192 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

of obeying or rebelling. His false life is, indeed, but one of the conditions of death* or stupor, but it acts, even when it cannot be said to animate, and is not always easily known from the true. It is that life of custom and accident in which many of us pass much of our time in the world; that life in which we do what we have not proposed, and speak what we do not mean, and assent to what we do not understand; that life which is overlaid by the weight of things external to it, and is moulded by them, instead of assimilating them; that, which instead of growing and blossoming under any whole-some dew, is crystallised over with it, as with hoar-frost, and becomes to the true life what an arborescence is to a tree, a candied agglomeration of thoughts and habits foreign to it, brittle, obstinate, and icy, which can neither bend nor grow, but must be crushed and broken to bits, if it stand in our way. All men are liable to be in some degree frost-bitten in this sort; all are partly encumbered and crusted over with idle matter; only, if they have real life in them, they are always breaking this bark away in noble rents, until it becomes, like the black strips upon the birch tree, only a witness of their own inward strength.¹ But,² with all the efforts that the best

* Yes; and therefore had been much better called so simply, without all this metaphor and inaccurate metaphysics. What we carelessly call False hope, or False charity, is only mistaken hope and mistaken charity. The real question is only-are we dead or alive?-for, if dead at heart and having only a name to live in all our actions, we are sowing seeds of death. [1880.]

characters, and fits each for his peculiar duty. But the False life is the life of servility and of custom, the life wherein he ceases to have a will properly so called, because he ceases to have thought, the spurious and languid life ... assimilating them; it is a life which has no root of intellect nor of moral principle, and whose branches, therefore, instead of growing... hoar-frost, so that the whole man instead of being a tree is a mere arborescence, a thing with no sap in it, a candied agglomeration of the glitter and edges of other people’s ways and thoughts and fancies, brittle...”]

¹ [For similar parallels between human vitality and the life of trees, see Ethics of the Dust, § 57, and Proserpina, i. ch. iii.]

² [A variant in the MS. of the passage from this point to the end of § 3 is as follows:

“But woe to those who have not strength to do this, and who go through the world one mingled heap of prejudices and habits and accepted necessities and formalisms, drifted and decaying creatures of internal impulse-moving as puppets and speaking as echoes-thinking as they are told.

“Now as the creations of Architecture are peculiarly dependent on the

[Version 0.04: March 2008]