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44 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
APHORISM 6. Modern builders are capable of little; and don’t even do the little they can.2
It is the especial characteristic of modern work. All old work nearly has been hard work.1 It may be the hard work of children, of barbarians, of rustics; but it is always their utmost. Ours has as constantly the look of money’s worth, of a stopping short wherever and whenever we can, of a lazy compliance with low conditions; never of a fair putting forth of our strength.3 Let us have done with this kind of work at once: cast off every temptation to it: do not let us degrade ourselves voluntarily, and then mutter and mourn over our shortcomings; let us confess our poverty or our parsimony, but not belie our human intellect. It is not even a question of how much we are to do, but of how it is to be done; it is not a question of doing more, but of doing better. Do not let us boss our roofs with wretched, half-worked, blunt-edged rosettes; do not let us flank our gates with rigid imitations of mediæval statuary. Such things are mere insults to common sense, and only unfit us for feeling the nobility of their prototypes. We have so much, suppose, to be spent in decoration; let us go to the Flaxman of his time, whoever he may be;4 and bid him carve for us a single statue, frieze, or capital, or as many as we can afford, compelling upon him the one condition, that they shall be the best he can do; place them where they will be of the most value, and be content. Our other capitals may be mere blocks, and our other niches empty. No matter: better our work unfinished than all bad. It may be that we do not desire ornament of so high an order: choose, then, a less developed style, as also, if you will, rougher material; the law which we are enforcing requires only that what we pretend to do and to give, shall both be
1 [For another side to this truth, that all great art is done easily, see, e.g., Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xvi. § 27, and Letters to J. J. Laing, at pp. 11, 21 of the privately printed Letters on Art and Literature, edited by Thomas J. Wise, 1894 (given in a later volume of this edition).]
2 [The text of the aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “We are none of us...” down to “not belie our human intellect.”]
3 [The MS. here reads: “I think a man’s pride as well as his conscience should equally revolt from such voluntary degradation. Cast off...”]
4 [See Elements of Drawing, § 257 n., for a further note on Flaxman to some extent qualifying the above.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
