DECORATION XX. MATERIAL OF ORNAMENT 265

must be the expression of all this. Not copies of your own handiwork; not boastings of your own grandeur; not heraldries;¹ not king’s arms, nor any creature’s arms, but God’s arm, seen in His work. Not manifestation of your delight in your own laws, or your own liberties, or your own inventions; but in divine laws, constant, daily, common laws;-not Composite laws, nor Doric laws, nor laws of the five orders, but of the Ten Commandments.²

§ 17. Then the proper material of ornament will be whatever God has created; and its proper treatment, that which seems in accordance with or symbolical of His laws. And, for material, we shall therefore have, first, the abstract lines which are most frequent in nature; and then, from lower to higher, the whole range of systematised inorganic and organic forms. We shall rapidly glance in order at their kinds; and, however absurd the elemental division of inorganic matter by the ancients may seem to the modern chemist, it is one so grand and simple for arrangements of external appearances, that I shall here follow it; noticing first, after abstract lines, the imitable forms of the four elements of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, and then those of animal organisms. It may be convenient to the reader to have the order stated in a clear succession at first, thus:-

(1.) Abstract lines.

(2.) Forms of Earth (Crystals).

(3.) Forms of Water (Waves).

(4.) Forms of Fire (Flames and Rays).

(5.) Forms of Air (Clouds).

(6.) (Organic forms). Shells.

(7.) Fish.

(8.) Reptiles and Insects.

(9.) Vegetation (A). Stems and Trunks.

¹ [For an “atonement” for Ruskin’s depreciation of heraldry in ornament, see Seven Lamps, ch. iv. § 8, note of 1880 to a passage similar to this (Vol. VIII. p. 147).]

² [With §§ 15, 16 here, compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. ch. xiv. § 41, and the other passages there noted as “knitting our conclusions together” and establishing “a great declaration of the central mediæval purpose”-namely, that men’s happiness “was not in themselves, and that their labour was not to have their own service as its chief end.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]