It is not therefore open to the criticism often passed upon it, that it is too grand, but it is the wrong kind of grandeur.  If there be truth in the contention that the living needs of today cannot be grafted upon the dead stump of any ancient grandeur, the futility of every attempt to accomplish this impossible will somehow, somewhere, reveal itself to the discerning eye.  Let us seek out, in this building, the place of this betrayal.

It is not necessarily in the main facade, though this is not a face, but a mask—­and a mask can, after its kind, always be made beautiful; it is not in the nobly vaulted corridor, lined with shops—­for all we know the arcades of Imperial Rome were similarly lined; nor is it in the splendid vestibule, leading into the magnificent waiting room, in which a subject of the Caesars would have felt more perfectly at home, perhaps, than do we.  But beyond this passenger concourse, where the elevators and stairways descend to the tracks, necessity demanded the construction of a great enclosure, supported only on slender columns and far-flung trusses roofed with glass.  Now latticed columns, steel trusses, and wire glass are inventions of the modern world too useful to be dispensed with.  Rome could not help the architect here.  The mode to which he was inexorably self-committed in the rest of the building demanded massive masonry, cornices, mouldings; a tribute to Caesar which could be paid everywhere but in this place.  The architect’s problem then became to reconcile two diametrically different systems.  But between the west wall of the ancient Roman baths and the modern skeleton construction of the roof of the human greenhouse there is no attempt at fusion.  The slender latticed columns cut unpleasantly through the granite cornices and mouldings; the first century A.D. and the twentieth are here in incongruous juxtaposition—­a little thing, easily overlooked, yet how revealing!  How reassuring of the fact “God is not mocked!”

The New York Central terminal speaks to the eye in a modern tongue, with however French an accent.  Its facade suggests a portal, reminding the beholder that a railway station is in a very literal sense a city gate placed just as appropriately in the center of the municipality as in ancient times it was placed in the circuit of the outer walls.

Neither edifice will stand the acid test of Mr. Sullivan’s formula, that a building is an organism and should follow the law of organisms, which decrees that the form must everywhere follow and express the function, the function determining and creating its appropriate form.  Here are two eminent examples of “arranged” architecture.  Before organic architecture can come into being our inchoate national life must itself become organic.  Arranged architecture, of the sort we see everywhere, despite its falsity, is a true expression of the conditions which gave it birth.

[Illustration:  PLATE V. THE NEW YORK CENTRAL TERMINAL]