conceptions and the matter on which it works! A work of art rises in vision to the divinely-inspired artist; what years, what ages are consumed in expressing in the slow stone this conception! and the stone is transformable, perishable. Can the mind be so?
The name of the architect of the Cathedral of Cologne is unknown. No matter; here are his thoughts written in stone.
You cannot see the Gothic architecture of Europe without being often reminded of Victor Hugo's idea that architecture was, till superseded by painting,"the great book" wherein man wrote his thoughts in "marble letters and granite pages;" and, being once possessed with this notion, you cannot look at the beautiful arches and columns, at such stupendous flying buttresses as these of the Cologne Cathedral, and its "forest of purfled pinnacles," without feeling as if you were reading a Milton or a Dante. There are innumerable expressions that you cannot comprehend, but, as your eye ranges over them, you read the rapturous praises of a David, and prophecy and lamentation, and, even in these sacred edifices, the keen satires and unbridled humour of the profane poets. Victor Hugo says that, at one period, whoever was born a poet became an architect; that all other arts were subservient to architecture, all other artists the servants of the architect, "the great master workman.'"[1]
I do not know that the ideas which he has so well
- ↑ "L’architecte, le poète, le maître totalisait en sa personne la sculpture qui lui ciselait ses façades, la peinture qui lui enluminait ses vitraux, la musique qui mettait se cloche en branle et soufflait dans ses orgues."—Victor Hugo.
