o a certain degree a principle of
beauty," says M. Bourget, and to these structures this order of beauty
cannot be denied, but even this is vitiated by a failure to press the
advantage home: the ornate facades are notably less impressive
than those whose grim and stark geometry is unmitigated by the
grave-clothes of dead styles. Instances there are of strivings toward
a beauty that is fresh and living, but they are so unsuccessful and
infrequent as to be negligible. However impressive these buildings may
be by reason of their ordered geometry, their weight and magnitude,
and as a manifestation of irrepressible power, they have the
unloveliness of things ignoble being the product neither of praise,
nor joy, nor worship, but enclosures for the transaction of sharp
bargains--gold bringing jinn of our modern Aladdins, who love them not
but only use them. That is the reason they are ugly; no one has loved
them for themselves alone.

For beauty is ever the very face of love. From the architecture of
a true democracy, founded on love and mutual service, beauty would
inevitably shine forth; its absence convicts us of a maladjustment in
our social and economic life. A skyscraper shouldering itself aloft at
the expense of its more humble neighbors, stealing their air and
their sunlight, is a symbol, written large against the sky, of
the will-to-power of a man or a group of men--of that ruthless and
tireless aggression on the part of the cunning and the strong so
characteristic of the period which produced the skyscraper. One of
our streets made up of buildings of diverse styles and shapes and
sizes--like a jaw with some teeth whole, some broken, some rotten,
and some gone--is a symbol of our unkempt individualism, now happily
becoming curbed and chastened by a common danger, a common devotion.

Some people hold the view that our insensitiveness to formal beauty is
no disgrace. Such argue that our accomplishments and our interests are
in other fields, where we more than match the accomplishments of older
civilizations. They forget that every achievement not registered in
terms of beauty has failed of its final and enduring transmutation. It
is because the achievements of older civilizations attained to their
apotheoses in art that they interest us, and unless we are able
to effect a corresponding transmutation we are destined to perish
unhonoured on our rubbish heap. That we shall effect it, through
knowledge and suffering, is c