BOOK FIFTH.
CHAPTER 2. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
(continued)
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 versa. 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.
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