[From "The Builder," December 9, 1854.]
"LIMNER" AND ILLUMINATION.[159]
(To the Editor of "The Builder.")
I do not usually answer objections to my written statements, otherwise I should waste my life in idle controversy; but as what I say to the workmen at the Architectural Museum is necessarily brief, and in its words, though not in its substance, unconsidered, I will answer, if you will permit me, any questions or cavils which you may think worthy of admission into your columns on the subject of these lectures.
I do not know if the Cambridge correspondent, whose letter you inserted last week, is more zealous for the honor of Cary, or anxious to detect me in a mistake. If the former, he will find, if he take the trouble to look at the note in the 264th page of the second volume of the "Stones of Venice," that Cary's reputation is not likely to suffer at my hands.[160] But the translation in the instance quoted is inadmissible. It does not matter in the least whence the word "limner" is derived. I did not know when I found fault with it that it was a corruption of "illuminator," but I knew perfectly that it did not in the existing state of the English language mean "illuminator." No one talks of "limning a missal," or of a "limned missal." The word is now universally understood as signifying a painter or draughtsman in the ordinary sense, and cannot be accepted as a translation of the phrase of which it is a corruption.
Touching the last clause of the letter, I should have thought that a master of arts of Cambridge might have had wit enough to comprehend that characters may be illegible by being far off, as well as by being ill-shaped; and that it is not less difficult to read what is too small to be seen than what is too strange to be understood. The inscription on the Houses of Parliament are illegible, not because they are in black letters, but because, like all the rest of the work on that, I suppose, the most effeminate and effectless heap of stones ever raised by man, they are utterly unfit for their position.
J. Ruskin.
FOOTNOTES:
[159] In his lecture on "the distinction between illumination and painting," being the first of a series on Decorative Color delivered at the Architectural Museum, Cannon Street, Westminster, Mr. Ruskin is reported (Builder, Nov. 25, 1854) to have said, "The line which is given by Cary, 'which they of Paris call the limner's skill,' is not properly translated. The word, which in the original is 'alluminare,' does not mean the limner's art, but the art of the illuminator—the writer and illuminator of books." In criticism of this remark, "M. A.," writing to the Builder from Cambridge, defended Cary's translation by referring to Johnson's dictionary to show that "limner" was after all corrupted from "enlumineur," i.e., "a decorator of books with initial pictures." His letter concluded by remarking upon another of Mr. Ruskin's statements in the same lecture, namely, that "Black letter is not really illegible, it is only that we are not accustomed to it.... The fact is, no kind of character is really illegible. If you wish to see real illegibility, go to the Houses of Parliament and look at the inscriptions there!"
The present letter was written in reply to "M. A.," from whom the latter portion of it elicited a further letter, together with one from "Vindex," in defence of Sir Charles Barry and the Houses of Parliament (see the Builder, Dec. 16, 1854).
[160] "It is generally better to read ten lines of any poet in the original language, however painfully, than ten cantos of a translation. But an exception may be made in favor of Cary's 'Dante.' If no poet ever was liable to lose more in translation, none was ever so carefully translated; and I hardly know whether most to admire the rigid fidelity, or the sweet and solemn harmony, of Cary's verse," etc. See the note to the "Stones of Venice," at the above-named page.