I. ARCHITECTURE 45

battlements that frown through the woods of Craigmillar,¹ to the pointed turrets that flank the front of Holyrood, or to the massy keeps of your Crichtoun and Borthwick and other border towns. But look merely through your poetry and romances; take away out of your border ballads the word tower wherever it occurs, and the ideas connected with it, and what will become of the ballads? See how Sir Walter Scott cannot even get through a description of Highland scenery without help from the idea:-

“Each purple peak, each flinty spire,

Was bathed in floods of living fire.” ²

Take away from Scott’s romances the word and idea turret,

of the domestic origin of the northern Gothic, that “Mr. Ruskin is evidently possessed by a fixed idea, that the Venetian architects were devout men, and that their devotion was expressed in their buildings; while he will not allow our own cathedrals to have been built by any but worldly men, who had no thoughts of heaven, but only vague ideas of keeping out of hell, by erecting costly places of worship.”³ If this writer had compared the two passages with the care which such a subject necessarily demands, he would have found that I was not opposing Venetian to English piety; but that in the one case I was speaking of the spirit manifested in the entire architecture of the nation, and in the other of occasional efforts of superstition as distinguished from that spirit; and, farther, that in the one case, I was speaking of decorative features, which are ordinarily the results of feelings, in the other of structural features, which are ordinarily the results of necessity or convenience. Thus it is rational and just that we should attribute the decoration of the arches of St. Mark’s with scriptural mosaics to a religious sentiment; but it would be a strange absurdity to regard as an effort of piety the invention of the form of the arch itself, of which one of the earliest and most perfect instances is in the Cloaca Maxima. And thus in the case of spires and towers, it is just to ascribe to the devotion of their designers that dignity which was bestowed upon forms derived from the simplest domestic buildings; but it is ridiculous to attribute any great refinement of religious feeling, or height of religious aspiration, to those who furnished the funds for the erection of the loveliest tower in North France, by paying for permission to eat butter in Lent.⁴

¹ [The ruins of Craigmillar Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots lived on her return from France in 1561, lie embossed by trees three miles south-east of Edinburgh, and consist of a square tower in the centre, another in front, and two circular turrets behind-the whole surrounded by a high wall with towers at the corner.]

² [Lady of the Lake, canto i. 11. For the next passage, see Rob Roy, ch. xviii.]

³ [The passage of Ruskin’s on which the criticism is founded is Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. xiii. § 6 (Vol. IX. p. 185).]

⁴ [The Tour de Beurre, Rouen; see Vol. VIII. p. 50 n., and for drawings of it by Ruskin, Vol. II. pp. 400, 430.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]