II. CHANGEFULNESS VI. THE NATURE OF GOTHIC 207

do of a novelist, that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.¹

Yet all this is true, and self-evident; only hidden from us, as many other self-evident things are, by false teaching. Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture; and it is, of the two procedures, rather less rational (because more easy) to copy capitals or mouldings from Phidias, and call ourselves architects, than to copy heads and hands from Titian, and call ourselves painters.

§ 29. Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony; and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size.

§ 30. And this we confess in deeds, though not in words. All the pleasure which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in pictures, sculpture, minor objects of virtu, or mediæval architecture, which we enjoy under the term picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere in modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery: hence, as I shall hereafter show, that peculiar love of landscape, which is characteristic of the age.² It would

¹ [With § 28 compare Lectures on Architecture and Painting, §§ 3, 4, where the same points are dwelt upon.]

² [See Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. iv. § 33. Ruskin was pleased when this point occurred to him, for it established also a point of contact between his architectural work at Venice and his suspended work on Modern Painters. This appears in a letter to his father:-

“Venice, 22nd Feb. [1852].-... I have been ... getting my work into its final form, subject only now to contraction, not to expansion. The reason that I have added the fourth part to it [as finally arranged, the third, dealing in detail with the Renaissance, see Vol. IX. p. 47 n.], is chiefly because I see

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