Chapter II: This Will Kill That

Our lady readers will pardon us if we pause for a moment to seek
what could have been the thought concealed beneath those
enigmatic words of the archdeacon: “This will kill that. The book
will kill the edifice.”

To our mind, this thought had two faces. In the first place, it
was a priestly thought. It was the affright of the priest in the
presence of a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror
and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the
presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg. It was the pulpit
and the manuscript taking the alarm at the printed word:
something similar to the stupor of a sparrow which should behold
the angel Legion unfold his six million wings. It was the cry of
the prophet who already hears emancipated humanity roaring and
swarming; who beholds in the future, intelligence sapping faith,
opinion dethroning belief, the world shaking off Rome. It was the
prognostication of the philosopher who sees human thought,
volatilized by the press, evaporating from the theocratic
recipient. It was the terror of the soldier who examines the
brazen battering ram, and says:—“The tower will crumble.” It
signified that one power was about to succeed another power. It
meant, “The press will kill the church.”

But underlying this thought, the first and most simple one, no
doubt, there was in our opinion another, newer one, a corollary
of the first, less easy to perceive and more easy to contest, a
view as philosophical and belonging no longer to the priest alone
but to the savant and the artist. It was a presentiment that
human thought, in changing its form, was about to change its mode
of expression; that the dominant idea of each generation would no
longer be written with the same matter, and in the same manner;
that the book of stone, so solid and so durable, was about to
make way for the book of paper, more solid and still more
durable. In this connection the archdeacon’s vague formula had a
second sense. It meant, “Printing will kill architecture.”

In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century
of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book
of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different
stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when
the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and
so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing
them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner
which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most
natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron
had not touched,” as Moses says. Architecture began like all
writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright,
it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each
hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the
column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the
same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the
“standing stones” of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of
America.

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they
coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some
combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan
tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially the
tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great
deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense
pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.

At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols,
beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath
its foliage; all these symbols in which humanity placed faith
continued to grow, to multiply, to intersect, to become more and
more complicated; the first monuments no longer sufficed to
contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these
monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple
like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The symbol felt
the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was
developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant
with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this
floating symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While
Dædalus, who is force, measured; while Orpheus, who is
intelligence, sang;—the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade,
which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,—all set in
movement at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry,
grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, ascended,
placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in
stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation of
the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were
also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of
Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of
all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon,
for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was
the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the
priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye,
and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to
sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its
most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the
arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was
upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for
them, revealed the thought which they represented, according as
the symbol to be expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned
her mountains with a temple harmonious to the eye; India
disembowelled hers, to chisel therein those monstrous
subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows of granite
elephants.

Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the
most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne,
architecture was the great handwriting of the human race. And
this is so true, that not only every religious symbol, but every
human thought, has its page and its monument in that immense
book.

All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This
law of liberty following unity is written in architecture. For,
let us insist upon this point, masonry must not be thought to be
powerful only in erecting the temple and in expressing the myth
and sacerdotal symbolism; in inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its
pages of stone the mysterious tables of the law. If it were
thus,—as there comes in all human society a moment when the
sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated under freedom
of thought, when man escapes from the priest, when the
excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of
religion,—architecture could not reproduce this new state of
human thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty
on the back; its work would be mutilated; its book would be
incomplete. But no.

Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more
clearly because it is nearer to us. During its first period,
while theocracy is organizing Europe, while the Vatican is
rallying and reclassing about itself the elements of a Rome made
from the Rome which lies in ruins around the Capitol, while
Christianity is seeking all the stages of society amid the
rubbish of anterior civilization, and rebuilding with its ruins a
new hierarchic universe, the keystone to whose vault is the
priest—one first hears a dull echo from that chaos, and then,
little by little, one sees, arising from beneath the breath of
Christianity, from beneath the hand of the barbarians, from the
fragments of the dead Greek and Roman architectures, that
mysterious Romanesque architecture, sister of the theocratic
masonry of Egypt and of India, inalterable emblem of pure
catholicism, unchangeable hieroglyph of the papal unity. All the
thought of that day is written, in fact, in this sombre,
Romanesque style. One feels everywhere in it authority, unity,
the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII.; always the priest,
never the man; everywhere caste, never the people.

But the Crusades arrive. They are a great popular movement, and
every great popular movement, whatever may be its cause and
object, always sets free the spirit of liberty from its final
precipitate. New things spring into life every day. Here opens
the stormy period of the Jacqueries, Pragueries, and Leagues.
Authority wavers, unity is divided. Feudalism demands to share
with theocracy, while awaiting the inevitable arrival of the
people, who will assume the part of the lion: _Quia nominor leo_.
Seignory pierces through sacerdotalism; the commonality, through
seignory. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face of
architecture is changed also. Like civilization, it has turned a
page, and the new spirit of the time finds her ready to write at
its dictation. It returns from the crusades with the pointed
arch, like the nations with liberty.

Then, while Rome is undergoing gradual dismemberment, Romanesque
architecture dies. The hieroglyph deserts the cathedral, and
betakes itself to blazoning the donjon keep, in order to lend
prestige to feudalism. The cathedral itself, that edifice
formerly so dogmatic, invaded henceforth by the _bourgeoisie_, by
the community, by liberty, escapes the priest and falls into the
power of the artist. The artist builds it after his own fashion.
Farewell to mystery, myth, law. Fancy and caprice, welcome.
Provided the priest has his basilica and his altar, he has
nothing to say. The four walls belong to the artist. The
architectural book belongs no longer to the priest, to religion,
to Rome; it is the property of poetry, of imagination, of the
people. Hence the rapid and innumerable transformations of that
architecture which owns but three centuries, so striking after
the stagnant immobility of the Romanesque architecture, which
owns six or seven. Nevertheless, art marches on with giant
strides. Popular genius amid originality accomplish the task
which the bishops formerly fulfilled. Each race writes its line
upon the book, as it passes; it erases the ancient Romanesque
hieroglyphs on the frontispieces of cathedrals, and at the most
one only sees dogma cropping out here and there, beneath the new
symbol which it has deposited. The popular drapery hardly permits
the religious skeleton to be suspected. One cannot even form an
idea of the liberties which the architects then take, even toward
the Church. There are capitals knitted of nuns and monks,
shamelessly coupled, as on the hall of chimney pieces in the
Palais de Justice, in Paris. There is Noah’s adventure carved to
the last detail, as under the great portal of Bourges. There is a
bacchanalian monk, with ass’s ears and glass in hand, laughing in
the face of a whole community, as on the lavatory of the Abbey of
Bocherville. There exists at that epoch, for thought written in
stone, a privilege exactly comparable to our present liberty of
the press. It is the liberty of architecture.

This liberty goes very far. Sometimes a portal, a façade, an
entire church, presents a symbolical sense absolutely foreign to
worship, or even hostile to the Church. In the thirteenth
century, Guillaume de Paris, and Nicholas Flamel, in the
fifteenth, wrote such seditious pages. Saint-Jacques de la
Boucherie was a whole church of the opposition.

Thought was then free only in this manner; hence it never wrote
itself out completely except on the books called edifices.
Thought, under the form of edifice, could have beheld itself
burned in the public square by the hands of the executioner, in
its manuscript form, if it had been sufficiently imprudent to
risk itself thus; thought, as the door of a church, would have
been a spectator of the punishment of thought as a book. Having
thus only this resource, masonry, in order to make its way to the
light, flung itself upon it from all quarters. Hence the immense
quantity of cathedrals which have covered Europe—a number so
prodigious that one can hardly believe it even after having
verified it. All the material forces, all the intellectual forces
of society converged towards the same point: architecture. In
this manner, under the pretext of building churches to God, art
was developed in its magnificent proportions.

Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius,
scattered in the masses, repressed in every quarter under
feudalism as under a _testudo_ of brazen bucklers, finding no
issue except in the direction of architecture,—gushed forth
through that art, and its Iliads assumed the form of cathedrals.
All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves under the discipline
of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The
architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the
sculpture which carved his façades, painting which illuminated
his windows, music which set his bells to pealing, and breathed
into his organs. There was nothing down to poor poetry,—properly
speaking, that which persisted in vegetating in
manuscripts,—which was not forced, in order to make something of
itself, to come and frame itself in the edifice in the shape of a
hymn or of prose; the same part, after all, which the tragedies
of Æschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals of Greece;
Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.

Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the
principal writing, the universal writing. In that granite book,
begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the
Middle Ages wrote the last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an
architecture of the people following an architecture of caste,
which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is
reproduced with every analogous movement in the human
intelligence at the other great epochs of history. Thus, in order
to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would require
volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive
times, after Hindoo architecture came Phœnician architecture,
that opulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after
Egyptian architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean
monuments are but one variety, came Greek architecture (of which
the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with the
Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture
came Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series
into their component parts, we shall find in the three eldest
sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque
architecture, the same symbol; that is to say, theocracy, caste,
unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,
Phœnician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture,
whatever, nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in
their nature, the same signification also; that is to say,
liberty, the people, man.

In the Hindu, Egyptian, or Romanesque architecture, one feels the
priest, nothing but the priest, whether he calls himself Brahmin,
Magian, or Pope. It is not the same in the architectures of the
people. They are richer and less sacred. In the Phœnician, one
feels the merchant; in the Greek, the republican; in the Gothic,
the citizen.

The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are
immutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional
lines, the consecration of the primitive types, the constant
bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the
incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books,
which the initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover,
every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which renders
it inviolable. Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry
to reform their design, or to improve their statuary. Every
attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In these
architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had
spread over the stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The
general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are
progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are
already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their
beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their
parure of statues or arabesques. They are of the age. They have
something human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine
symbol under which they still produce. Hence, edifices
comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every
imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as
nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the
difference that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar
language, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and
Phidias.

If the reader will sum up what we have hitherto briefly, very
briefly, indicated, neglecting a thousand proofs and also a
thousand objections of detail, he will be led to this: that
architecture was, down to the fifteenth century, the chief
register of humanity; that in that interval not a thought which
is in any degree complicated made its appearance in the world,
which has not been worked into an edifice; that every popular
idea, and every religious law, has had its monumental records;
that the human race has, in short, had no important thought which
it has not written in stone. And why? Because every thought,
either philosophical or religious, is interested in perpetuating
itself; because the idea which has moved one generation wishes to
move others also, and leave a trace. Now, what a precarious
immortality is that of the manuscript! How much more solid,
durable, unyielding, is a book of stone! In order to destroy the
written word, a torch and a Turk are sufficient. To demolish the
constructed word, a social revolution, a terrestrial revolution
are required. The barbarians passed over the Coliseum; the
deluge, perhaps, passed over the Pyramids.

In the fifteenth century everything changes.

Human thought discovers a mode of perpetuating itself, not only
more durable and more resisting than architecture, but still more
simple and easy. Architecture is dethroned. Gutenberg’s letters
of lead are about to supersede Orpheus’s letters of stone.

_The book is about to kill the edifice_.

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is
the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of
humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping
off one form and donning another; it is the complete and
definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since
the days of Adam has represented intelligence.

In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it
is volatile, irresistible, indestructible. It is mingled with the
air. In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself,
and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it
converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the
four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.

We repeat, who does not perceive that in this form it is far more
indelible? It was solid, it has become alive. It passes from
duration in time to immortality. One can demolish a mass; how can
one extirpate ubiquity? If a flood comes, the mountains will have
long disappeared beneath the waves, while the birds will still be
flying about; and if a single ark floats on the surface of the
cataclysm, they will alight upon it, will float with it, will be
present with it at the ebbing of the waters; and the new world
which emerges from this chaos will behold, on its awakening, the
thought of the world which has been submerged soaring above it,
winged and living.

And when one observes that this mode of expression is not only
the most conservative, but also the most simple, the most
convenient, the most practicable for all; when one reflects that
it does not drag after it bulky baggage, and does not set in
motion a heavy apparatus; when one compares thought forced, in
order to transform itself into an edifice, to put in motion four
or five other arts and tons of gold, a whole mountain of stones,
a whole forest of timber-work, a whole nation of workmen; when
one compares it to the thought which becomes a book, and for
which a little paper, a little ink, and a pen suffice,—how can
one be surprised that human intelligence should have quitted
architecture for printing? Cut the primitive bed of a river
abruptly with a canal hollowed out below its level, and the river
will desert its bed.

Behold how, beginning with the discovery of printing,
architecture withers away little by little, becomes lifeless and
bare. How one feels the water sinking, the sap departing, the
thought of the times and of the people withdrawing from it! The
chill is almost imperceptible in the fifteenth century; the press
is, as yet, too weak, and, at the most, draws from powerful
architecture a superabundance of life. But practically beginning
with the sixteenth century, the malady of architecture is
visible; it is no longer the expression of society; it becomes
classic art in a miserable manner; from being Gallic, European,
indigenous, it becomes Greek and Roman; from being true and
modern, it becomes pseudo-classic. It is this decadence which is
called the Renaissance. A magnificent decadence, however, for the
ancient Gothic genius, that sun which sets behind the gigantic
press of Mayence, still penetrates for a while longer with its
rays that whole hybrid pile of Latin arcades and Corinthian
columns.

It is that setting sun which we mistake for the dawn.

Nevertheless, from the moment when architecture is no longer
anything but an art like any other; as soon as it is no longer
the total art, the sovereign art, the tyrant art,—it has no
longer the power to retain the other arts. So they emancipate
themselves, break the yoke of the architect, and take themselves
off, each one in its own direction. Each one of them gains by
this divorce. Isolation aggrandizes everything. Sculpture becomes
statuary, the image trade becomes painting, the canon becomes
music. One would pronounce it an empire dismembered at the death
of its Alexander, and whose provinces become kingdoms.

Hence Raphael, Michael Angelo, Jean Goujon, Palestrina, those
splendors of the dazzling sixteenth century.

Thought emancipates itself in all directions at the same time as
the arts. The arch-heretics of the Middle Ages had already made
large incisions into Catholicism. The sixteenth century breaks
religious unity. Before the invention of printing, reform would
have been merely a schism; printing converted it into a
revolution. Take away the press; heresy is enervated. Whether it
be Providence or Fate, Gutenburg is the precursor of Luther.

Nevertheless, when the sun of the Middle Ages is completely set,
when the Gothic genius is forever extinct upon the horizon,
architecture grows dim, loses its color, becomes more and more
effaced. The printed book, the gnawing worm of the edifice, sucks
and devours it. It becomes bare, denuded of its foliage, and
grows visibly emaciated. It is petty, it is poor, it is nothing.
It no longer expresses anything, not even the memory of the art
of another time. Reduced to itself, abandoned by the other arts,
because human thought is abandoning it, it summons bunglers in
place of artists. Glass replaces the painted windows. The
stone-cutter succeeds the sculptor. Farewell all sap, all
originality, all life, all intelligence. It drags along, a
lamentable workshop mendicant, from copy to copy. Michael Angelo,
who, no doubt, felt even in the sixteenth century that it was
dying, had a last idea, an idea of despair. That Titan of art
piled the Pantheon on the Parthenon, and made Saint-Peter’s at
Rome. A great work, which deserved to remain unique, the last
originality of architecture, the signature of a giant artist at
the bottom of the colossal register of stone which was closed
forever. With Michael Angelo dead, what does this miserable
architecture, which survived itself in the state of a spectre,
do? It takes Saint-Peter in Rome, copies it and parodies it. It
is a mania. It is a pity. Each century has its Saint-Peter’s of
Rome; in the seventeenth century, the Val-de-Grâce; in the
eighteenth, Sainte-Geneviève. Each country has its Saint-Peter’s
of Rome. London has one; Petersburg has another; Paris has two or
three. The insignificant testament, the last dotage of a decrepit
grand art falling back into infancy before it dies.

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 versâ. 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.

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, candidam 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.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally,
it will no longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law
of literature, which formerly received the law from it. The
respective positions of the two arts will be inverted. It is
certain that in architectural epochs, the poems, rare it is true,
resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is branching, strange,
impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry has like the
edifices, grandeur and tranquillity of line; in antique Greece,
beauty, serenity, calm; in Christian Europe, the Catholic
majesty, the popular naïvete, the rich and luxuriant vegetation
of an epoch 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 hitherto said, in a fashion which is
necessarily incomplete and mutilated, the human race has two
books, two registers, two testaments: masonry and printing; the
Bible of stone and the Bible of paper. No doubt, when one
contemplates these two Bibles, laid so broadly open in the
centuries, it is permissible to regret the visible majesty of the
writing of granite, those gigantic alphabets formulated in
colonnades, in pylons, in obelisks, those sorts of human
mountains which cover the world and the past, from the pyramid to
the bell tower, from Cheops to Strasbourg. The past must be
reread upon these pages of marble. This book, written by
architecture, must be admired and perused incessantly; but the
grandeur of the edifice which printing erects in its turn must
not be denied.

That edifice is colossal. Some compiler of statistics has
calculated, that if all the volumes which have issued from the
press since Gutenberg’s day were to be piled one upon another,
they would fill the space between the earth and the moon; but it
is not that sort of grandeur of which we wished to speak.
Nevertheless, when one tries to collect in one’s mind a
comprehensive image of the total products of printing down to our
own days, does not that total appear to us like an immense
construction, resting upon the entire world, at which humanity
toils without relaxation, and whose monstrous crest is lost in
the profound mists of the future? It is the anthill of
intelligence. It is the hive whither come all imaginations, those
golden bees, with their honey.

The edifice has a thousand stories. Here and there one beholds on
its staircases the gloomy caverns of science which pierce its
interior. Everywhere upon its surface, art causes its arabesques,
rosettes, and laces to thrive luxuriantly before the eyes. There,
every individual work, however capricious and isolated it may
seem, has its place and its projection. Harmony results from the
whole. From the cathedral of Shakespeare to the mosque of Byron,
a thousand tiny bell towers are piled pell-mell above this
metropolis of universal thought. At its base are written some
ancient titles of humanity which architecture had not registered.
To the left of the entrance has been fixed the ancient
bas-relief, in white marble, of Homer; to the right, the polyglot
Bible rears its seven heads. The hydra of the Romancero and some
other hybrid forms, the Vedas and the Nibelungen bristle further
on.

Nevertheless, the prodigious edifice still remains incomplete.
The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the
intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh
materials for its work. The whole human race is on the
scaffoldings. Each mind is a mason. The humblest fills his hole,
or places his stone. Rétif de La Bretonne brings his hod of
plaster. Every day a new course rises. Independently of the
original and individual contribution of each writer, there are
collective contingents. The eighteenth century gives the
_Encyclopedia_, the revolution gives the _Moniteur_. Assuredly,
it is a construction which increases and piles up in endless
spirals; there also are confusion of tongues, incessant activity,
indefatigable labor, eager competition of all humanity, refuge
promised to intelligence, a new Flood against an overflow of
barbarians. It is the second tower of Babel of the human race.

BOOK SIXTH.