THE

PENN MONTHLY.

SEPTEMBER, 1870.

THE THREE ARCHES.

ALL life tends to the expression of itself in appropriate and expressive forms. This expression is art in the broadest sense of the word. All men are artists in their several spheres and their various ways-not those only who have devoted themselves to the service of the beautiful.

To a philosopher's eye the human body is itself the greatest work of art. It is merely the soul or spirit of man making itself visible expressing itself. Hence its close and intimate dependence upon the states of the spirit as modifying its own states. Medicine finds itself at every step confronted by this fact-the body is incurable except through the mind. Your indigestion is chronic unless you get rid of that black anxiety; your bile will never be in order until your melancholy disappears. "Take no thought for the morrow," is the first prescription of the most successful of all physicians.

Observe, again, the wonderful adaptation of the parts of the body to the expression alike of the temporary moods and the permanent qualities of the mind. The human face speaks the only universal language—the speech of all people. The tongue may lie, but the eye cannot; what is said in secret in the corner of the heart, it will proclaim in the high places of the streets Unless it bids welcome, no grasp of hand or word of mouth will put the visitor at ease. A Lavater runs over your face, your hands, your gait, the whole statue that you have spent your life in carving, and tells your history. The outline and proportion of your face tells him whether you are an enthusiast or a

philosopher. The lips and teeth tell of your taste for good living, or the reverse,-of your pride and vanity. The chin betrays weakness or promises strength of will. The cheeks tell of mental alertness or slowness; the lower frontal formation discloses your taste for music or the mathematics; while the height, breadth, and proportion of the forehead disclose your general mental cast. The corners of the eyes and mouth reveal your active and passive sense of humor; and the nose-Napoleon's chosen index of character-tells of nobility, positiveness and emphasis, or their absence. "There is nothing hidden that shall not be manifested." Nature hides your thought that you may amend it, but not your thoughts-your life. She writes your annals in your face, or rather the soul itself, by the force of this artistic instinct, acts as the scribe of this most impartial of all records. Nor is the face the only place of record; hand and foot, proportion and gait, are all eloquent to such as have ears to hear, and, indeed, unconsciously to all men.

Nearly as universal is artistic expression of life in religious forms. Mystics may declaim against rites and ceremonies as unnecessary to religion, and as no element of our ground of our acceptance with God. Be it so; they are none the less necessary to man. This artistic instinct of expression demands free play in regard to matters where the profounder relations of our life are concerned; the veriest Quaker will rise and uncover his head while his brother kneels and prays at his side. The great majority of Christian sects go farther in the indulgence of this instinct; they express the praises of God in metrical forms and musical tones, not that God is better pleased thereby than with plain prose and conversational tones, but because they feel this to be the most becoming expression of feelings attuned to the harmony of the divine order. Even those who abhor genuflections and other postures, associated in their minds with what they dislike or dread, do yet, by other postures and gestures, confess the correctness of what we may call the artistico-ritualistic principlethat men may as truly and as lawfully confess and proclaim their opinions and feelings by gesture of body as by word of mouth or pen. Their Ritualism may be graceful or rude, expressive or awkward, but, in greater or less degree, it is found in every body of Christian or Unchristian religionists, a few individuals of the ultra-Quietist type alone excepted.

Intimately connected with ritualistic art is architectural art. The religious home expresses the religious thought of the worshippers. The awe and mystery of the religious spirit of Egypt, her childish delight in animal pets and entangled puzzles, are still reflected in the Sphynx, the Hieroglyphs, and the Pyramids. The latter are but copies in cut stone of the earthen burrows or mounds which served for monuments at a still earlier date, and like these, reflect the same half-intelligent constructive instinct as do the mud-pies and sand-heaps of childhood. The counterpart of the hieroglyphs may be found in the puzzle pages of our modern children's magazines.

The Greek temple was at the first a temenos, or enclosure, only -fenced in with posts and cords. The place within was an anathema, a place set apart for divine service and possessed of a sacredness not shared by other places of earth. Here the gods were localized, dwelling in temples made with hands. The temples were places of sacrifice-not of assembly. The god dwelt in the place-not in the midst of an assembled people. Yet the religious services at the opening of popular Grecian assemblies were an approximation to the Christian idea of a worshipping congregation. In the course of time the temenos was roofed over; a piece of trouble which seems to have been regarded as of special merit in the worshipper. When the insulted priest, Chryses, prays to Apollo, (Iliad I., 39,) he makes this the special ground of his plea. Later still, an inner space, or naos, was further enclosed by walls reaching up to the roof. When, in the progress of Grecian art, stone was substituted for lighter material, the whole arrangement was petrified into the Greek temple as we know it the old wooden posts becoming the stately and massive pillars of marble. Hence the square arch, the first in order of

the three.

The Christian church called for yet other systems of architecture for reasons already indicated. The congregations at first worshipped mainly in private houses, but when greater numbers demanded larger buildings, and when public toleration permitted their erection, basilicas were modelled after the prevailing system of architecture, and the Roman semi-circular arch, devised for the erection of roads and aqueducts, and pillars with conventional ornamentation, were the architectural alphabet employed. The first step beyond this was the Byzantine or Constantinopolitan

style, which modified the proportions of the arch and added ornamentation imitated more closely from nature. The Roman arch was just a semi-circle; the Byzantine prolonged the ends into something nearer the form of a horseshoe. The capitals were massive; the ornamentation convex; in both respects following the Doric style.

The Normans, in their day, were the adventurous sailors of Europe, and the most churchly sons of Mother Church. They copied in their churches the Byzantine style-whether as they found it in their wanderings at Constantinople, or as they saw it imitated in Western Europe. Their modification of the Byzantine is the style that still bears their name-the name of the priestly teachers and military drill-sergeants of Western Europe.

In a fortunate hour, when the Norman was declining, they began to overlap the two series of arches. Some German workman, with a true eye for beauty and a true feeling for nature, observed that the combination arch, made by the parts of two Norman arches, far exceeded the round arch in gracefulness and nobility of outline. He saw that it corresponded more closely to natural forms than the Norman did-for nature abhors circles. If you carve a bank into any close approximation to a circular outline, she sets all her forces to destroy your work. But when two branches of neighboring trees curve out freely and upward from the parent stem and cross in the air, something very like the Gothic arch's form is the frequent result. With the same eye for beauty and "keeping," they adopted the slender pillars and concave ornamentation of the Corinthian style, another fundamental variation from the Norman. The new style seems to have flashed into favor all over Europe; churches begun in the Norman style were actually completed as Gothic. It was the period when Norman feudalism was giving place to the free burgher spirit of the cities of Western Europe, by a process literally of civil-ization. It was also the era of great united popular efforts in architecture. Not the nobles of Europe, but the municipalities erected her great cathedrals-St. Omer, Strasburgh, Cologne, and a host of others. The Free Masons of Europe grew into a brotherhood of the foremost rank among craftsmen, and Erwin of Steinbach formed them into an order or Trade's Union around the rising foundations of the cathedral of Strasburgh. The huts or "lodges," the ranks or "degrees," the pass-words and secret