Section 2

The avenue of approach to an Egyptian temple was flanked on both sides, sometimes for a mile or more, with great stone
THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE 19
Sphinxes — that emblem of man's dual nature, the god emerging from the beast. The entrance was through a single high door- way between two towering pylons, presenting a vast surface sculptured and painted over with many strange and enigmatic figures, and flanked by aspiring obelisks and seated colossi with faces austere and calm. The large court thus entered was surrounded by high walls and colonnades, but was open to the sky. Opposite the first doorway was another, admitting to a somewhat smaller enclosure, a forest of enormous carved and painted columns supporting a roof through the apertures of which sunshine gleamed or dim light filtered down. Beyond this in turn were other courts and apartments culminating in some inmost sacred sanctuary.
Not alone in their temples, but in their tombs and pyramids and all the sculptured monuments of the Egyptians, there is the same insistence upon the sublimity, mystery and awefulness of life, which they seem to have felt so profoundly. But more than this, the conscious thought of the masters who conceived them, the buildings of Egypt give utterance also to the toil and suffering of the thousands of slaves and captives which hewed the stones out of the heart of the rock, dragged them long distances and placed them one upon another, so that these buildings oppress while they inspire, for there is in them no freedom, no spontaneity, no individuality, but everywhere the felt presence of an iron conventionality, of a stern immutable law.
In Egyptian architecture is symbolized the condition of the human soul awakened from its long sleep in nature, and become conscious at once of its divine source and of the leaden burden of its fleshy envelope. Egypt is humanity new-born, bound still with an umbilical cord to nature, and strong not so much with its own strength as with the strength of its mother. This idea is aptly symbolized in those gigantic colossi flanking the entrance
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to some rock-cut temple, which though entire are yet part of the living cliff out of which they were fashioned. "^ In the architecture of Greece the note of dread and mystery yields to one of pure joyousness and freedom. The terrors of childhood have been outgrown, and man revels in the indulgence of his unjaded appetites and in the exercise of his awakened reasoning faculties. In Greek art is preserved that evanescent beauty of youth which, coming but once and continuing but for a short interval in every human life, is yet that for which all ante- cedent states seem a preparation, and of which all subsequent ones are in some sort an effect. Greece typifies adolescence, the love age, and so throughout the centuries humanity has turned to the contemplation of her, just as a man all his life long secretly cherishes the memory of his first love.
An impassioned sense of beauty and an enlightened reason characterize the productions of Greek architecture during its best period. The perfection then attained was possible only in a nation whereof the citizens were themselves critics and ama- teurs of art, one wherein the artist was honored -and his work appreciated in all its beauty and subtlety. The Greek architect was less bound by tradition and precedent than was the Egyptian, and he worked unhampered by any restrictions save such as, like the laws of harmony in music, helped rather than hindered his genius to express itself — ^^restrictions founded on sound reason, the value of which had been proved by experience.
The Doric order was employed for all large temples, since it possessed in fullest measure the qualities of simplicity and dig- nity, the attributes appropriate to greatness. Quite properly also its formulas were more fixed than those of any other style. The Ionic order, the feminine of which the Doric may be con- sidered the corresponding masculine, was employed for smaller temples; like a woman it was more supple and adaptable than
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the Doric, its proportions were more slender and graceful, its lines more flowing, and its ornament more delicate and profuse. A freer and more elaborate style than either of these, infinitely various, seeming to obey no law save that of beauty, was used sometimes for small monuments and temples, such as the Tower of the Winds, and the monument of Lysicrates at Athens.
Because the Greek architect was at liberty to improve upon the work of his predecessors if he could, no temple was just like any other, and they form an ascending scale of excellence, cul- rriinating in the Acropolis group. Every detail was considered not only with relation to its position and function, but in regard to its intrinsic beauty as well, so that the merest fragment, detached from the building of which it formed a part, is found
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worthy of being treasured in our museums for its own sake.
Just as every detail of a Greek temple was adjusted to its posi- tion and expressed its office, so the building itself was made to fit its site and to show forth its purpose, forming with the sur- rounding buildings a unit of a larger whole. The Athenian Acropolis is an illustration of this: it is an irregular fortified hill, bearing diverse monuments in various styles, at unequal levels and at different angles with one another, yet the whole arrangement seems as organic and inevitable as the disposition of the features of a face. The Acropolis is an example of the ideal architectural republic wherein each individual contributes to the welfare of all, and at the same time enjoys the utmost personal liberty (Illustration i).
Very different is the spirit bodied forth in the architecture of Imperial Rome. The iron hand of its sovereignty encased within the silken glove of its luxury finds its prototype in build- ings which were stupendous crude brute masses of brick and concrete, hidden within a covering of rich marbles and mosaics, wrought in beautiful but often meaningless forms by clever de- generate Greeks. The genius of Rome finds its most charac- teristic expression, not in temples to the high gods, but rather in those vast and complicated structures — basilicas, amphitheatres, baths — built for the amusement and purely temporal needs of the people.
If Egypt typifies the childhood of the race and Greece its beautiful youth. Republican Rome represents its strong man- hood — a soldier filled with the lust of war and the love of glory — and Imperial Rome its degeneracy: that soldier become con- queror, decked out in plundered finery and sunk in sensuality, tolerant of all who minister to his pleasures but terrible to all who interfere with them.
The fall of Rome marked the end of the ancient Pagan world.
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Above its ruin Christian civilization in the course of time arose. Gothic architecture is an expression of the Christian spirit; in it is manifest the reaction from licentiousness to asceticism. Man's spiritual nature, awakening in a body worn and weak- ened by debaucheries, longs ardently and tries vainly to escape. Of some such mood a Gothic cathedral is the expression: its vaulting, marvelously supported upon slender shafts by reason of a nicely adjusted equilibrium of forces ; its restless, upward- reaching pinnacles and spires; its ornament, intricate and enig- matic — all these suggest the over-strained organism of an as- cetic; while its vast shadowy interior lit by marvelously traceried and jeweled windows, which hold the eyes in a hyp- notic thrall, is like his soul : filled with world sadness, dead to the bright brief joys of sense, seeing only heavenly visions, knowing none but mystic raptures.
Thus it is that the history of architecture illustrates and en- I forces the theosophical teaching that everything of man's creat- ing is made in his own image. Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of the race, which is the life of the indi- vidual written large in time and space. The terrors of child-" hood ; the keen interests and appetites of youth ; the strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood ; the lust, the greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age — all these serve but as a preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the man becomes again as a little child, going over the whole round, but on a higher arc of the spiral.
The final, or fourth state being only in some sort a repe- tition of the first, it would be reasonable to look for a certain correspondence between Egyptian and Gothic architecture, and such a correspondence there is, though it is more easily divined than demonstrated. In both there is the same deeply religious spirit; both convey, in some obscure yet potent manner, a sense
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of the soul being near the surface of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism ; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify trans- cendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gar- goyle. The conditions under which each architecture flour- ished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and con- trolled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened men — the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in the other — working together toward the consummation of great undertakings amid a populace for the most part oblivious of the profound and subtle meanings of which their work v^as full. In Mediaeval Europe, as in ancient Egypt, fragments of the Ancient Wisdom — transmitted in the symbols and secrets of the cathedral builders — determined much of Gothic architecture.
The architecture of the Renaissance period, which succeeded the Gothic, corresponds again, in the spirit which animates it, to Greek architecture, which succeeded the Egyptian, for the Renaissance as the name implies was nothing other than an attempt to revive Classical antiquity. ■ Scholars writing in what they conceived to be a Classical style, sculptors modeling Pagan deities, and architects building according to their understanding of Vitruvian methods succeeded in producing works like, yet different from the originals they followed — different because, animated by a spirit unknown to the ancients, they embodied a new ideal.
In all the productions of the early Renaissance, "that first transcendent springtide of the modern world," there is the evanescent grace and beauty of youth which was seen to have per- vaded Greek art, but it is a grace and beauty of a different sort. The Greek artist sought to attain to a certain abstract per- fection of type; to build a temple which should combine all the
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excellencies of every similar temple, to carve a figure, impersonal in the highest sense, v^^hich should embody every beauty. The artist of the Renaissance on the other hand delighted not so much in the type as in the variation from it. Preoccupied with the unique mystery of the individual soul — a sense of which was Christianity's gift to Christendom — he endeavored to portray that wherein a particular person is unique and singular. Acutely conscious also of his own individuality, instead of effacing it he made his work the vehicle and expression of that individuality. The history of Renaissance architecture, as Symonds has pointed out, is the history of a few eminent individuals, each one mould- ing and modifying the style in a manner peculiar to himself alone. In the hands of Brunelleschi it was stern and powerful; Bramante made it chaste, elegant and graceful; Palladio made it formal, cold, symmetrical; while with Sansovino and Sam- michele it became sumptuous and bombastic.
As the Renaissance ripened to decay its architecture assumed more and more the characteristics which distinguished that of Rome during the decadence. In both there is the same lack of simplicity and sincerity, the same profusion of debased and meaningless ornament, and there is an increasing disposition to conceal and falsify the construction by surface decoration.
The final part of this second or modern architectural cycle lies still in the future. It is not unreasonable to believe that the movement toward mysticism, of which modern theosophy is a phase and the spiritualization of science an episode, will flower out into an architecture which will be in some sort a reincarna- tion of and a return to the Gothic spirit, employing new materi- als, new methods, and developing new forms to show forth the spirit of the modern world, without violating ancient verities.
In studying these crucial periods in the history of European architecture it is possible to trace a gradual growth or unfolding
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as of a plant. It is a fact fairly well established that the Greeks derived their architecture and ornament from Egypt; the Romans in turn borrowed from the Greeks; while a Gothic cathedral is a lineal descendant from a Roman basilica.
The Egyptians in their constructions did little more than to place enormous stones on end, and pile one huge block upon another. They used many columns placed close together: the spaces which they spanned were inconsiderable. The upright or supporting member may be said to have been in Egyptian architecture the predominant one. A vertical line therefore may be taken as the simplest and most abstract symbol of Egyp- tian architecture (Illustration 2). It remained for the Greeks fully to develop the lintel. In their architecture the vertical member, or column, existed solely for the sake of the horizontal member, or lintel ; it rarely stood alone as in the case of an Egyp- tian obelisk. The columns of the Greek temples were reduced to those proportions most consistent with strength and beauty, and the intercolumnations were relatively greater than in Egyp- tian examples. It may truly be said that Greek architecture exhibits the perfect equality and equipoise of vertical and hori-
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zotital elements and these only, no other factor entering in. Its graphic symbol would therefore be composed of a vertical and a horizontal line (Illustration 3). The Romans, while retaining the column and lintel of the Greeks, deprived them of their structural significance and subordinated them to the semicir- cular arch and the semi-cylindrical and hemispherical vault, the truly characteristic and determining forms of Roman archi- tecture. Our symbol grows therefore by the addition of the arc of a circle (Illustration 4). In Gothic architecture column, lintel, arch and vault are all retained in changed form, but that which more than anything else differentiates Gothic architecture from any style which preceded it is the introduction of the principle of an equilibrium of forces, of a state of balance rather than a state of rest, arrived at by the opposition of one
thrust with another contrary to it. This fact can be indicated graphically by two opposing inclined lines, and these united to the preceding symbol yield an accurate abstract of the elements of Gothic architecture (Illustration 5).
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All this is but an unusual application of a familiar theosophic teaching, namely, that it is the method of nature on every plane and in every department not to omit anything that has gone before, but to store it up and carry it along and bring it into manifestation later. Nature everywhere proceeds lilce the jingle of The House that Jack Built: she repeats each time all she has learned, and adds another line for subsequent repetition.
II
UNITY AND POLARITY
THEOSOPHY, both as a philosophy, or system of thought, which discovers correlations between things apparently unrelated, and as a life, or system of train- ing whereby it is possible to gain the power to perceive and use these correlations for worthy ends, is of great value to the creative artist, whose success depends on the extent to which he works organically, conforming to the cosmic pattern, pro- ceeding rationally and rhythmically to some predetermined end. It is of value no less to the layman, the critic, the art amateur — to anyone in fact who would come to an accurate and intimate understanding and appreciation of every variety of esthetic endeavor. For the benefit of such I shall try to trace some of those correlations which theosophy affirms, and indicate their bearing upon art, and upon the art of architecture in particular. ^-'
One of the things which theosophy teaches is that those tran- scendent glimpses of a divine order and harmony throughout the universe vouchsafed the poet and the mystic in their moments of vision are not the paradoxes — 'the paronomasia as it were — of an intoxicated state of consciousness, but glimpses of reality. We are all of us participators in a world of concrete music, geometry and number — a world of sounds, odors, forms, motions, colors, so mathematically related and coordinated that our
pigmy bodies, equally with the farthest star, vibrate to the
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music of the spheres. There is a Beautiful Necessity which rules the world, which is a law of nature and equally a law of art, for art is idealized creation: nature carried to a higher power by reason of its passage through a human consciousness. Thought and emotion tend to crystallize into forms of beauty as inevitably as does the frost on a window pane. Art therefore in one of its aspects is the weaving of a pattern, the communication of an order and a method to the material or medium employed. Al- though no masterpiece was ever created by the conscious follow- ing to set rules, for the true artist works unconsciously, in- stinctively, as the bird sings or as the bee builds its honey-cell, yet an analysis of any masterpiece reveals the fact that its author (like the bird and the bee) has "followed the rules without knowing them."