CHAPTER VII

THE LAMP OF OBEDIENCE¹

§ 1. IT has been my endeavour to show in the preceding pages how every form of noble architecture is in some sort the embodiment of the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations. Once or twice in doing this, I have named a principle to which I would now assign a definite place among those which direct that embodiment; the last place, not only as that to which its own humility would incline, but rather as belonging to it in the aspect of the crowning grace of all the rest; that principle, I mean, to which Polity owes its stability, Life its happiness, Faith its acceptance, Creation its continuance,-Obedience.

APHORISM 32. There is no such thing as liberty.²

Nor is it the least among the sources of more serious satisfaction which I have found in the pursuit of a subject that at first appeared to bear but slightly on the grave interests of mankind, that the conditions of material perfection which it leads me in conclusion to consider, furnish a strange proof how false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty:³ most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason

¹ [There are two MSS. relating to opening passages of this chapter; one is that of the text as published; the other contains two portions of an earlier draft, for which see Appendix ii., p. 286.]

² [The text of this aphorism, in black-letter in the 1880 edition, is from “Nor is it the least ...” down to “our heaviest punishment.”]

³ [To illustrate this doctrine fully from Ruskin’s other works would be to refer to them all. He learnt the lesson of the “phantom,” he tells us, in the nursery. He wanted “to touch the tea-urn which was boiling merrily.” His mother bade him keep his fingers back, but he did not obey, and she said, “Let him touch it, Nurse.” “That was my first lesson in the meaning of the word Liberty” (The Story of Arachne, § 3, in Verona and its Rivers, 1894, p. 35). In his reflections on politics, induced by the reading of Italian history, the lesson was re-inforced. See the letter of 1845 quoted below, p. 262. And so in the most deliberate writings of his later period: “Liberty-of which nothing but evil ever comes, or can come” (Lectures on Art, § 184).]

248

[Version 0.04: March 2008]