his manner, under the pretext
of building churches to God, art was developed in its magnificent
proportions.

Then whoever was born a poet became an architect. Genius, scattered in
the masses, repressed in every quarter under feudalism as under a
_testudo_ of brazen bucklers, finding no issue except in the direction
of architecture,--gushed forth through that art, and its Iliads assumed
the form of cathedrals. All other arts obeyed, and placed themselves
under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the great
work. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the
sculpture which carved his facades, painting which illuminated his
windows, music which set his bells to pealing, and breathed into his
organs. There was nothing down to poor poetry,--properly speaking, that
which persisted in vegetating in manuscripts,--which was not forced, in
order to make something of itself, to come and frame itself in the
edifice in the shape of a hymn or of prose; the same part, after all,
which the tragedies of AEschylus had played in the sacerdotal festivals
of Greece; Genesis, in the temple of Solomon.

Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal
writing, the universal writing. In that granite book, begun by the
Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote
the last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an architecture of the
people following an architecture of caste, which we have just been
observing in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every analogous
movement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs of history.
Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would
require volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive
times, after Hindoo architecture came Phoenician architecture, that
opulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian
architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are but
one variety, came Greek architecture (of which the Roman style is only
a continuation), surcharged with the Carthaginian dome; in modern
times, after Romanesque architecture came Gothic architecture. And by
separating there three series into their component parts, we shall find
in the three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture,
Romanesque architecture, the same symbol; that is to say, theocracy,
caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters,
Phoenicia