The Evolution of Architecture. 329 



particular of change. But the Ionic column with its order 

 was never the most characteristic of the Hellenic genius ; it 

 never could compete with the Doric in European Greece. 

 But the Doric, even more obviously than the Ionic, was a 

 borrowed form, and Egypt was its original home. There 

 it was the proto-Doric column which was, as I have said, de- 

 veloped by the chamfering off of angle after angle of the 

 square pier till it was practically round, and then grooving 

 it to obviate its "sleek rotundity." The monuments of 

 Beni-Hassan prove that Egypt reached this proto-Doric 

 form a thousand years/before the architects of Greece. 

 Shakespeare was ttoVso^ royal a borrower as the Greeks, nor 

 so justified his borrowing from the clumsy playwrights who 

 furnished him with his various plots by his imperial trans- 

 formation. As with the Ionic column, the capital took on 

 an ever purer grace and the entablature added a member 

 of the first importance, the wide frieze, a necessity of the 

 roof and ceiling, where the Egyptians had them both in 

 one, and flat, encouraged by their rainless skies. Then, too, 

 the Greeks were practical idealists. They knew that things 

 are not what they appear and contrariwise, and so they gave 

 the shaft an entasis i. e., bulged it out a little so that it 

 might not look as if it were hollowed in ; and in the same 

 spirit they inclined the columns a little inward (a very lit- 

 tle, 1 ^ ir of the height), so that they might look exactly ver- 

 tical. It can hardly be regarded as an Egyptian reminis- 

 cence that the Doric column was so sturdy in its strength. 

 The most perfect architects " by their loved masonry ap- 

 proved " this sturdiness, the columns of the Parthenon, in 

 which the Doric style reached its perfection, being about 

 five diameters in height, a happy mean between the earliest 

 and later forms.* It was no foolish fancy that the Doric was 

 to the Ionic column as masculine strength compared with 

 feminine delicacy and grace, and the comparison held good 

 of the entire order, which in the Ionic was proportionately 

 delicate in every part as in the Doric it was proportionately 

 stout and strong. Both the base and capital of the Ionic 

 column prove its Asiatic source. But as the Egyptian proto- 

 Doric suffered a Greek change into something rich and 

 strange, so did the primitive Ionic. The round base-mold- 

 ing got the under concave plinth, its horizontal groovings 

 bringing it into harmony with the perpendicular groovings 



' Four at Corinth ; six at Sunium. 



