Page:Ruskin - The Seven Lamps of Architecture.djvu/20

xiv associations are connected, at any time when they can hardly see it. 2. Proud Admiration. The delight which most worldly people take in showy, large, or complete buildings, for the sake of the importance which such buildings confer on themselves, as their possessors, or admirers. 3. Workmanly Admiration. The delight of seeing good and neat masonry, together with that belonging to incipient developments of taste; as, for instance, a perception of proportion in lines, masses, and mouldings. 4. Artistical and rational Admiration. The delight taken in reading the sculpture or painting on walls, capitals, friezes, etc.

Of these four kinds of feeling I found, on farther inquiry, that the first, or sentimental kind, was instinctive and simple; excitable in nearly all persons, by a certain amount of darkness and slow music in a minor key. That it had good uses, and was of a dignified character in some minds; but that on the whole it was apt to rest in theatrical effect, and to be as well satisfied with the incantation scene in Robert le Diable, provided there were enough gauze and feux-follets, as by the Cathedral of Rheims. That it might generally be appealed to with advantage as a judge of the relative impressiveness of two styles of art, but was wholly unable to distinguish truth from affectation in the style it preferred. Even in its highest manifestation, in the great mind of Scott, while it indeed led him to lay his scenes in Melrose Abbey and Glasgow Cathedral, rather than in St Paul's or St Peter's, it did not enable him to see the difference between true Gothic at Glasgow, and false Gothic at Abbotsford. As a critical faculty, I found it was hardly to be taken into consideration in any reasoning on the higher merits of architecture.