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 oldest Sculptural art through the shaping of natural substances to imitate the human form; just as Architecture answered an immediate human need by the fitting and framing of natural.' stuffs' into what we may call a condensation of Nature's features to suit the special aim: as, for instance, we may recognise in the God's-temple the condensed presentment of the God's-grove. Now we have seen that if the man whose purpose informed the builder's art had no thought for aught but the immediate practical use, then this art could only stay a handiwork, or return thereto; while if, on the contrary, he were an artist and set himself in the forefront of this purpose, as the man who had already become the subject and the matter of his own artistic treatment, he also raised the building-handicraft to Art. In like manner, so long as Man felt bound in brutish slavery to Nature, he might indeed conceive the objects of his nature-worship under the guise of a human form, but could only shape their plastic images according to the standard by which he measured himself namely in the garb and with the attributes of that Nature on whom he felt so brutishly dependent. But in measure as he raised himself his own uncrippled body, and his inborn human faculties, to the stuff and purport of his artistic handling, he gained the power to also show his Gods in the image of a free, uncrippled human form; until at last he frankly set before himself:, in highest glee, this beauteous human shape itself as nothing but the likeness of a man.
Here we touch the fatal ridge on which the living Human Artwork splintered, and left its fragments to linger through an artificial life of petrefaction in the monumental fixity of Plastic art. The discussion of this vital question we have been forced to reserve for our present exposition of the art of Sculpture.-
The first and earliest association of men was the work of Nature. The purely tribal fellowship, i.e., the circle of all those who claimed descent from a common ancestor and the lineal seed of his loins, is the original bond of union of every race of people that we meet in history. This tribal stem preserves in its traditional Sagas, as in an ever lively memory, the instinctive knowledge of its common ancestry: while the impressions derived from the particular natural features of its surroundings exalt these legendary recollections to the rank of religious ideas. Now, in however manifold accretion these ideas and reminiscences may have heaped themselves together and crowded into novel forms, among the quickest-witted historical nations, owing to racial admixture on the one hand, and on the other to change of natural surroundings as the result of tribal migration, - however broadly, in their Sagas and religions, these peoples may have stretched the narrowing bands of nationality, so that the idea of their own particular origin was expanded to the theory of a universal descent and derivation of men in general from their Gods, as from the Gods in general,-yet in every epoch and every land where Myth and Religion have flourished in the lively faith of any racial stem, the peculiar bond of union of this particular stem has always lain in its specific myth and its particular religion. The Hellenic races solemnised the joint memorial celebration of their common descent in their religious feasts, i.e., in the glorification and adoration of the God or Hero in whose being they felt themselves included as one common whole. Finally and with the greatest truth to life-as though from a felt need to fix with utmost definition their recollection of what was ever dropping farther back into the past-they materialised their national traditions in their Art, and most directly in that full-fledged work of art, the Tragedy. The lyric and the dramatic art-works were each a religious act: but there was already evinced in this act, when compared with the simple primitve religious rite, a taint of artificial effort; the effort, namely, to bring forward of set purpose that common memory which had already lost its immediate living impress on the life of every day. Thus Tragedy was the religious rite become a work of Art, by side of which the traditional observance of the genuine religious temple-rite was necessarily docked of so much of its inwardness and truth that it became indeed a mere conventional and soulless ceremony, whereas its kernel lived on in the Art-work.
In the highly important matter of the externals of the religious act, the tribal fellowship shows its communal character by certain ancestral usages, by certain forms and garments. The garb of Religion is, so to speak, the costume of the Race by which it mutually recognises itself, and that at the first glance. This garment, hallowed by the use of ages, this- in a manner-religio-social conventiona had shifted from the religious to the artistic rite, the Tragedy; in it and by it the Tragic actor embodied the familiar, reverenced figure of the People's fellowship. It was by no means the mere vastness of the theatre and the distance of the audience, that prescribed the heightening of the human stature by the cothurnus, or, precisely, that admitted the employment of the immobile tragic mask ;-but the cothurnus and the mask were necessary, religiously significant attributes which, accompanied by other symbolical tokens, first gave to the performer his weighty character of Priest. Now where a religion, commencing to fade from daily life and wholly withdrawing from its political aspect, is discernible by its outer garb alone, but this garment, as with the Athenians, can only now take on the folds of actual Life when it forms the investiture of Art: there must this actual life at last confess itself the core of that religion, by frankly throwing off its last disguise. But the core of the Hellenic religion, the centre round which its whole system revolved, and which instinctively asserted its exclusive rule in actual life, was: Man. It was for Art to formulate aloud this plain confession: she did it, when she cast aside the last concealing garment of Religion, and showed its core in simple nakedness, the actual bodily man.