Excerpt from Architecture in Its Relation to Civilization, Vol. 2

So one might go on with the other great periods of history, finding in the enormous and insolent art of Rome what Gibbon could not reveal, nor F errero; in Hagia Sophia and St. Mark's and the Splendid mosaics of a thousand churches, something in Byzantium that gives the lie to the bitter and contemptuous estimates of the civilization of the Eastern Empire that are the stock in trade of the average historian: in the Lombard art of Italy clear evidence of a strong and ardent life that otherwise we should not suspect; in the Norman abbeys and the cathedrals and sculpture and glass and metal work, the hymns and poems and romances of the Middle Ages revelation of a culture that cries shame to our own barbarism; in the architecture and painting and sculptureand industrial arts of the early Renaissance, contrasted with the same' arts of the later or Pagan Renaissance, a keen demonstration of a change for the infinitely Worse that escapes the chroniclers of the period. Finally, in the arts of the present day we shall find a commentary on modern civilization that should have warned us of 1 its inherent dangers before the cataclysm of the last four years came to drive home bitter truths we had refused to admit.

In using art as a gauge of civilization it must be borne in mind that it is a result rather than a product, and that therefore a certain difference in time exists between the impulse itself and the thing it brings into being. All civilization of a high type is immediately accompanied by artistic activity, appreciation, and desire on the part of the people as a whole. The result is industrial art of all sorts, from kitchen pottery to goldsmiths' work, and the more abstract arts of poetry and music, from folk lore to religious hymns. The impulse is cumulative, and little by little the arts grow and develop; out of carving comes sculpture, out of simple construction in masonry comes the master craftsman With his schools and his cathedrals. Painters appear, and poets and musicians, and by and by a community awakes to find itself famous for its eminent artists. Then at last the curve of social development long ascending begins to decline; culture corrupts, civilization suddenly breaks down, and char acter degenerates. Yet for a brief period the wave of art continues to crest under the push of cumulative force, and it is at this very moment that the greatest individual artists appear, created by a society and a culture only the dregs of which remain.

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