252 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

that the architecture of a nation is great only when it is as universal and as established as its language; and when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many dialects. Other necessities are matters of doubt: nations have been alike successful in their architecture in times of poverty and of wealth; in times of war and of peace; in times of barbarism and of refinement; under governments the most liberal or the most arbitrary; but this one condition has been constant, this one requirement clear in all places and at all times, that the work shall be that of a school, that no individual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary, accepted types and customary decorations; and that from the cottage to the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, and from the garden fence to the fortress wall, every member and feature of the architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current, as frankly accepted, as its language or its coin.¹

§ 4. A day never passes without our hearing our English architecture called upon to be original, and to invent a new style:² about as sensible and necessary an exhortation as to ask of a man who has never had rags enough on his back to keep out cold, to invent a new mode of cutting a coat. Give him a whole coat first, and let him concern himself about the fashion of it afterwards. We want no new style of architecture. Who wants a new style of painting or sculpture? But we want some style. It is of marvellously little importance, if we have a code of laws and they be good laws, whether they be new or old, foreign or native, Roman or Saxon, or Norman, or English laws. But it is of considerable importance that we should have a code of laws of one kind or another, and that

¹ [Here, as so often, Ruskin in revising made the endings of his paragraphs more effective. The MS. shows that in the first draft he continued: “and its principles as openly and undisputingly acknowledged as those of its criminal legislation.” With the idea in § 3, cf. the preface to St. Mark’s Rest.]

² [In the second fragment of MS. above referred to (p. 248 n.) this passage runs:-

“A day does not pass, a lecture is never recorded in our public journals without some call upon English architects to do something of their own-to be original-to create an English style, and to perform other feats and marvels of a novel description ...”

Cf. Two Paths, § 102, where Ruskin again chastises “the perpetual, empty, idle, incomparably idiotic talk about the necessity of some novelty in architecture.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]