And this we suppose to be all the
pleasure that architecture was ever intended to give us. The idea of
reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the
same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never
enters our minds for a moment. And for good reason;--There is indeed
rhythm in the verses, quite as strict as the symmetries or rhythm of
the architecture, and a thousand times more beautiful, but there is
something else than rhythm. The verses were neither made to order, nor
to match, as the capitals were; and we have therefore a kind of
pleasure in them other than a sense of propriety. But it requires a
strong effort of common sense to shake ourselves quit of all that we
have been taught for the last two centuries, and wake to the perception
of a truth just as simple and certain as it is new: that great art,
whether expressing itself in words, colours, or stones, does _not_ say
the same thing over and over again; that the merit of architectural, as
of every other art, consists in its saying new and different things;
that to repeat itself is no more a characteristic of genius in marble
than it is of genius in print; and that we may, without offending any
laws of good taste, require of an architect, as we do of a novelist,
that he should be not only correct, but entertaining.
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