Roman.]

Look upon this picture, and on this!--the one, refined, delicate,

sensitive, fastidious, severe, never repeated; the other, thoughtless,

vulgar, mathematical, common-sense, sensuous, reappearing ever with a

stolid monotony. And such is the sentiment pervading all Roman Art.

The conquerors took the _letter_ from the Greeks, but never had the

slightest feeling for its Ideal. But even this _letter_, when they

transcribed it, writhed and was choked beneath hands which knew better

the iron caestus of the gladiator than the subtile and spiritual touch

of the artist.

We can have no stronger and more convincing proof that Architecture is

the truest record of the various phases of civilization than we find in

this. There was Greek Art, living and beautiful, full of inductive power

and capacities of new expressions; and there were the boundless wealth

and power of Rome. But Rome had her own ideas to enunciate; and so

possessed was she with the impulse to give form to these ideas, to

her ostentatious brutality, her barbarous pride, her licentious

magnificence, that she could not pause to learn calm and serious lessons

from the Greeks who walked her very forums, but, seizing their fair

sanctuaries, she stretched them out to fit her standard; she took the

pure Greek orders to decorate her arches, she piled these orders one

above the other, she bent them around her gigantic circuses, till at

last they had become acclimated and lost all their peculiar refinement,

all their intellectual and dignified humanity. Every moulding, every

capital, every detail was changed. The Romans had neither time nor

inclination to bestow any love or thought on the expressiveness and

tender meaning of subordinate parts. But out of the suggestions and

reminiscences of Greek lines they made a rigid and inflexible grammar of

their own,--a grammar to suit the mailed clang of Roman speech, which,

in its cruel martial strength, sought no refinements, no delicate

inflections from a distant Acropolis. The result was the coarse splendor

of the Empire. How utterly the still Greek Ideal was forgotten in this

noisy splendor, how entirely the chaste spirituality of the Greek line

was lost in the round and lusty curves which are the _inevitable_

footprints of Sensual Life, scarcely needs further amplification. I

have referred to the Ionic capital of the Erechtheum as containing a

microcosm of Attic Art, as presenting a fair epitome of the thought and

love which Hellenic artists offered in the worship of their gods. Turn

now to the Roman Ionic, as developed in any one of the most familiar

examples of it, in the Temple of Concord, near the Via Sacra, in the

Theatre of Marcellus, or the Colosseum. What a contrast! How formal,

mechanical, pattern-like it has become! The grace of its freedom, the

intellectual reserve of its strength, the secret humanity that thrilled

through all its lines, the divine Art which obtained such sweet repose

there,--all these are gone. Quality has yielded to quantity, and nothing

is left save those external characteristics which he who runs may read,

and he who pauses to study finds cold, vacant, and unsatisfactory. What

the Ionic capital of Rome wants, and what all Roman Art wants, is _the

inward life_, the living soul, which gives a peculiar expressiveness

to every individual work, and raises it infinitely above the dangerous

academic formalism of the schools.

In view of our own architecture, that which touches our own experience

and is of us and out of us, the danger of this academic formalism

cannot be too emphatically spoken of. When one carefully examines the

transition from Greek to Roman Art, he cannot but be impressed with the

fact, that the spirit which worked in this transition was the spirit of

a vulgar and greedy conqueror. To illustrate his rude magnificence

and to give a finer glory to his triumph, by right of conquest he

appropriated the Greek orders. But the living soul which was in those

orders, and gave them an infinity of meaning, an ever-varying poetry of

expression, could not be enslaved; nor could the worshipful Love which

created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became

lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified,

subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in

moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in

that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the

true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to

avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and

delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical

language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of

design. The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome,

it became academic. Thus systematized, it is true, it awes us by the

superb redundancy and sumptuousness of its use in the temples and forums

reared by that omnipresent power from Britannia to Baalbec. But the Art

which is systematized is degraded. Emerson somewhere remarks that man

descends to meet his fellows,--meaning, I suppose, that he has to

sacrifice some of the higher instincts of his individuality when he

desires to become social, and to meet his fellows on that low level of

society, which, made up as it is of many individualities, has none of

those secret aspirations which arise out of his own isolation. Society

is a systematic aggregation for the benefit of the multitude, but great

men lift themselves above it into a purer atmosphere. As Longfellow

says, "They rise like towers in the city of God." So with Art,--when we

systematize it for the indiscriminate use of thoughtless and unloving

men, we degrade it. And a singular proof of this is found in the fact

that the Roman academical orders never have anything in them reserved

from the common ken. They are superficial. They say all that they have

to say and express all that they have to express at once, and disturb

the mind with no doubt about any hidden meaning. They are at once

understood. All their intention and purpose are patent to the most

casual observer. He does not pause to inquire what motives actuated the

architect in the composition of any Corinthian capital, because he feels

that it is made according to the dictates of a rigid school created for

the convenience of an unartistic age, and there is no individual love or

aspiration in it.

Virtually, the Roman orders died in the first century of the Christian

era. We all know how, when the authority of the Pagan schools was gone

and the stern Vitruvian laws had become lost in the mists of antiquity,

these orders gradually fell from their strict allegiance, and imbibed a

new and healthy life from that rude but earnest Romanesque spirit, as in

Byzantium and Lombardy. And we know, too, how, in after Gothic times,

the spirit of the forgotten Aphrodite, Ideal Beauty, sometimes

lurked furtively in the image of the Virgin Mary, and inspired the

cathedral-builders with somewhat of the old creative impulse of Love.

But the workings of this impulse are singularly contrasted in the

productions of the Greek and Mediaeval artists. Nature, we have seen,

offered to the former mysterious and oracular Sibylline leaves,

profoundly significant of an indwelling humanity diffused through all

her woods and fields and mountains, all her fountains, streams, and

seas. Those meditative creators sat at her feet, earnest disciples,

but gathering rather the spirit and motive of her gifts than the gifts

themselves, making an Ideal and worshipping it as a deity. But for the

cathedral-builder, Dryads and Hamadryads, Oreads, Fauns, and Naiads did

not exist,--the Oak of Dodona uttered no oracles.

"A primrose by the river's brim

A yellow primrose was to him,

And it was nothing more."

To him Nature was an open book, from which he continually quoted with a

loving freedom, not to illustrate his own deep relationships with her,

but to give greater glory to that vast Power which stood behind her

beautiful text and was revealed to him in the new religion from

Palestine. He loved fruits and flowers and leaves because they were

manifestations of the Love of God; and he used them in his Art, not as

motives out of which to create abstract forms, out of which to eliminate

an ideal humanity, but to show his intense appreciation of the Divine

Love which gave them. Had he been a Pantheist, as Orpheus was, it is

probable he would have idealized these things and created Greek lines.

But believing in a distinct God, the supreme Originator of all things,

he was led to a worship of sacrifice and offerings, and needed no Ideal.

So, with a lavish hand, he appropriated the abundant Beauty of Nature,

imitating its external expressions with his careful chisel, and

suffering his sculptured lines to throw their wayward tendrils and

vagrant leaflets outside the strict limits of his spandrels. The life of

Gothic lines was in their sensuous liberty; the life of Greek lines

was in their intellectual reserve. Those arose out of a religion of

emotional ardor; these, out of a religion of philosophical reflection.

Hence, while the former were wild and picturesque, the latter were

serious, chaste, and very human.

Doubtless the nearest approach to ideal abstractions to be found in

Mediaeval Art is contained in that remarkable and very characteristic

system of foliations and cuspidations in tracery, which were suggested

by the leaf-forms in Nature. In this adaptation, when first it was

initiated in the earliest phases of Gothic, there is something like

Greek Love. The simple trefoil aperture seems a fair architectural

version of the clover-leaves. But the propriety of the use of these

clover-lines was hinted by a constructive exigency, the pointed arch.

The inevitable assimilation of the natural forms of leaves with this

feature was too evident not to be improved by such active and ardent

worshippers as the Freemasons. Thus originated Gothic tracery, which

afterwards branched out into such sumptuous and unrestrained luxury as

we find in the Decorated styles of England, the Flamboyant of France,

the late Geometric of Germany. Thus were the masons true to the zealous

and passionate enthusiasm of their religion. They used foliations, not

on account of their subjective significance, as the Greek artists did,

but on account of their objective and material applicability to the

decoration of their architecture. But no natural form was ever made

use of by a Greek artist merely because suggested by a constructive

exigency. It was the inward life of the thing itself which he saw, and

it was his love for it which made him adopt it. This love refined and

purified its object, and never would have permitted it to grow into any

wild and licentious Flamboyant under the serene and quiet skies of the

Aegean.

And so the Greek lines slept in patient marble through the long Dark

Ages, and no one came to awaken them into beautiful life again. No one,

consecrated Prince by the chrism of Nature, wandered into the old land

to kiss the Sleeping Beauty into life, and break the deep spell which

was around her kingdom.

Then came the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. But--alas that we

must say it!--it was fundamentally a Renaissance of error rather than of

truth. It was a revival of Roman Art, and not of Greek. The line which

we call Hogarth's, but which in reality is as old as human life and its

passions, was the key-note of it all. So wanton were the wreaths it

curled in the sight of the great masters of that period, that they all

yielded to its subtle fascinations and sinned,--sinned, inasmuch as they

devoted their vast powers to the revival and refinement of a sensuous

academic formalism, instead of breathing into all the architectural

forms and systems then known (a glorious material to work with) the pure

life of the Ideal. Had such men as Michel Angelo, San Gallo, Palladio,

Scamozzi, Vignola, San Michele, Bernini, been inspired by the highest

principles of Art, and known the thoughtful lines of Greece, so catholic

to all human moods, and so wisely adapted to the true spirit of

reform,--had they known these, all subsequent Art would have felt the

noble impulse, and been developed into that sphere of perfection

which we see rendering illustrious the primitive posts and lintels of

antiquity, and which we picture to ourselves in the imaginary future of

Hope as glorifying a far wider scope of human knowledge and ingenuity.

The Gothic architecture of the early part of the fifteenth century

was ripe for the spirit of healthy reform. It had been actively

accumulating, during the progress of the age of Christianity, a

boundless wealth of forms, a vast amount of constructive resources, and

material fit for innumerable architectural expressions of human power.

But in the last two centuries of this era the Love which gave life to

this architecture in its earlier developments gradually became swallowed

up in the Pride of the workman; and the luscious and abandoned luxury of

line led it farther and farther astray from the true path, till at last

it became like an unweeded garden run to seed, and there was no health

in it. In the year 1555, at Beauvais, the masonic workmen uttered their

last cry of defiance against the old things made new in Italy. Jean Wast

and François Maréchal of that town, two cathedral-builders, said,--"that

they had heard of the Church of St. Peter at Rome, and would maintain

that their Gothic could be built as high and on as grand a scale as the

antique orders of this Michel Angelo." And with this spirit they built a

wonderful pyramid over the cross of their cathedral. But, alas! it fell

in the fifth year of its arrogant pride, and this is the last we hear of

Gothic architecture in those times. Over the wild and picturesque ruins

the spirits of the old conquerors of Gaul once more strode with measured

tread, and began to set up their prevailing standards in the very

strongholds of Gothic supremacy. These conquerors trampled down the true

as well as the false in the Mediaeval _régime_, and utterly extinguished

that sole lamp of knowledge which had given light to the Ages of

Darkness and had kindled into life and beauty the cathedrals of Europe.

This was the error of the Renaissance. Its apostles would not recognize

the capacities existing in the great architecture they displaced,

for opening into a new life under the careful culture of a revived

knowledge. But they rooted it out bodily, and planted instead an exotic

of the schools. It was the re-birth of an Art _system_, which in its

former existence had developed in an atmosphere of conquest. It taught

them to kill, burn, and destroy all that opposed the progress of its

triumph. It was eminently revolutionary in its character, and its reign,

to all those multitudinous expressions of life and thought which had

arisen under the intermediate and more liberal dynasty, was one of

terror. Truly, it was a fierce and desolating instrument of reform.

It would be a tempting theme of speculation to follow in the imagination

the probable progress of a Greek, instead of a Roman Renaissance, into

such active, but misguided schools as those of Rouen and Tours in the

latter part of the fifteenth century,--of Rouen, with its Roger Arge,

its brothers Leroux, who built the old and famous Hôtel Bourgtheroulde

there, its Pierre de Saulbeaux, and all that legion of architects and

builders who were employed by the Cardinal Amboise in his castle of

Gaillon,--of Tours, with its Pierre Valence, its François Marchant, its

Viart and Colin Byart, out of whose rich and picturesque craft-spirit

arose the quaint fancies of the palaces of Blois and Chambord, and the

playfulness of many an old Flemish house-front. Such a Renaissance

would not have come among these venial sins of _naïveté_, this sportive

affluence of invention, to overturn ruthlessly and annihilate. Its

mission would inevitably have been, not to destroy, but to fulfil,--to

invest these strange results of human frailty and human power with that

grave ideal beauty which nineteen centuries before had done a good work

with the simple columns and architraves on the banks of the Ilissus, and

which, under the guidance of Love, would have made the arches and vaults

and buttresses and pinnacles of a later civilization illustrious with

even more eloquent expressions of refinement. For Greek lines do not

stand apart from the sympathies of men by any spirit of ceremonious and

exclusive rigor, as is undeniably the case with those which were adopted

from Rome. They are not a _system_, but a _sentiment_, which, wisely

directed, might creep into the heart of any condition of society, and

leaven all its architecture with a purifying and pervading power without

destroying its independence, where an inflexible system could assume a

position only by tyrannous oppression.

Yet when we examine the works of the Renaissance, after the system had

become more manageable and acclimated under later Italian and French

hands, we cannot but admire the skill with which the lightest fancies

and the most various expressions of human contrivance were reconciled to

the formal rules and proportions of the Roman orders. The Renaissance

palaces and civil buildings of the South and West of Europe are so full

of ingenuity, and the irrepressible inventive power of the artist moves

with so much freedom and grace among the stubborn lines of that revived

architecture, that we cannot but regard the results with a sort of

scholastic pride and pleasure. We cannot but ask ourselves, If the

spirit of those architects could obtain so much liberty under the

restrictions of such an unnatural and unnecessary despotism, what would

have been the result, if they had been put in possession of the very

principles of Hellenic Art, instead of these dangerous and complex

models of Rome, which were so far removed from the purity and simplicity

of their origin? Up to a late day, the great aim of the Renaissance has

been to interpret an advanced civilization with the sensuous line; and

_so far as this line is capable of such expression_, the result has been

satisfactory.

Thus four more weary centuries were added to the fruitless slumbers

of Ideal Beauty among the temples of Greece. Meanwhile, in turn, the

Byzantine, the Northman, the Frank, the Turk, and finally the bombarding

Venetian, left their rude invading footprints among her most cherished

haunts, and defiled her very sanctuary with the brutal touch of

barbarous conquest. But the kiss which was to dissolve this enchantment

was one of Love; and not Love, but cold indifference, or even scorn,

was in the hearts of the rude warriors. So she slept on undisturbed in

spirit, though broken and shattered in the external type, and it was

reserved for a distant future to be made beautiful by her disenchantment

and awakening.

In 1672, a pupil of the artist Lebrun, Jacques Carrey, accompanied the

Marquis Ollier de Nointee, ambassador of Louis XIV., to Constantinople.

On his way he spent two months at Athens, making drawings of the

Parthenon, then in an excellent state of preservation. These drawings,

more useful in an archaeological than an artistic point of view, are

now preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale of Paris. In 1676, two

distinguished travellers, one a Frenchman, Dr. Spon, the other an

Englishman, Sir George Wheler, tarried at Athens, and gave valuable

testimony, in terms of boundless admiration, to the beauty and splendor

of the temples of the Acropolis and its neighborhood, then quite unknown

to the world. Other travellers followed these pioneers in the traces of

that old civilization. But in 1687 Königsmark and his Venetian forces

threw their hideous bombshells among the exquisite temples of the

Acropolis, and, igniting thereby the powder-magazine with which the

Turks had desecrated the Parthenon, tore into ruins that loveliest of

the lovely creations of Hellas. It was not until the publishing of the

famous work of Stuart and Revett on "The Antiquities of Athens," in

1762, that the world was made familiar with the external expressions

of Greek Architecture. This publication at once created a curious

revolution in the practice of architecture,--a revolution extending in

its effects throughout Europe. A fever arose to reproduce Greek temples;

and to such an extent was this vacant and thoughtless reproduction

carried out, that at one time it bid fair to supplant the older

Renaissance. The spirit of the new Renaissance, however, was one of mere

imitation, and had not the elements of life and power to insure its

ultimate success. No attempt was made to acclimate the exotic to suit

the new conditions it was thus suddenly called upon to fulfil; for the

_sentiment_ which actuated it, and the Love with which it was created,

were not understood. It was the mere setting up of old forms in new

places; and the Grecian porticos and pediments and columns, which were

multiplied everywhere from the models supplied by Stuart and Revett,

and found their way profusely into this New World, still stare upon us

gravely with strange alien looks. The impetuous current of modern life

beats impatiently against that cumbrous solidity of peristyle which

sheltered well in its day the serene philosophers of the Agora, but

which is now the merest impediment in the way of modern traffic and

modern necessities. But presently the spirit of formalism, engendered by

the old Renaissance, took hold of the revived Greek lines, and

stiffened them into acquiescence with a base mathematical system, which

effectually deprived them of that life and reproductive power which

belong only to a state of artistic freedom. They were reduced to rule

and deadened in the very process of their revival.

So the Greek Ideal, though strangely transplanted thus into the noise of

modern streets, was not awakened from its long repose by the clatter and

roaring of our new civilization. As regarded the uses of life, it still

slept in petrifactions of Pentelic marble. And when those petrifactions

were repeated in modern quarries, it was merely the shell they gave; the

spirit within had not yet broken through.

Greek lines, therefore, owed their earliest revival to the vagaries of a

capricious taste, and the desire to give zest to the architecture of the

day by their novelty. It was not for the sake of the new life there was

in them, and of that pliable spirit of refinement so suited to the wise

re-birth of ancient Love in Art. It is not surprising that some of the

more modern masters of the old Renaissance, with whom that system had

become venerable, from its universal use as the vehicle by which

the greatest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had

expressed their thoughts and inspirations, regarded with peculiar

distrust these outlandish innovations on the exclusive walks of their

own architecture. For they saw only a few external forms which the

beautiful principles of Hellenic Art had developed to fit an old

civilization; the applicability of these primary principles to the

refinement of the architectural expressions of a modern state of society

they could not of course comprehend. About the year 1786, we find Sir

William Chambers, the leading architect of his day in England, in his

famous treatise on "The Decorative Part of Civil Architecture," giving

elaborate and emphatic expression to his contempt of that Greek Art,

which had presented itself to him in a guise well suited to cause

misapprehension and error. "It must candidly be confessed," he says,

"that the Grecians have been far excelled by other nations, not only in

the magnitude and grandeur of their structures, but likewise in point of

fancy, ingenuity, variety, and elegant selection." A heresy, indeed!

Two distinguished German artists--the one, Schinkel of Berlin, born in

1781,--the other, Klenze of Munich, born in 1784--were children when

Chambers uttered these treasonable sentiments concerning Greek Art.

Later, at separate times, these artists visited Greece, and so filled

themselves with the feeling and sentiment of the Art there, so

consecrated their souls with the appreciative study of its divine Love,

that the patient Ideal at last awoke from its long slumbers, entered

into the breathing human temples thus prepared for it by the pure rites

of Aphrodite, _and once more lived_. Thus in the opening years of the

nineteenth century was a new and reasonable Renaissance, not of an

antique type, but of a spirit which had the gift of immortal youth, and

uttered oracles of prophecy to these chosen Pythians of Art.

Through Schinkel, the pure Hellenic style, only hinted at previously in

the attempts of less inspired Germans, such as Langhaus, who embodied

his crude conceptions in the once celebrated Brandenburg Gate, was

fairly and grandly revived in the Hauptwache Theatre and the beautiful

Museum and the Bauschule and Observatory of Berlin. He competed with

Klenze in a series of designs for the new palace at Athens, rich with a

truly royal array of courts, corridors, saloons, and colonnades. But the

evil fate which ever hangs over the competitions of genius was baleful

even here, and the barrack-like edifice of Gütner was preferred. His

latest conception was a design of a summer palace at Orianda, in the

Crimea, for the Empress of Russia, where the purity of the old Greek

lines was developed into the poetry of terraces and hanging-gardens and

towers, far-looking over the Black Sea. Schinkel was called the Luther

of Architecture; and the spiritual serenity which he breathed into the

pomp and ceremonious luxury of the Art of his day seems to give him some

title to this distinction. Yet, with all the freedom and originality

with which he wrought out the new advent, he was perhaps rather too

timid than too bold in his reforms,--adhering too strictly to the

original letter of Greek examples, especially with regard to the orders.

He could not entirely shake off the old incubus of Rome.

And so, though in a less degree, with Klenze. When, in 1825, Louis of

Bavaria came to the throne, he was appointed Government Architect, and

in this capacity gave shape to the noble dreams of that monarch, in the

famous Glyptothèque, the Pinacothèque, the palace, and those civil and

ecclesiastical buildings which render Munich one of the most monumental

cities of Europe. It was his confessed aim to take up the work of the

Renaissance artists, having regard to our increased knowledge of that

antique civilization of which the masters of the sixteenth century could

study only the most complex developments, and those models of Rome which

were farthest removed from the pure fountain-head of Greece. "To-day,"

he said, "put in possession of the very principles of Hellenic Art,

we can apply them to all our actual needs,--learning from the Greeks

themselves to preserve our independence, and at the same time to be duly

novel and unrestrained according to circumstances." These are certainly

noble sentiments; and one cannot but wish, that, when, in 1830, Klenze

was called upon to prepare plans for the grand Walhalla of Bavaria, he

had remembered his sublime theory and worked up to its spirit, instead

of recalling the Parthenon in his exterior and the Olympian temple of

Agrigentum in his interior. The last effort of this distinguished artist

was the building of three superb palaces for the museum of the Emperor

at St. Petersburg, finished in 1851.

The seed thus planted fell upon good ground and brought forth a

hundred-fold. Then, throughout Germany, the scholastic formalism of the

old Renaissance began to fall into disrepute, and a finer feeling for

the eloquence of pure lines began to show itself. The strict limitations

of the classic orders were no longer recognized as impassable; a

sentiment of artistic freedom, a consciousness of enlarged resources,

a far wider range of form and expression, were evident in town and

country, in civil and ecclesiastical structures; and with all this

delightful and refreshing liberty was mingled that peculiar refinement

of line which was revived from Greece and was the secret of this change.

It was not over monumental edifices alone that this calm and thoughtful

spirit was breathed, but the most playful fancies of domestic

architecture derived from it an increased grace and purity, and the

study of Love moved over them, elegant and light-footed as Camilla.

"The flower she touched on dipped and rose,

And turned to look at her."

This revival of Hellenic principles is now infusing life into modern

German designs; and so well are these principles beginning to be

understood, that architects do not content themselves with the mere

reproduction of that narrow range of motives which was uttered in the

temples of heroic Greece, but, under these new impulses, they gather in

for their use all that has been done in ancient or modern Italy, in the

Romanesque of Europe, in the Gothic period, in Saracenic or Arabic Art,

in all the expressions of the old Renaissance. By the very necessity

of the Greek line, they are rendered catholic and unexcluding in their

choice of forms, but fastidious and hesitating in their interpretation

of them into this new language of Art. Thus the good work is going on in

Germany, and architecture _lives_ there, thanks to those two illustrious

pilgrims who brought back from the land of epics, not only the

scallop-shells upon their shoulders, but in their hearts the

consecration of Ideal Beauty.

According to the usual custom, in the year 1827, a scholar of the École

des Beaux Arts in Paris, having achieved the distinguished honor of

being named _Grand Pensionnaire_ of Architecture for that year,--was

sent to the Académie Française in the Villa Medici at Rome, to pursue

his studies there for five years at the expense of the Government. This

scholar was Henri Labrouste. While in Italy, his attention was directed

to the Greek temples of Paestum. Trained, as he had been, in the

strictest academic architecture of the Renaissance, he was struck by

many points of difference between these temples and the Palladian

formulae which had hitherto held despotic sway over his studies. In

grand and minor proportions, in the disposition of triglyphs in the

frieze, in mouldings and general sentiment, he perceived a remarkable

freedom from the restraints of his school,--a freedom which, so far from

detracting from the grandeur of the architecture, gave to it a degree of

life and refinement which his appreciative eye now sought for in vain

among the approved models of the Academy. Studying these new revelations

with love and veneration, it was not long before the pure Hellenic

spirit, confined in the severe peristyles and cellas of the Paestum

temples, entered into his heart, with all its elastic capacities, all

its secret and mysterious sympathies for the new life which had sprung

up during its long imprisonment in those stained and shattered marbles.

Labrouste, on his return to Paris, in 1830, surprised the grave

professors of the Academy, Le Bas, Baltard, and the rest, by presenting

to them, as the result of his studies, carefully elaborated drawings

of the temples at Paestum. Witnessing, with pious horror, the grave

departures from their rules contained in the drawings of their former

favorite, they charged him with error, even as a copyist. True to their

prejudices, their eyes did not penetrate beyond the outward type, and

they at once began to find technical objections. They told him, never

did such an absurdity occur in classic architecture as a triglyph on a

corner! Palladio and the Italian masters never committed such an obvious

crime against propriety, nor could an instance of it be found in all

Roman antiquities. It was in vain that poor Labrouste upheld the

accuracy of his work, and reminded the Academy that among the Roman

models no instance had been found of a Doric corner,--that this order

occurred only so ruined that no corner was left for examination, or in

the grand circumferences of the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus,

where, from the nature of the case, no corner could be. The professors

still maintained the integrity of their long-established ordinances,

and, to disprove the assertions of the young pretender, even sent

a commission to examine the temples in question. The result was a

confirmation of the fact, the ridicule of Paris, the consequent branding

of the young artist as an architectural heretic, and a continued

persecution of him by the École des Beaux Arts. Undaunted, however,

Labrouste established an _atelier_ in Paris, to which flocked many

intelligent students, sympathizing with the courage which could be

so strong in the conviction of truth as to brave in its defence the

displeasure of the powerful hierarchy of the School.

Thus was founded the new Renaissance in France; and, in this genial

atmosphere, Greek lines began to exercise an influence far more thorough

and healthy than had hitherto been experienced in the whole history of

Art. To the lithe and elegant fancy of the French this Revelation was

especially grateful. For the youth of this nation soon learned that

in these newly opened paths, their invention and sentiment, so long

straitened and confined within the severe limits of the old system,

could move with the utmost freedom, and at the same time be preserved

from licentious excess by the delicate spirit of the new lines. Thus

natural fervor, grace, and fecundity of thought found here a most

welcome outlet.

For some time the designs of the new school were not recognized in the

competitions of the École des Beaux Arts; but when, in the course of

Nature, some two or three of the more strenuous and bigoted professors

of Palladio's golden rules were removed from the scene of contest, the

_Romantique_ (for so the new system had been named) was received at

length into the bosom of the architectural church, and now it may be

justly deemed _the distinctive architectural expression of French Art_.

Labrouste was not alone in his efforts; but Duban and Constant Dufeux

seconded him with genius and energy. Most of the important buildings

which have been erected in France within the last six or eight years

have either been unreservedly and frankly in the new style, or been

refined by more limited applications of Hellenic principles. Even the

revived Mediaeval school, which, under the distinguished leadership of

M. Viollet le Duc and the lamented M. J.B.A. Lassus, has lately been

strengthened to a remarkable degree in France, and which shared with

the _Romantique_ the displeasure of the Academy,--even this has tacitly

acknowledged the power of Greek lines, and instinctively suffered them

to purify, to a certain degree, the old grotesque Gothic license. Most

of the modern buildings of Paris along the new Boulevards, around the

tower of St. Jacques, and wherever else the activity of the Emperor

has made itself felt in the improvements of the French capital, are by

masters or pupils of the _Romantique_ persuasion, and, in their design,

are distinguished by that tenderness of Love and earnestness of Thought

which are the fountains of living Art. One of the most remarkable

peculiarities of this school is, that it brings out of every mind which

studies and builds in it strong traits of individuality; so that every

work appears as if its author had something particular to express in

it,--something to say with especial grace and emphasis. The ordinary

decorations of windows and doors are not made in conventional shapes,

as of yore, but are highly idiosyncratic. The designer had a distinct

thought about this window or that door,--and when he would use his

thought to ornament these features, he idealized it with his Greek lines

to make it architectural, just as a poet attunes his thought to the

harmony and rhythm of verse. Antique prejudices, bent into rigid

conformity with antique rubrics, are often shocked at the strange

innovations of these new Dissenters from the faith of Palladio and

Philibert Delorme,--shocked at the naked humanity in the new works,

and would cover it with the conventional fig-leaves prescribed in the

homilies of Vignola. Laymen, accustomed to the cold architectural

proprieties of the old Renaissance, and habituated to the formalities

of the five orders, the prudish decorum of Italian window-dressings and

pediments and pilasters and scrolls, are apt to be surprised at such

strange dispositions of unprecedented and heretical features, that the

intention of the building in which they occur is at once patent to the

most casual observer, and the story of its destination told with the

eloquence of a poetical and monumental language. All great revolutions

have proved how hard it is to break through the crust of custom, and

this has been no exception to the rule; yet in justice it must be said

that every intelligent mind, every eye possessing the "gifted simplicity

of vision", to use a happy phrase of Hawthorne's, recognizes the truth

and wisdom there are in the blessed renovations of the _Romantique_,

and looks upon them as the sweeps of a besom clearing away the dust

and cobwebs which ages of prejudice have spread thickly around the

magnificent art of architecture.

Unlike the unwieldy and ponderous classic or Italian systems, whose

pride cannot stoop to anything beneath the haughtiest uses of life

without being broken into the whims of the grotesque and _Rococo_, the

_Romantique_ has already exhibited the graceful ease with which it may

be applied to the most playful as well as the most serious employments

of Art. It has decorated the perfumer's shop on the Boulevards with the

most delicate fancies woven out of the odor of flowers and the finest

fabrics of Nature, and, in the hands of Labrouste, has built the great

Bibliothèque Ste. Geneviève, the most important work with pure Greek

lines, and perhaps the most exquisite, while it is one of the most

serious, of modern buildings. The lore of the classics and the knowledge

of the natural world, idealized and harmonized by affectionate study,

are built up in its walls, and, internally and externally, it is a work

of the highest Art. The _Romantique_ has also been used with especial

success in funereal monuments. Structures of this character, demanding

earnestly in their composition the expression of human sentiment, have

hitherto been in most cases unsatisfactory, as they have been built

out of a narrow range of Renaissance, Egyptian and Gothic _motives_,

originally invented for far different purposes, and, since then,

_classified_, as it were, for use, and reduced to that inflexible system

out of which have come the formal restrictions of modern architecture.

Hence these _motives_ have never come near enough to human life, in its

individual characteristics, to be plastic for the expression of those

emotions to which we desire to give the immortality of stone in memory

of departed friends. The _Romantique_, however, confined to no rigid

types of external form, out of its noble freedom is capable of giving

"a local habitation and a name" to a thousand affections which hitherto

have wandered unseen from heart to heart, or been palpable only in words

and gestures which disturb our sympathies for a while and then die.

Probably the most remarkable indication of this capacity, as yet shown,

is contained in a tomb erected by Constant Dufeux in the Cimetière du

Sud, near Paris, for the late Admiral Dumont d'Urville. This structure

contains in its outlines a symbolic expression of human life, death,

and immortality, and in its details an architectural version of the

character and public services of the distinguished deceased. The finest

and most eloquent resources of color and the chisel are brought to bear

on the work; and the whole, combined by a very sensitive and delicate

feeling for proportion, thus embodies one of the most expressive elegies

ever written. The tomb of Madame Delaroche, _née_ Vernet, in the

Cimetière Montmartre, by Duban, is another remarkable instance of this

elastic capacity of Greek lines; and though taken frankly, in its

general form, from a common Gothic type, its chaste and graceful

freedom from Gothic restrictions in detail gives it a life and poetic

expressiveness which must be exceedingly grateful to the Love which

commanded its erection.

Paris thus affords us, in its modern architecture, a happy proof of the

inevitable reforming and refining tendencies of the abstract lines

of Greece, when properly understood and fairly applied. Under their

influence old things have been made new, and the coldness and hardness

of Academic Art have been warmed and softened into life. Through the

agency of the _Romantique_ school, perhaps more new and directly

symbolic architectural expressions have been uttered within the last

four years than within the last four centuries combined. Like the

gestures of pantomime, which constitute an instinctive and universal

language, these abstract lines, coming out of our humanity and rendered

elegant by the idealization of study, are restoring to architecture its

highest capacity of conveying thought in a monumental manner. One of the

most dangerous results of that eclecticism which the advanced state of

our archaeological knowledge has made the principal characteristic

of modern design consists in the fatal facility thus afforded us

of availing ourselves of vast resources of forms and combinations

ready-made to suit almost all the exigencies of composition, as we have

understood it. The public has thus been made so familiar with the set

variations of classic orders and Palladian windows and cornices, with

all manner of Gothic chamfers and cuspidations and foliations, and the

other conventional symbols of architecture, which undeniably have more

of _knowledge_ than _love_ in them,--so accustomed have the people

become to these things, that the great art of which these have been the

only language now almost invariably fails to strike any responsive chord

in the human heart or to do any of that work which it is the peculiar

province of the fine arts to accomplish. Instead of leading the age, it

seems to lag behind it, and to content itself with reflecting into our

eyes the splendor of the sun which has set, instead of facing the east

and foretelling the glory which is coming. Architecture, properly

conceived, should always contain within itself a direct appeal to the

sense of fitness and propriety, the common-sense of mankind, which is

ever ready to recognize reason, whether conveyed by the natural motions

of the mute or the no less natural motions of lines. Now history has

proved to us, as has been shown, how, when the eloquence of these

simple, instinctive lines has been used as the primary element of

design, great eras of Art have arisen, full of the sympathies of

humanity, immortal records of their age. It cannot be denied, on the

other hand, that our eclectic architecture, popularly speaking, is not

comprehended, even by the most intelligent of cultivated people; and

this is plainly because it is based on learning and archeology,

instead of that natural love which scorns the limitations of any other

_authorities and precedents_ than those which can be found in the human

heart, where the true architecture of our time is lying unsuspected,

save in those half-conscious Ideals which yearn for free expression in

Art.

Let our artists turn to Greece, and learn how, in the meditative repose

of that antiquity, these Ideals arose to life beneficent with the

baptism of grace, and became visible in the loveliness of a hundred

temples. Let them there learn how in our own humanity is the essence of

form as a language, and that _to create_, as true artists, we must

know ourselves and our own distinctive capacities for the utterance of

monumental history. After this sublime knowledge comes the necessity

of the knowledge of precedent. The great Past supplies us with the raw

material, with orders, colonnades and arcades, pediments, consoles,

cornices, friezes and architraves, buttresses, battlements, vaults,

pinnacles, arches, lintels, rustications, balustrades, piers, pilasters,

trefoils, and all the innumerable conventionalities of architecture. It

is plainly our duty not to revive and combine these in those cold and

weary changes which constitute modern design, but to make them live and

speak intelligibly to the people through the eloquent modifications of

our own instinctive lines of Life and Beauty.

The riddle of the modern Sphinx is, How to create a new architecture?

and we find the Oedipus who shall solve it concealed in our own hearts.

* * * * *