beautiful than affected fine ones, but they are more to the point:  they are the one sure sign we have of where we are going to be beautiful next.  It is impossible to love the fine arts in the year 1913 without studying the mechanical ones; without finding one’s self looking for artistic material in the things that people are using, and that they are obliged to use.  The determining law of a thing of beauty being, in the nature of things, what it is for, the very essence of the classic attitude in a utilitarian age is to make the beautiful follow the useful and inspire the useful with its spirit.  The fine art of the next thousand years shall be the transfiguring of the mechanical arts.  The modern hotel, having been made necessary by great natural forces in modern life, and having been made possible by new mechanical arts, now puts itself forward as the next great opportunity of the fine arts.  One of the characteristic achievements of the immediate future shall be the twentieth-century Parthenon—­a Parthenon not of the great and of the few and of the gods, but of the great many, where, through mighty corridors, day and night, democracy wanders and sleeps and chatters and is sad and lives and dies, streets rumbling below.  The hotel—­the crowd fireside—­being more than any other one thing, perhaps, the thing that this civilization is about, the token of 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