But it now occurs to inquire, before the merit of rational design can be granted, or these architectonic labours admitted among the works of genius,--Do these lofty effects arise from principle, or are they purely accidental? Are they the meditated results of science and taste, or are they merely inevitable consequences of the large and enduring style which the political system recommended?
Upon the nature of the reply to these questions will, in a great measure, depend the rank of the Greeks, as original inventors and refiners of taste in architecture. Now, there can be no doubt that in these, to use Strabo's expression, 'barbarous monuments of painful labour,' the sublimity and imposing solemnity of the general effect is incidental, not inherent. It is the grandeur of mass, not of proportion. The imagination is subdued, indeed, by vastness, but neither is the fancy delighted by tracing a well preserved resemblance to any acknowledged prototype, nor is the judgment instructed by the contemplation of a harmony consistent in itself, though deriving its elements from no immediate source. We discover neither imitation nor creative taste, for imitation is ever destroyed by some monstrous incongruity, and originality becomes aimless through interminable variety of accessories. As a science, then, beyond the rules necessarily imposed by the leading intention of durability, we detect nothing in the architecture of Egypt like the universal harmony given to it in Greece. The same is the character of Indian art, with still more of incongruous union; for here the massive simplicity of the original, or at least earliest source, for so we have already shown Egyptian art to be, is broken down and loaded with frittered and pretending ornament, Syria, or the vast district lying between, furnishes nothing beyond conjecture, or rather in the only instance, that of Solomon's labours, where we attain some information on which implicit reliance may be placed--clear manifestations are discovered of mixed art, in which that of Egypt predominated. Thus, in the whole of the ancient world, about a thousand years before our present era, and when the Greeks first, or soon after, began to erect temples, there existed no science complete in itself, or whose principles even had been elicited from the chaotic mass of materials, by which they could have been directed, in their own matchless monuments. Whatever of grace and of beauty--of dignity and truth--of sublimity and harmonious proportion,--whatever of architectonic excellence, grounded on the most profound principles of taste, and established on the sure basis of geometry,--whatever of all this can be discovered in the building of Greece, she owes it to the superiority of native genius. Yet the obligations to Egyptian predecessors were neither few nor unimportant. The rectangular area, in which the breadth should bear a proportion less to the length, a shape of all others best adapted to beauty and convenience, was introduced. A still less obvious source of almost every higher beauty in the science--columnar architecture--was there practised so early, that whether it originated in the country, or was introduced, is unknown. Even the system of ornament may, in its rise at least, be traced in these primeval remains; for not a single detail afterwards introduced may not, in a rudimental, often nearly perfected state, be remarked; especially the beautiful idea of floral ornaments. Lastly, in the works of Egyptian art, very perfect examples of mechanical practice, both in dressing and laying the materials, might be observed in almost every instance. All these elements, however, the last excepted, jarring among themselves, whether as wholes or parts, were to be selected, arranged, methodized, and animated by grace, harmony, nobleness,--in short, the science of architecture was yet to be created.