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DECORATION XXI. TREATMENT OF ORNAMENT 291
imagining, and having mapped out their lines so that there can be no possibility of error, sets his two thousand men to work upon them, with a will, and so many onions a day.
§ 13. I said those times cannot now return. We have, with Christianity, recognised the individual value of every soul; and there is no intelligence so feeble but that its single ray may in some sort contribute to the general light. This is the glory of Gothic architecture, that every jot and tittle, every point and niche of it, affords room, fuel, and focus for individual fire.1 But you cease to acknowledge this, and you refuse to accept the help of the lesser mind, if you require the work to be all executed in a great manner. Your business is to think out all of it nobly, to dictate the expression of it as far as your dictation can assist the less elevated intelligence; then to leave this, aided and taught as far as may be, to its own simple act and effort; and to rejoice in its simplicity if not in its power, and in its vitality if not in its science.
§ 14. We have, then, three orders of ornament, classed according to the degrees of correspondence of the executive and conceptive minds.2 We have the servile ornament, in which the executive is absolutely subjected to the inventive,-the ornament of the great Eastern nations, more especially Hamite, and all pre-Christian, yet thoroughly noble in its submissiveness. Then we have the mediæval system, in which the mind of the inferior workman is recognised, and has full room for action, but is guided and ennobled by the ruling mind. This is the truly Christian and only perfect system. Finally, we have ornaments expressing the endeavour to equalise the executive and inventive,-endeavour which is Renaissance and revolutionary, and destructive of all noble architecture.
§ 15. Thus far, then, of the incompleteness or simplicity of execution necessary in architectural ornament, as referred to
1 [See further, Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. (“The Nature of Gothic”).]
2 [See Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. § 9, where this classification is repeated and further illustrated.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
