60 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

been cultivated; otherwise, it might appear more than strange that a nation so distinguished for its general uprightness and faith as the English, should admit in their architecture more of pretence, concealment, and deceit, than any other of this or of past time.

They are admitted in thoughtlessness, but with fatal effect upon the art in which they are practised. If there were no other causes for the failures which of late have marked every great occasion for architectural exertion, these petty dishonesties would be enough to account for all.¹ It is the first step, and not the least, towards greatness, to do away with these; the first, because so evidently and easily in our power. We may not be able to command good, or beautiful, or inventive, architecture; but we can command an honest architecture: the meagreness of poverty may be pardoned, the sternness of utility respected; but what is there but scorn for the meanness of deception?

§ 6. Architectural Deceits are broadly to be considered under three heads:-

1st. The suggestion of a mode of structure or support, other than the true one; as in pendants of late Gothic roofs.

2nd. The painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood²), or the deceptive representation of sculptured ornament upon them.

3rd. The use of cast or machine-made ornaments of any kind.

Now, it may be broadly stated, that architecture will be noble exactly in the degree in which all these false expendients are avoided. Nevertheless, there are certain degrees of them, which, owing to their frequent usage, or to other causes, have so far lost the nature of deceit as to be admissible; as, for

¹ [The MS. adds :-

“For it is impossible for an habitual hypocrisy to be banished on a sudden, and thoughts which have been continually moulded in stucco and cast-iron cannot on the instant be solidified into stone.”

Special reference was perhaps intended to the Italian frontage added to Buckingham Palace in 1846 by Blore.]

² [Cf. above, p. 38, and below, § 14, p. 72.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]