II. THE VIRTUES OF ARCHITECTURE 67

all that I suppose we want is to get safely over the river; the man who has taken us over is still a mere bridge-builder,-a builder, not an architect; he may be a rough, artless, feelingless man, incapable of doing any one truly fine thing all his days. I shall call upon you to despise him presently in a sort, but not as if he were a mere smoother of mortar; perhaps a great man, infinite in memory, indefatigable in labour, exhaustless in expedient, unsurpassable in quickness of thought. Take good heed you understand him before you despise him.

§ 9. But why is he to be in anywise despised? By no means despise him, unless he happen to be without a soul,* or at least to show no signs of it; which possibly he may not in merely carrying you across the river. He may be merely what Mr. Carlyle rightly calls a human beaver¹ after all; and there may be nothing in all that ingenuity of his greater than a complication of animal faculties, an intricate bestiality,-nest or hive building in its highest development. You need something more than this, or the man is despicable; you need that virtue of building through which he may show his affections and delights; you need its beauty or decoration.²

§ 10. Not that, in reality, one division of the man is more human than another. Theologists fall into this error very fatally and continually; and a man from whom I have learned much, Lord Lindsay, has hurt his noble book by it, speaking as if the spirit of the man only were immortal, and were

* Appendix 14: “Divisions of Humanity” [p. 444].

¹ [“The Industrialisms are all of silent nature; and some of them are heroic and eminently human; others, again, we may call unheroic, not eminently human, beaverish rather, but still honest. ... If a soul is born with divine intelligence, ... this young soul will find the question asked of him by England every hour and moment: ‘Canst thou turn thy human intelligence into the beaver sort?’” (Latter-Day Pamphlets, No. V.). This book had been just published (1850) when Ruskin wrote, and it may be observed that this is one of the first passages in which Ruskin’s style has a faint ring of Carlyle.]

² [Compare on this subject Seven Lamps of Architecture, ch. i. § 1 (Vol. VIII. pp. 27-28), where Ruskin again distinguishes between architecture and building, and dwells on the “intellectual dominion” which “separates architecture from a wasp’s nest.”]

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