its freedom, the
intellectual reserve of its strength, the secret humanity that thrilled
through all its lines, the divine Art which obtained such sweet repose
there,--all these are gone. Quality has yielded to quantity, and nothing
is left save those external characteristics which he who runs may read,
and he who pauses to study finds cold, vacant, and unsatisfactory. What
the Ionic capital of Rome wants, and what all Roman Art wants, is _the
inward life_, the living soul, which gives a peculiar expressiveness
to every individual work, and raises it infinitely above the dangerous
academic formalism of the schools.

In view of our own architecture, that which touches our own experience
and is of us and out of us, the danger of this academic formalism
cannot be too emphatically spoken of. When one carefully examines the
transition from Greek to Roman Art, he cannot but be impressed with the
fact, that the spirit which worked in this transition was the spirit of
a vulgar and greedy conqueror. To illustrate his rude magnificence
and to give a finer glory to his triumph, by right of conquest he
appropriated the Greek orders. But the living soul which was in those
orders, and gave them an infinity of meaning, an ever-varying poetry of
expression, could not be enslaved; nor could the worshipful Love which
created them find a home under the helmet of the soldier. So they became
lifeless; they were at once formally systematized and classified,
subjected to strict proportions and rules, and cast, as it were, in
moulds. This arrangement enabled the conqueror, without waste of time in
that long contemplative stillness out of which alone the beauty of the
true Ideal arises, out of which alone man can create like a god, to
avail himself at once of the Greek orders, not as a sensitive and
delicate means of fine aesthetic expression, but as a mechanical
language of contrasts of form to be used according to the exigencies of
design. The service of Greek Art was perfect freedom; enslaved at Rome,
it became academic. Thus systematized, it is true, it awes us by the
superb redundancy and sumptuousness of its use in the temples and forums
reared by that omnipresent power from Britannia to Baalbec. But the Art
which is systematized is degraded. Emerson somewhere remarks that man
descends to meet his fellows,--meaning, I suppose, that he has to
sacrifice some of the higher instincts of his individuality when he
desires to become social, and