,"[25] and gravely informing his hearers, that "in the Middle
Ages angels were human figures;" that "some of the richest ornaments of
Solomon's temple were imitated from the palm and pomegranate," and that
"the Greeks followed the example of the Egyptians in selecting their
ornaments from the _plants_ of their own country." It is to be presumed
that the lecturer has never been in the Elgin or Egyptian room of the
British Museum, or it might have occurred to him that the Egyptians and
Greeks sometimes also selected their ornaments from the _men_ of their
own country. But we must not expect too much illumination at once; and
as we are told that, in conclusion, Mr. Huggins glanced at "the error of
architects in neglecting the fountain of wisdom thus open to them in
nature," we may expect in due time large results from the discovery of a
source of wisdom so unimagined.
[Footnote 25: See "The Builder," for January 12, 1854.]
72. Proposition 5th.--_Ornamentation should be thoughtful._ That is to
say, whenever you put a chisel or a pencil into a man's hand for the
purpose of enabling him to produce beauty, you are to expect of him that
he will think about what he is doing, and feel something about it, and
that the expression of this thought or feeling will be the most noble
quality in what he produces with his chisel or brush, inasmuch as the
power of thinking and feeling is the most noble thing in the man. It
will hence follow that as men do not commonly think the same thoughts
twice, you are not to require of them that they shall do the same thing
twice. You are to expect another and a different thought of them, as
soon as one thought has been well expressed.
73. Hence, therefore, it follows also that all noble ornamentation is
perpetually varied ornamentation, and that the moment you find
ornamentation unchanging, you may know that it is of a degraded kind or
degraded school. To this law, the only exceptions arise out of the uses
of monotony, as a contrast to change. Many subordinate architectural
moldings are severely alike in their various parts (though never unless
they are thoroughly subordinate, for monotony is always deathful
according to the degree of it), in order to set off change in others;
and a certain monotony or similarity must be introduced among the most
changeful ornaments in order to enhance and exhibit their own changes.
The truth of this proposition is self-evident; for no art can be noble
which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of
expressing thought which does not change. To require of an artist that
he should always reproduce the same picture, would be not one whit more
base than to require of a carver that he should always reproduce the
same sculpture.
The principle is perfectly clear and altogether incontrovertible. Apply
it to modern Greek architecture, and that architecture must cease to
exist; for it depends absolutely on copyism.
74. The sixth proposition above stated, that _Gothic ornamentation is
nobler than Greek ornamentation_, etc., is therefore sufficiently proved
by the acceptance of this one principle, no less important than
unassailable. Of all that I have to bring forward respecting
architecture, this is the one I have most at heart; for on the
acceptance of this depends the determination whether the workman shall
be a living, progressive, and happy human being, or whether he shall be
a mere machine, with its valves smoothed by heart's blood instead of
oil,--the most pitiable form of slave.
And it is with especial reference to the denial of this principle in
modern and Renaissance architecture, that I speak of that architecture
with a bitterness which appears to many readers extreme, while in
reality, so far from exaggerating, I have not grasp enough of thought
to embrace, the evils which have resulted among all the orders of
European society from the introduction of the Renaissance schools of
building, in turning away the eyes of the beholder from natural beauty,
and reducing the workman to the level of a machine. In the Gothic times,
writing, painting, carving, casting,--it mattered not what,--were all
works done by thoughtful and happy men; and the illumination of the
volume, and the carving and casting of wall and gate, employed, not
thousands, but millions, of true and noble _artists_ over all Christian
lands. Men in the same position are now left utterly without
intellectual power or pursuit, and, being unhappy in their work, they
rebel against it: hence one of the worst forms of Unchristian Socialism.
So again, there being now no nature or variety in architecture, the
multitude are not interested in it; therefore, for the present, they
have lost their taste for art altogether, so that you can no longer
trust sculpture within their reach. Consider the innumerable forms of
evil involved in the temper and taste of the existing populace of London
or Paris, as compared with the temper of the populace of Florence, when
the quarter of Santa Maria Novella received its title of "Joyful
Quarter," from the rejoicings of the multitude at getting a new picture
into their church, better than the old ones;--all this difference being
exclusively chargeable on the Renaissance architecture. And then,
farther, if we remember, not only the revolutionary ravage of sacred
architecture, but the immeasurably greater destruction effected by the
Renaissance builders and their satellites, wherever they came,
destruction so wide-spread that there is not a town in France or Italy
but it has to deplore the deliberate overthrow of more than half its
noblest monuments, in order to put up Greek porticoes or palaces in
their stead; adding also all the blame of the ignorance of the meaner
kind of men, operating in thousands of miserable abuses upon the
frescoes, books, and pictures, as the architects' hammers did on the
carved work, of the Middle Ages;[26] and, finally, if we examine the
influence which the luxury, and, still more, the heathenism, joined with
the essential dullness of these schools, have had on the upper class of
society, it will ultimately be found that no expressions are energetic
enough to describe, nor broad enough to embrace, the enormous moral
evils which have risen from them.
[Footnote 26: Nothing appears to me much more wonderful, than the
remorseless way in which the educated ignorance, even of the present
day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not
absolutely consistent with immediate convenience or economy. Putting
aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish
that people would only consider the steps and the weight of the
following very simple argument. You allow it is wrong to waste time,
that is, your own time; but then it must be still more wrong to waste
other people's; for you have some right to your own time, but none to
theirs. Well, then, if it is thus wrong to waste the time of the living,
it must be still more wrong to waste the time of the dead; for the
living can redeem their time, the dead cannot. But you waste the best of
the time of the dead when you destroy the works they have left you; for
to those works they gave the best of their time, intending them for
immortality.]
75. I omitted, in preparing the preceding lecture for the press, a
passage referring to this subject, because it appeared to me, in its
place, hardly explained by preceding statements. But I give it here
unaltered, as being, in sober earnest, but too weak to characterize the
tendencies of the "accursed" architecture of which it speaks.
"Accursed, I call it, with deliberate purpose. It needed but the
gathering up of a Babylonish garment to trouble Israel;--these marble
garments of the ancient idols of the Gentiles, how many have _they_
troubled! Gathered out of their ruins by the second Babylon,--gathered
by the Papal Church in the extremity of her sin;--raised up by her, not
when she was sending forth her champions to preach in the highway, and
pine in the desert, and perish in the fire, but in the very scarlet
fruitage and fullness of her guilt, when her priests vested themselves
not with purple only, but with blood, and bade the cups of their
feasting foam not with wine only, but with hemlock;--raised by the hands
of the Leos and the Borgias, raised first into that mighty temple where
the seven hills slope to the Tiber, that marks by its massy dome the
central spot, where Rome has reversed the words of Christ, and, as He
vivified the stone to the apostleship, she petrifies the apostleship
into the stumbling stone;--exalted there first as if to mark what work
it had to do, it went forth to paralyze or to pollute, and wherever it
came, the luster faded from the streets of our cities, the gray towers
and glorious arches of our abbeys fell by the river sides, the love of
nature was uprooted from the hearts of men, base luxuries and cruel
formalisms were festered and frozen into them from their youth; and at
last, where, from his fair Gothic chapel beside the Seine, the king St.
Louis had gone forth, followed by his thousands in the cause of Christ,
another king was dragged forth from the gates of his Renaissance
palace,[27] to die, by the hands of the thousands of his people gathered
in another crusade; or what shall that be called--whose sign was not the
cross, but the guillotine?"
[Footnote 27: The character of Renaissance architecture, and the spirit
which dictated its adoption, may be remembered as having been centered
and symbolized in the palace of Versailles; whose site was chosen by
Louis the Fourteenth, in order that from thence he might _not_ see St.
Denis, the burial-place of his family. The cost of the palace in
twenty-seven years is stated in "The Builder," for March 18th, 1854, to
have been L3,246,000 money of that period, equal to about seven millions
now (L900,000 having been expended in the year 1686 alone). The building
is thus notably illustrative of the two feelings which were stated in
the "Stones of Venice," to be peculiarly characteristic of the
Renaissance spirit, the Pride of State and Fear of Death. Compare the
horror of Louis the Fourteenth at the sight of the tower of St. Denis,
with the feeling which prompted the Scaligeri at Verona to set their
tombs within fifteen feet of their palace walls.]
76. I have not space here to pursue the subject farther, nor shall I be
able to write anything more respecting architecture for some time to
come. But in the meanwhile, I would most earnestly desire to leave with
the reader this one subject of thought--"_The Life of the Workman._" For
it is singular, and far more than singular, that among all the writers
who have attempted to examine the principles stated in the "Stones of
Venice," not one[28] has as yet made a single comment on what was
precisely and accurately the most important chapter in the whole book;
namely, the description of the nature of Gothic architecture, as
involving the liberty of the workman (vol. ii. ch. vi.). I had hoped
that whatever might be the prejudices of modern architects, there would
have been found some among them quicksighted enough to see the bearings
of this principle, and generous enough to support it. There has hitherto
stood forward not _one_.
[Footnote 28: An article in _Fraser's Magazine_, which has appeared
since these sheets were sent to press, forms a solitary exception.]
But my purpose must at last be accomplished for all this. The laborer
among the gravestones of our modern architecture must yet be raised up,
and become a living soul. Before he can be thus raised, the whole system
of Greek architecture, as practiced in the present day, must be
annihilated; but it _will_ be annihilated, and that speedily. For truth
and judgment are its declared opposites, and against these nothing ever
finally prevailed, or shall prevail.
LECTURE III.
TURNER AND HIS WORKS.
_Delivered November 15, 1853._
77. My object this evening is not so much to give you any account of the
works or the genius of the great painter whom we have so lately lost
(which it would require rather a year than an hour to do), as to give
you some idea of the position which his works hold with respect to the
landscape of other periods, and of the general condition and prospects
of the landscape art of the present day. I will not lose time in
prefatory remarks, as I have little enough at any rate, but will enter
abruptly on my subject.
78. You are all of you well aware that landscape seems hardly to have
exercised any strong influence, as such, on any pagan nation or pagan
artist. I have no time to enter into any details on this, of course,
most intricate and difficult subject; but I will only ask you to
observe, that wherever natural scenery is alluded to by the ancients, it
is either agriculturally, with the kind of feeling that a good Scotch
farmer has; sensually, in the enjoyment of sun or shade, cool winds or
sweet scents; fearfully, in a mere vulgar dread of rocks and desolate
places, as compared with the comfort of cities; or, finally,
superstitiously, in the personification or deification of natural
powers, generally with much degradation of their impressiveness, as in
the paltry fables of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from AEolus, and
of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil.[29]
Of course, you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher
sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, AEschylus, Aristophanes, and
Virgil. Homer, though in the epithets he applies to landscape always
thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet for rocks, seas, and trees,
from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest
interest in anything of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers,
the absence of sensation on these subjects is singularly painful. For
instance, in that, to my mind, most disgusting of all so-called poems,
the Journey to Brundusium, you remember that Horace takes exactly as
much interest in the scenery he is passing through as Sancho Panza would
have done.
[Footnote 29: Of course I do not mean by calling these fables "paltry,"
to dispute their neatness, ingenuity, or moral depth; but only their
want of apprehension of the extent and awfulness of the phenomena
introduced. So also, in denying Homer's interest in nature, I do not
mean to deny his accuracy of observation, or his power of seizing on the
main points of landscape, but I deny the power of landscape over his
heart, unless when closely associated with, and altogether subordinate
to, some human interest.]
79. You will find, on the other hand, that the language of the Bible is
specifically distinguished from all other early literature, by its
delight in natural imagery; and that the dealings of God with His people
are calculated peculiarly to awaken this sensibility within them. Out of
the monotonous valley of Egypt they are instantly taken into the midst
of the mightiest mountain scenery in the peninsula of Arabia; and that
scenery is associated in their minds with the immediate manifestation
and presence of the Divine Power; so that mountains forever afterwards
become invested with a peculiar sacredness in their minds: while their
descendants being placed in what was then one of the loveliest districts
upon the earth, full of glorious vegetation, bounded on one side by the
sea, on the north by "that goodly mountain" Lebanon, on the south and
east by deserts, whose barrenness enhanced by their contrast the sense
of the perfection of beauty in their own land, they became, by these
means, and by the touch of God's own hand upon their hearts, sensible to
the appeal of natural scenery in a way in which no other people were at
the time. And their literature is full of expressions, not only
testifying a vivid sense of the power of nature over man, but showing
that _sympathy with natural things themselves_, as if they had human
souls, which is the especial characteristic of true love of the works of
God. I intended to have insisted on this sympathy at greater length, but
I found, only two or three days ago, much of what I had to say to you
anticipated in a little book, unpretending, but full of interest, "The
Lamp and the Lantern," by Dr. James Hamilton; and I will therefore only
ask you to consider such expressions as that tender and glorious verse
in Isaiah, speaking of the cedars on the mountains as rejoicing over the
fall of the king of Assyria: "Yea, the fir trees rejoice at thee, and
the cedars of Lebanon, saying, Since _thou_ art gone down to the grave,
no feller is come up against us." See what sympathy there is here, as if
with the very hearts of the trees themselves. So also in the words of
Christ, in His personification of the lilies: "They toil not, neither do
they spin." Consider such expressions as, "The sea saw that, and fled.
Jordan was driven back. The mountains skipped like rams; and the little
hills like lambs." Try to find anything in profane writing like this;
and note farther that the whole book of Job appears to have been chiefly
written and placed in the inspired volume in order to show the value of
natural history, and its power on the human heart. I cannot pass by it
without pointing out the evidences of the beauty of the country that Job
inhabited.[30] Observe, first, it was an arable country. "The oxen were
plowing and the asses feeding beside them." It was a pastoral country:
his substance, besides camels and asses, was 7,000 sheep. It was a
mountain country, fed by streams descending from the high snows. "My
brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks
they pass away; which are blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the
snow is hid: What time they wax warm they vanish: when it is hot they
are consumed out of their place." Again: "If I wash myself with snow
water, and make my hands never so clean." Again: "Drought and heat
consume the snow waters." It was a rocky country, with forests and
verdure rooted in the rocks. "His branch shooteth forth in his garden;
his roots are wrapped about the heap, and seeth the place of stones."
Again: "Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field." It was a
place visited, like the valleys of Switzerland, by convulsions and falls
of mountains. "Surely the mountain falling cometh to nought, and the
rock is removed out of his place. The waters wear the stones; thou
washest away the things which grow out of the dust of the earth." "He
removeth the mountains and they know not: he overturneth them in his
anger." "He putteth forth his hand upon the rock: he overturneth the
mountains by the roots: he cutteth out rivers among the rocks." I have
not time to go farther into this; but you see Job's country was one like
your own, full of pleasant brooks and rivers, rushing among the rocks,
and of all other sweet and noble elements of landscape. The magnificent
allusions to natural scenery throughout the book are therefore
calculated to touch the heart to the end of time.
[Footnote 30: This passage, respecting the book of Job, was omitted in
the delivery of the Lecture, for want of time.]
80. Then at the central point of Jewish prosperity, you have the first
great naturalist the world ever saw, Solomon; not permitted, indeed, to
anticipate, in writing, the discoveries of modern times, but so gifted
as to show us that heavenly wisdom is manifested as much in the
knowledge of the hyssop that springeth out of the wall as in political
and philosophical speculation.