436 THE STONES OF VENICE

from one end to the other, especially when the time has been short, and circumstances disadvantageous.

§ 138. Works thus executed are of course despised, on account of their quantity, as well as their frequent slightness, in the places where they exist; and they are too large to be portable, and too vast and comprehensive to be read on the spot, in the hasty temper of the present age. They are, therefore, almost universally neglected, whitewashed by custodes, shot at by soldiers, suffered to drop from the walls piecemeal in powder and rags by society in general;¹ but, which is an advantage more than counterbalancing all this evil, they are

¹ With these sections, Browning’s Dramatic Lyric, “Old Pictures in Florence,” published two years later, may well be compared:-

“Wherever a fresco peels and drops,

Wherever an outline weakens and wanes,

Till the latest life in the painting stops,

Stands One when each fainter pulse-tick pains:

One, wishful each scrap should clutch the brick,

Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster,

-A lion who dies of an ass’s kick,

The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.”

How intensely Ruskin felt the injuries which he describes in those sections will be seen from the following letters to his father:-

“Jan. 8, 1852.-... They talk of taking down Tintoret’s Paradise and ‘retouching’ it. The world is such a heap of idiots that if it were not for the Turner Gallery I believe I should go and live in a cave in a cliff-among crows!

“Jan. 9.-... I have been rather low these two days, for I have heard there is a project to take down the Paradise of Tintoret and ‘retouch’ it and put it up, well varnished; and I went up to look at it, and though miserably injured, it is now as pure as if he had left it yesterday, and all California and Botany Bay together could not express its value,-if men did but know what God had given them and what he leaves it to their own hands to take away.

“Jan. 28.-... Men are more evanescent than pictures, yet one sorrows for lost friends, and pictures are my friends. I have none others. I am never long enough with men to attach myself to them; and whatever feelings of attachment I have are to material things. If the great Tintoret here were to be destroyed, it would be precisely to me what the death of Hallam was to Tennyson-as far as this world is concerned-with an addition of bitterness and indignation, for my friend would perish murdered, his by a natural death. Hearing of plans for its restoration is just the same to me as to another man hearing talk behind an Irish hedge of shooting his brother.... All my labour and all my writing are done under the conviction of pictures being of enormous importance, and of our neglect of them being sin. So that, needs must be, if I am ardent at one time, I am despondent at another, and in exact proportion to the pleasure I have in getting a Turner, or saving some record of a piece of architecture, is the pain I have in losing a Tintoret, or seeing a palace destroyed.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]