452 APPENDIX, 17

architectural ornament is this, and nothing but this; that a noble building never has any extraneous or superfluous ornament; that all its parts are necessary to its loveliness, and that no single atom of them could be removed without harm to its life. You do not build a temple and then dress it.* You create it in its loveliness, and leave it, as her Maker left Eve. Not unadorned, I believe, but so well adorned as to need no feather crowns. And I use the words ornament and beauty interchangeably, in order that architects may understand this: I assume that their building is to be a perfect creature, capable of nothing less than it has, and needing nothing more. It may, indeed, receive additional decoration afterwards, exactly as a woman may gracefully put a bracelet on her arm, or set a flower in her hair: but that additional decoration is not the architecture. It is of curtains, pictures, statues, things which may be taken away from the building, and not hurt it. What has the architect to do with these? He has only to do with what is part of the building itself, that is to say, its own inherent beauty. And because Mr. Garbett does not understand or acknowledge this, he is led on from error to error; for we next find him endeavouring to define beauty as distinct from ornament, and saying that “Positive beauty may be produced by a studious collation of whatever will display design, order, and congruity” (p. 14). Is that so? There is a highly studious collation of whatever will display design, order, and congruity, in a skull, is there not?-yet small beauty. The nose is a decorative feature,-yet slightly necessary to beauty, it seems to me; now, at least, for I once thought I must be wrong in considering a skull disagreeable. I gave it fair trial; put one on my bedroom chimney-piece, and looked at it by sunrise every morning, and by moonlight every night, and by all the best lights I could think of, for a month, in vain. I found it as ugly at last as I did at first.¹ So, also, the hair is a decoration, and its natural curl is of little use; but can Mr. Garbett conceive a bald beauty? or does he prefer a wig, because that is a “studious collation” of whatever will produce design, order, and congruity? So the flush of the cheek is a decoration,-God’s painting of the temple of his spirit,²-and the redness of the lip; and yet poor Viola thought it beauty truly blent;³ and I hold with her.

I have answered enough to this count.

The second point questioned is my assertion, “Ornament cannot be overcharged if it is good, and is always overcharged when it is bad.”⁴ To which Mr. Garbett objects in these terms: “I must contend, on the contrary, that the very best ornament may be overcharged by being misplaced” [p. 17].

A short sentence, with two mistakes in it.

First. Mr. Garbett cannot get rid of his unfortunate notion that ornament is a thing to be manufactured separately, and fastened on. He supposes that an ornament may be called good in itself, in the stonemason’s yard or in the ironmonger’s shop. Once for all, let him put this idea out of his head. We

* We have done so-theoretically: just as one would reason on the human form from the bones outwards: but the Architect of the human form frames all at once-bone and flesh.

¹ [See Præterita, iii. ch. ii. § 25, and compare Vol. II. p. 57 n.]

² [1 Corinthians vi. 19.]

³ [Twelfth Night, i. 5; compare Modern Painters, vol. ii., Vol. IV. p. 131 n.

⁴ [Seven Lamps, ch. i. § 15, Vol. VIII. p. 52.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]