The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo [100]
Thus, for the first six thousand years of the world’s history, from the most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan to the Cologne Cathedral, architecture was the great writing of mankind. And this is so true that not only every religious symbol, but even each human thought, has its page and its monument in this vast book.
All civilization begins with theocracy and ends with democracy. This law of liberty succeeding to unity is written in architecture. For,—let us dwell upon this point,—we must not suppose that the mason’s work is only potent to build the temple, to express myth and priestly symbols, to transcribe the mysterious tables of the law in hieroglyphic characters upon its pages of stone. Were it so, as in every human society there comes a moment when the sacred symbol is worn away and obliterated by free thought, when the man slips away from the priest, when the excrescences of philosophies and systems eat away the face of religion, architecture could not reproduce this new state of the human mind; its leaves, closely written on the right side, would be blank upon the other, its work would be mutilated, its book would be imperfect. But it is not so.
Let us take for example the Middle Ages, which we see more clearly from their being nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy was organizing Europe, while the Vatican rallied and reclassified around it the elements of a Rome made up from the Rome which lay crumbling about the Capitol, while Christianity was seeking the various stages of society amid the rubbish-heaps of previous civilizations, and was rebuilding from its ruins a new hierarchic universe whose high priest was the keystone of a vault, there was first heard springing into place amid this chaos, then little by little seen arising beneath the inspiration of Christianity, under the hand of the barbarians, fragments of dead schools of architecture, Greek and Roman,—that mysterious Roman architecture, the sister of the theocratic edifices of Egypt and India, the unalterable emblem of pure Catholicism, the unchanging hieroglyph of papal unity. All the thought of that time, in fact, is written in this somber Roman style. Authority, unity, the impenetrable, the absolute, Gregory VII, are everywhere evident; everywhere we find the priest, never the man; everywhere the caste; never the people. Next came the Crusades. This was a great popular movement; and every great popular movement, whatever its cause and purpose, always releases the spirit of liberty from its final precipitate. Novelties are at hand. Here begins the stormy period of the Jacqueries, the Pragueries, and the Leagues. Authority is shaken, unity is divided. Feudality insists upon sharing with theocracy, until the people shall inevitably rise, and, as usual, seize the lion’s portion: Quia nominor leo. The nobility then penetrate the ranks of the priesthood, the commonalty those of the nobility. The face of Europe is changed. Well! the face of architecture is also changed. Like civilization, it has turned the page, and the new spirit of the times finds architecture ready to write at its dictation. It returned from the Crusades with the pointed arch, as the nations did with liberty. Then, while Rome was being slowly dismembered, Roman architecture died. The hieroglyph forsook the cathedral, and went forth to emblazon the donjon and lend a glory to feudalism. The cathedral itself, that edifice once so dogmatic, henceforth invaded by the burghers, by the Commons, by liberty, escapes from the priest and falls into the power of the artist. The artist builds it in his own way. Farewell to mystery, myth, and law! Fancy and caprice have full sway. If the priest have but his basilica and his altar, he has nothing to say; the four walls belong to the artist. The architectural book no longer belongs to the priesthood,