Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

even after verifying it with one’s own eyes. All the material, all the intellectual forces of society,
converged to that one point—architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to the glory
of God, the art developed to magnificent proportions.
In those days, he who was born a poet became an architect. All the genius scattered among the masses
and crushed down on every side under feudalism, as under a testudo of brazen bucklers, finding no outlet
but in architecture, escaped by way of that art, and its epics found voice in cathedrals. All other arts
obeyed and put themselves at the service of the one. They were the artisans of the great work; the
architect summed up in his own person, sculpture, which carved his façade; painting, which dyed his
windows in glowing colours; music, which set his bells in motion and breathed in his organ pipes. Even
poor Poetry—properly so called, who still persisted in eking out a meagre existence in manuscript—was
obliged, if she was to be recognised at all, to enroll herself in the service of the edifice, either as hymn or
prosody; the small part played, after all, by the tragedies of æschylus in the sacerdotal festivals of
Greece, and the Book of Genesis in the Temple of Solomon.
Thus, till Gutenberg’s time, architecture is the chief, the universal form of writing; in this stone book,
begun by the East, continued by Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages have written the last page.
For the rest, this phenomenon of an architecture belonging to the people succeeding an architecture
belonging to a caste, which we have observed in the Middle Ages, occurs in precisely analogous stages
in human intelligence at other great epochs of history. Thus—to sum up here in a few lines a law which
would call for volumes to do it justice—in the Far East, the cradle of primitive history, after Hindu
architecture comes the Phœnician, that fruitful mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, Egyptian
architecture—of which the Etruscan style and the Cyclopean monuments are but a variety—is succeeded
by the Greek, of which the Roman is merely a prolongation burdened with the Carthaginian dome; in
modern times, after Romanesque architecture comes the Gothic. And if we separate each of these three
divisions, we shall find that the three elder sisters—Hindu, Egyptian, and Roman architecture—stand for
the same idea: namely, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, God; and that the three younger
sisters—Phœnician, Greek, Gothic—whatever the diversity of expression inherent to their nature, have
also the same significance: liberty, the people, humanity.
Call him Brahmin, Magi, or Pope, according as you speak of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman buildings, it is
always the priest, and nothing but the priest. Very different are the architectures of the people; they are
more opulent and less saintly. In the Phœnician you see the merchant, in the Greek the republican, in the
Gothic the burgess.
The general characteristics of all theocratic architectures are immutability, horror of progress, strict
adherence to traditional lines, the consecration of primitive types, the adaptation of every aspect of man
and nature to the incomprehensible whims of symbolism. Dark and mysterious book, which only the
initiated can decipher! Furthermore, every form, every deformity even, in them has a meaning which
renders it inviolable. Never ask of Hindu, Egyptian, or Roman architecture to change its designs or
perfect its sculpture. To it, improvement in any shape or form is an impiety. Here the rigidity of dogma
seems spread over the stone like a second coating of petrifaction.
On the other hand, the main characteristics of the popular architectures are diversity, progress,
originality, richness of design, perpetual change. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to
take thought for their beauty, to tend it, to alter and improve without ceasing their garniture of statues and
arabesques. They go with their times. They have something human in them which they constantly infuse