To treat fully the various ways in which structure may be made expressive of life would need a volume rather than a chapter. Enough has however been said to indicate the principle and to suggest a criterion by which good and bad structure may be judged. Let us turn to the question of ornament. In European art it is very common for ornament to be used as a kind of adjunct to structure; it follows the lines of structure and accentuates them. In Japanese art, however, the contours of an object often appear to determine the ornament applied to it as little as a window-frame determines the landscape we see through it. The apparent insouciance of Japanese ornament is, however, carefully calculated in relation to the field which is to be covered. In either case ornament as such—that is to say, apart from whatever charm of colour and rhythm its individual forms may have—is to be interpreted as an attempt to give life by introducing what is so characteristic of life—the element of change and variety. Popular language has hit the mark when it talks of a ‘dead’ wall, meaning thereby a wall whose surface is unbroken by openings or ornament. Ruskin has somewhere spoken of the magnificent work of Ghiberti on the bronze doors of the Baptistery in Florence as having been primarily designed to produce “a pleasant bossiness of surface.” The breaking up of the surface will not, however, be pleasant unless the forms of the decoration are in themselves good and instinct with life. The beauty which so often arises from the effects of use and exposure may perhaps seem in some cases hard to reconcile with the principle which it is here sought to establish. If aptness for use, it may be asked, is an element in the beauty of an object of use, how are we to account for the strong appeal which the ruin of a noble building certainly makes to the sense of beauty? For my own part I am inclined to think that the taste for ruins is often a sign of a want of taste for art. A beautiful thing is better whole and sound than in decay. Yet the spectacle of the silent struggle of strength and grace with destructive forces has in it a sense of action, of drama, to which beauty cannot be denied. Apart from the question of actual decay, every one feels the æsthetic gain which has been made when a thing ceases to be blankly new. A natural adornment has then been added to it. A room that has been lived in, a piece of silver that has been rubbed and handled for a lifetime, the steps of an ancient building worn by thousands of passing feet, a wall whose angles are softened and whose surface is stained by having fronted the sun and rain for many years—all these have the natural and inimitable charm produced by the touch of life—they no longer stand in crude isolation, they are related to the goings-on of the world.