"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances, we
invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we see
how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The Doric
temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in which the
Dorian dwelt. The Chinese pagoda is plainly a Tartar tent. The
Indian and Egyptian temples still betray the mounds and subterranean
houses of their forefathers. "The custom of making houses and tombs
in the living rock," says Heeren, in his Researches on the
Ethiopians, "determined very naturally the principal character of the
Nubian Egyptian architecture to the colossal form which it assumed.
In these caverns, already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed
to dwell on huge shapes and masses, so that, when art came to the
assistance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without
degrading itself. What would statues of the usual size, or neat
porches and wings, have been, associated with those gigantic halls
before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean on the
pillars of the interior?"

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of
the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade,
as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes
that tied them. No one can walk in a road cut through pine woods,
without being struck with the architectural appearance of the grove,
especially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the
low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon one will
see as readily the origin of the stained glass window, with which the
Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in the colors of the western sky seen
through the bare and crossing branches of the forest. Nor can any
lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English
cathedrals, without feeling that the forest overpowered the mind of
the builder, and that his chisel, his saw, and plane still reproduced
its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, pine, fir,
and spruce.

The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the
insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms
into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish, as
well as the aerial proportions and perspective, of vegetable beauty.

In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all
private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes
fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the Persian
imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his architecture the
stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian court in its
magnificent era never gave over the nomadism of its barbarous tribes,
but travelled from Ecbatana, where the spring was spent, to Susa in
summer, and to Babylon for the winter.

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and
Agriculture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and