their compasses, and, without thought or love, mechanically produced a gross likeness to it by the union of two quartercircles thus: :

Look

upon

Greek.

Roman.

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 cæstus 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 æsthetic 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 Medieval 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 medita

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 hu

man.

Doubtless the nearest approach to ideal abstractions to be found in Medieval Art is contained in that remarkable and very characteristic system of foliations and cuspidations in tracery, which were suggest

ed 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 Egean.

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 wise ly 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 develop ments 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 cathedralbuilders, 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 Mediæval 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 indiffer ence, 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 archæological 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 Kö