The Press. — London, England, 1854-02-04 00:00:00

I s FEBRUARY 4, 1854. yittraturt. The Stones of Venice. By John Ruskin. With Illustrations. 3 vols., Bvo. 1851-3. Loudon: Smith, Elder, and Co. Ma. Russiti, though still a young man, is by no means a young author. Several years have past since he first appeared before the public in that capacity, but we regret to find that few of the errors which disfigured his earlier productions have been confessed or amended. Ho made the common mistake of rushing too hastily into print ; while his own education was unfinished he fearlessly under took to instruct the world; the very book which was to reverse every received canon of criticism, and produce a revolution in the national taste, was ostentatiously announced in the titlepage as the performance of an " undergraduate." That work, however, evinced no ordinary powers, and raised high expectations of what the author might achieve when years had matured his experience and reflection had sobered his rashness and self-confidence. But we have been disappointed. His first produc tion remains his best, displaying more origin ality, a purer style, and an imagination more amenable to the control of reason. We do not think Mr. Ruskin's strength lies in criticism : his very eloquence is a snare, and the vehemence of his partialities makes him a powerful advocate, but totally unfits him for a judge. In poetry, whether of verse or prose, we have no doubt he would have excelled. There is much of the poetic in his keen and delicate observation of nature and in the lively play of his imagination, but he must forgive us if we add that we do not think his perceptions of the beautiful very acute, or his taste very correct: had they been so he could not so consistently have sacrificed. them to the exigencies of his extravagant theory. This theory it is necessary we should clearly set forth. He insists in the first 'Once on the indissoluble union of the fine arts with morality and religion, and he identifies bad taste in architecture with levity, hypocrisy, and un belief. In the absence of all proof, nay, in defiance of the testimony of history, he ascribes an enthusiastic devotion and moral purity to the artists of a particular age, and au inherent holiness to the buildings which they raised. We must quote his own words : " The stars upon this azure ground [he is " describing an ornament on a portal at St " Mark's] ought to make us remember, as its " builder remembered, the stars that ascend " and fall in the great arch of the sky " And I believe that the man who designed " and the men who delighted in that archivolt " to have been wise, happy, and holy."—Vol. 11., 1 1 . 96. It is also part of his theory that religious art and moral architecture are confined to one short period and one particular style, and that all which preceded or followed it is base, worthless, and impious. Mark what was the fate of Venice :—" On the 27th of March, 1424, " the first hammer was lifted against the old " palace of Ziani. That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the " Renaissance. It was the knell of the " architecture of Venice—and of Venice her " self."—Vol. 11., p. 301. The moral Mr. Ruskin designs us to draw is this. If England would not share the fate of Venice, if we would fly the evils of civil war and anarchy, if we would avoid crime on earth and its punishment hereafter, " we must give "up the classic style totally, despise and " forget it, and build henceforth only in that " perfect and Christian style hitherto called " Gothic, which is everlastingly the best." — Vol. 111., p. 254. Mr. Ruskin is particularly desirous not to be misunderstood, and lie is indignant with " certain reviewers " who have ventured to suppose that his words were not intended to convey the full meaning that, in their obvious sense, they bear. Ho dates the decline of arch' tecture from the fifteenth century, when that change took place " to which London owes St. " Paul's, Rome St. Peter's, Venice and Vicenza " the edifices commonly supposed to be their THE PRESS. " noblest, and Europe in general the degrada " Lion of every art she has ever since prat " tised."—Vol. 1., p. 22. We can quite understand the hesitation of the " reviewers" in attributing such opinions to a man of Mr. Ruskin's intelligence. A few years ago such sentiments would have hardly required a serious reply ; but Mr. Ruskin is by no means the only man in the present age of reason who affects to associate piety and pointed Gothic, and to test the orthodoxy of a church by the tracery of its windows. The fashionable folly of the day has found in him an eloquent and ingenious, though we must add a somewhat extra vagant, exponent. He professes an aver sion to " shams ; " but we must remind him that shams are by no means confined to stuccoes and " compo." We are surrounded by them—we have sham reformers, sham peacemakers, and sham philanthropists—all bad in their way. We have also sham bigots— recent perverts, or candidates for perversion— and sham enthusiasts, the most provoking of all ; and, as Mr. Ruskin has, to our regret, constituted himself the champion of their cardinal doctrine, it is worth while to ex amine the process by which he maintains his thesis. Like Nebuchadnezzar, he permits no worship of idols excepting those which he himself sets up. He praises the taste of the Byzantine artists of the eleventh century in dressing their female idols. It was, he says, "the dress of the matronage of the day, and none can be more modest or beautiful;" but while he rejects the undraped gods of the Parthenon, he does not admire the waxen images that the modern churches enshrine, dressed in spangled muslins and pink satin shoes. Yet such is the " dress of the day" as near as the church milliner can imitate it, and such are the idols worshipped by the zeal of the servant maids and fishermen of Venice ; and we know not what proof there exists that the devotion of the eleventh century is purer than that of the nineteenth, and their worship more acceptable. Piety, he thinks, is extinguished in Venice, where the careless passenger lounges in front of the Church of St. Mark's regardless of the sacred texts and mystic symbols inscribed upon it, forgetting that the portico he so much admires always was, as it now is, the very centre of business and of pleasure, and neces sarily the haunt alike of the busy and the idle. We know not where he has studied the early history of Venice, or where he discovers " the holiness and happiness" he attributes to her first inhabitants. Our own opinion is very different. We should rather have said that their intercourse with Constantinople had taught them to unite the crimes of Eastern with the violence of Northern barbarism; and hence the bloody mutinies and civil wars, the doges degraded, mutilated, or butchered in cold blood at the horns of the altar. From the middle of the thirteenth to the opening of the fifteenth century is the model period that Mr. Ruskin selects for approbation both in morals and in architecture. Yet admit ting " foliation" to have been pure, what a pic ture do contemporary writers present us of the depravity of manners throughout the Italian peninsula! Rome, abandoned by its pastors, was pre-eminent only in disorder—robbers in the streets, tyranny in the palace, simony in the Church, and outrage and selfishness every where. Dante Mr. Ruskin allows to be au thority (and indeed Carey's version of it he prefers to " Paradise Lost " ) : Ah, slavish Italy !.thou inn of grief ! Vessel without a pilot in loud storm! Lady no longer of fair provinces, But brothellouse impure! Purgatory, Canto VI. Venice was no exception to the general cor ruption. However pure her Gothic, treachery arid selfishness reigned in public and in pri vate, and her policy was as tortuous and unscru pulous as if the " five orders" had been adopted by public decree, and the principles of \Tani vim acknowledged by the senate and council. To give any plausibility to the theory that the revival of ancient architecture in Venice was connected, as cause and effect, with the decay of private morality or public prosperity, he should prove that moral degradation had followed the same architectural innovation in other coun- tries also. The arts of Greece and Rome together with their literature, were first revived in Italy ; but they rapidly spread throughout Europe generally, and were introduced into Spain and France exactly at the moment when those countries rose to unprece dented greatness and prosperity. If the sceptre fell in Italy, it was seized in countries no less guilty of the classic " orders." Such, however, are not the views of Mr. Ruskin, and he writes as if Venice had no fault or misfortune to charge herself with but " the five orders of "architecture." These sapped her energies and crippled her trade, and not the monopoly of Spain, or the discovery of the New World and of a new passage to India. With such an example before us, if England will he warned, there is yet time. " I plead," he says, " for " the introduction of the Gothic form into our " domestic architecture, not merely because it " is lovely, but because it is the only faithful, " strong, enduring, and honourable building." Vol. 11., p. 268. To produce this revolution he tells us is one of the principal objects of his treatise. We do not believe he will succeed in converting London into a mediaeval city, any more than in induciug its citizens to adopt chain armour, which he seems to think de sirable. But surely he cannot tax the existing generation with an architectural fanaticism for " the five orders " ! What liberties are taken with them, and how their proportions aro defied when something like them is attempted! And much has been done in the way he recom mends. We have churches in all styles, Plantagenet castles for retired grocers, By zantine schools and parish unions, Elizabethan railway-stations, and. Saracenic madhouses. But he has other and more immediately prac tical reasons for urging his advice with so much energy. He thinks the happiness and respect ability of the working classes involved in its acceptance. Technical skill and exact work• mauship degrade the artisan into a machine and his employer into a tyrant inflicting a " slavery a thousand times more bitter and " degrading than that of the scourged African "or helot Greek."—Vol. 11., p. 163. It is not work that is objected to, but the nature of the work, which withers the soul, corrupts the heart, and depsides the body—" work which " God blesses not and humanity will not en " dure."—Vol. 11., p. 164. "It is a mistaken supposition that ono " man's thought can or ought to be executed " by another man's hands."—Vol. 11., p. 168. If this be true, we must assume that the head that planned and the hands that executed the building belonged to the same individual ; that in Byzantine and Gothic architecture no unskilled hands were employed, no mere labourers carried the hod, no mechanic quar ried or shaped the stone. In the various specimens of Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architecture Mr. Ruskin can discover no beauty, and, if we understand him right, he admits no variety of excellence and recognises no difference in performance ; so that " any " bricklayer might be taught to practise it " without the intervention of an architect " and that " a stone-cutting machine, producing " any of the five orders on the most perfect " Greek model," might be invented to supplant the use of manual labour altogether ; that is to say, because the sculptor of a Co rinthian capital is supplied with a desi g n, no head is required to work the acanthus leaf, no taste to mould its delicate foliage ; and of course Mr. Ruskin means to imply that the By zantine and Gothic architect trusted all the decoration of their edifices to the taste and fancy of their workmen, unshackled by their tyrannical superintendence. Mr. Buskin's remedy for this evil is truly won derful. "A determined sacrifice of such conve " nience, or beauty, or cheapness, as is only to be " got by the degradation of the workman ; never " to encourage the manufacture of any article " not absolutely necessary in the production " of which invention has no share'—Vol. IL, p. 185. As a poetical flight, such a sentiment might pass without reply ; but Mr. Ruskin affects to write with practical aims, and we may con sider what would he the practical results of following his advice—nothing less than a re• lapse into a state of semi-barbarism for the consumer, and for the workman the transmu- 111 _.. ~-::~~i~ T ~. i~ 4? ' . l I .A