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    May 18, 1850.] tRfft %t&t}tt+ 183

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    BUSKIN ON ARCHITECTURE. The Seven Lamps ...

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    MERIVALE'S ROMAN EMPIRE. A History of th...

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    Laino On European Social Life. Observati...

    the exposure of property in London , and at the small amount of i predation m proportion to the vast amount of articles e posed to depredation in every street , lane , and shop ; and consider the total inadequacy of any police force , however numerous—and in all London the police force does not exceed five thousand persons—or of any vigilance on he part of the owners themselves , however strict , to guard this property , if it were not guarded by the general , habitual , thorough honesty of the population itself . Look at the temptations to inebriety , and the small proportion of the people totally abandoned to habitual drunkenness , or even to the hourly dram-drinking of Scotch people , or the schnaps of the lower classes in

    Germany . Virtue is not the child of the desert or of the school-room , but of the dense assemblages of mankind in which its social influences are called into action and into practical exertion every hour . The urchin on the pavement dancing Jim Crow for a chance halfpenny , and resisting in all his hunger the temptation of snatching the apple or the cake from the old woman's oven stall or the pastrycook ' s window , is morally no uneducated being . His sense of right , his self-restraint , his moral education are as truly and highly cultivated as in the son of the bishop who is declaiming at Exeter-hall about this poor boy ' s ignorance and vice , and whose son never knew in his position what it is to resist

    pressing temptation , secret opportunity , and the urgent call of hunger . Practical moral education , a religious regard for what belongs to others , the doing as you would be done by , the neighbourly sympathy with and help of real distress , and the generous glow at what is manly , bold , and right in common life , and the indignation at what is wrong or base , are in more full development among the labouring class in London than among the same class elsewhere , either at home or abroad . They put more of the fair-play feeling in their doings . The exceptions to this character ; the vice , immorality , blackguardism , brutality of a comparatively small number—and many of these not born and bred in the lowest ranks , but in much higher positions from which they have sunk , besmeared d which caused

    with the vice , immorality , andishonesty their fall—cannot be justly taken as a measure of the moral condition of the lower or labouring classes in London . The genuine cockneys are a good-natured hearty set of men ; their mobs are full of sport and rough play ; and the ferocious spirit of mischief , wickedness , and bloodshed rarely predominates . Considering their great temptations and opportunities , and the inadequacy of any social arrangements or military or police force that we possess to oppose them , if a majority were inclined to active deeds of mischief , the London population may claim the highest place among the town populations of Europe , for a spirit of self-restraint on vicious propensi ties , and for a practical moral education in the right and reasonable . "

    May 18, 1850.] Trfft %T&T}Tt+ 183

    May 18 , 1850 . ] tRfft % t & t } tt + 183

    Buskin On Architecture. The Seven Lamps ...

    BUSKIN ON ARCHITECTURE . The Seven Lamps of Architecture . By John Ruskin . Smith and Elder . We are somewhat late in our notice of this book , but many of our readers may not have even heard of it , and it is too rare an example of deep and enthusiastic criticism , to be passed over . The great defect of almost all our writing on Art in this country is the absence of any reference to those fundamental principles which really operate in Art ; the great merit

    of Mr . Ruskin's writings is precisely in the strong consciousness they exhibit of this defect , and in his resolute endeavour to bring those principles to light . Hence the Seven Lamps of Architecture is an sesthetical not a technical treatise . It instructs architects in the primary conditions of their art , and teaches the public ho w to feel and appreciate the results . With its peculiar views we have nothing here to do ; the general and

    tendency of the work is that of deepening widening the aesthetic capacities . The seven Lamps of Sacrifice , Truth , Power , Beauty , Life , Memory , and Obedience are held up as the lights to guide an artist on his " dim and perilous way . " Under this fanciful yet striking nomenclature the primary and indispensable conditions of Art are exhibited ; conditions which separate Art from Artifice , and which give to works their holy influence and enduring

    substance . Whatever may be thought of the theoretical principles herein laid down , there can be but one chorus of praise for the keen perception of what is characteristic and noble in works of art , and for the splendour of diction with which the positions are illustrated ; as a mere example of the power of eloquence the book deserves to be studied . How fine is this defence of " ornament , " which , as he says ,

    cannot be too profuse , although some styles can dispense with it , and by their very simplicity produce the pleasurable effect of contrast , though they would be wearisome if universal : — " They are but the rests and monotones of the art ; it is to its far happier , far higher exaltation that we owe those fair fronts of variegated mosaic , charged with wild fancies and dark hosts of imagery , thicker and quainter than ever filled the depth of midsummer dream ; those vaulted gates , trellised with close leaves ; those windowlabyrinths of twisted tracery and starry light ; those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower ; the only witnesses , perhaps , that remain to us

    of the faith and fear of nations . All else for which the builders sacrificed has passed away—all their living interests , and aims , and achievements . We know not for what they laboured , and we see no evidence of their reward . Victory , wealth , authority , happiness—all have departed , though bought by many a bitter sacrifice . But of them , and their life and their toil upon the earth , one reward , one evidence , is left to us in those gray heaps of deep wrought stone . They have taken with them to the grave their powers , their honours , and their errors ; but they have left us their adoration . " Again , in his exposition of the causes of decline in Gothic architecture : — " So fell the great dynasty of medieeval architecture . It was because it had lost its own strength , and disobeyed its own laws—because its order , and consistency , and organisation had been broken through that it could oppose no resistance to the rush of overwhelming innovation . And this , observe , all because it had sacrificed a single truth . From that one surrender of its integrity , from that one endeavour to assume the semblance of what it was not , arose the multitudinous forms of disease and decrepitude which rotted away the pillars of its supremacy . It was not because its time was come ; it was not because it was scorned by the classical Romanist , or dreaded by the faithful Protestant . That scorn and that fear it might have survived and lived ; it would have stood forth in stern comparison with the enervated sensuality of the renaissance ; it would have risen in renewed and purified honour , and with a new soul , from the ashes into which it sank , giving up its glory , as it had received it , for the honour of God—but its own truth was gone , and it sank for ever . There was no wisdom nor strength left in it to raise it from the dust ; and the error of zeal , and the softness of luxury , smote it down and dissolved , it away . It is good for us to remember this , as we tread upon the bare ground of its foundations , and stumble over its scattered stones . Those rent skeletons of pierced wall , through which our sea winds moan and murmur , strewing them joint by joint , and bone by bone , along the bleak promontories on which the Pharos lights came once from houses of prayer—those grey arches and quiet aisles under which the sheep of our valleys feed and rest on the turf that has buried their altars—those shapeless heaps , that are not of the earth , which lift our fields into strange and sudden banks of flowers , and stay our mountain streams with stones that are not their own , have other thoughts to ask from us than those of mourning for the rage that despoiled , or the fear that forsook them . It was not the robber , not the fanatic , not the blasphemer , who sealed the destruction that they had wrought ; the war , the wrath , the terror , might have worked their worst , and the strong walls would have risen , and the slight pillars would have started again , from under the hand of the destroyer . But they could not rise out of the ruins of their own violated truth . " In the following distinction between Architecture and Painting , with reference to masses of shadows , an important suggestion is beautifully expressed : — " Of these limitations the first consequence is that positive shade is a more necessary and more sublime thing in an architect's hands than in a painter ' s . For the latter being able to temper his light with an undertone throughout , and to make it delightful with sweet colour , or awful with lurid colour , and to represent distance , and air , and sun , by the depth of it , and fill its whole space with expression , can deal with an enormous , nay , almost with an universal , extent of it , and the best painters most delight in such extent ; but as light with the architect is nearly always liable to become full and untempered sunshine seen upon solid surface , his only rests , and his chief means of sublimity , are definite shades . So that , after size and weight , the power of architecture may be said to depend on the quantity , whether measured in space or intenseness , of its shadow , and it seems to me that the reality of its works , and the use and influence they have in the daily life of men , as opposed to those works of art with which we have nothing to do but in times of rest or of pleasure , require of it that it should express a kind of human sympathy , by a measure of darkness as great as there is in human life ; and that as the great poem and great fiction generally affect us most by the majesty of their masses of shade , and cannot take hold upon us if they affect a continuance of lyricsprightliness , but must be serious often , and sometimes melancholy , else they do not express the truth of this wild world of ours ; so there must be in this magnificently human art of architecture some equivalent expression of the trouble and wrath of life fur its sorrow and its mystery ; and this it can only give by depth or diffusion of gloom , by the frown upon its front and the shadow of its recess . So that Rembrandtism is a noble manner in architecture though a false one in painting , and I do not believe that ever any building was truly great unless it had mighty masses , vigorous and deep , of shadow mingled with its surface . And among the first habits that a young architect should learn , is that of thinking in shadow , not looking at a design in its miserable liny skeleton , but conceiving it as it will be when the dawn lights it , and the dusk leaves it ; when its stones will be hot , and its crannies cool ; when the lizards will bask on the one , and the birds build in the other . Let him design with the sense of cold and heat upon him , let him cut out the shadows as men dig wells in unwatered plains , and lead along the lights as a founder does his hot metal , let him keep the full command of both , and see that he knows how they fall and where they fade . His paper lines and proportions arc of no value , all that he has to do must be done by spaces of light and darkness , and his business is to be that the one is broad and bold enough not to be swallowed up by twilight , and the other deep enough not to be dried like a shallow pool by a noonday sun . "

    Merivale's Roman Empire. A History Of Th...

    MERIVALE'S ROMAN EMPIRE . A History of the Romans under the Empire . By Charles Merivale , B . D . Late Fellow of St . John ' s College , Cambridge Vols . 1 . and II . Lonsrman .

    ( Second Notice . ) L ? we proceed now to specify one or two critical objections to Mr . Merivale ' s volumes , let it be understood that we do so rather with a view to what the public has yet to expect from him than in the spirit of disparagement towards what he has already done . We believe , as we have already said , that his style of treatment will become richer and deeper as he advances with his work : it may not be useless , therefore , to point out those precise respects in which , as it seems to us , this tendency towards increased richness and depth is most especially desirable .

    And , first , we have to complain of a kind of thinness or meagreness in the history so far as it has yet been written . By this we mean that the author , with , all his care in following the right thread in the narration , and all his conscientiousness in passing the materials under review , has yet failed to accumulate in his book such a rich abundance of facts and details relative to the Romans of the days of Csesar as he might easily . have done . The period embraced by Mr . Merivale in these two volumes ,

    namely , from the Death of Sulla ( B . C . 78 ) to the Death of Caesar ( B . C . 44 ) is little more than a generation . Now , the aim of any one that should attempt to write a history of the Romans during that generation should clearly be to gather such an amount of authentic material relating to it as should , when duly arranged and elaborated , present a complete illustrative tableau of all that was Roman in that generation . Here , accordingly , an author would have to attend to two things—firsts to the narrative of the events of

    thirtyfour successive years , which narrative , including as it could only the events of chief political importance , must at least be but a narrow line leaping as it were from place to place , from Rome to Gaul , from Gaul to Spain , from Spain to the East , just as the real centre of activity altered itself ; and , secondly , to the general delineation and laying out of that great area or theatre of differently peopled lands , whereon , in this shifting manner and for whose weal or wo , the said narro w series of events was all the while transacted . If either of these

    things is insufficiently attended to ; if , on the one hand , the narrative is too slight , or if , on the other , the theatre of events is not clearly and vividly laid out , the history will necessarily be defective . Now , in Mr . Merivale ' s volumes too large a proportion o the space is occupied by the mere narrative . He traces the thread of events well and lucidly , never losing or breaking it , but pursuing it from Rome to Gaul , and from Gaul to Rome , as necessity requires ; but he does this , so to speak , over a bleak and bare

    landscape . We do not see in his pages the broad area of Mediterranean lands green with grass , or brown with heather , city-studded at intervals , and covered with bustling populations held together by an organization of Roman origin ; all this we may know , but Mr . Merivale does not keep it before us ; and so far as his care to inform us to the contrary is concerned , the great struggle between Ccesar and Pompey and the whole activity of Cajsar ' s generation , may have enacted itself on a mere area of dry

    pumice-stone or polished blue slate . In short , Mr . Merivale must devote more space to social surveys , or descriptions of surfaces , and comparatively less to mere lineal narration , especially narration of military movements , for which , the fact is , people care supremely little . But even , adhering to his own plan , Mr . Merivale might have been less meagre . A writer of history possessing a true eye for the interesting and anecdotic , which , after all , is the

    thing of main consequence in History , would , even in the course of a mero narrative , contrive to accumulate , from the right and from the left , details and illustrations of extensive historic import . Mr . Merivale is not actually deficient in this sense of the picturesque ; but he might cultivate it with advantage . There is too much in him , wo think , of tendency to avoid the anecdotic and the familiar , especially the humorous . This is wrong : the history of Csesar and his times , we are convinced , is capable

    of being so written as to prove intensely interesting even to the modern reader ; but this can only be done by a person that shall have his eye open equally to the comic as to the grand aspects of the Roman character . Two instances occur to us in which Mr . Merivale seems purposely to have avoided an in-

• Citation
  • Leader (1850-1860), May 18, 1850, page 15, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse-os.kdl.kcl.ac.uk/periodicals/l/issues/cld_18051850/page/15/