Kabanata Kabanata 23 · THIS WILL KILL THAT.

”

Coictier, who had eagerly approached the book, could not repress

an exclamation. “Hé, but now, what is there so formidable in

this: ‘GLOSSA IN EPISTOLAS D. PAULI, _Norimbergæ, Antonius

Koburger_, 1474.’ This is not new. ’Tis a book of Pierre Lombard,

the Master of Sentences. Is it because it is printed?”

“You have said it,” replied Claude, who seemed absorbed in a

profound meditation, and stood resting, his forefinger bent

backward on the folio which had come from the famous press of

Nuremberg. Then he added these mysterious words: “Alas! alas!

small things come at the end of great things; a tooth triumphs

over a mass. The Nile rat kills the crocodile, the swordfish

kills the whale, the book will kill the edifice.”

The curfew of the cloister sounded at the moment when Master

Jacques was repeating to his companion in low tones, his eternal

refrain, “_He is mad!_” To which his companion this time replied,

“I believe that he is.”

It was the hour when no stranger could remain in the cloister.

The two visitors withdrew. “Master,” said Gossip Tourangeau, as

he took leave of the archdeacon, “I love wise men and great

minds, and I hold you in singular esteem. Come to-morrow to the

Palace des Tournelles, and inquire for the Abbé de Sainte-Martin,

of Tours.”

The archdeacon returned to his chamber dumbfounded, comprehending

at last who Gossip Tourangeau was, and recalling that passage of

the register of Sainte-Martin, of Tours:—_Abbas beati Martini,

SCILICET REX FRANCIÆ, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet

parvam præbendam quam habet sanctus Venantius, et debet sedere in

sede thesaurarii_.

It is asserted that after that epoch the archdeacon had frequent

conferences with Louis XI., when his majesty came to Paris, and

that Dom Claude’s influence quite overshadowed that of Olivier le

Daim and Jacques Coictier, who, as was his habit, rudely took the

king to task on that account.

CHAPTER 23. THIS WILL KILL THAT.

Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek

what could have been the thought concealed beneath those

enigmatic words of the archdeacon: “This will kill that. The book

will kill the edifice.”

To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it

was a priestly thought. It was the affright of the priest in the

presence of a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror

and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the

presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit

and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word:

something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold

the angel Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry of

the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and

swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith,

opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was the

prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought,

volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic

recipient. It was the terror of the soldier who examines the

brazen battering ram, and says:—“The tower will crumble.” It

signified that one power was about to succeed another power. It

meant, “The press will kill the church.”

But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no

doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary

of the first, less easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a

view as philosophical and belonging no longer to the priest alone

but to the savant and the artist. It was a presentiment that

human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode

of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no

longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner;

that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to

make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more

durable. In this connection the archdeacon’s vague formula had a

second sense. It meant, “Printing will kill architecture.”

In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century

of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book

of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different

stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when

the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and

so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing

them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner

which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most

natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron

had not touched,” as Moses says. Architecture began like all

writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright,

it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each

hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the

column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the

same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the

“standing stones” of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of

America.

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they

coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some

combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan

tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially the

tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great

deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense

pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.

At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols,

beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath

its foliage; all these symbols in which humanity placed faith

continued to grow, to multiply, to intersect, to become more and

more complicated; the first monuments no longer sufficed to

contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these

monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple

like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The symbol felt

the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was

developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant

with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this

floating symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While

Dædalus, who is force, measured; while Orpheus, who is

intelligence, sang;—the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade,

which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,—all set in

movement at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry,

grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, ascended,

placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in

stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation of

the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were

also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of

Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of

all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon,

for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was

the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the

priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye,

and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to

sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its

most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the

arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was

upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for

them, revealed the thought which they represented, according as

the symbol to be expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned

her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye; India

disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous

subterranean pagodas, borne up 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 was the great handwriting of the human race. And

this is so true, that not only every religious symbol, but every

human thought, has its page and its monument in that immense

book.

All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This

law of liberty following unity is written in architecture. For,

let us insist upon this point, masonry must not be thought to be

powerful only in erecting the temple and in expressing the myth

and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its

pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were

thus,—as there comes in all human society a moment when the

sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom

of thought, when man escapes from the priest, when the

excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of

religion,—architecture could not reproduce this new state of

human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty

on the back; its work would be mutilated; its book would be

incomplete. But no.

Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more

clearly because it is nearer to us. During its first period,

while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican is

rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a Rome made

from the Rome which lies in ruins around the Capitol, while

Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the

rubbish of anterior civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a

new hierarchic universe, the keystone to whose vault is the

priest—one first hears a dull echo from that chaos, and then,

little by little, one sees, arising from beneath the breath of

Christianity, from beneath the hand of the barbarians, from the

fragments of the dead Greek and Roman architectures, that

mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic

masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem of pure

catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal unity. All the

thought of that day is written, in fact, in this sombre,

Romanesque style. One feels everywhere in it authority, unity,

the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the priest,

never the man; everywhere caste, never the people.

But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and

every great popular movement, whatever may be its cause and

object, always sets free the spirit of liberty from its final

precipitate. New things spring into life every day. Here opens

the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues.

Authority wavers, unity is divided. Feudalism demands to share

with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the

people, who will assume the part of the lion: _Quia nominor leo_.

Seignory pierces through sacerdotalism; the commonality, through

seignory. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face of

architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it has turned a

page, and the new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at

its dictation. It returns from the crusades with the pointed

arch, like the nations with liberty.

Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque

architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and

betakes itself to blazoning the donjon keep, in order to lend

prestige to feudalism. The cathedral itself, that edifice

formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the _bourgeoisie_, by

the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the

power of the artist. The artist builds it after his own fashion.

Farewell to mystery, myth, law. Fancy and caprice, welcome.

Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has

nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The

architectural book belongs no longer to the priest, to religion,

to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the

people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that

architecture which owns but three centuries, so striking after

the stagnant immobility of the Romanesque architecture, which

owns six or seven. Nevertheless, art marches on with giant

strides. Popular genius amid originality accomplish the task

which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each race writes its line

upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque

hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most

one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new

symbol which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits

the religious skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even form an

idea of the liberties which the architects then take, even toward

the Church. There are capitals knitted of nuns and monks,

shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of chimney pieces in the

Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah’s adventure carved to

the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is a

bacchanalian monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, laughing in

the face of a whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of

Bocherville. There exists at that epoch, for thought written in

stone, a privilege exactly comparable to our present liberty of

the press. It is the liberty of architecture.

This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an

entire church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to

worship, or even hostile to the Church. In the thirteenth

century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in the

fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la

Boucherie was a whole church of the opposition.

Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote

itself out completely except on the books called edifices.

Thought, under the form of edifice, could have beheld itself

burned in the public square by the hands of the executioner, in

its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent to

risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would have

been a spectator of the punishment of thought as a book. Having

thus only this resource, masonry, in order to make its way to the

light, flung itself upon it from all quarters. Hence the immense

quantity of cathedrals which have covered Europe—a number so

prodigious that one can hardly believe it even after having

verified it. All the material forces, all the intellectual forces

of society converged towards the same point: architecture. In

this manner, under the pretext of building churches to God, art

was developed in its magnificent proportions.

Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius,

scattered in the masses, repressed in every quarter under

feudalism as under a _testudo_ of brazen bucklers, finding no

issue except in the direction of architecture,—gushed forth

through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of cathedrals.

All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under the discipline

of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The

architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the

sculpture which carved his façades, painting which illuminated

his windows, music which set his bells to pealing, and breathed

into his organs. There was nothing down to poor poetry,—properly

speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in

manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of

itself, to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a

hymn or of prose; the same part, after all, which the tragedies

of Æschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece;

Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.

Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the

principal writing, the universal writing. In that granite book,

begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the

Middle Ages wrote the last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an

architecture of the people following an architecture of caste,

which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is

reproduced with every analogous movement in the human

intelligence at the other great epochs of history. Thus, in order

to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would require

volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive

times, after Hindoo architecture came Phœnician architecture,

that opulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after

Egyptian architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean

monuments are but one variety, came Greek architecture (of which

the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with the

Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture

came Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series

into their component parts, we shall find in the three eldest

sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque

architecture, the same symbol; that is to say, theocracy, caste,

unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,

Phœnician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture,

whatever, nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in

their nature, the same signification also; that is to say,

liberty, the people, man.

In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the

priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin,

Magian, or Pope. It is not the same in the architectures of the

people. They are richer and less sacred. In the Phœnician, one

feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic,

the citizen.

The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are

immutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional

lines, the consecration of the primitive types, the constant

bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the

incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books,

which the initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover,

every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which renders

it inviolable. Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry

to reform their design, or to improve their statuary. Every

attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In these

architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had

spread over the stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The

general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are

progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are

already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their

beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their

parure of statues or arabesques. They are of the age. They have

something human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine

symbol under which they still produce. Hence, edifices

comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every

imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as

nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the

difference that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar

language, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and

Phidias.

If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very

briefly, indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a

thousand objections of detail, he will be led to this: that

architecture was, down to the fifteenth century, the chief

register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought which

is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the world,

which has not been worked into an edifice; that every popular

idea, and every religious law, has had its monumental records;

that the human race has, in short, had no important thought which

it has not written in stone. And why? Because every thought,

either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating

itself; because the idea which has moved one generation wishes to

move others also, and leave a trace. Now, what a precarious

immortality is that of the manuscript! How much more solid,

durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In order to destroy the

written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the

constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution

are required. The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the

deluge, perhaps, passed over the Pyramids.

In the fifteenth century everything changes.

Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only

more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more

simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters

of lead are about to supersede Orpheus’s letters of stone.

_The book is about to kill the edifice_.

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is

the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of

humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping

off one form and donning another; it is the complete and

definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since

the days of Adam has represented intelligence.

In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it

is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the

air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself,

and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it

converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the

four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.

We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more

indelible? It was solid, it has become alive. It passes from

duration in time to immortality. One can demolish a mass; how can

one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the mountains will have

long disappeared beneath the waves, while the birds will still be

flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the

cataclysm, they will alight upon it, will float with it, will be

present with it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new world

which emerges from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the

thought of the world which has been submerged soaring above it,

winged and living.

And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only

the most conservative, but also the most simple, the most

convenient, the most practicable for all; when one reflects that

it does not drag after it bulky baggage, and does not set in

motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares thought forced, in

order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion four

or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones,

a whole forest of timber-work, a whole nation of workmen; when

one compares it to the thought which becomes a book, and for

which a little paper, a little ink, and a pen suffice,—how can

one be surprised that human intelligence should have quitted

architecture for printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river

abruptly with a canal hollowed out below its level, and the river

will desert its bed.

Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing,

architecture withers away little by little, becomes lifeless and

bare. How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the

thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from it! The

chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press

is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful

architecture a superabundance of life. But practically beginning

with the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is

visible; it is no longer the expression of society; it becomes

classic art in a miserable manner; from being Gallic, European,

indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from being true and

modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this decadence which is

called the Renaissance. A magnificent decadence, however, for the

ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic

press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its

rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian

columns.

It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.

Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer

anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer

the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,—it has no

longer the power to retain the other arts. So they emancipate

themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves

off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by

this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes

statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes

music. One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death

of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those

splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as

the arts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made

large incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks

religious unity. Before the invention of printing, reform would

have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a

revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it

be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set,

when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon,

architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more

effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks

and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and

grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.

It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art

of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts,

because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in

place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The

stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all

originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a

lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo,

who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was

dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair. That Titan of art

piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter’s at

Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last

originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at

the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed

forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable

architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre,

do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, 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 one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or

three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit

grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.

If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have just

described, we examine the general aspect of art from the

sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena

of decay and phthisis. Beginning with François II., the

architectural form of the edifice effaces itself more and more,

and allows the geometrical form, like the bony structure of an

emaciated invalid, to become prominent. The fine lines of art

give way to the cold and inexorable lines of geometry. An edifice

is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron. Meanwhile,

architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal this

nudity. Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman

pediment, and vice versâ. It is still the Pantheon on the

Parthenon: Saint-Peter’s of Rome. Here are the brick houses of

Henri IV., with their stone corners; the Place Royale, the Place

Dauphine. Here are the churches of Louis XIII., heavy, squat,

thickset, crowded together, loaded with a dome like a hump. Here

is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italian pasticcio of

the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., long

barracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome. Here, finally, is

Louis XV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the

warts, and all the fungi, which disfigure that decrepit,

toothless, and coquettish old architecture. From François II. to

Louis XV., the evil has increased in geometrical progression. Art

has no longer anything but skin upon its bones. It is miserably

perishing.

Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leaving

architecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs,

printing swells and grows. That capital of forces which human

thought had been expending in edifices, it henceforth expends in

books. Thus, from the sixteenth century onward, the press, raised

to the level of decaying architecture, contends with it and kills

it. In the seventeenth century it is already sufficiently the

sovereign, sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently established in

its victory, to give to the world the feast of a great literary

century. In the eighteenth, having reposed for a long time at the

Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword of Luther,

puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously to the

attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it

has already killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century

comes to an end, it has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth,

it begins to reconstruct.

Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented human

thought for the last three centuries? which translates it? which

expresses not only its literary and scholastic vagaries, but its

vast, profound, universal movement? which constantly superposes

itself, without a break, without a gap, upon the human race,

which walks a monster with a thousand legs?—Architecture or

printing?

It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is

dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,—slain because it

endures for a shorter time,—slain because it costs more. Every

cathedral represents millions. Let the reader now imagine what an

investment of funds it would require to rewrite the architectural

book; to cause thousands of edifices to swarm once more upon the

soil; to return to those epochs when the throng of monuments was

such, according to the statement of an eye witness, “that one

would have said that the world in shaking itself, had cast off

its old garments in order to cover itself with a white vesture of

churches.” _Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet,

rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret_. (GLABER

RADOLPHUS.)

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How

can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel?

This does not mean that architecture will not still have a fine

monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and there. We may still

have from time to time, under the reign of printing, a column

made I suppose, by a whole army from melted cannon, as we had

under the reign of architecture, Iliads and Romanceros,

Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people, with

rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of an

architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like

that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer

be the social art, the collective art, the dominating art. The

grand poem, the grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no

longer be built: it will be printed.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally,

it will no longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law

of literature, which formerly received the law from it. The

respective positions of the two arts will be inverted. It is

certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true,

resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange,

impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the

edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece,

beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic

majesty, the popular naïvete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation

of an epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the

Iliad, the Parthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth

century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the

sixteenth, the last Gothic cathedral.

Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which is

necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two

books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the

Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. No doubt, when one

contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the

centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the

writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in

colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human

mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to

the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasbourg. The past must be

reread upon these pages of marble. This book, written by

architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the

grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must

not be denied.

That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has

calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the

press since Gutenberg’s day were to be piled one upon another,

they would fill the space between the earth and the moon; but it

is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.

Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a

comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our

own days, does not that total appear to us like an immense

construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity

toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in

the profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of

intelligence. It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those

golden bees, with their honey.

The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on

its staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its

interior. Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques,

rosettes, and laces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes. There,

every individual work, however capricious and isolated it may

seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results from the

whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron,

a thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this

metropolis of universal thought. At its base are written some

ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered.

To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient

bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot

Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some

other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further

on.

Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete.

The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the

intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh

materials for its work. The whole human race is on the

scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole,

or places his stone. Rétif de La Bretonne brings his hod of

plaster. Every day a new course rises. Independently of the

original and individual contribution of each writer, there are

collective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the

_Encyclopedia_, the revolution gives the _Moniteur_. Assuredly,

it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless

spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity,

indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge

promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of

barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.

BOOK SIXTH.