Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek whatcould have been the thought concealed beneath those enigmatic words ofthe 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 apriestly thought. It was the affright of the priest in the presence ofa new agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazementof the men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press ofGutenberg. It was the pulpit and the manuscript taking the alarm at theprinted word: something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which shouldbehold the angel Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry ofthe prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring andswarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith,opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was theprognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought, volatilizedby the press, evaporating from the theocratic recipient. It was theterror of the soldier who examines the brazen battering ram, andsays:--"The tower will crumble." It signified that one power was aboutto 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 philosophicaland belonging no longer to the priest alone but to the savant and theartist. It was a presentiment that human thought, in changing its form,was about to change its mode of expression; that the dominant idea ofeach generation would no longer be written with the same matter, and inthe same manner; that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, wasabout to make way for the book of paper, more solid and still moredurable. In this connection the archdeacon's vague formula had a secondsense. It meant, "Printing will kill architecture."
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of theChristian 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 massof reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused thatspeech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, mentranscribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the mostvisible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each traditionbeneath a monument.
The first monuments were simple masses of rock, "which the iron had nottouched," as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It wasfirst an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, andeach letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group ofideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest racesdid everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world.We find the "standing stones" of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in thepampas of America.
Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupledthose syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celticdolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words.Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when menhad a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. Theimmense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.
At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneathwhich they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage;all these symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, tomultiply, to intersect, to become more and more complicated; the firstmonuments no longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowingin every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitivetradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. Thesymbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture wasdeveloped in proportion with human thought; it became a giant witha thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floatingsymbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Daedalus, who isforce, measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;--the pillar,which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, whichis a word,--all set in movement at once by a law of geometry and by alaw of poetry, grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended,ascended, placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselvesin stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation ofthe general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were alsomarvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, theTemple of Solomon.
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation ofall these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, forexample, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holybook itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could readthe word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followedits transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it inits last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belongedto architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, butits image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of amummy.
And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them,revealed the thought which they represented, according as the symbol tobe expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains witha temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chiseltherein those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rowsof granite elephants.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from themost immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne,architecture was the great handwriting of the human race. And this is sotrue, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, hasits page and its monument in that immense book.
All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This law ofliberty following unity is written in architecture. For, let us insistupon this point, masonry must not be thought to be powerful only inerecting the temple and in expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism;in inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterioustables of the law. If it were thus,--as there comes in all human societya moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliteratedunder freedom of thought, when man escapes from the priest, whenthe excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face ofreligion,--architecture could not reproduce this new state of humanthought; 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 clearlybecause it is nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy isorganizing Europe, while the Vatican is rallying and reclassing aboutitself the elements of a Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruinsaround the Capitol, while Christianity is seeking all the stages ofsociety amid the rubbish of anterior civilization, and rebuilding withits ruins a new hierarchic universe, the keystone to whose vault is thepriest--one first hears a dull echo from that chaos, and then, little bylittle, one sees, arising from beneath the breath of Christianity, frombeneath the hand of the barbarians, from the fragments of the dead Greekand Roman architectures, that mysterious Romanesque architecture, sisterof the theocratic masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem ofpure catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal unity. All thethought of that day is written, in fact, in this sombre, Romanesquestyle. One feels everywhere in it authority, unity, the impenetrable,the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the priest, never the man; everywherecaste, never the people.
But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and everygreat popular movement, whatever may be its cause and object, alwayssets free the spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. Newthings spring into life every day. Here opens the stormy period of theJacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues. Authority wavers, unity is divided.Feudalism demands to share with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitablearrival of the people, who will assume the part of the lion: _Quianominor 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 apage, and the new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at itsdictation. It returns from the crusades with the pointed arch, like thenations with liberty.
Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesquearchitecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and betakesitself to blazoning the donjon keep, in order to lend prestige tofeudalism. 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 artistbuilds it after his own fashion. Farewell to mystery, myth, law. Fancyand caprice, welcome. Provided the priest has his basilica and hisaltar, he has nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. Thearchitectural book belongs no longer to the priest, to religion, toRome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the people. Hencethe rapid and innumerable transformations of that architecture whichowns but three centuries, so striking after the stagnant immobility ofthe Romanesque architecture, which owns six or seven. Nevertheless,art marches on with giant strides. Popular genius amid originalityaccomplish the task which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each racewrites its line upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancientRomanesque hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at themost one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the newsymbol which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits thereligious skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even form an idea of theliberties which the architects then take, even toward the Church. Thereare capitals knitted of nuns and monks, shamelessly coupled, as on thehall of chimney pieces in the Palais de Justice, in Paris. There isNoah's adventure carved to the last detail, as under the great portalof Bourges. There is a bacchanalian monk, with ass's ears and glass inhand, laughing in the face of a whole community, as on the lavatoryof the Abbey of Bocherville. There exists at that epoch, for thoughtwritten in stone, a privilege exactly comparable to our present libertyof the press. It is the liberty of architecture.
This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a facade, an entirechurch, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to worship, oreven hostile to the Church. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume deParis, and Nicholas Flamel, in the fifteenth, wrote such seditiouspages. Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was a whole church of theopposition.
Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote itselfout completely except on the books called edifices. Thought, under theform of edifice, could have beheld itself burned in the public squareby the hands of the executioner, in its manuscript form, if it had beensufficiently imprudent to risk itself thus; thought, as the door of achurch, would have been a spectator of the punishment of thought as abook. Having thus only this resource, masonry, in order to make its wayto the light, flung itself upon it from all quarters. Hence the immensequantity of cathedrals which have covered Europe--a number so prodigiousthat one can hardly believe it even after having verified it. Allthe material forces, all the intellectual forces of society convergedtowards the same point: architecture. In this manner, under the pretextof building churches to God, art was developed in its magnificentproportions.
Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius, scattered inthe masses, repressed in every quarter under feudalism as under a_testudo_ of brazen bucklers, finding no issue except in the directionof architecture,--gushed forth through that art, and its Iliads assumedthe form of cathedrals. All other arts obeyed, and placed themselvesunder the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the greatwork. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person thesculpture which carved his facades, painting which illuminated hiswindows, music which set his bells to pealing, and breathed into hisorgans. There was nothing down to poor poetry,--properly speaking, thatwhich persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,--which was not forced, inorder to make something of itself, to come and frame itself in theedifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same part, after all,which the tragedies of AEschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivalsof Greece; Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principalwriting, the universal writing. In that granite book, begun by theOrient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrotethe last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an architecture of thepeople following an architecture of caste, which we have just beenobserving in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every analogousmovement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs of history.Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it wouldrequire volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitivetimes, after Hindoo architecture came Phoenician architecture, thatopulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptianarchitecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are butone variety, came Greek architecture (of which the Roman style is onlya continuation), surcharged with the Carthaginian dome; in moderntimes, after Romanesque architecture came Gothic architecture. And byseparating there three series into their component parts, we shall findin 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,Phoenician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture,whatever, nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in theirnature, the same signification also; that is to say, liberty, thepeople, man.
In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels thepriest, 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 Phoenician, one feels themerchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic, the citizen.
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture areimmutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines,the consecration of the primitive types, the constant bending of allthe forms of men and of nature to the incomprehensible caprices of thesymbol. These are dark books, which the initiated alone understand howto decipher. Moreover, every form, every deformity even, has therea sense which renders it inviolable. Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian,Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or to improve theirstatuary. Every attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In thesearchitectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma hadspread over the stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The generalcharacteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress,originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are already sufficientlydetached from religion to think of their beauty, to take care of it, tocorrect without relaxation their parure of statues or arabesques. Theyare of the age. They have something human, which they mingle incessantlywith the divine symbol under which they still produce. Hence,edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to everyimagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature.Between theocratic architecture and this there is the differencethat lies between a sacred language and a vulgar language, betweenhieroglyphics 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 objectionsof detail, he will be led to this: that architecture was, down to thefifteenth century, the chief register of humanity; that in that intervalnot a thought which is in any degree complicated made its appearance inthe world, which has not been worked into an edifice; that every popularidea, and every religious law, has had its monumental records; thatthe human race has, in short, had no important thought which it has notwritten in stone. And why? Because every thought, either philosophicalor religious, is interested in perpetuating itself; because the ideawhich has moved one generation wishes to move others also, and leave atrace. Now, what a precarious immortality is that of the manuscript! Howmuch more solid, durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In order todestroy the written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolishthe constructed word, a soci
al revolution, a terrestrial revolution arerequired. 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 moredurable and more resisting than architecture, but still more simple andeasy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg's letters of lead are aboutto 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 themother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which istotally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donninganother; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of thatsymbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has representedintelligence.
In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it isvolatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the air. Inthe days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerfulpossession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flockof birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points ofair and space at once.
We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far moreindelible? It was solid, it has become alive. It passes from durationin time to immortality. One can demolish a mass; how can one extirpateubiquity? If a flood comes, the mountains will have long disappearedbeneath the waves, while the birds will still be flying about; and if asingle ark floats on the surface of the cataclysm, they will alight uponit, will float with it, will be present with it at the ebbing of thewaters; and the new world which emerges from this chaos will behold, onits awakening, the thought of the world which has been submerged soaringabove it, winged and living.
And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only the mostconservative, but also the most simple, the most convenient, the mostpracticable for all; when one reflects that it does not drag after itbulky baggage, and does not set in motion a heavy apparatus; when onecompares thought forced, in order to transform itself into an edifice,to put in motion four or five other arts and tons of gold, a wholemountain of stones, a whole forest of timber-work, a whole nation ofworkmen; when one compares it to the thought which becomes a book, andfor which a little paper, a little ink, and a pen suffice,--how can onebe surprised that human intelligence should have quitted architecturefor printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river abruptly with a canalhollowed out below its level, and the river will desert its bed.
Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing, architecturewithers away little by little, becomes lifeless and bare. How one feelsthe water sinking, the sap departing, the thought of the times and ofthe people withdrawing from it! The chill is almost imperceptible inthe fifteenth century; the press is, as yet, too weak, and, at themost, draws from powerful architecture a superabundance of life.But practically beginning with the sixteenth century, the malady ofarchitecture is visible; it is no longer the expression of society; itbecomes 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 theRenaissance. A magnificent decadence, however, for the ancient Gothicgenius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic press of Mayence, stillpenetrates for a while longer with its rays that whole hybrid pile ofLatin arcades and Corinthian columns.
It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.
Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer anythingbut an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer the total art, thesovereign art, the tyrant art,--it has no longer the power to retainthe other arts. So they emancipate themselves, break the yoke of thearchitect, and take themselves off, each one in its own direction. Eachone of them gains by this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything.Sculpture becomes statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canonbecomes music. One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the deathof its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.
Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those splendorsof the dazzling sixteenth century.
Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as thearts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made largeincisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks religiousunity. Before the invention of printing, reform would have been merelya schism; printing converted it into a revolution. Take away the press;heresy is enervated. Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is theprecursor of Luther.
Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set, whenthe Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon, architecturegrows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more effaced. The printedbook, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks and devours it. It becomesbare, denuded of its foliage, and grows visibly emaciated. It is petty,it is poor, it is nothing. It no longer expresses anything, not even thememory of the art of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by theother arts, because human thought is abandoning it, it summonsbunglers in place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. Thestone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all originality,all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a lamentable workshopmendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo, who, no doubt, felt evenin the sixteenth century that it was dying, had a last idea, an idea ofdespair. That Titan of art piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon, and madeSaint-Peter's at Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain unique,the last originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist atthe bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed forever.With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable architecture, whichsurvived itself in the state of a spectre, do? It takes Saint-Peterin Rome, copies it and parodies it. It is a mania. It is a pity. Eachcentury has its Saint-Peter's of Rome; in the seventeenth century, theVal-de-Grace; in the eighteenth, Sainte-Genevieve. Each country has itsSaint-Peter's of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris hastwo or three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepitgrand art falling back into infancy before it dies.
If, in place of the characteristic monuments which we have justdescribed, we examine the general aspect of art from the sixteenthto the eighteenth century, we notice the same phenomena of decay andphthisis. Beginning with Francois II., the architectural form of theedifice 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 ofgeometry. An edifice is no longer an edifice; it is a polyhedron.Meanwhile, architecture is tormented in her struggles to conceal thisnudity. Look at the Greek pediment inscribed upon the Roman pediment,and vice versa. It is still the Pantheon on the Parthenon: Saint-Peter'sof Rome. Here are the brick houses of Henri IV., with their stonecorners; the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here are the churchesof Louis XIII., heavy, squat, thickset, crowded together, loaded with adome like a hump. Here is the Mazarin architecture, the wretched Italianpasticcio of the Four Nations. Here are the palaces of Louis XIV., longbarracks for courtiers, stiff, cold, tiresome. Here, finally, is LouisXV., with chiccory leaves and vermicelli, and all the warts, and allthe fungi, which disfigure that decrepit, toothless, and coquettish oldarchitecture. From Francois II. to Louis XV., the evil has increased ingeometrical progression. Art has no longer anything but skin upon itsbones. It is miserably perishing.
Meanwhile what becomes of printing? All the life which is leavingarchitecture comes to it. In proportion as architecture ebbs, printingswells and grows. That capital of forces which human thought had beenexpending in edifices, it henceforth expends in books. Thus, from thesixteenth century onward, the press, raised to the level of decayingarchitecture, contends with it and kills it. In the seventeenth centuryit is already sufficiently the sovereign, sufficiently triumphant,sufficiently established in its victory, to give to the world the feastof a great literary century. In the eighteenth, having reposed for along time at th
e Court of Louis XIV., it seizes again the old sword ofLuther, puts it into the hand of Voltaire, and rushes impetuously tothe attack of that ancient Europe, whose architectural expression it hasalready killed. At the moment when the eighteenth century comes toan end, it has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth, it begins toreconstruct.
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented humanthought for the last three centuries? which translates it? whichexpresses 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 amonster 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 fora shorter time,--slain because it costs more. Every cathedral representsmillions. Let the reader now imagine what an investment of funds itwould require to rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands ofedifices to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochswhen the throng of monuments was such, according to the statement of aneye 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 whitevesture of churches." _Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet,rejecta vetustate, candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret_. (GLABERRADOLPHUS.)
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can itsurprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does notmean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolatedmasterpiece, here and there. We may still have from time to time, underthe reign of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army frommelted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads andRomanceros, Mahabahrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people,with rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of anarchitect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that ofDante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the socialart, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grandedifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will beprinted.
And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it willno longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature,which formerly received the law from it. The respective positions of thetwo arts will be inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs,the poems, rare it is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa isbranching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetryhas like the edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antiqueGreece, beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholicmajesty, the popular naivete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation ofan epoch of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids; the Iliad, theParthenon; Homer, Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is thelast Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth, the last Gothiccathedral.
Thus, to sum up what we have hitherto said, in a fashion which isnecessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two books, tworegisters, two testaments: masonry and printing; the Bible of stone andthe Bible of paper. No doubt, when one contemplates these two Bibles,laid so broadly open in the centuries, it is permissible to regret thevisible majesty of the writing of granite, those gigantic alphabetsformulated in colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of humanmountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to thebell tower, from Cheops to Strasburg. The past must be reread upon thesepages of marble. This book, written by architecture, must be admiredand perused incessantly; but the grandeur of the edifice which printingerects 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 sinceGutenberg's day were to be piled one upon another, they would fillthe space between the earth and the moon; but it is not that sort ofgrandeur of which we wished to speak. Nevertheless, when one tries tocollect in one's mind a comprehensive image of the total products ofprinting down to our own days, does not that total appear to us like animmense construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanitytoils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in theprofound mists of the future? It is the anthill of intelligence. It isthe hive whither come all imaginations, those golden bees, with theirhoney.
The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on itsstaircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its interior.Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques, rosettes, andlaces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes. There, every individualwork, however capricious and isolated it may seem, has its place andits projection. Harmony results from the whole. From the cathedral ofShakespeare to the mosque of Byron, a thousand tiny bell towers arepiled pell-mell above this metropolis of universal thought. At its baseare written some ancient titles of humanity which architecture hadnot registered. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancientbas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot Biblerears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some other hybridforms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further on.
Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete. Thepress, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectualsap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for itswork. The whole human race is on the scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason.The humblest fills his hole, or places his stone. Retif de le Bretonnebrings his hod of plaster. Every day a new course rises. Independentlyof the original and individual contribution of each writer, there arecollective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the _Encyclopedia_,the revolution gives the _Moniteur_. Assuredly, it is a constructionwhich increases and piles up in endless spirals; there also areconfusion of tongues, incessant activity, indefatigable labor, eagercompetition of all humanity, refuge promised to intelligence, a newFlood against an overflow of barbarians. It is the second tower of Babelof the human race.
BOOK SIXTH.
CHAPTER I. AN IMPARTIAL GLANCE AT THE ANCIENT MAGISTRACY.