The Beautiful Necessity | Page 3

corresponding to
music, and the tail to architecture; in other words, though in one sense

they are the most-widely separated of the arts, in another they are the
most closely related.
Music being purely in time and architecture being purely in space, each
is, in a manner and to a degree not possible with any of the other arts,
convertible into the other, by reason of the correspondence subsisting
between intervals of time and intervals of space. A perception of this
may have inspired the famous saying that architecture is frozen music, a
poetical statement of a philosophical truth, since that which in music is
expressed by means of harmonious intervals of time and pitch,
successively, after the manner of time, may be translated into
corresponding intervals of architectural void and solid, height and
width.
In another sense music and architecture are allied. They alone of all the
arts are purely creative, since in them is presented, not a likeness of
some known idea, but _a thing-in-itself_ brought to a distinct and
complete expression of its nature. Neither a musical composition nor a
work of architecture depends for its effectiveness upon resemblances to
natural sounds in the one case, or to natural forms in the other. Of none
of the other arts is this to such a degree true: they are not so much
creative as re-creative, for in them all the artist takes his subject ready
made from nature and presents it anew according to the dictates of his
genius.
The characteristic differences between music and architecture are the
same as those which subsist between time and space. Now time and
space are such abstract ideas that they can be dealt with best through
their corresponding correlatives in the natural world, for it is a
fundamental theosophic tenet that nature everywhere abounds in such
correspondences; that nature, in its myriad forms, is indeed the concrete
presentment of abstract unities. The energy which everywhere animates
form is a type of time within space; the mind working in and through
the body is another expression of the same thing. Correspondingly,
music is dynamic, subjective, mental, of one dimension; while
architecture is static, objective, physical, of three dimensions;
sustaining the same relation to music and the other arts as does the
human body to the various organs which compose, and consciousnesses
which animate it (it being the reservatory of these organs and the
vehicle of these consciousnesses); and a work of architecture in like

manner may and sometimes does include all of the other arts within
itself. Sculpture accentuates and enriches, painting adorns, works of
literature are stored within it, poetry and the drama awake its echoes,
while music thrills to its uttermost recesses, like the very spirit of life
tingling through the body's fibres.
Such being the relation between them, the difference in the nature of
the ideas bodied forth in music and in architecture becomes apparent.
Music is interior, abstract, subjective, speaking directly to the soul in a
simple and universal language whose meaning is made personal and
particular in the breast of each listener: "Music alone of all the arts,"
says Balzac, "has power to make us live within ourselves." A work of
architecture is the exact opposite of this: existing principally and
primarily for the uses of the body, it is like the body a concrete
organism, attaining to esthetic expression only in the reconciliation and
fulfilment of many conflicting practical requirements. Music is pure
beauty, the voice of the unfettered and perpetually vanishing soul of
things; architecture is that soul imprisoned in a form, become subject to
the law of causality, beaten upon by the elements, at war with gravity,
the slave of man. One is the Ariel of the arts; the other, Caliban.
Coming now to the consideration of architecture in its historical rather
than its philosophical aspect, it will be shown how certain theosophical
concepts are applicable here. Of these none is more familiar and none
more fundamental than the idea of reincarnation. By reincarnation more
than mere physical re-birth is meant, for physical re-birth is but a single
manifestation of that universal law of alternation of state, of animation
of vehicles, and progression through related planes, in accordance with
which all things move, and as it were make music--each cycle complete,
yet part of a larger cycle, the incarnate monad passing through
correlated changes, carrying along and bringing into manifestation in
each successive arc of the spiral the experience accumulated in all
preceding states, and at the same time unfolding that power of the Self
peculiar to the plane in which it is momentarily manifesting.
This law finds exemplification in the history of architecture in the
orderly flow of the building impulse from one nation and one country
to a different nation and a different country: