But we ought to have pieces
of Greek architecture, as we have reprints of the most valuable records,
and it is better to build a new Parthenon than to set up the old one.
Let the dust and the desolation of the Acropolis be undisturbed forever;
let them be left to be the school of our moral feelings, not of our
mechanical perceptions; the line and rule of the prying carpenter should
not come into the quiet and holy places of the earth. Elsewhere, we may
build marble models for the education of the national mind and eye; but
it is useless to think of adapting the architecture of the Greek to the
purposes of the Frank; it never has been done, and never will be. We
delight, indeed, in observing the rise of such a building as La
Madeleine: beautiful, because accurately copied; useful, as teaching the
eye of every passer-by. But we must not think of its purpose; it is
wholly unadapted for Christian worship; and were it as bad Greek as our
National Gallery, it would be equally unfit.
The mistake of our architects in general is, that they fancy they are
speaking good English by speaking bad Greek. We wish, therefore, that
copying were more in vogue than it is. But imitation, the endeavor to be
Gothic, or Tyrolese, or Venetian, without the slightest grain of Gothic
or Venetian feeling; the futile effort to splash a building into age, or
daub it into dignity, to zigzag it into sanctity, or slit it into
ferocity, when its shell is neither ancient nor dignified, and its
spirit neither priestly nor baronial,--this is the degrading vice of the
age; fostered, as if man's reason were but a step between the brains of
a kitten and a monkey, in the mixed love of despicable excitement and
miserable mimicry.
Pages:
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221