290 THE STONES OF VENICE DECORATION

and grandeur of your buildings. Do not think you can educate your workmen, or that the demand for perfection will increase the supply: educated imbecility and finessed foolishness are the worst of all imbecilities and foolishnesses; and there is no free-trade measure which will ever lower the price of brains,-there is no California of common sense.¹ Exactly in the degree in which you require your decoration to be wrought by able men, you diminish the extent and number of architectural works. Your business as an architect, is to calculate only on the co-operation of inferior men, to think for them, and to indicate for some of them at least such expressions of your thoughts as the weakest capacity can comprehend and the feeblest hand can execute. This is the definition of the purest architectural abstractions. They are the deep and laborious thoughts of the greatest men, put into such easy letters that they can be written by the simplest. They are expressions of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood.

§ 12. And now suppose one of those old Ninevite or Egyptian builders, with a couple of thousand men-mud-bred, onion-eating creatures-under him, to be set to work, like so many ants, on his temple sculptures. What is he to do with them? He can put them through a granitic exercise of current hand; he can teach them all how to curl hair thoroughly into croche-cœurs,² as you teach a bench of school-boys how to shape pothooks; he can teach them all how to draw long eyes and straight noses, and how to copy accurately certain well-defined lines. Then he fits his own great design to their capacities; he takes out of king, or lion, or god, as much as was expressible by croche-cœurs and granitic pothooks; he throws this into noble forms of his own

¹ [These were topical allusions, when this volume was written (1850). Peel’s Free Trade policy had come into effect in 1849, and at the same time the gold rush into California began.]

² [These curls, more properly “accroche-cœurs” or heart-hookers, are pomaded on to the face, in the shape of hooks, just in front of the ears, and sometimes on the forehead. They are much favoured by Spanish women-perhaps Adèle Domecq (Vol. II. p. xx.) and her sisters had worn them-and they may be seen in some of the pictures of J. F. Lewis. At one time they were also fashionable in France and America.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]