The archdeacon returned to his cell in amazement, realizing at last who this Compere Tourangeau really was, and calling to mind this passage from the cartulary of Saint-Martin de Tours: “Abbas beatti Martini, SCILICET REX FRANCI?, est canonicus de consuetudine et habet parvam pr?bendam quam habet sanctus Venantius et debet sedere in sede thesaurarii.”bv
It is said that from this time forth the archdeacon held frequent meetings with Louis XI, when his Majesty came to Paris, and that Dom Claude’s credit much eclipsed that of Oliver le Daim and Jacques Coictier, the latter of whom, as was his custom, roundly reproached the king on this score.
CHAPTER II
The One Will Kill the Other Our fair readers will pardon us for pausing a moment to search for the hidden meaning of those enigmatical words of the archdeacon: “The one will kill the other. The book will kill the building.”
In our opinion this thought had two phases. In the first place it was the thought of a priest. It was the terror of a true ecclesiastic at sight of a new agents,—printing. It was the fear and confusion of the man of the sanctuary at sight of Gutenberg’s light-giving press. It was the pulpit and the manuscript, the spoken word and the written word, taking fright at the printed word; something similar to the stupor of a sparrow who should see the angel Legion spread his six million wings. It was the cry of the prophet who already hears the busy noise and stir of humanity set free, who sees in the future intellect undermining faith, opinion superseding belief, the world shaking off the yoke of Rome; the presage of the philosopher who sees human ideas, volatilized by the press, evaporated from the theocratic receiver; the dread of the soldier who examines the iron battering-ram and says: The tower must fall. It meant that one power was about to succeed another power. It meant: The press will kill the church.
But underlying this idea, doubtless the first and simplest, there was, to our thinking, another and more recent one, a corollary of the first, less easily seen and more easily contested; a point of view quite as philosophic, but not that of the priest alone,—that of the scholar and the artist as well. It was the presentiment that human thought, in changing its form, would also change its mode of expression; that the leading idea of each generation would no longer be written with the same material and in the same fashion; that the book of stone, so solid and so enduring, must make way for the book of papers still more solid and enduring. Looked at in this light, the archdeacon’s vague statement had another meaning; it meant that one art would dethrone another art. It meant: Printing will destroy architecture.
Indeed, from the beginning of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era inclusive, architecture was the great book of humanity, the chief expression of man in his various stages of development, whether as force or as intellect.
When the memory of the earliest races became surcharged, when mankind’s burden of recollections became so great and so bewildering that mere speech, naked and winged, was in danger of losing a part on the road, men wrote them upon the ground in the way which was at once plainest, most enduring, and most natural. Every tradition was sealed beneath a monument.
The first monuments were mere fragments of rock “which the iron had not touched,” says Moses. Architecture began like all writing. A stone was placed on end, and it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph; and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on a column. Thus did the first races, everywhere, at the same moment, over the entire surface of the world. We find the “cromlech” of the Celts in Asiatic Siberia and in American pampas.
Later on, words were formed; stone was added to stone, these granite syllables were coupled together, the verb essayed a few combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some of them, particularly the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes, when there was plenty of stone and a vast stretch of coast, a phrase was written. The immense pile of Karnac is an entire formulary.
Finally, men made books. Traditions gave birth to symbols, which hid them as the leaves hide the trunk of a tree; all these symbols, in which humanity believed, grew, multiplied, crossed one another, became more and more complicated; the first monuments were no longer sufficient to contain them; they overflowed them on every side; these monuments barely sufficed to express the primitive tradition, as bare, as simple, and as plain as themselves. Symbolism must needs expand into an edifice. Architecture, therefore, was developed parallel with human thought; it became a thousand-headed, thousand-armed giantess, and fixed all that floating symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While D?dalus, that is, force, measured; while Orpheus, which is to say, intellect, sang, the column, which is a letter, the arcade, which is a syllable, the pyramid, which is a word, set in motion alike by a geometric and a poetic law, grouped, combined, blended, rose, fell, were juxtaposed upon the ground, placed in rows one above another in air, until they had written, at the dictation of the universal idea of an epoch, those marvelous books which were also marvelous buildings,—the pagoda at Eklinga, the Egyptian Rhamse?on, the Temple of Solomon.