as really represented human
thought for the last three centuries? which translates it? which
expresses not only its literary and scholastic vagaries, but its vast,
profound, universal movement? which constantly superposes itself,
without a break, without a gap, upon the human race, which walks a
monster with a thousand legs?--Architecture or printing?

It is printing. Let the reader make no mistake; architecture is dead;
irretrievably slain by the printed book,--slain because it endures for
a shorter time,--slain because it costs more. Every cathedral represents
millions. Let the reader now imagine what an investment of funds it
would require to rewrite the architectural book; to cause thousands of
edifices to swarm once more upon the soil; to return to those epochs
when the throng of monuments was such, according to the statement of an
eye witness, "that one would have said that the world in shaking itself,
had cast off its old garments in order to cover itself with a white
vesture of churches." _Erat enim ut si mundus, ipse excutiendo semet,
rejecta vetustate, candida ecclesiarum vestem indueret_. (GLABER
RADOLPHUS.)

A book is so soon made, costs so little, and can go so far! How can it
surprise us that all human thought flows in this channel? This does not
mean that architecture will not still have a fine monument, an isolated
masterpiece, here and there. We may still have from time to time, under
the reign of printing, a column made I suppose, by a whole army from
melted cannon, as we had under the reign of architecture, Iliads and
Romanceros, Mahabahrata, and Nibelungen Lieds, made by a whole people,
with rhapsodies piled up and melted together. The great accident of an
architect of genius may happen in the twentieth century, like that of
Dante in the thirteenth. But architecture will no longer be the social
art, the collective art, the dominating art. The grand poem, the grand
edifice, the grand work of humanity will no longer be built: it will be
printed.

And henceforth, if architecture should arise again accidentally, it will
no longer be mistress. It will be subservient to the law of literature,
which formerly received the law from it. The respective positions of the
two arts will be inverted. It is certain that in architectural epochs,
the poems, rare it is true, resemble the monuments. In India, Vyasa is
branching, strange, impenetrable as a pagoda. In Egyptian Orient, poetry
has like the edifices, grand