CHAPTER IV

THE LAMP OF BEAUTY

§ 1. IT was stated, in the outset of the preceding chapter, that the value of architecture depended on two distinct characters: the one, the impression it receives from human power; the other, the image it bears of the natural creation. I have endeavoured to show in what manner its majesty was attributable to a sympathy with the effort and trouble of human life * (a sympathy as distinctly perceived in the gloom and mystery of form, as it is in the melancholy tones of sounds). I desire now to trace that happier element of its excellence, consisting in a noble rendering of images of Beauty, derived chiefly from the external appearances of organic nature.

It is irrelevant to our present purpose to enter into any inquiry respecting the essential causes of impressions of beauty. I have partly expressed my thoughts on this matter in a previous work,¹ and I hope to develope them hereafter. But since all such inquiries can only be founded on the ordinary understanding of what is meant by the term Beauty, and

* Yes, but that is not what is meant in the 17th Aphorism, by “Dominion” or Government: though, on the embossed cover of the book, I partly implied it to be, in substituting “Auctoritas” for “Potestas.” The intellectual “Dominion” of Architecture is treated of partly in the course of the present chapter, under the heads of Proportion and Abstraction; and partly in the fifth chapter, (of which see the opening paragraph, Aphorism 23),-a confusion induced partly by haste and mismanagement, and partly by excess of management, and the difficulty I have before confessed, (though I forget where,) of keeping my Seven Lamps from becoming Eight-or Nine-or even quite a vulgar row of foot-lights.2 [1880.]

¹ [Modern Painters, vol. ii.]

² [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 5: “I have always a great suspicion of the number Seven; because when I wrote the Seven Lamps of Architecture, it required all the ingenuity I was master of to prevent them becoming Eight, or even Nine, on my hands.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]