226 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE

APHORISM 28. The sanctity of home, for good men.¹

treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father’s house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples-temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our fathers’ honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only.² And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital-upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone-upon those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar-not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man’s aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man’s past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and the crowded

¹ [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “I say that if men lived ...” down to the end of § 3.]

² [To the sentiment of this passage Ruskin often recurred; see, for instance, Lectures on Architecture and Painting, § 50, and Lectures on Art, § 122.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]