Part 4 (1/2)
[Footnote 25: See ”The Builder,” for January 12, 1854]
72 Proposition 5th--_Ornahtful_ That is to say, whenever you put a chisel or a pencil into ahim to produce beauty, you are to expect of hi, and feel soht or feeling will be the most noble quality in what he produces with his chisel or brush, inas is thein the man It will hence follow that as hts twice, you are not to require of the twice You are to expect another and a different thought of theht has been well expressed
73 Hence, therefore, it follows also that all noble ornamentation is perpetually varied ornaing, you raded school To this law, the only exceptions arise out of the uses of e Many subordinate architectural h never unless they are thoroughly subordinate, for ree of it), in order to set off change in others; and a certain eful ornaes
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 saether 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 i forward respecting architecture, this is the one I have most at heart; for on the acceptance of this depends the deterressive, and happy hu, 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 erating, I have not grasp enough of thought to e all the orders of European society fro, in turning away the eyes of the beholder fro the work, painting, carving, casting,--it htful and happyand 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 for 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 for 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,” fro 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 ree of sacred architecture, but the ireater 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 bla in thousands of miserable abuses upon the frescoes, books, and pictures, as the architects' haes;[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 ultih to describe, nor broad enough to embrace, the enormous moral evils which have risen fro appears to me much more wonderful, than the renorance, even of the present day, will sweep away an ancient monument, if its preservation be not absolutely consistent with i aside all antiquarian considerations, and all artistical ones, I wish that people would only consider the steps and the weight of the following very si to waste time, that is, your own ti to waste other people's; for you have soht to your own ti to waste the ti to waste the ti 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 ti the the preceding lecture for the press, a passage referring to this subject, because it appeared tostate, 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 gararments 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 extre forth her chahway, 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 ine only, but with heias, raised first into that hty 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 apostleshi+p, she petrifies the apostleshi+p into the stu stone;--exalted there first as if to mark ork it had to do, it went forth to paralyze or to pollute, and wherever it caray 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, fro St
Louis had gone forth, followed by his thousands in the cause of Christ, another king was dragged forth froates 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,been centered and symbolized in the palace of Versailles; whose site was chosen by Louis the Fourteenth, in order that froht _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 3,246,000 money of that period, equal to about sevenbeen 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 Coht of the tower of St Denis, with the feeling which proeri 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 anythingarchitecture 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 Workular, that a all the writers who have attempted to examine the principles stated in the ”Stones of Venice,” not one[28] has as yet le comment on as 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 workht be the prejudices ofthes 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 purposethe gravestones of oursoul 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 judg ever finally prevailed, or shall prevail
LECTURE III
TURNER AND HIS WORKS
_Delivered Nove is not so enius of the great painter e 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 tih at any rate, but will enter abruptly on my subject
78 You are all of you well aware that landscape see 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 ar 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 radation of their i the winds in bags fro 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 Hoh 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 s of the kind; and in the mass of heathen writers, the absence of sensation on these subjects is singularly painful For instance, in that, toof all so-called poems, the Journey to Brundusium, you remember that Horace takes exactly as h as Sancho Panza would have done
[Footnote 29: Of course I do notthese fables ”paltry,”
to dispute their neatness, ingenuity, or moral depth; but only their want of apprehension of the extent and awfulness of the pheno 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 froery; and that the dealings of God with His people are calculated peculiarly to awaken this sensibility within theypt they are instantly taken into the htiest 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 theirplaced in as 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 s 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 syth, 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 theof 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 coainst 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 ra 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 hu 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 h snows ”My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass ahich are blackish by reason of the ice, and wherein the snow is hid: What time they arm they vanish: when it is hot they are consuain: ”If I wash ain: ”Drought and heat consume the snoaters” 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 ht, 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 er” ”He putteth forth his hand upon the rock: he overturneth thethe rocks” I have not tio farther into this; but you see Job's country was one like your own, full of pleasant brooks and rivers, rushi+ng a the rocks, and of all other sweet and noble elenificent allusions to natural scenery throughout the book are therefore calculated to touch the heart to the end of ti the book of Job, was omitted in the delivery of the Lecture, for want of time]