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104 THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE
magnitude as he can command. There are few rocks, even among the Alps, that have a clear vertical fall as high as the choir of Beauvais; and if we secure a good precipice of wall, or a sheer and unbroken flank of tower, and place them where there are no enormous natural features to oppose them, we shall feel in them no want of sublimity of size. And it may be matter of encouragement in this respect, though one also of regret, to observe how much oftener man destroys natural sublimity, than nature crushes human power. It does not need much to humiliate a mountain. A hut will sometimes do it; I never look up to the Col de Balme from Chamouni, without a violent feeling of provocation against its hospitable little cabin, whose bright white walls form a visibly four-square spot on the green ridge, and entirely destroy all idea of its elevation. A single villa will often mar a whole landscape,1 and dethrone a dynasty of hills; and the Acropolis of Athens, Parthenon and all, has, I believe, been dwarfed into a model by the palace lately built beneath it.2 The fact is, that hills are not so high as we fancy them,3 and, when to the actual impression of no mean comparative size, is added the sense of the toil of manly hand and thought, a sublimity is reached, which nothing but gross error in arrangement of its parts can destroy.
§ 5. While, therefore, it is not to be supposed that mere size will ennoble a mean design, yet every increase of magnitude will bestow upon it a certain degree of nobleness:4 so that it is well to determine at first, whether the building is to be markedly beautiful, or markedly sublime; and if the
1 [See The Poetry of Architecture, § 174, Vol. I. p. 133.]
2 [Ruskin never visited Athens, and this account of the effect of the Royal Palace (built in 1834-1838) as dwarfing the Acropolis can hardly be accepted.]
3 [See The Poetry of Architecture, § 222; Vol. I. p. 165.]
4 [See Stones of Venice, vol. iii. ch. ii. § 44 n., where a distinction is drawn between “the finished and polished magnitude sought for the sake of pomp” and “the rough magnitude sought for the sake of sublimity.” But see Aratra Pentelici, §§ 145, 146, where Ruskin notes as “one of the primal merits and decencies of Greek work, that it was, on the whole, singularly small in scale ... And indeed,” he adds, “the best buildings that I know of are thus modest.” He then refers to this passage in the Seven Lamps as seeming, at first, contradictory; but, he says, “you cannot command grandeur by size till you can command grace in minuteness.”]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
