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which I gave as normal. For Venetian architecture developed out of British moral consciousness I decline to be answerable. His accusation is that I induced architects to study sculpture more, and what he is pleased to call “expressional character” less. I admit I should be glad if he would tell me what, before my baneful influence began to be felt, the expressional character of our building was; and I will reconsider my principles if he can point out to me, on any modern building either in London or, as aforesaid, within twenty miles round, a single piece of good sculpture of which the architect repents, or the public complains.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

J. RUSKIN.

March 21.

APPENDIX, 14

PREFACE BY WILLIAM MORRIS TO CHAPTER VI. (“THE NATURE OF GOTHIC”¹)

THE chapter which is here put before the reader can be well considered as a separate piece of work, although it contains here and there references to what has gone before in The Stones of Venice. To my mind, and I believe to some others, it is one of the most important things written by the author, and in future days will be considered as one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century. To some of us when we first read it, now many years ago, it seemed to point out a new road on which the world should travel. And in spite of all the disappointments of forty years, and although some of us, John Ruskin amongst others, have since learned what the equipment for that journey must be, and how many things must be changed before we are equipped, yet we can still see no other way out of the folly and degradation of civilisation. For the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us, is that art is the expression of man’s pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it; and lastly, that unless man’s work once again becomes a pleasure to him, the token of which change will be that beauty is once again a natural and necessary accompaniment of productive labour, all but the worthless must toil in pain, and therefore live in pain. So that the result of the thousands of years of man’s effort on the earth must be general unhappiness and universal degradation-unhappiness and degradation, the conscious burden of which will grow in proportion to the growth of man’s intelligence, knowledge, and power over material nature.

If this be true, as I for one most firmly believe, it follows that the hallowing of labour by art is the one aim for us at the present day. If politics are to be anything else than an empty game, more exciting but less innocent

¹ [For particulars about the separate edition of chapter vi. in which this preface appeared, see above, Introduction, p. lviii., and Bibliographical Note, p. lxviii.]

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