Everything is mutable, everything is perishable around us. The forms of
nature and the works of art alike crumble away; and amid the gigantic
forms that surround it, the soul of man is alone immortal. Knowledge
itself ebbs and flows like the changing sea, and art has become extinct
in regions where it earliest flourished. Kingdoms that once gave law to
the nations, figure no more in the world's history, leaving nothing but
a name, and Ruins.
Most of the ruins of the ancient world are remarkable as monuments
of a political element now happily extinct. They are emblems of that
despotic rule which, in the early history of mankind, was well-nigh
universal; which delighted in rearing immense structures, like the
Pyramids, of little utility, but requiring an enormous expenditure of
labour; and contrasted with the capriciousness and violence of which,
the most arbitrary of modern governments is liberty itself. But such
ruins not only teach us to be grateful to Heaven for the blessings of
political freedom, but reveal to us glimpses of a past which, but for
them, would remain veiled in obscurity. By a right use of them we
discover, more or less perfectly, the history and the customs of races
long dead. Buried Herculaneum, once more given back to the sunbeams,
reveals to us the domestic life of ancient Rome; the hieroglyphics of
Egypt, the paintings and sculptures of Nineveh, tell us stories of
their kings, and show us symbols of their splendour. What geology is
to us in relation to the early earth, such are ruins in regard to its
human habitants: they are their history in stone.
There is a peculiar grandeur and impressiveness in the ruins which date
from the era of the old universal monarchies. So many centuries have
rolled away since then, conquest and desolation have so often swept
over their territories, and tyranny so decimated their inhabitants,
that among them Decay assumes a grander form than elsewhere in the
world. It is not single edifices dilapidated that meet our view, but
whole cities desolate--whole cities so crumbled into dust, that the
very sites of some of the greatest of ancient capitals have slipped
from the world's memory. Egypt, Greece, Persia, the Assyrian realm,
are great names, once filling earth with their glory, now all but
obliterated from the roll of nations. We enter the regions where
once sat those old Queens of the East, and look for some reflection
of former greatness still lingering on the brows of the inhabitants.
We look in vain. Cities are mean; poverty is everywhere; man is
degraded, nature half desolate, and the testimony of our senses makes
us sceptical as to the truth of history. But search yet further, and
lo! silent and inanimate witnesses for the dead rise around. Amid
the solitude and the desert, pillar and obelisk, palace and temple,
cities immense even in their ruins, mark how the barren sands were
once a garden, and the solitude was peopled by busy myriads. Those
shattered colonnades, those fallen capitals and mutilated statues,
once rose above the dwellings of Hundred-gated Thebes; those mounds
of rubbish, now shunned even by the wild Bedouin, cover the wondrous
relics of Nineveh; those silent mountains that look down on the lone,
ruin-covered plain of Merdusht, once echoed back the shouts of royal
Persepolis. Ruins are the voice of past ages chiding the present for
its degeneracy. They are like sea-ware on the shore at low water,
marking how high the tide of civilisation once rose.
When we consider the remote period at which such edifices were
constructed, we are at first surprised by two qualities which they
exhibit, sometimes united, sometimes apart--magnitude and beauty.
Magnitude always exerts a great influence on the senses; and without
seeking to explain how such an effect is produced, it is evident from
history that an admiration of the colossal is especially characteristic
of the human mind in the early stages of its development. Accordingly,
and perhaps also from a recollection of gigantic works before the
Flood, the first undertaking of the united race of Postdiluvians
was the vastly-imagined Tower of Babel. The first family of man in
Europe--the Pelasgi--mute and inglorious in everything else, have
left samples of an enormous architecture, whose ruins to this day
exist under the title of Cyclopean. This peculiarity is not confined
to the shores of the Mediterranean. In the remote East, and in the
long undiscovered regions of the West, in Ceylon and in Mexico, the
aboriginal races have left their sole memorials in similar masses of
masonry. With them size seems to have been everything; it was magnitude
which then fascinated the imagination. Even when men are well advanced
in civilisation, the same spirit is perceptible among them, and a love
of exaggeration, the frequent use of hyperbole, characterises the early
literature of all nations.
From the exquisite beauty of much of the architecture, poetry, and
sculpture that have come down to us from antiquity, the singular fact
is apparent, that the fine arts reached perfection at a time when
those conducive to the material comforts were still in infancy. In
those days the race of man was yet young; and youth in the species,
as in the individual, is the season of the Beautiful. It was a lively
love and susceptibility to the charms of nature that peopled the woods
and waters, the sunny skies and the sparkling sea, with deities in
sympathy with man--that saw in the rainbow a messenger from heaven
to earth, and in the thunder of the tempest the wrath of the Most
High. The vague ever excites interest; and the mysterious phenomena
of nature contributed to fix their attention on her aspects, and
consequently on her beauties. Cœlum and Terra, heaven and earth--in
one word, Nature was the great goddess of paganism. She was the great
parent of their Pantheon--from her all other gods drew birth; they were
personifications of her powers, and, till the days of the Greeks, it
was under forms of her that they were worshipped. This susceptibility
to beauty in nature was the parent of the beautiful in art. In stone,
in bronze, on the canvas, they strove to reproduce the perfection of
form that they beheld in select nature--to attain the same harmony of
parts--and thus to awaken in the beholder corresponding emotions of
pleasure. Thus art, in different countries, varied with the aspects of
nature. The monotonous vastness and horizontal lines of the scenery
of Egypt, find a counterpart in the heavy and monotonous grandeur of
its temples; and the unhandsome features of its inhabitants, in the
half-Negro faces of its gods. In Greece, on the other hand, the variety
in its architecture corresponds with the varied aspects of the country;
and its exquisite sculpture is but a reflection of the noble lineaments
of the people. The showy prettiness of Chinese decoration is typical of
the Flowery Realm; and from the exuberance of animal life in Central
Asia, springs the profusion of animal forms in the sculpture and
architecture of India, Persia, and Assyria.
External circumstances also then fostered genius in architecture.
Splendour was the glory of the kings of those days--partly from taste,
but not less so from necessity. The moral faculties of their subjects
were too weak to be alone regarded: their senses had to be appealed to.
As, during the Heroic Age, the king distinguished himself from his army
by his valour in the field, so, during peace, he had to distinguish
himself from his subjects by his magnificence. The royal mansion,
constructed of enduring granite or shining marble, represented the
visibility of power; and the people felt that they could as soon shake
the globe as overturn the lord of so much might: hence the palaces of
Persia. Religion, too, availed herself of like means of impressing the
unspiritual mind of the people; while superstition imagined that the
gods were pleased by the splendour of the temples reared for their
worship. Hence the stupendous temples of Luxor and Carnac, with their
huge ornamented propylæ, and far-stretching avenues of pillars and
sphinxes--and the countless other sacred structures of Egypt, whose
very ruins have all but perished: hence, too, the rock-temples of
Ellora and Elephanta, where the labour of the worshippers has hollowed
out of the mountain rock a mansion for their deity, and has sculptured
its sides with groups from Hindoo mythology. Even in the New World
traces of a similar spirit are to be found; and doubtless the vast
ruins recently discovered in Yucatan were designed to magnify the
worship of the great sun-god of the ancient Indians.
The noblest source from which architecture can proceed was
pre-eminently exhibited in the republics of Greece. The exalted race
that peopled that favoured land had passed the stage of intellectual
development in which magnitude is the chief object of admiration;
and among them the great object of desire was beauty, and their
chief characteristic was the love of the beautiful. Among them
Despotism was not seen building palaces to exhibit its own glory; it
was a people gratifying an elevating passion, and, while doing so,
voluntarily adding majesty to the state. Simple and unostentatious
in their private dwellings, they lavished genius and splendour in
the construction of their public buildings; for the state was but a
concentration of themselves, and in its glory they felt they were
all partakers. Nevertheless they desired beauty more for itself than
for its concomitant splendour; and even in religion they were less
worshippers of heaven than adorers of the beautiful. It is the loftiest
of delights to say to the beautiful--'I am thy Maker!' and when
kneeling before the matchless statues of their gods, the Greeks rather
gloried in them as divine creations of their genius, than humbled
themselves before them as emblems of their deities. Favoured by blood
and climate, by the character of their country, and the advent to its
shores of all the knowledge of the old East--the Greeks had a noble
career before them; and well did they fulfil their destiny. Genius and
power have long departed from the descendants of that lordly race; but
mankind still flock to the Hellenic strand to gaze on the divine relics
of the past. The sun of Greece has long set--but the land is still
radiant with her ruins.
Egypt--that land of silence and mystery--as if to compensate for its
total deficiency of written records, has left the greatest number of
ruins. From the mouth of the Nile to above the Cataracts, relics of
former magnificence stretch away to the borders of the Desert; and even
amid the now sandy wastes we stumble at times upon a ruin lordly even
in its decay. It tells us the oft-told tale of the triumph of Time. We
gaze on the ruin, and see in it a broken purpose--and the strain of our
meditations is sad. We think of the mighty monarch its founder--proud
of his power, and eager to use it; yet conscious of his evanescence,
and resolved to triumph over decay ere it triumphed over him--dreading
the forgetfulness of human hearts, and resolving to commit his glory
to things less noble, but less perishable than they, and to make the
silent marble eloquent with his praise. Those porphyry blocks have
come from the far-off Nubian mountains, and earth must have groaned
for leagues beneath their weight; the carving of those friezes, and
the sculpture of those statues, must have been the labour of years.
Alas for the captive and the slave! Hundreds have toiled and sunk on
the plain around us--till the royal pile became a cenotaph to slaves.
That vase-shaped capital, half imbedded in the sand, has been soiled
with the sweat, perhaps dabbled with the blood, of poor goaded beings;
and the sound of the lash and the groan of the victim have echoed
in halls where splendour and gaiety were thenceforth to dwell. But
long centuries have passed since then; and now indignation does not
break the calm of melancholy with which we gaze on the broken emblems
of departed power. The structure which was to exhibit the glory and
resources of a monarch lies shattered and crumbling in fragments; and
the lotos-leaf, which everywhere appears on the ruins, is an emblem of
the oblivion that shrouds the name of the founder.
But many a ruin that still 'enchants the world' awakens other
reflections than on the fall of power. It may be a concentrated history
of its architect--it may be the embodiment of the long dream that
made up his life. From the inspired moment when first its ideal form
filled his mental eye, in fancy we see it haunting his reveries like
the memory of a beautiful dream. In sorrow it has come like an angel
to gladden his lonely hours; and though adversity crush his spirit,
he still clings like a lover to the dream of the soul. At length the
object of his life is accomplished; and the edifice, awful in its
vastness, yet enchanting in its beauty, stands in the light of day
complete. To behold beauty in mental vision is a joy--but to place it
before the eyes of men, and see them bow in admiration and love, and
to know that it will live in their memories and hearts, elevating and
gladdening, and begetting fair shapes kindred to its own--this is joy
and triumph. The object which thousands are praising, and which will
be the delight and glory of future ages, is his child--it is a part
of himself. And yet now it has perished: the hand of man or of Time
has struck it to earth. It is a broken idol--and we half feel the
anguish at its fall which death has long ago spared its worshipper.
The joy, the inspiration of a lifetime--the creature and yet the idol
of genius--lies shattered on the sand; and the wild palm-tree rises
green and graceful above its remains. In this we behold the moral of
ruins--it is Nature triumphing over Art.