III. GROTESQUE RENAISSANCE 159

by its laws. The fantastic gables, built up in scroll-work and steps, of the Flemish street; the pinnacled roofs set with their small humourist double windows, as if with so many ears and eyes, of Northern France; the blackened timbers, crossed and carved into every conceivable waywardness of imagination, of Normandy and old England; the rude hewing of the pine timbers of the Swiss cottage;¹ the projecting turrets and bracketed oriels of the German street; these, and a thousand other forms, not in themselves reaching any high degree of excellence, are yet admirable, and most precious, as the fruits of a rejoicing energy in uncultivated minds. It is easier to take away the energy than to add the cultivation; and the only effect of the better knowledge which civilised nations now possess has been, as we have seen in a former chapter,² to forbid their being happy, without enabling them to be great.

§ 35. It is very necessary, however, with respect to this provincial or rustic architecture, that we should carefully distinguish its truly grotesque from its picturesque elements. In the Seven Lamps I defined the picturesque to be “parasitical sublimity,”³ or sublimity belonging to the external or accidental characters of a thing, not to the thing itself. For instance, when a highland cottage roof is covered with fragments of shale instead of slates, it becomes picturesque, because the irregularity and rude fractures of the rocks, and their grey and gloomy colour, give to it something of the savageness, and much of the general aspect, of the slope of a mountain side. But as a mere cottage roof, it cannot be sublime, and whatever sublimity it derives from the wildness or sternness which the mountains have given it in its covering, is, so far forth, parasitical. The mountain itself would have been grand, which is much more than picturesque; but the

¹ [In the MS. this passage was different: “the rude ornaments which the mountaineer carves in the winter night, while the snow lies deep against his door, upon the pine rafters of the Swiss cottage.”]

² [See above, ch. ii., pp. 65-67.]

³ [Vol. VIII. p. 236, and with what follows compare The Poetry of Architecture, Vol. I. p. 44.]

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