2

to consist in the poverty of His temple, and the column is shortened and the pinnacle shattered, the colour denied to the casement and the marble to the altar, while exchequers are exhausted in luxury of boudoirs and pride of reception-rooms; when we ravage without a pause all the loveliness of creation which God in giving pronounced Good,' and destroy without a thought all those labours which men have given their lives and their sons' sons' lives to complete, and have left for a legacy to all their kind, a legacy of more than their hearts' blood, for it is of their souls' travail;-there is need, bitter need, to bring back into men's minds, that to live is nothing, unless to live be to know Him by whom we live; and that He is not to be known by marring His fair works, and blotting out the evidence of His influences upon His creatures; nor amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which He gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty; He did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation, that we might give the work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; He has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; He brings not up His quails by the east wind only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven."

4

6

Science and art are either subservient to life or the objects
As subservient to life, or practical, their results are,

of it.

8

1 [Genesis i. 10.]

2 John xvii. 3.

3 Ed. 1 reads, "we, foul and sensual as we are, might ."]

Habakkuk, iii. 9.)

5 Job xxviii. 5.]

6 [Numbers xi. 31: "And there went forth a wind from the Lord, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp."]

7 [Matthew vi. 30.]

[Ed. 1 reads, "All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to life, or which is the object of it."]

I

of the pursuits servient and

of men into sub

in the common sense of the word, Useful. As the object of life or theoretic, they are, in the common § 8. Division sense, Useless. And yet the step between practical and theoretic science is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the objective. chemist; and the step between practical and theoretic art is that between the builder and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater. So that the so-called useless part of each profession does, by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind, assume the more noble place; even though books be sometimes written, and that by writers of no ordinary mind, which assume that a chemist is rewarded for the years of toil which have traced the greater part of the combinations of matter to their ultimate atoms, by discovering a cheap way of refining sugar; and date the eminence of the philosopher whose life has been spent in the investigation of the laws of light, from the time of his inventing an improvement in spectacles.

But the common consent of men admits that whatever branch of any pursuit ministers to the bodily comforts, and regards material uses, is ignoble, and whatever part is addressed to the mind only is noble; and that geology does better in reclothing dry bones and revealing lost creations, than in tracing veins of lead and beds of iron; astronomy

* With juvenile vanity I begin using this word in my own peculiar sense, before it is explained to the reader in any sense at all. He must please remember that Theory, from the beginning to the end of this part of Modern Painters, is used in the sense of contemplation, whenever it is used carefully. Passages may perhaps occur in which I have used the word accidentally in its ordinary sense of "supposition;" but I will try to catch these in revising.2 [1883.]

1 [Ruskin in his copy for revision omits § 8 down to this point, and reads here, "And even the common consent. The rest of § 8 is § 3 in Frondes Agrestes. For "admits that whatever branch," ed. 1 reads "proves and accepts the proposition, that whatever part. . ."]

2 [There were, however, no such passages caught, though a passage on p. 64 might have been noticed. In a later note of 1883, Ruskin inadvertently uses the word "theory" in its ordinary sense: see p. 233.]

better in opening to us the houses of heaven, than in teaching navigation; botany better in displaying structure than in expressing juices; surgery better in investigating organization than in setting limbs.* Only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in the more exalted range of science adds something also to its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly, as it reveals to farther vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice, and we live, dispense yet such kind influences, and so much of material blessing, as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of their nature may admit; † that the strong torrents which, in their own gladness, fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed, and barge to bear that the fierce flames to which the Alp owes its upheaval, and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and warm the quickening spring; and that for our incitement,—I say not our reward, for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and stars their times.

§ 9. Their relative digni

It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which are altogether theoretic, whose results are desirable or admirable in themselves and for their own sake, and in which no farther end to which their

ties.

* All this, though right, is much too violently expressed-the juvenile vanity again appearing in the desire, to say what might appear strange, in the most striking way; and what might be questioned by many readers, in the most positive way. As I grew older, I more and more respected vulgar uses; and in the 8th chapter of Deucalion1 which I am at present arranging, it will be found that they are regarded as a leading test of rightly systematized science. [1883.]

† Hooker, Eccl. Pol., book 11. chap. ii. § 2.

[Ruskin meant the 8th Part (i.e. ch. ii. of vol. ii. as originally published, entitled "Revision"), where he says:-"It is perhaps, of all the tests of difference between the majestic science of those days, and the wild theories or foul curiosities of our own, the most strange and the most distinct, that the practical suggestions which are scattered through the writings of the older naturalists tend always directly to the benefit of the general body of mankind."]

versed through

erring notions

of the contem

plative and

productions or discoveries are referred can interrupt the contemplation of things as they are, by the endeavour to discover of what selfish uses they are capable (and of this order are painting and sculpture), ought to take $10. How rerank above all pursuits which have any taint* in them of subserviency to life, in so far as all such tendency is the sign of less eternal and less holy imaginative function.† And such rank these two sublime arts would indeed assume in the minds of nations, and become objects of corresponding efforts, but for two fatal and widespread errors respecting the great faculties of mind concerned in them.

faculties.

The first of these, or the Theoretic faculty, is concerned with the moral perception and appreciation of ideas of beauty. And the error respecting it is, the considering and calling it Esthetic, degrading it to a mere operation of sense, or

* “Taint” is a false word. The entire system of useful and contemplative knowledge is one; equally pure and holy: its only "taints" are in pride, and subservience to avarice or destruction; but see the footnote. [1883. The "footnote" is the earlier one that follows †.]

† I do not assert that the accidental utility of a theoretic pursuit, as of botany for instance, in any way degrades it, though it cannot be considered as elevating it. But essential utility, a purpose to which the pursuit is in some measure referred, as in architecture, invariably degrades, because then the theoretic part of the art is comparatively lost sight of; and thus architecture takes a level below that of sculpture or painting, even when the powers of mind developed in it are of the same high order.

When we pronounce the name of Giotto, our venerant thoughts are at Assisi and Padua, before they climb the Campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore. And he who would raise the ghost of Michael Angelo must haunt the Sistine and San Lorenzo, not St. Peter's.**

It is one of the principal reasons for my reprinting this book, that it contains so early and so decisive warning against the then incipient folly, which in recent days has made art at once the corruption, and the jest, of the vulgar world. [1883.]

** This old note already anticipates the subjection of the constructive to the decorative science of architecture which gave so much offence, to architects capable only of construction, in the Seven Lamps, written two years later, and Stones of Venice. The obscure sentence about Michael Angelo signifies that he is to be judged by his sculpture and painting-not his dome building, which is true enough-and I wish now very heartily that he had never done anything but domes. [1883.]

1 [Seven Lamps, ch. i. § 1; Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. ii., "The Virtues of Architecture."]

perhaps worse, of custom; so that the arts which appeal to it sink into a mere amusement, ministers to morbid sensibilities, ticklers and fanners of the soul's sleep.1

The second great faculty is the Imaginative, which the mind exercises in a certain mode of regarding or combining the ideas it has received from external nature, and the operations of which become in their turn objects of the theoretic faculty to other minds. And the error respecting this faculty is, in considering that its function is one of falsehood, that its operation is to exhibit things as they are not, and that in so doing it mends the works of God.

§ 11. Object of the present section.

Now, as these are the two faculties to which I shall have occasion constantly to refer during that examination of the Ideas of Beauty and Relation on which we are now entering, because it is only as received and treated by these that those ideas become exalted and profitable, it becomes necessary for me in the outset2 to explain their power and define their sphere; and to vindicate, in the system of our nature, their true place for the intellectual lens and moral retina, by which, and on which, our informing thoughts are concentrated and represented.

NOTE. The reader will probably recollect the two sonnets of Wordsworth which were published at the time when the bill for the railroad between Kendal and Bowness was laid before Parliament. His remonstrance was of course in vain; and I have since heard that there are proposals entertained

[In the MS. there was an additional passage here, which is worth printing as an illustration of the author's compression in final revision:

"... fanners of the soul's sleep. This can hardly be the case with the sciences; one may indeed collect spars and gather weeds and cheapen coins for mere amusement; but then one cannot have anything to do with the science properly so-called; one may be a spar-collector in idleness, but one cannot be a geologist in idleness, nor a botanist,--there must be work, memory, thought, activity, or one is nothing. But it unfortunately happens in the case of art that it is exceedingly possible to be an artist, and an amateur also, in idleness; that the amusing and æsthetic part of the science is not boldly marked off from the great or theoretic part, and of course it is the very necessity of human weakness to stop the greater number of votaries in this easy stage until the whole function of art is forgotten and despised."]

2 [In his copy for revision Ruskin underlines this word, writing in the margin "and in the end-set and in-set"; he underlines also the words "the intellectual lens and moral retina."]