John Ruskin, Nature of Gothic
SECOND, OR GOTHIC, PERIOD.
THE NATURE OF GOTHIC.
§ I. If the reader will look back to the division of our subject
which was made in the first chapter of the first volume, he will find that we
are now about to enter upon the examination of that school of Venetian
architecture which forms an intermediate step between the Byzantine and Gothic
forms; but which I find may be conveniently considered in its connexion with
the latter style. In order that we may discern the tendency of each step of
this change, it will be wise in the outset to endeavor to form some general
idea of its final result. We know already what the Byzantine architecture is
from which the transition was made, but we ought to know something of the
Gothic architecture into which it led. I shall endeavor therefore to give the
reader in this chapter an idea, at once broad and definite, of the true nature
of Gothic architecture, properly so called; not of that of
Venice only, but of universal Gothic: for it will be one of the most
interesting parts of our subsequent inquiry, to find out how far Venetian
architecture reached the universal or perfect type of Gothic, and how far it
either fell short of it, or assumed foreign and independent forms.
§ II. The principal difficulty in doing this arises from the fact
that every building of the Gothic period differs in some important respect from
every other; and many include features which, if they occurred in other
buildings, would not be 152considered Gothic at all; so that all we have to reason upon is
merely, if I may be allowed so to express it, a greater or less degree of Gothicness in
each building we examine. And it is this Gothicness,—the character which,
according as it is found more or less in a building, makes it more or less
Gothic,—of which I want to define the nature; and I feel the same kind of
difficulty in doing so which would be encountered by any one who undertook to
explain, for instance, the nature of Redness, without any actual red thing to
point to, but only orange and purple things. Suppose he had only a piece of
heather and a dead oak-leaf to do it with. He might say, the color which is
mixed with the yellow in this oak-leaf, and with the blue in this heather,
would be red, if you had it separate; but it would be difficult, nevertheless,
to make the abstraction perfectly intelligible: and it is so in a far greater
degree to make the abstraction of the Gothic character intelligible, because
that character itself is made up of many mingled ideas, and can consist only in
their union. That is to say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor
vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some
of these things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as
to have life.
§ III. Observe also, that, in the definition proposed, I shall only
endeavor to analyze the idea which I suppose already to exist in the reader’s
mind. We all have some notion, most of us a very determined one, of the meaning
of the term Gothic; but I know that many persons have this idea in their minds
without being able to define it: that is to say, understanding generally that
Westminster Abbey is Gothic, and St. Paul’s is not, that Strasburg Cathedral is
Gothic, and St. Peter’s is not, they have, nevertheless, no clear notion of
what it is that they recognize in the one or miss in the other, such as would
enable them to say how far the work at Westminster or Strasburg is good and
pure of its kind: still less to say of any non-descript building, like St.
James’s Palace or Windsor Castle, how much right Gothic element there is in it,
and how much wanting, And I believe this inquiry to be a pleasant and
profitable 153one; and that there will be found something more than usually
interesting in tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the
Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and
our Northern hearts. And if, at any point of the inquiry, I should interfere
with any of the reader’s previously formed conceptions, and use the term Gothic
in any sense which he would not willingly attach to it, I do not ask him to
accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation, as necessary to
the intelligibility of what follows in the rest of the work.
§ IV. We have, then, the Gothic character submitted to our
analysis, just as the rough mineral is submitted to that of the chemist,
entangled with many other foreign substances, itself perhaps in no place pure,
or ever to be obtained or seen in purity for more than an instant; but
nevertheless a thing of definite and separate nature, however inextricable or
confused in appearance. Now observe: the chemist defines his mineral by two
separate kinds of character; one external, its crystalline form, hardness, lustre,
&c.; the other internal, the proportions and nature of its constituent
atoms. Exactly in the same manner, we shall find that Gothic architecture has
external forms, and internal elements. Its elements are certain mental
tendencies of the builders, legibly expressed in it; as fancifulness, love of
variety, love of richness, and such others. Its external forms are pointed
arches, vaulted roofs, &c. And unless both the elements and the forms are
there, we have no right to call the style Gothic. It is not enough that it has
the Form, if it have not also the power and life. It is not enough that it has
the Power, if it have not the form. We must therefore inquire into each of
these characters successively; and determine first, what is the Mental Expression,
and secondly, what the Material Form, of Gothic architecture, properly so
called.
1st. Mental Power or Expression. What
characters, we have to discover, did the Gothic builders love, or instinctively
express in their work, as distinguished from all other builders?
§ V. Let us go back for a moment to our chemistry, and 154note that, in defining a mineral by its
constituent parts, it is not one nor another of them, that can make up the
mineral, but the union of all: for instance, it is neither in charcoal, nor in
oxygen, nor in lime, that there is the making of chalk, but in the combination
of all three in certain measures; they are all found in very different things
from chalk, and there is nothing like chalk either in charcoal or in oxygen,
but they are nevertheless necessary to its existence.
So in the various mental characters which make
up the soul of Gothic. It is not one nor another that produces it; but their
union in certain measures. Each one of them is found in many other
architectures besides Gothic; but Gothic cannot exist where they are not found,
or, at least, where their place is not in some way supplied. Only there is this
great difference between the composition of the mineral, and of the
architectural style, that if we withdraw one of its elements from the stone,
its form is utterly changed, and its existence as such and such a mineral is
destroyed; but if we withdraw one of its mental elements from the Gothic style,
it is only a little less Gothic than it was before, and the union of two or
three of its elements is enough already to bestow a certain Gothicness of
character, which gains in intensity as we add the others, and loses as we again
withdraw them.
§ VI. I believe, then, that the characteristic or moral elements
of Gothic are the following, placed in the order of their importance:
|
1. Savageness. 2. Changefulness. 3. Naturalism. 4. Grotesqueness. 5. Rigidity. 6. Redundance. |
These characters are here expressed as belonging
to the building; as belonging to the builder, they would be expressed thus:—1.
Savageness, or Rudeness. 2. Love of Change. 3. Love of Nature. 4. Disturbed
Imagination. 5, Obstinacy. 1556. Generosity. And I repeat, that the withdrawal
of any one, or any two, will not at once destroy the Gothic character of a
building, but the removal of a majority of them will. I shall proceed to
examine them in their order.
§ VII. 1. Savageness.
I am not sure when the word “Gothic” was first generically applied to the
architecture of the North; but I presume that, whatever the date of its
original usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric
character of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied
that they were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture
had been originally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that
they and their buildings together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness,
which, in contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations,
appeared like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the
Roman in their first encounter. And when that fallen Roman, in the utmost
impotence of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the
imitation of civilized Europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the
word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt, not unmixed with aversion.
From that contempt, by the exertion of the antiquaries and architects of this
century, Gothic architecture has been sufficiently vindicated; and perhaps some
among us, in our admiration of the magnificent science of its structure, and
sacredness of its expression, might desire that the term of ancient reproach
should be withdrawn, and some other, of more apparent honorableness, adopted in
its place. There is no chance, as there is no need, of such a substitution. As
far as the epithet was used scornfully, it was used falsely; but there is no
reproach in the word, rightly understood; on the contrary, there is a profound
truth, which the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously recognizes. It is
true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and
wild; but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or
despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves
our profoundest reverence.
§ VIII. The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern
science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of
knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the
spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists
between Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but
we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in
their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the
Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic
of the world’s surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference
between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the
swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us, for a moment,
try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the
Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient
promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a
grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed
wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the
most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain,
laid like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop
nearer to them, with bossy beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly
with terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses
of laurel, and orange and plumy palm, that abate with their grey-green shadows
the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping under
lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see the
orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the
pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the
Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of the
Volga, seen through clefts in grey swirls of rain-cloud and flaky veils of the
mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther
north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and
heathy moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt 157of field and wood, and splintering into
irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm and
chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until
the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger
of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of
ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the
polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought its gradation of the
zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to
it, and watch the parallel change in the belt of animal life: the multitudes of
swift and brilliant creatures that glance in the air and sea, or tread the
sands of the southern zone; striped zebras and spotted leopards, glistening
serpents, and birds arrayed in purple and scarlet. Let us contrast their
delicacy and brilliancy of color, and swiftness of motion, with the
frost-cramped strength, and shaggy covering, and dusky plumage of the northern
tribes; contrast the Arabian horse with the Shetland, the tiger and leopard
with the wolf and bear, the antelope with the elk, the bird of paradise with
the osprey: and then, submissively acknowledging the great laws by which the
earth and all that it bears are ruled throughout their being, let us not
condemn, but rejoice at the expression by man of his own rest in the statutes
of the lands that gave him birth. Let us watch him with reverence as he sets
side by side the burning gems, and smoothes with soft sculpture the jasper
pillars, that are to reflect a ceaseless sunshine, and rise into a cloudless
sky: but not with less reverence let us stand by him, when, with rough strength
and hurried stroke, he smites an uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has
torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the
pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as
wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid
limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as
the clouds that shade them.
There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach
in this, but all dignity and honorableness; and we should err grievously
in 158refusing
either to recognise as an essential character of the existing architecture of
the North, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it yet may be,
this wildness of thought, and roughness of work; this look of mountain
brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy
power, put forth only the more energetically because the fine finger-touch was
chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye dimmed by the moor-mist, or
blinded by the hail; this outspeaking of the strong spirit of men who may not
gather redundant fruitage from the earth, nor bask in dreamy benignity of
sunshine, but must break the rock for bread, and cleave the forest for fire,
and show, even in what they did for their delight, some of the hard habits of
the arm and heart that grew on them as they swung the axe or pressed the
plough.
§ IX. If, however, the savageness of Gothic architecture, merely
as an expression of its origin among Northern nations, may be considered, in
some sort, a noble character, it possesses a higher nobility still, when
considered as an index, not of climate, but of religious principle.
In the 13th and 14th paragraphs of Chapter
XXI. of the first
volume of this work, it was noticed that the systems of architectural ornament,
properly so called, might be divided into three:—1. Servile ornament, in which
the execution or power of the inferior workman is entirely subjected to the intellect
of the higher:—2. Constitutional ornament, in which the executive inferior
power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its
own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher
powers;—and 3. Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is
admitted at all. I must here explain the nature of these divisions at somewhat
greater length.
Of Servile ornament, the principal schools are
the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian; but their servility is of different kinds.
The Greek master-workman was far advanced in knowledge and power above the
Assyrian or Egyptian. Neither he nor those for whom he worked could endure the
appearance of imperfection in anything; and, therefore, what ornament he 159appointed to be done by those beneath him was
composed of mere geometrical forms,—balls, ridges, and perfectly symmetrical
foliage,—which could be executed with absolute precision by line and rule, and
were as perfect in their way when completed, as his own figure sculpture. The
Assyrian and Egyptian, on the contrary, less cognizant of accurate form in
anything, were content to allow their figure sculpture to be executed by
inferior workmen, but lowered the method of its treatment to a standard which
every workman could reach, and then trained him by discipline so rigid, that
there was no chance of his falling beneath the standard appointed. The Greek
gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute. The
Assyrian gave him subjects which he could only execute imperfectly, but fixed a
legal standard for his imperfection. The workman was, in both systems, a slave.56
§ X. But in the mediæval, or especially Christian, system of
ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; Christianity having
recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every
soul. But it not only recognizes its value; it confesses its imperfection, in
only bestowing dignity upon the acknowledgment of unworthiness. That admission
of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be
intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian
makes daily and hourly, contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending,
in the end, to God’s greater glory. Therefore, to every spirit which
Christianity summons to her service, her exhortation is: Do what you can, and
confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened
for fear of failure, nor your confession 160silenced for fear of shame. And it is, perhaps,
the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they
thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds; and out of fragments
full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch,
indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.
§ XI. But the modern English mind has this much in common with
that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost
completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble
character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the
relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the
lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged
by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more
perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him,
so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are
always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and
shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the
clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall
be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly,
one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of
its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things
that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are
nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above
the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above
shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honorable defeat; not to lower
the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of
success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to
take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which
might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our
admiration from great excellences, because they are mingled with rough faults.
Now, in the make and nature of every 161man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in
manual labor, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination,
torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the
worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy
or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them
in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honor them in their imperfection
above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do
with all our laborers; to look for the thoughtful part of
them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and
errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot
manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You
can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved
line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or
forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work
perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to
consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution
becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he
makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being.
But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an
animated tool.
§ XII. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You
must either made a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.
Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and
perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and
make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike
curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their
spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their
attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye
of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul’s force must fill
all the invisible nerves that guide 162it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from
its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human
being be lost at last—a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in
this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form
of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside
humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature,
you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do
anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come
all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame,
failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him
also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon
him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration
behind and within them.
§ XIII. And now, reader, look round this English room of yours,
about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good
and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those
accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the
seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and
thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so
thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery
in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the
scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked
like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and
the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew
into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to
make the flesh and skin which, after the worm’s work on it, is to see God, into
leathern thongs to yoke machinery with,—this it is to be slave-masters indeed;
and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest
words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman
dropped in the furrows of her fields, 163than there is while the animation of her
multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of
them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the
exactness of a line.
§ XIV. And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old
cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of
the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters,
and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are
signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom
of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no
charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this
day to regain for her children.
§ XV. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It
is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than
any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into
vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot
explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and
against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or
the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages;
but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day.
It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by
which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.
It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they
cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labor to which they are
condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had
the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they
have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old,
the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law;
now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between
upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity and there is
pestilential 164air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when
the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to
obey another man, to labor for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is
not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,—liberty from care. The man
who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in
most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him.
The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the
other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be
lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To
yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is
not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this
world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say,
irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say,
reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in
this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it
be loving, a man is raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of the serf
nature in him,—the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his
landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old
mountain servant, who, 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life
and the lives of his seven sons for his chief?57—and
as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, “Another for Hector!” And
therefore, in all ages and all countries, reverence has been paid and sacrifice
made by men to each other, not only without complaint, but rejoicingly; and
famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne
willingly in the causes of masters and kings; for all these gifts of the heart
ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received them, and nature
prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering
within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized
abyss, to be counted off 165into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its
wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes;—this nature bade not,—this God
blesses not,—this humanity for no long time is able to endure.
§ XVI. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great
civilized invention of the division of labor; only we give it a false name. It
is not, truly speaking, the labor that is divided; but the men:—Divided into
mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that
all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to
make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the
head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins
in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were
polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned
for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great
cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace
blast, is all in very deed for this,—that we manufacture everything there
except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape
pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living
spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which
that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor
preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to
them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only
by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor
are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined
sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by
the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the
products and results of healthy and ennobling labor.
§ XVII. And how, it will be asked, are these products to be
recognized, and this demand to be regulated? Easily: by the observance of three
broad and simple rules:
1. Never encourage the manufacture of any
article not 166absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has
no share.
2. Never demand an exact finish for its own
sake, but only for some practical or noble end.
3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any
kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works.
The second of these principles is the only one
which directly rises out of the consideration of our immediate subject; but I
shall briefly explain the meaning and extent of the first also, reserving the
enforcement of the third for another place.
1. Never encourage the manufacture of anything
not necessary, in the production of which invention has no share.
For instance. Glass beads are utterly
unnecessary, and there is no design or thought employed in their manufacture.
They are formed by first drawing out the glass into rods; these rods are
chopped up into fragments of the size of beads by the human hand, and the
fragments are then rounded in the furnace. The men who chop up the rods sit at
their work all day, their hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely
timed palsy, and the beads dropping beneath their vibration like hail. Neither
they, nor the men who draw out the rods, or fuse the fragments, have the
smallest occasion for the use of any single human faculty; and every young
lady, therefore, who buys glass beads is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a
much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put
down.
But glass cups and vessels may become the
subjects of exquisite invention; and if in buying these we pay for the
invention, that is to say for the beautiful form, or color, or engraving, and
not for mere finish of execution, we are doing good to humanity.
§ XVIII. So, again, the cutting of precious stones, in all ordinary
cases, requires little exertion of any mental faculty; some tact and judgment
in avoiding flaws, and so on, but nothing to bring out the whole mind. Every
person who wears cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is, therefore, a
slave-driver.
But the working of the goldsmith, and the
various designing 167of grouped jewellery and enamel-work, may become the subject of
the most noble human intelligence. Therefore, money spent in the purchase of
well-designed plate, of precious engraved vases, cameos, or enamels, does good
to humanity; and, in work of this kind, jewels may be employed to heighten its
splendor; and their cutting is then a price paid for the attainment of a noble
end, and thus perfectly allowable.
§ XIX. I shall perhaps press this law farther elsewhere, but our
immediate concern is chiefly with the second, namely, never to demand an exact
finish, when it does not lead to a noble end. For observe, I have only dwelt
upon the rudeness of Gothic, or any other kind of imperfectness, as admirable,
where it was impossible to get design or thought without it. If you are to have
the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it in a rough and
untaught way; but from an educated man, who can without effort express his
thoughts in an educated way, take the graceful expression, and be thankful.
Only get the thought, and do not silence the peasant because
he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar. Grammar
and refinement are good things, both, only be sure of the better thing first.
And thus in art, delicate finish is desirable from the greatest masters, and is
always given by them. In some places Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Phidias,
Perugino, Turner, all finished with the most exquisite care; and the finish
they give always leads to the fuller accomplishment of their noble purposes.
But lower men than these cannot finish, for it requires consummate knowledge to
finish consummately, and then we must take their thoughts as they are able to
give them. So the rule is simple: Always look for invention first, and after
that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is
capable of without painful effort, and no more. Above all, demand
no refinement of execution where there is no thought, for that is slaves’ work,
unredeemed. Rather choose rough work than smooth work, so only that the
practical purpose be answered, and never imagine there is reason to be proud of
anything that may be accomplished by patience and sandpaper.
§ XX. I shall only give one example, which however will show the
reader what I mean, from the manufacture already alluded to, that of glass. Our
modern glass is exquisitely clear in its substance, true in its form, accurate
in its cutting. We are proud of this. We ought to be ashamed of it. The old
Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at
all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it. For there is this difference
between the English and Venetian workman, that the former thinks only of
accurately matching his patterns, and getting his curves perfectly true and his
edges perfectly sharp, and becomes a mere machine for rounding curves and
sharpening edges, while the old Venetian cared not a whit whether his edges
were sharp or not, but he invented a new design for every glass that he made,
and never moulded a handle or a lip without a new fancy in it. And therefore,
though some Venetian glass is ugly and clumsy enough, when made by clumsy and
uninventive workmen, other Venetian glass is so lovely in its forms that no
price is too great for it; and we never see the same form in it twice. Now you
cannot have the finish and the varied form too. If the workman is thinking
about his edges, he cannot be thinking of his design; if of his design, he
cannot think of his edges. Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or
the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the
worker a man or a grindstone.
§ XXI. Nay, but the reader interrupts me,—“If the workman can
design beautifully, I would not have him kept at the furnace. Let him be taken
away and made a gentleman, and have a studio, and design his glass there, and I
will have it blown and cut for him by common workmen, and so I will have my
design and my finish too.”
All ideas of this kind are founded upon two
mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to
be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labor is a
degradation, when it is governed by intellect.
On a large scale, and in work determinable by
line and rule, it is indeed both possible and necessary that the thoughts 169of one man should be carried out by the labor of
others; in this sense I have already defined the best architecture to be the
expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood. But on a smaller
scale, and in a design which cannot be mathematically defined, one man’s
thoughts can never be expressed by another: and the difference between the
spirit of touch of the man who is inventing, and of the man who is obeying
directions, is often all the difference between a great and a common work of
art. How wide the separation is between original and second-hand execution, I
shall endeavor to show elsewhere; it is not so much to our purpose here as to
mark the other and more fatal error of despising manual labor when governed by
intellect; for it is no less fatal an error to despise it when thus regulated
by intellect, than to value it for its own sake. We are always in these days
endeavoring to separate the two; we want one man to be always thinking, and
another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an
operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker
often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is,
we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and
the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now
it is only by labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that
labor can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. It
would be well if all of us were good handicraftsmen in some kind, and the
dishonor of manual labor done away with altogether; so that though there should
still be a trenchant distinction of race between nobles and commoners, there
should not, among the latter, be a trenchant distinction of employment, as
between idle and working men, or between men of liberal and illiberal
professions. All professions should be liberal, and there should be less pride
felt in peculiarity of employment, and more in excellence of achievement. And
yet more, in each several profession, no master should be too proud to do its
hardest work. The painter should grind his own colors; the architect work in
the mason’s 170yard with his men; the master-manufacturer be himself a more
skilful operative than any man in his mills; and the distinction between one
man and another be only in experience and skill, and the authority and wealth
which these must naturally and justly obtain.
§ XXII. I should be led far from the matter in hand, if I were to
pursue this interesting subject. Enough, I trust, has been said to show the
reader that the rudeness or imperfection which at first rendered the term
“Gothic” one of reproach is indeed, when rightly understood, one of the most
noble characters of Christian architecture, and not only a noble but an essential one.
It seems a fantastic paradox, but it is nevertheless a most important truth,
that no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect.
And this is easily demonstrable. For since the architect, whom we will suppose
capable of doing all in perfection, cannot execute the whole with his own
hands, he must either make slaves of his workmen in the old Greek, and present
English fashion, and level his work to a slave’s capacities, which is to
degrade it; or else he must take his workmen as he finds them, and let them
show their weaknesses together with their strength, which will involve the
Gothic imperfection, but render the whole work as noble as the intellect of the
age can make it.
§ XXIII. But the principle may be stated more broadly still. I have
confined the illustration of it to architecture, but I must not leave it as if
true of architecture only. Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect
merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with
average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of
unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the laborer’s mind had room for
expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect,
and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of
the ends of art.
§ XXIV. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The
first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of
failure; that is to say, his mind is 171always far in advance of his powers of
execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it;
besides that he will always give to the inferior portions of his work only such
inferior attention as they require; and according to his greatness he becomes
so accustomed to the feeling of dissatisfaction with the best he can do, that
in moments of lassitude or anger with himself he will not care though the
beholder be dissatisfied also. I believe there has only been one man who would
not acknowledge this necessity, and strove always to reach perfection, Leonardo;
the end of his vain effort being merely that he would take ten years to a
picture, and leave it unfinished. And therefore, if we are to have great men
working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect,
however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its
own bad way.58
§ XXV. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort
essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body,
that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or
can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove
blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a
type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain,
irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources
of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf
perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they
imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check
exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and
more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the
law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.
Accept this then for a universal law, that
neither architecture 172nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be
imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we
shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the
first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of
perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for
greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.
Thus far then of the Rudeness or Savageness,
which is the first mental element of Gothic architecture. It is an element in
many other healthy architectures also, as in Byzantine and Romanesque; but true
Gothic cannot exist without it.
56The third kind of ornament, the Renaissance, is that in which the
inferior detail becomes principal, the executor of every minor portion being
required to exhibit skill and possess knowledge as great as that which is
possessed by the master of the design; and in the endeavor to endow him with
this skill and knowledge, his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole
building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility. We must
fully inquire into the nature of this form of error, when we arrive at the
examination of the Renaissance schools.
57Vide Preface to “Fair Maid of Perth.”
58The Elgin marbles are supposed by many persons to be “perfect.” In
the most important portions they indeed approach perfection, but only there.
The draperies are unfinished, the hair and wool of the animals are unfinished,
and the entire bas-reliefs of the frieze are roughly cut.
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