from which our whole Art originates, it was not this purely physical need, but the need of men engaged in artistic presentation of themselves, that was destined to convert the Handicraft of building into a genuine Art. Not the royal dwellings of Theseus and Agamemnon, not the rude rock-built walls of Pelasgian citadels, have reached our physical or even our mental field of vision,- but the Temples of the Gods, the Tragic theatres of the Folk. Every relic that has come to us of architectural art applied to objects outside these, dates after the decline of Tragedy, i.e. of the completed Grecian Art, and is essentially of Asiatic origin.
As the Asiatic, that perpetual thrall of Nature, could only show the majesty of man in the one and absolute ruling despot, so did he heap all pomp of circumstance around this 'God on earth' alone: and all this heaping-up was merely reckoned for the satisfaction of that egoistic sensuous longing which, even to the pitch of brutish fury, but wills itself but loves itself to madness, and in such never-sated appetite piles object upon object, mass on mass, in order to attain a final satisfaction of its prodigiously developed physicality. Luxury, therefore, is the root of all the Asiatic architecture: its monstrous, soulless sense-confounding outcrop we witness in the city-seeming palaces of Asiatic despots.
Sweet repose and noble charm breathe on us, on the other hand, from the radiant aspect of Hellenic temples; in which we recognise the form of Nature, but spiritualised by human Art. The broadening of the temple of the Gods to the assembled People's show-place of the highest human art, was the Theatre. Herein Art, and verily that common-nurtured art which communed with a commonwealth, was a law and standard to herself; proceeding by her own Necessity and answering that necessity to the fullest, - nay, bringing forth therefrom the boldest and most marvellous creations.
Meanwhile the dwellings of the individual units but answered to the need from which they sprang. Originally carpentered of wooden logs, and fitted--like the pavilion of Achilles-in accordance with the simplest laws of usefulness: in the heyday of Hellenic culture they were indeed adorned with walls of polished stone, and duly broadened out to give free space for hospitality; but they never stretched themselves beyond the natural needs of private persons, and neither in nor by them did the individual seek to satisfy a longing, which he found appeased in noblest fashion in the common polity; from which alone, at bottom, it can spring.
The attitude of Architecture was entirely reversed, when the common bonds of public life dissolved, and the self-indulgence of the unit laid down her laws. When the private person no longer sacrificed to gods in common, to Zeus and to Apollo, but solely to the lonely bliss-purveyor Plutus, the God of Riches,-when each would be for his particular self what he had erstwhile only been amid the general community,-then did he take the architect also into his pay, and bade him build a temple for his idol, Egoism. But the slender temple of chaste Athene sufficed not the rich egoist for his private pleasures: his household goddess was Voluptuousness, with her all-devouring, never sated maw. To her must Asiatic piles be reared, for her consumption; and only bizarre curves and flourishes could seek to stanch her whim. Thus we see the despotism of Asia stretching out its beauty-crushing arms into the very heart of Europe-as though in vengeance for Alexander's conquest-and exercising its might to such effect beneath the imperial rule of Rome, that Beauty, having fled completely from the living conscience of mankind, could now be only conned from memory of the past.
The most prosperous centuries of the Roman era present us, therefore, with the repugnant spectacle of pomp swelled up to a monstrosity in the palaces of the Emperors and richer classes, and Utilitarianism-however colossal in its proportions - stalking naked through the public buildings.
Public life, having sunk to a mere general expression of the universal egoism, had no longer any care for the beautiful; it now knew naught but practical utility. The beautiful had withdrawn in favour of the absolutely useful; for the delight in man had contracted to the exclusive lust of the belly. To speak plainly, it is to the satisfaction of the belly that all this public utilitarianism (28) leads back, especially in our modern time with its boasted practical inventions, this time which-characteristically enough !- the more it invents, in this sense, the less is able to really fill the stomachs of the hungering classes. But where men had forgotten that the truly beautiful is likewise the highest expression of the useful, in so much as it can only manifest itself in life when the needs of life are secured a natural satisfaction, and not made harder, or interdicted, by useless prescripts of utility,-where the public care was concentrated on the catering for food and drink, and the utmost stilling of this care proclaimed itself as the vital condition of the rule of Caesars and of plutocrats alike; and that in such gigantic measure as during the Roman mastery of the world :-there arose those astounding causeways and aqueducts which we seek to-day to rival by our railway-tracks; there did Nature become a milch-cow, and Architecture a milking-pail; the wanton splendour of the rich lived on the skilful skimming of the cream from off the gathered milk, which then was taken, blue and watery, along those aqueducts to the beloved rabble.
Yet with the Romans this utilitarian toil and moil, this ostentation, put on imposing forms: the radiant world of Greece lay not so far from them but that, for all their practical stolidity and all their Asiatic gaudiness, they still could cast an ogling glance towards her; so that our eyes discern, and rightly, outspread o'er all the buildings of the Roman world a majestic charm which almost seems to us a beauty. But whatever has accrued to us from that same world, across the steeples of the Middle Ages, lacks both the charm of beauty and of majesty; for where we still may trace a gloomy shade of undelighting majesty, as in the colossal domes of our cathedrals, we see alas! no longer any drop of beauty. The genuine temples of our modern religion, the buildings of the Bourse, are certainly most ingenuously propped by Grecian columns; Greek tympana invite us to our railroad journeys; and from under the Athenian Parthenon the military guard is marched towards us, on its 'relief,'-but however elevating these exceptions may be, they are still but mere exceptions, and the rule of our utilitarian architecture is desperately vile and trivial. Let the modern Art of Building bring forth the gracefullest and most imposing edifice she can, she still can never keep from sight her shameful want of independence: for our public, as our private, needs are of such a kind that, in order to supply them, Architecture can never produce, but forever merely copy, merely piece together. Only a real need makes man inventive: whilst the real need of our present era asserts itself in the language of the rankest utilitarianism; therefore it can only get its answer from mechanical contrivances, and not from Art's creations. That which lies beyond this actual need, however, is with us the need of Luxury, of the un-needful; and it is only by the superfluous and un-needful that Architecture can serve it-i.e. she reproduces the buildings which earlier epochs had produced from their felt need of beauty; she pieces together the individual details of these works, according to her wanton fancy; out of a restless longing for alteration, she stitches every national style of building throughout the world into her motley, disconnected botches; in short-she follows the caprice of Fashion, whose frivolous laws she needs must make her own because she nowhere hears the call of inner, beautiful Necessity.
Architecture has thus to share in all the humbling destiny of the divided humanistic arts; insomuch as she can only be incited to a true formative process by the need of men who manifest, or long to manifest, their inborn beauty. In step with the withering of Grecian Tragedy, her fall began; that is, her own peculiar productive power commenced to weaken. The most lavish of the monuments which she was forced to rear to the glory of the colossal egoism of later times-aye, even of that of the Christian faith-seem, when set beside the lofty simplicity and pregnant meaning of Grecian buildings at the flowering-time of Tragedy, like the rank, luxuriant parasites of some midnight dream, against the radiant progeny of the cleansing, all-enlivening light of day.
Only together with the redemption of the egoistically severed humanistic arts into the collective Art-work of the Future, with the redemption of utilitarian man himself into the artistic manhood of the Future, will Architecture also be redeemed from the bond of serfdom, from the curse of barrenness, into the freest, inexhaustible fertility of art- resource.
2. THE ART OF SCULPTURE.
Asiatics and Egyptians, in their representation of the nature-forces that governed them, had passed from the delineation of the forms of beasts to that of the human figure itself; under which, although in immoderate proportions and disfigured by repugnant symbolism, they now sought to picture to themselves those forces. They had no wish to copy man; but since man, at bottom, can only conceive the highest in his own generic form, they involuntarily transferred the human stature-distorted for this very reason-to the objects of their nature- worship.
In this sense, and from a similar impulse, we also see the oldest Hellenic races portraying their gods, i.e., their deified embodiments of nature-forces, under the human shapes they hewed from wood or stone for objects of their worship. The religious need for objectification of invisible, adored or dreaded godlike powers, was answered by the
