DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61217#0124
112
JOHN RUSKIN.
even as red would be difficult to describe to one who
had not seen it, but who must be told that it was the
colour mingled with blue to make this violet, and with
yellow to make yonder orange. Universal Gothic, like
other great architecture, began with artless utterance.
“ It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss
of power in modern days owing to the imperative re-
quirement that art shall be methodical and learned.”
For there will always be “more intellect than there
can be education.” But Gothic was in a special
manner the work of the savage intellect, of the inventor,
the intellectual workman; it has not the same word
to repeat, but the perpetual novelty of life. And, to
the Gothic workman, living foliage — no longer the
mere “ explanatory accessory ” of Lombardic or Roman-
esque sculpture—became “a subject of intense affec-
tion.” Here is an incomparable Ruskin thought:
the love of change, he tells us, that was in the char-
acter of the Gothic sculptor, restless in following the
hunt or the battle, “ is at once soothed and satisfied
as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the
budding of the flower.” And here a Ruskin phrase, also
in its place incomparable: “ Greek and Egyptian
ornament is either mere surface engraving ... or its
lines are flowing, lithe, and luxuriant. . . . But the
Gothic ornament stands out in prickly independence
and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, and freezing
into pinnacles.” In the same chapter is, amongst others,
JOHN RUSKIN.
even as red would be difficult to describe to one who
had not seen it, but who must be told that it was the
colour mingled with blue to make this violet, and with
yellow to make yonder orange. Universal Gothic, like
other great architecture, began with artless utterance.
“ It is impossible to calculate the enormous loss
of power in modern days owing to the imperative re-
quirement that art shall be methodical and learned.”
For there will always be “more intellect than there
can be education.” But Gothic was in a special
manner the work of the savage intellect, of the inventor,
the intellectual workman; it has not the same word
to repeat, but the perpetual novelty of life. And, to
the Gothic workman, living foliage — no longer the
mere “ explanatory accessory ” of Lombardic or Roman-
esque sculpture—became “a subject of intense affec-
tion.” Here is an incomparable Ruskin thought:
the love of change, he tells us, that was in the char-
acter of the Gothic sculptor, restless in following the
hunt or the battle, “ is at once soothed and satisfied
as it watches the wandering of the tendril, and the
budding of the flower.” And here a Ruskin phrase, also
in its place incomparable: “ Greek and Egyptian
ornament is either mere surface engraving ... or its
lines are flowing, lithe, and luxuriant. . . . But the
Gothic ornament stands out in prickly independence
and frosty fortitude, jutting into crockets, and freezing
into pinnacles.” In the same chapter is, amongst others,