[46] We are not thinking of the effect upon the human frame of the air which is favorable to vegetation. Chemically considered, the bracing breeze of the more sterile soil is the most conducive to health, and is practically so, when the frame is not perpetually exposed to it; but the keenness which checks the growth of the plant is, in all probability, trying, to say the least, to the constitution of a resident.
[47] We hope the English language may long retain this corrupt but energetic superlative.
[48] This position, as well as the two preceding, is important, and in need of confirmation. It has often been observed, that, when the eye is altogether unpracticed in estimating elevation, it believes every point to be lower than it really is; but this does not militate against the proposition, for it is also well known, that the higher the point, the greater the deception. But when the eye is thoroughly practiced in mountain measurement, although the judgment, arguing from technical knowledge, gives a true result, the impression on the feelings is always at variance with it, except in hills of the middle height. We are perpetually astonished, in our own country, by the sublime impression left by such hills as Skiddaw, or Cader Idris, or Ben Venue; perpetually vexed, in Switzerland, by finding that, setting aside circumstances of form and color, the abstract impression of elevation is (except in some moments of peculiar effect, worth a king's ransom) inferior to the truth. We were standing the other day on the slope of the Brevent, above the Prieuré of Chamouni, with a companion, well practiced in climbing Highland hills, but a stranger among the Alps. Pointing out a rock above the Glacier des Bossons, we requested an opinion of its height. "I should think," was the reply, "I could climb it in two steps; but I am too well used to hills to be taken in in that way; it is at least 40 feet." The real height was 470 feet. This deception is attributable to several causes (independently of the clearness of the medium through which the object is seen), which it would be out of place to discuss here, but the chief of which is the natural tendency of the feelings always to believe objects subtending the same angle to be of the same height. We say the feelings, not the eye; for the practiced eye never betrays its possessor, though the due and corresponding mental impression is not received.
[49] This is rather a bold assertion; and we should be sorry to maintain the fact as universal; but the crystals of almost all the rarer minerals are larger in the larger mountain; and that altogether independently of the period of elevation, which, in the case of Mont Blanc, is later than that of our own Mendips.
[50] In § 166 we noticed the kind of error most common in amateur designs, and we traced that error to its great first cause, the assumption of the humor, instead of the true character, for a guide; but we did not sufficiently specify the mode in which that first cause operated, by prompting to imitation. By imitation we do not mean accurate copying, neither do we mean working under the influence of the feelings by which we may suppose the originators of a given model to have been actuated; but we mean the intermediate step of endeavoring to combine old materials in a novel manner. True copying may be disdained by architects, but it should not be disdained by nations; for when the feelings of the time in which certain styles had their origin have passed away, any examples of the same style will invariably be failures, unless they be copies. It is utter absurdity to talk of building Greek edifices now; no man ever will, or ever can, who does not believe in the Greek mythology; and, precisely by so much as he diverges from the technicality of strict copyism, he will err. But we ought to have pieces of Greek architecture, as we have reprints of the most valuable records, and it is better to build a new Parthenon than to set up the old one. Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed forever; let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our mechanical perceptions; the line and rule of the prying carpenter should not come into the quiet and holy places of the earth. Elsewhere, we may build marble models for the education of the national mind and eye; but it is useless to think of adapting the architecture of the Greek to the purposes of the Frank; it never has been done, and never will be. We delight, indeed, in observing the rise of such a building as La Madeleine: beautiful, because accurately copied; useful, as teaching the eye of every passer-by. But we must not think of its purpose; it is wholly unadapted for Christian worship; and were it as bad Greek as our National Gallery, it would be equally unfit.
The mistake of our architects in general is, that they fancy they are speaking good English by speaking bad Greek. We wish, therefore, that copying were more in vogue than it is. But imitation, the endeavor to be Gothic, or Tyrolese, or Venetian, without the slightest grain of Gothic or Venetian feeling; the futile effort to splash a building into age, or daub it into dignity, to zigzag it into sanctity, or slit it into ferocity, when its shell is neither ancient nor dignified, and its spirit neither priestly nor baronial,—this is the degrading vice of the age; fostered, as if man's reason were but a step between the brains of a kitten and a monkey, in the mixed love of despicable excitement and miserable mimicry.
If the English have no imagination, they should not scorn to be commonplace; or rather they should remember that poverty cannot be disguised by beggarly borrowing, that it may be ennobled by calm independence. Our national architecture never will improve until our population are generally convinced that in this art, as in all others, they cannot seem what they cannot be. The scarlet coat or the turned-down collar, which the obsequious portrait-painter puts on the shoulders and off the necks of his savage or insane customers, never can make the 'prentice look military, or the idiot poetical; and the architectural appurtenances of Norman embrasure or Veronaic balcony must be equally ineffective, until they can turn shopkeepers into barons, and schoolgirls into Juliets. Let the national mind be elevated in its character, and it will naturally become pure in its conceptions; let it be simple in its desires, and it will be beautiful in its ideas; let it be modest in feeling, and it will not be insolent in stone. For architect and for employer, there can be but one rule; to be natural in all that they do, and to look for the beauty of the material creation as they would for that of the human form, not in the chanceful and changing disposition of artificial decoration, but in the manifestation of the pure and animating spirit which keeps it from the coldness of the grave. [With this remarkable foreshadowing of Mr. Ruskin's Art-teaching compare Seven Lamps and Lectures on Architecture and Painting, throughout.]
[51] [Referring again to the intended sequel.]
[52] This difference of principle is one leading distinction between the artist, properly so called, and the scene, diorama, or panorama painter.
[53] [For further discussion of which, see Elements of Drawing, Letter III.]