APPENDIX, 13 459

would explain what he means by saying that my direct influence on architecture is always wrong, and my indirect influence right; because, if that be so, I will try to exercise only indirect influence on my Oxford pupils. But the fact to my own notion is otherwise. I am proud enough to hope, for instance, that I have had some direct influence on Mr. Street; and I do not doubt but that the public will have more satisfaction from his Law Courts¹ than they have had from anything built within fifty years. But I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between this² and Bromley; and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin and bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals copied from the Church of the Madonna of Health or of Miracles. And one of my principal notions for leaving my present house is that it is surrounded everywhere by the accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making.

I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

JOHN RUSKIN.

March 15.

From The Pall Mall Gazette, March 21, 1872.

MR. RUSKIN’S INFLUENCE: A REJOINDER

To the Editor of “The Pall Mall Gazette”

SIR,-I am obliged by your critic’s reply to my question, but beg to observe that, meaning what he explains himself to have meant, he should simply have said that my influence on temper was right, and on taste wrong; the influence being in both cases equally “direct.” On questions of taste I will not venture into discussion with him, but must be permitted to correct his statement that I have persuaded any one to prefer Venetian to English Gothic. I have stated³ that Italian-chiefly Pisan and Florentine-Gothic is the noblest school of Gothic hitherto existent, which is true; and that one form of Venetian Gothic deserves singular respect for the manner of its development. I gave the mouldings and shaft measurements of that form,⁴ and to so little purpose, that I challenge your critic to find in London, or within twenty miles of it, a single Venetian casement built on the sections

in his second letter on the subject. The Pall Mall reviewer may have been Coventry Patmore, who was a contributor to that journal during the editorship of his friend, Mr. Frederick Greenwood, and who had made the point about “underrating of expressional character” in a review elsewhere of The Stones of Venice: see Vol. IX. p. xl.]

¹ [Mr. Street’s design for the New Law Courts was, after much discussion, selected, May 30, 1868, and approved by commission, August, 1870. The building was not, however, begun till February, 1874, and the hope expressed in this letter is therefore, unfortunately, no expression of opinion on the work itself.]

² [Denmark Hill. Ruskin sold his house there in 1872, and settled permanently at Brantwood, which he had bought, in the autumn of that year.]

³ [See Vol. VIII. p. 13.]

⁴ [See “Arabian Windows in the Campo Santa Maria, Mater Domini,” Plate ii. of the Examples of the Architecture of Venice, reprinted in the next volume; and see, too, in this volume chapter vii., “Gothic Palaces.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]