became a term of unmitigated contempt, not unmixed with aversion. From
that contempt, by the exertion of the antiquaries and architects of this century,
Gothic architecture has been sufficiently vindicated; and perhaps some among
us, in our admiration of the magnificent science of its structure, and sacred
ness of its expression, might desire that the term of ancient reproach should
be withdrawn, and some other, of more apparent honorableness, adopted in
its place. There is no chance, as there is no need, of such a substitution. As
far as the epithet was used scornfully, it was used falsely; but there is no
reproach in the word, rightly understood; on the contrary, there is a profound
truth, which the instinct of mankind almost unconsciously recognizes. It is
true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and
wild; but it is not true that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise.
Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our pro
foundest reverence. The charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have
thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but
I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to
1. From vol. 2, chap. 6. had been 'to show that the Gothic architecture of 2. Lack of refinement, roughness. Goths: a Ger-Venice had risen out of .. . a state of pure national manic people who by the 3rd century C.E. had set- faith and domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance tled north of the Black Sea. architecture had arisen out of.. . a state of con3. Renaissance architecture, based on imitating cealed national infidelity and domestic corrupclassical buildings, was distasteful to Ruskin. He tion.' later stated that his aim in The Stones of Venice
.
THE STONES OF VENICE / 1325
imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between
Northern and Southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we
have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in
their fullness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the
Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated
mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference
between the district of the gentian and of the olive which the stork and the
swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind.4 Let us, for a moment,
try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the
Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient prom
ontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a gray
stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed
wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the
most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid
like pieces of a golden pavement into the sea-blue, chased, as we stoop nearer
to them, with bossy5 beaten work of mountain chains, and glowing softly with
terraced gardens, and flowers heavy with frankincense, mixed among masses
of laurel, and orange, and plumy palm, that abate with their gray-green shad
ows the burning of the marble rocks, and of the ledges of porphyry sloping
under lucent sand. Then let us pass farther towards the north, until we see
the orient colors change gradually into a vast belt of rainy green, where the
pastures of Switzerland, and poplar valleys of France, and dark forests of the
Danube and Carpathians stretch from the mouths of the Loire to those of
the Volga, seen through clefts in gray swirls of rain cloud and flaky veils of the
mist of the brooks, spreading low along the pasture lands: and then, farther
north still, to see the earth heave into mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy
moor, bordering with a broad waste of gloomy purple that belt of field and
wood, and splintering into irregular and grisly islands amidst the northern seas,
beaten by storm, and chilled by ice drift, and tormented by furious pulses of
