No More Learning

COUNSELS
C
OUNSELS three the mother gave her daughter:
Not to sigh, and not be discontented,
And to kiss no young man whatsoever.
Mother, if thy daughter trespass never,
Trespass never 'gainst your last-named counsel,
She will trespass 'gainst the first two, surely.
Translation of Palmer and Magnusson.


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12509
JOHN RUSKIN
(1819-)
BY JOHN C. VAN DYKE
T IS not given every man to date an epoch from himself, to'
turn aside old conceptions, and to swing the whole current
of thought into a new channel. The epoch-making men are
few in any century; they themselves seldom realize the value of the
work they are doing, and the public recognizes it perhaps last of all.
Each one of them, as he appears, undergoes the usual misunderstand-
ing at the hands of both friends and foes. There are assertions and
denials, attacks and defenses, adulation and abuse; until at last it has
passed into a proverb that a man cannot be summed up justly by
contemporary thought. Perhaps no one in the nineteenth century has
suffered so much from misunderstanding and indiscriminate criticism
as John Ruskin. His work is done, though he himself is living out a
quiet old age at Brantwood; but the value of that work and the place
of the worker are far from being accurately estimated. The world
persists in considering him only as an art critic; while he himself
thought his best endeavor to have been in the field of political econ-
omy. It is not impossible that both of these conclusions are wide of
the mark. One may venture to think that his greatest service to
mankind has been his revelation of the beauties of nature; and that
his enduring fame will rest upon no theories of art or of human
well-being, but upon his masterful handling of the English language.
Whatever feature of his activity may be thought the best, it cannot
be denied that he has been a powerful force in many departments:
a prophet with a denunciatory and enunciatory creed, a leader who
has counted his followers by the thousands, a writer who has left
a deeper stamp upon the language than almost any Englishman of
this century.
Mr. Ruskin's parentage, early training, and education are recorded
in 'Præterita' (1885-9),- his fascinating but incomplete autobiogra-
phy. In his childhood his Scotch mother made him read the Bible
again and again; and to this he thinks was due his habit of taking
pains, and his literary taste. Peace, obedience, and faith, with fixed
attention in both mind and eye, were the virtues inculcated by his
early training. The defects of that training he puts down as-


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12510
JOHN RUSKIN
nothing to love, nothing to endure of either pain, patience, or misery,
nothing taught him in a social way, no independence of action, and
no responsibility. At fourteen Mr. Telford, one of his father's part-
ners in the wine trade, gave him a copy of Rogers's 'Italy' with
Turner's illustrations; and his parents forever after held Mr. Telford
personally responsible for the art tastes of the son. They had pre-
destined him to the Church. "He might have been a bishop," was
the elder Ruskin's sigh.
His study of art practically began with an admiration for Turner.
He knew a great deal about nature, and had met his great passion,
the Alps, before he was twenty; and he had also studied drawing
under Runciman, Copley Fielding, and Harding. His earliest writings
were poetical; and as an Oxford student he wrote the pretty story,
'The King of the Golden River' (1841), besides making some contri-
butions to magazine literature: but his first important effort was when
as the Oxford graduate he put forth the first volume of 'Modern
Painters (1843). Ostensibly this was an inquiry into the object and
means of landscape painting, the spirit which should govern its pro-
duction, the appearances of nature, the discussion of what is true in
art as revealed by nature; but in reality it was a defense of Turner
at the expense of almost every other landscape painter, ancient or
modern. It came at a time when people knew very little about art,
and thought it a mystery understood only by the priests of the craft;
but Mr. Ruskin burst the door wide open, and talked about the con-
tents of the high altar in a language that any one could understand.
It was an energetic and eloquent statement of what he believed to
be truth. From his studies of nature he came to think that truth was
the one and only desideratum in art; and the whole argument and
illustration of 'Modern Painters' is hinged upon nature-truth and its
appearance in the works of Turner. It was nearly twenty years
before the five volumes of the work were completed, and during that
time Mr. Ruskin's views had broadened and changed, so that there is
something of contradiction in the volumes; but it to-day stands as his
most forceful work. Philosophical it is not, because lacking in sys-
tem; scientific it is not, because lacking in fundamental principles.
The logic of it is often weak, the positiveness of statement often
annoying, the digressions and side issues often wearisome; yet with
all this it contains some of his keenest observations on nature, his
most suggestive conceits, and his most brilliant prose passages. It
made something of a sensation, and Mr. Ruskin came into prominence
at once.
While 'Modern Painters' was being written, he made frequent
journeys to Switzerland to study the Alps, and to Italy to study the
old Italian masters. From being at first a naturalist and a prophet


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JOHN RUSKIN
12511
art.
of modernity, he soon became an admirer of Gothic and Renaissance
Turner and Fra Angelico were almost antithetical. He tried to
reconcile them on the principle of their truthfulness; but one had put
forth an individual truth, the other a symbolic truth, and Mr. Ruskin
never brought them together without the appearance of incongruity.
The more he studied Italian painting, the more he became impreg-
nated with the moral and the religious in art. In a letter he puts it
down that what is wanted in English art is a "total change of char-
acter. It is Giotto and Ghirlandajo and Angelico that you want and
must want until this disgusting nineteenth century has—I can't say
breathed, but steamed, its last. " The moral element and the sincerity
of fifteenth-century work quite captivated him, and he began to fail
in sympathy for modern products. He started the hopeless task of
turning the art world backward, and reviving the truth and faith of
the early Italians. But the world never turns backward successfully.
Italian art was good art because it did not turn backward; because it
revealed its own time and people, and was imbued with the spirit of
its age.
That spirit died with the Renaissance. The nineteenth cen-
tury could not revive it. It had a spirit of its own which it revealed,
and which Mr. Ruskin opposed all his life. It was not moral enough
or reverent enough or true enough; in short, it was not like the old,
and therefore it was wrong.
About 1850 the Pre-Raphaelites began to attract attention. They
were not followers of Mr. Ruskin, though they were a part of the
new movement which he more than any other man had started.
His advice to go to nature-selecting nothing, rejecting nothing,
scorning nothing-had been accepted by many landscapists, and it
undoubtedly somewhat affected the Pre-Raphaelites. He defended
their work against popular ridicule in his spirited 'Pre-Raphaelitism'
(1851); and tried to show that they and Turner were on the same
naturalistic basis, and that his old ideas of nature and his new ideas
of Italian art were not contradictory. In principle he seemed to have
eliminated the personal equation (the dominant factor in nineteenth-
century art); and what really attracted him in Pre-Raphaelitism was
the combination of literal detail with the imitated sincerity of the
early Italians. The Pre-Raphaelites as a body soon drifted apart;
and Mr. Ruskin's teaching, as regards their work, was condemned as
impractical and impossible. It did not reckon with the nineteenth-
century spirit.
Painting alone was not sufficient to occupy so active and many-
sided an intellect; and Mr. Ruskin's first twenty years of authorship
produced many books on many subjects. He wrote on the Alps,
published his 'Poems (1850), reviewed books, issued 'Notes on the
Construction of Sheepfolds' (1851), — the misleading title of a plea for


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12512
JOHN RUSKIN
church unity in England, and wrote his 'Seven Lamps of Archi-
tecture' (1849) and his 'Stones of Venice' (1850-53). The last-named
work is not a manual of history or a traveler's guide; but the expres-
sion of Mr. Ruskin's ideas of life, society, and nationality as shown
in architecture. The ideas are somewhat smothered by beautiful
language, and many side issues in parenthesis; but they are at least
original, and the result of his own observations. He spent much
time and labor in Venice taking measurements and trying to recon-
cile conflicting styles on a single basis; but the task was too colossal.
Venetian architecture is a medley of all styles. Mr. Ruskin did what
he could, and the 'Stones of Venice' was the result. It excited
opposition and was sharply attacked. He had been too erratic, too
rhetorical, too violently independent of architectural laws; but at
least he had explained Gothic architecture in a new way, and made
an impression on the lay mind. Other works on art came out one
by one: the Elements of Drawing' (1857), the 'Political Economy of
Art' (1857), the 'Elements of Perspective' (1859), and yearly 'Notes
n the Royal Academy'; but Mr. Ruskin's art teaching was practi-
cally summed up in 'Modern Painters,' the 'Seven Lamps,' and the
'Stones of Venice. ' His other art writings have been desultory,
scattered, lacking in plan and unity. At forty years of age his career
as an art critic closed, though he never ceased to write about art
until he ceased writing altogether; but after 1860 he became inter-
ested in the human problem, and his mind turned to political economy.
As an art critic Mr. Ruskin has never been unreservedly accepted.
He felt aggrieved that his readers cared more for the "pretty pass-
ages" in the second volume of 'Modern Painters' than for the ideas;
but his readers were more than half right. Criticism calls for more
of the calm philosophical spirit than Mr. Ruskin ever possessed. All
his life he has been not so much a judge as a partisan advocate, an
enthusiast, a man praising indiscriminately where he admired, and
condemning indiscriminately where he lacked sympathy. His passion
of praise, his vehemence of attack, his brilliancy of style, have at-
tracted and still attract attention; but the feeling that they are too
brilliant to be true underlies all. Nevertheless, the multiplicity and
clearness of his ideas are astonishing, and their stimulating power
incalculable. To-day one may disagree with him at every page and
yet be the gainer by the opposition excited. No writer of our times
has been quite so helpful by suggestion. Moreover, many of his ideas
are true and sound. It is only his art teaching as a whole to which
objection may be taken. This is thought to be too erratic, too
inconsiderate of existing conditions,-in other words, too impractical.
The services which Mr. Ruskin has rendered humanity as an
art writer should not, however, be overlooked. First, he brought art
----


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JOHN RUSKIN
12513
positively and permanently before the public, explained it to the
average intelligence, and created a universal interest in it by sub-
jecting it to inquiry. Secondly, he elevated the rank and relative
importance of the artist, and showed that he was a most useful factor
in civilization. Many of the artists who are to-day sneering at Mr.
Ruskin for some hasty opinion uttered in anger, appreciate but poorly
what a great preacher and priest for the craft he has been, and what
importance his winged words have given to art in this nineteenth
century. Thirdly, though he did not make Turner, yet he made the
public look at him; and though he did not discover Italian art, he
turned people's eyes toward it. Before Mr. Ruskin's utterances, Giotto
and Botticelli and Carpaccio and Tintoretto were practically unknown
and unseen. Mr. Ruskin was the pioneer of Renaissance art study;
and though modern critics may have much amusement over his
occasional false attribution of a picture, they should not forget that
when Mr. Ruskin went to Italy in the 1840's there was no established
body of Italian art criticism to lean upon. He stood quite alone;
and the wonder is not that he made so many mistakes, but that he
made so few. Generally speaking, his estimate of Italian art was just
enough, and his appreciations of certain men well founded.
But Mr. Ruskin's greatest discovery has been picturesque nature;
and for that, humanity is more indebted to him than for anything
else. Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron had dabbled in nature beauty
in a romantic associative way; but Ruskin, following them and in a
measure their pupil, began its elaborate study. To enforce his argu-
ment for truth in art, he drew for illustration truth in nature. With
rare knowledge, keenness of observation, and facility in description, he
displayed the wonder-world of clouds, skies, mountains, trees, grasses,
waters, holding them up in all their colors, lights, shadows, and atmo-
spheric settings. In youth his predilection for mountain forms, rock.
structure, crystals, and scientific facts was well marked; and in his
art writings his sympathy is always with the landscape at the ex-
pense of the figure composition. Indeed, it was to prove Turner true
to nature that he first began writing upon art; and his most profound
studies have been in the field of natural phenomena. Well trained
and specially equipped for this field, he pointed out the beauties of
nature in the infinitely little and the infinitely great with such mas-
terful insight and skill that people followed him willy-nilly. Almost
instantly he created a nature cult-a worship of beauty in things
inanimate. People's eyes were opened to the glories of the world
about them. They have not been closed since; and the study of
nature is with succeeding generations a growing passion and an un-
wearying source of pleasurable good. Mr. Ruskin is to be thanked
for it. This great service alone should more than counterbalance in
XXI-783


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JOHN RUSKIN
popular judgment any artistic or political vagaries into which he may
have fallen.
About 1860, as already noted, his art and nature studies were
pushed aside by what he thought more urgent matter. His moral
sense and intense humanity went out to the workingmen of England,
and he courageously devoted the rest of his life to an attempt to
better their condition. This was the natural leaning of his mind. He
was always an intensely sensitive and sympathetic man, with moral
ideas of truth, justice, and righteousness opposed to the ideas of his
times. He should have been a bishop, as his parents desired, or a
preacher at least; for he had the Savonarola equipment. Denun-
ciation and invective were his most powerful weapons; and lacking a
pulpit, he now sent forth letters against the prevailing social system,
written as eloquently as though he were describing sunsets and Al-
pine peaks. His 'Unto this Last' (1860), "the truest, rightest-worded,
and most serviceable things I have ever written," was followed by
'Munera Pulveris' (1862-63), Time and Tide' (1867), and 'Fors
Clavigera (1871-84). These books contain the substance of his politi-
cal economy, which is as impossible to epitomize as his art teachings.
It was written for the workingmen of England, but it shot over their
heads; and is moreover marked by inconsistencies, the result of Mr.
Ruskin's changing views and waning strength-for much of his work
in the 1880's is hectic and spasmodic from pain of mind and body.
He believed in a mild form of socialism or collectivism,-a pooling
of interests, a stopping of competition, and a doing away of interest
upon money. So earnest was he in his beliefs that he did not write
only, but strove for practical results. He established St. George's
Guild, the Sheffield museum, an agricultural community, a tea store,
and a factory. He even had the streets of London swept clean to
show that it could be done, and lent a helping hand wherever he
could. Like Tolstoi, he tried to live his beliefs; but British material-
ism was too strong for him. After giving away his whole fortune,
upwards of £200,000, he had to stop; broken physically and mentally
as well as financially. His political economy was not a success
practically, but no one who loves his fellow-man will ever cast a
stone at him for it. It was a noble effort to benefit humanity.
During all the years of his political-economy struggles, his restless
mind and pen found many other fields in which to labor. He lect-
ured at Oxford; wrote 'Sesame and Lilies' (1865), a series of miscel-
laneous essays; 'Ethics of the Dust' (1866), lectures on crystallization;
'The Crown of Wild Olive' (1866), three lectures on work, traffic, and
war; The Queen of the Air' (1869), a study of Greek myths of cloud
and storm; 'Aratra Pentelici' (1872), on the elements of sculpture;
'Love's Meinie' (1873); 'Ariadne Florentina' (1873); 'Val d'Arno'


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JOHN RUSKIN
12515
(1874); Mornings in Florence' (1875-7); 'Proserpina' (1875-86); 'Deu-
calion' (1875-83); St. Mark's Rest' (1877-84); The Bible of Amiens'
(1880-5); The Art of England' (1883); and a vast quantity of lect-
ures, addresses, letters, catalogues, prefaces, and notes. In sheer bulk
alone this work was enormous. Finally body and mind both failed
him; and the last thing he wrote, 'Præterita,' his autobiography, was
done at intervals of returning strength after severe illnesses.
Mr. Ruskin tells us that his literary work was "always done as
quietly and methodically as a piece of tapestry. I knew exactly what
I had got to say, put the words firmly in their places like so many
stitches, hemmed the edges of chapters round with what seemed to
me graceful flourishes, and touched them finally with my cunningest
points of color. " His poems are all youthful and of small conse-
quence. His prose is marked by two styles. The first is dramatic,
vehement, rhetorical, full of imagery, some over-exuberance of lan-
guage, and long-drawn sentences. This is the style of Modern
Painters' and the Seven Lamps. ' After 1860, when he took up po-
litical writing, he strove for more simplicity; and his 'Fors Clavigera'
is an excellent example of his more moderate style. But he never
attained reserve either in thinking or in writing. It was not in
his temperament. He had almost everything else—purity, elasticity,
dramatic force, wit, passion, imagination, nobility. In addition his
vocabulary was almost limitless, his rhythm and flow of sentences
almost endless, his brilliancy in illustration, description, and argument
almost exhaustless. Indeed, his facility in language has been fatal
only too often to his logic and philosophy. Words and their lim-
pid flow ran away with his sobriety, lusciousness in illustration and
heaped-up imagery led him into rambling sentences, and the long
reverberating roll of numbers at the close of his chapters often
smacks of the theatre. Alliteration and assonance, the use of the
adjective in description, the antithesis in argument, the climax in
dramatic effect,—all these Mr. Ruskin has understood and used with
powerful effect.
How he came by his style would be difficult to determine. He
says he got it from the Bible and Carlyle: but he was a part of the
romantic, poetic, and Catholic revival in this century; and Byron,
Scott, Coleridge, Newman, Tennyson, Carlyle, were influences upon
him. The impetuosity of romanticism was his heritage; and the
great bulk of his writing is headlong, feverish, brilliant as a meteor,
but self-consuming. His prose cannot be judged by rules of rhetoric
or composition, any more than the pictures of Turner can be meas-
ured by the academic yard-stick. They both defy rules and meas-
urements. 'Modern Painters' and the Ulysses and Polyphemus'
blaze with arbitrary color, and are in parts false in tone, value, and


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12516
JOHN RUSKIN
perspective; yet behind each work there is the fire of genius - the
energy of overpowering individuality. Mr. Ruskin's style is his crea-
tion as an artist, as distinguished from his exposition as a teacher;
and perhaps it is as an artist in language that he will live longest in
human memory.
A whole library of books on many subjects - art, science, his-
tory, poetry, ethics, theology, agriculture, education, economy-has
come from his pen. Few even among the learned classes realize
how much the nineteenth century owes to Mr. Ruskin for suggestion,
stimulus, and hopeful inspiration in many fields. He has taught
several generations to see with their eyes, think with their minds,
and work with their hands. And the beautiful language of that
teaching will remain with many generations to come. He has been
in the right and he has been in the wrong. Apples of discord and
olive-branches of peace-he has planted both, and both have borne
fruit; but the good outbalances the bad, the true outweighs the false.
John C. Van Dyke
ON WOMANHOOD
From Sesame and Lilies'
GE
ENERALLY we are under an impression that a man's duties
are public, and a woman's private. But this is not alto-
gether so. A man has a personal work or duty relating
to his own home, and a public work or duty-which is the
expansion of the other-relating to the State. So a woman has
a personal work and duty relating to her own home, and a
public work and duty which is also the expansion of that.
Now, the man's work for his own home is, as has been said,
to secure its maintenance, progress, and defense; the woman's to
secure its order, comfort, and loveliness.
Expand both these functions. The man's duty as a mem-
ber of a commonwealth is to assist in the maintenance, in the
advance, in the defense of the State. The woman's duty as a
member of the commonwealth is to assist in the ordering, in
the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the State.
What the man is at his own gate,-defending it if need be
against insult and spoil, that also,-not in a less but in a more
devoted measure, he is to be at the gate of his country; leaving


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JOHN RUSKIN
12517
his home, if need be, even to the spoiler, to do his more incum-
bent work there.
And in like manner, what the woman is to be within her
gates, as the centre of order, the balm of distress, and the mir-
ror of beauty, that she is also to be without her gates, where
order is more difficult, distress more imminent, loveliness more
rare.
·
It is now long since the women of England arrogated, uni-
versally, a title which once belonged to nobility only; and having
once been in the habit of accepting the simple title of gentle-
woman, as correspondent to that of gentleman, insisted on the
privilege of assuming the title of "Lady," which properly corre-
sponds only to the title of "Lord. "
I do not blame them for this; but only for their narrow
motive in this. I would have them desire and claim the title
of Lady, provided they claim not merely the title, but the office
and duty signified by it.
Lady means "bread-giver" or "loaf-
giver," and Lord means "maintainer of laws"; and both titles
have reference not to the law which is maintained in the house,
nor to the bread which is given to the household, but to law
maintained for the multitude and to bread broken among the
multitude. So that a Lord has legal claim only to this title
in so far as he is the maintainer of the justice of the Lord of
Lords; and a Lady has legal claim to her title only so far as
she communicates that help to the poor representatives of her
Master, which women once, ministering to him of their substance,
were permitted to extend to that Master himself; and when she
is known, as he himself once was, in breaking of bread.
And this beneficent and legal dominion, this power of the
Dominus, or House-Lord, and of the Domina, or House-Lady, is
great and venerable, not in the number of those through whom
it has lineally descended, but in the number of those whom it
grasps within its sway; it is always regarded with reverent wor-
ship wherever its dynasty is founded on its duty, and its ambi-
tion co-relative with its beneficence. Your fancy is pleased with
the thought of being noble ladies, with a train of vassals. Be it
so: you cannot be too noble, and your train cannot be too great;
but see to it that your train is of vassals whom you serve and
feed, not merely of slaves who serve and feed you; and that the
multitude which obeys you is of those whom you have com-
forted, not oppressed,— whom you have redeemed, not led into
captivity.


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12518
JOHN RUSKIN
THE USES OF ORNAMENT
From The Seven Lamps of Architecture'
WHAT
is the place for ornament? Consider first that the
characters of natural objects which the architect can rep-
resent are few and abstract. The greater part of those
delights by which Nature recommends herself to man at all
times cannot be conveyed by him into his imitative work. He
cannot make his grass green and cool and good to rest upon,
which in nature is its chief use to man; nor can he make his
flowers tender and full of color and of scent, which in nature are
their chief powers of giving joy. Those qualities which alone he
can secure are certain severe characters of form, such as men
only see in nature on deliberate examination, and by the full and
set appliance of sight and thought: a man must lie down on the
bank of grass on his breast and set himself to watch and pene-
trate the intertwining of it, before he finds that which is good
to be gathered by the architect. So then while Nature is at all
times pleasant to us, and while the sight and sense of her work
may mingle happily with all our thoughts and labors and times.
of existence, that image of her which the architect carries away
represents what we can only perceive in her by direct intellectual
exertion; and demands from us, wherever it appears, an intel-
lectual exertion of a similar kind in order to understand it and
feel it. It is the written or sealed impression of a thing sought
out; it is the shaped result of inquiry and bodily expression of
thought.
Now let us consider for an instant what would be the effect
of continually repeating an expression of a beautiful thought
to any other of the senses, at times when the mind could not
address that sense to the understanding of it. Suppose that in
time of serious occupation, of stern business, a companion should
repeat in our ears continually some favorite passage of poetry,
over and over again all day long. We should not only soon be
utterly sick and weary of the sound of it, but that sound would
at the end of the day have so sunk into the habit of the ear, that
the entire meaning of the passage would be dead to us, and it
would ever thenceforward require some effort to fix and recover
it. The music of it would not meanwhile have aided the busi-
ness in hand, while its own delightfulness would thenceforward
be in a measure destroyed. It is the same with every other


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JOHN RUSKIN
12519
form of definite thought. If you violently present its expression
to the senses, at times when the mind is otherwise engaged, that
expression will be ineffective at the time, and will have its sharp-
ness and clearness destroyed forever. Much more if you present
it to the mind at times when it is painfully affected or disturbed,
or if you associate the expression of pleasant thought with incon-
gruous circumstances, you will affect that expression thencefor-
ward with a painful color forever.
Apply this to expressions of thought received by the eye.
Remember that the eye is at your mercy more than the ear
"The eye, it cannot choose but see. " Its nerve is not so easily
numbed as that of the ear, and it is often busied in tracing and
watching forms when the ear is at rest. Now if you present
lovely forms to it when it cannot call the mind to help it in its
work, and among objects of vulgar use and unhappy position,
you will neither please the eye nor elevate the vulgar object.
But you will fill and weary the eye with the beautiful form, and
you will infect that form itself with the vulgarity of the thing to
which you have violently attached it. It will never be of much
use to you any more: you have killed or defiled it; its freshness
and purity are gone. You will have to pass it through the fire
of much thought before you will cleanse it, and warm it with
much love before it will revive.
Hence then a general law, of singular importance in the pres-
ent day, a law of simple common-sense,- not to decorate things
belonging to purposes of active and occupied life. Wherever you
can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty.
You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you
may mix play. Work first, and then rest. Work first, and then
gaze; but do not use golden plowshares, nor bind ledgers in
enamel. Do not thrash with sculptured flails; nor put bas-reliefs
on millstones. What! it will be asked, are
What! it will be asked, are we in the habit of
doing so? Even so; always and everywhere. The most familiar
position of Greek moldings is in these days on shop fronts.
There is not a tradesman's sign nor shelf nor counter in all the
streets of all our cities, which has not upon it ornaments which
were invented to adorn temples and beautify kings' palaces.
There is not the smallest advantage in them where they are.
Absolutely valueless, utterly without the power of giving pleas
ure, they only satiate the eye and vulgarize their own forms.
Many of these are in themselves thoroughly good copies of fine


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12520
JOHN RUSKIN
things; which things themselves we shall never, in consequence,
enjoy any more. Many a pretty beading and graceful bracket
there is in wood or stucco above our grocers' and cheesemongers'
and hosiers' shops: how is it that the tradesmen cannot under-
stand that custom is to be had only by selling good tea and
cheese and cloth; and that people come to them for their honesty,
and their readiness, and their right wares, and not because they
have Greek cornices over their windows, or their names in large
gilt letters on their house fronts? How pleasurable it would be
to have the power of going through the streets of London, pull-
ing down those brackets and friezes and large names, restoring
to the tradesmen the capital they had spent in architecture, and
putting them on honest and equal terms; each with his name in
black letters over his door, not shouted down the street from the
upper stories, and each with a plain wooden shop casement, with
small panes in it that people would not think of breaking in
order to be sent to prison! How much better for them would it
be, how much happier, how much wiser, to put their trust upon
their own truth and industry, and not on the idiocy of their cus-
tomers! It is curious, and it says little for our national probity
on the one hand, or prudence on the other, to see the whole
system of our street decoration based on the idea that people
must be baited to a shop as moths are to a candle.
But it will be said that much of the best wooden decoration
of the Middle Ages was in shop fronts. No: it was in house
fronts, of which the shop was a part, and received its natural and
consistent portion of the ornament. In those days men lived,
and intended to live, by their shops, and over them, all their
days. They were contented with them and happy in them: they
were their palaces and castles. They gave them therefore such
decoration as made themselves happy in their own habitation,
and they gave it for their own sake. The upper stories were
always the richest; and the shop was decorated chiefly about the
door, which belonged to the house more than to it. And when
our tradesmen settle to their shops in the same way, and form
no plans respecting future villa architecture, let their whole
houses be decorated, and their shops too, but with a national and
domestic decoration. However, our cities are for the most part
too large to admit of contented dwelling in them throughout life:
and I do not say there is harm in our present system of sepa-
rating the shop from the dwelling-house; only where they are so


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JOHN RUSKIN
12521
separated, let us remember that the only reason for shop decora-
tion is removed, and see that the decoration be removed also.
Another of the strange and evil tendencies of the present day
is to the decoration of the railroad station. Now, if there be
any place in the world in which people are deprived of that
portion of temper and discretion which is necessary to the con-
templation of beauty, it is there. It is the very temple of dis-
comfort; and the only charity that the builder can extend to us.
is to show us, plainly as may be, how soonest to escape from it.
The whole system of railroad traveling is addressed to people
who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miser-
able. No one would travel in that manner who could help it,—
who had time to go leisurely over hills and between hedges,
instead of through tunnels and between banks; at least those who
would, have no sense of beauty so acute as that we need consult
it at the station. The railroad is in all its relations a matter
of earnest business, to be got through as soon as possible. It
transmutes a man from a traveler into a living parcel. For the
time, he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his human-
ity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not
ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind.
Carry him safely, dismiss him soon: he will thank you for
nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are
mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavor
to do so. There never was more flagrant nor impertinent folly
than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned
with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the way, take
them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the
miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for
safety and speed. Give large salaries to efficient servants, large
prices to good manufacturers, large wages to able workmen; let
the iron be tough, and the brickwork solid, and the carriages
strong. The time is perhaps not distant when these first neces-
sities may not be easily met: and to increase expense in any
other direction is madness. Better bury gold in the embank-
ments than put it in ornaments on the stations. Will a single
traveler be willing to pay an increased fare on the South-Western
because the columns of the terminus are covered with patterns
from Nineveh ? - he will only care less for the Ninevite ivories
in the British Museum: or on the North-Western, because there
are Old-English-looking spandrels to the roof of the station at


## p. 12522 (#582) ##########################################

12522
JOHN RUSKIN
Crewe? he will only have less pleasure in their prototypes at
Crewe House. Railroad architecture has, or would have, a dig-
nity of its own if it were only left to its work. You would not
put rings on the fingers of a smith at his anvil.
It is not however only in these marked situations that the
abuse of which I speak takes place. There is hardly, at present,
an application of ornamental work which is not in some sort
liable to blame of the same kind. We have a bad habit of try-
ing to disguise disagreeable necessities by some form of sudden
decoration, which is in all other places associated with such
necessities. I will name only one instance, that to which I have
alluded before the roses which conceal the ventilators in the
flat roofs of our chapels. Many of those roses are of very beau-
tiful design, borrowed from fine works: all their grace and finish
are invisible when they are so placed, but their general form
is afterwards associated with the ugly buildings in which they
constantly occur; and all the beautiful roses of the early French
and English Gothic, especially such elaborate ones as those of
the triforium of Coutances, are in consequence deprived of their
pleasurable influence, and this without our having accomplished
the smallest good by the use we have made of the dishonored
form. Not a single person in the congregation ever receives one
ray of pleasure from those roof roses; they are regarded with
mere indifference, or lost in the general impression of harsh
emptiness.
Must not beauty, then, it will be asked, be sought for in the
forms which we associate with our every-day life? Yes, if you
do it consistently, and in places where it can be calmly seen; but
not if you use the beautiful form only as a mask and covering
of the proper conditions and uses of things, nor if you thrust it
into the places set apart for toil.
Put it in the drawing-room,
not into the workshop; put it upon domestic furniture, not upon
tools of handicraft. All men have sense of what is right in this
matter, if they would only use and apply that sense; every man
knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure, if he would
only ask for it when it does so, and not allow it to be forced
upon him when he does not want it. Ask any one of the pas-
sengers over London Bridge at this instant whether he cares
about the forms of the bronze leaves on its lamps, and he will
tell you, No. Modify these forms of leaves to a less scale, and
put them on his milk-jug at breakfast, and ask him whether he
---


## p. 12523 (#583) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12523
likes them, and he will tell you, Yes. People have no need of
teaching, if they could only think and speak truth, and ask for
what they like and want, and for nothing else; nor can a right
disposition of beauty be ever arrived at except by this common-
sense, and allowance for the circumstances of the time and place.
It does not follow, because bronze leafage is in bad taste on the
lamps of London Bridge, that it would be so on those of the
Ponte della Trinità; nor because it would be a folly to decorate
the house fronts of Gracechurch Street, that it would be equally
so to adorn those of some quiet provincial town. The question
of greatest external or internal decoration depends entirely on
the conditions of probable repose. It was a wise feeling which
made the streets of Venice so rich in external ornament; for
there is no couch of rest like the gondola. So again, there is
no subject of street ornament so wisely chosen as the fountain,
where it is a fountain of use; for it is just there that perhaps
the happiest pause takes place in the labor of the day, when the
pitcher is rested on the edge of it, and the breath of the bearer
is drawn deeply, and the hair swept from the forehead, and the
uprightness of the form declined against the marble ledge, and
the sound of the kind word or light laugh mixes with the trickle
of the falling water, heard shriller and shriller as the pitcher
fills. What pause is so sweet as that-so full of the depth of
ancient days, so softened with the calm of pastoral solitude?
LANDSCAPES OF THE POETS
From 'Lectures on Architecture and Painting'
Ο
F COURSE all good poetry descriptive of rural life is essen-
tially pastoral, or has the effect of the pastoral, on the
minds of men living in cities: but the class of poetry which
I mean, and which you probably understand, by the term pastoral,
is that in which a farmer's girl is spoken of as a "nymph," and
a farmer's boy as a "swain"; and in which, throughout, a ridicu-
lous and unnatural refinement is supposed to exist in rural life,
merely because the poet himself has neither had the courage to
endure its hardships, nor the wit to conceive its realities. If
you examine the literature of the past century, you will find
that nearly all its expressions having reference to the country
show something of this kind; either a foolish sentimentality or a


## p. 12524 (#584) ##########################################

12524
JOHN RUSKIN
•
morbid fear, both of course coupled with the most curious ignor-
ance. You will find all its descriptive expressions at once vague
and monotonous. Brooks are always "purling"; birds always
"warbling"; mountains always "lift their horrid peaks above the
clouds"; vales always "are lost in the shadow of gloomy woods";
a few more distinct ideas about hay-making and curds and cream,
acquired in the neighborhood of Richmond Bridge, serving to
give an occasional appearance of freshness to the catalogue of the
sublime and beautiful which descended from poet to poet; while
a few true pieces of pastoral, like the 'Vicar of Wakefield' and
Walton's 'Angler,' relieved the general waste of dullness. Even
in these better productions, nothing is more remarkable than the
general conception of the country merely as a series of green
fields, and the combined ignorance and dread of more sublime
scenery; of which the mysteries and dangers were enhanced by
the difficulties of traveling at the period. Thus, in Walton's
'Angler you have a meeting of two friends, one a Derbyshire
man, the other a lowland traveler who is as much alarmed, and
uses nearly as many expressions of astonishment, at having to go
down a steep hill and ford a brook, as a traveler uses now at
crossing the glacier of the Col de Geant. I am not sure whether
the difficulties which until late years have lain in the way of
peaceful and convenient traveling, ought not to have great weight
assigned to them among the other causes of the temper of the
century; but be that as it may, if you will examine the whole
range of its literature- keeping this point in view-I am well
persuaded that you will be struck most forcibly by the strange
deadness to the higher sources of landscape sublimity which is
mingled with the morbid pastoralism. The love of fresh air and
green grass forced itself upon the animal natures of men; but
that of the sublimer features of scenery had no place in minds
whose chief powers had been repressed by the formalisms of the
age. And although in the second-rate writers continually, and in
the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an affectation of interest
in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever they write from
their heart you will find an utter absence of feeling respecting
anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the
novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Molière,
and the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you
will find a single expression of true delight in sublime nature in
any one of them. Perhaps Sterne's 'Sentimental Journey,' in its


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JOHN RUSKIN
12525
total absence of sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its
entire want of notice of anything at Geneva which might not as
well have been seen at Coxwold, is the most striking instance I
could give you; and if you compare with this negation of feeling
on one side, the interludes of Molière, in which shepherds and
shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you will have a very
accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.
It was in such a state of society that the landscape of Claude,
Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa attained its reputation. It
is the complete expression on canvas of the spirit of the time.
Claude embodies the foolish pastoralism, Salvator the ignorant
terror, and Gaspar the dull and affected erudition.
It was, however, altogether impossible that this state of things
could long continue. The age which had buried itself in form-
alism grew weary at last of the restraint; and the approach of a
new era was marked by the appearance, and the enthusiastic
reception, of writers who took true delight in those wild scenes
of nature which had so long been despised.
I think the first two writers in whom the symptoms of a
change are strongly manifested are Mrs. Radcliffe and Rousseau;
in both of whom the love of natural scenery, though mingled in
the one case with what was merely dramatic, and in the other
with much that was pitifully morbid or vicious, was still itself
genuine and intense, differing altogether in character from any
sentiments previously traceable in literature. And then rapidly
followed a group of writers who expressed, in various ways, the
more powerful or more pure feeling which had now become one
of the strongest instincts of the age. Of these, the principal is
your own Walter Scott. Many writers, indeed, describe nature
more minutely and more profoundly; but none show in higher
intensity the peculiar passion for what is majestic or lovely in
wild nature, to which I am now referring.
now referring. The whole of the
poem of the 'Lady of the Lake' is written with almost a boyish
enthusiasm for rocks, and lakes, and cataracts; the early novels
show the same instinct in equal strength wherever he approaches
Highland scenery: and the feeling is mingled, observe, with a
most touching and affectionate appreciation of the Gothic archi-
tecture, in which alone he found the elements of natural beauty
seized by art; so that to this day his descriptions of Melrose and
Holy Island Cathedral in the 'Lay of the Last Minstrel' and
'Marmion,' as well as of the ideal abbeys in the 'Monastery'


## p. 12526 (#586) ##########################################

12526
JOHN RUSKIN
and 'Antiquary,' together with those of Caerlaverock and Loch-
leven Castles in 'Guy Mannering' and 'The Abbot,' remain the
staple possessions and text-books of all travelers,-not so much.
for their beauty or accuracy, as for their exactly expressing that
degree of feeling with which most men in this century can sym-
pathize.
THE THRONE
From the Stones of Venice'
IN
N THE olden days of traveling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which
that toil was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate
survey of the countries through which the journey lay, and partly
by the happiness of the evening hours, when, from the top of
the last hill he had surmounted, the traveler beheld the quiet
village where he was to rest, scattered among the meadows
beside its valley stream; or from the long-hoped-for turn in the
dusty perspective of the causeway, saw for the first time the tow-
ers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset,— hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival
in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent,-in those days, I say, when there was something
more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of
each successive halting-place than a new arrangement of glass
roofing and iron girder, there were few moments of which the
recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveler than that
which, as I endeavored to describe in the close of the last chap-
ter, brought him within sight of Venice, as his gondola shot into
the open lagoon from the canal of Mestre. Not but that the
aspect of the city itself was generally the source of some slight
disappointment; for, seen in this direction, its buildings are far
less characteristic than those of the other great towns of Italy:
but this inferiority was partly disguised by distance, and more
than atoned for by the strange rising of its walls and towers out
of the midst, as it seemed, of the deep sea; for it was impossible
that the mind or the eye could at once comprehend the shallow-
ness of the vast sheet of water which stretched away in leagues
of rippling lustre to the north and south, or trace the narrow line
of islets bounding it to the east. The salt breeze, the white


## p. 12527 (#587) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12527
moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and dis-
appearing gradually, in knots of heaving shoal, under the advance
of the steady tide, all proclaimed it to be indeed the ocean on
whose bosom the great city rested so calmly; not such blue, soft,
lake-like ocean as bathes the Neapolitan promontories, or sleeps
beneath the marble rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak
power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a strange
spacious rest, and changed from its angry pallor into a field of
burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of the
lonely island church, fitly named "St. George of the Seaweed. "
As the boat drew nearer to the city, the coast which the traveler
had just left sank behind him into one long, low, sad-colored
line, tufted irregularly with brushwood and willows: but at what
seemed its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose in a dark
cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the bright mirage of
the lagoon; two or three smooth surges of inferior hill extended
themselves about their roots, and beyond these, beginning with
the craggy peaks above Vicenza, the chain of the Alps girded
the whole horizon to the north—a wall of jagged blue, here and
there showing through its clefts a wilderness of misty precipices,
fading far back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself rising and
breaking away eastward, where the sun struck opposite upon its
snow, into mighty fragments of peaked light, standing up behind
the barred clouds of evening, one after another, countless, the
crown of the Adrian Sea, until the eye turned back from pur-
suing them to rest upon the nearer burning of the campaniles
of Murano, and on the great city, where it magnified itself along
the waves as the quick silent pacing of the gondola drew nearer
and nearer. And at last, when its walls were reached, and the
outmost of its untrodden streets was entered, not through tow-
ered gate or guarded rampart, but as a deep inlet between two
rocks of coral in the Indian sea; when first upon the traveler's
sight opened the long ranges of columned palaces, each with its
black boat moored at the portal, each with its image cast down
beneath its feet upon that green pavement which every breeze
broke into new fantasies of rich tessellation; when first, at the
extremity of the bright vista, the shadowy Rialto threw its colos-
sal curve slowly forth from behind the palace of the Camerlen-
ghi that strange curve, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a
mountain cavern, graceful as a bow just bent; when first, before
its moonlike circumference was all risen, the gondolier's cry,
-


## p. 12528 (#588) ##########################################

12528
JOHN RUSKIN
"Ah, Stall! " struck sharp upon the ear, and the prow turned aside
under the mighty cornices that half met over the narrow canal,
where the plash of the water followed close and loud, ringing
along the marble by the boat's side; and when at last that boat
darted forth upon the breadth of silver sea, across which the
front of the Ducal Palace, flushed with its sanguine veins, looks
to the snowy dome of Our Lady of Salvation,—it was no mar-
vel that the mind should be so deeply entranced by the visionary
charm of a scene so beautiful and so strange, as to forget the
darker truths of its history and its being. Well might it seem
that such a city had owed her existence rather to the rod of
the enchanter than the fear of the fugitive; that the waters
which encircled her had been chosen for the mirror of her state,
rather than the shelter of her nakedness; and that all which in
nature was wild or merciless,- Time and Decay, as well as the
waves and tempests,- had been won to adorn her instead of
to destroy, and might still spare, for ages to come, that beauty
which seemed to have fixed for its throne the sands of the hour-
glass as well as of the sea.
·
And although the last few eventful years, fraught with change
to the face of the whole earth, have been more fatal in their
influence on Venice than the five hundred that preceded them;
though the noble landscape of approach to her can now be seen
no more, or seen only by a glance as the engine slackens its rush-
ing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are for ever
defaced, and many in desecrated ruins,-there is still so much
of magic in her aspect that the hurried traveler, who must leave
her before the wonder of that first aspect has been worn away,
may still be led to forget the humility of her origin, and to shut
his eyes to the depth of her desolation. They at least are little
to be envied, in whose hearts the great charities of the imagi-
nation lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress
the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is igno-
ble and disguise what is discordant in a scene so rich in its
remembrances, so surpassing in its beauty. But for this work
of the imagination there must be no permission during the task
which is before us. The impotent feelings of romance, so singu-
larly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never
save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are at-
tached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from
the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood


## p. 12529 (#589) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12529
in their own strength. Those feelings, always as fruitless as they
are fond, are in Venice not only incapable of protecting, but even
of discerning, the objects to which they ought to have been
attached. The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of
yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage dream which
the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner
whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrow deserved
sympathy, ever crossed that "Bridge of Sighs" which is the
centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of
Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now passes
with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero
address as of one of his great ancestors was erected to a sol-
dier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero's death;
and the most conspicuous parts of the city have been so entirely
altered in the course of the last three centuries, that if Henry
Dandolo or Francis Foscari could be summoned from their tombs,
and stood each on the deck of his galley at the entrance of the
Grand Canal,- that renowned entrance, the painter's favorite.
subject, the novelist's favorite scene, where the water first nar-
rows by the steps of the Church of La Salute,-the mighty
Doges would not know in what spot of the world they stood,
would literally not recognize one stone of the great city for
whose sake, and by whose ingratitude, their gray hairs had been
brought down with bitterness to the grave. The remains of their
Venice lie hidden behind the cumbrous masses which were the
delight of the nation in its dotage; hidden in many, a grass-
grown court and silent pathway, and lightless canal, where the
slow waves have sapped their foundations for five hundred years,
and must soon prevail over them for ever. It must be our task
to glean and gather them forth, and restore out of them some
faint image of the lost city, more gorgeous a thousandfold than
that which now exists, yet not created in the day-dream of the
prince, nor by the ostentation of the noble, but built by iron
hands and patient hearts, contending against the adversity of
nature and the fury of man; so that its wonderfulness cannot be
grasped by the indolence of imagination, but only after frank
inquiry into the true nature of that wild and solitary scene whose
restless tides and trembling sands did indeed shelter the birth of
the city, but long denied her dominion.
•
The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (vary-
ing considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a
XXI-784


## p. 12530 (#590) ##########################################

12530
JOHN RUSKIN
shore, is enough to cause continual movement in the waters, and
in the main canals to produce a reflux which frequently runs like
a mill-stream. At high water no land is visible for many miles
to the north or south of Venice, except in the form of small
islands crowned with towers or gleaming with villages. There is
a channel some three miles wide between the city and the main-
land, and some mile and a half wide between it and the sandy
breakwater called the Lido, which divides the lagoon from the
Adriatic, but which is so low as hardly to disturb the impression
of the city's having been built in the midst of the ocean; although
the secret of its true position is partly, yet not painfully, betrayed
by the clusters of piles set to mark the deep-water channels,
which undulate far away in spotty chains like the studded backs
of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick glittering of the crisped and
crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds
upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is
widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches
is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon;
and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst.
of a dark plain of seaweed of gloomy green, except only where
the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams con-
verge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and som-
bre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous
channels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, and often so
choked with slime that the heavier keels furrow the bottom till
their crossing tracks are seen through the clear sea-water like the
ruts upon a wintry road, and the oar leaves blue gashes upon
the ground at every stroke, or is entangled among the thick
weed that fringes the banks with the weight of its sullen waves,
leaning to and fro upon the uncertain sway of the exhausted
tide. The scene is often profoundly oppressive, even at this day,
when every plot of higher ground bears some fragment of fair
building: but in order to know what it was once, let the traveler
follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented
channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let him re-
move, in his imagination, the brightness of the great city that
still extends itself in the distance, and the walls and towers from
the islands that are near; and so wait until the bright investiture
and sweet warmth of the sunset are withdrawn from the waters,
and the black desert of their shore lies in its nakedness beneath
the night, pathless, comfortless, infirm, lost in dark languor and


## p. 12531 (#591) ##########################################

JOHN RUSKIN
12531
fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tide-
less pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a ques-
tioning cry,— and he will be enabled to enter in some sort into
the horror of heart with which this solitude was anciently chosen
by man for his habitation. They little thought, who first drove
the stakes into the sand, and strewed the ocean reeds for their
rest, that their children were to be the princes of that ocean, and
their palaces its pride; and yet, in the great natural laws that
rule that sorrowful wilderness, let it be remembered what strange
preparation had been made for the things which no human imagi-
nation could have foretold, and how the whole existence and
fortune of the Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, by
the setting of those bars and doors to the rivers and the sea.
Had deeper currents divided their islands, hostile navies would
again and again have reduced the rising city into servitude; had
stronger surges beaten their shores, all the richness and refine-
ment of the Venetian architecture must have been exchanged for
the walls and bulwarks of an ordinary seaport. Had there been
no tide, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the narrow
canals of the city would have become noisome, and the marsh in
which it was built pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or
eighteen inches higher in its rise, the water access to the doors
of the palaces would have been impossible: even as it is, there is
sometimes a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing without setting
foot upon the lower and slippery steps; and the highest tides
sometimes enter the court-yards, and overflow the entrance halls.
Eighteen inches more of difference between the level of the flood
and ebb would have rendered the doorsteps of every palace, at
low water, a treacherous mass of weeds and limpets, and the
entire system of water carriage for the higher classes, in their
easy and daily intercourse, must have been done away with. The
streets of the city would have been widened, its network of
canals filled up, and all the peculiar character of the place and
the people destroyed.
The reader may perhaps have felt some pain in the contrast
between this faithful view of the site of the Venetian Throne,
and the romantic conception of it which we ordinarily form; but
this pain, if he have felt it, ought to be more than counter-
balanced by the value of the instance thus afforded to us at
once of the inscrutableness and the wisdom of the ways of God.
If, two thousand years ago, we had been permitted to watch the


## p. 12532 (#592) ##########################################

12532
JOHN RUSKIN
slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted
sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the life-
less, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have
understood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out
of the void, and the torpid waters inclosed with their desolate
walls of sand! How little could we have known, any more than
of what now seems to us most distressful, dark, and objectless,
the glorious aim which was then in the mind of Him in whose
hand are all the corners of the earth! how little imagined that in
the laws which were stretching forth the gloomy margins of those
fruitless banks, and feeding the bitter grass among their shallows,
there was indeed a preparation, and the only preparation possible,
for the founding of a city which was to be set like a golden
clasp on the girdle of the earth, to write her history on the white
scrolls of the sea surges, and to word it in their thunder, and to
gather and give forth in world-wide pulsation the glory of the
West and of the East, from the burning heart of her Fortitude
and Splendor.
DESCRIPTION OF ST. MARK'S
From the Stones of Venice'
A
YARD or two farther we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle;
and glancing as we pass through the square door of mar-
ble, deeply molded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows
of its pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed
shield carved on its side; and so presently emerge on the bridge
and Campo San Moisè, whence to the entrance into St. Mark's
Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the Ve-
netian character is nearly destroyed, first by the frightful façade
of San Moisè, which we will pause at another time to examine,
and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza,
and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging
groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through
them into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the Bocca di
Piazza, and then we forget them all: for between those pillars
there opens a great light, and in the midst of it, as we advance
slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly
forth from the level field of checkered stones; and on each side
the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry,


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JOHN RUSKIN
12533
as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above
us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedi-
ence and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken
walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly
sculpture and fluted shafts of delicate stone.
And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered
arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great
square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we
may see it far away;-a multitude of pillars and white domes,
clustered into a long low pyramid of colored light; a treasure
heap, it seems, partly of gold and partly of opal and mother-of-
pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with
fair mosaic and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber
and delicate as ivory,- sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm
leaves and lilies, and grapes and pomegranates, and birds clinging
and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an
endless network of buds and plumes; and in the midst of it the
solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and lean-
ing to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among
the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them,
-interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back
among the branches of Eden when first its gates were angel-
guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are
set pillars of variegated stones,- jasper and porphyry, and deep-
green serpentine spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles that
half refuse and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, "their
bluest veins to kiss,". the shadow, as it steals back from them,
revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide.
leaves the waved sand; their capitals rich with interwoven tracery,
rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and
vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross;
and above them, in the broad archivolts, a continuous chain of
language and of life,-angels, and the signs of heaven, and the
labors of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth; and
above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with
white arches edged with scarlet flowers,-a confusion of delight,
amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in
their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted.
on a blue field covered with stars: until at last, as if in ecstasy,
the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss them-
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12534
JOHN RUSKIN
selves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured
spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound
before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral
and amethyst.
Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an
interval! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt
them; for instead of the restless crowd, hoarse-voiced and sable-
winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches
are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and min-
gle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every
motion, with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood un-
changed for seven hundred years.
And what effect has this splendor on those who pass beneath
it? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the
gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it,
nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier
and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to
the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the
city push their counters; nay, the foundations of its pillars are
themselves the seats, not "of them that sell doves" for sacrifice,
but of the vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole
square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line
of cafés, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge
and read empty journals; in its centre the Austrian bands play
during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the
organ notes,-the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen
crowd thickening round them,-a crowd which if it had its
will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the
recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest
classes, unemployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like
lizards; and unregarded children - every heavy glance of their
young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their
throats hoarse with cursing-gamble and fight and snarl and
sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the
marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ
and his angels look down upon it continually.
That we may not enter the church out of the midst of the
horror of this, let us turn aside under the portico which looks
towards the sea, and passing round within the two massive pil-
lars brought from St. Jean d'Acre, we shall find the gate of the


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Baptistery: let us enter there. The heavy door closes behind us
instantly; and the light, and the turbulence of the Piazzetta, are
together shut out by it.
We are in a low vaulted room; vaulted not with arches, but
with small cupolas starred with gold and checkered with gloomy
figures: in the centre is a bronze font charged with rich bas-
reliefs; a small figure of the Baptist standing above it in a single
ray of light, that glances across the narrow room, dying as it
falls, from a window high in the wall-and the first thing that
it strikes, and the only thing that it strikes brightly, is a tomb.
We hardly know if it be a tomb indeed: for it is like a narrow
couch set beside the window, low-roofed and curtained; so that it
might seem, but that it has some height above the pavement, to
have been drawn towards the window, that the sleeper might be
wakened early,-only there are two angels who have drawn the
curtain back, and are looking down upon him. Let us look also,
and thank that gentle light that rests upon his forehead for ever,
and dies away upon his breast.