CHAPTER XX

THE MATERIAL OF ORNAMENT

§ 1. WE enter now on the second division of our subject. We have no more to do with heavy stones and hard lines; we are going to be happy: to look round in the world and discover (in a serious manner always however, and under a sense of responsibility) what we like best in it, and to enjoy the same at our leisure: to gather it, examine it, fasten all we can of it into imperishable forms, and put it where we may see it for ever.

This it is to decorate architecture.

§ 2. There are, therefore, three steps in the process: first, to find out in a grave manner what we like best; secondly, to put as much of this as we can (which is little enough) into form; thirdly, to put this formed abstraction into a proper place.

And we have now, therefore, to make these three inquiries in succession: first, what we like, or what is the right material of ornament; then how we are to present it, or its right treatment; then, where we are to put it, or its right place. I think I can answer that first inquiry in this Chapter, the second inquiry in the next Chapter, and the third I shall answer in a more diffusive manner, by taking up in succession the several parts of architecture above distinguished, and rapidly noting the kind of ornament fittest for each.

§ 3. I said in Chapter II. § 14, that all noble ornamentation was the expression of man’s delight in God’s work. This implied that there was an ignoble ornamentation, which was the expression of man’s delight in his own. There is such a school, chiefly degraded classic and Renaissance, in which the ornament is composed of imitations of things made by man.

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