what it loves and of how it
lives, is bound to be a masterpiece sooner or later that shall express
democracy. The hotel rotunda, the parlour for multitudes, is bound to be
made beautiful in ways we do not guess. Why should we guess? Multitudes
have never wanted parlours before. The idea of a parlour has been to get
out of a multitude. All the inevitable problems that come of having a
whole city of families live in one house have yet to be solved by the
fine arts as well as by the mechanical ones. We have barely begun. The
time is bound to come when the radiator, the crowd's fireplace-in-a-pipe,
shall be made beautiful; and when the electric light shall be taught
the secret of the candle; and when the especial problem of modern
life--of how to make two rooms as good as twelve--shall be mastered
aesthetically as well as mathematically; and when even the piano-folding,
bed-bookcase-toilet-stand-writing-desk--a crowd invention for living
in a crowd--shall either take beauty to itself or lead to beauty that
serves the same end.

While for the time being it seems to be true that the fine arts are
looking to the past, the mechanical arts are producing conditions in the
future that will bring the fine arts to terms, whether they want to be
brought to terms or not. The mechanical arts hold the situation in their
hands. It is decreed that people who cannot begin by making the things
they use beautiful shall be allowed no beauty in other things. We may
wish that Parthenons and cathedrals were within our souls; but what the
cathedral said of an age that had the cathedral mood, that had a
cathedral civilization and thrones and popes in it, we are bound to say
in some stupendous fashion of our own--something which, when it is built
at last, will be left worshipping upon the ground beneath the sky when
we are dead, as a memorial that we too have lived. The great cathedrals,
with the feet of the huddled and dreary poor upon their floors, and
saints and heroes shining on their pillars, and priests behind the
chancel with God to themselves, and the vast and vacant nave, symbol of
the heaven glimmering above that few could reach--it is not to these
that we shall look to get ourselves said to the nations that are now
unborn; rather, though it be strange to say it, we shall look to
something like the ocean steamship--cathedral of this huge unresting
modern world--under the wide heaven, on the infinite seas, with spars
for towers and the emp