granite deeps beyond range of vision, and mountains of masonry with seas of labor in turmoil at their base, and monumental spaces displaying the grimness of ordered power slow-gathering through centuries.  Of beauty there was nothing to make appeal to him between those endless cliffs of stone which walled out the sunrise and the sunset, the sky and the wind.

The view of our pre-war architecture thus sketchily presented is sure to be sharply challenged in certain quarters, but unfortunately for us all this is no mere matter of opinion, it is a matter of fact.  The buildings are there, open to observation; rooted to the spot, they cannot run away.  Like criminals “caught with the goods” they stand, self-convicted, dirty with the soot of a thousand chimneys, heavy with the spoils of vanished civilizations; graft and greed stare at us out of their glazed windows—­eyes behind which no soul can be discerned.  There are doubtless extenuating circumstances; they want to be clean, they want to be honest, these “monsters of the mere market,” but they are nevertheless the unconscious victims of evils inherent in our transitional social state.

Let us examine these strange creatures, doomed, it is hoped, to extinction in favor of more intelligent and gracious forms of life.  They are big, powerful, “necessitous,” and have therefore an impressiveness, even an aesthetic appeal, not to be denied.  So subtle and sensitive an old-world consciousness as that of M. Paul Bourget was set vibrating by them like a violin to the concussion of a trip-hammer, and to the following tune: 

The portals of the basements, usually arched as if crushed beneath the weight of the mountains which they support, look like dens of a primitive race, continually receiving and pouring forth a stream of people.  You lift your eyes, and you feel that up there behind the perpendicular wall, with its innumerable windows, is a multitude coming and going,—­crowding the offices that perforate these cliffs of brick and iron, dizzied with the speed of the elevators.  You divine, you feel the hot breath of speculation quivering behind these windows.  This it is which has fecundated these thousands of square feet of earth, in order that from them may spring up this appalling growth of business palaces, that hide the sun from you and almost shut out the light of day.

“The simple power of necessity is to 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.