h the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform. It was
an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image. The people saw the
building like a giant looking at them with a score of eyes, and they
struck at it as at a carved fact. For of all the shapes in which that
immense illusion called materialism can terrify the soul, perhaps the
most oppressive are big buildings. Man feels like a fly, an accident,
in the thing he has himself made. It requires a violent effort of the
spirit to remember that man made this confounding thing and man could
unmake it. Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual, a ritual
meaning far beyond its immediate political results. It is a religious
service. If, for instance, the Socialists were numerous or courageous
enough to capture and smash up the Bank of England, you might argue for
ever about the inutility of the act, and how it really did not touch the
root of the economic problem in the correct manner. But mankind would
never forget it. It would change the world.

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength of a society,
for the most valuable things in a human state are the irrevocable
things--marriage, for instance. And architecture approaches nearer than
any other art to being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get
rid of. You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall. You
can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of very sincere emotion
that you tear a town-hall to pieces. A building is akin to dogma; it
is insolent, like a dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims
permanence like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture
of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is
obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that
does not change like the clouds of the sky. But along with this decision
which is involved in creating a building, there goes a quite similar
decision in the more delightful task of smashing one. The two of
necessity go together. In few places have so many fine public buildings
been set up as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been
destroyed. When people have finally got into the horrible habit