by Hugo, Victor
That freedom was far-reaching. Sometimes a doorway, a façade, a whole church offers a symbolic meaning absolutely alien to worship, or even hostile to the Church. Going back to the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Paris,* and in the fifteenth Nicolas Flamel, wrote some of these subversive pages. Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie was wholly an opposition church.
Thought at that time enjoyed no other kind of freedom, and was therefore written down in full only in those books which were called buildings. But for its form as a building it would have found itself being publicly burned at the hand of the executioner in the form of manuscript, had it been unwise enough to risk appearing thus. Thought in the form of church doorway would have attended the punishment of thought in book form. Thus, having no other way of declaring itself but in stone masonry, thought rushed to it from every direction. Whence the vast quantity of cathedrals all over Europe, so prodigious a number as to be hardly credible even when verified. All the material, all the intellectual forces of society converged on the same point: architecture. In this way, under the pretext of building churches to God, the art developed into one of magnificent proportions.
At that time anyone who was born a poet became an architect. The genius scattered among the masses, kept down everywhere under the feudal system as though by a testudo* of bronze shields, finding no other outlet than architecture, emerged through that art, and its Iliads took the form of cathedrals. All the other arts were obedient and submitted to the discipline of architecture. They were workmen in the great work. The architect, the poet, the master summed up in his own person the sculpture carved over his façades, the painting illuminating his windows, the music which set his bells swinging and breathed through his organ. Even poor poetry, properly so-called, that which went on obstinately vegetating in manuscripts, found itself obliged, if it were to count for something, to become incorporated into the framework of the building in the form of hymn or prose sequence; that after all was the role played by Aeschylus’ tragedies in the religious festivals of Greece, by the book of Genesis in Solomon’s Temple.
Thus, until the coming of Gutenberg, architecture was the main, the universal form of writing. This book of granite was begun in the Orient, carried on by Greek and Roman antiquity, and the last page was written in the Middle Ages. Moreover, this phenomenon of a popular architecture succeeding a caste’s architecture, which we have just observed in the Middle Ages, is repeated with every analogous movement of human intelligence in the other great periods of history. Thus, to give only a summary statement of a law which it would take volumes to develop, in the high Orient, cradle of primitive times, after Hindu architecture came Phoenician architecture, opulent mother of Arab architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of which the Etruscan style and the Cyclopean monuments are only a variation, came Greek architecture, of which the Roman style is simply an extension, with the Carthaginian dome put on top; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture came Gothic. And splitting these three series into two, you will find in the three elder sisters, Hindu, Egyptian, and Romanesque architecture, the same symbol: namely theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God; and in the three younger sisters, Phoenician, Greek, and Gothic architecture, whatever diversity of form may be inherent in their nature, there is also the same significance: freedom, the people, man.
Whether he be called Brahmin, magus, or pope, in the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque masonry it is always the priest, nothing but the priest, of whom one is aware. It is not the same with popular forms of architecture. They are richer and less sacred. In Phoenician architecture one is aware of the merchant, in Greek of the republican, in Gothic of the citizen.
The general characteristics of any theocratic architecture are immutability, a horror of progress, preservation of traditional lines, consecration of primitive types, the constant bending of every form of man and nature to the incomprehensible whims of the symbol. They are books wrapped in obscurity which only initiates can decipher. Besides, every form, every deformity even, in them has a sense which renders it inviolable. Do not ask Hindu, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry for a corrected design or improved statuary. For them any attempt at improvement is impiety. In these forms of architecture it seems that dogmatic rigidity has spread over the stone like a second petrifaction. The general characteristics of popular masonry on the other hand are variety, progress, originality, opulence, perpetual motion. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their own beauty, to take care over it, to adjust incessantly their adornment of statues and arabesques. They belong to their age. There is in them a human quality which they constantly blend with the divine symbol under which they are still produced. Whence buildings accessible to every soul, every intellect, every imagination, still symbolic, but as easy to understand as nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference between a sacred and a vulgar tongue, between a hieroglyph and art, between Solomon and Phidias.
To sum up what we have so far sketched very roughly, ignoring countless proofs and also countless objections of detail, it comes to this: architecture up to the fifteenth century was the principal record of mankind; during that time no concept of any complexity appeared in the world which was not made into a building; every popular idea like every religious law has had its monuments; finally, the human race never had an important thought which it did not write down in stone. And why? Because every thought, be it religious or philosophical, has an interest in perpetuating itself, an idea which has stirred one generation wants to stir others and leave its mark. Now, how precarious is the immortality of a manuscript! How much more solid, durable, and resistant a book is a building! All that it takes to destroy the written word is a lighted torch or a Turk. To demolish the constructed word it takes a social, a terrestrial revolution. The barbarians passed over the Coliseum, the Flood, perhaps, over the Pyramids.
With the fifteenth century everything changed.
Human thought discovered a means of perpetuating itself not only more durable and more resistant than architecture, but simpler and easier. Architecture was dethroned. Orpheus’ letters of stone were succeeded by Gutenberg’s letters of lead.
The book is going to kill the building.
The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolutions. It is humanity’s mode of expression totally renewed, human thought discarding one form and putting on another, it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolic serpent which, ever since Adam, has represented intelligence.
In the form of printing, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, elusive, indestructible. It blends with the air. In the time of architecture it became a mountain and took forceful possession of an age and a space. Now it becomes a flock of birds, scatters to the four winds and simultaneously occupies every point of air and space.
We repeat, who can fail to see that in that form it is much more indelible? It used to be solid, now it has become long-lived. It has passed from being durable to being immortal. A mass can be demolished, but how can ubiquity be eradicated? If a flood comes, the mountain will long since have disappeared beneath the waters while the birds are still flying overhead; and if there is but one ark still afloat on the surface of the cataclysm, they will settle on it, stay afloat with it, will be there with it to see the waters go down; and the new world emerging from this chaos will see as it awakes the thought of the drowned world hovering overhead, winged and alive.
And when you observe that this form of expression is not only the best for conservation, but also the simplest, the most convenient, the most universally available; when you think that it is not encumbered by baggage and requires the moving of no heavy apparatus; when you compare the way thought, before it can be translated into a building, has to set in motion four or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stone, a whole forest of timber, a whole people of workmen; when you compare it with thought becoming a book, needing only a little paper, a little in
k, and a pen, how can anyone be surprised if human intelligence has forsaken architecture for printing? If you suddenly cut across the bed of a river a canal dug at a lower level, the river will abandon its bed.
Look, then, at how since the discovery of printing architecture has gradually dried up, atrophied, and been stripped bare. What a feeling one has of waters falling, sap failing, the thought of ages and peoples withdrawing from it! This cooling-off is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century, the printing press is as yet too feeble, and at the most draws off from mighty architecture some of its superfluous vigour. But already from the sixteenth century on, architecture’s sickness is evident; it has already ceased to be the essential expression of society; it transforms itself miserably into classical art; once Gaulish, European, indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman, once genuine and modern, it becomes pseudo-antique. This decadence is what is called Renaissance. A splendid decadence, though, for the old Gothic genius; the sun setting behind the gigantic printing press at Mainz still for a while sheds its final rays on that hybrid heap of Latin arcades and Corinthian colonnades.
This setting sun is what we take for a new dawn.
Yet once architecture became merely one art among others, once it ceased to be the total, sovereign, tyrannical art, it was no longer strong enough to hold on to the other arts. So they freed themselves, threw off the yoke of architecture and each went its own way. Each of them gained from this divorce. Isolation enlarged everything. Sculpture became statuary, imagery became painting, the canon became music. It was like dismembering an empire on the death of its Alexander, with all its provinces becoming kingdoms.
Whence Raphael, Michelangelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those glories of the dazzling sixteenth century.
At the same time as the arts, thought set itself free on every side. The heresiarchs of the Middle Ages had already made large inroads into Catholicism. The sixteenth century shattered religious unity. Before printing, the Reformation would just have been a schism; printing made it a revolution. Take away the printing press and heresy is enervated. Be it fate or providence, Gutenberg was Luther’s precursor.
Meanwhile, when the sun of the Middle Ages had finally set, when Gothic genius had faded away for ever on the horizon of art, architecture became ever more dull, colourless, nondescript. The printed word, gnawing like a worm at its buildings, sucked and devoured it. It grew bare, its leaves fell off, it wasted visibly away, it was mean, poor, of no account. It no longer expressed anything, not even the memory of the art of former days. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts because abandoned by human thought, it called in labourers for want of artists. Plain glass replaced stained glass in the windows. The stonecutter succeeded the sculptor. Farewell to any vigour, originality, life, intelligence. It dragged itself along, pathetically begging its way round the studio from copy to copy. Michelangelo, who already in the sixteenth century no doubt felt that it was dying, had one last idea, an idea born of despair. This Titan of art had heaped the Pantheon on the Parthenon and created St Peter’s, Rome: a great work which deserved to remain unique, architecture’s last piece of originality, a giant artist’s signature at the bottom of that colossal stone record which then closed. With the death of Michelangelo what did this wretched architecture do, living on as a spectre and shade of its former self? It took St Peter’s, Rome, copied it, parodied it. It was an obsession. It was pitiful. Every century has its St Peter’s, Rome; in the seventeenth century the Val-de-Grâce, in the eighteenth Sainte-Geneviève. Every country has its St Peter’s, Rome. London has one, St Petersburg has one, Paris has two or three. A meaningless legacy, last ramblings of a great art fallen into decrepitude and second childhood before it expires.
If instead of characteristic monuments like those we have just mentioned we examine the general picture of architecture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, we observe the same phenomenon of decline and emaciation. From the time of François II the architectural form of the building becomes steadily less evident and makes the geometrical form stand out like the bone-structure of someone emaciated through illness. The beautiful lines of art give way to the cold, inexorable lines of the geometer. A building is no longer a building, it is a polyhedron. Architecture, however, took great pains to conceal its nakedness. Here is the Greek pediment inscribed in the Roman pediment, and vice versa. It is still the Pantheon in the Parthenon, St Peter’s, Rome. Here you have the brick houses with stone quoins of Henri IV: the Place Royale, the Place Dauphine. Here the Louis XIII churches, heavy, squat, surbased, stocky, weighed down with a dome like a hump. Here Mazarin’s architecture, the bad Italian pastiche of the Quatre-Nations.* Here Louis XIV’s palaces, long barracks for courtiers, stiff, glacial, boring. Finally Louis XV style, with its chicory and vermicelli, and all the warts and all the tumours disfiguring that old architecture, a toothless, decaying, and still coquettish hag. From François II to Louis XV the disease has grown worse in geometrical progression. The art has become just skin and bones. It is dying wretchedly.
Meanwhile what has become of printing? That is where all the life ebbing out of architecture has gone. As architecture diminishes, so printing swells and grows. The capital reserves of strength which human thought once spent on buildings are henceforth spent on books. So as early as the sixteenth century the printing press, grown now to equal stature with declining architecture, fights and slays its rival. In the seventeenth century the printing press is already sufficiently supreme, sufficiently triumphant, sufficiently secure in its victory to entertain the world to a great age of literature. In the eighteenth, after its long years of repose at Louis XIV’s court, it takes up once more Luther’s old sword, arms Voltaire with it, and rushes tumultuously to attack the old Europe whose architectural expression it had already killed. By the time the eighteenth century draws to its close the printing press has destroyed everything. In the nineteenth century it will rebuild.
And now we put the question: which of the two arts has for the past three centuries really represented human thought? Which has translated it? Which has expressed, not only its literary and scholastic obsessions, but its vast, deep, universal movement? Which has constantly superimposed itself, without a break or a lapse, on advancing mankind, that monster of a thousand feet? Architecture or printing?
Printing. Make no mistake about it, architecture is dead, dead beyond recall, killed by the printed book, killed because it is less durable, killed because it costs more. Every cathedral is a thousand million francs. Try now to imagine what capital outlay would be needed to rewrite the book of architecture; to restore to the earth those teeming thousands of buildings; to return to the ages when the throng of monuments was such that in the words of an eye-witness: ‘it was as though the world had shaken off its old garments to clothe itself in a white vestment of churches.’ Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet, rejecta vetustate, candidam ecclesiarum vestem indueret (GLABER RADULPHUS).*
A book is soon finished, costs so little and can go so far! Why be surprised that all human thought should flow down that slope? That does not mean that architecture will not produce here and there a fine monument, an isolated masterpiece. One might well still have now and then, under the reign of the printing press, a column made, I suppose, by a whole army out of cannon* all stuck together as, under the reign of architecture, one had Iliads and Romanceros, Mahabharatas and Nibelungen, made by a whole people from an accumulation and fusion of rhapsodies. The great accident of an architect of genius might occur in the twentieth century as did that of Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social, the collective, the dominant art. The great poem, the great building, the great work of mankind will no longer be built, it will be printed.
And from now on, if architecture should accidentally revive, it will no longer be sovereign. It will be subject to the law of literature, to which it once laid down the law. The respective positions of the two arts will be reversed. Certainly during the age of architecture poe
ms, though rare, it is true, were like the monuments. In India, Vyasa* is complex, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In the Egyptian East poetry has the same grandeur and tranquillity of line as the buildings; in ancient Greece beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe the majesty of Catholicism, the simplicity of the people, the rich, luxuriant vegetation of an age of renewal. The Bible resembles the Pyramids, the Iliad the Parthenon, Homer Phidias. Dante in the thirteenth century is the last Romanesque church; Shakespeare in the sixteenth the last Gothic cathedral.
Thus, to sum up what we have said so far in an inevitably incomplete and abbreviated form, mankind has two books, two records, two testaments: masonry and printing, the stone Bible and the paper Bible. No doubt, looking at these two Bibles so widely open through the centuries, one may be permitted to regret the loss of the visible majesty of that granite writing, those gigantic alphabets formulated as colonnades, pylons, and obelisks, those man-made mountains, as it were, covering the earth and the past from the pyramid to the steeple, from Cheops to Strasbourg. The past must be reread on those marble pages. We must admire and ceaselessly leaf through the book written by architecture; but we must not deny the grandeur of the building raised in its turn by printing.
That building is colossal. Some statistician or other has calculated that if all the volumes printed since Gutenberg were piled one on top of another they would reach as far as the distance from the earth to the moon, but that is not the sort of grandeur we want to talk about. Yet, when you try to compose a full mental picture of the combined production of printing up to our own day, does not this look like an immense construction, based on the whole world, at which humanity labours without respite, and whose monstrous head is lost in the profound mist of the future? It is the ant-hill of all intellect. It is the hive to which the golden bees of imagination bring their honey. The building has a thousand storeys. Here and there you can see opening out on the ramps around it the dark caves of science, which intersect in its bowels. Everywhere on its surface art brings forth a visible luxuriance of arabesques, rose-windows, and tracery. There each individual work, however fanciful and isolated it may seem, has its place and its projection. The whole results in harmony. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron, countless turrets jostle in disorder on this metropolis of universal thought. On its base some ancient titles of humanity, unrecorded by architecture, have been rewritten. To the left of the entrance has been fixed the old white marble bas-relief of Homer, to the right the polyglot Bible raises its seven heads. The hydra of the Romanceros bristles further on, with other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen. For the rest the prodigious edifice remains always unfinished. The printing press, that giant machine, pumping without respite all the intellectual sap of society, incessantly spews out fresh material for its work. The entire human race is on the scaffolding. Every mind is a mason. The very humblest stops up a hole or lays a stone. Rétif de la Bretonne* brings up his hod full of plaster. Every day a new course is added. Independently of the original, individual contribution of each writer, there are collective shares. The eighteenth century gives the Encyclopédie, the Revolution the Moniteur* To be sure this too is a construction which grows and rises in endless spirals; there too is a medley of tongues, ceaseless activity, tireless labour, unremitting assistance from the whole of mankind, the refuge promised to intelligence against a new Flood, against submersion by the barbarians. It is the second Tower of Babel of the human race.