great city, for whose sake, and by whose in- continually; the main fact with which we have gratitude, their grey hairs had been brought to do is the gradual transport, by the Po and down with bitterness to the grave. The re- its great collateral rivers, of vast masses of mains of their Venice lie hidden behind the the finer sediment to the sea. The character cumbrous masses which were the delight of the of the Lombardic plain is most strikingly exnation in its dotage; hidden in many a grass-pressed by the ancient walls of its cities, comgrown court, and silent pathway, and lightless posed for the most part of large rounded 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 tasks 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. Alpine pebbles alternating with narrow courses of brick; and was curiously illustrated in 1848, by the ramparts of these same pebbles thrown up four or five feet high round every field, to check the Austrian cavalry in the battle under the walls of Verona. The finer dust among which these pebbles are dispersed is taken up by the rivers, fed into continual strength by the Alpine snow, so that, however pure their waters may be when they issue from the lakes at the foot of the great chain, they become of the colour and opacity of clay before they reach the Adriatic; the sediment which they bear is at once thrown down as they enter the sea, forming a vast belt of low land along the eastern coast of Italy. The powerful stream of the Po of course builds forward the fastest; When the eye falls casually on a map of on each side of it, north and south, there is a Europe, there is no feature by which it is more tract of marsh, fed by more feeble streams, likely to be arrested than the strange sweeping and less liable to rapid change than the delta loop formed by the junction of the Alps and of the central river. In one of these tracts is Apennines, and enclosing the great basin of built RAVENNA, and in the other VENICE. Lombardy. This return of the mountain chain What circumstances directed the peculiar arupon itself causes a vast difference in the char-rangement of this great belt of sediment in the acter of the distribution of its débris on its earliest times, it is not here the place to inopposite sides. The rock fragments and sedi-quire. It is enough for us to know that from ment which the torrents on the other side of the Alps bear into the plains are distributed over a vast extent of country, and, though here and there lodged in beds of enormous thickness, soon permit the firm substrata to appear from underneath them; but all the torrents which descend from the southern side of the High Alps, and from the northern slope of the Apennines, meet concentrically in the recess or mountain bay which the two ridges enclose; every fragment which thunder breaks out of their battlements, and every grain of dust which the summer rain washes from their pas tures, is at last laid at rest in the blue sweep of the Lombardic plain; and that plain must have risen within its rocky barriers as a cup fills with wine, but for two contrary influences which continually depress, or disperse from its surface, the accumulation of the ruins of ages. I will not tax the reader's faith in modern science by insisting on the singular depression of the surface of Lombardy, which appears for many centuries to have taken place steadily and 8 I. e.. Ruskin's task. in this intended work on Venetian architecture and sculpture. the mouths of the Adige to those of the Piave there stretches, at a variable distance of from three to five miles from the actual shore, a bank of sand, divided into long islands by narrow channels of sea. The space between this bank and the true shore consists of the sedimentary deposits from these and other rivers, a great plain of calcareous mud, covered, in the neighbourhood of Venice, by the sea at high water, to the depth in most places of a foot or a foot and a half, and nearly everywhere exposed at low tide, but divided by an intricate network of narrow and winding channels, from which the sea never retires. In some places, according to the run of the currents, the land has risen into marshy islets, consolidated, some by art, and some by time, into ground firm enough to be built upon, or fruitful enough to be cultivated: in others, on the contrary, it has not reached the sea level; so that, at the average low water, shallow lakelets glitter among its irregularly exposed fields of seaweed. In the midst of the largest of these, increased in importance » Compare what Huxley says on the chalk formation of Europe, p. 670. by the confluence of several large river channels when every plot of higher ground bears some towards one of the openings in the sea bank, the city of Venice itself is built, on a crowded cluster of islands; the various plots of higher ground which appear to the north and south of this central cluster, have at different periods been also thickly inhabited, and now bear, according to their size, the remains of cities, villages, or isolated convents and churches, scattered among spaces of open ground, partly waste and encumbered by ruins, partly under cultivation for the supply of the metropolis. fragment of fair building: but, in order to know what it was once, let the traveller follow in his boat at evening the windings of some unfrequented channel far into the midst of the melancholy plain; let him remove, 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 fearful silence, except where the salt runlets plash into the tideless pools, or the sea-birds flit from their margins with a questioning 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 wilder The average rise and fall of the tide is about three feet (varying considerably with the seasons); but this fall, on so flat a 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 mainland, 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 dis-ness, let it be remembered what strange prepturb the impression of the city's having been aration had been made for the things which no built in the midst of the ocean, although the human imagination could have foretold, and secret of its true position is partly, yet not how the whole existence and fortune of the painfully, betrayed by the clusters of piles set Venetian nation were anticipated or compelled, to mark the deep-water channels, which undu- by the setting of those bars and doors to the late far away in spotty chains like the studded rivers and the sea. Had deeper currents backs of huge sea-snakes, and by the quick divided their islands, hostile navies would again glittering of the crisped and crowded waves and again have reduced the rising city into that flicker and dance before the strong winds servitude; had stronger surges beaten their upon the uplifted level of the shallow sea. But shores, all the richness and refinement of the the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall Venetian architecture must have been exof eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show changed for the walls and bulwarks of an ground over the greater part of the lagoon; ordinary sea-port. Had there been no tide, and at the complete ebb the city is seen stand- as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the naring in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, row canals of the city would have become of gloomy green, except only where the larger noisome, and the marsh in which it was built branches of the Brenta and its associated pestiferous. Had the tide been only a foot or streams converge towards the port of the Lido. eighteen inches higher in its rise, the waterThrough this salt and sombre plain the gondola access to the doors of the palaces would have and the fishing-boat advance by tortuous chan- been impossible: even as it is, there is somenels, seldom more than four or five feet deep, times a little difficulty, at the ebb, in landing and often so choked with slime that the without setting foot upon the lower and slipheavier keels furrow the bottom till their cross-pery steps; and the highest tides sometimes ing 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, enter the courtyards, 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 counterbalanced 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 slow settling of the slime of those turbid rivers into the polluted sea, and the gaining upon its deep and fresh waters of the lifeless, impassable, unvoyageable plain, how little could we have under stood the purpose with which those islands were shaped out of the void, and the torpid waters enclosed 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 Splendour. Understand this in company with much error. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its Heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but Now, in the make and nature of every man, begin to imagine, to think, to try to do any however rude or simple, whom we employ in thing worth doing; and the engine-turned premanual labour, there are some powers for bet- cision is lost at once. Out come all his roughter things: some tardy imagination, torpid ness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after there are, even at the worst; and in most cases pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him it is all our own fault that they are tardy or also; and we know the height of it only when torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless see the clouds settling upon him. And, we are content to take them in their feebleness, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there and unless we prize and honour them in their will be transfiguration behind and within them. imperfection above the best and most perfect And now, reader, look round this English manual skill. And this is what we have to do room of yours, about which you have been with all our labourers; to look for the thought-proud so often, because the work of it was so ful part of them, and get that out of them, good and strong, and the ornaments of it so whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but THE MEDIAEVAL AND THE MODERN WORKMAN. FROM VOLUME II, CHAPTER VI we finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tem དང་པོསྒོས་ཀྱིས jen ostched over སཨཱར rotting pollards the her human intelligence, tau skin which, after the 1. t to see God,2 into leathern vege macinery with,-this it is to be mited, and there might be more n hond, though her feudal lords' work were worth men's lives, and biod of the vexed husbandman of the furrows of her fields, than there why the primation of her multitudes is sent nd to feed the factory smoke, and the of them is given daily to be wasted murupes of a web, or racked into the ་;་ Never wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for, of old, the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty,-liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The movements of the one are hindered by the bur den on his shoulder; of the other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds be thought to speak wildly or of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is ja verily this degradation of | raised by it. Which had, in reality, most of 1144 a martine, which, more than the serf nature in him, the Irish peasant who of tur times, is leading the mass was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, el hard data mierywhere into vain, incoherent, with his musket muzzle thrust through the gg og for a freedom of which ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, Priyank #272 1 the nature to themselves, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up intery against wealth, and his own life and the lives of his seven sons for 18 not foreed from them his chief?-as each fell, calling forth his we pree,re of famine, or the sting brother to the death, “Another for Hector!" It f These do much, and have And therefore, in all ages and all countries, 1. agre; but the foundations of reverence has been paid and sacrifice made by ye shaken as they are at men to each other, not only without complaint. not that men are ill fed, but but rejoicingly; and famine, and peril, and furamure in the work by which sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been and therefore look to borne willingly in the causes of masters and w the other hand, go forth again to up the old cathedral front, where you Wanded so often at the fantastic ignorance De od mulptors; examine once more those why wedding, and formless monsters, and stern cute, auntomiles and rigid; but do not cock at them, for they are signs of the life and kokocke of nonry workman who struck the stone; a kusedom of Thonght, and rank in scale of lotus such as to wes, no charters, no charities an about, but want it must be the first aim dal Budgets day to regain for her kings; for all these gifts of the heart ennobled the men who gave, not less than the men who received, them, and nature prompted, and God rewarded the sacrifice. But to feel their souls withering within them, unthanked, to find their whole being sunk into an unrecognized abyss, to be counted off into a heap of mechanism, numbered with its wheels, and weighed with its hammer strokes ;-this nature bade not,―this God blesses not,-this humanity for no long time is able to endure. which its operation is admissible, even in changing or strangely combining what is brought within its sphere. For hitherto we have spoken as if every change wilfully wrought by the imagination was an error; apparently implying that its only proper work was to summon up the memories of past events, and the anticipations of future ones, under aspects which would bear the sternest tests of historical investigation, or abstract reasoning. And in general this is, indeed, its noblest work. Nevertheless, it has also permissible functions peculiarly its own, and certain rights of feigning, and adorning, and fancifully arranging, inalienable from its nature. Everything that is natural is, within certain limits, right; and we must take care not, in over-severity, to deprive ourselves of any refreshing or animating power ordained to be in us for our help. (A). It was noted in speaking above of the Angelican1 or passionate ideal, that there was a certain virtue in it dependent on the expres sion of its loving enthusiasm. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false | name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:-Divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,-sand of human (B). In speaking of the pursuit of beauty soul, much to be magnified before it can be dis- as one of the characteristics of the highest art, cerned for what it is, we should think there it was also said that there were certain ways might be some loss in it also. And the great of showing this beauty by gathering together, ery that rises from all our manufacturing without altering, the finest forms, and marking cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in them by gentle emphasis. very deed for this,-that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour. FROM MODERN PAINTERS (C). And in speaking of the true uses of imagination it was said that we might be allowed to create for ourselves, in innocent play, fairies and naiads, and other such fictitious creatures. Now this loving enthusiasm, which seeks for a beauty fit to be the object of eternal love; this inventive skill, which kindly displays what exists around us in the world; and this playful energy of thought which delights in various conditions of the impossible, are three forms of idealism more or less connected with the three tendencies of the artistical mind which I had occasion to explain in the chapter on the Nature of Gothic, in the Stones of Venice. It was there pointed out, that, the things around us containing mixed good and evil, certain men chose the good and left the evil (thence properly called Purists); others received both good and evil together (thence properly called Naturalists); and others had a tendency to choose the evil and leave the good, whom, for convenience' sake, I termed Sensualists. I do Of the True IDEAL:-FIRST, PURIST. PART IV. not mean to say that painters of fairies and CHAPTER VI Having thus glanced at the principal modes in which the imagination works for evil, we must rapidly note also the principal directions in naiads must belong to this last and lowest So named by Ruskin because Fra Angelico (13871455). famous for his paintings of angels, was "the central master of the school." |