Part 16

At length books were made. Traditions had given birth to symbols, beneath which they vanished like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these symbols, in which humanity had faith, went on increasing, multiplying, crossing, complicating themselves more and more; the earliest monuments no longer sufficed to contain them; they overflowed them on every side; scarce did these monuments any longer express the primitive tradition, themselves simple, naked, and lying upon the ground. The symbol needed to unfold itself in the edifice. Architecture then developed with human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed in an eternal form, visible, palpable, all that floating symbolism. While Daedalus, who is strength, measured, while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang, the pillar which is a letter, the arch which is a syllable, the pyramid which is a word, set in motion at once by a law of geometry and a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, rose, juxtaposed themselves upon the soil, ranged themselves in stages in the sky, until they had written, at the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvelous books which were also marvelous edifices: the pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, the temple of Solomon.

The mother idea, the word, was not only at the heart of all these edifices, but also in their form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not merely the binding of the holy book, it was the holy book itself. Upon each of its concentric enclosures the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eyes, and they followed thus its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary until they seized it in its last tabernacle under its most concrete form, which was still of architecture: the ark. Thus the word was enclosed in the edifice, but its image was upon its envelope as the human figure upon the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices but also the site they chose revealed the thought they represented. According as the symbol to be expressed was graceful or gloomy, Greece crowned her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye, India disemboweled hers to carve there those deformed subterranean pagodas borne by gigantic rows of granite elephants.

Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture has been the great writing of the human race. And this is so true that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that immense book and its monument.

Every civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist upon this point, one must not believe that masonry is powerful only to build the temple, only to express the myth and sacerdotal symbolism, only to transcribe in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were so, as in every human society there comes a moment when the sacred symbol wears away and is effaced beneath free thought, when man withdraws from the priest, when the excrescence of philosophies and systems gnaws at the face of religion, architecture could not reproduce this new state of the human mind, its leaves, charged on the recto, would be empty on the verso, its work would be truncated, its book incomplete. But no.

Let us take for example the middle ages, where we see more clearly because they are nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy organizes Europe, while the Vatican rallies and reclasses around itself the elements of a Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins around the Capitol, while Christianity goes seeking amid the debris of anterior civilization all the strata of society and rebuilds with those ruins a new hierarchical universe of which the priesthood is the keystone, one hears first welling up from that chaos, then one sees little by little, beneath the breath of Christianity, beneath the hand of the barbarians, arising from the rubbish of dead architectures, Greek and Roman, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic masonries of Egypt and India, unalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, immutable hieroglyph of papal unity. All the thought of that time is indeed written in that somber Romanesque style. Everywhere one feels authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII; everywhere the priest, never the man; everywhere the caste, never the people. But the crusades arrive. It is a great popular movement; and every great popular movement, whatever its cause and aim, always disengages from its final precipitate the spirit of liberty. New things will come to light. Here opens the stormy period of the Jacqueries, the Pragueries and the Leagues. Authority is shaken, unity bifurcates. Feudality asks to share with theocracy, awaiting the people who shall inevitably arrive and who shall make, as always, the lion's share. _Quia nominor leo_. Lordship therefore pierces through beneath the priesthood, the commune beneath lordship. The face of Europe is changed. Well then! the face of architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it has turned the page, and the new spirit of the times finds it ready to write at its dictation. It has returned from the crusades with the pointed arch, as the nations with liberty. Then, while Rome is little by little dismembered, Romanesque architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral and goes to emblazon the donjon to make a prestige for feudality. The cathedral itself, that edifice once so dogmatic, henceforth invaded by the bourgeoisie, by the commune, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the power of the artist. The artist builds it at his pleasure. Farewell to mystery, to myth, to law. Here is fancy and caprice. Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The architectural book no longer belongs to the priesthood, to religion, to Rome; it belongs to the imagination, to poetry, to the people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that architecture which has but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility of Romanesque architecture which has six or seven. Art however marches with giant strides. Popular genius and originality do the work that the bishops once did. Each race as it passes writes its line upon the book; it erases the old Romanesque hieroglyphs upon the frontispiece of the cathedrals, and it is scarce if one still sees the dogma peeping here and there beneath the new symbol it deposits there. The popular drapery scarce lets the religious bone be guessed. One could not form an idea of the liberties then taken by the architects, even toward the church. These are capitals knitted of monks and nuns shamefully coupled, as in the Hall of Chimneys of the Palace of Justice in Paris. It is the adventure of Noah sculpted _in full letters_ as beneath the great portal of Bourges. It is a bacchic monk with ass's ears and glass in hand laughing in the face of a whole community, as upon the lavabo of the abbey of Bocherville. There exists at that epoch, for thought written in stone, a privilege quite comparable to our present liberty of the press. It is the liberty of architecture.

This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a facade, a whole church presents a symbolic sense absolutely foreign to worship, or even hostile to the church. As early as the thirteenth century Guillaume of Paris, Nicolas Flamel in the fifteenth, have written such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was a whole church of opposition.

Thought was then free only in this way, therefore it wrote itself entire only upon those books called edifices. Without that edifice form, it would have seen itself burned in public place by the hand of the executioner under the manuscript form, had it been imprudent enough to risk itself there. The portal thought of the church would have assisted at the torture of the book thought. Hence having but this one way, masonry, to come to light, it threw itself into it from all sides. Thence the immense quantity of cathedrals which covered Europe, a number so prodigious that one can scarce believe it, even after having verified it. All the material forces, all the intellectual forces of society converged upon the same point: architecture. In this manner, under pretext of building churches to God, art developed itself in magnificent proportions.

Then, whosoever was born a poet made himself an architect. Genius scattered among the masses, compressed on every side beneath feudality like beneath a _testudo_[61] of brazen shields, finding issue only on the side of architecture, burst forth through that art, and its Iliads took the form of cathedrals. All the other arts obeyed and put themselves in discipline under architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master totalized in his person the sculpture which chiseled his facades, the painting which illuminated his stained glass, the music which set his bell swinging and breathed into his organs. There was not even the poor poetry properly so called, that which obstinately vegetated in manuscripts, which was not obliged to be something by coming to frame itself in the edifice under the form of hymn or _prose_; the same role, after all, which the tragedies of Aeschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece, the Genesis in the temple of Solomon.

Thus, until Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the universal writing. This granitic book begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the middle ages wrote its last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of a popular architecture succeeding a caste architecture which we have just observed in the middle ages, reproduces itself with every analogous movement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs of history. Thus, to state here only summarily a law which would demand to be developed in volumes, in high Orient, cradle of primitive times, after Hindu architecture, Phoenician architecture, that opulent mother of Arab architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture of which the Etruscan style and Cyclopean monuments are but a variety, Greek architecture, of which the Roman style is but an overloaded prolongation of the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture, Gothic architecture. And in doubling these three series, one finds again upon the three elder sisters, Hindu architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque architecture, the same symbol: that is to say theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God; and for the three younger sisters, Phoenician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture, whatever besides the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same signification also: that is to say liberty, the people, man.

Whether he be called bramine, magus or pope, in the Hindu, Egyptian or Romanesque masonries, one always feels the priest, nothing but the priest. It is not the same with the popular architectures. They are richer and less holy. In the Phoenician, one feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic, the bourgeois.

The general characters of every theocratic architecture are immutability, horror of progress, conservation of traditional lines, consecration of primitive types, the constant fold of all the forms of man and of nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books which the initiated alone know how to decipher. Moreover, every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which makes it inviolable. Ask not of the Hindu, Egyptian, Romanesque masonries that they reform their design or improve their statuary. All perfection is impiety to them. In these architectures, it seems that the stiffness of dogma has spread over the stone like a second petrification.--The general characters of the popular masonries on the contrary are variety, progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty, to care for it, to correct without cease their adornment of statues or arabesques. They are of the century. They have something human which they mingle without cease with the divine symbol under which they still produce themselves. Thence edifices penetrable to every soul, to every intelligence, to every imagination, still symbolic, but easy to understand like nature. Between theocratic architecture and this, there is the difference of a sacred language to a vulgar language, of the hieroglyph to art, of Solomon to Phidias.

If one resumes what we have indicated hitherto very summarily in neglecting a thousand proofs and also a thousand objections of detail, one is brought to this: that architecture was until the fifteenth century the principal register of humanity, that in that interval there appeared not in the world a thought somewhat complicated which did not make itself edifice, that every popular idea as every religious law has had its monuments; that the human race finally thought nothing important which it did not write in stone. And why? It is that every thought, whether religious or philosophical, is interested in perpetuating itself, it is that the idea which moved one generation wishes to move others, and to leave a trace. Now what precarious immortality that of the manuscript! How a building is a book far more solid, durable, and resistant! To destroy the written word it suffices of a torch and a Turk. To demolish the built word, it needs a social revolution, an earthly revolution. The barbarians have passed over the Coliseum, the deluge perhaps over the Pyramids.

In the fifteenth century all changes.

Human thought discovers a means of perpetuating itself not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but also simpler and easier. Architecture is dethroned. To the letters of stone of Orpheus are going to succeed the letters of lead of Gutenberg.

_The book will kill the edifice._

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which renews itself totally, it is human thought which sheds one form and dons another, it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolic serpent which, since Adam, represents intelligence.

Under the printing form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, ungraspable, indestructible. It mingles with the air. In the time of architecture, it made itself mountain and powerfully seized upon a century and a place. Now it makes itself a flock of birds, scatters to the four winds, and occupies at once all points of the air and of space.

We repeat it, who sees not that in this way it is far more indelible? From solid which it was it becomes living. It passes from duration to immortality. One may demolish a mass, how extirpate ubiquity? Come a deluge, the mountain will have long disappeared beneath the waves while the birds still fly; and, that a single ark float upon the surface of the cataclysm, they will alight upon it, float with it, witness with it the abatement of the waters, and the new world which shall issue from that chaos will see upon awakening hovering above it, winged and living, the thought of the engulfed world.

And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the most conservative, but also the simplest, the most convenient, the most practicable for all, when one reflects that it drags not a heavy baggage and moves not a cumbersome train, when one compares thought obliged to translate itself into an edifice to set in movement four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones, a whole forest of timber, a whole people of workmen, when one compares it to the thought which makes itself book, and to which suffices a little paper, a little ink and a pen, how wonder that human intelligence has quit architecture for printing? Cut abruptly the primitive bed of a river with a canal dug below its level, the river will desert its bed.

Hence see how from the discovery of printing architecture little by little dries up, atrophies and denudes itself. As one feels the water lowering, the sap departing, the thought of the times and of the peoples withdrawing from it! The cooling is almost insensible in the fifteenth century, the press is too feeble yet, and draws off from powerful architecture at most a superabundance of life. But, from the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is visible; it no longer expresses essentially society; it makes itself miserably classical art; from Gallic, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman, from true and modern, pseudo-antique. It is this decadence which is called renaissance. Magnificent decadence however, for the old Gothic genius, that sun setting behind the gigantic press of Mayence, still penetrates some time with its last rays all that hybrid heap of Latin arches and Corinthian colonnades.

It is that setting sun which we take for a dawn.

But from the moment when architecture is only an art like another, as soon as it is no longer the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art, it has no longer the force to retain the other arts. They emancipate themselves therefore, break the yoke of the architect, and go each his own way. Each gains by this divorce. Isolation enlarges all. Sculpture becomes statuary, imagery becomes painting, the canon becomes music. One would say an empire which dismembers itself at the death of its Alexander and whose provinces make themselves kingdoms.

Thence Raphael, Michelangelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.

At the same time as the arts, thought emancipates itself on all sides. The heretics of the middle ages had already made large incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religious unity. Before printing, the reformation had been but a schism, printing makes it revolution. Remove the press, heresy is enervated. Whether it be fatal or providential, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther.

Meanwhile, when the sun of the middle ages is quite set, when the Gothic genius has forever extinguished at the horizon of art, architecture will tarnish, discolor, efface itself more and more. The printed book, that worm gnawing the edifice, sucks and devours it. It strips itself, it sheds its leaves, it grows thin before the eyes. It is mean, it is poor, it is null. It expresses nothing more, not even the memory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts because human thought abandons it, it calls journeymen for lack of artists. The windowpane replaces the stained glass. The stonecutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags itself, lamentable beggar of the workshop, from copy to copy. Michelangelo, who in the sixteenth century already felt it dying no doubt, had had a last idea, an idea of despair. That titan of art had heaped the Pantheon upon the Parthenon, and made Saint Peter's of Rome. Great work which merited to remain unique, last originality of architecture, signature of a giant artist at the foot of the colossal register of stone which was closing. Michelangelo dead, what does that miserable architecture do which survived itself in the state of specter and shade? It takes Saint Peter's of Rome, and copies it, and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Each century has its Saint Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grâce, in the eighteenth Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint Peter's of Rome. London has its own. Petersburg has its own. Paris has two or three. Insignificant testament, last dotage of a great art decrepit which falls back into infancy before dying.

If, instead of characteristic monuments like those of which we have just spoken, we examine the general aspect of the art of the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we remark the same phenomena of decrease and wasting. From Francis II, the architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more and lets project the geometric form, like the bony frame of a lean sick man. The beautiful lines of art give place to the cold and inexorable lines of the geometer. An edifice is no longer an edifice, it is a polyhedron. Architecture however troubles itself to hide that nakedness. Here is the Greek pediment inscribed in the Roman pediment and reciprocally. It is still the Pantheon in the Parthenon, Saint Peter's of Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henry IV with stone corners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here are the churches of Louis XIII, heavy, squat, surbased, huddled, charged with a dome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin architecture, the bad Italian pasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV, long barracks for courtiers, stiff, glacial, tiresome. Here finally Louis XV, with chicories and vermicelli, and all the warts and all the fungi which disfigure that old caducous architecture, toothless and coquettish. From Francis II to Louis XV, the evil has grown in geometrical progression. Art has but skin upon bones. It agonizes miserably.

Meanwhile, what becomes of printing? All that life which departs from architecture comes to it. As architecture declines, printing swells and grows. That capital of forces which human thought spent in edifices, it spends henceforth in books. Hence from the sixteenth century the press, grown to the level of declining architecture, struggles with it and kills it. In the seventeenth, it is already sufficiently sovereign, sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently seated in its victory to give the world the feast of a great literary century. In the eighteenth, long rested at the court of Louis XIV, it reseizes the old sword of Luther, arms Voltaire, and runs, tumultuous, to the attack of that ancient Europe whose architectural expression it has already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century ends, it has destroyed all. In the nineteenth, it will reconstruct.

Now, we ask, which of the two arts really represents for three centuries human thought? which translates it? which expresses, not merely its literary and scholastic manias, but its vast, deep, universal movement? Which superimposes itself constantly, without rupture and without lacuna, upon the human race which marches, monster with a thousand feet? Architecture or printing?

Printing. Let none be deceived, architecture is dead, dead without return, killed by the printed book, killed because it endures less, killed because it costs more. Every cathedral is a billion. Let one now represent to oneself what outlay it would take to rewrite the architectural book; to make swarm anew upon the soil thousands of edifices; to return to those epochs where the crowd of monuments was such that, according to an eyewitness, "one would have said that the world in shaking itself had rejected its old garments to clothe itself with a white vestment of churches". _Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret_ (RADULPHUS GLABER).

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How wonder that all human thought flows by that slope? This is not to say that architecture will not yet here and there have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece. One may well still have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column made, I suppose, by a whole army, with amalgamated cannons, as one had, under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabharatas and Niebelungen, made by a whole people with accumulated and fused rhapsodies. The great accident of a genius architect may occur in the twentieth century, as that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art, the collective art, the dominant art. The great poem, the great edifice, the great work of humanity will no longer be built, it will be printed.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”