Nevertheless, that architecture, in one point, by its chambers and its halls, its tombs, begins to approach the following class, which exhibits a more positive design, and of which the type is a house.
A third rank marks the transition of symbolic to classic architecture. Architecture already presents a character of utility, of conformity to an end. The monument has a precise design; it serves for a particular use taken aside from the symbolic sense. It is a temple or a tomb. Such, in the first place, is the subterranean architecture of the Indians, those vast excavations which are also temples, species of subterranean cathedrals, the caverns of Mithra, likewise filled with symbolic sculpture. But this transition is better characterized by the double architecture, (subterranean and above ground) of the Egyptians, which is connected with their worship of the dead. An individual being, who has his significance and his proper value; the dead one, distinct from his habitation which serves him only for covering and shelter, resides in the interior. The most ancient of these tombs are the pyramids, species of crystals, envelopes of stone which enclose a kernel, an invisible being, and which serve for the preservation of the bodies. In this concealed dead one, resides the significance of the monument which is subordinate to him.
Here, then, Architecture ceases to be independent. It divides itself into two elements—the end and the means; it is the means, and it is subservient to an end. Further, sculpture separates itself from it, and obtains a distinct office—that of shaping the image within, and its accessories. Here appears clearly the special design of architecture, conformity to an end; also it assumes inorganic and geometric forms, the abstract, mathematical form, which befits it in particular. The pyramid already exhibits the design of a house, the rectangular form.
(b) Classic architecture has a two-fold point of departure—symbolic architecture and necessity. The adaptation of parts to an end, in symbolic architecture, is accessory. In the house, on the contrary, all is controlled, from the first, by actual necessity and convenience. Now classic architecture proceeds both from the one and from the other principle, from necessity and from art, from the useful and from the beautiful, which it combines in the most perfect manner. Necessity produces regular forms, right angles, plane surfaces. But the end is not simply the satisfaction of a physical necessity; there is also an idea, a religious representation, a sacred image, which it has to shelter and surround, a worship, a religious ceremonial. The temple ought then, like the temple fashioned by sculpture, to spring from the creative imagination of the artist. There is necessary a dwelling for the god, fashioned by art and according to its laws.
Thus, while falling under the law of conformity to an end, and ceasing to be independent, architecture escapes from the useful and submits to the law of the beautiful; or rather, the beautiful and useful meet and combine themselves in the happiest manner. Symmetry, eurythmy, organic forms the most graceful, the most rich, and the most varied, join themselves as ornaments to the architectural forms. The two points of view are united without being confounded, and form an harmonious whole; there will be, at the same time, a useful, convenient and beautiful architecture.
What best marks the transition to Greek architecture, is the appearance of the column, which is its type. The column is a support. Therein is its useful and mechanical design; it fulfils that design in the most simple and perfect manner, because with it the power of support is reduced to its minimum of material means. From another side, in order to be adapted to its end and to beauty, it must give up its natural and primitive form. The beautiful column comes from a form borrowed from nature; but carved, shaped, it takes a regular and geometric configuration. In Egypt, human figures serve as columns; here they are replaced by caryatides. But the natural, primitive form is the tree, the trunk, the flexible stock, which bears its crown. Such, too, appears the Egyptian column; columns are seen rising from the vegetable kingdom in the stalks of the lotus and other trees; the base resembles an onion. The leaf shoots from the root, like that of a reed, and the capital presents the appearance of a flower. The mathematical and regular form is absent. In the Greek column, on the contrary, all is fashioned according to the mathematical laws of regularity and proportion. The beautiful column springs from a form borrowed from nature, but fashioned according to the artistic sense.
Thus the characteristic of classic architecture, as of architecture in general, is the union of beauty and utility. Its beauty consists in its regularity, and although it serves a foreign end, it constitutes a whole perfect in itself; it permits its essential aim to look forth in all its parts, and through the harmony of its relations, it transforms the useful into the beautiful.
The character of classic architecture being subordination to an end, it is that end which, without detriment to beauty, gives to the entire edifice its proper signification, and which becomes thus the principal regulator of all its parts; as it impresses itself on the whole, and determines its fundamental form. The first thing as to a work of this sort, then, is to know what is its purpose, its design. The general purpose of a Grecian temple is to hold the statue of a god. But in its exterior, the character of the temple relates to a different end, and its spirit is the life of the Greek people.
Among the Greeks, open structures, colonnades and porticoes, have as object the promenade in the open air, conversation, public life under a pure sky. Likewise the dwellings of private persons are insignificant. Among the Romans, on the contrary, whose national architecture has a more positive end in utility, appears later the luxury of private houses, palaces, villas, theatres, circuses, amphitheatres, aqueducts and fountains. But the principal edifice is that whose end is most remote from the wants of material life; it is the temple designed to serve as a shelter to a divine object, which already belongs to the fine arts—to the statue of a god.
Although devoted to a determinate end, this architecture is none the less free from it, in the sense, that it disengages itself from organic forms; it is more free even than sculpture, which is obliged to reproduce them; it invents its plan, the general configuration, and it displays in external forms all the richness of the imagination; it has no other laws than those of good taste and harmony; it labors without a direct model. Nevertheless, it works within a limited domain, that of mathematical figures, and it is subjected to the laws of mechanics. Here must be preserved, first of all, the relations between the width, the length, the height of the edifice; the exact proportions of the columns according to their thickness, the weight to be supported, the intervals, the number of columns, the style, the simplicity of the ornaments. It is this which gives to the theory of this art, and in particular of this form of architecture, the character of dryness and abstraction. But there dominates throughout, a natural eurythmy, which their perfectly accurate sense enabled the Greeks to find and fix as the measure and rule of the beautiful.