286 APPENDIX

that the proportions or forms of a small thing are good for a great one. It is a most palpable yet a most prevalent absurdity. Every right form, whether in nature or in art, is fitted to a given size, and becomes monstrous if it is expanded. You must not surround your columns, because they are twelve feet in diameter, with ivy leaves two feet long; you must not build a dome three hundred feet from the ground on the pattern of an artichoke¹ or a sea urchin. If nature has furnished no decorated example of a similar size, you cannot decorate at all. Your invention will be of no use to you; you will have to divide your object into parts, and treat those parts separately, or if you leave it a mass, to let that mass alone. And this is precisely what takes place in the case of large curvilinear surfaces. Every attempt to adorn them has failed, and the rich patterns of the domes of the Caliphs would look contemptible beside the plain roofs of Sta. Maria del Fiore and St. Paul’s. Yet if you are not content with the rude tiles and grey metal, you may do better if you will look to your teacher’s work. Nature builds domes though she does not decorate them, some dark, indeed, and stern, like those that stand on bases of black pillars above the valleys of Auvergne;² but some most light and fair. Watch the lines of snow wreath and gradations of sunset shadow on the front of the Dome du Goûter or Mont Blanc du Tacul,³ and consider how near you might come to them with a pure dome of rosy marble.”

In another sheet of MS. part of the above runs thus:-

“If nature has furnished you with no decorated example on a similar or approximate scale, you must either divide the object into bold parts and treat those parts separately, or else leaving it a mass treat it with a surface decoration independent of its form, as in interior mosaics or frescoes. And as this method is especially inexpedient on the outside of domes, their interior being like a panorama surface susceptible of effects of extended space, while their exterior is always of marked outline and of definite light and shade, so that their specific form cannot be conquered, every attempt,” etc.

CHAPTER VII

The following passages were written for Chapter VII., “The Lamp of Obedience”:-

“If it be true, as I have sometimes feared it is, that Poetry is gradually losing her power over our hearts, I should look for the cause of her diminished dominion less to an alteration in the tendencies of popular thought or the channels of national enthusiasm, than to her

¹ [The MS. first reads “pineapple.”]

² [Ruskin travelled in Auvergne in 1840 (see Præterita, ii. ch. ii. § 22). He here recalls the characteristic volcanic domes or craters of the district; cf. the Letter to Dale, “the volcanic cliffs and black lavas of Auvergne” (Vol. I. p. 377).]

³ [See the descriptions of these cited in Vol. III. pp. xxvi.-xxvii.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]