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

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.,
11. 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 design,
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-