xlii INTRODUCTION

age had influenced architects as he had. He was responsible to a great extent for that wave of Venetian Gothic which passed over the country, notable examples of which were to be found in Oxford and in London. He was the man who probably first awakened the English people to a knowledge of what art really meant: art in the life of its people, art in the true sense of the word, as an ennobling faculty which raised men, and induced in them a longing for higher and nobler things. Probably in that connection no work had had more influence and deserved higher commendation, not only to students of architecture, but to all who were striving for culture, than that magnificent book, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, and particularly those chapters which dealt with Truth and with Sacrifice.”¹

The influence of The Seven Lamps of Architecture has, however, been something else besides that of “a hymn to architectural loveliness.” Its central idea and many of its leading principles made an epoch in the study of architecture, and exercised considerable influence upon its practice and development. “The present volume,” says Professor Charles Eliot Norton, “is, so far as I know, the first treatise in English to teach the real significance of Architecture as the most trustworthy record of the Life and Faith of nations.” “The book I called The Seven Lamps was to show,” says Ruskin, “that certain right states of temper and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture had been produced.”² Ruskin had seized this truth securely, long before he wrote the volume. It is stated-incidentally, though clearly-in his first essay, that on The Poetry of Architecture. Various parallels between that work and the Seven Lamps are cited in notes to the text, but special attention may be called here to the passage in the earlier essay (§ 225 n., Vol. I. p. 168), where Ruskin remarks that in art people “cannot seem what they cannot be”; that a nation which is “modest in feeling, will not be insolent in stone”; that the beauty of architecture must be found “in the pure and animating spirit which keeps it from the coldness of the grave.” This fundamental doctrine, adds Professor Norton, “is sound, and needs to be enforced to-day no less than forty years ago. It is, that in architecture, as well as in the other fine arts, the final test of the excellence of a work is the spirit of which it is the expression, and of which it gives evidence alike in its design and in its execution,-evidence all the more convincing because of its unintentional and inevitable character. The nature of this evidence is set forth with admirable force and clearness in those parts of the volume which treat directly of the principles and the works of

¹ Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol. vii. (3rd series), p. 116.

² Crown of Wild Olive, § 65.

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