! Towers and temples are the luxury of princes. A simple and
independent mind does not toil at the bidding of any prince. Genius is
not a retainer to any emperor, nor is its material silver, or gold, or
marble, except to a trifling extent. To what end, pray, is so much stone
hammered? In Arcadia, when I was there, I did not see any hammering
stone. Nations are possessed with an insane ambition to perpetuate the
memory of themselves by the amount of hammered stone they leave. What if
equal pains were taken to smooth and polish their manners? One piece of
good sense would be more memorable than a monument as high as the moon.
I love better to see stones in place. The grandeur of Thebes was a
vulgar grandeur. More sensible is a rod of stone wall that bounds an
honest man's field than a hundred-gated Thebes that has wandered farther
from the true end of life. The religion and civilization which are
barbaric and heathenish build splendid temples; but what you might call
Christianity does not. Most of the stone a nation hammers goes toward
its tomb only. It buries itself alive. As for the Pyramids, there is
nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could
be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for
some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to
have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might
possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it.
As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same
all the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the
United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to. The mainspring is
vanity, assisted by the love of garlic and bread and butter. Mr. Balcom,
a promising young architect, designs it on the back of his Vitruvius,
with hard pencil and ruler, and the job is let out to Dobson & Sons,
stonecutters. When the thirty centuries begin to look down on it,
mankind begin to look up at it. As for your high towers and monuments,
there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through
to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots
and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to
admire the hole which he made. Many are concerned about the monuments
of the West and the East--to know who built them. For my part, I should
like to know who in those days did not build them--who were above such
trifl