sensibly rising and others insensibly sinking; the necessary alternative, that all these varied and there is indirect, but perfectly satisfactory, species have been evolved from pre-existing proof that an enormous area now covered by crocodilian forms, by the operation of causes the Pacific has been deepened thousands of feet as completely a part of the common order of since the present inhabitants of that sea came nature as those which have effected the changes into existence. Thus there is not a shadow of the inorganic world. Few will venture to of a reason for believing that the physical affirm that the reasoning which applies to crocochanges of the globe in past times have been diles loses its force among other animals, or effected by other than natural causes. Is there among plants. If one series of species has any more reason for believing that the con- come into existence by the operation of natural comitant modifications in the forms of the liv- causes, it seems folly to deny that all may have ing inhabitants of the globe have been brought arisen in the same way. about in other ways? A small beginning has led us to a great ending. If I were to put the bit of chalk with which we started into the hot but obscure flame of burning hydrogen, it would presently shine like the sun. It seems to me that this physical metamorphosis is no false image of what has been the result of our subjecting it to a jet of fervent, though nowise brilliant, thought tonight. It has become luminous, and its clear rays, penetrating the abyss of the remote past. have brought within our ken some stages of the evolution of the earth. And in the shifting Before attempting to answer this question, let us try to form a distinct mental picture of what has happened in some special case. The crocodiles are animals which, as a group, have a very vast antiquity. They abounded ages before the chalk was deposited; they throng the rivers in warm climates at the present day. There is a difference in the form of the joints of the backbone, and in some minor particulars, between the crocodiles of the present epoch and those which lived before the chalk; but in the cretaceous epoch, as I have already mentioned, the crocodiles had assumed the modern type of structure. Notwithstanding this, the crocodiles of the chalk are not identically the same as those which lived in the times called "older tertiary," which succeeded the cretaceous epoch, and the crocodiles of the older tertiaries are not identical with those of the newer tertiaries. nor are these identical with existing forms. (I leave open the question whether particular species may have lived on from epoch to epoch.) Thus each epoch has had its peculiar crocodiles; though all, since the chalk, have belonged to Among the hours of his lite to which the the modern type, and differ simply in their pro-writer looks back with peculiar gratitude as havportions, and in such structural particulars as ing been marked by more than ordinary fulness are discernible only to trained eyes. How is the existence of this long succession of different species of crocodiles to be accounted for? Only two suppositions seem to be open to us-Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes. Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time. Science gives no countenance to such a wild fancy; nor can even the perverse ingenuity of a commentator pretend to discover this sense in the simple words in which the writer of Genesis records the proceedings of the fifth and sixth days of the Creation. On the other hand, I see no good reason for doubting without haste, but without rest' of the land and sea, as in the endless variation of the forms assumed by living beings, we have observed nothing but the natural product of the forces originally possessed by the substance of the universe. JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900) FROM THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHI TECTURE* THE LAMP OF MEMORY. of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with none of the savage"Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast.”—---Goethe. 1 A chain of mountains in eastern France. * Published in 1849, some time after the first two volumes of Modern Painters. The seven "Lamps" are Sacrifice. Truth, Power. Beauty. Life, Memory, and Obedience. The word "lamp is used in allusion to the story of Aladdin's magic lamp: and the book was written, said Ruskin, "to show that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture. without exception. had been produced.' The selection here given illustrates Ruskin's early exuberant style and also contains his fundamental doctrine of the necessity of relating art to life and morality. power had been dependent upon a life which was not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.5 ness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a curling pools of the green river gliding and great power beginning to be manifested in the glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes earth, and of a deep and majestic concord in moving with him as he flew. It would be diffithe rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the cult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any first utterance of those mighty mountain sym- other interest than that of its own secluded and phonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. the sudden blankness and chill which were cast But their strength is as yet restrained; and the upon it when he endeavoured, in order more far-reaching ridges of pastoral mountain sue- strictly to arrive at the sources of its impresceed each other, like the long and sighing swell siveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene which moves over quiet waters from some far in some aboriginal forest of the New Contioff stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness nent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, pervading that vast monotony. The destructive the river its music; the hills became oppressively forces and the stern expression of the central desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed.ened forest showed how much of their former dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forests; no pale. defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joy ful flowers as I know not the like of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulæ; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop.cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie, compared to that which the living nation writes, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked and the uncorrupted marble bears!-how many up with them as with heavy snow, and touched pages of doubtful record might we not often with ivy on the edges-ivy as light and lovely spare, for a few stones left one upon another! as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush The ambition of the old Babel builders was well of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; directed for this world: there are but two and in the more open ground the vetch and com- | strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, frey, and mezereon, and the smali sapphire | Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some buds of the Polygala Alpina,3 and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two all showered amidst the golden softness of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge of the ravine; the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; and on the opposite side of the valley. walled all along as it was by gray cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings. and with the shadows of the pines flickering 5 upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the 2 "Mary's Month." The reference is to May processions in honor of the Virgin. 3 A milkwort. It is as the centralization and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How sort includes the former, and is mightier in its In the Fort de Joux. Mirabeau, the French ora- army. 6 See Genesis. xi. 4. 7 It was during the ascendency of Pericles that the Parthenon was built. confess that we have learned more of Greece given and parents taught, a strange consciousout of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if indeed there be any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate; the first, to render the architecture of the day historical; and the second, to preserve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages. It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of Architecture; for it is in becoming memorial or monumental that a true perfection is at tained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning. As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain limitation to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins; and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness or their suffering,-that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon-was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the heart and house to them; that all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples-temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have ness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers' honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up. in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital-upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone-upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar-not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck, in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular dis content; that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt, and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change. This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their children what they have been, and from what, if so it had been permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance. which, as I endeavoured to describe in the close of the last chapter, 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 shallowness 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 moaning sea-birds, the masses of black weed separating and disappearing 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 FROM THE STONES OF VENICE. promontories, or sleeps beneath the marble THE THRONE. VOLUME II, CHAPTER I* rocks of Genoa, but a sea with the bleak power of our own northern waves, yet subdued into a In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which distance could not be strange spacious rest, and changed from its vanquished without toil, but in which that toil angry pallor into a field of burnished gold, as the sun declined behind the belfry tower of was rewarded, partly by the power of delib- the lonely island church, fitly named "St. erate survey of the countries through which George of the Seaweed. As the boat drew the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the evening hours, when from the top of had just left sank behind him into one long, nearer to the city, the coast which the traveller the last hill he had surmounted, the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, brushwood and willows; but at what seemed low, sad-coloured line, tufted irregularly with scattered among the meadows beside its valley its northern extremity, the hills of Arqua rose stream; or, from the long hoped for turn in in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time, the towers of some famed three smooth surges of inferior hill extended on the bright mirage of the lagoon; two or city, faint in the rays of sunset-hours of themselves about their roots, and beyond these, peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station beginning with the craggy peaks above Viis perhaps not always, or to all men, an equiv-horizon to the north-a wall of jagged blue, cenza, the chain of the Alps girded the whole alent,-in those days, I say, when there was here and there showing through its clefts a something more to be anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive back into the recesses of Cadore, and itself wilderness of misty precipices, fading far halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass rising and breaking away eastward, where the roofing and iron girder, there were few mosun struck opposite upon its snow into mighty ments of which the recollection was more fondly cherished by the traveller, than that the barred clouds of evening, one after anfragments of peaked light, standing up behind In this "faithful view of the site of the Vene- other, countless, the crown of the Adrian Sea, tian Throne," we have both an illustration until the eye turned back from pursuing them, of Ruskin's descriptive and narrative powers, to rest upon the nearer burning of the and an expression of the deep religious convictions which informed his earlier writings, paniles1 of Murano, and on the great city, cam In the selection that follows will be found his defence and praise of Gothic art, together 1 bell-towers (Murano is an island just north of with his central social theory, Venice.) where it magnified itself along the waves, as 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 2 The Bridge of the Rialto, across the Grand Canal, consists of a single marble arch of 74 feet span and 32 feet in height. 3 Indicating that the gondolier meant to turn to the right. 4 The Church of Santa Maria della Salute, on the right side of the mouth of the Grand Canal. by a glance, as the engine slackens its rushing on the iron line; and though many of her palaces are forever defaced, and many in desecrated ruins, there is still so much of magic in her aspect that the hurried traveller, 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 imagination lie dead, and for whom the fancy has no power to repress the importunity of painful impressions, or to raise what is ignoble, 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 singularly characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save, the remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing flowers; and they must be torn away from the magnificent fragments, if we would see them as they stood 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 traveller now passes with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as one of his great ancestors was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero 's death;6 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 favourite subject, the novelist's favourite scene, where the water first narrows by the steps of the Church of La Salute, the mighty Doges would not know in what part of the world they stood, would literally not recognize one stone of the 5 See Childe Harold, IV, 1. 6 See Marino Faliero, III, i, 36. 7 Early Doges of Venice; the one was blinded by the Byzantine emperor, the other compelled to abdicate. |