IV. CONCLUSION 223

the food of all, and with such intricacy and subtlety that it may deeply employ the thoughts of all. If we refuse to accept the natural delight which the Deity has thus provided for us, we must either become ascetics, or we must seek for some base and guilty pleasures to replace those of Paradise, which we have denied ourselves.

Some years ago, in passing through some of the cells of the Grande Chartreuse, nothing that the window of each apartment looked across the little garden of its inhabitant to the wall of the cell opposite, and commanded no other view, I asked the monk beside me why the window was not rather made on the side of the cell whence it would open to the solemn fields of the Alpine valley. “We do not come here,” he replied, “to look at the mountains.”¹

§ 31. The same answer is given, practically, by the men of this century, to every such question; only the walls with which they enclose themselves are those of Pride, not of Prayer. But in the Middle Ages it was otherwise. Not, indeed, in landscape itself, but in the art which can take the place of it, in the noble colour and form with which they illumined, and into which they wrought, every object around them that was in any wise subjected to their power, they obeyed the laws of their inner nature, and found its proper food. The splendour and fantasy even of dress, which in these days we pretend to despise, or in which, if we even indulge, it is only for the sake of vanity, and therefore to our infinite harm, were in those early days studied for love of their true beauty and honourableness, and became one of the main helps to dignity of character and courtesy of bearing.² Look back to what we have been told of the dress of the early Venetians, that it was so invented “that in

¹ [This was in 1849. Ruskin recalls the incident again in Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 17, and in Præterita, iii., ch. i. § 2.]

² [The importance of costume alike in national life and in art was to be a frequent theme with Ruskin. See, for instance, Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 22 n., where he says that “every effort should be made to induce the adoption of a national costume;” and Fors Clavigera, Letter 15, where he again connects the wearing of a distinctive dress with noble habits of life (cf. Praeterita, i., ch. x. § 214). See, too, Inaugural Address at the Cambridge School of Art, § 10, where the delight of great

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