CH. III THE LAMP OF POWER 135

of delicious swells and curves, and covered with warm tones of moss and lichen. Very often the thing is more delightful than the stone-work itself, and all because it is broad, dark, and simple. It matters not how clumsy, how common, the means are, that get weight and shadow-sloping roof, jutting porch, projecting balcony, hollow niche, massy gargoyle, frowning parapet; get but gloom and simplicity, and all good things will follow in their place and time; do but design with the owl’s eyes first, and you will gain the falcon’s afterwards.

§ 24. I am grieved to have to insist upon what seems so simple: it looks trite and commonplace when it is written, but pardon me this: for it is anything but an accepted or understood principle in practice, and the less excusably forgotten, because it is, of all the great and true laws of art, the easiest to obey. The executive facility of complying with its demands cannot be too earnestly, too frankly, asserted. There are not five men in the kingdom who could compose, nor twenty who could cut, the foliage with which the windows of Or San Michele are adorned; but there is many a village clergyman who could invent and dispose its black openings, and not a village mason who could not cut them.¹ Lay a few clover or woodroof leaves on white paper, and a little alteration in their positions will suggest figures which, cut boldly through a slab of marble, would be worth more window traceries than an architect could draw in a summer’s day.² But I know not how it is, unless that our English hearts have more oak than stone in them, and have more filial sympathy with acorns than Alps; but all that we do is small and mean,

¹ [There is at least one village clergyman who has acted in the spirit of this passage-namely, the Rev. F. W. Ragg, M.A., Trinity College, Cambridge, Vicar of Marsworth, Bucks. He has carved, with his own hand, the window traceries and capitals of the columns in his church with natural objects of vegetable life, including “kale” leaves; one window is framed entirely with horse-chestnut leaves.]

² [Ed. 1 here continues:-

“There are few men in the world who could design a Greek capital; there are few who could not produce some vigour of effect with leaf designs on a Byzantine block: few who could design a Palladian front, or a flamboyant pediment; many who could build a square mass like the Strozzi Palace.”

For the Strozzi Palace, see Vol. IV. p. 137 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]