Yet all this is true, and self-evident; only hidden from us, as many
other self-evident things are, by false teaching. Nothing is a great
work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be
given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from
given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture; and it is, of the
two procedures, rather less rational (because more easy) to copy
capitals or mouldings from Phidias, and call ourselves architects, than
to copy heads and hands from Titian, and call ourselves painters.
Let us then understand at once that change or variety is as much a
necessity to the human heart and brain in buildings as in books; that
there is no merit, though there is some occasional use, in monotony;
and that we must no more expect to derive either pleasure or profit
from an architecture whose ornaments are of one pattern, and whose
pillars are of one proportion, than we should out of a universe in
which the clouds were all of one shape, and the trees all of one size.
And this we confess in deeds, though not in words. All the pleasure
which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, is in pictures,
sculpture, minor objects of virtu, or mediaeval architecture, which we
enjoy under the term picturesque: no pleasure is taken anywhere in
modern buildings, and we find all men of true feeling delighting to
escape out of modern cities into natural scenery: hence, as I shall
hereafter show, that peculiar love of landscape, which is
characteristic of the age.
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