46 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

and see how much you would lose. Suppose, for instance, when young Osbaldistone is leaving Osbaldistone Hall, instead of saying “The old clock struck two from a turret adjoining my bedchamber,” he had said, “The old clock struck two from the landing at the top of the stair,” what would become of the passage? And can you really suppose that what has so much power over you in words has no power over you in reality? Do you think there is any group of words which would thus interest you, when the things expressed by them are uninteresting?

23. For instance, you know that, for an immense time back, all your public buildings have been built with a row of pillars supporting a triangular thing called a pediment. You see this form every day in your banks and clubhouses, and churches and chapels; you are told that it is the perfection of architectural beauty; and yet suppose Sir Walter Scott, instead of writing, “Each purple peak, each flinty spire,” had written, “Each purple peak, each flinty ‘pediment,”*-would you have thought the poem improved? And if not, why would it be spoiled? Simply because the idea is no longer of any value to you; the thing spoken of is a nonentity. These pediments, and stylobates, and architraves never excited a single pleasurable feeling in you-never will, to the end of time. They are evermore dead, lifeless, and useless, in art as in poetry, and though you

* It has been objected to this comparison that the form of the pediment does not properly represent that of the rocks of the Trossachs. The objection is utterly futile, for there is not a single spire or pinnacle from one end of the Trossachs to the other. All their rocks are heavily rounded, and the introduction of the word “spire” is a piece of inaccuracy in description, ventured merely for the sake of the Gothic image. Farther: it has been said that if I had substituted the word “gable,” it would have spoiled the line just as much as the word “pediment,” though “gable” is a Gothic word. Of course it would; but why? Because “gable” is a term of vulgar domestic architecture, and therefore destructive of the tone of the heroic description; whereas “pediment” and “spire” are precisely correlative terms, being each the crowning feature in ecclesiastical edifices, and the comparison of their effects in the verse is therefore absolutely accurate, logical, and just.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]