APPENDIX, 17 453

may say of a thing, considered separately, that it is a pretty thing; but before we can say it is a good ornament, we must know what it is to adorn, and how. As, for instance, a ring of gold is a pretty thing: it is a good ornament on a woman’s finger; not a good ornament hung through her under lip. A hollyhock, seven feet high, would be a good ornament for a cottage-garden; not a good ornament for a lady’s head-dress. Might not Mr. Garbett have seen this without my showing? and that, therefore, when I said “good” ornament, I said “well-placed” ornament, in one word; and that, also, when Mr. Garbett says “it may be overcharged by being misplaced,” he merely says it may be overcharged by being bad.

Secondly. But, granted that ornament were independent of its position, and might be pronounced good in a separate form, as books are good, or men are good. Suppose I had written to a student in Oxford, “You cannot have too many books, if they be good books;” and he had answered me, “Yes, for if I have many, I have no place to put them in but the coalcellar.” Would that in anywise affect the general principle that he could not have too many books?

Or suppose he had written, “I must not have too many, they confuse my head.” I should have written back to him: “Don’t buy books to put in the coal-hole, nor read them if they confuse your head; you cannot have too many, if they be good: but if you are too lazy to take care of them, or too dull to profit by them, you are better without them.”

Exactly in the same tone, I repeat to Mr. Garbett, “You cannot have too much ornament, if it be good: but if you are too indolent to arrange it, or too dull to take advantage of it, assuredly you are better without it.”

The other points bearing on this question have already been stated in the close of the 21st chapter.

The third reference I have to answer, is to my repeated assertion, that the evidence of manual labour is one of the chief sources of value in ornament, (Seven Lamps, p. 49, Modern Painters, paragraph 1, chap. III.,)¹ to which objection is made in these terms [p. 162 n.]: “We must here warn the reader against a remarkable error of Ruskin. The value of ornaments in architecture depends not in the slightest degree on the manual labour they contain. If it did, the finest ornaments ever executed would be the stone chains that hang before certain Indian rock-temples.” Is that so? Hear a parallel argument. “The value of the Cornish mines depends not in the slightest degree on the quantity of copper they contain. If it did, the most valuable things ever produced would be copper saucepans.” It is hardly worth my while to answer this; but, lest any of my readers should be confused by the objection, and as I hold the fact to be of great importance, I may re-state it for them with some explanation.

Observe, then, the appearance of labour, that is to say, the evidence of the past industry of man, is always, in the abstract, intensely delightful: man being meant to labour, it is delightful to see that he has laboured, and to read the record of his active and worthy existence.²

The evidence of labour becomes painful only when it is a sign of Evil

¹ [The references in this edition are Vol. VIII. p. 82, Vol. III. p. 93.]

² [The following passage (with an introductory “But”), from “The evidence of labour” down to “crooked limbs,” was printed as a note to a later passage in this appendix in the second and later editions: see below, p. 456.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]