68 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

make up your mind to allow the consideration of the effect of your purchases to regulate the kind of your purchase, and you will soon easily find grounds enough to decide upon. The plea of ignorance will never take away our responsibilities. It is written, “If thou sayest, Behold, we know it not; doth not He that pondereth the heart consider it? and He that keepeth thy soul, doth not He know it?”¹

46. I could press this on you at length, but I hasten to apply the principle to the subject of art.² I will do so broadly at first, and then come to architecture. Enormous sums are spent annually by this country in what is called patronage of art, but in what is for the most part merely buying what strikes our fancies. True and judicious patronage there is indeed; many a work of art is bought by those who do not care for its possession, to assist the struggling artist, or relieve the unsuccessful one. But for the most part, I fear we are too much in the habit of buying simply what we like best, wholly irrespective of any good to be done, either to the artist or to the schools of the country. Now let us remember, that every farthing we spend on objects of art has influence over men’s minds and spirits, far more than over their bodies. By the purchase of every print which hangs on your walls, of every cup out of which you drink, and every table off which you eat your bread, you are educating a mass of men in one way or another. You are either employing them healthily or unwholesomely; you are making them lead happy or unhappy lives; you are leading them to look at Nature, and to love her-to think, to feel, to enjoy,-or you are blinding them to Nature, and keeping them bound, like beasts of burden, in mechanical and monotonous employments.³ We shall all be asked one day, why we did not think more of this.

¹ [Proverbs xxiv. 12.]

² [Compare again the passage in Stones of Venice, vol. ii. ch. vi. §§ 11-21 (Vol. X. pp. 191 seq.), where Ruskin similarly pleads for the life of the workman to be considered in the “patronage of art.”]

³ [For other references to merely mechanical employments-“tecnai banausikai-see Lectures on Art, § 123.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]