lviii INTRODUCTION

also that no architect could claim the title to authority of magister unless he himself wrought at the head of his men, captain of manual skill, as the best knight is captain of armies.”¹ So it had been, he found, in Venice-in the days of the best health and strength of the Republic. Must it not be so also in modern states, if they were to consist of communities, healthy in their organisation, happy in their activities, and free in their constitution-in that positive sense of freedom which means liberty to all men to make the best of their capacities? What he found positively in his study of Gothic architecture, he found also negatively in that of the Renaissance at Venice. When art was reduced to formalism its vitality was gone; and “the Fall” was of the state, as well as of its architecture. The third volume thus connected itself closely with the central chapter in the second. Ruskin’s thoughts at Venice were much given, as we have seen, to the political and social mysteries of life-the inequalities of worldly fortune, the existence side by side of idle luxury and servile toil (p. xl.). He had written, also, his first essays on questions of politics and political economy (p. xli.). He had been brought into personal contact with popular revolutionaries, and the Austrian officers of law and order. He sought for some synthesis of all these things, and he found it in the central pages (§§ 9-21) of the sixth chapter of this volume, on “The Nature of Gothic Architecture,” and on the true functions of the workman in art. True art, he said, can only be produced by artists; true freedom is the freedom of the soul. “Life without industry,” as he summed up the matter in a later book, “is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.”² “There might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords’ lightest words were worth men’s lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line.”³ This chapter, said Ruskin in the following year, “was precisely and accurately the most important in the whole book.”⁴ In it is to be found “the creed, if it be not the origin, of a new industrial school of thought.”⁵

“I should be led far from the matter in hand,” wrote Ruskin, “if I were to pursue this interesting subject” (below, p. 202). He was to be led far in later years; and at the time the effect of his words was far-reaching,

¹ See p. 14 of the work cited above (p. xlvii. n.).

² Lectures on Art, § 95.

³ See below, ch. vi. § 13.

⁴ Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 1854, § 76.

⁵ F. Harrison’s John Ruskin, p. 76.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]