BOOK FIFTH.
CHAPTER 2. THIS WILL KILL THAT.
(continued)
Now, we ask, which of the three arts has really represented
human thought for the last three centuries? which translates
it? which expresses not only its literary and scholastic
vagaries, but its vast, profound, universal movement? which
constantly superposes itself, without a break, without a gap,
upon the human race, which walks a monster with a thousand
legs?--Architecture or printing?
It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture
is dead; irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain
because it endures for a shorter time,--slain because it costs
more. Every cathedral represents millions. Let the reader
now imagine what an investment of funds it would require to
rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of edifices
to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs
when the throng of monuments was such, according to the
statement of an eye witness, "that one would have said that
the world in shaking itself, had cast off its old garments in
order to cover itself with a white vesture of churches." Erat
enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate,
candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret. (GLABER RADOLPHUS.)
A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far!
How can it surprise us that all human thought flows in this
channel? This does not mean that architecture will not
still have a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece, here and
there. We may still have from time to time, under the reign
of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from
melted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture,
Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabâhrata, and Nibelungen Lieds,
made by a whole people, with rhapsodies piled up and melted
together. The great accident of an architect of genius may
happen in the twentieth century, like that of Dante in the
thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social art,
the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the
grand edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be
built: it will be printed.
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