CHAPTER I
INDEPENDENT SYMBOLICAL ARCHITECTURE
The primary and original necessity of art is this, that a conception, a thought emanate from mind, be produced and emphasized by man as the result of his activity, just as in speech there are simple ideas which man communicates thereby and makes intelligible to others. In human speech, however, the means of communication is accepted merely as a sign, and for this reason is an entirely arbitrary mode of externalization. The function of art, on the contrary, is not only to make use of the mere symbolic sign, but, in contrast to this, to supply a sensuous presence correspondent to significances. On the one hand, therefore, the sensuous product, which art presents to us, must afford lodging for an ideal content; on the other it has to represent this content in a manner which enables us to see that it is itself as its content not merely a realization of immediate reality, but an actual product of human conception and its spiritual activity. If I see, for example, an actually living lion I deduce from the unique presentment of the same the concept of lion precisely as I should in the case of a picture of it. In the picture, however, we find something more than this. It demonstrates to us that the form has been conceived in the mind, and has found the origination of its existence in the human spirit and its productive activity, so that now we not only receive the idea of an object, but the idea of a human conception of that object. There is, however, no original artistic necessity that either a lion, merely as such[34], a tree, or any other single object be added for the success of such reproduction. We have seen, on the contrary, that art, and pre-eminently plastic art, proceeds with the presentation of such objects in order to affirm in them the dexterity of the counterfeit from the artist's own point of view. The interest in its first origination is directed to bringing before the vision of the artist himself and others the primary impressions of the objective facts, and the universal or essential thoughts thus stimulated. Such popular impressions are, however, in the first instance abstract and in themselves of indefinite character, so that man, in order that he may present them to the imagination, lays hold of that which is essentially just as abstract, the material medium as it is—which is at once massive and ponderous—a material which is no doubt capable of a definite, but not of an intrinsically concrete and veritably spiritual, content. The relation between content and sensuous reality, by virtue of which the content is to pass from the concipient world into that of imagination, can consequently only be of a symbolical type. At the same time, however, a building, which purports to declare a general significance for others, stands there for no other purpose save that of essentially expressing this loftier aspect, and is consequently an independent symbol of a thought that goes straight to its essential import, and is of universal validity, a kind of speech which is present to spiritual life on its own account, however much it may not be expressed through sound. The products, therefore, of this type of architecture are necessarily stimulating to thought of themselves, and arouse universal concepts, albeit they fail to be the mere envelope and environment of significances which otherwise possess independent form. For this reason, however, the form which permits a content of this kind to appear through it cannot perforce merely pass as symbolic sign, as, for example, in the case when we raise a cross to a deceased person, or erect stones in memory of battles. For signs of this character are doubtless qualified to stimulate ideas, but a cross, or a pile of stones, do not suggest, in virtue of their own nature, the idea which it is our object to awake, but are just as able to remind us of much else entirely different. This distinction constitutes the general notion of the stage now discussed[35].
With regard to this it may be affirmed that entire nations have known how to express their profoundest requirements in no other way than by the arts of building, or at least pre-eminently in an architectonic way. This has been, however, to an essential degree only in the East, as will appear from what we have already seen when we were called on to discuss the symbolic type of art. To an exceptional degree we may say that the constructions of the more ancient art of Babylonia, India, and Egypt—which we have now before us to some extent only in ruins, ruins which have been able to defy all ages and their revolutions, and which excite our wonder and astonishment as much on account of what is wholly fantastic in their forms as in virtue of their extraordinary proportions and mass—either completely bear this character, or in great measure are derived from it. They are works whose construction enlists at certain periods of history the entire activity and life of nations.
If, however, we inquire more closely into the classification proposed by this chapter and the heads of subject-matter comprised in it, we shall find that the point of departure in this kind of architecture is not, as in the case of the classic or romantic type, from definite forms similar to that of the house. In other words we have here no independently secure content, and with it no secure mode of embodiment, advanced as the principle thereof, which is forthwith related in its further development to the entire range of the different constructions. Rather the significances which are accepted as content remain, as in the case of the symbolic type generally, likewise inchoate and general conceptions, elementary, in many respects separated and interfused abstractions of natural life mingled with thoughts of spiritual activity, without being, ideally concentrated to a focus as the evolved states of one mind[36]. This aspect of dissolution gives them the appearance of the greatest variety and change, and the object of such architecture merely consists in emphasizing in its presentation first one aspect and then another, in making such symbolical, and, by means of human labour, making such symbolism apparent to us. Before a multiplicity of content such as this we cannot pretend in this discussion to be either exhaustive or systematic. I shall limit myself to an attempt, so far as this is possible, to bring simply that which is of most importance into connection with a rational classification.
The prominent features of such a survey may be thus briefly enumerated.
As content our demand was for modes of view of a wholly general character, in which peoples and individuals possess an ideal resting-place, a point, a unity for consciousness. The proximate object, therefore, of such independent and self-substantive construction is simply to raise some work, which forms the unity of a nation or nations, a place in which its life may be concentrated. We may also find along with this the further object more nearly associated, to present by means of this very embodiment, that which generally unites mankind, in other words the religious ideas of nations, by virtue of which works of this kind receive likewise a more definite content for their symbolical expression.
Furthermore, in the second place, such an architecture is unable to remain fixed within the limits of this incipient determination of its entire content; the symbolical images tend to become isolated; the symbolical content of their signification is more closely defined, and by this means we find that the distinctions of their forms tend to come into more assured prominence, as for instance we see in the case of the Lingam columns, obelisks, and other examples of this kind. From another point of view the art of building, in the spirit of such isolated self-subsistency, presses forward in its passage to sculpture, its acceptance of organic animal forms or human figures, its enlargement of either and association of both of them, however, on a prodigious scale, in its further addition of walls, doors and passages, and throughout in its treatment of what is adapted to sculpture in such objects in an entirely architectonic manner. The Sphinxes, Memnons, and enormous temples of Egypt come under this category.