We might, therefore, without the light of
experience, conclude, that Architecture never could flourish except
when it was subjected to a national law as strict and as minutely
authoritative as the laws which regulate religion, policy, and social
relations; nay, even more authoritative than these, because both
capable of more enforcement, as over more passive matter; and needing
more enforcement, as the purest type not of one law nor of another, but
of the common authority of all. But in this matter experience speaks
more loudly than reason. If there be any one condition which, in
watching the progress of architecture, we see distinct and general; if,
amidst the counter-evidence of success attending opposite accidents of
character and circumstance, any one conclusion may be constantly and
indisputably drawn, it is this; that the architecture of a nation is
great only when it is as universal and as established as its language;
and when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many
dialects. Other necessities are matters of doubt: nations have been
alike successful in their architecture in times of poverty and of
wealth; in times of war and of peace; in times of barbarism and of
refinement; under governments the most liberal or the most arbitrary;
but this one condition has been constant, this one requirement clear in
all places and at all times, that the work shall be that of a _school_,
that no individual caprice shall dispense with, or materially vary,
accepted types and customary decorations; and that from the cottage to
the palace, and from the chapel to the basilica, and from the garden
fence to the fortress wall, every member and feature of the
architecture of the nation shall be as commonly current, as frankly
accepted, as its language or its coin.
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