140 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

in its origin, and feebly resembled many canaliculated organic structures. Beauty is instantly felt in it, but of a low order. The decoration proper was sought in the true forms of organic life, and those chiefly human. Again: the Doric capital was unimitative; but all the beauty it had was dependent on the precision of its ovolo,¹ a natural curve of the most frequent occurrence. The Ionic capital (to my mind, as an architectural invention, exceedingly base,) nevertheless depended for all the beauty that it had on its adoption of a spiral line, perhaps the commonest of all that characterise the inferior orders of animal organism and habitation. Farther progress could not be made without a direct imitation of the acanthus leaf.

Again: the Romanesque arch is beautiful as an abstract line. Its type is always before us in that of the apparent vault of heaven, and horizon of the earth. The cylindrical pillar is always beautiful, for God has so moulded the stem of every tree that is pleasant to the eyes. The pointed arch is beautiful; it is the termination of every leaf that shakes in summer wind, and its most fortunate associations are directly borrowed from the trefoiled grass of the field, or from the stars of its flowers. Farther than this, man’s invention could not reach without frank imitation. His next step was to gather the flowers themselves, and wreathe them in his capitals.²

§ 3. Now, I would insist especially on the fact, of which I doubt not that farther illustrations will occur to the mind

which accompanies its swift taper; but another, and far more subtle, and at the same time powerful reason, for the fluting is in the capacity of a series of concave surfaces to express an active resistance against, or rather denial of, any tendency to burst and crumble beneath the super-imposed burden. This may, perhaps, seem a refinement; but let the reader compare the fluted Greek with the smooth ‘Roman Doric’ shaft and he will probably acknowledge that a certain unpleasant effect which always accompanies the last, and which caused the Greeks invariably to flute their shafts, is mainly owing to the absence of any such suggestion of resisting power. That which sounds like an over-refinement when explained to the understanding is often simple enough to the eye” (Edinburgh Review, vol. 94, 1851, p. 380).]

¹ Ovolo (from the Italian, meaning “egg-formed”); the name applied to the moulding at the head of the Doric column. The MS. has, instead of this technical term, “its single curved line.”]

² [For an additional passage here, in the MS., see Appendix ii., p. 285.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]